A team of hackers dubbed "Anonymous" claims to have breached vice presidential hopeful Gov. Sarah Palin's Yahoo e-mail account, based on a number of announcements and screenshots posted to the Web and Wikileaks.orgEither it was an elaborate fake, or the hackers actually did compromise VP Palin's e-mail address and then send the information to Wikileaks.

The link, which has been only intermittently available, is available here:

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin_Yahoo_email_hack_2008

This is the information that was posted on Wikileaks.org:

Circa midnight Tuesday the 16th of September (EST) Wikileaks' sources loosely affiliated with the activist group 'anonymous' gained access to U.S. Republican Party Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account gov.palin@yahoo.com. Governor Palin has come under criticism for using private email accounts to avoid government transparency mechanisms. The zip archive made available by Wikileaks contains screen shots of Palin's inbox, example emails, address book and two family photos. The list of correspondence, together with the account name, appears to re-enforce the criticism.

It's not yet at all clear how Gov. Palin's account had been breached, although chances are that the password to her account was cracked and Yahoo wasn't breached.

This AP story quotes a statement from the McCain campaign on the incident:

"This is a shocking invasion of the governor's privacy and a violation of law. The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these e-mails will destroy them," the McCain campaign said in a statement.