Seixon Gets Anonymous Phone-Call Threat From Person Who Sounds Like Jason Leopold

"You're a dead man."

Idle talk? Just something someone might say on an anonymous phone call to you?

Just some hijinks?

I tried not to overplay it, because I don't think any criminal charges will come from this. When you look at the long history of cyberstalking, though, this looks a little worse.

Note: Seixon himself reports that he hears one of Leopold's unhinged sock-puppeting defenders sounds something like Leopold, so it could be that guy. Or it could be some completely other guy.

Whoever this was, though, Leopold shares in the blame at least partly. (If not fully.) Because Leopold has been posting Seixon's information all over the place, and has been forging emails from Seixon to make them sound that Seixon himself is making absurd threats about "making stuff up about your family" and driving Leopold to "commit suicide" and the like. And then posting those at ThinkProgress, and online community where, it seems, that partisan passion well exceeds the average level of emotional stability.

If you tell all of your on-line buddies, over and over again, that Seixon is admitting his desire to "blackmail" you and "lie" about you (and "your family") the goal of attempting to drive you to "commit suicide," well, then, someone who believes in you just might attempt to defend you in a criminal manner, no?

One thing that occurs to me is that a lot of this is a he-said he-said sort of deal, and that I'm assuming Seixon's credibility.

I do know that those "threatening emails" seem so incredibly crude as to be unintended comedy, and that no one writes "threats" like that, nor announces an intention to lie. They are simply implausible. I don't know Seixon, and only heard of his blog recently, but I simply don't buy he's crazy enough to commit to words his intention to lie, blackmail, and drive someone to suicide.

Further, someone I know fairly well through online communications knows him somewhat and says he's a level-headed sort. I will ask further about this, just to make sure we aren't making unwarranted assumptions about credibility.

Seixon, a commenter noted, wrote sentence "My critics will stop at nothing to silence me" (or something like that; I'll check a moment), which seems pretty melodramatic.

However, given the fact that someone -- Leopold, or Dean, or a yet unknown Leopold partisan -- is spamming the Internet with Seixon's personal information, including his mother's maiden name (which can be used to get someone's financial information-- that's an almost de rigeur security question for changing a password and the like), the sentence doesn't read quite so melodramatic.

Again, I'll check as to my source's take on Seixon.

And AnonymousArmy says my site is down for him, which is possible, and that's why he can't post, but that is beginning to bother me a little bit.

But given those emails, we seem to have a case where one party to the dispute is a little unbalanced, so that party's credibility is in question. It's possible that two unbalanced people have just found each other and are now going at it with both sides engaging in sockpuppetry and lies, but it seems more likely it's just one.

I suppose that it could be the case that Seixon is gaslighting Leopold, writing deliberately crude and implausible emails so that, when Leopold disloses them, they will look like forgeries.

That is possible.

Then again, it is also possible Glenn Greenwald lives in an over-crowded flop-house of blog-buddies obsessively scouring the internet to find references to Greenwald and refute challenges to his cyberhonor.

posted by Ace at 12:13 PM

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