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Re: Question about list members masquerading as someone else

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 pregen@egenconsulting.com 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