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Formerly less-harmless crank turns into harmless crank, gets Time article. by Zseni 01/07/2007, 8:58am PST It's about voting machine fraud! And the author wants to frame this harmless and felonious crank-with-a-point as a symbol of internet communication as a whole: hey, they're on to something, those guys! Too bad they can't legitimate it with anything but evidence. Look, it's even stated explicitly here: "For an army of Internet activists, the verdict is already in on "Florida 13." To them, it is the latest example of suspicious Republican victories based on electronic balloting and further evidence that U.S. democracy is threatened by the increased use of e-voting. The movement is a classic Internet phenomenon. On the one hand, it is breathless and conspiratorial, its credibility undermined by exaggerated claims and unsupported accusations. On the other hand, it is on to something." Unsupportedly on to something. ... "[List of ugly felony offenses and classic crank moments...] Kimberlin, in short, is an unlikely candidate to affect an important issue of public policy." Here in Old Media Land, we prefer you commit your felonies while in office. ... "And yet he has. Kimberlin has found a home in the blogosphere, digging up and disseminating an indiscriminate gush of anti-e-voting material. In turn, a loose network of lawyers, congressional staff members and academics have filtered that torrent, verifying and using parts of it for their cause, many of them without knowing Kimberlin's background." ... hey, he's on to something, this guy! Too bad he can't legitimate it with anything but evidence. ... ... "In Kimberlin's mind, his successes are the product of special powers obtained through meditation. "I have evolved to where I can dip into the place of universal consciousness and tap into its very powerful forces to effect change in a positive way," he wrote in an e-mail to me late in my reporting for this story." First hint that the author has a, shall we say, editorial opinion about Kimberlin's character! ... The key to Kimberlin's success has been the credibility of those who have put his raw material to use. [...] Kimberlin called Professor Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins University, who had written about vulnerabilities in Diebold's e-voting source code after it was inadvertently left on a public server. "When Brett first contacted me, he seemed surprised that I didn't recognize him," Rubin says. "He said, 'It's Brett with Velvet Revolution,' and I felt like, 'Oh, boy, let's figure out how I can get off of this call.'" He's an INTERNET CRANK. Time wants to make sure you know that Kimberlin is an INTERNET CRANK. ... KIMBERLIN IS ONE OF THOSE people who indulge in late-night e-mails. "You have to explain what makes me different," he wrote in a message sent to me at 2:36 a.m. last month. "Not only did I have to overcome my past, but I then had to rise above millions of others to accomplish what I have. That is what makes this story special." In fact, it is not Kimberlin but his habitat that is special. Because he is a CRANK on the INTERNET. Years of honest crankery in the service of a noble goal mean nothing to this hip, sophisticated, detached author, who is going to pin this guy to the fucking mat for Failure To Be Cool. This man's life's work is about to be pissed on by a permanently irrelevant asleep-at-the-wheel reporter just because he can't fucking tone it down a little. Jesus, buddy, what's so important about a crisis in democracy so serious we can't bear to look at it? Any idiot could deal with that shit! How about you unclench a bit, huh? ... This might not seem like a big deal, but legitimacy is the musculature of democracy; without it, government has all the credibility of, say, Brett Kimberlin. Or, say, Time Magazine.

Formerly less-harmless crank turns into harmless crank, gets Time article. by Zseni 01/07/2007, 8:58am PST