Hilarious conspiracy!

Did you know about this?


And that apparently Anonymous claims to have actually thwarted a plot by Karl Rove and friends from stealing the election? I find this amazingly entertaining! I mentioned back in November when discussing Rove's mini-meltdown live on Fox that it just felt like watching some sort of super-villain finally get his on live TV.  Now I have make believe evidence that is exactly what happened!

Naturally, I have no way to prove that this is true and honestly it feels like it's malarkey...but...there's still that little, naive boy inside of me that enjoys lapping this kind of shit up! It's like UFOs or ghost stories, probably garbage though highly entertaining garbage. I first heard about this whole thing over the Thanksgiving holiday so a little post-turkey Google action yielded this from Salon by Natasha Lennard:

A release claiming to be from hacker collective Anonymous alleges there was more behind Rove’s freak-out than first met the eye. The group says that it foiled Rove’s attempt to steal the election in Florida, Virginia and Ohio by using the GOP’s ORCA system.
Two weeks prior to Election Night, a typical Anonymous video was released warning Rove against rigging the election. “We want you to know that we are watching you, waiting for you to make this mistake of thinking you can rig this election to your favor,” Anonymous’ ubiquitous Guy Fawkes character warned.
Then, following Obama’s win and Rove’s very public outburst, a group calling themselves “The Protectors,” believed to be comprised of Anonymous hackers, sent a letter to election transparency non-profit, Velvet Revolution, claiming to have thwarted attempts by GOP strategists to flip votes and rig the election in three swing states.

Oh, so, so magnificent! Naturally, there is no real way to prove much of anything and in the end it boils down to either choosing to believe it, or not. I am not enough of a techno-dweeb to truly understand how this could have worked in the first place so I am a perfect sort of person who can just take this at face value and assume that what I read is true:

The letter claims that the GOP’s ORCA — a GOTV (Get Out the Vote) system — was in fact designed to rig votes in favor of Romney (although the letter does not verify this or specify how ORCA was designed to do this.) The Protectors claim that they installed a  password protected firewall to block attempts to digitally rig votes:

We coded and created, what we call, The Great Oz. A targeted password protected firewall that we tested and refined over the past weeks. We place this code on more than one of the digital tunnels and their destination’s that Karl’s not so smart worker bees planned to use on election night.

The Protectors alleged these “digital tunnels” were leading to servers in three different states. The release claims that Rove’s operatives attempted to unsuccessfully breach The Great Oz firewall to access these tunnels throughout election night. “We watched as Karl’s weak corrupters repeatedly tried to penetrate The Great Oz.  These children of his were at a loss-how many times and how many passwords did they try? — exactly 105.”

Sounds legitimate to me! Hell, I feel like Hamster when he published that ridiculous Agenda 21 thing earlier this year. The same quoted article goes on to question the validity of this claim and even asks a few pertinent questions that make it seem even more unlikely that is nothing but fictional fluff. Though I kind of like it even if it is fictional fluff, in fact, it probably IS fictional fluff and it still makes me smile as the real reporter types have no way to verify this story either. A few days after the first story I linked came out there was also this from the Daily Caller:

The left-wing Velvet Revolution, which works to investigate and prove instances of electronic election tampering, offered IT specialists a $1 million reward for proof of instances of electronic election tampering during the 2012 cycle. The Velvet Revolution is particularly suspicious of Republicans.
Following the election, Velvet Revolution says they received a letter from a hacktivist group — referring to itself as “we protectors of democracy” — that claimed it was responsible for the program’s technical failures, and that it had found a system in place to electronically rig the election in three states.

Oh? Really? But...

The letter did not offer any proof of its allegations.

Oh, then why bother posting it in the first place?

 “Regarding the Protectors letter, we posted the reward asking for info about electronic manipulation of the vote and then right after the election we received ‘The Protector’ letter at our POBox,” said Kevin Reese, an attorney for Velvet Revolution and a board member, in a press statement.
“We posted it not because we are vouching for it but because it is news, and it seems to corroborate the Anonymous video that came out two weeks before the election warning Rove not manipulate the election,” Reese said.

I see, then it does generate some web traffic, eh?
WHO WOULD EVER POST SUCH UNSUBSTANTIATED GARBAGE LIKE THIS ONLINE?!

Probably some asshole blogger tapping away on their lap-tops, late at night, alone, in their underwear, in their parent's basement...That's who. Worry not friends, I remain confident that this post will continue Ahlblog's fine, long-standing tradition of having virtually no web traffic. If you read the comments on the Daily Caller post you will get a nice, solid sense of just how far down the rabbit hole this whole probable fabrication goes but I just cannot help but enjoy it a little and hope for nothing but the best for Karl Rove and his bright future making shit up on Fox News with the best of them. Also could make for a smashing film!