US Democrats Accidentally Publish Whistleblowers' Email Addresses

iluvcapra writes "The US House Judiciary Committee recently emailed all of its potential whistleblowers information about how it was restructuring its whistleblower program. Unfortunately for its sources, it emailed them this information with their addresses in the "To:" field (and not the Bcc: field) It also cc:'d this email to the Vice President. I'd like to think think this is some sort of ingenious subterfuge, but I'm doubtful."

Comments

Shift the blame

[GaryOlson]

"A technological error in a recent communication inadvertently disclosed certain email addresses."

I call bullshit on the source of the error. By implicating the technology as the source of the error, the Justice Department is failing to address the real cause -- human error and incompetence in the Justice Department. This single statement alone reinforces the point of the original investigation -- the politicizing of the Justice Department.

Re:Shift the blame

[MillionthMonkey]

Someone gave you a Funny but I'm not sure I get it:

"A technological error in a recent communication inadvertently disclosed certain email addresses."
I call bullshit on the source of the error. By implicating the technology as the source of the error, the Justice Department is failing to address the real cause -- human error and incompetence in the Justice Department. This single statement alone reinforces the point of the original investigation -- the politicizing of the Justice Department.

Is this is a joke? Learn who the players are: The House Judiciary Committee (legislative branch) is in the process of investigating the Department of Justice (executive branch). Someone in the HJC, not the DOJ, made the email screwup here, when emailing whistleblower recipients within the DOJ, about how the HJC was going to do such a swell job of keeping the whistleblowers' identities hidden from the DOJ. This excuse that you are mocking came from a spokesman for the HJC, not the partisans running the DOJ- who were the beneficients, and not the perpetrators, of this particular email gaffe. The DOJ would have the political interest in their whistleblowers' email addresses being exposed, not the HJC. Maybe there is a rogue low level Democratic staffer with secret Republican sympathies who "pretended" to make the mistake in order to sabotage the HJC investigation, but there is no reason to think that, because people do this all the time, especially when they use a stupid program like Outlook that doesn't want to confuse you with a BCC field and hides BCC in a dropdown somewhere.

And since some retard went to the HJC page and registered as a whistleblower using Dick Cheney's public email address at whitehouse.gov, which the HJC did not notice and remove, he got included in the CC.

"The politicization of the Justice Department" refers to all the maneuvering to get political partisans in top DOJ positions who are willing to influence elections with carefully timed prosecutions and selective prosecutions at least partially based on party affiliation. Things like that are true hallmarks of fascism in a way that simple human error and technical incompetence are not.

Re:Who's got the list?

[je ne sais quoi]

They did.... and they STILL used the "To:" field. Astounding.

FTFA:

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.

Re:Both the Dems and the Reps...

[ajs]

Please try to stop letting your idealogical position getting in the way of facts.

  From the ACLU:

This program is commonly known as "extraordinary rendition."

The current policy traces its roots to the administration of former President Bill Clinton.

I'd suggest that you do the same. Re-read what you quoted. The phrase, "traces its roots" is key here.

Rendition was the practice of extraditing non-U.S. citizens to their countries of origin for interrogation. It was a questionable policy and one of Clinton's gravest policy mistakes IMHO, but nothing like extraordinary rendition which expands the program to exporting anyone we feel like to any destination country we think will torture them sufficiently.

The controversy arose when it became clear that we were exporting prisoners of war to Syria, Egypt and anyone else that was willing to wield a cattle-prod in our name. As someone who grew up liberal but has become increasingly conservative as I grow older, I find the defense of this practice by Republicans who don't want to break ranks with the President to be abhorrent. This is a violation of what the Republican party used to stand for, and Bush et al. should be jettisoned from the party for it. Not everything that a Republican administration does should be beyond the reproach of the party.