David Mastio is planning to use his blog to catalog and help counteract the inevitable spread of astro-turfing that's sure to come this fall:

Election season is here and with it will come a flood of fake letters to the editor from “real people” in reality written by political campaigns and activists groups of the right and left.

America’s editorial page editors make a heroic effort to stem this tide every year, but hundreds of professionally-written plagiarized fakes sneak through, polluting one of the most popular features in newspapers. (Incidentally, for Internet triumphalists, letters to the editor are THE original interactive feature.)

Just for a change of pace, I am hoping that the blogosphere can work with the mainstream media to stop the practice this year, or at least raise the price.

Right now, the National Conference of Editorial Writers, uses a members-only list-serv to trade information about astro-turf letters. It serves to keep some letters out, but because it is private, letters fraud perpetrators pay no public cost and editors who aren’t NCEW members -- or don't have time to read the list-serv -- don’t find out about it.

So, here’s what I am proposing:

InOpinion’s blog is going to become a clearinghouse for letters fraud information through this fall’s election (we’ll decide on a permanent home for the Letters Fraud Project after the election). This is going to be a completely non-partisan effort – fake missives that I agree with are just as bad as ones I disagree with.

I am going to invest my own time to report on as many instances of letters fraud as I can. We’ll report on which organizations are doing it and provide links to the online tool they use to help their supporters plagiarize. Most importantly, we’ll provide emails and phone numbers for the leaders of organizations engaged in this deceit as well as the same information for important financial supporters of these organizations. We are also developing information on the technology and consulting companies that make a profit from deceiving readers. We’ll be exposing them as well.