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Is the Dean Campaign Spamming?
bluelark writes "A few days ago, a friend of mine fowarded to me some spam apparently from the Howard Dean campaign. The sender's return address, however, was dean@america.propulsive.net. In addition, this is not the Texas email we've all heard about. Being bored, I did some research, and I found some intriguing results. If you are interested, I've posted the the technical details and the the spam. Even though the images in the email are being served from Venezuela, the links in the body of the spam are actually redirects from a marketing partner called eScriptions.net to a Dean for America registration page. It appears that the campaign is outsourcing their email with some dubious marketing partners who are then using notorious spamhauses to send out the actual email. Why does a supposedly "net savvy" campaign even think for one second that this approach is acceptable?"
Perhaps being net saavy means that you know enough to farm it out and not have to:
1) worry about doing it yourself, and
2) being able to blame it on someone else when it all goes badly (or is revealed as spam).
A politician lying! Oh dear!
</sarcasm>
If you want to market this way then at least use a list of people you know who will vote for you, or have requested it. There is no reasons to spam people about this and I wouldn't be surprised that a large number of people who are outside the state or even in another country got it.
Now how can they defend that? Spamming is worse than junkmail as the recipient has to pay rather than the sender. And before anyone say just press the delete key how do you do that on that average 3000 spams I get a month?
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Just a thought.
sPh
...even think for one second that this approach is acceptable?"
Probably for the same reasons spammers everywhere continue to do it: some people will click on the pretty colors - they get results.
Look at who is calling the Dean campaign savvy- its mostly political journalists. Do we really think they are qualified to label someone net savvy? Just because Dean supports use Meetup.com does not mean the campaign is net savvy. Heck, most politicians aren't even politically savvy...
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Why does a supposedly "net savvy" campaign even think for one second that this approach is acceptable?"
Well, here it is on slashdot - and probably will end up being posted on numerous other sites, blogs, etc.
And as the old saying goes "Any publicity, is good publicity"
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
Why hasn't he emailed those running the campaign and ask them if they are working with eScriptions.net and if they are, if they know about the spam?
First things first, ask the accused. If they admit to it, then you don't have to waste all the time on researching it. If any other answer, then the research could be done to verify the answer.
Question everything.
Spam to me is all those emails about porn sites, viagra, college degrees, and all the other unwanted crap that ends up in my inbox.
If we did not have any spam, the kinds listed above, would anyone complain about emails from persons running for public office?
I think one of the most important jobs a citizen has is to review the candidates running for office and pick the best one. To that end, I do not think an email here or there about something important is a bad thing.
Then again, I guess those of us who are interested in politics could sign up with the individual campaigns to recieve emails.
The one thing I think everyone can agree on, is do not use known spammers. Do not validate what they do, so they can later say they deliver important speech.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Kinda funny to load slashdot and see this article, as not even five minutes ago I checked my email and found some spam with an e-mail tracking redirect to http://www.arnold-2003.com/ trying to get me to buy a t-shirt...
God was my copilot, but then we crashed on the top of a mountain and i had to eat him...
Maybe anti-dean people are simply sending 'fake' Spam in order to discredit his campaign. Hopefully someone from the dean campaign can clear this up.
The other possibility is that this might actually work. They are probably sending messages to 'known democrats' who signed their emails when they registered for the party or whatever (I live in IA and I've been getting a lot of calls from democrats and pollsters on my Cell, which they must have gotten from my registration).
Btw, just to defend the fact that I'm actually 'registered' to a political party. I liked both McCain and Bill Bradley (who ran against Gore in '2000), but the democratic primary was closer to my dorm room (the republican one was all the way across campus) and I figured there was a better chance of meeting a hot chick at the dem. Primary. Also, a friend of mine knew a guy working on the Bradley campaign so we were invited to the campaign HQ in Des Moines after the vote, which was kind of cool.
In fact, I did meet a really hot chick and she decided to come up to Des Moines with us, which was pretty cool.
It also worked out well, as I fucking hate bush.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I want to know his slashdot user ID.
I wondered about this as well, but sadly it appears that Dean did at least pay for the marketing campaign. *However*, it also appears that the campaign was duped into thinking that company they contracted with would only send mails to people who opted-in, so they were actually showing a reasonable amount of acumen, and just neglected to run a Google search on the company in question. Oops.
I'm a little unsure of the submitter's motives in posting a two-week old story to Slashdot, because if anyone bothers to read the rest of the blog, they'll note that the Dean campaign severed its ties to the Spamhaus when it was informed about the actions being taken in its name.
More balanced coverage from Spamvertized.org
It looks like an honest mistake, and its a shame that some people will fixate on this misstep.
His intentions are well founded, but he has a large staff of people who make decisions for him. One of them probably thought it was indicitive of his "net savy" reputation to use online mail as a form of campaigning.
Sounds resonable.
I don't think he's net savy, as much as he is resonable to needs to the internet generation, or more than likely using this as the thing to set him a part, and make him a great canidate for president if the stock in people caring about the internet grows.
Yee Haw.
http://use.perl.org
Exactly. Political solicitation is spam. And in our society the most aggressive spammer wins.
I think the itch here is how email systems get mucked up.
The Dean campaign is lean and mean so we should expect their auditing to be lackluster. Its not surprising that in the course of pulling favors they end up enlisting some information mercenaries.
But as a heads up they should probably keep things simple and clean. Participate in respected forums and maybe court some intelligent folks from around here to help them out.
I am part of the Dean campaign here in Brooklyn, and I am qualified to label the campaign net savvy. Over the past 6 years I've built massive e-commerce sites, B2B, non-profit, and many other sorts of web-projects. I used to work with asp/sql server, now mostly in L.A.M.P. And I'm not the only one. Three-quarters of the people in the campaign work in tech or internet-related professions, from coders to DBAs to sysadmins to designers to information architects. Furthermore, almost without exception all of those people use OSS. Yes, OSS, the same constituency as those who read /. In fact, through /. I have accidentally stumbled upon other Dean campaigners, and through the Dean campaign I have accidentally stumbled upon other /.-ers. If that doesn't define a net-savvy campaign, then I defy you to come up with a better definition.
But even without that, using Meetup and MoveOn, blogs and online contributions does make you net-savvy, because it is ground-breaking and it is working. They have used the internet as a tool to organize, raise money, and turn Dean from a little-known name into the front runner in the democratic field. That, my friend, makes you net savvy. Measure that against Bush, who won't even let you email him anymore.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
The fact is that blacklists are not organized half as well as they would have people believe. If you want to send bulk mail you use an outsourcer because unless you do most of your messages will get classified as junk. Getting round spam filters turns out to be the main technical skill the outsourcers provide.
The problem with spam is that it has got to the point where everything becomes a he-said she-said argument. There is actually no way to know if either side is telling the truth. Try putting up a pro-israeli or pro-palestinian web site and you will find you are blacklisted for spamming before you send out a single email.
All 'outsourced maillers' are listed on blacklists, most of them for good reason. There is absolutely no way that an outsourced email provider can know if an email list provided by a client is legit or spam.
The problem here is that the protocols simply don't work as well as they should. We don't have a way to know who is behaving honestly and who is not. That is a protocol bug. It is fixable but only if we face up to the fact that we need to fix it and get the email providers to deploy whatever changes are necessary.
That is not going to happen in time for the 2004 election. But think of this, until the Internet US politics has been game where you take as much money in bribes from corporate America and then you spend your whole time in office paying back favors. Bush and Cheney are paying back $2000 for every $1 they collected from the super-rich. Next election they plan to spend $200 million. That means another $400 billion to be spent on tax cuts for the super rich when the budget deficit is heading for $700 billion. Don't think you are getting any of that unless you are one of the insider investors. Otherwise you are more likely to find that your investment in Bush reaps the same results as your investment in 'Kenny Boy' Lay's Enron.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Suprise, the Bush II relection machine also spammed. You can see it here on Cryptome.
The difference? Dean for America stopped working with the spamming company the same day. Did Bush-Cheney '04 Inc. ? No, However, after cryptome posted the e-mail, the email used in the spam was unsubscribed from the list, and an automatic confirmatory e-mail sent. This despite the fact that John, who runs Cryptome, never subscribed, and never sent in an e-mail requesting to be unsubscribed. There is no evidence that the unsolicited e-mailing has been stopped.
It's easy to say Dean for America isn't net-savvy. I mean they sent out some unsolicted e-mail right? But how many companies stop using spam once they realize what their marketing department was doing?
How many do it the same day? Bush, despite a record breaking campaign warchest still is soliciting by spam. Dean isn't. That tells me who is savvy.
Gryftir
http://www.santacruzbynight.com/index.shtml Santa Cruz By Night Vampire Larp
It was necessary to destroy your privacy in order to save it?
I can't help but imagine what the reaction among the YRO crowd would be if this had been the Bush campaign.
If you had bothered to check the page that you actually link to yourself here, you had seen that this already was resolved (5 days ago by the looks of it). To quote: "After the Dean campaign was presented with clear cut evidence as to the nature of emailresponse.net, they investigated promptly and terminated their relationship with the company that same day."
Funny how when Orrin Hatch hires another company to run his website and that company violates copyright laws, it's Orrin Hatch's fault and he should be responsible.
But when the allegedly net-savvy Dean does the same, it's an honest mistake.
Mmmm.. Donuts
I think one of the most important jobs a citizen has is to review the candidates running for office and pick the best one. To that end, I do not think an email here or there about something important is a bad thing.
How does this crap get modded up? Any unsolicited, mass, annoying contact is spam. Why would you even think that it is ok to send someone email that they may or may not care about?
Then again, I guess those of us who are interested in politics could sign up with the individual campaigns to recieve emails.
Duh.
I don't want some politician to decide what is important for me to know. I know how to seek out information I am interested in, thank you.
Mmmm.. Donuts
I'm a republican. I'm certainly not going to vote for Dean. Let's make that clear at the outset.
That being said, who cares about this in the long run? He apologized, I doubt they'll do it again, so I would hardly hold it against him long term. With all the spammers out there who will send out junk email - it's kind of hard to find someone reputable to do this for you. A campaign worker fucked up. Big deal.
That being said, isn't anyone on that side of the aisle worried about Dean? I find him to be the easiest Democrat to beat in the fall of 2004. This guy can be turned directly into the scion of leftist antiwar evil with a few carefully placed TV ads. The reason why he has survived till now is that he is running in a Democrat primary audience - a very leftist group to start with. His credentials and arguments play well there. Put him in a general electoral audience and watch how fast he gets bashed.
I'm going to risk a preliminary estimate of 500 electorals for Bush if Dean is the Democrat candidate. If you think i'm wrong, I recommend a drive to Middle America and a discussion with some of the people there.
At least Graham or Kerry or Lieberman would have a better chance with the general public. And for my sake, make this an actual campaign rather than a romp, willya? I haven't been overly happy with this administration.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The Dean campaign is decentralized, and one aspect of decentralization is that you'll have a lot of activity that's inherently outside the campaign's control. The fact that it's supportive of Dean doesn't mean that the Dean campaign sent it. For that matter, Dean's opponents might've funded it to make him seem less clueful about the 'net.
Jon Lebkowsky jonl@polycot.com http://www.polycot.com
There are many "well meaning" people who would like to see Dean elected, are not part of his official campaign group, but are really not net savvy enough to understand the issue of spamming. Some of them may even think that this helps Dean and are just ignorant of the issue. Don't think for a moment that Dean controlls the actions of all people who are "participating" in his campaign.
It's not spam. He's not trying to sell you anything. He's running for office. This is a great inexpensive way to compete against politicians who have more advertising funds. Far less annoying than TV ads, too.
The dean campaign has been doing a very good job of using the net to build their grass roots, not that Howard Dean knows how to configure a Cisco router, or whatever.
Oh, Then I don't want Howard Dean to be my canidate. I was misinformed.
I will only vote for people who can configure a Cisco router. That way, I am assurded that their political stances, and agendas coincide with mine.
http://use.perl.org
Dean for America strongly opposes spam and has in place a "no spam" policy. We recently contracted with two vendors who made assurances that their lists were opt-in only. On Tuesday, August 12th, Dean for America received notification from a supporter that spam was being sent. We terminated our relationship with both vendors immediately.
There are currently no third party vendors authorized to send email on behalf of Dean for America and none planned in the future.
Please send any additional complaints to abuse@deanforamerica.com.
Nicco Mele
Webmaster
http://www.deanfor
(As to the "Consent, not method" definition: I think this definition is less useful than "bulk email from a stranger" because currently you do have a right to other forms of non-consent based communications, so courts might not look kindly on laws that take that right away. Especially any rules that prevent individual emails from one person to another)
You have a right to free speech. You don't have a right to free free speech. Just because you can't afford a billboard doesn't give you the right to substitute inexpensive spraypaint grafitti instead. Just because you can't afford a radio commercial doesn't give you the right to use a bullhorn in a high-school football game crowd. Just because you can't afford printing costs for a mail campaign doesn't give you the right to steal a stamp machine. Just because you don't want to work to get an opted-in email list doesn't give you the right to hijack relays, fake return addresses, and do the other 'take resources without any payment' that spammers do.
The problem here is that the protocols simply don't work as well as they should. We don't have a way to know who is behaving honestly and who is not. That is a protocol bug. It is fixable but only if we face up to the fact that we need to fix it and get the email providers to deploy whatever changes are necessary.
;) Kidding.
;)
Well it might be a natural consequence and trade off for such a promiscuous system.
In my free hotmail inbox, I routinely get salacious emails whose subjects are obviously random walks with spaces in between the letters. If a random process can send me spam, then no amount of client side filtering will ever work completely.
The real problem is not email, or politics, or being rude, but the fact that the internet as a product of our collective choice; is not authentic. Its a big haze and its a turing test with every fricken email you get.
Everyone jumps at the thought of internet citizenship. That our privacy and individuality is at stake. The fact is, the most vociferous privacy advocates are really closet sex freaks who just want to pick up little kids in public forums.
But seriously, in meat space we have entrusted public agencies at various levels to enforce social canon to provide and protect our liberty but no further before liberty is diminished. Its a little recursive and confusing, but there is no way to apply that to the internet. Right now.
We elect to participate in an untrusted system with little enforcement.
If Dean were really smart, he would propose something as balanced as our bill of rights pertaining to a public network. It would blend well with environmentalism and the whole supernational mindset that is in character with politically neutral intellectual forums.
Like slashdot.
Did anyone ask Dean's campaign for comment before publicizing this information? It would be rather simple for opponents to send fake spam and have a few geeks spread the lie as gospel.
This is why I continue to trust our crappy corporate media more than independent media.
Also, are you guys going to put a press release out on the site noting that the campaign has terminated the relationship with emailresults.net and eScriptions.com? Those are the two vendors you are referring to, correct?
Because he had just introduced a bill to destroy the computers of users who did exactly what he did.
It perfectly illustrates how flawed his thinking for the bill was and how innocent people like himself in that case will get trapped in it.
That's why it's a big deal.
I'm gonna put on my psychic cap on right now and make two predictions:
Dean will win the Democratic primary. Dean will lose the general election.
But then, the democratic race has always been a race to find out who is going to lose to Bush. The country has moved frightenly to the right in the past few years, and despite how many fucked up things Bush does, he's still popular. IMO, Dean has the best chance to win, but it's still not enough.
First and foremost, the democratic base likes to see someone with a backbone come out against Bush. Someone who didn't belly over after September 11th and vote for all these horrendous laws. Secondly, you talk about "Middle America", filled with people that you presume would never vote for an anti-war candidate. That may be true, but they'd never vote for a pro-war Democrat either. Why vote for Kerry or Lieberman instead of Bush, when all they do is talk about how great Bush is?
It is not sufficient to simply mimick your opponent. The Coke vs. Pepsi argument has lasted for decades because they're different and they appeal to different people. If one simply copied the other, they wouldn't be around for very long. Kerry and especially Liberman are trying very hard to be the Shasta Colas of the world. Dean, on the other hand, is more like 7-Up: the un-cola.
go check the headers of the particular spam or better yet, go check the the HTML source.
The campaign manager, Joe Trippi, has the Slashdot ID #689074. Is it the the real Joe Trippi? Who knows, but he's posted before on Dean campaign issues, and I'm waiting to see if he posts again on this subject.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
If the National Do Not Call List rules are any indication, Mr. Dean may believe that he is exempt from being labelled a spammer.
From the FTC donotcall site:
Will the National Do Not Call Registry cover all telemarketing calls?
Placing your number on the National Do Not Call Registry will stop most telemarketing calls, but not all. Some types of calls are exempt. Political organizations, charities, telephone surveyors, and the business of insurance, to the extent that it is regulated by state law, are permitted to call you.
So if this is specifically exempted from the telephone spam rules, presumably it will also be exempted from any future email spam rules, and thus has already been declared perfectly acceptable behavior.
Laugh while you can, monkey-boy!
Sorry guys, if you were expecting him to be different from the majority of other politicians then you will be truly disappointed. He might be better than Bush or Lieberman, but not much. If UCE will get him into the Oval Office then UCE it is.
Rutland Herald - Newspapers sue Dean for access to schedule
Portsmouth Herald - A medical marijuana campaig report card
My advice: pick another horse.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST