During the 2008 presidential elections, when Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, ran as the Republican vice presidential candidate (John McCain was the GOP presidential candidate), a hacking incident occurred. UT student David Kernell, son of longtime Memphis Democratic State Representative Mike Kernell, decided to attempt to hack into Palin’s Yahoo! e-mail account following rumors that she conducted gubernatorial business through the account. He guessed her password by reading information about her on Google and Wikipedia, changed the password, gained access to the account, and boasted about it on an Internet discussion board.
Federal authorities imposed four felony charges. At his trial in April, jurors rejected a wire fraud charge outright, reduced a felony illegal e-mail access charge to a misdemeanor, deadlocked on an identity theft count, and convicted Kernell of the felony charge of anticipatory obstruction of justice. Federal US Circuit Judge Thomas Phillips upheld the conviction, and defense attorney Wade Davies appealed to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. The court upheld the decision, and in November 2010, two years after David Kernell had guessed his way into the Republican vice presidential nominee’s private Yahoo! e-mail account, he was sentenced to a year and a day, with the recommendation that he be allowed to serve the sentence in a Knoxville halfway house. Judge Phillips also ruled that Kernell could continue to attend Pellissippi State while serving his sentence. (The US Bureau of Prisons sent him to a work camp.)
The trial was one of the district’s most expensive and high-profile federal trials, with Palin and her reality-star daughter Bristol Palin taking turns in the witness chair alongside principals from Yahoo! and Facebook. Kernell appealed the obstruction conviction, and in January 2012 the 6th District Court of Appeals upheld the conviction.