This is the deal. You’re Bobbie Johnson, the Tech/IT honcho at The Guardian – you are The Man…….on the edge, in the fast lane, so where it’s at that everyone else is not just yesterday but yesteryear.
Then suddenly you hear from the jungle drums that The Guardian is losing circulation, advertising and money. There’s talk of downsizing so you cut loose before being pushed and take redundancy. You need to scout for another slot, however, so you decide to punt a few hundred words towards another UK paper. You need something that is ostensibly about IT but also presses the right media buttons.
No problem. Contact The Daily Telegraph and offer a hit piece on Sarah Palin. The so called right wing Telegraph has been using Alex Spillius and Toby Harnden to trash Palin for nearly two years so you simply cannot lose.
The result?
Sarah Palin vs the hacker
The student who faces decades in jail for guessing a password.
Now you do not have to be Sherlock Holmes to work out where the piece is headed. It starts with an unexceptional bit of scene setting describing how David Kernell (“Rubico”)hacked into Palin’s yahoo e mail account in September 2008 at the height of the media feeding frenzy following her selection as McCain’s running mate. Johnson not only proceeds to sanitise Kernell’s action but goes the full McGinniss and paints Kernell as the victim of – yes, you’ve guessed it – a Palin witch hunt.
So why was the whole weight of the law brought down upon David Kernell? Many believe Palin used the case to stay in the limelight ahead of what may be another run for office in 2012.
………….
After the verdict was read out and David Kernell emerged into the Tennessee sunshine, I asked his prosecutors whether they would have pursued the case so zealously if the victim had been somebody less high-profile.
Mark Krotoski, the Assistant US Attorney, played the question with the deadest of bats.
‘We felt the conduct in this case warranted each one of those charges,’ he said. ‘The victim of this case certainly was mentioned, but it wasn’t a big part of the presentation of the government’s case.’
Now ace reporter Bobbie is not at all happy with that. Our fearless sleuth just knows there is something darker hiding behind those bland words of the Assistant US Attorney. Indeed there is almost a suggestion that Mr Krotoski, having issued his smokescreen statement climbed into an unmarked black helicopter to be spirited away to some secret desert compound.
It’s a conspiracy, man……..and it’s SINISTER……
That’s the official line, but, to others, it feels like youthful misdemeanours are being manipulated for political and professional gain.
As Kernell’s friend Brett Ballinger – sitting in the quad of the university – asked: ‘What are they trying to push on him? Did any of them ever sit down and ask, “How did he really hurt these people and is it worth us going and destroying his life?’”
You can just sense Bobbie’s growing sense of excitement – it’s that Woodward/Bernstein moment when our fearless investigative reporter smells Pulitzer. You see he knows that Palin is just a construct, a puppet whose strings are being pulled by darker figures determined to drive America away from the forces of light that sprang forth out of Cook County in 2008 – and Kernell is clearly an agent of The Light.
This is why Kernell has to be crushed by the forces of Darkness.
Bobbie’s task, therefore, is to slash at the tangled undergrowth of lies and insinuations that surrounded this case with the Sword of Truth and he does this in an original and unexpected way.
He ignores the evidence presented to the court and considered by the jury – after all, what do they know?
Bobbie digs down really deep and finds the truth from…… Kernell’s friends. Not only does he discover how the young student was just an average Joe with no interest in politics but he cracked into Palin’s e mails as an intellectual exercise.
Moreover, by being so predictable in her yahoo security codes she was really just “asking for it” (a phrase frequently heard in the investigation of another familiar crime) Thus Bobbie, in an act of masterly legerdemain, whips the mantle of victimhood from Palin and places it squarely on the shoulders of our innocent middle class student…
Bobbie Johnson – ace reporter?
Bobbie Johnson for a Pulitzer?
Not, I fear, in a million years. His whole “conspiracy/Kernell as victim” thesis is one of the soggiest bowls of cold porridge since Geoffrey Dunn’s last HuffPo Palin hit piece. So, let’s dig in our spoons and analyse some of the bits floating on the top of this mess.
Rubico was not some mastermind hacker or hard-core political activist. Instead, he was a middle-class, lanky economics student called David Kernell.
Who happened to be the son of Democratic Rep. Mike Kernell of Memphis, a long serving member of the Tennessee House and Obama supporter. Rather disingenuous of Bobbie to initially imply that David was just some kind of ordinary Joe.
Of course when it became known that Kernell had a political background some people began connecting speculative dots – not surprising considering the tsunami of vitriol thrown at Palin by Obama activists in the weeks following her nomination.
It didn’t matter that Kernell and his father denied the political plot: suddenly Rubico’s blunder had become a cause célèbre in the battle between Left and Right.
From all the evidence it is crystal clear that Kernell’s father had no knowledge of his son’s hacking activity. However the fact that his son denied any political motivation might be enough to satisfy Bobbie’s razor sharp forensic skills but for the slightly more cynical it is a claim more open to question. Indeed Bobbie himself inadvertently allows us a glimpse of a very interesting cat in the bag
buoyed by his success at gaining access, Kernell had bragged about it on an online messageboard called 4Chan.
‘There was nothing there, nothing incriminating, nothing that would derail her campaign as I had hoped,’ he told them.
‘All I saw was personal stuff, some clerical stuff from when she was governor… and pictures of her family.’
“Nothing that would derail her campaign” – bit of an odd statement coming from someone so apolitical isn’t it, Bobbie?
Then he produces a cute little puppy to tug at our heartstrings and show how well intentioned Mr Ordinary Average Middle Class Student really was – he decided to prove to the world that there was no smoking gun in Palin’s e mails by….POSTING THEM….
Kernell posted some of the things he’d found as proof – photos, screen shots, the new password – before realising he could be in serious trouble.
He suddenly got scared and a few seconds later, he disappeared.
‘If this s— ever got to the FBI I was f—-d,’ he wrote later on the site. ‘I panicked… I posted the pass and then promptly deleted everything and unplugged my internet and just sat there in a comatose state.’
But of course he was too late. The stuff was swarming around the cyberworld within nanoseconds.
Palin’s family started receiving abusive emails and phone calls and the McCain campaign went into temporary panic mode.
Later, Palin described the moment she discovered what had happened while watching the news on television.
‘I thought: what kind of creep would break into a person’s files, steal them, read them, then give them to the press to broadcast… in order to influence a presidential campaign?
‘And what kind of responsible press outfit would broadcast stolen private correspondence?’
Hey Sarah – who the hell do you think you are? John Edwards? You’re a conservative woman, for crying out loud – you and your family are fair game!!!
Indeed Bobbie can hardly restrain himself when she actually has the nerve to speak to the court and pretend she has feelings…
When the case finally came to trial last month, Palin played it for all it was worth. The former candidate, now a presenter on the Right-wing TV channel Fox News, arrived in a blacked-out four-wheel drive.
After taking her place on the stand, she delivered her testimony in front of a packed courtroom.
Kernell, she said, was responsible for ‘the most disruptive and discouraging’ moment of her failed campaign to reach the White House.
Ignoring other setbacks during the election – the huge gaps in her knowledge of foreign affairs; the $150,000 bill for her wardrobe – she explained how her adolescent nemesis had affected her chances of success.
Crocodile tears according to Bobbie. It was a student prank, nobody important was harmed, give Kernell a mild slap on the wrist and let’s all move on.
Oh and Mr Editor of The Daily Telegraph you ought to take me on as your regular IT/Technology guru – not only am I a brilliant journalist but I am also cheaper than Shane Richmond, currently Head of Technology (Editorial) for Telegraph Media Group.
I suspect our Bobbie is fishing for a regular job again though of course I can’t prove it. I am sure that if I spoke to Bobbie’s friends they would tell me what a regular stand up guy he is. But he will have to get up very early to put one over Shane Richmond because, just one day after Bobbie’s puffed up posturing Mr Richmond’s rapier was skilfully slipped between the Johnson ribs in another Daily Telegraph piece….
I don’t take Sarah Palin’s side on many issues but it seems clear to me that David Kernell………….should go to prison.
……..
The sentences for those charges of which he has been found guilty amount to a maximum of one year for unauthorised access and up to 20 years for obstruction of justice.
It would certainly be harsh for Kernell to receive the maximum sentence, though we will have to wait and see whether the judge agrees, but some of the arguments in his defence have been absurd. They have suggested that the case is being pursued simply because the target was Palin and that this was just a youthful prank that went too far.
………
Is that the case here? I think not.
Kernell was not a child when he did this. Regardless of how easy it was to guess his way into Palin’s email account, he must have known that doing so was wrong. He can’t have thought that changing her password was acceptable. And in posting some of her messages to a public forum – something that eventually led to Palin’s entire email archive being made public – he can’t possibly have thought that he was just playing a prank. Can he?
……….
Even if he did think this was just a small prank, his actions amounted to a serious – and possibly malicious – invasion of privacy. He should have been aware of that at the time. If he does go to prison, he has only himself to blame, not a rightwing conspiracy led by Palin and her supporters.
Whoops, Bobbie – oh well you could always try the Willesden & Brent Times – or The Huffington Post……
