Some 4,700 unlucky donors to the Coleman senate campaign have , and another 51,000 supporters got their names, addresses, e-mail, and passwords exposed. The data has been out in the wild for at least six weeks, and now that , everybody can have at it.

The key culprits? Why, the Coleman campaign itself. And therein lies a tale.

News of the wide-open database first hit the Net on Jan. 28, thanks to a Minneapolis-based consultant named , who posted a screen shot of the . She details the process of how she found the open database (in less than two minutes) on her . (She says, however, that she did not download it.)

On that same day, the Coleman campaign claimed its Web site had been overwhelmed by traffic and taken offline. Coleman campaign manager Cullen Sheehan implied the crash was related to "."

According to , that doesn't seem to be what actually happened. Blogger Aaron Landry even accused the Coleman campaign of : "In short, they have configured their website to intentionally point at nothing," he wrote.