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Dirty tricks department

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.

2 Comments

  1. t. rev t. rev

    To settle into my now-familiar role of deliberate, bloody-minded yet half-hearted contrarian:

    From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight — and with what tactics.

    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?

  2. 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.

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