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Letter from Cybersalem #2
The Testimony of Sarah Bibber in the Witchcraft trial of George Burroughs, Salem, Massachusetts, August 3, 1692:
"The deposition of Sarah Biber, who testifieth and saith, that on the 9th day of May, 1692, as I was agoing to Salem Village, I saw the apparition of a little man, like a minister, with a black coat on, and he pinched me by the arm and bid me go along with him, but I told him I would not. But when I came to the village I saw there Mr. George Burroughs, or his appearance, most grievously torment and afflict Mary Wallcott, Mercy Luis, Elizabeth Hubbert, Ann Putnam, and Abigaill Williams, by pinching, twisting, and almost choking them to death. Also, several times since, Mr. George Burroughs, or his appearance, has most grievously tormented me with a variety of tortures, and I believe in my heart that Mr. George Burroughs is a dreadful wizard, and that he has most grievously tormented me and the abovementioned persons by his acts of witchcraft.
"Sarah Biber declared to the Jury of Inquest that the abovementioned evidence is the truth, August 3, 1692, the which she owned on her oath." [1]
From the Prosecutor's Summation in Oregon v. Schwartz:
"Let's look at what he told Jim Lilley. Defendant admits to gate and that it violated Intel policy and was technically illegal. Defendant said he knew this.
"In regard to the Crack program, defendant initially says for security, but he knew his activities were against Intel policy and technically illegal and he did it to enable continued access to the Supercomputer Division.
"What he told Rich Cower, that he said he knew gate and cracking against Intel policy. He worried that gate would be found and he needed the passwords so he would have another computer to land the gate on.
"So of all the password files that were available to him in the Intel Corporation, he says he was just testing out the Snoopy computer, but we know he had what is called root access and System Administrator duties on ***programs of the Domain Name Service, Clayton Kirkwood and Bob Wilcox, the thing that changes Mink into numbers, that's how I look at it, and he could have copied password files to them from there to run on this."
Tr. 7-25-95, page 29, lines 5 to page 30, line 2. Tom Tintera was the prosecutor.
We can see that criminal law has declined in the last 300 years. Sarah Bibber's deposition is a coherent account in good English of the time. The jury is given clear specifics of what it is George Burroughs did wrong.
The prosecutor's summation in Oregon v. Schwartz is presumably a prepared speech, but the first three paragraphs get it wrong nearly every time they use computer terminology, and have shaky English grammar to boot. I can reconstruct Tintera's probable meaning with some effort, though how a lay jury followed him, I cannot imagine.
The last paragraph of the Tintera quote is pure gibberish by any standard. The asterisks indicate a point at which the court reporter could not even follow the words. The names of the two witnesses seem to be randomly inserted. What Randal is being said to have had root access and System Admin duties on is not clear -- you get those on machines, not programs. The idea of DNS, part of whose function is to translate machine names into IP numbers, turning the machine Mink itself into numbers is amusing. By the time this passage winds up and Tintera is speaking of the copying of "password files to them from there to run on this.", no amount of study gives me any idea what "them", "there" or "this" is. I suspect Tintera hadn't a clue either and we can be sure that the jury did not.
It must be admitted that Tintera, after all is said and done, proves smart in the above passage. He gets up and gives a lot of technical sounding double-talk interspersed with Randal's confession as "remembered" by his Intel and police witnesses. He bet that all an Oregon jury will listen to would be "defendant said", "illegal", "violated" and "he knew". He didn't trouble getting the actual facts straight or figuring out how to express them coherently. He bet he didn't have to, and he knew his audience.
Second, it is believable that, if George Burroughs were indeed "a dreadful wizard", Sarah Bibber could have seen, remembered and described what she says she saw. Detective Jim Lilley was, by his own account, not computer literate [2], but claims to have carried in his head a confession to a crime involving firewalls, passwords, programs, root access, directories, DNS, IP numbers, the Internet and Ethernets, and later accurately summarized it into a tape recorder with the aid of a few "cryptic" [3] notes.
This hardly seems likely and detailed examination of Lilley's full report [4] makes it seem less likely. For example, the sentence in Lilley's report beginning, "However, on further questioning, Mr. Schwartz did admit to me ..." misuses the term "root". Now, who is believable as the originator of this mangled "admission", Randal, author of several best-selling and acclaimed books which use this term correctly throughout, or Lilley, who admits he does not know what the word means [5]? And indeed, if you look at all the halting, computer-illiterate bureaucratese spoken by Randal's apparition to the police, it's hard to take seriously the possibility that these are Randal's actual words.
Third, again supposing George Burroughs were A Dreadful Wizard (and God preserve us from such!), he would probably be doing the sort of things Sarah Bibber says she saw and heard (and felt!) him doing. Assume Randal also to be A Dreadful Wizard, and contrast Detective Lilley's evidence. Randal was installing DNS at Intel, and had access for this purpose to 10 root passwords strategically distributed around Intel's internal network. Lilley says Randal was using crack, which only finds weak passwords, for his attack on Intel, when by using sniffers he could have obtained pretty much any and all the passwords he wanted, strong and weak alike. If this were Randal's way of practicing Dreadful Wizardry he ought to be required to turn in his pointed hat and wand, for incompetence. [6]
We compared the quality of the prosecution case in Salem, Massachusetts, 1692 and in Hillsboro, Oregon, 1995 in three areas. First, did the prosecution understand its case enough to present its allegations coherently? Second, is it believable the witness could have actually recalled the matters they claim to have recalled? Third, is the story internally believable as an account of how a criminal might carry out a crime? By all three tests, the Salem evidence proves superior.
Note 1: Quoted in Salem-Village Witchcraft, Boyer and Nissenbaum, eds., Northeastern University Press, 1993, p. 79. Spelling of names was not as regular in 1692 as it is now, and this witness's name is spelled variously in the sources. In addition to the two spellings in the above, it's spelled Vibber elsewhere.
Note 2: Tr. 7-13-95, page 45, lines 3-5.
Note 3: Tr. 7-13-95, page 51, line 19.
Note 5: Tr. 7-13-95, page 84, lines 6-10. Det. Lilley also testifies he does not know the meaning of the word "directory", indicating computer talk must have been very hard for him to follow, indeed. See Tr. 6-13-95, page 138, line 14 to page 139, line 22.
Note 6: The police reports present many more remarkable features, including admissions by Randal's apparition to the police of events which can be proved to have not occurred. Later letters will take these up.
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