"Little of political interest was exposed by the attack on Palin's gov.palin@yahoo.com webmail account,"

I'm not sure that's true.. a better phrasing might be

'No juicy sexual titbits were thrown into the US election media feeding frenzy by the attack..."

It was just shown that a 'law and order' candidate was/is doing political and governmental business from a personal mail account. That's should be quite interesting because it's illegal, but I guess dishonesty and hypocrisy are the norm in politics these days.

So in the DoJ's opinion, does merely having read email in your account void any protections? I think it's possible someone could use some good ol' plausible deniability here, and claim that every email that was in a given account was already opened. The onus would then be on whoever got broken into to prove that they didn't open a given email, rather than proving who broke into the account.

It seems to me that the DoJ doesn't particularly understand technology, and probably shouldn't be putting out opinions on such matters.

Paris, because she understands about as much as the DoJ

The article miss something very important: when will Sarah Pallin be put on the grill about her use of Yahoo! Mail for state business? Shurely there's an "ongoing investigation" there too, as it's a far more serious offense than accessing her Yahoo account without permission.

I'm sure moot has gone to Mexico to get some soup.

LOL, that's funny. Given who we are talking about and her political affiliations I'm quite certain that either there is A: no investigation at all or B: a tertiary investigation that will end up in no charges being filed and the whole thing swept under the rug. After all we are still living in dubya's 'Merica.

But another, and more interesting, sidetopic, is does this mean that any person being the victim of this kind of evidence-gathering (I will not call this a hack!), can now REQUIRE the FBI and Secret Service to investigate it prompte? If not, then there is a trustworthyness-problem with the entire investigating branch of the US system...

I've tried to get law enforcement people involved in catching someone who DDOS'd a website I run, repeatedly a few years ago. I had his name, his website, details of the botnet he ran, the IRC server it ran on and a list of the IPs of a few thousand bots on it, yet they didn't want to know. Yet when something like this happens (which frankly happens all the time, but generally between 'friends') to a politician, sudden they manage to get it into court within weeks...