Critics have charged that she uses the Yahoo! account to get around said public records laws, much as the Bush administration has been accused of doing.
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 the data, 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).
The internet activist group 'anonymous', famed for its exposure of unethical behavior by the Scientology cult, has now gone after the Alaskan governor and republican Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
At around midnight last night the group gained access to governor Palin's email account ... and handed over the contents to the government sunshine site Wikileaks.org.
Governor Palin has come under media criticism in the past week for using pseudo-private email accounts to avoid Alaskan freedom of information laws.
The zip archive made available by Wikileaks contains screen shots of Palin's inbox, two example emails, governor Palin's address box and a couple of family photos. While the emails released so far reveal little, the list of correspondence appears to re-enforce the criticism that Palin is mixing governmental and personal affairs.
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."
As if we needed more proof, McCain-Palin 2008 Campaign Manager Rick Davis issued the following statement:
"This is a shocking invasion of the Governor's privacy and a violation of law. The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them. We will have no further comment."
Bingo, we have official confirmation.
For conspiracy theorists, there wasn't that much found, at least not of political import. Wikileaks said it may release additional e-mails if they find any of political substance.
At the same time, once the story hit the airwaves, so to speak, both the gov.palin@yahoo.com and the better-known gov.sarah@yahoo.com Yahoo! profiles were apparently deleted. Too bad, as maybe the gov.sarah@yahoo.com address had more juicy stuff, and you can bet Anonymous was trying to hack it.
And that raises the question of if, in doing so, Palin deleted "evidence" of any sort. It also brings to mind the question: why Yahoo! and not Gmail? :-)
