One possibly surprising thing about spam is that how little of it is political or religious in nature. Given the strong feelings both of these topics arouse, you'd expect to see more attempts by zealots to pitch the cause to an audience of millions. Yet, by and large, even the most passionate believers seem to stay away from spam.

There are exceptions. I get a trickle of pitches from Latin American candidates, and an occasional Neateye Gouranga spam. I also sometimes see political spam in other channels: I've seen at least one US politician try to 'follow' everyone on Twitter, apparently in the hope that the auto-generated notifications will lure people to their home page. Workers at Rudy Giuliani's campaign recently made themselves unpopular by batch-posting links to their online resources to Digg (the campaign put a stop to this at once when it was pointed out that they weren't winning any friends this way).

And then there was the Ron Paul botnet spam, which delivered large numbers of messages pitching for US presidential candidate Ron Paul and linking to his campaign videos on YouTube. While the number of messages sent out were small compared to the average pharmacy or penis enlargement spam run, the Internet's obsession with Ron Paul and the fact that a botnet was apparently used meant that the spams got the attention they were seeking.

There is no particular reason to think that the Ron Paul campaign was behind the spam run, which doesn't seem to have helped the candidate's image. The first assumption of most commentators was that it was simply a case of an overzealous supporter going too far, not an unlikely hypothesis given the zealotry that Paul seems to inspire.

But now a new interpretation is gaining popularity. It has been pointed out that YouTube removed some Ron Paul videos in response to the spam. There is also the matter of the subject lines, which had that 'goes just a little too far' quality we've learned to associate with joe-jobs. In amidst relatively anodyne subject lines like:

Ron Paul wins GOP debate
Vote Ron Paul 2008!
Government Wasteful Spending Eliminated by Ron Paul

were flights of fantasy such as:

Ron Paul Stops Iraq War!
Ron Paul Eliminates the IRS!
Iraq Scam Exposed, Ron Paul

The messages themselves were similarly extravagant:

Ron Paul is for the people, unless you want your children to have human implant RFID chips, a National ID card and create a North American Union and see an economic collapse far worse than the great depression ... He will eliminate the IRS, Wasteful Government Spending & Stop The Iraq War Immediately!

This doesn't read like the kind of thing the campaign staff of a serious political candidate would write. It doesn't even read like the work of a zealous Ron Paul supporter (although I've seen them write some fairly wacky things). It reads like the work of either someone who has an entire closet full of tinfoil hats, or someone who really, really wants you to go over to YouTube and complain about Ron Paul's videos.

I don't hold any particular brief for Ron Paul, and I find the Rondroids who fill forums with ecstatic praise for their hero to be frankly tiresome. Nor do I believe the oft-repeated claim that “No real Ron Paul supporter would ever send spam.” But various things about this one say joe job to me. Disturbingly, it seems to have worked, at least to some degree.

If the unknown sender is indeed in the other camp, then that raises some interesting questions. The sender could be simply a lone kook who has taken it on himself to try some spoiling action on a candidate that he sees as threatening whoever it is that he supports. But the spam was apparently sent by a botnet, possibly even the infamous Storm Worm net. That implies a different level of commitment. It's not just a case of someone buying a mailing list and firing up a shareware bulkmail client. To get the use of the botnet, they presumably needed to know where to contact the botnet's ‘authorized sales representatives’ and pony up some cash for the privilege of using it.

The sums involved aren't so large as to exclude the possibility of a private individual dipping into their own pocket to finance the operation as their own personal ‘campaign contribution’. The cost of the spam run was probably on the order of a few hundred dollars, maybe as much as a thousand. But it also wouldn't be the first time that a political organization has allegedly launched similar spoiling operations against their rivals.

Lone gunman, or the dirty tricks budget of someone's machine at work? You decide. It seems likely, however, that this is only an opening shot and we may be hearing from these people again. Election 2008 could be the spammiest to date.