What's this IP address doing in political race?

Here's a relatively minor yet annoying matter to think about before heading off to the polls: Someone within the Securities and Exchange Commission appears to be using his or her work time and government-issued computer to wage political battle through Wikipedia on behalf of Missouri's Republican U.S. senator, Jim Talent, who is locked in a reelection battle with Democrat Claire McCaskill.

Central to this wikiwarfare is ongoing disagreement over how to characterize Talent's position on stem-cell research, an imbroglio that most of you know has featured a television commercial by actor Michael J. Fox and an unconscionable mocking of Fox's Parkinson's symptoms by radio loudmouth Rush Limbaugh.

So what's an SEC IP address doing in the middle of this mess? Nothing related to securities, so it represents at best highly inappropriate workplace conduct, and, if my layman's understanding of election law holds water, may even be illegal.

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Here's a relatively minor yet annoying matter to think about before heading off to the polls: Someone within the Securities and Exchange Commission appears to be using his or her work time and government-issued computer to wage political battle through Wikipedia on behalf of Missouri's Republican U.S. senator, Jim Talent, who is locked in a reelection battle with Democrat Claire McCaskill.

Central to this wikiwarfare is ongoing disagreement over how to characterize Talent's position on stem-cell research, an imbroglio that most of you know has featured a television commercial by actor Michael J. Fox and an unconscionable mocking of Fox's Parkinson's symptoms by radio loudmouth Rush Limbaugh.

So what's an SEC IP address doing in the middle of this mess? Nothing related to securities, so it represents at best highly inappropriate workplace conduct, and, if my layman's understanding of election law holds water, may even be illegal.

First to raise questions about Talent's wikiwarrior was a blogger with the handle lliiffee, who posed this question:

"Senator Jim Talent, like most politicians, has a Wikipedia entry. Like all Wikipedia entries, if someone wants to edit the page without logging in, their IP address is recorded. Take a look at the history of edits to Jim Talent's page: An interesting IP address shows up: 162.138.176.51. Now, if we do a lookup of this IP address, like perhaps at ip2location.com, we get some interesting information."