Palin: Someone Hacked my Yahoo, OK?
Republicans everywhere are shaking with outrage because some individual broke the law by hacking into Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account.
Just savor the irony. A bunch of lawless, authoritarian, surveillance-craving zealots suddenly get angry when someone breaks federal laws and reads someone’s webmail.
These are the same people, as Glenn Greenwald helpfully reminds us, that
cheered on every last expansion of the Lawless Surveillance State of the last eight years — put their fists in the air with glee as the Federal Government seized the power to listen to innocent Americans’ telephone calls; read our emails; obtain our banking, credit card, and library records; and create vast data bases of every call we make and receive and every prescription we fill and every instance of travel and other vast categories of information that remain largely unknown — all without warrants or oversight of any kind and often in clear violation of the law.
The same political faction which today is prancing around in full-throated fits of melodramatic hysteria and Victim mode (their absolute favorite state of being) over the sanctity of Sarah Palin’s privacy are the same ones who scoffed with indifference as it was revealed during the Bush era that the FBI systematically abused its Patriot Act powers to gather and store private information on thousands of innocent Americans; that Homeland Security officials illegally infiltrated and monitored peaceful, law-abiding left-wing groups devoted to peace activism, civil liberties and other political agendas disliked by the state; and that the telephone calls of journalists and lawyers have been illegally and repeatedly monitored.
Read Glenn’s whole post. Really worth it.
