Put away your tinfoil hat.
Seriously.
This was a prank. It was perpetrated by a group of people across a number of internet message boards.
It did not originate on 4chan, either. Somebody else did the actual work of breaking the password (don't ask me, I don't know who it was), and when they realized the e-mails were totally innocuous, the e-mail password was leaked to 4chan to establish plausible deniability.
For the record, I wasn't involved. I found out about this on Tuesday night when I saw the thread where people on 4chan were "trying to hack the e-mail". I was amused by it, I cruised the thread to see what was happening, but I didn't participate.
This was not a political dirty trick- this was a prank perpetrated by a bunch of adolsecents and internet tough guys with no other purpose than to cause trouble.
What it should indicate to everyone is that first of all, free e-mail services are not a secure medium. Everyone should know this, for their own safety. And that Sarah Palin used an unsecured e-mail account to conduct government business is, in my mind, more important than the fact that somebody hacked it.
That it was hacked was inevitable, just like it was inevitable that Levi's MySpace page and personal blog would be found (before they were deleted), just like it was inevitable that Sarah Palin's Wikipedia page would be scrubbed by VRWC trolls.
Welcome to the Internet, folks. It's a wild and wooly world out here, and we like it that way. Learn to protect yourself or leave. And stop all the handwringing.
This was not Rove. This was not a dirty trick. This isn't even surprising. Hacking a Yahoo account, especially when it belongs to a public figure, is embarrasingly easy, and Sarah Palin should have known better.