SAN FRANCISCO -- Employees of Salon were ordered out of their building for two hours Friday afternoon because of a telephoned bomb threat that followed a controversial story published this week by the online magazine.
"A receptionist took a call stating that 'a bomb is on the way' at 2:03 in the afternoon," said a San Francisco Police Department spokeswoman. "[Salon] said they had initiated an evacuation."
A thorough search failed to turn up an explosive device, but the company's technical staff said that their network has been under attack Thursday and Friday.
Over the course of 11 hours, the company's email system has grappled with 6,000 obscene messages, apparently routed through a server in the Czech Republic. The attacks have overloaded the company's email systems.
The incidents are apparently in response to a story the magazine published on Wednesday that revealed Republican Representative Henry Hyde's affair with a married woman that ended in 1969.
The story's publication has been accused of being part of a conspiracy to undermine Hyde, who heads the US House committee studying the report issued by independent counsel Kenneth Starr last week.
"This is explicitly in response to the Henry Hyde article. So it's purely political," said Andrew Leonard, technology correspondent for Salon, referring to the email bombs.
"It's unlikely that the attack was carried out by a real hacker," said Leonard, "as they would have defaced the site or done some real damage.
"It's usual for sites to get hacked protesting the treatment of hackers such as the demonstrations on The New York Times site last week," he added.
Salon's technical staff spent most of Friday trying to come up with a way to filter out the obscene emails. While the email flooding has hampered the company's email servers, the attacks have not affected the availability of Salon's Web site.
Hyde is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which will decide if impeachment proceedings should be brought against President Clinton over his alleged perjury in the Monica Lewinsky affair.
Leading Republicans have charged that the White House may be leaking stories of others' adulterous affairs to take the heat off President Clinton. The FBI was sent to investigate that claim on Thursday.
Salon dismissed the Republicans' accusation, and said the Clinton administration did not provide the magazine with any details of Hyde's affair.
