Lovely propaganda, but the letter is fake

Today, #OccupyOakland (#OO) carried out what was termed a "mass propaganda action". I was unable to participate myself, but my understanding is that the plan was to meet at Oscar Grant Plaza at 11am, split into small groups of three to ten people, and fan out over the city, visiting stores, banks, offices, the DMV, and the street corners to "talk to the people". I think propaganda is fascinating. I took a class on it in college, and I've always been interested in psychology in general, so the idea of they psychology behind changing someone's mind or reinforcing an opinion is certainly something I find interesting. So, as I said, I was unable to participate myself, but I wanted to check the internets to see how things were going.

As I looked over my twitter feed, I found this picture of a document being distributed by the #OO people: https://p.twimg.com/Ac8dJg0CMAA8SOG.jpg:large. I read over it and thought, wow, if Jean Quan is endorsing the strike, that's pretty big. But it seems kinda fishy; shouldn't I have heard about that already? Especially given that the letter is dated Thursday October 27th. And really, that letter has some fairly inciting rhetoric in it; I'm frankly a bit surprised that Mayor Quan would say some of the things in that letter, even if she does support the strike. So I started doing a bit of investigation. First off, I visited the website in the letterhead - http://www.oaklandmayor.com. It seems very legit. Go ahead, check it out. Looks like the city of Oakland's website. It has everything you might expect from a city's website: recent news, recent events, commemorations of past events, information for residents, businesses, visitors, etc. And right there on the front page, Mayor Quan's statement to Occupy Oakland, "heartily endors[ing]" the call for a general strike. So I clicked the link to "read the full statement", which took me here: http://www.oaklandmayor.com/docs/apologyletter.pdf, and this is where I really started to get confused. Two things caught my eye - first, the date on the letter was different. The letter I saw a picture of on Twitter was dated Thursday, October 27th, 6pm, but the one on the website is dated Friday, October 28th, 6pm, yet the text is the same. Secondly, take a look at the signatures on both letters - completely different.

I wondered why the official City of Oakland website would specifically reference the Mayor in its URL; that seemed odd to me (and I remembered a different URL from the other day when Anonymous took down the OPD's website), so I googled "City of Oakland", and found this, the official city website: http://www2.oaklandnet.com/. Take a look at it; compare it to http://www.oaklandmayor.com. They are nearly identical. You can switch back and forth between tabs and hardly see any difference. You can click links and explore the sub-pages and not find any difference. The only _real_ difference is the text on the homepage under Mayor Quan's Statement to Occupy Oakland (and, okay, on www2.oaklandnet.com, when you reload, the header banner sometimes changes, and it doesn't seem to do so on www.oaklandmayor.com).

My next stop was http://www.whois.net/whois/oaklandmayor.com. Sure enough: "Creation date: 28 Oct 2011 22:22:00". I don't know who registered and built the website; the Administrative and Technical Contacts listed on whois.net both refer to WhoisGuard, a service intended to protect the private information of domain owners and prevent their information from being harvested by spammers. Anyone who needs to contact the domain owner contacts WhoisGuard instead, and they pass "legitimate contacts" on to the actual domain owner (i.e. "When some one sends an email to your uniquely generated xyz.protect@whoisguard.com address, we will in-turn forward it your real email address which you specify", trying to filter out the spam in the process).

So, my conclusion is that the letter is totally fake. Jean Quan has not endorsed the strike. However, whoever is behind this did a remarkably good job of producing some pretty convincing (on the surface) propaganda in a short amount of time. The letter's fake, but I'm impressed. ;)

P.S. One final note - the date/time on the letter from the Twitter picture, 27 Oct 6PM, is the same date/time on the _actual_ statement Jean Quan made to #OO, which can be found here: http://www2.oaklandnet.com/oakca/groups/cityadministrator/documents/report/oak031951.pdf. Take a look at the signature on that page; totally different than either of the other two. ;)

P.P.S. For the record, I do totally support #OO in general, and the idea of the general strike, although I am probably not going to strike on November 2nd personally, for a number of reasons I won't go into here. I just thought this was some interesting work being done for the propaganda action. I'm not even condemning the fake letter; I actually think it's pretty funny and cool. Whoever made it did a good job. I just want people to be fully informed about realities.