Interesting. BTW the state appears to be claiming that they took care of the _McIntyre_ problems by rewriting the statute post-decision to only apply to pseudonymous/anonymous messages written by someone affiliated with a campaign. So in other words, you could write stuff under a nym, but someone on the campaign staff could not. (Note I'm not saying this makes the statute constitutional, but that it's not as broad as it could be.) -Declan At 05:15 PM 6/18/01 +0000, robbin stewart wrote:

Matt, Declan, thanks for bringing this to my attention. It's worse than it looks at first. The prosecutor isn't claiming the content of the message was untrue, but that using a "katie" psuedonym was the falsity making the messages criminal.

I don't keep up on minnesota politics too well. Was the fall election close, and did the publicity around the case have much impact? It's fairly unusual for an incumbent senator to lose.

I just noticed that this was a -federal- election. Therefor any minnesota statutes on this topic are preempted by the FECA (441a or d or something.)

Arguably, what we have here is a case where the balance of the US Senate was shifted because of an illegal conspiracy to violate the civil rights of the (future) wife of a senator, by charging her under a statute which is unconstitutional as applied to her, as well as probably unconstitutional per se, under the minnesota constitution and McIntyre. [There would also be a malicious prosecution issue.]

I detect the presence of my old nemisis J Bradley King, currently the director of the Minn. election division. I will try to contact Samuelson, the ACLU guy mentioned in the article, before assuming the articles cited got all the facts right.

As Matt mentioned, I have a small practice based in Indiana which monitors and litigates about anonymous election speech on the net. I would be eager to follow up on this case. My bottleneck is that I don't have cocounsel for states other than Indiana - I welcome solutions to this problem. More info at http://communities.msn.com/robbinstewart

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From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> To: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com> In-Reply-To>Matt: That's a good point, and I should have highlighted it in my article.

No, she's not alleged to have said anything that was untrue. If she did, Ciersi could have sued for libel rather than relying on the state to prosecute.

-Declan

At 01:11 PM 6/15/01 -0400, Matthew Gaylor wrote:

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Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com> wrote:

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* Gunhus is accused of using a Hotmail account (Katie Stevens -- kylomb@hotmail.com) to send the disparaging email messages, which talked about how Ciresi had represented corporate polluters and anti-union companies.

Is what she wrote being alleged to be untrue? From my perspective disparaging politicians is like shooting fish in a barrel. Usually all that is needed is to truthfully compare their campaign speeches to their actual voting or other practices.

At 9:48 PM -0400 6/14/01, Declan McCullagh wrote:

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* And what about the legal risk to free speech? The Minnesota Civil Liberties Union reasonably argues that a criminal law that bans sending pseudonymous messages is unconstitutional. A Supreme Court decision, McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission (http://www.epic.org/free_speech/mcintyre.html), says that a prohibition on the distribution of anonymous campaign literature violates the First Amendment. The state law seems to be ecumenical in its application: A Republican has used it to attack the Sierra Club (http://www.fcregister.com/ziegler11_6_00.htm).

I'm being represented by attorney Robbin Stewart (Brother of Cypherpunk Bill Stewart) in an anonymous speech case as we speak. Robin has had several victories in Indianapolis for anon political speech. His first victory was inspired from Freematt's Alerts, Robbin had read some commentary from my list on McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission that prompted him to challenge a city ordinance that ordered him to remove a campaign sign from his residence (The sign didn't have who paid or wrote it written on it.) The ordinance was overturned in the Indiana Supreme Court.

Regards, Matt-

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Matthew Gaylor, (614) 313-5722 ICQ: 106212065 Archived at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fa/ *******************************************************************

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