Facebook has been caught engaging in a secret smear campaign against industry rival Google.  Smear campaigns happen all of the time, of course, but you aren't supposed to get caught or you look extra stupid.

The Daily Beast wrote Wednesday night that Facebook hired P.R. firm Burson-Marsteller to “pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy.”

Oops.  And the P.R. firm was not happy at being outed either.  "Now that Facebook has come forward, we can confirm that we undertook an assignment for that client," Burson-Marsteller spokesman Paul Cordasco told FoxNews.com. "Whatever the rationale, this was not at all standard operating procedure and is against our policies, and the assignment on those terms should have been declined."

And yet it wasn't. Guess those policies are more guidelines than rules when it comes to deep-pocketed clients.  

More ridiculous, they approached a security issues blogger, Christopher Soghoian, and offered to 'ghostwrite' a piece for him that, they claimed, they could get on sites like The Washington Post, Politico and The Huffington Post.    Why do these old media PR firms think online people are low-rent amateurs that get all twitterpated over being seen on some other site?   We used to syndicate here and pulled the plug on it, because all we did was make other people more  successful.    Soghoian was not impressed either and instead posted the e-mail exchange online.