Palin Yahoo eMail Hacked, Posted on WikiLeaks
by Bradley, Editor
September 17, 2008
Sarah Palin
A group of anonymous hackers has gained access to Vice Presidential Candidate Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo email account (gov.palin@yahoo.com, naturally…for serious) and posted some of its contents on WikiLeaks. Included in the posting are screen shots of several private emails, including correspondence with advisers.
The traffic appears to have temporarily put WikiLeads out of service…this is going to get interesting.
Update: Gawker has posted the emails
Wow…There are claims that she uses this email because, unlike her government one, the contents can’t be suppenoed.
Here’s more on this topic from an article Mark wrote recently:
http://demockracy.com/secrecy-you-can-believe-in/
If they wanted to, investigators could certainly subpoena her “private” Yahoo emails, given evidence that Palin and her aides used private accounts for the express purpose of evading subpoenas. You’ll recall that Rove & Co. used this same tactic with the RNC email addresses, but the RNC conveniently “lost” all the emails requested because they re-use backup tapes.
As an IT guy who deals with backups every day, I can say with 100% certainty that if an organization wanted to create an environment in which it would be very easy to lose important data, by building negligence into the design and not being redundant about backups, then it would be very easy. Unfortunately, Yahoo does do frequent backing up, so the plausible deniability here is not as easy as with Rove.
Thanks for elaborating on all of that, Mark. I’ve heard that it might be illegal for her to conduct government business via her yahoo account. Is that true in general or only true because it was possibly done with malicious intent?