So let's get this straight. A 22-year-old UMass Dartmouth student lies to his fellow students, to his professors, and finally to several members of the media, elaborating on an increasingly far-fetched story about some Homeland Security agents who took a special interest in him after he requested an edition of Mao's Little Red Book via Interlibrary Loan, only to break down six days after the story broke and confess to making the whole thing up.

In the meantime the anecdote had been incorporated into editorials by credulous political writers like Ted Kennedy and Graham Lampa, who cited it as just one part of a larger evil/Republican trend.

At other websites, most notably Boing Boing, skeptical netizens looked into the student's claims almost immediately.

(Though there's no way to prove this, I was also skeptical of the story, and would have made a note of it on Graham's post had I not already used up my friendly skepticism quota in another thread. So I doubted in silence.)

The doubters had already piled up a quite a bit of circumstantial evidence by the time the student confessed, though the reporter who had first broke the story opined in his defense that "had the student stuck to his original story, it might never have been proved [sic] false."

The student's motive? Representative Man calls your attention to the final, admirably snarky paragraph of the Standard-Times story revealing the hoax:

"When I came back, like wow, there's this circus coming on. I saw my cell phone, and I see like, wow, I have something like 75 messages and like something like 87 missed calls," he said. "Wow, I was popular. I usually get one or probably two a week and that's about it, and I usually pick them up."

The Boston Globe also interviewed the student about the hoax, though (being somewhat more suspicious than Mr. Nicodemus of the Standard-Times) they didn't publish anything until the story had been retracted. Their story also lacks the dry and bitter censure of the Standard-Times piece.

Just as the story, when thought true, neatly illustrated many of the problems with the government's domestic surveillance, that same story, now that it has been proven false, raises many questions about our domestic media.

Blastfax kudos to the blogosphere skeptics, of course. And let's not be too hard on the various pundits who merely used the story for rhetorical effect — there are few among us who haven't at one point swallowed an MSM story without question because it confirmed our worldview. Or for any number of other reasons, for that matter.

The reporters, on the other hand, had and continue to have a certain responsibility as reporters, and the most important question we should be leveling at them right now is this:

Why are you withholding this student's name?

I'm not especially fond of anonymice generally, but even though I think anonymity is granted to far too many sources for little or no reason and with little or no explanation, this is an especially heinous case.

Let's review: a 22-year-old lied to the media at first by proxy (through his professors, whom he misled for weeks if not months) and then in several interviews, and even after it was in the news he stood by that lie for almost a week. At least two professors, at least two journalists, and all those people who called his cell phone know his name. And yet, as the Boston Globe story noted: "The student was not identified in any reports."

Yes, I know you probably don't think it's important to go after some faceless twenty-something in Massachusetts who told a lie, in academia no less — who could have thought it would get out to the real world? — but the public was bamboozled, and accountability isn't just for high-level politicians.

An anonymous source who admits to fabricating nearly all of his story does not deserve protection. He deserves to be identified, so there is a public record of his uselessness as a source and that same public doesn't get fooled again. Even if he'll likely never talk to the press again, he deserves to be identified out of principle, because for playing the reporters, for playing us like that, he deserves public derision.

So what if he broke down when he found out he'd been caught in his own lies? He's certainly old enough to be held responsible for his actions. So his social circle already knows? Not good enough: this was a national story, so let's let the nation know, already.

At this point, the fact that releasing his name would lower the public's perception of this student is not sufficient grounds to hold it. He is in no credible danger from the newsreading public (the only ones, it appears, who are still out of the loop) and, what's more, he was the instigator of a fabrication perpetrated upon that public, a major player in a news story of his own concoction.