Last Wednesday, a 20-year-old Tennessean college student illegally gained access to vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's e-mail account. If nothing else, the so-called hack job makes the play-by-play coverage of the campaign more interesting. Less than a month after the announcement of Palin's candidacy, we have her to thank for three delectable political scandals-babygate, troopergate and now, e-mailgate.

The e-mail scandal is part of a larger trend in which the journalistic establishment-and in this case, the public- has subjected Palin to the vetting process her campaign seems to have not. The issue is whether Palin committed obstruction of justice by using a non-government e-mail account for government business. (While government e-mail accounts provide streamlined access to a permanent archive of messages, Yahoo! does not, making subpoenas difficult if not futile.)

Complete information regarding the breach was gathered as the week went on, but before this could happen, the story was reported using one of two competing narratives. One claims that a group of hackers intentionally broke into Yahoo's security to receive and sell the information found in the account. The other suggests the offense was the work of a lone prankster in search of amusement.

In truth, one person executed the breach with the utmost ease. David Kernell, the son of a Democratic state senator, used Yahoo's "forget your password?" service and guessed that Palin met her husband in high school. He then reset the password to "popcorn" and posted his findings on 4chan.org, favorite of Anti-Scientology Activists Anonymous, who were wrongly accused of being the perpetrators.

After news of the privacy violation broke, screenshots of the e-mail account were uploaded to Wikileaks and later gossip blog Gawker. The content of the e-mails was relatively innocuous. They included some unseen family photographs, husband Todd's previously known e-mail address and daughter Bristol's phone number.

Bill O'Reilly of television's "No Spin Zone" did his best to make the online publications sound like a pornographic hub, bellowing, "I'm not going to mention the website that posted this, but it's one of those despicable, slimy, scummy, websites that in a free society we have to tolerate, but I'd like to see the website prosecuted."

Is it just me, or does that quote reveal O'Reilly refusal to tolerate a free society? Television's top-rated news host went on, likening hacking to stealing and accusing Gawker of "trafficking in stolen merchandise." There are many words I could come up with to describe the content of an e-mail, but merchandise is not one of them. E-mail is not some good you'd haggle for at a bazaar; it's a service for transferring data. While gaining access to personal information is a violation of privacy, stealing is a crime that entails a complete loss of ownership. But when someone gains illegal access to your e-mail, the content of the e-mail is still yours.

Of course if your intention is to seek the maximum punishment, conflating the difference between breaching and stealing is a logical way to frame the incident. But as conservative commentators raised the guillotine, Gawker noted that the law, quite clearly, protects the publication of newsworthy items so long as the institution played no direct part in the illicit activity. In contrast to O'Reilly moral indignation, Gawker approached the entire affair as if it were a flippant encounter, a joke good for a few laughs.

We live in an age when privacy is not a right or a privilege, but a peculiarity easily interrupted. Somewhere in all this exists a lesson to be learned: Next time you sign up for an e-mail account, use fake information.