Weiner Can’t Say Pic Is Not Him
As a preface to this post I don’t care one way or the other about the tweet. It’s between Weiner and his family and to a lesser degree his constituents.
I do find it a tad hypocritical in that if it were a GOP House member in the scandal Weiner would likely be screaming for their immediate resignation. But again that’s between him and the voters.
However I do find it interesting that on the one hand he says he was hacked but on the other hand cannot say this picture is not him.
Now perhaps I am dull, but I can say with certainty that if someone posts a picture claiming to be of me in my underwear I am certain it is not me.
Again I don’t care one way or the other but if he is going to claim hacking then it doesn’t really seem to make sense that the picture could be him.
30 Responses to “Weiner Can’t Say Pic Is Not Him”
NEWSBREAK!!
Men are stupid and think the world revolves around what’s in their pants. This is apparently universal, based on the endless parade of middle aged Lotharios who populate our political universe.
Every time I think we’re going to get a break, another one goes over the edge. It’s him, folks. “Tweeting while horny” needs to be in the urban dictionary right beside “sexting” and “drunk dialing”.
How do you know this? Has Weiner actually done this, in the past?
Computers and Twitter accounts can be hacked into. If it *is* Weiner in the pic (which I consider unlikely), it doesn’t necessarily have to be Weiner who posted it.
Kathy
Sorry but the story from the GOP that this most closely resembles is the guy from NY26 that chose to resign NOT because of the initial scandal but instead to hide the fact that he had been shopping online to find trannies. So that would be a fail on the equivalence charts.
http://gawker.com/5769037/the-craigslist-congressman-and-the-crossdressing-prostitute
So where as I understand your glee at Weiners weener pic the situation is rather different. Another difference is that the girl that it was sent to also supports Weiners side of events AND a suspect exists that was stalking her and harassing Weiner, same guy. If it is a pic of him that does add spice to the story but probably more along the lines that he used the same password for Twitter and an email account, which is so common and stupid that it is rather unremarkable, where the photo resided for a reason that I am sure we will get a lie about in explanation but hardly a smoking gun.
To be honest him saying “I didnt do it I was hacked, lets stop discussing it, yea it may be me in the pic” sounds more like he is telling the total truth and is horrified as to what has been accessed by some online troll. For all we know it could have been a pic to his wife or a joke pic to a friend “hey look who made it to DC, A Weiner LOL” I mean come on the guy is a NYer and that is rather funny. My guess is that him not being able to deny the pic is him and his desire to not discuss it too much are linked but likely because god only knows what will come out next, or be photoshopped or what have you(also unwise to speak to much while under investigation unless he starts destroying hard drives lol). I am not alluding to anything illegal but joke emails, online flirting possibly even a mistress are all things that wouldnt be illegal and would likely still result in him being re-elected but would be utterly humiliating. Funny side note, HBGary was speaking with the Chamber of Commerce and other groups to actively work for them as cyber activists when Anon dumped their emails. Depending on how far a prof or amateur hacking group wants to go this could be a much bigger story and actually link to large political power groups. I think that angle is about as likely as Weiner being caught red handed and that he posted a pic of himself broadcast over twitter, in other words an interesting theory but I have my doubts.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110214/02201413084/hbgary-federal-spied-families-children-us-chamber-commerce-opponents.shtml
To save you time I have a link to some of the info above. One other thing about Weiner, he married his wife in 2010. This means the chances of him having some pics from his single days in an email account is actually rather good…stupid but pretty good chance.
I think TMSF might be the closest to the truth – that the true explanation is something that is personally embarrassing for Weiner but not the original suspicion that he was tweeting his junk to his coed girlfriend.
Thanks for all the comments
Again, I have no particular glee on the topic, I don’t really care if he did or didn’t send the pic, that’s not my business.
As to him most likely calling for resignation, he is a very partisan Democrat and so I think it plausable (not certain, just plausable) that he would call for the GOP to quite.
As to him having a picture like that on his computer and/or online photo account, as I said perhaps I’m just dull but I don’t take pictures of my underwear.
CASE CLOSED! CONGRESSMAN WEINER WAS FRAMED! (An important update to “The Weiner affair: Close to solution (but I need your help!)”
Actually I do not care all that much about Weiner. He is amusing unlike Greyson but being someone that thinks we need compromise and not flaming partisans he really doesnt excite me. I do on the other hand have a rather extreme interest in IT security/hacking/cracking/and rogue groups so when the story broke I kept up on it out of the IT security interest and say what you will what happened sounds more like a hack than anything and most likely pulled from his own email accounts. This would explain his desire to move on since they may have every email he has sent in the last few years not to mention highly personal information about himself and loved ones.
Of course if you desire to see a liberal conspiracy you are welcome to but I will just keep chuckling until it happens to one of “your guys” and suddenly you see that what I am saying is not only possible it is rather probable.
You are not secure in what you do on the web. Every post, every email, every twit, upvote on facebook, chat is there for the taking for those that know how and if you annoy/anger or merely bring yourself to the notice of those people they will own the contents of your every “click.” The HBGary story was interesting not only because he showed how it was done but also because it became quickly evident that he had merely done a basic footprinting op on some folks compared with times of FB or other site postings, mostly 4Chan. Interesting because this is what footprinters do for fun/employment 24/7/365.
Basic footprinting often results in likely user name and passwords of a target.
Now as for passwords that can best be fought with a nice super crazy long password and using a different user name/password on every site but few people do that. Most people use one for every place they go, like some of HBGarys staff lol(still cant believe they made that error as security “experts”). To put it plainly even without any security holes a password of anything less than 8 chars including symbols/numbers can be cracked in minutes. If only letters it can be cracked in seconds. Even with lock out features programs exist that are free that can avoid the time window that notifies the system of a possible crack and most major sites like Twitter likely have at least mildly well known security features on the deep web. In short without extreme precautions no ones info is safe. You call it defense of him and I call it noting that wooden houses catch on fire.
gcotharn-actually they “prove” and show “evidence” for nothing other than right wingers desire to shut him up and left wingers desires to prove another breitbart story is utter BS.
Those two things are rather cold hard facts, everything else will take weeks or possibly much longer for an IT forensics team to dig around and track stuff down. A member of the US Houses twitter account was hacked WHILE we are in the middle of a massive cyber attack in many gov departments. It WILL be investigated though depending on the skill of the user it may be impossible to trace. The one thing that is true is if it was Weiner it will be found out and it will be made public when the investigation wraps up unless he has some major IT knowledge that he has never alluded to. The only wild card here is that yfrog seems to have been involved and yfrog has a rather well known security flaw.
Of course if that comes out that would be the real story so I am not so much saying that there is nothing to see here but instead to wait until it is at least something noteworthy.
Meh, if the only people who think Weiner did this are Breitbart and our own local conspiracy theorists — including the young women who was one of the victims of the prank — I’m not going to lose sleep about it. I do think those who have a valid complaint are the young women that the conspiracy theorists are harassing and trying to paint as sluts in their quest to bring down a pol who has the guts to stand up to the ridiculous GOP in a time when few others do. Those young women don’t deserve to have their privacy invaded like this.
gcotharn,
A) He ‘s a lawyer and therefor he is making damn sure that he can’t be accused of lying…
B) When your accuser has as solid a track record as Breibart does, do you really need to respond?
C) What is any news organization (other than Fox) doing treating Breibart like an honest or serious individual?
Oh g, I’m sorry, when I said “our local conspiracy theorists”, I was talking about you. I was trying to be nice, but you make it tough.
Good job on carrying the torch though buddy. I knew I could count on you.
Haha! Ok, g. That’s so funny. You let me know when someone with half an iota of credibility comes up with anything of interest, and I’ll be all over it. “Facts”. Ha! Is “we all know what it means!!!111!!” a “fact”? Oh man.
Sorry. But you said not to be nice.
“Just get your facts straight”. Ha!
The view I heard today is that possibly Weiner wanted to directly send the photo to the woman in Seattle but accidentally Tweeted it instead. (That supports all statements he makes that he “didn’t send it”; “send” here has a specific, not common, meaning. He should be asked if he Tweeted the material including the photo.)
He has been evasive throughout, which makes him look really bad. He doesn’t answer plain questions plainly. Highly suspicious.
His hiring a private firm to investigate this event keeps him in control of the investigation (and the results, no doubt). Were he to ask for a police or FBI investigation, he’d lose control of the investigation and the consequences.
As for how he’d act toward anyone in the GOP, of course he would be abusing them, calling for resignation, and perhaps even harrassing them the way he harrassed Glenn Beck’s sponsor Goldline, which was deliberate harrassment of one (and possibly someday, more) sponsor of Beck — intimidation.
He’s toxic waste and it would be delightful if he were forced to resign or merely was censured.
(Is his private investigation not of him but of GOP members of the Congress, I also wonder.)
When a Democrat even has the Washington Post on his case, you know it is, as Shaun Mullen likes to say, going to have some legs.
gcotharn-So a possible case of hacking has not one thing to do with IT security, you fail at logic. You desire an outcome and are blind to any other option…as usual you are playing a Breittbart stooge.
Want to know why he may not be going the FBI route? Because if it was the hole in yfrog it is not a hack and not a crime. It instead is someone posting on his Twitter feed that is not him which looks different but to followers or watchers looks like it was through the Twitter owners account. This is what it currently looks like. That would mean Twitter may not have been hacked at all, it is a form of digital graffiti and at best would fall into a legal grey area since the security hole is in yfrogs design. Now if the picture is of him, and he admits to such pictures existing, THAT would mean that an email account or something else has been hacked to access the picture(possibly phone as well NewsCorp in Britain is under investigation for accessing lawmakers phone info). In other words hack seems to be a yes, illegal hack is still under question. If he reports it to law enforcement and it is not a hack he has just handed over all of his email trails to the FBI or whoever, doing such a thing would be unwise unless an actual crime had been committed. Listen to how specifically he is speaking. He is speaking like a lawyer that has found himself in a legal grey area which is where much of cyber law currently is.
Here is LGF’s take on it.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/38648_Documented_Yfrog_MMS_Feature_Made_Framing_Rep._Weiner_Easy
Actually no ones actions EVER amount to overwhelming evidence of guilt. Guilt does and on a medium that is as traceable as the internet he either did or did not do it and proof DOES exist. TO act like it doesnt or that actual proof doesnt matter is an attempt at spin, spin likely linked to the fear of an undesired outcome.
It would take the FBI much longer than 5 minutes to investigate this from scratch, especially if it may come from a hacked account and if the picture is him. If that is the case a private contractor can say “FB wasnt hacked this gmail account was though” and then he can hand that gmail account over for investigation while keeping the remainder of his private correspondence private. For ANYONE to hand over all of their digital info to law enforcement willingly would be legal suicide since god only knows what they may desire to make of even your spam folder.
To put it plainly you are using old techniques “well he looks/talks or I suspect he is guilty” on a medium where a paper trail exists that can be found using what we call science. Let the science do its job and we will know for sure what happened unless you dont trust science…hold it dont you also deny GW, ahh I see the problem now lol.
g, TMSF has obviously “sifted” through the “sordid” details. His ability to assess whether or not the “evidence is clear and overwhelming” is frankly much better than yours, and he does not have the incredible need to believe everything that the lying liar Breitbart says, as you do.
This really does fit Breitbart’s MO — there’s a powerful force he doesn’t like (Acorn, NAACP, now Weiner), so he makes up and publicizes a humungous lie which blows up in the media all at once. By the time the lie is proven to be just that, the damage is already done. We know that by the fact that you, Mr Cotharn, still believe that Acorn harbors sex traffickers and that Sherly Sherrod is a racist.
Again, if anyone with any credibility finds anything out, I’m all about hearing it. I am not an apologist for gross men who send lewd photos to young women who do not want them. If he did this, I admit I will be greatly disappointed, because I really like the guy, but I will not be an apologist for him. Right now, it’s just you and Breitbart. If Breitbart and I were standing in the middle of a hurricane, I would not trust him to tell me whether or not it was raining, so someone who is not him is going to have to come up with something resembling a fact before I get worried about this.
Well thank god we have you to relate to us your expertise, g, the real facts of the case. Which you learned from…watching Weiner’s feed during the event? No? An in-depth knowledge of yfrog and Twitter and general hacking principles? You’ve already said you don’t know much on that, so it couldn’t be it. Perhaps your close personal relationship with Weiner’s best friend’s sister’s cousin? No? How about your old buddy at the company Weiner hired to do the investigation? Unlikely, I’d say. G, you have the same access to facts as the rest of the world — which is extremely limited — and yet while it’s generally agreed that nobody’s sure what happened, you seem to have come to the conclusion that there is proof of what happened. You sound like a die-hard Truther or a moon-landing denier, except the evidence is so much less ambiguous in this case, because there’s just not much evidence right now at all.
There is evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.
Again, you’re the only person who is saying that. That might tip you off that you’re wrong. If you’re the only person who thinks the evidence holds up to any sort of scrutiny, then maybe it doesn’t. This is a good rule, in general.
Oh dear, that’s *not* a good rule for you. If your reasoning is telling you that there’s “proof” of anything here, your reasoning isn’t working, and it’s not leading you to truth.
Gcotharn-You may want to go back and read the thread. The only thing I got from any blog is the connection to yfrog everything else comes from my knowledge and study of IT security, or insecurity as the case may be. See I have spent the last few years studying nothing but tech and psych. I have also spent the last 7 or so years working in the tech industry. So where does the tech knowledge and info security knowledge that you seem to think you have, but have failed to relay here, come from??? I am speaking of computer science, you are speaking of political coverups and/or conspiracy the main difference is I can prove mine with peer reviewed science that since it is computer related breaks down to actual math.
As for “seek truth and trust your reasoning” that is pretty much the rules we lived by for 1500 years in the dark age of science…it didnt really work out until we turned our back on such superstitious systems and began looking to science.
Oh! I see. You don’t have any idea whether it actually happened, you just “know” it in your heart based upon the way that Weiner has acted…ok I get it. You know, that’s the same sort of reasoning that gets lots of rapists off scott free.
So I’d ask that you please present your credentials that say that you know without a doubt how every person *must* act after being the victim of harassment and privacy invasion. Wait, what’s that that the experts say? There are many many different ways that people act after they are the victims of crimes? Oh, well that’s very interesting.
But he hasn’t, g. Objectively, he has not incriminated himself. You think he should be acting one way if he is telling the truth, and he’s acting a different way. That is you, and your feelings. In your heart. It’s a bit disconcerting that you’re so insistent that your feelings ARE the facts, and they ARE the self-incrimination.
Unless there’s new information! Has he said that he did it in the last few hours? Because that would change everything.
Wait, let’s try something different. Name one of the 12 ways you say he has “incriminated” himself and shown his guilt. We’ll start there. Just 1. (Good God, I know I’m a glutton for punishment…)
The use of feelings in place of reason is left liberal modus operandi; it is not mine.
This is an hilarious little edit you must have made while I was typing my reply.
“I do find it a tad hypocritical in that if it were a GOP House member in the scandal Weiner would likely be screaming for their immediate resignation.”
If Weiner has done what he is accused of doing, that’s wrong, stupid, etc, etc., and he should pay for his stupidity and wrongdoing.
But hypocritical?
Wiener would be hypocritical if he had God-fearingly been condemning all those who take pictures of themselves in their fruit-of-the-loom and then tweet such pictures to others, or had been piously legislating against those who do such.
Behavior is allowed in courts as evidence. If juries could hear and use such testimony it clearly isn’t out of line for the public to use such to determine their own opinions. The issue should be when “feelings” (which is not what he is saying but I’ll leave that be) ignore facts.
Was a U.S. Congressperson interested in the philosophical or day to day tweets of 20 year old young women? Of course not. Lets be serious. Did Weiner want to solicit the political opinions of young girls who were not NY State or NYC citizens? Of course not. Be serious.
Let’s just start here, ok? Did you not read my comment the other day on this subject? You did not reply to it or address it, so I don’t know if that means you did not see it or if you refused to acknowledge it because it’s devastating to your argument. Here it is, reapeated:
Furthermore, one of the young people he was following was 13. Are you saying what I think you’re saying? Or is it possible that he actually takes a moment to interact with his young supporters to get them interested in the political process?
So let’s start there, k? There are number of factually incorrect things in the rest of your post, but let’s start with the fact that interaction with young women does not mean he texting his junk to them. If that’s *your* only interaction with 21-year-olds, then that’s your problem. Other people aren’t necessarily like you.
you and those officials had a sort of pact
No, we didn’t.
Ok, I see. He was “forced” to labor through updates on their routine activities, which means he must have been screwing them. Do you realize how dumb that sounds? Also: have you ever used Twitter? Do you know what it means to be following someone? Because it seems like you probably don’t.