Would a regular citizen get FBI treatment if their email was hacked?

The questions asks it all, although I would add that it be personal email. Since it was personal email of Palin’s that was hacked, and not her government email (which then I would understand FBI intervention).

Taking your question at face value…

No, of course not. The FBI would not get involved just because a random person’s Yahoo! email got hacked.

Same thing that would happen if someone steals your regular mail. That is also a federal offense. FBI isn’t going to worry about it.

My yahoo account got hacked about a month ago. Even yahoo didn’t give a damn.

Short answer. No.

We’ve had damage to systems. We can trace the damage to a particular source.

In many cases there is a time factor involved because log files often get purged or compromised systems are discovered and taken offline/deleted (attacks normally go through a “hacked” third party computer).

If the detectives have the resources to get to it in time often they are stonewalled by the provider of the system that was compromised - often asking for a court order.

If we do have a court order we have a hard time just getting ISPs or providers in another town/state/country to help us in an investigation in which we have a court warrent in our region. They start claiming jurisdiction issues.

If you, as a average Joe, are a victim of a “cybercrime” that has no real soild monetary loss (IE;someone steals/cracks your password), forget it. Everyone will tell you to get a new account or change your password.

IIRC, Ms. Palin did a lot of her professional correspondance through her personal e-mail. That was one of the things her opponents disapproved of, as it impeded the transparency she said she valued.

How significant is the “regular citizen?” If it’s Joe Biden, sure they would. If it’s Bozo Joe, the FBI is busy unless the ramifications extend beyond Bozo’s little world.

The difference may lie in the fact that matter made the national news.

From the statement that the hacker posted this is just not true. According to the hacker, he broke into her email to find evidence of what you describe and found nothing.

“I read though the emails… ALL OF THEM… before I posted, and what I concluded was anticlimactic, there was nothing there, nothing incriminating, nothing that would derail her campaign as I had hoped, all I saw was personal stuff, some clerical stuff from when she was governor…. And pictures of her family.”

My bolding. I don’t know about you, but I suspect even at my level my employers would be somewhat dismayed that I used a private Yahoo account to do even basic admin related to my work. Oh, and I’m not even in a position held to public account.

That depends.

If she used her personal email account to send a travel claim to accounting (presumedly she worked on the travel claim at home, say, after arriving home on a Friday), then the only personal info in that email is her own.