Hacker Toys with New Zealand General Election

Leaked materials in a new book by journalist Nicky Hager have sucked the oxygen out of the National party’s re-election campaign.

Hager drew on thousands of hacked emails and Facebook private messages for the book. Some materials tie sordid actions by a rightwing blogger to the current prime minister.

A cache of correspondence from the computer of Cameron Slater, better known by his site’s title, Whale Oil, reveal his links to Jason Ede, then a senior press adviser and so-called “black ops” coordinator in the prime minister’s office.

“In an unlikely convergence of old and new media, the acts described in the book have been supported by the drip feed of source documents online, via an anonymous Twitter account, @Whaledump, almost certainly controlled by the same individual who handed the documents to Hager,” the Guardian reports.

Slater attributes the hack of his computer to Kim Dotcom, a New Zealand-based Internet entrepreneur wanted for extradition by the United States to face copyright and money laundering charges.

Dotcom denies any involvement with the hack.

Hager denies Dotcom is the source.

The hacker, who swiped only a fraction of Slater’s private correspondence before the intrusion was detected, originally intended to publish the material online. Hager persuaded him to provide “all the political information that you’ve found ... I was saying: rather than just dumping this out in the world, like hackers tend to do, could I have it, and try to use it for something really worthwhile?”

Hager refutes suggestions the book was designed as an election bombshell.

“He was provided the hacked material in March, he says, and while he was determined that it should be published before the election from a public interest point of view,” the Guardian reports.

Prime Minister John Key now is accused of making contradictory statements about his knowledge of how Slater had obtained material from domestic spy agency, SIS, that would embarrass a rival Labour leader.

“Ede, meanwhile, is shown in correspondence reproduced by Hager to have allegedly colluded in probing a Labour party website that had been left insecure,” the Guardian reports.

After the book came out, Key said: “I think there’s a real risk that a hacker, and people with a leftwing agenda, are trying to take an election off New Zealanders.”