At least one Canadian businesswoman claimed on Tuesday to have received threats after appearing on a list of alleged donors to Freedom Convoy protestors hacked from the site GiveSendGo and shared with media.
Tammy Giuliani, owner of Stella Luna Gelato Cafe, said she has been forced to close the doors of her Ottawa business due to threats from extremists after her name appeared on the list. The Freedom Convoy is a protest movement calling for an end to all civil rights violations imposed on Canadians allegedly to prevent the spread of Chinese coronavirus.
“We got a call from the team saying, ‘We’re getting phone calls here,'” Giuliani told the Ottawa Citizen newspaper and added, “I said, ‘What’s going on?’ and they said, ‘They’re threatening to throw bricks through our window. They’re threatening to come and get us.’ We said, ‘Lock the door and we’ll find out what’s going on.'”
Giuliani confirmed that she donated to the Freedom Convoy through GiveSendGo, a Christian-owned crowdfunding site that became the go-to place to aid the anti-mandate protesters after the larger GoFundMe shut down their fundraiser and said it would give the money to causes that it deemed palatable (GoFundMe has since relented under widespread condemnation). Giuliani also confirmed that she brought food to the protestors – but now claims she regrets helping them.
“In retrospect, it was bad judgment, but does that mean that people have a right to threaten our staff? Does it mean people have the right to threaten to throw bricks through our window and to threaten my family? We made a mistake. Who could have anticipated it?” she said.
Others, like Vicki Dutton and her husband, are also concerned about possible reprisals after their names appeared in the list of nearly 93,000 people, which allegedly included personal information such as emails and postal codes.
“We’re not ashamed of the donation, but what we’re worried about is being targeted by people who find hate in this, and I don’t think there should be hate in a peaceful movement,” Dutton told the Toronto Sun newspaper in an interview.
Vicki’s husband David suggested that the Canadian government or police may have had a role in the hack of the GiveSendGo list, saying, “I feel very frightened of my government right now, and no one really shouldn’t have to feel frightened of the government,” noting the fact leftist Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has invoked emergency powers through the never-before-used Emergencies Act.
The alleged GiveSendGo donor list has been spread across various social media platforms, including Twitter, despite Twitter’s alleged policy against the spread of hacked materials.
Gerald Butts, a former top advisor to Prime Minister Trudeau who resigned amid a corruption scandal in 2019, quote-tweeted one of the accounts spreading the donor information, writing, “Quite the list of #GiveSendGo donors from Toronto. A Ford Government staffer and a bunch of @UofT faculty & students jump out.”
“If you donate to a political campaign in Canada, your name and donation are published, by law. But these guys think you should be able to donate to an insurrection anonymously? Give me a break,” Butts later stated after being confronted by another user.
The Freedom Convoy protests nationwide have been overwhelmingly peaceful, resulting in a small number of arrests for “mischief.” In some areas, footage of police embracing protesters, rather than conflict, has surfaced.