At the end of January, a hacker broke into Senator Norm Coleman’s web site and gained access to information there about donors to the Coleman campaign. Coleman’s staff had a forensic analysis performed and were assured that the donor information had not been downloaded.
It appears, however, that this conclusion was mistaken, as last night, a left-wing group called Wikileaks.org sent emails to Coleman’s donors that attached an Excel spread sheet with the hacked donor information:
Wikileaks has released detailed lists of the controversial Republican Norm Coleman’s supporters and donors. Some 51,000 individuals are represented. Although politically interesting in their own right, the lists, which are part of an enormous 4.3 Gb database leak from the Coleman campaign, provide proof to the rumors that sensitive information–including thousands of supporter’s [sic] credit card numbers–where [sic] put onto the internet on January 28 as a result of sloppy handling by the campaign.
I would say that they were “put onto the internet” as a result of illegal hacking by a Democrat.
“Wikileaks” explained in an earlier email that it was making public the information on Coleman’s donors, including their credit card numbers, because of the “Coleman campaign’s effort to impugn the election processes in the State of Minnesota.” As a result of Wikileak’s mass email of a spread sheet containing credit card information for thousands of Coleman donors, the Coleman campaign sent an email to its supporters today suggesting that they cancel their credit cards.
It’s impossible to say whether Wikileaks hacked Coleman’s site and is now making the information public out of frustration at lack of publicity, or whether a different Democratic Party group did the hacking and passed the information off to Wikileaks to be illegally disseminated. I replied to Wikileaks’ email asking for a name and telephone number and saying that I would like to interview them; needless to say, I didn’t get a response. Like so many leftists, they prefer to hide behind a cloak of anonymity.
A week or two after the liberal hacking of Coleman’s site took place, I got a notice from my bank that my credit card numbers had been stolen and patently improper charges were being rung up. As a result I had to cancel that credit card and get a new one. I didn’t know it at the time, but it appears that in all probability, I was one of the victims of the Democrats’ hacking of Coleman’s web site.
Just another day in contemporary American politics. Liberals break the law, violate their opponents’ privacy, either commit or facilitate theft, and meanwhile assure the rest of us that they did all of this because of their moral superiority.
UPDATE: A reader suggests that the original theft may have been carried out by, say, Russian or Chinese criminals who do this sort of thing all the time. Then, when the list became more or less useless because the credit card numbers had been used and the cards canceled, some lefty who had come into possession of the list gave it to Wikileaks for political purposes.
That’s possible, I suppose. But it’s not what Wikileaks is saying. Here is an excerpt from their latest email, which, once again, is basically a long anti-Coleman screed:
A number of people tried to raise the issue back in January, without releasing any [credit card] information at all. There was no response from the Coleman Campaign and the material had been “floating around” the Internet for at least six weeks.
This quote is accompanied to links to left-wing web sites that claimed it was the Coleman campaign’s fault that there was a security breach in late January. Wikileaks clearly implies that at least some of the people who were blaming Coleman for the breach at the time were in possession of the database, which (to their credit, apparently) they didn’t “release.” Wikileaks says that the database has been “floating around” the internet for six weeks, without indicating how long they themselves have had it.
Further, Wikileaks quotes at length an email from the lefty who provided the database to them. This individual blames Coleman’s campaign for the security breach but does not claim that he came into possession of the database by some innocent means. He certainly doesn’t suggest that he bought it from a Russian gangster or found it lying around on the internet.
Putting all the facts together, it seems reasonably clear that the operation was carried out from beginning to end by liberal opponents of Senator Coleman. In any event, it is certainly true that Coleman’s liberal opponents are behind the current publication of the donors’ information, forcing thousands of Republicans to cancel their credit cards.
Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.