Whaleleaks – What does Phil's email tell us

The email from Phil Goff to NZEI and other harvested email addresses tells us a great deal. You do have to know what you are looking at though.

We know that the server that their system is stored on and the server that their CRM system uses to process transaction including the mass emailing of people is funded by parliamentary services. Two of the sites on the server are funded and identified as such.

Therefore the email from Phil Goff, apart from being sent to people illegally because their email addresses were harvested illegally by Labour also breaches parliamentary services regulations as well as electoral law.

It breaches parliamentary services funding rules – because it solicits a donation. So therefore, it should technically have a promoter statement too – because there’s no way it is Parliamentary business.

In not having a promotor statement it also breaches electoral law.

Both Parliamentary Services and the Electoral Commission should be investigating Labour. It is apparent that they are blatantly blurring the lines between genuine constituency work that parliamentary services can and does fund and outright electioneering. Labour has consistently shown that they will not and do not use promoter statements and that they are using parliamentary services as their private campaign fund.

What is more concerning though is that the email details obtained from the server show that Labour is using the same sort of technology that has got Blue State Digital, Labour’s American black ops advisors, in big trouble around the world.

The data clearly shows:

Stop asset sales email 1
Deliv­ery Sum­mary
Intended Recip­i­ents 6190
Suc­ces­ful Deliv­er­ies 6190 (100.00%)
For­wards 0
Replies 0
Bounces 0 (0.00%)
Unsub­scribe Requests 19 (0.31%)
Sched­uled Date April 8^th, 2011 2:41 PM
Sta­tus Com­plete
Start Date April 8^th, 2011 2:44 PM
End Date April 8^th, 2011 5:35 PM

That shows that, just like Blue State Digital does, Labour is tracking your emails. They are recording forwards, replies and bounces. If you get an email from Labour you are being tracked.

I blogged in January about this, asking if it was possible that Labour was following their American black ops advisors lead and now I have the proof that they are. The tactics are identical and it looks like the tracking codes are too.

Blue State Dig­i­tal (BSD), which used the lat­est inter­net tech­nol­ogy to mobilise mil­lions of peo­ple behind Obama, has been employed to help cre­ate a grass­roots net­work across theUK as part of the cam­paign to stop the BNP leader, Nick Grif­fin, becom­ing the far-right party’s first MEP.

The firm began work last week and has already signed up thou­sands of sup­port­ers and donors. As part of the first stage of its cam­paign BSD and an anti-fascist mag­a­zine, Search­light, has sent thou­sands of emails ask­ing each recip­i­ents to for­ward it to five friendsand make a small dona­tion. The soft­ware means cam­paign­ers can then track who opens the emails, where they are sent and what hap­pens when they arrive at the other end — tai­lor­ing future emails to groups and individuals

Be very wary now if you receive an email from Labour. There is a high chance it contains tracking code, a high chance that they harvested your email illegally.

This is turning into, to quote David Farrar, a clusterf*ck for Labour. Their server was wide open to the world, then they blamed hacking or malicious intent for the acces when the evidence proved it was their ineptitude. They followed up that fiasco by blustering and lamely threatening a blogger about their data. Then it turns out that Labour are asking me to delete personal information that they weren’t entitled to hold in the first place. Personal information, that I might just add here includes DoB information that they illegally obtained from the NZEI.

Can it get any worse for them? …well… yes it can. There is plenty more to come.