Attack of the Online Swine

[paft.livejournal.com]

Statement by Gennette Cordova to the NY Daily News:

I've watched in sheer disbelief as my name, age, location, links to any social networking site I've ever used, my old phone numbers and pictures have been passed along from stranger to stranger.

My friends have received phone calls from people claiming to be old friends of mine, attempting to obtain my contact information. My siblings have received tweets that are similar in nature…I have seen myself labeled as the "Femme Fatale of Weinergate," "Anthony Weiner's 21-year-old coed mistress" and "the self-proclaimed girlfriend of Anthony Weiner."




Some of you may have heard about Representative Anthony Weiner, the Democrat from New York, accused of sending a photo of his penis to one of his admirers, a 21-year-old Seattle college student. As the hours have passed it’s become more and more evident that Weiner’s account was hacked and he was the victim of what he very charitably calls a “prank.” According to the tweet’s intended recipient:

The account that these tweets were sent from was familiar to me; this person had harassed me many times after the Congressman followed me on Twitter a month or so ago. Since I had dealt with this person and his cohorts before I assumed that the tweet and the picture were their latest attempts at defaming the Congressman and harassing his supporters.

Apparently, Weiner is now consulting lawyers about what kind of action to take and whether he can pursue civil or criminal action against the hacker. I hope he does. I hope, if he learns who did it, he prosecutes to the full extent of the law.

Because this isn’t just about someone trying to make Representative Weiner look bad. This is about harassing a young woman online, deliberately dragging her into the public spotlight, smearing her sexually, merely because she was a fan of the Democratic congressman.

If you post online under an obviously feminine name or avatar for an extended length of time, you inevitably come at least once across some online pig figuratively or literally waving male genitals at you. That’s ugly enough, but the oinkers involved in this have gone further. Now her reputation is being destroyed by people who really don’t care much whether what they are saying is true or not. In their minds, the fact that she’s a young liberal woman who's dared to post her opinions on the Internet makes it okay to post any picture online they can find about her, discuss her breasts, refer to her as the “comely coed,” the “Demo-Commie Scumbag journalism student” etc.

In short, the only fact these swine are willing to recognize about her is that she’s young and female and therefore, in their minds, f*ckable. What she says matters only to the extent to which it can be used to bolster their own malicious fantasies about her.

So please, Congressman. Pursue it, if you can.

And if you find the people responsible, nail them to the wall for hacking your account.

Crossposted from Thoughtcrime

Comments

[paft.livejournal.com]

Why?

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Wienergate!

[rasilio.livejournal.com]

Could have been worse, there used to be a Congressman (or was it Senator, don't remember off the top of my head) from New Hampshire whose name was Dick Sweat.


Seriously.

Funny thing is he made himself really unpopular in the state at one point and there was a very active campaign to get him voted out of office.

The slogans just roll off the tongue at that point.

[paft.livejournal.com]

No, sorry, Joan Walsh accusing a man who has a history of involvement with pseudo-scandals involving deceptively edited videos is not worse than passing around pictures of a young woman and speculating about her sexuality merely because she admired a liberal congressman.

[dreadfulpenny81.livejournal.com]

Actually, the real swine are people like Joan Walsh who are falsely accusing someone with no evidence to back it up. Why is someone being falsely targeted for the alleged hacking? Because they're CONSERVATIVE. The girl who received the lewd photo doesn't even think the person being falsely accused hacked Weiner's account, yet Libs keep making false accusations.

I hope Weiner DOES find out who hacked his account (if that is, in fact, the truth) and I also hope that the people being falsely accused sue Joan Walsh and Salon.com for every penny they're worth!

[paft.livejournal.com]

They are being "targeted" because certain online conservatives have a history of obsessively following the congressman's tweets and bombarding any female followers -- in particular the college girl now being dehumanized online -- with nasty sexual innuendo

[mrsrandomcheese.livejournal.com]

Yes, those poor conservatives, always harrassed by false accusers.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I don't think there's enough evidence one way or another. I could believe the type of people who'd think up something like Encyclopedia Dramatica might have some be conservative. The way he's handling it, he looks like he's something to hide even if he doesn't. Which is bad for him all the way around.

[prog-expat.livejournal.com]

"Because they're CONSERVATIVE."

Bollocks. "Right now I'll trust that 21 year old over that creep who smeared Shirley Sherrod and put out fake ACORN tapes" — Joan Walsh. Breitbart got named for two reasons: one, he hounded an innocent bystander to break what now appears to be a false story and two, he has a track record of manufacturing scandals aimed at his political opponents. Furthermore, Joan Walsh didn't accuse him of hacking, she accused him of dragging an innocent's reputation through the mud to get a story and stated that she trusted said innocent more than him.

That being said, suspicions regarding Brietbart seem misplaced to me. Breitbart has a history of misleading editing of video footage, not hacking accounts.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

The whole thing is disgusting, politics notwithstanding.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

As the hours have passed it’s become more and more evident that Weiner’s account was hacked and he was the victim of what he very charitably calls a “prank.”

How the hell do you come to this conclusion? The more Weiner tries to cover it up, the more it becomes evident that he just got caught sending his naughty bits to young admirers.

No, it doesn't forgive some of the treatment this woman has been getting. Maybe Weiner should have considered that before trying to pin his mistake on a "hacker" or "prankster" as opposed to coming clean.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

How the hell do you come to this conclusion?

By... reading the article?

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

I am just glad we have finally moved past trivia like entitlement reform and Afghanistan -- so we can concentrate on the genuinely critical Issues of Our Time.

[paft.livejournal.com]

Like many women who post on the internet regularly, I consider online sexual harassment an issue worth discussing.

[kylinrouge.livejournal.com]

Considering all the shit-talking Weiner's been doing to the GOP over the years, this was inevitable. Just look at places like stormfront or freerepublic, those people are crazy and it only takes one or two of them to be good enough hackers to pull this off.

If ANY of you buy this bullshit then you are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Republican party.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

scroll up, there's a coupla franchises here already.

[dreadfulpenny81.livejournal.com]

A similar incident happened to a Canadian politician this weekend:

http://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3146344

George Lepp, Progressive Conservative candidate for Niagara Falls, Ontario

[root-fu.livejournal.com]

Swine vs swine.

(I hope those carrying out attacks know what they're getting into.)

[paft.livejournal.com]

How does the young lady in question qualify as a "swine?"

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

I know it is generally discouraged on threads like this but I've been thinking...

Liberal Congressman has been accused of sending a highly inappropiate tweet, and a right-wing blogger has been accused of setting him up.

One or both of them could be innocent but this is not a case of he said/she said. An electronic record exists of the alleged actions. If the accused open up their computers to a neutral, third party it should be fairly simple to determine if either/both/none of them is culpable. Unfortunatly this will not happen as knowing for sure would ruin the media's fun.

That said the numbers don't add up (http://datechguyblog.com/2011/05/29/hey-msm-any-old-twiterer-understands-what-rep-weiners-numbers-mean/). Why would US Rep of some prominance be "following" a 20-something college girl 3000 miles away?

[dreadfulpenny81.livejournal.com]

Typos aside, that article made some decent points, especially about the one-character difference between sending a regular tweet and sending a private message (DM).

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

Considering that Breitbart is a smarmy bottom-feeder and Weiner is a sanctimonious hack (more visas for models? Seriously? While how many New Yorkers are unemployed? Priorities, priorities...) it's hard to believe anything that comes out of either one's mouth, but Breitbart's posting of the picture and subsequent comments about "constituent outreach" are even more contemptible than his usual shenanigans.

Having said that, I think the treatment of the young lady in question has less to do with her being a "liberal" than with the fact that the 90% of the Internet is apparently populated by the kind of juvenile losers who spend their days trolling 4chan before playing eight straight hours of Halo 3 (or whatever the hell people are playing today...I'm not a gamer so I don't know) and then giggling their way to getting C-'s in college classes their parents are paying for. These execrable excuses for human beings will latch on to anyone and anything they find titillating, and this poor student is their latest victim.*

I don't know if Brietbart can actually be blamed for her treatment (according to some sources he didn't name her until after she came out publicly to defend Rep. Weiner), so I'm not going to lay all this at his feet, although he did get the ball rolling. I blame the collective moronic misogyny that is 90% of the Internet.

* Before anyone starts screaming that they aren't all unemployed dropouts who live in their mothers' basements, I know that. Some of them are doctors, lawyers, accountants, social workers, stockbrokers, pharmacists, teachers, and of many other outwardly useful professions. This does not change the fact that their online behavior makes them juvenile losers.

[blue-mangos.livejournal.com]

I blame the collective moronic misogyny that is 90% of the Internet.

This right here. Everyone is so quick to turn everything into a right vs left discussion, but this was (or should have been) the point of the post, that a young woman is being virtually attacked, in a sexual manner for no good reason. She is not a public figure, and in no way deserves the things that are being said about her.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Andrew Breitbart? If that guy said the sky was blue I'd check three times just to be sure.

More Weinergate

[404.livejournal.com]

Where there's smoke there's fire... (http://news.yahoo.com/s/dailycaller/20110601/pl_dailycaller/weinergatepornstarstrippergingerleetalkstothedc;_ylt=Ag_PVJOGHEGhYu1MM5AZz7NH2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTRpMTJpY29zBGFzc2V0A2RhaWx5Y2FsbGVyLzIwMTEwNjAxL3dlaW5lcmdhdGVwb3Juc3RhcnN0cmlwcGVyZ2luZ2VybGVldGFsa3N0b3RoZWRjBGNjb2RlA3RvcGdtcHRvcDIwMHBvb2wEY3BvcwMxBHBvcwMxBHNlYwN5bl90b3Bfc3RvcmllcwRzbGsDd2VpbmVyZ2F0ZXBv#mwpphu-container)

[chessdev.livejournal.com]

SSL is not the end-all-be-all of defense:

That also assumes malware wasnt on Weiner's machine -- lot of people cache their login credentials in the browser or machine, so if malware gets on your box then can log in without having to actually do anything.

Social Engineering attacks (click this link which downloads my evil software) will defeat most security no matter how tough.

[xforge.livejournal.com]

I really hope it turns out to be someone they can link directly to Breitbart so we can be rid of his lying intransigent smirking ass once and for all forever.