We are drawing close to a point where we can know essentially what happened with regard to the Kennedy ad that the Klobuchar campaign was alerted to.  Here, as far as can be determined thus far, is the sequence of events.

     
  1. Noah Kunin accesses the Scott Howell website and goes to the “Netview” page.  Once there, there is strong evidence that he did indeed reach a prompt for a “password.”

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  2. Kunin enters a password of “Allen,” evidently searching for ads on George Allen, and is redirected to a world-readable index page.

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  3. Kunin finds a Kennedy ad, and copies the URL for the ad.

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  4. He then forwards the URL to Tara McGuinness, alerting her to the ad.

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  5. Tara McGuinness clicks on the link to the ad; the site does not ask her for a password to view said ad.

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  6. The Klobuchar campaign discovers these actions, fires McGuinness, and directs Kunin to no longer send links to the campaign.

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  7. The Klobuchar notifies the FBI of a potential violation of campaign law.

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  8. Once FBI reporting is complete, the Klobuchar campaign notifies the Kennedy campaign and the media.

A few conclusions may be drawn here:

     
  • Kunin may indeed be in some trouble.  The site did evidently ask for a “password,” and while the site simply redirected Kunin to a world-readable site, he did have to enter something to get there.  One possible mitigating factor, in Kunin’s own words: “While searching for political ads, I clicked on a link titled ‘netview,’ which then brought me to another webpage. No other information was requested. I therefore typed in the name ‘Allen.’ Nothing more, nothing less.”  It is possible that Kunin did not see that the textbox was requesting a password specifically, or that the “password” shockwave movie did not load correctly.

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  • McGuinness comes of somewhat more sympathetically here than initially; she clicked on a link, she didn’t use a purloined password.  She still isn’t off the hook–but it appears that nobody inside the Klobuchar campaign was doing anything related to hacking.

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  • The Klobuchar campaign itself appears to have handled this about as well as possible.  There had to be temptation to cover this up to avoid this sort of scandal.  Kudos to them for doing the right thing and notifying both Kennedy and the media.

Much more to come, including a look at what legal issues remain.