Ok, Here’s How We Did It

   Our Channel 4 I-Team investigation focused on government employees, typically state employees, spending time - on your dime - playing around on the web.

   How do you track “personal” time on the web? And how do you know it came from state offices?

   We focused on Wikipedia, which, if you read blogs, you know is a sort-of communal encyclopedia that contains information guaranteed to be at least 86% true.

   Because it allows anyone to post anything about anyone, Wikipedia’s integrity is, to say the least, contentious. It has been the basis for a number of libel suits, and untold numbers of websites and counter-websites.

   In the evolution of the controversy surrounding Wikipedia, a 24-year-old graduate student named Virgil Griffith created “Wikiscanner,” a man on a crusade to track reputation “vandalism”.

   Wikiscanner, found at http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/, analyzes Wikipedia posts and tracks IP addresses.

   Griffith writes:

“How does WikiScanner work?

When you make an edit to Wikipedia, you have two choices. First, you can register and leave your username, or you can edit anonymously. But, when you edit anonymously, it uses your IP address, a number which identifies what computer network are you from, in lieu of a username. Wikipedia does this for convenience to distinguish your anonymous edits from someone else’s anonymous edits. In essence, WikiScanner combines two databases: (1) The list of all IP adresses that have made edits to Wikipedia, and (2) What IP addresses belong to which companies. So with WikiScanner you can type a company name, and it shows you what edits have come from IP addresses owned by that company”

 

   We correlated posts to government IP-address ranges.

   We should note, it is nearly impossible to get more specific than “State of Tennessee” government offices, because IP addresses are closely guarded in this Patriot Act-ivated age.

   We found nearly 700 entries from state goverment range IP-addresses, things of vital Tennessee business like: 60 entries from one address about the Sigma Chi fraternity; the complete listing of lyrics to the “All In The Family” theme song (p.s. that long-elusive last line: “Gee, that old La Salle ran great”); and a new gel to prevent herpes.

  We also found 200-300 enties from Metro Nashville government I.P. addresses. The difference with city government: the city provides free wi-fi in places, and those locations are included within the IP address ranges. The mayor’s spokesperson suggests there’s no way to verify that the posts were from city workers as opposed to public wi-fi… which, by the exact same logic, means there’s no way to verify that the posts weren’t from city workers as opposed to public wi-fi.