Tuesday, a
federal grand jury in Knoxville
indicted David Kernell of Knoxville, Tennessee,
for having accessed Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! account without authorization.
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.
