Greetings. By now you've probably heard -- assuming that we're not dealing with a sophisticated and probably unlikely political hoax -- that Sarah Palin's Yahoo account has been hacked, and apparently quantities of her e-mail, photos, and related materials have been publicly posted.

Since it has previously been suggested in some quarters that Gov. Palin often used private e-mail accounts for Alaska state business -- which would avoid government data retention laws associated with official e-mail -- the exposure of the Yahoo data seems to be triggering considerable glee in some quarters.

As much as I hold in disdain the concept of someone like Sarah Palin being considered for a single microsecond as qualified to be Vice President of this great country, and as much as I find most of her viewpoints and her public modus operandi to be appalling, I still must assert that any joy over this hacking is dumb, wrong -- and dangerous -- both from ethical and practical standpoints.

The ethical issue should be clear enough and is as old as mankind -- we shouldn't be doing to others that which we wouldn't want done to ourselves. Palin's truly personal e-mail and photos have no bearing on the political situation, yet they've been posted along with everything else. There's simply no justifying this from an ethical standpoint.

But the practical issues are equally obvious. There are official channels for the gathering of electronic evidence in cases of suspected wrongdoing. Those channels should not and normally do not include -- and in fact efforts at prosecution can be stymied by -- ad hoc public releases, especially when those materials are obtained through illegal acts as was apparently the case in this situation. Exposure can also trigger premature deletion (maybe still retrievable, maybe not) of other materials that might have been useful to investigators, as may have already happened in this case.

Even worse, this chain of events plays into the hands of the Palin/McCain campaign (some observers have suggested that perhaps this was all actually a "dirty trick" from that side -- I consider this to be extremely unlikely based on what we know right now).

The hacking and publication of Palin's data unfortunately feeds directly into the sensibilities of many of Palin's supporters, who have already been attempting to position her (up to now I would have said without merit) as a victim of unfair treatment -- and using this to their political advantage. Now the hackers who released her data have handed that campaign a gift that on balance will probably help Palin's and McCain's efforts between now and election day.

Many in the public will react to this event with a natural revulsion to the apparent privacy violation, regardless of the contents of the material that was released in this situation.

The concept of Sarah Palin being Vice President of the U.S. is not only utterly unacceptable, but also just this side of completely insane. Her presence on the GOP ticket can't help but cause one to question John McCain's judgment and unfortunately his previously untarnished integrity as well.

But none of this justifies the hacking of Sarah Palin's accounts. The hackers in this case haven't done any favor to those of us who don't want to see Palin one heartbeat away from the President, and have simultaneously struck a blow against continuing efforts to bring ethics back into the political discourse.

Dumb, dumber, and wrong.

--Lauren--