David Kernell's ; federal prosecutors had asked for an 18-month sentence. According to the Associated Press,

Kernell, a 20-year-old college student at the time of the incident, got into Palin's gov.palin@yahoo.com account by guessing answers to the security questions used by Yahoo to reset the account's password. In chat logs, Kernell said he was hoping to find information that would "derail" her 2008 vice presidential election campaign.

Palin was then governor of Alaska, and her critics thought she may have been conducting state business via the Yahoo account, in order to sidestep Alaska's open records law. Kernell found no such evidence after examining her Yahoo account.

He did, however, post the account's new password -- "popcorn" -- to the 4chan discussion board, and the contents of the account were eventually made public.

In her 2009 autobiography, "Going Rogue," Palin called the incident "the most disruptive" of the campaign.