The latest from the Obama campaign
Protest the McCain/Palin appearance in Media, PA (Organizing)
Anti-McCain Protest: Media, PA Stop The Lies! Hosted by: Greater Media Nether Providence PA Team Where: Delaware County Courthouse When: Monday, Sept 22nd, 3:00 pm
David Kernell's friends are not doing him any favours.
Devon Holbrook is a UT student from Memphis who grew up with Kernell. He was shocked to hear from mutual friends that David was in some serious trouble.
"I went on Google, and the first thing I saw is David's picture and articles talking about what had happened," Holbrook said. "I immediately started freaking out."
When Holbrook confirmed the news about the FBI frenzy surrounding his longtime friend, he started calling but wasn't able to connect with Kernell.
"I would love to know where he is and know he's alright."
Holbrook says Kernell loves chess, economics, and talking about politics.
"I would definitely say he's more to the left in terms of politics, but he's never really been active as far as political groups or anything like that," Holbrook added.
However under a different name, Kernell's political views are all over several websites.
"He goes by the name Rubico," Holbrook said.
A blogger named Rubico admitted to the web community he broke into Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's e-mail, saying it was easy.
In response to The Jawa Report expose.
The idea for the video was mine. No one paid me to produce it. The only out-of-pocket cost will be the fee for the voice-over narrator, which I will pay personally when I receive an invoice. Contrary to the allegation in the Jawa Report, the voice-over artist has never done any work for the Obama campaign. I retained her through a talent agency based solely on the quality of her voice.
These noose tightens on social engineer and Obamacrat David Kernell.
The man who traced the IP address of the hacker who accessed Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's e-mail account last week confirmed today that it belongs to an Illinois company that provides Internet service to the Knoxville, Tenn., apartment complex where the FBI served a search warrant early Sunday.
Gabriel Ramuglia, the webmaster of Ctunnel, an Athens, Ga.-based proxy service used by the hacker to mask his or her identity, acknowledged that the IP address he found in his server logs belongs to Pavlov Media, an Internet service provider based in Champaign, Ill.
Ramuglia said Sunday that the IP address he found in the proxy service logs didn't "look consistent" with reports identifying Kernell. By today, however, he had changed his mind.
"It became clear that the ISP, in addition to serving Illinois, also serves Tennessee, which means that the IP address could actually be consistent with the news reports," Ramuglia said today.
If you haven't read The Jawa Report's expose on alleged Astroturfing by Democrats to smear Sarah Palin, then you should read it now.
Those who have read it will get a kick out of this.
John McCormack of The Weekly Standard has contacted one of the alleged Astroturfers with hillarious results.
A YouTube video that appears to have been produced by the PR firm Winner & Associates falsely claims Sarah Palin is a member of the Alaskan Independence Party. Shackleford has evidence that Jared Liu-Klein, an Associate at Winner & Associates, posted this video on website DemocraticUnderground.com more than a week after reports of Sarah Palin's membership in the party had been debunked.
I just spoke with Liu-Klein on the phone and asked him about the matter, but he said that he would have to get back to me later. I gave him my email address and asked if he could give me a simple yes or no answer if he had ever posted a video on the Internet about Sarah Palin and the Alaskan Independence Party. Liu-Klein replied: "I'll have to get back to you as soon as I can." Then he hung up the phone. I'll post Liu-Klein's response if and when I get it.
I wonder if Liu-Klein realizes that as the lowest man on the totem poll here, he's the obvious fall-guy: "We regret an overly eager employee decided to hijack our YouTube accounts for his own unauthorized political purposes..."
I know this is totally the behaviour of someone who has done nothing wrong.
According to witnesses, the raid came while several neighbors were partying after the University of Tennessee verse Florida football game
“This black SUV came up, and all these guys got out with equipment and they had a big black bag with high tech stuff in it,” said Jarrett Mooneyham, who was at the apartment. “It was just a big ordeal and everybody was drunk, so it was really chaotic."
Mooneyham said the agents were looking for Kernell, but never found him because he was hiding out on the second floor of the complex with some of his friends.
Just thinking out loud here:
Dozens of unsubstantiated rumors about Sarah Palin and her family have been blasted out onto the Internet over the last 10 days, seemingly starting within hours of her introduction.
These slurs start on left-wing blogs (and left-wing blogs that insist they're right-wing), and soon fill up blog comments everywhere.
The smears are then read by "journalists," who spread them to their audience.
They're almost instantly debunked.
This keeps happening over and over, even though it's not working.
It seems unlikely that so many independent bloggers and blog commenters would suddenly and simultaneously become self-described experts on somebody who most people hadn't heard of two weeks ago.
It's more probable that these lies and half-truths are coming from a single source and are being made to look like the work of a grassroots movement. A netroots movement, if you will.
With all that in mind:
Who would have the means, motive, and opportunity to launch such a wide-ranging smear campaign so quickly?
More importantly: Who would have enough at stake to be so obviously panicky about it?
We believe that the case has been made that the Palin smear video was produced by the Publicis Groupe's Winner & Associates. We believe the evidence to this effect is compelling.
We also believe that the evidence shows that W&A tried to spread the lies about Palin in such a way as to catch the attention of the left-wing netroot supporters of Barack Obama. We think it is unlikely that one of the largest PR firms in the world would do this for free. That they would pay for video production out of their own pockets, hire a well known voice actress, or that its employees would work together in their free time to help the video go viral.
So, if we're right, who paid them? As of this writing we cannot answer that question. Our initial reaction was that this campaign had all the hallmarks of the Soros funded Moveon.org, but given David Axelrod's known predilection to these type of stealth campaigns it would not surprise us in the least if the Obama campaign itself was orchestrating it.
That this is what Obama meant by "taking the gloves off". Especially given the timing of the video's release -- during the brief period when Obama trailed McCain in the polls, and when most of McCain's sudden surge was attributed to the popularity of Sarah Palin.
A major break in the case of who hacked into Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin's private Yahoo! email account earlier this week.
Early this morning, the FBI issued a search warrant at David Kernell's apartment. Witnesses said the feds were there for about 2 hours and took pictures of the entire place.
Wild goose chase?
Not likely.
Consider this:
The hacker, who went by the screen name "rubico" at 4chan.org. wrote a confession in the forum that was later deleted. Here's one of the things he said.
and it finally set in, THIS internet was serious business, yes I was behind a proxy, only one, if this shit ever got to the FBI I was fucked, I panicked, i still wanted the stuff out there but I didn’t know how to rapidshit all that stuff, so I posted the pass on /b/, and then promptly deleted everything, and unplugged my internet and just sat there in a comatose state
"Usually, this sort of thing would be hard to track down because it's Yahoo email, and a lot of people use my service for that," he told El Reg in a phone interview. "Since they were dumb enough to post a full screenshot that showed most of the [Ctunnel.com] URL, I should be able to find that in my log."
Ramuglia got into the proxy business a few years ago, after schools began blocking access to an online game site he used to co-own. Pretty soon, people began using the proxy service to access YouTube, Gmail, MySpace, and dozens of other sites that are routinely blocked by IT departments.
To prevent abuse of the service - such as the occasional bomb threat or other illegal act that's been known to happen - Ramuglia logs each user's IP address, along with the time and web destination. That often isn't enough to track down people who access extremely popular websites. But in this case, the perpetrators included a whole string of random-looking characters when posting screenshots of Palin's hacked account. That will probably be enough for him to pinpoint the proverbial needle in the haystack.
They had to get subpoenas to get the anonymizer services, other proxy services and the ISP's to cough up their records and then obtain those records, they probably also got all of his phone records, including text messages. I am sure they have a list of every website he has visited (all of them-including any he visited behind a proxy) and every phone call and text message he has made for the last 5 years. Then they had to get a warrant for his arrest. They are also probably getting warrants for any and all who knowingly hosted the posts he made of the contents of Gov. Palin's email account, too. Those people will be charged as accessories. I hope they all have retained legal help-they will need it.
They also have probably had him, his family, his friends and the people he most likes to chat to via internet or phone under close surveillance 24/7 since this occurred. He really was not a flight risk and if he had tried he would have been stopped. As to the "contents of his computer" there are ways to restore that but he made enough public posts of the contents of her email account and his actions to obtain them to convict him. I hope his daddy doesn't have anything incriminating on his computer because they probably seized all the computers in the house.
PS--Let me add that David is in a hotel with his father, Mike, and not in jail.
Let me also reiterate that I stand by Rep. Mike Kernell who never has had anything to do with this, and my heart goes out to him and David's mother who just got back from Iraq.
My heart also goes out to the Palins for having this happen to them. While I disagree with Palin on all political issues, no one should have their private email invaded.
Again, David is free, and I have no idea what will happen next.
This just in ...
The FBI is stepping up its investigation into the possibility that a University of Tennessee student hacked into the personal e-mail of Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
A person who identified himself as a witness tells 10 News that agents with the FBI served a federal search warrant at the Fort Sanders residence of David Kernell early Sunday morning. Kernell lives in the Commons apartment complex at 1115 Highland Ave.
David Kernell is the son of Mike Kernell, a Democratic state representative from Memphis.
A Department of Justice spokesperson confirmed there has been "investigatory activity" in Knoxville regarding the Palin case, but she said there are no publicly available search warrants, and no charges have been filed.
A separate law enforcement source confirmed to 10 News that a search warrant was served on Kernell's apartment.
According to the witness, several agents arrived at The Commons of Knoxville around midnight.
They presented their badges upon entering Kernell's apartment, where several students were having a party, and took down their names.
The witness tells us they asked him and those who did not live in the unit to go outside. He believes the investigators took about 1.5 to 2 hours taking pictures of everything inside the apartment.
He says Kernell's three roommates were also subpoenaed, and must testify this week in Chattanooga.
