Likely, you’re astute enough to watch the candidates and make your own judgments about their intellectual capacities. It would be inordinately hopeful, though, to expect natural skepticism in all instances of reported IQ scores. Indeed, cognitive dissonance is more often the enforcer of bias rather than alarm of truth: If you already think Sarah Palin’s dumb, then discovering “proof” of an 83 IQ—just eight points higher than Forest Gump—is enough to solidify the belief. Worse, if you’re convinced she’s brilliant, seeing said “proof” would nary make a dent into that perception, even if the proof was rock solid—which it is isn’t.

Two camps have arisen recently arguing the veracity of the Internet. Inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has taken the pessimist side—the side acknowledging that on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog—and has called for some kind of verification or trust system to identify reliable sources. Meanwhile, Arianna Huffington praises the Internet as a repository for truth so powerful it has taken down the Rovian smear machine.

But at least in this one aspect—the respective IQs of the candidates—the truth was incredibly hard to come by, if really, truly out there somewhere on the vast Web. Google Web search results and Google News search results brought back bupkis from so-called reputable sources. Blogs with clear political leanings, forum posts, and a gossip site or two were the best one could get.

Our journey began with sightings of various Google text ads declaring the IQs of the candidates, and sometimes celebrities. John McCain, it stated, has an IQ of 138. Paris Hilton’s is 120. Sarah Palin’s reported IQ in the ads changed from 118 to 126. (Can’t have her being dumber than Paris Hilton, right?). The ads invite the reader to discover if they are smarter than the person mentioned.

Obviously, I never found out my score. Another company running the ads is not Joe The Plumber or Joe Six Pack, but JoeTec Networks, Inc., whose About Us page is coming soon and owns FastFreeIQTest.com. JoeTec’s test is a bit lengthier, a little more on the reasoning side (but trivia questions are there too), and there are lots of opportunities to sign up for stuff along the way. You’ll have to give them your email address to get the results.

That makes me 0 for 2 today to discover how smart I am. I wasn’t about to give them my email address, at least through their quiz sites. Neither company got back with me to let me know where they sourced their candidate IQ information.

“The Internet,” the representation of which we grant to Google’s top 10 results, isn’t any help in settling the matter. Guesstimates abound. The aforementioned 83 score is present everywhere a person could do a drive-by post, a CBS sports forum, for example, and comes from a posting of a supposed official graph. In addition to that “evidence,” are Palin’s grades and SAT scores. A mediocre 2.2 GPA was quite good in comparison to a composite 841 SAT score, which at one time would have correlated to an 89 IQ.

Good thing, then, we have sites like Snopes.com and FactCheck.org, which unfortunately didn’t pop up in the Google results. Snopes, which also verifies Obama’s birth certificate, declared Palin’s posted scholastic records as hoaxes, mentioning also it would be difficult to get into the Honors Society with a 2.2 GPA.

What’s her real IQ? The campaign hasn’t been super forthcoming about that, but some dude from Alaska guarantees it’s “at least 120” based on her survival in Alaskan politics and that she was a bookworm in junior high. Other accounts concur, citing also her bachelor’s degree, which still others say would give her an automatic 115 (the average IQ for a college graduate). Yahoo Answers proves its worth once again, suggesting Palin’s IQ is 34D.

Likely a score reflecting male intelligence once laying eyes on her.

Is John McCain’s IQ really 138? Not unless it’s changed from Time’s 1999 report, citing military tests that put his IQ at 133, placing him in the gifted category rather than the near-genius one, so not a bad showing.

Obama and Biden? Well, if you ask Biden, he’s lots smarter than you and somebody somewhere out there says 146. Obama? Current estimations peg him between 130 and 148, based on the average LSAT score of Harvard Law attendees. One source says Affirmative Action special treatment of minorities bumps him down to 116, but he cites average SAT scores for admission to Harvard’s undergraduate program, which are a different test and different (lesser) program, making that number as or meaningless as numbers that have come before.

Conclusion: It’s still really, really hard to find accurate political information online unless you already know the reputable sites to begin with. Google failed this particular test when it comes to bringing back reliable, relevant sources. Not that print or TV or radio media are any better.
 

Given what is being described as a major breach of confidentiality and privacy on the part of the republican candidate, Veracode has an idea of exactly how the yahoo mail hack was carried out via the Yahoo password reset screen. If you know basic information about the person you are interested in, and have access to the backup e-mail account that the person uses, you can get a password reset sent to that other account.

So if you back up is an account that someone else has access too, regardless of who they are, the yahoo password reset function will work just the way it was intended. The problem is that at least the backup account has to be compromised in some manner to make this work. The data though that is in Wikileaks is a lot of information that investigators were wanting to get but were being difficult to get legally. None of the information on Wikileaks can be used in court, and odds are now that the account has been compromised, none of the yahoo information can be used either. Wikileaks reports that:

Circa midnight Tuesday the 16th of September (EST) activists loosely affiliated with the group ‘anonymous’ gained access to U.S. Republican Party Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account gov.palin@yahoo.com and passed information to Wikileaks. Governor Palin has come under criticism for using private email accounts to conduct government business and in the process avoid transparency laws. The zip archive made available by Wikileaks contains screen shots of Palin’s inbox, two example emails, address book and a couple of family photos. The list of correspondence, together with the account name tends to re-enforce the criticism. Following the release of this story, both Sarah Palin’s better known account gov.sarah@yahoo.com and the gov.palin@yahoo.com account have been suspended or deleted as revealed by a test email sent to these addresses by Wikileaks. Although the reasons for the deletion of both accounts can not not yet be established, one interpretation is that Palin is trying to destroy her email records. Source: Wikileaks

This hack brings home the idea to the candidates that information security is something that needs to be talked about at a national level if we are to be successful in defending cyberspace in the USA. This is the kind of example that will bring a deeper focus at least on the vice presidential candidate that we need some very real information security, and she will have her own story to tell about it. This is not a good thing on many levels, because the data has now been compromised and is useless to law enforcement in case she really was doing something that she should not have been doing. So while the hackers on this one might have provided the data in the yahoo mail account, in the end they might have ended up compromising the entire State of Alaska investigation into Governor Paulin’s actions.

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