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David Kernell indicted; faces five years in prison for accessing Palin’s email

Updated Dec 19th, 2018 6:05PM EST
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The saga continues. David Kernell, University of Tennessee student and son of Tennessee Democratic state representative Mike Kernell, has now been indicted by a grand jury in Knoxville Tennessee. What started as a prank that Kernell laughingly bragged about in an online forum has now become a nightmare that may land the 20-year-old in prison. Kernell, as you may recall, allegedly used Yahoo’s password reset mechanism to change the password for one of Governor Palin’s email accounts and then posted the new password on 4chan.org along with screen shots of her email. The FBI conducted an investigation with the help of ISP Parlov Media, cTunnel webmaster Gabriel Ramuglia and others that quickly lead them to Kernell, who reportedly fled the scene during an initial FBI raid of his on-campus residence. Earlier today, Kernell willingly turned himself in to the FBI and is scheduled to be arraigned before the day is through. It was initially believed that the culprit of the Palin email invasion would likely face a misdemeanor charge but the situation is much more serious in fact. If convicted, Kernell faces up to five years in prison and a fine to the tune of $250,000.

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Zach Epstein
Zach Epstein Executive Editor

Zach Epstein has been the Executive Editor at BGR for more than 15 years. He manages BGR’s editorial team and ensures that best practices are adhered to. He also oversees the Ecommerce team and directs the daily flow of all content. Zach first joined BGR in 2007 as a Staff Writer covering business, technology, and entertainment.

His work has been quoted by countless top news organizations, and he was recently named one of the world's top 10 “power mobile influencers” by Forbes. Prior to BGR, Zach worked as an executive in marketing and business development with two private telcos.