Cyber crimes are rampant in America today. Frequently they involve theft of identity metrics used to tap the victim’s credit. As I reviewed in a recent piece for the BBC, however, the Department of Justice has allocated few resources to investigate these crimes except in very large scale and systematic cases—that is crimes in which there is a clear criminal purpose and a clear victim, and tens of millions at stake. Generally the Department has not acted in cases in which the result of the intrusion is merely to embarrass the target, for a fairly obvious reason. At best we’re only talking about a misdemeanor. The Palin email hacking case quite plainly falls into this category. So what is going on?