Palin’s Email Hacked - UPDATED

5 Responses to “Palin’s Email Hacked - UPDATED”

1. Do Gooder on September 19th, 2008 9:40 pm
   

   Palin, lawbreaker. Far more serious offense for a public official to use non-government email systems to communicate government business than for some wannabe script kiddie to break into hear weakly password protected email account. I know others will justify otherwise, but this is the truth.
2. Laura on September 19th, 2008 10:21 pm
   

   Oh, PLEASE, “Do Gooder” - show me credible evidence that Palin broke any law. Furthermore - even if she had done what you assert with no evidence whatsoever, just repeating the AP’s so-far baseless lie, that STILL does not justify in any way whatsoever her account being accessed by a social engineering hack.
3. Paul on September 21st, 2008 1:56 am
   

   http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/politics/14palin.html?pagewanted=4&_r=2&hp talks about her using private email for state business. Not proof, by any means, but then it’s often hard to find proof of things that are being hidden and not investigated properly. Having said that the hackers almost certainly broke the law, and definitely did something wrong, and what Palin may have done wrong does not excuse that.
4. Laura on September 21st, 2008 3:24 am
   

   Paul, that article is a typical NYT hit piece, long on assertions, anonymous sources and speculation, and short on documentation and verifiable facts. Just on the first page, talking about the polar bears, is some serious dishonesty. For example, here’s a clip from the NYT piece you linked:

   Rick Steiner, a University of Alaska professor, sought the e-mail messages of state scientists who had examined the effect of global warming on polar bears. (Ms. Palin said the scientists had found no ill effects, and she has sued the federal government to block the listing of the bears as endangered.) An administration official told Mr. Steiner that his request would cost $468,784 to process.

   When Mr. Steiner finally obtained the e-mail messages — through a federal records request — he discovered that state scientists had in fact agreed that the bears were in danger, records show.

   But there are five times as many polar bears today as there were 50 years ago, and this article describes how the misleading report was created.

   The original source of the drowning polar bear story is a series of studies conducted by Charles Monnett and colleagues from the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS) out of Alaska which as been observing and counting polar bears on Alaska’s north shore for the past 30 years or so as part of a broader efforts to survey bowhead whale populations in the region and assess any impacts that oil and gas exploration activities may be having on them. Since the late 1970s, aerial surveys have been conducted from small airplanes flown during the late summer/early fall documenting the numbers of whales, polar bears, and other large marine mammals.

   In December 2005, Monnett et al. presented a poster at the Marine Mammals Conference in San Diego (followed soon thereafter by a publication in the journal Polar Biology in early 2006) in which they documented a change in the patterns of late-summer polar bear sightings. During the first part of the record, polar bears were usually spotted on ice floes lying off the Alaskan coast, between say Barrow and Demarcation Point, near the Alaska/Canada border. During the latter part of the record, from 1992-2005, most of the bears were spotted on land as there was little ice to be found within tens to hundreds of kilometers of the coast. Alone, these observations indicated that the behavior of the polar bears was changing as the environmental conditions around them were changing. Hardly newsworthy in and of itself—polar bears adapting as best they could to climate change.

   But the part of the study that garnered the press attention so much so that it has become ingrained in global warming lore was that Monnett et al. reported the sighting of four polar bear carcasses floating in the sea several kilometers from shore, presumably having drowned. All four dead bears were spotted from the plane a few days after a strong storm had struck the area, with high winds and two meter high waves. Since polar bears are strong swimmers, the authors concluded that it was not just the swimming that caused the bears to drown, but that the swimming in association with high winds and waves, which made the exertion rate much greater, sapping the bears of their energy and leading to their deaths. The authors also suggested that the frequency and intensity of late summer and early fall storms should increase (as would the wave heights) because of global warming and thus the risk to swimming bears will increase along with the number of bears swimming (since there will be less ice) and subsequently more bears will drown. But they didn’t stop there—they suggested that the increased risk will not be borne by all bears equally, but that lone females and females with cubs will be most at risk—putting even more downward pressure of future polar bear populations. And thus a global warming poster child (or cub) is born.

   But does all of this follow from the data? Again, we haven’t heard of any reports of polar bear drownings in Alaska in 2005, 2006, or 2007—all years with about the same, or even less late-summer sea ice off the north coast of Alaska than in 2004, the year of the documented drownings.

   In 2004, the researchers saw four, that’s right 4, polar bear carcasses floating at sea where they had never seen any in previous surveys. The 4 dead bears, coupled with 10 other bears that were observed to be swimming in open water, more than 2 km from land, led them to conclude that global warming was making the bears swim long distances and then drowning as the exertion overcame them when they got caught in a storm.

   That’s page 1. Page two is largely reports of people who have been fired, whose accounts are treatedly uncritically and pretty much go unrebutted. Page three includes the fully debunked banned books lie, and page four includes such gems as the Wasilla High yearbook slam. What, only Palin and three others went to Wasilla High? The email descriptions sure sound good, but a) the NYT is not an honest broker of information and b) there’s no supporting evidence that can be checked. In one sentence they “discussed the benefits” in the next an assistant told her it would be confidential, and in the next, it asserts they’re doing it. Next a highly truncated quote; given the Times’ record on Dowdified quotes, I’m quite suspicious. Then the hit piece wraps up with this take on a perfectly reasonable request:

   At a recent lunch gathering, an official with the Wasilla Chamber of Commerce asked its members to refer all calls from reporters to the governor’s office. Dianne Woodruff, a city councilwoman, shook her head.

   “I was thinking, I don’t remember giving up my First Amendment rights,” Ms. Woodruff said. “Just because you’re not going gaga over Sarah doesn’t mean you can’t speak your mind.”

   At least the McCain campaign isn’t siccing Justice Department lawyers, having Obamabots spam radio shows, and threatening groups with the IRS.

   If Palin’s done something wrong, I want to know it. Seriously. I’m in the tank for her and I don’t mind admitting it, but I’m not blind. But the NYT just doesn’t cut it as a source anymore. And by their own admission, neither does WaPo.
5. Paul on September 23rd, 2008 9:53 am
   

   (For some reason my reply is blocked, probably because I provided plenty of links. I’ve stripped most out and replaced them with references)

   I find it a little ironic that the article you link to show how flawed the NYT is uses a chart credited (in part) to the NYT. I can’t decide if that’s more evidence for your point, or if it discredits it!

   How about the Anchorage Daily news? Or the Juneau Empire or Seattle Times, that both (with others) felt comfortable running the same story? How about the Washington Post, which said:

   “Palin also routinely does government business from a Yahoo address, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, rather than her secure official state e-mail address, according to documents already made public.”

   It also pointed out that she won’t release certain emails for a public records request, despite copying her husband in on some of them (her husband being, for these purposes, just a member of the public).

   I don’t *know* that Palin has done anything wrong, but then if I did we could skip that whole investigation/trial thing and go straight to sentencing. But there’s enough smoke to warrant further work. The way the hacker(s) did that was, as I said before, probably illegal and certainly wrong, and I hope he/they are prosecuted. But that wrong doesn’t make Palin right.
6. Trackbacks on January 8th, 2009 3:40 am
   • Son Of Tennessee Democratic State Representative Mike Kernell Hacked Into Palin’s E-mail | Right Voices

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