...and the MSM is missing the Kimberlin & Co boat too

In my last post I noted the MSM is a year behind blog­gers on Fast and Furi­ous. On the Brett Kim­ber­lin, Neal Rauhauser et/​al story it looks like they will have to play catch-​up as well. Only instead of being behind the young beau­ti­ful and tal­ented Katie Pavlich they are lag­ging behind the less beau­ti­ful but com­pletely unre­lent­ing Robert Stacy McCain

Brett Kim­ber­lin became a “client” of Neal Rauhauser in 2011. Rauhauser has described his spe­cialty as “solv­ing prob­lems in the social media work space for polit­i­cal cam­paigns and causes,” and Kim­ber­lin had dis­tinct “prob­lems in the social media work space,” namely how to stop blog­gers from writ­ing about Kimberlin’s crim­i­nal past.

One should not that this “prob­lem in the social media work space” didn’t and appar­ently still doesn’t apply to the MSM but unfor­tu­nately for Brett, Neal et/​al Stacy McCain seems to be doing the work of 20 jour­nal­ists all by his lone­some. He excerpts a 2000 word doc­u­ment from Rauhauser (that he scrubbed from the net) that to a techie would be worth read­ing for the excel­lent tech­ni­cal insights con­cern­ing online iden­ti­ties alone but for the pur­poses of this story these two bits jump out at me all empha­sis mine:

The whole idea is to encap­su­late an online per­sona in a safe envi­ron­ment. The VM is the con­tainer for the per­son­al­ity, but what if your lap­top is stolen, or if you’re arrested and ques­tioned? We run http://truecrypt.comsoftware to make encrypted file con­tain­ers. Our first test involved cre­at­ing a 4 gig space, bind­ing it to drive W:, and installing Win­dows in a VM there. The per­sona in the VM is now per­fectly safe if the machine is lost or stolen, so long as a strong pass­word is used.…

and this

This can­not be stressed strongly enough: we have only pro­tected against the fol­low­ing threats. Dis­clo­sure due to loss/​theft/​seizure of host computer

Hmmmm maybe it’s the Sicil­ian in me but am I to under­stand Mr. Rauhauser is giv­ing advice to peo­ple cre­at­ing false iden­ti­ties on how to stymie law enforcement?

Lets put this all into context:

1. You have Con­ser­v­a­tive writ­ers and blog­gers who have been Swat­ted because they have writ­ten about Brett Kim­ber­lin et/​al.

2. You have a Jour­nal­ist who has been forced to relo­cate his fam­ily for their own safety for exer­cis­ing his first amend­ment rights con­cern­ing this story.

3. You have one of the prin­ci­pals of this story giv­ing advice in writ­ing on how to keep ones activ­i­ties and iden­ti­ties con­cealed from law enforce­ment, and then after writ­ing these 2,000 words scrub­bing them from the net.

4. You even have a pos­si­ble con­nec­tion to the Stop Rush Lim­baugh Move­ment where its head Mr. Eddlestein wor­ries:

“that some­one had dis­cov­ered “one of my plant names that I use on the web to con­fuse the Right.”

Exactly the type of thing that Mr. Rauhauser was giv­ing advice on.

Any one of these items indi­vid­u­ally would be we call a STORY. A news­wor­thy story. and as I said in this week’s under the fedora col­umn at the Con­ser­va­tory, the Minor­ity Report and Con­ser­v­a­tively Speaking

There are now, thou­sands to tens of thou­sands of peo­ple who had no idea who Brett Kim­ber­lin & Neal Rauhauser et/​al were 60 days ago. They do today due to the now nomadic Robert Stacy McCain.

It’s said that one needs to hit rock bot­tom before recov­ery can begin, the MSM still has a way to go. The ques­tion remains if they will decide to cover this story before they are forced to by events beyond their control?

If they do then once again we will have the spec­ta­cle of their remain­ing view­er­ship look­ing on in amaze­ment as peo­ple go to jail for some­thing they never heard of…

… and won­der­ing why?

Update: Stacy Links on his fast and furi­ous story and I’ll repeat the ques­tion I asked in the pre­vi­ous post, it was made con­cern­ing Fast and Furi­ous but could apply here:

and since to our knowl­edge there is no White House con­nec­tion to the Kim­ber­lin & Co story (yet)

I think the answer to both is yes, but the fact both ques­tions can be cred­i­bly asked is a dis­grace in itself.