FIGURE B

Karl's porking up at Porker's. Click picture for a larger image.

Then, the boys at Coptix fired up Photoshop, updating the image to show Mr. Rove holding a report with Coptix' name on the front, as shown in Figure C.

FIGURE C

Mr. Rove is apparently holding a Coptix report. Click picture for a larger image.

And then, Mr. Cross and the Coptix team sat back and waited for the blogosphere to blow a gasket. Which, in short order, it did.

One such example is Corrente, which stated this of Coptix:

Karl went out and hired his own, bespoke, politically wired nameserver company. Of course, Karl would never give business to any company that hadn't sworn fealty to the authoritarian agenda, but I imagine Karl is also getting a level of, erm, personal service that he wouldn't get from a fiddy-dollar administrator like GoDaddy or Yahoo or whatever.

and...

Nameserver administrators also provide email forwarding, which is the equivalent of call-forwarding on the Intertubes. So, if Karl wanted to store all his email safely offshore in, oh, American Samoa or Guam, then Coptix would be the company to do that for him.

The Wonkette blog called Coptix "GOP stooges".

Traffic all across the Internet jumped to judgement, claiming that because Mr. Rove had a document in his hands from an Internet company, he was "privatizing" his White House email in an effort to hide it from public view.

Shortly after this story exploded, Josiah Roe, Executive Vice President of Coptix Inc. published an explanation in the Chattanooga Times Free Press:

Our experiment demonstrated that, as with all great marketing, Web marketing can be used by a few people to shape the way that millions think. Of course, we ran our test on April Fool's weekend, when bloggers, like all journalists, should have their skepticism synapses at their sharpest. Today, two very busy days later, we are reminded that the Internet is a tool to be mastered rather than feared, and that the right word whispered in the right ear can still carry around the world.

Moving on
While the bulk of our investigative report into the White House missing emails is intended to be technical in nature, we're finding there are all sorts of interesting detours along the way. There's no evidence that Coptix is anything more than they seem: Web developers with a twisted sense of humor and outrage.

Citizen journalism is a very powerful thing. Matt Drudge single-handedly opened the door to the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal. In the past decade, digital journalism has scooped traditional "mainstream media" over and over again with exceptional reporting and detailed analysis.

But blogging and citizen journalism also has a darker side, a mob mentality. Many of the so-called "first tier" blogs tend to rush to judgement, triggering an avalanche of follow-on pile-on from hundreds of other bloggers.