Olivia Chow’s Website Hacked

For Immediate release
December 11, 2008 - Toronto

Website of Member of Parliament Olivia Chow was suspiciously ‘hacked’ yesterday.

The website, which had a poll asking users to vote, was blatantly ’spammed’ with hundreds of votes, shows the website logs.

The poll which asked voters if they rejected Harper’s economic plans had a 60/40-yes/no split between about 170 votes. Around 11:30 pm yesterday it began gaining hundreds of votes in a few hours, all in favour of ‘no’.

Until that time, the poll only attracted an average of about 10 votes a day and had around 60 percent in favour of Olivia’s position. According to website logs, at 11:36 pm on December 10th, the poll began getting 200-300 votes an hour all suspiciously cast contrary to Olivia’s position.

Early on, the website’s administrator tried resetting it to pre-11:30 pm results, but it was obvious the poll was being spammed by a disingenuous voter, or spamming software set in motion.

“I doubt 300 Trinity-Spadina voters an hour are up at 3 am clicking furiously on her website, it is obvious the site was the victim of a spam campaign” said the website’s administrator.

The poll has since been removed. “It’s a shame that a method allowing us to gain genuine feedback from our constituents gets abused by a few” said the administrator.

Screen captures documenting the ‘hack’ have popped up around the internet since. “No one with good intentions is going around taking “before” screen captures of MP websites; it’s obvious the screen captures were done with an agenda.” said the web administrator. “But we have the logs which tell the real story” he added.

The poll-rigging behaviour sometimes known as “freeping” is a common tactic used by right-wing groups to get public opinion in their favour. “If you have to rig polls in favour of your opinion” said the administrator, “it says more about your core ethics and the weakness of your position, than it does the issue.”