Later that evening, the Independent was stored on the Coleman site. A few hours after that, the page containing that database was suddenly password protected.

But the Coleman campaign didn't bother notifying any of its supporters that their data had been exposed on the Net. (Which, , may be a violation of Minnesota state law.)

Fast-forward six weeks. Wikileaks.org receives copies of the databases from an anonymous whistle-blower. The site sends an e-mail to everyone in those databases, warning them it's about to spill the beans. Two days later, the databases, with most of the credit card digits removed but everything else intact, go online.

The Coleman crew immediately begins shrieking about . (Though, as Richards notes, the only "hacking" tool she needed to find all this information was Google.) Their official response also included this gem: "We take the privacy and confidentiality of our donors and supporters extremely seriously."

But not quite seriously enough to a) keep their unprotected confidential data off the Net, or 2) tell anyone after they knew the data was exposed.