U.S. man indicted for hacking Palin's e-mail account

A 20-year-old Tennessee man has been indicted for hacking into an e-mail account of U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, according to court records.

David C. Kernell was indicted Tuesday on a single charge of accessing a protected computer by a grand jury in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee in Knoxville. The indictment, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, was unsealed Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice said. (Read Columnist Paul McNamara's blog when the story first broke.)

Kernell, from Knoxville, turned himself in to law enforcement authorities and is scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday. He is the son of Mike Kernell, a Democratic state representative from Memphis.

The three-page indictment alleges that Kernell gained access to a Yahoo e-mail account used by Palin, the Republican governor of Alaska, on about Sept. 16. Palin was named Sen. John McCain's vice-presidential running mate in August.

The next day, the Wikileaks.org published several screen shots of Yahoo e-mail messages, e-mail addresses of Palin family members and associates, and other data that hackers claimed to have obtained from Palin's private account.

A hacking group known as Anonymous claimed to have gained access to Palin's gov.palin@yahoo.com account and sent the information to Wikileaks, which acts as an anonymous clearinghouse for leaked documents.

"Governor Palin has come under criticism for using private e-mail accounts to conduct government business and in the process avoid transparency laws," Wikileaks wrote in a note accompanying the material. "The list of correspondence, together with the account name, appears to re-enforce the criticism."

Bloggers had fingered Kernell as a suspect after linking him to the online name "rubico," used by the hacker who claimed to have accessed Palin's Yahoo account. Rubico claimed to have accessed the account by using Yahoo's password reset feature and answering security questions with publicly available information, and the indictment supports that claim. He guessed correctly that Palin had met her husband at Wasilla High.

The indictment alleges that Kernell posted screenshots of Palin's e-mails, e-mail addresses of her family members, pictures of her family and at least one mobile phone number to the 4chan.org Web site. It's unclear in the indictment how the information came to Wikileaks from 4chan.org, an image-based bulletin board.

Another person also reset the account's password and was able to access Palin's e-mail account, the indictment said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.