"Anonymous" Hacks Palin's Private Email 1733
netbuzz writes "'Anonymous,' best known for its jousts with Scientology, has apparently hacked Sarah Palin's private Yahoo email account. Contents, including sample emails, an index, and family photos, have been posted by Wikileaks, which calls them evidence that the GOP vice presidential candidate has improperly used private email to shield government business from public scrutiny." Note that there is no easy way to tell if the material on Wikileaks is genuine or a hoax. Update by J : Genuine.
The crossed the line this time (Score:5, Interesting)
Attacking Scientology is one thing. We all know that it is a crock of crap. However, when somebody hacks a VP candidate, the FBI and Secret Service will react strongly.
No way to tell? (Score:5, Interesting)
Translation: Wikileaks has been down for hours.... Wonder why?
Probably Genuine (Score:5, Interesting)
Note that there is no easy way to tell if the material on Wikileaks is genuine or a hoax.
Wired has confirmed [wired.com] from one sender, Amy McCorkell, that the displayed message from her to Sarah Palin is genuine.
Hooray for women's rights! (Score:5, Interesting)
Sarah Palin is proof that there is no glass ceiling for women, as long as you're not ugly, have fufilled your reproductive obligations, don't have any actual power, will be subordinate to a man, seem clueless, and hiring you will keep a black man out of the white house.
Re:The crossed the line this time (Score:5, Interesting)
I would imagine though that hacking into a yahoo e-mail account, even if it's a political figure, is not really going to get any serious penalties. It's not like they hacked into a government e-mail account. It's also not as if she has launch codes yet. McCain has to be elected, then die of a heart attack for her e-mail to be of much real importance. ... of course, if she did, they would probably end up in her yahoo account. And we'll be dead soon anyway. As Matt Damon said, someone who belives in creationism should not be an (old) heartbeat away from the football.
But I suspect secret service is investigating mostly to determine if there's a real security risk IE if she e-mailed out that there was a spare key to her house under a fake rock in the garden, or she was going to be in room 287 of the doubletree hotel.
Re:Hooray for women's rights! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Scrutiny (Score:1, Interesting)
Of course it doesn't prove anything. Any more than government officers having closed door meetings on major policy issues with industry insiders while forming official policy.
(for those accusing me of being partisan, I was thinking of both energy policy and healthcare, which would cover both parties)
First impression: not cool (Score:2, Interesting)
I tend to put myself in other people's shoes, and here I definitely feel I would feel miserable if my e-mails and family photos were exposed to the world. Not because I have something terrible to hide, but just because it's such a cruel thing to do.
Slashdot readers and posters are very big on privacy - well, this is one grave (and I think extremely insensitive) breach of a person's privacy.
Re:I've looked. Check Gawker (Score:5, Interesting)
the scuttlebut on /b/ yesterday was that no, Anon did not download a backup file, and got cold feet when he realised where he was and that partyvans would be dispatched shortly. There was much crying and gnashing of teeth among /b/tards yesterday, I tell you, who were hoping for complete copies of the e-mails, and were denied.
A generation gap... (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Yahoo e-mail account
2) Password was her zip code
3) Prominent public figure
4) No attempt to disguise her identity in the user name
Are the over 30 year olds really that stupid? This is stuff I'd expect from my grandmother, not a governor/VP candidate.
The sad thing is the media isn't going to note that her behavior was unsafe. Instead it will be the dirty hacker's fault, nevermind that the account has likely been "hacked" several times. Even if it hasn't it sure as hell would be if this info wasn't made public and the account was shut down.
It will really twist my nuts if:
1) Everything in the account becomes a inadmissible when an investigation of the legality of the account is conducted.
2) The issue of the McCain/Palin ticket's technological illiteracy is not brought up. Maintaining the security of your e-mail account is something every user has to be able to do, and that includes using a real password. And, no, I don't think Biden's a competant human either, but the top of that ticket hasn't really given me reason to worry, yet...
Fuck, people are stupid. But nevermind that, it's those damn tricky kids... so crafty these days!
Re:Intended purpose of hacking the e-mail (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No way to tell? (Score:2, Interesting)
It is a bit odd, isn't it, that ALL of the mirrors are timing out....
Re:The crossed the line this time (Score:3, Interesting)
Holy shit. How you believe we originated really matters on whether you should have control of nuclear codes?
Because Fundamentalism not only deals with where we came but how we supposedly end too. Jesus can't come back until Armageddon happens according to biblical mythology -- so anyone who takes the mythology seriously might want to speed up the process...
Hacking into a Yahoo account (Score:3, Interesting)
Why?
Simply because the next President and Vice President will be chosen for perhaps 50% on the strength of their respective programmes, and for the other 50% on the strength of their personality. As in "Do we feel that we can trust that person to take the helm for 4 years?".
That's why trying to dig up dirt on candidates is part of the procedure. If they can stand that test, they're either clean or adequately adept at covering up. I personally see little difference between snooping in someone's private life using private detectives and hacking into his (or her) email account.
Now whatever their political color, I think that most Americans would be Ok with McCain as a person. Nevermind his age, his health, his policies, or his party. McCain comes across as someone who won't panic in a tight corner, who won't flip and start pushing the nuclear button, who won't let his personal feelings get in the way of necessary politics, and who won't stick his head in the sand when there's bad news. You may or may not agree with his policies and his ideas, but at least he's reliably and predictably biased in certain directions.
When it comes to Governor Palin, I'm not convinced. Being a relative outsider she hasn't really had so much time in the limelight as the other candidates, so her past and personal quirks haven't been looked at in as much detail.
Personally I'm scared of having someone as VP who doesn't know what the Bush doctrine is, who doesn't know why we went into Iraq, who felt that "I'm the mayor, I can do whatever I want until the courts tell me I can't." (see http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/09/17/palin_mayor/ [salon.com]). That level of ignorance coupled with that level of contempt for rules (in my view) creates a level of unpredictability which is very uncomfortable in someone who might become president on medical grounds. Such ignorance is Ok for Joe Sixpack, but not Ok for a candidate VP. If I had to choose between Palin and Cheney, Cheney would get my vote. I find his political ideas abhorrent, but at least I can trust him to have thought them through. By the same token, I find Hillary no more likeable than Palin, but at least I trust Hillary to know what she's doing.
What I can discern of Palin's political ideas doesn't appeal to me either, and I have grave doubts about her intellectual abilities.
In this respect I find the following disturbing:
(see http://www.sa [salon.com]
Re:The crossed the line this time (Score:2, Interesting)
If a similiar group engaged in sousveillance ("watchful vigilance from underneath" [wearcam.org]) demonstrated that a government officials I admired (hah!) was engaging in illegal activities, such as using personal communication accounts to conduct official business to avoid the mandated official records, I'd be happy that they brought out the truth. I'd rather be corrected about someone I wrongfully admired, then persist in my error.
Government officials have no privacy rights when conducting their business. Palin was using this account to conduct official business, and that's the real issue here. When she started doing that, this account became rightfully open to the public. The sooner everyone understands she's crooked, the sooner McCain can dump her and get a better running mate - or the sooner McCain will be exposed as someone who doesn't care whether his running mate is crooked or not.
It's a win for the people either way. Fsck her and the moose she rode in on.
Scientology setup? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The crossed the line this time (Score:3, Interesting)
It just doesn't hold that believing in some crazy religious BS entails being stupid in other areas.
Agreed. However, someone who believes the literal origin of man is in the bible is likely inclined its literal end is similiarly foretold. They also beleive God is very much an interventialist.
Such a person would be more inclined to think things ranging from 'God will intervene and shield me, his righteous soldier, from a retaliatory strike' to 'It is my manifest destiny to launch the apocalypse...' to 'this isn't how the world ends in the bible, so launching the nukes can't possibly bring about the end of the world.'
Re:The crossed the line this time (Score:5, Interesting)
Palin was a trap that the Democrats walked into. There are many substantive policy issues upon which one could attack Palin, instead she was attacked personally and her family was made the center of attention. Within a week, Obama's poll numbers took a nosedive and McCain led in both national polls and electoral vote count. The Guardian commentary [guardian.co.uk] summarized it nicely:
Two weeks ago an Obama volunteer who knew from class came up to me and gave me that well-tread talking point about Palin's lack of experience, and the hilarious "heartbeat away from the presidency" cliche.
The bottom line is that both Obama and Palin have been at their presidency-qualifying jobs (Senator & Governor) for less than four years. Obama having two years on Palin is insignificant compared to the experience that McCain and Biden have: 25 years and 35 years in Congress, respectively.
It's also insignificant compared to the experience that our three youngest presidents--TR, Jack Kennedy and William Jefferson Clinton--had before assuming the presidency. TR had already been Asst. Sec. of the Navy, Governor of New York, and Vice President. Jack Kennedy was in the House and Senate for a combined 13 years. And William Jefferson Clinton was Governor of Arkansas for 14 years.
The major difference between Obama and Palin, in terms of experience and bracketing their policy differences, is that the former is running for the presidency, whereas the latter will only assume the presidency if McCain keels over. The big threat the democrats keep speculating about is how inexperienced Palin will be if she is called up to the presidency, schizophrenically trying to ignore that by voting for Obama they're guaranteeing someone with an inexcusable dearth of experience will be the president. Doublethink. On experience alone, neither Obama or Palin should be in the race, both are bad choices (again leaving aside their policy positions and "vision").
What's so unbelievably hypocritical on the Democratic side of things was their opposition to Hillary's "experience experience experience" propaganda that she used against Obama. Now they're turning around and reproducing the same failed strategy by doing exactly what Hillary did, giving lie to their protestations that experience wasn't the most important thing when defending Obama against Hillary's OMGTHREEINTHEMORNINGPHONECALL attacks.
There are significant substantive problems with Palin. Instead Democrats emphasized their own weaknesses in attacking Palin. Dumb.
Re:Intended purpose of hacking the e-mail (Score:4, Interesting)
If they really were trying to prove corruption they'd have surely hacked the other candidates as well.
I finally found these emails on the web. They are a bunch of goody-goody feel good mush. There was nothing incriminating there, just some stuff that looked like an obvious hoax by a Palin supporter. That you are writing to an official doesn't mean it's official business. It's an easy "defense" if anyone tries to make a case of the emails. Plus she gets the privilege of claiming she was victimized without having anything really compromising or incriminating being released. Read the prose, it's made to give her a particular appearance and you don't see anything incriminating. Also look at the supposed text by the person from Anonymous. They use proper capitalization everywhere except for the group the supposedly represent. Why no capital A? Its Always a Capital A. But this person screws it up twice in the same text? They weren't in a hurry, they just didn't fake it correctly.
Re:Hacking into a Yahoo account (Score:3, Interesting)
Would you condone the same type of tactics in digging up Obama's past? After all, he's spent about the same amount of time in politics, and only slightly longer in the national 'limelight.' There are significant portions of his past that are still unclear and that his campaign refuses to speak about. His records and writings while at Columbia U. are all locked up, there is zero information on his activities as a constitutional law professor (his syllabi, anything that he wrote on the topic, etc). Should Obama's privacy be breached in order to get at this hidden information, in lieu of a longer public record?
Re:Intended purpose of hacking the e-mail (Score:5, Interesting)
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/09/17/palins_yahoo_account_hacked.html [washingtonpost.com]
This is from the Washington Post
"Among the e-mails released as part of the records request in June were several from Frye asking a state official whether private e-mail accounts and messages sent to BlackBerry devices are immune to subpoena, then reporting the answer to the governor and her husband, Todd, who also uses a Yahoo! mail address."
She's screwed. She's using her personal address to ask if here blackberry account can't be subponea'd. It looks pretty conclusive to me that she was doing or planning to do bad things with her personal accounts to keep the courts from getting ahold of it easily. So says the Washington Post, and well, that's about as good as it gets.
Re:Intended purpose of hacking the e-mail (Score:3, Interesting)
According to Michelle Malkin's site that someone linked above, it wasn't guessing a password, but using the "forgot your password" feature and then being able to guess one of the questions.
Just serves as a reminder that your webmail account is only as secure as its weakest point.
Re:Who did? (Score:4, Interesting)
Well then, let me be the first to say fuck you for condoning a crime.
What's the bigger crime - abusing the system to avoid accountability to the public, or abusing the system to bring the prior to account from the public?
Re:The crossed the line this time (Score:1, Interesting)
That editorial is out of date. Things have changed incredibly in the political landscape since Saturday, when that editorial was written for Sunday publishing. Palin is now the most unfavorable candidate running. The exposure of her lies -- not her character -- but her lies (although it goes to character) is necessary to get people initially enamored by the newcomer (the unknown) to know better. And the truth about McCain's bad judgment in picking her are now apparent.
So, the economy is front and center this week. A real issue that shows the differences between the two tickets. The Republicans will try to get this race back off topic. But they won't be able to.
People care when their retirements evaporate, their homes get foreclosed, and the economy falters.
John McCain's real running-mate is Bush. And that is where his candidacy ends.
A public figure uses a PC personally? (Score:3, Interesting)
Color me shocked. I had thought all potential candidates for high public office were vetted for having ever used a PC attached to a network directly. Plausible deniability is what aides are for. That's why aides filter your email, and "interpret" it over an encrypted voip line for trivial stuff, and important stuff is conveyed in person directly without witnesses.
That's why they know nothing about tech issues. Getting plugged in is just too dangerous to your public career.
And while I'm at it, why isn't "Special Prosecutor" a permanent position? Do we have to go through the farce of pretending we're not going to investigate phantom coverups of every President, Vice President, the candidates for same, and supreme court nominee from now until the end of time? We could save the bucks on the turnover and we'd get faster amusement process just by keeping a pair of teams on permanent staff.
Re:I wouldn't say that. (Score:3, Interesting)
RTFA
She had a weak 'insecurity question'.
The attacker guessed where she met her husband, reset the password, and did his thing.
Re:What this shows... (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong here, I'm not a fan, I think Obama's ticket is better for country, if not only because it shows the middle east that yes, its possible to get a different party in charge. My dad is a hardcore republican and he was ecstatic that Palin was selected - because she wouldn't be governor anymore. He thinks "McCain will win as long as she doesn't open her mouth". Really, there isn't a good reason Palin should have won over Binkley except that the area she represented had a much larger population than her republican opponents during the primaries. And anyone who wasn't Frank Murkowski would have won the election.
Here's some more info about Palin, mainly about how she just happened to be the right face at the right time: Palin unqualified to server vice president [newsminer.com]
But seriously, give her the benefit of the doubt a little. I'm assuming your trying to imply she created those accounts to conduct government business "under the radar". If she wanted to do that she would just talk to someone in person. Its very easy, creating an e-mail account that flat out gives away who you are is by far the most illogical way of doing that. On the bright side, if she is elected, she probably won't make this mistake again.
This helps Palin more than hurt her (Score:3, Interesting)
now Anonymous made Palin look like a victim of vicious liberal hacker attacks and this has swung more Liberal voters over to McCain as they think Obama put them up to it.
When Matt Damon did that "Dinosaurs lived 4000 years ago as creatures of Satan" smear attack on Palin it made more Blue Dog Democrats support McCain in the polls because they thought Obama put him up to it.
Obama is not behind these smears, it is the Ultra-left Wing of the Democratic Party on The Daily Kos, Kuro5hin, IWETHEY, Moveon.org, /b/, and other liberal web sites and blogs as well as Hollywood actors and actresses. If they really wanted Obama to win they would just STFU and let Obama cover the issues and how he will fix them and McCain won't fix them. All the Ultra-Left Wingers are doing is scoring "own goals" in this politcal soccer game.
Like when they faked that Palin in a bikini holding a rifle, it made Palin more popular with the male population because she had an 18 year old body with her 35 year old face Photoshopped on it.
These smear tactics and smear web sites only sabotage Obama's campaign, because he promised he isn't a politician and does not do smears. So either Anonymous doesn't know what they are doing, or they are really McCain supporters and want to torpedo Obama's campaign and get four more years of Neocons in the White House?
Re:Too much attention to entertainers (Score:3, Interesting)
The two distinguishing features of the Romans were that they were clever engineers and better at organising soldiers. They were not so much a superior civilization that conquered the barbarians by historic necessity, as a bunch of barbarians themselves, who had harvested the achievements of the Greeks, Egyptians, Persians etc etc. They just had a stronger military at a time when their neighbors didn't, and they got to write the history books; they, and later the Christian church, who in many ways were their heirs.
All those inventions you mention were not theirs.
Aqueducts: just canals on stilts, known and used for thousands of years in arid regions.
Sanitation: Known and used all over the world long before the Romans - have you ever heard of Skara Brae on the Orkney Islands? Occupied from 3100 BC and with advanced sewer system.
Roads: You are joking, right? Paved roads have been found everywhere there were people.
Medicine: the Greeks, Egyptians etc.
Education: organized schools are as old as human society, the idea of intellectual study for its own sake was invented by the Greeks, among others, and so on.
Health: in which sense? Health care? Do you think other cultures didn't take care of their sick?
Wine: Just read your Bible, mate. If we are to believe the Christians it was written well before the Romans and it mentions wine.
Public baths: Well, yes, obviously nobody ever washed before. Makes you wonder what Jesus smelled like.
Public order: There was a sort of police force in Rome itself, sort of, -ish: the quaestors. All four of them. I suspect the public order mostly just kept itself like in every other human society in the world. It is not as if it something the government has to force on people, normally.
Peace: Nonsense, and in plain contradiction of the known facts. The Roman empire existed by constantly waging war and perished when they could no longer keep it up. The so-called Pax Romana existed not because the Romans were there, but despite. You see, people generally just want to get on with their lives, they don't want to fight at every opportunity. And if the tribes of Gaul and elsewehere stopped fighting each other it was because they united against a common enemy, even after the occupation.
In fact the Roman Empire only stands out as a high point of civilization when you compare with the state of the Roman Empire after it crumbled.
Re:A generation gap... (Score:1, Interesting)
I say blame it on her kids for not providing proper guidance and a real email account. Yahoo, my word. Say what you will about him, but Cheney would never leave subversive emails on a Yahoo account...I mean that's what his old Haliburton account is for.
Illegal? Yes. Wrong? No. (Score:3, Interesting)
Palin is the candidate of the Republican party. The party that has been in power for the last 8 years and is responsible for MASSIVE, illegal surveillance. So we might be reading her mail now, but they've been reading all of ours.
Re:Intended purpose of hacking the e-mail (Score:5, Interesting)
You think they're the same people? Anonymous isn't an organisation. It's a meme complex, nothing more. It's a collective term used for the posters on a variety of independent imageboards sharing a common culture of in-jokes, comic references, stock trolls and memes. Some Anons protest scifags; others crack email accounts; others go on Habbo Hotel dressed as Samuel L. Jackson and announce that the pool's closed; others grief furries on Second Life; others go to online memorials for teen suicides and declare the dead kid an hero. Although actually, it's usually ebaumsworld doing that stuff and not Anonymous at all.
It's actually very unlikely that the Anonymous we're dealing with here have anything to do with the Scientology campaign. That's mostly moved off the chans to its own dedicated forums now. Most of the sentiment among the Anonymous mainstream is that protestfags are part of the cancer that is killing /b/.
Re:Posting near the top.... (Score:4, Interesting)
The guy who originally cracked the account immediately went online and started telling everyone about it, giving them all the info to get in.
Someone else [referred to as a 'white knight'] decided to change the password and then sent an email to Palin's daughter letting her know what happened, the email he sent included the new password so she could log in. He posted a screenshot of this email [WITH the password in it!] and everyone started trying to log in again trying to change the password themselves.
This triggered Yahoo's automatic security and the account was shut down. Eventually it was taken down entirely.
One thing I have to say is that I wish the original person who had cracked the account had actually saved everything onto his hard drive and uploaded it to rapidshare before divulging the information. We had a huge opportunity to get all sorts of juicy info on Palin and it was thrown away by idiots, who only took a couple screenshots to 'prove' anything.
And yes, I do realize that this is a gross invasion of privacy, but you know what, I honestly don't care. The government's been spying on us through illegal wiretaps, it's nice to see the tables get turned for once. Also, using a yahoo account for government business!? It was asking for trouble.
Re:Too much attention to entertainers (Score:3, Interesting)
Are you really talking about the Romans, or was this just an anti-American screed filtered through: s/Americans/Romans/ s/British/Greeks/ s/French/Egyptians/ s/Germans/Persions/?
Re:Posting near the top.... (Score:3, Interesting)
> All lunatics seem to be on Obama's side, and every calm, controlled, you know, normal person seems to be on McCain's side
Yeah all the warmongers, religious fanatics, and shoot-everything rednecks all support Obama, the freaks.
Re:Posting near the top.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Technically speaking is was not a private ISP email account but a webmail account, it's a postcard account, which under typical webmail rules remains the property of web mail service provider so that it can be analysed for targeted advertising and well has harvested for all incoming and outgoing email addresses, whilst staying clear of any privacy issues.
Brings to mind the kind of targeted advertising that Palin might have gotten, hmm, tanning bed accessories, holidays in Switzerland, investment ideas for the Bahamas, contraceptive advice, wolf paw butt scratchers, book burning barbecue ideas, colleges for rich dummies and Machiavellian politics for idiots.
The yahoo marketing executives most probably have a better idea of what is going on in Alaskan politics than the hockey pucks supposedly running the place.
Re:The crossed the line this time (Score:2, Interesting)
The opposite can be argued and quite well. The overwhelming "evidence" is in most cases supposition piled on top of guess work. Every time a bone fragment is found you see some creative (-- ironic that evolutionists are so creative) group of evolutionists fabricating an entire skeleton to show the next best proof of a missing link.
The problem is that after a 20+ year non-stop campaign of this THEORY being put forward as fact there are very few people left who have the integrity to question it. The people who control grants being given and the journals don't allow dissent in the ranks by refusing to give out money to or publish scientists that may not support their "facts". Multiple methods of dating have been disproved or shown to be inaccurate but when this happens a new piece of technology (usually unproven as well) is then used to again try to show guesswork is fact when it's still just good old guesswork.
There has been plenty of work done to show that creation is scientifically possible and that the THEORY of evolution doesn't stand up to it's own supposedly scientific roots. Even if you don't want to believe in creation have enough self respect to be critical of the scientific community and question them.
Start with the method the scientific community use s for dating objects based on the rocks and earth strata they are found in or near. Rocks are dated based on what layer of strata they are found in. Strata is dated based on the rocks found within it. This is called circular reasoning, isn't scientific but is used to date things all the time. People not bothering to ask how a scientist determined the age of something leads to "facts" like people living millions of years ago becoming accepted as true.
Stating that someone might read the story of the flood and press a button is as ridiculous as intimating that someone would go on a rampage of burning witches because of watching the Wizard of Oz.