WHO TURNED THE TABLES ON INTERNET POLLUTER ?

Mr. Burnbaum leaving NY District Court

Regular readers of this blog know well the story of disgraced former Miami criminal defence attorney, Michael Burnbaum. A former Assistant US Attorney, he was convicted of participation in a cocaine trafficking conspiracy. After serving a sentence in Federal Prison, and losing his license to practise law in Florida, he concealed the fact from the state of Massachusetts regarding his conviction, and later used his bar status there to represent a criminal defendant in a New York Federal case. The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts has scheduled a disciplinary hearing for October, where he will most likely be disbarred, due to his conviction of a serious felony.

Burnbaum, or someone acting on his behalf, has polluted the Internet with literally hundreds of websites, of all types and styles, so as to move all the negative information about his life to the rear pages of a search engine query. Since most searchers know that the results are keyed to relevance, they never plow through all those good entries that have literally diluted the results, finding the truth about him at the end of the line. Thus, any searcher fails to find his felony conviction, and loss of the privilege to practise law in Florida.

That has now changed, for reasons unknown. Apparently, someone must have taken offence to his underhanded method of hiding the truth, for they have polluted the Internet with negative websites, and other entries, repeating ad nauseum the criminal conviction, in may, many places. The YouTube entries, which appear on the first page of any web search, are particularly effective.

They have even perpetrated what I can only describe as negative disinformation, most of which is obviously untrue, adding to his list of crimes:

(1) An arrest for prostitution.
(2) An arrest for use of crack cocaine.
(3) An arrest for Conspiracy to Commit Perjury.
(4) A charge of illegally bringing a handgun into a movie theatre.

The hacker inserted Mr. Burnbaum's name into the headings of videos of other individuals being charged with these crimes, making it appear that he is a multiple offender.  Untrue, of course, but highly effective when searchers troll the headings, looking for his name.

So, Internet IT types who are now making a good living packing the world wide web with garbage, to distract searchers from the sordid truth, and their clients, had better watch out, for they may just become the victims of Internet pollution, rather than the perpetrators. Turnabout is fair play, my friends, especially when it is the criminal who is now being forced to take his own medicine.