What does Sarah Palin have to hide in her Yahoo e-mails?

[bigtree]

Thursday Sept. 18, 2008 05:07 EDT


SOME adolescent criminal (in mentality if not age) yesterday hacked into a Yahoo account used by Sarah Palin for both personal and business email, and various sites -- including Gawker -- posted some of the emails online. While the bottom layers of the right-wing noise machine (the kind that make you run for the shower after reading them) are moronically describing the hacker(s) as "liberals" and "left-wing," nobody actually has any idea of their identity, let alone their political leanings (if any). The available evidence strongly suggests the hacker is loosely part of an assorted band of Internet pranksters ranging from the juvenile to the psychopathic. Conventional political agendas ("Vote Obama!") don't exactly appear to be their interest. Either way, whoever did this committed a serious crime -- it's rather revolting to see screen shots of someone's inbox splattered across the Internet -- and the hacker should be apprehended and prosecuted.

Still, it's really a wondrous, and repugnant, sight to behold the Bush-following lynch mobs on the Right melodramatically defend the Virtues of Privacy and the Rule of Law. These, of course, are the same authoritarians who have cheered on every last expansion of the Lawless Surveillance State of the last eight years -- put their fists in the air with glee as the Federal Government seized the power to listen to innocent Americans' telephone calls; read our emails; obtain our banking, credit card, and library records; and create vast data bases of every call we make and receive and every prescription we fill and every instance of travel and other vast categories of information that remain largely unknown -- all without warrants or oversight of any kind and often in clear violation of the law.

The same political faction which today is prancing around in full-throated fits of melodramatic hysteria and Victim mode (their absolute favorite state of being) over the sanctity of Sarah Palin's privacy are the same ones who scoffed with indifference as it was revealed during the Bush era that the FBI systematically abused its Patriot Act powers to gather and store private information on thousands of innocent Americans; that Homeland Security officials illegally infiltrated and monitored peaceful, law-abiding left-wing groups devoted to peace activism, civil liberties and other political agendas disliked by the state; and that the telephone calls of journalists and lawyers have been illegally and repeatedly monitored.


Shouldn't these same people be standing up today and insisting that if Sarah Palin has done nothing wrong, then she should have nothing to hide? If Sarah Palin isn't committing crimes or consorting with The Terrorists, then why would she care if we can monitor her emails? And if private companies such as Yahoo can access her emails -- as they can -- then she doesn't really have any "privacy" anyway, so what's the big deal if others read through her communications, too? Isn't that the authoritarian idiocy that has been spewed since The Day That 9/11 Changed Everything -- beginning with the Constitution -- to justify vesting secret and unchecked surveillance powers in our Great and Good Leaders?


read more: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/09/18/privacy/

[gratuitous]

1. If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide

And since a Yahoo! e-mail account is a personal account, there shouldn't be any "official" State o' Alaska business in those e-mails anyway. Right? I mean, who cares if she's e-mailing Trig, Cig, Fig and Pig to be home by 10 o'clock?

[Clcal422]

3. That was great - TOO funny

:rofl:

[SammyWinstonJack]

5. LOL

Trig, Cig, Fig and Pig. :rofl:

[bigtree]

7. that view holds a great deal of legitimacy

. . . considering it was revealed that she used the personal e-mail account to conceal state dealings from potential subpoenas.

[wvbygod]

10. Have not heard that one yet...got a link? n/t

[bigtree]

12. no problem

NTY: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14palin.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1221588185-c0NhbTON3/fDJJQww%20P%20bQ&pagewanted=print


"While Ms. Palin took office promising a more open government, her administration has battled to keep information secret. Her inner circle discussed the benefit of using private e-mail addresses. An assistant told her it appeared that such e-mail messages sent to a private address on a “personal device” like a BlackBerry “would be confidential and not subject to subpoena.”

Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state business. A campaign spokesman said the governor copied e-mail messages to her state account “when there was significant state business.”

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14palin.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1221588185-c0NhbTON3/fDJJQww%20P%20bQ&pagewanted=print

[Pavulon]

11. And now it is fruit of a poison tree

anything in the emails in not admissible or at minimum tainted because it was hacked. There is no way to guarantee the content of anything in that account now.

So instead of putting "evidence" in play, they just destroyed it.

[B Calm]

2. Most people open a Yahoo e-mail to have their trash mail sent to.

[Why Syzygy]

4. Praching to the choir! k/r

[NJmaverick]

6. The story here

is the lack of judgment shown by Palin. First off it's illegal to be using outside email for official business, as those messages are not archived or open to discovery. Secondly it was extremely irresponsible of her to conduct official business using a free and easily hacked email account.

[Dont_Bogart_the_Pretzel]

8. no kidding! I hate it when I go into an respected business

that has been around awhile, and has a [e-mail] account.
What does this say about this person or this company that won't get its own Domain/Email.


Back to Palin, This is just a stupid thing to do...using personal email account for government work(?).

[wvbygod]

9. why would she care if we can monitor her emails

Even a repub candidate should be allowed to have a private email account for non-government
related activities. As for expecting privacy in her private life, I suspect she has as much
a right to it as any of us do.