Tuesday, a
federal grand jury in
The young man, aged 20, is the son of Mike Kernell, a Democratic lawmaker of the aforementioned state and the chairman of Tennessee's House Government Operations Committee.
A statement made by the Justice Department informed that Kernell had been scheduled to be arraigned before United States Magistrate Judge C. Clifford Shirley on Wednesday. During the hearing, the man pleaded not guilty.
David Kernell is an economics student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville who, on September 16, allegedly hacked into Palin’s e-mail by reseting her password. All it took was some searching the Web for personal information on the Alaska governor: her birthday, her zip code and most importantly, the answer to her security question concerning the place where she had met her husband. After resetting her password to „popcorn,” Keller took snapshots of her account details, her address book and other private content and posted it to the Wikileaks Website.
According to the Justice Department, the case concerning Sarah Palin’s e-mail hacking was being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Greg Weddle of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Tennessee, alongside section chief Michael DuBose and trial attorney Mark Krotoski of the criminal division's computer crime and intellectual property section.
Kernell stands to receive a punishment of up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and a three-year period of supervised release.
His trial has been scheduled for December 16. Until then, he is under no circumstances to own a computer and the court has ordered that he use the Internet only to check his e-mail and complete his class work.
Judge C. Clifford Shirley has also prohibited Kernell from discussing the case with potential witnesses including his roommates and from having any contact with Palin or members of her family. If the student fails to comply with these rules, he is to be held in federal custody up to the date of the trial.
In September, two Yahoo! accounts of Sarah Palin, gov.sarah@yahoo.com and gov.palin@yahoo.com, were deleted after a hacker that called himself „Rubico” broke into her e-mail.
At that time, the FBI and the US Secret Service kicked off an investigation into the hacking, trying to track down the one responsible for it, by tracing the original web address, which the latter had routed through the CTunnel proxy service before having performed the felony, back to the hacker(s).
Nevertheless, soon after, a controversy revolving around the definition of „electronic storage” arose, the Department Of Justice stating that the phrase referred only to unopened content. And since there was no evidence that the hackers had accessed unread messages, they could have avoided prosecution due to this DOJ loop-hole, although the federal Stored Communication Act clearly forbids prohibits unauthorized access of a person’s wire or electronic communication while the content is in electronic storage. The Act also states that electronic storage includes both read or unopened e-mails.
Sarah Palin is the Republican Party’s nominee for United States vice-president in the up-coming elections and Senator John McCain’s running-mate. The latter has been nominated by the GOP to candidate for president of the United States.