You Never Know Who's Watching You

Declan McCullagh of Cnet posted an item last week about Maureen O'Gara and Groklaw which spilled over into the bizarre world of open source paranoia. According to McCullagh, "Maureen O'Gara, a freelance writer who pens the weekly LinuxGram, alleged that Groklaw blog author Pamela Jones is a '61-year-old Jehovah's Witness with religious tracts in her backseat.' O'Gara said she personally visited what appeared to be Jones' apartment and Jones' mother's home in the New York City area."

While that is mildly amusing, it's not really surprising. The net allows people to assume, let's call them "avatars", that mask the real person with all their consequent flaws and frailties. But anonymity isn't a Constitutional right, especially when you take center stage in a legal battle, as Groklaw has done. In fact, why be anonymous at all? Since Ms. Jones has lots of supporters who like her work, what's the problem?

Well, apparently Ms. Jones thinks she has a right to privacy even if she takes a very high public profile. "In an earlier message posted Monday, Jones said: 'I never agreed to be a public person. I don't want to be, and I have a human and a legal right to privacy. Just because you decide to blog, it doesn't rob you of your rights as a private person'." Uh, I think she ought to check with someone with a real legal degree on this one - maybe Mr. Boies is available for a consult?

But with all this Sturm und Drang, the unstated question in all this is "Why is she so upset?". After all, Ed McMahon turns up on ordinary people's doorsteps with cameras and a big check and they don't seem to mind. Even 60 Minutes likes a bit of kamikazi journalism and the public loves it. So why are some folks so upset with Ms. O'Gara for doing what most journalists would consider "fact checking"? Perhaps it is because Ms. O'Gara did a dreadful thing to Ms. Jones, at least from her advocates standpoint - smashed their open source fantasy that Groklaw was written by somebody important, perhaps even a top-flight Harvard-educated lawyer by day fighting against corporations and by night fighting for open source. But sad to say, Ms. Jones turns out to be just an ordinary woman with evangelical interests working on a blog - no one of special influence or judicial note. She wouldn't be a top nominee for the Supreme Court, nor defending Stanford Law Professor Larry Lessig if *he* needed a lawyer. And she's not Wonder Woman or Spiderman.

So Ms. O'Gara, "a well-known technology journalist who broke the news two years ago that the SCO Group had hired David Boies to pursue a legal strategy against Linux" in the words of Mr. McCullagh, has been hence called a "sleazy sensationalist" by LinuxWorld editor James Turner and banned from their site.

So, is O'Gara a "well-known technology journalist" who has broken major stories over her career, according to Cnet, or a "sleazy sensationalist" (Turner) who has "finally gone too far" (Dee-Ann LeBlanc)?

Like O'Gara's piece on Jones, perhaps the difference in opinion between Cnet and LinuxWorld is one of credibility. I leave the reader to choose which is which.