A 22-year-old economics student is reported to be facing a maximum of 20 years in prison and a fine of $500,000 (£331,000) after being convicted last Friday of hacking into Sarah Palin's private Yahoo! email account and posting some of the contents online while she was campaigning to become the Republican vice-president in 2008. David Kernell, a college student from Tennessee and son of a prominent local Democrat politician, was found guilty of obstruction of justice by destruction of records and a misdemeanour of unauthorised access to a computer.

Sarah Palin welcomed the conviction, posting this message on her Facebook page:

My family and I are thankful that the jury thoroughly and carefully weighed the evidence and issued a just verdict. Besides the obvious invasion of privacy and security concerns surrounding this issue, many of us are concerned about the integrity of our country's political elections. America's elections depend upon fair competition. Violating the law, or simply invading someone's privacy for political gain, has long been repugnant to Americans' sense of fair play. As Watergate taught us, we rightfully reject illegally breaking into candidates' private communications for political intrigue in an attempt to derail an election.



The length of time that Kernell could now face in jail might seem preposterously excessive, but there is no doubt he committed a crime by guessing Palin's password and security questions and then posting screenshots of her private emails online under the pseudonym "Rubico". Prosecutors claimed that Kernell was politically motivated because he had hoped to damage Palin's campaign for vice-president by proving that she used her private email account for her state business as governor as Alaska. Kernell's defence attorney said his action were nothing more than a "prank".

But let's rewind a few months and revisit an article Palin wrote for the Washington Post before the Copenhagen conference last December about the illegally released UEA emails:

With the publication of damaging emails from a climate research centre in Britain, the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point. The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue.

"Climategate", as the emails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have become known, exposes a highly politicised scientific circle – the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won't change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse. The emails reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. What's more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even within the CRU crowd.

So, let's get this straight: Palin is more than happy to utilise the contents of stolen emails to score political points when it suits her own cause – in this case, attacking the "radical environmental movement" – but finds it "repugnant" when her own privacy is invaded "for political gain"? Why was she not calling in her article for whoever stole (hacked, leaked, whatever) the UEA emails to face a "just" punishment instead of jumping up and down with glee at their politically convenient content?

Hypocrisy? You betcha.