Last night, James Comey admitted he had a secret Twitter account. Today, a reporter for Gizmodo almost certainly found it. Just how and why they did so, however, illustrates the very real problems with privacy on the internet, even before your ISP starts selling your data.

In theory, this shouldn’t be easy. Comey is so paranoid about hackers he covers his webcam with a piece of tape. All Gizmodo reporter Ashley Feinberg really had to go on was what Comey stated, namely that he had a secret Twitter account, that he had an Instagram account, and that Instagram account had nine followers, all of whom were family members. But that turned out to be enough.

Feinberg had a slight advantage: Comey’s son is Brien Comey, a relatively high-profile college basketball player. She managed to find Brien Comey’s Instagram, which was locked down, but requesting a follow brought up other people Feinberg supposedly knew, including, suspiciously, one Reinhold Niebuhr, a theologian well known in political circles for his thoughts on foreign policy.

This was Comey’s first mistake, and a pretty glaring one, as it’s well known Comey’s senior thesis in college was about Niebuhr. From there, Feinberg was able to find the Twitter account @projectexile7, which, just to make this doubly embarrassing, is one of Comey’s signature policy achievements before he joined the FBI. Pair that with the fact that his follows are almost entirely tied to Comey’s job, and it’s not a lock but it adds up.

Of course, it’s worth asking why Comey, who has made his distaste and dislike of social media and hackers abundantly clear, would basically fire up a neon sign announcing who he is with his usernames. But if it’s a fake, it’s a fake that went to extreme lengths. And it illustrates that even though you may lock everything down and not use your real name, that doesn’t mean your social media is private.

UPDATE: Comey has made the account private but not before some 8000 people followed his secret account. He then posted his first and only tweet, a tip of the cap of sorts to Feinberg’s expert sleuthing.

(via Gizmodo)