Thursday, September 18, 2008

FBI, Secret Service Investigate Hacking of Palin’s E-mail

The FBI and Secret Service have launched a joint investigation into the apparent hacking of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s private e-mail account after a widely-read Web site published screen grabs from it on Wednesday.

The article posted on Gawker.com revealed snapshots of e-mail exchanges the Alaska governor had with colleagues as well as private family photos. The gossip site says the email account has since been shut down.

Rick Davis, campaign manager for John McCain, released a statement Wednesday calling the publication a “shocking invasion of the governor’s privacy and a violation of law.”

“The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these e-mails will destroy them. We will have no further comment,” Davis said.

An FBI spokesman in Alaska later confirmed, “We are going to be working a joint investigation with Secret Service on this.”

The Secret Service contacted The Associated Press and asked for copies of the leaked e-mails, which circulated widely on the Internet. The AP did not comply.

The Gawker article boasts about the lengths to which the reporter went to verify the account, saying he or she even called a phone number listed for Palin’s teenage daughter, Bristol, which apparently went to her voicemail. The site also listed dozens of contact e-mails from the account.

“Here are the screenshots of the emails saved before the account went dark, along with the contact list. It’s newsworthy and we will not be taking it down!” the site declares.

Both WIRED and Gawker reported that members claiming to be with a group known as Anonymous took credit for hacking into Palin’s account. Screen grabs were published on other Web sites and then deleted, Gawker reported.

The hacking took place on a Yahoo e-mail account Palin uses — separate from another private account that was publicized in The Washington Post last week.

One person whose e-mail to Palin apparently was among those disclosed, Amy B. McCorkell, declined to discuss her correspondence. “I do not know anything about it,” McCorkell said. “I’m not giving you any comment.” Wired.com said McCorkell later confirmed that she did send the e-mail to Palin.

Another e-mail apparently revealed Wednesday was an exchange in July with Alaska Lt. Gov. Sean Parnell discussing a talk show host who had been critical of Parnell. Parnell declined to discuss the matter.

Gawker complained that Palin has since “deleted” the account, and suggested she was trying to “destroy evidence.”

It wasn’t immediately clear how hackers broke into Palin’s Yahoo! account, but it would have been possible to trick the service into revealing her password knowing personal details about Palin that include her birth date and ZIP code. A hacker also might have sent a forged e-mail to her account tricking her into revealing her own password.

Palin has faced scrutiny for using her private account to do government business. The Washington Post reported last week that a local Republican activist is trying to get Palin to release more than 1,100 e-mails she withheld from a public records request. The appeal reportedly questions why Palin and her aides shift between public and private e-mail accounts.

A spokeswoman in the governor’s office in Alaska declined to comment Wednesday, referring questions from FOXNews.com to the McCain-Palin campaign.

“Primarily we’re referring people to the campaign because honestly people wouldn’t be asking these questions if she wasn’t a candidate for [vice president],” spokeswoman Kate Morgan said.

The Palin family was subjected to intense scrutiny after she was selected as John McCain’s running mate on Aug. 29. Reporters descended on her home town of Wasilla, Alaska, as the media focused on her unwed teenage daughter’s pregnancy.

Palin’s hacked email account — what’s next?

The news buzz last night was all about Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s hacked email account.

Palin’s personal Yahoo account was apparently plundered late Tuesday evening and the contents of the account — personal emails, email addresses of her parents, children and friends, private family photos, and phone numbers — were published all over the Internet Wednesday.

Shocking invasion

News of the break-in received a harsh response from the McCain campaign.

“This is a shocking invasion of the governor’s privacy and a violation of law,” McCain’s campaign manager said. “The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities, and we hope that anyone in possession of these e-mails will destroy them.”

Those appropriate authorities are the FBI and the Secret Service as they’ve teamed up to investigate the breach.

Yeah, but…

The hacking community however isn’t really in to the “authority thing.”

Upon word of Davis’s statement, one blogger at Gawker.com said - we think with a touch of sarcasm - “I guess we’ll have to blow up the internet now?”

Ryan Tate over at Gawker doesn’t condone the break-in but said the hacker “succeeded in reviving the unanswered question of why the Alaska governor had two quasi-official email addresses.”

“This use of the accounts is a naked affront to public records laws in Alaska,” Tate writes. “But it’s not exceptional: It’s one battle in a 30-years war between conservatives and civil libertarians over government openness, during which the current presidential administration itself blurred the lines between public and private email. Is there any way to finally stop these hijinks?”

Why use Yahoo?

The topic of whether Palin should be using a personal account for state business has been subject of a lot of talk recently. Two days before the email account was hacked, the Anchorage Daily News discussed it.

“Even before the McCain campaign plucked Palin from Alaska, a controversy was brewing over e-mails in the governor’s office. Was the administration trying to get around the public records law through broad exemptions or private e-mail accounts?” the newspaper asked.

Pssssstttt

The British IT website The Register published an article early this morning with the wonderfully attractive headline: Memo to US Secret Service: Net proxy may pinpoint Palin email hackers.

Translation? If the feds were to contact an individual named Gabriel Ramuglia they might be able to track down the, as President Bush and Aquaman would say, “evil-doers.”

The 25-year-old webmaster and entrepreneur is the operator of Ctunnel.com, the browsing proxy service used by the group that hacked into the vice presidential candidate’s personal email account and exposed its contents to the world. While he has yet to examine his logs, he says there’s a good chance they will lead to those responsible, thanks to some carelessness on their part.

“Usually, this sort of thing would be hard to track down because it’s Yahoo email, and a lot of people use my service for that,” he told El Reg in a phone interview. “Since they were dumb enough to post a full screenshot

Act now and save

The article, written by a San Francisco based reporter named Dan Goodin, suggests the law enforcement communities get working now as the logs on the server which house this information expires in seven days.

Ramuglia told The Register he would “probably” comply with requests from law enforcement but has not yet been contacted.

Karl Rove

Former Bush strategist, Karl Rove, gets brought up nearly every time a controversy with a Republican candidate emerges. No different this morning. Farhad Manjoo, over at Slate, this morning says the use of the Yahoo based email is “Rovian” in nature.

“The Yahoo breach does raise a few questions about Palin’s e-mail habits,” Manjoo wrote. “Why was she using Yahoo? Critics say she was taking a page from Karl Rove, who cooked up the idea of using an off-site e-mail address to confound investigations of his activities in the Bush administration.”

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

How to Add Soy-Based Foods to Your Diet

Soy-based foods, such as tofu, tempeh, TVP, soy nuts and soy milk, contain protein and nifty chemicals called isoflavones. These help prevent heart disease; osteoporosis; and breast, ovarian and prostate cancers. Soy foods can also reduce symptoms of menopause such as hot flashes. It is easy to add soy foods to your diet.



Step1
Pour soy milk over your morning cereal.


Step2
Add texturized vegetable protein (TVP) to spaghetti sauce instead of ground beef.


Step3
Combine raisins with roasted soy nuts for a quick trail mix.


Step4
Chop firm tofu, then mix it with a chopped hard-boiled egg, chopped celery and mayonnaise for a tofu-salad sandwich.


Step5
Dice tempeh and add it to stir-fried vegetables during the last few minutes of cooking.


Step6
Substitute mashed soft tofu for ricotta cheese in lasagna and stuffed pasta shell recipes.


Step7
Grill soy burgers instead of hamburgers. Enjoy them in a bun with plenty of catsup, onions and lettuce.


Step8
Blend a smoothie out of a banana, a handful of frozen blueberries and 1/2 c. soft silken tofu.


Step9
Enjoy steamed green soybeans (edamame) in the pods as a snack or appetizer. Look for these fresh and frozen.


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