Steve Angelica of The PEN, the Congressional email site

[kk897]

Some of you may have seen this site:

http://www.usalone.com/

Here's the mission statement:

Our democracy is only as strong as the participation of the people. Do your representatives only hear from you once every two or four years, assuming you vote at all?

(snip)

The People's Email Network is constructed to facilitate communication with our elected officials. (snip)

And most importantly, when you cast your votes in the section above, be sure to use the ground-breaking input functions of our website to also submit the email addresses of everyone you know. In this way we can together mobilize the entire country to speak in the loudest possible voice.

The deal is, you sign up, use their "proprietary software" to contact your members of Congress, then input your own list of email addresses of your "friends." You can also choose to allow The PEN to "CC" other members of the network in order to "distribute the load," or something like that.

They say they're non-partisan, but they give an extensive links list which seems to be very progressive. Perhaps you, like I did a while ago, have even used The PEN to write to your members of Congress about election fraud.

I got kind of curious about The PEN, since they keep sending me emails. I like the causes they put up on the site, but, oddly, the emails come from a yahoo.com address rather than the usalone.com address. I don't know why, but something seemed a little fishy to me when there isn't anything on the site like an "about us" section or a nice little photo accompanying a profile of the founder. You commonly see that kind of thing on political sites.

So I did a whois, and discovered that the domain belongs to a Steve Angelica of California. I googled him and discovered that indeed he has applied for a patent on this "proprietary software", as a MARKETING TOOL. It involves the "Issue Action Center" button he wants you to put on your webpages to get more people involved.

Here's from his patent application:

A method and system is disclosed for creating additional advertising space by sensing the position of an element on a web page or other client viewer, and upon interaction of a user with that element positioning the appearance of additional web page elements not limited by the boundary of the initial element.

http://www.freshpatents.com/Expanding-computer-display-advertising-method-and-system-dt20041202ptan20040239703.php

Here's from the email he sent:

Those of you who have generated your custom Issue Action Centers, your new pages should all be live now. And to everyone else, remember we will set up a custom action page for any issue of your own you like for no charge, and you get a snazzy drop-in dynamic menu for your own web page to help promote it at

http://www.usalone.com/action_center.html

Please forward this message and post this link everywhere you can to everyone you know.

This Steve Angelica is definitely one who posted on the 911TruthAction yahoo group, since he mentions The PEN:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/911TruthAction/messages/2501?viscount=100

Looking a little further at my google search, I discovered that a Steve Angelica seems to have been involved in software piracy:

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-210637.html

Novell said today that it has recovered unauthorized copies of its NetWare product, a market value of nearly $14 million, in a settlement with a Southern California-based company.

Both parties agreed to a settlement that includes Comptek turning over unauthorized copies, as well as a cash sum, to Novell. The deal also includes transferring ownership of computer equipment from Comptek to Novell.

Novell said the copies of its NetWare are valued at about $13.8 million.

The lawsuit, which was originally filed in the U.S. District Court, Central District of California, Western Division, against reseller Comptek and its owner, Steve Angelica, alleged that Comptek sold unauthorized copies of NetWare and used the Novell and NetWare trademarks in violation of Novell's rights.

Of course, I don't know that this is the same Steve Angelica. Interestingly, when you go to Novell's official press release site,

http://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/1998/04/pr98045.html

it leaves out the name of Comptek's owner. However, the cached site does name Steve Angelica. I assume this had something to do with the settlement.

A Steve Angelica was also involved in some shady doings in the gemstone trade:

In August 1983 the FTC filed a complaint against Kimberly International Gem Corp. The complaint also named Frank Kimball, founder and former president of Kimberly; co-presidents Stephen Small and Steve Angelica; the firm's chief gemstone appraiser, International Gemological Society (IGS); IGS' president, Harvey Levitt; and three salespeople: Robert McCallum, Rene Dupont and Jean Paul Pierre.  Kimberly and Levitt filed for bankruptcy. 

http://www.crimes-of-persuasion.com/Crimes/Telemarketing/Outbound/Major/Investments/gemstones.htm

A few other really odd things turned up on the google search wherein the name Steve Angelica is embedded somehow in the key words of porn sites. I won't include the links here, but here's the google search link, and the porn stuff's at the end:

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22steve+angelica%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

Finally, there's an interesting link to a Steve Angelica who seems to have co-written songs with Diane Warren (she's been Oscar nominated), which I only mention because The PEN site has a "theme song":

Meantime, absent from Wednesday's proceedings will be one of Warren's few collaborators, Steve Angelica, who co-wrote several songs with her early in Warren's career. He is said to be working for a limousine company in Los Angeles these days.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,27198,00.html

I'll be doing a little more research about Comptek, but it seemed to me to be worth mentioning. If you know Steve Angelica, or if you *are* Steve Angelica, I'd sure like to know if The PEN is on the up and up. Right after I used it to communicate with my reps and senators, I received some very odd email that purported to come from the Kerry campaign (which I had never donated to; nor had I ever visited its site--not even the Democratic Party's site). It all just seems a little suspicious to me.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this matter? I only bring this issue here because I know The PEN was something I learned about on DU, and I'm sure others here may have used this "service."

(note: edited for clarification)

[kk897]

1. not trying to be pushy,

but if The PEN is a scam, or Steve Angelica a con or some sort of mole, I would think DU would want to know about it, since it supports lefty causes and has been mentioned on DU.

Comptek, like so many computer companies, appears to be a rather common name for a business in this industry. There is a Comptek that's part of Northrup Drummond, and there's also a Russian Comptek, and several other variations.