http://www.nypost.com/seven/10272008/po ... 135428.htm

It's a shame that this does not get more attention. That this has happened from a once-stalwart champion of campaign finance reform is just pathetic. I don't go with the "buying the election" tripe much, but when you're not reporting your donations and don't even put in place basic systems that most e-commerce sites use.
And it's a damned shame that we will probably never know HOW those donations were collected, how many were legitimate, and - worse - how many were from overseas.

The precedent has been set. No more public financing, and unless the dems enact some reform before the next election (highly unlikely, why should they?), it won't change any time soon. I was against Obama's stunt of pledging to accept public financing and then abandoning it when he saw the dollar signs - I'm even more against it now that I know his campaign hasn't put basic safeguards in place.

A 30 minute special on network television during prime time. And we have no idea how literally half of the money he has gathered WAS gathered. Doesn't this bother some of you?

Isn't that fraud? (On the part of the "donor"?) If so, I hope he gets some fines or jail time.

But no, I'm not bothered. As long as Obama wins, and he's ethical about it. You have no idea the internal audit check donations goes through neither does that gentlemen and we have no idea if that's even true or not, could be just some random asshole spouting off lies, as has been typical of McCain supporters / anti-Obama folks. What's wrong with overseas donations by the way? The world has a vested interest in making sure that Bush 2.0 doesn't enter the White House.

It's against election laws, for one.

So suddenly Obama is responsible for the honesty of millions of people?

Grasping at straws much?

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It bothers me. Any time I use my credit card, or process one for my job, if the mailing address doesn't match what I entered it is denied. Why something that seems to be basic isn't used by the Obama campaign is indeed troubling. It hurts, but I must agree with joxur here. I'd like some answers here.

I'm pretty much up for anything that cements Obama's election to the Presidency. The funds that are questionable that come in are very minimal and every time they are reimbursed. I have no doubt that this will be the same in this instance.

Hmm must of been fixed I was declined because I put the wrong zipcode in.

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"Creating Havoc and Pie Since 2001!"
My Website: http://www.anthonyhays.com
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Fixed already, or another silly claim latched onto by Republicans and Joxur that will probably end up being proven false yet again ala Joe and ATM-Girl? <3

So glad they fixed it a week before the election.

If it's fixed

What confuses me is, even if you enter false info, and even if their website says, "k tkx money." isn't the final authority still the credit card company/processor who is going to kick it out anyway?

I'm not super-savvy on internet credit card transactions, so eh.

The results of this experiment are interesting, but not conclusive by any means. The experiment shows that a man who could legally donate 45 dollars total could in fact donate 45 dollars to Obama. If he had successfully managed to donate more than the threshold value for reporting, then your argument would be pretty much QED, but as it stands you haven't proven much beyond the fact that the site at some point took the money even if the donor had a strange sense of humor. For all you know (and I'm not claiming one way or another, but it's totally YOUR burden here), the system would have rejected the CC number as soon as the total take from it reached the threshold. Similarly, you have given me to indication to think that a foreign card was tested, which means we can only speculate about how the system would treat a foreign card. There are actually simple ways a CC billing system could read a card number to determine which bank it originates from. Foreign cards have foreign issuers (banks), except in the AMEX context, which I'm not going to get into because I'm already way off point.

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Knowledge without reason is useless.

http://boxrockssocks.blogspot.com/

That's "Similarly, you have given me NO ...", yar.

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Knowledge without reason is useless.

http://boxrockssocks.blogspot.com/

If you enter false info, and the verification step is taken off, the charge will go through. That's why the credit card companies charge more per transaction if you disable the safeguards. It opens them up to more liability.

The only remotely plausible explanation I can think of is that it made it easier for college students to donate. At my university you are given what is basically a P.O. box which cannot be used for credit transactions. However they are more than happy to send you cards to that address.

Liability on the network (the credit card company, for the lay, so as not to confuse anyone) side isn't the problem here though. It's easy to confuse the issues here, but it's not about credit card fraud; it's about donor fraud and getting away with donating more than you should without being documented (which is not very well proven, as far as I can tell).

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Knowledge without reason is useless.

http://boxrockssocks.blogspot.com/

And as a matter of course, actually, there is only very rarely actual network liability. The network itself serves mostly as an intermediary between issuing and merchant banks (hence the term network), and is not actually contractually vulnerable to a whole lot of the things that can go wrong in a credit card transaction. Visa and Mastercard were actually nonprofit entities for some time, I believe, actually. Merchant and issuer banks on the other hand, which the consumer may or may not realize are different from the "credit card company" itself except in the case of AMEX as already mentioned among other rare exceptions, will be liable for a lot of that stuff and will act in the manner described by the previous poster. Oh, and none of this is advice, but I doubt any of you are running merchant or issuer banks.

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Knowledge without reason is useless.

http://boxrockssocks.blogspot.com/

Actual reporting.

More people like Obama than McCain!!! ?! ?! HOW COULD IT BE?

He's simply more popular. Twice as popular it would seem.

This landslide I called for is looking more and more possible every day.

Ahh, I pine for the burdens of a free society.

That's interesting to me as the GOP has always been the evil empire, and dems a rag tag band of rebels. Also good to know Obama is flush with cash. Hey maybe McCain can sell a couple of his 12 homes to raise some money?

They're not his, they belong to his wife. She has kept her personal fortune separate and there's a prenup.

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She did kinda finance his first campaign though.

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Knowledge without reason is useless.

http://boxrockssocks.blogspot.com/

I'm fairly certain I've donated about $200 more than I'm legally allowed, all of it through web forms and whatnot, most of it anonymously. It disturbs me that controls aren't in place, but speaking strictly for myself, I've begun telling campaign employees who call me that I've already reached the federally mandated maximum.

It's not fraud. He is the card holder. If he used someone elses card then yeah.

Actually, the verification of the credit card falls on the merchants shoulders, in this case Obama. The address verification is there to protect the card holder and the credit card company, not the merchant. Full liability falls on the shoulders of the card acceptor. Trust me on this, I know first hand due to a lawsuit 11 yrs ago involving an PC Parts company that I owned which sold CPU's, memory and HDD's on auction sites. This was before they had address verification security in place. I became the target of a credit card fraud ring and before I knew what was going on they had racked up 135k in credit card bills before the first charge back came rolling in. They (the bank, Union Federal) Froze my accounts and came in with Sheriffs ,locksmiths and a moving truck and hauled all of my inventory away. I spent 4 days in court but managed to win my case and get all my stuff back minus the 135k. Too bad this happened Nov 22 1997 and I didn't get my stuff back until Jan 6th. I didn't get a single Xmas sale and by the time I did get my stuff back prices had dropped as they always do after Xmas....

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"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -Henry Louis Mencken
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VEGETARIAN -Noun (vej-i-tair-ee-uhn): Ancient tribal slang for the village idiot who can't hunt, fish or ride.

Democrats, you have your Bush. Congratulations, you really picked a winner.

Obama Accepting Untraceable Donations
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 13_pf.html

lol... riiiight.

Lol IRL Joxur.

Like I said before though, at this point I am for anything Obama needs to do to cement his grasp on this victory. It will be a landslide like I predicted, and Obama will win like I predicted.

I am SO fucking stoked this week!!!!!!!!!!!

I guess the next questions would be:
Is it reasonable to accept donations from prepaid debit/credit cards?
If prepaid debit/credit cards aren't reasonable, are there ways a merchant can screen them out?

I can't really see why someone making a legitimate donation would have to use one offhand. But I live in a world where I use my debit card when I want to pay with something from my checking account, and my credit card when I want to charge something.

Maybe there are people at lower levels of the economic strata who don't do checking accounts and feel money orders are too insecure (which they are). I really don't know. The only reasons I would personally get one would be for gift-giving, teaching your kid to live on a budget (if I had them), or out-of-town travel.

As for screening them, I'm not sure how one would do that. Possibly there are portions of the card number that flag it as a prepaid card. Not sure. I'm sure that the vast majority of merchants only care that the purchase gets authorized and not what kind of card it is.

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Hope is the new black.

Keep fighting the good fight, Jox, you loon.

And apparently so is Obama's campaign. So funny how his political moral compass has changed directions.

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"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." -Henry Louis Mencken
_____
VEGETARIAN -Noun (vej-i-tair-ee-uhn): Ancient tribal slang for the village idiot who can't hunt, fish or ride.

Obama and his campaign hasn't done anything wrong.

Yes, He Can
Barack Obama should be able to disclose his small-dollar donors pretty easily.
http://www.slate.com/id/2203421/?from=rss

Perhaps they should have used some of the millions he has raised to hire some more IT people? It certainly would have been a more noble use of the money than the phone calls I'm getting here in WV. To be fair, neither party/candidate is being very noble atm.

Are democratic candidates held to a higher standard of ethics then republicans? Is this a good or bad reflection of the different parties?

I only charge $125/hour.

Orme, by that design I have about 12 keys. How can you demonstrate they're all me? 10 of the donations were anonymous, and no more than 4 came from the same account -- sometimes I sent money from a long-term savings account, sometimes from everyday checking, once through PayPal (which will NOT tell you my account number without a court order). You see the problem with expecting Obama to dig out information that's just not there? I'll grant that more careful design would have enabled the campaign to capture and track it, but expecting retroactive capture from past transactions requires time travel.

The code was more of a joke, but to elaborate...

I don't know specific campaign law. So, I can't criticize that.
But, I can criticize their information management... maybe.

Any semi-respectable database design would have a method to uniquely identfiy individuals - whether that is a social security number, PayPal account, verified street address, credit card number, or whatnot. Of course, I've worked at billion dollar+ companies that were unable to do this. So although it's taught in pretty much every "Intro to Relational Data" course, lots of designers fail.

Ultimately, it comes down to what the law requires, which I don't know what that is.

I've worked for companies that explicitly refuse to build database structures that allow for unique identification of clients. If we don't build for ourselves the ability to help the government violate your privacy, then we never have to do it -- not even passively by handing over records under a court order. There are also probably political advantages related to plausible deniability, and someone might have built those into both campaigns' systems without ever telling the candidates -- for their own good, of course. We'd never find out who actually wrote the table structure. The same principle states that no one will have written his name down.

You are now arguing law, not data design.
Intentional incompetence may or may not = plausible deniability.

One would think that campaign law would require you to identify your donors.
But I have no idea and don't particularly care.

Ok! (man there is too much to keep up with today)

Barack Obama could preside over demise of modern campaign finance
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/24675.html

What he said then:
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/06/ ... iew-4.html



What he's (not) doing now: