Palin email hacker used freely available info to gain access

The hacker who breached GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin's email account (GOP prez candidate McCain doesn't know anything about or use computers or email according to his own previous statements) did it by using information freely available on the internet to gain access to her account and change the password to one of his own choosing.

How could such a thing be possible? The Today @ PC World blog explains:

A user identifying himself as "Rubico" claims all he did was select the option to reset the password on Yahoo Mail's interface. The service, he recalls, asked only for her birth date, zip code, and where she met her husband (which was her own self-chosen security question). That information can all easily be found with some basic Internet searching -- a task the hacker says took him less than an hour to complete.

According to political adversaries and critics in Alaska, Palin was using Yahoo email to circumvent government accountability safeguards placed on Alaska state email -- despite the fact that she touts herself as a reformer and advocate of open government. Of course, state run email services would presumably have a little tighter security than clueless giant Yahoo's notoriously lax email system.

Now, it's really worth noting that this is a woman who will be the proverbial heartbeat away from the presidency, serving under a man who will be 76 at the end of a first term and 80 at the end of a second, should he win the presidency and survive.

Actuarial tables suggest that the chances of a man McCain's age passing before his 80th birthday (which is how old he would be at the end of a second term) are about 1 in 3. According to the Politico blog:

The odds of a 72-year-old man living four more years, or one full White House term, are better. But for a man who has lived 72 years and 67 days (McCain’s age on Election Day this year), there is between a 14.2 and 15.1 percent chance of dying before Inauguration Day 2013, according to the Social Security Administration’s 2004 actuarial tables and the authoritative 2001 mortality statistics assembled by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.

Is John McCain wobbling? He seems to maintain Spain is in Latin America...

In a protracted interchange with a Florida affiliate of Spain's Union Radio, Republican candidate John McCain persistently seemed to maintain that Spain is Latin America instead of in Old Europe.

It's yet another sign that McCain's grasp on the basics of foreign affairs is challenged, at best.*

From Juan Gonzales, a staff writer for the Daily News:

In an interview with a Florida affiliate of Spain's Union Radio, McCain was asked, if elected president, would he invite Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero to the White House.

"I would be willing to meet with those leaders who are friends and want to work with us in a cooperative fashion," McCain said. He then mentioned Mexican President Calderon, who he said "is fighting a very tough fight against the drug cartels."

When the reporter repeated that he was talking about Spain, McCain responded: "I know the issues, I know the leaders."

Asked again if he would invite Zapatero, McCain shot back:

"All I can tell you is that I have a clear record of working with leaders in the Hemisphere that are friends with us and standing up to those who are not and that's judged on the basis of the importance of our relationship with Latin America and the entire region ."

Is the campaign strain starting to show on McCain?

A presidential campaign is a harrowing, potentially humbling experience, that's for sure. It demands a lot out of a man or woman.

But it's a walk in the park compared to being president for four years.



* He's made some egregious slip ups in the past, for example, repeating several times, even after being corrected, that the Shi'ia leadership in Iran and the Sunni Wahabist Al Qaeda have a working relationship, even though they are, in essence, mortal enemies. On another occastion he confused Russian premier, Vladimir Putin, with the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev. (OK, that may be somewhat understandable, given the hand-in-puppet status of the former to the latter.)

The BIG Lie -- "Your taxes will go up!"

John McCain, running ever deeper into the red of lies stacked on lies, is mounting a new series of advertisements making a claim what must seem to GOP voters like an evergreen: his opponent Barack Obama is a "tax and spend liberal" and that your taxes will go up under a President Obama.

But is there truth behind the claim?

For those who earn under about $227,000 a year, McCain's claim is a whopper, blatantly inaccurate.

For someone in the bracket of $161,000 a year and $227,000, the average tax bill will decrease an average of $2,789 per year under Obama's supposed "tax and spend" budget.


How about those 'unlucky' enough to earn between $227,000 a year and $603,000 a year (well more than a half million dollars a year, mind you)?

Surely their taxes will go up under Obama! Right?

Yes... on average, their taxes will be 12 dollars a year more than current rates. A 12 dollar yearly increase for someone making a half-million a year... quite the onerous ax burden, eh?

CNN: What they'll do to your tax bill


File under: McCain Desperation

McCain lies finally get ink...

I'm tempted to say it's about time.

A few times in the last few weeks I felt like me and FactCheck.org (the scrupulously nonpartisan truth-in-politics organization) were the only folks on top of the fact that a substantial number of GOP candidate John McCain's utterances and campaign claims were... well... what's the nice word for lies?

But it's clear the sheep-like tides of the media have finally shifted to revelations that the sometimes ludicrous fibs told by McCain and team have been, in deed, just that.

Here's a particularly in depth thought piece on McCain's fall from limelight grace from Joe Klein writing in Time Magazine:

McCain's lies have ranged from the annoying to the sleazy, and the problem is in both degree and kind. His campaign has been a ceaseless assault on his opponent's character and policies, featuring a consistent—and witting—disdain for the truth. Even after 38 million Americans heard Obama say in his speech at the Democratic National Convention that he was open to offshore oil-drilling and building new nuclear-power plants, McCain flatly said in his acceptance speech that Obama opposed both. Normal political practice would be for McCain to say, "Obama says he's 'open to' offshore drilling, but he's always opposed it. How can we believe him?" This persistence in repeating demonstrably false charges is something new in presidential politics.

But wait... Klein is only getting warmed up:

Worse than the lies have been the smears. McCain ran a television ad claiming that Obama favored "comprehensive" sex education for kindergartners. (Obama favored a bill that would have warned kindergartners about sexual predators and improper touching.) The accusation that Obama was referring to Sarah Palin when he said McCain's effort to remarket his economic policies was putting "lipstick on a pig" was another clearly misleading attack — an obnoxious attempt to divert attention from Palin's lack of fitness for the job and the recklessness with which McCain chose her. McCain's assault on the "élite media" for spreading rumors about Palin's personal life — actually, the culprits were a few bloggers and the tabloid press — was more of the same. And that gets us close to the real problem here. The McCain camp has decided that its candidate can't win honorably, on the issues, so it has resorted to transparent and phony diversions.

Klein's observation that the new tactics began during what was seen by the world press as Obama's triumphal but brief mini-world tour that featured stops in Iraq and Europe -- that flowed in part from McCain's insistence that Obama couldn't be considered a serious candidate until he'd visited Iraq (again). At about that time, the McCain campaign's direction was taken over by key lieutenants from the old 'Rove Machine' that had (by many accounts) secretly orchestrated an especially nasty rumor and lie campaign against McCain himself in the 2000 primary.

This new strategy emerged during the first week of Obama's overseas trip in late July. McCain had been intending to contrast his alleged foreign policy expertise and toughness with Obama's inexperience and alleged weakness. McCain wanted to "win" the Iraq war and face down the Iranians. But those issues became moot when the Iraqis said they favored Obama's withdrawal plan and the Bush Administration started talking to the Iranians. At that point, McCain committed his original sin — out of pique, I believe — questioning Obama's patriotism, saying the Democrat would rather lose a war than lose an election. Ever since, McCain's campaign has been a series of snide and demeaning ads accompanied by the daily gush of untruths that have now been widely documented and exposed. The strategy is an obvious attempt to camouflage the current unpopularity of his Republican brand, the insubstantiality of his vice-presidential choice, and his agreement on most issues — especially economic matters — with an exceedingly unpopular President.

Troopergate: fired official says Palin lied to ABC

Big lies, little lies.

GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has made a lot of noise about how she supposedly opposed the so-called "Bridge to Nowhere" -- a taxpayer-supported boondoggle that Palin had actually lobbied hard for -- and even after she scuttled the project in the wake of taxpayer and Congressional outrage, kept the money.

A lie? Certainly an attempt to mislead US voters into thinking she did not support or lobby for the Bridge to Nowhere.

Now comes word of another, apparently bald-faced lie from Palin.

In her much-watched ABC TV interview last week, Palin claimed that neither she nor her husband pressured former Alaska Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan to fire Palin's sister's Alaska State Trooper ex-husband.

But Monegan has gone on the record that Palin was "not telling the truth":

"She's not telling the truth when she told ABC neither she nor her husband pressured me to fire Trooper Wooten," said Walt Monegan, the Alaskan official whose dismissal by Sarah Palin is the focus of a state investigation known as "Troopergate". "And she's not telling the truth to the media about her reasons for firing me."

Palin had said in the interview that she dismissed Monegan for "poor job performance" and that neither she nor her husband had pressured the commisoner. But Monegan says he was summoned to a meeting with Palin's husband, Todd, soon after she was elected:

"I was called to her Anchorage formal Governor's office to talk with Todd Palin about an issue that was a private family matter," recounted Monegan. Todd became "upset," Monegan recalled, when told the allegations had already been investigated and the case would not be re-opened.

"When Sarah later called to tell me the same thing, I thought to myself, 'I may not be long for this job.'" But, Monegan said, he stood by his position. "I held the public trust. As Chief, I was responsible."

Monegan tried to reason with the Palins:

Monegan said he tried to persuade the first couple to drop the matter. "As a cop for 35 years I'm pretty familiar with issues that come up in divorce cases," and said his argument to both Todd and Sarah was, "if this was so egregious, why didn't you bring it up sooner? Why did you wait until several years later?"

Monegan was, indeed, fired, eventually leading to a state investigation only now getting under way.

Governor Palin initially agreed to "cooperate fully" with the Alaska state legislative investigation but since being chosen as John McCain's running mate both she and her husband have refused to testify voluntarily. Friday the legislature issued a subpoena for Todd Palin.

And, it looks like Monegan has corroborating materials to support his claims:

Monegan, who gave sworn testimony behind closed doors for nearly eight hours last week, said he also provided the State's investigator with copies of e-mails he received from the Governor in which she referred in disparaging terms to her former brother-in-law.

"This is not a 'he said she said' situation. Others were contacted by Todd and Sarah as well," according to Monegan, who said he was confident the investigation would find adequate documentation to corroborate his testimony.

War in cyberspace... it's here now.

GOP presidential candidate John McCain may not know anything about computers, cell phones, or the internet -- but warfare in the 21st century has already made our interconnected technologies into a new and perhaps supremely important battlefield.

International -- and computer -- security experts have been paying special attention to the cyber-attacks apparently launched by Russia against some its former subjugated states from the old Soviet Union (Georgia, the Ukraine) and their information infrastructure and networks.

Now comes word from the UK's Telegraph that hackers were able come very close to shutting down the Large Hadron Collider -- the largest, most powerful atomic particle collider ever built. No lasting harm was apparently done -- but this should chill the bones of those worried about international and informational security in coming years:

[I]t has emerged that, as the first particles were circulating in the machine near Geneva, a Greek group had hacked into the facility and displayed a page with the headline "GST: Greek Security Team."

The people responsible signed off: "We are 2600 - dont mess with us. (sic)"

The website - cmsmon.cern.ch - can no longer be accessed by the public as a result of the attack.

Scientists working at Cern, the organisation that runs the vast smasher, were worried about what the hackers could do because they were "one step away" from the computer control system of one of the huge detectors of the machine, a vast magnet that weighs 12,500 tons, measuring around 21 metres in length and 15 metres wide/high.

If they had hacked into a second computer network, they could have turned off parts of the vast detector and, said the insider, "it is hard enough to make these things work if no one is messing with it."

Fortunately, only one file was damaged but one of the scientists firing off emails as the CMS team fought off the hackers said it was a "scary experience".