Posted by
Always To The Right on Sunday, October 26, 2008 2:56:48 PM
Demanding proof of address would just get in the way of Change, man.
Yeah, “wants” being the key word. The whole point of the blogosphere’s inquiry
the past few days has been to try to show that this isn’t business as
usual, that someone on Team Barry’s end made a decision at some point
to dial down the security safeguards and his online vendor evidently agreed to go along.
Why National Journal didn’t seize on that angle when they’re obviously
willing to expose donation shenanigans is beyond me. Instead, we get a
long, interesting, but not terribly exciting meditation on the flaws in
verifying online donations generally.
Someone from Team Obama told Fox News the other day that they catch
this stuff on the back end, so presumably the defense here will be that
they’ll refund the money eventually. Revisit Weissman’s quote
above for a sense of what “eventually” means. Exit question: How many
staffers would they have to hire to verify donations that are coming in
at a clip of several per second?
The same guy claims to have tried to donate the same way on McCain’s
website and had his card rejected. I’m skeptical that The One would be
quite this blatant about things, but (a) at the Corner, Mark Steyn
notes that the only way to get his own online merchandising vendor to
bypass a name check when processing credit card information would be to
modify certain security settings, and (b) this wouldn’t be the first
time Team Barry’s website had dragged its feet on online donation
security measures. From Ken Timmerman’s much-linked piece at Newsmax
last month: “Unlike McCain’s or Sen. Hillary Clinton’s online donation
pages, the Obama site did not ask for proof of citizenship until just
recently. Clinton’s presidential campaign required U.S. citizens living
abroad to actually fax a copy of their passport before a donation would
be accepted.” Meanwhile, in response to his earlier post on this, Geraghty receives this e-mail from an Obama supporter
The Washington Post
takes a front-page look at the shenanigans in Team Obama’s Internet
fundraising efforts, but they don’t quite connect all the dots.
Matthew Mosk outlines the problem well, but neglects to mention an
important point
Mosk never thinks to ask the one question that has already occurred to conservative bloggers. What makes the Obama campaign different from online retail operations?
After all, we have spent almost 15 years buying and selling products
and services on the Internet, and retailers know how to protect
themselves and their customers. They employ a system that compares the
billing information on the order to the information in the credit-card
system — and when they don’t match, the sale gets denied. Credit-card
companies have gone an extra step in recent years by adding a security
code to protect against fraudulent use.
The McCain campaign apparently uses these systems to prevent fraud. Why doesn’t Team Obama? That’s
the pertinent question. Systems have existed for years to prevent
exactly the kind of fraud that has occurred in Obama’s fundraising.
Why did Team Obama deliberately avoid using them?