Wikileaks springs a leak

24.02.2009
Live by the leak, die by the leak. Apparently that's the motto at , the whistle-blowing site that provides one-stop shopping for stuff other folks really don't want you to see.

Wikileaks made headlines last year when and other activities not-entirely-on-the-up-and-up. The bank sued, inspiring some laughably lame attempts to shut the site down and generating even more bad PR.

About a month later the site . The site has also been instrumental in documenting , human rights protests in Tibet, and .

But Wikileaks is now dangling by its own petard, after someone in its fundraising arm sent out an e-mail shilling for donations but put the addresses of its 58 recipients on the "To:" field instead of "Bcc:". Someone quickly submitted the e-mail to the Wikileaks foundation as a "leaked" document, presumably to test just how devoted Wikileaks is to its own mission.

Egg meet face.

To its credit (and probably to some donors' horror) the site , including all 58 email addresses. Many of them feature aliases like "eekameeka" and "phantom 7266," while other less fortunate folks included what appear to be their real names and work email addresses. But even a pseudonymous address can yield a lot of information about someone if they use it to sign onto multiple sites across the Web.