All Things Digital

THIS internet was serious business, yes I was behind a proxy, only one, if this … ever got to the FBI I was f–ked.”

– Excerpt from a message posted to 4chan.org by someone claiming to have hacked into Gov. Sarah Palin’s Yahoo Mail account

Five years in prison, a $250,000 fine and a three-year term of supervised release. That’s the maximum sentence facing the Tennessee college student who was indicted today on charges that he broke into Gov. Sarah Palin’s private email account last month. According to a statement from the FBI, David C. Kernell–an economics major at the University of Tennessee and the son of Tennessee state legislator Mike Kernell–was indicted by a federal grand jury for “gaining unlawful access to stored communications and obtaining information from a protected computer via interstate communication,” or as the McCain campaign described it, “a shocking invasion of the Governor’s privacy and a violation of the law.”

Kernell entered the not guilty plea at the hearing and was released on bond with the following conditions:

• He may not leave the Eastern District of Tennessee without court permission.
• He may not possess a computer.
• He may use the Internet for classwork only.
• He may not have any contact with Gov. Sarah Palin or her family.

A trial date has been set for Dec. 16.

If I go down, you all go down. That’s the personal philosophy former CA CEO Sanjay Kumar appears to have embraced after serving a few years in prison for conspiracy, securities fraud and obstruction of justice. In a 27-page affidavit filed in court Tuesday, the disgraced Kumar claims that several current and former directors were aware of the company’s … generally unaccepted accounting practices and concealed them from government investigators. Smeared in the affidavit: board members Lewis Ranieri and former U.S. Senator Alfonse D’Amato, as well as company co-founder Russell Artzt and former CEO Charles Wang.

Kumar alleges they were all aware of the infamous “35-day month” ploy for which he and eight other former CA (CA) officials took the fall. “Wang was not only aware of the accounting improprieties, such as the 35-Day Month, he also actively participated in concealing those improper accounting practices. … Wang knew that CA’s quarters were ‘open’ for five days into the next month per his directive, and he sometimes instructed CA to keep CA’s books ‘open’ after the usual ‘five days’ to execute license agreements and recognize revenue from those agreements in the previously ended quarters.”

Damning allegations and ones Wang, D’Amato, et al., vigorously deny.
Said a spokesman for Ranieri and D’Amato: “[Kumar] from jail continues to be a stranger to the truth.”

If Fouad Mourtada spends the next three years in prison for creating a fake profile of a Moroccan prince on Facebook, it won’t have been the social-networking site that put him there. Facebook insists it didn’t help the Moroccan government identify the 26-year-old engineer as the author of crown prince Moulay Rachid’s fake Facebook page. Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker said in a statement that the company shares information with law enforcement and other government agencies only “when it has a good-faith belief it is legally obligated to do so.” But with regard to the bogus profile that led to Mourtada’s arrest, “Facebook has shared no such information with the Moroccan authorities,” she said.

So if not Facebook, then who? Advocacy group Reporters Without Borders suspects Mourtada’s ISP, Maroc Telecom. “Did the police get his computer’s IP address? And if so, how? We have asked the ISP, Maroc Telecom, in which the French company Vivendi is a shareholder, to provide us with the relevant information.”