The New York Post was the first newspaper to get a response from Rep. Anthony Weiner’s office on May 28 after news broke that day of a lewd photo sent from his official Twitter account. But over the next few days, Weiner’s story veered dramatically from the account given to the newspaper.
IS IT YOUR BULGE?
Asked that first day if the photo — of a man’s erect penis inside gray briefs — was of the congressman, his spokesman, David Arnold, said no.
The photo doesn’t belong to him and wasn’t taken by him, the spokesman said.
Five days later, Weiner admitted he could not say “with certitude” that it isn’t him.
WHAT DOES ‘HACK’ MEAN?
Initially, Weiner tweeted only that his Facebook page was hacked, not his Twitter account. Then, hours later on May 28, the spokesman claimed in an e-mail that the congressman had fallen victim to an all-consuming hack attack.
“Anthony’s accounts on both Facebook and Twitter were hacked,” Arnold said.
But what the Weiner camp subsequently described was more a case of password theft. Facebook sent Weiner an alert sometime prior to the May 28 incident, saying something like “It looks like your password has been changed,” Weiner’s spokesman said.
A Facebook spokeswoman said e-mail notifications are sent to users anytime a password account is altered with a link to click if the change is unauthorized.
“This will lock the account down and require the user to prove their identity before setting a new password. If the user ignores the notification (for instance, if the password change was legitimately initiated by the user), the new password will remain valid,” the spokeswoman said.
PASSWORD CHANGE?
But it does not appear Weiner was locked out of his account, because he continued to post to Facebook and Twitter. And apparently neither he nor his staff thought to change his password — presumably, he uses the same one for both his Facebook and Twitter accounts — even though they were warned it might be compromised.
Though Weiner’s staffers are no longer answering questions on the topic, their basic contention seems to be that someone logged on to his Twitter account because they knew his password. Then they used that access to post one picture to one follower in Seattle.