by Datechguy | June 2nd, 2011
Last night on Twitter the fights were fast and furious. Tommy Christopher vs Lee Stranaham, Ace of Spades vs Lee Stranaham and a cast of dozens all with interesting theories with drama added by the silence of Partiotusa76 (no tweets in over 24 hours), even more interesting is the slight suggestion in Lee’s latest post that “Dan Wolfe” might not be a man, (That would explain why he was communicating only via e-mail and declined my request to speak on the phone) and that the Rep KNOWS both who and how the tweet was sent.
With the Potential of a tornado hitting Fitchburg I was a tad distracted from this entire business but I’ve had a night to sleep on it.
In terms of the story, I still maintain the most significant piece is the twitter follow pattern (could a “jilted” woman follower have decided to highlight this unnoticed fact.
But anyway. Although I find Lee’s theory possible, here is where I think the hole is:
For the tweet to have come from Patroitusa76 AND deleted by Weiner in the sequence
1. Patriot76USA He (she) would have needed to know about the Yfrog tweet vulnerability/feature
2. … would have had to have the exact code necessary to exploit that vulnerability/feature
3. … would have had to have access of a picture that Anthony Weiner will not deny is his…stuff
4 and over a memorial day weekend Anthony Weiner would have to be monitoring his twitter account, notice it at once and delete it within seconds.
For the tweet to have come from Rep Weiner he would have had to :
1. … hit the wrong character when sending a tweet.
2. … realize it and delete it
Which one would seem more likely?
Lee’s big question is how does “patriotusa76″ KNOW the image is deleted within 1-5 secs.
But consider, on the left side of the aisle there are organizations paid to monitor everything said and done by leaders and up and coming pols on the right. Why would it be odd that an admitted opponent would be determined to nail him a tab open with Wiener’s twitter feed? The number of clicks necessary to capture the tweet and the deletes are minimal.
But to me the clincher is this: For Lee’s theory to be right Patriotusa76 needs to be either 1. Convinced that Anthony Weiner will not go to the law. 2. Willing to deal with the consequences of Weiner going to the law in order to expose his odd twitter and photo patterns (a jilted female follower?)
Think about that and ask yourself. What pol do you disagree with so much that you would risk going to jail to embarrass?
There are enough oddities (Patriots silence and Weiner’s unwillingness to go after a political opponent) that I think Lee should keep on this track to see if there is some THERE there, but until we have more I have to consider it the “B” possibility. After all Stacy dogged the Bill Sparkman case and found it was not what many thought. Then again that came after an investigation by law enforcement….
…an investigation that Anthony Weiner, to this point, will not allow.
Update Next week on CSI Twitter, The hunt for Patriotusa76?
Update 2: Not quite as strange as a certain tweet up a very strange post. I wouldn’t have traded 4 hours of my life for that for any amount of resulting hits.
I think my previous comment had a typo in the email address.
You wrote:
For the tweet to have come from Rep Weiner he would have had to :
1. … hit the wrong character when sending a tweet.
2. … realize it and delete it
That way is unlikely. He’d have to do it on purpose without realizing what he was doing, a highh level mental lapse. More likely in fact is the way it was propoised it could have been hacked except that that’s what Weiner did.
There are many mysteries here.
Here is a proposed timeline
-4. Weiner announces on Twitter he is leaving for 30 Rockefeller Plaza to be on the Rachel Maddow show, where he is a frequent guest. The show starts at 9 PM. Which isn’t exactly 5:45 in Seattle, as he states in the tweet, but that’s his idea of a joke. His hashtags
frequently are supposed-to-be-one-step-or-two-away-from-the-truth jokes.
-3. Weiner doesn’t actually leave right away, but sticks around to see the beginning of Game 7 of the semi-final to the Stanley Cup
playoffs between the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Boston Bruins,
and start his Tivo recording the game. The game (or rather the show) starts at 8 PM. He won’t be able to watch it live if he wants to be on the Rachel Maddow show, and he doesn’t want to miss an
opportunity to go on the show. He plans to see it all upon his
return home, so he probably doesn’t even try to sneak a few
minutes while he’s waiting, and besides that didn’t work too well
on April 13 when he was on The Last Word. Tivoing the whole game is a better idea.
Before he goes, he sees something on his computer from Twitter and replies with exaggerated thanks and then he leaves after 8:07 PM.
-2. Weiner goes to NBC, is on the air, leaves, and goes home. Although Versus is also owned by NBC, and is a sister channel of MSNBC, that is not much help to him. He can’t really see anything while he’s there.
-1. Weiner arrives back home, just about as the game is ending but the cablecast is still going on, and it looks like the game was
very interesting and exciting. Tivo is still recording and it looks like this will go on for another 15 minutes. Tivo has a feature called “trick play” which allows the viewer to pause live television, and go back – but you can only go back half an hour and AW wants to go back to the beginning of the game. He can’t, and then maybe he tries to stop the recording, but he botches things up in such a way so that he loses the entire show. Now the hockey game he recorded is not there anymore.
Frustrated by not being able to see the hockey game, he turns his attention away to other things, and…. [We need some special melodramatic music here.]
0. Weiner now gets the idea for another Twitter joke. He’ll take one of the pictures he made for Meagan Broussard, crop it a bit, and upload it to Yfrog, where it will sit, ready for an instant reply, in case Genette Nicole Cordova mentions (again?) that he needs a
better avatar – i.e. it shouldn’t be his picture when he was 13
years old. He will then quickly shoot that picture over to her as an
alternative avatar. The tweet will be somewhat like tweet number 310 on the list of AW’s tweets counting backwards from June 2, only it will be sent as a DM. The idea is a sort of a play on words on the meaning of the word “weiner”
1. Weiner uploads the picture to Yfrog from his desktop, where he is not logged in to Yfrog because *that* computer doesn’t remember his password and neither is it in his head, or perhaps the log-in is automatic when it is done from his blackberry. Yfrog creates an URL for the picture, but does not store the URL on its site, but instead emits it as a tweet that mentions Gennette, because he put @GenetteNicole on the subject line of the e-mail he sent to Yfrog. (Or perhaps it is actually Tweetdeck that issues the tweet which is also copied to Yfrog. This needs further investigation)
2. Weiner goes onto Twitter and tweets about his missing hockey
game. (This means he can’t comment about the play of the game
like he wanted to.)
“just kill me now” tweets Weiner. [Ominous music needed here]
3. “Dan Wolfe” notices the tweet, and checks to see what it is. At least ten minutes have gone by since the tweet. Dan Wolfe does not want to alert AW to the tweet – and/or to the fact that it is a problem. “Dan Wolfe” reasons that Weiner clearly hasn’t noticed anything wrong yet, or else he’d have aleady deleted the tweet, so the chances that he would realize it within the next few minutes are small, so there probably is some time to do other things first, and he screencaps everything related to the tweet that he can find.
When he is finished…
He does not make an official retweet because he knows that doing so would mean that his retweet would disappear whenever Weiner deletes his original tweet. Dan Wolfe knows much more about twitter works than the average person. If he didn’t he never would have even seen the tweet in the first place! Tweets that start with @mention were never ordinarily shown to anybody who doesn’t follow both the sender and the addressee.
See http://tinyurl.com/2e8jhz7.
Dan Wolfe said he didn’t follow Repweiner and probably in fact didn’t because he doesn’t want Weiner to know. But he is in fact following him. He has a window on AW’s twitter page, which is one way of seeing such tweets (searching is another)
4. Dan Wolfe makes a manual retweet and includes @weiner in it. It is now safe to alert AW. (The @weiner is there to alert other people *about* Weiner, not to alert Anthony Weiner himself.)
5. Weiner’s Tweetdeck program shows him the tweet and he clicks on it, sees the picture and is shocked to see it there.
6. Weiner drops what he is doing, and deletes the tweet, thinking that that deletes the picture too, and then tries to log into Yfrog
because he realizes all hosted pictures are public – all you need
is the URL, of course. It’s meant to be shared. He doesn’t remember, or never even really knew, the name Yfrog, and he doesn’t remember the password, but he knows the type of thing it is and sort of how to get there.
He hardly knows what he is doing. He has trouble getting in, or finding the place. But he manages to get in anyway after a while.
(There’s a way to do it. If he’s logged into Facebook or Twitter
or something he can transit over to Yfrog. It could be he went
through Facebook. Before, when he uploaded the picture, he hadn’t been logged into anything but probably had some sort of a macro to do it.)
AW deletes the tweeted picture, kind of surprised he has to do it all over again, then looks for other bad pictures on Yfrog and
deletes them too.
(Dan Wolfe and company, of course, had had all these pictures back on May 5, but he didn’t know who they were for, and wanted to find the identity of the mistress he presumes AW has and get more evidence. Keeping the fact that they had had a lot of pictures all along a secret later becomes a big priority to him. He mostly succeeds.)
7. Finished, Weiner attempts to find out about what happened in
the hockey game by watching the post game show. He doesn’t get
much information. It tantalizes him more than it informs him.
There’s not much he can get a full sense of, beyond the fact,
of course, that the Bolts lost the game by one goal scored verey late in the game.
8. First BigJournalism story goes up at 12:21 and 12:24. It
mentions the Yfrog picture is gone – and claims the whole
account was closed, which it wasn’t, and claims all the photos
were gone by 11 PM eastern, which is actually before the
original tweet! It does not mention any claim by Weiner to
having been hacked – he hadn’t made it yet by 12:20 am.
9. At 12:30 am AW begins tweeting what he can about hockey, which isn’t much. This is merely an occasional tweet in between
doing other things, as are, really, most of his tweets. It’s
mostly about the fact he didn’t get to see the game. In one of
these very late night tweets he alludes to previous hockey tweets.
In particular he thinks of the predictions he made, like in Weiner
tweet number 129, way back on April 19 before the Stanley cup playoffs started. (Hockey, like basketball, has fewer games in the regular season than baseball, and a very extended playoff schedule. The playoffs last about one third of the length of time of the regular season and include more than half of all the teams – 16 out of 30.)
At 12:54 AM, in his third post-midnight tweet, he tweets again
about his Tivo not working (although it’s more likely he just
botched it up, not that it’s entirely his fault, because systems
should be made idiot-proof, and he wasn’t even that much of am
idiot.) This time he also includes in the tweet a mention about his
Facebook being hacked, which is probably the best idea he has for
what happened.
That is his last tweet of the evening.
10. Dan is tweeting online to everyone he can think of, and calling
the image X-rated, which it isn’t exactly, and includes in his
tweets and retweets some online journalists. He sends Dana Loesch, Breitbart’s editor, several pictures including some that really are X-rated. Dana Loesch says these are the same pictures she has and that’s very weird. (because she has them from a totally different source, not screencaps)
Dan decides he had better start covering things up. AW is not aware that there is a problem. And, in fact, it isn’t a problem until late the next afternoon. AW finally mentions it again at 5:08 PM.
Sammy Isn’t months after Weinergate is over, after the congressman has fessed up and just before the special election in the district a tad late for commentary on this?
The tweet was apparently confirmed by Tweet Congress, which archives all tweets sent by members of Congress, and this is supoposed to the source of teh screencap that BigJournalism had.
Also Weiner never tgried to deny that a tweet had been sent.
The exact timing is another problem, as is the timinbg of Patriot’s retweet
>> For the tweet to have come from Rep Weiner he would have had to : 1. … hit the wrong character when sending a tweet.
Now wait a second. Actually he would have had to type
@GenetteNicole instead of DM GenetteNicole. There’s not just a misisng D or M. This is one place wheer all theories are wrong.
I am very very confused. I have a question. I am also rude and won’t be back here to check the answer.
How do we know that the alleged tweet was ever on twitter ? As far as I know (obviously not very far) the only evidence is a *.jpg which is alleged to be a screen capture.
My preferred explanation of all of the data is that Patriot76usa photoshopped that alleged screen capture, that neither he nor Weiner tweeted the link. That the alleged tweet was never a tweet.
The implausible 1 to 5 seconds would be an explanation of why no one else saw the tweet there is no need to explain how Weiner (or his staff) managed to get the tweet off of twitter so fast if it was never on twitter.
The alleged Yfrog screen capture has been discussed. I have read (somewhere on the web) a confident claim that it was photoshopped made by someone who explained what sounds like evidence and claims expertise (you know somewhere on the web).
But the claim that the alleged tweet was indeed a tweet and isn’t a photoshopped image passed off as a twitter feed screen capture isn’t even being discussed.
One possible explanation is that Weiner said his facebook account was hacked. Weiner’s defenders seem determined to argue that he is not only non-lewd but also tech savvy (they even argue that he wrote “facebook,” because hacking the facebook account was a step towards hacking the twitter account for some reason).
What if the first he learned of the alleged tweet and alleged YFrog hosting of the photo cam from biggovernment.com ?
It seems to me that the idea that either Patriot75USA is telling the truth or something was hacked follows very logically from Weiner’s stated guess of what happened. But why assume that he must know what happened (so his hypothesis is true or he is lying) ? I mean he’s looks very geeky but he is a congressman not a technopunk.
Robert, I don’t blame you, Considering the Patriotusa76 source those are fair questions however that a tweet was sent from the congressman’s account has not been in dispute, even by the congressman and his staff (thus the “hacked” statement up front.
What makes your suggestion less likely is the repeated statement of authorities who say they can crack this case in 5-15 minutes if the congressman will just allow an investigation. If this was a hack particularly by an obsessed foe (which admittedly Mr. Patriot76usa seems to be) I would think that would be a no brainer.
I think a lot of folks on the left are investing an awful lot in the idea that there is more to this than a foolish congressman and an obsessed foe who with nothing better to do that to watch his accounts.
They will likely be very disappointed.