Hacking the Governator

mytrip writes, "The Democratic rival to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger acknowledged that his aides were responsible for obtaining a controversial audio file, in which the Governator was heard disparaging members of other races, in a move that has led to allegations of Web site hacking. A source close to Angelides told CNET News.com that it was possible to 'chop' off the Web links and visit the higher-level 'http://speeches.gov.ca.gov/dir/' directory, which had the controversial audio recording publicly viewable. No password was needed, the source said." And jchernia notes, "As an aside, the California Highway Patrol is running the investigation — maybe the Internet is a truck after all."

Comments

Disparaging members of other races? Hardly

[dgerman]

Disparaging? hardly. This is just a sensationalist way to report the news. Here is the actual comment (from the Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/09/08/AR2006090800599.html):

  "I mean Cuban, Puerto Rican, they are all very hot," the governor says on the recording. "They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it."

the article continues...

'Garcia, who is Puerto Rican and the only Latina Republican in the assembly, appeared with Schwarzenegger yesterday and said she was not offended by the governor's comments. Garcia earlier told the Times that she refers to herself a "hot-blooded Latina."

"I love the governor because he is a straight talker just like I am," she said.'

CHP

[matt2413]

The CHP merged with the California State Police in 1995. They are the law enforcement authority on CA state property.

http://www.chp.ca.gov/html/history.html

Re:Wasn't this a crime in the UK?

[MichaelSmith]

I vaguely remember someone in the UK that was convicted of the computer equivalent of trespass for doing something like this: manually removing the trailing elements in a URL.

When the GST (tax) was launched here in 2000 the tax department had a web site where you could query something about your tax and the cgi script it used had an argument like ?tfn=nnnnnnn where the n's are your tax file number (9 digits).

So this guy tried a couple of combinations, got the details of others, and took it to the tax people with advice to change their security arrangements.

So they did, by locking him up.

Re:Moo

[Darth Liberus]

No, that's the way normal human beings interact. Only people who have never really spent much time in a diverse, multiethnic environment get offended by such things... the rest of us tease each other constantly and have a grand old time.

Re:CHP == State Trooper

[DragonWriter]

For those to whom the parent is not clear, the California Highway Patrol has, for quite some time, subsumed the function of the formerly-separate California State Police, and also has a function with regard to the Governor (and, IIRC, certain other state officers) parallel to the protective role of the federal Secret Service.

So its not all that odd that the CHP is running the investigation, other than the fact that there is obviously nothing illegal about accessing publicly-served pages from someone's webserver, so there shouldn't be an "investigation" at all.

Re:gross generalizations

[Sylver Dragon]

You do realize that he is up for re-election in November, and that his major opponent is none other than the person who passed the information on to the LA Times? And that the LA Times went on to quote Phil Angeledies as being very outraged, in the same article that they broke the story. Those of us in California, with more than half a brain (which does eliminate a large portion of the state's population), realized it for what it was: election year mud-slinging. The LA Times is generally expected to be a left slanted newspaper, and they do what they can to attack Schwarzenegger at any possible time. So, running a story, on the front page, about an off-color comment, made in a closed door meeting, (which didn't even offend the person who was being talked about. She actually took it as a point of pride, being called "hot blooded.") is absolutly no suprise.