Wired Reports on Criminal Acts in Support of Paul Campaign

Wired has reported on the recent investigations regarding the use of email spam to promote Ron Paul’s campaign:

If Texas congressman Ron Paul is elected president in 2008, he may be the first leader of the free world put into power with the help of a global network of hacked PCs spewing spam, according to computer-security researchers who’ve analyzed a recent flurry of e-mail supporting the long-shot Republican candidate.

“This is clearly a criminal act in support of a campaign, which has been committed with or without their knowledge,” says Gary Warner, the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s director of research in computer forensics. “The question is, will we see more and more of this, or will this bring shame to the campaigns and will they make clear that this is not a form of acceptable behavior by their supporters?” Warner pointed to provisions of the federal Can-Spam Act.

Ron Paul spokesman Jesse Benton says the campaign has no knowledge of the scam. Warner himself says that he has no reason to believe that the Paul campaign had anything to do with these messages.

Some participants in the online political world have long suspected Paul’s technically sophisticated fan base of manipulating online tools and polls to boost the appearance of a wide base of support. But the UAB analysis is the first to document any internet shenanigans.

The finding is significant, because Paul’s online support — as gauged by blog mentions, friends on social-networking sites such as MySpace and popularity in online polls — has garnered him wide mainstream print and television coverage, despite his relatively poor performance in offline polling.

The spamming allegations are based on a slew of e-mails captured by contributors to the university’s Spam Data Mining for Law Enforcement Applications project, a research venture that receives 2.5 million spam messages a day, and selects about 100,000 a week for analysis. The project receives its spam from other researchers with ties to ISPs, and in some cases from “trap” addresses that have never been used for any other purpose.

The report of such use of spam has received considerable coverage by bloggers undoubtedly as a consequence of our experiences with the abusive use of comment spam by Paul supporters who fail to realize how their tactics reflect poorly on their candidate.

The responses to the earlier report here, as well as on other blogs, demonstrate the mind set of Paul supporters. Even though the accusations are against abusive Paul supporters as opposed to the campaign itself, Paul supporters immediately began spamming blogs with denials. As is typical of comments from Paul supporters, their denials contain a combination of denial of the facts, incorrect information, specious arguments, and even paranoid conspiracy theories.

The conduct of Paul supporters reminds many bloggers of similar problems with some supporters of Howard Dean in 2003. While the problem from Dean supporters never reached the degree we are seeing from Paul supporters, Joe Trippi and many other Dean supporters did recognize how such conduct harms their candidate and did work to dissuade such actions. I am less hopeful of such action from either the Paul campaign or a meaningful contingent of Paul supporters. I fear that neither the Paul campaign or a significant number of his on line supporters are sensible enough to understand the problem.

Ultimately this is the result of the conduct of Paul and his supporters. If used properly and responsibly, the internet could be a valuable tool to promote a candidate. However when misused there is also potential to harm the candidate. When even libertarian-leaning blogs such as Liberal Values which initially treated Paul as a legitimate voice when the media ignored him now see both the candidate and his supporters as wackos we see how counterproductive the tactics of Paul’s supporters are.

More at Right Wing Nuthouse, Blue Crab Boulevard, The American Mind, The Van Der Galiën Gazette, Outside The Beltway

4 Comments

  1. 1
    disinter says:

    How to Whip This Ron Paul Character and All His Whacky Followers.

    Ron Paul can be defeated by ignorance. Ignore him if you can.
    By lies. Misrepresent his positions whenever possible.
    By word gaming. As Lenin advised, “First, confuse the vocabulary.”
    By contempt. Dismiss him as amusing and pathetic.
    By smearing his supporters. Find the worst and spotlight them. Call them a cult.
    By consensus. Dismiss him with peer-pressure ridicule.
    By false accusations. Spread them quickly and far.
    By never discussing his policies. Change the subject to his person.
    By the polls. Ask the right people the right questions and get the answer you want.
    By reporting his most unpopular votes. But don’t report his reasoning.
    By rudeness. Wreck any debate where his ideas are winning.
    With all these tools, he can be easily defeated. Use them generously.

    But Ron Paul cannot be defeated by refuting him in an honest and courteous technical debate. Avoid that.

    – Moderno Machiavelli

  2. 2
    Ron Chusid says:

    And once again a Paul supporter just cannot resist demonstrating why they are not taken seriously.

    Paul supporters think that they are doing Paul a favor by spamming any blog that says anything critical, failing to understand how counterproductive this is, and how much it lessens the opinion of Paul and his supporters among bloggers.

    Discussion of the cult nature of his following is a legitimate topic for a blog post. Of course I’ve also discussed the problems with his ideas in other posts where I’ve noted how he is a social conservative whose ideas would lead to less freedom, and not someone I’d consider a libertarian.

  3. 3
    Iconoclast421 says:

    The bottom line is that even if Paul supporters were the most polite citizens in the universe, there would still be problems like this. Just because I have 20 emails in my inbox trying to sell generic viagra doesnt mean that Pfizer is doing anything wrong. That’s just the way the world works. Any two bit hack can send out a million viagra spams. Similarly, any moron supporting Ron Paul, or even any moron hack from an opposing campaign can send out a bunch of Ron Paul spam to incriminate Ron Paul. Quite frankly I would be surprised if any of the other candidates were not doing this. It’s been a Reich Wing talking point for months now that the Ron Paul internet phenomenon is somehow fake. Regardless of what charges are actually levied and prosecuted, they will use these unsubstantiated claims to promote that talking point. And the reich wing followers will believe it without question. That’s actually one of the reasons that Ron Paul supporters are so frustrated and confrontational. The entire republican party almost entirely consists of delusional zealots who dont research any of the claims made by their glorious headmasters. That’s what got us into Iraq…

  4. 4
    Ron Chusid says:

    “The bottom line is that even if Paul supporters were the most polite citizens in the universe, there would still be problems like this”

    This misses the point that it is specifically the Paul campaign where there are such problems.

    “It’s been a Reich Wing talking point for months now that the Ron Paul internet phenomenon is somehow fake.”

    Every now and then, right wing talking points turn out to be true. In this case, we have a university study, not a bunch of right wingers behind it.

    “The entire republican party almost entirely consists of delusional zealots who dont research any of the claims made by their glorious headmasters. That’s what got us into Iraq…”

    True, but the faults of the other Republicans do not mean that the faults in the Paul campaign do not exist.

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