Ed Felten has a summary of the technical and legal issues in the report on the file pilfering by a Republican Senate staffer. If you’re not familiar with this story, a clerk working for Republicans on the Senate Judiciary committee figured out that he could access files that belonged to Democrats stored on a server used by all members of the committee. The Republicans went on to use the files to plot their strategy and selectively leaked them to the press. It’s kind of a shame for the Democrats that they didn’t have anyone on the scene who knew the first thing about computer security.