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Investigators from the FBI searched the apartment of a University of Tennessee student Sunday morning looking for leads into the hacking of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's e-mail account, according to WBIR, an NBC affiliate in Knoxville, Tenn.
The suspect, David Kernell, is the son of Tennessee state legislator Mike Kernell, a Democratic representative from Memphis. Mike Kernell last week confirmed that his son was the subject of speculation about the Palin e-mail hack, but did not say David Kernell was officially being investigated.
"I had nothing to do with it, I had no knowledge or anything," Mike Kernell reportedly told the Associated Press Monday. "I was not a party to anything of this nature at all. I wasn't in on this -- and I wouldn't know how to do anything like that."
Meanwhile, Gabriel Ramuglia, the owner of the Internet proxy service believed to have been used by the Palin e-mail hacker said he couldn't link David Kernell to what Ramuglia said was the IP address of the hacker.
The FBI served a federal search warrant on the residence of David Kernell in Knoxville's Fort Sanders neighborhood, breaking up a party at the apartment unit and spending between one-and-a-half and two hours taking pictures inside, an unidentified witness told WBIR.
Witnesses also said Kernell and some friends fled the apartment when the FBI agents arrived, WBIR reported. The student and his three roommates have been subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury this week in Chatanooga, according to news reports.
Palin's Web-based Yahoo e-mail account was hacked last week and some screenshots of the Alaska governor's messages were posted on Internet forum 4chan.org, where the governor's username and password were also reportedly posted before being taken down by site administrators. Some of the messages were later reposted by technology-oriented gossip site Gawker.com and elsewhere.
WikiLeaks.org, a self-styled whistleblower site that publishes anonymous submissions of sensitive material, has confirmed the hack of Palin's e-mail account, as have officials for John McCain's presidential campaign.
A 4chan.org user called "Rubico" last week posted what the user claimed was a first-person account of how the hack was carried out. This post on 4chan.org's notorious "/b/" Web board followed the removal of the password information to access Palin's account on 4chan.org, and the actions of a 4chan.org user who reportedly reset Palin's password so others couldn't access her e-mail account. This user, whom Rubico refers to as a "white knight f***er," also notified a friend of the Alaska governor about the hack.
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