The folks who do computer forensic at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have evidence that a criminal bot-net is being used to flood the internet with spam supporting Ron Paul. They do not believe – and the campaign stoutly denies – that the campaign itself has anything to do with the spampaign, but it is happening.
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.
This is a bizarre situation, but one that could be big trouble in future years. It's a double-edged sword:
Paul spokesman Jesse Benton said in an e-mail, "This is the first I've heard about this situation."
"If it is true, it could be done by a well-intentioned yet misguided supporter or someone with bad intentions trying to embarrass the campaign," he wrote while ferrying his boss to tape an appearance on The Tonight Show. "Either way, this is independent work, and we have no connection."
I've had a few attempts at comment/trackback spam along these lines here. So far the spam filters have been able to stop it cold. The Wired story mentions that Redstate banned new Paul supporters because of their repeated thread-jacking. I generally delete any comments I consider to be astroturfing (essentially that is an attempt at stealing free advertising bandwidth).
