I don't usually like to get involved in partisan sniping--mostly because I tend to take a "pox on both your houses" attitude--but the Republican response to this scandal/controversy about the stolen memos is completely off the wall. See, for example, this article .

First, some quick background, for those who haven't been following it the past few days. Over the past several months, internal (and sometimes embarassing) memos from Democrats in the U.S. Senate have mysteriously wound up in the hands of conservative columnists. After an investigation, it was discovered that the memos were obtained by Republican staffers off of a shared computer network. The Democrats had apparently inadvertently or unknowingly turned on file sharing on their Windows computers without setting a password.

The Democratic response has been outrage, both for taking the files to begin with, and for not informing anyone of the security hole.

The response from some Republican bloggers can basically be summed up as, "Well, that's what you should expect, you dummies, if you don't set a password. Maybe it was unethical to read your files, but it was hardly criminal."

The best way to view this situation is to strip it of any technological overtones by looking at a physical-world analogy. The analogy is simple: The Democrats forgot to lock their office doors and filing cabinets in the Senate Office Building. A couple of Republican staffers noticed this, and snuck in without telling anyone, rifled through the Democrats' filing cabinets, and copied some files which they thought might be politically embarrassing or strategically useful.

Put in these terms, there's a word whose legal definition fits the situation perfectly: burglary. The fact that the burglary was committed electronically instead of in a physical filing cabinet is a distinction with a difference only in the technical legal definitions.

Depending on the laws in the District of Columbia, there's a good chance it fits the legal definition of computer crime. I know that it would be a felony in Minnesota.

So, rather than suggesting that this is "no big deal," I suggest that the Republicans take a cue from Watergate, and make an effort to punish the individuals responsible, before the cover-up becomes a bigger story than the crime.