Palin speaking at a campaign rally in Carson City, Nevada, September 13, 2008. Credit: wikipedia

Sunday Sep 21, 2008 (foodconsumer.org) -- A hacker last Tuesday gained access to gov.palin@yahoo.com, an e-mail account that Gov. Sarah Palin had used for personal and or state business in Alaska, Washington Post reports.

Yahoo.com email system like many others would ask for the secret answer to a question in order to issue a new password.  The hacker figured the secret answer would be the name of the place where Palin’d met her husband, which is available on many sites. The hacker guessed it right and broke in Palin’s account.

The reset password was posted on 4chan - a discussion forum site for hackers.  Readers from the site flooded into the account and browsed and stole any messages they wanted.  

A guy changed the password and notified yahoo.com of this breach.   And later yahoo.com notified Palin of the incident and deleted the hacked account along with another one gov.sarah@yahoo.com.

Not much damage was caused by the incident. But the McCain campaign called the incident a "a shocking invasion of the Governor's privacy and a violation of law," the Post reported.

Why did the republican vice-president candidate use a public email address?  Critics were cited by the post as saying that Palin was following a strategy that former White House political mastermind Karl Rove used.  Using of the public messaging system such as yahoo.com or google.com or whatever non-governmental email system could avoid the messages getting subpoenaed for any possible future investigation by the government.

The New York Times was cited as reporting last Sunday that shortly after Palin took office, her aides discussed the benefits of using private-email systems (such as yahoo.com).

The benefits have become obvious when Andrée McLeod, a republican activist in Alaska filed a request for public records, namely copies of all e-mails sent between Ivy Frye and Frank Bailey, two aides of Palin.   Palin's office gave out literally four boxed of e-mails, but refused to release more than 1,000 other messages citing executive privilege.

For ordinary citizens, using a public email account like yahoo.com could risk their privacy for sure.   Emails can be easily cached and saved for years awaiting law enforcement officials to browse with or without a court order.