It was a year of soul searching at THREAT LEVEL, every day a fresh challenge to our fundamental beliefs and convictions: Alberto Gonzales made us pine for John Ashcroft; Google made us love roving surveillance cams; and Jammie Thomas' internet spoofing defense was enough to make us secretly root for the RIAA.

If you missed any of it, not to fear: here's the year-end wrap up that will push your personal threat level to code orange.

One of the things singled out in Threat Level's Year in Review was, as expected, Virgil and his WikiScanner.

Readers also carried the water when graduate student Virgil Griffith released WikiScanner, a web tool that mashes up whois IP records with Wikipedia logs to unmask corporations and government agencies making anonymous changes to Wikipedia. Readers found hundreds of self-serving edits and revisionist cuts by the likes of Diebold, Dow Chemical and ExxonMobil -- the latter tweaked the entry on the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill to whitewash the effect on Alaskan wildlife.

For many of us, this will also be remembered as the year Virgil set the bar really fucking high for cool. Billy wrote a book which has been released to wide critical acclaim, but Virgil was on the Colbert Report. Elonka hasn't been on the Colbert Report. Mike's shenanigans didn't make the Daily Show.

It's going to be hard to top. I think the smart money is on Cyan..