When I saw this story from the San Jose Mercury News, I was irritated by its vagueness. The campaign of Phil Angelides, the Democratic campaign for governor of California, “admits downloading” a “tape” of Gov. Arnold making a racist comment. There’s an extensive back and forth between the two campaigns about whether the downloading was ethical or not, but not specific details about what actually happened.
Fortunately, Declan McCullagh is on the case:
The controversy may center on the design of the Web server called speeches.gov.ca.gov. The California government used it to post MP3 files of Schwarzenegger’s speeches in a directory structure that looked like “http://speeches.gov.ca.gov/dir/06-21.htm.htm”. (That Web page is now offline, but saved in Google’s cache.)
A source close to Angelides told CNET News.com on Tuesday that it was possible to “chop” off the Web links and visit the higher-level “http://speeches.gov.ca.gov/dir/” directory, which had the controversial audio recording publicly viewable. No password was needed, the source said.
If Declan is right, then this isn’t a hard issue.
You could do the same thing to me. I occasionally have pictures to accompany blog posts here and elsewhere, and I tend to post them in this directory. Anyone with two much free time on their hands could easily find a picture, chop off the file name, and view the contents of the directory. If the directory contained embarrassing photos of me, you’d be able to access them.
Luckily, there aren’t any embarrassing photos there, although you can see random photos of some furniture I sold on Craigs List last year. My images are publicly available by any reasonable definition. No special hacking skills are needed to access them, just a reasonable knowledge of how the web works. I don’t think there was anything remotely unethical about accessing them.
On the other hand, it’s equally clear that the governor didn’t intend to make the files publicly available. So it’s not crazy to argue that it’s unethical to release them public. But I don’t think that argument really works. When President Bush made some off-the-record (and off-color) remarks into an open microphone a few weeks ago, I don’t recall anyone arguing that repeating the statements was unethical. This case seems no different. The fact that it involves computers gives Arnold’s campaign team the opportunity to take advantage of the public’s technical ignorance to make spurious accusations of “hacking,” but those charges don’t have any merit as far as I can see.
The public has a legitimate interest in learning as much as possible about the views of elected officials on issues of public concern. Evidence suggesting that the president doesn’t like Syria, or that the governor of California doesn’t like Cubans, seems to me to be legitimate subjects of public interest, and therefore I think passing the information off to the media was entirely appropriate.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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