Your Friday Morning Weinergate Crazy Update
[Guest Post by Lee Stranahan]
Here’s a little morning music to get you in your mood.
My thoughts on the significant stuff from Doc Dump 2…
1) JohnReid9 has vanished again, not even communicating with Pattercio last night. This is more highly suspicious behavior, especially given the sudden disappearance of @PatriotUSA90210.
2) Add in the threats and boy – it seems like someone is having a breakdown. And that person having a breakdown causes threats from a new character, an erased account and radio silence.
I’ll say to this to the person behind this, again – this can’t be fun. Call me back
3) While lots of folks seem to want to attack on Gennette or Jen Preston from the New York Times, which I view as a ton of misplaced focus and fury. The focus right now should be on whoever is behind Reid / Nikki / Marinara (and possibly Patriot) and Anthony Weiner. Of course Weiner is the ultimate epicenter of the story but bringing out the truth about the Puppet Master (or Puppet Mistress, which seems ever more likely) only helps root about the reality of what was happening with Weiner.
4) Gennette seems to be confirming all the docs released related to her but has warned that “John Reid” isn’t releasing everything
5) “Nikki” was giving different stories to different people along the way – and Gennette mentions in comments that Nikki told her that Nikki attended The Buckley School around the time Nikki was trying to get Weiner to take her to the prom – not Hollywood High, was Tommy Christopher was told. And the Buckley School’s prom was over. Nikki made up some excuse.
6) Another big detail about the floundering fakery of Nikki – Gennette says she mentioned that Nikki seemed to have no Twitter friends and a generic picture. Then the next day, she has the now infamous Dog Photo and Marianela appears. Shazzam!
7) Finally and crucially — everything in both doc dumps is consistent with the fact that Nikki was a sock puppet account trying clumsily to gather info on Anthony Weiner. Why? That’s not clear yet. But the meticulous cataloging of all these emails and DMs is consistent with snooping on Weiner. I honestly don’t even get why his is controversial because it’s so obvious to me.
That’s a quick recap of the crazy. It’s a dynamo.
– Lee Stranahan
Lee, on the contrary, MR CHAOA is having nothing but a very good time.
SarahW (af7312) — 6/24/2011 @ 6:30 amDoh, that was supposed to say CHAOS but I might call him CHAOA from now on.
SarahW (af7312) — 6/24/2011 @ 6:31 amGC deserves some cluck::clucking but Jan_Preston is not the bogeyman of bias some make out. Whatever assumptions you think she made, she is not a PoorTommy. No, not at all.
SarahW (af7312) — 6/24/2011 @ 6:36 amMonica Lewinsky went to the Buckley School. She’s not listed though so I don’t know.
Vermont Neighbor (0b8a2b) — 6/24/2011 @ 6:46 amHollywood High would be used by someone who doesn’t know what it is these days. It’s not Hollywood High from years past.
Vermont Neighbor (0b8a2b) — 6/24/2011 @ 6:52 amSarah…I agree with you..
Vermont… That is interesting
Lee Stranahan (708cc3) — 6/24/2011 @ 6:54 am@PatriotUSA90210 “Walter Plinge” had replied to a few of my tweets related to JR9. The last one, after Lee’s show and IP posting, reads: “Step one is to file a police report.”
And after that at some point his account went missing, as Lee reported.
His tweets were usually cooly delivered about the facts or current questions regarding the Reids and how Preston & Stranahan were reporting on them.
I have the emails that Twitter sends noting the replies. They were public tweets for all to see. Not DMs. He started following me on June 22.
JR9 also publicly tweeted complimenting PatriotUSA90210 (and copying Preston, Patterico, & me on June 21) : “ohnreid9 john reid
@PatriotUSA90210 @wittier @NYT_JenPreston @patterico Yup. See a pattern there? Lol. Smart man.
Jun 21, 11:03 PM via web
In reply to…
PatriotUSA90210 Walter Plinge
@johnreid9 @wittier @NYT_JenPreston I did notice she deflected @patterico’s questions by noting they are leading questions.
Jun 21, 10:58 PM via web
Below are the last two replies he made early this morning (1:13 AM, presumably ET)
First, I had posted to @lizbuddie and @Stranahan a link to an IP address lookup in reply to the IP that Stranahan had posted for the Seattle545 person who had sent the screen caps of various DMs a few days ago. It said http://t.co/ui4eeVR “a server farm…”Ubiquity Server Solutions Seattle” but map says Bloomington IL 61701
PatriotUSA90210 replied 4 minutes later:
PatriotUSA90210 Walter Plinge
@wittier You’re going to have to ask the proxy service to provide the IP address of whoever sent this message.
Jun 24, 1:13 AM via web
PatriotUSA90210 Walter Plinge
koam (7c1f46) — 6/24/2011 @ 6:55 am@wittier Step one is to file a police report.
Jun 24, 1:13 AM via web
patriotusa90210’s last few tweets that I saw last night were about it not being cool to list patriotua76’s IP address, and how did Stranahan get it.
patriotusa90210, I just assumed he was “dan wolfe,” but did he officially confirm for anyone? he was a bit nicer to me when i had said it couldn’t yet be proven whether nikki was pro-weiner or anti-weiner, but was just bizarre.
and “90210”? a tip to nikki’s refs to “the O.C.”?
patriotusa90210 and I exchanged DMs once yesterday(?), the only time that has happened. his response used “pal” in the same friendly way dan wolfe would always say ‘brother’ to goatsred, etc.
milowent (0f8248) — 6/24/2011 @ 7:27 amI was given a different twitter account that’s supposed to be Dan.
I didn’t think 90210 was Dan. Why would he use that if he were hiding?
The OC and 90210 (Beverly Hills) are both in SoCal but aren’t really close. It would be a very loose hint.
koam (7c1f46) — 6/24/2011 @ 7:31 amThe Buckley School????
I missed that in the comments. Very Interesting.
Good catch Lee.
Paul (59d3fd) — 6/24/2011 @ 7:39 amI’m starting to think they (cavalcade of socks) were collecting evidence for the comedic potential.
SarahW (af7312) — 6/24/2011 @ 7:46 amLord I spent hours looking for them at the Buckley school. I guess that makes me #tommyproud.
SarahW (af7312) — 6/24/2011 @ 7:46 am@koam — 90210 and the O.C. were both very popular teen TV shows, though 90210 was maybe 5-7 years prior. its a cultural connection i thought, not a physical location one.
—
re buckley school, nikki followed the buckley school twitter feeds and buckley school newspaper, i can confirm that. normal sockpuppet behavior.
milowent (0f8248) — 6/24/2011 @ 7:48 am12. milowent.
koam (7c1f46) — 6/24/2011 @ 7:52 amyeah, i understood the shows thing.. failed to mention. if i were thinking like Gennette, I’d say “different generations” of shows. but not really important . thank you
I may have made a mistake. Monica Lewinsky went to the Curtis school in Beverly Hills.. possibly not Buckley. Just noting the themes here. 90210, Hollywood High, left coast..
Vermont Neighbor (cae88c) — 6/24/2011 @ 7:54 amCould this have been someone(s) trying to gather intel to show W’s wife then, when the SHTF, decided to disappear?
jim2 (b845ab) — 6/24/2011 @ 7:55 amSide note, probably meaningless, about @PatriotUSA90210 disappearance.
When I read about this, first thing I tried to do was go check for myself to make sure it wasn’t a shift in his security levels or something…
First thing, his page still showed up but without any tweets. It had a “Follow” button, but I was already following..so something had changed.
When I clicked Follow, I got an error that MY Twitter account had been suspended. Further activities that I tried also gave me errors in Twitter. But some of my stuff was still there.
Nevertheless, I was able to log in from a different browser, after first getting some “Twitter is busy” pages and other delays.
Now it seems back to normal. It just seemed odd timing to see the report of this guy is gone and then get those “you’re suspended” messages several times from Twitter.
All seems fine now.
Sorry to even report this but I did just in case anyone else has seen similar glitches.
No I’m not paranoid.
koam (7c1f46) — 6/24/2011 @ 7:56 amOne of the tweets I sent to @Stranahan last night showed the IP address of the JR9 emails. Server farm in SF.
I sent it out at very end of his radio show to see if perhaps it matched the IP he had for Seattle545 (before Lee had time to post his).
It did not match. These IPs probably don’t show much.
But someone posting to a blog or sending emails from, say, a home connection might give us more revealing IPs.
And a good point would be if Gennette, Tommy, Preston or other primary sources had very early IPs attached to emails, etc. from other players, on the off chance that the other players were taking fewer security measures back then as things were moving quickly.
koam (7c1f46) — 6/24/2011 @ 8:03 amDidn’t Gennete Cordova say that she broached the subject of Anthony Weiner with Nikki? After a week and a half of exchanging tweets? That’s not consistent with the hypothesis that sockpuppet Nikki was trolling for information on Weiner.
Here’s another hypothesis that nobody seems to have considered: maybe sockpuppet Nikki was trying to garner information on Ethel and Gennette.
So far, the prevailing wisdom is that sockpuppet Nikki was either trying to garner information either to help Weiner or to hurt Weiner. What if sockpuppet Nikki was Weiner stalking these two girls, trying to get to suss out their interests, likes and dislikes, with the intent of using this information to advance his pathological twitter predation?
lamchopsl (a91fe8) — 6/24/2011 @ 8:41 am19. lamchopsl – dig the name.
I’m not pushing one theory or another…but if Nikki’s mission was to collect info to use against RAW, there’s no rule that
1) Nikki had to follow RAW right away
2) Nikki had to talk shop right away with each of the real women who were connected to Weiner.
Nikki could have employed a different strategy with GC than she did with others. Perhaps knowing GC’s journo interest (could see who she followed on Twitter for example…Nikki might have been suspicious of GC’s motivations, which would have been a correct suspicion, I might add), wanted to remain off her radar re: RAW for a while.
Doesn’t that make sense too?
I’m not pushing one theory over another. And I’m only responding to the first part of your post.
koam (7c1f46) — 6/24/2011 @ 8:57 am20. koam
I agree, it isn’t necessary, just unusual that Nikki wouldn’t have been more direct in attempting to garner info on Weiner, if that was her intention.
Another thing about Nikki that reminds me of Weiner is the Prom invitation tweets. That was so over the top, so absurd. Especially when viewed in retrospect, knowing that Nikki was not some high school girl, but a sockpuppet with an ulterior motive.
It kind of reminds me of the initial tweet after Weiner tweeted his meat, when he claimed his Tivo was on the blink but his toaster remained loyal. To me both those inventions are of the same ilk: very hyperbolic, very imaginative in an absurd way.
lamchopsl (a91fe8) — 6/24/2011 @ 9:23 amWouldn’t it be a hoot if Nikki was Weiner’s wife suspecting something might be up between AW and these high school girls?
crosspatch (52411e) — 6/24/2011 @ 9:30 am21. lamchopsl
When I first ready yesterday here that Gennette said that she had to bring up the topic of Weiner with Nikki, certainly my jaw dropped.
But before posting about it (I was tempted to react right away)…I let GC explain. And thought about it.
Nikki could have had different strategies and objectives with the different girls. She may have recognized that they are not all cut from the same cloth just because they are Weiner fangirls. And certainly each of these women/girls have proven to be very different.
But GC was playing Nikki. And (if we are just assuming for the sake of argument that Nikki was on a mission and not just a fangirl) Nikki was grooming GC, just like RAW groomed his harem.
As I said before, Nikki would have been 100% right to be suspicious of GC. Hence the cautious approach of a lot of girltalk first.
koam (7c1f46) — 6/24/2011 @ 9:37 amThe IP addresses I saw him post last night on Twitter were all from web hosting companies that rent servers in colocation facilities. So you rent a Linux server, run VNC (which you can think of as “remote desktop” for Linux), connect to it from your home PC, start a web browser on the server and to everywhere you browse it appears that you are browsing from the server.
Or you load Apache mod-proxy, rewrite the user-agent header, and use the web server on the box as a proxy. Or you can load any number of other proxy programs.
And you can even use iptables so that the magic port that you connect to is only visible from your home IP address (or block of IPs that your provider users) and is invisible to everyone else.
If you see IP addresses that trace back to server farms, then that isn’t likely were the person you are looking for is really located.
crosspatch (52411e) — 6/24/2011 @ 9:39 amThe thing is, though, the servers he listed were in three different locations. Atlanta, Washington DC, and Seattle. Someone with access to hosted servers in those three cities probably manages websites for a living or works for a employer that has websites in those locations. Unless some group has gone and rented servers in those cities just for this purpose, which seems a little “out there” but not impossible.
crosspatch (52411e) — 6/24/2011 @ 9:47 amTwo of the IPs were hosted by this outfit:
http://www.ubiquityservers.com/
The one in Washington was on softlayer.
Anyone know of a website that appears to be hosted on ubiquity out of Seattle and Atlanta?
crosspatch (52411e) — 6/24/2011 @ 9:55 amHA! BINGO
“enrolled in screenwriting school” “studied at UCLA” “creative writing class”
bmertz (d77c52) — 6/24/2011 @ 10:11 amSo she has experience in creating characters
bmertz (d77c52) — 6/24/2011 @ 10:13 amCrazy liberal woman, according to Lee. And a real person named Jenny with real last name, known by real people.
koam (7c1f46) — 6/24/2011 @ 10:26 amOk, so it looks like the IP addresses (two of them, anyway) are apparently from a “cloaking” service offered by WiTopia. You can get a subscription VPN service with them that hides your IP address (you appear to come from their VPN access point) or you can purchase a “cloak box” that makes a dedicated VPN connection to them and all of your Internet traffic appears to come from their location. It completely hides your original IP address.
Point is, that whoever is using those accounts coming from those IPs isn’t your average casual Twitter user. It someone spending cash to remain hidden. There might be other ways of locating them, but it would require snooping the actual TCP traffic at one or more web servers as the person accesses it. Not something the average person can do.
crosspatch (c58f80) — 6/24/2011 @ 2:19 pmAlso, unless the WiTopia client alternates between access points, it might indicate more than one person was using a particular Twitter account. One connected in Atlanta, and one connected in Seattle.
crosspatch (c58f80) — 6/24/2011 @ 2:36 pmAnd note that depending on how you look up those IP addresses, it might say something like “Dallas” but that is the location of the company that got the address allocation, now where the address is actually deployed. Traceroute can tell you a lot as can reverse DNS. One address said it was in “Dallas” but traceroute showed it was in Atlanta and the “round trip time” of the packets verified the distance to Atlanta. Other tools showed who was using the address (or who had used it at some point). Both addresses hosted by Ubiquity are or have been used by WiTopia. WiTopia provides a sort of product that would be consistent with someone who doesn’t want their real IP address known (you can’t really hide your general physical location very easily, but that takes more sleuthing to track down).
crosspatch (6adcc9) — 6/25/2011 @ 11:06 am