Palin conducted state business from Yahoo email
Summary: Open government? Call it Yahoo government.The hacking of Sarah Palin's Yahoo email has raised serious questions about whether she was trying to hide official government business from the public.
Open government? Call it Yahoo government. The hacking of Sarah Palin's Yahoo email has raised serious questions about whether she was trying to hide official government business from the public. The prospect is especially worrying given the Bush Administration's use of Yahoo accounts at the RNC and the subsequent disappearance of those emails.
Email from Amy McCorkell to Palin, cached at Gawker. Full collection of screenshots.
While Ms. Palin took office promising a more open government, her administration has battled to keep information secret. Her inner circle discussed the benefit of using private e-mail addresses. An assistant told her it appeared that such e-mail messages sent to a private address on a “personal device” like a BlackBerry “would be confidential and not subject to subpoena.”Ms. Palin and aides use their private e-mail addresses for state business. A campaign spokesman said the governor copied e-mail messages to her state account “when there was significant state business.”
On Feb. 7, Frank Bailey, a high-level aide, wrote to Ms. Palin’s state e-mail address to discuss appointments. Another aide fired back: “Frank, this is not the governor’s personal account.”
Mr. Bailey responded: “Whoops~!”
Mr. Bailey, a former midlevel manager at Alaska Airlines who worked on Ms. Palin’s campaign, has been placed on paid leave; he has emerged as a central figure in the trooper investigation.
If you're going to hide your communications from the public, might as well be smarter about it, says Slate:
Rovian tactics aside, Wednesday's hacking episode proves that it's rather boneheaded to put state business on Yahoo. True, all e-mail addresses are vulnerable to hacking. But Yahoo is a big target—lots of people spend a lot of time trying to crack Yahoo accounts. Do a quick search for "hack yahoo," and you'll be presented with myriad methods of attack. Alaska's private e-mail system probably does not include a "Did you forget your password?" function. Yahoo, of course, does—and that function presents a key method of entry for hackers.
What to do about the Yahoo-ization of government? Gawker suggests:
[R]eformist liberals (could) take a cue from Gerald Ford's Congress and enact laws and penalties tough enough to ensure the government can't thumb its nose at access laws already on the books — thus making slightly less laughable the idea of government officials acting as "servants" to taxpayers.
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Talkback
knuckleheads in the news
http://whistlersear.wordpress.com.
you can't have it both ways...
If this were an even-handed analysis of political candidates' use of Email to segregate their messages which had were related to political campaigning from those which were purely connected with the conduct of their business as elected officials (and I realize there's a gray area in there the size of Texas), then I would expect to see at least some attempt to look at how Senators Obama and Biden address this same issue.
As it is, it's difficult not to characterize this article as a one-sided political attack masquerading as an ethical analysis.
RE: Palin conducted state business from Yahoo email
This is not limited to any party or candidate. (nt)
Well, yeah
Give me a break.
Assuming you live, come back and tell us about it.
King of the irrelevant
He kind of forgets...
Oh, please
RE: Palin conducted state business from Yahoo email
However, McCain/Palin still have my vote - Why? Because it would piss off NOW to no end ;o)
Your bias is showing
The righteous tone of the article is a dead giveaway.
I am a Democrat
Nope
a radical democrat before we finished reading the headline.
See, if Palin had been a Democrat, you'd be attacking the
hackers for invasion of privacy. You know, kind of like the
press did when Republican staffers hacked emails showing
Democrats trying to spike Estrada because he was hispanic. In
that case, it was all about how horrible it was that the email
messages got intercepted and publicly revealed.
Now, it's all about the content of the emails and how the
hackers are heroes.
One thing you can always count on with a hard-core Democrat
zealot. Pravda-style propaganda in political reporting.
And if Dems were using private email
we wouldn't know, would we?
If the Obama/Biden camp were concealing information from later criminal investigation (and associates of Tony Rezko would probably be wise to do that) then we can assume they wouldn't use clear messages over Yahoo Email.
In fact, critics of Barack Obama's highly non-transparent campaign finances and personal finances would probably be delighted if the details of Nadhmi Auchi's transfer of millions of dollars through Tony Rezko to Barack Obama were located in Yahoo Mail, where a Federal subpoena could locate them and make them public knowledge.
There ya go...
Ain't it the truth?
"radical democrat"-- ha!
"radical republican". If you're a member of the two
major parties, you're not a radical anything. period.
What would change it is if ....
Why wasn't your party affiliation in your "disclosure"?
However, you didn't disclose your party affiliation until just now, so there was no way to evaluate your failure to conduct an even-handed analysis which tried to look at Governor Palin's use of Yahoo in the context of the other candidates' use of similar Email facilities. Are Obama and Biden making use of less public Email accounts, and if they are, what does this signify?
Palin's use of Yahoo to handle her campaign-related communications is not even remotely sinister, despite your clear attempt to paint it as such. She simply tried to segregate what she did as a political candidate from what she did as an elected state official.
Where is the attempt to discover and explore parallel methods of communications in the Obama/Biden campaign versus their electronic communications as Senators and analyze whether what is happening in the Democratic camp is any different?
The analysis is ridiculous on the face of it when you look at it from that perspective - Governor Palin is so secretive that she uses an electronic mail service known to be diaphanous and highly insecure to conduct her political communications, when much more secure fora for these communications are available (and with a trivial amount of effort, even the Yahoo messages could have been encrypted to a high level using PGP if concealing something had been Palin's intention).
No, the only purpose this analysis could serve is to obfuscate the issue and create the false impression that Palin and her staff are hiding something - by using the least secure method of electronic communication short of broadcasting it on talk radio to do so.