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My ears are burning…

I’m expecting a number of FOI requests to come back this week, including one from Fás. Strictly speaking, the Fás one should have been sent from their office today, as it was submitted exactly four weeks ago… so it was interesting to note an upsurge in hits to this site from the Fás server this morning.

At 10.06 the first click-through from the Fás internal PHPBB forum landed on this site. Since then there have been approximately 75 more (it’s now 2.45pm) - nearly every second hit to this site today has been from the same thread on the internal Fás forum.

All the Fás click-throughs land on this website’s About page, which makes it more interesting.

As I am a conspiracy theorist journalist; this raises a number of questions…

  • why is there a link to this site from the Fás internal server?
  • Is it relevant to the FOI requests I’ve submitted?
  • What is being said?
  • If relevant to the FOI request, why does it matter who sent the request?
  • Who in Fás went looking for me online and found this website?
  • What does it matter what the work I’m doing for this site involves?
  • Does this effect whether or not the FOI is granted?

I wonder… it should be noted however that at the moment I can’t know if the thread is relevant to my FOI or not, I’m just making an educated guess as I’ve had no other involvment with Fás at any point.

Anyone with access to the thread [which can be found at this link, if you've access to the Fás server, http://intra.fasoffice.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=11270] could let me what’s happening, my number is kicking about

Or I could simply FOI the details of the thread and find out for myself in four weeks time.

Dear Fás: I’m watching you watching me? So, who are you?

Of course, I’m not one to miss an opportunity to use a Bros song in a blog post.

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7 Responses

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  1. Eoin Ryan says

    Well spotted. That’s kindof interesting! Can you give us a hint about what that FAS FOI request was related to?

    I’d hope that someone with access to the FAS forum discussion about thestory.ie would take the time to copy and paste the contents to you anonymously, I mean it’s the least they could do. Here’s hoping at least one of them has the guts.

  2. SerialComplainer says

    Not great advice to send the FAS staffers to sendspace.com – if they do this from inside their own firewall, it will almost certainly log which user(s) have hit this particular site.

  3. cymorg says

    Intriguing.

    Being “totally anonymous” on the web is, unfortunately, not so easy. FAS will most likely log all traffic from their users to the web. A good log being read by a good sys admin will usually reveal all you need to know in a few mins. For less likely detection copy the file to a stick drive and email it from an internet cafe using the Sendspace method would be fairly foolproof unless FAS have some pretty sophisticated data leakage detection systems.

  4. Mark Coughlan says

    Edited, cheers.

  5. Robert says

    You know that they’re probably just gonna look at the site form the internet café across ther street now?

Continuing the Discussion

  1. More interesting searches – The Story linked to this post on November 30, 2009

    [...] here? You may consider subscribing to our RSS feed or for updates via email.Like Mark explained last week, we are closely watching the search strings and IP addresses of visitors. Today another one popped [...]

  2. FAS notice board – The Story linked to this post on February 14, 2010

    [...] Sunday Independent, points out that the FAS internal notice board has been closed. Back in November we highlighed the existence of referral traffic from an internal FAS bulletin board, with traffic coming to this blog. Emphasis mine: It seems that [...]



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