You may remember a few weeks ago when vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! email account was hacked. This was revealed to be the work of David Kernell, the son of Tennessee Democratic State Representative Mike Kernell. David was indicted Wednesday morning, and faces a maximum of 5 years in prison and a $250,000 fine after turning himself in.
Mike has said that he had nothing to do with his son’s actions, but that hasn’t stopped the theories from circulating throughout the blogosphere. The fact that Kernell is a Democrat and an Obama supporter obviously is going to create some noise, whether that is justified or not. Some would even have you believe Kernell was just echoing the wishes of the Obama campaign, like this post at Deadenders:
He wasn’t working for the campaign even though he was following Michelle O’Angry’s words:
“Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone . . . Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual – uninvolved, uninformed.”
I don’t think Democrat vs. Republican is the real issue here. Perhaps what we should really be looking at is the fact that the information of our political figures is being hacked into at all and that their info is so easily hackable to begin with. Even Obama’s own site was hacked earlier this year. Then of course there was the recent hacking of influential political analyst Bill O’Reilly’s site after he bashed sites that would post information obtained from the breach of Palin’s account.
I think security is the issue here that is and will continue to be lost in a sea of political propaganda from either party. Luckily we have a medium to openly discuss these things, and don’t have to take a bias from any side as the definitive source on a matter. I guess that’s just the “new media” legitimacy champion in me.
Update: In an interesting turn of events, Kernell pled not guilty today according to ComputerWorld. His trial has been set for December 16th.
