Will Sarah Palin’s Personal Emails Be Made Public Property?

by Glynnis MacNicol | 10:03 am, January 4th, 2010

» 13 comments

Everything lives forever on the Internet, or so the saying goes. This adage is perhaps what Sarah Palin had in mind when, as Governor of Alaska, she apparently encouraged “family members, advisors and her chief of staff” to use her personal email address instead of her official one because “everyone and their mother will be able to read emails that arrive via that state address.” Palin reportedly carried to Blackberries in order to keep the two addresses straight, though according to the Alaska Dispatch that did not keep the then-governor from doing State business on her personal account.

Alas for Palin, everyone and their mother were able for a short time to view her “personal” emails after someone hacked into her Yahoo account and Gawker published some of the contents.

More to the point, however, it’s considered a no-no to conduct government business on a personal account partly due to the fact that a government email account is subject to pesky laws about the retention of government records and such, and a personal account may or may not be. (There was, you may recall, some question last fall where Palin had erased emails in the Yahoo account pertaining to the Troopergate investigation.)

The “may or may not be” is what’s under debate in Alaska now, thanks to Palin. Last year’s email debacle has resulted in one Alaskan requesting the private emails about state business be released under public records law. According to the Alaska Dispatch the “case has raised a key question: As state law stands now, should personal e-mails by state employees be treated as public records?” Which is something a whole lot of politicians should probably be considering right now, including our Blackberried president. Palin of course is free and clear of these questions since resigning from office in July. Unless she decides to make a run for it in 2012 at which point perhaps she will have to reconsider the merits of a Yahoo account.

Alaska Dispatch, Email Scandal, Gawker, Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin Personal Email, Troopergate, twitter

ImNotBlue

And it’s Glynnis’s Palin attack of the day. *Sigh*

Nothing to do with media… nothing to do with anything relevant. Just another, “Palin = Bad” screed from Glynnis. Starting off 2010 very, very, typically.

PS-

Palin reportedly carried to Blackberries…

Two Blackberries.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Chris-Jones/1384303476 Chris Jones

Hacking her email account was an outrageous and illegal act. However, much to the chagrin of Palin haters everywhere the emails were completely benign. Better luck next time, jerks.
LNSmithee

Glynnocchio, Glynnocchio … it’s so sad. You’re so desperate to fire the silver bullet that kills Palin, you’re yanking out your fillings looking for something to melt.

Get help.
LNSmithee

Oh, BTW, Editor Glynnis: You are singularly focused on the possibility that Palin may have run afoul of “pesky laws,” but you say nothing about the person who revealed her confidential information and spread it on the internet.

In the interest of full disclosure, tell us, since you’re a (snicker) news reporter: WHO hacked into Palin’s Yahoo email account? What interesting connections did that person have? What happened to that person? Was he arrested, and by whom?

Think your readers deserve to know that? Or is that truth a wee bit too … inconvenient?
roxsteady

Awe! Still trying to defend this moron? Perhaps she’ll be pregnant again in 2012? Just not interested in that whole birth control thing. Of course there’s nothing more unseemly than a knocked up granny. EEEEU!
roxsteady

Not one comment on the substance of the article? You’re not supposed to conduct govt. business on your private account. What doof doesnt’ know that?
ImNotBlue

roxsteady says:
January 4, 2010 at 12:36 pm

That’s HILARIOUS! You complain about “no comments on the substance of the article” (because there is none), right after YOU posted something that didn’t talk about the “substance of the article.”

I mean, I knew you were a gigantic hypocrite, who hates anyone who doesn’t expressly agree with you… but wow! That’s pretty impressive… even for you!
paintguru

I’m not sure what the writer is implying or stating…

In my opinion, when Sarah Palin made that statement regarding using “personal e-mail accounts” she was talking about PERSONAL E-MAIL. Her advice was probably good advice so her employees don’t put their personal life out there for a FOIA request to then obtain and publish them.

I’m not a Palin supporter and don’t believe she’d be a good choice for President, but the vitriol directed at her is ridiculous. I believed then and still do now that she had more executive experience then Barack Obama (at the time of the election)… but that wasn’t the story. The media made her out to be a buffoon based on certain quotes/interviews…. Barack Obama was able to make equally ridiculous statements in a vacuum…. but he was “protected” by the media that wanted him to get elected.

Camille Paglia is what I consider a “brilliant Liberal Democrat” http://dir.salon.com/topics/camille_paglia/
…and she holds a high opinion of Sarah Palin. After reading thousands of Camille’s words, I’m certain she’s far more sharp than the Palin critics out there.
RazorsEdge

Anybody else have a work email and a personal email address? When you signed up to comment online, like here, did you submit your work email address on the registration?
Moderate

I will never understand how Sarah Palin drives the far left “bat shit crazy”.
http://www.sailrabbits.com Magister

From the Alaska blog, it sounds like the current administration is going in the right direction and as would be the case with anyone, if private emails would be subject to discovery and subpoena.

With that said and I realize that I may be stirring a hornets nest, but one does have to wonder if the commenters calling for the head of whomever got into her email account, if memory serves, they used the same trick as was used against Paris Hilton, so it can’t really be called hacking and I’m not sure about the legalities, but…

One does have to wonder, if those calling for the head of the “hacker” feels the same way about whomever stole the ClimateGate docs, especially since that appears to be a more straight-forward case?
http://www.sailrabbits.com Magister

Whoops – it appears that I dropped that first paragraph midsentence.

…if if private emails were subject to discovery and subpoena, they’d become part of the public record.
http://lnsmitheeblog.blogspot.com LNSmithee

Magister wrote:

One does have to wonder, if those calling for the head of the “hacker” feels the same way about whomever stole the ClimateGate docs, especially since that appears to be a more straight-forward case?

One man’s hacker is another man’s whistleblower. In my estimation, here’s the difference: As anyone who is paying attention realizes, Al Gore, his Kleiner Perkins partners, and the global-warming/climate change-promoting statisticians have been careful to avoid addressing the fact that the worst-case global scenarios they’ve built their fortune on for years aren’t working out as they predicted. In ClimateGate, the transfer of literally trillions of dollars of wealth and the economies of untold numbers of nations depended on the continued string of pseudo-scientific “tricks”, nefarious plotting, and conspiracies of silence perpetrated by AGW boosters. If the science isn’t sound, someone ought to say so. The breaking in and theft of those emails revealed possible crimes that dwarf the violation of law.

In the case of David Kernell — son of Tennessee state senator Mike Kernell, a Democrat (natch) — his breaking into Palin’s Yahoo account was just the latest of a leftist lightning assault on the Palins’ privacy; in previous days, Dem partisans posted much personal private information online, including her Social Security number. Young Kernell broke into Palin’s Yahoo email account, rummaged through everything, and by his own account…

I read though the emails… ALL OF THEM… before I posted [to a hacker message board], and what I concluded was anticlimactic, there was nothing there, nothing incriminating, nothing that would derail her campaign as I had hoped, all I saw was personal stuff, some clerical stuff from when she was governor…. And pictures of her family…

(snip)

…I really wanted to get something incriminating which I was sure there would be, just like all of you anon out there that you think there was some missed opportunity of glory, well there WAS NOTHING, I read everything, every little blackberry confirmation… all the pictures, and there was nothing, and it finally set in, THIS internet was serious business, yes I was behind a proxy, only one, if this s— ever got to the FBI I was f—–, I panicked, i still wanted the stuff out there…

So, let’s review: Kernell was looking to be a whistleblower, but unlike the ClimateGate email crackers, he found no whistle to blow. “Nothing incriminating…there WAS NOTHING.” But he “still wanted the stuff out there.” That removes any possible veneer of nobility from Kernell’s actions.