The Minority Report

I ran a small chat board for a while. I established a rule on that site to stop troublemakers from breaking the spirit of the board. For the most part, it worked great however, one day, one of my “favorites” (read posters that didn’t make my board a living hell) broke that rule.

What did I do?

Well having chatted over the years on a lot of sites, most admins would have overlooked this one transgression that was out of character with the posters normal behavior. They would have made up some situational ethic to smooth over the problem and look the other way.

Not me. It took a few hours but the right thing to do, whether running a chat site or a Wikileaks site, is to live and die by your own swords (rules).

I applaud WikiLeaks for eating their own dogfood, living by their own sword and following their own rules no matter how much it hurts. That builds both credibility and respect for their service.

Nice job guys.

That’s exactly the conundrum Wikileaks faced this week after someone from the controversial whistle-blowing site sent an emergency fund-raising appeal on Saturday to previous donors. But instead of hiding email addresses from the recipients by using the bcc field, the sender put 58 addresses into the cc field, revealing all the addresses to all the recipients.

Someone then submitted the email as a leaked document, writing “WikiLeaks leaks it’s own donors, aww irony. BCC next time kthx.”

Wikileaks Forced to Leak Its Own Secret Info — Update | Threat Level from Wired.com