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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."
This is the dumbest crime ever. If he really did it, I just wish he would say, "Yeah I did it, I'm an idiot - just look at my goofy hair." Then they could cite him with a $200 fine for disorderly conduct and we could all move on with our lives. But the fact that he's pleading not guilty is going to give this whole thing legs both in the court and in the media.
I'm a big tall mofo.
She changed her password to 0ldGuY=Mepr3z!!
My understanding was that illegally wiretapping American citizens carried neither fine nor penalty.
Yahoo! Pipes are awesome. How awesome? http://pipes.yahoo.com/jesdynf/slashdot
Obviously, the perpetrator was not entitled to any of the information contained within that Yahoo! email account and should be punished for breaking the law. 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.
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"
Personally I forgot it happened until I saw this story. At least the trial should bring this back out into the open... But my guess is that nothing will happen to Palin and this guy will get punished. Sorry, I'm just your typical American who has lost a great deal of faith in our government, economy, and legal system.
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;
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
If you do something illegal, STFU!
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
For some reason the uber-parent failed to mention this, but the TN State legislator is a Democrat. May or may not mean anything, but odd to not mention it, isn't it?
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
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?
Close your eyes; it's not illegal.
The freedom of information act would disagree.
Except she wasn't conducting business illegally, and I'm puzzled as to why you'd falsely post that as a justification for an immoral and illegal act. As the hacker Rubico apparently said:
See, for example, here:
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/09/17/the-story-behind-the-palin-e-mail-hacking/
Personally, I prefer Tina Fey to Sarah Palin, but the emails I saw reprinted, while to political colleagues, were the kind that would be illegal (at least at the federal level) to send using government email accounts. For instance, she talked about her Lt-Governor's election campaign. Doing that kind of business on state accounts is a no-no.
But even if all that were not true, you're saying it's just fine to hack into someone's personal email account because you suspect they are guilty of something. So it's fine for the police to do that to you? You must love the Patriot Act and think it doesn't go remotely far enough.
Call that 1984.
Even if Palin had improperly conducted state business on yahoo (which would be stupid and illegal), hacking her email account is still immoral and illegal. I'm surprised that many people who normally are pro-freedom turn out to have very situational ethics when it comes to people they regard as political enemies. As others have said in this thread, a guy called Richard Nixon seemed to think that way.
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.
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
Unfortunately the example it makes is that you can get away with crimes as long as the victim isn't important.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
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.
Completely incorrect. Fruit of the poisoness tree ONLY applies to searches done by police. As is the same with most other evidence law precedents. There may be another reason why it isn't admissable, but that is not it.
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.
Actually, Alaska Public Records Act. FOIA is a Federal law, not a state law.
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.
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.
As I understand, the archive didn't make it; just a few screenshots before the guy freaked out and asked 4chan to glom it for him, which is when/where someone changed the password and alerted Palin. (The screenshots are also supposedly what made it possibly to backtrack him through his weak-sauce anonymizer.)
In short, epic fail for Palin and this cracker schmuck. But a quarter million $ and 3 years? Not going to happen. This kind of thing happens hundreds of times a week, if not day. How many times a day in the US, does someone steal a piece of physical mail (a Federal crime)? Probably in the thousands.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
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.
I don't know from where you post, but in the USA very few (actually, I can't think of any) professions have a legal salary cap.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
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
Why should she be indicted? None of her emails were very inappropriate.
Government officials have record and reporting requirements. By using an external E-mail provider, she avoided those.
even though her personal emails have been exposed and cleared as appropriate
The account was called "gov.palin" and contained messages like this:
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin_Yahoo_inbox_2008
Let it go--she obviously wasn't, and we know that thanks to the idiot who accessed her emails.
She was using the account inappropriately, that much is clear. One can argue about whether this should be a big deal, given that there was no obviously incriminating information she was trying to hide.
I'd usually say this shouldn't be a big deal. But given her apparent history of abuse of power, this is quite relevant.
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.
Wikileaks hasn't posted the full e-mail archive to the general public.
The Guardian looked through them, and found e-mails related to a draft letter to Gov. Schwarzenegger, discussion of nominations to the state court of appeals, and emails from "DPS" - the department at the center of Troopergate.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/deadlineusa/2008/sep/17/uselections2008.sarahpalin
"Incorporation" concerns the Bill of Rights and various other rights. FOIA is an act of congress that applies to certain documents of certain federal agencies. FOIA is not a right, and thus is not incorporated.
-Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
Do you always write like a trailer for Steven Seagal movie?
The only one I can think of are professional sports. Even then it's a series of rules to limit team salary, and not a hard cap on how much an individual can make.
Incorporation applies via the 14th amendment to rights guaranteed by the bill of rights and other constitutional mechanisms. The Constitution does not grant a right to our government's communication to the public, which is why we have the FOIA. It also doesn't prohibit them, since it's not even discussed in the Constitution in the detail that's covered by the FOIA and related state laws, therefore it falls under the purview of the 10th amendment, which leaves the matter to the states and their residents to decide.
The FOIA act does not grant a new right under the Constitution, and Congress does not have the authority, even under the expanded Interstate Commerce Clause rulings, to force open such communications. Therefore it is not incorporated by precedent into state laws and actions. It is thus functionally invisible to the 14th amendment.
That said, she's probably fair game under Alaska state law, as it should be, since she's only accountable to Alaskans at this point given the only elected office she holds.
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.
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