|
| September 26, 2006 12:17 AM
Cybergate, Minnesota
A stolen ad in a Senate race.
By Susan Vigilante
If the last few days are any indication, Mark Kennedy’s Senate campaign may be singing “Wake Me Up When September Ends.”
Kennedy, a Minnesota Republican congressman, is running against Amy Klobuchar, the Hennepin County Attorney running on the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) ticket. Last Monday, the Minneapolis Star Tribune published a poll showing him 24 points behind Klobuchar. (Kennedy’s people maintain that the poll, conducted by Star Tribune Minnesota, was biased, and that their own polls show him trailing by 8 to 10 points.)
On Tuesday the New York Times published a report on the poll. “Perhaps not coincidentally,” David Kirkpatrick of the Times smirked,“Mr. Kennedy this week began running one of the first major negative television advertising campaigns of the season.” The ads accused Klobuchar of hypocrisy in her criticism of oil companies and lobbyists. “Republicans have vowed to deploy such ‘contrast ads,’” wrote Kirkpatrick, “in a move to focus voters on individual candidates rather than national issues. “
This must have been especially painful to see, since that night — Tuesday — the candidates were to square off in their first televised debate on Minneapolis public TV.
On Wednesday, Pat Shortridge, Kennedy’s campaign manager, got a phone call from Ben Goldfarb, who is managing the campaign for Amy Klobuchar. Goldfarb asked Shortridge for his e-mail address and told Shortridge to keep a close watch on his inbox. A special announcement was coming from Klobuchar headquarters.
The “special announcement” arrived later that day: On Saturday, September 16, an unnamed blogger had sent the Klobuchar campaign’s communications director, Tara McGuinness, a link to an as yet unreleased television ad from Kennedy’s campaign. The link was lifted from the website of the firm that made the ad, Scott Howell and Associates TK of Dallas, Texas. McGuinness had watched the ad and had ordered her staff to watch it too.
“When we learned of this occurrence,” Goldfarb went on, “Ms. Klobuchar directed that I take immediate action. I instructed the blogger that sending information like this to the campaign was wrong and not to send us any further advertisements. I then asked for and received Ms. McGuinness’ resignation. Ms. Klobuchar also directed that the incident be reported to federal law enforcement for their review. That report has been made and the Klobuchar campaign will cooperate fully with law enforcement.”
The next day the unnamed “local blogger” called a press conference, or rather his lawyer’s PR firm did. He turned out to be something more than just your average blogger.
Noah Kunin is a 24-year-old Minneapolis man with dozens of internet postings on various liberal websites to his credit. He lists several blogs of his own in his Internet profile, including the blog for Frontier PAC, which invites readers to contribute cash to help “the positive establishment of the Democratic brand in the Western states.” As Heidi Frederickson, Kennedy’s press secretary, put it, “He’s not some college kid. He’s a political operative for the DFL.”
At the press conference Kunin said he found the ad when he visited the website of Scott Howell, Kennedy’s media consultant. As to how he gained access to the site, he said he typed in the name “allen” for the password, which was just a lucky guess on his part — he knew Howell had done media work for Virginia Senator George Allen — and voila!, the ad was revealed. He did nothing wrong, he declared. Anybody could have gotten into the site which, he insisted, “was in no way secured.”
But logs of Internet traffic show that Kunin did not just type in “allen.” According to Dan Allen of Scott Howell & Co., Kunin worked hard to break into the firm’s files. “He tried more than a dozen names,” Allen told the Star Tribune. “Eighteen, in all. The fact that he was trying other names proves [Kunin’s explanation] to be false. It’s a password protected, secure site.”
Minnesota Public Radio interviewed a number of online-security experts and found that they tend to agree that Kunin crossed a line. “The blogger certainly did something illegal and something that is obviously illegal,” says Bruce Schneier of Counterpane Internet Security, a California-based firm. “If you deliberately try to bypass a password block and you do, that is the equivalent of breaking and entering.”
Currently the FBI is investigating the case to see if any federal laws were violated in the course of the cyber break-in. They are not releasing any statements on the investigation.
Kennedy’s campaign staff, meanwhile, are waiting for Klobuchar to answer a few questions. Goldfarb admitted that he knew of the stolen ad on Saturday, and that Amy Klobuchar had learned of it “over the weekend.” Why, then, did it take them until Wednesday to tell Kennedy about the theft? Why did they sit on the information for five days?
“The analogy we’d use would be Kunin stole our ATM card and got hold of our PIN number,” said Frederickson. “He gave it to Amy Klobuchar’s campaign. Then Klobuchar held onto it for five days. What we need to know is, who else was accessing our account in those five days?”
Minnesota State GOP Chairman Ron Carey also has a few questions for Klobuchar. As the Star Tribune for Friday, September 22, reported, Carey wants to know why Kunin went after the material in the first place. Did he do it on his own, “or was he instructed to do so by the Klobuchar campaign?”
As Monday evening, the most recent post on one of Noah Kunin’s websites issues an apology for the situation. He says he is sorry for placing Klobuchar “under inappropriate scrutiny.” The website is called “Blanked Out.” The title, he writes, refers to his belief that “that which is not said is often the greater truth.”
Klobuchar’s campaign has not returned phone requests for information. And no one is saying what Klobuchar’s people did with those five missing days.
— Susan Vigilante blogs from Minneapolis at www.desperateirishhousewife.blogspot.com. |
| | 
|
|
► Subscribe to National Review magazine
here
or NR / Digital here. |
