Thread by @ClimateAudit

there's an odd loose detail about the four "alter ego"s used by Guccifer 2 in his alteration of metadata in June-July 2016 that has teased me for years. FN and I chatted about it recently with no real solution. I'll explain briefly.

As well known, in original drop at his wordpres blog, Guccifer 2, both seemingly pointlessly and at price of calling authenticity into question, opened and immediately re-saved 4 documents, with result that user metadata modified to Felix Edmundovich (in Cyrillic), Cheka founder.

it was immediately proclaimed by numerous computer security professionals as an "opsec error" revealing that Guccifer 2 was a Russian intel agency. This confidence always seemed misplaced to me, since no one would interpret a username of J Edgar Hoover as proof of FBI presence

be that as it may, in his next blogpost, Guccifer 2 similarly altered metadata of several documents, but this time added username of "Ernesto Che" [Guevara], the famous Cuban revolutionary and Fidel Castro contemporary.

on Jun 30, 2016, after a couple of drops with no alterations, G2 again altered metadata of several documents, this time adding username of (in Mandarin) of Zhu De en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhu_De, a very senior Mao era general and official, but obscure enought that I didnt recognized name

the fourth and final alter ego, used on July 6, 2016, was "Nguyen van Thang" (with diacriticals). Obviously a Vietnamese name, but who is it? Does anyone know?
Similar to, but NOT Nguyen Van Thieu, a South Vietnamese president in Vietnam War era.

this alter ego was used one day after large-scale copying of July 5, 2016, from which ngpvan.7z archive was later extracted and which gave rise to Binney's theories on copy speed (which IMO are post-exfiltration and uninformative on exfiltration speeds. Pls don't discuss here.)

FN wondered whether Nguyen Van Thang might be some sort of subtle pun alluding to ngpvan. Without an identification for Nguyen Van Thang, we're rather grasping at straws.

but the main question posed today is: these four alter egos are, to say the least, idiosyncratic. So can we deduce anything about Guccifer2 from his selection of these four alter egos? At a minimum, it indicates a certain amount of modern historical erudition for Guccifer 2/

I'm inclined to think that the choice of these alter egos indicates someone older, rather than younger. Alter egos more likely to be chosen by someone 60 than 29. Not PROOF, but slight indication. (I'm open to argument on this).

Obviously Mueller investigation and profession computer security community are totally convinced that G2 is a manifestation of GRU, but, unfortunately, Mueller didn't provide detailed evidence demonstrating this.
Very little of the G2 episode makes any sense to me.

a solution to the Nguyen Van Thang puzzle from

https://twitter.com/Whiteleydj1/status/150823768154480641

. It was birth name of Nguyen Hai Than, a Vietnamese revolutionary in early part of 20th century en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nguy%E1%B…

so Nguyen Van Thang fits into the pattern of a somewhat esoteric version of the name of a revolutionary sufficiently well known to occur in history books, but, in this case, not necessarily known even by people with excellent general knowledge

by coincidence (or not), Margot just linked to Hal Martin valedictory

https://twitter.com/ProfMJCleveland/status/1508285693579206658

- a document that FN and I discussed relative to the four obscure alter egos. Hal Martin seems like the sort of person who would have both knowledge and quirkiness to use them.