More likely the connection was made via your address/location and/or IP address for the place you were renting from.

Theorizing how she could have been 'outed' * She took steps from separating her 'real' life from 'work' life', but did she do the same to seperate her 'work' life from her 'real' life? Did she conceal her real identity from her workers? Does she avoid being photographed on smart devices? All it takes is for them to mention her real name in their 'work' social media or to tag her on a photograph for Facebook to make the connection. * Does she avoid posting self-photographs on her 'real' life Facebook page? Facebook's photo recognition could be sophisticated enough to correlate her photos with any photos her 'workers' may have snapped and uploaded, along with location & timestamps to make the connection. * Does she keep seperate smart mobile devices an/or turn off personal info collection like GPS? If she has location tracking turned on for her 'real' life smart device, then facebook can correlate that she frequents places, establishments, and timestamps and notice that she's often at the same places & times as her co-workers and that she may know them.

Lots of FUD here. Snowden's response only removes duplicates. If all 33k known emails were found & removed, the FBI would still have to sift 617k emails to look for secret/classified/confidential info.

Its nice that finally someone has used this kind of technique in a game, but unless Carmack gives more detail, things like this has been done before. ex. SGI's clipmapping technique