Stardate 20040619.1311

(Captain's log): Quentin sent me this URL for a quite amazing post on the Aces High bulletin board. I've decided that it is sufficiently important that it justifies being added to my Essential Library, the first new addition in months.

I think what it says is extremely important, but identifying the source of it has turned out to be problematic.

It wasn't written by "Toad", the pseudonym of the person who posted it. I googled to see if I could locate other, perhaps more definitive (and more permanent) instances, and I didn't find anything which looked like the official, original, authorized copy online.

I did find it posted here on "The Anderson Report". That copy ended with an email address at netvision.net.il, an ISP in Israel. Probably that's the person who sent it to the The Anderson Report, but there's no indication of where he got it.

As I write this (20040619) Google also indicates that it was posted on Free Republic, but though a copy of that post remains in Google's cache (for the time being), Free Republic seems to have deleted the post. (Which is quite puzzling. Since when has Free Republic worried about copyright violation or controversy?)

Google's cache-copy included a photograph of Haim Harari, the purported author, along with his surface mail address, phone number, and an email address at weizmann.ac.il. That's the "K.B. Weissman Institute of Physical Sciences" in Israel, and there is a Professor Harari working there. But it is very unlikely that Professor Harari posted it to Free Republic, or that he mailed it directly to the person who posted it.

I didn't find any other instance of it anywhere online within Google's Argus-eyed field of vision. My guess is that it was leaked. The original transcript was either on a web server or was circulated via email inside a "large multinational corporation", and it was supposed to be company-confidential. I suspect that someone inside the company mailed a copy of it to a friend outside, and it began to spread from there, and eventually it was emailed to The Anderson Report. I don't know if the person who posted it on Aces High BB or the person who posted it on Free Republic got it from there or were also recipients of the circulating email copy.

I suspect that the attribution is correct. I think that Professor Harari actually did present it at some sort of meeting in April 2004.

These kinds of things get circulated by email all the time. All kinds of things get spread around this way: the latest joke, pleas that people send business cards to a dying kid who wants to get into the Guinness Book of World Records, other kinds of chain letters, alarmist reports of some sort of dreadful danger. And it's happened to me, too.

In September of 2002, I wrote this post. About a year later, I learned that it had been circulating on the email circuit, and that the copy which was circulating didn't include any attribution. A couple of recipients who were curious and technically savvy googled some phrases from it and discovered that I was the author, and sent me email. If they hadn't, I never would have known. And to this day I don't have the slightest idea how many people ultimately got sent copies of it, or how many of those actually read it. It might only have been a few hundred, or it could have been millions. There's no way for me to discover that.

I don't really mind, actually. I wrote that post because I believed what I was saying and thought it was important to say it in public at that time so others could read it. Frankly, if I had been permitted to choose any post I made during that period to circulate widely on the email circuit, that would have been my choice. I don't care if those who read it know my name; I'm just glad to learn that a lot of people ended up reading it and thinking about it.

Later I learned that it had been posted on the web site of the "US Committee for a Free Lebanon", under the byline "Muhammad Oueiny". When one of my readers recognized it and wrote to the editor there pointing me out as the original author, the editor responded with the claim that Oueiny was the true author and that I had plagiarized it from him. I had been amused when I first learned of Oueiny's plagiarism, but I was not amused by that accusation, and I sent my own email to the editor. He promised to investigate, and though I never heard from him again, the page was taken down.

In May of 2004, another reader pointed out that there are now