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Court Rules That Palin Must Save Yahoo Emails
Posted by
timothy
on Sun Oct 12, 2008 02:19 PM
from the hope-yahoo's-ok-with-that dept.
from the hope-yahoo's-ok-with-that dept.
quarterbuck writes "An Anchorage judge has ruled that Governor Sarah Palin must save her emails, as they were apparently used for state business. Last week a Tennessee man was arrested over hacking one of her Yahoo email accounts. The Washington Post also reports that Sarah Palin, her husband, and officials had set up email accounts known only to each other."
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Taking one for the team. (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess you can say that 4chan kid took one for the team.
Had he not gained access (I don't use the word hack because he didn't hack anything) to her email account, this decision may not have come to be.
I guess you can say he took one for the team although that may not have been his original intentions.
Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:5, Informative)
Now he's going to be seen the some cowering, harmless punk kid who half-wittedly exposed the blatant stupidity of Sarah Palin and the weaknesses of Yahoo and similar mail services.
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Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:5, Informative)
But do you think that if he had not gained access to her emails, this decision would have been made? Regardless if he backed out, this still resulted in her being forced to keep her yahoo emails. This could come back to bite her if she doesn't remove those emails first.
I believe there was already an effort underway by some Alaskans to gain access to the emails in the commercial accounts that Palin and her staff were using. The account that got hacked was actually her personal Yahoo account, not one of the ones normally used for official business.
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Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, I don't believe for a second they were personal.
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Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:5, Informative)
Personal email accounts called gov.palin@yahoo.com and where the subjects clearly implied she was talking business?
Sorry, I don't believe for a second they were personal.
gov.palin@yahoo.com was her personal use account. gov.sarah@yahoo.com was the one that she was using for official state business [adn.com].
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Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:5, Interesting)
gov.palin@yahoo.com was her personal use account. gov.sarah@yahoo.com was the one that she was using for official state business.
It doesn't really matter what she says the account was used for, it is the actual usage that counts.
The list of subjects and correspondents from the so-called 'personal use account' that are posted on wikileaks is extremely incriminating.
I'm sure that the worst punishment she will receive will be a slap on the wrist, after all the president and his staff have already done far worse wrt to email hiding and nothing happened to them. But what it does do is expose 'politics as usual' for her, all claims to maverick status are pretty much null and void now.
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Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a sysadmin, if I failed to run backups properly, and data were lost, they wouldn't have to prove that I maliciously failed to do so in order for me to deserve to get fired. Simply not doing so is bad enough. Same for her.
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Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ignorance of the law is no excuse, especially when you hold the highest office in your state, sworn to uphold *all* the laws of the land.
At the time that Palin was using her Yahoo accounts for govt business, she was also in the public record as knowing that activists were suing for access to her email.
Using private email accounts for public business is illegal in Alaska. Rather than deny this, surely she should be a big lady and step up to admit ... but it doesn't matter. The judge will ensure that the emails will come forth, unless Yahoo says "oops! we lost that backup tape..." like the current White House did.
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Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:5, Insightful)
Among a governor's various duties is preservation of official records. If they fail to do that, there is a problem. If the behave in such a manner as would lead to their failing to do that, there is a problem. If they do so deliberately, there is a bigger problem.
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Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:5, Insightful)
The big deal is that she is required by law, the very same law she has sworn to uphold as governor, to follow certain rules and regulations about how she conducts her business. Had she used her work e-mail, as it were, compliance would have been enforced server side and this would not be an issue, but she chose not to and then violated the rules. If she'd used Yahoo! and followed the rules there wouldn't be a problem (well, outside of Yahoo! mail being crap...), but she didn't follow them and now it IS a problem. She may choose whatever e-mail provider she wants, she MAY NOT choose to break the law.
And before somebody comes along with "well it's just her personal e-mail address, she probably didn't even think to" as a defense of doing this... the account names pretty obviously indicate she created them AFTER becoming governor, so it's not like these are legacy addresses. It's also not as if somebody held a gun to her head and made her run for and accept the office of governor of Alaska, if she didn't want to comply with these laws, all she needed to do was not take on a job which required her to follow them.
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Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly the point. Our system was created by the people who might be punished, so when they made it they never built in any real accountability. In a rational world, just using a private, personal account for state buisiness would be enough to get her fired. In the same way, the "I do not recall" defense has become a staple of culture, especially in politics, to the point where it is pretty clear that anyone with memory problems as bad as, say, Alberto Gonzalez, should be fired immidiately and prevented from ever working for the public again. Accountability must be restored or in the long term the negative feedback will build until we end up having to go to war with ourselves to clean out the corruption. Its fucked up, but thats how it is.
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Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:4, Informative)
No, you are totally wrong. Your analogy is, frankly, total shit. When she is conducting buisiness relevant to her job, she is not some average citizen, she has obligations that come with her office to ensure that all official buisiness and communication is properly archived, which is why the taxpayers of Alaska fund an email system for her to use that has those archival functions built into it. You utterly fucking fail at being worth even the sum of your constituent organic molecules if you think it is ok for her to bypass the law. Without rule of law, there is only tyranny. Or maybe that is what you're after.
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Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, and if the emails pertain only to her acting as an "ordinary citizen", she doesn't have to keep them. If the emails pertain to official government business, which some of them clearly do, she is required by law to keep them.
The normal procedure would be to use her state-provided email for all official business, and something else for personal stuff. This keeps everything nicely segregated. The fact she has not done this could mean that she is intentionally evading the law, or that she is an idiot; but one should not jump to conclusions and neglect the possibility of both.
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Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sarah Palin on the other hand is an employee of the the citizens of the US (some people forget this) and as such she shouldn't be hiding things from us just as it's expected that any employee shouldn't be hiding official business from their employer.
But it's not even about hiding things. Yahoo email isn't secure enough for someone who may have to be potentially passing around state security information.
Her supporters are more likely to be the type that live in fear of terrorists so why shouldn't they be applauded that she's doing something to make it easier for terrorists to find out potential information to aid in attacking her state which isn't that far fetched seeing how it's one of our resource rich states meaning that attacking it and destroying, for instance, the oil infrastructure could have a great effect on the whole nation.
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Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:5, Interesting)
Some interesting news on this front: because Palin deleted her Yahoo email accounts, she may be up for destruction of evidence charges. Felony if true, up to four years in prison.
Shortly after the email account hack, Time revealed that the feds already had access to her Yahoo email accounts [time.com], as part of a federal investigation into Troopergate.
One shoe left to drop, and it's the big one. Hopefully we'll hear something about it during October, though it's quite plausible that the current DOJ may drag their feet well past election day.
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Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, they found email related to official buisiness on her yahoo account. Sorry, I know I know, reality has a well known liberal bias.
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Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:5, Insightful)
Second paragraph FTA, friend:
The judge issued the orders at the request of Andree McLeod, an Anchorage activist whose pursuit of Palin's e-mails revealed that the governor did considerable state business from a Yahoo e-mail address -- an arrangement that avoided the safeguards and accountability of the state's secure e-mail system.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's long been policy that government officials do not use non-government email and communications methods that circumvent the official logging of such communications. What she did was wrong, and in fact just as bad as the Whitehouse administration using non-whitehouse email services for official communications.
Though the guy who accessed her emails might be in trouble, I'd like to see a jury refuse to convict him. He should be seen as a whistleblower and protected, not prosecuted.
She hasn't even been elect
Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know how this keeps getting repeated. The media has been much easier on Palin than they were on Obama or even his wife. Not so much an anti Obama thing either it was that they got lambasted for going off into the trivial.
How long did they go on about "why doesn't he wear a flag pin?" Is your memory so short that you can't remember from two months ago?
McCain crying that the media hates him doesn't make it so. If he didn't want a media frenzy then he shouldn't have picked a complete unknown as his VP.
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Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sarah Palin shows up out of the blue, with a little over two months until the election, and you're surprised the press is all over her, her family, and anyone that knew her since childhood? If that level of scrutiny is too much for her then she should not have agreed to be on the Republican ticket. As Gail Collins said in an opinion piece, "Palin has been pressing the line that people don't really know 'the real Barack Obama,' and who could make the argument better than a woman who we've already known for almost six weeks? Really, she's like one of the family."
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Re:Taking one for the team. (Score:4, Informative)
>Did you know about Ayers?
I knew about Ayers when he was pallin' around with Nancy Reagan, before the Reaganite Annenberg gave him $50 million. That was in the early 90s.
I laughed a lot when his name came up, because I already know he had as many Republican connections as Democrat.
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Re:Count me off your team (Score:5, Insightful)
she has a right to privacy
Sarah Palin the private individual has a right to privacy. Sarah Palin the Governor of Alaska has a responsibility to openness and transparency. I Sarah Palin the Governor of Alaska has been pretending to be Sarah Palin the private individual in order to escape this responsibility, then there is a problem.
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Re:Count me off your team (Score:4, Insightful)
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Gmail (Score:5, Funny)
Taking bets (Score:5, Interesting)
What do you want to bet she went ahead and cleared out any potentially incriminating emails?
I wonder if Yahoo would be able to retrieve it or if they would even have to.
Sooper secret email address !!! omgroflcopter!!1 (Score:4, Funny)
The super-secret one that got haxored? gov.palin@yahoo.com
Will the right-wing treachery know no bounds?
Re:Sooper secret email address !!! omgroflcopter!! (Score:5, Insightful)
why is a government employee sending emails on govt business through a free email account?
Why are taxpayers paying for the states computer infrastructure if she isn't using it?
Of course something dodgy is going on.
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Re:Sooper secret email address !!! omgroflcopter!! (Score:5, Interesting)
why is a government employee sending emails on govt business through a free email account?
Because it's illegal to send campaign messages, partisan political messages, or e-mails dealing with RNC activities through a government account.
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Re:Sooper secret email address !!! omgroflcopter!! (Score:5, Insightful)
They've already seen boxes of emails [adn.com] from her aides to her Yahoo account. In fact, all but one email was sent to her gov.sarah@Yahoo.com account. That's the account she used for state business. It's not the account that got hacked.
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Saving the emails is irrelevant (Score:5, Funny)
Why would Palin care to delete any emails, or even try to hide them?
Palin is a young earth creationist. She has no understanding of Evidence.
Re:Saving the emails is irrelevant (Score:5, Funny)
Those emails were put there by GOP to test our faith.
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The GOP has been testing my faith... (Score:4, Funny)
And my patience for the last 8 years. I don't need any emails for that.
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Re:Saving the emails is irrelevant (Score:4, Funny)
As a young earth creationist, I'm offended and also confused by all those words.
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great (Score:5, Funny)
Re:great (Score:5, Funny)
Oh you betcha they can!
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More reasons Palin isn't ready for VP... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only was she stupid enough to have her yahoo account password resettable by an outsider, she was stupid enough to conduct state business on this and other non-state-secured e-mail accounts.
I'm sorry, but anyone who doesn't realize that in order to be safe it ALWAYS important to assume that your emails are immediately and fully in the hands of your worst enemies is hopelessly naive. Besides the sketchily legal issue of conducting state business over unsecure email, she also copied her husband on some of it.
Seriously Palin? Talk about it over the dinner table. Sending the email to your hubbie sends it over unsecure servers in the internet proper where they could be read in transit by any number of unruly or dangerous individuals. And that's assuming that she was sending it from a state-secured email on state-secured servers, which she obviously didn't at least some of the time.
The scary part now is that if she were to pull the same stuff in the whitehouse, there would be terrorists and spies trying to get ahold of national secrets, not just the inner workings of a state government. And I think we can all agree that the resources they have at their disposal are frightening.
I'm much happier with her gambling with Alaskan politics than National Security.
I wonder if... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh right (Score:3, Insightful)
That will put an end to hearing about her in the media I'm sure...
Re:Palin (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks, you're on the same brainless and reactionary wavelength as the crazy idiots on the other side screaming "Kill him!" and "Terrorist!" whenever Obama is mentioned.
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Re:Like hell she will... (Score:5, Informative)
Or she'll just claim the emails say the exact opposite of what they actually say, just like she did with the troopergate report [cbsnews.com].
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Re:Like hell she will... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Wait, she had private email... (Score:5, Insightful)
Good sir Ken,
The problem is that she used the personal email for official correspondence, which is not all that legal.
The personal account is required for campaign and private correspondence.
HTH
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Re:Wait, she had private email... (Score:4, Informative)
Selective reading clearly shows someone's bias...or lack of comprehension.
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Re:Does that inbred hick even know how? (Score:5, Funny)
Why do you hate freedom?
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Re:Does that inbred hick even know how? (Score:4, Interesting)
Um, yeah, about that. Do you mind coming now and voting against our idiots in charge? Or at least helping us mince them to minority? (I like the way that turns out; government oversteps, smacked into elections) ... because if Harper wins a majority I'm moving to the US...
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Re:Privacy (Score:5, Informative)
Not that I'm for the ditz, but isn't everyone entitled to their privacy? Even online.
As in, being free to delete whatever non-work emails come to you.
The problem is that she was using a commercial account for state business [adn.com], which circumvents the security and accountability of using official state email services. She essentially made state business subject to Yahoo's terms of service rather than the laws of Alaska. Her official email is supposed to be public record, but the state can't access or archive her commercial account.
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Re:Why is this bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
Shouldn't secret communications always be an option?
No, it shouldn't be. Not when a public official is acting in their official capacity. If it's not classified enough so that Yahoo mail wouldn't be a security breach, it's not so classified that the public shouldn't know about it.
And no, I don't buy into the theory that advisers give better advice if the know that the public won't know what they say.
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Re:Why is this bad? (Score:5, Funny)
Hopefully we'll get good old secret police to operate on their own terms and put this here country back in shape.
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