Is Dan the man? And is there a CIA connection?

Dan Wolfe, the chief suspect in the Weiner smear, has offered a hilariously unconvincing account of his role. He has also privatized his own Twitter feed, which gives the lie to his contention that he has nothing to hide.

I still have seen no evidence that anyone other than Dan -- and perhaps his cohorts -- saw that photo in situ.

He also claims that he has never followed Weiner on Twitter!

He claims to have found two separate versions, differently sized, of the photo in his browser cache. I see no innocent explanation as to how that might have occurred. (Neither of the two files is thumbnail-sized, and Wolfe says he did not click through to see the largest image.) The EXIF data for these photos is decidedly funky.

(That funkiness may be a sign of sloppy craft, because a good fake will have convincing EXIF data. EXIF can be re-jiggered; there are apps designed to do the job. The easiest way to fake EXIF information is to use the copy and paste function within Photoshop -- a trick which occurred to me about 90 seconds after I first learned what EXIF data is. Or, hell, if we're talking about a screen cap of the EXIF data, then you can use Photoshop to fake up the screen cap.)

From a site called Media-ite

For example, if someone monitored his Twitter feed fanatically, and kept close tabs on who he followed, and spoke feverishly of an impending sex photo scandal involving a northeastern Democrat, Gennette Nicole Cordova would be a natural selection to receive the hacked tweet.

As it happens, the man who was the one and only person to directly retweet the offending picture, Dan Wolfe (aka @patriotusa76) was part of a group that did just that, and Gennette Nicole Cordova was one of their targets. They descended upon several young women who received mutual follows from Rep. Weiner, harassing one of them (a 16 year-old) right off of Twitter. They also tweeted a nonstop stream of venom at Rep. Weiner, much of it involving sexual innuendo about the Congressman.

In the post below, I posited that there may have been no hacking at all -- that we may, in fact, be dealing with an elaborate fake which leaves everyone feeling trapped by a false dichotomy: "Weiner was hacked" versus "It's all true."

But let's suppose that Weiner was indeed hacked. How was it done?

Well, one person to ask would be the guy who hacked Sarah Palin's accounts. His reprehensible actions certainly offer proof of concept.

Weiner has said that his Facebook account did show evidence of being hacked, although he hasn't yet said what made him think so. People often use one password for all of their accounts; this practice may not be safe, but convenience often trumps safety for the non-paranoid. So anyone who got into Facebook could have had access to Twitter and Yfrog and god-knows-what-else.

The ties between Facebook and the intelligence community are well-established. One need not be a conspiracy theorist to stipulate the existence of those ties; one need only be willing to acknowledge reality.

Keep those ties in mind, then try to recall January of 2010. That's when Brietbart's crew tried to bug the offices of Democratic Mary Landrieu -- an incident which everyone now seems far too willing to forget. One member of that crew was James O'Keefe, the guy behind the "pimp" hoax.

Another member of that crew was a fellow named Stan Dai, a rather young fellow who was a political science major at George Washington University. I'll repeat what was said in a previous Cannonfire post, quoting from research done by Laura Rozen and Majikthise:

One Stan Dai was listed as the Assistant Director of the The Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence (ICCAE) at Trinity (Washington) University. The ICCAE says it prepares young people for careers in intelligence.

Stan Dai spoke about torture and terrorism last June at a "CIA day" organized by the Junior Statesmen Summer School at Georgetown. The program included a field trip to the CIA and lectures at Georgetown, according this event program I found online. As we know, Dai served as the assistant director of a program dedicated to steering young people into careers in intelligence

By the way, Politico's David Mark was also a featured speaker at this event -- an event which, we might say, marked the nexus between "new" journalism and spook-world. Politico's Laura Rozen, without mentioning this potential conflict, has been doing some research into Dai.

In 2008, he was assistant director of an intelligence community "center for academic excellence" at Trinity Washington University.

"Stan Dai was a junior program administrator for one year in a grant-funded program at Trinity Washington University," Ann Pauley, media relations director at Trinity Washington University. "The program was called the Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence (ICCAE) and was one of several similar programs created with federal funding through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence following the September 11 attacks..."

We're also told that Dai never worked for the CIA. I'm sure that's true. He just ran an organization which recruited young people into the CIA. Well, that could happen to anyone. You'd be silly to draw the conclusion that Dai himself had something to do with the CIA.

And now you know why I've long held that it was important to focus on Facebook's CIA connections. We may fairly presume that there are people in the Agency who can get hold of pretty much any Facebook password. (And they don't even need to bring the NSA into it.)

An Agency employee (even one who is fervently right-wing, as many are) probably would not engage in direct political action on the domestic scene. But such an individual could offer a bit of help -- wink wink, nudge nudge, password password -- to a helper who stood just outside of the Agency. Plausible deniability, and all that.

A young spook-loving zealot like Dai sounds perfect for that role. Dai travels in Breitbartian circles. So right there, anyone who wants to figure out how Weiner's password was compromised has a promising avenue of investigation.

The time has come once again to ask: Who is Breitbart?

Whenever someone like this comes along, most people just accept his prominence as a fact of nature. They never ask who funds him. As I've said on previous occasions:

Anyone can maintain a blog -- hell, even I can do it. But making money at this game is a very different matter. It takes a large amount of capital to set up a high-profile website with paid staff and "name" writers and an advertising budget and all the rest. So where is Breitbart getting his dough?

The righties think that George Soros funds the left-wing blogosphere. That's a myth. But there is a ton of money behind the right-wing blogosphere, and much of it comes from libertarian think tanks. If you're in the mood to investigate further, you might want to look at a shadowy outfit called the Leadership Institute.