Mark Robinson is running for governor of North Carolina and his pron internet history of comments got leaked. How did this get revealed and how do you link pseudonym internet comments to a person?
In: Technology
The guy used the same allis for everything and even linked his real name to the p*** site profile. Its likely someone doing opposition research decided to just search his online alias (likely to find either old tweets or old comments on a similar platform of him saying crazy damaging stuff) and ended up find the allis in a lot of different places. He was also know to have a bit of a history with p*** as a local shop had reported him owning them money a while ago.
So, when you run for office, there’s a moment when your campaign manager sits down with you in a room. Also in the room will be key staff members and at least one private investigator. You will be asked for EVERY negative thing in your past. You will be asked if that is everything you can remember. You will be asked if there are any things that are too embarassing to mention, You’ll be asked over, and over, and over, about EVERYTHING.
Then your staff and the investigator will dig deeper. Someone will take your username and passwords and start scrubbing your discoverable Internet history of anything negative. They will do everything possible (not necessarily legal) to clean up your past of discoverable negatives.
Somehow, Robinson got into office without this apparently happening. Maybe it did happen and he wasn’t forthcoming. Maybe the investigator was incompetent. At any rate, this process was not done.
One could very easily guess some of the email addresses tied to him given his age and his username. I know I just did. Turns out he left breadcrumbs all over the internet tied to his FB and other places that list bits of his personal details. Sites like spokeo can crawl all of his info and tie it back to him.
Worried?
Or asking for a friend 😉
It’s incredibly easy to search up a known username especially if someone posts on forums. Step 1, find username. Step 2, look for verifiable ties (email address).
My question is: if they’re able to ID him based on the same user name and unique identifying factors… what’s stopping the opposition party from just fabricating this?
I definitely don’t think that happened in this particular instance, but I mean what’s stopping say an intern from the rival party discovering his username on a site like twitter and then creating accounts on other sites with that name pretending to be him and posting incriminating or scandalous content?
The CNN report on this lays it out pretty extensively but basically it’s a combination of using the same user name in multiple places, using his real email address, discussing biographical details about himself, and using turns of phrase that are relatively unusual but that he uses. The case is pretty damned conclusive, honestly.
1. He used the same username and email address for some political accounts and porn accounts.
2. On the porn sites, he kept posting very specific information about himself, such as age, location, family history, marital status, etc.
Maybe someone used a data scraper. Someone can put in an email and find out all the sites where that email is registered. And it’s totally legal.
People who don’t take online privacy/security seriously are always so shocked to learned how easy it is to find stuff out about someone.
Latest Answers