As I often do during my day, I checked my Google Reader to see what was going on with my favorite blogs. Tech-Ex included an entry with the heading "Hackers Break into Palin’s Yahoo! Email."
In case you can’t read it, the post says:
| Quote: |
| Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running-mate, has come under fire for using her private Yahoo! email address for state business. The reason? As a public official she’s supposed to use her official email address (which is, of course, subject to laws requiring the retention of government records). She even has a Blackberry, so why would she even need to use Yahoo! mail?
At any rate, the hacker group Anonymous, famous for taking on the Church of Scientology, said Wednesday it had hacked into a second Palin Yahoo! account, and shipped off screenshots and emails to Wikileaks, the web site started with the intention of allowing whistleblowers to anonymously release government and corporate documents, "an uncensorable version of Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. " Sounds like a good place to send them, if in fact Palin was hiding anything. Here’s the announcement from Wikileaks (someone seems to be firing back at Wikileaks as it is unreachable at the time of this writing). Circa midnight Tuesday the 16th of September (EST) Wikileaks’ sources loosely affiliated with the activist group ‘anonymous’ gained access to U.S. Republican Party Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account gov.palin@yahoo.com. Governor Palin has come under criticism for using private email accounts to avoid government transparency mechanisms. The zip archive made available by Wikileaks contains screen shots of Palin’s inbox, example emails, address book and two family photos. The list of correspondence, together with the account name, appears to re-enforce the criticism. |
That was enough to send me to Tech-Ex and read more.
Strange. The page is missing, but was yet to be deleted from Google Reader. I decided to click on the link within the Google Reader entry for the Wikileaks info.
Similar to as reported in the Tech-Ex entry, Wikileaks is still unresponsive. I got the same results after attempting to reload the page several times. I also go the same results when I tried to load the main Wikileaks page.
I’m not saying she nor the Republican Party had anything to do with this, but what the hell?
And for those who can’t read the final bit of small type at the end of the first image, here’s what else Tech-Ex had to say:
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| While, of course, it would be easy to fake an email address like this, the quantity of emails, the contacts list, and the fact that Wired got a response confirming at least one email leads me to believe it’s not a fake.
Amy McCorkell, whom Palin appointed to the Governor’s Advisory Board on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse in 2007, confirmed to Wired that one of the emails was legitimate. The e-mail, a message of support to Palin, tells her not to let negative press get to her and asks Palin to pray for McCorkell, who writes that "I need strength to 1. keep employment, 2. not have to choose." |
Be sure to check out the Wired article while you still can!