E-Mail Harassment Case Raises Furor On Calif. Campus -- Expelled Grad Student Later Acquitted Of Stalking Charges

In a controversial decision that has polarized the campus at California Institute of Technology, a promising doctoral candidate was expelled from the prestigious Pasadena university last month for allegedly sexually harassing another student - largely via electronic mail.

The unusual action has raised new concerns over the nature of harassment in a digital age, and the credibility of e-mail records at a time when the use of the medium is steeply increasing, both on campus and off.

Jinsong Hu, 26, who spent six months in jail before being acquitted by a Los Angeles Superior Court jury in June of stalking, insists he did not send some of the e-mail in question and that parts of the mail he did send were doctored.

Jiajun Wen, Hu's former girlfriend, accused him of verbal and written harassment. But the bulk of the evidence examined in court and in the university's disciplinary hearings was electronic mail.

Complaints of e-mail harassment at many U.S. universities have risen sharply over the last 18 months as students, faculty and staff have gained increased access to electronic communication.

`Spoofing' possible

Given the ease and relative anonymity with which e-mail can be sent, university officials worry that it's an especially potent tool for harassment. But at the same time, it's often possible for e-mail to be manipulated or "spoofed" - made to look as if it has been sent by someone else - and thus many schools are treating e-mail evidence with considerable caution.

In the Hu case, for example, one of the apparently harassing e-mail notes that Wen originally told campus authorities had come from Hu was later found to have been a joke sent by a friend of Wen's new boyfriend from Salt Lake City.

"Forging e-mail is notoriously easy," said Gary Jackson, director of academic computing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "If you get a piece of ordinary e-mail from me, you have absolutely no way of establishing that I sent it."

Policy-makers at the national and state level are wrestling with questions about how to govern cyberspace. A congressional committee is debating several bills that would regulate the distribution of "indecent" material over the Internet - and sexually oriented or harassing e-mail could fit that definition. Connecticut recently passed the nation's first anti-computer harassment law.

But important precedents may well be set on university campuses, where most students get a free Internet account and daily tasks are migrating to cyberspace more quickly than anywhere else. Many schools have wired their residence halls to the global computer network, and students are doing homework online and attending "virtual office hours."

First expulsion

Caltech is thought to be the first academic institution to expel a student for harassment primarily based on electronic mail records. Hu's appeal to Caltech Vice President Gary Lourden was rejected last month.

While a university computer expert testified that she traced the offending e-mail back to Hu's account, Hu's defenders argue that Wen had his password, that others had access to his computer - which was often left logged on - and that e-mail is easily edited once it is received.

Because of the difficulties involved in authenticating e-mail - and because the social and legal protocols defining electronic harassment have not yet been fully worked out - many university administrators advise recipients of unwanted e-mail simply to ask the suspected sender to stop. Many schools, including Caltech, also prohibit students from sharing passwords.

Kathleen McMahon, assistant dean of students at UCLA, says e-mail harassment has become prevalent in several forms. Four students were suspended last quarter for planting "e-mail bombs" that disrupted the school's computer system. And there have been several incidents of e-mail threats of violence.

Most common, though, is e-mail harassment stemming from romantic troubles.

Largely in response to the increased usage, the University of California recently drafted a systemwide e-mail policy that critics fear will compromise the privacy of those who use a UC account to log on to the Internet.

MIT's Jackson says that most cases can be dealt with simply by getting those involved to ask for it to stop. At MIT, where e-mail has long been the main form of communication, the university has implemented a system called "stop it" to handle harassment complaints.

But the borderline between free speech and harassment can be blurry, especially when electronic harassment takes on particularly ugly forms. Last year, a racist message about Asians was posted to a widely read newsgroup on Chinese literature, under the name of an MIT student.

The student denied having sent the message, but she nonetheless became the recipient of hundreds of angry e-mailings. Jackson was unable to identify the actual sender.

Further complicating the unfamiliar territory is the assumed authenticity of electronic records.

"There is a tendency for non-computer experts to believe anything the computer says because the computer says it," said Steve Worona, a computer expert at Cornell University. "But that's just not the case."

There are several tools for encrypting messages and stamping e-mail with an electronic signature to verify the sender, but no good way of telling if an unencrypted message is authentic.

At MIT, Jackson handles about 50 harassment complaints a year. "But if there's been an incident and all the woman has in her hand is a piece of harassing e-mail and that is the sole evidence, there's nothing you can do at that point," he said.

The Caltech case involved four pieces of e-mail. The first one Hu allegedly sent to Wen when they broke up in August 1994. The other three were apparently sent to Bo Yu, her new boyfriend, in January.

Hu maintains he did not send them. He says he first learned of messages allegedly being forged from his account when he tried to sign on one day in early January and found that it had been disabled by a campus computer administrator.

William Goddard, Hu's adviser, says the main issue in the university's investigation of Hu was whether he had an alibi for the times when the e-mail message log indicated they were sent. And he did - for two of them. But even then, administration officials noted that he could have written a program to have the computer send the mail while he was no longer at his terminal.

"My own belief is that he didn't send the mail," Goddard said. "And in the worst-case scenario that he did send it, it's not clear to me that it's sexual harassment. It's e-mail."

Goddard has appealed the expulsion to Caltech's provost.