Election Scoop: uicsbg.com

This was originally posted Tuesday, April 21, 2009, at 1am , on http://blog.mrzach.com/

A great deal of “scandal” has arisen over the spoof site, uicsbg.com. I have been indicated as being the author and perpetrator of this site. Up until now, I have downplayed or denied any direct involvement in the creation of this website. This remains true – however, I have not been 100% forthcoming about everything I knew and what my role in this site’s creation was.

The main reason for this was because I honestly didn’t know most of the story, and had to go around making phone calls, sending emails, and getting in touch with people I haven’t seen or spoken to in over a year just to get the story straight. So, if you want the full story – and my full disclosure on MY role in the creation of this website, please read on.

(names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals involved)

This story actually begins in December 2007 during the primary campaign season. I spent the month of my winter break in Iowa and South Carolina working Ron Paul’s primary campaign, and there, along with many Ron Paul supporters from UIC and U of C, to include my UIC Ron Paul buddies Marshall and Lily. I worked and lived side by side with several groups of Ron Paul supporters. These came from all over the political spectrum and the country. There was one very large and energetic group of guys from KU with whom myself and Marshall worked closely. These guys were VERY dedicated – almost a little too dedicated at times: There were often conflicts about crossing lines of being too pushy, getting in people’s faces, etc. Most disputes could eventually be handled by our favorite moto: “What would Ron Paul do?” (which, of course, always turned out to be the most polite meek option).

Now, fast forward one year. I am still in contact with several UIC Ron Paul Supporters, and I decide to run for USG President. Knowing they are pretty good supporters to have, I contact Marshall and Lily and asked them to work for my campaign. Within a few days, however, Marshall and I had a great disagreement. Marshall has had some major problems with the Chicago Flame, and was very concerned about one candidate in particular, Joel Ebert, whom I wasn’t running against directly, but was on a slate of candidates of former Chicago Flame employees, which included my direct opponent.

Marshall wanted to focus my campaign on attacking the integrity of the Chicago Flame, and I thought this was a distraction because (1) it seemed to focus more on someone I wasn’t even running against, and (2) all I really wanted to do was get my message out there, and I was confident that would speak for itself and get me the votes I needed to win. I asked Marshall to leave my campaign team, and he did so, but not after calling me a coward and a loser. Things between us have been uncomfortable ever since.

I was not surprised when several weeks into the campaign a Facebook came up that basically all the points he had discussed attacking. I was pleased that this never really got any traction and only amassed about 60+ members, none of whom were “undecided” voters, so this didn’t bother me too much, but I was disappointed at the unnecessary distraction. I was actually surprised to see that Marshall had added to his list of accusations a few new issues, however. This led me to suspect that Marshall had been working together with someone else – perhaps even my friend, Robin, who has major issues with SBG as well. Marshall and I weren’t speaking at the time so I just left the mater alone.

Meanwhile, my campaign is developing slowly but surely on its own. Over spring break, I didn’t really do much work on the campaign, but several friends and I would sit around and joke about things, discuss the opponents, and poke fun at some of them. In particular, Robin (this is before I suspected a connection her to Marshall) and I were up late one night goofing off, and we were having the greatest time making fun of the cheesy pictures SBG had posted to their Facebook group. It was at this time, that Robin and I came up with the silly captions and edits to make these pictures look like inspirational posters.

We uploaded the pictures to one of my domain names, vanitye-mail.com, and we passed the links around to several of our friends who shared a general ad nauseum regarding SBG’s campaign rhetoric and image they were promoting. This was all innocent fun and was intended to be a nice private joke. At this time, I shared the pictures with my campaign worker, Lily, who was a fellow Ron Paul supporter, and by extension the pictures ended up being shared among most of the Ron Paul people on campus and in the Chicago area.

Quick back story: Part of the reason Marshall disliked Joel Ebert so much was because of an article Ebert wrote which very disrespectfully mocked Ron Paul. This article has been well circulated among Ron Paul supporters in the area, and there is a mutual disdain for Ebert for this reason, so they were quite pleased with a chance to poke fun of him and his running mates.

Now, I had planned on spending my entire Spring Break working on the USG website, but because of some technical problems, I was unable to do so and was pretty bored. So, again, over spring-break, Robin set up a secret Facebook group where she uploaded the pictures and several of us all collaborated on some funny content that spoofed the SBG stuff. Much of it never was published on the Facebook group, and after about a week or so, after Spring Break when we all got busy with our real lives again, most people didn’t seem to give it much thought. In fact, my Facebook group was accidentally deleted over Spring Break, and I wasn’t on Facebook for several weeks anyway, so I wasn’t thinking much about the Facebook world around then.

Okay, two more essential back stories:

(1) I own and manage about 40 domain names. Some of them I make money off of, some are for personal use, and some are just names I park for $9 a year in the anticipation that I may use them one day (vanitye-mail.com being one of them). I actually don’t do most of the work on these domain names: There are at least a few dozen people who have access to administrative functions in my account and can work on whatever domain names they are working on. I keep my personal ones protected with extra passwords, and my commercial sites are also password protected, but none of my parked domains, and many of my informational sites are just out there for anyone to mess with. The majority of people who have access to my account do so because – again, going back – during the 07-08 primary season, I created several political sites, to include KnowBeforeYouVote.com, and some Ron Paul support sites, and I outsourced most of the work keeping those sites up to date to: you guessed it, the friends I made while on the campaign trail over winter break.

(2) Right before the election campaign got started, myself and a fellow USG friend, let us call him Bob, were speculating how SBG would run their campaign. Bob had already seen much of their campaign materials prepared, and we were trying to figure out if they had a website set up already. The USG website is called “uicusg.com” so we guessed that SBG probably had set up uicsbg.com. When we searched for the site and found nothing there, we assumed they would try to register it eventually, so I bought the domain names, uicsbg.com and uicsbg.org just to get on their nerves if they actually tried to buy the domain name. These were never intended to be used to make a website, but were simply a way of confusing my opponents when they tried to buy a domain name that – for all intent reasons should not be registered by anyone – but would turn out to not be available.

Now, back to the present: This is where the story gets confusing: In fact, I am even still not 100% what the sequence of events were, but I’ll do my best to reconstruct the general idea of what happened. First, I found out about Marshall’s Facebook group, suspected Robin was involved, and started to get nervous about the whole negative campaigning thing turning into a full blown issue. I still didn’t have a Facebook account at the time, so I asked Robin to delete the pictures we uploaded to our Facebook and to delete the group. I think Robin wasn’t really sure how to do that, because as it turns out she just left the group, and one of the 15 other members, another Ron Paul supporter whom I’ve never even met, took over administration of the group.

Now, I’m not sure if it was that guy, or Lily who eventually passed the news of my campaign, my opponents, the Ron Paul mockery, and our private joke (along with the pictures) out of the state, but somehow, this all ended up crossing state lines and ending up in the camp of the KU guys. I was totally floored when I found out about their involvement. Actually, when I found out they were involved, I was shocked that it wasn’t on a massive crazy scale – that’s the kind of guys they are. It is charming at times, and annoying at others. Anyway, it was at this point that my old friend Ted got his hands on the photos, the spoof content we had been tossing around, to include the secret Facebook group content, and the real SBG website (sbguic.com).

Ted, is a brilliant web programmer and graphic artist. If I were to try and recreate the SBG website from scratch, I’m sure it would take me all day if not several days, and honestly I just don’t have that kind of time. Ted told me it took him about 30 minutes. Wow. Okay, maybe he’s exaggerating. He would exaggerate I think. At any rate, Ted was one of my main contributors to my Ron Paul support sites, and Ted logged into our account one day with the intention of publishing all this on one of those sites, but when he was looking through my domain name list, he noticed the parked uicsbg.com domain name. This is where the light bulb goes off above Ted’s head. Ted decided to just spoof the sbguic.com website, and so he set up a folder on my server, pointed the domain name to that folder, and threw together the site. He even copied the pictures over from my vanitye-mail .com folder to the new folder (waste of space if you ask me, but I pay for plenty I guess).

At this point, I was totally unaware of all of this, so I can’t say with certainty of when all this went live or any of those details. What I do know is that one night I stumbled upon the website by my own sort of Freudian slip mistake of typing uicsbg.com instead of sbguic.com, where I was planning to go and study my opponent’s platform and look for holes in it for the upcoming debates. My immediate first reaction was that Bob, the guy I was with when I bought that domain name, had set up this site. After all, he was the ONLY person who knew about the domain name, and I had given him the login/password to my account, so I was pretty sure that it was him. I emailed him and BCC’d a couple friends in on the email trying to see if he would fess up and take responsibility. At this point, I suspected the site was still just a private joke thing.

Bob never received my email, because he was so disinterested in being involved in the elections that he set his gmail to automatically delete any emails from any candidates in the election. While I was waiting for a response from Bob, the public Facebook group surfaced (or maybe it was already surfaced, I honestly don’t know what order this all happened in). At first I thought a new one had been set up, but I quickly learned that this was the same old private Facebook group Robin and I had been joking around with that never got deleted. This perturbed me a bit and I told the new administrator of the group that I would appreciate it if he would take the group down. He refused and cited the anti-Ron Paul, Joel Ebert, and how he deserved a taste of his own disrespectful mockery medicine. I figured that at this point, the best I could do would be to provide an explanation on the group, so I posted a link to the Chicago Flame article Joel wrote, and said that was the main reason the Facebook group existed.

Then, I started to found out that the uicsbg.com spoof website was getting advertised around campus somehow and was getting a lot of hits. My opponents who were the brunt of the joke became aware of the site, and immediately attacked me and accused me of creating it. Well, I knew that I didn’t create it, but what was I going to say? I wasn’t sure who created it – and Ted, the actual author – was the furthest person from my mind of having any knowledge of these elections or of having created the site. We literally had not spoken since January 2008.

At this point, I started to get a bit nervous and tried to deflect much of the heat by denying direct involvement, and being less than forthcoming about the details. I honestly didn’t know what to say:
“Well, yes I registered that domain name. Yes, I created some of the pictures on the site. No, I didn’t put the website up, awe shucks, I don’t know who did.” This did not seem like a very satisfactory answer to the angry SBG people, and I knew I needed to find out more before I could really say anything.

The first reaction was to find the folder where the site content was being hosted. Bad luck: Password protected. To this day, I never got a reasonable explanation why my own domain would get password protected. I could have just reset the password I suppose, but I figured that whoever was responsible might just put the site right back up, so I focused on contacting the person who did this first. At this point, I was a little peeved that my own domain name had been hijacked. In the meantime, I spoke with Dean Rodriguez about the predicament I was in, and he suggested that if it was true that I was against using this kind of tactic as a campaigning tactic, the best thing for me to do in the meantime would be to speak out against it publically.

So, I did. I put all my thoughts into words, and I publically decried negative campaigning. My issue was really this: It is one thing to have a private joke and make fun of them behind their back. Maybe that isn’t nice to do, but that wasn’t really something that bothered me too much. These guys had put themselves out there, they took the cheesy pictures, so I figured they were asking for it. It is an ENTIRELY different thing to publically humiliate someone, which is what this private joke had become – a public smear against my opponents.

Let me just say right here and now, that I think my opponents are nice decent fellows. While I share many of the issues about Joel Ebert that my colleagues felt, even he, I feel, has the best interest of students at heart in his campaign for SMBOT. In fact, I have come to be very impressed and like Mr. Ebert very much after seeing him speak. I am willing to put past differences aside. As for Bernard and Sean, while I was never much impressed with them, the image they put forth as candidates and what I thought was a platform of platitudes and rhetoric, I think they are certainly very good, kind hearted individuals who do NOT deserve to be publically humiliated in such a manner. Mind you, when Robin and I first made the photographs, we had never even met the guys – we were making fun of the preposterous image they were promoting of themselves. After meeting Bernard, I actually started to feel really bad for making fun of him, and this was part of what led to me asking Robin to take the pictures down and delete the Facebook group.

FINALLY, back on the trail of tracking down which of – I don’t even know how many – people has access to my site and the majority of my domain names: After making several phone calls, Lily told me she was aware that the content of the site had been shared with the KU Ron Paul guys. I knew that 5 of them had access to my site, so it didn’t take me long after that to get a hold of Ted and confront him on the issue.

It was actually not very hard. First, I explained to him that he wasn’t helping me, he was actually hurting my campaign – and I knew he probably never wanted to do that. Next, I explained that one of my friends had made the site he was spoofing, and it had hurt her feelings quite a bit and I didn’t like that. I also mentioned that someone who had taken the photographs that were being spoofed was claiming copyright infringement. Finally, I just mentioned to him the old adage: “What would Ron Paul do?”

Ted was pretty cool about things. He apologized to me, told me he was never trying to screw me over, but just have a little fun, and then he gave me the password to the domain, and I promptly took the website down and pointed it to the Ron Paul mockery article. I explained to Ted that these guys we had been making fun of were actually good guys, and I felt pretty bad about it because I thought that publically humiliating them like that was bound to hurt their feelings. Ted offered to apologize, so I gave him a list of emails of people he should send an apology letter. I never actually saw the letter, but I assume he sent it. We actually haven’t spoken since that night – I’ve been too busy to follow up. The email addresses I gave him were of the candidates who were made fun of, and the two individuals whose website design and content was spoofed.

I still wasn’t entirely sure if there were any lingering loose ends to tie up. I did get a hold of Marshall and just asked him to somehow get administrative control of the Facebook group and to get rid of it. I think he was eventually successful at taking administrative control, but the last time I checked it is still “publically” viewable. There are only 26 members, so that doesn’t really bother me much. I knew that a proper explanation would take a great deal of time. I actually just needed some time to wrap my head around how everything came about. I was heading into the last week of the campaign, so I felt that with the website down, the content gone, and most people just not making a fuss about the issue, this lengthy explanation could wait a few days. I would have published this over the weekend, but I actually decided to take the entire weekend off and not do ANYTHING related to elections and just get everything out of my system.

So, it is at this point I would like to make a very deep apology to the individuals who have been offended or hurt by everything that went down with the publication of uicsbg.com. It was never my intention for this to be turned into a public smear campaign, but I accept do full responsibility for the contributions I made that facilitated this unfortunate incident. You all deserve better treatment than has been given to you. It was disrespectful of me to make fun of you behind your back – especially since I didn’t even know you. I am very sorry for what has happened. I will take the lessons from this to heart and certainly think twice before taking action or speaking words that are disrespectful to others, even if it is done privately.

I would also like to apologize for being less than forthcoming with everyone who questioned me about this incident. I felt that you deserved a full explanation and an apology, but since I could not even give a decent explanation nor could I immediately figure out how to take the site down, the best I could think to do was to deflect and deflect until I had a better grasp of the full story myself. I’m sure that my method of dealing with this was not satisfactory to most, but I still think that having the FULL story all at once, even if not in the most timely manner, is better than getting sketchy bits and pieces of the story slowly over time.

I am in the process of taken measures to make sure my hosting space and domain names are more secure in the future. This is actually a bit complicated since over the years I really have never had to keep track of who was administering what on my hosting account: I generally am pretty trusting, perhaps too trusting, of people when I give them access to things. This has taught me that I need to be a little more security minded in my affairs.

I know that even after this lengthy and complicated explanation and even an apology many people will still be unsatisfied. I would apologize to those people to their face, but I would not be surprised if they still want to have nothing to do with me. I understand that. I accept that. Honestly, I probably deserve that.

I am happy to answer any questions you might have regarding this incident. There are a lot of details I left out simply because they aren’t as important. I will not give the names of any of the individuals involved. This is mainly because those people don’t matter: At the end of the day, I am taking responsibility for this catastrophe. I am confident that no one had any malice on their mind when they were acting, even though there are hard feelings.

At end of the day, it seems to me that this is really a matter of a private joke that got way out of hand and spun out of control. I’ve done my best to real things in to the best of my ability, but I know that plenty of damage and hurt has been done in the meantime. I take full responsibility for that, and I apologize greatly. In time, I hope that your hearts may be softened to be able to forgive me for my offenses.

I believe SBG is full of many good, well intentioned, and kindhearted people with sincere and good intentions. Any personal issues I might have with any of those individuals, I will take directly to those individuals, and I will not escalate our personal differences any further unless absolutly necessary to achieve resolution. I suspect (and sincerely hope) this will never actually be necessary.

I would like transfer the domain names uicsbg.com and uicsbg.org to SBG to have full possession of them if they would like them. If there is anything more I can do to make restitution, please feel free to ask.

With great sadness and regret,
Zachariah B. Wiedeman

PS – I will be proofing this blog later. At this point, I have been typing for several hours, and I am exhausted.