said by Steve :

..... her actions don't convey any kind of self-styled internet expertise, .....

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Security researchers' accounts ransacked in embarrasing hacklash
13th August 2008

On Sunday morning, security consultant Alan Shimel woke to discover that his personal blog, which is frequented by countless peers and reporters, was pointing to a website featuring explicit gay porn. Equally disturbing, he found someone had cracked open his Yahoo! Mail account and aired sensitive documents he filed with the Internal Revenue Service.

Oh, and while the miscreants were at it, they sent crude pornographic images to parents on the Little League baseball team Shimel coached.

The chief strategy officer for security firm StillSecure, Shimel is one of three high-profile researchers in the security world known to have been attacked by unknown criminals over the past week. A personal Gmail account belonging to Petko D. Petkov, of the GNUCitizen ethical hacking collective, was ransacked and 2GB of its contents made public. And logs believed to come from the home blog of Security-Protocols.com researcher Tom Ferris have also been exposed.
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.... The public attacks are the latest reminder that privacy on the internet is never guaranteed, even for those whose technical skills far surpass those of the average internet denizen.

"Personally, I don't keep any personal email on any webserver," said Jeremiah Grossman, CTO of White Hat Security and the only non-victim security researcher willing to be named in this story.
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said by mitchmiami :

No evidence obtained by illegal means is admissible in court in the USA.

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Evidence unlawfully obtained from the defendant by a private person is admissible. The exclusionary rule is designed to protect privacy rights, with the Fourth Amendment applying specifically to government officials.

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Hack of Palin e-mail makes case for sticking with .gov account

The break-in comes amid controversy over the Alaska governor's use of the Yahoo e-mail account for state business. Internal documents obtained by reporters allegedly show Palin staffers discussing the possibility of using unofficial channels, such as personal e-mail accounts, as a means of evading subpoenas and requests under the state's open records law targeting her official account.

Though criticism of Palin's use of the Yahoo account had largely focused on worries about transparency, Donald Mitchell, the attorney for an Alaska citizen-watchdog who had been seeking disclosure of the governor's e-mail records, also broached security concerns. "There's a reason the governor should be using her own official e-mail channels, because of security and encryption," Mitchell told The Washington Post, "She's running state business out of Yahoo?"

Though the authenticity of the released material was initially questioned, the McCain-Palin campaign today confirmed what it called a "shocking invasion of the Governor's privacy and a violation of law." The account hacked was not the publicly-known "gov.sarah@yahoo.com" but a second, private address apparently used by close friends and family, "gov.palin@yahoo.com." The public profiles for those accounts have since been deleted, though Yahoo would not confirm whether the same was true of the accounts themselves.

According to a timeline compiled by users at the online chat board 4Chan, an anonymous poster appeared on the "Random" board known as /b/, claiming to have accessed Palin's account. Skeptical posters apparently dismissed the claim as a hoax, until the hacker posted the password ("popcorn"), prompting groups of forum users to log in. One of these—who appears to be the source of the documents released on Wikileaks—subsequently changed the password and notified one of Palin's assistants via e-mail. That user, however, inadvertently included the new password in the released screenshots, prompting a second flood that triggered Yahoo's security lockdown.

The fate of e-mails stored in those accounts—as well as the accounts themselves—is now unclear. A source at Yahoo could neither confirm nor deny their deletion, but did tell Ars that any e-mails emptied from an account's trash were not "readily" available to Yahoo. The source also indicated that the company cooperates with legitimate orders for records. In addition to the citizen-watchdog's request, the e-mails are also implicated in an ongoing ethics investigation into whether Palin improperly fired a subordinate, who had resisted pressure to oust an Alaska state trooper then involved in a messy divorce and custody battle with Palin's sister.

The information published to date does not appear to have been especially sensitive—one is a supportive message from a colleague; in another, Palin commiserates with her lieutenant governor about attacks by a political opponent. But if multiple parties had access to the account, it's at least possible that e-mails may have been obtained by intruders. The McCain campaign noted that the matter had been referred to the FBI and Secret Service, and expressed a "hope that anyone in possession of these e-mails will destroy them."

A spokesman for the group Anonymous denied any involvement in or knowledge of the hack. But since Anonymous is an inchoate activist/prankster group coordinated through forums like 4Chan, there doesn't appear to be any clear criteria for who counts as a "member."

If Palin's recourse to the popular Web mail service was an attempt to dodge disclosure requirements, it has clearly backfired. The effect of the incident on the ongoing investigation is uncertain, but it suggests that the use of unofficial accounts for government business is troubling, not just as an obstacle to open-government rules, but on security grounds as well.

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While the account is plausible enough on its face—and, if true, highlights the special vulnerability of such password reset mechanisms for public figures—there are also some reasons for skepticism. The post was made under the handle "rubico," and linked to a similar e-mail address. Through a bit of Google searching, it is trivial to link that handle and e-mail to a real person—a student with ties to state-level Democratic politics. And while it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility, it does strain credibility somewhat to think that, after committing the most publicized computer intrusion in recent memory, the perpetrator would effectively return to the scene to deliver a signed confession. Equally possible, then, is that either the real hacker or an unrelated party with an active imagination decided to play a prank on the student in question.

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The hacker's email addy is rubico10@yahoo.com. I said it was my understanding he's been busted. His fellow hacker turned him in.

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So, you know those Yahoo accounts Sarah Palin was using to keep her official business safe from subpoenas? Turns out they're not so safe after all. Palin's Yahoo accounts (gov.palin@yahoo.com and gov.sarah@yahoo.com) were successfully hacked last night and you can see the screengrabs here. Since then, the accounts have been deleted, which could be considered destruction of evidence if a court chose to pursue it.

The evidence, at first glance, looks pretty solid that the accounts were authentic. Photos of Palin's family were pulled from e-mails, plus a "sent" e-mail to aide Amy McCorkell was confirmed by a call to McCorkell herself, reports Wired.

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The group known as Anonymous, which earlier took on Scientology, has published screenshots of e-mail messages and images that it says came from a private e-mail account belonging to Governor Sarah Palin at gov.palin@yahoo.com. The data has been published by WikiLeaks.

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