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Conference 7.286::digital

Title:	The Digital way of working

Moderator:	QUARK::LIONELON

Created:	Fri Feb 14 1986
Last Modified:	Fri Jun 06 1997
Last Successful Update:	Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:	5321
Total number of notes:	139771

1461.0. "Digital Raids Consultant's Office and Home" by JARETH::EDP (Always mount a scratch monkey.) Tue May 07 1991 09:45

RISKS-LIST: RISKS-FORUM Digest  Friday 3 May 1991  Volume 11 : Issue 61

        FORUM ON RISKS TO THE PUBLIC IN COMPUTERS AND RELATED SYSTEMS 
   ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator

Date: Thu, 2 May 91 15:35:59 BST
From: Jim Cheetham <jim@oasis.icl.co.uk>
Subject: The means justify the ends? (piracy probe)

From the front page of "Computing", 2 May 1991, comes the following report
(quoted with permission).  Comments/indications of unquoted text are in []s.

	   DEC raids consultant in piracy probe (by Joanne Evans)

  DEC has searched the office and home of a training consultant in Reading
 [England -jim], confiscating hardware, software and paper files to find
  evidence of alleged software piracy.

  A number of people from DEC and it's solicitors, Linklaters & Paines,
  searched the home of Greg White [...] on 5 April while he was out.
  They had obtained a civil search warrant.

  Earlier in the day, they searched the office of Syntellect, an arm of
  a US training company which Greg White runs in the UK. [...]

  DEC was granted the Anton Piller order, a warrant granted without the
  subject's knowledge, by the High Court of Justice Chancery Division
  in London on evidence alleging that Syntellect was using unlicensed
  software to provide training courses. [...]

  The evidence was obtained by a consultant employed by DEC at attend
  a Syntellect training course in February. He copied its system
  software which was later examined by DEC. [...]

Besides the problem of someone holding unlicensed proprietary software,
what strikes me here is the subterfuge used by DEC to gain the evidence
they needed in the first place. Surely the consultant attending
Syntellect's training course didn't ask for permission to copy their
system? In which case, is the evidence not inadmissable by virtue of
being gained by illegal means?

This seems to be a case where "the ends justify the means", which is
most definitely *not* acceptable in the legal system normally. Another
example of the law not being in touch with computers, perhaps?

  Jim Cheetham, jim@oasis.icl.co.uk, +44 344 424842 x3121 (ICL ITD 7263 3121)

T.R	Title	User	Personal Name	Date	Lines
1461.1		LESLIE::LESLIE	thirtysomething	`Tue May 07 1991 10:20`	5
	All seems perfectly reasonable to me. What's the problem? This isn't the first or last time that DEC will chosse to protect itself in this manner. - andy
1461.2	lawful protection of a company's rights	CSC32::K_BOUCHARD	Ken Bouchard CXO3-2	`Thu May 09 1991 18:29`	4
	Is the author of .0 trying to imply that DEC did something un-ethical? Sounds like everything was on the "up and up". Ken
1461.3		LESLIE::LESLIE	Acouplapints now	`Thu May 09 1991 22:19`	3
	Note that the author of .0 is not the author of the article. - andy
1461.4	Think "International"	COVERT::COVERT	John R. Covert	`Thu May 09 1991 22:56`	5
	Well, is it strange (in the U.K.) for someone other than the police to search someone's office and home? Need some context here, since this happened in a foreign culture and all. Don't want to be too American-ethnocentric in my viewpoint on this, ya know.
1461.5	fruit of a poisoned tree	MAMTS3::GTOPPING		`Fri May 10 1991 13:55`	9
	I think the questionable activity mentioned in .0 was the use of a consultant to attend a course and gather evidence in order to get the search warrant. .0 sort of suggests that the consultant may have made an unauthorized copy of the system used for training, and this copy was analyzed to develop the evidence for the warrant. (I apologize to the author of .0 if I got this wrong) The idea of a "civil" search warrant is not familiar to those of us in the U.S., at least as described here.
1461.6	consultant was authorized by the softwares owner DEC	CVG::THOMPSON	Semper Gumby	`Fri May 10 1991 16:46`	5
	RE: .5 I don't think Digital needs authorization to copy software that Digital owns. And we license the use of system software so we do own it. Alfred
1461.7		PSW::WINALSKI	Careful with that VAX, Eugene	`Fri May 10 1991 23:26`	41
	RE: .5 A lot depends on the interpretation of this line (pasted in here from .0): > The evidence was obtained by a consultant employed by DEC at attend > a Syntellect training course in February. First off, I assume that "at attend" is a typo for "to attend". It makes no sense otherwise. What exactly is meant by "a consultant employed by DEC"? Does this mean "a third party hired by DEC to snoop at Syntellect" or does it mean "a DEC employee with the title 'consultant'"? Furthermore (again quoting from .0): > He copied its system > software which was later examined by DEC. [...] What exactly is meant by "copied its system software"? Did this person do a BACKUP of the system disk? Or did he print out a DIRECTORY of SYS$SYSTEM and SYS$LIBRARY (enough to tell what layered products were there)? From these questions, one could build two scenarios of what happened: 1) DEC suspect that Syntellect is using pirated copies of their software. DEC hire an outside consultant to attend a training course there and instruct the consultant to obtain a BACKUP copy of their system disk or a DIRECTORY listing of the system areas (latter more likely) so that DEC can later check this against what Syntellect is supposed to have. 2) A DEC systems consultant (i.e., DEC employee), while attending a Syntellect training course, notices that Syntellect is running something they shouldn't have. The employee does a DIRECTORY of Syntellect's system disk and takes this away as evidence of the wrongdoing. (2) seems to me to be the more likely. The article in .0 could be interpreted either way. --PSW