FC: Ex-GOP senator's wife pleads to email attack campaign

[Declan McCullagh]

http://www.cluebot.com/article.pl?sid=01/06/15/0135212

   Ex-GOP Senator's Wife Pleads to Email Attack Campaign
   posted by Declan (declan at well.com) on Thursday June 14, @08:32PM


   The wife of a U.S. senator who unsuccessfully ran for re-election in
   2000 plead "no contest" on Thursday to charges of using a pseudonym to
   send email messages that disparaged her husband's Democratic rival.
   
   Minnesota prosecutors charged Christine Gunhus, who married former
   Republican senator Rod Grams after working on his campaign, with
   violating state criminal laws. Grams' rival, Democratic-Farmer-Labor
   candidate Mike Ciresi, had filed a complaint under the Minnesota Fair
   Campaign Practices Act.
   
   The risks of using technology you don't completely understand and that
   could leak your identity are worth noting:
   
   * Gunhus is accused of using a Hotmail account (Katie Stevens --
   kylomb at hotmail.com) to send the disparaging email messages, which
   talked about how Ciresi had represented corporate polluters and
   anti-union companies. But Hotmail includes an X-Originating-IP: header
   that shows the IP address of the sender -- a problem if you're typing
   it from the opposing campaign's computer!
   
   * Prosecutors say they traced the IP address back to an AT&T WorldNet
   user who repeatedly used the "Katie Stevens" Hotmail account by
   connecting from Gunhus' home number. (Guess they keep Caller ID logs.)
   Apparently the person using the "Katie Stevens" pseudonym was smart at
   first, sending the mail from a Kinko's store, but then got sloppy.
   
   * The email attacks included Microsoft Word attachments, which a
   Ciresi aide investigated. The aide found that Word listed the document
   authors as Grams staffers including -- you guessed it -- Christine
   Gunhus.
   
   * Democratic researchers reported that they found Globally Unique
   Identifiers (GUIDs) in the Word documents. The GUID includes the
   Ethernet MAC address. Prosecutors last August obtained a search
   warrant to seize Gunhus' computer, from which they could extract the
   MAC address if the Ethernet card was still the same.
   
   * Let's not forget the political risk. In an article in the
   Minneapolis Star-Tribune on the pseudonymous mail campaign last year,
   the Grams campaign offered a remarkably narrow denial. A spokesman
   hedged: "We didn't put this together and send it out of the Grams
   campaign office," leaving open the question of whether it was sent by
   a campaign worker from another location.
   
   * 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).
   
   Epilogue: Grams managed to derail his Democratic rival's primary bid,
   and Ciresi did not win his party's nomination. Even though Grams lost
   the general election in the fall, that hasn't halted his political
   ambitions. The Washington Times reported on April 13 that Grams is
   reportedly considering a challenge in 2002 to U.S. Senator Paul
   Wellstone, a liberal Democrat.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
   Slate articles from last year on the pseudonymous attacks:
   http://slate.msn.com/netelection/entries/00-07-21_86798.asp
   http://slate.msn.com/netelection/entries/00-09-13_89569.asp
   City Pages article from last year:
   http://www.citypages.com/databank/21/1032/article8969.asp
   AP article on the "no contest" plea this week:
   http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=408342905



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