Accused Palin Hacker Says Stolen E-Mails Were Public Record
A surprise legal maneuver by the defense in the Sarah Palin hacking case could undermine key charges carrying the stiffest potential penalties.
A lawyer for the Tennessee college student charged with hacking into the Alaska governor’s Yahoo e-mail account last year says his client couldn’t have violated Palin’s privacy because a judge had already declared her e-mails a matter of public record.
“He’s not suggesting that e-mail can’t be private,” says Mark Rasch, a former Justice Department cybercrime prosecutor. “He’s saying this particular e-mail was not private or personal because of who she is and because it wasn’t intimate communication. ”
Additionally, photos that 20-year-old David Kernell allegedly obtained of Palin and her family were not private since the Palins are “the subjects of untold numbers of photo-ops,” the lawyer argued last week, in one of a slew of motions and memorandums attacking
the government’s four-count federal indictment against Kernell.
Threat Level broke the story last September that a hacker had obtained unauthorized access to Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account —
gov.palin@yahoo.com — by using publicly available information to reset her password to “popcorn.” The intruder then posted screenshots of Palin’s e-mail, as well as her new password, to a forum at 4chan.org under the handle “Rubico,” enabling other intruders to access the account. Bloggers quickly traced the name Rubico to an e-mail address that Kernell was known to use.
Accused Palin Hacker Says Stolen E-Mails Were Public Record | Threat Level | Wired.com