Wednesday, May 09, 2012

RoboConundrums

Despite yesterday's somewhat dampening headline : Pierre Poutine robocalls trail goes cold in Saskatchewan, the main story here is not that Elections Canada's Al Mathews was unable to secure phone records from a proxy server company in Saskatchewan a whole freakin year after the fraudulent election calls were made.

No, the main story is :
Why did someone in the Guelph Con campaign - who would normally call RackNine to set up legit campaign robocalls directly via their Rogers IP- feel the need to use a proxy server to hide their ID at all?

Why did Guelph and Poutine both use the proxy server IP and the Rogers IP from the same computer to call RackNine for two days prior to the election?

Why did Guelph and Poutine both call RackNine from the same IP address via that proxy server exactly four minutes apart at 4am in the morning on election day? First Poutine, then Guelph deputy campaign manager Andrew Prescott.

Why is one of the three CIMS reports downloaded by Andrew Prescott - phone numbers identifying supporters and non-supporters - now missing from CIMS?

How did Poutine manage to crack the Guelph CIMS database in order to upload a list of 6,738 phone numbers to RackNine to send voters to the wrong polling stations?

And the biggie : Is Prescott, who has cancelled further interviews with Elections Canada, 'Poutine' or is he being framed or is he merely the tip of a previously unsuspected and ongoing elections fraud iceberg in 200 ridings across Canada? 

And so on and so on. The trail is not so much 'cold' as overwhelming.
A Tale of a Boy and his TV Show is doing a breakdown of the RoboCon stories one by one. Good resource.
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Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Baird enters the Iran got nukes! office pool

Baird says Iran could build nuclear bomb within months screams the CBC headline over Evan Solomon interviewing John Baird under a giant picture of visiting Israel PM Shimon Peres.

Fans of the Iran got nukes! cry wolf sweepstakes will recall both Peres and Netanyahu predicted in 1992 that Iran would have nuclear warheads by 1999, 1992 also being the year a former Mossad official advised "Iran has to be identified as Enemy No.1"

"Remember," said former IDF Chief of Strategic Planning Shlomo Brom in 2004 (page 167):
"the Iranians are always five to seven years from the bomb. Time passes but they’re always five to seven years from the bomb."
Juan Cole lists his top four Iran got nukes! predictions in the 90's from a longer list at Christian Science Monitor, which notes that the alarums predate the 1979 Islamic revolution to a time when the US, Germany and France were selling 20 nuclear reactors to Iran.
Wide Asleep in America has a more extensive list beginning in 1984.
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Boris : "Baird also won't talk about why Iran might want to develop a threshold capacity for nuclear weapons for regional strategic reasons."
Let's go to the map, shall we?

Friday, May 04, 2012

RoboCon : Cross-border election shopping

A Republican operative convicted of perpetrating election phone fraud for the Republican National Committee told interviewer Stephen Maher that "fraudulent calls in the last Canadian election are likely an American import" and a "fairly sophisticated operation".


Allen Raymond wrote a book about his stint as a GOP dirty trickster called How to Rig an Election in which he explains the use of tactics like phone jamming political opponents - hey, did Elections Canada ever investigate the over 10,000 phone jamming calls used to disrupt the NDP's online leadership vote this year ? - as well as harassment live calls intended to discourage opponents from voting at all. 


Raymond says he was approached for the illegal phone work by an RNC field director he knew called Jim Tobin, a regional chairman of George Bush's 2004 reelection campaign.
The RNC spent years and millions of dollars defending Tobin through umpteen court cases and appeals to choke off the flow of election fraud charges at just Raymond. When Raymond realized he was going under the bus alone, he talked.


Today the Ottawa Citizen and the G&M both report Elections Canada has confirmed 'Pierre Poutine' launched his fraudulent robocalls from the Guelph Con campaign election office.
Stephen Maher explains on CTV here.

Wednesday, May 02, 2012

RoboCon : A history lesson



Four years ago CBC's Keith Boag did this piece on voter data-gathering and microtargeting, including a look at the Cons' CIMS database and cameos from Michael Geist and Con-turned-Lib MP Garth Turner.

Much more interesting now, isn't it?
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