• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, June 14, 2010

Blogger Zachery Kouwe, ousted from The New York Times for plagiarizing from other publications, has now been booted from financial site Dealbreaker for allegedly emailing "anonymous" commenters.

At least two Dealbreaker commenters posted about receiving emails from Kouwe, Reuters reports. One of the supposedly anonymous commenters said that Kouwe specifically mentioned that he knew where the commenter worked.

Dealbreaker encourages its readers to sign up under pseudonyms but, as Reuters' Felix Salmon points out, people with access to the system could figure out users' identities. "If you sign up for a pseudonym using your personal email address, and then post a comment from your work IP address, Dealbreaker's editors, if they're feeling aggressive, can use that information to find out where you work," he writes.

What's really noteworthy here isn't that someone connected to a Web site went too far in responding to a critic, but that this incident isn't the only time. In fact, it marks at least the third time in the last several months that someone affiliated with a publication has obtained a commenter's information and used it against that person.

In March, the Cleveland Plain Dealer decided to announce in a news story that the prolific commenter "lawmiss" was actually Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold. (Saffold, who denies writing all of the messages, is now suing the paper.)

Last November, Kurt Greenbaum, a St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor notified a school that someone had sent in a vulgar comment from the school's IP address. The commenter, a teacher at the school, ended up resigning.

Many news sites have done a good job at protecting commenters' anonymity when outsiders seek to unmask the posters. Some have even waged battles in court to preserve commenters' privacy.

But those efforts won't amount to much if a site's employees or affiliates end up learning commenters' identities and then using that information against them.