HACKERS have revealed private emails sent by Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, as well as what appear to be email addresses for her snowmobile-riding husband Todd, her pregnant daughter Bristol and her soldier son Track.
The hackers broke into Mrs Palin`s personal Yahoo! email account, which she uses to send government emails in addition to her official Governor`s address.
Screengrabs and what appears to be a full listing of her email contacts have been posted on the web, including on WikiLeaks, raising concerns about the vulnerability of information in the official emails sent on the private address.
Critics have also suggested Mrs Palin and her office might use personal accounts to send information they want to keep secret, sidestepping public diclosure laws.
Two email accounts apparently used by Mrs Palin - "gov.sarah" and "gov.palin" - have since been discontinued. The latter was the account which was hacked.
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It showed Mrs Palin`s husband Todd used "fek9wnr" in his address - "Fe" for iron and "k9" for dog. Mr Palin won the Iron Dog snowmobile race and has the same term as his licence plate number.
It also showed an address for Bristol Palin, the 17-year-old whose pregnancy made global headlines after her mother was chosen as John McCain`s running mate, as well as one for Track Palin under the name "track_44".
Users on Gawker.com, which published the screengrabs and contacts list, speculated on the meaning of the name, prompting a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that there must have been 43 other kids named Track who beat him to the punch.
Privacy
"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 e-mails will destroy them," the McCain-Palin campaign said.
The Associated Press reported that the US Secret Service had asked it to turn over its copies of the hacked emails, but the news agency refused to do so.
The content of hacked emails published so far seem mostly harmless, restricted mainly to congratulatory messages after she was announced as the Republican vice-presidential candidate.
In another, she writes to her Lieutenant Governor, complaining about a local radio host. In yet another, an associate tells her to ignore negative publicity in the aftermath of her entry into the White House race.
The Associated Press suggested the hackers might have broken into the account by tricking Yahoo! into revealing Mrs Palin`s password using publicly available information about her.
Or, it said, the hackers might have tricked Mrs Palin into revealing her own password in a phishing scam.
Private emails are Private.Anyone involved in obtaining these emails should be prosicuted.
Posted by: Brian Janak of Victoria, TX 2:13pm today
Well done Anon! Excellent raid.
Posted by: David Davidson 2:07pm today
In spite of the various comments on blogs that "she must have something to hide, using a private email account instead of her government account", the reality is that it's not uncommon for people to use private accounts to get around the draconian restrictions that email system administrators have put on their systems.The most common restriction is on the size/type of email attachments (such as photos, etc.) that are accepted.The second most common restriction is to disallow emails that might be spam from senders that are not pre-approved.
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