SOCK PUPPET ALERT

My post on blogger-lawyer Irfan Yusuf gratuitously revealing the place of residence of hostile commenter Daniel Lewis has drawn an interesting comment:

Daniel, I know you live at Rushcutters Bay. How did I figure it out? Because I went to Factiva and typed in your name and all your letters to the editor came up.

I took this suburb info and went to the white pages website and typed in your surname and initial and an address and phone number came up.

So I figured out where you live by using public info. Any member of the public could do what I did. Your accusations against Irf make you and all your idiotic far-Right friends look like the sh#theads that you are.

If you didn't hang around with so many brain-dead far-Right idiots, you wouldn't be so paranoid. Or have you been borrowing cocaine from Akerman and Blair again?

Get off the drugs, mate!

Factiva, now there's a site not commonly used by the man on the street to find people but to which a business person might have access. Someone like, say... lawyer Irfan Yusuf, here threatening Lewis with a Factiva search:

Maybe I should go to Factiva and dig out some of your letters to the editor.

It looks like Yusuf finally made good on that threat.

The bit about finding Lewis through the online White Pages is a lie: there are only two listings for Lewis in Rushcutters Bay; neither has the initial "D".

All of this is merely distraction from the pertinent question: why did Yusuf include Lewis's suburb in his sidebar notice if not to draw attention to where he lives? The information simply isn't relevant to the matters being discussed.

It's sufficient to refer to "Sydney lawyer Irfan Yusuf" when I could, if I wanted to, describe him as "Sydney lawyer Irfan Yusuf, 46 Twin Road, North Ryde, NSW 2113, (telephone 02 98780731, mobile 0414355786)". Now this is no big deal because all of the information on Yusuf is readily available online but it's not relevant. Lewis on the other hand keeps his exact address to himself. But for some reason Yusuf wants to narrow down Lewis's location as precisely as he can.

Finally, the comment above was lodged under the pseudonym Hashem, sometimes used by Jews as a name for God. Given Yusuf's ample proportions he might have more appropriately chosen Buddha.

Update: Yusuf, miffed that I posted his publicly available details (which he says are incorrect, anyway), informs me via email that he referred the matter to the Australian Federal Police for investigation. So if you don't hear from me for a while it's probably because I'm being interrogated.

By the way, Yusuf does not deny that he authored the comment posted under the name Hashem.