Is would-be VP Sarah Palin a hacker?

[undeterred]

Does the GOP VP nominee possess hidden computer skills? Can she possibly bring the White House into the 21st century, technologically at least? Cringely has a few thoughts.
TAGS: Hackme Inc., Political pandering, Wikinomics


As we've learned over the last few days, the presumptive GOP candidate for vice president is many things: a reformist governor, a hunter, an ex-beauty queen, a mother of five, a physical fitness nut, and a lover of caribou burgers.

But is she a hacker?

According to the Anchorage Daily News she is. In a front page story from September 2004, the ADN describes Palin thusly:

Sarah Palin never thought of herself as an investigator.....Yet there she was, hacking uncomfortably into Randy Ruedrich's computer, looking for evidence that the state Republican Party boss had broken the state ethics law while a member of the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission.

In the great north, where political corruption vies with oil and gas for the state's primary export, it seems Palin was asked to rummage around former state GOP leader Ruedrich's hard drive.

... The next week, when Palin went back to work at the AOGCC, she noticed that Ruedrich had removed his pictures from the walls and the personal effects from his desk. But as she and an AOGCC technician worked their way around his computer password at the behest of an assistant attorney general in Fairbanks, they found his cleanup had not extended to his electronic files.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/robertxcringely/archives/2008/09/is_wouldbe_vp_s.html