Edinburgh Sucks! | How to find the Whistleblower!

Children & Families

How to find the Whistleblower!

By The Basa ⋅ December 5, 2006 ⋅

Interestingly, we got a nice chunck of documents today. In fact, we got over 2 Gigabytes of files which should finally help us document the whole City Connect/ELLP fiasco which has seen the whistleblower hounded by not only senior council officials (Fraudster Rosendale, David Hillson) but also elected members including the present council leader Ewan Aitken who was Chairman of ELLP.

For those not quite sure how it all started here’s a quick intro:

The whistleblower under the name Donald Reekie sent two emails to the then Leader of the council, Teflon Don Anderson.

Anderson then passed them on to Fraudster Mike Rosendale and asked him to investigate the allegations. Fraudster, knowing that there was in fact problems with the auditors who eventually found that 400,000 quid was missing and also 188,000 pounds worth of equipment then went into attack mode. He asked one of his trusted senior ComEd officers (David Hillson) who was so far up his arse he resembled bum-fluff to get involved.

We’ll now pass over to Mr. Hillson as to what he did next:

On looking at the Internet header from the email I noticed the IP address. While I did not really think that investigating the IP address would lead anywhere, on searching the Internet I was surprised when I found that it was from a computer attached to the Internet by Zen ADSL. This is significant as Zen are presently the major supplier of Internet connections for the City Connect project. Also significant is that, while most ADSL suppliers provide dynamic addresses (i.e. the address changes whenever a new connection is made – and is therefore not readily traceable), Zen ADSL provides static addresses.While looking at the list of IP addresses for locations connected by City Connect did not show any matches, I was aware that some members of staff had also recently moved to ADSL provided by Zen. As members of staff would have done this as private individuals City Connect does not have access to the unique address of their computers. However, emails from such people’s home accounts could show the (static) IP address in the Internet header.
I therefore compared the IP address on the Internet header from the ‘Donald Reekie’ with that of members of staff sent from their home account. It should be noted here that this does not directly imply that email from an individuals personal account is necessarily sent from their home computer.

I found that the IP address on the email sent to all staff by ‘Donald Reekie’ was exactly the same as the address on an email sent to City Connect by John Travers (jint@visps.com).On finding this out I notified Mike Rosendale who advised me to contact the Client Services Team. John Wilson put me in touch with Neil Ferguson (tel 345 4674) of Syntegra and I sent a copy of the two Internet headers to him (attached). I have asked him to ascertain whether or not an IP address can be ‘spoofed’ (i.e. someone falsely inserting a different IP address on to an Internet header.

On finding this out I notified Mike Rosendale who advised me to contact the Client Services Team. John Wilson put me in touch with Neil Ferguson (tel 345 4674) of Syntegra and I sent a copy of the two Internet headers to him (attached). I have asked him to ascertain whether or not an IP address can be ‘spoofed’ (i.e. someone falsely inserting a different IP address on to an Internet header.While Neil Ferguson has informed me that it may be possible to do this (and is trying to emulate the process), he confirmed that it is highly probable that both emails were sent from the same computer.

I have suggested that, as Syntegra have to date only seen copied Internet headers, they should now look at the emails concerned on the computers of Al Frater, a member of community education staff, and the elected members concerned.

David Hillson
28 November 2002

This is now total proof of how the City of Edinburgh Council treat whistleblowers. They don’t look into the allegations, their main thrust is to get hold of the whistleblowers and get rid of them.

We are assuming that we will get a lot more info from the more than 2 gigabytes of information - there is a lot of stuff to go through. If there are any journalists who wish to have the data, drop us a message. There is some good stuff at first flick through.

It is amazing the stuff that people don’t encrypt on their computers.