Virginia company tied to anti-Obama texts

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Virginia company tied to anti-Obama texts

7:56PM EDT October 31. 2012 - WASHINGTON — A Virginia firm with deep ties to GOP politicians and conservative causes faced scrutiny Wednesday after sending unsolicited robotext messages criticizing President Obama to an unknown number of mobile phones in the Washington metro area on Tuesday.

It's illegal to send unsolicited automated text messages, but the company linked to the messages, ccAdvertising, a political research firm, may have entered into a gray area in the rules set by the Federal Communications Commission by sending the message as e-mails to phone numbers as texts, not as phone-to-phone texts.

Among the messages: "Medicare goes bankrupt in 4000 days while Obama plays politics with senior health"; "Obama denies protection to babies who survive abortions. Obama is just wrong"; "Obama wants to invest in Planned Parenthood instead of your future."

The messages originated from a variety of domains including votersett.com, informedett.com, republicanett.com and GOPmessage.com. The texts included no information about who the sender was.

The Centreville, Va., company linked to the messages did not respond to requests for comment, but the company posted this message on its website: "In the more than 12 years since its founding and currently, ccAdvertising has scrupulously complied with all laws and regulations affecting its activities."

The company has worked for for former GOP presidential contenders Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and Newt Gingrich, and Missouri Senate hopeful Todd Akin.

Nick Fuller, spokesman for GoDaddy.com, which hosts some of the domains belonging to ccAdvertising, confirmed that some of the domains were suspended Wednesday. But it appeared that several belonging to ccAdvertising were active as of late Wednesday. GoDaddy.com prohibits its clients from spamming as part of its terms of service agreement.

The Obama campaign declined to comment. But Scott Goodstein, a Democratic tech consultant who heads the group Revolution Messaging, said ccAdvertising's technique is problematic for a number of reasons, including that many recipients did not opt-in to receive these messages and ultimately end up having to pay the cost for unwanted texts to their mobile phone.

Earlier this year, Goodstein's group, Revolution Messaging, filed a petition with the FCC and asked it to "declare ... this Internet to text message political spam is illegal."

"As an active form of communication, even if you already read half of their message before deleting it, you've gotten some form of messaging that cuts through the clutter in the political world crowded by direct mail and television advertising saturation," Goodstein said. "The problem with it is that it is coming from an unknown source and spewing nefarious information to a device that you didn't request information be sent to," Goodstein said.

The largest active client of ccAdvertising is the Faith Family Freedom Fund, a super PAC allied with Family Research Council Action, the Christian activist group headed by Tony Perkins, according to Federal Election Commission reports.

The super PAC has paid ccAdvertising $165,000 this year, mostly for "generic get-out-the-vote calls," according to FEC records. Reached on Wednesday, Family Research Council spokesman J.P. Duffy said he was looking into whether the group had any connection to the text messages.

Over the years, the company has done business under several different names. Several of the domains used in the anti-Obama text messages were registered to G Joseph. In a 2007 profile in the magazine Mother Jones, the company's president, Gabriel Joseph III, was described as one of the "kings of the political robo-call."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2012/10/31/virginia-company-tied-to-anti-obama-texts/1672729/
 
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