14 DAY TRIAL // A Japanese publishing house gathered the counter-terrorism files allegedly leaked from Tokyo's Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and released them together as a book last week.
As WikiLeaks is keeping the US State Department on edge about the content of its secret diplomatic cables being slowly published online, Japan deals with a sensitive leak of its own.
Last month, a cache of documents containing confidential information about police investigations into terrorist activities, including the identity of officers, informants, and that of people placed under surveillance, appeared on file sharing sites.
The incident was strongly criticized in the media, because some of the files were shared with the MPD by foreign law enforcement agencies like the FBI and their exposure could affect inter-country terrorism information sharing in the future.
The documents are believed to have been stolen from MPD's Public Security Bureau, a division tasked with overseeing public safety and national security issues.
The book has 469 pages, is called "Leaked police terrorism info: all data" [translated from Japanese] and has been released by a Tokyo-based publisher called Dai-San Shokan.
The Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reports that the book hit bookstore shelves last Thursday, despite some companies refusing to distribute it.
Its questionable nature stems from the use of raw, unredacted data. The files were simply copied as they were, with no "harm minimization" process being undertaken to limit risks to certail individuals.
Several people who's names and addresses appear in the book have asked the police to halt its distribution, however, that is impossible given that the MPD has so far refused to confirm the leak.
Yomiuri Shimbun, quotes Akira Kitagawa, president of the publishing house, as saying that the reason for this release is "to raise questions about the laxity of the police's information control system."