I’ve been covering the activities of John Patrick Frey aka @Patterico for a while now. This guy has been deeply involved in Weinergate, either running the actual operation, or at the very least clearly visible in public leading the charge on muddying the waters and attempting to intimidate anyone who wants to get to the bottom of what really happened.
This sort of thing would draw the eye no matter who was involved given that the target was a U.S. Congressman. Frey, a Deputy District Attorney in Los Angeles County, continued to push the Reid sock puppet family long after they’d been roundly debunked. This smacks of cover up; someone in his position ought to be used to sorting out complex cases. He’s either utterly incompetent to do his job as a Deputy D.A. or he is complicit in the Weinergate scheme.
Since I’ve taken up reporting on this I’ve had all sorts of curious customers poking around in my digital shadow and today one of them might have just slipped a bit …
First, I had to give away my big 2,600 follower Twitter account. Again. This happens every time I get into a tussle – gotta disappear myself until the heat is off. @NealRauhauser still comes to another account that lands on UberSocial in my Blackberry. A few dozen trusted sets of hands and eyes keep the wheels turning while I am “away”, with a couple of them running my big account. I get weird follower requests, take this one from @wittier, for example. This is some guy named Ken Danieli, I am told, and I’m uncertain what his role is in the overall scheme, but there he is, wanting to be buddies.
I got a burst of enthusiasm over my Facebook presence, but this one was most comical. Why is James O’Keefe’s video producer guy wanting to be my friend? Do they really not get there are a bunch of people reading Google Alerts on them on a daily basis? I guess not …
They were talking about how I was involved in the Sony hack (NOT!) and I actually got a rather sad, battered Sony security guy nosing around my LinkedIn profile. We talked a bit and I sent him away with a “call me if I can help”. As regular readers will recall, I’m A Hacker, but I’m an old hacker, and we have a natural career path into security work if we survive youthful enthusiasm without any serious marks.
Oh, and we’ve got some socks here, too. Specifically The Scyphers Murder and plkimin turned up after the fact, only talking in my diaries, and only then when my diaries are Patterico focused. That’s about all I need to see … how about you? Oh, and my latest doppelganger on Twitter is quite clever with an extra L where they think it won’t be noticed.
I’ve been pondering who the two local socks might be. The universe of real people is pretty small. John Patrick Frey himself. Seth L. Allen of South Easton, MA, who was found out after he bothered one of the Velvet Revolution guys last year. Maybe it’s Mike Stack aka @goatsred but he hardly seems swift enough for the level of writing the socks here display, and he seems a bit bewildered by the happenings. I am prepared to believe he and the rest of Born Free Crew were victimized by …
The only one I can’t put a real name to: @dwp6776, the mysterious “Dan Wolfe” that knew so much about Weiner. Lee Stranahan got an IP on this guy in Arizona and that jibes with my information – that he’s employed at the Bayside Café in Lake Havasu, AZ. I wasn’t going to put that out, but after what was revealed today I guess I’m OK with people having a more accurate fix than a 32,768 block of IP addresses centered around Phoenix.
My money is on Wolfe being behind the @PeterPavel1 troll, which I paddled in Patterico’s Personal Pipsqueak. It’s interesting how this little tidbit leaked. Someone watches @ronbryn and provides me with a daily write up of any interesting happenings. @dwp6776 had permitted him to follow, but Ron announced he was going to stop due to all the hackers he saw Wolfe following.
So they’re desperate for some way to get me off them, and they’re not smart enough or scary enough to chase me away on their own, so the @PeterPavel1 troll resorts to talking to the various hacking superpowers: right wing anti-jihadist @th3j35t3r, anarcho-syndicalist @AnonymousIRC, and anarchist @AnonymouSabu. They’ve struck out swinging, failing to interest any of these groups.
And Wolfe makes sense as the one doing this – taking up a persona, slipping into an existing group on Twitter, attempting to fit in, and then steering them toward a certain goal. The very same thing he did with Born Free Crew.
So that’s a possible explanation. If you have the skill to see purposeful distractions as they’re presented, the mental filter needed to ignore the noise they put out, and the patience to just stand around and wait for people to make mistakes, sooner or later those who can’t shut up will reveal everything you wanted to know.
This is an incredibly dangerous situation for them.
Instead of having the initiative in the action, a small, soft target like a troubled Congressman, and an ideologically friendly online discussion group like Born Free Crew to help, the only houses on the block they have left to try are: a right wing collective that does almost nothing but international work, an aggressive anarchist group that just yanked NATO’s tail, and an anarcho-syndicalist group that would be diametrically opposed to everything Frey and those around him represent.
One of those groups will incinerate them on principle, one will disembowel them just to hear the screams, and the one that might be inclined to help is probably not going to do so for several reasons.
This isn’t over, not by a long shot. ACORN is in ruins, a popular Democratic Congressman’s career is over, and another rat from the same nest that brought forth Patterico is gnawing on the Medicaid strand of our tattered safety net. The principles of karma tell us that bad behavior begets bad results.
And you can almost feel those consequences blowing in the wind …
