Alleged Anthrax killer Bruce Ivins reportedly made edits to Wikipedia

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Thursday, August 7, 2008

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A 2003 photo showing Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, participating in an awards ceremony.
Image: U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

The Washington Post has reported that the lone anthrax killer, Bruce Ivins, reportedly edited Wikipedia under the username Jimmyflathead. The contributions from the Jimmyflathead account reveal a few hundred edits were made from December 2005 to September 2007, and almost all of them concern inclusion of information critical of Kappa Kappa Gamma, a sorority which Ivins became obsessed with after being rebuffed by a woman in the sorority during his days as a student at the University of Cincinnati.

The anthrax letters are believed to have been mailed from a letterbox in Princeton, New Jersey, some 60 feet from a Kappa Kappa Gamma office.

Wikinews looked at the edits made by the account, and information revealed in the edits is made available below.

The user threatened by Jimmyflathead was contributing from a Harvard University IP address that was registered to a location in Oxford Street, Cambridge
Image: openstreetmap.

Wikipedia user ppfleiger described how Jimmyflathead bullied other users. Ppfleiger said that "most of the negative content on the [talk] page [of Kappa Kappa Gamma] is merely there because you [Jimmyflathead] bullied folks with threats of adding negative content and through personal emails."

Below is an extract from a threat made by Jimmyflathead on the talk page of Kappa Kappa Gamma:

	If you remove it again, I will request you to be blocked. Furthermore, I suggest that you sign in with a name. If my additions to this page continue to be removed, then I will begin to add things such as the hazing incident at DePauw, the Kappa chapter being kicked off the University of Maryland campus for drugs, the fact that a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army was a Kappa. I hope that I have made myself clear.
—Wikipedia User Jimmyflathead, which the Washington Post says is Bruce Ivins

The user threatened by Jimmyflathead was contributing from a Harvard University IP address that was registered to a location in Oxford Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Sources

• "Inside The Anthrax Probe" – The Smoking Gun, August 7, 2008
• "Acquaintances, Counselor Recall Ivins as Frightening and Disturbed" – The Washington Post, August 7, 2008
• "140.247.179.117" – Whois, Retrieved August 7, 2008
• "User talk:Jimmyflathead" – Wikipedia, Last modified August 6, 2008
• Jimmyflathead "Talk:Kappa Kappa Gamma/Archive 2" – Wikipedia, February 9, 2006

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