McCain Camp: Hacking Of Palin's E-Mail A 'Shocking Invasion Of Privacy'

The open government activist site Wikileaks Tuesday received Palin's correspondence from a group known simply as "anonymous." Wikileaks subsequently made the zip archive available through its Web site. The files in Palin's folder include two e-mails, an address book and family photos in the form of screen shots.

In a statement, Rick Davis, campaign manager for Republican presidential candidate John McCain, called the intrusion 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."

Both the FBI and Secret Service are investigating the matter, according to CNN.

"We are aware of the allegations and we are coordinating with Secret Service as far as the allegation that someone has hacked into Governor Palin's personal e-mail account," said FBI spokesman Eric Gonzalez in Anchorage, Alaska. "We are going to be working a joint investigation with the Secret Service on this."

Tech columnist Dan Goodin has some advice for investigators: contact Gabriel Ramuglia, the Web master and operator of Ctunnel.com, the browsing proxy service used by the 'anonymous' group that hacked into Palin's e-mail.

"Usually, this sort of thing would be hard to track down because it's Yahoo e-mail, and a lot of people use my service for that," Ramuglia told Goodin in a phone interview. "Since they were dumb enough to post a full screenshot that showed most of the [Ctunnel.com] URL, I should be able to find that in my log."

In operating the service, Ramuglia logs a user's IP address, in addition to the time and Web destination. Goodin said that while that is not always sufficient enough to track users who access popular Web sites, in the Palin case, the hackers included a "whole string of random-looking characters when posting screenshots of Palin's hacked account."

Palin's e-mail activities were called into question last week in The Washington Post. The article reported that an Alaskan Republican activist requested that Palin release more than 1,100 e-mails she withheld from an earlier request.

"Palin also routinely does government business from a Yahoo address, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, rather than her secure official state e-mail address, according to documents already made public," reported the Post.

The activist's lawyer, Donald Mitchell, said that Palin's husband, Todd Palin, was copied on "sensitive state correspondence," according to the Post.

"There's a reason the governor should be using her own official e-mail channels because of security and encryption," the lawyer told the paper. "She's running state business out of Yahoo?"

Yahoo was unavailable for comment, and there was no mention of the hack on the McCain campaign site. The Palin account has since been disabled.