* What may or may not seem real on the Web
Democracy and the American First Amendment – you gotta love them. Because of our right to free speech and freedom of the press, we Americans can say or publish darn near anything we want, whether it’s true or not. Combine that with the power of the Internet for reaching millions of people quickly, and you have the recipe for disseminating lots of unfounded information and getting people all riled up.
Web-savvy people have already learned to be wary of urban legends, suspicious e-mails and sophisticated phishing scams; now we have to question the sources of our supposed news feeds. One story in particular has opened my eyes to the need to question everything before I seriously believe it.
I’m a news junkie, and I read and watch all sorts of news reports. I subscribe to dozens of newsletters that I believe to be published by very reputable sources…like Network World. So when a newsletter came to my inbox from the source “Techsecurity@techsecurity.org” and bearing the subject line “Tech Story: Hacking the Touch Screen Votes,” the message captured my interest. I never thought to question the validity of the source, as it seemed quite believable.
Perhaps you have seen this vote hacking story. It was written by someone named Thom Hartmann. The story is all about how the results of the recent federal election allegedly were changed to favor Bush. The article cites some examples from Florida and Ohio that seem quite convincing. I read the entire article, looked at the Web sites it referenced, and felt saddened that these unknown culprits could change the course of our election…and perhaps history.
Then a friend forwarded an article to me that was along the same lines, written by William Rivers Pitt. (The article was off a Web site called truthout.org, though I couldn’t tell that from the forwarded e-mail that simply contained the article.) Pitt seemed to corroborate the charges made by Hartmann, and provided even more alleged instances of corruption in the vote-tallying process.
What’s more, this article contained a letter that was supposedly sent to the Comptroller General of the U.S. by three members of the U.S. House of Representatives. This letter calls for the investigation of possible voting fraud, citing the same issues that Hartmann pointed out.
Then came a story on the front page of the Nov. 12, 2004 Houston Chronicle newspaper – a publication that I read regularly and trust implicitly. This story pointed out that the original article I received (Hartmann’s) was really part of a blog that was mostly theory and rumor and not grounded in absolute fact. The charges in that article, in fact, were discredited by a group of political scientists from Cornell, Harvard and Stanford universities. (Hey, if you can’t trust college professors, whom can you trust?)
I decided to learn more about the organization that first sent me the story of vote hacking, Techsecurity.org. Hmm, it seems there is no valid URL for www.techsecurity.org. When I do a Google search on techsecurity.org, it leads me to video game sites. This is what Oprah calls “the ‘ah ha’ moment.” “Ah ha,” I said to myself. I had been scammed. The feeling is a bit like learning there is no Santa Claus.
As for truthout.org, it appears to be a valid source of opinions from around the world. I’m not sure how much of its information is rooted in fact.
There was a popular saying when I was a teen: Question authority. I think I’ll now put that advice to work every time I receive unsolicited information from an unknown source – no matter how trustworthy the source appears to be. It’s a good practice for us all, whether the information we receive is an apparent news story, an urgent message from our banks requesting account information, or an offer to lose ten pounds overnight without dieting.
Linda Musthaler is vice president of Currid & Company. You can write to her at mailto:Linda.Musthaler@currid.com
