[Letter to the editor of Dr. Dobb's Journal, appearing in August 1996 issue,
as submitted.]

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I read with interest your editorial by Jonathan Erickson regarding the 
conviction of Mr. Schwartz and I think that some of the facts were missing. 

The first count involved Mr. Schwartz placing a gate through Intel's 
firewall. This action violated company policy and the defendant had been told 
on three separate occasions that this violated policy; the last time was told 
that if he wanted this gate he would need to obtain security clearance.  Mr. 
Schwartz's response was to move the gate to a little used lab computer in the 
SSD division of Intel (defendant's work no longer involved SSD).  When 
questioned by the police, Mr. Schwartz said that he knew his actions were 
against Intel policy and 'technically illegal' but he knew he could do it so 
he did.

Counts two and three charged the defendant with appropriating to his own use 
a password file and passwords (theft).  Your editorial left out the fact that 
Mr. Schwartz was not a system administrator for the machine that he copied 
the initial password file from and than ran crack against. Also, you do not 
mention that he then used one of the passwords as his own and entered an area 
of Intel (SSD) where he was not employed and copied that password file and 
ran crack against it.  The records showed that he had done this twice over a 
five week span. Defendant was not a systems administrator for any of the 
machines password files that he ran crack against and Mr. Schwartz told the 
police " I needed them in case they caught me doing it [gate] and I knew they 
would shut me down, so the more passwords I had, the longer I could continue 
doing what I wanted to do".

Thomas J. Tintera
Washington County District Attorney's Office
Hillsboro, Or