OARPA Newsletter Vol. 2 No. 1

Update: OK, so somebody spilled the password. Look it’s all a joke, OK. It’s April Fools Day. Ignore the Obot behind the curtain.

This issue probably should be dedicated to our “Chief Alinsky Officer,” Carmen Montoya, who came up with the “hide in plain sight” strategy. As you know, we’ve been planting farcical OARPA articles at the Obama Conspiracy Theories blog to immunize the birthers against suspecting that OARPA is real and working full tilt very much against their interests. This article, published on April 1 no less, will add to the farce mystique, but they won’t be able to read it because of the password. After this issue, OARPA newsletters will resume in the protected section of our honey trap DARPA Technology web site.

Infrastructure news

Mr. Fessenden mandated that the new distributed data center network be up by this date, and we are pleased to report that our 5 data centers are now online and fully operational, including the deep cover defense contractor. Construction was completed and the new power management hardware installed at OARPA1 on March 23.

Projects

Our Chief Technology Officer, Kevin Davidson, reports the roll-out  of “New Architecture 3.0” and that it has been installed on most of the OARPA client machines to good reviews from users. Suggestions from our defense contractor to tighten security on the software update channel have been implemented. The information database structure has been enhanced to store more types of information, and to allow quicker searches and simpler SQL queries through views and user-defined functions. The development team has been putting in 16-hour days in February/March to make it happen. We owe them, both the paid staff and the volunteers, our thanks.

Rapid response

Expanding on the brilliant success of the President’s “Fight the Smears” web site, we are more proactive in dealing with Internet news items that go against our interests. The conventional debunking and ridicule activities are ably carried on by our misinformation fronts: Obama Conspiracy Theories and The Fogbow. The rapid response team goes one step further by injecting malware-carrying advertising into those sites with advertising, or taking them down with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks from the OARPABot network. They can effectively take a site down usually within 1-2 hours. The debate continues as to whether Birther Report is to remain off limits because of their overall bad reputation and the suspicions raised the last time we did it to them.

Security breach

This was described briefly in the March 30 Newsletter. One of our researchers literally stumbled on a 33 MB data file that was a WordPress Extended RSS export of one of the major birther blogs (named in the previous newsletter) from October of 2010. The WordPress export includes all of the site comments (including unapproved and deleted ones) with the information that the blog administrator sees, specifically including the comment author, the comment author email address and the comment author IP address. Of the 1,843 distinct individuals represented in the data set, 106 were on our watch list.

Local activities for April

• “April Fool the Birthers – share your story” party, Nashville, TN, April 1
• Technology workshop, New Orleans, LA, April 4
• OARPA Book Club, Richmond, VA – April 9
• Regional leadership training, Phoenix, AZ – April 11
• Regional leadership training, Columbus, OH – April 14
• Tax day celebration, Seattle, WA – April 15
• Regional leadership training, Austin, TX – April 16
• Temperance Alliance, Palm Bay, FL – April 21
• Soros Club, Midlothian, IL – April 22
• Patriots Roundtable, Wilkes-Barre, PA – April 24
• Birthers Я Funny skit,  Clarkesville, TN – April 24
• Regional leadership training, Ft. Lauderdale, FL – April 27
• Technology workshop II, Williston Park, NY – April 27
• California Liberal Coalition, Fountain Valley, CA – April 30