Sarah Palin — beauty queen, sportscaster, hacker
Did you know Sarah Palin was a hacker, too? We already suspected there was nothing the Republican vice-presidential candidate couldn't do. While serving as Alaska's governor, she just had a baby. Even as she runs for office, she's preparing to be a grandma and planning her eldest daughter's not-so-coincidental wedding. Google has revealed the superwoman from the north's background as Miss Wasilla, her career as a sports journalist, and other highlights of her resume. But rifling through computer files for evidence? Not a problem for Palin. The Anchorage Daily News laid out how the VPILF used her technical savvy to discover evidence that suggested a state politician was in bed with the oil industry:
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.
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.
The technician "said it looked like he tried to delete this, but she knew a way to go around and get some of the deleted stuff," Palin said in an interview. "I didn't know what I was looking for, but I was there."
Palin found dozens of e-mail messages and documents stacked up in trash folders, many showing work Ruedrich had been doing for the Republican Party and others showing how closely he worked with at least one company he was supposed to be regulating.