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Rep. Bill Jones Thinks Spam is "Innovative"
GMontag writes "Wired is running this story:Candidate: Spam in Every Pot about candidate-for-governor Bill Jones' spam campaigning. The most telling quote: "Jones spokesman Darrel Ng said the e-mail wasn't spam, commonly defined as unsolicited commercial e-mail. Ng instead classified Jones' non-commercial mass-mailing as an "innovative way to use the Internet.'" Another interesting item: "An examination of the e-mail sent out by the Jones campaign revealed forged headers. The e-mail, purportedly sent from an MSN.com address, was actually routed through the server of an elementary school in Chonnam, Korea.""
I hate to say it, but I think we're going to see much more of this kind of mentality coming from our elected officials (and candidates). You have to realize they farm this sort of thing out, and to them it's all a broad spectrum of marketing/contact/fundraising/etc.
I doubt the candidate in mind was even aware of what was going on, but when confronted he responded as you would expect any politico to respond. doublespeak and warm fuzzies, with a handful of buzzwords.
Hopefully there will be a day when there is a representative we can stand behind- the only way we can get there is for all of us to make our voices heard, and to use the system to fight the system. as many have said before, make phone calls or write actual letters spelling out WHY you feel something is bad, and rational reasons as to why they as your elected representative should be against something.
my 2 cents. have a good weekend!
EOM
I, for one, am only surprised that email spam has not been used for campaigning earlier.
I'm very surprised anyone would want to use spam for political purposes. It's just stupid. Your average spammer doesn't care about his reputation, so it doesn't matter that 95% of the people who see their message will angrily throw it away. Politians, however, live off of their reputation. They can't afford to piss off that many people at once.
I'm sure this guy is regreting it. I mean, his website is blackholed right now, a few days before the primary! And this guy was supposedly "net savy"....
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Choose mnemonic identifiers. If you can't remember what mnemonic means, you've got a problem. - Larry Wall
If Bill Jones had spammed from Bill Jones' machine, and paid Bill Jones' ISP to deliver the outbound spew, you might have a point.
But according to the article, Bill Jones didn't do that. According to the article, Bill Jones raped an open relay in Korea. That is, he sent an SMTP transaction to a server (a server on which he had no authorized access), and commanded that server's MTA to deliver multiple copies of his spew to recipients in California and Canada.
Ignoring the theft-of-service issue that applies to all spam delivered through open relays, the server was on foreign soil -- that is, he appropriated the resources of a foreign government to influence the results of a domestic political event. That sounds like it could be in violation of numerous election finance laws (at a minimum), and a potential diplomatic incident to boot.
I happen to believe that all spam is theft (by conversion) of my mailbox. That is, Bill Jones has the right to speak, but he doesn't have the right to appropriate my resources to deliver his speech.
But even if you choose accept that sort of theft as OK in certain cases, how can you deny that (if the article is true) what he did is anything other than unauthorized access to, and theft of service from (if not a denial-of-service attack on) the Korean high school's server?
The really telling thing is the forged headers. Even if you could argue the points of political mailings being spam/not being spam, as far as I'm concerned, using a fake email/forged headers makes it spam. Forged email/headers trumps all other arguments. It is spam.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
At this election, you're probably worried about how your government is going to spend your money, whether your child is going to get a decent education, whether your candidates actually cares about the issues, or will do anything to get elected. What would you say if one candidate decided to use a primary school's facilities to send out thousands of publicity messages to electors worldwide, many of whom couldn't even vote in that election? What if that candidate didn't pay that school a penny, despite disrupting that school's ability to use its computers while the candidate exploited them? What if this kind of behaviour wasn't just immoral, but probably illegal too in this country, and so the candidate had evaded American law by using a school in a third world country to send out his publicity? And what if that school had never given him permission, but he'd hacked into the school's computer systems anyway, like a common criminal? Representative Bill Jones did exactly that. And what's more, he called his abuse of third world primary children "innovative". At this election, you might want to innovate in your own way, and elect XXX XXXXXX for YYYYYYY, telling Bill Jones that you want someone you can trust. Not a penny pinching computer hacker.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.