"The most troubling lesson she learned from Mullen, Gomez says, is how readily misleading information can migrate from a posting on an Internet forum to official status. “In a second, what’s false becomes true,” she observes. “All it takes is for one person to put it on the record.” That seems to be what happened with Mullen’s Most Wanted status. A spokeswoman from the US Marshals Service told WIRED that Deputy Sheasby knew nothing about a $2 million cybertheft by Mullen until he was told by “an investigator,” and that he’d passed on the story only because he felt obliged to make other investigators aware of everything he had heard."
Looks like the barrier between social network/forums etc. & official record are pretty porous.
"The most troubling lesson she learned from Mullen, Gomez says, is how readily misleading information can migrate from a posting on an Internet forum to official status. “In a second, what’s false becomes true,” she observes. “All it takes is for one person to put it on the record.” That seems to be what happened with Mullen’s Most Wanted status. A spokeswoman from the US Marshals Service told WIRED that Deputy Sheasby knew nothing about a $2 million cybertheft by Mullen until he was told by “an investigator,” and that he’d passed on the story only because he felt obliged to make other investigators aware of everything he had heard."
Looks like the barrier between social network/forums etc. & official record are pretty porous.