The FBI has raided on Sunday the apartment of the alleged hacker who broke into Sarah Palin's Yahoo email using social engineering. The guy is named David Kernell, a student at the University of Tennessee, and he's the son of Tennessee Democratic state representative Mike Kernell. Three of his roommates could testify before a Chattanooga grand jury as they were subpoenaed, and a grand jury is reportedly set to convene on Tuesday.

No charges have been filed yet, and there was a party going on at the place when agents arrived. They asked everybody out and conducted a search for almost two hours. Meanwhile, local media reported that the partymen fled the scene, including the suspected hacker, David Kernell.

Apparently, Kernell Jr. bragged about hacking Sarah Palin's address on the Internet forum 4chan, a forum connected to the online activists Anonymous. He connected through a proxy, CTunnell.com, whose owner has apparently turned him in to authorities. However, there's a slight problem. The Georgia man who runs the CTunnell.com proxy service told Computerworld that the IP address he's traced "doesn't look consistent" with reports in the media about the identity and location of David Kernell.

Gabriel Ramuglia, the webmaster of Ctunnel, also said that the FBI already had an IP address from some other source that they searched for in his logs. The hacker, whose online handle is Rubico, claimed that the online research needed to reset Palin's password took just 45 minutes.

Screen captures of her Yahoo Inbox were posted after the hack on wikileaks.org, the anonymous whistleblower website, which was taken offline subsequently, for a significant period of time, apparently by U.S. authorities in a censorship effort. Several prominent websites such as Gawker refused to yield to censorship.

While no real dirt was found in Palin's mailbox, it is clear that she was using her private account to do government business, a common way of evading accountability inherent with using official email addresses. However, circumventing the message retention features of the government network, she also circumvented the security features which would not have enabled a hacker to gain access so easily to her stuff.

Sarah Palin and her aides are already under fire for using their private email accounts to do government business. A local Republican activist is trying to get Palin to release more than 1,100 e-mails she withheld from a public records request.

Using a Yahoo email address was just dumb for Sarah Palin and indeed highlights her utter disregard for common security practices. Yahoo features a password reset feature which makes use of personal data to gain access to an account (smart...). This means that a public figure could be easily targeted should he use real information in his Yahoo account.