It’s not been a good week, online or off, for the McCain campaign, but it’s been especially brutal online. The biggest news, aside from the obvious fundamentally strong economic crisis occurring Monday, has been the hacking of Sarah Palin’s email account.
Wikileaks, where screenshots of the contents of Palin’s Yahoo account were posted as evidence of her conducting state business on non-state accounts, has been crashed all day with people clamoring to get a glimpse of the illegally obtained content and judge for themselves (we assume the Secret Service didn’t shut it down, anyway). Likely they’re discovering the emails are as boring as Lou Dobbs on a pile of actuaries.
The story behind the email hack is much more exciting. One of Michelle Malkin’s loyal subjects explains the hacker’s complex and embattled relationship with the entity (not so much a an organized group) that is Anonymous in the notoriously juvenile and destructive /b/ forum on 4chan.org. The reader aptly describes them as “gremlins” rather than hackers because of their joy of “upsetting people and making messes.”
The person who hacked Palin’s account, according to a copy of a forum post submitted by the above reader, said it took him or her about 45 minutes to find the information necessary online (from Wikipedia and Google) to access the account. “rubico” says the account was accessed by guessing at the secret question prompts provided when one forgets a password:
it took seriously 45 mins on wikipedia and google to find the info, Birthday? 15 seconds on wikipedia, zip code? well she had always been from wasilla, and it only has 2 zip codes (thanks online postal service!)
the second was somewhat harder, the question was “where did you meet your spouse?” did some research, and apparently she had eloped with mister palin after college, if youll look on some of the screenshits that I took and other fellow anon have so graciously put on photobucket you will see the google search for “palin eloped” or some such in one of the tabs.
I found out later though more research that they met at high school, so I did variations of that, high, high school, eventually hit on “Wasilla high” I promptly changed the password to popcorn and took a cold shower…
Even some Anonymous forum members, known for outrageous acts, thought this was over the line and moderators in the forum actively deleted related info as it appeared. Too late, though, it got to Wikileaks and the press. The Secret Service requested copies of the leaked emails from the Associated Press, who had the stones to refuse.
So good on the AP, at least.
Regardless of one’s opinion on Palin (according to the latest polls opinions are slumping), the intent of hacking her personal account (the intent of exposing Bush-like circumvention of open records laws) was overshadowed and out-shouted by the appalling nature of the act itself. Of course, one wonders if we’d feel the same had he or she found something juicy.
Meanwhile, take a break and find out what your name would be if you were one of Palin’s half-dozen kids. Mine would be “Strike Chipper,” king of the bowling alley and the golf course.
