ARCHIVE 7/29/08: What the Benoit Wikipedia Hacker Police Video Should Tell Us – But Probably Won’t

What the Benoit Wikipedia Hacker Police Video Should Tell Us – But Probably Won’t

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Yesterday I formally complained to the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission in an effort to acquire the Stamford police video interrogation of Benoit Wikipedia hacker Matthew Greenberg. Read all about it in the last post.

What I hope to accomplish by this exercise was well explained by Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, on June 29, 2007, the same day the cops were grilling Greenberg.

“The guy who’s admitted to [the unauthorized edit of Benoit’s Wiki page] said it was just a coincidence,” Wales said. “He said he was hearing rumors. I wonder where those rumors came from. I guess the police will figure that out eventually.”

But if the police did figure that out, the existing public record isn’t telling. And the reason the Fayette County and Stamford authorities are playing an Alphonse-and-Gaston routine with the release of the complete Greenberg video may be that what they’re hiding will show that they didn’t even try.

So far I have in hand a three-minute clip of the beginning of the Greenberg police interview. (Fayette County says that’s the only video on file there, and Stamford says it’s a faulty dupe.) I haven’t posted the partial video, but on July 16 I did publish a transcript.

“I was reading rumors and speculation online,” Greenberg told Stamford PD Detective Tim Dolan.

“Where online?” Dolan asked.

“Um, like on forums, I forget the exact, like, sites….”

Moments later the video cuts off. Only the complete video can show whether Dolan followed up effectively. The idea that Greenberg could not name any of the sites he visited just five days earlier wouldn’t be very credible.

The written summaries of the Connecticut police investigation of Greenberg are equally unrevealing. Dolan’s report is viewable at http://muchnick.net/StamfordGreenberg.pdf. For the search of Greenberg’s computer, Stamford PD turned to the Darien police, who have a computer forensics expert on staff; Darien Detective Chester Perkowski’s report on the search is at http://muchnick.net/DarienGreenberg.pdf.

From the main report, it seems clear that Dolan asked Greenberg no pressing questions about the most obvious curiosity of the Wikipedia affair: Greenberg’s residence in the same city where World Wrestling Entertainment is based. In his anonymous Wiki apology, Greenberg had professed no connection to WWE, but Stamford PD might not have probed that assertion at all.

Dolan also appears not to have talked to Greenberg about his pattern of unauthorized Wikipedia edits – including, on the most charitable end of the spectrum, his removing ethnic slurs from the page for Chavo Guerrero. And Guerrero was one of the wrestlers who received Chris Benoit’s final text messages Sunday morning the 24^th, close to a full day before Greenberg posted on Wikipedia that Benoit missed the Sunday night show in Houston because of circumstances “stemming from the death of his wife Nancy.” (In fairness to Detective Dolan, it’s possible he was not briefed well by Fayette County sheriff’s officers.)

Darien Detective Perkowski’s computer search report follows the same paradigm of asking only a single, and essentially useless, question. He wrote that an examination of the Greenberg computer hard drive “revealed no information that was posted about the homicide prior to June 25, 2007.”

Again, it’s not Perkowski’s fault if Fayette County didn’t ask Stamford PD – and Stamford PD in turn didn’t ask Darien PD – to search Greenberg’s Internet history to see the sites he visited and where he might have picked up on Benoit rumors on June 24.

But it’s somebody’s fault. Advertently or not, Matthew Greenberg’s sophomoric online vandalism opened a major window on the mystery of the timeline of the Benoit case. The video that the cops are suppressing could show that all they did was slam that window shut.

As they say in computer science, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

Irv Muchnick