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One of the hot topics floating around the Internet this week is Virgil Griffith's wikipedia scanning tool. The tool operates by scanning through the volumes of wikipedia edits, and tracing back the IP's that made them.

As anyone who has edited/vandalised a Wikipedia page before knows, Wiki keeps a permanent and detailed log of all edits, and the computer IP addresses that made them. An IP address is essentially the computer equivalent of a phone number, it's unique and traceable. Given the growth and presence of Wikipedia, the creation of an aggregate tracing scanner was only a matter of time.

Given the technical detail of IP's, it's not surprising that companies and individuals within Fox news, Diebold, the BBC, and US congressional offices would be caught out. However, for officers within the Central Intelligence Agency to be caught out, officers whose first function is "obtaining and analyzing information", is laughable. So laughable that the "IA" in CIA might stand for something else.

In some cases, such as the BBC, Wikipedia edits are relatively innocuous and the act of individuals. But in the cases of Fox news, Diebold, and some US congressmen, it illustrates a systematic program of deception and propaganda. What is perhaps most worrying is that the fundamental task of two of these institutions is truth and integrity.

Of course the appearance of the scanner is only a minor setback for these companies and institutions. Circumventing the Wikipedia scanner can be easily achieved if anonymity software is used, such as TOR or a non-transparent proxy, which I discussed two years ago.