Palin, her emails, her hacker: No secrets`

The theft of Sarah Palin's "private" emails from her Yahoo account this week flared into a potentially fascinating but short-lived story of the presidential campaign. Apparently, there is little within the emails that gives us new insight into the Republican vice presidential candidate.

What is far more interesting -- and instructive -- are the stories underneath this non-story. There are three:

• Hacking with ease. It took virtually no technical expertise for the hacker to get into Palin's email account. The security question used to prevent unauthorized entry could easily be answered through a Google search or by just looking at a standard biography. Just about anyone with rudimentary knowledge of email systems could have done it. (See "Palin Email "Hack" Was Hardly a Hack at All" at Gizmodo.)
  
  
• Secret government. Why was Sarah Palin using a private email account instead of the one provided for her by the state government of Alaska? She was doing so as a work-around to Alaska's Open Records Act. According to the Seattle Times, "Palin routinely uses a private Yahoo e-mail account to conduct state business. Others in the governor's office sometimes use personal e-mail accounts, too." To those of us who believe the public's business should be conducted in public, the attitude of the governor and her administration is troubling. But, given the permeable nature of "private" email accounts, this scheme comes up somewhat short of brilliant.
  
  
• Tracking the hack. If Palin doesn't have any protection from intrusions, then neither does the hacker. Attention is being focused on a University of Tennessee student who is the son of a Democratic legislator. (UT is where I teach, but no, I don't know him.) Even though he made some efforts to conceal his identity, he was tracked through a number of clues he left about himself and information that appeared in his high school yearbook. (For more details, see the Knoxville News Sentinel's "Kernell mum on allegations son hacked into Palin’s e-mail."

The Big Lesson here: The web is no place to hide. What happens on the web doesn't stay on the web.

When we put information, thoughts, ideas, pictures or whatever on the web, we lose control of it. And sometimes it comes back to haunt us.

Destroy the Palin emails? It ain't gonna happen

I pretty much agree with Steve Outing's take on the Sarah Palin email theft thing. First, it shouldn't have happened. Digging into someone else's email is the wrong thing to do.

But what gets Steve is the McCain campaign's reaction to it. Rick Davis, a McCain spokesperson has asked that anyone who has these emails should destroy them.

Steve says, "Get real."

Perhaps they still use typewriters over at McCain campaign HQ. Davis must be thinking we still live back in the day when the news media could be persuaded to squelch something like this. If the media decided to hold back (because, after all, this was an illegal act committed by someone, and old media probably wouldn’t touch a story that’s so ethically and legally challenged), then the public wouldn’t see the e-mails.

Sorry, Mr. Davis, but we don’t live in that era anymore.

Steve wisely advises the McCain advisers to deal with what the emails say -- and the fact that Palin was using her Yahoo account to conduct public business.

The toothpaste isn't going back into the tube.