By Joel Thurtell
The New York Times is lucky.
Lucky they’re a wealthy organization that can afford to hire a topflight computer security company when they find out that their computers have been hacked.
I can kid around about my big newsroom staff.
There’s Peter Pizzicato, music critic.
Writing restaurant reviews is Melanie Munch.
Ned Yardline edits sports.
Mary Typeset is our copy editor.
And Peppermint Patti is my star columnist.
Patti is my dog.
When I run into computer problems, I have nobody to turn to except for Billie Baud, head of IT here at JOTR.
In other words, the buck stops with me in every department, including computer security.
The Times believes that Chinese government hackers broke through the newspaper firewalls to access sensitive information.
I have no way of knowing who hacked my system.
It happened at least two times in 2012. Hackers struck in March, and for a time I was afraid I had lost all my files back to November 2007 when I first started writing for joelontheroad. My son, Adam, and his web-savvy pal, Potsy, struggled to revive JOTR. I had my site back in time to break articles about California’s Capital Appreciation Bond scam in April, May and June. Then in July, weird things began to happen. I had trouble using the site. I posted only one column in July 2012.
On August 17, 2012, I took two massive hits. The first came from The New York Times, when the paper of record falsely credited another news organization with breaking the story of an atrocious Capital Appreciation Bond issue by Poway schools in San Diego. That story actually was broken by me. I wrote about Poway’s CABs starting on May 1. I desperately wanted to respond to The Times. When I tried to log onto joelontheroad, I discovered it had again been hacked.
This time, I hired a professional webmaster to clean up the site.
Who paid for that?
Well, I don’t have advertisers paying to appear on my site.
I don’t charge people for visiting my site.
So yes, it was I who paid for repairing my site.
It took several days for me to regain access, but in fact, even after I could again log in, my site was still contaminated. My web guy had not cleaned the site thoroughly. Google was warning readers to beware of my site. According to my web guy, it would take time for google to scan my site and approve it for general consumption. But the google warning persisted for months. Early this year, I hired a new web person who succeeded in making my site secure for visitors. We now have a clean record with google.
I decided to write about the hack attacks on my site after reading about what happened to The New York Times. On August 17, 2012, when my site was taken down the very day when the Times wrote about me, I wondered if there were a connection. The Times provided a link to my site. Suddenly, I was exposed to the world. Normally, that would be a good thing — great publicity. Too bad for me that my site was hacked and vanished just when it had attained great visibility, thanks to the Times.
I’ve assumed that the two incidents — mention of JOTR in the Times and the near-simultaneous hacking of my site — were unrelated. In truth, I have no way of knowing.
But I sympathize with the agony of Times people whose files were illegally accessed. However, at least the Times didn’t lose access to their publication.
When you’re one guy paying to maintain a website while doing all the writing as well as such editing as a writer can perform on his own work, and suddenly disaster strikes in the form of some fun-loving vandal in who knows what country, you have a choice.
You can fold the operation and say to hell with it.
Or you can convince yourself that your site is performing a public service that is vitally needed even though there is no valid economic argument for keeping it alive.
Here at joelontheroad, I found myself muzzled at a time when I most needed to speak.
How ironic that the message I most wanted to communicate was my unhappiness about the way the Times had written about my role in the California CAB story.
I’ve convinced myself that this site has performed a public service. I was the first to speak out against the billionaire bridgemaster, Matty Moroun. I broke the California CAB story, which is now an issue before the Legislature in Sacramento. JOTR is an independent voice, and I intend to keep it alive as long as I can.
