In a bid to outsmart legislation on access to information, which includes e-mail correspondence, some American politicians have moved to using private e-mail accounts to conduct state business. One such politician is vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who had her two Yahoo! accounts hacked and their content published on wikileaks.org (1).

Palin's private e-mail accounts, which, oddly enough, were not named sarah.palin and sarah.palin2 or something similar, but gov.palin and gov.sarah, gave a scary insight in how this candidate vice-president thinks and works.

Discussions in United States media have since largely focused on the content of the messages, which have become known as Troopergate and on how Palin was the next politician to duck legislation on accountability and openness of records by attempting to hide her tracks using supposedly private e-mail accounts.

Her closing down both accounts immediately after they were hacked caused Gawker to ask "did the internet just cause Sarah Palin to destroy evidence?" (2).

Meanwhile, a significant part of Bulgarian diplomatic services around the world continues to use Yahoo! and similar free webmail services as their official e-mail accounts.

A quick count I did a few months ago (3) showed that of 71 Bulgarian embassies around the world that are listed on the website of the Foreign Affairs Ministry, 12 have Yahoo! e-mail addresses, while four use the free-of-charge Bulgarian web-based e-mail service ABV.

The hackers who accessed Palin's Yahoo! e-mail account did so by simply requesting a password reset. The hacker was able to research the answers to two of the three questions, her home postal-code and date of birth in public records. The answer to the third question was not that difficult to guess: she met her husband in high school.

Other typical questions include one's mother's maiden name, childhood pet's name or school mascot.

I cannot help but wonder what the questions and the answers to reset the password of the Yahoo! accounts used by Bulgarian embassies would be.

Question: What is your date of birth?

Answer: 681

We will probably never find out, as it is extremely unlikely there will ever be a Bulgarian Sarah Palin.

Knowing the e-inadequateness of state institutions in this country, there can hardly be anything worth the trouble in those e-mail accounts.

Unless it is a strange certainty that the State Agency for National Security would find the perpetrators and the Bulgarian Judiciary would efficiently prosecute them - maybe this is why the Foreign Affairs Ministry appears to make no effort whatsoever to ban the use of free webmail services by its diplomats.

1. http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Sarah_Palin_Yahoo_inbox_2008
2. http://gawker.com/5051193/sarah-palins-personal-emails
3. http://www.sofiaecho.com/article/columnists-offline-diplomatic-e-bag/id_29631/catid_99