Over on Connecticut Local Politics, people have posted blog entries under the usernames "Harry Reid" and "Barak [sic] Obama". The Journal Inquirer has a report that “A Hartford lawyer says the FBI has agreed to investigate postings promoting Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman's re-election on a popular Connecticut-based Internet "blog" in the names of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.”

There is a long discussion about this over at Connecticut Local Politics. Instead of simply adding another comment to that thread, I thought it was worthwhile to write my own longer blog post about it.

Were people on CLP libeled? Did the posters commit criminal impersonation? Is this an appropriate investigation for the FBI? As a supporter of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I worry about action that could curtail discussions online. As a member of the Media Bloggers Association, I get particularly nervous when I see legal action being pursued against people that blog or in this case comment on blogs.

Does posting under the username of a famous person constitute impersonating that person? Unlike the person from Hartford, I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me as if a "reasonable man" would not believe that the people posting are in fact Harry Reid or Barack Obama. As to whether or not what the person posted constitutes libel, I’ll leave that for courts to decide if it ever gets this far.

A few other things to consider. When I was working on one political blog, one person commented, pretending to be a staffer of a key elected official in Hartford. People from the official’s office called and asked me to take down the post. I pointed out that even if I did take it down it would remain in various records online, such as archive.org or the cache at Google for a long time, and in my opinion it would be better to have a statement from the office that the comment was not from a staffer. They said that they still preferred the comment to be deleted and I reluctantly did so.

In another case, staffers of an elected official did post to a local blog and the blogmaster successfully tracked the post to an office in Washington. This was a pretty clear violation of laws about what government employees can do during their work time from government offices. I don’t know what the final outcome was. I don’t believe any legal action was pursued, but the actions were stopped.

Whether or not there was in fact criminal activity involved in the posts under the usernames “Harry Reid” and “Barak Obama” to CLP, the behavior did seem over the top to me and I do hope that the CLP community finds more constructive ways of dealing with inappropriate content.