Hacking Sarah Palin

Some morons have broken into Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account. They took screen shots of some of the emails and posted them to the notorious /b/ bulletin board. Gawker.com got a copy and has put them up on its web site. Governor Palin's account has since been shut down. Some thoughts:

1) I hope whoever did the hacking is caught and severely punished. I hope they throw the book at them. This is not a harmless prank.

2) Bill O'Reilly was about to pop a blood vessel in his forehead last night, over this issue and the finance meltdown. He wants the Gawker people thrown in jail. His resident internet 'expert' was there to parrot his outrage. The fact that Gawker has probably not violated any laws doesn't seem to matter to Bill or his 'expert'. Bill doesn't like what Gawker has done (who does? it is no doubt slimy) and that's enough for him to demand jail time. It's important to remember that Gawker didn't do any hacking. They only re-posted the pics after the actual hackers posted them to /b/. Newspapers print evidence of criminal activity all the time. Gawker's action is likely covered by the 1st amendment.

3) As of early this morning, the FBI hasn't contacted ctunnel.com. Ctunnel is the web proxy that the hackers used while accessing Palin's account. They hoped this would give them some cover. Why the FBI didn't contact ctunnel within about 10 minutes of the breaking of this news is unfathomable. I know that yesterday, within about 5 minutes of seeing one of those screen shots, I was Googling and looking at information on ctunnel. And I'm no internet cop. Is the FBI really that incompetent? It's pretty disturbing.

"We are aware of the allegations and we are coordinating with Secret Service as far as the allegation that someone has hacked into Governor Palin's personal e-mail account," he said. "We are going to be working a joint investigation with Secret Service on this."

I'm not holding my breath while I wait.



4) Fortunately, again looking at one of those screen shots, I see that Sarah Palin has only 84 or so messages in her inbox. The list of subjects for the messages makes it seem like there is little there to embarrass her. My guess is that she rarely used this account. This shouldn't matter in the prosecution of those hackers though. "Fullest Extent of the Law," says I.

This could have been much worse.

Update: Buzz says this is the guy. Son of a Democratic State congressman from Tennessee. Yeesh.