ANDY WHITMAN - THE MISSING LEGEND

Michael Debinhex, Private Defective

A lot of you may have been wondering just where I've been. Well, as usual, I've been on a case, and I've been underground, so to speak. Incognito. This one, which *you* have an interest in, has taken me months to solve. And in the words of Jerry Garcia (who's also been underground lately), "What a long, strange trip it's been."

In the mid 1980s, when the Internet was still the purview of a small community of computer geeks and their cohorts, a brilliant, witty, insightful fellow by name of Andy Whitman appeared on rec.music.christian.

Andy, a technical writer at AT&T, had a way with words seldom seen on the Net even then (and extremely rare these days). He mixed common and uncommon sense with clear logic, beautiful prose, and thoughts that came from deep inside.

Sometime during 1994, Andy was reported MIA to the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force, or The Cabal). Following standard police procedure, they suggested that when he had been missing for weeks, someone should get back to them, but in the meantime they would assume his router was on vacation or something.

Months later, when it became clear that Andy Whitman was, indeed, missing, Gene Spafford, noted security expert and Venusian, started looking into things. Here are just a few of the startling facts he came up with:

The posts all came via AT&T, but did not originate from inside AT&T
No trail whatsoever could be found beyond AT&T
Nobody reliable (Kent Paul Dolan and other talk.bizarre regulars did not count) could be found who admitted to having ever seen Andy Whitman

At this point, Spaf called me. I won't bore you with all the legwork, network, and other work I did, but here are the bare facts pointed to:

There is no record of an Andy Whitman having ever lived or worked in or near either Columbus, Ohio, or Mt. Vernon, Ohio.
When a complete listing of all the posting times of all the archived posts of "Andy Whitman" was compiled and matched against all archived network logs at the NIC, we could find a total of only 17 computer systems which had been connected at all of those times - and only three of those were capable of sending news articles.
Two of those systems, for security reasons, could not have been used to post the articles in question.
The remaining system was a privately owned, small Radio Shack Xenix system maintained by a Caucasian, female, teen hacker named Lisa Andrea Whitman, whose parents called her "Andy".

I was eventually able to track this person down and interview her, and thus solve the case. Here are the salient points:

``I really wanted to be taken seriously on the Net. But very few women, much less girls, got any respect anywhere besides talk.bizarre, and all anyone there really got was desperate pleas from the rest of the Internet to "stay in tDOTb and leave the rest of us alone!" - not quite what I was hoping for.
``So I decided to create a male persona. A lot of guys were creating female personas to weasel into womens' groups, so it was kinda like justice. Anyway, I was trying to decide what to call myself one Saturday, when the mail arrived. There was some junk mail for "Andy Whitman" about being more macho and learning to "pick up chicks", and I just went, "Hey! There's my name!"
``I created a fictitious job at AT&T, mostly because I had figured out how to hack their news security. I created a fictitious boss, co-workers, and everything. (laughs) Twice I even got email from women at AT&T asking whether I was married! So I ended up creating a wife and two daughters - it was hard enough thinking like a guy all the time, I needed some females to at least write about occasionally!
...
``I was accepted at the University of Texas. Shortly after I started there, the Internet started to take off, and more and more women started showing up, even in traditionally male dominated parts of the hierarchy, such as *.christian and *.muslim . So I took the plunge, had Andy bid the group adieu, and and started posting as myself. Of course, I got married, so between my given first name and my new last name, the break was complete, and nobody suspected a thing. Until now...''

The whole affair has a number of subtle ironies to it. For instance, the former legend quickly became a new legend, even though nobody knew the legends were related. Using a completely different posting style, and her own personality, "Andy" forged a new name for herself - with her own name.

Having created a fictitious male with a wife and two daughters, it is only fitting that she now has a husband and two sons.

The list goes on, but that's not important, even though some of those subtle ironies helped me track her down. What matters is that I now present you with, at last, the person behind the myth of Andy Whitman:

Lisa Andrea Whitman Reid, r.m.c Social Secretary

Michael Debinhex
Private Defective
md@rru.com

Last updated: 14 July 1998