Slimvirgin gets slashdotted, No place to hide... Options

[JohnA]

Link to slashdot[

"International Humanitarian Law professor Ludwig Braeckeleer thinks so. In an article published yesterday in the Korean newspaper OhMyNews, he reveals a discovery he made while researching a story on the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland. It turns out that a Wikipedia administrator named SlimVirgin is actually Linda Mack, a woman who as a young graduate in the 1980s was hired by investigative reporter Pierre Salinger of ABC News to help with the investigation. Salinger later came to believe that Mack was actually working for Britain's MI5 on a mission to investigate the bombing and to infiltrate and monitor the news agency. Shortly after her Wikipedia identity was uncovered, many of her edits to articles related to the bombing were permanently removed from the database in an attempt to conceal her identity. This discovery comes only months after another Wikipedia admin was caught lying about his credentials to the press. What can Wikipedia do about those who would use it for their own purposes?"

Bring popcorn. This one could get interesting.

[Somey]

I remember the MC5, led by guitarist Wayne Kramer, were one of the hardest-rockin' bands of the late-60's/early-70's era, with songs like "Kick Out the Jams" and "Shakin' Street." Man, they rocked! But I doubt that SlimVirgin was ever a member... or if she was, she did a much better job of keeping it off the internet.

We all have to remember that this has occurred as the result of a confluence of extremely unusual circumstances and coincidences. What are the chances that Slimmy would have bought a copy of Namebase in the early 90's by asking her boyfriend to physically go to Daniel Brandt's office to buy one? And that she'd then start an article about Brandt, only to delete it a few days later, but then have it restored by some Google-fan she probably had never heard of before? And what are the chances that she'd run into yet another editor who just happened to be obsessed with attacking a corporate CEO whom she'd known 20 years before, in Oxford-Cambridge of all places, and who had offended her by asking someone to pass him some French Fries using a phony British accent? And on top of that, to have someone affiliated with said CEO be one of the most tenacious and dedicated IP-address and sock-puppet trackers any of us have ever encountered in our entire online lives? And that he and Brandt would both end up on the same message board?

In spite of it all, I actually expect this to blow over, probably within a week or two, followed by the usual denials.

At the same time, I often wonder... What would a post-Slimmy Wikipedia be like? Would editors finally be able to take the Nazis out of the Martin Luther article, for example? Would they be allowed to make references to Bosnian Holocaust victims? Would it even become acceptable to make links to the Animal Rights article from the Animal Liberation Front article actually say "animal rights"?

Personally, I doubt it, but life is full of surprises, I suppose!

[Daniel Brandt]

We all have to remember that this has occurred as the result of a confluence of extremely unusual circumstances and coincidences. What are the chances that Slimmy would have bought a copy of Namebase in the early 90's by asking her boyfriend to physically go to Daniel Brandt's office to buy one? And that she'd then start an article about Brandt, only to delete it a few days later, but then have it restored by some Google-fan she probably had never heard of before? And what are the chances that she'd run into yet another editor who just happened to be obsessed with attacking a corporate CEO whom she'd known 20 years before, in Oxford-Cambridge of all places, and who had offended her by asking someone to pass him some French Fries using a phony British accent? And on top of that, to have someone affiliated with said CEO be one of the most tenacious and dedicated IP-address and sock-puppet trackers any of us have ever encountered in our entire online lives? And that he and Brandt would both end up on the same message board?

One breakthrough was the connection showing that one S.McEwan in Swalwell, Alberta had registered the domain slimvirgin.com, and that this was probably the same as one Sarah McEwan from Canada who wrote a couple of letters to a newspaper in Britain defending animal rights on the foxhunting issue. That domain was created in May, 2002. The email address on the domain registration was already bouncing; it was slimvirgin1@yahoo.com. Slim signs the name "Sarah" on Wikipedia. Unless my memory is faulty, her IP address geolocated to Alberta when she first got involved with my biography. But in recent months, her IP address geolocates to somewhere in Saskatchewan. She's somewhere in central Canada, at any rate.

But the biggest breakthrough of all came from a member of this board in June, 2006. Knowing that SlimVirgin on her user page had identified herself as an alumnus of Cambridge, this board member found an obscure page on the Kings College, Cambridge web site. Twenty pages deep, and seen only with a mouseover (to keep the search engines out), this board member discovered that a mouseover on the name of alumnus Linda Mack showed an email address of slimvirgin1@yahoo.com. This board member sent me an email informing me of the discovery. I recognized the name Linda Mack instantly.

Then by looking at SlimVirgin's early edits on Wikipedia, it was obvious that she was obsessed with PanAm 103, just as Linda Mack was known to be obsesseed with PanAm 103. I started looking for stubs she created and found a couple of ABC-affiliated journalists among these stubs. One of them was reachable on the web, and he generously gave me contact information for John K. Cooley in Athens. I wanted to contact Cooley because in a book written by someone who was involved in the PanAm 103 investigation, he mentioned getting a call from Cooley requesting an interview, and then Cooley passed the telephone to Linda Mack, who asked the questions.

Cooley responded to my email quite quickly. I had already posted on this board that I had found Cooley and was hoping to get a response. That response revealed the information about Salinger's suspicions and Mack getting locked out of her office by Salinger. About a day after I got this smoking gun, Cooley sent a second email, saying that Mack had just contacted him and asked him to not talk to me.

Just as Slim's edits on Wikipedia have slowly but surely been oversighted to obscure the Linda Mack connection, so too has some of the above information. Cooley seemed very nervous after Mack contacted him, and while he didn't retract anything he told me earlier, it was obvious to me that I wouldn't get anything more from him, even if he had more to offer, which I doubted. I didn't bother him again.

The Kings College website listing of Linda Mack was deleted within the last six months, and the domain registration for slimvirgin.com was changed to an anonymous registration by proxy the last time it was renewed. (By the way, I emailed SlimVirgin at gmail.com anonymously in late October 2005, asking if she would be interested in selling the slimvirgin.com domain name. In two separate responses, she flatly denied that she was the owner.)

Someone was trying to keep the lid on this thing, which of course made it much more interesting. It was starting to read like an Eric Ambler spy novel. (Ambler's heroes are amateurs who stumble into these hairy situations. They're not stupid or clumsy, but shit happens and they find themselves smack in the middle of it all without quite knowing how or why they got there. Then they have to use their wits against hardened bad-guy spies to get themselves out of the situation.)

To all those on the Wikipedia mailing list who are insinuating that our evidence about Slim is weak or nonexistent, my response is that our evidence is much, much stronger than the evidence that sent that Libyan to prison for 27 years.