Sarah Palin’s email hacked, political fallout expected
Sarah Palin, Vice President candidate under John McCain’s Yahoo! email account was hacked Wednesday, and several email were leaked to the confidential document website Wikileaks.org. At least one email to Amy McCorkell of Palin’s advisory board has been confirmed, and the FBI is investigating the hack and the group behind it, titled “Anonymous”.
As if John McCain’s computer illiteracy was bad enough, his own VP candidate’s private emails and photos are now posted on Wikileaks, the wiki for confidential documents hosted by the same group of individuals running The Pirate Bay, an infamous bittorrent web site, as well as serving as the ISP for both websites refusing to take either down.
Palin has been criticized for using private email accounts to conduct formal business, something the Bush administration has also come under fire for, but McCain is unable to do so due to lack of knowledge regarding turning a computer on. Some argue that she does so to avoid public record laws, which require such data to be publicly available (a la wikileaks?).
It is unknown how the Anonymous hacker group gained access to Palin’s account, although the fact that Yahoo!’s free email service uses very little SSL encryption could be part of the problem, as opposed to GMail’s liberal usage of th standard (once enabled).
In McCain’s favor, his lack of computing skills could concievably prevent this from happening due to his usage of only hard copies and telephone conversations, unless a secretary is appointed to handle all email-related affairs. If elected, McCain could use this experience as a reason for an internet-related bill before congress that while aiming at black-hats such as the Anonymous group hurts other geeks due to bad wording in addition to net neutrality in general, or one that hurts open source, but only time will tell.
In the meantime, Yahoo! and the Wikileaks/Pirate bay administrators can expect a lot of pressure from the FBI and U.S. govornment as a result of this, and peer-to-peer filesharing users might even experience downtime as well. Things look grim for the rougue Nordic ISP, whom is already suffering international trouble with the MPAA due to The Pirate Bay’s movie sharing, and now Wikileaks just earned them trouble with the FBI, possibly causing another server raid like the one in 2006 that shut down The Pirate Bay for a few days. All of this, because a group of black-hat hackers (dubbed ‘thugs’ by FOX’s ‘lovable’ Bill O’Reilly today) gained access to a Yahoo! email account, which honestly is as common as internet service itself these days.
