Mediawhoresonline.com was registered as a domain on Oct. 30, 2000 with contacts listed as "Clinton, Socks and Buddy." The timing couldn't have been better. The weeks following the uncertain general election sowed the seeds for cyber activism to come. The media's coverage of the showdown in Florida frustrated and incited many, particularly Gore supporters, who felt the election was stolen out from under them. At the same time that some people were discovering the MWO site and Bartcop, other partisan sites such as the Drudge Report-inspired Buzzflash.com, Democrats.com, the Daily Howler and a host of smaller but similarly lefty blogs found burgeoning new audiences.

Despite a new era of crack Internet-crime investigators and looming federal legislation demanding domain accountability, the Web site has managed to grow without being required to make any further disclosure.

Of course, nothing is completely anonymous about the Internet, since every e-mail message and Web site has a specific digital address traceable to its point of origin. Names can also be found in a Web site's html coding, or in a header on an e-mail. But a moderately tech-knowledgeable person can figure out how to remove blatant identifiers, as the Media Whores Online site has done, and only Internet hosting companies (and, of course, hackers) have the means to trace IP addresses to actual computers.

And there are no legal restrictions on anonymous publishing. "Any person can publish anything anonymously any time in any medium," said Ronald Coleman, an intellectual property attorney at the New York law firm of Gibney Anthony and Flaherty. "That is a very fundamental corollary to freedom of the press."

Of course, anonymous speech is not protected if it's defamatory. But the laws on Internet defamation are changing. In years past, if a corporation wanted to shut down an anonymous Web site that was writing critically about it, it would file a "John Doe" lawsuit and subpoena the Internet host, such as America Online or Earthlink, to disclose the registered user. Last year, the New Jersey Superior Court Appellate Division put a stop to this. Now those seeking to unveil the authors of anonymous Web sites in the name of defamation have a greater threshold of proof. "You've got to do more than merely file a lawsuit and use it as a fishing expedition," Coleman said.

Besides, as several experts also pointed out, a miffed journalist would have a hard time proving that being labeled a "media whore" constitutes defamation.

Other hurdles may loom in the future. Verisign Inc., which has a monopoly on the registry of all domain names, has an agreement with some 90 different registrars, many of whom have agreements with sub-registrars, that requires customers to enter reliable, accurate information when setting up a domain name, which then appears in Verisign's library of names.

Technically, a customer found to have provided a false identity ("Clinton, Socks and Buddy" would presumably qualify) could be found in violation of the contract, and lose the Web site he or she registered, Verisign spokesman Patrick Burns said. But for now, the requirement is in effect voluntary. Many, many people provide false information to the registry, even those who are not publishing anonymous Web sites, simply to avoid spam, said Chris Hoofnagle, legislative counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. Verisign hasn't the time or the energy to verify a few million sites, Burns said, so false domain contacts are usually only examined upon inquiry by a third party, often an attorney.

This could change with federal legislation recently introduced in the House by Rep. Howard Coble, R-N.C., and Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., that would make providing false information while registering a domain name a criminal offense. The measure faces opposition by civil libertarians. "The danger is people could be prosecuted for fraud when their real objective is to obtain anonymity," Hoofnagle said. If the legislation passed, the force behind MWO might finally become known. Passage, however, appears unlikely.

Beyond any legal ramifications, the ethical issues involved in anonymous attacks seem clear -- especially for media outlets that choose to cite an anonymous Web site. As Aly Colón, on the ethics faculty of the Poynter Institute, says, "I think every citizen should feel free to hold the media accountable; it's better for the media.

"But to use that site as an information source that is definitive and credible may be difficult, especially for those who question who they are and what their agenda is," he says.

And yet in the last year and a half, Media Whores Online has been cited in two dozen publications, including the (London) Guardian, USA Today and, yes, Salon. Just last month, a column published in both the Los Angeles Times and the Record of Bergen County, N.J., quoted a Media Whores Online report about, interestingly enough, the funding sources of a "conservative media watchdog" group's Web site. Yet the story failed to give Media Whores Online, its source, any context, simply attributing the reporting to "mediawhoresonline, a watchdog group," without mentioning the Web site's partisanship or its anonymous management.

"It seems like sloppy journalism to just re-quote from an anonymous medium," said Roger Boye, assistant dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. "You have to question the source's motives."

"You take the information at face value, and have to decide for yourself how credible it is based on what the individuals are writing about," Colsn said. Of course, that's also the point reiterated ad nauseam on the site itself: Consider the source.

Even Aaron Brown sees a virtue, of sorts, in the site. "They may be a little over the top," he says. "Their choice of words is offensive. But I guess I'd rather that people care than not."

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