Step 1: a comment on Facebook observed by a Wired intern leads to a probe of the guy's friends and recent groups.

Given the latest spritz of "I'm leaving Facebook" posts on HN, this is a coincidentially relevant tale of how it was used to track somebody down against his wishes. Even more interesting was that the timing of his profile deletion was an indicator to Wired that he was involved in something abnormal.

Some of you seem to regret ever opening a Facebook account; you can count Hogan solidly among your numbers. This story is a memorable counter to the claim that in the new era of social networking, people want everything to be public all the time. Perhaps you might not care too much about your privacy, but one day might come along where you really need to and it's too late.

IMHO, this fits nicely under Eric Schmidt's philosophy that "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." After all, it's the morally questionable act of profiting from someone's mistake that's the ultimate cause of his troubles.

FTA: I hope it sends a message that journalism is still very much alive,

Wow... why don't I see a hue and cry regarding the name revelation by wired.com here. When Gizmodo released the name of Gary powell it was called a cheap shot... But stalking someone using facebook and revealing their name to the world which definitely could affect the person's career is suddenly fair game.

Has this person been convicted of a crime? No? Well now... Does anybody remember Richard Jewell?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Jewell

On the other hand, the guy's lawyer does admit he was the one that found the phone, it's not likely Wired found the wrong person.

I don't think Wired is making any assumptions about the legal status of what he did.

Does that make it any less freaky that trawling Facebook is what led to this scoop? Well, admittedly no.

To me, "trawling Facebook" means using publicly available information. Pretending to be interested in friendship is "social engineering," which is a polite way of saying "lying."

A telling Facebook comment on the wall of a former Wired intern who still had connections to Wired. Had he not done that, he might still be underground.

> But even so, the comment was vague (a single word) and not enough to draw a conclusion

What was the single word?

Payday? Money? "Stolen?!"?, Nevermore?

First step, you get lucky. I mean, once you have a name and a social group, you're already 99% of the way there.

I wonder how many lies were told in order to get this scoop? "Hi, I'm a friend of Brian's, do you know...?"

Hi I'm that intern.

No lies involved. We got an email at Wired about the phone (pre-Gizmodo story) and ignored it. After the story we came back to the email, I looked it up on Google, found his real name associated to a post on a forum, searched it on Facebook and, for some very odd reason, he accepted a friends request from me.

I guess the lesson here is not to talk (or accept friends requests) from strangers.

You dishonestly pretended to be interested in friendship with someone and you tell us that he lesson is not to accept friendship requests from strangers?

I take the lesson as "Beware, even the nicest people will rationalize dishonesty."