The fact that Sarah Palin was using a Yahoo! account is almost neglectable in light of the fact that Anonymous members were illegally cracking the email account and deliberately spread private and government information on the internet, on top of all endangering the safety of Palin's family. No "public interest" exists for this, and their doing was just plain illegal. Anonymous is known for illegal and harassing actions for a long time.

Article:

http://www.nolanchart.com/article4803.html

Fox11 News on Anonymous:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNO6G4ApJQY

Anonymous response:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFjU8bZR19A

Another Fox11 report:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYH-5ke_bOU

Anonymous documentary:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbwNyKXux70 or

http://www.anonymous-exposed.org

I find it hard to take anyone to serious who says that this is the deal breaker for voting for McCain/Palin. The same hacker group, Anonymous has hacked The Church of Scientology. Are you now going to join that church? Yes it was a bad thing to do, lots of people have bad things happen to them but it does not change where they stand on issues that will effect you or your family.

If you agree with McCain/Palin on the enocomy, national security, domestic issues vote for them. I happen to think that women should earn the same pay as men for the same work. I happen to think insurances that cover Viagra should cover contraception, McCain is against those things. I can't tell you where Palin stands becuase she has never said anything about it. I know Obama and Biden both support those measures.

Back to the main point, are you really going to vote for someone because you feel sorry for them? This is not a high school homecoming that is being decided. Now is not the time to get all your friends to vote for someone because you know things have been hard for them and you want them to feel better. This is not a movie where the poor little small town girl will stand up and fight against the bullies and it won't end when she is on stage and everyone is clapping for her. If McCain/Palin win we will have a man who was one of the Keating 5 and help create the last S&L scandal as POTUS during a major financial crisis and you will have a women that does not think man contributes to global warmin as VPOTUS when the polar ice caps are melting.

The world, like technology is changing rapidly and we need leaders that have the intellectual capacity to navigate our country through it.

Palin's case is not all that unusual - just very publicized now, for obvious reasons. Poor password habits need to become a thing of the past, especially considering the Web world we live in.

Here is a Palin/password post with some tips:

http://tinyurl.com/3glbge

Louise

I am now definitely supporting McCain and Palin.

Whatever happened to someone's right to privacy? I thought that was so sacrosanct,it was written into our constitution.

Whoever did this has absolutely no right to, and no respect for anyone's right to privacy.

Sarah Palin has every right to have a private email address.

I hope this hacker is found and sent to jail.

Let me first say that I think hacking an email account for any political gain or otherwise is wrong.

That being said I guarantee that the group Anonymous has been consistently trying to expose or hack into all of the candidates accounts, where they can find them. The difference is that the other candidates know better.

This is another example of the Mayberry Machiavelli's. She was clever enough to try and use a separate account to cover her tracks (ala Rove) but both dumb enough to not realize that Yahoo might not be the best idea and narcissistic enough to name her account gov.sarah or gov.palin.

She is out of her league on the national stage and this is just exposing it further.

Please don't let activities like this, and there will probably be more, prevent you from voting for Obama. The biggest reason I say this is because the Obama campaign wasn't involved. The second biggest reason is tied to the first: hackers seem to be a special category, like internet trolls: they have a specific agenda and it's about their personal politics (subversion and fear) rather than the politics of this election. If Obama has a Yahoo account, it will likely be broken into as well.

I'm not a fan of Palin, but I've regularly decried cheap tactics used against her. Nevertheless, if someone doesn't like Palin and chooses to write a negative article (or edit an online journal so that the site is chock full of negative articles) with no basis in fact, or chock full of double-standard personal attacks, that just isn't Obama's fault. Or his campaign's. And yes, I'm sure Obama and his staff are't crying themselves to sleep at night over the hammering their adversary is getting. But still, they can't, and shouldn't, be held responsible for the actions of others.

My personal response to the story is "Palin has a Yahoo account? How cool." I have a minor celebrity friend who still uses Yahoo (and My Space). I think the willingness to remain a part of the general culture rather than shutting one's self off within the marble halls of the famous is a good sign.

We live in world where any celebrity foolish enough to establish an e-mail account with a popular web service such as Yahoo is gonna get hacked. The governor didn't count as a celebrity for long enough to have gotten away with it for a while.

There is no privacy to invade here, bluster by campaign managers notwithstanding. Anybody who thinks that anything they post on the web is truly private is only kidding themselves. Of course the Yahoo account was hacked, and not by anyone to do with Obama. It was an irresistible temptation to a fairly standard set of hackers. They are all over, perpetuating far more malicious tricks than this one. I very much doubt that there was any political motivation to this effort whatsoever -- far more likely a desire to stalk a new celebrity, any new celebrity.

A propos of the comments of barrister89, let's not forget that this was the address alleged to have been used by the governor to, ah, take care of matters that *ought* to have been handled through her government e-mail account. She has been accused of circumventing accountability standards by trying to keep some of her correspondence that *should* have been in the public record out of that record.

Yeah, right. Sorry, folks, no conspiracy here.

Only, as the post points out, some pretty egregious stupidity by a public official who ought to have been expected to know better. Except that, apparently, she's as techno-illiterate as her running mate. Oh no, he's the one who invented the Blackberry, right?