Informants’ Names Accidentally Included in WikiLeaks Release

Near the beginning of the year, WikiLeaks supporters released a collection of U.S. State Department documents that inadvertently contained the names of confidential sources. Unlike previous releases, the names were not redacted.

The publication seems to mean that an unknown number of lives and livelihoods are in jeopardy. –ARK

Der Spiegel:

The ongoing conflict between WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and his former German spokesman Daniel Domscheit-Berg has led to the accidental release of confidential data that was in WikiLeaks’ possession. Since the beginning of the year, an encrypted file has been circulating on the Internet containing the collection of around 251,000 US State Department documents that WikiLeaks obtained in spring 2010 and made public in November 2010.

… At the end of 2010, Domscheit-Berg finally returned to WikiLeaks a collection of various files that he had taken with him, including the encrypted cables. Shortly afterwards, WikiLeaks supporters released a copy of this data collection onto the Internet as a kind of public archive of the documents that WikiLeaks had previously published. The supporters clearly did not realize, however, that the data contained the original cables, as the file was not only encrypted but concealed in a hidden subdirectory.

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