When Benjamin Edelman was a Harvard sophomore, he earned $400 an hour as an expert witness for the National Football League against unauthorized Web broadcasting. As a senior, the American Civil Liberties Union paid him $300 an hour to oppose the government’s use of information filters in libraries.

Bloomberg’s John Hechinger has a report on what the school’s Associate Professor has been up to since graduating.

Now on the faculty of Harvard Business School, Edelman epitomizes a new breed of sleuths for hire, enforcing norms of online behavior.

Edelman is “an astonishing scholar of the Internet,” said Alvin Roth, a Nobel-prize winning economist, who was a mentor and colleague at Harvard Business School. “It’s the Wild West out there, and Ben is the sheriff.”

Edelman, a 33-year-old associate professor, mixes scholarship, lucrative consulting and a digital version of the 1960s-style activism of his family, including his aunt, Marian Wright Edelman, the civil-rights and children’s advocate. While he ferrets out misdeeds on the Internet, his multiple roles have put his own work under scrutiny.

“The Internet is what we make of it,” said Edelman, who arrived at his Ivy League office in jeans and sneakers this week after commuting by bicycle through Boston’s snowy streets. “We can shape it through diligence, by exposing the folks who are making it less good than it ought to be, like the neighborhood watch, or the busybody neighbor who yells at you when you throw your cigarette butt on the street.”

Unlike bloggers who have long formed a volunteer police force on the Internet, Edelman embarks on paid crusades that raise questions about whether he can remain objective in his academic roles as scholar and teacher.

In a move that elevated his profile in the stock market and prompted a dispute about his financial disclosures, he published a blog on Jan. 28 that accused Internet video and advertising purveyor Blinkx Plc of using hidden software to inflate traffic counts. His posting caused Blinkx shares to fall the most in the company’s history.

Blinkx responded to Edelman’s broadside with a statement saying the company “strongly refutes” his assertions and conclusions. Harvard pressed Edelman to say more about his clients, prompting him to disclose that they included two U.S. investors. Their names still aren’t known.

While taking on some giants, such as Google Inc. (GOOG) and Facebook Inc., Edelman has worked for others, including Microsoft Corp. Google has said that he’s biased and hasn’t been forthright enough in disclosing that he’s a paid consultant to Microsoft.