Dear bile,

Barack Obama is now the presumptive Democratic nominee, and hundreds of thousands of new supporters have joined our movement for change in the past few weeks.

This is from an email I just received from Obama for America <info@barackobama.com>

The reason I’m receiving spam from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is that I sent them a message through DownsizeDC.org asking him to fight the FISA telecom immunity.

I wonder how many of those thousands were in fact auto signups from emails from DownsizeDC.org like I did. Sorry Barack but we aren’t supporters and we surely have not joined your movement for “change.”

http://www.nolanchart.com/…

http://blog.wired.com/…

[The messages] … all linked YouTube searches for “ron paul” which results in the usual electoral propaganda you’d expect 372 days before an election.

Later in the day it changed however. With the usual addition of bayes poison, randomness in the subject lines and a tinyurl and no doubt some additional sending resources since they just burned a load, this campaign moved up a gear.

This is trivial stuff as I’m sure you can appreciate, but that tinyurl did catch my attention:

tinyurl 345s6g -redirects-> 301 Moved Permanently -to-> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeHWW5gbc0w

“This video has been removed due to terms of use violation.”
Now I have no idea what that video was (and frankly dear, I don’t give a damn!) but what struck me is that this would be a really efficient way to remove your competitions videos from youtube. I’m not picking on YouTube here, I believe almost any social site would do the same.

I hadn’t really considered this but it’s a very clever trick. I’m hopeful that YouTube will realize this isn’t the Paul campaign or the owners of the independent videos. If these companies allow this spam to affect the Paul online community the MSM will use it to validate their labeling of us as spammers.

http://www.wired.com/…

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’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.

I hope that this is not being done by a legit Ron Paul supporter. They would be violating the system of beliefs which Paul holds on top of breaking the law. I wouldn’t doubt that one of the other candidates have put this together. It could also just be someone spamming using the popularity of Paul as random people on Youtube do. Maybe this could actually help get his name out if it’s not received multiple times and makes it through filters. As long as there isn’t some prescription drug ad at the end of it.