State child welfare officials are concerned about a new threat to their hold on sensitive information: the Internet.

Florida child welfare administrators have had little tolerance for investigators and caseworkers who air the agency's dirty laundry in public. In recent years, department chiefs have launched several investigations to determine who leaked records to reporters.

But with recent seismic changes to the media, Department of Children & Families administrators have found they now have a new enemy: websites and blogs in which agency employees can post sensitive information directly, without even speaking to a reporter.

The top DCF administrator in Lee County, Harriet ''Cookie'' Coleman -- who is a former Miami-Dade Police major -- recently launched an inspector general investigation to identify the employee who had posted comments on a Fort Myers newspaper website that reported on the death of a Cape Coral child with a long DCF history.

''Some of the blog comments appeared to contain information from someone having specific knowledge about the current protective investigation [into the child's death] and/or previous investigations that had been conducted on the family,'' the inspector general report said.

Erin Geraghty, a DCF spokeswoman in Tallahassee, said the proliferation of websites, blogs and comment sections is a challenge to the agency, which is struggling to strike a balance between Secretary Bob Butterworth's desire for greater transparency and the need to protect the privacy of agency clients.

''We have . . . already revised both our privacy/confidentiality training and our separate open government training to complement one another and clearly explain the importance of respecting protected information and our obligation to maintain privacy,'' Geraghty said.

Kelly McBride, an ethics instructor at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, said she expects ``stuff like this will come up more and more.''

''People think they are being completely anonymous, hiding behind screen names of their own creation, but they are not as protected as they think they are,'' McBride said.

Though most newspaper websites allow readers to post comments without using their real names, moderators or producers usually can identify at least an e-mail or IP address for each poster. That's why most media sites do not promise readers that their identities will be protected if a law enforcement or regulatory authority asks questions.

''I don't think newspapers have made any promises of confidentiality'' to readers who post comments, McBride said. ``I don't think a shield law, if there was one, would apply in this case.''

On Feb. 21, The News Press in Fort Myers reported that 6-year-old Joshua Jenkins had been savagely beaten to death -- allegedly by his stepfather -- after DCF investigators had essentially ignored three reports to the state's abuse hot line that the boy had been injured in prior beatings.

Joshua's stepfather, Phillipe Gayle, 26, has been charged with first-degree murder.

The story was posted on the newspaper's website, which also allowed readers to comment on the article. According to the inspector general's report, some of the comments posted to the site appeared to originate with a caseworker or investigator with detailed inside knowledge of the case.

Reacting to the comments, Coleman asked for an audit of the state's child welfare computer system, called Florida Safe Families Network, or FSFN, to identify department or contract employees who had inappropriately accessed reports on Joshua and his family, the inspector general's report says. Coleman identified seven people who had access to the records.

''Ms. Coleman then notified the [inspector general] and requested an investigation to determine if the seven individuals had a legitimate business reason for accessing the intake report and/or the FSFN case,'' the report said.

At least one of the DCF employees who read details of the case on the agency's computer said she reviewed the case after Joshua died as a training tool to learn from the mistakes of other investigators -- an action that was confirmed by two of her bosses. Using such cases as a training tool has been discontinued, the report said.

The inspector general investigation failed to identify the employee who posted confidential information, and the case was closed with no action.

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