[385] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Why Hacking Sarah Palin's E-Mail Was Dumb, Dumber,
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (privacy@vortex.com)
Wed Sep 17 22:54:12 2008
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Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:26:33 -0700
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Why Hacking Sarah Palin's E-Mail Was Dumb, Dumber, and Just Plain Wrong
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000429.html
Greetings. By now you've probably heard -- assuming that we're not
dealing with a sophisticated and probably unlikely political hoax --
that Sarah Palin's Yahoo account has been hacked, and apparently
quantities of her e-mail, photos, and related materials have been
publicly posted ( http://gawker.com/5051193/sarah-palins-personal-emails )._
Since it has previously been suggested in some quarters that Gov.
Palin often used private e-mail accounts for Alaska state business
- -- which would avoid government data retention laws associated with
official e-mail -- the exposure of the Yahoo data seems to be
triggering considerable glee in some quarters.
As much as I hold in disdain the concept of someone like Sarah Palin
being considered for a single microsecond as qualified to be Vice
President of this great country, and as much as I find most of her
viewpoints and her public modus operandi to be appalling, I still
must assert that any joy over this hacking is dumb, wrong -- and
dangerous -- both from ethical and practical standpoints.
The ethical issue should be clear enough and is as old as mankind --
we shouldn't be doing to others that which we wouldn't want done to
ourselves. Palin's truly personal e-mail and photos have no bearing
on the political situation, yet they've been posted along with
everything else. There's simply no justifying this from an ethical
standpoint.
But the practical issues are equally obvious. There are official
channels for the gathering of electronic evidence in cases of
suspected wrongdoing. Those channels should not and normally do not
include -- and in fact efforts at prosecution can be stymied by --
ad hoc public releases, especially when those materials are obtained
through illegal acts as was apparently the case in this situation.
Exposure can also trigger premature deletion (maybe still
retrievable, maybe not) of other materials that might have been
useful to investigators, as may have already happened in this case.
Even worse, this chain of events plays into the hands of the
Palin/McCain campaign (some observers have suggested that perhaps
this was all actually a "dirty trick" from that side -- I consider
this to be extremely unlikely based on what we know right now).
The hacking and publication of Palin's data unfortunately feeds
directly into the sensibilities of many of Palin's supporters, who
have already been attempting to position her (up to now I would have
said without merit) as a victim of unfair treatment -- and using
this to their political advantage. Now the hackers who released her
data have handed that campaign a gift that on balance will probably
help Palin's and McCain's efforts between now and election day.
Many in the public will react to this event with a natural revulsion
to the apparent privacy violation, regardless of the contents of the
material that was released in this situation.
The concept of Sarah Palin being Vice President of the U.S. is not
only utterly unacceptable, but also just this side of completely
insane. Her presence on the GOP ticket can't help but cause one to
question John McCain's judgment and unfortunately his previously
untarnished integrity as well.
But none of this justifies the hacking of Sarah Palin's accounts.
The hackers in this case haven't done any favor to those of us who
don't want to see Palin one heartbeat away from the President, and
have simultaneously struck a blow against continuing efforts to
bring ethics back into the political discourse.
Dumb, dumber, and wrong.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com or lauren@pfir.org
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
- People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Co-Founder, NNSquad
- Network Neutrality Squad - http://www.nnsquad.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
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