Remember how about a year ago, Manuel Miranda was forced to resign from his job as a staffer for Senator Frist when it was found out he had read documents written by Democrat Senators urging obstruction of judicial nominees? And the files were publicly available. There were no computer restrictions on the computer resources, and Mr. Miranda notified the administrators who setup the network of this before the documents were publicized. I remember reading David Corn (sorry, cannot find link. Will update post if I find it) in The Nation that it was the equivalent of someone taking a file from the computer I use at work at my desk. Corn was wrong - my computer is password-protected under a corporate security policy, and if I share any of my resources, I cannot claim that anyone who has legal access to them is guilty of stealing them.
Now it has been found out that Democrats have been reading Republican-written memos for years. (full text of Congressional memo here) How did they get away with it? Because the network was never made secure by its administrators, and if a computer network's resources are shared (in this case shared among both Democrat and Republican personnel), then people who have legal access to those shared resources cannot be accused of wrongdoing for reading those files. At least that's the way it was when the Democrats were doing the "document perusal". But let a Republican staffer read a Democrat-written memo and all hell breaks loose.
Manuel Miranda deserves his job back, and the text of the memos, which deal with the subject of liberal special interest groups unduly influencing the judicial nominating process, deserve special consideration.
UPDATE:
David Corn's reaction to Memogate in The Nation
Manuel Miranda's statement