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On March 17, 2010, the magistrate judge presiding over the criminal case pending against the alleged hacker, David Kernell, issued a detailed and thorough ruling denying Mr. Kernell’s request for broad subpoena requests to rummage through Sarah Palin’s email account. The judge, U.S. District Judge C. Clifford Shirley, Jr. denied David C. Kernell’s motion to subpoena all of Governor Palin’s emails. Instead, the judge looked closely at the governments allegation against David Kernell, and Kernell’s defenses, and determined that the subpoenas the defense lawyer proposed sought, with one exception, completely irrelevant information to any issue pending in the case. Mr....

Lawyers for David Kernell, who is charged with hacking into Sarah Palin's webmail and posting her messages on the internet, are now claiming that their client's computer was infected with spyware. According to The Register: The contention may be used at trial to support arguments that the 21-year-old student son of a Tennessee Democrat politician was not personally responsible for the hack on a Yahoo! account maintained by the former Alaskan governor, which was traced back to an IP address used by Kernell. [...] Palin described the incident as hugely disruptive to the Republican presidential campaign in her recently published book....

Alleged Sarah Palin hacker, Kernell to wait another six months for trial by Robert McMillan, Security Blanket Tue, 2009-10-27 23:32 Topic(s): Data Protection It shouldn't come as a surprise, given all the motions flying before Judge C. Clifford Shirley, but alleged Sarah Palin hacker David Kernell's trial has been moved back six months. It was set to start today, but it turns out the judge moved it to April 20 2010 a few weeks back. Looks like there are about a dozen motions before the judge right now, including five motions to dismiss the indictment. Kernell was fingered as the...

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) - Three more federal charges have been filed against a University of Tennessee student charged with hacking into the personal e-mail account of Alaska Gov. and former Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

The son of a Democratic Tennessee state legislator surrendered to authorities in connection with the hacking of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's e-mail, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

I rarely partake in either political discussions or mob rage, but what has transpired with the Palin “hacker,” and Gawker, is to my mind the very dead end, the very suicide, of the media cogniscenti, of anybody who touches it with a bargepole, or pretends it is anything short of a lynching of everything this country aims to stand for. This is not “hacking.” Hacking sounds kind of cute, like surfing, like something faintly nerdy and ingenious. No — the word is “surveillance,” and the cultures that invented it and perfected it were dictatorships, most of which have crumbled and...

A Grand Jury in Chattanooga on Tuesday morning heard testimony into the alleged hacking of the personal e-mail of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Three young college-age people declined to comment as they entered the Federal Courthouse around 9 a.m. Security officers notified members of the media at 10:30 a.m. that the trio had exited the courthouse by another door. The three, including two males and a female, are apparently friends of a University of Tennessee student who is under investigation for the hacking. David Kernell is a UT student who is the son of a Democratic state legislator from...

Excerpt - WASHINGTON - The hunt for the hacker who broke into Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's personal e-mail account is shaping up to be a remarkably simple investigation, by the standards of major cybersecurity whodunits. ~ snip ~

Excerpt - David Kernell, the young Memphis man at the center of a controversy over Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s personal e-mail, has hired a Knoxville attorney to help him deal with the issue, his father, state Rep. Mike Kernell, said today. ~ snip ~ “He’s hired an attorney,” Mike Kernell said by phone this afternoon. Kernell confirmed that the lawyer is Wade V. Davies of Knoxville. ~ snip ~

Link to article here.

The federal government is pursuing their investigation into the University of Tennessee student accused of hacking into the personal Yahoo! email account of Alaskan Governor and Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Witnesses said agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched David Kernell’s apartment on Saturday around midnight. "He is a good guy,” said Ashley Menner, who has been Kernell’s neighbor since classes began in August. “He seems like a really nice guy and I’ve talked to him a few times." Menner was nearby when the FBI searched Kernell’s Fort Sanders Apartment, and had seen the accused hacker in...

How the Palin email hacker suspect was caught Thomas Lifson September 20, 2008 TGDaily, a tech site, explains how the suspected Palin email hacker, 20-year-old David Kernell, a student at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and son of Democratic Tennessee state representative Mike Kernell, was caught. He used a proxy server supposed to anonymize his identity, but the owner was quite upset at being used to cover illegal activities, and was also contacted by the FBI. Read the further details here. It is obvious from posts the hacker made that he was fully conscious of breaking the law. There is some...

The guy who hacked into would-be VP Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account is none other than the son of a Democratic state representative from Tennessee, posits GatwayPundit. A convincing amount of evidence suggests the “hacker” (perhaps a status he doens’t deserve) is David Kernell, son of Tennessee representative Mike Kernell.

http://www.mikefrancesa.com/wordpress/?p=1212Mike Kernell, a longtime Tennessee state assemblyman from Memphis and a technology enthusiast, is concerned about future elections because the new machines are harder to get a look at. ”We used to be able to check the machines and see if they’d been tampered with,” he said. ”It is now almost impossible.” Mr. Kernell wonders whether he will have to hire a computer programmer in his next race to make sure the machines are working smoothly and haven’t been tampered with. ”We’ve hit a brick wall,” he said.

It looks like Sarah Palin wasn’t the only target of an online hacker. Law enforcement officials are investigating claims that the private e-mail accounts of the Republican vice presidential candidate’s family and staff were also compromised. “Yesterday, the Department received a referral alleging that the personal e-mail accounts of Gov. Sarah Palin, her staff, and her family had been unlawfully hacked. The Department is reviewing the matter,” Justice Department spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said on Thursday. The FBI and Secret Service launched a formal investigation on Wednesday into the hacking of one of Palin’s Yahoo! e-mail accounts. Yahoo! declined to comment...

Cannot be posted due to copyright issues: http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/D4/20080918/NEWS01/80918041

I'm getting bombarded with e-mails claiming that at least one of the persons responsible for hacking into Sarah Palin's personal e-mail account is David Kernell, the son of Tennessee state representative & Democrat Mike Kernell. The evidence is that the hacker responsible uses the e-mail: rubico10@yahoo.com . That email was used at one time by a person named David Kernell. Democratic politician Mike Kernell has a son named David. Pretty thin, but it's a starting place. Also, earlier I posted that it would be relatively easy to track down the Palin hacker by comparing the Wikileak IPs to the IPs...