Despite Rumors, Republican VP Candidate is No Hacker

[gi4obama]

Is Sarah Palin a hacker? Well, not exactly, but that's what a couple of articles and a nascent internet rumor might have you believe.

According to a 2007 article in Salon about Alaska's frontier politics, Palin, Senator John McCain's pick for his Republican running mate in the presidential election, "began her political career . . . by hacking into the computer" of a co-worker in 2003.

Sounds intriguing, and possibly illegal, doesn't it?

Except there's more to the story than this.

According to the piece, Palin hacked a computer belonging to Randy Ruedrich, chairman of the Republican Party at the time and a fellow commissioner on Alaska's Oil and Gas Commission. She did it in order to uncover evidence of ethical wrongdoing on Ruedrich's part.


More:

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/is-sarah-palin.html

[EV_Ares]

1. Is that the link you intended?

[gi4obama]

2. I corrected it.

[EV_Ares]

4. Thanks, enjoy Wired, goes to show you, should always keep that recycle bin emptied. eom.

[ColbertWatcher]

3. She's so brave. NOT n/t

[lpbk2713]

5. From the article in your link ...

"Palin, as chairwoman of the Oil and Gas Commission and its ethics supervisor ... "


I have read where her husband works for an oil company. Was this not a conflict of interest for her?

And she was the 'ethics' supervisor, no less. Sounds like the fox guarding the hen house.

[stillcool]

6. Long article here...

from 2004, I don't know what to make of it...

http://dwb.adn.com/front/story/5572779p-5504444c.html
Palin explains her actions in Ruedrich case

ETHICS: Former oil and gas commissioner's missteps went beyond his partisan work.

By RICHARD MAUER
Anchorage Daily News

Published: September 19, 2004
Last Modified: September 20, 2004 at 12:14 AM

WASILLA -- Sarah Palin never thought of herself as an investigator.

Yet there she was, hacking uncomfortably into Randy Ruedrich's computer, looking for evidence that the state Republican Party boss had broken the state ethics law while a member of the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission.

Ruedrich had resigned on Nov. 8 -- so suddenly that when Palin, the commission's chairwoman, caught the news at the end of a television newscast, she didn't know whether he had quit the commission or quit the party to resolve his conflicts of interest. When she learned it was the commission, Palin wasn't surprised that she'd heard it first from the media, given her difficulty in getting any word from the governor's office about Ruedrich, who played a major role in Gov. Frank Murkowski's election.

The next week, when Palin went back to work at the AOGCC, she noticed that Ruedrich had removed his pictures from the walls and the personal effects from his desk. But as she and an AOGCC technician worked their way around his computer password at the behest of an assistant attorney general in Fairbanks, they found his cleanup had not extended to his electronic files.

The technician "said it looked like he tried to delete this, but she knew a way to go around and get some of the deleted stuff," Palin said in an interview. "I didn't know what I was looking for, but I was there."

Palin found dozens of e-mail messages and documents stacked up in trash folders, many showing work Ruedrich had been doing for the Republican Party and others showing how closely he worked with at least one company he was supposed to be regulating.

For Palin, a fellow Republican who was appointed to the commission by Murkowski about the same time as Ruedrich, the evidence came as little surprise.

http://dwb.adn.com/front/story/5572779p-5504444c.html