Ironically, the BNP is relying on Britain's Human Rights Act, which it opposes, to protect the privacy of its members. The list, which is freely available on BitTorrent sites such as thepiratebay.org despite a court injunction, includes names, phone numbers, ages and home and email addresses of more than 10,000 BNP members, including children.

It also contains hobbies and occupations, leading to the identification of a number of police, school teachers, clergymen and government employees who secretly supported the organisation. Their names were marked with "discretion requested". Party officials have said that hundreds of members were now receiving abusive calls and death threats, which could plunge the party into a membership crisis. It is not illegal to join the BNP but the group, which only accepts whites as members, is frowned upon due to its hardline, racist views.

Some public service workers such as police officers are forbidden from joining the party. UK police forces and the prison service are scouring the list for serving officers, vowing to sack any they find, the Guardian reported.

Web geeks quickly mashed up the data with Google Maps and published it on the web, with pins showing the number of members in each postcode. Ben Charlton, who created the first map, quickly removed it after people complained that markers on the map could incorrectly imply a property contained a BNP member. By then the cat was out of the bag and someone else had created bnpnearme.co.uk - a heat map showing all British BNP members by post code.

Seeing the humorous side of the whole debacle, other online troublemakers created a new site, LOLGriffin, which puts a BNP twist on the LOLCats phenomenon, whereby poorly spelled, childish text is placed on top of pictures of cats. But in the process of naming and shaming the fascists, who generally shun non-whites and believe foreigners should be sent home, the list also outed a number of former members and even those who may have expressed interest in joining the party but did not sign up.

The Guardian spoke to several of those included on the list who claimed to have no interest in the BNP at all. "The fact that we have teachers and doctors and women that knit, it's a fantastic event politically for us," Griffin told the Associated Press. The BNP holds no parliamentary seats but now has about 50 of England's 22,000 local council seats.