One later crime committed against her does not mean she gets a pass on her own.
I did not say she should get a pass. However, accusations should be backed up with evidence.
The person I responded to said "The whole reason Palin is using Yahoo instead of government sponsored email is that any email sent through those channels is archived for a Very Long Time as a matter of public record.".
I have not seen any evidence that says she sent or received these emails specifically to avoid record keeping, even if it was improper.
So it does matter a bit more than what some punk does.
What some punk does, and whether we protect candidates against that behavior, affects the future candidates for any political office in the country.
You're the one who said: "The whole reason Palin is using Yahoo instead of government sponsored email is that any email sent through those channels is archived for a Very Long Time as a matter of public record."
With that kind of an accusation, it's your responsibility to provide the evidence. I can't prove a negative.
I don't see any issue with laying blame on an issue that would never go to court.
That's an interesting ethical position; I do not share it. You made a declaration that could be damaging to her reputation, and you should only say something like that if you can back it up. Otherwise you're just lying to hurt someone.
Maybe she was using her personal email for her personal political career, and there is good reason for that to be marked "CONFIDENTIAL" without being official government business.
In fact, there may be laws preventing her from using government networks to discuss a political career.
You should really provide some specific evidence that she did something wrong, because I haven't seen any yet.
You cannot attack her because that would make her a victim and she makes you appear rude.
Someone violated her privacy, broke the law, and distracted from other issues during the presidential election.
That's a little more than "rude".
As far as the usual political back-and-forth (the legal kind), every politician uses rhetorical shields to hide from legitimate criticism. Ultimately, the people decide what's a legitimate criticism and what is not.
Many people have decided that, yes, it is rude to criticize Palin for the actions of her daughter, or to question the parents of her youngest child.
But it's not rude to criticize her for supporting the bridge to nowhere, or some policy position you disagree with. If she tries to hide behind the "underdog" persona to avoid these charges she will be unsuccessful.
If he's a student, I hope Palin opts not to press charges,
I wouldn't be too surprised if she tried to mitigate the punishment he received so she didn't appear "mean".
However, it's mean to everyone else who might want to run for office to not punish this person appropriately.
At some point we have to say "no, this is not OK". This student has become severely misguided if he thinks it's "cool" to attack people he doesn't agree with politically (and break the law in the process) and cause this kind of disruption on a national scale during a presidential election.
We'll get more and more of these people the more apologists like you they have.
This is like the people who throw pies at Ann Coulter because they disagree with her ideas. It's a socially regressive mob mentality and for some reason has become socially acceptable on college campuses (when directed at conservatives, at least).
It would almost be better not to prosecute at all, if it has the effect of making people aware...
More excuses. People have many vulnerabilities, and the pain of having one of those vulnerabilities exploited is reason enough to be "aware" of them. For those who do exploit others' vulnerabilities, they should be punished according to the law.
As for the hacker, hopefully the Feds will give him a nice long stay in a real PMITA prison with a guy named Bubba.
Your post was great until you said this. People should be punished according to sentences under the law, not subjected to the arbitrary abuse of other prisoners.
Re:Why can't a government employee use Yahoo?
on
Palin Email Hacker Found
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
It's a blurry line but I suppose that could be considered personal.
So we have two people: (1) Sarah Palin, who may or may not have crossed a "blurry line". (2) Some punk who obviously broke the law, caused chaos, and distracted from other issues during an election for the US President.
Maybe you should reconsider how quickly you accuse people without evidence. I'd also be interested to know how you would have reacted if the perpetrator instead attacked Obama and ended up being connected to an elected Republican.
The whole reason Palin is using Yahoo instead of government sponsored email...
Do you have any evidence of this, other than a few isolated emails?
People use a variety of communication systems. They talk on the phone, talk in person, email from various accounts, etc.
Most people make some attempt to organize this: a work phone number, a work email address, etc., but there is almost always some spillover. People socialize with other people they work with, and so there is bound to be some mixing among all of these types of communication. The only time that doesn't happen is when the consequences are huge, such as top secret information or something.
So what is your evidence that she did so to avoid record keeping and hide the information from FOIA requests?
It's very poor form to do so and is the real story here.
No, the real story here is our tolerance for people who harass, intimidate, violate the privacy of, or otherwise punish people who run for public office (or maybe just the people we don't like). We're never going to get good people to run for office if they are punished for doing so.
I think you'd be hard pressed to claim that the current electoral system is ideal.
No voting system is ideal. And no voting system is clearly better than the one we have. Every voting system can be gamed -- that is, in every voting system, it's possible for some people to improve their chances of a desirable outcome by voting differently from how they really believe.
Maybe so, but we'd need to amend the Constitution first:
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors,..."
Either way, the (Texas) law is the law, and allowing people the power to change the rules in the middle of the game is far worse than a single undesirable outcome.
I say this realizing that such an outcome would be likely to hurt the candidate that I want to win.
But how many mistakes are required before you forfeit all of your privacy?
Do one or two errant emails count as a forfeit of your privacy? What about if someone else sends them to you. In that case, you didn't even do anything!
I think that you have to provide some more serious evidence before you can claim that she was using the email address to conduct work.
Sarah Palin has done the exact same thing that Bush did - hide governing related communications on non-government servers.
You have no proof at all that she did this to "hide" government business.
First of all, many people (including Palin, obviously) have several email accounts. I do too. I send to/from the wrong email account every once in a while, and people do the same to me. Also, sometimes people carelessly send to the wrong email address because they think you will receive it faster, or reply when on vacation, or otherwise treat the email differently.
Second, the only thing that matters, especially as the law is concerned, is what she sent from that address, unless she specifically directed staff to send certain types of email to her personal address. And even email sent from that address might have been quite innocent (although perhaps careless) replies to work-related emails mistakenly sent to her personal email.
Third, if any of the emails were sent to/from a colleague, there's a good chance that it's still on the same government server anyway, so nothing is hidden.
And forth, there is a lot of communication that goes unrecorded anyway, particularly in-person conversations and phone calls. Trying to regulate email communications certainly won't do anything about those other types of communications, so it seems ridiculous to take an over-aggressive, mistakes-are-illegal approach to email retention in government.
And yes, I do realize that this is a gross invasion of privacy, but you know what, I honestly don't care.
You should even if you don't care about Palin, because it has practical negative effects for the rest of us.
If we continue to escalate the personal attacks against candidates for public office, that will eliminate a large class of qualified people from running just because they don't want to subject themselves to that kind of punishment. We complain about the selection of candidates, but there is a strong selection bias here.
I have even heard commentators say that Sarah Palin should not have run because she would be putting her family through these personal attacks. If we eliminate all the people who don't want to subject their family to personal attacks, who are we left with?
I sure wouldn't want to run for anything that drew that many attacks.
making the announcement of hypothetical future production to lower current prices will last for, what, an afternoon???
Let me ask you a simple question. You are considering buying a house in a new development, and an area 1 mile away is reserved for open space (and let's say this open space doesn't have value to you). Then, the town decides to lift the restriction on the open space, and sells the land to a housing developer that will complete a new development in 2 years.
Would you still pay the same amount for the house? A wise buyer would not. They would realize that the local supply of housing is about to increase, and that will drive down the value of their property. So, even though the supply has not increased yet, the price falls in anticipation, and stays down.
There is nothing irrational about this process.
In fact, it's an important process, because the falling housing prices prevent other builders from flooding the market.
The reverse is also true. If a town sets aside open space, that will drive current prices up, because wise buyers realize that future supply will not increase as much as it otherwise might (consider this the next time someone says they want open space around their house for environmental reasons -- they probably want it for personal financial gain). Again, these rising prices act as a signal to developers to build more on the land that is still available, to mitigate a housing shortage in the future.
Analytical devices are calibrated, and are supposed to be tested/validated regularly.
The only way to effectively calibrate the device is to calibrate it against real humans.
Some reference sample is not a reasonable analogue of real breath from a real human. Many chemicals are emitted from real breath, at many different temperatures and pressures.
I believe that a device could be accurate in the face of varying humidity, air pressure, tempurature, and irrelevant chemicals and particles. However, I have serious doubts that these things can be calibrated by a simple reference sample.
I bought a personal breathalyzer so I would know how they really behave. I have also used others before (belonging to friends). These aren't super-cheap key-chain things, but $80 devices that are supposed to be reasonably accurate. And they are surprisingly consistent if you use them consistently.
But they are also easy to foil. Just exhale as much air as you can very quickly (if you don't feel like you're going to faint, you did it wrong), and immediately inhale as much as you can very quickly, and then immediately take the test. It will drop your reading at least 30% every time.
Politicians represent a wide variety of interests, and successful politicians are generally quite inconsistent. They change positions, make compromises, etc.
So she at one time, and maybe currently, is promoting the teaching of some religious philosophy in science class. That's wrong.
But aren't there more important issues? Teaching is mostly left up to the states anyway (or should be), so this really has very little effect. She has been governor of Alaska for a while now, are they teaching creationism up there?
I'm getting a little tired of this "gotcha" style of political debate, where supposedly one instance of unmitigated "wrong" will disqualify a a candidate. Hillary lied about getting off the airplane under sniper fire. Wrong? Yes. Would it affect my vote? Probably not.
When debating policy, we aim for perfection and consistency. When debating candidates, that just doesn't work.
I'm not sure I agree with your version of idealism. Sure, idealistic people never want to retire.
The part I take exception to is that selling a business and moving on is somehow not idealistic. Selling out is not bad by itself, it's only bad if you hurt people in the process (e.g., if it's bought out just to destroy the company).
The usual case is that some idealistic person creates something, it makes people happy, they don't care enough about business details to stick around, so they sell it to work on something else.
We don't always hear about the "something else", because it's rare enough to create something great, so in all likelihood they won't do it twice in a row.
If they stick around with the first thing that attracts attention, and never let it go, maybe it's because that person doesn't really have the courage to challenge himself again. How idealistic is that?
And these "CV builders" you're talking about can be easily spotted if that's all they're in it for. Does it really interfere with anything the idealistic people are doing? If not, there are a lot of people who just see a job as a place to make money, it's not limited to IT people.
Since when do assembly line workers get to plan and design cars?
I don't follow the argument there. One of the things that GM has been heavily criticized for is being "a retirement plan based on selling cars". I don't have the numbers so I'm not sure, but it seems to me that the union benefits (like pensions, etc.) are a huge reason for the decline of the US automotive industry.
Instead of expanding capacity (which lowers prices) they stuck to their high price, let 'em wait attitude.
Might that be because expanding requires more labor, and the unions made hiring more labor unprofitable?
I presented a valid argument. The parent of the post to which I replied pointed out that social services expansion can be costly, and that those costs must fall upon someone.
The post to which I replied (which may have been you, or maybe not) then compared the expense of social services to the expense of war, while providing no numbers at all.
I injected a fact into the discussion by pointing out that Social Security alone is more costly than the entire DoD budget (which includes a lot of things not directly tied to an in-progress war).
At no point did I claim that Obama is a socialist. I grouped social services, some of which Obama intends to expand, into the category of socialism, which is a correct usage of the term (social security is a socialist policy).
And fascism comes totally out of nowhere. If we're talking about economics (which is presumably the discussion at hand) fascism and socialism have a lot in common -- after all, Nazi stands for National Socialist.
Slashdot Mirror
He's a punk for showing us another facet of someone who is in the running for an office in the higher end of executive U.S. Government.
I'll repeat myself, because apologists like you don't seem to get it:
What some punk does, and whether we protect candidates against that behavior, affects the future candidates for any political office in the country.
One later crime committed against her does not mean she gets a pass on her own.
I did not say she should get a pass. However, accusations should be backed up with evidence.
The person I responded to said "The whole reason Palin is using Yahoo instead of government sponsored email is that any email sent through those channels is archived for a Very Long Time as a matter of public record.".
I have not seen any evidence that says she sent or received these emails specifically to avoid record keeping, even if it was improper.
So it does matter a bit more than what some punk does.
What some punk does, and whether we protect candidates against that behavior, affects the future candidates for any political office in the country.
has come under media criticism
Anonymous critics can say whatever they want, so it's pretty meaningless.
You didn't provide a reference, so I can't specifically refute this. However, the original story here:
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/32838
says "does appear to indicate that she has been using it for both private and official business".
"appear to indicate" is a much weaker statement than the declaration to which I was responding.
Sarah Palin, who is actively interfering with an investigation into "Troopergate"
She has not been convicted of any wrongdoing, nor does this have anything to do with the matter at hand.
How does this justify making unrelated, unsubstantiated accusations about the reasons she's using Yahoo email?
You're the one who said: "The whole reason Palin is using Yahoo instead of government sponsored email is that any email sent through those channels is archived for a Very Long Time as a matter of public record."
With that kind of an accusation, it's your responsibility to provide the evidence. I can't prove a negative.
I don't see any issue with laying blame on an issue that would never go to court.
That's an interesting ethical position; I do not share it. You made a declaration that could be damaging to her reputation, and you should only say something like that if you can back it up. Otherwise you're just lying to hurt someone.
Maybe she was using her personal email for her personal political career, and there is good reason for that to be marked "CONFIDENTIAL" without being official government business.
In fact, there may be laws preventing her from using government networks to discuss a political career.
You should really provide some specific evidence that she did something wrong, because I haven't seen any yet.
You cannot attack her because that would make her a victim and she makes you appear rude.
Someone violated her privacy, broke the law, and distracted from other issues during the presidential election.
That's a little more than "rude".
As far as the usual political back-and-forth (the legal kind), every politician uses rhetorical shields to hide from legitimate criticism. Ultimately, the people decide what's a legitimate criticism and what is not.
Many people have decided that, yes, it is rude to criticize Palin for the actions of her daughter, or to question the parents of her youngest child.
But it's not rude to criticize her for supporting the bridge to nowhere, or some policy position you disagree with. If she tries to hide behind the "underdog" persona to avoid these charges she will be unsuccessful.
Does that matter at all?
If he's a student, I hope Palin opts not to press charges,
I wouldn't be too surprised if she tried to mitigate the punishment he received so she didn't appear "mean".
However, it's mean to everyone else who might want to run for office to not punish this person appropriately.
At some point we have to say "no, this is not OK". This student has become severely misguided if he thinks it's "cool" to attack people he doesn't agree with politically (and break the law in the process) and cause this kind of disruption on a national scale during a presidential election.
We'll get more and more of these people the more apologists like you they have.
This is like the people who throw pies at Ann Coulter because they disagree with her ideas. It's a socially regressive mob mentality and for some reason has become socially acceptable on college campuses (when directed at conservatives, at least).
It would almost be better not to prosecute at all, if it has the effect of making people aware...
More excuses. People have many vulnerabilities, and the pain of having one of those vulnerabilities exploited is reason enough to be "aware" of them. For those who do exploit others' vulnerabilities, they should be punished according to the law.
As for the hacker, hopefully the Feds will give him a nice long stay in a real PMITA prison with a guy named Bubba.
Your post was great until you said this. People should be punished according to sentences under the law, not subjected to the arbitrary abuse of other prisoners.
It's a blurry line but I suppose that could be considered personal.
So we have two people:
(1) Sarah Palin, who may or may not have crossed a "blurry line".
(2) Some punk who obviously broke the law, caused chaos, and distracted from other issues during an election for the US President.
Maybe you should reconsider how quickly you accuse people without evidence. I'd also be interested to know how you would have reacted if the perpetrator instead attacked Obama and ended up being connected to an elected Republican.
The whole reason Palin is using Yahoo instead of government sponsored email...
Do you have any evidence of this, other than a few isolated emails?
People use a variety of communication systems. They talk on the phone, talk in person, email from various accounts, etc.
Most people make some attempt to organize this: a work phone number, a work email address, etc., but there is almost always some spillover. People socialize with other people they work with, and so there is bound to be some mixing among all of these types of communication. The only time that doesn't happen is when the consequences are huge, such as top secret information or something.
So what is your evidence that she did so to avoid record keeping and hide the information from FOIA requests?
It's very poor form to do so and is the real story here.
No, the real story here is our tolerance for people who harass, intimidate, violate the privacy of, or otherwise punish people who run for public office (or maybe just the people we don't like). We're never going to get good people to run for office if they are punished for doing so.
I think you'd be hard pressed to claim that the current electoral system is ideal.
No voting system is ideal. And no voting system is clearly better than the one we have. Every voting system can be gamed -- that is, in every voting system, it's possible for some people to improve their chances of a desirable outcome by voting differently from how they really believe.
So what you say is absolutely meaningless.
passed at a federal level.
Maybe so, but we'd need to amend the Constitution first:
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, ..."
Either way, the (Texas) law is the law, and allowing people the power to change the rules in the middle of the game is far worse than a single undesirable outcome.
I say this realizing that such an outcome would be likely to hurt the candidate that I want to win.
The problem is it's difficult to think of another reason for a governor to use a non-government email address for official business.
Except for the first three reasons I listed, of course.
It was her mistake, and someone busted her.
But how many mistakes are required before you forfeit all of your privacy?
Do one or two errant emails count as a forfeit of your privacy? What about if someone else sends them to you. In that case, you didn't even do anything!
I think that you have to provide some more serious evidence before you can claim that she was using the email address to conduct work.
Sarah Palin has done the exact same thing that Bush did - hide governing related communications on non-government servers.
You have no proof at all that she did this to "hide" government business.
First of all, many people (including Palin, obviously) have several email accounts. I do too. I send to/from the wrong email account every once in a while, and people do the same to me. Also, sometimes people carelessly send to the wrong email address because they think you will receive it faster, or reply when on vacation, or otherwise treat the email differently.
Second, the only thing that matters, especially as the law is concerned, is what she sent from that address, unless she specifically directed staff to send certain types of email to her personal address. And even email sent from that address might have been quite innocent (although perhaps careless) replies to work-related emails mistakenly sent to her personal email.
Third, if any of the emails were sent to/from a colleague, there's a good chance that it's still on the same government server anyway, so nothing is hidden.
And forth, there is a lot of communication that goes unrecorded anyway, particularly in-person conversations and phone calls. Trying to regulate email communications certainly won't do anything about those other types of communications, so it seems ridiculous to take an over-aggressive, mistakes-are-illegal approach to email retention in government.
And yes, I do realize that this is a gross invasion of privacy, but you know what, I honestly don't care.
You should even if you don't care about Palin, because it has practical negative effects for the rest of us.
If we continue to escalate the personal attacks against candidates for public office, that will eliminate a large class of qualified people from running just because they don't want to subject themselves to that kind of punishment. We complain about the selection of candidates, but there is a strong selection bias here.
I have even heard commentators say that Sarah Palin should not have run because she would be putting her family through these personal attacks. If we eliminate all the people who don't want to subject their family to personal attacks, who are we left with?
I sure wouldn't want to run for anything that drew that many attacks.
making the announcement of hypothetical future production to lower current prices will last for, what, an afternoon???
Let me ask you a simple question. You are considering buying a house in a new development, and an area 1 mile away is reserved for open space (and let's say this open space doesn't have value to you). Then, the town decides to lift the restriction on the open space, and sells the land to a housing developer that will complete a new development in 2 years.
Would you still pay the same amount for the house? A wise buyer would not. They would realize that the local supply of housing is about to increase, and that will drive down the value of their property. So, even though the supply has not increased yet, the price falls in anticipation, and stays down.
There is nothing irrational about this process.
In fact, it's an important process, because the falling housing prices prevent other builders from flooding the market.
The reverse is also true. If a town sets aside open space, that will drive current prices up, because wise buyers realize that future supply will not increase as much as it otherwise might (consider this the next time someone says they want open space around their house for environmental reasons -- they probably want it for personal financial gain). Again, these rising prices act as a signal to developers to build more on the land that is still available, to mitigate a housing shortage in the future.
Analytical devices are calibrated, and are supposed to be tested/validated regularly.
The only way to effectively calibrate the device is to calibrate it against real humans.
Some reference sample is not a reasonable analogue of real breath from a real human. Many chemicals are emitted from real breath, at many different temperatures and pressures.
I believe that a device could be accurate in the face of varying humidity, air pressure, tempurature, and irrelevant chemicals and particles. However, I have serious doubts that these things can be calibrated by a simple reference sample.
I bought a personal breathalyzer so I would know how they really behave. I have also used others before (belonging to friends). These aren't super-cheap key-chain things, but $80 devices that are supposed to be reasonably accurate. And they are surprisingly consistent if you use them consistently.
But they are also easy to foil. Just exhale as much air as you can very quickly (if you don't feel like you're going to faint, you did it wrong), and immediately inhale as much as you can very quickly, and then immediately take the test. It will drop your reading at least 30% every time.
Politicians represent a wide variety of interests, and successful politicians are generally quite inconsistent. They change positions, make compromises, etc.
So she at one time, and maybe currently, is promoting the teaching of some religious philosophy in science class. That's wrong.
But aren't there more important issues? Teaching is mostly left up to the states anyway (or should be), so this really has very little effect. She has been governor of Alaska for a while now, are they teaching creationism up there?
I'm getting a little tired of this "gotcha" style of political debate, where supposedly one instance of unmitigated "wrong" will disqualify a a candidate. Hillary lied about getting off the airplane under sniper fire. Wrong? Yes. Would it affect my vote? Probably not.
When debating policy, we aim for perfection and consistency. When debating candidates, that just doesn't work.
I'm not sure I agree with your version of idealism. Sure, idealistic people never want to retire.
The part I take exception to is that selling a business and moving on is somehow not idealistic. Selling out is not bad by itself, it's only bad if you hurt people in the process (e.g., if it's bought out just to destroy the company).
The usual case is that some idealistic person creates something, it makes people happy, they don't care enough about business details to stick around, so they sell it to work on something else.
We don't always hear about the "something else", because it's rare enough to create something great, so in all likelihood they won't do it twice in a row.
If they stick around with the first thing that attracts attention, and never let it go, maybe it's because that person doesn't really have the courage to challenge himself again. How idealistic is that?
And these "CV builders" you're talking about can be easily spotted if that's all they're in it for. Does it really interfere with anything the idealistic people are doing? If not, there are a lot of people who just see a job as a place to make money, it's not limited to IT people.
Since when do assembly line workers get to plan and design cars?
I don't follow the argument there. One of the things that GM has been heavily criticized for is being "a retirement plan based on selling cars". I don't have the numbers so I'm not sure, but it seems to me that the union benefits (like pensions, etc.) are a huge reason for the decline of the US automotive industry.
Instead of expanding capacity (which lowers prices) they stuck to their high price, let 'em wait attitude.
Might that be because expanding requires more labor, and the unions made hiring more labor unprofitable?
I presented a valid argument. The parent of the post to which I replied pointed out that social services expansion can be costly, and that those costs must fall upon someone.
The post to which I replied (which may have been you, or maybe not) then compared the expense of social services to the expense of war, while providing no numbers at all.
I injected a fact into the discussion by pointing out that Social Security alone is more costly than the entire DoD budget (which includes a lot of things not directly tied to an in-progress war).
At no point did I claim that Obama is a socialist. I grouped social services, some of which Obama intends to expand, into the category of socialism, which is a correct usage of the term (social security is a socialist policy).
And fascism comes totally out of nowhere. If we're talking about economics (which is presumably the discussion at hand) fascism and socialism have a lot in common -- after all, Nazi stands for National Socialist.
in a non-diverse and sparsely populated state
Are you saying that all Alaskans are the same?
Sounds like something a bigot would say.