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Sklyarov Discusses the ElcomSoft Trial
DaytonCIM writes "Dmitry Sklyarov talks openly about the ElcomSoft trial to CNET News. The 'Russian programmer thinks it was unfair of prosecutors to play his videotaped deposition at the ElcomSoft trial rather than calling him to the stand.'"
Video someone before the trial, edit the tape, and play that back in court...and with no intention of letting him stand up and defend himself?
Sounds like someing you'd hear about in a _really_ backwards country somewhere...
Chaos, panic, disorder...my work here is done.
They can't compel him to testify, so why ask him to? It would have wasted everyones time to call him to the stand.
If he had something to say his lawyers would call him to the stand in rebuttal to the prosecution.
Skylarov is a citizen!
YOU testify for the VIDEO TAPE
in US
the VIDEO TAPE testifies for YOU
...how did they settle the jurisdictional questions? I mean, last I heard, Skylarov was working in Russia. One assumes the US government just did it by fiat, or was there more diplomacy involved than what I'm led to believe?
If the US just went ahead and did it anyway, that's kind of a scary precedent, meaning that now, no matter where you are in the world, the long arm of US law enforcement can come after you for doing something it doesn't happen to like? If that's the case, as sort of a quid pro quo, I would like some of the priveleges of US citizenship to go along with the burdens.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
The US Constitution says that you have the right to own a gun. A tool with but one purpose and that is to kill. Killing is illegal - but you write a piece of software that could potentially be used to pirate something but has several other good purposes and they throw you in jail. I will never underestimate the stupidity of american lawmakers.
Two words.
Cross examination.
It's, like, a fundamental part of our legal structure. The opposing side gets to IMMEDIATELY challenge your statements on the stand, obviously with the intent to lessen the impact of those statements on the jury.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
If you want to know more about this case, ElcomSoft, or Dmitry Sklyarov, EFF.com has a great FAQ. Check it out here.
Doesn't matter. His name only has an exact cyrilic spelling. Anything written in the roman alphabet is simply an approximation.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
He said if someone came to him with another project focused on cracking copyrights, "I would ask you, if you're sure this is legal." If the answer is unclear, Sklyarov said he would suggest the person find a lawyer who could figure it out.
I'm sure he was told his previous project was legal. It's sad that now lawyers will have to say "Yes, this is legal. Except in the USA."
Hmm... held under guard in a foreign country and not allowed to go home until you make a video tape that incriminates you and/or your friends... nope, I can't think of any reason the testimony might be faulty. Of course, when folks in "the axis of evil" do things like that, our freedom-loving leaders tend to call it "hostage taking" and "terrorism".
Well, depending on how liberally you interpret the DMCA, his talk at DefCon could be construed as a crime. It would then be breaking a US law in the US, which we hold non-residents for all the time.
The usual method is that one side "designates" deposition testimony to be read (or played) to the jury and the other side "counter-designates" testimony which it believes is necessary to make the testimony complete. The court is usually provided with a transcript of the entire deposition marked to show the designated and counter-designated portions. The point is to read (or play) only the relevant portions of the testimony rather than waste the jury's time and confuse the issues. There's nothing fishy about it.
I was just about to release to the world the greatest invention ever, when I read Sklyarov's
article, and that part about the lockpick possibly being illegal got to me! I realized a teleporter could be used to bypass shrink-wrap licenses, pop cd's out of thir unopened jewelbox vaults, or maybe even make "secure" adobe pdf documents useful (I haven't figured that one out yet, but it MAY be possible). Sorry, world! My lawyer has advised me to destroy all the evidence, make my lab notebooks useless by converting them to MS-WORD format, and additionally to re-format my brain to avoid any chance of this big-media-busting technology being used against me in court.
Why do folks keep misrepresenting what actually happened here?
The fact is, he did all his work on the product (which is legal in its country of origin) in Russia, where, last I heard, US laws don't apply. The fact that they were waiting to arrest him, apparently, for giving an academic lecture on a product he produced where it was legal is far more disturbing than you make it out to be.
ISTR that Skylarov isn't the first person to whom this sort of jurisdictional knucklebones has happened at the behest of some large, US-based money-wielding entity. As you may recall when the DeCSS story broke, the US wanted Jon Johansen to stand trial in the US for breaking a US law when he wasn't even in the US when he allegedly "broke" it (how can you break the law of another country when you aren't even there, I'd like to know?), but that quickly passed off around the same time as the Norwegian authorities decided to go ahead and prosecute him for related offenses, real or imagined. Also, you may recall Edward Felten's legal difficulties surrounding his paper on encryption.
All of which, in my (paranoid?) mind, adds up to the US's playing very fast and loose with international law (what else is new?) and an immense chilling effect in the technology field.
If it were provable that Elocomsoft was deliberately and knowingly (with malice aforethought) selling products to customers not legally able to buy them, that would be another matter, which I think was upheld with the verdict here. However, the very clear perception that I'm getting from the Elocomsoft case in general is that the US wants to enforce the DMCA worldwide, and will do just about anything it can to make sure that it gets what it wants. Note, please, I'm not a US citizen, and so don't have US patriotism getting in the way of my natural impulses to be skeptical and cynical of the US government's motives in any given instance, so I could be erring on the side of hostility here.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Well, if this case has anything to say for precedence, it wouldn't surprise me if China gained that right.
Scary, eh?
The fifth amendment gives you the OPTION to not testify against yourself. If you want to be called, you certainly can. It's not until you're sitting in the witness box that you have the option to excercise your fifth amendment right.
Travis
I agree with you, just want to enhance one point...
challenge your statements on the stand, obviously with the intent to lessen the impact of those statements on the jury.
I wouldn't say it is to lessen the impact, I would say it is to clarify and balance the statements.
The US legal system is an adversarial system, each lawyer tries to turn the testimony to support his side as much as possible. Witnesses are not allowed to simply get up there and announce the "truth". They can only answer the lawyer's questions. The laywer has a lot of control of what information is presented and how it is presented. Without cross examinaton it can be extremely distorted.
With recorded testimony the control is even greater. If the lawyer doesn't like the way one of his questiones was answered I think he can "unask the question" by not including the question in the tape.
Was this a misscarrige of justice? No, the defence was able to add him to their witness list and call him themselves. It just strikes me as a stupid stunt by the prosecution.
If I were on a jury and this sort of think happened I'd certainly wonder why the hell the prosecution didn't want him on the stand.
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