Emilie Oy Explains It All!
Or, as Anna puts it, “It just keeps getting weirder.”
It seems that Emilie Oy’s latest salvo is an attempted explanation of just what it was her daughter was doing online in exchange for the $15,000 her mother paid her out of her public campaign funds (although she doesn’t explain why she appears to have paid her daughter in advance for this work, in violation of the law).
Apparently, the “Internet marketing” in which her sixteen-year-old daughter was engaged was precisely the sort of thing that Homeland Security agents do in order to find terrorists, except applied in this case to pimping out her mother’s political campaign.
“Dilligent internet marketers,” writes Oy in the piece she claims cannot be reproduced even in part, “take the very words used by people on line to sell the same people products or ideas based on the information they put out.”
She continues: “It is the job of the internet intelligence agent to manage the huge amounts of information available, track new sources of data, organize the data into useable materials, create and manage multiple online personas taylored to the identified targets, and sell products or information.”
In other words, you spy on online groups and then pretend to be one of them so that when you pimp your product — in this case, Oy’s daughter’s product being her mother — it appears to be coming from within and not from without.
(I can’t help but wonder if Oy herself, if elected, would use such subterfuge when interacting with the Portland residents whom she was expected to represent.)
Left unexplained by this (and despite Oy’s insistence that “[t]his does not include spam”) is how sending a request for a free lawyer to online groups dedicated to subjects as diverse as Celtic music, Republicans, American Sign Language, “peak oil”, homeschooling, condo residents, Portland parks, and children with congenital heart defects qualifies as some sort of justifiable “Internet marketing” requiring a level of sophistication matching that of data mining by Homeland Security agents, rather than simply being spam.
As noted in Anna’s blog item, Oy ends her alleged explanation in essence by threatening to out “information about individuals and organizations” available in the “public domain” from anyone who “live[s] or [has] lived in the city of Portland and [has] ever posted anything online.”
Unless, of course, any of you were smart enough to include a disclaimer which tries to trick the reader into thinking that “no part” of your posted material “may be published or reproduced without prior written permission from the author.”
Addendum: By the way, I do not think it’s ego to suggest that her concluding threat is aimed, at least in part, at me, since it was I, here on FURIOUS nads! (sparked by a post on Metroblogging Portland), who rabidly latched on to the trail of the long string of online activities of both Oy and her daughter.
Addendum: Betsy posts on Metroblogging Portland, where the Oy-as-spammer story first broke.
May 10th, 2006 at 8:05 pm
Great blogs post alike – I was updating MetBlogs while you were writing this, I’d bet…!
And yep, I’m taking that threat a little personally myself. But as I said in the MetBlogs post – given her team’s display of competence to date, I’m not that concerned.
May 11th, 2006 at 12:34 am
Not only am I not concerned, I’m hardly afraid of what her daughter could dig up if they decided to follow through on the threat, and managed to do a more than half-assed job of it.