Heaneyland!

Illegal file sharing (not what you're thinking)

Hey, look at that! Some of the fine people who gave us the Patriot Act and swore it wouldn't be used to spy on regular non-terrorist type people have been busted for spying on their co-workers! That fills me with confidence about their concerns for my own privacy.

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 [Boston] Globe.

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.

Nice. All the moral ambiguity of Watergate, but without all that tedious business of breaking into a hotel room. The computer age really has made life simpler. Anyway, here's the best part:

As the extent to which Democratic communications were monitored came into sharper focus, Republicans yesterday offered a new defense. They said that in the summer of 2002, their computer technician informed his Democratic counterpart of the glitch, but Democrats did nothing to fix the problem.

Other staffers, however, denied that the Democrats were told anything about it before November 2003.

Whether the story about the computer tech is true or not, that is the lamest excuse in the world. "Officer, I warned him ages ago that he should've put a lock on his garage door; you can't blame me for stealing his car."

Posted by Francis at 02:15 AM