Adventures in Jigsaw Identification

The folks at Logical Intelligence, a social media monitoring firm, have managed to discover the identity of "GhostEzra", who has been running one of the worlds largest antisemitic forums.

I cannot say that I am at all upset that this guy's name is now public.

But their description does describe how information about someone can be pieced together, even when allegedly anonymized by actors like Google and Facebook, can be definitively identified by piecing the data together.

It's why the privacy hostile policies of the major internet firms are disturbing:

Logically, as part of our mission to understand and counter harmful online misinformation, conducts continuous research into the networks, channels, and actors that play an outsized role in spreading misinformation and conspiracies. One element of that research program is working to uncover the identities of those who leverage online anonymity to avoid accountability for spreading misinformation and hate speech. GhostEzra is the most extreme, and arguably the most influential such figure that the investigative team has uncovered to date.

GhostEzra, who first appeared online at the end of 2020, has made claims about Jewish control of Big Pharma, the media, and central banking. The account has also claimed that Jews are responsible for both world wars and that the people who “identify as Jewish but are not actually even Jews” have a goal of “total world domination and control.” He has linked his followers multiple times to neo-Nazi propaganda, including a 12-hour film that, among other claims, asserts that Jews created communism with a goal of “total world domination.” As a result, the comments under the account’s Telegram posts now effectively function as a neo-Nazi discussion forum.

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The man behind the account, Robert Smart, is an evangelical Christian and serial entrepreneur who attends several churches in his local area. He appears to have previously operated at least four other QAnon Twitter accounts, each set up within a day of its predecessor being suspended and each sharing similar identifiers, including almost identical bios, and a similar writing style. All of the accounts identified by Logically as his in some way invoked the identities of individuals frequently lauded by QAnon adherents as significant players or bringers of "the storm," such as Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, or Ezra Cohen-Watnick.  

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GhostEzra’s channel also served as an ideal venue for further radicalization of disenchanted QAnon adherents, according to Amarasingham: “for one, the faction who follow him closely will be drawn deeper into his ideological bubble, which consists of anti-trans, anti-vax, antisemitic, and white nationalist content. Second, once these sorts of views become normalized and become part of your everyday consumption, it is not difficult to find other channels and groups on Telegram that are much darker and more dangerous.”

Despite GhostEzra’s true identity long eluding QAnon adherents and conspiracy researchers alike, Logically was able to reveal GhostEzra’s identity by following a trail of open-source intelligence leads to determine the identity of the person posting as GhostEzra.

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On January 16, 2021, GhostEzra posted to their channel that they had been bowling that night, taking a detour to drive past the JFK Medical Center on the way back. This post did not mention the location of the medical center; in an earlier reply on Gab, however, GhostEzra had mentioned living in Florida.

Though GhostEzra often reposts images taken from elsewhere on the internet to his Telegram channel, a small number of images appear more likely to be originals. On a number of occasions, GhostEzra posted photos of Florida Emergency Alerts Systems displayed on a television set, narrowing down possible locations.

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On May 17, 2021, GhostEzra also posted a close-up picture from a gas station at night time in a post about rising fuel prices.

By looking at U.S. national averages and trends for gas prices, we were able to narrow the location of the gas station in the photo down to three possible states. GhostEzra’s posting patterns also suggested that they were located in the Eastern U.S. time zone. This information enabled us to identify the exact location of the gas station pictured to be St Andrews Boulevard in Boca Raton, Florida. 

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Alongside photos shared from a variety of sources to the GhostEzra Telegram channel, a number of screenshots of a specific Android phone were posted which appeared to be originals. This provided further ways to narrow our search, by referring to certain apps and services they used which were visible in the phone's status bar in the posted screenshots. On the first of March, GhostEzra posted a screenshot of a YouTube livestream he was viewing. In the bottom-left corner, “Chat publicly as Robert S...” was displayed in the livestream chatbox featuring a black silhouette and a question mark as a profile picture.

It goes on from there, and shows a very competent bit of detective work, but it's also profoundly chilling.

If they can do this to Mr. Smart, there are a lot more people who can do a similar deep dive on anyone.