James Comey is, of course, the director of the FBI, a Republican appointed to what is customarily (but not necessarily) a 10 year term by Barack Obama.
The fatal chink in Comey's OPSEC armor: he admitted to having an Instagram account with which he kept connected to his family. His son is somewhat high-profile at Kenyon College and his Instagram account was easy to find. If you send a friend request to an Instagram account, Instagram will algorithmically suggest related accounts; the related accounts here included an anonymous account named after Reinhold Niebuhr. From there, it wasn't hard to find a similarly named Twitter account whose metadata fit the profile.
The moral of the story here might be to avoid giving your anonymous accounts distinctive names. If he had assumed the fictitious name "Dave Smith", this article probably could not have been so easily written.
"Liking" tweets from your anonymous account is also probably a terrible idea, with no upside.
Um stalking much? Just because he's a public figure, it doesn't give this author the right to be a creep. We blast TMZ and the like for being slimy but always give a pass when it's in our own interest. So, I won't do that, this isn't cool, man. All it takes is one person to follow this lead, find the location of someone or their family member, and do something nefarious. No matter if it's anything else, it's inconsiderate and frankly dangerous. Poor show.
How is the author being a creep? There is immense public interest in knowing that the director of the CIA is "liking" particular tweets about high-profile investigations his office is conducting.
If it's really Comey, the fact he 'liked' this particular article suggests some pre-existing bias on his decision to break protocol and make public the new FBI investigations into Clinton's email server days before the election.
EDIT - about an hour after this post the twitter account was put into 'protected' mode, so tweets are not viewable.
I think "immense" is an exaggeration. Who we present ourselves to be on the internet is often not who we actually are. I can say with great confidence that while at least a few of my coworkers would probably care, there are few to none among my friends and family who put any credence into social network "likes".
And it's creepy that the author parsed public comments to invent an investigation into the private accounts of a public figure by using a flaw in Instagrams suggestion feature to follow family members to their father. If you did that in real life you'd be a stalker. Here, this is journalism? Give me a break.
The fatal chink in Comey's OPSEC armor: he admitted to having an Instagram account with which he kept connected to his family. His son is somewhat high-profile at Kenyon College and his Instagram account was easy to find. If you send a friend request to an Instagram account, Instagram will algorithmically suggest related accounts; the related accounts here included an anonymous account named after Reinhold Niebuhr. From there, it wasn't hard to find a similarly named Twitter account whose metadata fit the profile.
The moral of the story here might be to avoid giving your anonymous accounts distinctive names. If he had assumed the fictitious name "Dave Smith", this article probably could not have been so easily written.
"Liking" tweets from your anonymous account is also probably a terrible idea, with no upside.