Subject: Re: Question about list members masquerading as someone else

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2003 18:14:04 -0400

Question: Is one of the persons of the pair named Jeff Williams?
He has been haunting IETF lists for years, and has been found guilty of 
using multiple identities in the past.

What I did in the (ICANN) context where I confronted him with it was to 
establish a rule that people were entitled to "one voice only", and that if 
challenged, they had to provide some proof of distinct identities to a 
third party.

Jeff Williams never did anything but bluster - and I removed four of his 
alternate identities from the list.
That's one reason why he puts "CENSORSHIP IN ALL ITS FORMS IS WRONG" in 
every post that he sends where I am involved....

I'd suggest doing some legwork:
- check if there are indications that the two persons both exist - most 
workers in IT leave an imprint somewhere.
- check if they are connecting in ways that are very cheap (for instance 
free service providers)
- don't overlook the obvious, like seeing if they're listed in the 
telephone directory - but carefully; one of the names used by Jeff Williams 
belonged to a real person living at the address he claimed - but that 
person had never heard of ICANN.....

if you do find that there's good reason to suspect that they are one and 
the same, one fairly easy means of verification is to ask them (separately) 
to send you their phone number so that you can talk to them......

                   Harald

--On 15. september 2003 02:14 -0400 [email-masked] wrote:

>
> I have a situation on my list where I am fairly sure someone has signed
> on with a fictitious name.  Not a problem really, lots of people do this.
> However, in this case, this "new person" on the list is making comments
> defending a position and making comments like "you lie..." etc.  The real
> problem is this new person is defending the position that someone on the
> list can not get anyone else to agree to - and several of us are fairly
> sure that the "new person" is indeed the same person who had made the
> original position statement.
>
> Has anyone else run into this on their list?  If so, how did you handle
> it?  You can't come out on the list and say "hm, Mr. so and so, are you
> really who you say your are or are you an alias for ....."  This one is
> tricky and this person is now really causing the list to turn into a ugly
> and nasty mess.  Before I do what I have planned, I wanted to poll the
> other chairs first.  Don't you just love this non-paying stress
> jobs....8-(  ___________________
> Patricia Egen Consulting
> www.egenconsulting.com
> 423-875-2652