This is big. Seriously.
The Republicans have been reading Democrat secret files since 2001. Internal documents. The Dems don’t look too good in it… they say “Estrada’s bad, he’s a hispanic so maybe we couldn’t block him going to the Supreme Court” in so many words, more or less, but… uh, I’m not surprised or anything. You read the internal, cut the crap memos, and it’ll always look ugly.
I don’t know. Think there’s going to be fallout here?
Well it’s not like it’s the first time they’ve used tactics that some may find dodgy.
Will be interesting to see does this one have legs.
This is not even up to the level of ‘Freedom-fry-gate’. Seriously.
Nobody ‘hacked’ their way into anything:
But as a whistle-blowing service, that same incompetent sysadmin should be commended. We get gems like this about the Dem/special-interest relationship:
Won’t be anything like Watergate.
First, even if this was found to rise to the level of summary execuation style supercrime, it would be limited to a small number of Senators, and even they could probably pass it off on staffers.
Second, the public has shown little to no interest in information crimes. Aside from Napster, try getting a non-computer literati interested in the security of their private information. How many people would just give away their Social Security number to a random stranger on the phone?
Third, this isn’t something that will garner press interest. Scandals in the White House always have a certain appeal. Scandals in a Congressional committee, not so much. Even Janklow didn’t rise to the Scott Peterson level of press coverage, and he killed a guy.
So, this isn’t going to end up a big deal. It should, and those involved should be perp walked out of chambers straight past the Washington press core, but that’s not going to happen. Not to mention that the “liberal” media pundits will probably talk it down until people think the Dems were the bad guys.
Irrelevant.
Is burglary any less a crime when the victim forgot to lock the door?
No, but that wasn’t the question.
Entirely correct. It is not hacking, it may or may not be cracking, but it is still accessing files in an unauthorized manner. If a congressman leaves his desk unlocked, does it mean you have the right to open it and read his notes?
And remember, Watergate was a breakin to get democrat election plans. This is bigger than watergate in that manner, they’ve been reading everything for years.
It’s horribly unethical. And a teensy bit criminal.
Yes, it was. 
Brutus’s straw man (note that neither the article nor any previous posts accused anyone of hacking) implied that what occured was mitigated because there wasn’t any electronic means in place to prevent the wrong people from accessing this information. Just as burglary isn’t mitigated by the absence of a lock, accessing information you know you’re not supposed to access isn’t mitigated by the absence of a password.
This is nowhere near as big as Watergate. Watergate constituted a series of planned activities, ranging from pranks and harassment that might or might not have been illegal at the misdemeanor level, to commission of multiple burglaries, and concluding with a felony criminal conspiracy to cover up the Nixon Administration’s involvement with the whole mess.
The crimes themselves were planned at a fairly high level in the Nixon Administration, and Nixon himself was an active participant in the cover-up.
In this business, we don’t yet know that any U.S. Senators were involved. That’s really the primary outstanding question (and the worst-case scenario for the GOP), and even if answered in the affirmative, that’s still a big step down from the President of the United States being involved.
What will be interesting is the response of GOP officials and those who wield influence in the party, particularly of those who’ve yammered about the importance of character and integrity. For them, now is put-up-or-shut-up time. If Pat Robertson or Rush Limbaugh or William Bennett soft-pedal this one, or give it a pass, they lose the moral right to criticize the integrity of liberals and Democrats and the like. (They’ll keep on doing it, of course, but we can remind them and their followers of their selective approach to morality.)
One Republican who has been a stand-up guy on this is Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-LDS):
Lord knows I disagree with Hatch about nearly everything, but I’ve got to give him a big thumbs-up here.
Considering we’ve got a President who’s been caught lying about WMDs as a justification for invading Iraq, this is small potatoes by comparison.
We’re talking about a politcal party that had no qualms about calling a quadraplegic Vietnam veteran and the author of the Homeland Security Billa coward who was against national security. What makes you think the RNC gives two toots about the unethical behavior of snooping through someone else’s files?
Oh yes, Hatch is shocked, *shocked * about this, isn’t he? Not enough to have actually done anything about it, though. He had every reason to suspect it, just from reading Novak’s columns, but didn’t put on that lemon-sucking sanctimonious face until it became impossible to deny its existence. Spare us the false-front preachiness and get your people under control instead, Orrin - or go back to Utah and your true calling as a Mormon elder.
This isn’t Watergate, or even lying us into a war. All it does is to continue to undermine the GOP claims to be “the party of morality” and so forth, or to be “changing the tone” for the better in a government they control.
Taking advantage of a glitch, whether simple and obvious or arcane and difficult, to access something that is intended to be kept secure is definitely a crack, or “hack” to use the label most common in general use and in the media.
Firefly, you made me laugh so hard my shoe polish ran–and only you wear shoe polish under your nose.
One of my good pals must necessarily be at the epicenter of this controversy. I’ll try to get the inside scoop for you guys.
While this is undoubtedly unethical, I can’t see how it is illegal, nor does it particularly violate the time-honored tradition of Senate fair play, which at its best is rough. A probably apocryphal example of Senate exploitation of science and/or technology claims that Daniel Webster’s seat in the Senate (not the House, as stated on this page) was at one focus of the chamber, while the opposition regularly deliberated in private under the other focus, allowing Webster to hear even whispered conversation.
The K-Street corridor of Washington is achurn with rumors, some of which are highly accurate thanks to confidential information being leaked from Congress on a regular basis. The thing is, lobbyists also use the rumors by presenting them to whomever might be opposed to the proposed action back on the Hill. Thus, one side is rarely totally uninformed as to what the other side is planning. Even in the midst of a total Republican information lock-down on Energy and Medicare reform this past year, the main structure and even many minute details were known to schmos like me long before they became public.
Do the Patriot Act’s provisions against cyberterrorism draw a distinction between “cracking” and “taking advantage of gaping security holes”? I’m not certain, but it seems like a safe bet that they do not. If they do not, that would seem to torpedo the “incompetent Democrats” defense that Miranda is trying.
Just to clarify: are you commending these actions by the Republican leakers as morally and/or ethically just?
The GOP doesn’t necessarily have to have ordered the continued collection of data to look bad here: just knowingly using the information garnered without telling anyone is pretty underhanded. I don’t think it’s illegal, but it’s dirty tricks done cheap, and it certianly could be that the political battles of the last few years weren’t between evenly matched opponents.
Would they really have passed up on the use of this tremendous advantage for 3 years? Did they use it to good effect?
And, for the record, I don’t think there was much at all untoward about the Estrada comments. The party said that he was being nominated so that when they opposed him, they could be accused of being bigots, and thus it was a cagey move on the Republicans part that would pose a real danger to their own party. They were exactly right on this: this is exactly what the Republican party did when they opposed him.
Scoff scoff. Are you seriously implying that these three have EVER truly been equal opportunity critics whose outrage we should take seriously? Men who feel that, for instance, the Wellstone funeral was a disgrace cannot at the same time wildly mischaracterize what happened their for political effect, not in any sort of sincere way. All three of these people trade on carefully fabricated outrage for a living.
The law says…
1030. Fraud and Related Activity in Connection with Computers
(a) Whoever
(1) having knowingly accessed a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access, and by means of such conduct having obtained information that has been determined by the United States Government pursuant to an Executive order or statute to require protection against unauthorized disclosure for reasons of national defense or foreign relations, or any restricted data, as defined in paragraph y. of section 11 of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, with reason to believe that such information so obtained could be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation willfully communicates, delivers, transmits, or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it;
(2) intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains–
(A) information contained in a financial record of a financial institution, or of a card issuer as defined in section 1602(n) of title 15, or contained in a file of a consumer reporting agency on a consumer, as such terms are defined in the Fair Credit Reporting Act (15 U.S.C. 1681 et seq.);
(B) information from any department or agency of the United States; or
(C) information from any protected computer if the conduct involved an interstate or foreign communication;
(3) intentionally, without authorization to access any nonpublic computer of a department or agency of the United States, accesses such a computer of that department or agency that is exclusively for the use of the Government of the United States or, in the case of a computer not exclusively for such use, is used by or for the Government of the United States and such conduct affects that use by or for the Government of the United States;
(4) knowingly and with intent to defraud, accesses a protected computer without authorization, or exceeds authorized access, and by means of such conduct furthers the intended fraud and obtains anything of value, unless the object of the fraud and the thing obtained consists only of the use of the computer and the value of such use is not more than $ 5,000 in any one-year period;
And a bit more. But I think it’s pretty illegal, just there at the “without authorization” bit.
I’m sure if it was the other way around-- if the Dems had been hacking into GOP computers and stealing files-- that the GOP would be calling for executions. Just admit it, Pubbies. It’s fucking slimy. Don’t apologize for it.
We do not live in a just society. We do not even live in a society run by law. If we did, someone would already have been arrested for this.
If I were to have taken advantage of such a security lapse, I would have been arrested and charged with a crime. Something tells me that nothing of the sort will happen here.
At one time, I truly believed that there was one set of laws that were applied to everyone equally. Then I turned 6.
Except that this server doesn’t belong to either party. According to the article it belongs to the Senate Judiciary Committee, meaning it’s owned by the federal government. That’s what I find most unsettling about the situation - that resources owned by the federal government as a whole are being co-opted for Party use. Gore got in a bit of trouble over something similar to this when he got caught making campaign calls from his government-owned telephones. This seems little different to me. The federal government should in no way be providing resources for use in Party activities. And if a person, or organization, has appropriated such for their own use, it seems to that it ought to be actionable.
If the Republicans had accessed a server owned by the Democrats, then yeah, it would be slimy and most probably illegal, whether the Dems had taken proper actions to secure the server, or not. But that ain’t the case. This machine was a public resource, and as such, anything stored there should be available to everyone equally.