The political and legal troubles facing San Bernardino County offer valuable lessons including some that touch directly on RedCounty.com and our readers, writers and those who post comments.

At the top of the list: electronic memory is forever.  San Bernardino County computers were seized, data analyzed, and data corroborated with interviews.  While interviews and testimony can be discredited and refuted; electronic data is impersonally objective.

So what does it mean for RedCounty? Be careful what you post because it might not be so "anonymous."

How do I know? Because in a brief moment of curiosity back in 2007 I learned (in 30 seconds of work on a public internet registry database) that a blog reply critical of me had been posted using a IP address registered to the County of San Bernardino.  I did not publicly reveal who the commenter was, but from my own relationships I knew who the likely poster was because of the electronic fingerprints revealed to me and any other savvy blog poster or writer.

Many public blog spaces and most bloggers are notified of the IP used by a person "commenting" on blog postings or content.

At the height of the GOP presidential primary campaign, I posted (under my own name) a blog post linking to a story in a conservative publication placed by surrogates who claimed Sen. John McCain was a true conservative, or words to that effect. While praising much in Sen. McCain's career, I did point out that the posting was devoid of words such as "campaign finance" and "immigration reform." While the surrogates made a strong case for McCain, the absences spoke volumes to me, and to our readers, I asserted.

A commenter posted a response busting my chops because a Congressman I worked for in 2001 had subsequently voted for Shays-Meehan, the House of Representatives version of the McCain-Feingold bill--the bill I had just used as a rhetorical tool to illustrate a conservative argument against McCain. But the allegation against me was hollow because, as I pointed out in a reply, that vote took place many months after I had left Washington, D.C. and taken up work in California. I gave it no other thought.

Until last summer when the political firestorm came to a head. At that point, I learned (from media sources) that county computers had been seized and I concluded that this one incident involving me was just a speck of what experts reviewing the computers were sure to find. (I've had no contact with anyone related to or on either side of this issue).  

The trouble is, as we now learn from San Bernardino's tale, the camoflage of anonymity provided by the web is really just an opaque veil.

There's no justice in what has happened in San Bernardino. Good people and troubled people have had lives, families, job prospects and careers tainted by two of the heaviest words in politics: special counsel.

The lesson we in the blog world--and our readers--can take is that as we evolve fully into the next generation online world we are reminded that the fingerprints of technology are indelible, and it only takes one incident to pierce the veil and reveal that which might have been hoped to remain untold.