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Microsoft Fakes Citizen Letters of Support
An Anonymous Coward writes: "According to this Seattle Times article, Microsoft is sending letters to Utah's Attorney General in support of the company, but with fake signatures of citizens (some of whom are dead!). The article says: "Letters sent in the last month are on personalized stationery using different wording, color and typefaces, details that distinguish Microsoft's efforts from lobbying tactics that go on in politics every day. State law-enforcement officials became suspicious after noticing that the same sentences appear in the letters and that some return addresses appeared invalid."" The original source appears to be this story in the LA Times today. We here at Slashdot would like to take the time to say that strong competition and innovation have been the twin hallmarks of the technology industry, and if the future is going to be as successful as the recent past, the technology sector must remain free from excess regulation.
http://128.241.244.96/portal/uploads/27000/27549_w inrg.swf
This
> Microsoft is sending letters to Utah's Attorney General
> in support of the company, but with fake signatures
> of citizens (some of whom are dead!).
Oh my God! The dead have risen, and they're supporting Microsoft!
(with apologies to the Simpsons)
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
The two of us, undersigned, wish to protest your needless hassling of the legendary innovator Microsoft. Please desist.
(signed)
Generalissimo Francisco Franco (Ret.)
John Lennon (Beatle)
Asuming the answer is "no it's not a crime" the next questions I wonder are - can it be (given the First Amendment), and should it be (seeing that it's essentially political fraud)?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
...but with fake signatures of citizens (some of whom are dead!).
...and in fact, Microsoft doesn't actually do this themselves. Several different "pro-Microsoft" groups are undertaking this.
This is misleading. Microsoft is not sending the letters to the final destination; based on personal surveys, pre-written and pre-stamped letters are sent out to individuals, who then sign and send. In addition, the article states:
Utah officials found two of the pre-fab letters bore the typed names of dead people. Those names had been crossed out by family members who signed for them. And another letter came from "Tuscon, Utah," a city that doesn't exist.
So the statement implying that the dead had been stuffing the ballot box is misleading, to say the least - but no explanation is offered for Tucson, Utah.
But... is is sleazy? You're damn right it is. It even sounds, from the tone of the article, like this isn't a common practice. Is it wrong? Probably.
But it's not as bad as the caption said.
(Favorite section: Microsoft complaining about 'well-funded special interest companies.' Um?)
The Los Angeles Times reported 3 years ago a similar scheme, where Microsoft was planning "a massive media campaign designed to influence state investigators by creating the appearance of a groundswell of public support for the company." [LA Times, "Microsoft Plans Stealth Blitz to Mend Its Image Public relations", Apr 10, 1998]. At the time that target was for free-lance writers to write opinion pieces, which would then be billed to Microsoft as an out of pocket expense.
The only difference is, at the time Microsoft claimed that the idea it "was merely a proposal and 'not something we are moving on'" while this time they seem to be executing this plan.
Faked video tapes, lying executives, and now this. Perhaps I'm overreacting (and it's 7 a.m. for me, so maybe I am), but can this company's actions get any worse? If the government itself were caught doing something like this, people would be in an uproar. But when it's Microsoft, most people respond with, "well, what can you do?"
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Maybe there should be an investigation into how these people died!
A letter from one of the deceased:
"I have been happily using microsoft products for years, and have never had a problem with them. In fact i recently requested that my life support machine be converted to run with win 95, and have not had a problem with it"
"We here at Slashdot would like to take the time to say that strong competition and innovation have been the twin hallmarks of the technology industry, and if the future is going to be as successful as the recent past, the technology sector must remain free from excess regulation."
I think that one of the things that have gotten us to the point of bloated, unstable software is a LACK of regulation and recourse against some of the larger Software companies.
Companies like General Motors or Boeing must abide by safety and quality standards, while a Microsoft doesn't, even though it's products may or may not have more of an impact on daily lives and safety than cars by GM or planes from Boeing.
The point-click-lock-you-in EULA has done away with the ability to have stable software on a computer for the vast majority of users in the United States and the rest of the world.
Hoping for a hands off approach will not make it better, it will make it worse. I think that if you make a product, physical or virtual (software) you should be held responsable for the quality if you are charging money for it. Getting the software industry to the same level that the automotive, aerospace or appliance industry is, isn't excess...it's minimum regulation.
With all the recent articles about "astroturfing" (I'd link to them, but search is down right now) here on Slashdot, why is it that when a Linux group does it, it's the responsiblity of a single person who is quickly singled out, but when the group from Redmond does it, suddenly it's the entire corporation that is to blame?
All we know is that we have a single person, perhaps more, sending invalid letters to the Utah Attorney General. For all we know, it could be just one person within Microsoft sending them because of a mis-interpreted order.
Actually, the more I think about it, for all we know, it is actually a Linux supporter who is trying to discredit any valid grass-roots campaign that has sprung up for Microsoft.
Let's not jump to conclusions here, folks; Let's wait for the facts before we start grandstanding about how terrible the Big Bad Corporation Microsoft is, mmmkay?
Is there a mail fraud case in this?
http://windows.scares.us
The part that just kills me is this
The maker of Windows and other software also has stepped up campaign donations, becoming the fifth-largest soft-money donor to the national Republican and Democratic parties in 1999-2000, and it has hired a slew of well-connected lobbying firms.
These letters contained this information.This is all out bribery at this point...and not even close to subtle.
Face it, most people can't articulate themselves very well and prefer to use boilerplate letters. It doesn't make their opinions any less valid.
The first intelligent phrase ever spoken occurred today
" We here at Slashdot would like to take the time to say that strong competition and innovation have been the twin hallmarks of the technology industry, and if the future is going to be as successful as the recent past, the technology sector must remain free from excess regulation."
While I'm reasonably sure this was irony as originally posted, but as this AC notes, there are a lot of people who believe--like Sunday morning Gospel singers--that competition and innovation have actually occured, and this has been a Good Thing.
Now, I'm not blind to the appearance of some major conveniences that have been showered onto rich Westerners, but where is the innovation when it comes to feeding people and protecting the environment? Really, all the tech that AC and people like him fetishize has been handed down from the State-Military Nexus as second-rate gear fit for the consumer masses that paid for the original research that created the tech to start with. I'd hardly call that innovation, and you certainly can't say that Raytheon and Lockheed *compete* for the government contracts that float their boats (unless you call the bidding graft sessions "competition".) In this context, "regulation" has no meaning: who watches the Watchmen?
Comfort and longevity do not equate to happiness and wisdom, even if those wonderful gifts are showered only on those rich enough to afford them.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories
Regulators became suspicious of the ruse after noticing that the same sentences appear in the letters and that some return addresses appear invalid.
Hard to send out spam to invalid addresses, no?
As for that "other" group or two on the MS payroll:
Microsoft referred questions about the new campaign to the group running it, Americans for Technology Leadership, which gets some money from Microsoft but won't say how much. ATL was founded in 1999 as a spinoff of the Assn. for Competitive Technology, another pro-Microsoft group.
Asked about the relationship between the telephone calls to citizens and the subsequent letters, ATL Executive Director Jim Prendergast initially said those who agreed the prosecution was misguided merely were given suggestions about what to use in drafting their own letters. "We gave them a few bullet points, but that's about the extent of it," he said. Asked why some phrases were identical, Prendergast then conceded the letters were written by his operation. "We'd write the letter and then send it to them," he said. "That's fairly common practice."
Hmmmm. MS is not getting good value here, but I suppose it's cutting edge, the best lobby ever TM! Must be using MS Loby, cuz it's transparent and sucks:
"It's an obvious corporate attempt to manipulate citizen input," said Rick Cantrell, community relations director for the Utah attorney general.
"You can just tell these were engineered. When there's a real groundswell, people walk in, they fax, they call. We get handwritten letters."
Yawn, another second rate offering from MS.
Kissing two points of Karma goodbye! Mr. Overturf is sure to blast this one to -1 flamebait. Eat me!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I think it's shameful the way Slashdot $shameful_adverb dumps on Microsoft, a $supportive_phrase of our community. Without Microsoft, we might all be {a computerless nation|carving our own boot disks}. Thumbs up for Microsoft and its right to {innovate|forcefully monopolize} on our desktop!
Yours, etc. -
$name
$address
Mormon City, UT 96629
Three others use exactly these words: "If the future is going to be as successful as the recent past, the technology sector must remain free from excess regulation."
Would that be the recent past, or the not-so-recent past? Because I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that the technology sector should not repeat its "success" of the last six months.
Paperclip: /pr/astroturf/currentsuits.asp , line 145] case?
It seems that you are writing a letter. Do you want me to change it into a letter supporting Microsoft in the [ODBC: SQL Error in
[Yes] [Yes]
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
> I honestly am hard pressed to believe the people at
> the top could be 'this' stupid.
I'm not so sure it's stupidity so much as an astonishing amount of hubris. For example, shortly after Judge Jackson's remedy was thrown out, Mr. Gates himself held a news conference in which he explicitly said that the event was proof that Microsoft did not illegally tie its browser to it OS. Since several courts since then have not overturned the conviction (only the punishment), this statement was either an horrific mistake on his part, or a bald-faced lie. In either case, with this episode (and the falsified benchmark video) in mind, it does not strike me as out of character for the top brass at Microsoft to try something like this.
Virg
> Nothing new here, par for the MS course.
Wait, I think there is something new here.
Using the US Mail to commit fraud! That's a whole
new ballgame, and probably a lot easier to try and
convict than antitrust accusations have been.
They only need one count, and executives get locked up for decades in small rooms with large
men deciding what tv channel to watch.
You really don't want to do the whole mail fraud thing, even if you are a multitrillion dollar company.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
How much you want to bet the letters begin with "I send you this file to ask your advice"?
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."