Congressman Weiner's inappropriate tweet

sarge said:
So...

1. It has been demonstrated that it is entirely possible to "hack" the accounts and post a picture so that it appears a photo has been sent from an account?
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In general, no.

2. The person that received the photo says that the message containing the photo did not come from the Congressmoron
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No she didn't. I keep seeing this claim, but it's simply not true. She said that she assumed he didn't send it, but she never claimed to know that he didn't. Why would she, and why would we even care if she did? She has no access to any more information about the sender than the rest of us.

3. Both the recipient and alledged sender deny that they have ever met.
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I don't see anyone claiming otherwise.

4. The person that first noticed the photo is on record as having predicted an embarrasing situation about two weeks before the photo was sent?
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Apparently. Because another girl lied to him:
"A high school friend of Betty’s, whom I will call Veronica (she’s a minor), was also contacted, via Twitter, by a member of the group, Mike Stack (@goatsred). For personal reasons I won’t go into, Veronica saw a means of getting attention, and agreed to follow @Goatsred so that they could speak privately. She told him that she and Betty had incriminating Direct Messages from Rep. Weiner, a claim she now admits was false, and which she made without Betty’s knowledge.

In fact, she was simultaneously telling Betty that @Goatsred had tried to induce her to lie about Rep. Wiener, and to enlist Betty in the plot. Veronica now admits this was also false. Yes, @goatsred did contact her, and she did feed him false information about Rep. Weiner, but this was not at his urging."
 
sarge said:
5. The sum total of the "evidence" against the congressass is that "He didn't react the way I think he should have"?
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No. Unless a security analysis can show otherwise, the evidence is that Wiener sent the photo and the critique of his handling of the event comes from a wide spectrum of people from both sides of the aisle as well as outside of politics.
 
Ziggurat said:
Only if Weiner had enabled posting from yfrog, as that previous link details. Without granting such permission (and Weiner had no apparent reason to, and hasn't indicated that he did), such an exploit is not possible.
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There's at least one instance of a previous tweet containing a yfrog image url on Weiner's account being tagged as being "from yfrog". It happened on 2/25/11. Every single other time Weiner tweeted a yfrog URL, they were tagged as coming from "Twitter on Blackberry".

Now, the blogger's claim is that because he uses an app that logs into yfrog separately, loads an image, gets the yfrog url for that image, then separately logs into Twitter and posts a tweet with that url, then that's how Weiner did it and therefore the exploit wouldn't work.

The problems with that are a) Weiner has never used the application the blogger said could do that to load an image to yfrog. He was posting from his Blackberry, and that application is not available for Blackberry. Now, it's possible that "Twitter for Blackberry" can do that, but that brings us to b) the "from yfrog" tweet.

The only way yfrog could have posted a tweet on Weiner's account is if yfrog had permission to do that. And if yfrog had permission to do that, then Weiner was vulnerable to the exploit.
 
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This whole affair reminds me of a story I once heard. The story was originally attributed to a 20th century president, but since I have no idea whether the story is true, I won't mention his name.

The story:
A polititcian in the midst of a campaign sugests to an aide that they start a rumor that is opponent uh, has relations with pigs. The aide says, "We can't prove that."

The politician says, "We don't have to prove it. We just have to get him to deny it."

It seems to me that it's very likely that Weiner didn't send that tweet. Unfortunately, he has handled the situation so badly that he might as well have sent it. He would have been much better off to respond to all questions with "No comment", or "This is a private matter", than to respond as he did.
 
I Am The Scum said:
Like I said, it's extremely speculative. I don't actually believe that the above scenario is true, because I don't have any good evidence to back it up. However, this is the only way I can really tie it all together.
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I'll give you another scenario, one which DOES have some evidence to back it up.

Weiner is a perv. He chooses to follow an inordinate number of young attractive women. The only benefit to following these women is that it allows private messages to be sent between them.

Some critics (@patriotusa76 and @goatsred) who are obsessed with Weiner notice that he's a perv who keeps following attractive young women. They suspect a scandal is lurking in there somewhere, because let's face it, for a congressman to be following lots of young attractive girls IS pervy (and it's not exactly the only evidence to that effect).

So they start contacting these women, hoping to flush out such a scandal. One girl decides to bait them with claims of incriminating private messages, the exact sort of evidence that these guys suspect must be out there somewhere. They jump the gun and announce that a scandal is brewing, even though it's fake.

But then Weiner DOES do something pervy when he tries to send a private message to one of those young women. But it's a different woman, and the message is accidentally made public. And @patriotusa76 stumbles upon it.

No grand conspiracy involved. Only one attention-seeking girl who lied, some obsessive critics who took the bait on a fake scandal before stumbling upon a real one, and one pervy congressman.
 
Ziggurat said:
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No grand conspiracy involved. Only one attention-seeking girl who lied, some obsessive critics who took the bait on a fake scandal before stumbling upon a real one, and one pervy congressman.
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Buffy: "So, how does the water buffalo fit in again?"
 
sarge said:
2. The person that received the photo says that the message containing the photo did not come from the Congressmoron, but came instead from someone the recipient recognizes as having harrased her in the past?
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Weiner himself says that the tweet in question came from his account, and that he quickly erased it. What the coed was talking about was that she received a subsequent retweet from the "harasser" and that the retweet included a link to the screencap of the photo.

Some of you folks don't seem to think it's necessary to get up to speed on this story before lecturing those of us who have been following it since last weekend. Honestly, if the answer was this simple, the media would have recognized it and the story would be dead.
 
Ziggurat said:
But then Weiner DOES do something pervy when he tries to send a private message to one of those young women. But it's a different woman, and the message is accidentally made public. And @patriotusa76 stumbles upon it.

No grand conspiracy involved. Only one attention-seeking girl who lied, some obsessive critics who took the bait on a fake scandal before stumbling upon a real one, and one pervy congressman.
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But why wouldn't Wolfe just say so? Wouldn't you agree that Wolfe's e-mails are extremely strange for someone who just happened to stumble upon Weiner being a perv?
 
I Am The Scum said:
But why wouldn't Wolfe just say so? Wouldn't you agree that Wolfe's e-mails are extremely strange for someone who just happened to stumble upon Weiner being a perv?
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Yes, it's strange. Wolfe appears to be a strange guy. Maybe even paranoid. But I'm not sure it's really relevant how big a weirdo he is.
 
ZirconBlue said:
I must have missed that one. How many "young attractive women" does he follow?
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Here is a list of the people Weiner follows. I don't see a huge number of obvious women; offhand, I'd wager that I follow more "young attractive women" than he does. However, I don't know what Ziggurat's definition of "inordinate" might be.
 
By the way, for those still appealing to Cordova's statement to exonerate Weiner, that strategy was clearly a mistake.
 
Ziggurat said:
In general, no.



No she didn't. I keep seeing this claim, but it's simply not true. She said that she assumed he didn't send it, but she never claimed to know that he didn't. Why would she, and why would we even care if she did? She has no access to any more information about the sender than the rest of us.



I don't see anyone claiming otherwise.



Apparently. Because another girl lied to him:
"A high school friend of Betty’s, whom I will call Veronica (she’s a minor), was also contacted, via Twitter, by a member of the group, Mike Stack (@goatsred). For personal reasons I won’t go into, Veronica saw a means of getting attention, and agreed to follow @Goatsred so that they could speak privately. She told him that she and Betty had incriminating Direct Messages from Rep. Weiner, a claim she now admits was false, and which she made without Betty’s knowledge.

In fact, she was simultaneously telling Betty that @Goatsred had tried to induce her to lie about Rep. Wiener, and to enlist Betty in the plot. Veronica now admits this was also false. Yes, @goatsred did contact her, and she did feed him false information about Rep. Weiner, but this was not at his urging."
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Yeesh, after reading that post at Mediaite, I have to say that Stack and Wolfe come off as scumbags. Still, as I said when Ben Domenech was caught for plagiarism, you can yell witch-hunt right up until the point when a witch is caught, after that it's just a distraction.

It certainly does explain why Wolfe was so worried about his wife's lawyer getting a hold of this information.
 
Brainster said:
No particular surprise, the answer lies in the part you forgot to quote:



Not sure why they'd be able to use a phone call with him recorded on it, but the guy definitely comes off as paranoid when you add the bit about him being worried about Clinton's connections.

This story is not about Dan Wolfe, and it's not about Breitbart, no matter how many times you try to shift the focus.
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It's 100% absolutely about Breitbart and Wolfe. This is the source of the story. Why is Breitbart calling him out and posting private email exchanges? This is the same pattern that played out with Sherrod: Breitbart posts the video, tweets his gleeful outing of a racist in Obama's administration. It's revealed that the whole thing was the result of malicious editing, Breitbart whines, "that's how I got the video, it wasn't my fault." At some point you guys are going to have to wise up to his methods.

If Wolfe's story is, "I found the tweet and sent it to you," why is he afraid to talk on the phone? Why does he claim to have more revealing photos of Weiner? Why did he brag that Breitbart had revealing photos of Weiner some weeks before this story broke?

The answers to those questions are what he doesn't want recorded.
 
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Ziggurat said:
By the way, for those still appealing to Cordova's statement to exonerate Weiner, that strategy was clearly a mistake.
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Cordova's statement absolutely exonerates Weiner in so far as any claims of an affair are concerned.

If he meant it to go to a porn star, so? Is that illegal or even immoral? Can you say with certainty that he and his wife don't do this sort of thing for fun, and if they did, what's the problem?

Once again we've arrived at the point where we assume the charges are true and left wondering why anyone cares.

But he lied, what about the children!?! Weiner being confused about how and why a private message intended to one person ended up addressed to another and was made public could explain why he thought he was hacked or pranked. There's absolutely no evidence of anything sinister even if the worst case scenario from the Weiner-obsessed is granted.
 
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ZirconBlue said:
I must have missed that one. How many "young attractive women" does he follow?
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Here's a list of women he was following:
http://m.ibtimes.com/anthony-weiner-twitter-women-gennette-155828.html

By the way, I keep seeing two numbers for how many accounts he follows: 198 and 91. The latter is the number he's currently following. The former was the number he was following back in mid-April. I can't find a definitive answer about how many he was following when the tweet in question was sent. But of course, that's not the number of people he follows, since some of those (like HuffPostPol) are news feeds, not people.
 
Ziggurat said:
Here's a list of women he was following:
http://m.ibtimes.com/anthony-weiner-twitter-women-gennette-155828.html
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26 out of 198? Great. Out of the 223 feeds I follow, 61 of them are women. Which is more "inordinate?"

By the way, I keep seeing two numbers for how many accounts he follows: 198 and 91. The latter is the number he's currently following.
The former was the number he was following back in mid-April.
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No, it isn't. He currently follows 198 feeds.
 
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Cleon said:
26 out of 198? Great. Out of the 223 feeds I follow, 61 of them are women. Which is more "inordinate?"
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That list is not all the women he follows. It's a list of young women who are neither politicians nor journalists, whom there is no obvious reason for Weiner to be following. Women politicians and journalists are not included. So you're doing an apples-to-oranges comparison.

No, it isn't. He currently follows 198 feeds.
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Sorry, typo. I rearranged part of the post and didn't change the rest to match. Yes, 198 is the number he currently follows, 91 is the number he followed back in mid April, and the number he followed when he sent the tweet is uncertain as far as I can tell.
 
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