NEW YORK TIMES: Representative Anthony D. Weiner, one of the most prolific users of social media among politicians, said his Twitter account was hacked this weekend when someone sent out a lewd photograph under his name to a young woman in Seattle. The episode unfolded Saturday night when it was reported on the Web site biggovernment.com, run by the conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart. It played out all day Sunday on the Internet, with Mr. Weiner, a Democrat who represents part of Brooklyn and Queens, addressing the matter on his own Twitter and Facebook accounts, and with bloggers from the left and the right arguing about whether this might be the start of a scandal or an example of how easy it is for political rivals to harm each other’s reputations using new technologies. MORE
DAILY KOS: Not one word on Breitbart’s lying sack of shit past. Not one word about his infamous role in the Shirley Sherrod lynching. Nope. The fuckheads at the NYT just “report” that “Neither Mr. Weiner, an outspoken defender of liberal positions, nor Mr. Breitbart returned messages requesting comment on Sunday night.” FUCK YOU you pathetic excuses for “journalists.” You give more column space to the lying shit-stirrers, and present all of Rep Weiner’s facts as “he says” or “he claims.” MORE
POLITICO: Weiner’s office — generally one of the most press friendly around — did not respond to a request for comment on whether he has contacted federal authorities to report the alleged cyber-attack, which could fall under laws prohibiting cyberhacking and impersonating federal officials. Whatever the case with the Weiner incident, it’s clear that the age of electronic communication is leaving politicians with even less privacy than they had in the past. MORE
PHAWKER: ‘Whatever the case with the Weiner incident’? WTF kind of journalism is that?
RELATED: Mr. Weiner’s spokesman, Dave Arnold, said on Monday, “We’ve retained counsel to explore the proper next steps and to advise us on what civil or criminal actions should be taken. This was a prank. We are loath to treat it as more, but we are relying on professional advice.” MORE
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS: Cordova said she has been harassed for weeks online after she started following Weiner on Twitter and the congressman added her to the list of about 200 people he follows. Her harrasser “started posting about me, saying, ‘Oh, the congressman is following school girls,’ tweeting it over and over. It was very annoying,” Cordova told the Daily News. When the crotch shot appeared online, she said the same Twitter user was the first to comment on it. “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,” she said. “Annoyed, I responded with something along the lines of ‘are you f***ing kidding me?’ and ‘I’ve never seen this. You people are sick,'” she said. MORE
RELATED: IndictBreitbart.org is a new campaign to seek accountability for the violations of criminal law committed by Andrew Breitbart, James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles. O’Keefe and Giles illegally and surreptitiously recorded employees of the Baltimore ACORN office in the summer of 2009 and then their employer Breitbart illegally published their edited versions online in order to harm ACORN. This is a grassroots campaign to let law enforcement officials in Maryland know that ordinary citizens want accountability. Since that illegal conduct occurred, numerous official reports have come out showing that O’Keefe, Giles and Breitbart acted illegally/unethically with regard to their ACORN recordings. Those reports are listed here. Also, James O’Keefe has been arrested and convicted for tampering with the phones in Senator Mary Landrieu’s office, and he is under investigation for attempting to lure a CNN reporter on to a boat in Maryland for nefarious purposes. Andrew Breitbart was responsible for posting an edited recording of Department of Agriculture employee Shirley Sherrod which resulted in her improper firing. A subsequent investigation determined that she did nothing wrong and should be reinstated. You can help hold these people accountable for violating Maryland law by signing this letter to Gregg Bernstein, the new Baltimore State’s Attorney. MORE
ALSO: PBS just learned an unpleasant lesson about what happens when you kick an Internet hornet’s nest. After televising its “Frontline: Wikisecrets” documentary, the public television consortium’s site, PBS.org, was hacked into and defaced by a group calling itself LulzSec — a combination of the word security and the Internet argot for laughs had at another’s expense. The group hit PBS with a series of embarrassing and potentially damaging payloads, posting graffiti-like Web pages, a fabricated story about rappers Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls being alive in New Zealand, and making public a huge cache of phone numbers, logins and passwords apparently of PBS member station websites. The pranksters posted a cached version of the Tupac story, visible here. […} “Greetings, Internets. We just finished watching WikiSecrets and were less than impressed,” the attackers wrote. “We decided to sail our Lulz Boat over to the PBS servers for further … perusing.” MORE