29 March 2011. Add excerpt from Daniel Domscheit-Berg's book on Wikileaks about this email. This excerpt cites 106 email addresses (two shown below), not the 58 reported in the press accounts. Wikileaks at the time explained it was publishing a partial list of 58 donor email addresses:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:NRJ6xLAbD6YJ:www.wikileaks.ch/wiki/Wikileaks_
partial_donors_list,_14_Feb_2009+%22Wikileaks_partial_donors_list,_14_Feb_2009
%22&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a&source=www.google.com

Also, thanks to A:

http://www.wikileaks.ch/wiki/Wikileaks_partial_donors_list,_14_Feb_2009

Wikileaks partial donors list, 14 Feb 2009

Release date

February 18, 2009

Summary

The document presents an email from Wikileaks to 58 of its donors on valentines day. The sender of the email did not use BCC (Blind Carbon Copy), so all recipients of the message appeared in the "To:" field, consequently showing the email identities of these donors to each other.

A prankster, apparently connected to one of the donors, then submitted this list to Wikileaks, possibly to test the project's principles of complete impartiality when dealing with whistleblowers.

[In contradiction, a Torrent link, still active, was provided to the email below, not to an email with 58 donor email addresses.]

A Torrent version of the email below was found which negates Cryptome's deletion of email addresses:

http://bitsnoop.com/wikileaks-leaks-donors-txt-q11949559.html

A copy of, or pointer to, the February 14, 2009, WL email listing of 58 donor addresses would be appreciated. Send to cryptome[at]earthlink.net.

28 March 2011

Wikileaks Donor Relations

News accounts in February 2009 reported 58 email addresses of Wikileaks donors were accidentally released by putting them in the cc: field rather than in the bcc: field. The email below, dated the same Valentine Day, listed 104 email addresses in the To: field. Thus all recipients saw the full list, with one cc, perhaps the sender.

Adrian Lamo claims to have submitted the email with 58 cc: email addresses to Wikileaks as a leaked document. His public email address <adrian[at]adrian.org> was not on the list below. Added 29 March 2011: An alternate address is listed: "adrianl[at]realityplanning.com" <adrianl[at]realityplanning.com>.

Likely there were several such "Valentines" to accidentally or purposely reveal to donors they were part of a larger group.

A sends:

----- Forwarded Message ----
> From: Wikileaks Donor Relations <wl-supporters[at]sunshinepress.org>
> To: [104 email addresses deleted by Cryptome]; WikiLeaks dot Org <wikileaks[at]wikileaks.org>; 
> Cc: Randy Ware <donations[at]sunshinepress.org>
> Sent: Saturday, 14 February, 2009 3:00:45
> Subject: Wikileaks important news
>
> Dear Wikileaks donor,
>
> Remember the major legal confrontation we had against the largest
> private Swiss Bank, Bank Julius Baer, in San Francisco, coming upto
> a year ago today? Your assistance helped us win through and keep
> going strong, exposing thousands cases of injustice, including
> numerous political assassinations, around the world. Since then
> Bank Julius Baer has lost hundreds of millions and cancelled its
> US IPO, parliamentry and senate equires have been formed, and the
> coverage continues on.
>
> The Gardian newspaper released a special yesterday on the
> Swiss banking whistleblower Ruduolf Elmer in the Island haven
> of Mauritius:
>
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/video/2009/feb/13/tax-haven
> http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Tax_Gap:_Rare_glimpse_into_offshore_world_of_big_money_and_low_taxes
> http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Tax_Gap:_Isles_of_plenty
>
> The journalists involved are Nick Davies (see a great talk by Nick here:
> http://www.tcij.org/talks), and David Leigh.
>
> Earlier in the month from Forbes and Reuters also released articles.
>
> http://wikileaks.org/wiki/J.Baer_confirms_trading_incident%2C_shares_off_lows
> http://wikileaks.org/wiki/How_One_Fund's_Profits_Ended_Up_in_the_Caymans
>
> Although the San Francisco case remains our largest, since, we've been
> legally attacked around once every three weeks. All attacks have been
> defeated. For our recent victories, see:
>
>     http://wikileaks.org
>
> More detail from the last month:
>
>     http://news.google.com/news?q=wikileaks&nolr=1&scoring=d
>
> Although the project is more successful than ever, it is, as a
> result more expensive than ever to run, and infact, ran out of
> formal funding four months ago. Since that time our staff and lawyers
> have run the entire organization from their personal savings.
>
> We expect to receive substantial additional funding late this year,
> but in the mean time, your support, and that of your friends and
> collegues, will mean the difference between us staying on line and
> closing for a period until the end of the year!
>
> See:
>     http://wikileaks.org/
>
> Best regards,
> Wikileaks / The Sunshine Press editorial team.

Inside Wikileaks, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, pp. 62-64.

We were already getting a few donations to our PayPal account and had gotten into the habit of sending out thank-you e-mails at regular intervals. In the e-mails we showed our appreciation, telling our supporters how important their contributions were and that they were investing in the freedom of information. We took turns doing this job. This time it was Julian's turn to write the e-mail and paste in the names of all our current donors.

So there he was, sitting on my sofa in the yellow light. wrapped in two blankets, rhythmically click-clacking away next to me, writing his e-mails. But the aria came to an abrupt halt with a quiet "Goddamn!" Julian had made a mistake. Because we were sending the e-mails to several recipients, he had to change the "To" line into a "bcc" so that the recipients could not see the names of the other donors. And there was precisely where Julian had slipped up. He had already pressed the Send button -- thanks to his perfect way of working.

This mistake bestowed on us our first and only homegrown leak in February 2009. The reaction to this thank-you e-mail did not take long in coming: "Please use the Blind Carbon Copy [bcc] to send e-mails of this kind" and "Unless you intended to leak the 106 e-mail addresses of your supporters, bcc would be better." One person offered us some remedial help: "If you don't know the difference, don't hesitate to contact me. I will be happy to guide you through the process." Julian wrote an apology. Julian? No. "Jay Lim," our legal expert from the "WikiLeaks Donor Relations Department," the person in charge of donations. [Elsewhere in the book, DDB states "Jay Lim" is an Assange pseudonym.]

As chance would have it, one of the donors whom we had thanked on this occasion was a certain Adrian Lamo. He was the semi-famous ex-hacker responsible for the arrest of US Army private Bradley Manning, who has been accused of being one of our sources.

"Look at that," Julian said when he discovered Lamo's contribution. "What an idiot!"

I clicked our mailbox and yes, there it was: a new secret document. Someone had sent us our own donor list as an official leak, along with a relatively unfriendly comment. Normally, we don't know who our sources are. But Lamo would later confess that he was the one who had confronted us with our own blunder. For good or for evil, we were going to have to reveal it.

It was interesting because we had spent some time philosophizing about what would happen if we were compelled to publish something about our own organization. We agreed that we had to release things that were bad as well as good publicity. In fact, our internal leak went down well with the press. At least we were consistent and none of the donors complained.