Typed-In Country vs. Logged IP
The location field on a Steam profile. This is a text box, not a measurement. Full write-up →
Two things circulated after September 10 that look like the same kind of fact and are not remotely the same kind of fact.
The two records, side by side
| The location field | The IP address | |
|---|---|---|
| Who supplies it | The account holder | The network connection itself |
| How it is set | Typed into a text box | Not set by anyone; observed |
| How long it takes to change | Seconds | Cannot be changed after the fact |
| Can be a joke, a meme, a favourite place | Yes, constantly | No |
| Who can see it | Anyone, publicly | Valve only, in its own logs |
| Present in this investigation's public record | Yes, widely circulated | Never published |
| Evidentiary value | Approximately zero | Decisive |
The whole of the Steam-side foreign question turns on that table. The row that circulated is the useless one. The row that would settle it is the one nobody has.
The worked example: the Egypt field
A profile in the same Steam circle lists Egypt as its location and gives a Discord handle in its bio. An X thread put those two facts next to separate reporting about aircraft in Provo on September 10 and treated the pairing as significant. Both pages are here:
- The Ankha Profile and the Egypt Claim — the raw profile.
- The Ankha Thread — the post as it circulated, and where its reasoning breaks.
The ordinary reading is the strong one. The account uses the Animal Crossing character Ankha, who is Egyptian-themed — a cat in a nemes headdress. A person who picks that avatar typing "Egypt" into a one-line location box is doing the most obvious thing available, and it tells you nothing about where they were sitting.
A second "Egypt" appears in this material and is also not evidence. The September 2 comment on the wall is a mock news bulletin set "in Egypt" — a gaming in-joke among the friend group. The full text and why it is not foreshadowing.
Two unverifiable Egypts, from two different sources, neither one a measurement of anything.
The point people miss
Here is what is easy to get backwards. Showing that the typed-in Egypt is worthless does not close the foreign question. It reopens it.
If the location field had been trustworthy, it would already be answered — one way or the other. It is not trustworthy, in either direction. It cannot establish that anyone was in Egypt, and it equally cannot establish that everyone was in Utah. It simply carries no information.
So after you throw out every self-reported location, the honest position is:
- We do not know whether anyone in this circle was outside the United States.
- We do not know which country any of them was in.
- We do not know what the private messages said.
- Nothing in the public record answers any of it.
That is not a conspiracy claim. It is a statement about the size of the hole.
Who can close it
The login-IP history exists. Valve holds it, for the profile and for every account on its friend list — see The Friend List and What Valve Holds. Federal investigators can obtain it by subpoena. US intelligence has its own means of establishing whether an account was operated from abroad, and former NCTC director Joe Kent has said on the record that his center's parallel check for foreign ties was ordered to stop once Robinson was in custody — before those leads were exhausted.
The public can obtain none of it.
None of this is saying that any of these people did anything illegal or immoral. Choosing a cartoon cat as an avatar and typing a country into a text box is not evidence of anything. The list of accounts an investigation could clear is on The Steam Names Roster.
What Would Settle It
- Login IP history from Valve for the profile and every friend-list account, resolved to country.
- Session-IP correlation to the September 10–12 window.
- A statement from US intelligence on whether any account in the circle was foreign-operated — including a clean "none were," which would close this permanently.
- Whether, when and by whom the profiles were scrubbed after the event.
The Fix
- Law 2 — US Intelligence Disclosure forces the foreign answer out of the agencies that can actually establish it.
- Law 4 — Trusted Investigations removes the DoJ as gatekeeper and lets trusted investigators compel the records from Valve, a private company, and take testimony under threat of perjury.
Read the four laws → · The explainer video →
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