Scholar traces online Obama smears
The e-mail landed in Danielle Allen's queue one morning as she was in her office at the Institute for Advanced Study, the haven for some...
By Matthew Mosk
The Washington Post
PRINCETON, N.J. — The e-mail landed in Danielle Allen's queue one morning as she was in her office at the Institute for Advanced Study, the haven for some of the nation's most brilliant minds. The missive began: "THIS DEFINITELY WARRANTS LOOKING INTO."
Laid out before Allen, 36, a political theorist, was what purported to be a biographical sketch of Barack Obama that has become one of the most effective — and baseless — Internet attacks of the 2008 presidential season. The anonymous chain e-mail makes the false claim that Obama is concealing a radical Islamic background. By the time it reached Allen on Jan. 11, 2008, it had spread with viral efficiency for more than a year.
During that time, polls show the number of voters who mistakenly believe Obama is a Muslim rose: from 8 percent to 13 percent between November 2007 and March 2008. Some cited this religious misaffiliation when explaining their primary votes against him.
As the general-election campaign against Sen. John McCain has begun, Obama's aides have made the smears a top target. They recently launched FightTheSmears.com to "aggressively push back with the truth," said Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor. The site urges supporters to upload their address books and send e-mails to their friends.
Long before this, Allen had been obsessing about the origins of her e-mail at the institute, most famous for having been the research home of Albert Einstein. Allen studies the way voters in a democracy gather their information and act on what they learn. She was familiar with the false rumors of a secret love child that helped sink McCain's White House bid in 2000, and the Swift Boat attacks that hurt Democrat John Kerry in 2004. But the Obama e-mail was on another level: The use of the Internet made it possible to launch anonymous attacks that could reach millions of voters in weeks or days.
As an Obama supporter, she became angry — and curious.
"I started thinking, 'How does one stop it?' "
Allen set her sights on dissecting the modern version of a whisper campaign, even though experts told her it would be impossible to trace the chain e-mail to its origin. Even as her hunt grew cold, she gained insight into the way political information circulates, mutates and sometimes devastates in the digital age.
Allen has two doctorates, one in classics from Cambridge University and the other in government from Harvard University; she won a $500,000 MacArthur "genius" award at 29. Last year she joined the faculty of the institute, the only African American and one of a handful of women at the elite research center, where she works alongside groundbreaking physicists, mathematicians and social scientists.
Already an expert on the mechanics of politics, she fast began to learn the mechanics of the Internet. She discovered the recipe for launching a chain e-mail attack is not as simple as typing it up and hitting the send button to a long list of recipients.
It takes effort to seed a chain mail that spreads as widely as the Obama missive, said Jeff Bedser, president of the Internet Crimes Group, a company that helps corporations battle such broadsides. "Lighting that fire, getting something to have momentum, takes work," he said.
For this kind of chain message to gain traction, it must be plausible, and it has to resonate, said Eric Dezenhall, a public-relations specialist who once worked in the Reagan White House.
The Google trail
Allen's first thought was to try to learn about the people behind the recipient addresses on the e-mail. She traced a number to North Carolina Web sites about golf but quickly hit a dead end. Then she took some of the unusual phrases from the text of the e-mail and Googled them
Her eyes fell on this untrue sentence: "ALSO, keep in mind that when he was sworn into office he DID NOT use the Holy Bible, but instead the Kuran (Their equivalency to our Bible, but very different beliefs)."
The use of "their equivalency" and the spelling of "Kuran" made the sentence her point of departure.
That search showed the first mention of the e-mail on the Internet had come more than a year earlier. A participant on the conservative Web site FreeRepublic.com posted a copy of the e-mail Jan. 8, 2007, and added this at the end: "Don't know who the original author is, but this e-mail should be sent out to family and friends."
Allen discovered that theories about Obama's religious background had circulated for years on the Internet, and that the man who takes credit for posting the first article to assert the senator was a Muslim is Andy Martin.
Martin, a former political opponent of Obama's, is the publisher of an Internet newspaper. He said he began questioning Obama's religious background after hearing his famous keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. In a 2004 article, which he posted on Web sites and e-mailed to bloggers, he said Obama had concealed his Muslim heritage.
"I feel sad having to expose Barack Obama," Martin wrote in an accompanying news release, "but the man is a complete fraud. ... He has lied to the American people, and he has sought to misrepresent his own heritage." Martin's article did not suggest a link between Obama and radical Islam.
Martin was trying to launch a Senate bid against Obama when he said he first ran the Democrat's name by a contact in London. "They said he must be a Muslim. ... As a candidate you learn how to harness the Internet. You end up really learning how to work the street. I sort of picked this story up as a sideline."
Martin said the primary basis for his belief was simple: Obama's father was a Muslim. In a defamation lawsuit he filed against The New York Times and others several months ago, Martin said Obama "eventually became a Christian" but that "as a matter of Islamic law began life as a Muslim" due to his father's religion.
Martin said he posted his 2004 article on Web sites and distributed it by e-mail to authors of other popular blogs. But he said he had nothing to do with the chain e-mail. "I'm not trying to smear anybody," Martin said.
Other articles followed Martin's. Ted Sampley, of North Carolina, published a similar piece on his Web site. In an interview, he denied authorship of the chain e-mail but said he did not doubt his article had provided source material. "That's the miracle of it," Sampley said. "Once it takes off, and people start posting it on Web sites, you really have no idea how far it goes or who reads it. You get a ripple effect."
Poring over these early articles, Allen noticed that in each instance, someone had posted the articles on the Free Republic Web site, prompting a discussion involving the same handful of people, with several expressing a desire to spread the word about Obama's supposed faith.
2 key "Freepers"
Since its start in 1996 by Jim Robinson of Fresno, Calif., Free Republic has grown into a home for discussion of all types, though it is particularly noted for political discussions dominated by conservatives and libertarians. Most "Freepers," as they're called, remain anonymous.
Allen counted 23 Freepers among those engaging in regular discussions about Obama's religion and isolated a handful whom she began to suspect as having a role in the e-mail. Sifting through hundreds of postings, she began to piece together their identities. There was "Beckwith," whom she pegged as a veteran from Boston, old enough to vote for John F. Kennedy, in uniform by 1964, and host of a Web site that devotes considerable space to an "Obama file" that says the senator is "by birth, blood and training, a Muslim."
Allen found Beckwith discussing the matter in a Jan. 13 clip from a Web-based conservative radio show based in San Diego. Beckwith told hosts Jeff Lynch and Mike Howard that Obama's "relationship to Islam is the big question. When one investigates the background of Obama's conversion, I can find no record of his baptism."
"Wow! Interesting!" Lynch gasped.
"This guy could easily be the Muslim Manchurian candidate," Howard said.
As Allen scanned his postings on Free Republic, she noticed Beckwith repeated several phrases that also surface in the e-mail. Beckwith called Obama "an apostate Muslim, educated in madrassas." When Beckwith later repudiated the "madrassa" claim — after it was debunked by the mainstream media — the term disappeared from subsequent versions of the chain e-mail.
The Post found Beckwith in a Boston suburb, and he agreed to be interviewed on condition that he not be identified. The 69-year-old said he is retired as a software engineer and lives alone. He said he started a Web site in 2005 "because I don't play golf." His initial goal was to take swats at the liberal left. "Then this new guy comes along called Obama," he said.
Beckwith said he built a Web site that features hundreds of pages of material intended to undermine Obama. "If 20 percent of what's on my Web site is true, this guy is a clear and present danger," Beckwith said. But while Beckwith speaks with pride about his research — much of which he credits to an unnamed "colleague" in Europe — and to his extensive Obama files, he rejected the suggestion that he authored the chain e-mail. "I've never been involved with any e-mailings. Period," he said.
Another Free Republic participant who attracted Allen's interest went by the handle "Eva." She was one of the first to write on the site about Obama's religion; in November 2006, she began repeating the phrase "Once a Muslim, always a Muslim," when discussing Obama.
The Post located Eva in rural Washington state. She is Donna Shaw, 60, a teacher who said Obama's ability to captivate audiences made her deeply uneasy because his "tone and cadence" reminded her of the child revivalist-con-man-preacher Marjoe Gortner.
Shaw said she has done extensive online research about Obama but thinks many of the initial sites that provided "proof" of his Muslim background have been removed from the Internet. "Everything about his Muslim background was readily available on the Web in 2004. But they were all cleared from the Internet before he ran for Senate."
When asked about the Obama e-mail, she said: "I've never seen the e-mail. I don't get any political e-mails. I have a good filter on that."
A new challenge
Allen said the level of anonymity, the technical efficiency and the electoral impact of Internet-based smears represent a new challenge.
"What I've come to realize is, the labor of generating an e-mail smear is divided and distributed amongst parties whose identities are secret even to each other," she said.
A first group of people published articles that created the basis for the attack. A second group recirculated the claims from those articles without ever having been asked to do so.
"No one coordinates the roles," Allen said. Instead the participants swim toward their goal like a school of fish: moving on their own, but also in unison.
"Citizens and political scientists must face the fact that the Internet has enabled a new form of political organization that is just as influential on local and national elections as unions and political-action committees," she said.
For proof of this, Allen said, she need look no further than her e-mail inbox. After months of research, a new chain-mail smear against Obama arrived with an innocuous subject line: "Food for thought."
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