Radio show used Arnold audio

"We’ve been hacking them for years, if this is hacking,” Jason Nathanson, a former producer for the Jon Ziegler show on KFI 640-AM in Los Angeles, said on the show Tuesday night.

State Treasurer Phil Angelides’ campaign manager acknowledged Tuesday that two staffers leaked a recording of the governor bantering in his office with his staff to the Los Angeles Times. The governor apologized for remarks he made about a Hispanic female legislator after the Times story appeared.

The governor’s campaign has accused the Angelides campaign of unethical behavior for downloading the recording and leaking it to the Times, and the governor’s office has referred the matter to the California Highway Patrol for investigation.

Angelides has yet to comment on the leak, which has put his campaign on the defensive. His campaign pointed out Tuesday’s KFI program to The Associated Press.

Angelides’ spokeswoman, Amanda Crumley, said the program supports the campaign’s claim that Schwarzenegger’s office itself is to blame for putting up private recordings on their own Web site.

"It further undermines their wild accusations in this whole matter,” she said. "The Schwarzenegger campaign made an error, and now they’re trying to cover that up.”

Ziegler, a harsh conservative critic of the governor and also of Angelides, said he thought it was legitimate for his station to use the recordings because they were so readily available on the governor’s public Web site.

"This was all extremely public,” he said in an interview Wednesday with the AP. "We just happened to find it.”

Ziegler said on the show that he used recordings made by the governor’s office of interviews that other news organizations had done with Schwarzenegger and that were "not publicly disseminated.”

Nathanson said he stumbled on the audio files while trying to find a link the governor’s press office had sent him.

"I typed in a few numbers wrong and I got a whole list of all the governor’s speeches, interviews, all the public things that he’s been doing for years,” Nathanson said on Tuesday’s show. "And there’s a whole directory that they had on their site, and it was public. It wasn’t private. There was no password needed. There was nothing protected.”

Nathanson said that when the Angelides campaign explained Tuesday how its staffers downloaded the leaked recording from the governor’s Web site, he realized he had been doing the same thing.

"It’s the same exact Web site that we used to use,” he said, although he added that he never found a recording of a private conversation in the governor’s office like the one the Angelides campaign leaked.

The governor’s legal secretary, Andrea Hoch, said in a statement that the leaked file and others that were downloaded by the Angelides campaign were stored "in a password protected area” of the governor’s computer network. However, the statement does not say a password was needed to access the files that Nathanson and the Angelides campaign found. She also does not refer to hacking.

The governor’s spokesman, Adam Mendelsohn, maintains that anyone who strayed into the private area of the Web site should have received a pop-up warning saying, "This system is restricted to authorized users for authorized use only.”

But Ziegler said he never saw any pop-ups.

"There were no passwords; there were no scary warnings — nothing remotely like that,” he said in an interview.

The Angelides campaign this week publicly released the URL — or Internet address — its staffers used to access the governor’s Web site. Nathanson, the former producer, said he had been using the same address.

That portion of the governor’s site has since been taken off-line.

Mendelsohn said he wasn’t aware of the radio station making use of the private recordings and said it was not clear to the administration what "the Ziegler show is referring to.” He maintained that it was different from what the Angelides campaign had done.

"The radio show did not go in and access private conversations and secretly leak them to a newspaper,” he said. "This is a fundamentally different set of circumstances with the intent to harm the governor.”

Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said he did not think there were any cases yet to decide whether chopping off a Web address, as both the Angelides campaign and Nathanson did, is illegal.

But he said he doubted it would be because it is so commonly done.

"Basically, you’re just messing with the URL that you’re putting into your browser,” he said. "It’s hard to see how that could be unauthorized access.”

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