This new detail isn't a smoking gun per se, but it certainly qualifies as yet another remarkable, non-exculpatory Weinergate "coincidence:"
As the world has attempted to make sense of Rep. Anthony Weiner’s claim that his Twitter account was hacked, a key clue has been missing: exactly how the notorious groin pic was posted online.
But according to data provided exclusively to The Daily from TweetCongress.org, a nonprofit website that captures each member of Congress’s Twitter feeds in real time, the shot seen round the world was transmitted using TweetDeck — a popular Adobe desktop application that links up with social networking sites. A review of Weiner’s Twitter stream from May 27, the day of the crotch pic, shows that Weiner had been posting only from TweetDeck — one of many ways to post messages to Twitter — that entire night.
Chet Wisniewski, a senior security adviser at security software company SophosLabs, said the TweetDeck stamp “does make it more plausible that it did come from him.”
Weiner used TweetDeck frequently, but he often also posted from the Web directly or from his BlackBerry. A widely circulated explanation for how Weiner’s Twitter account could have been hacked by email would also seem to be incompatible with the fact that the message in question originated on TweetDeck. If email had been used, the message probably would have originated via the photosharing site Yfrog, where the infamous picture was posted.Matthew Green, chief technology officer at Independent Security Evaluators, said that if the offensive tweet had been transmitted through something other than TweetDeck that night, it might have gone a long way to exonerate Weiner. “You have to keep in mind that if the person’s goal was really to frame this guy and really embarrass him … they know all the previous posts,” Green said. “They’re going out of their way to make sure it looks like it came from him.”
In other words, if Weiner really is the victim of a sophisticated and detailed cyber crime, the responsible party went to extreme lengths to frame him. Consider this: If a hacker went through an enormous amount of trouble to defame your character, would you be cracking erection jokes with reporters and waving off official investigations? Of course not -- which invariably brings us back to Occam's razor: The simplest explanation is also the likeliest. Anthony Weiner probably just did exactly what the entire planet intuitively suspects he did.
UPDATE - Oh boy:
A new woman has come forward with what she claims are photographs, chats, and emails with Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY). These appear to undermine severely Rep. Weiner’s explanations that he was the victim of a “prank” or a “hack.” The detailed new information suggests that the Brooklyn- and Queens-based representative and the young woman in question were involved in an online, consensual relationship involving the mutual exchange of intimate photographs.
UPDATE II - The first photo is in. It's not exactly incriminating, but it doesn't seem entirely appropriate either.
