Stung by a Twitter renegade, group in Obama administration launched sting of its own

Stung by a Twitter renegade, group in Obama administration launched sting of its own

By David Nakamura, Anne Gearan and Scott Wilson at the Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/stung-by-a-twitter-renegade-group-in-obama-administration-launched-sting-of-its-own/2013/10/23/3cb89d56-3c00-11e3-b6a9-da62c264f40e_story.html?Post+generic=%3Ftid%3Dsm_twitter_washingtonpost

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Inside the National Security Council, most officials aren’t allowed to use or even look at Twitter, the popular social-networking service.

But that didn’t stop some of President Obama’s top advisers from trying to identify the person responsible for @natsecwonk, an anonymous Twitter account that published a steady stream of personal and sometimes offensive attacks on White House and State Department officials.

Three weeks ago, the group hatched a plan to trick the suspected NSC staffer into revealing himself. They would intentionally plant inaccurate, but harmless, information with him to see if it would pop up as a 140-character tweet, according to a U.S. official with knowledge of the effort.

It is not clear whether the sting led directly to the unmasking last week of Jofi Joseph, 40, who was identified as the creative force behind @natsecwonk and was fired from his position on the administration’s Iran negotiations team. But the lengths to which White House officials went to find Joseph reveal how much of an embarrassment his Twitter feed had become inside the West Wing and across the street at the stately Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where Joseph worked alongside his NSC colleagues while secretly skewering them online.


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