Are they doxxing donors, or reporting on the doxxing? A little of both, actually, which makes this criticism from Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) perhaps accurate but misdirected.  Hackers penetrated a crowdfunding platform and exposed the names of people who had contributed to the truckers’ protest of COVID-19 restrictions in Canada. A number of reporters then began contacting the previously anonymous donors demanding explanations of why they gave money to support the protests.

Omar called this “unconscionable” in a Tweet late yesterday, but may have picked the wrong target:

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. https://t.co/oF7WIoS1jp

— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) February 16, 2022

Alison Mah protected her Twitter account at some point, but her Ottawa Citizen report actually focused on the impact of the doxxing. It had the cooperation of the donor, apparently, who wanted to explain her side of the story before pitchfork-and-torch brigades burned down her business:

Ottawa’s Stella Luna Gelato Café was forced to close Tuesday after receiving threats when owner Tammy Giuliani’s name appeared on a hacked list of GiveSendGo donors to the Ottawa “Freedom Convoy.”

Giuliani says that she now regrets making her $250 donation on Feb. 5 and that staff in the shop had begun receiving threats Monday morning after her donation was posted on Twitter.

“We got a call from the team saying, ‘We’re getting phone calls here,’” Giuliani said in a phone interview Monday afternoon. “I said, ‘What’s going on?’ and they said, ‘They’re threatening to throw bricks through our window. They’re threatening to come and get us.’ We said, ‘Lock the door and we’ll find out what’s going on.’”

Giuliani said she ordered the shop closed and staff to go home for their own safety. She said she intended to report the threats to police.

Omar picked the wrong target, but she wasn’t altogether wrong about the journalistic dogpile. Twitchy covered this yesterday, when e-mail entreaties started going out from media outlets that suddenly got a lot less picky about using hacked material as the basis for their reporting:

The Washington Post is contacting people whose donation info was leaked and who gave as little as 40 dollars to the truckers to ask them why they did so

Email provided to me by a source pic.twitter.com/qbzebYyHiP

— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) February 16, 2022

The Washington Post had already published its story with a deep analysis of donor locations and some e-mail exchanges with donors:

Residents in wealthy enclaves across the United States — from Beverly Hills, Calif., to suburbs of Austin, to Florida beach communities — sent millions of dollars to support trucker convoys that occupied the Canadian capital and shut down commerce at key border crossings between the two nations, according to a Washington Post analysis of leaked fundraising data posted online over the past 48 hours.

The richer an American community was, the more likely residents there were to donate, and the biggest number of contributions often came from communities where registered Republicans made up solid majorities, according to the review of more than 55,000 U.S.-based donations through the Christian fundraising website GiveSendGo. The site, which had suffered multiple security breaches over the past year, emerged as a fundraising magnet early this month after the better-known online fundraising platform, GoFundMe, stopped accepting donations for the convoy. GoFundMe pulled away after saying the occupation born out of opposition to vaccine requirements for truckers violated its policies.

Hackers began to extract the information about donors to the controversial protest shortly after the Super Bowl began Sunday evening, the site’s co-founder Jacob Wells told The Post in an interview.

How did they get the materials to send these contact e-mails? It appears that the hackers provided it to reporters, as promised:

The Sunday data from the U.S.-based Christian fundraising site included names, email addresses, ZIP codes and internet protocol addresses. Tuesday’s leak offered similar material in addition to payment details, based on a review of the data.

The new GiveSendGo data also came from a “hack” according to DDoS, which did not provide further information. The Adopt-a-Trucker campaign has pulled in nearly $600,000, according to GiveSendGo.

DDoS said that because the donor information contained sensitive personal information, it would not be making the data available publicly but would instead be offering it to journalists and researchers.

DDoS describes itself as a nonprofit devoted to enabling the free transmission of data in the public interest.

How odd that reporters have such interest in this crowdfunding effort, as opposed to tracking down the donors to other protest movements with actual violence on their record. Will DDOS hack into BLM’s donor data after bailing out the attempted assassin in Louisville yesterday with those funds? Are reporters planning on asking corporate supporters of BLM whether they regret their financial support in light of yesterday’s events?

Probably not, which is why Omar’s criticism might have aimed at the wrong target but still scored some points. Media outlets and social-media platforms seem very happy to use hacked materials to shine a bright line on private individuals donating to disfavored causes, but much less so when asked to look into potential corruption involving the family members of powerful Democrats. Omar may have been inaccurate, but she wasn’t wrong.