Sarah Palin’s Yahoo Email Hacked
The intertubes are abuzz about the hacking of Vice Presidential Candidate and Alaska Governor, Sarah Palin’s personal Yahoo.com email account. Michelle Malkin was outraged by the act, but she seemed more pissed off about the fact that Gawker reposted screenshots of the crime.
Gawker knowingly and deliberately published illegally obtained photos of the Palin children.
Where are the privacy absolutists now?
You think Palin Derangement Syndrome is bad now? These by-any-means-necessary lunatics are just warming up.
Bastards. Bastards all.
At first I thought this was all an elaborate hoax. The email account had less than 90 emails in the inbox, which is small for a personal account. Also, there were no bombshells of information gleaned other than email contact lists, which could have been compiled from anywhere. But confirmation came later when the McCain camp issued a statement that law enforcement was getting involved in the investigation.
The Reg has details here on the proxy server used by the 4chan user who broke into the account. The account was breached by guessing the security challenge, according to a follow-up post by Michelle Malkin here. The perpetrator goes by the name of Rubico and claims he did the hack on his own.
Liberals are all up in arms that Sarah Palin may have been using her Yahoo account to conduct state business. The email breach was unable to uncover any wrongdoing, but that doesn’t stop them from feigning outrage- not at the violation of a citizen’s privacy, but at the fact that the Governor had a Yahoo email account in the first place.
There is a lot to learn from this incident. First, make sure your free email accounts have strong passwords and you don’t choose easy-to-guess password reset challenge questions. Second, Governor Sarah Palin used this Yahoo account the way it was intended: As an untrusted, disposable convenience. There was nothing incriminating nor personally embarrassing on the account. You should treat your gmail, hotmail, yahoo and other free email accounts the same way.
Finally, Michelle was way offbase for criticizing Gawker over this issue. Reposting screencaps of an internet crime is not a crime, nor is it immoral. For a dozen years, Attrition.Org captured web defacements which were also federal crimes performed by the actual hackers. Posting a mirror of the defacement was not a crime. Posting screencaps the way Gawker did was no worse than posting a mirror defacement.
Throughout the entire primaries and the general election, the Obama campaign has played dirty politics. In addition to the never ending vitriol of the Obama bloggers on the internet, nearly every time I have posted a supportive blog for Hillary Clinton … and, then for McCain/Palin … my computer’s mailbox has been inundated with hundreds of pieces of email spam. Another example of under handed behavior by Obama’s henchmen, is that they have been organized to approach retirement homes, as volunteer community speakers … only to visit multiple times spewing lop sided pro-Obama, and negative McCain propaganda to elderly people, to get their votes in November. And, now we can see unprincipled politicians and bias media hacks using the race card … telling people ” if you don’t vote for Obama, you must be a racist”. Usually, when Americans uncover such despicable tactics, they can count on the mainstream media to expose it to the public … however, in this case, most of the mainstream media is in the tank for Obama … so, they either look the other way, or they make phony biased excuses to mischaracterize, and cover up what’s really happening.
Gina, thanks for the comments. The way that democrats for Obama treated Hillary supporters was one of the most shocking things I’ve seen in politics in a long time.
And you are right about the double standard going on with this election. The same folks who scream bloody murder about the government reviewing library reading habits under the patriot act are the same ones staying silent now on the breach of Palin’s personal email account.