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Palin E-mail Hacker Indicted
doomsdaywire writes "A University of Tennessee student who is the son of a Memphis legislator has been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of hacking Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's personal e-mail. [...] If convicted, [David C.] Kernell faces a maximum of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and a three-year term of supervised release. A trial date has not been set."
The only reason this is even news is because of the target. If there's no government communication on the account, why are the FBI and Secret Service involved?
How many times a day do bitter exs break into each others accounts? Nothing ever comes of those incidents.
"liberty and justice for all those who can afford it"
Is it just me, or does that sound a bit excessive for guessing the answers to her all-too-obvious "forgot password" questions? I'm not saying he shouldn't be punished, but no actual harm was done. How does this compare to what the punishment would be for, say, hacking into an ISP's mail server and obtaining root access? Or defacing a company's web site?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
One can only hope that he is prosecuted to the exact same extent that he would be prosecuted for hacking my Yahoo mail account.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Yes, he is.
Please stop reposting from the DailyKos.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
he's being punished for making Sarah Palin and thus the GOP look bad.
He's being punished for breaking the law in a high-profile way. Millions of people get away with speeding every day, yet if I were to speed past a vigil for children killed by reckless drivers, and TV cameras caught it and it became a big news story, I'd expect to get busted for it. High profile crimes are typically prosecuted in a high profile way.
As for the assertion that it made the GOP look bad, how so? There was nothing incriminating there, he even commented himself on how disappointed he was when he was unable to find something to use against her. If anything, it's a net positive for the GOP since they've been victimized by a crime from Obama's supporters without any damage being done in the long run.
That's all well and good, but bragging to the world about what you did because you thought it would make you leet is still stupid.
I personally think this deserves punishment, regardless of whose email account he happened to crack. It doesn't matter if it was the Republican nominee for VP or Joe Six-Pack's, and it doesn't matter what portentous revelations came of it.
But the punishment needs to fit the crime. Certainly any sort of jail time would be excessive to say the least. But kids like these need to understand that there are limits and rules which are more important than having a chuckle with the internet. At the very least it should be a lesson on how not to announce to the world what you did.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
> What sucks is that he not really being punished for breaking the law,
> rather he's being punished for making Sarah Palin and thus the GOP look bad.
That would only make sense if he actually *found* any of the kind of thing he was looking for and, thus, actually made the aforementioned persons look bad. The only people who really look bad here are Yahoo, and perhaps other sites that follow a similar practice of encouraging users to use fundamentally highly insecure "Security Questions.
At worst Palin comes off looking she's not a computer security expert (everyone who is surprised about this, raise your hand), and at best she comes off looking like she has nothing to hide. The only way she'd look bad out of this would be if she got hateful and vindictive and angry about it and started screaming for justice, but she presumably has better political sense than that, having already run a successful campaign for office at the state level.
If you do something illegal, STFU!
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
When the maximum penalty is 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, "Guilty" is a dumb thing to say.
You can't make a deal with a prosecutor if you have zero leverage.
Remember, because of lawyers, common courtesy is dead. For example, you can no longer apologize at the scene of a car accident that's your fault, because then you might be sued.
I seem to see dozens of posters who have decided that Palin was conducting government business over her email. I thought I'd read all the email that had been made public. Did I miss some? Where is this idea coming from? Is it just a meme that everyone believes because someone asserted it? Has anyone actually SEEN an email that was "conducting government business"? If so, can you please post the content?
Enough with this.
I can't believe how many blindly partisan people simply ignore the violation of her privacy.
Would you have the same attitude if you had been the victim?
You'd be OK with someone hacking into your email, or perhaps browsing around your home to look for something that *might* indicate that you've done something wrong?
Would you say, "I guess I had it coming"?
I think it's sad that this (eternal) election has divided American citizens into Republicans or Democrats and not much else.
Damn.
What id dont get is why if someone hacked my email, there is no way theyd get a penalty like that. the judge would look at me and say "tough love".
although it is illegal, i just dont care because since she is a celebrity right now, she has the pwer to do something about it. just goes to show you dont want her in office, because she thinks that she deserves special treatment. Also, although her daughter is hot (and so is she)
Obama, FTW!
Go go Gadget Nailgun!
How could you have learned that?
The entire mail archive was posted to wikileaks. Post ONE email from that archive (with appropriate obfuscations, of course) that supports that claim.
note: I'm not suggesting that she did or didn't do anything, only that I'm not convinced the evidence available supports the claim that she did.
note2: I'm not going to look through the archive myself. I don't want to look through someone else's private mail, and the burden of proof falls on the claim that she did commit wrongdoing, anyway.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
To the extent that there may have been e-mail there that was intended to avoid Alaska's public records law, there could have been a crime. However, we will now never know if that alleged illegal activity was taking place, because by compromising the account, this bozo gave Palin a perfect excuse to close the account and (presumably) destroy all the evidence. (And any evidence that can be recovered will be tainted.)
Given the presumption of innocence in US law, we now must presume that she did nothing wrong... even if she had in fact been doing exactly what is alleged. Way to go, fella!
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Politicians don't deserve the same freedoms as citizens. Sorry to say this but they cannot be trusted with as much freedom. The most a citizen will do doesn't matter to national security w/e. But the president/vicepresident, congresscritters they can cause really big problems and when there are allegations of corruption and wrong doing they should NOT get the same level of privacy citizens are supposed to (but dont get regardless). Look up congression level hacks and almost ALWAYS corruption is found. Sorry, privacy is nice and all but when you find they took a few hundred grand or a house in bribes (previous congressmen) then the hack was well justified. Its the same as hacking/investigating people when you have a warrant. The bar should simply be set lower for politicians since they seem to set it lower.
I learned that Sarah Palin was illegally using personal email accounts for business email
Um, that's perfectly legal.
What you meant to say was that she was illegally using personal email accounts for government business, which is not.
Or maybe they're like a lot of folks who didn't grow up with computers, and they are experts in other fields besides technology. This is like saying that a doctor is stupid because he couldn't fix your carburetor.
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
Gosh, why is the system failing. What could possible have happened to the US and democracy in general. Could there be some clue. Maybe something in your post. Geez, lets see.
Personally I forgot it happened
The powers that be thank you, dear consumer with the attention span of a kitten in a chicken plucking factory.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You just proved the parent post in 2 ways- 1. Calling him an idiot instead of just disagreeing with him demonstrates that common courtesy is dead, and 2. If you get in an accident with someone and you caused it your best response to their justifiable anger is to tell them to go pound sand.
John McCain can't type because his arms were repeatedly broken by the Vietnamese while he was a POW. Why do you insult disabled veterans?
Well, that's what his campaign claims when the embarrassing topic of his technological ignorance comes up. On the other hand, here you can see him firmly holding a pad in one hand, while signing his name with the other hand, standing up, with no awkwardness that I can observe. He's hardly an invalid. If he can do that, he can type on a keyboard.
While I respect McCain's sacrifice 35 years ago as a single data point, unfortunately he's also proved himself to be a dishonorable liar since then.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Great. So the Obama campaign will be publishing all of Joe and Barrak's e-mail in the next few days then. 'Cause, how can we know if they're conducting public business with those private accounts, unless we see it all??
The Big Rule of a democratic society is Equality Before the Law. Same rules for everyone. So if Palin's e-mail must all be public record, then the same goes for Biden and Obama, and Kennedy, and everyone else. And you.
That's the key. How many webmail accounts do you think are compromised every day in the world? Now, how many are investigated by the secret service and result in a federal indictment?
It's called incorporation, so yeah FOIA applies no matter what the Alaska law says.
Also, she hasn't been elected yet, so don't try to the whole "executive privilege" thing either.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Mod parent up. If this happened to us, we'd be laughed at when we called the police (or whoever). To hell with her government job, this was a private e-mail account, it is not of more importance than anyone else's but is being treated like it is.
He is being punished for breaking the law. He is being prosecuted for making Sarah Palin look bad.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Media publication of this information has nothing to do with whether or not the data was obtained illegally. News organizations publish information obtained from criminals about their criminal acts on a regular basis, and most of them are willing to shield their sources against investigation.
The fact that Palin was using non-state-sanctioned e-mail for purposes of administering the state is, if not outright illegal under either federal or Alaskan law, certainly underhanded and something that the people should know about.
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
No, it isn't. The US is not a company that produces a product called "email provider" or even "internet". You're comparing apples and oranges, and you're also missing my point entirely.
For the slow: Lots of older folks, especially, are not completely tech-savvy. It doesn't mean that they are incompetent at their jobs.
I'm also willing to bet that if this had happened to Joe Biden, these types of comments wouldn't be thrown around so liberally (har har, pun not intended, but realized and appreciated after typed).
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
I do think that Bidens and all other congressional emails (through GOV accounts) should be available/read by 3rd party. And when corruption is found like in palins case...
Uh, nothing was found. You can keep saying that, but there was nothing there. Sorry.
If a congress person (palin)...
Palin is not in Congress. She is the governor. That is an executive position.
She fired the Chief because he was going after funding after Palin denied it. He was trying to go over the Governor's head to get things done. Governor's don't like that much. What would your boss do if you went to his boss, or more accurately, the head of a different department to request funding after your boss had denied it? I suspect you would end up in the same place as this particular chief.
...then she should have her logs checked. Seems pretty simple... citizen emails would not need to be public because we don't make billion dollar decisions.
Government officials are still citizens. They deserve privacy just like you or I do. If they are not above the law, then they have the same rights as you or I. Otherwise, we would be allowed to see into the private lives of the old lady at the DPS office. She is just as much a government employee as the governor.
But, hey! Don't let the facts cloud your judgment.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.