I'm going to have to sign a confidentiality agreement really soon for my work in The Firm (not too hard to guess which one if you dig hard enough) so this is like my last chance to write and anything remotely oblique about the place and not feel guilty. For most of this morning today I ended up doing research in this really amusing defamation case. Someone had defamed our client on various internet forums and it was my job to try and dig around and see if there were any more such postings by him to be found.
Rather oddly one of the initial defamatory postings was on a gay forum. Using my super sleuthing 1337 interwebz skillz and using the other pseudonyms the defendant had been using prior (for he's being sued for defamation now) I gathered that that this person was heavily into the gay community in Singapore. This wasn't even the normal sort of forums one would expect, like needing help to come out of the closet but outright solicitation for gay sex. Needless to see as I was hunting him down online, I had a damn amusing job doing it. The tedious part came when I had to verify whether it was the same guy because there was a chance that we were looking at someone else all morning (which would also have been amusing, but in a rather bitter way).
The breakthrough finally came through at about 11:30am when I found a profile page with a picture of him, the e-mail he used on the other gay forums and linking it to the pseudonym used. Later verification with the Office Boy (who is like 10 year older than me... not really a boy anymore) who served the papers to the guy capped off the morning. Exhileratingly amusing. Moral of all of this? Don't go around defaming people recklessly and if you must, at least cover your internet trail properly (vary usernames and etc.) lest it all come to haunt you.
No comments:
Post a Comment