A federal grand jury convened Tuesday in Chattanooga, Tenn., to hear testimony relating to the hacking of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s personal Yahoo e-mail account, but ended without leveling any charges. Federal prosecutors said the investigation is ongoing.
In a closed-door session, the grand jury heard testimony from three roommates of University of Tennessee student David Kernell, 20, who is suspected of illegally accessing the Republican vice-presidential nominee’s account. Kernell’s father is Democratic Tennessee State Rep. Mike Kernell of Memphis, whose political affiliation has set the blogosphere a-twitter, but there are no credible suggestions of national political involvement.
Wade Davies, the attorney representing Kernell, issued a brief statement saying, “We are confident that the truth will emerge as we go through this process. David is a decent and intelligent young man, and I look forward to assisting him during this difficult period.”
Kernell became the leading suspect because of electronic crumbs left in cyberspace. When screenshots and a description of the break-in were posted to the 4chan imageboard, the author used the handle rubico, suspiciously similar to the Yahoo ID rubico10 associated with Kernell.
In addition, only one anonymous proxy was used to mask the hacker’s IP address. Ten years ago that might have stymied the Department of Justice, but a huge amount of money has since been spent upgrading the government’s cyber-investigation capabilities. The break-in was quickly tracked to the proxy Ctunnel, whose logs showed that a particular IP address accessed Yahoo mail, reset Palin’s password, and then visited 4chan.
That IP address was linked to the apartment complex where Kernell lives. The FBI executed a search warrant for Kernell’s apartment during a Sunday evening party. In addition to taking pictures, the FBI also seized computer equipment for forensic analysis.
There are at least two federal criminal statutes that could affect this…