You don’t really need to go any further than the first paragraph of this story (via Talking Points Memo) to get pissed off:
Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.
Apparently the Republicans have forgotten Watergate. Stealing memos, as it turns out, is wrong.
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To settle into my now-familiar role of deliberate, bloody-minded yet half-hearted contrarian:
It seems to me that this is somewhere between burglary and sightseeing.
To be less flippant, this is another angle on the old hacker’s dilemma: if the door’s open, and you don’t break anything, how wrong is it? Note that I am not saying this is morally equivalent to hacking; it’s clearly more wrong, inasmuch as the Republicans aren’t just satisfying idle curiosity here but gaining strategic advantage. Still, this amusingly reinforces the ‘Democrats: Stupid, Republicans: Evil’ stereotypes.
That’s not what I wanted to talk about, though. What I wanted to say was, didn’t this happen on AmberMUSH a few years back?
I’m down with the D: S, R: E meme. I can’t help but mock the Democrat’s IT guy.
And yeah, it’s clearly more wrong. I mean, if I’m sitting in someone’s office and I say “Hey, you shouldn’t let me stay in here while you’re out cause I might steal your files,” and he says “Heh, yeah, I shouldn’t…”
I’m still gonna get into trouble if I photocopy his files.