WASHINGTON -- A startling report from the Minnesota Senate race provides a stunning example of American politics as tech-cluelessness combined with petty nastiness.
Christine Gunhus, the wife of a U.S. senator who ran unsuccessfully for re-election in 2000, pleaded no contest last week to charges of using a pseudonym to unlawfully send e-mail messages that disparaged her husband's Democratic rival.
To hear state prosecutors tell it, Gunhus -- now married to former GOP senator Rod Grams -- violated the state's criminal election laws. Gunhus reportedly posted as a left-wing activist angry at the liberal, pro-labor candidate Mike Ciresi, who promptly turned around and filed a complaint under the Minnesota Fair Campaign Practices Act after he lost the primary election.
That would be unusual enough in itself, but this look at how not to write e-mail nastygrams underscores the risks of using technology you don't understand -- especially when it can reveal your identity:
- Gunhus is accused of using a Hotmail account (Katie Stevens -- kylomb@hotmail.com) to send the disparaging mails, 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 that had repeatedly used the "Katie Stevens" Hotmail account by connecting from Gunhus' home number. (Guess Worldnet keeps Caller ID logs.) Apparently, the person using the "Katie Stevens" pseudonym was cautious at first, sending the mail from a Kinkos store, but then got sloppy.
- The e-mail 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 finding Globally Unique Identifiers in the Word documents. The GUID includes the Ethernet MAC address. Prosecutors obtained a search warrant last August 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 last year, the Grams campaign offered a remarkably narrow denial. A spokesman said, "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 argues that a criminal law that bans sending pseudonymous messages is unconstitutional. A Supreme Court decision, McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, says that a prohibition on the distribution of anonymous campaign literature violates the First Amendment. 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 November, that hasn't halted his political ambitions. The Washington Times reported in April that Grams is said to be considering a challenge in 2002 to U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, a liberal Democrat.
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Fidel.com: Fidel Castro has no plans to launch a crippling "cyberattack" against the United States.
An apparently pained Castro, insulted that he would be suspected of such an offense, insisted last week that his honor was beyond reproach. How could those running-dog-capitalists even imply such a thing?
Though cyberattacks are out, verbal attacks are still muy bueno. Castro labeled the feds "orphans, and bereft of ideas," and the U.S. as "an empire that only knows lies," according to the Associated Press.
In February, as we told you at the time, Admiral Tom Wilson, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate that the 74-year-old dictator may be preparing a cyberattack against the United States.
"There's certainly the potential for them to employ those kind of tactics against our modern and superior military," Wilson said at the time.
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Carnivore update: House Majority Leader Dick Armey is asking the Justice Department to rethink Carnivore.
"I respectfully ask that you consider the serious constitutional questions Carnivore has raised and respond with how you intend to address them. This is an issue of great importance to the online public," Armey said last week in a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Armey said that the Supreme Court's decision this week in the Kyllo infrared surveillance case raises more questions about the continued use of the FBI's monitoring system.
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Assassinate this: Jim Bell may have been convicted of intimidating an IRS agent, but the world's most notorious crypto-convict remains undaunted.
Bell sent Wired News a copy of his latest legal filings, which include a renewed attempt to fire his court-appointed attorney and a request for an appeal of his conviction to the Supreme Court.
Bell is the anarcho-cypherpunk whose political propagandizing and authorship of the "Assassination Politics" essay drew the unwelcome attention of the feds and led to his conviction in April on two of five counts of stalking government agents.
He couldn't persuade the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn his ruling, so now Bell's taking his fight to the nation's highest court.
A legal filing in U.S. District Court and the appeals court that Bell wrote from federal prison says that U.S. District Judge Jack Tanner "was essentially incapable of conducting any sort of complete, proper, 'by the book' hearing, from the looks of things."
During the trial, Tanner denied all of Bell's requests for witnesses that Bell said would have illuminated unlawful surveillance on the part of government officials.
