I got hacked – yeah right!

On Wed 26 August the user GarfieldNZ twittered:

@suebr is STILL a good candidate for NZ’s first political assassination. (watch sue run to the Police because of a death threat, stupid cow)

For those who do not know Twitter, the reference to @suebr means it will get seen by user “suebr” which is Sue Bradford herself.

While I am not sure I would classify the tweet as a literal death threat, even implicit threats of violence should have no part in our discourse.

Dave at Big News names the user as Henk van Helmond, formerly of CYFSWatch, based on some good detective work.

The media door-stopped van Hermond and his response is reported by the Herald:

CYFSwatch is run by Henk van Helmond, who yesterday wrote that though the threats had come from his account “it seems my password was hacked”.

Yeah, Right.

IrishBill at The Standard dives into the gutter as usual and tries to link the actions of van Hermond to the anti-EFA campaign and me personally and sees something sinister in the fact I did not report the original Sunday News story, implying somehow I condone such threat of violence.

As usual he could not be more wrong. I’m not sure if I have revealed this publicly before, but in 2007 there were similar threats made by someone with the CYFSWatch site (and my response is here) – maybe even the same person. Back then, their identities were tightly kept.

Someone from CYFSWatch commented on my site. Due to the threats that had made against Bradford, I passed on their identifying information (IP address) to Sue Bradford’s office and explained the Police could use this to trace them.

Bradford’s office in time passed this into the Police, and they contacted me and I provided the Police with information which allowed them to obtain from the ISP, the identity of the person holding the account which had made the threats.

As I said I don’t think I’ve ever blogged this info before (I think I did mention it once in a comment) but as someone too cowardly to even post under their own name is trying to link me to condoning or encouraging this sort of activity, I need to set the record straight.

UPDATE: Idiot/Savant also jumps into the gutter. Again someone who hides behind anonymity tries to smear someone who does not. You never tend to get these sort of smears from people who blog under their own name. That is because blogging under your own name forces you to think about consequences (well except for Whale!) of what you say on your own reputation.