Putting a Blogger's Identity on the Record
Network World blogger Paul McNamara covers the St. Augustine Record's attempt to out a local blogger, calling me a "former newspaperman ... who appears to have forgotten a lot about the journalism business."
The Record, believing Padgett to be part of an organized political group out to unseat Rich, not merely a lonely pamphleteer voicing his displeasure with a public official, decided that making public Padgett's identity was the right to do.
They were correct. While there may be a long-held and cherished right to publish anonymously in this country, it isn't any more absolute than other First Amendment rights and should never be confused with a right to remain anonymous. After all, there was never anything stopping the lonely pamphleteer's neighbors from saying, "Hey, that looks a lot like farmer Ben's handwriting."
Truth be told, the Record didn't need a high-minded rational for outing Padgett. The mere fact that the man had kicked up public attention -- made himself a person of public interest -- makes him fair game for being identified (if not the video treatment).
I don't object to the Record seeking to identify Lee Padgett, whose LocalSafety blog came back online yesterday. I object to the paper treating him like a criminal by releasing video surveillance footage, not even explaining that his activities at its office were innocuous.
Although Record Editor Peter Ellis continues to tell people that Padgett's a front for an organized group, he has yet to feel confident enough in this fact to report it to his readers. No story has run about him since a Feb. 6 article in which Peter Guinta, its most experienced reporter, couldn't find his identity.
Ellis and McNamara appear to believe that if the press suspects a person of something, it's OK to call on the public to send in tips that might confirm its suspicions. Since when does reporting involve tossing out rumors in the hopes they'll be proven true by the public? If they want to do that, they should become bloggers.
Newspaper Asks Public to Identify Local Blogger
A Florida newspaper appears to have hit an all-time low in the relationship between bloggers and the media. The St. Augustine Record is asking the public to help expose the identity of a local blogger who recently started a site critical of county politicians. This evening, the paper's home page has a grainy surveillance photo of a man accompanied by this text:
Believed to be connected to a politically charged but anonymously-run Web site targeting the character of members of the St. Johns County Commission. Help us determine his identity. Start by watching these four movies featuring footage from surveillance cameras.
The Record published video taken inside and outside its offices March 1 that show a man dropping something off at the front desk. There's no explanation of what he's doing, making it look like some kind of threat was delivered, but I found the details on the paper's message board. He was at the newspaper buying an ad.
The ad, which the paper ran, criticized County Commissioner Ben Rich for comments he made during a televised meeting:
Unbelievably, Rich went on to say that he was angered by the police officer first responding to the Columbine school tragedy in Colorado. He actually remarked in the televised meeting that watching the police officer who was outside the school awaiting the SWAT team made him "want to go down there and shoot the cop and go in".
Mr. Rich, you should resign as an elected official, you do not deserve to serve. All of us know that in reality Rich is mad because the firefighters union supported candidates in the last election that Mr. Rich did not support. Rich has been trying to take his revenge against the firefighters publicly for months. Mr. Rich, we will not allow you to play politics with our local safety any longer.
The blogger's site, LocalSafety.org, is offline but I fished several pages from Google's cache. Allegations made by blogger Lee Padgett, as he's identified in the site's whois record and messages on the paper's message board, are backed up by the Record: Rich really did make the "shoot the cop" remark and disparage firefighters, drawing an angry response. This week, Rich filed for re-election early, hoping it would cause the site to be judged an excessive campaign contribution by local election officials and shut down.
"I find cowardice in any form repugnant," [Rich] said. "But in the political arena, where cowardice has become socially acceptable, I find it doubly repugnant." ...
"It's obvious to me that my political opponents have declared war and are using the unfair advantage of not registering as a political action committee," Rich said.
"Through the declaration of my candidacy, they'll no longer be able to operate in the shadows of anonymity. They will be forced into the open where they'll have their names and faces known to those they attack."
I don't know Padgett, but he has the right to speak his mind on the web without intimidation by politicians and the press, whether or not he's writing under his real name.
I've been reading the Record for a decade. I can't recall a single time where it conducted an effort to catch a rapist, robber or murderer anywhere near the scope of this manhunt for a blogger.
Ethereal Photo of Comerica Park
I was doing research for a SportsFilter post on Comerica leaving Detroit for Dallas when I found an incredible photo of a Tigers/Yankees game at Comerica Park:
Ryan Southen, a photography student at Oakland University, has been experimenting with photo manipulation through something called HDR, which I lack the PhotoShop chops to properly understand.
But judging by his work so far, I'd say the experiment is a success.
Judge Censors Stories on Kansas City Power Company
A circuit court judge in Kansas City has issued a temporary injunction ordering two news sites to remove articles from their web sites published Friday about the city's Board of Public Utilities on the grounds the power company would be "irreparably harmed" by their publication.
The articles, published by the Kansas City Star and The Pitch, describe a confidential document produced for the company in November 2004 that evaluates whether to tell the EPA that power plant upgrades did not comply with the federal Clean Air Act.
Attorney Stanley A. Reigel, in a 15-page document, identified 73 repairs or upgrades that were constructed without permits required under the Clean Air Act passed in 1977, according to The Pitch.
The work was done at the utility's three power plants: Nearman Creek Power Station, Quindaro Power Station and the now-closed Kaw Power Station. The work was completed between January 1980 and November 2004. Reigel determined that 15 of those repairs and upgrades were "questionable" and another 15 projects would be "probably not defensible" if the EPA conducted an audit.
Any one of those projects "puts BPU at risk" for an audit by the EPA, Reigel warned. Fines for utility companies in similar cases amounted to $1,000 for each megawatt of energy produced by the plant. Together, the Nearman and Quindaro plants produce 631 megawatts.
The stories had been cached on Google and elsewhere by the time Judge Kelly Moorhouse issued the unconstitutional order, making her actions utterly futile. Bloggers Brad Friedman and Justin McLachlan have reprinted them on First Amendment grounds.
Ironically, Judge Moorhouse graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia, home to one of the country's most prestigious schools of journalism
.XFN: Mark Up Your Friends
I added XFN support to Workbench this morning, putting keywords like "friend", "acquaintance", "met", and "colleague" inside the links on my blogroll. This tells XFN-aware software how I know people, which can be used to build distributed MySpace-style social networks across the web.
I'm a generation too old for this kind of thing to seem normal, but I'm curious to see whether anyone's doing interesting stuff with this data.
WordPress MU also supports XFN. Any time you add a link to your blogroll, click the Link Relationship pane to expand it and define how you know the linked site's author:
My newly codified relationships should be picked up soon by RubHub, an XFN search engine with a disturbing name. I do not plan to rub anyone on my blogroll, no matter how close we seem in this site's markup.
Jimmy Wales Invites Admin to Succeed Elsewhere
Wikipedia boss Jimmy Wales threw Ryan Jordan under the bus this morning:
I have been for several days in a remote part of India with little or no Internet access. I only learned this morning that EssJay used his false credentials in content disputes. I understood this to be primarily the matter of a pseudonymous identity (something very mild and completely understandable given the personal dangers possible on the Internet) and not a matter of violation of people's trust. I want to make it perfectly clear that my past support of EssJay in this matter was fully based on a lack of knowledge about what has been going on. Even now, I have not been able to check diffs, etc.
I have asked EssJay to resign his positions of trust within the community.
Assuming this is an order disguised as a request, it's the right outcome, but it's impossible to come away from this incident with much confidence in Wikipedia when so many site contributors defended his right to lie about his identity. There aren't many situations in life where an anonymous mob of people, working in an atmosphere allergic to the concept of personal accountability, is relied upon to achieve a societal good.
Cracker Adds PHP Exploit to WordPress 2.1.1
WordPress has issued an urgent upgrade for users who downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days:
It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. We have locked down that server for further forensics, but at this time it appears that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched by the attack. They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution.
This is the kind of thing you pray never happens, but it did and now we’re dealing with it as best we can.
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