McCain has some explaining to do. I'm pretty sure that it's illegal for a sitting member of congress with security clearance to solicit money from the Russian Federation.
I despise John McCain but I bet this turns out to be simply a fundraising email blast to huge numbers of email addresses, one of which may be that of a Russian. I’ve seen too many of these “click bait” type stories recently. They’re a waste of time.
You are most likely correct. In both politics and other areas we see an increase in spam where it is cheaper to just send a blast to everyone rather than spend the time and money to develop a targeted list.
Of course, this is also a way to hide things in plain view and give plausible deniability to everyone. Take an example away from politics.
I receive sex related spam despite never going to that type of site. Some of that sex related spam no doubt leads to sites that involve children or other offensive stuf.
And some of that offensive spam is sent to children.
When the police raid my computer the defendant has a plausible defense: I didn’t know it was there, everyone gets it.
Or when the police raid the computer of the sender and accuse him of sending it to children, the defendant can say: I did not intentionally send it to children. I just bought a list which I thought was adults.
Indeed, our legal system encourages spam. If you do any filtering of a list, then you are legally responsible for any and all errors that remain on that list. But if you do not filter the list then you are not legally responsible for errors on the list.
Credit card companies buy lists from the credit reporting companies. The lists of the credit reporting companies are extremely inaccurate and erroneous in many demonstrable ways, eg city, state and zipcode that clearly are impossible. But the Credit Card company is afraid to clean up the list prior to using it to market their new zirconium credit card.
They would rather send a mass mailing of 50 million mail pieces saying that you have been pre-qualified and have 20 million of the 50 million be to recipients that clearly could not meet any standard of pre-qualifiecation other than that they are on the list the credit card company bought.
To save postage on those 20 million would in no way cover the legal fees to fight off some ambulance chaser.
To make analytics work, our legal climate needs to change. And that is true for both climate change believers and climate change deniers ... but not for slip-n-fall lawyers.
McCain has some explaining to do. I'm pretty sure that it's illegal for a sitting member of congress with security clearance to solicit money from the Russian Federation.
That was my thought.