The person who allegedly hacked Mitt Romney’s Hotmail (heh) account yesterday, attracting the interest of the Secret Service, wants everyone to know that he’s sorry — but, specifically, Mitt Romney. Because the hacker doesn’t have any contact info for Romney, he sent a letter of apology through Gawker:
To Mitt Romney,
The time between when I first saw the email address in the WSJ and my first sending in the tip about my hacking was only a half hour at most. During this time I never stopped to consider what it was I was doing, it was only after I had got in to your account, after I sent my tip that I really started to consider what I had just done. While I was in I had thought about the tip I had sent in, about my use of the word ‘hack,’ my mind drifted to the British phone hacking scandal which I have been following closely. It was then I was hit with a terrible revelation, what I had done was no different then the actions of the tabloid journalists that had horrified me so.
So I tried to fix what I had done as best I could. There was no way for me to undo the fact I had illegally broken into your private accounts but I could stop the spread of the breech. I shutdown the Dropbox account and deleted all the files that I had downloaded and then, when I found myself unable to shutdown the email I changed the password and and security question so that no one else could get in the way I had. Finally I have not and will not tell anyone what I have seen.
But none of this changes what I’ve done. I engaged in an egregious violation of another persons privacy, a violation made all the worse by way of your being a public figure who has so little privacy to begin with, a figure for whom what privacy can be found is doubtless a valuable gift. A gift I took away. For this I am sorry. When I hacked in it struck me as funny at first, but now… I have never felt as bad about something I have done as I feel right now.
I don’t know if you’ll take anything from this message. I wouldn’t blame you for one second if you don’t. I just want you to know how I’ve been feeling about this.
Why do we get the feeling that the hacker’s mom made him write this?
