David Kendall, the University of Tennessee student accused of hacking Gov. Sarah Palin's email account, was indicted today by a federal grand jury. According to the indictment, Kendall is charged with unlawful access to Palin's email account, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in jail and a $250,000 fine. One can certainly imagine that with the high profile nature of the case, and the public disclosure of Palin's materials, federal prosecutors will be gunning for Mr. Kendall.

Bill McGeveran, an information law expert, raises questions about the government's case at the Info/Law blog.

Professors Orin Kerr and Paul Ohm, probably the two most knowledgeable scholars in the country on the subject of computer crime, are both dubious about the way the indictment achieves felony charges. (In short, the unauthorized intrusion into Palin’s e-mail needs to have been in furtherance of some other crime or tort; in typical cases that would be fraud or identity theft, but here it isn’t clear what that other crime or tort might be.)

It appears that someone has hacked into one or more of Sarah Palin's personal email accounts on Yahoo! and published some of the contents on the web. According to an entry on Wikileaks:

"Circa midnight Tuesday the 16th of September (EST) activists loosely affiliated with the group 'anonymous' gained access to U.S. Republican Party Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account gov.palin@yahoo.com and passed information to Wikileaks. Governor Palin has come under criticism for using private email accounts to conduct government business and in the process avoid transparency laws. The zip archive made available by Wikileaks contains screen shots of Palin's inbox, two example emails, address book and a couple of family photos. The list of correspondence, together with the account name tends to re-enforce the criticism."

Micah Sifry, Andrew Rasiej, and I have been taking turns speaking to WNYC talk-show host Brian Lehrer on his weekly TV show. I've linked to our appearances before, but the producers over at the show are making the videos embeddable.

After the jump, watch me and Wired's Sarah Lai Stirland talking about Yahoo Buzz! charts and videos. I'll post the videos of Micah and Andrew as soon as they're up.

We already know that Barack Obama won South Carolina on Saturday by a huge margin. Duh.

The outcome may be no surprise to those of you following Yahoo's Political Dashboard, who would have have seen Barack Obama dominate online buzz in the run-up to the South Carolina primary. But what explains Obama's skyrocketing numbers and Hillary's dip on the day of the primary?

Last week I wrote about Yahoo! Buzz, which in addition to tracking celebrity fandom across the web also tracks searches for political candidates (displayed in the excellent Political Dashboard). That data now shows Mitt Romney is ascendant in Nevada, and is fighting with John McCain for the lead in South Carolina.

Amidst all of the head-scratching -- or self-flagellating, as I like to call it -- following pollsters' erroneous predictions in New Hampshire, Yahoo! gives a sign that the web may have had it right all along.

Ron Paul breaks his own fundraising record, bringing in more than $6 million in one day; Yahoo launches the horserace-loving Dashboard; a new video attacks Mike Huckabee over his role in the parole of a convicted rapist; researchers detail the political preferences of social technology users; a partnership between the UpTake and Veracifier promises to recruit and train video journalists across the country; a new Hillary site solicits video from users. Pigs fly; and the FEC rules against John Edwards, says he can't receive matching donations for funds raised using ActBlue.

Karl Rove and Max Cleland spoke to over 100 online political consultants today in Washington, DC during Yahoo's The Rise of Citizen 2.0 event. Yahoo's Citizen 2.0 is not much unlike IPDI's Poli-fulentials , Roper's Influentials, or -- as Cleland noted -- the "attentive elites."

They're news-hungry voters with a heightened sense of civic responsibility and a penchant for online discourse. They’re involved in their communities and are the people "who get my friends to pitch in." They're more likely than others to agree with phrases such as "knowing what is going on politically is the responsibility of every citizen" and "the Internet empowers groups of people to get together and act."

For most of us in the audience, the presentation was an elaborately-delivered (think Tom Cruise as Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia) compilation of overused Pew research points and carefully-selected stock photos.

Clearly, we are not the intended audience. Those who would find this presentation helpful are those who still think internet users are 12-year-old kids in their mother's basement posting visceral blog comments in virtual echo chambers. In other words, Karl Rove and Max Cleland.

We're excited to announce the launch of 10Questions.com, a new kind of online presidential forum, one that aims to make the most of what the internet has to offer to politics. On 10Questions.com anyone will be able to directly pose video questions to the candidates for President and choose which ones they most want answered. Candidates will be able answer in detail and without the time limits imposed by traditional televised or on-stage debates. And citizens in turn will be able to give the candidates feedback on whether they actually answer those questions.

Barack Obama is the winner of the Huffington Post/Yahoo/Slate mashup debate; John Edwards will visit Columbus, KY, the winning town in his Eventful demands competition; Off The Bus introduces Roadkill, a guide to the goofy and wacky in the campaigns; Newt Gingrich posts on Mike Huckabee's blog, world explodes; Bill Richardson releases a new video featuring Matt Stoller and Chris Bowers, with a cool new site to boot; and Mike Huckabee hosts "Vertical Day," a 24-hour Q&A with supporters.