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Perl's Chip Salzenberg Sued, Home Raided
Chip continues: "The key evidence in the search warrant was so ridiculous as to be surreal: CVS logs indicating that I downloaded more than I uploaded, and that I sometimes accessed the company network from home. Apparently, for company management, the police, and a judge, working at home through a gateway the company set up for that very purpose, and refraining from editing every source file for every code change, is a sign of nefarious behavior.
My behavior in accessing the company network was entirely within my job description and in no way involved misappropriation of anything. For the more than two years that I worked at HMS, I used ssh and CVS to access company files with my laptop both from work and home, with management knowledge and approval.
What would lead management to such a sudden action? Days beforehand, I had made an internal report of unethical and apparently illegal behavior by the company: Use of open proxies for web harvesting to avoid blockage by web site operators. HMS apparently decided that working with me to address their use of open proxies was not an option.
Health Market Science is a large corporation with, compared to me, effectively infinite resources. My legal bills have topped $40K already over just two months. If HMS succeeds in tarring me with their false accusations, what's to stop your employer or client from doing the same to you, should your relationship sour?
Friends have set up GeeksUnite.net, an informational web site and Legal Defense Fund. The site includes the search warrant, my letter about open proxy abuse, and court documents.
Please contribute to my Defense Fund to fight this attack on the normal and legal work practices of millions of tech workers. Every little bit counts! If every person who visits the site contributes only ten dollars, that will make a huge difference. Only through community effort can we protect ourselves."
While this is sound advice, it doesn't necessarily follow from this story.
He said he made an internal report of unethical and possibly illegal behaviour. It doesn't say he took this up with police at all. It sounds more like he was trying to warn them that they were doing something they shouldn't be so they could stop before they got caught.
And just in general about this story: *sigh*
If anyone else was as confused as me about the intro, there's a town called "King of Prussia" in Pennsylvania. Go figure.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
Every company I have ever worked for has violated all sorts of labor laws. Start giving them a pile of minor regulatory headaches.
Then make sure you have a good shark for a lawyer. Make sure he has a technologically savy partner or associate that can understand the CVS and gateway issues.
Then countersue. They may have infinite resources compared to you, but they also have much deeper pockets to go after. If they are vunerable on this point, your lawers will be more than happy to go after that big paycheck.
If all you do is try and defend yourself, then they will steamroll all over you.
You will want to check your local law, but MOST states permit a concealed recording device on a person when there is no "perceived expectation" of privacy (don't record anything in the bathroom) or when more than 2 people are party to the conversation.
I've only had to resort to this tactic once, but it saved my job and cost the Veep his....
was it worth the $20????
d*mn straight it was.....
My name is Douglas Muth, and I live not too far from King of Prussia, PA.
Back in 2001, I was laid off from my previous job and looking for work. I interviewed with Health Market Sciences sometime around that July for a Software Engineer position, and it was an interesting experience. I met some of the people from that company and was finally interviewed by one of the Vice Presidents, a guy by the name of Rich Ferris. Rich seemed pretty impressed with my resume and said something to the effect of "we'll get you an offer by the end of the day".
So, I went home and gave Rich a call at the end of the day. But suddenly his story changed, and it was, "I had problems getting the offer through HR (or somesuch), I'll have one for you on Wednesday".
Wednesday came, and I was told, by Rich, to call back again on Friday. Friday came, and they were having money issues and would get back to me on Wednesday. Finally, next Wednesday rolls around and I'm suddenly told, "Well, we really want to hire you, but we don't have the money right now, so we cannot make you an offer".
So what it boiled down to is that I was led on by that company for over a week with the promise of employment, only to have it yanked out from me because they didn't have their stuff together. It was a total waste of my time, and the time of the job recruiter I was working with. If they didn't have the money, they shouldn't have been hiring in the first place. The whole experience left me rather bitter.
I hope Chip sues that company into oblivian.
Anyway if he had resigned how would it have helped him one iota? He'd still be facing a frivolous and expensive lawsuit and have all his stuff jacked.
Well, aside from the wrongfull lawsuit, if he had resigned under threat he could have applied for unemployment benifits and get his employer embroiled in arbiration (a free and apparently abritrary by some standards method of dispute resolution.) Not only would that help tie up the company and give backing to his (potential) counter-suit, but he might make some money to help with the bills.
<PARANOIA>
Finally, if I were a high-profile FOSS developer, I'd invest in a wireless adapter and a decent SOHO SAN box. Put that baby inside a wall with a UPS. It's impressive what you can do with a drywall knife, some 12 gauge homegrade wire, and a decent amount of drywall patch. Let them raid all his stuff, his data would have had remained 'safe' and all his HD's clean (save any cache/tmp/~ files.) Hell, get paranoid and setup the SAN to re-encrypt the drives and shut off if certain files aren't touched every X minutes.
Chip's problem now is that 100% of his admissable evidence is in the hands of a known immoral and hostile agent. There is no practical way to back up his claims without more money. Any 'evidence' he gets back from those machines may be unreliably tampered after the police's uber-windows nerd gets done trashing his probablly non-windows boxen.
</PARANOIA>
Save Chip, Sink Heath('s legal team)
"You cannot have a General Will unless you have shared experiences. You cannot be fair to people you don't know."
I really don't care about what's "expected" in this situation, and I don't care whether he was naive in his approach or not. What I care about is that if a company retaliates against someone for pointing out unethical behavior, files fradulent charges, and drags him through legal and financial hell, that they get their ass nailed to the wall.
(This is based entirely on conjecture. None of us really know what went down for sure.)
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
Basically these trade secret laws let big guys with resources or connection punish small guys (us) without any legal process. We're out tens of thousands of dollars just from the moment the process begins, without a court or a judge even having seen the issue.
There's also the emotional factor. It's terrifying. If I got a criminal trade secret conviction, I would never be able to work in the programming field again. What else could I do? My life would be ruined even if I got probation only. The fear is incapacitating. It's like someone telling you "you have cancer." Even if the cancer is treatable, it is terrifying.
Anyone in the programming field needs to be aware of these risks. You don't think about it because a) these things usually do not result in convictions (in TFA's case, if his telling is accurate, there is no evidence of any wrong-doing) and b) when they go away without a conviction, we're all scared to talk about them (like I am posting as AC right now). But even if the case goes nowhere, running into a $40k legal bill is disastrous. That's a downpayment on a house. That's 100% of your after-tax income for more than a year (probably). That's your new-car and vacation fund for several years. That could cause so much financial stress as to lead to divorce, family estrangement, etc. That's "liquidate all of your assets right now and borrow from all of your relatives" disastrous. That's a penalty this guy is suffering without any trial or judicial overview. That's (possibly) without even having a grand-jury rubber-stamp the police side of the story.
I'm afraid to even post this lest it have some bearing on my situation, but I'm posting because I want all of us Slashdot crowd to be aware of it.
I don't really have a solution, but one thing that seems to help is to put up a very aggressive and determined defense from the very beginning. Let everyone involved know, "there will be no plea bargain. There will be a vigorous defense. Trying to bring a civil matter into the criminal system will not work and I'm not going to beg for mercy. If it gets to a trial, we're fighting all the way and there will be an acquital."
This guy is brave to even be talking about this publicly. I'm sure his lawyer advised him not to (mine did). Most of us who are victims of this are silent victims like me.
Hah! First job I worked after college we had 3 developers sharing a Polyforth development system running multiuser in 12K of RAM with no memory protection. When you dropped out of the editor to test something you yelled "save your buffers"... because Polyforth didn't even use stack sentinels so just about any syntax error meant the system crashed and had to be rebooted.
I moved out West in 1997 to work for a company (heading up a software division for Windows) that a friend had bought into. Long story short, he and I found massive corruption (embezzlement) within weeks. He brought it up at a board meeting, and the next day was kicked out of the building, voted off the board (illegally it turns out) and his stuff left on the curb. I quit the same day.
At 7 AM the next morning, the sheriff was at my door with their lawyers in tow. Fortunately for me, they screwed up the warrant and were unable to seize my hardware, but they took a very detailed inventory of everything. Even more fortunately, my friend HAD consulted a lawyer before confronting the board and he (the lawyer) had the whole thing search/seizure suspended. The courts finally found the company's motions meritless (and fined them!!) They ended up with a huge lawsuit against them from several board members once the whole picture came to light, the BSA came down on them like the wrath of God (thanks to a cover your ass maneuver by the CIO) and the whole thing went into the crapper within 8 months.
ALWAYS consult a lawyer when doing any sort of confrontation with your employer. You need something to back you up. If they are doing something scummy, there is NOTHING that will stop them from doing something scummy to you in return. I should have done so before the board meeting, even though I wasn't directly involved. But my friend saved my ass. He lives 2000 miles away now, but I still send him thank you notes.