Lesson one about innocence: If you proclaim it too much, you’d better be sure it’s rock solid truth.

The campaign of former U.S. Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN) learned this lesson the hard way recently after proclaiming that all the data on their contributors was locked down and secure.

It wasn’t. To prove the point, whistle-blower site Wikileaks.org published personal info on more than 51,000 donors and supporters of Sen. Coleman it says were leaked because his campaign Web site was not properly secured.

The info included the names, street addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers and, in the case of 4,721 individuals, the last four digits of their credit card numbers.

In a statement on its site, Wikileaks said it was publishing the information to substantiate rumors that sensitive information belonging to thousands of Coleman’s supporters had been floating around the Internet since Jan. 28 “as a result of sloppy handling by the campaign.”

Wikileaks owners also wrote: “Senator Coleman collected detailed information on every supporter and website visitor and retained unencrypted credit card information from donors, including their security codes. Although made aware of the leak in January, Senator Coleman kept the breach secret, failing to inform contributors, in violation of Minnesota Statute 325E.61.”

According to media reports, technology consultant and blogger, Adria Richards, stumbled on the problem when looking into reports in January about Coleman’s campaign’s site crashing because of heavy traffic. In her attempts to figure out the problem, Richards said she entered the IP address for Coleman’s Web site into her browser, and the Web site’s directories were immediately exposed in plain text.

She says she found the database while “tooling around” the listing of exposed Web directories on Coleman’s site.

Richards insists the problem was the result of the Web server not being “told to restrict directories from the Web.” She says she didn’t download any of the files, though she said she posted screen shots of the directory listings on two other blogs.

Tags: Coleman, confidential information, database, exposed, security, senator