p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- Famed Anonymous Anti-Palin Blogger ‘Outed’ by Lawmaker.

That pretty much says it all.

It’s a headline to Dawn Teo’s Huffington Post story which goes on that Alaskan state legislator Mike Doogan deliberately blew the identity of an anonymous local blogger made famous by her criticisms of Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential campaign.

“Mudflats blogger ‘Alaska Muckraker’ (AKM) rose to blogger fame almost instantaneously when Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin was tapped to be John McCain’s running mate, and the then anonymous blogger wrote ‘What is McCain Thinking’?” – says the story.

Little was known about Palin in the lower 48, and AKM “provided a much-needed window throughout the campaign season into Palin’s performance as governor of Alaska from a progressive viewpoint,” it states.

Muckraker opted for anonymity

Online, you can be whoever you want to be.

Vested interest agencies and corporations are doing their best to change that, but they were doomed to fail from the start and it’ s still up to the individual to decide if s/he wants to tell the world who s/he is.

Alaska Muckraker opted for anonymity.

Mike Doogan (right) is an Alaskan blogger. He’s also a politician which automatically means he doesn’ t want to be anonymous. So he isn’ t.

He wanted to know who Alaska Muckraker was. Like really badly. And when he found out, he seemed to think it was his duty to tell everyone else in the world as well — whether AKM wanted it known or not.

AKM wrote a blog post about a rude email that Doogan sent to his constituents, says Dawn in her story, continuing »»»

He had saved up all of the emails from constituents on the Troopergate issue, and in December he responded to all of them at once, CC’ing a list of about thirty perfect strangers together in one email, telling them,

Are you people nuts? You send me — and everybody else in the legislature, from the looks of things — Spam and then lecture me on email etiquette — as if there were such a thing? Here’s an etiquette suggestion: Abandon your phony names, do your own thinking and don’t expect everybody to share your obsessions.

[Yes, that is the actual response that Doogan sent to his constituents.]

He, “wrote a piece for the Alaska Dispatch talking about ‘accountability’,” Blogs AKM.  “The thought was that if I was anonymous, I was not accountable.  In what way, I wondered.  I’m not a journalist.  I’m just, as we established before, me.  This is my opinion.  If he were around, we could ask the ‘anonymous blogger’ of his day, Benjamin Franklin what he thought about this.  Using the ’screen name’ Mrs. Silence Dogood, Franklin was able to put out thoughts and ideas that were weighted on their own merits, not attached to a particular person.  Sometimes it’s easier, if you don’t want to think, to attack the person, rather than the idea.  I think Franklin would heartily approve of anonymous bloggers.”

Focused on the messenger

AKM goes on »»»

So, it seemed odd to me that Mr. Doogan was seemingly more focused on the messenger, than on defending his position, or even better, apologizing to people whom he had insulted.  I didn’t think much more about it until yesterday, when I got this email:

From: “doogans@gci.net” <doogans@gci.net>
To: akmuckraker@yahoo.com
Sent: Thursday, March 26, 2009 2:55:14 PM
Subject: your identity

Jeanne:

I am reliably told that you are the anonymous blogger who writes Mudflats. I am planning to reveal this in the enews I send to my constituents tomorrow, and am writing to let you know this and offer the opportunity to comment.

Mike Doogan

I was a bit surprised to see my real name, as you can imagine.  But after the initial surprise wore off, it really hit me.  This is an elected State Representative, of my own political party, who has decided that it’s not OK for me to control the information about my identity; that it’s not OK to express my opinion on my own blog without shouting from the rooftops who I am.

If I were to appear, as many of you have, at a political rally and I were to hold up a sign that expressed my opinion, I don’t have to sign my name on the bottom.  And if someone wants to come online and read my diary, they are free to do so.  And if they want to disagree, that’s OK too.

It said in my “About” page that I choose to remain anonymous.  I didn’t tell anyone why.  I might be a state employee.  I might not want my children to get grief at school.  I might be fleeing from an ex-partner who was abusive and would rather he not know where I am.  My family might not want to talk to me anymore.  I might alienate my best friend.  Maybe I don’t feel like having a brick thrown through my window.  My spouse might work for the Palin administration.  Maybe I’d just rather people not know where I live or where I work.  Or none of those things may be true.  None of my readers, nor Mike Doogan had any idea what my personal circumstances might be.  But that didn’t seem to matter.

What appears to matter to Rep. Doogan is that either 1) he feels that if he “outs” me, he’ll change what I have to say, or keep me from saying anything. 2) he gets to play mystery detective (like in his books) and believes people will think he’s really cool for figuring it out, or 3) he feels like getting revenge.  He knows I want to remain anonymous, so he’s going to take it away.  In any of those three scenarios, he didn’t think it was important to get the bigger picture.

And in any of those three scenarios we should probably find it disturbing that an elected official is using his time and mental energy in this way, against an ordinary citizen.  I don’t need to remind Mudflats readers that Alaska is in a time of turmoil.  We are facing unknown consequences with an erupting volcano that threatens to wipe out a tank farm on Cook Inlet holding 6 million gallons of oil.  We have critical issues in the legislature, including Alaska’s acceptance or rejection of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal stimulus money for education and other critical purposes.  We have a governor who has just chosen an incredibly divisive and extreme right wing idealogue as our new Attorney General.  And there are only three weeks left in the legislative session.  It bothers me quite a bit that  instead of focusing all his energy on doing his job, one of our elected representatives would rather spend his time stalking and harrassing a political blogger.

And Rep. Doogan is not the only one who has fallen prey to this preoccupation.  Our governor, too, seems to be more interested in bloggers than seems healthy.  Just a thought, but perhaps if our politicians were doing their jobs better, there would be no need for political bloggers, and we could all write diaries about our dogs, or our kids, or knitting.

It turns out, that Rep. Doogan did make good on his threat to expose me in his legislative newsletter. It actually suprised me, because I thought that maybe he realized that blowing up a progressive political blogger wouldn’t earn him many brownie points with other Democrats.  But nevertheless, here you go.

Anonymous Blogger Anonymous No More

The identity of the person who writes the liberal Democratic Mudflats blog has been secret since the blog began, protected by the Anchorage Daily News, among others. My own theory about the public process is you can say what you want, as long as you are willing to stand behind it using your real name. So I was interested to learn that the woman who writes the blog is Anchorage resident Jeanne _____.*

Best wishes …

So, adds AKM, “now, if you look on the About page, you’ll get to see my real name* (which Rep. Doogan almost got right). And you also get to learn that Apparently for Rep. Doogan, the rules of the game are whatever his “theory of public process” say they should be.  How does everyone feel about that?  And as a former journalist, why is Rep. Doogan criticizing the Anchorage Daily News for protecting my identity?

“And here’s another irony.  Rep. Doogan thinks he has exposed me, but in reality he has done nothing but expose himself.

(No kidding. )

“And with that, Mudflatters, I need to take a little time off to assess things, and take stock of how life will be changing for me and my family.”

For the better, hopefully.

Good luck.

Huffington Post – Famed Anonymous Anti-Palin Blogger ‘Outed’ by Lawmaker, March 28, 2009
Blogs AKM – In Exposing the Identity of Mudflats, Rep. Mike Doogan Exposes Himself, March 28, 2009

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 9:12 am and is filed under Freedom, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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