Tennessee legislator’s son at center of Palin hacking speculation

A Tennessee Democratic state legislator said that his son is at the center of speculation about the identity of the hacker who got into the e-mail account of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

Online blogs and several news sources, including the New York Post (headline: “Dem Pol’s Son Was Hacker”), identified David Kernell, a 20-year-old University of Tennnessee student and son of legislator Mike Kernell, as the person who gained access to Palin’s e-mail.

Mike Kernell, who told The Tennesseean newspaper about the speculation concerning his son, did not respond to a message left on his home phone seeking comment.

The Athens Web site operator whose system helped hide the identity of the hacker also did not return a message requesting comment left on his phone answering system by an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter.

Gabriel M. Ramuglia, 25, who runs the Web site Ctunnel.com, told the Associated Press on Thursday that he would cooperate with FBI investigators trying to confirm the identity of the hacker. An FBI spokesman in Atlanta declined to comment and would not confirm the agency is investigating.

John Bankhead, spokesman for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, said his agency has not been called into the case. The Georgia Secretary of State’s office does not have Ctunnel.com registered as a corporation, nor does its Georgia corporation database include any mention of Gabriel Ramuglia as a business owner in the state.

According to numerous, unconfirmed reports, the person claiming to be the hacker in Internet postings under the name “Rubico,” said he hacked into Palin’s e-mail by resetting her password using her birth date, ZIP code, and information where she met her husband Todd, in the hope of uncovering political scandal.

According to the posting by the hacker identifying himself as Rubico, he found “nothing incriminating, nothing that would derail her campaign as I hoped.”

According to a page on the networking site Linkedin.com, Ramuglia was a Computer Science student at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, from 2001 to 2004. According to the Web site domaintools.com, which tracks Internet site addresses and who owns them, Ramuglia owns more than 130, including ctunnel.com.

He told the AP he planned to cooperate with investigators, reviewing logs on his Web site to trace back to the hacker who broke laws against using so-called “anonymity” services, such as his, in illegal activities.

Ramuglia’s service is primarily promoted to Internet users in schools or businesses who want to gain access to Web sites that are blocked by network administrators.