http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c ... e=politics

Democrat's campaign admits downloading Schwarzenegger tape
- By LAURA KURTZMAN, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, September 12, 2006


(09-12) 19:13 PDT SACRAMENTO, (AP) --

The campaign of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Democratic rival on Tuesday acknowledged it downloaded an embarrassing audio recording of the governor bantering with his staff and leaked it to the Los Angeles Times.

But Cathy Calfo, campaign manager for Democrat Phil Angelides, said that although she did not approve of the leak, the campaign had done nothing wrong because the file was available publicly on the governor's Web site.

The governor apologized the day the Times published its story for saying in the recording that a Hispanic female legislator had a "very hot" temperament because she had "black blood" and "Latino blood."

Calfo said her staff downloads information daily and used a computer to access the audio clip on Aug. 29. Staff members downloaded at least four hours of audio from the site, she said.

"It was provided on the Web site — no hacking, no password, no expertise required," she said during an afternoon news conference.

Schwarzenegger campaign manager Steve Schmidt said the Angelides campaign had behaved badly, first in obtaining the audio and then in furnishing it to the newspaper.

"It's wrong, it's unethical, and it's a very big deal," he said.

On Monday, Schwarzenegger's legal affairs secretary, Andrea Lynn Hoch, said the files were stored "in a password-protected area of the governor's office network computer system."

Hoch said she forwarded the Internet Protocol address used to download the file to the California Highway Patrol, which is investigating how the files became public.

The Sacramento Bee first reported that the Angelides campaign acknowledged downloading the audio file in an article Tuesday. The newspaper said Hoch provided what she said was the intruder's Internet Protocol address. The Bee looked up the address on the Web site IP-lookup.net and found that it was linked to the Angelides campaign.

One expert questioned whether it was proper for Hoch to release the IP address, since the governor's Web site pledges not to distribute "electronically collected personal information" such as IP addresses except to improve the content of the Web site or understand how people are using its services.

"At least on first glance, it does appear that the release of this IP address did violate the privacy policy," said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.

Adam Mendelsohn, the governor's communications director, said the privacy policy does not apply because those who used the IP address linked to the Angelides camp proceeded beyond the public domain and into an area that was explicitly marked as private and subject to monitoring.

Mendelsohn said the Angelides campaign staffers should have encountered a pop-up warning before downloading the audio file.

Amanda Crumley, communications director for the Angelides campaign, said the researcher who downloaded the file never received such a warning.

"If they have a pop-up window, that's something they've added now," she said.

Calfo said there was no mystery in how the campaign found the recording, in which Schwarzenegger also banters with aides about Republican legislators. She said an Aug. 29 news release about Hurricane Katrina on the governor's Web site linked to a Schwarzenegger audio file. And that, in turn, linked to other audio files from the governor's office.

Mendelsohn said someone would have had to snoop around to find the audio file.

"The file that was leaked to the Los Angeles Times was in a private area of the governor's server not accessible to the public without manipulation of information," he said.

Mendelsohn said the act was analogous to someone piggybacking on a neighbor's unsecured wireless network and accessing private information.

Calfo, Angelides' campaign manager, said she was unhappy that two campaign staffers had passed the audio clip to the Times without her permission or knowledge. She said Angelides, who was on the East Coast Tuesday, also did not know about it.

"We're looking into it now," she said. "Am I happy? No."

But Calfo said accusations that the Angelides campaign accessed the audio improperly were false and politically motivated.

"They provided access to a press release to files that it appears that they did not want people to see," she said. "Ask them if they're going to release those publicly, if those were on the Web site intentionally. What's the story here?"

To ensure that no more private recordings or other information was obtained from the Web, the governor's office took the private portion of its site off-line Thursday night after being contacted by the Los Angeles Times, Mendelsohn said.

The leaked recording was made during a speechwriting session in the governor's office last March. Schwarzenegger and his chief of staff, Susan Kennedy, speculate about whether state Assemblywoman Bonnie Garcia, R-Cathedral City, is Puerto Rican or Cuban.

Schwarzenegger says, "They are all very hot. They have the, you know, part of the black blood in them and part of the Latino blood in them that together makes it."

With Garcia by his side, the governor apologized for his remarks on Friday, saying he cringed when he read them. Garcia said she was not offended.

Schwarzenegger, who was in Los Angeles Tuesday morning to sign a bill raising the minimum wage, declined to talk about the controversy surrounding how the recording became public.

"I think that the minimum wage issue is so important that I don't really want to interfere with all this little, trivial things," he said.

Asked whether the recording could have been on a public part of the governor's Web site, Schwarzenegger said, "Let the experts deal with that."

California Highway Patrol spokesman Tom Marshall said that despite the political exchanges Tuesday, it likely would be weeks before the agency completes its investigation.

"People think that since the governor's office says this or Angelides' office says that, it's all over. Well, really it isn't," Marshall said. "We're looking at the overall security of the governor's system."


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Associated Press Writer Christina Almeida in Los Angeles and Aaron C. Davis in Sacramento contributed to this report.