I’ve decided to write a summary to give you my perspective two months after putting up the Norm Coleman database blog post.

I created the Norm Coleman blog post to answer the questions I began to receive the night this all happened. I started ButYoureAGirl.com to help people understand technology.

I like to document things (my Inner Nerd at work). You can see a similar example regarding Avira antivirus.

What happened next regarding Wikileaks and going on national television never crossed my mind as a possible outcome of following my geeky curiosity and documenting screenshots.

Photo Credit: Daveybot

Summary

Political Views
What I didn’t know at the time was how this issue was snowballing between the Democrats and Republicans. I don’t own a television and don’t follow politics. I sold my TV on Craigslist in 2006 as a part of “the great experiment” I was reading about on Steve Palina’s blog. I never really was a big fan of commercials anyway. I use David Allen’s Getting Things done (GTD) method of productivity to turn my dreams into reality. Every reporter asked me if I was “partisan”. I actually had to ask the what that was but figured it had to do with being strongly associated to a political party. Now don’t get me wrong, I have beliefs on things like education, the environment, the death penalty, the legal system, oil dependency, health care and taxes. It’s just that none of that had to do with this.

The Media
I started to see traffic spikes on my humble blog March 10th, 2009. By March 11th, more than 1,000 people had stopped by! My average number of daily visitors before then was about 40. Then the calls started. Reporters were calling and asking me to tell them what happened. Being a techie, I thought I was helping them; I now realize many were looking to sensationalize the story and twist my words to make things sound more exciting. I’m now wiser about the media and their “angles”. For those of you who work in technology, you know it can be a challenge to keep someone’s attention as you explain the benefits of data backups that utilize incremental, off-site and image based options. We find it fascinating but non technical people start to “glaze over”.

Where Do We Go From Here?
I want to share that I’m working on something exciting! I’ve been meeting and talking with security consultants around the US. I’ve also talked with people in the data privacy field. I’m working to put together a resource that will bring security and business people together in a way that makes sense. I myself am not a security consultant; rather an IT consultant who values security. I would like to utilize this event to help people connect on this issue and access accurate information on what they need to do to secure their data, networks and websites.

Thank You For Your Support
I appreciate all the words of encouragement, support, suggestions, personal stories from people on the list, research efforts and most importantly, technical folks speaking up to this. The first question I received from a reporter was, “Do you want to go the record about this?”. That reminded me that many people working in the IT field would have not feel comfortable talking about something like this for fear of the backlash. As an independent consultant, I understand I have more flexibility that those working full-time for someone. I also understand that what I do outside of my work does reflect on my work. My clients have been supportive about this issue and I thank them as well; Democrat and Republicans alike. After appearing on The Rachel Maddow Show, I really saw an increase in mentions about me across the Internet (I use Google Alerts to track this). My Technorati rank for this blog doubled. Some blogs were even referring to me as “Dr. Adria Richards”! Doh! I stopped by many sites and left comments to help answer people’s questions and to indicate I did not hold a doctorate degree.

The Haters
There have been people who voiced their opinions on what I did, how I did it, why I did it and so on. I can’t change what I did (looking into the Coleman fake website crash, taking screenshots, writing a blog post about it). I am a person who takes action. Some people are just angry people looking for targets. Some people feel they know what other people should do with their lives. I decided that I wasn’t going to feed the trolls.

How You Can Help
That said, if you are interested in helping with this upcoming project to bridge the gap between unsafe data storage in the business world and best practice data security audits, training and education, contact me.

Stay tuned…