The Internet has been put to some grisly uses by Iraqi kidnappers, but here’s a beneficial one. When Australian freelance journalist John Martinkus was captured outside his Baghdad hotel last Saturday, he had a hard time convincing his militant captors that he was on assignment for Australian public television and not the CIA.
The breakthrough came on Sunday, when a way to check Martinkus’ bona fides occurred to his four Sunni captors.
“They Googled him,” Mike Carey, executive producer at the Australian public television station employing Martinkus, said in a press interview. “They checked him out on a popular search engine and got onto his Web site, or his publisher’s Web site, and saw he was a writer and journalist.”
Asked if high-tech search capability saved Martinkus’ life, Carey said, “It certainly did help.”
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