July 7th, 2007
Clinton strategist: rival firm hacked into my BlackBerry email
The chief strategist for U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Democratic Party Presidential nomination campaign has been sued for illegal eavesdropping.
The suit, which was filed a week ago Friday by Mitchell E. Markel, claims that polling services firm Penn, Schoen & Berland began monitoring all messages sent from Markel’s personal BlackBerry nearly a month after he had resigned and become president of his new business.
This monitoring allegedly took place by hacking into Markel’s Blackberry and rigging his e-mail accounts to send blind carbon copies of his e-mails to another account that it had set up, reports the Associated Press’ Sara Kugler.
The suit claims that the founder of the firm, Mark Penn, who is Clinton’s strategist and pollster, knew about and approved of the monitoring, which the suit says violates federal wiretapping laws.
“The company hasn’t done anything improper and the e-mails came in on our own e-mail account,” replied Penn, Scoen and Berland attorney Howard Rubin to Kugler.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
