A hacking group known as Anonymous claimed to have gained access to Palin's gov.palin@yahoo.com account and sent the information to Wikileaks, which acts as an anonymous clearinghouse for leaked documents.

"Governor Palin has come under criticism for using private email accounts to conduct government business and in the process avoid transparency laws," Wikileaks wrote in a note accompanying the material. "The list of correspondence, together with the account name, appears to re-enforce the criticism."

Bloggers had fingered Kernell as a suspect after linking him to the online name "rubico," used by the hacker who claimed to have accessed Palin's Yahoo account. Rubico claimed to have accessed the account by using Yahoo's password reset feature and answering security questions with publicly available information, and the indictment supports that claim. He guessed correctly that Palin had met her husband at .

The indictment alleges that Kernell posted screenshots of Palin's e-mail messages, e-mail addresses of her family members, pictures of her family and at least one mobile phone number to the Web site. It's unclear in the indictment how the information came to Wikileaks from 4chan.org, an image-based bulletin board.

Another person also reset the account's password and was able to access Palin's e-mail account, the indictment said.