"What's Wikileaks, the net's foremost document leaking site, supposed to do when a whistle-blower submits a list of email addresses belonging to the site's confidential donors as a leaked document?

That's exactly the conundrum Wikileaks faced this week after someone from the controversial whistle-blowing site sent an emergency fund-raising appeal on Saturday to previous donors. But instead of hiding email addresses from the recipients by using the bcc field, the sender put 58 addresses into the cc field, revealing all the addresses to all the recipients.

Someone then submitted the email as a leaked document, writing "WikiLeaks leaks it's own donors, aww irony. BCC next time kthx."

Wikileaks, which has been criticized for lacking discretion in deciding whether to release documents or not, published the email and the donors' email addresses on Wednesday. The entry noted that the email was submitted "possibly to test the project's principles of complete impartiality when dealing with whistleblowers."

One notable email address belongs to convicted former hacker Adrian Lamo, who now runs his own security company. In a Twitter post on Saturday, Lamo noted the screw-up, writing "Thanks WikiLeaks, for leaking your donor list.[...] That's dedication." See more in his comment to this story."

Read more: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/02/wikileaks-force.html
Donors List: http://wikileaks.org/leak/wikileaks-leaks-donors.txt