ChrisInCanadaOrAussy on October 4, 2006 at 4:24 AM

Define real…

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX THU OCT 5 2006 2:53:48 ET XXXXX

CLAIM: FILTHY FOLEY ONLINE MESSAGES WERE PAGE PRANK GONE AWRY
**World Exclusive**
**Must Credit the DRUDGE REPORT**

According to two people close to former congressional page Jordan Edmund, the now famous lurid AOL Instant Message exchanges that led to the resignation of Mark Foley were part of an online prank that by mistake got into the hands of enemy political operatives, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal.

According to one Oklahoma source who knows the former page very well, Edmund, a conservative Republican, goaded an unwitting Foley to type embarrassing comments that were then shared with a small group of young Hill politicos. The prank went awry when the saved IM sessions got into the hands of political operatives favorable to Democrats.

The primary source, an ally of Edmund, adamantly proclaims that the former page is not a homosexual. The prank scenario was confirmed by a second associate of Edmund. Both are fearful that their political careers will be affected if they are publicly brought into the investigation.

A setup, and yes, that is real.

2. If I was talking to a celebrity or a Congressman, I would keep a log of the IM/email, etc. Who wouldn’t? So the fact that these IMs were saved is a no-brainer.

True, I did it when I talked to Dane Cook one time. But in this case you have to wonder, if these are in fact real and upsetting, why they weren’t brought out until now? (plus all other points mentioned by myself and others earlier). Again, Foley is the sicko here, but there are questions that need answering, and I find it irresponsible to simply buy the story as it’s being told simply because “ABC says so”. Just look out how the “Hastert knew” angle has been played up. There are actually claims now that the leadership was told a couple years ago, but it’s too early to know what to make of that… But up until now, as far as anyone could tell Hastert didn’t know anything about the IMs/sexual content. The Dems put it in their “playbook” to mix that part of the issue together with the emails to score maximum political points (aka – lie to win the election), and much of the media has allowed these liars to have a voice.

RightWinged, are you trying to lose all credibility and show how asinine you are?

Or, as I suspect, does it just come natural?

ChrisInCanadaOrAussy on October 4, 2006 at 4:22 PM

What did I say to deserve such civility now?

Retention of IM Communications and Public Records and Open Meetings Laws:

and

The IM Archiving Without Consent Problem:

Now if these IM logs were archival logs on congressional IM servers, who leaked them to Brian Ross?

If those IM chats that Brian Ross has did not come from congressional IM servers, where did they come from? If these IM chats took place on congressional IM servers, how do those logs compare to what Brian Ross has?

If these IM chats took place on consumer grade IM servers, out side of congressional duties, that means the congressional pages who participated in them, did so voluntarily; you have to sign up with the service, and obtain an account, and you have to give out your user name.

And how do you verify with whom you are chatting???

Most states and my country (Canada) are one-party consent jurisdictions.

The ultimate point, however, is that saving chat messages is easy to do — it’s often done automatically (often without the user realizing their computer is storing the chat à la Ian) and when not, still ultra easy.

But a great article nonetheless. Well worth reading for anyone that uses instant messages.

[formerly known as "ChrisInCanadaOrAussy"]

http://www.securityfocus.com/columnists/233

Or, as I suspect, does it just come natural?

2. If I was talking to a celebrity or a Congressman, I would keep a log of the IM/email, etc. Who wouldn’t? So the fact that these IMs were saved is a no-brainer.

The radical left is once again using its lie cheat and steal tactics and not being called on it. This happens in every fight. The president must step up and demand information in every instance. Not just in this case but also in the National Security leaks. The precedent that has been set on letting unsubstantiated information pass as vetted and credible is unconscionable.

Foley must go but the question is who else must go with him? Personally I believe the ones that sat on this information for so long only to releaseit now for political gain should. Furthermore if it turns out to be fabricated for political gain the fabricators shoulod be jailed. But like everything else eminating from the left in this country it will be sanctified and the perpetrators will be rewarded with millions!

Lack of denial is proof of nothing. I don’t doubt that he was sending IM’s to former pages, otherwise, why would he immediately resign? I wonder, however, if the reported IM’s are authentic, or re-written from memory?

Exactly.

There is no doubt that Foley is a pervert; he is no longer in the government and the FBI is rightfully investigating him. He had no actual physical contact with these teens, and it is good that he was outed before that happened.

The Democrats are capable of producing fake evidence–do I need to list examples? This time, they may have really had their ducks in a row. They knew Foley is gay, contacting former pages, possibly transmitting lurid, sexual messages. So why not capitalize on that? But, of course wait to get full political advantage, instead of protecting any other teens.

Now the left is doing all it can to implicate all Republicans in this. Which makes the whole affair even dirtier, giving it “legs” to last until the election.

The IMs are real for frig sakes.

First things first. How do you know? What Ross reports may NOT be what Foley said.

I was supposed to be called as an expert witness to testify that a message was received on my wife’s voicemail at a particular time from one of my wife’s clients, and that the copy I downloaded to a CD was a truthful, accurate copy of the message.

That voicemail transcribed to a CD was to be evidence of my wife’s client’s innocence in a charge of child endangerment, a criminal complaint filed by her child’s father in a custody/visitation dispute.

The stakes involve permanent loss of visitation (forget about custody) for the mother, possible jail time, a fine, and a criminal record upon conviction.

As of yesterday, the other side stipulated as to the facts that the message on CD that I created was recorded on voicemail when it was recorded, and that the .wav copy was an accurate recording. And I no longer have to testify.

I was part of the chain of custody between the voicemail recording and the .wav copy of it on CD, and had they not stipulated, I would be on the witness stand next week explaining exactly how I downloaded the .wav file, translated to a CD recording format, and burned the CD. I would have been required to disclose the source of the stored copy of the voicemail, the download mechanism, the software tool I used to transcribe, the CD burner, and the brand of CDs I used.

Everything. And Mark Foley, regardless of his behavior, even if he is a scumbag, deserves no less.

Because when you accuse a person of a heineous crime, fairness demands that the evidence be factual and truthful. The real damning evidence against Foley are those IMs that Ross claims were between Foley and a minor.

Here’s what we don’t know. We don’t know who is in the chain of custody for the alleged Foley IMs.

We don’t know even who, with certainty, the parties in the IM are.

We don’t know how Brian Ross acquired them, or how many others handled, viewed, transcribed, etc., them.

We don’t know if they are even accurate (and not forged or edited) renditions of a dialog between Foley and a page.

We don’t know squat about these messages except what Brian Ross says. And that ought to bother us. Because like Dan Rather and the forged TANG documents, Ross could be using forgeries.

The media (ABC in particular) are gang beating up the Republicans with the editorial equivalent of a baseball bat and chains. The Democrats are already running TV ads accusing the entire Republican Party of being accomplices to child molestation.

And some of you don’t seem to care if these IMs are even real. You’re ready to punish Foley AND Hastert on the basis of what Brian Ross says. [I'm sorry, Michelle, I DO questiong the truthfulness of Brian Ross and will continue to do so until those IMs are authenticated]

Well, I want to know. I think, in fairness to people who support the Republicans, that we NEED to know.

Given the blogging at gateway pundit, macsmind, and strata-sphere, and elsewhere, there appears to be one or more individuals who (1) somehow acquired these IMs, (2) sat on these IMs until recently, (3) created a bogus blogsite and primed it with a salacious report earlier this past summer, and (4) at the “right” time, just before the election, forwarded them on to Brian Ross, and that highly placed members of the Democratic Party may have been directly involved.

What a coup for the enemy if they can get us to panic and eat our own because of a well-designed set up designed to destroy the Republican Party.

First things first: Are those IMs real?

If they are, then we can determine if the Republican leadership was involved — of if the Democrats knew and held this back instead of reporting it. Oh, and Mark Foley can rot in prison.

If they are not, then Brian Ross and the individuals that aided and abetted him deserve to be punished. Ross should be fired like Mary Mapes or “retired” like Dan Rather. If any Democrats are involved, they should go to jail.

I’ll say it one more time: I do not defend Mark Foley. I am NOT in denial. If Foley did what is alleged, he deserves to be punished.

But we have all seen how the liberal media deliberatly misreports stories, and does so with clear malice aforethought. If a biased media, acting as an adjunct of the Democratic Party is willing to put up a 60 Minutes FRAUD and proclaim it to be “fake but accurate” in 2004, then they are certainly capable of forging IMs in 2006.

First things first. Are these IMs real?

I’ve been focussing on the real fishiness here since the beginning. And defending Dennis Hastert, the Republicans, etc.

You, however, are going off on silly tangents. The IMs are real. Deal with it.

Now ask the question that matters, who in the Democratic Party or their leftist supporters got them when and, if a while ago, why didn’t they do anything with them earlier to protect these youth?

That (I admit you’ve also asked this question)’s a question worth asking.

If they were fakes, don’t you think he might say, “Hey, those are fakes?”

That’s what I said, but it’s hardly a smoking gun, and given the media’s record, I’m going to need more proof or an admission from him. I think it’s likely that they are real, but georgej makes some good points.

Bottom line is that there’s a lot of fishiness here, whether these are real or not. Keep in mind also that Foley is likely not allowed contact with the outside world while in rehab, and can’t confirm or deny claims being made and transcripts being posted by ABC news. Even before he went in, I highly doubt in the state he was in, that he’d be following media reports about him. Like I said, for all we know this might turn in to “fake but accurate”. I just think you’re too willing to accept the media’s account here, based on nothing other than a lack of a denial from Foley.

I could be wrong, but I don’t remember Bush blasting Rather in the wake of Rathergate? Or how about the hundreds of other times the media has launched smear campaigns against him? A lack of lashing out at a dishonest media isn’t a smoking gun, proving that these are real logs. Again, if these conversations truly took place (again, likely as far as we know, but not even close to proven) it’s extremely odd that the kids were disturbed enough to save them, yet chose not to reveal them until now, don’t you think? Also, why were parents only complaining about the overly friendly emails last year, when these IMs were supposedly around in 2003? Why would some obvious straight kid (mention of previous girlfriends) out himself as some sicko who sex talked with an old man as now an adult, vs. doing it under the protection of minor status at 16. etc. etc. etc.

I already know your reaction to this, so you might want to save it, because I’m just going to reply by saying your lack of questioning and willingness to just accept what the MSM is putting out is unsettling, especially after all we’ve seen in recent years.

… with made-up conversations where you were asking them out on dates, sharing orgasms with them, persuading them to describe their genitals, etc., and calling them “studs”, would you:

a) Deny it.
b) Enter rehab and say you were raped by a priest.

Think, people.

Why do you think Foley is revealing that he was allegedly sexually assaulted by clergy and that he’s an alcoholic?

To gain sympathy from the public and even start softening up a jury.

If they were fakes, don’t you think he might say, “Hey, those are fakes?”

If I created in Notepad (although UltraEdit is way cooler ;-) and JEdit, PSPad, and EditPad Lite are excellent free choices) a series of IMs with youth once placed in your trust

Seriously. We’re going to see this stuff trickle out until the election, because that’s the Democrat’s plan. Just released, if you haven’t already heard, are more private messages:

ABC News now has obtained 52 separate instant message exchange…

Anyway I wasn’t prepared to quite go fully out on the limb you did, because as you can see they jumped all over me for barely approaching the subject, no matter how many times I blasted Foley. But I do have to comment on a few things you said…

Yes, creating forged IMs would be easy for most elementary school kids these days. Hell, I used to do a funny trick on friends when I was a teenager.. You know how in an IM your own screen name shows up blue and the person your talking to shows up red (or maybe it’s the other way around, I can’t remember).. Anyway, this is the same on your buddy’s IM box. What I would do is type a sentence but not send it, copy my friend’s screen name, hit shift+enter at the end of my unsent sentence (giving me a hard return), past the screen name, change it to blue, then type something stupid and change it to black, and send. It would appear as if I just said something casual, but that my buddy said something gross or stupid. They’d be like “hey, wtf!? I didn’t say that I swear!” And I’d be laughing at them sitting there all confused why they saw on their own screen, what looked like a message they typed, but they knew they hadn’t. Not sure if that makes sense, but it’s actually really easy and only takes a few seconds.

Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent, but a fun little trick to play on people. But again, georgej is right, for all we know someone typed this up in a word processing program and sent it Ross. What proof do we have of anything here? If there is anything we should have learned over the past few years is that you should NEVER trust the media unless you can get at least 2 sources independently confirming it. This may well be true, but I’ll wait until it’s proven before I fully accept it. The only thing that makes me lean towards real is no denial from Foley.

Back to georgej’s point about Dems pulling out fake docs… Would that surprise anyone? An investigation would likely not prove one way or another before the election, and by then it wont’ matter, politically. This wouldn’t be a surprising move by Dems at all.

Anyway, all and all, georgej is pretty on target and I think we need Ross to show us the money.

You have ONLY their word that what they received are in fact actual IM “logs” or saved IM sessions.

The Democrats have LEARNED from their experience with the forged Bush NG documents. No hardcopy created by MS Word using Times New Roman font this time. No forged signatures.

The Democrats have LEARNED not to use word processors to create a paper document whose credibility can be destroyed in minutes by experts out on the net.

Maybe they used notepad (or some other text editor) to create a text file containing the alleged conversations. I could easily do that in minutes.

They could have forwarded it to Brian Ross — a willing democratic party agent — for him to take and purport by publication to be actual conduct.

I’ve heard him claim that these messages are “documented.” Bull shit!

Point 1: The instant messages purported to contain conversations of Foley have not been authenticated by anybody but Brian Ross. And Ross was not credible on Katrina and other stories — what makes you believe him now?

Point 2: The original source of these purported conversations exists out there in cyberspace. If the FBI or experts examined the actual computers, then the origin could be proved.

These instant messenges are either (a) actual logs, that can be examined on the machine that stored them, or (b) forgeries typed up by a person or persons unknown using a simple text editor.

If they are forged, then Foley (and the Republican Party) is being defamed in pursuit of stealing an election.

In both cases, the data looks identical, being just a stream of ascii characters stored as bytes on a hard drive.

I am not defending Foley. I am pointing out that this media “slam-dunk” is TOO EASY TO FAKE by Democrats who WERE LOSING the election on the issues.

And given the fact that the Democrats FORGED A GOVERNMENT DOCUMENT in 2004 to try to get Kerry elected, I do not put it beyond them to fake some IM logs to force a change over of an acknowledged SAFE HOUSE REPUBLICAN SEAT.

The modern Democratic Party is run by people who are known to lie for political advantage. The Party has been taken over by an ideology whose basic premise is that LIES DON’T MATTER as long as they win.

Think back to 2004 and the claim that Bush stole the election just because the early projections didn’t hold up to the actual enumeration.

Think back to Joe Wilson and HIS LIES.

Think back to all those Katrina reports about snipers shooting at helos (never happened), to gangs raping and killing in the superdome (never happened — 400 armed National Guardsmen kept order), to the hundreds of dead bodies there (only 2, both natural causes).

The media LIED then, and they worked overtime to blame it all on Bush, to help the Democrats.

Think back to the LIES coming from DEMOCRATS that George W. Bush ordered the levies breached in order to drown blacks.

What is the “chain of custody” for this evidence? How do we know that the dialog is not fabricated? Who supplied these to Ross. How were they supplied? These are questions that must be answered.

Foley has NOT publicly admitted sending them, in case you haven’t heard. And several bloggers have detected inconsistencies in the non-sexually explicit EMAIL messages published by Ross, that the leadership confronted Foley about.

All we know for certain is that Foley resigned — and the Brian Ross is claiming to have explicit sexual dialog in IM logs.

So, if you really want to get to the bottom of this, DEMAND that Ross disclose his sources. Then have the source computers containing the data examined by computer forensic experts, and the owners testify under oath as to the authenticity of the dialog.

Ross won’t, of course. He’ll “protect his sources.” So, I say subpoena him tomorrow, and jail him if he doesn’t give them up, because what is at stake here is who controls the United States government.

I’m listening to Mark Halprin of ABC *GLOAT* at how this scandal has “turned the election” around. and I’ll be God-Damned if I’m going to stand by and watch the Party that stands for treason, surrender, and appeasement take over the country on what may very well be FORGERIES, authored by a Party that has a history of PRODUCING FAKES just before an election.

If Foley actually sent the messages or had sexual relations with underage boys, then he deserves everything that happens to him. And the person(s) who have withheld this data until now should be prosecuted as accessories.

If not, then America is being played as fools by the likes of Rahm Emanuel, Chuck Schumer, and media whores like Brian Ross.

And once again, saving IMs WAS a default setting on some old IM programs, but as stated, right now, with no configuration changes, there is not a single IM log on any of the 5 computers I have at home… all with standard default settings. When these default settings changed for each type of program would have to be researched… but of course knowing the program used would be helpfull…

As these were sent to different people, from different physical locations, the only way they could have been intercepted is either from more than one Ex Page not only saving these but also forwarding them to the same George Soros sponsored Website, from Foley’s computer (which if you found this data you could not release legaly… data theft), or from the possibly wireless Access point/firewall copying the traffic going across it (which is not public domain info, and is not released without a warrant…).

That this confluence of events comes just before an election, when it has been going on for years, is troubling in the extreme.

Also, give the FACT that the Ex pages involved almost HAVE to be 18 now, and thus legal adults, their not coming forward by name is troubling.

Add in the fact that the main attack is now on HASTERT???? Who really had no knowledge of the IMS? which someone sat on for years????

Add in that there is a new “release” today of old transcripts??? (gee, think we’ll get another one tomorow?)

Sorry…. stinks…