Student’s Expulsion Over E-Mail Use Raises Concerns : Cyberspace: Caltech harassment case illustrates growing problem. But experts fear unreliable records.

In a controversial decision that has polarized the Caltech campus, a promising doctoral candidate was expelled 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 and off campus.

Jinsong Hu, 26, who spent six months in County Jail before being acquitted by a Los Angeles Superior Court jury in June of stalking, insists that 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, also 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 of the nation’s universities have risen sharply over the last 18 months as students, faculty and staff have gained increased access to electronic communications.

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 though 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 messages 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.”

The Caltech case comes at a time when policy-makers at the national and state level are wrestling with myriad 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 on-line and attending “virtual office hours.”

Caltech may be the first academic institution to expel a student for harassment primarily based on e-mail records. Hu’s appeal to Caltech Vice President Gary Lorden was rejected last month.

Students and faculty at Caltech say the case has divided the campus and especially its close-knit Chinese community.

“E-mail is the bread and butter of an institution like this,” said Yuk Yung, a geology professor at Caltech. “But it is very hard to prove that the person whose name is on it indeed sent it, and that it has not been tampered with. Especially here, where these kids all have extraordinary computing ability.”

Described by his adviser, chemistry and applied physics professor William Goddard, as a brilliant student who scored the highest of nearly 1 million students taking the Chinese equivalent of the GRE exam, Hu was one year away from finishing his degree.

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.

“Nobody should be convicted or expelled based on unencrypted e-mail,” said Hu’s attorney, Anita Brenner, who has written several articles on cyberspace and the law. “Particularly in a campus climate of account sharing, sharing of passwords and mail spoofing.”

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.

“I’m amazed with the amount of sexual harassment among students and the use of e-mail to express it,” McMahon said. “When relationships go bad, instead of stalking the student they send 10 e-mail messages saying ‘I can’t believe you won’t go out with me.’ ”

In cyberspace, where facelessness has often led to extreme forms of expression, from angry “flaming” to amorous confessions, some believe such messages may mean less than they do in other forms. Civil libertarians say that moves to restrict or monitor e-mail may violate the 1st Amendment. And, they note, one can simply not read unwanted e-mail.

But anti-harassment advocates say the scope of the Internet and the capability it provides individuals to publish their opinions widely make it particularly dangerous.

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.

Cornell University is grappling with a similar issue this month. University administrators are getting barraged with e-mail from Internet users across the country offended by an e-mail message initially sent among four freshmen titled “Top 75 reasons why women (bitches) should not have freedom of speech.”

“I think everybody who got it forwarded it to everybody they knew, and we’re receiving a tremendous number of complaints,” said Marjorie Hodges, Cornell’s legal policy adviser on computer matters. “It’s a perfect example of something that might not violate university policies but is indeed offensive and does disrupt university business.”

Hodges says individual complaints regarding e-mail harassment doubled last year and the previous year, and she expects the trend to continue as more members of the campus community go on-line.

MIT’s Jackson, whose colleagues started calling him “Dear Abby” after he helped resolve a particularly convoluted e-mail triangle across three campuses, 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-mails. 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. “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.

Of those, the first described a sexual experience with Wen. “I would like to talk about our happy life in bed and her body which I know so well,” the e-mail printout said, according to court records. The next one continued, “If you are beginning to suffer now, tell Jiajun about it. She knows what it means.”

Hu maintains he did not send either of 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.

Caltech’s dean of graduate students, Arden Albee, says that e-mail is no different than any other form of communication, and therefore falls under the university’s harassment policy.

“Just like phone calls, it typically turns out that the system keeps many more records of the e-mail messages than most understand,” Albee said. “These can be traced if the need arises.”

Albee was one of three faculty members on the panel that decided to expel Hu. The university said all disciplinary matters are confidential and declined to explain what records the committee relied on to determine who sent the e-mail.

The court case, in which many students testified on both sides, involved allegations of both verbal and electronic harassment and threats. Hu, who had been held on $150,000 bail, was acquitted after three hours of jury deliberations.

Goddard 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.

“My personal belief is that the underlying reason they took what I think is a very unreasonable position is that it’s the safest thing for Caltech. And that may be true, but on the other hand we’re supposed to be here for the students.”