September Surprise?
I’m just now getting into the story of Sarah Palin’s purloined electronic letters because I’d been busy keeping my Palin-focused attention on stuff like:
- The alleged energy expert keeps making false assertions about the scale of Alaska’s energy production.
- The alleged reformer is stonewalling an ethics investigation she said she’d cooperate with.
- The alleged take-on-her-own-partier won’t take a stand on the re-election of corrupt Alaska incumbents Ted Stevens and Don Young.
- The McCain campaign’s fact sheet justifying their claim that she said “thanks but no thanks” to Congress on the bridge to nowhere doesn’t remotely justify the claim.
- Palin’s sinking popularity.
And when you think about it, that last factor really doesn’t bode well for John McCain’s campaign since he seemed to have been enjoying a brief-but-now-gone Palin bounce that gave him a brief-but-now-gone lead over Barack Obama. But this turn of events, insofar as it grabs public attention, gives the McCain campaign the opportunity to change the story and to shift back into their favorite mode — taking umbrage at Palin’s treatment by the cruel, cruel world:
“This is a shocking invasion of the governor’s privacy and a violation of law,” McCain’s campaign manager said. “The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities, and we hope that anyone in possession of these e-mails will destroy them.”
Would it be possible that someone working for McCain actually did this in order to shift attention off Palin’s mounting problems? One assumes that the vetting process has left the campaign in the possession of various pieces of personal information that could be useful in gaining access to someone’s account.
49 Responses to “September Surprise?”
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September 18th, 2008 at 9:32 am
I’m telling you here and now, the McCain campaign will see to it Obama is fingered in this affair. Bet on it.
September 18th, 2008 at 9:37 am
Username: gov.palin@yahoo.com
Password: WillowTrig
Please update password
Username: gov.palin@yahoo.com
Password: Lipstickpig
September 18th, 2008 at 9:41 am
let em finger away.
simple response: we had nothing to do with accessing the Yahoo account which Governor Palin illegally used to conduct government business.
September 18th, 2008 at 9:42 am
Only if one assumes the existence of a vetting process in the first place.
September 18th, 2008 at 9:45 am
Partisanship aside, this was a stupid thing to do for some internet geeks. Sure, it’s funny to laugh at the right wingers who’ve been screaming that we should have no privacy from the government anymore and that if you’re not with the terrorists you have nothing to hide. But this is a privacy invasion, it’s illegal, and it should be. Whatever dumb*sses did this did no public service.
Second, I sure wish people in the federal government (or aspiring to it) seemed to give a damn about actual data security — after Homeland Security let a private company leave a laptop in San Francisco exposing the data of 10’s of thousands of people who had signed up with the extra level of travel approval.
September 18th, 2008 at 9:48 am
If I understand it correctly, all you need is a bit of personal info to “hack” a yahoo account. Stuff like a birthday and zipcode, and if /b/ is to be believed, the location she met her spouse; all publicly available info. There’s a reason why you shouldn’t use yahoo email for important business and government matters, namely the security there is crap.
September 18th, 2008 at 9:48 am
Didn’t Johnny’s BFF Joey Lieberman claim someone hacked his website when he was losing to Ned Lamont? And didn’t we find out that that was a McCain-Palin type of truth, by which I mean lie?
September 18th, 2008 at 9:50 am
@El Cid: I’m not sure its as illegal as you think — anyway, perhaps it will draw more attention to the sheer idiocy of using a Yahoo account for gov’t business.
Really, Yahoo is not exactly tops when it comes to privacy. While I recognize no means other than password guessing was used to break into her account, there are a number of idiot-proof cracking tools available for Yahoo. Its basically a joke. Even GMail would have been safer.
September 18th, 2008 at 9:52 am
@jimmy: Insofar as its personal incompetence masquerading as the maleficence of others, yes, its quite similar.
September 18th, 2008 at 9:52 am
Memo to Governor Palin: Don’t use your mother’s maiden name as your security question when you are a public figure with the email address of gov.palin@yahoo.com. My guess is that this involved less “hacking” than it did “guessing”.
September 18th, 2008 at 9:54 am
There is a precedent — a certain Republican campaign operative planted a bug in his own office so he could accuse Democrats of being behind it. What was that fellow’s name? Hmmm… Hang on… almost got it… tip of my tongue…
Oh hell — can’t remember. Started with an “R,” though…
September 18th, 2008 at 9:54 am
Would someone in the McCain camp use phony electronic skulduggery as a sympathy ploy? Hmmm. Maybe we shoud ask someone associated with the Republicans. Mmmm. Could it be …
[looks at the camera]
SATAN!
[picture of Karl "Bug Myself" Rove]
September 18th, 2008 at 9:56 am
I wouldn’t worry, Matt. A large number of bad to mediocre movies have accustomed the nation to thinking there are a bunch of anarchic hackers in the world doing such mischief. And claiming the hackers are out to get you isn’t the sort of sympathy play that is likely to work.
September 18th, 2008 at 10:01 am
the “September Surprise” idea has a lot to recommend it when you look at the next item up on Matt’s blog. is the Mav campaign trying to preempt the Spain gaffe?
September 18th, 2008 at 10:04 am
“….claiming the hackers are out to get you isn’t the sort of sympathy play that is likely to work.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This nation has been conditioned to believe there is a monster under every bed, a hijacker on every plane, a liberal in every downtown office in the land plotting to tax them into penury. Irony will be officially dead after 8 years of Bush seeking ways to spy on the electorate only to have their first burst of outrage be over poor Sarah’s purloined e-mails. This is exactly the type of sympathy play that will resonate.
September 18th, 2008 at 10:15 am
Not that it would knock me over with a feather to find out this was fake, but I think I’ll stick with Occam’s Razor here. I think it’s much more likely that someone was screwing around with guessing passwords and was shocked to find that they actually stumbled onto the right one. If this were a legitimate hack by someone who knew what they were doing, they’d have been much more competent about searching the account for juicy information.
September 18th, 2008 at 10:20 am
“Would it be possible that someone working for McCain actually did this in order to shift attention off Palin’s mounting problems?”
Yes! A double-reverse ratfuck!
September 18th, 2008 at 10:20 am
hate to link to this, but malkin actually has a good recap of how the whole thing went down from a “tech-savvy reader who monitors the hackers’ site”:
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/09/17/the-story-behind-the-palin-e-mail-hacking/
looks like yahoo security questions are a lot easier to figure out than one might think.
September 18th, 2008 at 10:21 am
“….they’d have been much more competent about searching the account for juicy information.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Depending on the nature of the juice it just may be someone realizes its value lies not in exposing it but in offering not to expose it.
September 18th, 2008 at 10:22 am
Some concern trolling for the Republicans:
Palin’s moose hunting background actually provides her with expertise because – thanks to Republican economic policies – moose hunting is precisely the sort of lifestyle most of us will henceforth be required to engage in.
Just a thought.
September 18th, 2008 at 10:22 am
I heard the group “anonymous”, the ones who go after exposing Scientologys nasty ways, claimed credit/responsibility.
September 18th, 2008 at 10:23 am
If /b/ has any sort of political agenda, it can’t be plotted on the standard one- or two-axis graph. If they ran the country, they’d randomly change your SSN just to fuck with you, or instruct Homeland Security to detain women with garish earrings.
In other words, this wasn’t ratfucking; this was Internet trolling. They hacked Palin’s account because she’s a public figure. They did it “for the lulz.”
September 18th, 2008 at 10:26 am
The real thing to take away here is that Palin was playing at being a big-leagues, secretive Rove-type, and screwed it up hilariously. She was playing at being Rove and got tripped up by the first hacker who stumbled along. Hysterical.
September 18th, 2008 at 10:35 am
“The Real Scoop On Palin’s Staged Town Hall Meeting — Another Pretend Moment!
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
So, what was the catch? Unlike most town-hall events, which are open to the public, include diverse crowds, and no one needs an advance invitation, this event was for ticket-holders only. And the only way to get a ticket was through the local Republican Party, after an advance RSVP. No wonder Palin was prepared to play “stump the candidate” — it was a very friendly crowd that had no interest in testing her.
It doesn’t exactly sound like a vote of confidence in the candidates’ ability to answer tough questions, does it?”
How long will the GOP continue to get away with lying, cheating and deceiving the American people?
September 18th, 2008 at 10:48 am
— Frank Costanza
September 18th, 2008 at 11:05 am
Just tossing in my 2-cents’ worth:
cent #1) Let us all repeat this together, “Email is no more secure than a postcard”. Indeed, it is *less* secure, since once I have received my postcard, you would have to break into my house to read it. As we see, email can be accessed (in general) anytime, from anywhere. If you *really* want some level of security in your correspondence, use encryption.
cent #2) Is this a violation of her *personal* privacy as a citizen, or of the privacy afforded to her by ‘executive privelege’? Or both?
Of course- the outrage should be directed at *her* for being stupid enough to conduct government business with a yahoo account. More, to have government officials cc her husband, who is not a member of the government.
Yes- it is wrong of whoever cracked her account to have done so, and doubly-wrong to publish what they found. But, I don’t care about the content of her email, I don’t even know what they said (nor will I make any attempt to find out). We have *plenty* of other things to use against her – all of which have the advantage of being in the public record, and being true.
cheers-
Eric
September 18th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Admittedly not an original thought, but:
Obama and Biden can do the “Shocking, and the perpetrators should be punished.”
Others can do: “What they said, but this is exactly why public officials do not conduct official business over friggin Yahoo. Except, it seems, for Gov Palin.”
September 18th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Not much difference between the Watergate break in and breaking in to Palins email . . . there both illegal and should be thoroughly investigated then prosecuted
September 18th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Slap some $500 frames on Bullock and she’d look just like a pitbull with lipstick.
September 18th, 2008 at 11:33 am
It’s true, this reminded me of the phony Bush/National Guard letters that somehow made their way into Dan Rather’s hands in September ‘04.
September 18th, 2008 at 11:36 am
I agree with whoever above said to go with Occam’s Razor here. I also think this has about as many legs as a diamondback; in the face of the economic news, people will barely raise an eyebrow about this.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Great. More Pit Bullshit. Pray tell, what kind of Viagra jokes is she forwarding anyway? Maybe it was her idea to say McCain invented the Crackberry.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
What won’t happen, but should, is a public discussion on email security. Picking a good password is important, but as this incident demonstrates, picking good password-recovery security questions is equally important. If Michelle Malkin’s correspondent is to be believed, two of the questions (birthday and zip code) were easily obtainable from Wikipedia, and the third (where did you meet your spouse) didn’t take much guessing based on publicly available information. Best practice on this sort of thing is to use preference-based questions, if available (”what is your favorite literary character?”, etc.). Even for those of us without Wikipedia biographies, a lot of the standard account-recovery questions include information which is relatively easy to find.
September 18th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
I’m tinfoilish enough to think ‘double reverse ratfuck with tuck’, but the /b/tard who did it appears to have been… well, just a /b/tard. Not ‘Anonymous’, which is not an organised thing anyway. Just some random /b/tard.
Look, even Karl Rove’s off-the-books GOP.com email account wasn’t hosted on commodity webmail courtesy of Yahoo! SRSLY. As Harvey Lobster says, if she saw the whole GOP.com kerfuffle and thought ‘hey, that’s a good idea’, she fucked up big style.
September 18th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
t minus 6 days until republicans claim that email files were corrupted and evidence was “planted”.
December 6th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Politico’s Ben Smith reports that the current focus of the Obama – Clinton negotiations over Bill Clinton’s foundation and presidential library is looking forward –not necessarily vetting the past. Still, it’s worth remembering that during
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