Will they never learn? It has been more than four years—a geologic era in Internet time—since Wikipedia investigated Congressional staffers for mucking about with politicians' entries on the site. (One change, emanating from a House computer, altered Rep. Eric Cantor's bio to say that he "smells of cow dung.")

That investigation revealed that the lure of online anonymity proved too strong for many working on Capitol Hill, as more than 1,000 edits had been made to politicians' Wikipedia pages just in the preceding six months—and that was just from the House!

Wikipedia knew this, of course, by running the IP addresses of the posters and seeing which belonged to the block of addresses controlled by the House and Senate. In the midst of all this were the tens of thousands of high-profile lawsuits filed by the RIAA over file-swapping, which also relied on IP addresses to identify users. You might think, after enough major stories about "IP addresses" hit the news wires, everyone in political life would be aware that "anonymity" on the Internet is limited.

But someone in Sen. Saxby Chambliss' (R-GA) office didn't get the memo. In the aftermath of this week's failed vote on the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, someone named "Jimmy" registered an account at the gay news blog Joe.My.God. just to say, "All Faggots must die."

Your standard Internet troll? Not exactly, since in this case the site's operator, Joe, posted Jimmy's IP address, and it wasn't long before it was resolved back to Chambliss' office (and it appears to be a district office back home in Georgia). At that point, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution swung into action, snagging the confirmation from Chambliss' office that "it was indeed the source of a highly publicized homosexual-bashing slur on an Internet site" and that "it has not discovered exactly who was behind the slur, and has turned the matter over to the Senate Sergeant At Arms."

Two of the top six Google results for "Saxby Chambliss" now concern the comment, and Google News shows major coverage of the story in the media.

Once upon a time, such crass remarks would have gone no further than the office water cooler; now, they echo around the country. And all thanks to the humble IP address.