Bay Blogger Thursday

One of the ways bloggers can leverage their collective influence is through a good, old-fashioned pile on. We don't have to necessarily break the story, but if a critical mass of bloggers start addressing it simultaneously, the s**tstorm will finally hit the mainstream. Just ask Dan Rather.

The worldwide blogosphere was shocked -- shocked -- at the implications of a recent Chicago Sun-Times article. Turns out that armed with someone's phone number and a credit card, you can get their phone records lickety-split over the internet. The personal privacy and security breach here is absolutely staggering, and hundreds of blogs from all sides of the aisle chattered about it.

According to AmericaBlog, the story actually broke last July in the Washington Post. Sadly, our great leaders didn't do anything about it then. And as far as anyone can tell, no one's doing anything about it now. But AmericaBlog just gave the story a fresh set of legs, having purchased the cell phone records of former presidential candidate, general and supreme commander of NATO, Wesley Clark, for $90.

Granted, our first thought here at SFist was to run GavvyGav and KimKim's numbers to see if they've been calling each other a lot (we could even have gotten the length of the calls for more money). Other possibilities included seeing if DTIS and TechConnect point man Chris Vein was calling the GooglePlex regularly; seeing if The Daly really does call Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez as some might dream; and we bet Wade Randlett's call log is a real doozy.

But that would have been cruel and creepy (not that it should stop any of you). Seriously, though, some have called for running the numbers of every member of congress and sending them their results. Sadly, we don't have Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Boxer or Nancy Pelosi's cell phone numbers (or $300). But someone in the blogosphere does. So keep piling on this story and maybe we can collectively take credit for closing this rather glaring loophole.