Traces of Shooter’s Online Life Begin to Vanish

[Are_grits_groceries]

Updated | 6:27 p.m. A Google search for “James W. von Brunn,” the name of the 88-year-old white supremacist suspected of opening fire at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, killing a security guard, reveals that he was apparently an active user of the Web — although traces of his work online are already being erased by some of the sites he frequented.

This cached page at a Web site called AskArt.com, shows what appears to be an example of Mr. von Brunn’s painting. As Gawker points out, the painting seems to be a sort of remix of a painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard called The Reader and Pablo Picasso’s Woman With a Book. The artist’s page at AskArt also includes the first lines of a biography, which begins this way: “The von Brunn/Wenneker families migrated from Germany/Austria c. 1845, settling in St. Louis, Missouri.”

There were also traces of what appeared to be Mr. von Brunn’s work as a Wikipedia editor, albeit a very, very occasional one. More than a year before the shootings, the editor James von Brunn made a simple change to the article about Cordell Hull, the secretary of state during the Roosevelt administration. Next to a listing of Mr. Hull’s wife, Rose Frances Witz, he added the words “Orthodox Jew.” (Those words were removed long before the shootings.)

Just last month, he added a biography of himself — that he was born in 1920, and, among other things, “attempted to place the Federal Reserve Board of Governors under legal, non-violent citizens arrest, 12-7-81.”

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/traces-of-shooters-online-life-begin-to-vanish/

Keep looking! Screenshots!

[Triana]

1. If Google's cache hasn't been cleared it's all still there. n/t

[ColbertWatcher]

2. Orwell predicted that would happen. n/t