Journalists for mainstream media outlets are contacting the private individuals whose names appeared in the list of about 90,000 donors to the Freedom Convoy following the hacking of the Christian crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo.
The Delaware-based company's website was hacked late Sunday night on February 13, during which left Freedom Convoy donors exposed by hackers. According to WND, the personal information of thousands of Freedom Convoy donors were made public by the hackers after the website breach.
Data included names, email handles, IP addresses and zip codes, which were then provided to "journalists and researchers" by an activist group called Distributed Denial of Secrets. Now, media outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have published stories analyzing the Freedom Convoy donors and the sources of the funds. They also reported contacting small-dollar donors to investigate their donations.
"We were reporting on a matter of public interest and reached out to people listed in the data in order to confirm its authenticity," The Washington Post vice president Shani George told the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) in a statement.
Meanwhile, The Intercept on Thursday published two stories, alleging a $100 donation by one of the Freedom Convoy donors, former Canadian politician Richard Ciano. The media outlet said that Ciano denied donating to the Canadian trucker protests but may have in fact made a small contribution based on the list that the hackers made public.
The outlet claims that they "did not contact individual donors because we did not identify them, except where that information was newsworthy, such as in the case of Silicon Valley billionaire Thomas Siebel or prominent political operative Richard Ciano, who apparently wasn't telling the truth when he told the media that he did not donate," as per a statement to DCNF on Friday.
Local newspapers also started their own investigations into the Freedom Convoy donors, including Delaware Online, which published a story on a high-level officer of the Delaware Transit Corporation whose name could also be found in the leaked data.
Meanwhile, political correspondent Bryan Schott of the Salt Lake Tribune reported an analysis on the leaked data that showed Utah donors by zip code and said on Twitter that he had been "reaching out to people from Utah who appeared on the leaked Canadian trucker donation data" and had been receiving"aggressive" responses.
He later deleted the tweet following harsh criticism from other Twitter users and issued an apology, saying he it was not his intention to "cause any grief or upset."
Several media figure and politicians from both sides of the political aisle have criticized these investigations by media outlets. Even Democratic Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar recently took to Twitter to share her outrage on how one journalist harrassed a business owner in Ottawa.
Rep. Omar wrote, "I fail to see why any journalist felt the need to report on a shop owner making such a insignificant donation rather than to get them harassed. It's unconscionable and journalists need to do better."
