March 9, 2009 by Matt Thomas
A Tennessee student who hacked into the email account of former Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has been handed three felony charges. David Kernel, an amateur computer hacker, plead not guilty to the charges on Monday.
The charges levied against the student are as follows, unlawful electronic transmission of material outside Tenessee, fraud and attempts to conceal records. These charges are in addition to the initial charge of unauthorised access of a protected computer.
The new charges were levied in response to questions raised by the defence as to the soundness of that original charge. Essentially their argument was that under US law, accessing a protected computer without authorisation should be charged as a misdemeanour unless it is part of a separate or bigger crime. The prosecutors had argued that the further crime was accessing Palin’s actual email account, though, as the defence rightly pointed out, this was a little thin.
It’s likely that Kernel did very little damage by accessing the actual account, though some would argue that some damage has been done to Palin’s reputation. The fact that a none-too-gifted hacker was able to reset the personal Yahoo account of a Vice-Presidential candidate using publicly available information shows a shocking naivety about internet security on the part of Mrs. Palin.
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