Orly Taitz, the Queen of Birthers, apparently got some death threats after her fanatical appearance on MSNBC last week. Well, not exactly death threats. More like someone suggesting she be tried for sedition and hung for treason. Not quite the same as someone saying “I’m going to kill you.” But if Orly can find something to be dramatic about, she will be dramatic about it.

Anyway, one of her fans figured out who had been sending these threats … narrowed it down to an address with a person’s name and other personal information … all from the IP address from whence the email was sent. IP addresses are useful things, but they aren’t terribly useful the way this person used it. Of course, it’s only useful if one is certain the address is the actual address from which something has been sent. It’s not like an IP address can’t be spoofed.

With that said, let’s follow the steps he used to find the sender of the emails, shall we?

First he took the IP address from the emails and searched at IP Address Locator. It conveniently searches for your IP when you visit the link, if your browser happens to broadcast your IP. This search spits out some information related to said IP address. One of the bits of information is longitude and latitude coordinates.

Using this information, he then searched Google Maps for the coordinates. Google Maps does its best to resolve this to a physical address. Unfortunately, not only is an IP address a poor way to acquire GPS coordinates, Google Maps does a poor job of locating exact residences using GPS coordinates. I can enter the exact numbers for the exact location of my living room, and it consistently shows those coordinates as being a few doors down from where I actually live.

But wonder-boy finds himself an address, so he heads over to The White Pages Reverse Look-Up and searches there to find out who lives at that address. Now, of course, because the information put in was crap, the information it spit out was crap … i.e. someone not at all related to the person who sent the email, their only crime being living in the same city or neighborhood.

I followed these steps with my own IP address, just to see what it would lead to and not because I thought it would actually work. Of course, it didn’t lead to my own physical address. Not even close. Miles away from being in the same ballpark. I wish I lived at that address. Looks like a much nicer neighborhood, what with its sidewalks, curbs, and proper rain drainage systems (and really nice houses). Using my actual coordinates at Google Maps, still brought up the same wrong address it always does, and entering my actual address into the reverse look-up brought up exactly nothing. I guess that means my house (and I) don’t exist at all in Birther World. I can live with that.

All I can say is that I hope nothing bad happens to the people living at the address these idiots have determined are the source of the email threats, and I wish these Birthers would get some education.

I’d link to the posts about this on Orly’s blog, but Google has determined her site is full of dangerous code, and Firefox throws up warnings as well. She either doesn’t know this, doesn’t care, is implicit in the spreading of trojans and viruses, or is too stupid to realize why no one is visiting her site or commenting anymore.