Interdictor (Blogger)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources.
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. (help, get involved!)
This article has been tagged since February 2007.

Interdictor is the name of a LiveJournal Blog that documented the Effect of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans during and following the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina. It is operated by Michael Barnett, who was an employee Directnic.com, an internet services company on the 10th and 11th floors of an office building in downtown New Orleans at 650 Poydras Avenue, which they refer to as "Outpost Crystal" (after The Interdictor's fiancee, Crystal Coleman). In the early aftermath of the hurricane and flooding, it was one of the few reliable communications links between downtown New Orleans and the rest of the world, as they maintained an internet link to the rest of the world.^{[citation needed]}

Operating on a diesel generator when power was lost in New Orleans, while providing telecommunications links to the rest of the world, they provided a continuous stream of reports of what was actually happening, and through webcams, live video feeds, and thousands of high resolution pictures gave the rest of the world a chance to see the looting and destruction firsthand before the rest of the media was able to arrive on the scene.^{[citation needed]} Through internet relay chat and instant messenger they kept in constant contact with the outside world. The coverage provided by Interdictor was respected as a reasonably neutral and unbiased coverage from a firsthand source on the scene.^{[citation needed]}

The Interdictor blog quickly became a widely recognized and cited source from inside New Orleans. Sources such as CNN even read directly from the blog on the air, putting its contents on-screen.^{[citation needed]} Even after the media arrived, the Interdictor blog was still commonly cited as a reference to the events ongoing in New Orleans. When a police-enforced evacuation of New Orleans was ordered by Mayor Ray Nagin, the keepers of the Interdictor blog were exempted from the mandatory evacuation.^{[citation needed]}

Currently the blog is used by Barnett to discuss issues related to New Orleans specifically and politics generally. It has a distinctly libertarian slant as Barnett is a self-described Austrian School economist and a libertarian.^{[citation needed]}