If you value privacy, WikiLeaks stopped being your friend years ago.

The Democratic Party can’t be happy with WikiLeaks after that site published 19,252 emails taken from the Democratic National Committee’s servers. But party donors should be even angrier.

WikiLeaks, perhaps best known for its 2010 disclosure of video showing US soldiers fatally shooting Iraqi civilians, on Friday posted a trove of messages to and from the DNC that included home addresses, Social Security numbers and other personally identifiable information found in routine donation records.

Some cybersecurity experts believe Russian operatives leaked the DNC emails to Wikileaks, which describes itself as a “multi-national media organization and associated library.”

And its Twitter account has been getting into the creepy zone lately. Should you take this group as the independent guardian it portrays itself to be? I’m going to say no.

Doxing DNC donors

As Gizmodo and other news sites observed, if you search for “Contribution” in WikiLeaks’s DNC archive, you’ll see where these contributors live, the last four digits of some of their credit cards, and sometimes even their Social Security and passport numbers.

“There’s no clear public-interest value in publishing them,” said Alex Howard, a senior analyst with the Washington-based transparency group Sunlight Foundation. Instead, Howard says the act was “ethically dubious if not outright reprehensible.”


By Rob Pegoraro.
Full story at Yahoo News.