Jason Cherniak has spent days carefully building the case against Valentin Erikson, a Conservative Party researcher.  That effort culminated in what looked like a faked Facebook entry, shredded by Mike Brock:

The image posted appears to come from Valentin Erikson, a parliamentary staffer with the Conservative Party.

Unfortunately there are two very peculiar elements in this "evidence". 

The first, is only the first name is highlighted blue as a hotlink to his facebook profile.  Facebook highlights the entire name in messages posted.  I'm too lazy to post a screenshot of that right now, but you can go look for yourself.

The second, is the time: 19:32am.  This makes no sense. 19:32 would be PM. 

If I had to guess, somebody captured the HTML from facebook, modified it, and then took a screenshot of it. 

Confronted with this, Jason first promised to check into it, then admitted that the evidence was tampered with but that it was still credible, then just folded like a cheap suit:

Over the past few days I have written extremely critical comments about a Parliamentary staffer named Valentin Erikson. I now realize that my posts were based on factual inaccuracies, and my comments weren't fair. I have therefore taken down my blog posts on the subject.

Besides retracting my statements, I would like to offer my sincere apology to Mr. Erikson for any embarrassment I have caused him.

I shouldn't be so harsh.  Jason Cherniak has done the right thing.

Almost.

What he hasn't done is explain just where he got this screenshot:

This picture was featured in this post:

This story, about hate-crimes against an Estonian-Canadian, has just expanded significantly. I have a screen shot of what I am told is Mr. Erickson's government contact, which includes the supposedly fake email address.

People need to be very careful about jumping to conclusions. We still don't know what Mr. Erickson's involvement is in this. However, I think there are enough questions to throw them out there for the professional media to pick it up.

The "fake" email address is actually not fake, but the name change involves a personal matter.

But that's not what matters.  IntraParl is a government-run intranet for the House of Commons, and not connected to any party.

Someone used their access to IntraParl to send Jason Cherniak the user page for a party staffer to be used in a blog series designed to bring embarrassment on Erikson and on the Conservative Party.

Jason Cherniak presumably knows who it is, or at least what email address was used to send the picture.

I'm sure Erikson would like to know who that person is.  That person is still there, perhaps planning another attack.  And perhaps the Board of Internal Economy would like to know who that person is, so that he or she could be reminded about the proper use of government IT resources, about the importance of confidentiality of personal information stored on computer networks, and of the non-partisan nature of IntraParl.

I doubt we'll hear from Jason Cherniak, though.

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