Over the past several years, Wikileaks has made a name for itself by poking its electronic fingers in the eyes of the powers that be while shining a light on the confidential documents of said powers. Now, it appears that the spotlight has been turned inward. Due to a bit of careless e-mail etiquette, a list of past Wikileaks donors has fallen into the hands of an individual that, in turn, posted the list to Wikileaks. True to its principles, the organization has placed the list online.

It's hard to have followed the news of the past several years and not heard of Wikileaks—even if your taste in news stories doesn't tend towards confidential government documents—as the organization has found itself at the center of legal cases that raised questions about the basics of sharing information on the Internet. After confidential bank documents appeared on the site, a judge ordered its DNS record erased, which attracted the attention of some major civil liberties groups. Meanwhile, other documents hosted there have drawn the ire of the Mormons and Scientologists, who object to having their practices revealed to the public.

But governments remain a prime target of the group, which has hosted information ranging from the trivial (the Sarah Palin e-mail hack) to the sensitive (reports from the Congressional Research Service) to the positively dangerous (the specs for a military jamming device). That last case raised questions about exactly what editorial control takes place at Wikileaks, given that it must have some criteria for deciding which documents are genuine and relevant (especially since they seem to have fans among the conspiracy theorists—more on that below).

The issue of editorial control was obviously raised again when its fundraising appeal boomeranged back to it as a potential leak. Apparently, whoever sent the appeal via e-mail had a moment of carelessness, and placed a collection of 58 potential donors' addresses in the "CC:" field instead of "BCC:." That meant that anyone who received this particular missive was able to see who their fellows were; thanks to Wikileaks policy, everyone else can now see, as well.

For the most part, the list isn't especially informative. Someone who happens to e-mail "christhesoundguy" or "perilandmishap" on a regular basis might know who they were, but that's probably a small minority. In those cases where full names could be extracted from the list, they were fairly generic, and searching led to disambiguators at places like Facebook and LinkedIn. Some of the rest aren't particularly interesting—do I really care that a couple of German database programmers think Wikileaks is a good idea?

Perhaps the most interesting finds are that Wikileaks has fans among the conspiracy theory community, which presumably hopes that that the documents will ultimately uncover evidence of their personal mania (in one case, an inexhaustible energy source that has been suppressed by the oil companies). Given that these communities tend to see evidence of their pet theories pretty much everywhere, it reinforces the impression that the Wikileaks staff has to exercise some discretion when posting material.

It's possible that this use of staff resources may represent the biggest drain on Wikileaks' finances, as the group has saved on legal fees by steadfastly refusing to respond to any legal actions directed against it. The memo is probably less interesting for its list of donors than for noting that the organization is currently running off the savings of some of its members. Apparently, its attempts to auction off a piece of Hugo Chavez hasn't brought it the sort of stability it might have hoped for.

Listing image by Flickr user jepoirrier