The personal information of 31 world leaders - Xi Jinping, Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin included - was accidentally leaked ahead of last year's G20 summit, and a very stupid human error is to blame.
There are no tales of Snowden-esque globe-trotting leakers here: just somebody who had one job to send a very private email to Australia's immigration department and instead sent it to the organizers of the Asian Cup soccer tournament.
The message included the world leaders' passport and visa numbers, as well as a host of basic immigration-type information. It's not exactly sex tapes, but it was still information that wasn't supposed to be sent around for all of the public to see.
According to the South China Morning Post, "an autofill function of Microsoft Outlook" is to blame, which sounds a bit like somebody running over your dog and then blaming Volkswagen. If we had to guess, we'd say somebody typed the first few letters of an email address, a suggestion popped up and they figured "yeah, that's probably it," and went ahead and sent the message.
Fortunately enough, the Asian Cup recipient realized the mistake as soon as it was made, notified the G20 staffer (it's probably safe to say ex-staffer, by now) and deleted the message.
This took place last year, but the news has only just surfaced, thanks to some digging by The Guardian (and/or somebody over there is a big Asian Cup fan and happened to be on an email list or two).
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