So how serious is hacking? For once I agree with the Paybots and the Freepers.

[TheBigotBasher]

For once, I actually agree with the Paybots (my nom du jour for Palin supporters). Hacking, especially when the motive is purely political is a very serious offence.

I don't think it should carry 50 years and unlike some idiot Palin fans would not want to promote the idea of prison rape.

You can however see their "concern" in numerous discussion topics across the internet that David Kernell will get a light punishment.

Knox News reports that the Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Weddle said when presenting the prosecution case

He's a man old enough to know better. He set out to do something malicious from the very beginning."

That something malicious, Weddle insisted, was to try to derail the Republican presidential campaign of which Palin was a part by foraging through the account in hopes of finding politically damaging information.

The key part here being wasn't just the hacking, <strong>it was the political motive behind it.</strong>

Palin supporters are adamant he should face a tough sentence.

From that unmentionable PUMA/Freeper hate site, that has rather more bull than buzz:

scr_north Says:

April 27, 2010 at 2:07 am
Morning all. Um, isn’t this kid charged with a federal crime? If so, I think the feds are a lot less liberal when it comes to parole. Don’t you have to serve 80 or 90 percent of the sentence before you’re eligible for parole on a federal rap? He does deserve 3 to 5 years for this. Even leaving out the fact that his victim was a nationally known political figure, hacking, identity theft and these types of computer related crimes are skyrocketing and the courts still treat it almost like pranks gone too far.

BuffaloCo. Says:

April 27, 2010 at 5:04 am
Talk about a terrible defense. He didn’t put a bag of flaming poo on her porch. That would be a “prank”. He hacked into a private email and spread the info around the internet.

10+ years MAX.

SYD Says:

April 27, 2010 at 7:27 am
Probably because she already knows the kid will get next to nothing for a punishment. Like other lawmakers and their family… her kind are above the law.

Just a hunch.

Aitch748 Says:

April 27, 2010 at 10:21 am
If this little slimeball gets off, then he can spend the rest of his life being O.J. Simpson, being confronted and ridiculed in public until the end of his days.

From the semi official Conservatives4Palin

tim c
All other hackers get jail, he should too

Sapwolf
He needs a nice intimate and passionate evening with Cletus and Tyrone to help him understand his real true self.

So exactly why are these two not facing a long federal prison trial?


Attempted to interfere with the telephones of a US Senator.

According to the Bill of Information, between January 20, 2010, and January 25, 2010, Flanagan, Basel, O’Keefe, and Dai met on several occasions. During their meetings, they discussed, among other things, possible scenarios in which they would talk with members of the staff of Senator Mary Landrieu inside of her New Orleans, Louisiana office, in the Hale Boggs Federal Building, and record the interaction using audio and visual equipment. As a result of this planning, on January 25, 2010, Basel and Flanagan entered the Senator’s office dressed as telephone repairmen, said they were following up on reports of problems with the telephone system, engaged in conversation with the staff members, and pretended to test the phone system. O’Keefe, who had also entered the office, recorded the interaction between Basel, Flanagan, and the staff members.


Admitted to hacking the email account of her opponent in an attempt to find incriminating evidence

Sarah Palin never thought of herself as an investigator.

Yet there she was, hacking uncomfortably into Randy Ruedrich’s computer, looking for evidence that the state Republican Party boss had broken the state ethics law while a member of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

Ruedrich had resigned on Nov. 8 — so suddenly that when Palin, the commission’s chairwoman, caught the news at the end of a television newscast, she didn’t know whether he had quit the commission or quit the party to resolve his conflicts of interest. When she learned it was the commission, Palin wasn’t surprised that she’d heard it first from the media, given her difficulty in getting any word from the governor’s office about Ruedrich, who played a major role in Gov. Frank Murkowski’s election.

The next week, when Palin went back to work at the AOGCC, she noticed that Ruedrich had removed his pictures from the walls and the personal effects from his desk. But as she and an AOGCC technician worked their way around his computer password at the behest of an assistant attorney general in Fairbanks, they found his cleanup had not extended to his electronic files.

The technician “said it looked like he tried to delete this, but she knew a way to go around and get some of the deleted stuff,” Palin said in an interview. “I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I was there.”

Palin found dozens of e-mail messages and documents stacked up in trash folders, many showing work Ruedrich had been doing for the Republican Party and others showing how closely he worked with at least one company he was supposed to be regulating.

(Source: Alaska Daily News)

Republican hypocrisy continues.

[Bjorn Against]

1. Of course they think those who hack the e-mail accounts of climate scientists are heroes

[TheBigotBasher]

2. How long will it be before O'Keefe gets a FAUX News contract?

Why is it he is only facing a misdemeanour?

[KILL THE WISE ONE]

3. it was only a few years ago that Republican Staffers did this to the Democrats

on the Congressional servers, no body went to prison then :shrug:

[TheBigotBasher]

4. Yeah it was much, much worse

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/01/22/infiltration_of_files_seen_as_extensive/

WASHINGTON -- Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.

From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.

The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November.

[TheBigotBasher]

5. No one did get prosecuted either.

To Republicans their crimes are just a way of life.