Stardate 20040614.1133

(Captain's log): [Update 20040616: The guy who sent the email below wrote to me again, and there seems to have been a huge misunderstanding. He doesn't want his letter quoted. He agrees he probably shouldn't have sent it to me, and I now know I overreacted.]

Remember Micah Wright? He had his fifteen minutes of fame a couple of months ago, though it would be more accurate to call it his fifteen minutes of mortification. He works in the comics industry, and has also been a prominent, one might even say strident, anti-war voice in online political discussions. And one of the reasons he was held in such high regard by others who opposed the war was that he was a veteran. He'd been in the Rangers; he'd seen action in Panama. He'd really done that stuff, and he opposed the invasion of Iraq. That gave him the moral authority to condemn and excoriate "chickenbloggers" who favored war and had never served in the military.

Except that Wright didn't actually serve in the Rangers. He was nowhere near Panama when US forces captured Noriega. In fact, he never served at all. It was all a lie, a very elaborate one, one he constantly talked about. It was also a long-standing lie, going back years. But he drew the attention of a reporter for the Washington Post, who filed requests under the Freedom of Information Act for the service records which would confirm whether Wright had actually been in the service. When Wright learned of that, he confessed that he had made it all up.

A couple of bloggers named Kevin Parrott and Jim Treacher were particularly key in revealing this hoax, and in directing enough attention to it to attract the attention of that Wapo reporter. It would seem that someone out there is nursing a grudge against them. I just received the following email:

To: sdenbes1@san.rr.com
Subject: Thought you might be amused by this
From: "Huggins, Jeremy" <Hugginsj@cdnet.cod.edu>
Date: Mon, 14 Jun 2004 12:27:10 -0500

Do a whois on both kevinparrott.com and jimtreacher.com - As of 12:30 CT they're listed as the same person.

Being a fellow "warblogger" I thought you might be interested to know.

My friend and fellow "warblogger" Jeremy thoughtfully attached two PDF files containing the whois reports on those URLs, just in case I didn't know how to look them up myself, or perhaps in order to preserve the information in case Kevin/Jim scrambled to cover it up. (And because of that, this email message was 343K. Thanks for the sour persimmons, buster.)

My first reaction upon reading this was "who cares?" (in a snide rhetorical tone)

My second reaction was "who cares?" (genuine curiosity)

Why was this sent to me? By whom? What response did they hope they'd get from me? My guess is that this is classic tu quoque: These guys accused Micah Wright of lying, but lookee at this! They're liars, too! Or rather, he's a liar, since it's actually one guy using two sock-puppets.

My actual reaction: Why am I supposed to be impressed, even if that were true? And why should I believe that it is true, when it's more likely that one guy took care of acquiring a URL for the other guy? I know of lots of sites where the whois contact information has nothing to do with the person who actually controls the content on the site. And why should I give a damn anyway? Frankly, I don't read either of them regularly. (They're good, but there are a hundred times more good sites than I could possibly read.) It took me a while to even remember the Micah Wright connection.

Someone seems to be trying to make a mountain out of something so small that a molehill already looks huge by comparison. The content of this email is uninteresting, irrelevant, and insignificant.

But the fact that it was sent to me is not uninteresting, nor insignificant, nor irrelevant. So I started investigating.

– I have never received any other email from Hugginsj@cdnet.cod.edu. I have never received any other email from anyone who used the surname "Huggins". (In fact, this is the only email I've ever received which even contains the string "Huggins".)

– The IP of the machine which originated this email was [10.11.0.71]. The reverse DNS on that is "mail.cdnet-ad.ad.cod.edu", but the originating machine itself thinks its name is "mail.cod.edu". I have never received any other email from that IP, or any other IP in the class C block [10.11.0.*].

– The second hop, presumably the email server, was [192.203.136.11] ("cdnet.cod.edu"). I have never received any other email from that server or from any other IP in the block [192.203.136.*].

– In the last six months, there have been no HTTP requests to my web server from any IP in the class C block [10.11.0.*]. However, my email contact page got requested today from IP [192.203.136.252], reverse DNS "dyn252-03.cod.edu". That doesn't sound like an HTTP proxy. The name strongly suggests that it is a dynamically-allocated IP, and it means someone plugged their laptop into the