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The Web site, Free Whitewater, was launched last spring and takes aim at the "narrow-minded" leaders of the community of 14,000 about 45 miles southeast of Madison.
Its targets range from the aesthetics of Whitewater's main streets to a controversial roundup of suspected illegal immigrants at the Star Packaging plant.
"Adams" charges in his blog that Whitewater is run by "a small, obstinate, and poorly educated local elite" who are hostile toward the 10,000 students at UW-Whitewater and the region's growing Mexican-American population.
He is critical of the School District and other local officials, calling a former municipal judge who was convicted of lewd behavior last year a "vulgar laughingstock."
But much of his criticism is reserved for Whitewater's police chief, James Coan, whom the closeted critic accuses of misusing his position.
Case in point: Coan's use of city employees to try to unmask Adams — exposed in a series of posts on his blog earlier this month — that is part Keystone Cops and part challenge to Adams' constitutional rights.
According to Whitewater Police Department e-mails obtained by Adams under the state's open records law, Coan involved at least two detectives, the city's director of public works, its information technology officer and the city clerk — all working on city time and using taxpayer-funded resources — to find the identity of a man described as a "suspect" but who had not committed a crime.
Coan defended the "minimal" use of city resources, which he said was aimed at gauging "potential threats" from "someone who seems so extremely angry at me and with our department."
However, one man whom the chief erroneously accused of being the blogger said Coan never mentioned anything about a threat. Laird Scott and his wife, Mariann, a former Whitewater City Council member, said that during a Jan. 4 interview at their house, the chief repeatedly asked Scott to stop publishing the blog.
Coan denies he asked Scott to stop publishing and said the meeting was designed to "provide him with answers to his questions and concerns."
The push by the police to out the pseudonymous blogger is part of a trend of government and law enforcement "overreaching" their authority in response to legally protected criticism on the Internet, said Matt Zimmerman, an attorney at Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.
In December, his group successfully shielded an anonymous blogger in New Jersey from a subpoena seeking to uncover his identity. A judge quashed the subpoena, ruling the effort to unmask the blogger, who had criticized officials in the township of Manalapan, was "an unjust infringement on the blogger's First Amendment rights."
A 'radical'
In Whitewater, the effort to discover Adams' identity included examining his e-mails and Web site registration, running a license plate check on a man suspected of being Adams (he wasn't), and suggesting city officials conduct surveillance at the dedication of a restored historic landmark on the chance he might be there.
"I think it is someone we want to keep an eye on ...," Whitewater Police Detective Tina Winger wrote in an e-mail to Coan. "Seems like an anti-government radical to me."
The investigation culminated in a Jan. 4 visit from Coan and Whitewater Police Lt. Tim Gray to the home of Scott, whom Coan said afterward he was "99.9 percent convinced" was the blogger.
In fact, said Adams, who revealed his identity to the Wisconsin State Journal on condition of anonymity, the chief was "100 percent wrong."
Whitewater City Manager Kevin Brunner said he sees nothing wrong with city employees' attempts to expose Adams. He said the efforts took very little time and were aimed at seeking a dialogue with the blogger to address his complaints about the city.
"I think it was a very legitimate use of their time," Brunner said. "I think the impetus was to try to engage in some civil discourse with that person."
But Brunner, who is Whitewater's highest-ranking official, said he couldn't explain why the officials referred to the blogger in e-mails variously as a "suspect," "No. 1 suspect" or "person of interest."
He said he has instructed municipal employees to stop discussing and reading Free Whitewater while at work because the employees' actions have become "a source of contention for people."
Civil rights question
It could be more serious than that, civil rights experts say. The campaign by Whitewater officials to find and confront the blogger could have legal implications.
"It sounds like this individual may have a claim against the (police) department for a violation of his or her civil rights," said Christopher Ahmuty, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
The right to criticize government officials anonymously has long been protected in the United States, Ahmuty said. Launching a police investigation into an anonymous speaker's identity, he said, could be construed as an unconstitutional government effort to chill that speech.
"The case law is certainly strongly supportive of anonymous speech, so long as it isn't libelous ... or part of a criminal conspiracy," Ahmuty said.
Federal law also prohibits law enforcement from obtaining license plate registration information for non-law enforcement purposes. Coan said the license-plate search was legal since it involved an effort to assess the "threat" that the blogger posed and "other police-related reasons ... (that) I am not at liberty to discuss ... at this time."
Brunner defended the officials involved, saying: "They're good people. I think they just wanted to talk to this person. I don't think he (Coan) was trying to stifle anyone's freedom of speech."
But Scott said about three weeks after the police visit, he got an anonymous card addressed to "Mr. John Adams c/o Laird Scott" in the mail, wishing him a happy belated birthday. Scott said the card was unsettling because it accurately stated his birthday was a month earlier. He added that he believes the card was an attempt to intimidate him into silence, and he wondered how the card's author knew police suspected he was the blogger, John Adams.
Regarding the greeting card, Coan said he doesn't know "who would do such a thing," nor how many people believe Scott is the blogger.
He owns a pet
The real John Adams is a middle-age college-educated professional who likes to describe himself as a "citizen, resident, property owner, husband and parent." He does charitable and religious work in Whitewater, considers himself a Libertarian and owns at least one pet.
He asked not to be named because he wants to continue asserting his right to anonymous speech.
Adams said he chose his alias to honor the country's second president, whose anonymous newspaper columns helped galvanize public support for independence leading up to the Revolutionary War.
"I'm a common man following the example of uncommon men," said Adams, naming Thomas Paine, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay as leaders who criticized government under pen names.
"I believe it's fundamentally American. That's the very stuff of which we're made and from which we've sprung."
Adams said his goal is not to tear down his Walworth County community but to improve it. He continues to criticize Coan, whom he charges with failing to address serious problems within the police department.
That includes the actions of a now-retired police investigator whom a prosecutor said destroyed evidence and falsified the results of a search warrant while investigating a local businessman. Coan declined to say whether Larry Meyer was disciplined.
'It's broken'
Adams said he was chagrined to learn other Whitewater residents have gotten swept up in the probe, including Scott, a 68-year-old retired quality control manager who said he's had sleepless nights since Coan and Gray showed up at his house in January.
"I didn't even know that blog existed until the chief of police came to my house and accused me of operating it," said Scott, whose wife and son previously served on the Whitewater City Council. "He told me he knew I was John Adams. ... Their informers had told them I was a likely suspect."
Although Scott denied being the blogger, he said Coan didn't believe him and repeatedly asked the pony-tailed former Peace Corps volunteer to stop publishing the Web site, saying it was "torturing" him and his family.
Scott said he doesn't know who the blogger is, but he thinks he's wrong about one thing.
"John Adams wants to repair the city government," Scott said. "I think it's broken and can't be fixed."
Dee J. Hall is a reporter at the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison.
