Yesterday, hackers claimed to have hacked Alaska Governor and Republican running mate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! e-mail account. The loosely-connected hacker group, calling itself Anonymous, has taken credit for the hack, and has posted screenshots of Governor Palin’s e-mail account on the whistleblower site Wikileaks.

Wikileaks is a “whistleblower” website which allows users to anonymously publish sensitive government, corporate or religious documents, to verify their veracity, and to protect submitters from prosecution. The site is heavily involved in fighting censorship in general and that of the Chinese government in particular, as many staff members are said to be Chinese dissidents.

The documents posted by the hackers on Wikileaks include five screenshots of the gov.palin@yahoo.com email account, two digital photos of Governor Palin’s family (which were not until that moment on the public domain) and an address book. Aside from emails to Alaskan Lieutenant Governor Sean Parnell, there seems to be no traffic related to any official government business.

The attack follows allegations that Governor Palin was using a private email account to conduct state business, thus circumventing transparency laws that require all documents relating to official government business be made public, archived and not destroyed.

Both the gov.palin@yahoo.com and the gov.sarah@yahoo.com e-mail addresses owned by Governor Palin seem to have been shut down, according to investigators.

It is unknown what methods the hackers used to infiltrate Gov. Palin’s e-mail account, however screenshots published by the group show that they have used a web proxy to help hide their traces.