Index
Previous
Next
Letter from Cybersalem #1
An Oregonian headine during Randal's trial:
"Computer crime has arrived" [1]
The Letters from CyberSalem will be a numbered series dealing with aspects of Oregon v. Schwartz. They will be archived on the Web, and are subject to revision. Their contents are my responsibility and mine alone, and I do not speak for anyone else in them. References to the transcripts will be frequent. These may be found on the FORS site.
For those interested in my connections with the defendant, Randal:
I first met him two weeks before the trial. I was working on a project involving Perl and he offered to meet me for dinner and answer questions. It may seem improbable that a person looking at 15 years in a few days would take time from an already busy schedule to answer, free of charge, technical questions for someone he had never met. But that is Randal, as many will tell you. Until that dinner I was unaware he was a defendant in a criminal proceeding, though I had heard he had serious legal troubles with Intel as his adversary.
Since then the case has occupied much of my attention. I have met Randal several times since then and consider him a friend, though certainly not one of his closest. Randal has many friends. And he is appallingly gregarious. We've also talked business a number of times, but have never had any business connection. Randal has offered to write a foreword to a book of mine about this matter, if there ever is one. Other than that we have no plans for any business arrangements.
Intel and me:
In the past I have had business ties with the stealth plaintiff, Intel. I have been Intel's customer not just for chips, but for whole computers and even their proprietary version of UNIX. I have long been especially interested in all versions of UNIX running on 80x86 architectures, seeing this as a serious possibility long before the general wisdom did. While my devotion is to efficient use of technology, rather than any particular company, someone insisting on classifying me in such terms would, based on my record, would have had to call me a business ally of Intel's.
Since the first draft of this letter, I have become a permanent employee of Sun Microsystems. As Andy Grove says, in our business competitor and ally are not especially useful terms, but those who insist on classifying companies one way or another would probably say Sun is a competitor of Intel.
My enthusiasm for Intel has certainly been dulled, but I still do not have any philosophical or political problem with Intel's size or success. However, my rights or those of others are not negotiable as a part of the price for that success.
About the quote:
For the most part, the Oregonian restricted itself to suggestion rather than direct statement in getting across their belief in Randal's guilt, and the honesty, directness and courage of this headline suggests a slip-up to me. Ms. Gonzalez's article is filled with sentences which imply Randal's guilt, and has a few only very careful reading of which discovers she is not simply reporting that Randal is quilty 4 days ahead of the verdict. "It's the kind of crime high-tech firms fear most", she says. The obvious meaning for the "it" which is the most fearful variety of crime is Randal's, but very close reading shows "it" might refer to the sentence two paragraphs earlier, which describes what the prosecutors contend was the crime. She goes on to speak of "the fact that Intel ... was hit" by a crime, but a closer look at that paragraph reveals it is not clear whether she said that Randal hit Intel in supplying context for a quote, or this is part of what the source said. Quote marks would settle the issue, but they are not provided. Certainly anyone not studying the article very closely believed that Cristine Gonzalez reported Randal's guilt as an established fact, and she suggests his guilt at so many points that she clearly had no problem with giving that impression. Certainly this was what the headline writer thought, and he clinched the issue, but ruined with his directness an admirable piece of slimy craftsmanship.
The jury was instructed not to read coverage of the case, or listen to others discuss it, but they were not sequestered. That they were sitting on a case the area's only newspaper regarded as major news and important to the local business climate, was very likely to come to their attention despite the judge's instructions. Also very likely to come to their attention was that the Oregonian saw a guilty verdict as the obvious choice, and had said so on page B1. The reporters and editors of the Oregonian certainly knew of this likelihood.
My favorite innuendo from this article is "In fact, in most cases, perpetrators of high-tech crimes are employees." If you are working in Oregon as a butler, you had best hope nobody in the house gets murdered!
Note 1: Story by Christine Gonzalez, 7/21/95, page B1.
Index
Previous
Next