The fake op-ed in question. (Photo: opinion-nytimes.com)

Early this morning, a pro-WikiLeaks op-ed purporting to be penned by former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller cropped up online. It was a stunningly convincing piece of web fraud, its design practically identical to the New York Times's own homepage, with every link leading to an actual Times article or section. The only hint that it wasn't real was the URL: instead of showing as nytimes.com/pages/opinion, it read "opinion-nytimes.com." It's a tiny difference, but a monumentally important one.

The article itself, which staunchly defends WikiLeaks and the importance of qualifying it under the First Amendment, is certainly stylistically similar to the real writings of Mr. Keller. Some of the wording is rather clunky, but that seems to lend the piece the impression that its message was so dire that it was written in an emotional hurry. The faux article tries so hard to be convincing that it even borrows wording from an email Mr. Keller wrote recently to GigaOm about WikiLeaks.

The fake op-ed immediately radiated across Twitter, with several journalism and tech luminaries--including, most embarrassingly, the Times's own technology writer Nick Bilton--falling for the hoax before it was debunked. The official WikiLeaks Twitter account dove into the fray, tweeting the op-ed before following up with retweets by people conjecturing about what exactly happened. [See our update at the bottom.]

Mr. Bilton uncovered a fake Twitter account that replaced one of the lowercase "l's" in @NYTkeller with a capital "I," further complicating the story. Many thought that the op-ed was tweeted by Mr. Keller himself, when in fact it was done by a fake account.

What's more, a fake PayPal blog was created to voice support for the New York Times's alignment with WikiLeaks. Whoever staged this prank had a ton of help, or a ton of time on their hands.

So who's behind this elaborate hoax? Domain registration data indicates that opinion-nytimes.com was registered back in March, so whoever is behind this ruse was clearly waiting for the right time to launch it. (What better than a summer Sunday morning as people are enjoying their paper and coffee?)

Whoever registered it was also incredibly detail-oriented: the WhoIs information for the fake site notes the registrant as "Ellen Herb," the same person who is listed as the registrant for the real nytimes.com URL. Sneaky!

Betabeat searched for some of the related queries in the WhoIs data and found that opinion-nytimes.com possesses the same NIC handle as "blocknytimes.org," another site registered on Gandi, a French domain hoster. The fake PayPal blog also possesses the same NIC handle.

While blocknytimes.org doesn't yield many leads, there is a Twitter account for (Do Not) BlockNYTimes, which purports to be part of the hacker collective Anonymous. They're definitely supportive of the op-ed--if not directly involved with the hoax--as they've tweeted about it numerous times. They were also one of the first to tweet a link to the piece.

From what Betabeat can gather, there is a grassroots conservative group called "Block the NYTimes" that believes the Times and WikiLeaks are both guilty of treason for leaking U.S. military secrets. The official WikiLeaks account tweeted about them a few weeks ago, to which the "Do Not Block NYTimes" Anonymous group responded, "We are on it. BTW, Anonymous loves you."

UPDATE: WikiLeaks admitted that it was in on the hoax, along with "its supporters," which we assume means the Do Not Block NYTimes group. A little over an hour ago they tweeted, "Yes. We admit it. WikiLeaks (Assange & co) and our great supporters where behind the successful NYTimes banking blockade hoax on @nytkeller."

Further, they credited Julian Assange with the following quote: "If the NYTimes cannot act with honnor to defend their 'sources' from economic censorship then we'll just have to do it for them :)."

Here is a timeline of the hoax published by WikiLeaks on Pastebin.

Mr. Assange must be growing bored after being holed up in that Ecuadorian embassy for so long.

Additional reporting contributed by Steve Huff.

Same great taste, way less filter.

Apparently ripping and running with the work created by New York Times journalists was getting to be a little stale for the blog lords at The Huffington Post. Founder Arianna Huffington has been poaching top talent from the gray lady as well. But today, as first reported by John Koblin at WWD, the  Times hit HuffPo with a cease and desist letter threatening legal actions after they hired away parenting writer Lisa Belkin from Time's column Motherload and started a new blog of their own called, wait for it, Parentlode.

Ms. Belkin explained the new name in her first post on HuffPo:

Finally, why the new name...For three years I have answered those emails by saying that a brand is a brand, and the Times wasn't inclined to change this one, but if I were choosing today I would choose something more inclusive.

Seems I AM choosing today. So welcome to "Parentlode."

There is obviously a legitimate trademark case to be made here. But the deeper issue is the relationship between the Times and Huffington Post. The latter has emerged as the biggest winner and most reviled practitioner of online aggregation. As Bill Keller told The Atlantic:

"pretty damned annoying" how Arianna keeps coming back with big checks trying to take his best staffers. "She’s tried to hire a lot more good people and not succeeded. I don’t know that anybody’s actually keeping score around here but you might be surprised to know how many people have turned down big checks because they’d rather work here than there," he said. "But it’s probably also a really good thing for journalism that there are people writing checks," Keller concluded in a different interview.

So remember kids, a four letter domain name is money in the bank. It's got to be easy to spell and pronounce. But that won't stop the copy cats from coming out of the woodwork. The best bet is to execute and iterate faster than the next guy.

Oh and BTW, Parentlode? Seriously? You know that's no longer a pun...

The Twitter trap, as Keller calls it, is an ever present distraction. "Unlike the virtual fireplace or that nesting pair of red-tailed hawks we have been live-streaming on nytimes.com, Twitter is not just an ambient presence. It demands attention and response. It is the enemy of contemplation. Every time my TweetDeck shoots a new tweet to my desktop, I experience a little dopamine spritz that takes me away from . . . from . . . wait, what was I saying?"

Keller tried to provoke a debate by tweeting out #TwitterMakesYouStupid, then highlighted the fact that this failed to create a constructive conversation. "In an actual discussion, the marshaling of information is cumulative, complication is acknowledged, sometimes persuasion occurs. In a Twitter discussion, opinions and our tolerance for others’ opinions are stunted. Whether or not Twitter makes you stupid, it certainly makes some smart people sound stupid."

The thing is, Keller didn't engage in an actual discussion. So while his article has provoked a storm of commentary on the web, some of which has been quite smart, Keller has only sent 20 tweets in his career. And the article he wrote in its place is no less hyperbolic than most of the discussion online. "Last week my wife and I told our 13-year-old daughter she could join Facebook. Within a few hours she had accumulated 171 friends, and I felt a little as if I had passed my child a pipe of crystal meth."