Email Privacy and Security
09/19/2008Newswires are buzzing about the hacking of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's Yahoo! email account, which brings up the topic of email privacy and security.
According to the Associated Press, Palin used a Yahoo! Account with the name gov.palin for official business as Alaska's governor. The Secret Service requested copies of the vice presidential candidate's emails, which have been circulating on the Internet, from the Associated Press, which has not complied. Screen shots of these emails can now easily be viewed by anyone on the Internet. The availability of this information, however, is not the main issue, but rather the fact that this information could be obtained and the questions it raises about privacy in the workplace, politics, and beyond. Yahoo! can host email accounts for virtually anyone who elects to open an account with the service, hence if one can supply an email host with certain pieces of personal information about another person, it is not difficult to access that person's private email account.
In 2005 hotel heiress Paris Hilton was the victim of a hacking incident when a Massachusetts teenager accessed phone numbers, photographs, and other personal information that was stored on Hilton's T-Mobile phone and posted the information on the Internet. This crime occurred after a hacker group gained access to T-Mobile's employee-only website from a worker at a T-Mobile store in California and found a programming glitch in the site.
Hacking into another individual's online account of any sort falls into the realm of both privacy and technology. A simple search of Google with the words how to and hack turns up more than 20 million results. Totse.com, a website about "all sorts and all viewpoints" of "INFORMATION" even has a page titled How to Break Into Email Accounts (accompanied by a disclaimer about the illegality of accessing another person's private information without their knowledge). Because the technology may make it possible, it appears that many people do not think twice about committing the act. FunAdvice.com has a question from a member who goes by the name sventhheaven that reads:
How do I hack into someone's myspace account? I think my boyfriend is cheating on me?..I'm sure that is a question that no one can really answer but I wanted to put it out there!
Although the responses to sventhheaven's question suggested she do the mature thing and ask him about it, an Australian man was taken to court in 2005 for hacking into his ex-girlfriend's email account two years prior. The man, Craig Henry Griffis, reportedly printed then deleted messages from his ex's new boyfriend. The maximum penalty for the charge of unlawfully accessing data held in a computer in Australia was ten years imprisonment, but because he pleaded guilty, Griffis was sentenced to five months in jail.
The facility of accessing another person's private information that is stored in an Internet account does not override the moral, ethical, and legal issues associated with the act. However, it is up to the account owner to be sure to update their password and login information periodically to ensure that others are not able to access information that is not meant for their eyes. Given the recent events surrounding Palin's Yahoo! account, it is reassuring to know that the Oval Office does not have a computer. In fact, over the eight years of Bill Clinton's presidency, he sent only two emails: one to test the address, and a second to astronaut John Glenn who was on the space shuttle at the time.
