As I am a tech guy, I figured I'd weigh in on the Norm Coleman digital data issue. Coleman would like us to believe that this was a hack job, but I find this hard to believe. To prove this, I will offer an example. Let's say that this was the 1950s and that you were a thief trying to steal a list of wealthy donors and their financial information from a campaign office. Let's say that you get in, crack the safe, get the list, etc. Would you a) then leave, keeping the list or b) tape the list to the campaign office's door to allow anyone to see them, perhaps taking down the information yourself. Coleman's argument at this point is that (b) occurred, which is unlikely unless the thief had some sort of ulterior motives, which I suppose is possible but Occam's Razor tells us that it is more likely that a staffer accidentally put the donor list in the wrong folder.
Still, even if there were a hack, there are still issues. Including the CVV code--the three-digit code on the back of the card--is evidently illegal and indefensible, as with that information you could just use the card. In fact, having the credit card numbers there as unencrypted data is even less defensible, as it is really easy to encrypt data on a d-base--even a simple hashcode, or random sequence unique to a given value, requires only one line of code--so that it is not human readable. So there are actually a number of issues here, and I suspect some folks are going to join the swelled ranks of the unemployed soon. A setup this shoddy deserves nothing less.
Read more on this here. More broadly, I guess I don't understand the GOP's jiu jitsu. Coleman isn't going to win, and I understand that Republicans are desperate to keep Democrats from getting any more seats. But if Coleman somehow pulls it out there's the little matter of his getting investigated by the FBI. If he gets nabbed by them, whoever the GOP puts up to replace him is toast in the 2010 special election. Minnesota is pretty liberal, but Franken is probably polarizing enough to make races there more competitive in the future. I don't suppose that Republicans are thinking ahead of the next year or so anyway, and I guess they figure money spent to defend a likely crook is worth it to stop Obama's agenda, democracy be damned.
