[LINK] PM's staff shifts the Wikipedia blame

[Tom Worthington]

At 01:21 PM 31/08/2007, Scott Howard wrote:
>... can someone point out where Macquarie Telecoms has ever said 
>that this IP address was assigned to the
>Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet ? ...

Macquarie Corporate Telecommunications is recorded in the Australia 
Pacific Network Information Centre <http://wq.apnic.net/> entry for 
the address range 210.193.176.96 - 210.193.176.127. When I checked on 
25 August 2007, the record showed it was for Department of Prime 
Minister and Cabinet (this had been removed by 31 August 2007).

This IP range includes the address (210.193.176.115) listed in the 
Wikipedia against the change made to the entry for "Peter Costello" 
on 28 June 2007 to remove "(AKA "Captain Smirk")".

Macquarie Corporate Telecommunications will have logs of which agency 
each IP address was allocated to. The agencies will have logs of 
which workstation was used and who was logged in at the time. This 
could be used to find who was responsible for each change to the 
Wikipedia. Something like this must have been done for the head of 
PM&C to be able to say that none of his staff were involved.

The staff responsible for the logs at agencies and their ISPs need to 
made sure the records are retained. In past inquiries, such as that 
into "certain Australian companies in relation to the UN Oil-For-Food 
Programme", the electronic records have proved very useful 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/technology/it/courtech.shtml>.

The transcript of the Cole Inquiry has been transformed into the play 
"Deeply Offensive and Utterly Untrue", currently on in 
Sydney 
<http://www.performancespace.com.au/program_details.php?programid=142>. 
So perhaps one day we will have "Captain Smirk - The Musical", based 
on the changes to the Wikipedia.  ;-)



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml