Crucial private details of many of the world's most powerful leaders were accidentally passed on to soccer officials by the Australian government before the G20 summit last November.
In a stunning breach of security, the passport numbers and other information of leaders such as US President Barack Obama, Chinese President Xi Jinping, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi were inadvertently emailed to organisers of the recent Asian Cup soccer tournament.
The breach occurred before the leaders arrived in Australia.
It is being blamed on a failure to notice that the automatic fill-in functions of a Microsoft Outlook email address system had included the wrong recipient.
It has been reported that the colossal breach was not notified to the world leaders concerned but instead was revealed to the Australian Privacy Commissioner.
The mistake by an officer of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection came to light when Guardian Australia used freedom of information laws to obtain copies of correspondence.
The Guardian reported its queries had turned up an email from the Department of Immigration to the Australian Privacy Commissioner advising that an employee had wrongly disclosed the information.
"The personal information which has been breached is the name, date of birth, title, position nationality, passport number, visa grant number and visa subclass held relating to 31 international leaders (ie prime ministers, presidents and their equivalents) attending the G20 leaders summit," the officer wrote, according to Guardian Australia.
"The cause of the breach was human error."
The email which contained blacked out sections to protect the officer concerned said "(redacted) failed to check that the autofill function in Microsoft Outlook had entered the correct person's details into the email 'To' field. This led to the email being sent to the wrong person."
"The matter was brought to my attention directly by [redacted] immediately after receiving an email from [the recipient] informing them that they had sent the email to the wrong person.
"The risk remains only to the extent of human error, but there was nothing systemic or institutional about the breach."
Fairfax Media
