A spokesman for the website that posted a list of thousands of Norm Coleman's contributors last week said that an anonymous person found the document "floating around on the Internet" and uploaded it onto Wikileaks.org to expose the security breach.
Daniel Schmitt, who identified himself as a German programmer and journalist for Wikileaks, said the list contained the full credit card numbers for contributors and that the website stripped them out -- leaving only the final four digits and the security codes -- before posting it.
Republican Coleman, who is awaiting a decision in his lawsuit seeking to overturn Democrat Al Franken's 225-vote lead in the U.S. Senate election, said last week that the U.S. Secret Service is investigating the breach.
Coleman accused political opponents of hacking into his campaign website to discourage prospective donors from financing the long, expensive recount process. Several Web operators, however, said they believe the campaign mistakenly left the website open for several hours in late January.
Schmitt declined to say when Wikileaks first received the Coleman database, saying only that it was within the past month and not immediately after the information was accessible in January.
He also said he does not know who posted the database or why, and that's the way they like it.
Wikileaks is designed to enable whistleblowers to protect themselves against imprisonment while posting confidential and sensitive information about governments, corporations or other powerful institutions. Just two years old, the website boasts of containing hundreds of thousands of documents from around the world.
The site was organized, it says, by Chinese dissidents, mathematicians and start-up techies from the United States, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa. Staffers, who are mostly unidentified (which means that Schmitt may not be who he says he is), say they review submissions before publishing them.
Wikileaks has no partisan affiliation, Schmitt said. Sensitive information about Democrats also has popped up on the site, he said, notably documents on President Barack Obama's affiliation with ACORN, a liberal community organizing group.
Typical of Wikileaks material was a memo on Somalia civil war policy from the country's Islamic court system, or information on the corrupt family of a former Kenyan leader. But last fall, Wikileaks also exposed the content of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's e-mail account.
Schmitt said the site has received several e-mails criticizing it for the Coleman list, but he said politics had nothing to do with the posting. "The first day I heard about Franken was the first day we got feedback on this. I'm not very deeply into U.S. politics," he said. Kevin Duchschere • 651-292-1064
