Data Mining Sarah Palin's info

Most of the people making comments (everywhere) about Mrs Palin's use of Yahoo for her PERSONAL stuff also have no clue how it is to live in Alaska. Imagine that your state Capital is at Key West Florida and your 1st major city is at Washington DC - that is the distance between Juneau and Anchorage - oh yea, you can only FLY between the two - no driving. Now are you going to go to DC and make a long distance call to get your e-mail in Key West if you used a local provider? No, you are going to use a service that is everywhere.
People have NO sense of scale and the problems faced in Alaska. I spent years up there and practices that are taken for granted in the Lower 48 are not there are or just will not work there. These sense of scale and problems also helps her understand USA wide problems since he deals with it every day. Someone who lives in Delaware can drive the length of the whole state in less than an hour - an hour FLYING at 550 MPH in Alaska gets you over the Gulf of Alaska - or still in the middle of no where.

Her account being hacked was not her doing - it was the password recovery feature of Yahoo asking for personal details that only she should know - however with lots of details about her (or anyone) online doing some data mining to guess at the possible (constrained by Yahoo) answers to the recovery questions is the problem - NOT her. The intelligence agencies have been doing since since World War I - operational analysis and data mining of pieces of info to get at an answer. Due to the WWW search engines, these used to be hard to locate pieces of data about individuals are now online and findable with only a little effort (the report I read said it took him 49 minutes to get all the answers to the password recovery feature) and that is a problem. Most everything is said to be "public knowledge" due to efforts of the past 50 years of "public interest lobbyist", ACLU & even Government efforts to be "open and transparent" - now all these efforts have come back around to actually harm people since so much data is regularly posted that a complete profile of people - even those not using any internet service - is findable.

Remember, only the GOVERNMENT has restrictions on what it can do - private people and companies can - and do - use any means necessary to find out information - and its all perfectly legal.

One of most striking ways to tell whose side a firm is on is by who complains - and there was not ONE statement of concern by the ACLU that Sarah Palin's account was hacked into and the loss of her personal information - shows you that the ACLU has an agenda other safeguarding people's rights.