Facebook has thus far not commented to Big League Politics regarding the assistance they provided Daily Beast journalist and former convicted hacker Kevin Poulsen in doxxing the formerly private citizen who shared the viral meme of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appearing to speak even less clearly than usual.
Poulsen bragged about receiving private information directly from Facebook about Shawn Brooks, the man who uploaded the viral video of Pelosi that was slightly edited to make her appear less coherent than usual from big tech platform Facebook in his hit piece.
But a Facebook official, confirming a Daily Beast investigation, said the video was first posted on Politics WatchDog directly from Brooks’ personal Facebook account.
From this it is unclear exactly how much information Facebook provided about Brooks, but it appears Facebook may have completely outed Brooks’ identity.
Facebook has a history of compromising user data through leaks and accidental overreaches of third party application developers, but this may represent the first time Facebook has ever willingly turned over user data.
It is not entirely clear whether Facebook furnished Poulsen, a former black hat hacker who fled charges after he “was indicted on 19 counts of conspiracy, fraud, wiretapping and money laundering,” with the information regarding his identity, and thus far Facebook has declined to provide comment to Big League Politics.
In Poulsen’s article, he writes that “According to the [Facebook] official, there were indeed six other accounts registered alongside Brooks as page administrators,” and goes on to say that “the company determined last week that all six of them were controlled by Brooks.”
This would appear to suggest Facebook provided a great deal of information to Poulsen that he would otherwise have had little access to.
In Poulsen’s previous life as a hacker, he was accused of compromising the systems of a popular radio station, stealing private communications from a Hollywood actress, conspiring to steal United States military intelligence, and cracking the systems of the FBI and United States Army. He eventually was caught, and convicted on several of the these crimes. Poulsen served five years in prison and several more on probation. Poulsen was not allowed access to the Internet until his probation officer relented in 2004.
This event is eerily similar to a previous incident in 2017, when CNN threatened to dox a Twitter user who uploaded a video of President Donald Trump body slamming CNN. This may represent a new pattern of the media declaring war against private citizens who create content not approved by the fake news media.