Fox News is reporting that 20-year-old David Kernell of Knoxville, Tenn., has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Knoxville for intentionally accessing without authorization the private e-mail account of Alaska governor Sarah Palin.
Kernell is the son of Tenn. democratic state Rep. Mike Kernell of Memphis, he turned himself in to federal authorities for arrest today.
Michelle Malkin has more here.
Update: Allahpundit asks:
“Any legal eagles (or techies, I guess) want to speculate on why it took the grand jury an extra three weeks to return the indictment? The last time I wrote about this, the FBI reportedly already had the IP logs in hand and had searched his dorm for corroborating evidence. What extra evidence would they have needed to produce to nudge the case over the line of probable cause?”
As a former cop and a techie there’s several reasons, first this is a high profile case that involves a vice presidential candidate… You can not make mistakes, everything has to be done “by the book”, all the T’s crossed and I’s dotted. Second the server logs and IP adresses can get you to the suspects front door but it’s forensic analysis of his or her computer that will established his or her guilt or innocence. Finally, cyber forensics is time consuming process.
The FBI and Secret Service more then likely had a short list of suspects within a day or two… Connecting the all the dots to identify a “prime suspect” and establish probable cause for a search warrant takes days or even weeks. Ditto for conducting a proper forensic analysis of the suspects computer(s) and writing all the reports. All in all I think the FBI and Secret Service handled this case pretty well.
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