Bristol: Crank calls started after her cell phone number posted on Web

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Sarah Palin's eldest daughter told jurors Wednesday she was harassed by calls and texts to her cell telephone after her number was posted on the Internet by someone who illegally accessed her mother's e-mail account:

"I got a few anonymous phone calls," Bristol Palin testified. "I checked my caller ID. It said an unknown number. When the phone calls kept coming through the night, it got more suspicious - different tones of voice, different area codes."

Bristol Palin's cell phone number was included in a screenshot of Sarah Palin's inbox that wound up on the Internet and, later, broadcast news networks.

Bristol Palin said her phone was essentially under siege for a week before she turned it over to the U.S. Secret Service.

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Sarah Palin and her husband, Todd, are expected to testify this week, perhaps as soon as Thursday, in the U.S. District Court trial.

In other testimony on the trial's second day, Palin friend and one-time employee Ivey Frye told jurors that she and others received vulgar and threatening e-mails after news spread that then Governor Palin's personal e-mail had been illegally compromised:

"I received (e-mails) many a day, violent, sexual, threatening ... throughout the course of the (2008 presidential) campaign," Frye testified.

She said the e-mails, which were sent to everyone on Palin's e-mail contact list, were anonymously sent.

She read from one that said: "You don't know me. Neither do I know you, but we can change that."

Recipients of the e-mails included Palin's parents, she said.

Prosecutors argue that the governor's contact list was copied and pasted onto several web sites after in September 2008, Kernell worked at getting into her account, changed her password, and posted screenshots of messages, contact lists and other information from it on the 4chan Internet discussion board:

Testimony has shown that dozens of people perused the account before Palin learned via Frye that the password on the account had been changed.

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Federal prosecutors allege Kernell, then living in Knoxville, had read a story in The New York Times about the possibility that Palin was funneling gubernatorial business through a private Yahoo! e-mail account to avoid public scrutiny.

The son of longtime Memphis Democrat state Rep. Mike Kernell and a self-described "Obamacrat," Kernell decided to see if he could access the account.

Kernell is facing four felony charges including identity theft and wire fraud.

- JP