Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Invading Sarah Palin's email
Hackers attacked Sarah Palin's private email account, and Gawker published the emails, contact lists, private photos, and screenshots. I have four quick reactions that stand between me and a beer with colleagues.
Release the hounds.
25 Comments:
By 
Anthony, at
Wed Sep 17, 06:53:00 PM:
By 
, at
Wed Sep 17, 07:15:00 PM:
One of the ones I saw smelled fake.
By , at
Wed Sep 17, 07:32:00 PM:
You forgot the fifth quick reaction:
* Yet another Palin "scandal" that makes her more popular with the public, and Reagan Democrats in particular.
Favorite comment from the thread:
"I can't wait until someone cracks open her secret underground vault in Chicago"
By , at
Wed Sep 17, 07:42:00 PM:
Yes, but the mainstream press believes that it's been too easy on Palin.
Howard Fineman, for example, was on Olbermann (yeah, I know) admitting upon the hosts urgings that the news media needed to "grow some" in questioning Palin.
She's a cultural lightning rod and nowhere is the press's bias more obvious than on cultural issues.
Sure, they'll criticize the blogs but only after checking to see if there's something they can use on her.
By , at
Wed Sep 17, 07:53:00 PM:
yesterday's lefty reaction was to blame palin for using yahoo.
the claim was that she used it to shield state business from transparency.
surprisingly, nothing relevant to actual issues was released.
By , at
Wed Sep 17, 08:04:00 PM:
Aha, hackers = "the left".
In other news, computer-illiterate inventors of the Blackberry = "the right."
Silly me, I thought extrapolation from a tiny and nonrepresentative subset to an enormously large, vague, and nigh undefinable group was passé.
I really must get with the trend, it sounds so liberating.
By Catchy Pseudonym, at
Wed Sep 17, 08:51:00 PM:
Well said Eric.
Now prepare for the comments featuring tortured logic explaining how it really is the left and how it of course has to be Obama's people.
By TigerHawk, at
Wed Sep 17, 09:18:00 PM:
I do not believe that the culprits were Obama's people, but I do believe they are political opponents of Sarah Palin. Which would make them of "the left".
By Catchy Pseudonym, at
Wed Sep 17, 09:32:00 PM:
I'm a member of "the left" and I don't remember crowding around a computer and hacking into Palin's yahoo account. Unless there was a "The Lefty" memo I missed out on.
So I'm guessing these guys did it on their own, therefore making them not "The Left" but rather more like hackers (or hacker) who saw an opportunity to cause mayhem and generally be lame, and who may or may not vote democrat.
By Steve M. Galbraith, at
Wed Sep 17, 09:39:00 PM:
Geezus, we all use short-hand like "the left" or "the right" or "Republicans" or "liberals" when we, obviously, don't mean every single friggin' member of that group.
Lordy, it's going to be a long campaign.
By TigerHawk, at
Wed Sep 17, 09:49:00 PM:
Actually SMGalbraith, you presume too much. I definitely thought that every single last lefty in the entire universe was working on hacking in to Palin's email. One of them was bound to stumble upon the password eventually.
By Assistant Village Idiot, at
Wed Sep 17, 10:10:00 PM:
Eric and Catchy, the charge of overgeneralization is somewhat fair. It would be especially fair if this were the lone attack on Palin. As they are multiplying - and they are not being roundly condemned in the strongest possible terms by progressives everywhere - we do begin to crest into territory where larger groups of people - however ill-defined - deserve criticism.
Your first instinct was not to condemn the act, but to condemn the critics for not making their accusation as precise as you'd like. We see the extension of this reasoning among Islamic groups who are quick to warn against backlash when other Moslems kill people. You really don't want to go any further down that road, chaps.
By , at
Wed Sep 17, 10:16:00 PM:
Those who are aware of this hacking event will most likely consider it done by some people who are of the left, and thus by some supporters of Obama, not done by "politically neutral" hackers. Lacking any evidence, I would not say that the Obama campaign did it. Obama supporters? Certainly.
Just like the brownshirts who shouted down the WGN radio programs with Kurtz and the author of "The Case Against Obama."
It's not as if there is no pattern.
By , at
Wed Sep 17, 11:51:00 PM:
what did Obama know and when did he know it
By Pax Federatica, at
Thu Sep 18, 12:04:00 AM:
TH: Actually SMGalbraith, you presume too much. I definitely thought that every single last lefty in the entire universe was working on hacking in to Palin's email. One of them was bound to stumble upon the password eventually.
Makes sense to me. If, as they say, a million primates banging away on a million typewriters will eventually produce an alphabatim copy of War and Peace, a single eight-character password would be child's play. ;)
By Dan Kauffman, at
Thu Sep 18, 01:36:00 AM:
"This was probably a crime"
Yah think? I get a warm glow thinking about these maggots being interviewed by the Secret Service.
You have engaged in an Act of Cyber Terrorism, you do NOT have the right to remain silent. Go straight to Gitmo, Collect no Civil Rights ;-)
By ng2000, at
Thu Sep 18, 05:36:00 AM:
Valuable resource of sarah palin news summaries: http://www.ng2000.com/fw.php?tp=sarah-palin
By , at
Thu Sep 18, 08:59:00 AM:
As someone in line for the Veep and Presidency, I find it unbelievably poor judgment on her part to have relied on a Yahoo account for her email, personal or not. If you are a public official, at the very least use some kind of POP email that does not leave messages up in cyberspace for anyone to hack into. What a dolt.
By , at
Thu Sep 18, 09:44:00 AM:
Now prepare for the comments featuring tortured logic...
Thanks for the heads up.
By Dawnfire82, at
Thu Sep 18, 11:41:00 AM:
"As someone in line for the Veep and Presidency,"
For what, the last couple of weeks? I've used a yahoo account for ten years. If I'm suddenly asked to be a running mate tomorrow, and someone hacks my yahoo account the next day, I'm suddenly a moron?
"If you are a public official, at the very least use some kind of POP email that does not leave messages up in cyberspace for anyone to hack into."
They have in-house email systems for official traffic, you know. When I was in the Army, I used the Army account for official business and a personal account for personal business.
I must be a dolt.
By , at
Thu Sep 18, 12:53:00 PM:
There was a movie once called "They Shoot Horses, Don't They" about destitute marathon dancers competing during the Depression. Jane Fonda gets shot by Michael Sarrazin or something like that at the end.
Gig Young was the protangonist running the show, and he ends the movie with "How much longer can they go on!!"
So "How much lower can they go!" seems fitting at this moment.
Blaming Sarah Palin because she has a Yahoo account? And no one here has ever sent a business e-mail from their home computer?
Right.
-David
By , at
Thu Sep 18, 07:50:00 PM:
I know beyond a shadow of a doubt it was these guys:
www.4chan.org
These are the same people who attacked Scientology a while back. They do it for fun, because they're bored (in other words: for teh lulz), and because they can. Most of these people are in their 20s or below.
You have to have a college/high school sense of humor to properly view their website.
It's not Obama's campaign, and most of these people are only supporting Obama because actually voting on the libertarian ticket is silly, if principled.
Oh, and for someone who regularly frequents this website, it's hilarious that most of the commenters on here are Anonymous, or "Anon" as they like to say.
By TigerHawk, at
Thu Sep 18, 10:59:00 PM:
Dude, good comment. We shall see where this goes. I do think that the hacking is the hacking -- unfortunate and offensive, but par for the course. In the immortal words of Tony Soprano, "Wadda you gonna do?" BUT, that does not justify Gawker media publishing it. Gawker is a business, and some things are so irresponsible that they ought not be done for profit even if they are lawful. This strikes me as one of those things.
By TigerHawk, at
Thu Sep 18, 11:47:00 PM:
TigerHawk Teenager - Michelle Malkin posts an email that almost exactly tracks your account. Good job!
By , at
Thu Sep 18, 11:53:00 PM:
Having a personal email account is not necessarily stupid; it's that she was doing it with a non-POP account which stores her messages up on a server. With POP protocol (the one most of use at home), messages are downloaded from the server onto one's personal computer. In that case, someone would have to hack into your actual (1) machine in order to read the emails. She, or her advisers, should have known better.
