However, the secondary DNS for GWB43.COM is provided by one TRESPASSERS-W.NET, as we showed in last week's Figure A.

This week, we'll look into the very weird story of TRESPASSERS-W.NET. We didn't find anything suspect from the point of view of our investigation into possible missing email messages, but we did find some amazingly immature behavior from a bunch of geeks.

Trespassing on TRESPASSERS-W
As with our previous investigation into SMARTech, we begin our look at TRESPASSERS-W.NET with a "whois" lookup on TRESPASSERS-W.NET, as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A


Whois TRESPASSERS-W.NET? Roll over picture for a larger image.

As the report shows, TRESPASSERS-W.NET appears to be operated by Jeffrey Cross, who is listed as the registrant with Cross Computer Consulting (at CROSS-CC.COM) and with Coptix Inc. (at COPTIX.NET). Coptix, it turns out, is a Web development firm, also located in Chattanooga.

Like we did with the MX records in last week's report, we looked for further information on these two companies. As far as we can tell, the only independently provable digital link between TRESPASSERS-W.NET and the Executive Office of the President is that TRESPASSERS-W is a secondary DNS for GWB43.COM.

But, when we did a search on "Coptix", we found a whole host of references to Karl Rove. And a very silly story.

Coptix cops to a digital chop
As anyone with any visible presence online can attest to, the so-called "blogosphere" can be a pretty cruel place. I've certainly gotten my unfair share of digital badmouthing. While some incredible journalism can and does take place on blogs, there's also a whole lot of judgement, shoot-from-the-hip reporting, and vitriolic opinion bubbling up from the bowels of blogs.

We're not the first to look into the White House email controversy, although it seems we're doing the most comprehensive analysis and we're most definitely one of the few without a political axe to grind. Apparently, a bunch of folks with a definite political bent found out the same thing we did: that Coptix runs a DNS server for GWB43.COM.

However, they were far less kind about their discovery. These bloggers made the unsupported assumption that just because GWB43.COM exists, its mere existence implies that "all" White House email was routed through it. They then took the next unsupported leap, claiming that those operating the servers were obviously hiding the emails.

Apparently, this did not sit well with Cross and the techies of Coptix. They got their hands on an image of Karl Rove in Porker's Bar-B-Que in Chattanooga, as shown in Figure B.