January 15, 2006
Desperation
("Don" presumably refers to Don Plett, the president of the Conservative Party.)
I did a literal "LOL" when I read this. It's such a obvious fake (note the lack of any formatting or even paragraph breaks) that I have to wonder why the sender even bothered. For this reason, I doubt that the Liberal Party was behind it, at least in any official capacity. It was more likely some rogue Liberal supporter and/or Conservative-hater who sent it out on their own.
As I am wont to do, I immediately checked the headers to find out where it came from. The notable bits:
Return-Path: (standupf@jupiter.usedns.com)
Received: from jupiter.usedns.com not authenticated [85.142.33.27]
by smtp-send.myrealbox.com with NetMail SMTP Agent $Revision: 1.6 $ on Linux
via secured & encrypted transport (TLS);
Sun, 15 Jan 2006 20:21:45 -0700
Received: from standupf by jupiter.usedns.com with local (Exim 4.52)
id 1EyKwA-0003Cq-Rn
for *****@*********.***; Mon, 16 Jan 2006 06:21:42 +0300
X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report
X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname - jupiter.usedns.com
X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain - myrealbox.com
X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID - [33424 32003] / [47 12]
X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain - jupiter.usedns.com
X-Source-Dir: standupforcanada.ru:/public_html/mlist
Standupforcanada.net and standupforcanada.ru send you to an empty site. The domain is registered to someone from St. Petersburg, Russia; the site is also hosted somewhere in that country, as is usedns.com.
Unless the Conservative Party president has suddenly decided to take a vacation to Russia in the middle of an election, I think the idea that this e-mail reveals the "hidden agenda" of legend is pretty much dead. This hasn't stopped at least one blog from assuming it's genuine, though.
Update: This e-mail was discussed on Peter Warren's show on Sunday (audio link; go to the half-hour mark). He interviews a computer technician who notes the Russian connection, and adds that he traced one of the headers to Seattle. A caller says that the name the site is registered to (Alice A Tokareff) is a reference to a Russian gun and Paul Martin's favourite brownies.
Note that the site was registered on December 18, indicating that the creator(s) have been planning something like this for awhile.
I just checked the whois results again, and the registration seems to have been changed to "Vit Jouss."
Labels: Conservative Party, nerd stuff
