We're Still Rick James

"I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters." - Frank Lloyd Wright

I was going to blog about race and the Maryland issue tonight, but it was a cold morning here, so I went down to the Vestal Barnes & Noble for a hot cup of tea. While I was poking around the magazine section and reading an amazing article on Lincoln's clinical depression (which I'll blog about later), I saw the November Forbes with the cover story "Attack of the Blogs: They destroy brands and wreck lives. Is there any way to fight back?" Whoa. This I had to see, but I had to make tracks into Endicott, so I bought the whole copy.

I shouldn't have, and I want my five bucks back. This is the header from Daniel Lyons' slanderous hitpiece:

Weblogs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo[!.]

If this were an accurate depiction, Forbes would be in flames already, as torch-wielding bloggers smashed out the windows to pillage computers and crucify the brave Forbes writers who rebel against us, like Spartacus. The irony is that if it did come to that, it would now be because they deserve it: Virtually every one of Lyons' premises and allegations are so misguided and misleading as to be openly hilarious. Sample #1:

Gregory Halpern knows how to to hype. Shares of his publicly held company, Circle Group Holdings, quadrupled in price early last year amid reports that its new fat substitute, Z-Trim, was being tested by Nestle. As the stock spurted from $2 to $8.50, Halpern's 35% stake in the company he founded rose to $90 million. He put out 56 press releases last year.

Then the bloggers attacked. A supposed crusading journalist launched an online campaign long on invective and wobbly on facts, posting articles on his Web log (blog) calling Halpern "deceitful," "incredibly stupid" and "a pathological liar" who had misled investors. The author claimed to be Nick Tracy, a London writer who started his one-man "watchdog" Web site, our-street.com, to expose corporate fraud. He put out press releases saying he filed complaints against Circle with the Securities & Exchange Commission.

Halpern was an easy target. He is a cocky former judo champion who posts photos of himself online with the famous (including Steve Forbes, editor in chief of this magazine). His company is a weird amalgam of fat substitute, anthrax detectors, and online mattress sales. Soon he was fielding calls from alarmed investors and assuring them he hadn't been questioned by the SEC. Eerily similar allegations began popping up in anonymous posts on Yahoo, but Yahoo refused Halpern's demand to identify the attackers. "The lawyer for Yahoo basically told me 'Ha-ha-ha, you're screwed,'" Halpern says. Meanwhile, his tormentor sent letters about Halpern to Nestle, the American Stock Exchange, the Food & Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission and the Brookhaven National Laboratory (involved in Circle's anthrax deal).

But it turns out that the scribe Nick Tracy of London was, in fact, a former stockbroker in Oregon named Timothy Miles - and Miles himself faces SEC charges that he took part in a pump-and-dump stock scheme in 2000. He was tried in June and awaits a verdict. No matter: Circle Group stock fell below a dollar in a year of combat with Miles and the anonymous bashers on Yahoo (and after Nestle dropped Z-Trim). Halpern's stake is down $75 million, and he blames Miles and his acolytes; he has sued for defamation. "Some of these bloggers have just one goal, and that is to do damage. It's evil," he says.

First of all, Our-street.com is not a blog. Go look at it. I won't make a value judgement on the content, but not only is this site not a "blog", but the allegation by Lyons that "the bloggers attacked" is itself a fraudulent and malicious lie, unsupported by the article or readily available evidence: A search on Technorati reveals that the only discussion of Z-Trim on any blog indexed by their engine is either a passing reference or someone heckling Lyons. Lyons does not name any other blogs that took up this "cause". Why? I think it's reasonable, based on the fact that, firstly, no major blog that I've seen has ever mentioned this "issue", and based on the fact that, again, the only reference to this happening I can find on Google is in reference to Lyons' own article, that the "blogger attack" never actually happened. One lone fraudster did this all by himself? Are we to believe that Halpern was so inept that one kook in Oregon was able to single-handedly wreck his company?

While I feel for Halpern's situation (and will take Lyons at his word that this actually was Halpern's situation, despite Lyons having already chosen to, shall we say, "fudge" several points, the man is a martial artist that makes anthrax detectors and sells mattresses, and is now claiming to make weight loss products for a multinational company. Did he seriously have no public relations plan to defend the legitimacy of a company that anyone, when told about it, would assume is probably some kind of scam?

These types of attacks are nothing new, and to allege that they are is a further deceit on the part of Lyons: Procter & Gamble engaged in a bitter, years-long legal battle against competitor Amway, alleging that Amway has used their national voicemail system to push the ancient myth that Procter & Gamble executives worship Satan. Voicemail: It destroys brands and wrecks lives?

Blogs started a few years ago as a simple way for people to keep online diaries. Suddenly they are the ultimate vehicle for brand-bashing, personal attacks, political extremism and smear campaigns. It's not easy to fight back: Often a bashing victim can't figure out who his attacker is. No target is too mighty, or too obscure, for this new and virulent strain of oratory. Microsoft has been hammered by bloggers; so have CBS, CNN and ABC News, two research boutiques that criticized IBM's Notes software, the maker of Kryptonite bike locks, a Virginia congressman outed as a homosexual and dozens of other victims - even a right-wing blogger who dared defend a blog-mob scapegoat.

How dare they. Someone needs to tell Lyons that blogs don't kill people, bloggers do. Not only is he years behind the times if he's just now becoming aware of the blogosphere, but he completely misses the point of the blogosphere: No target is too small because bloggers are, themselves, individuals. That's what makes it easy to fight back: State your case. It's every bit as easy to put your side of the story, support it with facts, and win the issue, just as people have had to do since time immemorial. Lyons appears to contend that those in power should never be questioned: He cites both CNN and CBS News, but ignores that what both of those organizations have been "hammered" for are deliberate and vicious lies. Should a news organization come under scrutiny when they attempt to cheat their viewers and warp society with misinformation? Apparently not, if we're taking Lyons' angle on it.

"Bloggers are more of a threat than people realize, and they are only going to get more toxic. This is the new reality," says Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, a Cincinnati firm that sifts through millions of blogs to provide watch-your-back service to 75 clients, including Procter & Gamble and Ford. "The potential for brand damage is really high,"says Frank Shaw, executive vice president at Microsoft's main public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom. "There is bad information out there in the blog space, and you have only hours to get ahead of it and cut it off, especially if it's juicy."

Well, apparently one company has an idea on how to "fight back".

Some companies now use blogs as a weapon, unleashing swarms of critics on their rivals. "I'd say 50% to 60% of attacks are sponsored by competitors," says Bruce Fischman, a lawyer in Miami for targets of online abuse. He says he represents a high-tech firm thrashed by blogs that were secretly funded by a rival; the parties are in talks to settle out of court. One blog, Groklaw, exists primarily to bash software maker SCOGroup in its Linux patent lawsuit against IBM, producing laughably biased, pro-IBM coverage; its origins are a mystery (see box, p. 136).

I'd say the the origins are pretty obvious. Why, exactly, is Lyons obsessing about "laughably biased" blogs that, presumably, anyone outfitted with eyes and two synapses to rub together can see is bogus? This sort of behavior is self-regulating: It makes the perpetrator look worse than it does the victim.

The online haters have formidable allies amplifying their tirades to a potential worldwide audience of 900 million: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, plus a raft of other blog hosts. Google is the largest player; its Blogger.com site attracts 15 million visitors a month, more than each of the Web sites of the New York Times, USAToday and the Washington Post. An upstart, Six Apart in SanFrancisco, owns three blogging services--TypePad, LiveJournal and Movable Type--that together run a strong second to Google.

What does the popularity say about the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post? That they bore people, presumably.

Google and other services operate with government-sanctioned impunity, protected from any liability for anything posted on the blogs they host. Thus they serve up vitriolic "content" without bearing any legal responsibility for ensuring it is fair or accurate; at times they even sell ads alongside the diatribes. "We don't get involved in adjudicating whether something is libel or slander," says Jason Goldman, a manager at Google's blogging division. In squabbles between anonymous bloggers and victims Google sides with the attackers, refusing to turn over any information unless a judge orders it to open up. "We'll do it if we believe we are required to by law," he says.

Well, obviously. Why would Google be liable for what people do with their rented webspace? This isn't "government-sanctioned impunity", it's a basic principle of Western law.

Attack blogs are but a sliver of the rapidly expanding blogosphere. A hundred thousand new blogs are created every day, more than one new blog per second, says Technorati, a firm in San Francisco that tracks the content of 20 million active blogs. Some big blogs attract millions of readers. Weblogs Inc., a Santa Monica, Calif. outfit that just got bought by America Online for a reported $25 million, publishes 90 blogs and could bring in $2 million in ad sales this year, says cofounder Jason McCabe Calacanis.

Again, if they're "but a sliver", what's the obsessive rage about?

Bash-the-company Web sites emerged in the 1990s; Untied, founded in 1997 to carp at United Airlines, was one of the first. But blogs are more virulent; they spread farther and build on one another's allegations. The first blog is said to have gone up on Dec. 17, 1997 from a techie who wanted to log cool sites on the Web. By 1998 there were 23 known blogs. In 1999 the first tools to automate a site's design came out, making blogging easy for anyone. In 2003 the word "blog" made it into the Oxford English Dictionary.

They build on one another's allegations! Holy crap! Sometimes they use "facts" to build a "case", like that unfounded "hammering" of CBS News. In the immortal words of Dale Gribble, "The cops will try to pin it on me and because I did it, they will succeed!"

The combination of massive reach and legal invulnerability makes corporate character assassination easy to carry out. Dry treatises on patent law and trade policy don't drive traffic (or ad sales) for bloggers and hosts; blood sport does. Last year consultant Sara Radicati published a negative report about IBM's Notes e-mail product. That led to organized outrage from bloggers who, it turns out, are consultants who make money installing Notes. She says her firm, the Radicati Group in Palo Alto, Calif., was deluged with obscene phone calls and e-mails, a common element when blogs go negative. "They were trying to disable my business," she says. "It was obscene, vile, abusive, offensive stuff. These are a bunch of sickos."

The anti-Radicati bloggers got an endorsement of sorts from an executive at IBM. Ed Brill, an IBMer who works on Notes marketing and publishes his own blog (edbrill.com), responded on July 23 last year to Radicati's bearish Notes report. He questioned whether she had ties to Microsoft and referred readers to two other blogs with far blunter assertions.

So, let me get this straight: Lyons is horrified that a geek-fight over IBM vs. Microsoft products turned ugly? I should bring him in to watch people pull each other's hair out over Windows vs. Mac. Once again, however, we return to the same question: If any fool with a blog is so powerful, why can't Radicati just launch their own and state their case?

Within days bloggers had posted "investigative" articles "exposing" her as corrupt and unethical, claiming she was a "shill" who took bribes from Microsoft. One blogger said she was doing something shady by operating a group that helps small companies find venture funding. Bloggers linked to one another's sites and posted on Brill's blog and elsewhere, creating an echo chamber in which, through repetition, the scandal began to seem genuine. [Not to say that it is genuine, this was certainly never something anyone I consort with was even aware of, but why should we accept as fact from Lyons that it isn't genuine, when he's willing to imply that CBS News was treated unfairly for endlessly defending a story that was blatantly and wildly false as a matter of accepted fact?] Six days after the attacks began, a Notes consultant in the U.K. gloated on Brill's blog:"The Radicati Group? Their analysis is now meaningless .... Their name has been blackened, their reputation in tatters."

Radicati fought back by responding on her own Web site, but the smear job hovers online, appearing when you Google her name or start with Brill's mostly diplomatic site and then work your way through its links. One step away is IBM itself, which has a Notes site that once linked into Brill's. That link has since been taken down. Radicati says IBM ignored her pleas to stop Brill from linking to the hate sites. IBM says it has nothing to do with Brill's blog.

When I google Radicati's name, all I see is her website, IBM's corporate response to her report, a blog that printed Radicati's response in full, and a TechTarget article. The notion that "working your way through the links" even qualifies as having an allegation "hovering online" is ludicrous: Virtually everything ever placed on the web eventually ends up in the Google cahce.

A week after that flap IBMer Brill fired up the swarm again, issuing a call to arms against research firm Meta Group for similar sins. "Y'all did such a good job on the last report … " his blog entry began. Sure enough, soon Meta was being "investigated" by bloggers and "exposed" as Radicati was. Gartner, which now owns Meta, declined to comment.

Pardon me for a moment, but organizations not engaged in litigation that "decline to comment" have typically, though hardly universally, been found to be guilty of the sins of which they are accused: They may have no comment because there's rarely anything clever to say in the defense of a man who did, in fact, commit the crime. Lyons' maladroit application of weasel words quite frankly leaves one to wonder whether the reason he doesn't bluntly say Meta wasn't involved in whatever the "investigation" accused them of was because they were. Maybe it was like how CNN was "hammered" for spreading the boldfaced lie that the expiration of the Assault Weapons Ban would legalize machine guns. With Lyons at the keyboard, anything is now possible.

No wonder companies now live in fear of blogs. "A blogger can go out and make any statement about anybody, and you can't control it. That's a difficult thing," says Steven Down, general manager of bike lock maker Kryptonite, owned by Ingersoll-Rand and based in Canton, Mass.

My God, you mean people are allowed to speak without permission? Unbelievable. Does a marketing degree involve a lobotomy now?

Last year bloggers posted videos showing how to break open a Kryptonite lock using a ballpoint pen.That much was true. But they also spread bogus information--that all Kryptonite models could be cracked with a pen; that it is the only brand with this vulnerability; and that Kryptonite knew about the problem and covered it up.None of these claims is true, but a year later Kryptonite still struggles to set the record straight, while spending millions to replace locks.

Uh, boo hoo. You're selling a lock as the "toughest bicycle security in moderate to high crime areas" that can be picked with a dime-store Bic, and you're ticked off that rumors started that your company might be crap because of it? Of course, it wasn't bloggers at all who started this story going 'round: It was a discussion board, a format over a decade old at least. It was then picked up by Engadget, a site that is part of a massive, staffed network of professionally managed sites run (openly) by a central corporation. Hardly a fit for the picture Lyons paints of the Lee Harvey Oswald lone gunmen of the blogosphere, out to blow the heads off the first innocent billionaire who looks at them cross-eyed.

When the story got out, Kryptonite bungled their PR by claiming that the locks "remained resistant to theft". (Gee, they were resistant before? What part of this doesn't imply an attempt to sweep it under the rug?) That's what started the blogospheric slaughter, not the original post itself. I don't mean to be crass here, but Kryptonite had it coming: This is what happens when you so spectacularly screw up your public relations, and blogs have nothing to do with it. If it doesn't show up on blogs, it will show up in daily conversation in shopping aisles, college campuses, and pretty much everywhere else in the world. Again, if Lyons doesn't realize that, he's a naive fool. He's also lax when he ignores that CNN, too implied that all Kryptonite models have problems (adding a nefarious "but" when explaining that "only" certain models are eligible for free upgrades).

Of course, the best way to deal with the blogosphere is to talk straight. No, as Down observed, you can't control what people say (creep), but you can grow up, quit smearing your marketing spin feces all over your bad product ideas and just answer our questions. That's damage control, and if you have a bad product, you're going to have damage and deserve it.

Even mighty Microsoft, for all its billions, dares not defy the blogosphere. In April gay bloggers attacked Microsoft over its failure to support a gay-rights bill in Washington State (the company is based near Seattle). "Dear Microsoft, You messed with the wrong faggots,"wrote John Aravosis, publisher of AmericaBlog, which threatened to oppose Microsoft's plans for a big campus expansion unless the company caved in. Microsoft reversed itself two weeks later, saying it supports gay-rights legislation after all. It says pressure from its own employees, not from bloggers, caused the change of heart.

...and? What, is Lyons calling them liars? Is he not aware that the homosexual lobby (like pretty much every other activist group in the world) has been attempting to impose their will on companies for a couple decades now? Is he somehow surprised that they'd be upset?

Microsoft's p.r. people have added blog-monitoring to their list of duties. The company also fields its own blog posse. Some 2,000 Microsofties publish individual blogs, adding a Microsoft voice to the town square. The company also treats some bloggers like bona fide journalists, giving Gizmodo.com and Engadget.com interviews with Bill Gates.

Gizmodo, like Engadget, is backed by a powerful central entity: "Bona fide journalist" Nick Denton's Gawker Media. Denton used to write for the Financial Times, and now manages numerous websites. Again, no "magic bullet" here. I suspect Lyons didn't even do cursory research for this article beyond asking people who claim they were "wronged" by the blogosphere. Besides, where on Earth does Lyons get off thinking he can tell people who they can or should interview or be interviewed by?

But if blogging is journalism, then some of its practitioners seem to have learned the trade from Jayson Blair. Many repeat things without bothering to check on whether they are true, a penchant political operatives have been quick to exploit. "Campaigns understand that there are some stories that regular reporters won't print. So they'll give those stories to the blogs," says Christian Grantham, a Democratic consultant in Washington who also blogs. He cites the phony John Kerry/secret girlfriend story spread by bloggers in the 2004 primaries.

Actually, Wesley Clark's insinuation that Kerry was playing hide the sausage with an intern was spread by CNN. That's how bloggers found out about it. Again, Lyons lies or didn't stop to check. Which is ironic, since it is in a paragraph about lies and poor fact-checking in the blogosphere. (This will come back later.)

The story was bogus, but no blogger got fired for printing the lie. "It's not like journalism, where your reputation is ruined if you get something wrong. In the blogosphere people just move on. It's scurrilous," Grantham says.

Oddly, it's pretty unusual for the daily debunked lies in the MSM to result in firings, either. Despite that, blogs are a publication, and those that aren't a useful resource lose readership, just like any other. Like, say, 60 Minutes II. Or Forbes, for that matter. There's no right to force somebody's opinion off the shelf just because their opinions are stupid, and at a certain point you have to grow up, quit obsessing about whether or not you can "control" what people are saying, and participate in the discourse.

And though they have First Amendment protection and posture as patriotic muckrakers in the solemn pursuit of truth, the blog mob isn't democratic at all. They are inclined to crush dissent with the "delete" key. When consultant Nick Wreden criticized credit card banking giant MBNA on his blog, a reader responded in support of MBNA. Wreden zapped the comment. "I just thought: 'This has to be a plant,'" he says.

That's Wreden's site policy, he owns it. I don't agree with it, but too bad. If I want to say something Wreden won't let me say on his blog, I'll write it on mine. Lyons would be advised to start one himself. I suspect he'll have to delete a lot of comments.

"It almost takes on the feeling of a crusade," says Jeffrey Schneider, a vice president at Walt Disney Co.'s ABC network. "They put out a call to arms: 'We're going to take these guys down, and we won't stop blogging until someone loses their head.'" ABC News correspondent Linda Douglass came under attack from rampaging bloggers last March in covering the Terri Schiavo right-to-die case. She had cited a controversial memo written by a Republican staffer. Right-wing bloggers using such pen names as Right Pundit and Mr. Right (the latter hosted by Google) claimed she had fallen for a fake; the memo was real.

Actually, the memo was found to have written by some staffer who hadn't even proofread it yet, and who immediately resigned. So, no, it wasn't what the media portrayed it as, but it wasn't fake, either.

In that case the bloggers slinked away.

To date, CBS has still not slinked away from their forged memos, making them an open and public mockery across America. Again, what is Lyons' point? That sometimes someone makes a claim that is incorrect? That readers, too, should check the facts on anything they read before they believe it? (That same rule applies to mainstream media, but Lyons won't say that.)

In the case of a CNN executive they didn't stop until they had claimed a casualty. Eason Jordan, chief news executive at CNN, noted at an off-the-record conference in January that journalists had been killed by U.S. troops. He used a touchy word: "targeted." A blogger present, Rony Abovitz, ignored the off-the-record ground rule and posted an account. Other bloggers soon piled on. One created a site solely devoted to the topic, easongate.com.

Yup.

Jordan instantly and repeatedly denied the assertions, but the blog hordes kept wailing away. Jordan resigned in February, engulfed by a concocted controversy. Blogger Michelle Malkin crowed online, praising nine other bloggers and "legions of smaller" ones in the hunt. She wrote that the mainstream media "calls it a lynch mob. I call it a truth squad" and included a warning:"Cue the Carpenters music: 'We've Only Just Begun.'"

Malkin's a funny gal. Cute, too. This is where Lyons again treads on dangerously thin ice between being a deliberate fraud or merely burning with white hot ignorance: As with the Kryptonite locks, the reason that the controversy raged on and on was because despite eyewitnesses confirming that Jordan, the head of a major, ostensibly impartial news organization, had unjustly accused people of willful murder, CNN refused to prove their assertion that the eyewitnesses were lairs by releasing the video footage of the event. Even a Democratic Congressman who was present, Barney Frank of Massachusetts, confirmed that Jordan said it. Jordan was faced with highly credible allegations that he had made a horrible, slanderous accusation (completely unsubstantiated) against our troops in order to curry favor with some greasy Eurotrash. CNN painted themselves into a corner by denying it since it was true, thus meaning they'd have to admit to their lies by releasing the video, and they didn't release the video because Jordan said it and everyone knows it. Period. Had they just admitted that their fearless leader had done something wrong and apologized (as they did when Jordan issued a press release after the fall of Baghdad admitting that CNN had covered up Saddam Hussein's atrocities because they were afraid of him), it would've been a much smaller issue. As I said: You want to avoid horrible train wreck interactions with the blogosphere? Don't be a filthy liar.

Even some bloggers see the harm they can pose. "Some people in the blogosphere are too smug about free speech. They'll say it's okay if people get slandered or if people make up fake stuff because in the end the truth wins out," says John Hinderaker, a lawyer in Minneapolis, Minn. who helps run a right-wing blog, Power Line, which hounded CNN's Jordan and CBS anchor Dan Rather. "But I don't think that excuses it."

When Hinderaker published an item saying left-wing bloggers should stop assaulting a White House reporter alleged to have worked as a gay prostitute, his blog brethren went on the assault, publishing his phone number at work and prompting a deluge of harassing phone calls and e-mails. "My secretary was crying" because callers kept swearing at her, he says. "Then we started getting calls at the house. My wife wanted to hire a bodyguard."

So, actually, what Hinderaker said is that he can see the harm that malicious leftwing bloggers can pose. Not bloggers in general.

Google and other carriers shut down purveyors of child porn, spam and viruses, and they help police track down offenders.So why don't they delete material that defames individuals? Why don't they help victims identify their attackers? Because they are protected by the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which frees a neutral carrier of Internet content from any liability for anything said online.

Er, "protected"? Why would they delete "defaming" material, when defamation itself is a legal determination? Why would a neutral carrier take a side, when the legal determination itself is perfectly capable of creating a responsibility for the non-neutral blogger to fix it?

"Blogging is still in its infancy. Imposing regulations would create a chilling effect," says Annalee Newitz, until recently a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends anonymous attackers. The anonymous assault has a long tradition in American political discourse, recognized by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission in 1995 and in a recent decision by the Delaware Supreme Court refusing to force an Internet service provider to disclose who called a small-town politician inept.

Wow, this guy had nothing better to do than track down the people who don't like his policy?

But even the Constitution doesn't give a citizen the right to unjustly call his neighbor a child molester. Google and the like argue they bear no more responsibility for content than a phone company does for slander over its wires. But Google's blog business looks less like a phone company and more like a mix of reality TV and an online magazine. Bloggers provide the fare, and Google maintains it for them free of charge, sometimes selling ads.

This is too much: Lyons ignores that Engadget and Gizmodo are part of huge corporate blog conglomerates, but deliberately pretends that Google's blogs are somehow associated with one another?

Google says ad revenue isn't the point. The real aim is "to let users embrace the Web as a medium of self-expression," a spokesman says. Google lets them run wild. Yet Google edits and censors blog content all the time--to protect its own interests. The company, whose portentous corporate ethos includes the mantra "Don't be evil," snuffs out blogs that engage in "phishing" (tricking people into revealing confidential information) and "spam blogs" that skew Google's search results. Bloggers who sign up for its ad program (Google passes along 79% of sales, on average) must follow firm Google guidelines that limit references to drugs, alcohol, tobacco, gambling and even "excessive profanity."

Lyons is right: Google does have inconsistent ethical principles. However, it is their hypocrisy to indulge in. Anybody who doesn't like it can have their very own domain name for less than $10, and that's why Google's policies have little or no relevance to the blogosphere as a whole.

Once blogger attacks begin, victims can resort to libel and defamation lawsuits, but "filing a libel lawsuit, the way you would against a newspaper, is like using 18th-century battlefield tactics to counter guerrilla warfare," says David Potts, a Toronto lawyer who is writing a book on cyberlibel. "You'll accomplish nothing and just get more ridicule." He tells clients to find a third party to bash the bloggers.

Nice. Maybe they could just, you know, start their own blog and respond with facts. Legitimate bloggers pay attention to that kind of thing.

Gregory Halpern at Circle Group, in Mundelein, Ill., used this approach against his nemesis, Nick Tracy, a.k.a. Timothy Miles. After the first attack Halpern contacted the blogger's lawyer but got nowhere. He demanded a correction, only to get mocked: Miles posted on his blog an audio file of a perturbed message Halpern had left on his voice mail.

Maybe he should've come over there and put some judo moves on him!

Halpern had better luck, however, when he allied with Gayle Essary, who runs the FinancialWire online news service and had tangled with Miles, too. Halpern dug up details on Miles (his photo and Oregon driver's license; his links to a litany of questionable companies; his claim to be an ordained minister; his Web site that describes a mysterious crystal that contains a message from God) and fed them to Essary. Essary did 15 articles on Miles without citing Halpern as a source, and when Halpern heard from people asking about Miles' allegations against Circle Group, he referred them to FinancialWire, saying it had "exposed this guy a long time ago."

There you go. "Facts".

Halpern also used a new law, the Digital MillenniumCopyright Act, which requires hosts to take down copyrighted material used without permission. He confronted Miles' service provider and threatened to sue for copyright infringement and libel; the ISP pulled the plug. But our-street.com emerged days later at a second service. In three months Halpern pursued Miles through nine ISPs, finally giving up and filing a libel suit in state circuit court in Cook County, Ill. in June 2004. He accuses the blogger of orchestrating a short-seller scheme to send Circle stock plunging. Miles insists he never sold short or acted on behalf of short-sellers.

Of course the DMCA is crap legislation and people on both sides of the aisle know it. Watch Lyons try to make my host take down this article.

Miles, who says he misrepresented himself as Nick Tracy because "I wanted to be discreet," has abandoned our-street.com and moved from Oregon to Slovenia. He claims he is outside the Illinois court's jurisdiction. The judge disagrees. Miles says he plans to appeal. He has set up a new site, scamspotting.com, and insists he is a bona fide investigative journalist: "I tell the truth, and it's never pretty." This drives Halpern nuts:"It's amazing that an anonymous guy can put out a report full of lies and then be so self-righteous."

Slovenia?

After anonymous attacks spread to Yahoo, Halpern moved in court to force Yahoo to reveal who was behind the sniping. In September a state judge in Illinois ordered Yahoo to reveal the names. A lawyer for the secret posters is trying to settle without turning over their names, Halpern says. Yahoo declines to comment on the case, but Halpern argues that Yahoo and other carriers should step up: "They make money selling ads on these message boards, and the controversial material generates the most traffic. So they're benefiting from this garbage. I think they should take responsibility for it."

Hey, the power company benefits from this laptop. Let's just open up a huge, crazy can of poisonous worms and make everybody liable for everything, not just the people who do it!

Halpern has had less luck getting anyone in Congress to listen to his plaint. He says that may change if a few politicians get a taste of what he has gone through. "Wait until the next election rolls around and these bloggers start smearing people who are up for reelection,"Halpern says. "Maybe then things will start to happen."

Halpern must've been dead during the 2004 election cycle.

If this "neanderthal-make-fire" level of understanding of the marketplace of ideas (and the shoplifters within it) is even remotely an accurate representation of the upper business world's attitudes (and from what I've heard about the sweet oblivion enjoyed by executives at CBS, it is), it's no wonder that people's lives are being wrecked and and watching their brands sink into the mire: They aren't qualified to run a company. Lyons' hateful, ham-handed verbal violence against the blogosphere in general, accusing them of being, well, hateful and ham-handed, sounds like projection. I respect Steve Forbes for his pushing for a flat-tax in his Presidential campaign, but if this is the lunacy that passes for business literature among the editors of his magazine, well, that's really a shame.

Update: It looks like Glenn Reynolds beat me to this one a week ago while I was on the road: "Here's how to protect your brand: don't be an ass. And I'm giving that advice away for free."

Whoops, there went the Forbes brand. Good job, Lyons.