Daniel Sansoni is a 22-year-old aspiring politician who lives with his parents. Inexperienced and anxious to get his name into the public arena to raise campaign contributions, last week he sent out a mass emailing to netizens around the world, urging them to "vote for Sansoni."
"Hello!!! My name is Daniel Sansoni, and I am running for State Representative in Pennsylvania," his message read. "I recently defeated an eight-year incumbent in the primary which just passed. The amazing thing is that I am only 22-years-old. However, I am very dedicated and work extremely hard and will continue to do so after the November election. If you would like to know more about me, feel free to stop by my Web page....Have a great day!!!"
The email's headers had all the hallmarks of the infamous Stealth spamware, which hides the sender's true identity. The return address, [email protected], was forged to a non-existent domain, and the bulk mailing was relayed off an innocent third party's computer system -- in this case, a California school district.
Sansoni, whose Web site solicits campaign funds and lists a Philadelphia post-office box where contributions can be sent, feels he hasn't done anything "illegal" and remains unapologetic for spamming millions of Internet users outside of Philadelphia.
"I don't know of any laws that this violated," he said. "At the most, it might be unethical, but I don't even think it's that. In this case, the ends justify the means."
The ends were dollars. Sansoni won a contentious battle for the Republican primary nomination for state representative in May. He garnered the nomination with a mere 326 write-in votes. The outcome was a fluke enabled by the fact that his opponent, a four-term incumbent, ran in both the Democratic and Republican primaries.
As for Sansoni's chances against the same incumbent in the upcoming general election, the novice is less than sanguine. "I don't have the economic resources to compete," he complained. So, when he saw hope in an advertisement for the bulk email software and a five million address mailing list for US$150, he considered it an provident tactic.
Despite the fact that Sansoni's largely working-class district consists of 33,000 registered voters, the politician saw it as an opportunity to get "a lot of people" to look at his Web page. "In the worst case scenario," he explained, "I figured that if I send out five million e-mails, and only one percent actually receive the email, that makes 50,000.
"And if only one percent of those take the time to visit my Web page, that would be 500 hits. If only one percent of those people make a contribution, that's five more contributions than I have now," he concluded.
Sansoni didn't figure on the antispam sentiment raging on the Web, and he couldn't calculate the real worst case scenario: A flood of angry complaints that led his Internet service provider to close the site last Thursday.
Ironically, Sansoni's spamming misadventure took place just as federal lawmakers in Washington were looking at ways to deal with the problem of unsolicited junk email. In fact, at last week's House Commerce Committee's subcommittee hearing on spam legislation, the chairman, Representative W.J. "Billy" Tauzin (R-Louisiana), wondered about the drawbacks of using unsolicited bulk email to reach voters.
"Well, the last thing politicians ... would want to do is to associate themselves with unscrupulous spammers and alienate 99 percent of their constituency," responded Deirdre Mulligan of the Center for Democracy and Technology.
It's a reality that many politicians besides Sansoni haven't yet grasped. Indeed, he's not the first politician to see the medium of bulk email as a cheap, powerful tool. Last November, Robert Barnes, a California political consultant, sent out a mass emailing as an experiment in "public service." As a result of the angry outcry from antispam groups, Barnes scrapped his plans to send out nearly a million unsolicited political spams for the recent 2 June California primary. Instead, he used an opt-in mailing to those who had requested such information.
Other politicians -- like Murff Bledsoe of Texas and Jason Dimen of Oregon -- who have ventured into political spamming have also felt the sting of netizens' ire. Over and over again, such politicians have found that spam has a powerful boomerang effect. Most have lost both their Internet accounts and their elections.
With his Web site gone, Sansoni isn't sure if he'll continue to spam. In the meantime, he's planning to resume his election campaign the old fashioned way: knocking on doors.
