On Sunday I wrote this piece, #RoboCon - The Noose Tightens Around The #CPC Neck explaining the details involving Internet Cookies, IP Addresses and NAT Firewalls and how they relate to the facts that we know about Pierre Poutine. If you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you take the time.
Now, later on Sunday it was pointed out to me by SaskBoy and another person whom is very well informed on the details of the Poutine Investigation that I made an error by concluding that IP address linking Andrew Prescott’s and Pierre Poutine’s Rack-9 accounts originated from the Burke Campaign Office. This is factually incorrect, there has been no information stating that the Burke Campaign Office had the Rogers IP Address 99.225.28.34
This bother me somewhat, and I kept mulling over how the ownership of this IP Address could be resolved, and then late yesterday it hit me that I coming at this from the direction. Instead of asking myself “Is there a way to show that Burke Campaign owned this IP Address during the Election?” I should have been looking to see if there was a way exclude the Burke Campaign.
So the problem is simple, what internet ISP did the Burke Campaign use during the 41th Election? Was it Rogers, in which case it is possible at the Burke Campaign was the source. Or was it another company, Bell? Telus, Primus, IGS, Cogeco or any of the numeral other of possible carriers? If the Burke Campaign used any ISP other than Rogers, then this would rule them out as being the possible source of the Prescott/Poutine IP Address.
So how do we determine what ISP the Burke Campaign used? Well the old saying, the best records are Tax records, so all we need to do is look at the Burke Campaign financial return for the 41st Election.
The exact form we are looking for is Marty Burke’s Candidates’ Details - Statement of Electoral Campaign Expenses (Part 3a). There is no way to give a direct link to the form since they are generate by a script, so I have included a screen shot. I have edited it to place the column headers and the appropriate data to appear all in one screen shot, the form was also sorted on Supplier.
Click for large image.
Items #14 and #34 are payments to Rogers, and they fall under Office Expenses - Other (including telephone). So that rules out anyone saying this could be a payment to a person called Rogers. Also by examining the entire 3a form (not shown here) we can also see that there are no other payments to any other IPS’s.
From this information we can not eliminate the Burke Campaign as being the source of the Prescott/Poutine IP address, but we also can not conclude that the Burke Campaign owned the 99.225.28.34 IP Address.