A federal jury found Tennessee man David Kernell, 22, guilty of felony obstruction of justice and unauthorized access of a computer, a misdemeanor, after he accessed a Yahoo! email account in September 2008 used by then-Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

The jury cleared Kernell after four days of deliberation on a charge of wire fraud but deadlocked on the charge of identity theft. Kernell faces a maximum of 20 years in prison for the felony charge and one year for the misdemeanor. Federal prosecutors are considering whether to retry the identity theft charge, according to the Knoxville News Sentinel. Kernell is currently free on bond and awaits sentencing.

Kernell managed to access Palin's Yahoo! account not so much through hacking, but by using commonly-known facts about Palin to access her account through Yahoo! password hint prompts, and then by re-setting the password of her account to "popcorn."

He then posted screenshots of Palin's emails to the /b/ section of 4chan (seriously NSFW), an image board and online hangout for Internet trolls. Because Kernell also posted the account's new password online, 4chan users proceeded to lock out the account through their log in attempts.

Kernell quickly became fearful that his actions could attract federal law enforcement attention and began deleting his hard drive--hence the obstruction of justice charge. Although Kernell did use a proxy anonymizing service, Ctunnel, the FBI had the proxy site administrator hand over his IP address logs, according to a Threat Level article at the time.   

Palin, in a Facebook post, said the verdict was "just," compared the incident to Watergate, and added that "we rightfully reject illegally breaking into candidates' private communications for political intrigue in an attempt to derail an election."

For more:
- read the Justice Department press release on Kernell's conviction
- see the Knoxville News Sentinel article
- read Sarah Palin's Facebook statement about this Watergate-like event

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