I mentioned FleetAdmiralJ in my previous post about Daily Kos – and I will stand by my statement that he’s the LEAST crazy person on DailyKos. Bear that in mind as you read his theory on how #Weinergate went down…from the comments on this post.
…this is my working theory, partly based on the available evidence, partly speculation:
At some point - perhaps as long as 2 or 3 weeks ago, @patriotusa76 was able to gain access to Rep. Weiner’s social media accounts. Whether this was through luck, phishing, or social engineering, I don’t know (though my guess would be one of the latter two).
He then formulated a plan to frame Rep. Weiner, and started posting things suggesting that Rep. Weiner would soon be caught in some sort of sex scandal.
Then Friday night - either because that was the planned date or he had some certain set of circumstances he wanted to be met when he did the operation which were met - he logged on to Rep. Weiner’s yfrog account and uploaded the photo, and then logged into twitter (and possibly facebook) and posted a tweet to the image he posted.
@patriotusa76 then immediately deleted the tweet to make it look like Rep. Weiner was trying to DM it but accidentally sent it public and deleted it, but left the yfrog image in hopes that other people would see it.
However, he deleted it so fast that almost no one else saw the tweet. However, he, being the perpetrator, had the text of the tweet he sent and started RTing it. It’s possible this deletion was done both to lend credence to the argument that Weiner "noticed his mistake" and deleted it AND to give @patriotusa76 near exclusive coverage of the incident on twitter.
At some point - perhaps even before sending out the tweet - @patriotusa76 took a screenshot of the yfrog page as "evidence."
then about a half hour later, someone (probably Rep. Weiner) cleared out his yfrog account.
Weiner had also posted at some point that his Facebook had been hacked, which suggests that either something was posted on Facebook as well or that was the method through which someone gained access to twitter and yfrog.
Now for MY alternative theory partly based on the available evidence, partly speculation…
A Congressman made a mistake when he tried to message a picture to a girl he knew.
.
But who’s to say?
LMAO!!!
I hope they keep at it! Makes this whole thing even more hysterical!
He forgot the part where @patriotusa76 was actually born in Kenya and that he hatched the plan while sitting on a grassy knoll & drinking a bottle of fluoride injected water that also contained nanobots which track his every move and that will be used to prove he is the hacker.
And what of the EXIF data not matching in the hacked photo compared to known photos from weiner’s yfrog account? How does that fit into your theory?
Whose? That doesn’t fit either theory — all this planning, and they fuck that up?
Hacking by crack or guesswork doesn’t really require additional technical skills, tweaking EXIF data does. It’s also not the sort of thing one would think to change unless they’d changed it before.
The EXIF data not matching certainly lends credence to Weiner’s claim the account was hacked, if not the EXIF data would have matched EXIF data from other photos from the yfrog account. It doesn’t.
That data means nothing and even mediaite says it means nothing. 1. that data can be edited. 2. the info came from a cache not the original. 3. doesn’t take into account that the photo may have been taken by a different phone (personal instead of govt) 4. The sample is only a couple pictures, hardly enough to conclude anything 5. it could be an old photo/ not even him- neither precludes him from having sent it 6. this investigation was actually started by people trying to prove they DID match 7. even if they DID match it would not prove he actually sent it for all the reasons mentioned above.
It was an avenue people were exploring to prove one way or the other but I have yet to see that its reliable, and as I’ve said even if the data matched perfectly I wouldn’t take it as gospel that he took it. To much room for error.
About this — 5. it could be an old photo/ not even him- neither precludes him from having sent it
Weiner’s spokesman said Weiner doesn’t own the pic and that he didn’t take it…
A weird specific claim
@Jeremy But why would you edit out the EXIF data that proves Weiner posted it? Patriot76 provided the zip files and claims he didn’t touch them.
@Lee, I don’t understand you guys. Half of you are howling that he wasn’t specific enough in his denial, the other half are now howling he is too specific?
Even an old photo, not even him would have full EXIF data if someone else took it, it doesn’t. It has a bunch of missing EXIF data suggesting someone did edit it but didn’t quite do a good job.
would everyone get off the back of patroitusa76? please! he has answered all questions and provided his cached data for the photo. what everyone needs to be asking is why hasn’t congressman weiner demanded an investigation into the person who attempted to destroy his political career? patriotusa76 is still tweeting, has not been contacted by any LEO, and has welcomed an investigation. plus, neither gennette nor congressman weiner have been willing to explain the #thats545inseattletime hashtag tweeted by weiner and then retweeted by gennette. this thing has all played out on twitter. anyone who wants to see how this all unfolded, both before and after the story broke, out only needs to spend the time reading the tweets.