Posted on 11/05/2005 4:36:11 PM PST by kristinn
After yesterday's press conference in front of The Washington Post building in downtown Washington, D.C. that criticized The Post for violating their sourcing guidelines and for accessing a FreeRepublic.com account in possible violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, an editor for The Post is now claiming authorization to log-in to the account of MD4BUSH.
Earlier this week, Post Maryland editor R.B. Brenner made statements that reporter Matthew Mosk had logged in to MD4BUSH's account "two or three times" after being given the password by an "intermediary" in order to authenticate private messages sent between MD4BUSH and NCPAC on Free Republic.
Brenner has maintained that The Post does not know who MD4BUSH is.
Brenner is reported to have made the following statement to The Post for their story today about the press conference:
"As part of our reporting, we needed to verify that the chat room postings were authentic. We were authorized to view them, and it was appropriate to do so under the circumstances."
Link to Post article here.
Unless it be known that the Person's Heart is Pure, Like Mary Mapes or Anybody who works for the Washington Post...
We may be wearing our pajama's but .....we're watching the MSM very carefully.
They may have to admit they know who MD4Bush is in order to get off the hook legally.
She seemed to have a lot of trouble grasping the basics of the story.
Originating IP can be masked with simple off-the-shelve software.....
bookmark
Sounds to me like 6 months in the slammer unless they cough up MD4BUSH authorizing them to do it. Frog March time. Time to sieze all the Washington Post computer systems. Muhahaha
They then put the private mail on the public forum -- you have to be logged on to do that.
They're busted hard and they know it. I read this as the distress signal - they're hoping the NYT and the rest of the media will circle the wagons like they did when the TANG documents were exposed. The question is, will the rest of the media realize the seriousness of this and come charging to the rescue, or will they try to capitalize at the Compost's expense?
So far, they are not on the hook. Someone will have to sue or file a criminal complaint over this.
Exactly. If, as they say, they didn't know who the "owner" of the MD4BUSH ID was, then how could they really be sure that they had the legitimate MD4BUSH's authorization?
I think the Compost editor is full of (Woodward).
something as simple as a keylogger trojan gould get someone what they want.
IIRC, Jim has already said that he knows who MD4Bush is.
Yeppers...that is one lawsuit that I would cheerlead for!
"They may have to admit they know who MD4Bush is in order to get off the hook legally."
But wouldn't they also need the authorization of NCPAC since WAPO is claiming to be a third party as Congressman Billybob mentioned?
Do newspapers usually do stories about shenanigans of other newspapers???
Maybe they are afraid that this might be a "common" practice and they may have some guilty parties at their paper.
I have no doubt, though, that a lot of the OLD media would love to see Free Republic in legal trouble...we give THEM a bad name.
Which means the account user did not have the authority to give such authorization.
So the Post is smack dab in the middle of a conundrum
Steffen has all the standing he needs.
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