terrible in the early 2000s. He told The New
York Times in 2008 that he considered himself a
“disruptive technologist.”
In 2007, he created WikiScanner, a tool that
aimed to unmask people who anonymously
edited entries in Wikipedia, the crowdsourced
online encyclopedia. WikiScanner essentially
could determine the business, institutions
or government agencies that owned the
computers from which some edits were made.
It quickly identified businesses that had
sabotaged competitors’ entries and government
agencies that had rewritten history, among
other findings.
“I am quite pleased to see the mainstream
media enjoying the public-relations disaster
fireworks as I am,” Griffiths told The Associated
Press in 2007. (Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales,
for his part, said he welcomed WikiScanner as a
tool of transparency.)
Four years earlier, as a college student at the
University of Alabama, Griffith and a student at
another university were about to tell a hacker
conference about purported security flaws in a
widely used campus debit card system when the
manufacturer sued the two. They had posted
online about ways to exploit the alleged flaws
to get free vending-machine sodas, laundry
machine use and more.
A judge barred the students from discussing
the card-swiping system. In a settlement a few
months later, they apologized to the company,
promised to never actually build a transaction-
processing device and agreed to complete 40
hours of community service.