David Kernell, the 20-year-old Tennessee college student who hacked U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s e-mail account, has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Knoxville, Tenn.

The youngster has turned himself to the FBI and is expected to be arraigned later today before Judge C. Clifford Shirley according to a U.S. Department of Justice spokesman. If convicted, Kernell faces up to 5 years behind bars and a fine of $250,000.

The indictment accuses David Kernell (son of Democratic Rep. Mike Kernell of Tennessee) of gaining unauthorized access to Governor Palin's Yahoo e-mail account by resetting the password using Yahoo's password recovery tool. According to court papers, the student hacker reset Palin’s e-mail account password to “popcorn.” He managed to do this by correctly answering a series of personal security questions. He found the answers after a little research that took him under an hour.

On Sept. 17, Kernell used the pseudonym "Rubico" to show off on the Internet 4chan forum the recipe of his successful hacking of Palin’s e-mail account. He said that the hacking began as a prank and took only 45 minutes. But after breaking in, he checked all the messages in the account hoping he would find something incriminating.

Kernel also made screenshots of some messages in Governor Palin’s e-mail account as well as of some e-mail addresses of family members, pictures and one cell phone number. This prompted the court to accuse the student of providing "the means of access to the e-mail account to others, and at least one other individual successfully used the reset password to access Governor Palin's e-mail account."

The teenager also stands accused of removing, altering, concealing and covering up files on his laptop when facing a criminal probe.