While Whitewater is still buzzing with the mystery of who "John Adams" really is, one of the city's new City Council members has put one question to rest: Yes, Whitewater does support the right of citizens to criticize the government anonymously.

At his first council meeting in April, Lynn Binnie announced that he planned to introduce a resolution reaffirming guarantees under the law and the U.S. and Wisconsin constitutions that Whitewater residents have the right to anonymous free speech. At his second meeting on May 6, the resolution passed on a 5-2 vote.

Binnie, manager of a Whitewater retirement community, said he believed the reaffirmation was important in light of the investigation that Whitewater police and city officials conducted during late 2007 and earlier this year into the identity of the pseudonymous blogger "John Adams." author of the Free Whitewater blog.

City e-mails collected by Adams under the state's open-records law revealed that officials spent months trading messages, searching databases, making phone calls and conducting a small amount of surveillance — all on city time — to unmask him. On Jan. 4, Police Chief James Coan and Lt. Tim Gray confronted a person they thought was the blogger at his Whitewater home. They were wrong.

Coan defended the probe, saying it was intended to assess "potential threats" from "someone who seems so extremely angry at me and with our department." However, City Manager Kevin Brunner said he had instructed staffers to stop reading or talking about the blog on work time.

The controversy was the subject of a March 16 story in the Wisconsin State Journal, which guarded Adams' anonymity to allow him to continue asserting his right to be a closeted critic of Whitewater, a city of 14,000 about 45 miles southeast of Madison.

Binnie said he sponsored the resolution because the council had never discussed the issue, and he wanted residents to "be assured that we support the constitutional rights to free expression." The resolution said the council "calls on all public officials and public employees to respect and promote the right of all citizens to legally express their opinions whether credited, anonymous or pseudonymous, freely and without fear of discrimination or reprisal."

The resolution also directed Brunner and Coan to communicate that expectation to all city employees.

Adams said he was surprised and pleased to see the council tackle the issue. He said anonymous criticism of government has a long tradition in America, including former President James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, who criticized the government under pen names.

"Obviously, I support the wording of the resolution and what it says about our American legal tradition," he said.

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