Heat turned up on Palin hacker
By John Lister
The man accused of hacking into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account is facing tougher charges than expected. David Kernell (pictured) will now be tried for identity theft, wire fraud and obstruction of justice.
Kernell was originally charged last October with a single count of computer hacking following a raid on his college apartment. The raid and arrest came after a hacker reset the password on Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account and posted the new password online. Screenshots of Palin’s messages quickly appeared on the Wikileaks Web site.
A poster at a hacking site using the screenname Rubico claimed he had been responsible for the hacking and had simply figured out answers to security questions about Palin’s zip code and where she first met her husband. Fellow posters soon linked the screenname to Kernell through a YouTube account.
The hacker had also blundered by leaving the website address bar in the screen shots which appeared on Wikileaks. They showed he’d used a proxy service for ‘anonymous’ browsing; the service was able to give the FBI evidence showing the hacker operated from Kernell’s apartment block.
The new charges are a pretty harsh interpretation of the laws. The fraud charges don’t involve taking money, but instead relate to him ‘taking’ the e-mails and photographs stored on the account. Because of this, the hacking and identity theft (that is, posing as Palin) charges are both considered serious federal offenses because they were allegedly carried out in order to commit the fraud. The obstruction of justice charge involves destroying a document, likely a computer file.
That’s not to say that, if Kernell was the hacker, he isn’t technically guilty of all four charges. But it certainly looks as if prosecutors are using every weapon the law has to offer against him, raising the question of whether somebody breaking into an e-mail account that didn’t belong to a public figure would face such stiff consequences.
Kernell is the son of a Democratic state representative for Tennessee, though there’s no suggestion father Mike had any knowledge of his son’s alleged activities.
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