Whistleblowers on Confidential List Exposed...by our Government

Update:  11:55 p.m. 10-28-07

I read this post earlier this evening and shared it on Typepad with all of you.  I have been unable to verify the information about the release of whistleblower's names and contact information yet tonight.  I will follow up with this, and will post my findings.  I hope this was not disinformation, someone's idea of a joke.  GFS

From http://thenexthurrah.typepad.com
About that Need for a Whistleblower Law...
by emptywheel

I believe it was just the other day when I was saying it was more
urgent to implement whistleblower protection than to write a new
journalist shield law. This doesn't change my opinion in that regard.
This summer the House Judiciary Committee launched an effort to
collect tips from would-be whistleblowers in the Justice Department.
The U.S. attorney firings scandal had shown that much was amiss in
the Department, and with the danger of retaliation very real, the
committee had set up a form on the committee's website for people to
blow the whistle privately about abuses there. Although the panel
said it would not accept anonymous tips, it assured those who came
forward that their identity would be held in the "strictest
confidence."
But in an email sent out today, the committee inadvertently sent the
email addresses of all the would-be whistleblowers to everyone who
had written in to the tipline. The committee email was sent to
tipsters who had used the website form, including presumably
whistleblowers themselves, and all of the recipients of the email
were accidentally included in the "to:" field -- instead of
concealing those addresses with a so-called blind carbon copy
or "bcc:".
See, if we didn't force our whistleblowers to sneak around so much,
this wouldn't be the monumental **** up it is. As it is though, this
is likely to discourage a more whistleblowers from coming forward.
That say, I will at least entertain (for the moment) that this was
deliberate. The Republicans have always hated this tip line--they've
been trying to shut it down since Conyers started this. And the email
explained that the tip line has now been shut down.
This message is to inform you that the Committee is now ending the
tip line and has voted to approve procedures governing the
confidentiality of the e-mails received.
So this email included the emails of everyone who has--or will--
submit a tip to the tip line. And that entire list was carbon copied
to Cheney's office.
Some of the email addresses appear to be transparently fake, but
there's also, much more troubling, a vice_president@...
carbon copied on the email, which is the public email address for
Vice President Dick Cheney.
In other words, it would be very smart poker if some disloyal
Democratic staffer or a Republican staffer to "accidentally" send
Cheney the list of all those who were revealing secrets about DOJ.
There have been some Republican leaks of damaging testimony in the
past. What would it take for someone to "accidentally" make this tip
line backfire--to make it serve the intelligence purposes of those
trying to avoid responsibility for politicizing DOJ, rather than the
opposite?