A BlackBerry smartphone containing sensitive information including contact details and e-mails was sold by the disbanding McCain campaign to a Fox 5 reporter. The device, which had not been wiped, found its way into the reporter’s hands for just $20.

The campaign, in an effort to reclaim some of the money spent, held a fire sale, practically giving away anything from filing cabinets and whiteboards to electronic equipment such as laptops (which sold for $400 to $600) and BlackBerries, which were sold dirt cheap as mentioned above. The reporters bought two of them, and took them back to the office to charge them, as the batteries were dead and no chargers were sold with them. When they did so, they found that they had hit the jackpot: one of the devices held 260 personal contacts – including email addresses, phone numbers and postal addresses – of McCain supporters, while the other contained more than 50 phone numbers of people who had ties with the McCain-Palin campaign, as well as several hundred emails going as far back as September.

The reporters started calling the contacts, and among them some, such as ex Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore, weren’t very happy about it. "It makes me uncomfortable. ... It's a matter of principle. I gave the information to McCain headquarters, and to have it sold is bothersome," he told Fox. He was also irked at the low cost for which his information was sold. ''You don’t know who got this information,'' he says.  ''There’s possible harassment.  And there’s an enormous amount of campaign intelligence that shouldn’t be sold for such a low-value.''

Another unidentified McCain supporter who was called by Fox reporters wasn’t surprised at the ‘leak’: ''They should have wiped that stuff out,'' he said.  ''Given the way the campaign was run, this is not a surprise.''