Comments on: ALG Leveled a Serious Charge. Now it’s Time to Prove it.

By: Scott W. Graves

Scott W. Graves — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:43:02 +0000

Badanov –

The problem is that you have jumped to the conclusion of “Ms. Stone lied” without the proof. Proof is available and has not yet been published. That fact alone makes the accusation questionable.

Why are you are willing to take ALG at their word when proof is readily available? It seems the same logic would allow you to accept the word of those who falsely accused Rush Limbaugh of racism.

Without proof, accusations are just accusations. Racism is a serious issue and needs to be handled carefully by all parties.

By: badanov

badanov — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 05:09:39 +0000

Ms Stone lied.

Seeing the headers proves nothing. The only way to be sure is to look at the raw sent mail spool, not the interface. Even then, the raw spool can be modified without anyone being the wiser. It takes less than one tenth of a second to do so. No tracks and no problem for anyone with root access and an understanding of stream editing.

Do you really think that ALG has a Unix geek on their staff or at their disposal to make such modifications?

I don’t.

My best guess is that ALG uses a third party for their email, and while they can probably look at their raw received mail spool, they probably can’t modify them.

NBC can’t say the same thing.

Ms. Stone lied.

By: M. Bouffant

M. Bouffant — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 22:55:34 +0000

It is the responsibility of those in each faction of a political movement to hold its own accountable.

Anti-Semitism (and racism) is a serious matter and should never be used by any political organization as a tool in its communications toolbox.

Uh, so, are you all at last repudiating the Southern Strategy?

By: PJ Tibbs

PJ Tibbs — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:10:15 +0000

One hopes that the “Right” would apply the same standard to media personalities such as Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Lou Dobbs.

By: Concerned Conservative

Concerned Conservative — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:29:28 +0000

We have totally been played. I just wish people on the right would rip into ALG as they properly deserve. It’s small comfort that they destroyed their credibility with anyone who heard the story. Lazy groups that make bombastic charges should be eradicated. What a discredit to the people who actually do good work for limited government.

By: Rick

Rick — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 01:33:21 +0000

As a consultant who works with large enterprise email systems all the time, it was pretty obvious once NBC execs went public that they had traced the message on their side and it did not contain the offensive remarks, that ALG was the culprit.

It would have taken the NBC IT guys probably 30 minutes to track the message from the blackberry, to the blackberry server, to the email server, to the external SMTP relay. Which would actually track the connection, to the provider who hosts ALG’s email domain (Postini by the way), length of the connection(in milliseconds), and the bytes transferred.

Oh, and since ALG uses Postini as their SMTP relay/anti spam provider the detailed message information, including a copy of the message is available, this is a configurable setting, so it probably is defaulted to 24 hours. ALG also uses Microsoft Exchange 2007, and all the detailed message info is stored on the server and can be accessed from the admin console in about 5 minutes.

Now, that’s to get the absolute techyist details, but the header info is in the email UI from Outlook Web Access, which ALG has made available from any internet connected computer. All you need is the user name and password, which I’d guess ALG has.

Well, that’s what I thought at least.