E-Mail Hack Exposes Bush Family Pictures, Correspondence 230
New submitter rHBa sends this article about another high-profile email account breach:
"The apparent hack of several e-mail accounts has exposed personal photos and sensitive correspondence from members of the Bush family, including both former U.S. presidents. The posted photos and e-mails contain a watermark with the hacker's online alias, 'Guccifer.' ... Included in the hacked material is a confidential October 2012 list of home addresses, cell phone numbers, and e-mails for dozens of Bush family members, including both former presidents, their siblings, and their children. ... Correspondence obtained by the hacker indicates that at least six separate e-mail accounts have been compromised, including the AOL account of Dorothy Bush Koch, daughter of George H.W. Bush and sister of George W. Bush. Other breached accounts belong to Willard Heminway, 79, an old friend of the 41st president who lives in Greenwich, Connecticut; CBS sportscaster Jim Nantz, a longtime Bush family friend; former first lady Barbara Bush’s brother; and George H.W. Bush’s sister-in-law. "
*shiver* (Score:2, Funny)
G "dubya" Bush's shower self portrait.
Re:*shiver* (Score:4, Funny)
Hey Laura, I'm sending you a picture of The Decider!
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I hope this guy's good... (Score:5, Insightful)
The kid gloves are off. They're handing out actual jail time [wired.com] for people hacking phones/email for nude pics of Scarlett Johansson. If they find him/her, this dude's going to end up in gitmo over some addresses and phone numbers.
Re:I hope this guy's good... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you enter my house at take my photo album, that's theft regardless of whether the door was locked or unlocked. How is this any different? There is a reasonable expectation to privacy for an email account.
Re:I hope this guy's good... (Score:5, Informative)
Not according to the gubmint. According to them, after 180 days it is abandoned and they can search it for any reason without a warrant.
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I'm not opposed to the fact that the kid gloves are off if you got that impression from the "I hope this guy's good..." part. Just pointing out that if people are getting 10 years of hard time for nude pics, hacking email accounts involving two presidents is not going to go well for him if he's caught.
Re:I hope this guy's good... (Score:5, Informative)
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Unless the door was wide open, it's breaking and entering. Even the force needed to open a door is considered the "breaking" part -- you used force to illegally enter a residence. If it can be shown you did so with intent to commit a crime, then that is burglary. If you did this for a dozen different residences (as a dozen different email accounts) then the individual charges pile up.
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What does the statute define as "wide"? Do we need a ruler, or perhaps a yardstick, or can we measure it with a micrometer?
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If you had to move the door a millimeter in order to enter, it's breaking and entering.
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This depends on which state you live in
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It's called risk of escalation and implied direct physical threat. There is a hug difference between guessing some ones password and accessing their email account and entering some ones home with the direct threat of personal confrontation. Now moron, let me break it to you simply, idiot statements like yours do no ramp up the penalty for guessing some ones password the reduce the penalty for something like home invasion, so you and those idiot modders think before you spread stuff that has real negative c
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If you enter my house at take my photo album, that's theft regardless of whether the door was locked or unlocked. How is this any different? There is a reasonable expectation to privacy for an email account.
If I walk into your house, take a picture of your photo album, but leave you with it, it's not theft. It may not even be breaking and entering if your door's open. It could be copyright infringement I guess.
Re:Unless You're Aaron Swartz (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot is so hypocritical sometimes.
I hear ya, man, it's almost as if there was more than one of us.
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Only if the victim is famous. Good luck getting any help from the legal system if *your* account gets hacked. Back to work, plebe!
Re:I hope this guy's good... (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope this guy is not good, he deserves to be caught. As much as I despise the Bush administrations, they are out of power, and this just looks like personal correspondence. If evidence of wrongdoing is uncovered, this might be justified. But until then, this is just juvenile.
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Yeah, someone else seemed to think I was on this guy's side too. I'm not. I suppose I should have worded it, "I hope for this guy's sake that he's good..." or something. I'm fully supportive of something like this earning you a trip to PMITA prison.
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I think that he's just being sporting about it. The hacker did do something pretty ballsy, or incredibly stupid, or both. I'll salute the guy who takes the risk of jumping the Grand Canyon on a skateboard without a net, even if I think he's a moron for trying it. This hacker has just become a Secret Service "project", no doubt, so good luck to him, because he's going to need it.
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By that logic... the hack is justified from the beginning because without opening up these emails... we would have no way to know if there is any wrongdoing.
No... this is wrong. Period.
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Correct. After all, should the police be able to go on fishing expeditions? I hope not, because there are so many laws on the books, it has been suggested that we're all breaking a few obscure federal laws on a daily basis without even realizing it.
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Why limit it to just the police? Any anonymous hacker also should have this power... or so say those who are ok with this hack.
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I always enjoy it when liberals view history as only a very narrow window...
And yet... virtually every-thing Bush can be pointed to/blamed for can be said doubly so about the current occupant of the office who has doubled down on many a policy.
Obama feels he has the right to murder american citizens.
While Bush had legal authorit
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They both deserve to be tried for war crimes at the very least.
Why do supporters of a political party always respond to criticism by saying the other guys are just as bad? Do they like the race to the bottom we're seeing in politics?
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So this is sort like the case for Bradley Manning, while he may have released some documents as part of a massive file dump that show mistakes and cover ups on the part of the government, he should still be shot for treason, violating his oath, etc. In other words he should be willing to pay the price for his actions
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Ahh good, someone else who sees the foolishness of so many here.
It occurs to me that some like the above AC would be defending George Zimmermann had a gun, burglary tools, or a crack pipe been found on the body of Trayvon Martin.
"He looked like he was up to no good... so I shot him... turns out I was justified in the end... look at all of these illegal and dangerous things he had on him" they would hope he would say... and yet, that is not how our system works.
You do not shoot first and *hope* the person yo
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they are out of power
Bwahahaha!
Not while they have money and ties to Oil.
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Re:I hope this guy's good... (Score:5, Insightful)
And since this involves 2 former presidents and their families, you can bet it will be the secret service and other high profile agencies looking into this.
He'd better be damned good to avoid the full wrath of the agencies which are going to be all over this.
They might even take time out of enforcing copyright for this. ;-)
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The kid gloves are off. They're handing out actual jail time [wired.com] for people hacking phones/email for nude pics of Scarlett Johansson. If they find him/her, this dude's going to end up in gitmo over some addresses and phone numbers.
Could be worse. He could have shared a song or movie. Ever the serial rapist/murderers get chills when you tell them you're in for that.
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Yes and as former presidents keep their Secret Service detail for I think a decade this guy *is* going to be found and probably prosecuted such that he will wish he'd just been strung up by the balls.
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It's back up to lifetime protection as of a few months ago.
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Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if Holder ignores it even after they have the little shit in custody.
Are you sure we are on the same page? (Score:2)
The kid gloves are off. They're handing out actual jail time [wired.com] for people hacking phones/email for nude pics of Scarlett Johansson. If they find him/her, this dude's going to end up in gitmo over some addresses and phone numbers.
Are you sure we are on the same page?
I thought there was a kickstarter for nude pictures of certain celebrities?
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Well, I don't want drone strikes, but I do think a lot of people get the feeling that if you can mess with an ex-President, you probably feel like you could mess with everyone. While I know I don't have a security detail, there is probably the illusion that there is some protective mechanism keeping people from messing with me. The fact that Bushs 41 and 43 can get hit shows that there really is no such protection or shelter by default. Once you show that there is no shelter, people start wanting you to
Picked the right President (Score:3, Funny)
Just don't try the same trick with Obama. He has no problem drone bombing US citizens.
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Man, 'drone bombing' is the new meme, there is already 'drone zone' but done bombing comes right after WMD.
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Except that unlike the mythical WMD's, 'drone bombing' is all too real [businessinsider.com], e.g.
""Did we just kill a kid?"
"Yeah, I guess that was a kid," the pilot replied.
"Was that a kid?" they wrote into a chat window on the monitor.
Then, someone they didn't know answered, someone sitting in a military command center somewhere in the world who had observed their attack. "No. That was a dog," the person wrote.
They reviewed the scene on video. A dog on two legs?"
Shame (Score:2)
This isn't going to end well for the "hacker".
The lesson to be learned (Score:5, Insightful)
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No, I think the object lesson will be what happens to this guy when he gets caught
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The object lesson is that people are too stupid to realize what is really in store for them until it is too late.
The Bush family gets owned, and the hacker becomes the new girlfriend of Enrico the Drug Dealer in the Federal Pen when he's caught. No one is going to be winning here, except the media.
Link blocked for "Adult Themes" (Score:2)
Ah, I see the problem... (Score:2)
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AOL? No wonder Republicans are losing the technology war to Dems...
I don't think the Republicans have figured out that there is a technology war yet.
I truly hope it reveals... (Score:2)
Please please tell me the shoe really did find its target!
No fan of either Bush, BUT... (Score:2)
They're now private citizens, and deserve some regard for their personal privacy. IMHO, they should be left alone and this guy is a dick.
Agreed, dick move (Score:2)
Really - even if they were still in office, this is a dick move. Private emails are private emails. I care less about the hacking than the release, to be honest. If there's some actual funny business (like using personal email to avoid public disclosure statutes), then maybe the relevant text, but just releasing a bunch of personal, day to day emails (and all of the petty squabbling that everyone does) is unnecessary. I don't care what names they called each other or what they said "in private" about anyone
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Sometimes I feel people deserve to have their rights violated. Just like a serial rapist deserves to be raped in prison, a serial violator of people's privacy deserves to have his privacy violated. Sure it might not be legal, so the perpetrators deserve to get a slap on the wrist. But let's not kid ourselves, the 'victims' deserved it.
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Lets not kid ourselves, he is guilty of something so let the investigation commence.
hack a former CIA director ... (Score:2)
I thought it was billions of deaths? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why not include our insect and microbe friends (Score:2)
Re:For lying us into a war... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh dear, it appears that someone's privacy has been violated without a warrant. Hey, Bush family, join the club!
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Everybody, everywhere is a TERROR-WRIST!
Let's start putting them in FEMA camps for their protection! FEMA camps? why they're only for housing people during a "emergency", no? And the guard towers, electrified barbed/concertina wire fences is just to insure that the interned are "safe" no?
In the (future) land of the "free", "freedom" will mean that you are kept happily distracted while you are slowly and methodically herded into a slave labor camp where you will be kept medicated while you work for a Chin
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Last month a drone strike killed 24 civilians, with zero enemy combatants present. Bush would get blamed for this kind of thing outright, yet nobody blames obama.
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In SOME countries, leaders are not blamed or not blamed. They are put on a public trial. But this is rare. When it does happen it's usually only cinema.
Now, imagine every American president (after that we can go on European ones) on trail (ON TV !) because of killing and destroying lives of millions of civilians(directly/indirectly) around the globe. Now.. talk about utopian ideas.
If you want a "citation", sorry. No instant gratification here. Open youtube or wikipedia if by any chance you're actually inter
Re:For lying us into a war... (Score:5, Insightful)
can you imagine having died and learned that was the reason? That there wasn't one, never was, but now more need to die because of the mess we created by being there wrongfully in the first place? Can you imagine that the vast majority of our current debt is because of the massive amount being pumped into the war in iraq? And you're going to defend it?
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No one has issue with Afghanistan.
I have an issue with Afghanistan. More coalition troops have died in Afghanistan than died in 9/11. And what have we got for it? A dead bin Laden? Even if he would have been able to pull off another 9/11(unlikely), we're losing more lives than we're saving.
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I haven't had a cold since I started taking that homeopathic medicine...
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At what cost? Over the past 10 years we lost about 3000 people in Afghanistan. In the 10 years before that, we lost about 3000 people in terrorist attacks. This is a draw at best. And that's if and only if you expect a 9/11 attack every 10 years, which is not historically the case.
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We certainly could have went in with WWII style annihilation and occupied what was left of the country afterwards
And kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, rather than just thousands of them? And this is a mistake in your eyes?
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When the gauge is how many Americans have died or been maimed because of the war, yes.
Now, if it is a gauge of how many innocent people are killed or maimed, then no and that is largely a reason why we chose to fight that way.
But please, by all means, jump in and change the metrics of the conversation in order to impress your point. I mean it's not like the GP didn't directly compared the loss of US soldiers to the loss of people in the 9/11 attacks or anything. Oh wait, yes he did.
Re:For lying us into a war... (Score:4, Insightful)
Money is just numbers in a bank, the war pissed away a lot of lives and real resources that can't be recreated by adding more zeros to MIC bank accounts.
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Re:For lying us into a war... (Score:4, Insightful)
not our fault that sunni and shia hate each other. wonder how the hazara are doing in afghanistan? everyone hates them.
Re:For lying us into a war... (Score:5, Insightful)
And you believe that justifies the senseless carnage your war brought?
Never mind those local conflicts were never any of your business to begin with.
You people will never get it. You will never understand accountability or responsibility for your actions. Where mature adults would feel ashamed and penitent for what their country had done, America is obviously governed and populated by grown-up children who defiantly think they can have their way and never suffer consequences.
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Nothing wrong with being anonymous. Don't be an idiot.
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George jr. is not heard or seen much in the media since he left office, he's figured out how most of us do not like him, if some of us ever did.
George Sr was pretty low profile too. He's had a couple of moments in the spotlight, but there's been 16 more years to spread them out over.
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American here. I've always thought Bush Jr.'s Iraq war was a simple case of "Love me, daddy". "I'll get that Saddam for you. If I do, will you love me then?" A truly disgusting abuse of power. George jr. is not heard or seen much in the media since he left office, he's figured out how most of us do not like him, if some of us ever did. I hope that the world knows that the average U.S. citizen was against Bush from the beginning, when the voting shenanigans in Florida (hanging chads!) led to the outright theft of the office of the presidency. There are a lot of disillusioned voters who could only watch with disbelief what went on then. Many Anti-Bush demonstrations at the White House lawn happened, their effect was nothing changed, the friends of Bush kept profitting from these unnecessary wars. Truly a shameful time to be an American, imo.
It's true, he's a turd. Like father, Like son.. I think that's how the old saying goes. The only thing I wonder is whether or not he was really out to screw his own country or was just incompetent.
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Think about it people - a secular government that see religeous extremists as it's biggest threat and has tortured and killed thousands of them teaming up with a bunch of the people they usually round up and shoot?
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Are you that far divorced from reality? Apart from homoerotic fantasies it was like watching an angry child having a tantrum.
With the claim above, just like the last one, put up or shut up.
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Oh yea, I almost forgot.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/29/world/state-union-iraq-issue-bush-enlarges-case-for-war-linking-iraq-with-terrorists.html [nytimes.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_Resolution [wikipedia.org]
Read the reasons on the war resolution. And understand this is not exact but edited by the fine morons slanting everything to their advantage for wikipedia. Here are some highlights in case you can't figure out how to find the link.
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Keep trolling bud. Just remember, you can't have me.
Lies, I seriously don't think you know what that word actually means. You certainly aren't using it correctly. Of course that is if you are capable of grasping reality. Perhaps I should report you to the obama SS so you can be put on that list of retards not allowed to own guns before you hurt yourself or someone else.
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So put up or shut - the link between Saddam and Taliban. What is supposed to have drawn those opposite poles of ideology and mortal enemies together?
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You are spending an awful lot of time following me around and trolling me not to give a shit about what I said. But look at the other post I made troll.
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That's actually a pretty ridiculous assertion. The administration is going to say what they are going to say, and if they lie to us, precisely what intelligence assets to we have to prove them wrong?
In the end, we only found out that there were intelligence problems because we went there and had a look around ourselves, which is to say, the army did and they found nothing. We wouldn't have gotten that sort of information any other way.
Let's remember, the fact that Saddam did not have WMDs would actually h
Re:For lying us into a war... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's actually a pretty ridiculous assertion. The administration is going to say what they are going to say, and if they lie to us, precisely what intelligence assets to we have to prove them wrong?
Were you paying attention in 2003? It was clear then that most of their intelligence was fabricated. Opposition to the Iraq war produced some of the largest protests ever. Lots of people figured out that they were being lied to.
In the end, we only found out that there were intelligence problems because we went there and had a look around ourselves, which is to say, the army did and they found nothing. We wouldn't have gotten that sort of information any other way.
Bullshit. We could have waited for Hans Blix to finish. But Bush&Co knew that he wouldn't find anything that would support an invasion. Therefore he couldn't be allowed to finish.
Let's remember, the fact that Saddam did not have WMDs would actually have been less surprising if we didn't already know he had them at one point and used them on the Iranians and the Kurds.
The fact that Saddam did not have WMDs was not surprising at all.
In retrospect, I don't see why you think it would have been obvious to the American public that Saddam wouldn't have had weapons that he clearly demonstrated possessing and using in the past
Because there was no physical evidence, only fear mongering.
The fact that he did not have them is something that would not have been immediately apparent to the man on the street.
The man on the street should be able to recognize fear mongering when he sees it. When you hear things like "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud", you KNOW you are being manipulated. It was blatantly obvious in 2003.
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I honestly never saw why anyone thought an ad hoc UN weapons inspection team ever had a chance of discovering anything. The only satisfactory thing Hans Blix could have done was succeed in finding them. Not finding evidence of a secret program in a foreign country is not exactly surprising.
I am also not sure why you also think that a country that was actually attacked by terrorists only two years previously was going to be particularly skeptical about fear mongering either. There's nothing like a few air
Re:For lying us into a war... (Score:5, Insightful)
I am also not sure why you also think that a country that was actually attacked by terrorists only two years previously was going to be particularly skeptical about fear mongering either.
Because after a crisis is when people are most susceptible to fear mongering. Is this not obvious? Look at what happened after Sandy Hook, a shit load of fear mongering over guns, people crying "something must be done!", when violent crime is at historical lows.
Politicians use crises as cover for power grabs. That is how fear mongering works. Whenever there is a national tragedy, you will find politicians celebrating the opportunity to ram through bad laws and bad policy. It happens every time, so there's no excuse for being ignorant.
I knew from the moment I saw the planes hit the towers on 9/11/2001 that our overreaction would hurt us far more than the attack did, and I was right. I don't see how anyone could possibly expect anything else. If the way this has played out wasn't obvious from day one, you simply have no clue how the world works.
And being right or wrong in the absence of your own ability to verify makes you ignorant, but it doesn't make you culpable.
If you distort evidence to bolster your reasoning, that absolutely makes you culpable. Being honestly wrong is OK. But the Bush administration was never honest in the run up to Iraq, it was blatantly dishonest, and that was obvious to anyone who paid attention at the time.
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Because after a crisis is when people are most susceptible to fear mongering. Is this not obvious? Look at what happened after Sandy Hook, a shit load of fear mongering over guns, people crying "something must be done!", when violent crime is at historical lows.
Well you know.... if you look at everyone as being as intelligent as you are, I don't know if that is fair. After all, consider your own statement there. You knew, just as I did, that people would freak out and blame guns. Well how did you know this? Because you knew that the general population would be susceptible to it. The reason they are susceptible to it is because they are not particularly introspective, but they also lack independent sources of information. That makes them ignorant, but again, i
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...guess I've been out of the hacking biz for too many decades, but how are these mailboxes being compromised? I mean, it seems a rather long and arduous task to brute force passwords, especially if there are timeouts/captchas/whatever after so many missed passwords. Are these inside jobs?
I know I get emails daily from friends who have had their email accounts hacked...I simply can't believe that someone is sitting in front of their computer or even automatically generating passwords to hack these accounts.
Palin's account was hacked by guessing the "lost password" secret security question, such as "what was your mother's maiden name?"
I'm guessing something similar happened here.
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It depends ... it is pretty easy to hack a common person's e-mail. Look them up on FaceBook (if they have an account there).
Did they leave their e-mail address publicly available? Now you have their e-mail address, all you need is a password.
Look over their profile, noting the names of pets, significant others, family members as well as any publicly mentioned interests, celebrities, whatever.
Use variations of those names of pets, family members, etc as a password, if the account the e-mail is on requires
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Ok.
Done!
Dammit.
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Approx. 2 hours after submitting the story it was accepted.
I guess the lesson here is don't crowd-source if expediency is of the essence. In this case I can't see a few hours making a difference, it's not exactly a 'developing story'.