Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

First, Sequoia Systems was supposed to print and mail 18,000 absentee ballots for Denver County. They confirmed to the county that the ballots were mailed.

They weren't.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/11/postal-service.html


Then the Colorado Secretary of State continues to purge names from the voter's rolls after a judge orders him to stop.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/10/colorado-judge.html


But just so Colorado doesn't feel all alone, a woman in Alabama has a Georgia electronic voting machine delivered to her driveway.

Now, technically, doesn't that mean that she now owns the machine?

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/11/georgia-voting.html

You may have heard about Palin having a private email account. That's fine, no problem there. I probably have a dozen right now. But I'm not a government official, and my email (outside of work) is not subject to Freedom of Information requests. I do not discuss official work with work associates in my private email, heck, I don't think that I ever received an email from work associates in my private email, at least after I started working for the City.

This is where I differ from Sarah Palin. It appears that she discusses or conducts official Alaska government work from private email addresses.

This is against the law because it violates discovery and FOIA,

The first private email account, IIRC it was gov.sarah@yahoo.com (now closed) was hacked in a very simple and clever way. This guy was hanging out on the chat/board channels used by Anonymous, the people who are thumbing their collective noses against Scientology, and they were talking about trying to hack Palin's account and their approaches. The guy who did it went extremely low-tech: he used Google. Yahoo Mail has a password reset option, just in case. Answer a few questions, and *POOF!* the password is reset. This guy used Google and found all the answers, thus gaining access to her email.

Allegedly he did not open any emails, but he did do screen shots of the inbox. It clearly had incoming messages from her work associates, and the subjects seemed to indicate that they were discussing government business, including a letter to Gov. Schwarzenegger and emails regarding the State Police, with whom Palin is being investigated in an ethics probe.

This account has been closed.

Apparently she had a second Yahoo email account, gov.palin@... I don't know if this one is open or not.

Now an Alaskan ISP has announced that she had an email account with them, and that apparently it was used by the same band of people, i.e. State workers, and it appears they discussed work.


I freely admit that I don't like Palin, I don't think she's a fit selection for the person who is "a heartbeat away from the Presidency." I make no bones about it. But this is flat-out against the law, if you are a governor, mayor, any government official, you cannot use private email to discuss or organize anything related to work. Period. The law is pretty clear on this.

The comments on this linked post are amusing, people defending her saying why don't people hack Obama's email. Could it be that, just perhaps, Obama is obeying the law and doesn't have a private email address with which he's conducting official business? If someone gets ahold of his private email address and hacks it, if they discover he's been conducting official business with it, then by all means, hold him accountable. But we have the information on Palin right now, and she should be held accountable.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/10/palin-had-a-thi.html