Ride the Lightning

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT: PALIN'S HACKER CHARGED

October 8, 2008

It has just been reported that David Kernell (20), of Knoxville, TN has been charged with accessing Governor’s Palin’s Yahoo! e-mail account without authority. See my previous blog post for details of the hack. Kernell is an economics student at the University of Tennessee. I’m sure he now wishes he had been studying rather than trying to engineer his way into Palin’s account.

He pled not guilty. The court released him without bail, but forbid him to own a computer and restricted his Internet use to checking his e-mail and class work.

Kernell’s father is longtime state Rep. Mike Kernell of Memphis, chairman of Tennessee’s House Government Operations Committee and a Democrat. David Kernell was indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury in Knoxville and faces a maximum of five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and three years of supervised release. Trial is set for Dec. 16th.

As I tell my precociously bright daughters, no one is as bright as they think they are when they set out to commit an electronic crime. In spite of the old comic adage, sometimes on the Internet, they do know when you’re a dog.

Hat tip to Debbie Knapp for sounding the alarm on this one.

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