Australia's Labor Party claims to represent the little guy, advocating the interests of a wide slice of the population over the interests of those who might supposedly exploit them.

In this latest blog I'll look at just how the Victorian state branch of the party is emulating the more sinister elements of monitoring and control that you would typically expect from marketers, spammers and the NSA. It makes you wonder, if they do this to their own members, how can Australia's government ever hope to rein in spammers or other undesirable practices? Europe has tried cookie laws and the right to be forgotten, while the ALP has taken these developments almost as a guide to exploiting their own most valuable resource, their membership.

The email version of invisible ink

Straight out of an email attempting to recruit party members to the federal election campaign, we find that the ALP's logo itself has been turned into a sinister tracking mechanism. Looking underneath the logo, there is a hidden tracking number attached to every message:

http://gallery.mailchimp.com/3021e68df9a7200135725c633/images/Email_Header_ThisisLabor.jpg

There it is, that big long code 3021e68df9a7200135725c633. On it's own, you may think this number can't do much harm. Think again. After all, as the filename says, "ThisisLabor".

Reaching the grass roots by long distance email

When a party member sees any of the images in the email or clicks any of the links, their email software or web browser sends a HTTP request to the ALP's outsourced tracking server in the United States. Here is an example of what that request may contain:

TCP Headers:
  SOURCE IP ADDRESS: 198.51.100.56

HTTP headers:
  GET /3021e68df9a7200135725c633/images/Email_Header_ThisisLabor.jpg
  HTTP/1.1
  Host: gallery.mailchimp.com
  User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130515 Firefox/17.0 Iceweasel/17.0.6
  Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
  Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
  Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
  X-Forwarded-For: 192.168.1.54
  Connection: keep-alive

These codes are all transmitted from the recipient of the email back to the ALP. Notice the tracking number is in the very first line of the HTTP request? These codes send many details to the tracking server.

Just what is revealed?

  • What time the message was read
  • How many times the message was opened
  • Whether the message was read on multiple computers (perhaps it was forwarded)
  • The IP addresses reveal which network was used.
    • For people reading email at work or on wifi, the IP address reveals the name of the employer, it can be easily looked up in this public database. Here is an example querying one of the ALPs own IP addresses, 203.24.72.2
    • For people using an internet connection at home, the IP address reveals the service provider. There is more to it though: if one party member regularly visits another party member and uses their wifi, they will both appear to be using the same IP address and the party will be able to deduce that there is a connection between these two people.
  • The web browser name and version and the operating system name and version.
  • The language normally used on the computer

Crunching the numbers

You may think that nobody would be interested in all that data or that it is even too much data for anybody to easily study. Think again. The ALP has outsourced processing of this data to an offshore firm that specializes in bulk email, MailChimp. After lecturing everybody about the dangers of outsourcing, the ALP has literally sold the farm (their own membership data) - to a foreign marketing company. Here are some of the claims MailChimp make on their web site:

"Dig even deeper with Subscriber Activity Reports, which give you a real‑time report for every subscriber’s email activities: when they opened, what they clicked, and when they came back for more. You can even generate a list of people who didn’t open, and send them a modified campaign."

That's right: if ALP members don't read their emails fast enough, they will send even more of them.

Just who has access to this data? Well, the scope is quite broad. According to these rules, it is not only the dubious officials in the party's state office, but Labor Party regulations also list a whole lot of other officials who have access to some subset of the data: branch and FEA district committees, policy committees and maybe some trade union officials too. Once you start to contemplate this, it becomes apparent that the probability of somebody profiling members at an individual level is very real.

On the other hand, those rules clearly do not permit the state branch to process the member's data offshore.

Double whammy

In fact, even MailChimp is further outsourcing the data. When receiving an image from the booby-trapped link in the email, we receive a response like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Content-Length: 407474
Connection: keep-alive
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 06:25:55 GMT
Last-Modified: Tue,  03 Sep 2013 04:05:37 GMT
ETag: "df9a7200135725c6331369a22"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Server: AmazonS3
Age: 62097
Via: 1.0 e71fe855f29513f54a41e213fe653fb1.cloudfront.net (CloudFront)
X-Cache: Hit from cloudfront
X-Amz-Cf-Id: S2V2aW4gUnVkZCBpcyBhIGJhZCBib3kuCg==

which contains more tracking numbers and clearly indicates that the data is being processed in the massive AmazonS3 (a.k.a Amazon online bookstore) cloud platform.

Thanks to cloud computing, there is considerable scope for cross-referencing records across other web sites. The IP address becomes a magic key, allowing a range of sinister forces to join the dots at the click of a button and profile the whole private and professional identity of any individual ALP member.

Googling ALP members

It doesn't stop there however, after following these links a victim will eventually end up on one of the ALP's own web pages. Looking through the HTML code underneath http://www.viclabor.com.au is very easy, in most web browsers, you can just press Control-U to see what is hidden away in the shadows. Buried in the code, I found this little gem:

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-35325645-1']);
  _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);
  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

This may be even scarier: it's a JavaScript code that channels all access to the ALP web site into an outsourced tracking system provided by Google. Google can now cross-reference ALP members against their Gmail accounts, their friends and the topics they search for to further profile the type of advertising they should be exposed to. Google, like any private company, has a loyalty to its shareholders and the laws of the country where it is domiciled. Will that coincide with the best interests of ALP members in Victoria?

Australia's other parties: samples needed

Do you have similar communications from Australia's other political parties? Please send them to me and I'll be happy to examine them for similar shortcomings.