Palin hacker, Rubico, was on NewsBusters while taking pictures of her E-Mail

So, I guess I’m the first to look really closely at some of those screen shots the hacker, Rubico, posted on the internet. Either that or I should have done a lot more digging before posting this…

Either way it seems that Rubico was looking at one of the biggest conservative blogs out there, NewsBusters. And he was looking at a specific post on NewsBusters none the less…

Seems plain as day to me but you guys can judge for yourselves, keep in mind that the Rubico pictures are most likely screen shots of screen shots since I got them off of Gawker.com who got it from posters on 4chan.com where Rubico posted the pictures. That would most likely account for why they are so blurry compared to my screen shots…

Here is the full screen shot from Rubico (click on the images to see them full size):

UPDATE: I have found a higher quality image of the screen capture that Rubio posted online. Click here to view it full screen.

Here is the same picture zoomed in and cropped:

Now, yes they are blurry but simply looking at the fourth tab made me think that it looked like a tab that was open to an article on NewsBusters. So I went and did a search for the words I could make out which where “Classless Alan Colmes” because that’s what it seemed like and because I remembered there being a recent NewsBusters article on some baseless attacks Alan Colmes had made recently. What did I find? A post called “Classless Alan Colmes: OMG, the Palins Eloped“.

And furthermore, when you open that post in Firefox (like Rubico) with five other tabs open (like Rubico) you get this (I edited out some stuff to be on the safe side):

Here it is upclose:

Now, here’s the two close ups on top of one another (My screen shot is on top and Rubico’s is on the bottom):

Identical…

So then, why was Rubico on NewsBusters? And more specifically why that article?

Well, if what Malkin has been reporting is true, my best guess is that Rubico, since he said he was looking for dirt on Palin, was looking into Alan Colmes’ claim that the Palins eloped because Sarah was pregnant and not to save money.

Of course, its easy for us rational people to realize that, even if Colmes’ pathetic accusations were true, Sarah Palin probably wasn’t casually discussing the secret reason behind her wedding somewhere in her last 174 emails. But, hey, its also easy for us rational people to realize that hacking into the private email account of an elected official running for vice president is a terrible idea that entails drastic consequences… you know, like jail time.

But besides all of that, the reason I started looking so closely at those screen shots was to hopefully get some clues as to who this hacker was… Well, while it might not seem like it right away, this may help to do that.

How, you might ask? Well, in the screen shot where you can tell that the hacker is looking at NewsBusters there is a clue as to the general time when he was looking at the site. That time would be somewhere around 4:23 am based off of the last email received, which was undoubtedly recieved shortly after the hacker logged in since it is a password change notification. Now, that probably isn’t enough information to pinpoint who the person is.

But when you combine that information with the speculation that David Kernell may have been the one who hacked Palin’s email you can at least prove that theory right or wrong to a certain degree.

All NewsBusters would need to do, assuming they still have the visitor data for that post from two days ago, which is admittedly a big assumption, is check out their visitor logs for around 4:23 am EST and look for a visitor from the University of Tennessee who looked at “Classless Alan Colmes: OMG the Palins Eloped”.

If that visitor exists that would all but prove, for me at least, that it was David Kernell who hacked Sarah Palin’s email.

So what do you say NewsBusters? Will (can) you look for this visit? I would love to hear back from you guys on this one…

UPDATE: After some more thinking and some sleep I’ve refined a couple of things in my theory. After looking over Malkin’s story again I realized that Rubico was probably looking for an answer to one of the security questions in order to change the account’s password. And also Newsbusters may not be able to look for a visit from the University of Tennessee since the hacker used a proxy to visit the yahoo mail site. However, it is very possible that he only used that proxy to visit yahoo and not the other sites opened in the screenshot of his Firefox. So maybe my original theory stands, except that the visitor would have shown up sometime before 4:23 am EST since he was looking for answers to security questions.

UPDATE: Looks like Newsbusters has picked up my story. They seem to be a lot more skeptical about whether they can help Id the hacker. Here is a post with their concerns and my response.

Investigation UPDATE: Ongoing…

INDICTMENT UPDATE: Looks like the feds have caught Rubico, aka David Kernell