So here’s the other reason why if you’re, say, a public official, that you might want to use the official e-mail servers that are provided to you via taxpayer money. Because at least then when they get hacked, there’s someone whom you directly control that you can blame for it. Yep, it was bound to happen. Now that Gov. Palin’s Yahoo e-mail address has been plastered across the Internet — her e-mail has finally (confirmedthis time) been hacked.
The hack was apparently pulled off late last night by some members of Anonymous, the group of shadowy griefers and malcontents most recently made famous by their organization of worldwide protests against the Church of Scientology. They sent a package of screen shots and text files to WikiLeaks, which sent out a press release to reporters earlier today.
It’s not immediately obvious how this “hack” was pulled off. As the Associated Press pointed out, there wasn’t necessarily anything illegal going on, and it could have been as simple as social engineering:
It wasn’t immediately clear how hackers broke into Palin’s Yahoo! account, but it would have been possible to trick the service into revealing her password knowing personal details about Palin that include her birthdate and ZIP code. A hacker also might have sent a forged e-mail to her account tricking her into revealing her own password.
A group of screen shots and text files was posted late last night to the WikiLeaks Web site.
So what was revealed? Nothing terribly salacious, but here’s the list:
1) Screen shot of an e-mail to and from Sean Parnell, current lieutenant governor of Alaska and current candidate for Alaska’s sole congressional seat.
2) Draft e-mail to Palin aide Ivy Frye that reads: “This email was hacked by anonymous, but I took no part in that. I simply got the password back and changed it so no further damage could be done. Please get in contact with Sarah Palin and inform her the new password on this account is samsonite1.”
Note: According to the Anchorage Daily News, Frye was worried about her own personal reputation when a volume of Palin e-mails was turned over recently to Andrée McLeod, a Republican government watchdog.
In one e-mail string among the volumes turned over, Frye wanted to know if she would be audited or “dinged in any way” if her personal and state e-mails all routed to the same device.
“I would gladly buy my own blackberry if it and its contents were truely mine. Any thoughts here?” Frye wrote on March 17 at 10:56 a.m.
3) Screen shot of the in box of gov.sarah@yahoo.com showing ctunnel.com in the address bar, a way to anonymize one’s tracks online.
4) Screen shot of an e-mail from Amy McCorkell, a Palin supporter and member on Palin’s Board on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse in Alaska. Wired’s Kim Zetter confirmed earlier today with McCorkell that she did send the e-mail on Sept. 14, 2008.
5) Screen shot of the in box, scrolled down.
6) Text file containing the e-mail addresses of various Palin contacts and relatives, including her kids Bristol Palin and Track Palin.
7) Text file containing Gov. Palin’s and her husband Todd Palin’s birth date and ZIP code, and the personal e-mail account of Ivy Frye.
Text file list of recent e-mails and their dates. The last one is from Yahoo Account Services at 4:23 a.m. (no indication on which time zone or date, although it appears to be after Sept. 14, 2008).
9) A family photo of what appears to be the five Palin children.
10) A photo of what appears to be Bristol Palin with a baby in her arms on an airplane.
Apparently the McCain campaign, FBI and Secret Service are well aware of the situation.
So now the real question comes: Do you use government e-mail accounts that can be subject to public scrutiny, or do you stay on public commercial sites that aren’t accountable to the people and can easily be hacked?
This election has been full of superlatives and firsts. I’ve never been prouder to be an American abroad than right now. The historic rise of this unlikely candidate, in the unlikely story that is America, fueled by this unlikely swelling of the online masses donating in unprecedented numbers, is nothing short of historic and astonishing.
But there were also a few troubling episodes on the technological front, with text messages and e-mails being used as a way to perpetuate false information.
Wired reported late last night that voters in Florida and New Mexico received a fake text message from 505-507-6041 that says things like: “Due to long lines if you are voting for Barack Obama you can vote tomorrow,” or “Due to the long lines today, all Obama voters are asked to vote on Wednesday.”
The AP adds that there have been reports of similar “robo-calls” and fake texts in Missouri and that the Missouri secretary of state and U.S. Attorney’s Office have been notified. I’m glad that this wasn’t widespread enough to have made a difference, but it’s still a troubling development.
But that’s not all. Thousands of students at George Mason University received an e-mailspoofed to look like it was from Provost Peter N. Stearns saying that “election day has been moved to November 5th. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.” Apparently the FBI is on the case.
Still, we as a country really need to have a single standard for federal elections, get rid of these awful e-voting machines, and streamline this whole process so we don’t have to deal with this kind of crap anymore.
On a more personal and professional note, I share with you the news that this is my last post in Machinist, which is going on hiatus beginning tomorrow.
I thank all of you for reading and for your thoughtful and critical comments. If you’d like to follow me and/or any of my other work on public radio or elsewhere, you can do so on my blog: cyrusfarivar.com (where I’ll be announcing the result of our little trial voter-verified election), and/or you can email me at cfarivar [at] cfarivar [dot] org.
Among the wackiest technologies that I’ve seen during this election night is CNN’s hologram technology — something that was predicted back in the Star Wars era.
There’s not much info as to exactly how this stuff works, other than what USA Today has reported:
CNN will have 44 cameras and 20 computers in each remote location to capture 360-degree imaging data of the person being interviewed. Images are processed and projected by computers and cameras in New York. There’ll also be plasma TVs in Chicago and Phoenix that will let the people being interviewed see Blitzer and other CNN correspondents. Bohrman says the network can project two different views from each city so Blitzer can appear to be in the studio with two holograms.
Jessica Yellin was the first CNN reporter to be “beamed” to the New York newsroom, where Wolf Blitzer interviewed her — and she reported that there were only 35 cameras pointed at her, and that “talk to the cameras in New York.” Apparently representatives in the Obama campaign in Chicago and the McCain campaign in Phoenix will be interviewed as holograms later in the evening.
It’s still unclear who makes this hologram technology, nor how much it costs, nor how exactly it works — nor when I’m going to get it in my house. Man, and I was just getting used to Skype video chat. Still, scope out the video below.
At the risk of being a bit premature, I decided to poke around the Internet to find what tunes I could spin to spice up my Obama victory party tonight. After consulting Wired, About.com and this massive list on YouTube, I’ve come up with my Top 10 Obama songs:
This is without a doubt the best Obama song that I’ve seen so far. It’s got catchy lyrics — Viva Obama! — snappy outfits, a line about healthcare, and that female violin player? Muy caliente!
Jamaican reggae star Coco Tea recorded this tune earlier this year, earning a small writeup in the Jamaica Observer at the time.
As he told the newspaper:
“If you notice, Obama is getting a lot of support from the young people, and when the younger generation begin to call for change, it usually comes, as they and the future, and Obama’s future is in their hands. Support for Obama is also coming from other quarters including the Kennedy family, as he is seen as the man with a plan, therefore I was guided by Jah on this one.”
This tune comes to us from Cameroon, and if you believe what the Docta says on his Web site: “The video has quickly becomed a big hit on Youtube.” Indeed.
Mighty Sparrow is the world’s leading calypso singer, hailing from the island of Grenada. Cop a read on the lyrics over here — I’m sure this is the first time that the phrase “Foreign Relations Committee” has worked its way into a calypso song.
This song debuted just two days ago at a rally in Cleveland, so if you drop this joint at your fiesta, you’ll definitely be about 75 percent as cool as the Boss himself.
Although college a capella may get mocked on Stuff White People Like, this cover of the famed will.i.am song is perfectly pulled off by Barackapella, a group from Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. (Also, don’t forget the parody, by john.he.is!)
If you’re like me, you’re going to spend Election Night pretty much glued to the Internet, waiting for news to pop up wherever it might — on Twitter, blogs, YouTube and, yes, that good ol’ stalwart, the mainstreammedia. Usually I don’t watch television, but there are a few instances — like today — when I actually do want to watch something like CNN with the graphics, the analysis, the whole shebang. Further, I’m abroad, so it’s not like I can simply hop over to my local bar to watch election results (here’s a handy map showing when the polls close). So where can I go to watch live coverage online?
CNN is offering live coverage here and here. I’ve also found CBS‘s coverage to be working well so far — as of this writing, CBS has a camera trained (sans commentary) on a gym in Chicago where Obama is voting. (See photo at top.)
Oh yeah, and don’t forget about the ever-reliable C-SPAN.
Apparently ABC and MSNBC will be offering live coverage online as well, but I haven’t been able to find the respective sites yet.
There’s also this gray-market online streaming site, Channel Chooser, which offers both American channels and foreign ones, including BBC, France 24, Al Jazeera English and Sky News Australia.
Alley Insider has a bunch of live feeds from the McCain and Obama camps and some conservative Christian groups as well.
The New York Times has built a neat little election dashboard that updates every two minutes, and Google has gotten in on the action with its own map-based results page.
The French seem to be all over all kinds of new, far-reaching digital policy.
First, the French Senate “voted overwhelmingly” (297-15) late last week to create a sort of digital three strikes law, which after the third strike, would cut people off from the Internet. It’s not entirely clear how a law like this would be enforced, especially considering the fact that people can access the Internet from home, from their workplace, and also from free, public Wi-Fi hot spots, not to mention at other locations such as a public library.
The bill now heads to the French National Assembly for final approval.
If enacted, the law will put France on a collision course with Brussels, which rejected a call to impose such “three strikes” laws across Europe in April 2008.
Throwing people offline, it said, conflicted with “civil liberties and human rights”.
Second, late last month Eric Besson, a Sarkozy cabinet minister in charge of the “development of the digital economy,” presented a new 81-page Digital Plan 2012 for France, which apparently was one of Sarkozy’s presidential campaign promises.
If enacted, this would be one of the most ambitious technological policy plans in Western Europe in recent years. (And while I don’t mean to harp on Estonia, the Baltic powerhouse has had a few of these items, like digital ID cards and health records, for some time now.)
Among other things, the report says that “high-speed Internet,” like water and electricity , is “essential.” And as such, 2 million to 4 million French citizens are without it — and the government needs to work such that by 2010, every single citizen has 512 kbps that costs no more than 35 euros per month. Further, every French citizen should have access to high-speed mobile Internet as well, which only covers 85 percent of the citizenry as of today.
Other proposals include:
- allowing the old analog television signals to be opened up to wireless and mobile Internet access.
- an electronic national identity card for each citizen starting in 2009 (Estonia already has this).
- a doubling of cyber-crime law enforcement agents by 2012
- the promotion of telecommuting in the public sector
- a digital medical file for each citizen by 2012
- a Green IT and Cleantech prize
- a migration away from the American-dominated ICANN toward a more multilateral and international organization to run the infrastructure of the Internet.
As of yet, this remains but a proposal — but an interesting and ambitious one — and if Sarkozy is serious about keeping his campaign promise, especially while France holds the the Presidency of the Council of the European Union until the end of the year, it could be a boon to France.
Text file list of recent e-mails and their dates. The last one is from Yahoo Account Services at 4:23 a.m. (no indication on which time zone or date, although it appears to be after Sept. 14, 2008). 
