So the big story today is the uproar over Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account being hacked and a couple emails subsequently being leaked to the internet. It appears nothing terribly damaging will likely come of the affair. The McCain campaign released a statement calling the hacking “a shocking invasion of the Governor’s privacy and a violation of law.” It certainly was an illegal act for which the perpetrators should be prosecuted. But as usual, Glenn Greenwald does a masterful job exposing the outrage being expressed by the Right as little more than self-righteous sanctimony. I recommend reading his article on the matter in full, but here are a few excerpts:
[I]t’s really a wondrous, and repugnant, sight to behold the Bush-following lynch mobs on the Right melodramatically defend the Virtues of Privacy and the Rule of Law. These, of course, are the same authoritarians who have 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.
[. . . .]
As despicable as I personally find the Palin hacking to be, it pales in comparison to the Bush crimes, because when someone runs for President or Vice President, they voluntarily cede vast amounts of their personal privacy, which is why they’re required to disclose things like their medical records, tax returns, assocational history, and other financial documents — all information that private Americans, at least in theory in the pre-Bush era, had the right to keep private. Those subjected to Bush’s illegal surveillance programs have done nothing to cede their privacy — other than live in a country which has decided to abolish most privacy protections.
