A local Tennessee television station has said that FBI officials served the son of Mike Kernell, a Democratic state representative from Memphis, with a search warrant early Sunday morning.

According to WBIR, the witness said that several FBI agents arrived at the Commons apartment complex in Knoxville, Tennessee around midnight where students were having a party. They showed their badges, took names and then asked everyone that didn’t live in the unit to leave. Witnesses say 20-year-old David Kernell and his friends fled the scene once the FBI arrived and that agents spent between an hour and a half and two hours taking pictures of the apartment.

However, as ComputerWorld reports, the younger Kernell may not even be the culprit. Last week, someone operating under the name of Rubico claimed that they had been the one to hack Palin’s personal Yahoo ! account. A few people did some ground work and found the Yahoo ! address, rubico10@yahoo.com. They put two and three together and came up with a YouTube account that matched the address. ComputerWorld reports that last week, Kernell’s father confirmed that it was indeed his son at the centre of all the web gossip.

Despite the fact that Kernell’s father confirmed his son was the person the blogosphere was talking about, the site also contacted the webmaster of the proxy site the screenshots showed the hacker used in the attack. Gabriel Ramuglia, who runs Ctunnel, said that while he had identified the IP address of whoever was responsible for the hack and had a fair idea where it was based, he was not in contact with the ISP and so, could not confirm the exact location.

"Because I’m not in contact with the Internet service provider, I’m not 100% sure of where the IP is based," he said. "But from what I can tell, the IP address doesn’t look consistent with the media reports."

The thick plottens. We’ll keep you updated as things progress with the Kernell story and Ramuglia’s theory that they could have the wrong person.

Related Links

WBIR
ComputerWorld