Over at TPMmuckraker | Talking Points Memo is a sad story about some goof who managed to exposure whistleblowers through a poor using of email. How long has email been around now? Long enough this should not happen. Ever. See the sordid details at the site, but here is the lede:
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:".
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