Draft alert loose ends

This is probably the final post on the draft rumors.

First, I looked a little deeper into the way Congress.org works. The original draft rumor was a Soapbox Alert, not an Action Alert. Action Alerts are associated with the organization that produced them; Soapbox Alerts have no attribution.

Turns out anyone can post a Soapbox Alert. Anyone at all. There’s no way to tell who posted it and there seems to be no filter before a Soapbox Alert hits the site. I.e., there is no more accountability behind the original rumor than there would be from a message board posting on some random message board.

Second, how do I know IDI owns Congress.org? I did a whois on the domain to look up the owner of record. Survey says:

Registrant Name: Issue Dynamics Inc.
Registrant Organization: Issue Dynamics Inc.
Registrant Street1: 919 18th Street, NW 10th Floor
Registrant City: Washington
Registrant State/Province: DC
Registrant Postal Code: 20006
Registrant Country: US
Registrant Email: deutsch@IDI.NET

This matches the registration info for idi.net, although they used a different domain registrar for that one. But it’s clearly the same people using the same nameservers, etc.