Bonhomie Revealed?

So, I was reading Boing Boing Boing last week, and I came across an interesting correction from former EFF staffer and current sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow:

"An anonymous writer from [UK tech site] The Register writes to say that Andrew Orlowski was not the pseudonymous author of an article that attacked the Electronic Frontier Foundation by erroneously alleging that EFF loses the bulk of its cases... according to the source at The Register, the person who made the factually incorrect statements in that particular article was a different regular contributor to The Register."

Because I'm interested in why a regular contributor on a major IT site would actually use a pseudonym to bash the EFF, I figured a little word analysis could unlock the secret of who 'Bonhomie Snoutintroff', the author of the anti-EFF screed on The Register is, especially now that sources at El Reg have led Cory to print a correction on his belief that it was the somewhat infamous Andrew Orlowski.

So, let's look around a bit. The article deals with a lot of historical EFF stories, and maybe by comparing phrases to previous Register stories, we can work out who actually wrote it. Here's a basic first example, which I guess could theoretically be dumb luck:

From 'Thomas C Greene in Washington', we have the following 2001 article printed at The Register:

"First up, 2600 publisher Eric Corely aka Emmanuel Goldstein, who was barred from posting or linking to the DeCSS DVD descrambling utility last summer by a US district court, has lost his appeal."

From 'Bonhomie Snoutintroff', we have a rather similar sentence construction on his pseudonymous The Register piece:

"They also defended 2600 publisher Eric Corely, who was barred from posting or linking to the DeCSS DVD descrambling utility of "DVD Jon" fame, and they lost."

But hang on, there's a trump card here - the Ed Felten paragraph. From 'Bonhomie Snoutintroff' (who is based in Washington, incidentally, according to his pseudonymous piece published back in 2000), we have the following on his pseudonymous The Register piece in December:

"They persuaded Princeton University Computer Science Professor Edward Felten to withdraw from a talk on the old SDMI challenge, and later trumpeted it as an example of speech being "chilled" by DMCA threats. (Yet, once he'd enacted that media stunt, Felten delivered his talk at a different conference and survived without a scratch.)"

From 'Thomas C. Greene in Washington', we have, in a 2002 article in The Register:

"After coaching Felten to voluntarily withdraw from a talk in which he was scheduled to spill the beans, the EFF trumpeted this as an example of protected speech being chilled by DMCA threats. Once he'd enacted that choreographed media stunt, Felten later gave his talk at a different conference and survived without a scratch."

So, unless 'Bonhomie' has relocated to the same locality at Thomas C. Greene and is ripping off his old stories, I'd say we can make a good guess about the identity of Mr. Snoutintroff at this point - especially since there are a very small amount of The Register employees who have been around long enough to have posted in 2000 and still be posting on the site now.

I don't actually have a big agenda in this discussion either way (I've never contributed to the EFF, and actually have some reservations with some of their P2P-related arguments, though Doctorow did say something nice about my book once), but as a journalist, I believe that there's no reason at all for that Reg EFF rant to be pseudonymous. Why hide behind a pseudonym in an opinion column if you're a regular writer and respected security author/columnist for the site, unless you're just trolling, if indeed the author is Greene? It certainly doesn't seem like a good journalistic principle.

[Oh, and I'm aware I don't have any comments turned on right now, apologies - feel free to mail me if you're one of the involved people and you claim I'm plumb wrong.]