The Wingnuterer

We have a Extreme Heat Alert here in Toronto on the first official day of Summer.  So while your brain bakes with sun stroke and your body is dessicated by the sun while all the Global Warming Deniers tell us that the Earth has actually cooling for the last ten years (according to the Heartland Instituate).  Let me share with you the unbelievable audacity of man’s desire to know the truth, and even when early man got it right but for the wrong reasons

It’s a busy day for me today, so my Poutine research is put on hold until I take care of some client work first.  Some of my hunches are panning out and some aren’t.

Anyways, If you like me and burdened by things  like science and facts and have difficult believing the myth of Noah’s Ark, well I have your salvation at hand.  Enjoy!

So the latest buzz on the Poutine trail is that Elections Canada served freeproxyserver.ca with production orders for their logs. Marc Norris, the admin of freeproxyserver.ca complied with the order, but unfortunately his server log records do not go back that far. This is quite understandable since the amount of data that proxy server generates in day can be very large, and in order to store a years worth of log data could require terabytes of storage, and then additional space for the backups. Given that freeproxyserver.ca is a free service I can’t blame him for spending the additional money.

Now the real interesting thing that wasn’t mentioned in most stories is the fact that both Prescott and Poutine used freeproxyserver.ca to connect to the Rack-9 Servers.  From the Montreal Gazette we have this report Pierre Poutine’s trail goes cold in Saskatchewan

The suspect logged onto RackNine using the same IP address used to access an account with RackNine held by Andrew Prescott, a worker on the campaign of Guelph Conservative candidate Marty Burke. Both Poutine and Prescott’s account were also accessed through freeproxyserver.ca, Elections Canada says.

Now I fully understand why Pierre Poutine need to use a Proxy Server to connect to Rak-9, but why the hell did Andrew Prescott need to use a proxy server to do legitimate work for the Burke Campaign with Rack-9?   When you consider all the thousands of free proxy servers that are available in Canada and across the world, what are the chances that Poutine and Prescott would both use the same one?  Ya, that line that Prescott is using the he “categorically” denies he is Pierre Poutine getting a little stale.

COMING UP NEXT - Nailing Down Poutine’s Time Line and other interesting coincidences between Poutine and the Burke Campaign.

If we squirrels get it, why can’t humans figure it out?

All Hale Foamy, our Loving Lord and Master - OR FEEL OUR SQUIRRELLY WRATH!!!!

On Sunday I wrote this piece, #RoboCon - The Noose Tightens Around The #CPC Neck explaining the details involving Internet Cookies, IP Addresses and NAT Firewalls and how they relate to the facts that we know about Pierre Poutine.  If you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you take the time.

Now, later on Sunday it was pointed out to me by SaskBoy and another person whom is very well informed on the details of the Poutine Investigation that I made an error by concluding that IP address linking Andrew Prescott’s and Pierre Poutine’s Rack-9 accounts originated from the Burke Campaign Office.  This is factually incorrect, there has been no information stating that the Burke Campaign Office had the Rogers IP Address 99.225.28.34

This bother me somewhat, and I kept mulling over how the ownership of this IP Address could be resolved, and then late yesterday it hit me that I coming at this from the direction.  Instead of asking myself “Is there a way to show that Burke Campaign owned this IP Address during the Election?”  I should have been looking to see if there was a way exclude the Burke Campaign.

So the problem is simple, what internet ISP did the Burke Campaign use during the 41th Election?  Was it Rogers, in which case it is possible at the Burke Campaign was the source.  Or was it another company, Bell? Telus, Primus, IGS, Cogeco or any of the numeral other of possible carriers?  If the Burke Campaign used any ISP other than Rogers, then this would rule them out as being the possible source of the Prescott/Poutine IP Address.

So how do we determine what ISP the Burke Campaign used?  Well the old saying, the best records are Tax records, so all we need to do is look at the Burke Campaign financial return for the 41st Election.

The exact form we are looking for is Marty Burke’s Candidates’ Details - Statement of Electoral Campaign Expenses (Part 3a). There is no way to give a direct link to the form since they are generate by a script, so I have included a screen shot.  I have edited it to place the column headers and the appropriate data to appear all in one screen shot, the form was also sorted on Supplier.

Click for large image.

Items #14 and #34 are payments to Rogers, and they fall under Office Expenses - Other (including telephone).  So that rules out anyone saying this could be a payment to a person called Rogers.  Also by examining the entire 3a form (not shown here) we can also see that there are no other payments to any other IPS’s.

From this information we can not eliminate the Burke Campaign as being the source of the Prescott/Poutine IP address, but we also can not conclude that the Burke Campaign owned the 99.225.28.34 IP Address.

Is Stephen Harper Responsible for the election fraud that occurred during the last election in Guelph and very likely elsewhere in Canada?  The answer is YES.  I could go into a long winded explanation for the reasons, but I think there is one person whom even Stephen Harper can’t deny as a reasonable source, a person who makes the argument for Government Accountability and Responsibility very clear.

At worst, he personally ordered it done and chose the people who executed the plan. At the very least, he fostered an attitude within the party [...], chose the managers of the people who committed these crimes and completely and utterly failed to exercise any oversight, supervision or leadership.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter where [his] actions or lack of them fall on that scale. He is the leader and a leader is responsible for the actions of the people he leads.

If he had a right or honourable bone in his body, he’d admit that and resign immediately.

These words are of course those of Stephen Harper when he demanded accountability from the Liberals over the AdScam scandal.  I think that this quote will become my new closing tag on every new post I do and #Robocalls and Pierre Poutine

Update Nut #1 - It has been pointed out by Saskboy and one other highly placed person directly connected to this Poutine affair that I have one point in error, the IP Address linked to the Pierre Poutine has not been directly link to the Burke Campaign Office.  If the IP address is linked to Private Persons internet access or if it the IP address of publicly available WiFi HotSpot (say a Starbucks) then this would place the noose around Prescott’s neck.  So even if Prescott is outed as Pierre Poutine (I’m not saying that it is, at this point), there is still the question of who is/was covering for him when the CIMS database logs were altered.

Update Nut #2 : I have mistakenly identified the Burke Campaign Manager as Marty Morgan and once as Marty Burke when it should be Ken Morgan.  I have corrected these errors and thank you to readers at tyhe Galloping Beaver for pointing out this error.

UPDATE NUT #3 : The Wingnuterer would like to welcome visitors from the Privy Council Office in Ottawa and what I am assume are our Honorable Members of the House of Commons. Nice to see you gents back and reading quality blogs like mine again,… Ok, it’s nice to see gents back reading my somewhat questionable blog again.

The last big news in Pierre Poutine saga was back on April 16th when it was revealed that Robocalls probe extends to Tory headquarters. In that news article it was revealed that log entries in the CIMS Database were blank for the individual whom they were inquiring about.

What does this mean Blank.  Well in a Database system, you can delete a record, but that does not mean that record has been removed.  In fact, the method of “Deletion” is to mark the record as deleted and in subsequent queries made on the Database, records marked as Deleted are not processed/included during those queries.  A record can only be purged from the Database permanently by crunching/compacting/compressing the database.  During this process, the main database files and indexes are completely rewritten and all data marked as Deleted are removed.

So why does this distinction require such a detailed explanation?  The answer is simple, the only way to remove data in a log file is to over write record(s) with new data, and to selectively write to a log file in a database requires special security.  By Special Security I am referring to the type of security that is required by someone who has Administrative Privileges and the type of access/tools to the database that would facilitate this type of operation.  From my understand, I do not believe that the CIMS web interface has those required tools built into its program.

Now keep all of the above in mind and lets look at the bomb shell that was dropped on Friday, May 4th. Robocalls IP address same as one used by Conservative candidate campaign worker, Elections Canada alleges. I am just going to point out some the most critical information, but I recommend you the entire article for yourself.

The sworn statement filed by Elections Canada investigator Al Mathews and released Friday makes a crucial link between the calls and the Internet Protocol address (IP) used to arrange the fraudulent calls made through Edmonton voice-broadcasting company RackNine.

The IP address was used both by Burke campaign worker Andrew Prescott to arrange legitimate calls with the company and by whoever placed the fraudulent calls that sent hundreds of electors to the wrong polling stations, Mathews alleges.

RackNine records provided to Elections Canada showed that Prescott’s account had been accessed from 99.225.28.34, a Rogers IP address in Guelph. He used his account to send out robocalls promoting Burke campaign events.

Now I think its more than fair to say that there is no smoking gun proof that Prescott logged into to the Poutine account and made the illegal phone calls.  It can only be said that same computer in the Burke Campaign office logged into the both the Poutine (client #93) and Prescott’s (client #45) account.

Wait a second, couldn’t the Poutine account have been accessed from any computer in the Burke Campaign Office since it was behind the firewall IP that was recorded?   Well the short answer is yes, but the real answer is no.  Any computer in the Burke Campaign Office would appear to be coming from the Rogers IP Address is 99.225.28.34 (the IP on record for the Burke Campaign) with a NAT firewall (NAT Firewalling is the most common and prevalent form of Firewall) unless it was routed through a proxy server.  Poutine did use a Proxy Server to hide his true IP address from the Rak-9 Servers, but on May 2nd he made a critical error that circumvented his use of the Saskatchewan based freeproxyserver.ca.  To better understand this error, we have to look at another news article.

From the National Post article John Ivison: Closing in on Pierre Poutine, published on Marth 8th, 2012 we learn how the owner of Rack-9, Matt Meier, was rightly pissed off that his company had been used as an instrument to thwart democracy, and how Matt Meier continued to investigate to uncover the true ID of Pierre Poutine.

Mr. Meier said he had his “Eureka” moment at 3 a.m. one morning, and by 5 a.m. had written a 22 page report for Elections Canada. “He [Pierre Jones] screwed up. Just for a fraction of a second but it was enough for me to find him,” he said.

So what was this Eureka Moment, the answer is not in this article, but I do remember a more detailed article that out lined an interview with Matt Meier on how he tracked down the trail of IP addresses used by Pierre Poutine, a trail of cookie crumbs (it took me a while to locate the exact article again). From the article Pierre Poutine: Will Mystery Robocaller be unmasked Monday? we have this very interesting tidbit of information

Early last Tuesday morning – as in 2:45 AM early – Meier sent me this message: ”I think I know who Pierre Poutine is!!! I’ve been scouring all servers for logs and I’m pretty sure he messed-up hiding himself.”

The brain-wave hit him, he told me later, in the middle of the night, when he suddenly remembered that he had a tertiary server, which he hadn’t turned over to Elections Canada, because it wasn’t subject to the original court-issued production order. When he went back and analyzed the data on that server, he realized that the person who’d uploaded the fake calls had used a phony IP address. But when that user signed off, Meier told me, he left behind a tell-tale “cookie”, which left a trail of what you might call digital cookie crumbs, that led, in turn, to the real IP address.

It was the Rack-9 Server Cookie that led back to the Burke Campaign IP Address, but if Poutine was using a proxy server, how could have Poutine screwed up and not used proxy server on May 2nd? The answer is this, Poutine did use the Proxy Server, but it didn’t matter because the computer he used had initial picked up its initial Rack-9 Server Cookie when Prescott had connected to the Rack-9 Servers to place earlier, legitimate Robocalls.

To understand this better we need to look at how Internet Cookies are used and what they are comprised of.  An Internet Cookie is a simple text file that is stored in your internet browser cache.  A cookie is issued from a web server that you connect to and the cookie can contain many different pieces if information, but the one single unique piece of information that is common to all cookies is a Unique IDentification code (UID).  Now many web servers may issue several different Internet Cookies associated to a computer connecting to them, but the most simplest and common cookie is the Tracking Cookie. A Tracking Cookie will always be unique to computer and a local computer user profile.  This cookie is what used Meier to tracked down the computer in the Burke Campaign Office, and that cookie was issued under the account that was used to access the Client #45 account.  We know this is the case because the Prescott account was setup before the Poutine’s (Client #93) and Prescott’s account would have been issued a Rack-9 Server Cookie first.  So when Poutine logged into the Rack-9 Servers from the Burke Campaign Office, the Rack-9 Server requested if the computer being used had any Rack-9 Server Cookie, which according to Matt Meier, it did.  The Computer at the Burke Campaign relayed it’s cookies back to Rack-9 Servers, which in turn logged the UID of the cookies in the Server Logs.  Now the Internet Cookie in question was a Logout Cookie, and this type of cookie isn’t consider a user identification cookie type, like those associated with user accounts, but are commonly used to track the last time a specific computer was connected to a server, but there’s the rub, the Cookie is assigned a UID and that UID can be associated with more than one user server account, but with only with one computer and one local computer user account on that computer.

So where does this leave us?  Lets examine the facts that we know are 100% certain

1. Pierre Poutine made #robocalls calls using Rack-9.
2. Pierre Poutine claimed to have been given Matt Meier’s personal and private connect information.
3. Pierre Poutine had sufficient security access to access the CIMS database and pull digital lists of NON-CPC supporters
4. Pierre Poutine had sufficient knowledge of setting up and using Burner Phones and untraceable Pay-Pal accounts.
5. Pierre Poutine had sufficient knowledge on how to use masking proxy servers.
6. Pierre Poutine had access to same computer and local computer user profile that was used by Prescott to connect to Rack-9 on May 2nd to make the illegal voter suppression #Robocalls.
7. The computer used to make these illegal voter suppression calls was used from behind the Burke Campaign NAT Firewall and is directly linked to Burke Campaign Rogers Account that was assigned the IP Address 99.225.28.34

So was there anyone else in the Burke Campaign Office that had the personal and private contact information for Matt Meier?  Well according to Prescott, he shared this contact information with  Michael Sona and Burke Campaign Manager Ken Morgan.  So we have three possible people who did have Matt Meier’ personal and private contact information, but we can rule out Michael Sona as Pierre Poutine, since it is known that Michael Sona acting as an observer at one of Guelph’s polling stations all day, and as such he could not have been in the Burke Campaign Office to place the illegal voter suppression #robocalls with Rack-9.

So we are down to two rats in the Burke Campaign office on the Day of May 2nd, Campaign Manager, Ken Morgan and Andrew Prescott.

Now that is not the end of this, ignoring the other 199 ridings that are being investigated, there is the very important point I made at the beginning of the article.  Someone with Administrative Rights to the CIMS database blanked out the log records which point to the Poutine List pull.  Now I am fairly certain, that no one in their right mind is going to allow people who are under suspicion of being Pierre Poutine or who are even associated the Burke Campaign to be allowed access to the CIMS database in order to prep a copy of the database that is intended to be sent to Elections Canada for this investigation.  So it is obvious that we have a person higher up the CPC food chain actively and knowingly attempting to cover up this crime.

As for Sona, Prescott and Morgan, there is two possible scenarios to consider.  Let me VERY CLEAR, these are only hypothetical possibilities, none have been proven in a court of law, nor is there any clear evidence to support them.

Possible Senario #1 : All three of them could have been in on it.  From news reports we know Sona was mouthing off about the idea of using misleadng calls during the campaign.  We know Prescott had all the skills and knowledge to put the plan in action.  Morgan was the man who allowed it happen, because we all know that in the CPC if you want to break wind, you need permission, in triplicate, before you’re allow to unclamp your sphincter.  Now I am not saying that this is way it happened, but given the nature of the CPC, it does beg the question.

Possible Scenario  #2 :  It was one of the three of the people in the Burke Campaign who had Matt Meier’s personal and private contact information.  So pick among the three, Sone, Prescott or Morgan.

Possible Scenario #3 : Prescott isn’t Poutine, it was someone else.  If this is the case, then that person went through extraordinary lengths to frame Prescott as the most likely suspect in the event that the Poutine Rack-9 #Robocalls were tracked to the Burke Campaign Office.

Still in the very end, given any of these three possible scenarios, the unavoidable fact remains that someone deliberately, maliciously and criminally altered the CIMS database logs that were given to Election Canada.  What’s the punishment for altering evidence, obstruction an investigation and criminal conspiracy?

There is no polite way to put this, but to say that someone high up in the CPC delete database transaction log data from the copy of CIMS that they gave to Elections Canada.

Robocalls probe extends to Tory headquarters

There are a couple of very interesting revelations in this story (emphasis added by me)

They (Elections Canada) are now certain the list of numbers in Guelph that received the robocalls came directly from CIMS, according to the source. The CIMS data were compared to listings of the outgoing robocalls provided under court order by RackNine and matched perfectly, the source said.

Well it gets better, we further read;

“As you know, we have proactively reached out to Elections Canada and offered to assist them in any way we can,” party spokesman Fred DeLorey said Monday night. “That includes handing over any documents or records that may assist them.”

So the CPC willing prepared Documents and copy of the CIMS database for Election Canada to use in their investigation.  Now given the nature and severity of the crimes being investigated, one would make damn sure that any of the information isn’t tampered with or redacted in way.  One would make sure that the information given to investigators is on the level, because if it turns out that the data looks, how shall we say, cooked, then it makes you look as if you are actively trying to thwart the investigation and cover up criminal activity in your political party,… you know,… just saying.

CIMS is known for its tight access controls and detailed event logging and retains a digital record of every transaction on the database. Interns and volunteers have been sanctioned when the logs showed they had looked up Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s listing, for example.

The investigators have inquired about CIMS logs for one particular user in the party’s headquarters. The logs show blanks between this person’s CIMS logon and logoff on the day the Guelph data was accessed, according to the source.

It is now abundantly clear that someone with high enough security access to CIMS tampered with copy of CIMS given to Elections Canada.  Sorry, if the excuse “It was just an over site,… It was a clerical error” does not wash.  It doesn’t matter if the person who deleted this information was in cahoots with Pierre Poutine or not, this person has actively attempted to subvert a criminal investigation.  That in itself is another crime.

Time to start another investigation

When I say/think “I want a new scope” the song “I want a new drug” keeps going through my head, strange.   I have been contemplating buying a new telescope for a couple years now, but always held off because of my wife, now ex-wife.  It is a long story and I have no intention on going into it here.  All that said and done, in resent weeks my taste for astronomy has been on the up tick, especially since the discovery of a new supernova in the Galaxy M95.

When I was a teenager, I fell in love with the stars and stargazing.  The first Messier object I ever observer was M42, which you can see with the naked eye and is spectacular in normal 10×50 binoculars.  I soon found binoculars very limitings and want more power, more light, more magnification.  So I approached my dad and asked him if he would buy me a telescope.  To my amazement my dad never batted an eye and said yes (I don’t think he talked to my mom about it this purchase)  So I started to shop around and after many weeks I found someone who was selling a  home made telescope for $200.00, and believe me that was a staggering amount of money when I was kid.  My first telescope was a Newtonian Reflector with a 6″ hand ground mirror and had a whopping f-stop of f/13.5 (the light tube was taller than I was).  The telescope came with a hand made mount made from cement, steel tubing and plumbing pipe and was surprisingly stable, considering I could have attached a hose and used as a sprinkler to water the garden.

So with my brand new/used/home made telescope I began to explore to the heavens, and a few neighbours windows, but we won’t talk about that here.  For years I use to freeze my ass off in winter (when we had winters) and in the summertime I use gather large crowds at Sauble Beach.  It was a hoot showing people the red spot of Jupiter and rings of Saturn.  I would literately have 20 to 40 people laying in the cool summer sands of the beach, staring up at the stars, it was like people had never seen them before.  Soon, it was known that some geeky kid was giving free astronomy shows each Saturday night on the beach.  It was great fun seeing children squeal with joy when they saw Saturn, Jupiter and moon under high power magnification.

After 15 years of use, my old telescope gave up the ghost.  The soft iron shafts and brass bushings began to wear and there was to much free play in the mount.  The main mirror started to oxidize and the silver coating was actually starting to wear out in places.

Since then I stopped stargazing because other things took over in my life, and doing astronomy is not conducive to a marriage, unless your significant other likes it or doesn’t mind not seeing during the night for hours on end.

So now here I am, single again, with time on my hands and my eyes wander towards the heavens, but I do not have a decent size scope.  Ok, I do have a Meade Schmidt-Cassegrain D90 F/11.11 with dual focus, but it’s useful limits are really restricted to Mag +12 (under excellent view conditions) and I do not have an even half-ways decent mount for it.  It would make for an excellent piggyback scope and I do have the adapter rings to attach my Nikon D80 SDLR to it.

In the end, I want a scope,… and I have been shopping around and have narrowed my choice down to Meade LX90 series with either a Schmidt-Cassegrain 8″ F/10 or 10″ F/10 or the Celestron SGT series with a either a Schmidt-Cassegrain 8″ F/10 or 9.25″ F/10.

Any fellow nerds or nerdettes out there with an opinion on these kits or with a recommendation for a different setup?

Celeston SGT Schmidt-Cassegrain

Meade LX90 Schmidt-Cassegrain

The Daily Zorpheous

If I missed any please let me know, I may added them.