Innocence of Muslims

Abby Ohlheiser and Josh Voorhees have a Slate article about the mystery film, Innocence of Muslims:

It looks like the Associated Press has solved the mystery of who was behind the anti-Islam film believed to have sparked this week's violent protests at US missions in Egypt, Libya, and throughout the Middle East.
That man is Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a 55-year-old Coptic Christian with a criminal past who lives in California, according to the news wire's digging, which has been backed up by a federal law enforcement official.
In an interview with the AP, Nakoula admitted to providing logistical support for the production of Innocence of Muslims but denied being Sam Bacile, the name given as the film's maker. But the evidence cobbled together by AP reporters Gillian Flaccus and Stephen Braun suggests otherwise.
The AP was one of a handful of media outlets to publish an interview with a man who claimed to be Bacile. Reporters traced the cellphone number used during that interview to Nakoula's address and, once there, noticed that Nakoula covered up his middle name of Basseley with his thumb when displaying his driver's license.
A little more digging by Flaccus and Braun led to the discovery that Nakoula pleaded no contest in 2010 to bank fraud charges, had used numerous aliases in the past, and had a number of connections to the Bacile persona. An unnamed federal law enforcement official later confirmed to the AP that they had the right man.
Religion Dispatch's Sarah Posner appears to have been the first reporter to raise doubts about Bacile, noting that the man who spoke with the media gave conflicting details about himself. Over the course of the day, those doubts grew, with reporters noting that, despite a claim that the film cost five million dollars—which Bacile claimed to have raised from a hundred Israeli donors— it had comically poor production value.
A thirteen-minute trailer for the film portrays Mohammed as a pedophile-appeasing, bumbling spreader of false doctrine. Notably, as On the Media spotted, all of the more controversial lines in the trailer were dubbed in later, apparently to keep the film's actors and crew from knowing what they were working on.
Nakoula apparently went to Terry Jones, the Florida-based, Quran-burning pastor, a few weeks ago for help promoting the film. In an interview with the Daily Beast, Jones admitted that the film's negative portrayal of the Mohammed could cause violence, but he said he does not regret exercising free speech.