Yep

Yep, Saw That Coming:

Just yesterday we were talking about punishing the guilty:

One expects that, in Obama's America, justice will be done in this case: the citizen whose experiment proved that the campaign had manually disabled all credit-card safeguards will be arrested and prosecuted for making the fake donations. Once he's safely in prison, just as Joe is now safely out of work, we can all stop worrying about the matter.

Today, Megan McArdle notes a plan for prosecution:

If a wingnut uses the Internet to give the Obama campaign a donation in a fake name, with the intent of fooling the website into accepting an invalid contribution, isn't that using interstate communications facilities to defraud under 18 USC 1343?

Here's part of the definition of "fraud" from Black's Law Dictionary:

a false representation of a matter of fact, whether by words or by conduct, by false or misleading allegations, or by concealment of that which should have been disclosed, which deceives and is intended to deceive another so that he shall act upon it to his legal injury

Seems like a pretty good fit to me.

Ms. McArdle is a remakably generous woman, who chooses to believe the best about the Obama campaign:

The Obama campaign screwed up massively; it should not be possible to charge something to a credit card without matching the name to the name on the credit card. Most responsible web processors also require that you provide a fair amount of other information, to ensure that people aren't using stolen cards. And beyond that, last time I looked it was mandatory to get correct names to ensure that people aren't violating the campaign finance laws. I don't support those laws, to be sure. But as long as they are the law, all the campaigns have to abide by them.

Wondering if we can't prosecute the person who exposed the campaign's error smacks of police state tactics. Yes, I still support Obama, and I have no reason to think that the error was deliberate.

"Error"? She is aware that the campaign has disabled all the normal safeguards that "responsible web processors... require," and is ignoring the "mandatory" requirement to collect correct names "to ensure that people aren't violating the campaign finance laws."

It seems to me a stretch to believe this was a "massive screw up," given the extraordinary benefits that such an "error" brings to the Obama campaign. That would be somewhat suspicious even from a campaign that had behaved reasonably well up until now. This one has been accused of massive fraud from Iowa forward, as regards their abuses in the caucus states, with ACORN, and so on and so forth. Surely there's a threshhold beyond which we no longer assume these are innocent mistakes.

By the same token, this isn't the first time Obama supporters have wanted to destroy someone critical of the campaign. Ask Joe the Former Plumber.