The trial of Kevin Underwood, accused of the gruesome murder of a young girl in Purcell, Oklahoma, took a strange twist last week in Cleveland County District Court as presiding Judge Candace Blalock accused a local TV station of hiring hackers to break into her computer and steal her email.
According to reports published on Valentine’s Day by state newspapers, controversy swirled around the trial after Oklahoma City television station KWTV-9 posted a story dated February 11 on their website. The story revealed the details of what was supposed to be a “sealed” decision by Judge Blalock, a decision that allowed certain statements to be admitted into evidence. The story may still be viewed on the Channel 9 website at kwtv.com/Global/story.asp?s=7855568.
Defense attorneys blamed prosecutors for leaking the story to the media, which appeared on the station’s website less than an hour after Judge Blalock emailed them her sealed decision. Prosecutors fired back, blaming defense attorneys for the leak. The judge, however, had her own ideas about how the story was leaked. She stated that she had emailed a preliminary copy of the decision to her personal email account so that she could work on it over the weekend, and that Channel 9 had probably gotten it from her computer. Then, she said something about the TV station that just about knocked me out of my easy chair when I read it: “I don’t doubt that they hire people to hack into computers.” “That’s what I think happened,” NewsOK.com quoted her as saying, “and I think that because I do not believe any of the lawyers involved here would violate (the order).”
Wow! That’s a pretty serious accusation coming from a judge. At first, I thought that maybe Judge Blalock was simply shooting off her mouth, talking off the top of her head, as it were. But, keeping in mind that judges are always supposed to be truthful, and never insincere, I must conclude that Her Honor actually believes that all of the attorneys involved in the case, and their staff (including her own) are above reproach, and that TV reporters hired hackers to steal her email. This led me to think about how someone could actually have stolen the judge’s email.
The easiest way to steal someone’s email is to know his or her email password. Perhaps the judge left her password on a Post-it note stuck to her computer monitor. If that was the case, then there wasn’t much “hacking” involved, but instead, slacking on the judge’s part; she should know better. The next easiest way to steal someone’s email is to guess his or her email password. If her password was something like “blalock123,” again, there wasn’t much hacking involved; anyone with a normal imagination could have guessed that password. I hope that by now, believing that hackers are out to steal her email, the judge has changed her password to something secure.
Another way to get someone’s password is to trick them into clicking on a link and following through with one of those fraudulent “we need you to visit our website and verify your password” emails. Once again, no real hacking involved with this ploy, just stupidity on the part of the victim. Closely aligned with this tactic is tricking someone into opening a malicious email attachment that could install a password-stealing program. Again, I would imagine that Judge Blalock knows better than to do such things. Most all of the other ways to “hack” someone’s email, such as network snooping, packet sniffing, packet analyzing, browser exploits, software exploits, operating system exploits, trojan/keylogger installation, password decryption and others, actually require some degree skill to pull off, and would only be successful if the judge was the specific target of a very focused and expensive attack. In addition, these attacks would usually be successful only against unpatched, unprotected computers that had not been updated, a condition that no prudent judge would tolerate. Since all prudent judges, knowing the importance of their work, would also be sure to encrypt their email communications, those intercepting their messages wouldn’t even be able to read what they had stolen.
Did Channel 9’s hired hackers steal Judge Blalock’s email? It’s possible, but not very likely. I think that the good judge has been watching too many Hollywood hacker movies, because such things just don’t happen that easily. Furthermore, stealing someone’s email, especially an important court decision from a judge, is a highly illegal crime. If the judge has “no doubt” that such a crime occurred, why has nobody been arrested?