This entry was posted on
Monday, August 20th, 2007 at
1:29 pm and is filed
under The Political Weblog Movement.

Mark Pack (LibDemVoice) – Who was the person who faked the Norman Lamb Facebook profile?

Some lovely detective work by Mark. I have a couple of details and observations to add:

82.118.116.193 is the IP address connected so strongly to the Facebook impersonation. This is a *static* IP address used for DSL customers of KeConnect. It could be that more than one person is working on this, but only one user account is involved.

Of all of the activity tracked around the IP address, the most revealing is the Wikipedia record which shows that this IP address has been used solely to repeatedly alter Norman Lamb’s Wikipedia profile to include claims of dirty tricks against Iain Dale, claims that these were not reported because the local paper favours the Lib Dems and a plug for the next Conservative candidate due to face Lamb.

There are also some comments on the LibDemVoice website originating from the same the IP address seeking to blame the impersonation on everybody but the Tories.

So I’m going to go out on a limb and say that a Tory is behind this.

Now, those who habitually doubt the word of any Liberal Democrat may doubt the comment record claimed by Mark Pack, but mostly this is going to involve Tories who will at the same time believe or pretend to believe any old rubbish coming from Tory HQ.

Of course, one of those Tories is Iain Dale, who has recently and consistently shown strong form tolerating and allowing sock-puppetry and other forms of online chicanery when it suits him, but just because he tolerates it from others doesn’t mean he does it himself (he just can’t blame people for making that assumption is all). Also, just because someone anonymously claims that Lamb only increased his majority by telling voters that Iain Dale is gay (I wasn’t aware this was ever a secret, BTW), it does not follow that Iain Dale would be involved in this attempt to undermine his former adversary.

If anything, logic would dictate that the Tory with the strongest motive is the Tory who (currently) has the most to gain from a successful campaign of this kind and/or one of his key contributors to his campaign…. but Trevor Ivory has reportedly issued a strong denial.

I think I’ll sign off there for now and go in search of that denial…

UPDATE – (4pm) – Well, I’ll be jiggered… the Suffolk Conservative Councillors website was designed by KeConnect. I wonder if Suffolk Conservative Councillors also use KeConnect as their ISP.

:o)

Still trying to find an online record of the reported denial…. wait, no… with this little bit of help, I managed to track it down:

Eastern Daily Press MP fuming over Facebook fake: And in another twist the internet hoax had an e-mail link to the MP’s Conservative rival, Trevor Ivory, who yesterday strongly denied all knowledge on how the page was created… He said: “I strongly condemn what has happened to Mr Lamb and I have written to him to say I had nothing whatsoever to do with it.”