I felt really bad for this one girl today. I was getting out to lunch really late, 3pm’ish when I passed by this girl on the sidewalk, she caught my eye and when she noticed I had looked it was like a switch had been turned on. She burst into this introduction/I want to tell you about bad things happening to the environment. She told me she was with this group called “Environmental Action”(see link at the bottom) and that there was this bill in going through that would allow companies to dump 8x more mercury into the environment. They were canvasing for people to join and make donations. Now, I live in the Bay Area and work in San Francisco. I’m no stranger to environmental petitions or money requests on the streets. By my own rule of thumb, I am weary of walkups. If I think a organization or cause is interesting I will first check it out online and see if they are a legit organization, if there are any warnings, etc. I kept telling her that I don’t plan to join there on the street or give a cash donation right off the bat until I check them out a bit. She kept pushing, kept saying how street signups show that there is strong support for the cause and has more impact than online signups. I kept trying to convey I didn’t intend to hand over money or sign anything without checking it out. Eventually I just said “How do I know you are not someone trying to con me?”. Now I was using that as an example of how a person has to be careful, and realize I should have said something like “How do I know that they are a legitimate organization…” but I used the former sentence and it looked like I had just struck her. She had this absolute look of “How could you think of me that way” I immediately felt bad and tried to apologize and tell her that I did not mean to sound like I was attacking her character. I felt that she was about to start crying, and she said that she was not conning me because she would not do that type of thing. Then she picked up her back and walked away. At that point my stomach was in about 500 knots and I knew I wouldn’t be able to eat. I walked back to my building and decided to get online to follow up on the organization. I found their website:
http://environmental-action.org/
And started looking around and the website was very basic, the information she gave me was there “Bush passing the Mecury bill…”, “Getting Nixon to sign environmental laws 35 years ago…” etc. But the site was very “two levels deep” and what I mean by that is it was enough to fill someone looking to see if the site even existed, but if you decide to look around there wasn’t much. I was beginning to wonder how real they were. A lot of links turned out to be dead ends “404 errors” or the such. The JOIN button was not working:
Not Found The requested URL /environmental-action/join.html was not found on this server. Apache/1.3.27 Server at www.oursecureserver.org Port 443
All in all, kinda the place I would not trust. But then tonight I looked up their domain name ownership and found that the person who registered the domain also owns:
Which is “Public Interest Research Group” and it seems a more real. And yet, as I do lookups on each of the state chapter websites, there are NO registars for the domain names:
whois www.calpirg.org NOT FOUND
So I don’t know what to think at this point. I want to look into this some more. A lot of the links in Google trace back to PIRG with very few non-PIRG owned sites talking about them.
Minor Update:
I also found that the JOIN button of “Environmental Action” has the wrong URL.
It was: [https://www.oursecureserver.org/environmental-action/join.html]
When it should have been: [http://environmental-action.org/join.html]