Sock-puppetry, impersonation, or identity theft? Dem lobbying firm might find out the hard way.

Thanks to a post by Warner Todd Huston over at RedState I was alerted to a fascinating tale of – at the very least – horribly unethical tactics undertaken by a Democrat-aligned lobbying firm in Boston. Matthew Nadler works for the Halifax-Plympton Reporter and Enterprise out of Halifax, MA. He takes his paper’s position in the market as a small-community newspaper seriously and tries to make sure the local residents have a paper that deals with their local issues. Which is why what happened a few weeks ago has obviously rankled him. Having received a letter in the mail from a local resident who was writing to advocate on a national issue dealing with Medicare, Mr. Nadler sensed something amiss:

I have to tell you, there was something fishy about the letter to begin with. For starters, the letter didn’t ask people to contact Senators Kennedy or Kerry, or Congressmen Frank or Delahunt. I’m pretty sure that a local person would have included that. When you’ve been in this business long enough, you sort of get a sense of when a letter isn’t quite what it appears.

But, it was attributed to a local resident. It had his name and phone number. So I called. I spoke with him. The gentlemen informed me that he had no idea what I was talking about. I apologized for wasting his time and was happy for the lesson in why we always verify a letter, no matter how innocuous the subject matter.

That apparently wasn’t the end of it, however. Last week he got a phone call from a guy claiming to be calling on behalf of the man who, it turned out, hadn’t written the letter. When Mr. Nadler expounded a bit to the unknown caller on what had happened and what he generally thought about people who would impersonate a local resident to get their politics advanced, the caller became less than willing to identify himself. Mr. Nadler was just getting started:

Little did he know that, using modern communications technology available in most homes, I had his phone number, and using the magic of the Internet, I found out where he was calling from.

The number belonged to a company called the Dewey Square Group, which turns out to be a lobbying firm based in Boston. The staff list is full of some of the heavy hitters of Democratic politics in Massachusetts, people like Michael Whouley, who’s so important that Dennis Leary played him in a TV movie.

Now, their Web site doesn’t list their clients, but it doesn’t take a genius, or a newspaper editor, to figure out they’ve been hired by someone with an interest in keeping Medicare Advantage in business. That’s fine. A lobbying firm needs clients. Maybe Medicare Advantage is worth keeping. I really don’t know.

What bugs me is that they seem to think I’m stupid. Or maybe lazy. Or both. And they think there’s at least one senior citizen in town that meets those criteria as well.

One has to wonder how many times Dewey Square Group has done this. I mean if they were caught out this time, how many times did letters they wrote under the cover of some unsuspecting resident actually get in print because some other opinion section editor wasn’t as disciplined as Mr. Nadler obviously is?

One also has to wonder whether this kind of activity is actually illegal. When I read the story I was reminded of the episodes of “sock-puppetry” that ran around the blogosphere during the last election cycle. The difference here is that when some idiot blogger decides to create alternate personas to jack up his comment count and misrepresent how many people are agreeing with him he’s actually creating that persona, he’s not stealing someone’s name to do it. When I read this story to my wife, her response was that she thought this represented identity theft. It’s clearly impersonation. So, is it illegal? I think it certainly should be.

In any case, I think anyone looking to contract with a lobbying firm should be very careful about doing so with Dewey Square Group. If they’re using letters written by common joes on a subject as a metric of their effectiveness in bringing the issue to the public eye, then they’re putting their fingers on the scale to skew the reading. You might not be getting your money’s worth, here.