Politicians join the e-mail avalanche

Millions of Americans who are already trying to fight off unwanted electronic mail from direct marketers are about to get deluged by another source: politicians and lobbying groups.

For the first time, a nationwide list of registered voters has been cross-referenced with multiple lists of e-mail addresses collected from magazine subscribers, catalogue shoppers, online poll participants, and the like.

Now legislators, candidates, and interest groups can buy more than 25 million e-mail addresses of registered voters and contact them at will.

''This is the next generation of campaign strategies," said Roger Alan Stone, chief executive of Advocacy Inc., the Washington cyber-consultancy that helped create the new product. (He is not to be confused with Republican consultant Roger Stone.)

Privacy advocates are appalled. They see Stone's enterprise as dangerously intrusive and potentially harmful to the public's confidence in government.

''What we're talking about here is political spam," said Pam Fielding, coauthor of ''The Net Effect: How Cyberadvocacy Is Changing the Political Landscape."

Direct-mail marketers have long used voter registrations to find street addresses and then send what's often called junk mail. But the pairing of voter registrations with e-mail addresses is new and involves the use of what's widely considered to be private information.

Personal e-mail addresses are not as available as street addresses are, and they are acquired for this use without the owner's explicit consent.

In addition, e-mails can be sent in such large numbers and at so little cost that voters can be repeatedly targeted. Mailings can be tailored to voters' personal, even intimate, information. Advocacy Inc., for instance, can easily sort its e-mail lists by political party, voting frequency, age, gender, ethnicity, and geography, right down to neighborhood.

''Many constituents are likely to be incensed at such minute targeting; to them it will feel a lot like Big Brother is watching," Fielding said.

''We've been moving toward this for a long time," said Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, an Internet watchdog group. ''But most Americans still don't realize how frequently their information is sold to the highest bidder and that politicians are now operating in that same marketplace."

Other leaders in electronic lobbying have decided against compiling a similar list for fear of sparking voter outrage. Aristotle International Inc., which maintains a 50-state voter registration file, ''has repeatedly declined arrangements that would even appear to compromise privacy or utilize deceptive e-mail marketing," said its president, Dean Aristotle Phillips. ''Given the pervasiveness of spam, responsible campaigns, organizations, and vendors reject the deceptive methods of spammers."

Until now, reputable owners of e-mail databases have refused to sell their addresses unless the buyer could demonstrate a direct connection to potential future recipients. For instance, lobbying groups could legitimately get the e-mail addresses of their members or donors.

But Advocacy Inc. has argued that all registered voters have a clear interest in the democratic process and therefore are natural recipients of e-mails from any political organization.

Stone denies he's spamming anyone. Filters do not consider his company's e-mail to be spam because of the kind of servers that send it. E-mail recipients can click a link if they don't want to receive political communications, he said, and the complaint rate has been low since he launched the lists this year.

MailFrontier Inc., an e-mail security and antispam company, estimates that more than 1.25 billion unsolicited political e-mails will be sent to registered voters this year, up from virtually none during the last presidential election. ''It costs a lot less to send e-mails versus postal mail or TV advertising," said spokeswoman Deanne Phillips. In addition, commercially available e-mail databases are larger and can be tapped to produce substantial lists.

One of the largest clusters of users of off-the-shelf e-mail lists are members of Congress. Last fall, the House voted to give e-mail a privileged place in its franking system, under which lawmakers use taxpayer money to pay for communications with their constituents. Since then, dozens of legislators have been paying companies like Stone's to organize their e-mail programs and get their constituents' e-mail addresses. According to the House Administration Committee, at least 130 lawmakers in the 435-member House send e-newsletters to their constituents.

Ryan Turner, policy director of the nonprofit Community Technology Centers' Network, worries that the lists could be abused unless lobbying firms are prevented from selling to their lobbying clients the e-mail addresses they collect for lawmakers.

The firms scoff. They say they function as arm's-length consultants and keep their hands off the lawmakers' e-mail lists. ''We're only providing technical services," Stone said. ''The lawmakers have full ownership of the list and we don't."