Against the background of the recent "deaths" of Nowheremom and Kaycee, beloved but fictional members of online communities Anandtech and MetaFilter, respectively, FEED itself got to play a walk-on role in a case of a fictional identity with global reach. The cautionary tale of the two Dennis Lee's of Singapore, one real and one virtual, holds some not very comforting lessons for the future of identity spoofing.

The basic story is simple enough -- the fictional Mr. Lee was the creation of the actual Mr. Lee, but the two bore less and less resemblance to one another over time. Where the real Mr. Lee was a recent Nanyang Tech grad of moderate programming talent, the fictional Lee was a hot-shot Internet guru, one who had authored a myriad of articles and co-authored several books on all aspects of Internet technology. The fictional Lee was fleshed out, so to speak, by a plagiarizing spree that included copying a FEED daily (one of mine) on intelligent agents. Not content with mere authorship, however, Lee rewrote the article in the first person, giving himself credit for doing the actual research as well.

Then, to make sure the tech community in Singapore would have no doubt about his prowess, he unilaterally added himself to the advisory board of several software companies and the World Wide Web Consortium and topped it all off by bestowing upon himself the prestigious but nonexistent "MIT/ATT Innovator 2000" award, complete with an as-if-scanned image. Thus clad in the raiment of intellectual finery, he sallied forth.

He did astonishingly well for a time -- as CTO of a Singaporean startup called elipva, he was able to parlay the achievements of his fictional self into prominent speaking engagements, recently appearing as a keynote speaker at Internet World Asia, and was even nominated "Internet Visionary of the Year" (one award he didn't win). This was no mere résumé padding, since none of the writings and research listed on his site were actually his, and many of his awards, fellowships, and prominent colleagues listed there simply didn't exist. The high-powered Mr. Lee was as fictional as Nowheremom, and as unable to survive contact with reality.

Fictional identities are like stock bubbles, in that they tend to collapse rather than deflate. The end for Dennis Lee, Internet Superstar, was swift: An investigation of his activities by Jennifier Lien of the Singapore Business Times, tipped off by some of Mr. Lee's former colleagues, coupled with confirmation from MIT, ATT, FEED, and others that neither his writings nor his awards were genuine, led to an article exposing the fiction. As a result, the sites featuring his résumés, articles, and books vanished, and the real Mr. Lee was suspended from active duties at elpiva while the CEO digested news of the disappearance of the Dennis Lee he thought he employed.

It's tempting to think that what the Net giveth the Net taketh away, so that the ease of creating faked identities is balanced by the ease of finding them out -- in Mr. Lee's case, plagiarism that was performed in Singapore was no further from its pilfered sources than a Google search. The real lesson is more daunting, however. In the digital world, where identity is easy to fake and easy to spot, hustlers with short-term time horizons can do much more damage with much less effort than they can offline, since the Net makes it trivial to create a seemingly legitimate site with seemingly legitimate articles, backed up by seemingly legitimate images of seemingly legitimate awards. Stephen Glass, the infamous -- and former -- reporter, once created a Web site for Jukt Microelectronics, a fictional company, to bolster an entirely fabricated story. But Dennis Lee has gone him one better, showing that you can fool more people by creating fake degrees, awards, and even colleagues at real institutions, and still get away with it for a while.

Worse, the obvious solution -- trust no one -- would destroy the very fluidity that makes the Net so valuable. Trust, the trait the spoofers rely on, is an essential lubricant to almost every aspect of Internet use. The spoofers, who may not set out to create anything more than a padded résumé or play a prank on their friends, can quickly end up involving others in their fiction in a way that creates very real damage and distrust.

Instead of creating a neutral arms race, where spoofers and their discoverers both get newly powerful tools, the Net has handed the spoofers huge advantages while forcing potentially corrosive distrust on the average citizens. As is so often the case, the best and worst aspects of the Internet are completely intertwined. Just as lowered message costs led to spam, the increased ease with which an individual can (re-)publish to the world opens the door for Dennis Lee and his ilk, and there is no simple solution. Until the citizens of the Internet develop the kind of social antennae required to detect spoofed identity that earlier generations needed to sniff pyramid schemes and con artists, the prevalence of, and damage from, online spoofing is going to get a lot worse before it gets better.