SHOCKING: IP addresses of internet trolls traced to various government agencies and stat boards!!!

SHOCKING: IP addresses of internet trolls traced to various government agencies and stat boards!!!

A day after we published the interview with blogger ‘PothePanda’, we receive an email from an anonymous source:

“Hi there, Regarding your article on pothepanda, it isn’t surprising that his posts have been tracked. Even seemingly harmless stat boards monitor popular websites to monitor public comments related about their policies. The crux is how easily the administrators of the website will give away personally identifiable information such as IP addresses of the forumers to the authorities.”

We did not reveal the contents of this email because we do not have any evidence at hand. Now we do.

In the past one week, we have been receiving abusive comments on our site using different nicknames to create the impression that netizens are up in arms over our articles.

Initially we did not pay attention to them as we are strong believers in the freedom of speech. As long the comments do not involve race or religious issues, we will usually approve them even if they are meant to humiliate us.

We start to notice something amiss when the negative comments seem to be coming in increasing frequency sometimes one minute apart from each other and on closer look, they are all derived from the same IP address.

We plough through our entire archive of comments since the day our site was shut down temporarily under mysterious circumstances and discovered that most of them come from 5 IP addresses using different nicknames.
We key in the IP addresses into IP tracer and this is what we found:

You can try keying in the IP addresses stated above into the IP tracer to double check if you obtain the same result as us. All the posts were made during the day. We received on average 30 comments from these IP addresses in a day.

The IP tracer is unable to trace the exact computer from which the post was made. However it is able to identify the network used by the source. Residential IP addresses will usually show up as Singnet, Maxonline or Pacnet.

This is absolutely SHOCKING!! What are the staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, National Library Board, Singapore Press Holdings and IDA doing during the day? Why do they have so much time to post so many comments on our blog?

There are only two possibilities here:

1. They are ‘eating snake’, surfing the net during office hours. This is highly unlikely since it is obvious from their comments that they are not interested to engage us or other readers. Their main motive is to discredit and humiliate us.

2. They are paid to monitor our site and to rebuke our articles and comments posted here.
We are sure that wayangparty.com isn’t the only blog on their radar screen. Other than their own SPH-sponsored blog, the other prominent socio-political blogs such as sgpolitics and Singapore Enquirer are being monitored too.

Which begs the question: why are taxpayers’ money being used for such purposes? Is there a covert operation going on to counter rising anti-establishment sentiment in cyberspace?

Will the above organizations please give us an explanation? Why are their computers which are bought and maintained by public funds being used during working hours to surf the internet and post comments on a non-related blog run by ordinary citizens?

Either way, an internal investigation must be conducted and the findings presented to the public. If its staff are indeed found to be misusing the office computer for personal purposes, then they should be punished.

On the other hand, if they have been sanctioned to monitor socio-political blogs like ours as part of their work, then an explanation ought to be given as to why time and resources are allocated for this which is out of the purview of their scope of duties.

We would like to beseech netizens to take extra care when posting comments on government-owned forums and a blog which is run by ex-PAP and ex-MFA members.

If amateurs like us are able trace the organizations to which the IP addresses are from easily, the authorities will have the technical means to trace them right to your home or workplace. Remember Ng Kim Ngweng and PothePanda? Protect yourself, do not leave any trace of your identity on these forums and blogs.

http://forums.delphiforums.com/sunkopitiam/messages?msg=25597.1