The Somewhat Ambitious

Well, it certainly has been a bumper fortnight for the hackers over at 4chan. And no, they didn’t get laid. But after all the fun and excitement that was the Soulja Boy Myspace hacking, another loosely affiliated group of 4chan fun lovers named ‘anonymous’ have broken into the personal email account of everyone’s favourite political punching bag (well, ours at any rate), Sarah Palin. Perhaps motivated by those persistent accusations that Sarah had a nasty habit of using personal email accounts for State business, these mischievous little tykes managed to get into her gov.sarah@yahoo.com account (Yahoo!? Seriously? That’s enough to destroy her qualifications right there…) and take screen shots for all the world to see. How exciting!

Initially these apparently flew up onto wikileaks, but all of a sudden, lo and behold, wikileaks doesn’t seem to exist any more… Fortunately the internet being as it is, shutting down a single site is roughly as effective as killing a single grain of sand, so the information remains well and truly out there for all the world to see. Wired has a fairly comprehensive run down of the details, but notable excerpts include:

The subject line of an e-mail from Randall Ruaro, her deputy chief of staff reads, “Draft letter to Governor Schwarzenegger.” Another one from Ruaro says, “Please approve” and another one is about “Court of Appeals Nominations.”

Other e-mails from Ruaro indicate they’re about employee and budget issues for the DPS. DPS is how Alaska refers to its Department of Public Safety.

Palin’s chief of staff, Michael Nizich, sent her an e-mail August 22 with the subject line, “Using Royalty Oil to Lower the Cost of Fuel for Alaskans.” The subject line of another e-mail from Nizich reads “CONFIDENTIAL Ethics Matter.”

The campaign has basically shut up shop and the FBI appear to be investigating, but still, who said hacking couldn’t be fun? Just when Palin seemed to be losing some momentum as well…

P.S. This New York Times article is also required reading. My favourite bit, from right at the beginning

So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.

You know, I really loved cross-dressing when I was a child. Can I take over women’s affairs?