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Letter from Cybersalem #14
John Steinbeck:
"Let me tell you a story. When The Grapes of Wrath got loose, a lot of people were pretty mad at me. The undersheriff of Santa Clara County was a friend of mine and he told me as follows: 'Don't you go into any hotel room alone. Keep records of every minute and when you are off the ranch travel with one or two friends but particularly, don't stay in a hotel alone.' 'Why?' I asked. He said, 'Maybe I'm sticking my neck out but the boys got a rape case set up for you. You get alone in a hotel and a dame will come in, tear off her clothes, scratch her face and scream, and you try to talk yourself out of that one. They won't touch your book but there's easier ways.'
"It's a horrible feeling, Chase, particular because it works. No one would ever have believed my book again. And until the heat was off I never went any place alone." [1]
From Tim Jackson's new book, Inside Intel:
"As details of the operation unfolded, [ new Intel Security hire Robert ] Westervelt could hardly believe his ears. He understood that Intel had set up an arrangement with an employee who had recently been fired for theft. The plant security manager would give the employee a package of Intel chips, and the former employee would act as a fence: He would contact potential buyers for the chips, explain that they had been stolen from the assembly plant, and then sell them. An Intel employee would then sign a sworn statement 'confirming' that the goods had been stolen from the company. The buyer would be arrested by the local police, and the 'seller' would be paid by the company for his help in getting the buyers behind bars. [ ... ]"
"'The way you explained this in the meeting,' replied Westervelt, 'there's definitely been a crime committed. But not by the twenty-odd guys who bought the chips. The crime has been committed by you guys. You fabricated evidence, which is a felony in Malaysia and any other part of the world.'" (257-258) [2]
Also from Jackson's book, Vinod Dham, then Intel Vice-President and chief of the Pentium project, speaks to Albert Mu, an engineer he has discovered planning to form his own start-up:
"Intel can put you in jail just like that." (338)
Inside Intel, though recent, was the first book about Intel. The absence of titles on such a powerful corporation is unusual -- consider the steady flow of books about Apple and Microsoft. But apparently Intel made it clear that they would not cooperate with such ventures and this dissuaded everyone until Jackson (403-407).
Misdeeds of Intel security described by Jackson include: attempting break-ins to employees' desks and cars (262); absconding with the garbage outside an employee's home and reading its contents (238); unauthorized wire-tapping of conversation with an employee (262,263); bribing a motel employee to search an employee's room and attempting to bug it (263); unauthorized criminal record checks (264); unauthorized license plate checks (264); unauthorized financial checks on persons (264); tackling a employee's husband in their own home, while doing protective surveillance (323-324) [3]; taking employee's typewriter ribbons (265-266); and using the threat of arrest and imprisonment to search employees' homes (338) [4].
Westervelt, the Intel Security operative who brought the Malaysia chip setup to the attention of Intel management, wound up out of a job for this service. Indeed, he charged that Intel attempted to have him arrested on drug charges on his way back from Malaysia. Intel paid Westervelt an unrevealed amount to settle his lawsuit under non-disclosure (255-261). Westervelt was not the only one to wind up out of Intel security as a result of failure to condone or commit crimes. So did Terry Hudock (264-266).
Lest it appear that Intel's security staff does all the dirty work, we already saw Vinod Dham having employees' homes searched under threat. We also have the destruction of a report on fire hazards in Penang after a fire and insurance claim there (139); lying to an insurance investigator (142); opening, reading and deliberately using a mistakenly delivered Fed Ex (310-311); preparation of witnesses at a criminal trial (293); alteration of evidence in civil suits (322, 330); and the senior executive who threw a dictionary at a secretary who corrected his spelling (65).
Especially relevant to Randal's case is Jackson's account of the criminal prosecution of George Hwang, founder of start-up ULSI, for theft of Intel's trade secrets. Hwang had discovered ULSI had unwittingly come into possession of Intel proprietary documents, and had contacted Intel. Hwang offered to open his laboratories to Intel lawyers. Intel did not respond to ULSI. Instead the Santa Clara Police raided ULSI five days before Intel filed a civil suit (284-289). The leader of the police team that raided Intel, Nels Pearson, later did private consulting for Intel and Intel was allowed to be present at the interrogation of witnesses, and to see seized ULSI technical documents (290,293).
The testimony of Intel expert witness John Crawford showed that the criminal prosecution was for Intel just a side show to its civil case. Crawford, when asked if most of the information in the misapropriated documents was not already published, distanced himself from the article. An Intel attorney asked for a recess, and Crawford conferred with another Intel attorney about the implications of this for the civil case. On his return to the stand, Crawford changed his testimony (292).
Intel's eagerness to accompany the police on searches and at interrogations should not be seen as a sign of exaggerated respect for officers of the law. Intel policy is that the police not be called for bomb scares, in part because they are thought to be useless, in part because they are seen to waste the time of Intel employees on "dumb questions", and in part because they cannot be relied on not to talk to the local press (149-150). And certainly the presence of law enforcement is unhelpful when you want to break into a car (263).
Other highlights from Jackson's chronicle of Intel's "strategy of legal harassment" (372, 8 and note on 387): Intel legal's quota of two law suits per quarter (214); the suit with AMD in which the judge was moved to condemn Intel's "cold-blooded bad faith" (283); another AMD suit Intel lost because it altered a document submitted in evidence (330); and Intel's withholding of documents from the prosecution in the Hwang case (293).
Note 1: Letter from John Steinbeck to Chase Horton, quoted in the aftermatter for The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, pages 301-302.
Note 2: Inside Intelby Tim Jackson. The book has a rather extensive website .
Note 2: As recently as the early drafts of this letter, in fact, Jackson's was the only book about Intel. Since then some others, apparently with a positive spin, have seen the light of day. For example, Intel VP Albert Yu's Creating the Digital Future has just appeared.
Some passages in Jackson put Intel in a very positive light. Chapter 19, "Organization and Alpha Particles", pages 175-184, presents Intel as a very exciting place to work. Jackson's account of the Pentium floating point bug matter actually makes a better defense of Andrew Grove's conduct than his own account of the same matter (Chapter 1, Only the Paranoid Survive). In particular, Grove ignores the decision to remain silent about the the bug until the public discovered it, while Jackson points out that this is standard industry practice, so that Intel's fault in the matter amounts only to passing up an opportunity to set a new, higher ethical standard.
Throughout this letter, where numbers appear in parentheses, they are page references to Jackson.
Note 4: This incident is the context of the Dham quote.
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