WASHINGTON: Now we know why John McCain doesn’t use e-mail. Who wants to get their personal messages plastered all over the World Wide Web?
That’s what happened to his vice presidential running mate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who had her private e-mail account hacked into online.
Some adolescent criminal (in mentality if not age) hacked into her e-mail account, which she used for both personal and business communications.
The hacker group “Anonymous” said it broke into Palin’s private Yahoo e-mail account and published it Wednesday on WikiLeaks. The WikiLeaks postings included screen shots that show lists of e-mail subject lines, specific messages and photographs of Palin’s family as evidence of the validity of the hack.
Anonymous was acting in response to reports that Palin took a page from President Bush’s former adviser Karl Rove and illegally used her personal e-mail accounts to keep state business out of public record.
The episode focuses attention on Palin’s use of her personal e-email account as lawmakers in Alaska look into whether she fired the state’s public safety commissioner, Walter Monegan, because he refused to take action against her brother-in-law, a state trooper at the time.
Palin has been criticized in recent days for using a personal e-mail account to conduct state business. According to Wired News, Amy McCorkell, author of one of the messages to Palin and a member of the Governor’s Advisory Board on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, confirmed that her message was authentic.
An unhappy Alaska activist filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking disclosure of e-mails and another Yahoo account Palin used.
Andree McLeod, who filed the FOIA request, told reporters that Palin should have known better than to conduct state businesses using an unsecured e-mail account.
“If this woman is so careless as to conduct state business on a private e-mail account that has been hacked into, what in the world is she going to do when she has access to information that is vital to our national security interest?” she said.
In a statement released by the McCain-Palin campaign, Rick Davis, the campaign manager, called the incident “a shocking invasion of the governor’s privacy.” The FBI also acknowledged that the hacked account and its contents were Palin’s.
Although it has been public knowledge that Palin used private e-mail accounts to conduct state business since before her nomination as Republican vice presidential candidate, the hacked e-mail account, the revealed contents of its correspondences and the possible public records violations they represent are the latest surprise to be visited upon the GOP presidential campaign since McCain announced his running mate.
The hacking of Palin’s e-mail also has raised serious questions about whether she was trying to hide official government business from the public. The prospect is especially worrying given the Bush administration’s use of Yahoo accounts at the RNC and the subsequent disappearance of those e-mails.
Davis said: “The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities, and we hope that anyone in possession of these e-mails will destroy them.”
Those appropriate authorities are the FBI and the Secret Service as they have teamed up to investigate the breach.
The hacking community however isn’t really in to the “authority thing.” Upon word of Davis’s statement, a blogger at Gawker.com said with a touch of sarcasm: “I guess we’ll have to blow up the Internet now?”
Jokes aside, this is a serious crime. No matter which way your politics lean, it is revolting to see screen shots of someone’s inbox splattered across the Internet. All this is very discouraging for those seeking public office, and for that reason many Washington politicos are saying that the hacker should be apprehended and prosecuted.
