I managed to catch part of the broadcast of Obama’s town hall meeting earlier today. It was quite interesting in the response from the public, especially those who were leveraging the Internet to tap into it and, in some cases, actually pose questions for the President to answer. The town hall meeting was touted by news outlets as being generally successful and allows for better accessibility to Obama.
But, as I was driving and contemplating various mobile security exploits that nefarious people typically and not-so-typically employ, I began wondering: does the White House IT staff carefully screen and track the Internet traffic for identity purposes for things like online town hall meetings?
After all, in the realm of influencing U.S. politics from abroad, a new emerging trend is for offshore entities to use new and established botnets and traffic redirectors to impersonate the American public. In addition to outright criminal enterprises, manipulating the perceptions of American politicians by pretending to be their constituents will most likely continue to escalate as interest continues to gather in the wake of decreasing prosecution (and in some cases, reversal of guilty verdicts) for spamming and online identity fraud.
Other countries have realized that controlling the critical access points to their segments of the Internet is key to managing and monitoring traffic. This has been detailed in literature before, like in Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World
Management Perspective
There is definitely a place for gathering and evaluating international sentiment and attitudes toward the U.S. government and the American people; but there is also a great need for accuracy when collecting information, including public opinions, from people who should be the American public. Leveraging appropriate cybersecurity measures to guarantee that people are exactly who they claim to be is critical to properly monitoring and basing decisions upon online traffic and interactivity.
N.B.
It has been several months since we attempted to populate the Amazon-based storefront… 
