[Infowarrior] - House Panel Reveals Whistleblower Email Addresses

[Richard Forno]

D'Oh: House Panel Screw-Up Reveals Whistleblower Email Addresses
By Paul Kiel - October 26, 2007, 10:07PM

Here's a whoops with a capital W.

This summer the House Judiciary Committee launched an effort to collect tips
from would-be whistleblowers in the Justice Department. The U.S. attorney
firings scandal had shown that much was amiss in the Department, and with
the danger of retaliation very real, the committee had set up a form on the
committee's website for people to blow the whistle privately about abuses
there. Although the panel said it would not accept anonymous tips, it
assured those who came forward that their identity would be held in the
"strictest confidence."

But in an email sent out today, the committee inadvertently sent the email
addresses of all the would-be whistleblowers to everyone who had written in
to the tipline. The committee email was sent to tipsters who had used the
website form, including presumably whistleblowers themselves, and all of the
recipients of the email were accidentally included in the "to:" field --
instead of concealing those addresses with a so-called blind carbon copy or
"bcc:".

Only the email addresses were exposed; none of the names or other
identifying information of the whistleblowers was revealed. The blunder,
however, was noticed by a number of people who had used the website form and
received today's email. One disgruntled recipient replied to the entire list
of whistleblowers angrily complaining about the snafu; two others forwarded
the committee email to TPMmuckraker with similar complaints.

Compounding the mistake, the committee later sent out a second email
attempting to recall the original email; it, too, included all recipients in
the "to:" field, according to a recipient of the emails.

A committee spokesperson emailed the following statement in response to
TPMmuckraker's questions:

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