Sunday, October 14, 2007
E-mail hoaxes spread online
Dan Radmacher
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From the RoundTable blog
My mother is a smart, well-educated woman with a Ph.D. in psychology. She should be one of the last people to get taken in by an Internet hoax.
But last week she forwarded me an e-mail that's been circulating online since, well, from what I can tell, almost since there's been an online.
I know you've seen it. You probably even became briefly outraged by it. It alleges that members of Congress don't pay into Social Security. Instead, the e-mail says, these politicians voted themselves their own special retirement. They don't pay anything into it, but after they retire, they keep collecting their full salary. Until they die.
The e-mail claims that Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., stands to collect $7.8 million after he retires.
This should be the first clue, at least to anyone with a passing familiarity with Byrd, that the e-mail is questionable. Byrd, the longest-serving senator, is almost 90 years old. He just won re-election last year to another six-year term. If Byrd retires before he dies -- a questionable assumption -- he most certainly will not live long enough to collect $7.8 million at his current Senate salary: $183,500 a year.
If Byrd retired tomorrow, he'd have to live another 40 years.
That assumes that the e-mail's main hypothesis is correct -- which, as you may have come to suspect, it is not.
Members of Congress pay into and collect from the same pension plan as other federal employees. Since 1984, they have also paid into Social Security. Prior to that, they, like other federal employees, were covered by the Civil Service Retirement System.
To my mother's credit, she did not forward the e-mail on indiscriminately, as so many others have done. She sent it to me and another friend of hers, and asked us if it was true.
But whoever sent it to her was not so distrustful. At the top of the e-mail, they wrote, "Most of us have been aware of this for some time but we have sat by and done nothing. It really is an outrage and it's time for us to revolt and stand up for ourselves! Please send this on to as many people as you can."
E-mails such as this are essentially low-tech viruses. They don't rely on technical tricks or hacker skill to spread themselves. They count on plain old human gullibility.
There are countless variations. I've seen e-mails claiming a child died of a heroin overdose after being stuck by a discarded syringe in a McDonald's ball pit (someone at my son's day care actually passed this one out to parents). There's one improbably suggesting that, as part of the test of a new e-mail system, Microsoft and AOL will pay you money for forwarding the e-mail to everyone you know. Then there's the perennial classic about a kid dying of cancer who wanted to collect enough birthday cards to set a world record (almost always false, but, in at least one instance, an actual request for birthday cards by a dying child was sent out). A good source for debunking these pervasive e-mail urban legends is Snopes.com.
What interests me, though, is what motivates the people who first make up these emails. There's no fame or notoriety that goes along with creating a successful urban legend. Except for the Nigerian scams, there's rarely money to be made. Is there some twisted satisfaction in convincing gullible but usually well-meaning people to forward fake e-mails to everyone they know?
I'm especially interested in the origin of e-mails like the one about the congressional retirement perk. That one, and others like it, seem specifically designed to erode confidence and respect in government institutions, especially Congress.
It seems to me that members of Congress do a fine enough job of that on their own without anyone having to make up lies about lavish pensions.
I remember the first time I saw this particular message -- years and years ago when I first started using e-mail. My first thought was how outrageous that pension system was. I wondered if a one-term congressman would get that salary for life. I didn't forward the message, but I didn't think to doubt its veracity immediately, either.
When I finally did look up the details of congressional pensions, I realized how silly and absolutely unbelievable the e-mail was.
Most of us have learned to be far more cynical since then. It's just smart to assume any e-mail that attempts to gin up outrage and prompts you to send it out to your entire address book is a hoax.
Right, Mom?
Radmacher is the editorial page editor of The Roanoke Times.
