Behind the Palin E-Mail Hack; No Charges Yet
Ars Technica is reporting that while a grand jury is investigating the Palin e-mail hack, there are no charges yet:
The ongoing investigation into the hacking of Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s Yahoo e-mail account now appears to center on the son of a Democratic state legislator in Tennessee. A federal grand jury convened Tuesday morning in Chattanooga to hear testimony from friends of David Kernell, a 20-year-old economics student at the University of Tennessee whose apartment was raided by the FBI early Sunday morning, but ended their session for the day without issuing an indictment.
Kernell, whose father is Tennessee State Representative Michael Kernell, is the target of widespread speculation in the blogosphere. The attention came after a post appeared on the online chat board, 4chan, describing how it “took seriously 45 mins on wikipedia and google to find the info” needed to access the Alaska governor’s personal e-mail account using Yahoo’s password reset feature. (A Yahoo spokesperson indicated that the company is continually reviewing its security procedures, but had not planned any specific changes yet.)
Read on for some intriguing details. Here’s Wired’s story. Here’s TechCrunch and Wired on Sunday’s FBI raid search.
opinions powered by SendLove.to
5 Responses to “Behind the Palin E-Mail Hack; No Charges Yet”
It is interesting how soon this has gone to a grand jury.
I suspect this is about more than prosecuting a scrip kiddie who got lucky with a social engineering hack.
It is really a shot across the bow of the hackers in general. Hacking a Pres or VP candidate ain't like hacking NASA servers.
If you F**K with a candidate for one of the United States highest offices, we will come down on you fast and hard like the last days of Pompeii.
The kid has probably overwritten or tossed his hard drive if he was smart. However, they don't need this to get a conviction . . . or even to make a lesson of the kid. Sworn testimony from his friends . . . before they have time to get stories straight . . . can place him in a time and place.
The DOJ has to do this . . . and would have done so were it Obama or McCain or Biden who were hacked. The United States (despite the glee of liberals at potential Palin embarrassment) cannot have its leaders subject to the malicious whim of hackers.
It's a bit interesting though to think of the discussion that would be taking place if the hacker would have exposed something very very damning. I wonder in this case if we wouldn't be hearing more from “the ends justify the means” crowd.
If the gov't is allowed to read our emails and listen to our phone conversations (thank you FISA “compromise”), the opposite should be allowed as well.
Who's to say whether or not she was planning a terrorist attack?
Ok, so it's definitely not ok to hack into someone's personal email account. But (maybe I'm wrong here), I thought that all government business had to be conducted on government systems. Wasn't that the whole thing about the “lost” Cheney emails? If our government has to be willing to surrender their official emails on order of a judge or oversite committee, should those emails be going through a system like yahoo?
[...] Behind the Palin e-mail hack; no charges yet [...]