Daily Beast Investigation Refutes Evidence From Cyber Expert That Joy Reid’s Blog Was Hacked
The Daily Beast has published an extensive investigation that calls into question a number of claims made by the cybersecurity expert that Joy Reid hired to prove a trove of homophobic posts from her former blog were fabricated and inserted by hackers seeking to tarnish her reputation.
On Wednesday, Beast executive editor Noah Shachtman told staff in an internal memo that Reid — an MSNBC host and Daily Beast columnist — would have her column suspended pending the investigation by cybersecurity reporter Kevin Poulsen as well as an examination of her past statements by media reporter Max Tani.
Poulsen released late Thursday night a thorough — and damning — analysis of the claims made by Reid’s cybersecurity expert. That expert, a consultant named Jonathan Nichols, claimed in a statement that a number of the homophobic posts from Reid’s blog that were circulating online were manipulated screenshots, and that others were actually wholly fabricated and inserted onto her blog by a hacker.
Poulsen’s investigation poked fatal holes in the evidence Nichols provided to support his claims. It first examined the claim that some of the posts circulating on Twitter were fabricated images, after Nichols provided six posts he claimed did not exist anywhere on Reid’s blog. Poulsen uncovered all six of those posts on an Internet Archive of the blog. “And all six are exactly as they appear in the screenshots,” Poulsen wrote. Nichols acknowledged an error in his methodology to the Beast.
Next, Poulsen took on Reid’s claim that an imposter inserted fake posts into her blog. As Poulsen writes in his piece, the evidence supporting that theory falls apart under scrutiny.
The investigation apparently prompted Reid’s lawyer to accept that no one had hacked the Wayback Machine, an internet archiving service that took contemporaneous screenshots of Reid’s blog, but that in fact the nefarious hacker was inserting fabricated posts into Reid’s blog while she was running it.
“That’s an extraordinary claim,” Poulsen writes, “and so far the bits and pieces of evidence offered for it have not stood up to scrutiny when they’ve been specific enough to test.”
Poulsen concludes:
It’s possible that in the end Reid will discover her adversary isn’t a determined hacker, but a far more dogged foe: The Joy-Ann Reid of years past, writing in a voice she can no longer recognize as her own.
Reid’s lawyer said on Wednesday that the FBI is investigating “potential criminal activities” surrounding her old blog.
[Photo via Duane Prokop — Getty Images)]
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