Slashdot Mirror
Court Rules That Palin Must Save Yahoo Emails
quarterbuck writes "An Anchorage judge has ruled that Governor Sarah Palin must save her emails, as they were apparently used for state business. Last week a Tennessee man was arrested over hacking one of her Yahoo email accounts. The Washington Post also reports that Sarah Palin, her husband, and officials had set up email accounts known only to each other."
Good sir Ken,
The problem is that she used the personal email for official correspondence, which is not all that legal.
The personal account is required for campaign and private correspondence.
HTH
Second paragraph FTA, friend:
The judge issued the orders at the request of Andree McLeod, an Anchorage activist whose pursuit of Palin's e-mails revealed that the governor did considerable state business from a Yahoo e-mail address -- an arrangement that avoided the safeguards and accountability of the state's secure e-mail system.
They've already seen boxes of emails from her aides to her Yahoo account. In fact, all but one email was sent to her gov.sarah@Yahoo.com account. That's the account she used for state business. It's not the account that got hacked.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Not only was she stupid enough to have her yahoo account password resettable by an outsider, she was stupid enough to conduct state business on this and other non-state-secured e-mail accounts.
I'm sorry, but anyone who doesn't realize that in order to be safe it ALWAYS important to assume that your emails are immediately and fully in the hands of your worst enemies is hopelessly naive. Besides the sketchily legal issue of conducting state business over unsecure email, she also copied her husband on some of it.
Seriously Palin? Talk about it over the dinner table. Sending the email to your hubbie sends it over unsecure servers in the internet proper where they could be read in transit by any number of unruly or dangerous individuals. And that's assuming that she was sending it from a state-secured email on state-secured servers, which she obviously didn't at least some of the time.
The scary part now is that if she were to pull the same stuff in the whitehouse, there would be terrorists and spies trying to get ahold of national secrets, not just the inner workings of a state government. And I think we can all agree that the resources they have at their disposal are frightening.
I'm much happier with her gambling with Alaskan politics than National Security.
Shouldn't secret communications always be an option?
No, it shouldn't be. Not when a public official is acting in their official capacity. If it's not classified enough so that Yahoo mail wouldn't be a security breach, it's not so classified that the public shouldn't know about it.
And no, I don't buy into the theory that advisers give better advice if the know that the public won't know what they say.
I am officially gone from
she has a right to privacy
Sarah Palin the private individual has a right to privacy. Sarah Palin the Governor of Alaska has a responsibility to openness and transparency. I Sarah Palin the Governor of Alaska has been pretending to be Sarah Palin the private individual in order to escape this responsibility, then there is a problem.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I agree that malice may not have been intended. However, that doesn't really matter. For people in positions like her's, using official email systems for official business is a nonoptional aspect of documentation and accountability. Failure to do so is, at best, incompetent neglect of duty, and at worst deliberate conspiracy to deceive the public. Maliciously doing this is worse than doing so nonmaliciously; but using official email for official business is a necessary part of the job. Not doing a necessary part of your job, even if it is totally without malice, is still bad.
I'm a sysadmin, if I failed to run backups properly, and data were lost, they wouldn't have to prove that I maliciously failed to do so in order for me to deserve to get fired. Simply not doing so is bad enough. Same for her.
The big deal is that she is required by law, the very same law she has sworn to uphold as governor, to follow certain rules and regulations about how she conducts her business. Had she used her work e-mail, as it were, compliance would have been enforced server side and this would not be an issue, but she chose not to and then violated the rules. If she'd used Yahoo! and followed the rules there wouldn't be a problem (well, outside of Yahoo! mail being crap...), but she didn't follow them and now it IS a problem. She may choose whatever e-mail provider she wants, she MAY NOT choose to break the law.
And before somebody comes along with "well it's just her personal e-mail address, she probably didn't even think to" as a defense of doing this... the account names pretty obviously indicate she created them AFTER becoming governor, so it's not like these are legacy addresses. It's also not as if somebody held a gun to her head and made her run for and accept the office of governor of Alaska, if she didn't want to comply with these laws, all she needed to do was not take on a job which required her to follow them.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse, especially when you hold the highest office in your state, sworn to uphold *all* the laws of the land.
At the time that Palin was using her Yahoo accounts for govt business, she was also in the public record as knowing that activists were suing for access to her email.
Using private email accounts for public business is illegal in Alaska. Rather than deny this, surely she should be a big lady and step up to admit ... but it doesn't matter. The judge will ensure that the emails will come forth, unless Yahoo says "oops! we lost that backup tape..." like the current White House did.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
This is exactly the point. Our system was created by the people who might be punished, so when they made it they never built in any real accountability. In a rational world, just using a private, personal account for state buisiness would be enough to get her fired. In the same way, the "I do not recall" defense has become a staple of culture, especially in politics, to the point where it is pretty clear that anyone with memory problems as bad as, say, Alberto Gonzalez, should be fired immidiately and prevented from ever working for the public again. Accountability must be restored or in the long term the negative feedback will build until we end up having to go to war with ourselves to clean out the corruption. Its fucked up, but thats how it is.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.