Slashdot Mirror
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
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"
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.
Close your eyes; it's not illegal.
The freedom of information act would disagree.
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
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.
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.
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
According to The Anchorage Daily News her use of secret accounts for state business was already an issue before McCain selected her as his running mate. A records request this summer by a fellow Republican (Andree McLeod) turned up the fact that she was playing fast and loose with the state records laws.
The Republicans in Alaska had had just about enough of her before McCain swooped in. There was bipartisan support for several investigations against her and a growing consensus towards impeachment.
Now, of course, that's all forgotten, at least in some quarters.
I think that's the whole point. They haven't seen the emails, but their existence has been made clear by (among other things) the privilege logs, other e-mails, and sworn testimony of her staffers. So far, she's refusing to turn them over.
--MarkusQ
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?
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.
Do you always write like a trailer for Steven Seagal movie?
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.