DOS Employee Impersonating Sen. Webb?
By: arlingtonblue
Published On: 8/2/2007 5:40:00 PM
So apparently Sen. Jim Webb believes that J. Chapman Petersen, Janet S. Oleszek, George Barker, and possibly myself are trying to appeal to the criminal vote in Virginia?
Either that or someone using a Department of State computer is impersonating a United States Senator while posting on my blog during government office hours. Whatever the case is, someone claiming to be Sen. Webb responded to my post about the three Democratic State Senate seat challengers urging the repeal of abuser fees stating, "I love how good Democrats are at appealing to the criminal vote." Here it is in more detail:
http://bluenova.word...
On Aug. 2, 2007, at 11:33 AM I got a request for a comment from the email address jim.webb@senate.gov on my post from the previous day titled "WashPost: VA Fees Could Help Dems Win." Here is the picture:
Upon further examination of my email comment notification you see this:
And upon even further examination of the IP address 169.253.4.21 you can find this:
Now, I'm not very familiar with Senate and DoS protocol, but I'm pretty sure that Senator Webb's office isn't at 2201 C St NW, Sen. Webb is not an employee of the State Department, and sherman.state.gov is doing something wrong.
Original Post:
http://bluenova.word...
Comments
It's not a Senate email (The Grey Havens - 8/2/2007 7:26:09 PM)
Senate emails are of the form first_last@senatorname.senate.gov, so Jim Webb's official email should be jim_webb@Webb.senate.gov.
More interesting, what's a State Department official doing trawling the blogs at 11:30am on Government time, paid by our tax dollars?
It's an outrage!
For starters, the form of the email is wrong (Lowell - 8/2/2007 7:26:22 PM)
It should be firstname_lastname not firstname.lastname
For starters, the form of the email is wrong (Lowell - 8/2/2007 7:26:23 PM)
It should be firstname_lastname not firstname.lastname
Add to that is it's a completely (Catzmaw - 8/2/2007 9:18:32 PM)
un-Webb like statement. It's an ad hominem attack with no context or explanation. Webb would not make such a blanket statement against all Democrats, would never start a comment with the grammatically awkward "I love how", and probably does not think it's a great idea to fund the transportation system with the criminal justice system, especially given the fees' disparate impact on the poor and working class people. Somebody ought to track this imposter down and make him repeat 6th grade English. An investigation would probably reveal that he's a young intern or entry level recent college or high school graduate who made it through school without ever having to diagram a sentence.
Probably spoofing, too (code - 8/2/2007 10:49:23 PM)
You can pretty easily spoof IP addresses, so I wouldn't put too much stock in that being a real DoS address, either. Just some moron having some fun.
I'm sure its not Webb, (arlingtonblue - 8/3/2007 9:12:04 AM)
and I'm all for anyone trying to help me figure out who it is posting on my blog. I think it probably is some bored State Department employee - who should be held accountable for doing this on government time, or is this just typical Washington and I should forget about it?
Go over the DOS site, if there is one (Pain - 8/3/2007 11:30:45 AM)
and find the contact information. Send them the info you have. If it's real, they'll know, and if it's false they'll know that too. Not much else you can or should do about it.
I am a software engineer (relawson - 8/4/2007 2:11:02 AM)
Not that my experience matters or is required because this is so obvious. I think your findings are good - I can't imagine that this post is from Senator Webb.
One way to test that theory is to compare the headers with an actual email from the Senator - if anyone has one. I assume Lowell or some of the others may be close to him and have one. That should settle this.
check out the comments (TurnVirginiaBlue - 8/4/2007 3:12:31 AM)
come on post one on blog.noslaves.com :)
and you'll see you just can type in any old email address, there is no validation checking per say on it.
It's really lame, the IP address and a hell of a lot of other stats are the real ID clues and if anyone is worth their salt they should keep those logs private.
Site meter btw is putting tracking cookies on your computer.
Tough to say for sure (relawson - 8/4/2007 10:52:02 AM)
IP spoofing is also a possibility.
When did George Burke (Chris Guy - 8/4/2007 2:29:01 AM)
get a job at the State Dept.?
LOL! (TurnVirginiaBlue - 8/4/2007 3:10:04 AM)
I'm sorry but this is amusing, although wordpress demanding an email to post a comment, the entire software below it is pretty lame and semi-useless....so it looks to me like someone was spamming at work which might get that person into some real trouble!
But, the thing that would have shown up in wordpress is just the word "Jim" so beyond the admin panel and you seeing it, it wouldn't be a complete impersonation onto the Internets.