14 DAY TRIAL // The Internet's top whistleblowing website, Wikileaks, has been faced with a though decision, as someone submitted for publishing a partial list containing the e-mail addresses of its own donors. The web archive administrators eventually published it.
Wikileaks specializes in the publishing of sensitive and secret leaked documents, by protecting the identity of the whistleblowers. "We are of assistance to peoples of all countries who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and institutions. We aim for maximum political impact," the team running the website explains.
Due to the controversial nature of the data published on Wikileaks, the website is making the subject of constant legal attacks. Its administrators estimate that they face such legal threats once every three weeks on average.
Giving the funds required to fend off the legal attacks as well as maintain the heavily-trafficked website, a donation system has been set up in order to raise the monthly $25,000 required to keep the project going.
On February 14, things went a bit wrong for one of the staffers, who accidentally pasted the e-mail addresses of 58 donors into the CC field instead of the BCC one when sending a mass announcement. Unlike an e-mail's CC field, the BCC (blind carbon copy) allows the sender to forward copies of the message to multiple recipients without disclosing their e-mail addresses to each other.
Apparently, one of the donors or someone connected to one was curious to see if the website admins would display the same eagerness to make their own mistake public, as they were when it came to other organizations. "A phrankster […] submitted this list to Wikileaks, possibly to test the project's principles of complete impartiality when dealing with whistleblowers," is noted on the website.
The document in question was published by the staff on February 18 under the "Wikileaks partial donors list" name, and is available for download from 12 severs around the world, including TOR. However, the website is unlikely to lose support over this incident, as it is backed up by many civil liberties and transparency groups, as well as journalistic associations. For example, a few days ago, Wikileaks has made public an official confidential NATO report, according to which the civilian death toll resulting from the war in Afghanistan increased by 46% in 2008.
Last week, we also reported about the similarly ironic story of the Zone-h.org web defacement archive, which was itself defaced by a group of hackers.