Earlier this month TechPresident announced the creation of John Edwards' unofficial campaign headquarters in Second Life. It was put together by a volunteer not officially associated with the campaign. As noted in the article that makes him the first 2008 presidential candidate to establish a presence in Second Life, official or not.

I decided to stop by, only to discover that Edwards' Second Life headquarters had chalked up another first, the first virtual campaign HQ to be vandalized.

Presidential candidates are used to dealing with people seeking to disrupt events and vandalize their web sites, but as candidates venture more and more into the virtual world they will have to come up with new strategies to deal with things like this.

How do you stop someone from vandalizing your virtual land and how can you react to it quickly? Well as it turns out there are some tricks to the game and I caught up with Jordan Bigel (aka Dire Lobo in Second Life) over at InWorld Studios in Second Life to get some answers.

Raven Canning: So Dire Lobo, you were with me last night to see the aftermath of the vandalism. I noticed that I didn't have the ability to build things on the property, so how did this group pull this off?
Dire Lobo: One way is by rezzing objects on adjacent land and then moving them onto the parcel - why don't we meet somewhere and we can test the theory?
Dire Lobo: I can find a place which has no build rights - one sec, I will send you a tp or a landmark...
Dire Lobo: Ok, so, you notice the BUILD button is disabled here. You cannot create things and you cannot "rez" something from your inventory.
Raven Canning: In laymen's terms, what does "rez" mean?
Dire Lobo: REZ means to take something from storage (inventory) and create an instance of it in the virtual world. The word comes (I am told) from the film "Tron".
Dire Lobo: Objects can also contain other un-rezzed objects and then rez them and put them in a certain place for example.
Raven Canning: So what does that mean exactly?
Dire Lobo: This is one of the major forms of griefing (spamming), creating a self-replicating object which constantly rezes.

Editor's note, one example of this during a high profile event can be found here. The video footage isn't exactly safe for work so view cautiously.

Raven Canning: As a professional how would you defend against vandalism like this on a property you were asked to build?
Dire Lobo: The solution is a multi-part answer.
Dire Lobo: For one, you can just turn on auto-return.
Dire Lobo: This would simply return objects that were not created by the owner, but would be a problem for group ventures.
Dire Lobo: If you have people contributing content, make them DEED it to you or to the group (if the group owns the land). Then you can use auto-return.
Dire Lobo: But you introduce some overhead by doing that and it is fun to allow people to create things as they wish.
Dire Lobo: Now for a sensitive project like a campaign, I wouldn't take that attitude.
Dire Lobo: As I mentioned yesterday you can also use the SL programming tools to create a system which monitors not only everyone who comes and goes but can take a catalog of what objects exist - or at least who owns them - and compare that to a list of authorized owners.
Dire Lobo: This whole process can thus be automated and allow multiple builders, etc.
Dire Lobo: With the tools LL [Linden Labs] provides you can do an awful lot if you know how. This is one potential danger of amateur or hobby 3D sites for candidates.
Dire Lobo: In the early days of the WWW the same thing occurred and even now unauthorized web sites for candidates appeared all the time.
Dire Lobo: The key is that candidates have to provide an "Official" presence like they provide an "official" web site and this has the be a manned effort and properly managed to present the right message.

Raven Canning: So what if anything can regular SL users do to help police the areas they frequent, what is the ettiquette and tools available for community moderation?
Dire Lobo: Not much except IM the owner of the land.
Dire Lobo: The owner can file a report with LL which they will probably ignore. The only things which get their attention (and rightfully so) are child porn (actual child porn, not child-like avatars with porn-like clothing) and Nazi insignia.

Raven Canning: How can property owners stay on top of exploits that are possible in second life? In the real world there are updates and bulletins constantly flowing to administrators, does the second life community have anything similar?
Dire Lobo: There is an official source of info, the Linden Lab Blog - accessible from the secondlife.com home page.
Dire Lobo: It is usually a horse-out-of-the-barn already thing.
Dire Lobo: I mean, in terms of new techniques, no one knows about them until they are unleashed on people.
Dire Lobo: Once that happens they spread like fire through all the blogs and magazines and in-world newspapers.
Dire Lobo: But no, there is no listing or self-help group teaching land-owners the tricks of how to maintain peace.
Raven Canning: sounds like a possible business opportunity :)

Raven Canning: What about virtual security? In the real world and event would have security personnel working to ensure order and there would probably be a skeleton crew working round the clock. Is that feasible in second life, or will the measures you discussed previous suffice?
Raven Canning: in other words can you 'kick' a disruptive avatar from your land?
Dire Lobo: Real people in avatar form work the crowd and eject troublemakers.
Dire Lobo: Absolute neccessity at any live event.
Dire Lobo: For other times when a property is idle and there is static content only this is less important. Though like yesterday, even when no event is on, the griefing can cause more traffic then the content!
Dire Lobo: But its different for a polticial candidate then for someone who owns a virtual clothing shop which runs unattended most of the time.
Dire Lobo: Though in both cases, the spam can interfere with operations.
Dire Lobo: Well, maybe its not so different only that the Candidate has more to lose from bad press resulting from such an event.
Dire Lobo: The danger is casual observers who don't know the story will look.

Raven Canning: One last thing and then I should let you get back to work! Does your firm, InWorld Studios, offer any kind of security consulting as a professional service?
Dire Lobo: No, we do not, except that we provide those services to all of our clients.
Dire Lobo: But we do not do security consultations for only security - we are busy enough.
Dire Lobo: If anyone wants more information on security - go to Search and under the Places tab search for "Security" you will find hundreds of links.

In my mind the really interesting thing about this interview was the many parallels to our own world and existing problems for candidates as well as some new ones to tackle if they venture into this virtual world.

As for this incident, we may never know who was actually behind it. There really isn't any way to tell whether it was a rival campaign, a conservative group that didn't agree with Edwards or simply troublemakers and practical jokesters. I was chatting up some avatars that were there after the fun had ended and got a variety of answers, none of which I chose to believe.

I brought this topic up with Jordan during my interview and he had done some detective work of his own, the owners of the objects didn't have any profile information and the accounts were only about 2 weeks old. Second Life allows you to sign up free with little personal information so much like a denial of service attack on a web site there is little way to find out who is ultimately behind it. Prevention seems to be the key takeaway.

For as far as we've come with technology it seems like we have a long way to go, and particularly with this new medium as candidates begin to embrace it.