You may have seen what I posted to you here.

A journalist -- or a lawyer, or heaven help us, a banker -- whose real-world address is a post office box would not inspire great confidence either, though one would have the advantage of being able to stake out the post office. Street addresses, though they needn't be home addresses, are best. In fact, business addresses are often best of all, because most of us don't want to know whether someone's garage is semidetatched, but we do want to know they're legit in the business we seek.

It's the same in cyberspace.

Hotmail & Yahoo addresses, for example, are simply not reliable for verification of identity because they require no commitment. Addresses that one obtains from organizations with which one must sign a contract are very good, because someone must have confirmed the identity of the applicant. Their money depends on it. Work addresses specific to an organization are also good, because the identity requirements to get one of those are the ones used to get the job in the first place.

When I went to Jason's blog to check his credentials, all I found was a post office box: iraqnowblog@hotmail.com. The name of the author ought to have been there because, as he himself pointed out, he was not trying to keep it a secret. And it should have been with a more, um, demanding service provider than hotmail, who will give an account to a literate 7-year-old willing to lie about his age. Had those criteria been met, my hackles wouldn't have gotten up quite so much. I look at sources.

Then you came along, with those criteria for yourself, and you told me some details about your dealings with Jason, including the bit about the username and password. So I went back to look at Blogger's structure, which is pretty secure and requires some identity confirmation on the part of the applicant.

None of these items by themselves would have been enough to convince me, but the combination of all of them makes the likelihood of identity theft or fraud very much smaller, enough for me to entertain it as the kind of small risk I run when talking to sales reps that I only know from their companies' directories. That is, acceptable. Someone has vouched for them who has an identity verification I can live with.

It's like taking passport information for a person with no birth certificate because of a records accident, but who has a witness with proper ID who will swear out an affidavit that this person is known to them and known to be a citizen of the US. It's not ideal, but we can use our judgment and accept that document in combination with others, knowing that the State Department will look at our process when the ideal information is just not there.

To me it's very important to establish that people who say they saw things are the people they claim to be.

People think of the internet as the Wild West of the 21st century, and in a way they're right. It's full of wide, unclaimed expanse, beautiful things, new people, brave explorers, clever inventors, and valiant travellers. It also has its share of cattle rustlers, con men and hired guns. The reason the marshall came to town was to establish order to keep those last from preying on the unsuspecting and sometimes gullible townsfolk and settlers.

It's the same here. The same rules used for the older media may not work, and probably won't completely, but they point to a general foundation for what we can use to establish order.