Opinion

Campaign Creep

Politics has always been a contact sport, but as this season's crop of presidential candidates takes to the Internet, they may get tackled by the technology

By David H. Holtzman

Jamming at its simplest is making it difficult for your enemy to communicate or collect information. In the IT world, we would call that a denial-of-service attack. I hesitate to write about how easy it would be to take any candidate off the air before a primary, but it wouldn't take more than a few hours to bring the whole organization down for several days. If savvy government agencies and big technology companies such as Microsoft and AOL can be paralyzed, how hard could it be to silence Sen. Richard Gephardt?

Interference is different from jamming. Subtle hinderingnot active squelchingis the goal of this technique. Campaigns are confusing, and with a little assistance, they can be downright chaotic. Imagine a mass-mailing purporting to be from the candidate, asking for support for a controversial and divisive issue, such as capital punishment or the Iraqi war. If the position in the letter was different from the politician's stated one, it could cost him a lot of votes if not an election. For all that, a simple note supporting abortion sent to half of the country and one opposing it mailed to the other half would cause immense amounts of havoc.

It takes only a few days to cause those kinds of problems, but it takes weeks to fix them. The cost and anonymity advantages conferred by the Internet make it a good bet that unscrupulous people will take the risk. The first defense is the skepticism of a well-informed public, but full-time information security officers attached to each campaign and proactively involved will be a political necessity.

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