Kernell's motive at heart of legal debate in case of hacking Palin's e-mail
By Jamie Satterfield, Knoxville News Sentinel
Posted April 20, 2010 at 2:12 p.m.
Updated April 20, 2010 at 11:36 p.m.
Knoxville attorney Wade Davies, left, and his client David Christopher Kernell leave Federal Court Tuesday afternoon. [PHOTO BY PHOTO BY J. MILES CARY/KNOXVILLE NEWS SENTINEL]
KNOXVILLE — His roommate's reaction when a former University of Tennessee student announced he was trying to finagle his way into the private e-mail account of then vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin? Fat chance.
"He was trying to figure out the answer to one of her (password) security questions," David Omiecinski testified Tuesday of ex-roommate David Kernell of Germantown. "I was kind of taken aback, first, to think he would be able to do it, and, second, I didn't figure he'd be trying to do something like that."
Omiecinski was the first witness to take the stand in a trial that is expected to feature the testimony later this week of Palin, her husband and her daughter.
Kernell was a 20-year-old economics major at UT in September 2008. That's when he read a story about the possibility that Palin, then Alaska governor and running mate to Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain, was funneling gubernatorial business through a private Yahoo! e-mail account to avoid public scrutiny.
The son of longtime state Rep. Mike Kernell, D-Memphis, and a self-described "Obamacrat," David Kernell decided to see if he could access the account. The reason forms the crux of the legal debate framed in U.S. District Court on Monday by opposing sides that, earlier that day, had selected a group of six women and eight men from East Tennessee to serve as a 12-person jury with two alternates.
Federal prosecutor Mark Krotoski told jurors Kernell's motive was political.
"The evidence will show the defendant hoped to derail the (Republican presidential) campaign," Krotoski said.
Defense attorney Wade Davies countered that Kernell was merely being curious and never believed a prominent political figure like Palin would use a poorly protected Yahoo! account.
"This is a case about a prank, not a crime," Davies said. "The evidence will show he acted out of curiosity."
Omiecinski told jurors Kernell didn't like Palin's politics but "never wanted to hurt her."
Omiecinski was trying to go to sleep inside the Commons apartment he shared with Kernell and two other UT students when, just after midnight, he heard a knock on his bedroom door.
"It was David," he said. "He told me to come to his room to check this stuff out."
His computer screen was opened to an Internet page used to change the password on a Yahoo! account and a Wikipedia page on Palin. Omiecinski is a computer science major who rated Kernell's computer skills as typical of a game-playing college student.
He said he was shocked to later learn that Kernell had actually managed to reset Palin's password and posted "screenshots" of some of the contents of the account onto the 4chan Internet discussion board.
According to opening statements and initial testimony, once Kernell accessed Palin's account, he used a proxy service to try to conceal his own Internet identity, took computer photographs of the inbox page and two e-mails and copied photographs contained in the account onto his own desktop.
Krotoski told jurors that Kernell posted those screenshots onto 4chan, along with the new password he created for the account, to boast of his exploits and to allow others to peruse the account.
Davies countered that 4chan users belittled Kernell and his claims of accessing the account so he posted the screenshots to prove himself, an action he immediately regretted.
Davies was careful in opening statements not to declare Kernell innocent.
"The bottom line is this is a case of a 20-year-old college student who did something he shouldn't have done," he said.
But Davies contends that federal authorities slapped Kernell with four major felonies, including identity theft and wire fraud, solely because Palin is the alleged victim. He is urging jurors to affix Kernell with what he says is the more appropriate conviction -- a misdemeanor unauthorized computer access.