Perl's Chip Salzenberg Sued, Home Raided

Chip Salzenberg writes "In April of this year, Health Market Science of King of Prussia, PA, told police that they feared I was misappropriating trade secrets. That very afternoon, police raided my house with a search warrant to seize every computer in the house, paper files, CDs, and DVDs... even my wireless router and cable modem!" Chip was the pumpking for perl's 5.004 release. Keep reading for his description of his current legal troubles, and for a shortcut into what he says prompted his former company's actions, read his letter warning about abuse of open proxies.

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."

Comments

I'm the pimpking for our product!

[Radres]

WTF is a pumpking?

Re:I'm the pimpking for our product!

[cranos]

I'm guessing something like a release manager.

Re:I'm the pimpking for our product!

[ReverendHoss]

The person in charge of maintaining the Perl code used to have (still has?) a stuffed pumpkin they used to pass around. Project manager is a good parallel.

Re:I'm the pimpking for our product!

[ratajik]

Evidently, it's a pumkin head puking out a bunch of seeds: http://www.bewitchingways.com/images/pumpking.jpg

At least according to Google...

Re:I'm the pimpking for our product!

[Anonymous Coward]

The superior officer of a Squash Squire?

Re:I'm the pimpking for our product!

[ivoras]

I see that the glorious art of asking the google first is nearly abandoned.
Here's the first hit: http://www.perl.com/doc/manual/html/Porting/pumpki n.html#Why_is_it_called_the_patch_pumpk.

Re:I'm the pimpking for our product!

[cratermoon]

Gosh, I could google it faster than slashdot will let me finish a post: http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/P/pumpking.html

Re:I'm the pimpking for our product!

[blamanj]

In a company I used to work for, we had a stuffed bear that we used to synchronize large changes I you were going to do massive cvs checkin you had to go get the bear.

Re:I'm the pimpking for our product!

[EnderWiggnz]

bah... the company that i'm working at has 5 engineers on a linux server with an IDE drive. if you rebuild the world, you yell "generating all packages", so everyone knows that disk IO is fubar'd for the next 10 minutes.

Uh...

[Anonymous Coward]

If his version of events is true, then wouldn't there exist whistleblower protection laws he can seek refuge under?

Re:Uh...

[n0-0p]

Laws do exist, but the simple reality is that most whistle blowers still get screwed and are never able to work in their respective industry again. That's probably why he tried to resolve the problem internally first, although creating a paper trail exposing misconduct can scare management just as bad.

Re:Uh...

[jbolden]

The state of Pennsylvania has a whistleblower protection law for employees of public companies. Judges have tried to extend it to some extent to companies that recieve their revenue from government. That wouldn't apply in this case at all. The law explicitly does not protect Chip.

Re:Uh...

[soulhuntre]

See, there you go again... another person bringing facts into things.

You need to be screaming "big brother" and "intellectual property is bad for hax0rs!".

Re:Uh...

[EMN13]

Uhm... What kind of mumbo jumbo is that? Of course they don't have the right to seize your stuff just because they want their property back! It is, after all, a personal laptop... On the other hand, Chip doesn't have a right to keep the source - however, if there is a difference of opinion in that matter; that's for civil courts; not some sort of surreal grab what you can with police support action. This judge is apparantly not very well informed when it comes to technical issues.

It's really dubious that they're even allowed to fire him on such short notice; so this action definitely stinky... it's as if they're taking whatever actions they can to legally fire him on the spot and sink his ship as soon as possible.

That's unethical. It's also pretty unethical to not talk with him first. That's just pretty human-to-human standard, to first talk about any differences you may have.

It's possible they're intentionally keeping the legal situation as complex as possible to prevent him from having a chance. If they're really worried about the claimed source code leak, that makes no sense. Whatever the case; that too is fairly unethical.

So pretty much whatever the background is of their allegations - it's obvious they couldn't have any real evidence (a hypothetical source code leak which they're not sure exists is certainly not traceable to a particular user as all users get the same CVS code), and it's obvious they're generally being assholes just to make it hard for him to win the case - instead of focussing on their business; which they should be.

--Eamon

Am I missing something?

[winkydink]

You accuse the company, in writing, of illegal and immoral acts, yet you don't resign? What did you think they were going to do, make you an SVP?

Re:Am I missing something?

[mcc]

What did you think they were going to do, make you an SVP?

If it were me? Well, there would be a wide number of possible responses I could expect from the employer, but producing false information to police and courts to produce illegitimate legal action and have my private property unreasonably seized-- property which I may or may not ever see again once it disappears into the "evidence" system-- is not one of them.

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.

Re:Am I missing something?

[IthnkImParanoid]

IANAL, and I know this varies by state, but this kind of retribution and harassment for filing a complaint may be very illegal, and the company may have opened themselves up to liability for it. I know reporters of sexual harassment or discrimination are protected from retribution, and it would be interesting to know what protection a whistleblower for unethical behavior has under state and federal laws.

Regardless, no one deserves this treatment for stating their beliefs the company is doing something wrong.

Re:Am I missing something?

[caryw]

Yes but how is it that a judge or magistrate (I'm sure under intense pressure from the police department) will issue a search warrant without hard evidence of any illegal activity? Strongarm tactics like this are what is wrong with our judicial system today.

This is your tax dollars at work!
--
Fairfax Underground: Fairfax County and Northern Virginia message board

Re:Am I missing something?

[winkydink]

It's a lot easier to prove the company is acting maliciously against you if you:

1) Quit
2) Write your accusatory letter

order is important here.

Doubly true if you have to sign something styating you are retaining no confidential information when you leave.

Re:Am I missing something?

[lpret]

There are so many better ways to be a whistleblower and be protected from retaliation. However, before you attack a company (even rightfully so) lawyer up and make sure you have all your ducks in a row so that this type of retaliation doesn't occur. Or use an anonymous source such as ethicspoint.com. While this may seem a coward's path, it in fact can save your job.

There is still hope for the legal system. Title VII, the FLSA, and I believe all state laws have anti-retaliation language that protects you. Go to your local attorney general's office and see what you can do.

However, as others have said, if you do all of the above and management still does nothing -- get out! The best that can happen is you get a small blurb in the WSJ and worst case is that you'll be forever branded a snitch.

Re:Am I missing something?

[toddbu]

Strongarm tactics like this are what is wrong with our judicial system today.

Actually, what's wrong with our judicial system today is that not enough people take interest in it. How many people take the time to do the research on judges before going to vote? Since most judicial races are non-partisan, it can be difficult to tell if a judge shares your political leanings. So people vote for judges (and legislators for that matter) because they recognize the name from a sign that they saw on the way to the polls.

If you don't like the system then work to change it. Find tech-friendly judges and then run around town putting up their signs on election day.

Re:Am I missing something?

[waveclaw]

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)

Re:Am I missing something?

[gomiam]

...he essentially blackmailed his employer...

And, pray tell, where is the blackmail? I have read this letter and it just states what HMS was doing and its being illegal. Asking the company to stop doing it, refusing to cooperate on it, and warning on telling the authorities amounts to blackmail now? I guess there's this hidden paragraph where he asks for money or some other compensation. When you find it, please tell me. Until then, your blackmail charge falls flat.

Re:Am I missing something?

[DShard]

one comment about two... make sure it is to the DA and anonymous.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Romancer]

How do you blackmail an employer by filing an internal memo that can be traced by anybody in management? Blackmail requires some basic form, what's the threat and what's the demand?

It's more plausable that the company feared the files that would prove that they were breaking the law were copied on his home computers and made something up with their lawyers to get his computers for "imaging". He might or might not have been planning on going public, but their reaction is totally over the top. We'll see if any of the computers come back formatted. :)

Re:Am I missing something?

[oliphaunt]

Deserves? No. Expects? well, that's another matter entirely. If you've already confronted the founder of the company and pointed out that the business practices that he himself WROTE THE CODE to perform are, in fact, illegal... and he didn't seem shocked and appalled by that news... then odds are, he's already well aware of the legal status of his company's activities, he's a (wealthy? powerful?) unscrupulous bastard anyway, and won't mind squashing you like a bug if it keeps things just the way they are.

honestly, people- if your company's financial success is built on illegal behavior, and the guy who owns the majority of the company set it up to be that way, why would you think he's going to change anything just because you were bright enough to notice? The best you could hope for is that, when you try to blackmail him into splitting the profit with you, it's not just cheaper to have you killed.

Picture this: Vince Coll walks into Dutch Shultz's office.

Vince: Hey Dutch, I've been thinking.
Dutch: That's a dangerous habit.
Vince: You know, this Prohibition thing? That makes alcohol illegal right?
Dutch: Yeah.
Vince: So, all this beer we're selling, that's illegal too, right?
Dutch: Yeah. That's why we make so much money.
Vince: Well, I don't feel so good about breaking the law.
Dutch: I don't like where you're going with this.
Vince: I think maybe we should, you know, stop?
Dutch: Don't make me shoot you in my office.

I can understand why Chip had the moral problems that he did, but he sure picked a naive way to try and resolve them. There IS a federal whistleblower statute, so if he went to the Feds with his first letter he would have been legally protected from retaliatory action from his employer... but keeping your job after you've turned them in doesn't do you any good if the company's only revenue stream depends on illegal activities.

Re:Am I missing something?

[IthnkImParanoid]

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.)

Re:Am I missing something?

[jbolden]

The newspapers don't do the research on judges. For minor offices I go by endorsements. I can't even get endorsements for most judgeships. How is the average person supposed to get this information?

Re:Am I missing something?

[chrisah6]

Threats? Where do you arm chair lawyers get this crap? He brought this to the attention of management through a memo and stated he would have nothing to do with it and report it to the authorities if it didn't stop. That is a threat? Next time someone does something illegal and you know about it, don't say a word. Then when that person gets caught you tell the authorities that you knew what the person was doing all the time but you didn't think it was any of their business. Then let you know what happens.

Re:Am I missing something?

[databyss]

He made no veiled threats. The company was doing an illegal practice. He said "you shouldn't do that, and it's my ethical responsibility to report it to the authorities if you don't stop it."

He made an internal memo to save the company from public embarassment. He didn't make anything public until they had raided his house.

Re:Am I missing something?

[iamwahoo2]

Just because a few peoople within the company are doing somethings wrong is not a good reason for quitting. The last thing you should do is quit, ecspecially if you are determined to fix the problem. If you quit, the acts will look retaliatory.

Re:Am I missing something?

[iamwahoo2]

Wow, an internal practices website sounds like the perfect place to discuss internal practices.

Re:Am I missing something?

[CAIMLAS]

Seems to me that this might fall under the grounds of railroading, harassment, blackmail, or any number of other unethical items. Seems to me that, once the criminal charges are over (are there any?) he'll have the grounds to sue them for millions (not to mention potential legal reprecussions): for falsely representing evidence, for lying to cops, using the law to their own ends, ruining his name and reputation, for taking his property, and functionally preventing him from working (due to the legal charge). It might even direly impact his career in the future.

There isn't a single ethical computer science professional in the world (professors, lauded scientists, hell, even LW or LT) that wouldn't hesitate to come to his defense as an expert witness, I imagine.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

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.

Because that wouldn't look suspicious at all if they ever found it. Also, you'd be doing drywall and paint work every time the stupid thing ate a disk.

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.

Which may not be an actual problem. Given the company's apparent bad faith, it could be argued that all evidence is tainted as a result of the state's mishandling of it, therefore it could be assumed that there was exculpatory evidence, even if it is no longer present.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the affadavit, and I saw no legal basis for the seizure of this man's property. This was one step above an anonymous tip. I imagine the conversation might have been like this: Mark Brosso: "Look! This guy that we've employed for 2+ years at a job involving software development has been transferring data to and from our network using our computers! He's a thief! Seize him!" Affiant Det. Al Elverson, Jr: "Er, didn't you, his employer, issue him the computer and the account? Wasn't it his job to access your computer network? Didn't his job involve transferring data? If you wanted him to stop, why didn't you deactivate those? Do you have any EVIDENCE that what he downloaded was outside the normal course of his work? Can you prove to us that you have even informed him that he is no longer authorized to access the data? Can you prove that any of your trade secret information has been disclosed to ANYONE? So, you have a SUSPICION that a person who you employ MIGHT have trade secret information on his company laptop, or on removable media... which isn't illegal, since he hasn't DISCLOSED it... and you want me to bring the force of the law in to seize private property? I think I can find a judge that will do that..." Judge: "So, you have no evidence of any actual wrongdoing, and you want me to sign a warrant to seize private property? Sure! Where do I sign?

For, who the good fortune to be able to vote AGAINST someone who would issue a warrant for the seizure of computer equipment based on the affadavit of someone who couldn't even use a word processor to edit the request (see for yourself! It's obviously copied from a drug-related case, with the drug parts CROSSED OUT), without any actual basis of suspicion other than one man's un-sworn complaint against another, the issuing judge is the Honorable Jeremy Blackburn. Remember that when his term is up. Unfortunately, I think his district is in Chester County (where the property was seized), not in Montgomery County (where Salzenberg works, and where I live), so I don't think I get to vote for him.

Re:Am I missing something?

[the_mad_poster]

You're not real clued in to how criminal investigations work, huh?

When the police find something "suspicious", you don't just say "oh, I have this perfectly plausible excuse which sounds highly improbable to technical incompetents like you" and walk away. Trust me, I know. I had to jump through some pretty ridiculous hoops with a detective once just to prove that it was not, in fact, uncommon for a brand-spanking new hard drive to appear "wiped".

The justice system is a misnomer. It's not a "justice" system, it's a "legal" system. Justice would imply that all parties are acting in an informed, responsible, and full-capacity manner, which is probably the sickest joke one could make about our incompetent, bungling court system.

Chip Salzenberg is fucked. You would be fucked if you tried to right off your little hidden system with that excuse, and you'd probably get charged for trying to interfere with the investigation and giving false information to the police if you used it.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Arker]

It's simple.

If they're on the ballot, they have already sold out.

Hey, I said it was simple, I didn't say it wasn't depressing.

Re:Am I missing something?

[mcrbids]

Because that wouldn't look suspicious at all if they ever found it.

It's HIS stuff. HIS box. HIS wall. Having computers in the wall is not illegal (not sure, it may be against the building code in some areas, but it'd be a stretch)

What's to be suspicious of? I've considered putting one or two of my main (home-based) systems in an obscure cabinet (that looks like an Air Conditioner) in the cellar instead of out in public view, just to deter theft.

Also, you'd be doing drywall and paint work every time the stupid thing ate a disk.

That'd blow. I'd suggest the obscure cabinet in the cellar, first.

Re:Am I missing something?

[ShawnDoc]

The problem with voting histories for members of congress, is that final bills that get voted on are very complex and often contain content that goes against the title and summary of the bill. You know that the person in question voted against the "Feed the Orphans Act of 2003", but you don't know why. Were they against feeding orphans? Or did someone amend the bill to include language to make it illegal to wear pink on Thursdays? There are so many bills that start off good, generate good buzz, do good things, and then either get gutted or have so much crap added into them before the final vote that they no longer do any good.

Re:Am I missing something?

[boots@work]

Well, I'm not a lawyer. But they perhaps might have told him any of these things (I don't know which):

"Take out these sentences, it sounds like you're threatening them."

"Resign first, make absolutely sure you have none of their information on your machines, then send this."

"Don't warn them, just contact the DA."

"Don't be a hero, just resign and keep your mouth shut."

"Make a statory declaration of the facts first, and give me a copy of the documents."

Re:Am I missing something?

[siliconbunny]

I think what's wrong is the election of judges. To any lawyer observer from another common law country (like me), it just seems unbelievably wrong.

If you have to put yourself up for election, you will be deciding cases with a view to what potential voters -- really, just people mobilised by issue organisations, given how uninterested the average member of public is about voting --might think. This is either playing to mob mentality, or playing to vested interest groups. Either way is a recipe for bad judging.

The whole point of judicial independence is that judges will only feel free to take courageous decisions, and to avoid knuckling under to the government in power at the time, in particular, if their jobs are secure. That is, they can't be fired, and they can't have their pay reduced so much that they have to quit. Having to be re-elected to office is very much a serious job insecurity.

I would hate to have any of my legal rights determined by a judge with an eye on the opinion polls, the lobbysists and the millions of dollars in the bank accounts of sleazy, smoke-filled backroom operators itching to replace them if they decide cases in a way of which they disapprove.

I know plenty of judges in a number of countries, and have been employed by one at a court. Invariably they are horrified by the system of election of judges. Basically: they cannot see how many elected judges would feel comfortable taking an unpopular decision. Unpopular decisions being ones that (i) are against the prevailing mob mentality at the time and (ii) invariably turn out to be correct when viewed after the event, when passion and emotion has cooled, and what is left is the objective facts.

We've seen what playing to voters does to politicians. Why inflict it upon the judges too -- who are usually the ones who have to keep the politicians in check?

Re:Am I missing something?

[Tim C]

When the police find something "suspicious", you don't just say "oh, I have this perfectly plausible excuse which sounds highly improbable to technical incompetents like you" and walk away.

That'll be because the first thing the bad guys do in that situation is either claim ignorance, or trott out a prepared excuse.

The police can't take everything they're told at face value, or they'd let everyone go. Yes, it sucks when you're on the receiving end of it, but what's the alternative?

Any lega rights?

[bigox]

Doesn't he have any whistle-blower rights?

Re:Any lega rights?

[Senjutsu]

It might be a violation of the terms of service with their ISP, but I'm not sure it's illegal... In any case, if what he was doing turns out to be illegal then it really doesn't matter if he has the goods on the company or not.

Depends on which "what he was doing" you mean: if what the company is accusing him of doing were true, whistleblower laws would not protect him. But the charges they are leveling reek of retaliatory accusations with no substance. He is protected from that.

If the actions he took at the company's behest (ie, developing software to work around ISP blocks of their spyders) is illegal, whistleblower laws do protect him, provided he reports the illegal actions to the proper authorities when he becomes aware of their illegality.

Re:Any lega rights?

[Monkelectric]

I dont know about PA, but in California he absolutely would. I was in a situation where I was asked to do something extremely illegal, and I was able to report the problem to a different part of my organization which then *called* a Detective and DA to prosecute members of their own organaztion. I ended up wearing a wire in two undercover operations... However, they were unable to prosecute because the guys wised up somehow and did the scam in a way that was extremely hard to prove. Throughout the whole process I was anonymous through californias whistleblower laws.

This guys mistake was having faith in humanity that his company had any intention of being honest. If I was this fellow, I would find a tech savy lawyer and take all their money.

Lesson to be learned here

[Anonymous Coward]

Any time you're going to be challenging the mental giants that are in charge, ALWAYS have a lawyer in your pocket and all your ducks in a row. And offsite backups.
Seriously, what the hell did he expect - if they can use open proxies like this, that they would play nice with him?

Re:Lesson to be learned here

[egarland]

Any time you're going to be challenging the mental giants that are in charge, ALWAYS have a lawyer in your pocket and all your ducks in a row. And offsite backups.

I absolutely agree. Speak softly and carry a big stick.

This was a loud letter full of scarrey words for a CEO like "illegal" and "under explicit management direction" and it ends with "notifying the appropriate authorities". Hell, if I was a CEO and I got this letter, I'd freak out too.

DON'T EVER send a letter like this without already having talked to a lawyer and given the lawyer everything you'd need. The unfortunate fact is that police will raid the house of an employee in a heartbeat, take all your computers with evidence on them and hand them over to the criminal employer who can then accidentally delete all the evidence. There's no way in hell they'd be able to get to anything you've given your lawyer though.

Honestly.. I'd want to have already talked to the appropriate authorities before sending a letter as explosive as the one he sent.

The moral of this story

[Doktor Memory]

Retain, and have a very long chat with a very good lawyer before you threaten your bosses with police action.

Re:The moral of this story

[XaXXon]

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*

Re:The moral of this story

[Doktor Memory]

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.

Read the last paragraph of the letter again -- he was definitly threatening them with exposure to the legal authorities.

And hey, more power too him -- that was certainly the morally right thing to do. But as a practical matter, you want to make damn sure you have all of your ducks in a row and have an old-school carnivore lawyer in your corner before you throw that kind of threat down.

Re:The moral of this story

[Qzukk]

He's a Senior Programmer, and he's writing as if he were a Partner. He's confrontational and adversarial in the same breath, and somehow expects to remain employed

You assume, of course, that he wants to remain employed.

There is, however, a difference between being fired, and having your employer lie to the police in order to have you arrested and your computer equipment seized.

Re:The moral of this story

[Doktor Memory]

mmmmmph. I don't think it's that clean-cut. Management of this company may have been corrupt, but presumably not every other employee was in on it. (They're a big company.) So, assuming that you like your co-workers and don't want to see them all out of a job (either from the cops shutting down the company or from management firing anyone who was friendly to the whistleblower), and assuming also that you believe the company can be profitable without engaging in illegal behavior, I can see wanting to try to resolve it without immediately involving the cops. The police tend to not be very tech-savvy, and once they're involved it's hard to predict which way they'll jump.

Re:The moral of this story

[Anonymous Coward]

Retain, and have a very long chat with a very good lawyer before you threaten your bosses with police action.

Amen. I learned the hard way through several companies (some I started, some I helped turn around, and some I was wise to leave) that unless you're old money, your best option is to walk away. Notify the authorities anonymously and under extreme caution if you must, but make sure it's darn near impossible to pin it on you that you were the whistleblower, and even then, expect them to still come after you (who do you think the authorities work for, the people? LOL!). Old money and its network will blacklist you further than you'd ever imagine possible. Old money continues to keep making money by having idealistic middle class hard working entrepreneurs achieve great successes, only to discover old money eats first. After they are full, they may decide to leave you with some scraps.

The most important lesson I learned is that in any company, figure out quickly who is just like you (assuming you're a member of the unpriviledged middle class) and who's old money nobility. They're special people - the equivelent of "made men" - and middle class folks are not permitted to touch them. I learned at one company that even a psychotic, cocaine abusing, chair-sniffing and female harassing sexual predator, old money company owner who kept on blowing through family millions had more clout than a the technology manager who rebuilt the dying company product.

If you have to get into battle, get an old money law firm and get some old money patrons on your side. Let them protect you and understand you'll have to pay back the favor if you haven't already earned it. Just because the United States is technically a representative republic doesn't mean Machievelli's world doesn't rule here. I've had too many attorneys explain otherwise (if you've ever had a hearing moved to a different judge that your attorney used to clerk for, you know what I mean). As long as you understand that several thousand years of civilization has been about those in power making sure that the rest of us keep them in power and luxury, and you don't mess with that rule, you'll do fine.

Re:The moral of this story

[DerekLyons]

Retain, and have a very long chat with a very good lawyer before you threaten your bosses with police action.

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.

Try reading his letter rather than the sob story at the head of this discussion - a very different picture emerges. He made an internal report in which he threatened personal legal action against the company and announced that he would no longer performed his assigned work.

Re:The moral of this story

[jpostel]

I gotta say that I am more likely to report my employer to the BSA on the way out the door, than I am to the proper authorities. I have been on the right and wrong side of the law and it's hard to be believed when you are already labeled "criminal" before the trial starts.

false police report

[Deton8]

You should take your original letter to the police who raided you. Hopefully they will then prosecute your employer for filing a false police report.

Re:false police report

[truckaxle]

At least he could return fire and file a police report and have have HMS's computers consficated :)

Re:false police report

[OverlordQ]

How do you know it's false? Wait till you get all the sides of the story and not just he 'victim'

Two lessons

[Otter]

1) Past and future Ask Slashdot questioners: when we tell you to document your situation and to see a real lawyer, do it! This is why!

2) Working for obvious scumbags is going to burn you in the end.

(Assuming his version of the story is accurate -- I realize there's another side. I also realize that both of my suggestions are frequently easier said than done.)

Re:Two lessons

[IgnoramusMaximus]

2) Working for obvious scumbags is going to burn you in the end.

Minor difficulty: This would exclude 90% of corporations -- worldwide -- as it appears that being a "scumbag" is a pre-requisite to "corporate success". One has to only take look at the current CEO/CFO lineups, their views on society, their history of "ethics" and their inexplicable inter-dependencies with each other to see that quite clearly. These are the proponents of "globalization" where wealth is to be shuffled around the planet and no attention is to be paid to societal consequences of it. These are the promoters of taxation of individual consumption (via sales taxes) and no taxation of their own vast fortunes to "promote economic growth". These are the people who profit from wars and (in the case of Chip's nemesis) from illness and misery. Or slave labor. List an evil and chances are you can name a large corporation involved.

On a side, off-topic note, the problem is systematic to any large corporation. Larger the size, more attractive the operation becomes to conmen. Well healed conmen with dynastical family connections or self-made conmen who grease the right palms, it doesn't really matter. Sooner or later any company of value is run by them. Honest people do not stand a "snowball's in Hell" chance because the corporate game is rigged hopelesly against them, mostly due to the fact that the whole "free market" charade is run by the said hustlers, but also due to the fact that these thieves use the most powerful weapon known to blind and stupify their prey: greed. Thus they constantly talk about "growth" and "share value" to separate shareholders from their senses and grant themselves all the powers they need. A honest person, when put beside a pack of these howling wolves, appears timid and meek. Which is seen by the shareholders, themselves whipped to a frenzy, lusting for mega-profits to dismiss a down-to-earth, objective and realistic candidate out-of-hand and replace him/her with a snake who will promise them "profits beyond your wildest dreams". And the rest is history.

Prey

[Necromancyr]

Is it just me or does this sound similar to the begining of the Crichton book Prey?

(Could be that I just read it yesterday...)

Heh

[OverlordQ]

Friends have set up GeeksUnite.net, an informational web site and Legal Defense Fund.

and slashdot has blasted it off the web.

The company's website and contact info

[waynegoode]

The website of Health Market Science of King of Prussia, PA and their contact page and their email address info@healthmarketscience.com.

Re:The company's website and contact info

[TwistedSpring]

I think a legion of slashdot readers blasting these contact details and sending trollish e-mails will only worsen this guy's situation: "Then he got his legion of goons to come to his defence, causing massive problems with our e-mail infrastructure and bringing our website to a crawl, before this had even got to court." That cannot be good.

I would advise any slashdot readers considering trolling this e-mail address to think carefully about the implications their messages might have on this guy, and refrain from contacting HMS unless they have something worthwhile and appropriate to contribute.

Re:The company's website and contact info

[waynegoode]

Very good point. I'd give you my last mod point, but I've already posted here. I too encourage those who reply to show restraint.

I sent a short email (50 words or so) using the contact page that basically said "The guy was trying to help. Leave him alone." My point was to let them know people support Chip, not to aggravate them.

In April of this year, huh?

[greenguy]

If anyone else was as confused as me about the intro, there's a town called "King of Prussia" in Pennsylvania. Go figure.

Why write to this management?

[Teun]

Why write up such a paper about the companie's (il)legal activities when it's quite clear the managament expressely supports it/ sees it as a business model?

Get out or be prepared for a long and costly fight!

Re:Pumpking?

[uncle_fausty]

I hate to be the guy who says "Search the Frickin' Internet", but... http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl/pod/perlhist.pod It's the maintainer of a given release of Perl.

I can't send money

[stoolpigeon]

because all I know about the case is what I read on slashdot and a site set up by this guys friends. I have no idea what is going on and I don't have time to fly to Kind of Prussia (wtf?) and look into it. Even if I did, I don't think the suits at his former employer are going to take the time to go through interviews with me so I can decide whether or not I should contribute to his legal fund.

Sucks for him if he didn't do anything wrong. If so I hope it works out. If it goes to court and he is found innocent-- then giving to the fund would be a lot easier.

Re:I can't send money

[stoolpigeon]

The thing is-- it is quite possible that nobody knows he was doing something wrong except for him.

I don't doubt the depiction of verifiable events (law suit, search warrant, letter sent) and they lead me to lean towards thinking he did nothing wrong. But I don't know. And I'm not dishing up my cash until I do.

The fact that he is well known just doesn't have much to do with it. I've been shocked by what people I know personally have done. I've never met this guy before in my life. That he is a skilled programmer tells me nothing about what is really going on.

Re:I can't send money

[ElBeano]

The problem is... you'll decide it's too much trouble to get to the bottom of it and pass on a chance to help. Maybe I'm wrong, but apathy conveniently finds excuses to do nothing.

Re:I can't send money

[Zaak]

...they lead me to lean towards thinking he did nothing wrong. But I don't know. And I'm not dishing up my cash until I do.

The purpose of a legal defense is not to exonerate the guilty. It is to ensure a fair trial. Whether you believe he is guilty or innocent, or whether you don't know, makes no difference. He has the right to a fair trial. At present in the United States, that means having a lot of money to pay a competent lawyer.

TTFN

No probable cause...

[jhoger]

Based on the evidence at hand there was no probable cause for the search.

If he didn't keep any of the company's information, they likely have no case.

Crossing your fingers for summary judgment, a directed verdict :-) or a nice juicy settlement favoring the plaintiff.

Pretty scary though that the judge would authorize grabbing all your equipment with no genuine evidence of theft/misappropriation of trade secrets. There ought to be a high bar set for the kind of disruption that causes. There's no reason discovery couldn't have been allowed to proceed in a less violent manner unless he wasn't cooperating.

Re:No probable cause...

[Locke2005]

If he didn't keep any of the company's information, they likely have no case.

If he was still working for the company at the time of the seizure, than chances are he had a full source tree on his home computer so that he could do test builds at home. All of which is perfectly normal and necessary to do his job. To the non-technical, the argument "why did he need copies of files he was not charged with maintaining?" may sound valid. However, anybody who has ever maintained software can tell you that you usually need almost all the header files and always need all the objects to link against in order to do a test build just to see if you made any mistakes in the single file you changed. Again, finding all the companies source on his home computer proves nothing; what they would have to do is find proof that he was transmitting that source to somebody else. The REALLY stupid thing is that it is not at all necessary to download source to your home computer to appropriate secrets; anybody could walk into the company with a few 1GByte USB flash memory keys and walk out with all the source, and there would be no record of it having been transferred. Hmm... did the search warrant explicitly include flash memory devices as well? I am not a lawyer, but I beleive they can't seize anything not specifically mentioned in the warrant.

Re:No probable cause...

[v1]

Part of the problem is that with electronic data, specifically data that might be unique, is that there is a genuine risk that if you let a malicious person know you are going to try to take that unique information, that they might destroy it. It doesn't take much effort convince a judge to give someone a warrant if they lead him to belive that the victim has the only copy of precious data and is ready to erase it at a moment's notice. They'll paint it like a hostage situation, and judge/law will react accordingly - with a great deal of very sudden force, in an attempt to throw the victim off balance while they rescue the data, "just in case".

In some respects this method makes sense. Until you remember that it's wrong to infringe on the rights of one to protect the rights of another. Usually, if the ONLY way to guarantee the rights of one person is to infringe on the rights of another, they usually permit it, which is completely retarded.

I think the courts/police do it out of sense of duty... if they're presented with a scenario where they can either do nothing and risk one person being injured, or take action to protect that person and in doing so, injure another, they seem to prefer taking action. I think it's a matter of them simply wanting to take some action, trying to protect something, irrespectful of who gets trampled in the process.

Start reporting them

[david_anderson]

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.

Re:Start reporting them

[david_anderson]

Where did I mention retaliation?

I did not suggest harassment, whech the judge would have problems with. I suggested reporting actual violations of the labor laws. Judges are generally in favor of reporting illegal activity.

It says

[waynegoode]

Eeeh.. Slashdotted. What's it say?

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PA Code by Case Subject Search & Seizure
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Case Documents The OMITTED Letter The Search Warrant Plaintiff DefendantInterveners
Timeline of Events

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Information on this site is for educational purposes. Case Caption: Health Market Science, Inc. v Charles H. Salzenberg, Jr..
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OMITTED from the Company's Pleadings,
UN-INVESTIGATED by the Detective,
it caused IMMEDIATE ACTION by the CEO,
READ the LETTER that started it all!

Why 23 million telecommuters need to be worried about this case
Or: How your life can land into the "wrong hands".

Twenty-three million telecommuters (IATC 2003) access their employer's network from home. Some use their own personal computers, while others use a computer their employer assigned to them by their employer. Some bring their laptop to and from work. Do you? Should a dispute arise between you and your employer, you may be exposed to the legal tactics and strategies used by Chip's employer.

The company can file a police report, show logs of your network activity, convince the often insufficiently sophisticated police that your behavior is suspicious and claim they are in "fear" of the loss of their property and/or trade secrets and potentially millions of dollars of profits . If you're a programmer, that is your job description permits you to "appropriate" huge source code downloads with only even less uploads - exposing you to a "claim" of theft of your company's confidential and proprietary information and trade secrets . All the while you are having an exchage with the CEO by

Re:He's not required to resign...

[winkydink]

So you drive the company into Ch 11 after a long, and protracted battle. Then what has he got to show for it? Exactly what he has now: jack + big lawyer bill.

Re:Perl a high-risk legal environment?

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Yeah, convicted of a felony (!) for what should've been at worst, considered a disciplary matter between him and his employer.

EFF?

[The Amazing Fish Boy]

Why shouldn't the EFF be handling this? Or the ACLU? Do we really need a new fund?

Re:EFF?

[bladesjester]

The EFF is a lobying organization. They don't want to get involved in anything that may paint them in a bad light to legislators (who receive large contributions from companies like HMS).

They're notorious for dropping people like hot potatoes if they think there is a chance that it will negatively impact their political lobying.

Re:EFF?

[ntk]

Actually, the EFF is a 501(c)3 organization, which means that its specifically restricted as to how much lobbying it can do. Instead, the EFF concentrates on being an advocacy organization, representing defendants and plaintiffs in cases where there's a chance of making good case law.

(Actually, in practice, *I'm* the majority of the lobbying bit. If I had any influence on dropping people, I'd be like all "Hey drop *him*! Now pick him up! Now drop him again! You other lawyers, bring me a mojito!". But that's not really how lawyers work, alas.)

Amazing Fish Boy Makes Statement, Is Correct.

[The Amazing Fish Boy]

I won't pay for a different reason. I steadfastly refuse to help those that choose to write headlines in the third person.

Own grave dug

[petesmart]

It's disgusting that they can do this, particulary at such personal expense. Sadly, Chip has dug his own grave, I don't know much about US emplyment law, but I don't think whistle bower type protection will be any good, as he approached the company first, and not the authorities who are now chastising him. Working for an ethically dubious employer is tough, say something, and they'll throw the book of selective dismissal conditions at you, say nothing, and, well, like myself, sometimes the roof over your head is worth keeping whilst you seek employment elsewhere.

Re:Own grave dug

[lifeblender]

No, that's not how it's supposed to work. As an employee, loyal to the company, you are supposed to have internal recourse available to bring illegal activity to the attention of your seniors, and all the way up the chain if you direct supervisor won't listen. You are not supposed to have to go to the police, since a company should be capable of cleaning up its own act. Going to the police means that the normal channels of reporting issues have failed.

Everything I wrote there is how it works in ethical companies, meaning companies whose executives have laid out specific plans for remaining on the right side of the law. I don't care if you think that "most companies aren't like that". What that would mean is that "most companies deserve liquidation". If you can't at least have a plan for handling your own breaches of the law, and avoiding them in the future, then the company is not run in an ethical manner. Go ask someone with an MBA what kind of ethics class they had to take to get it. A company that doesn't have a plan for reporting issues about itself is derelict in its duties. All claims of impropriety leveled at such companies, including Chip's, have extra weight once they reach court.

Yeah, it'll be a while before they reach court.

If his complaints are true, then I sure as hell don't want to have anything to do with those companies. See? That's the reason that (ethical) companies need internal reporting mechanisms. If the CEO of an ethical company got wind of this behavior through internal channels, then they could correct it before I ever heard of it, and they wouldn't lose me as a customer, distributor, or business partner. That's what internal channels are for: protecting the company from itself.

Anyway, it's obvious from this that Chip's company doesn't have good internal reporting mechanisms. And that necessarily gives that company a strike against them to begin with. Or it should. We'll have to wait and see if it really does.

Re:Own grave dug

[gujo-odori]

Like others have noted, as I read his letter I could only think "Just what did he expect would happen if he delivered a letter like that to an employer that was knowingly involved in these activities?" The only thing more surprising than his naivete in giving them that letter was that I read all the way to the end only to find that was *not* a letter of resignation. If I received a letter in that tone from any of the people I manage, irrespective of specific content, I would assume I was reading a letter of (probably immediate) resignation.

That they are only out to screw him over seems pretty obvious, but his apparent lack of wordly understanding of these matters has given them every possible opportunity to do so. To anyone in a similar situation, my advice (as a manager, for whatever that may be worth), is to:

1) Prepare yourself financially to be unemployed;

2) Prepare your documentation of all allegations;

3) Make a backup set and put it in some secret offsite location that no one could reasonably either know about or get a search warrant for;

4a) Get a lawyer;

4b) Submit your letter of resignation, and don't say why. If pressed for an answer, just say you want to take some time off, then pursue other opportunities;

5) Finally, when you are no longer employed at that company, go to the police with your evidence.

The order of 4b and 5 could be reversed on advice of counsel, and if you want to move 4a up to, say, 1a, well, it's never too early to have a lawyer in a situation like that.

Re:Own grave dug

[DerekLyons]

As an employee, loyal to the company, you are supposed to have internal recourse available to bring illegal activity to the attention of your seniors, and all the way up the chain if you direct supervisor won't listen.

Had that been what he did - you'd have a point. But it's not. He threatened (personal) legal action against the company and announced his refusal to continue working on his assigned project. If you actually read the memo he submitted - it paints a very different picture from the sob story at the head of this discussion.

Anyway, it's obvious from this that Chip's company doesn't have good internal reporting mechanisms.

A completely groundless assumption. Again, try actually reading the memo - it has a whole raft of adressees, and no discussion or indication that any attempt to bring this to the attention of anyone had been made beforehand.

TImeline of events

[winkydink]

[sorry for sh*tty formatting...]

Timeline of Events

Please Contribute. Thank you for spending time on our site. It will be updated frequently. Please come back.

None of the views expressed in the website constitute the views of the Armstrong & Carosella PC law firm, or any

principals or employees, or agents or experts who have been retained in any capacity in connection with the case.

Information on this site is for educational purposes.
Case Caption: Health Market Science, Inc. v Charles H. Salzenberg, Jr..

Court of Common Pleas of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Case Number: 05-11918

Timeline of Events in Case

June 21, 2005

Intervener's Too Late? - DA Gives Away Computers Early. Company Already Imaging.

June 20, 2005

Emergency Stays Filed by All Parties - In an Attempt to Keep Property from falling into the Wrong Hands

June 17, 2005

Judge Awards Personal Property to Company - Admits to NOT Reading Salzenberg's Opposition.

June 16, 2005

Company Runs Interference - Files Motion to Intercept Released Computers Contrary to the May 2, Order and the "Return of Property" laws.

June 6, 2005

DA Drops Criminal Investigation - Annouces Return of the Seized Property to Salzenberg.

May 2, 2005
Company Agrees Not to Enforce Exparte Orders - Property to be Returned to Salzenberg unless another motion is filed.

April 26, 2005
Company files Exparte - Receives orders to intercept equipment from police to start imaging.

April 25, 2005
Salzenberg receives back dated letter from company "accepting his resignation"

April 21, 2005
Salenberg's Property Seized within hours of police report made by CEO.

April 20, 2005
Salzenberg and CEO exchange emails and faxes in an attempt to negotiate a face to face conversation. CEO finally gives the OK to Salzenberg bringing an attorney with him.

April 19, 2005
Salzenberg sends compliance letter to CEO. Salzenberg also sends follow up message to COO that he has "not resigned". CEO immediately locks Salzenberg out of company email and network.

April 18, 2005
Another employee leaves company after voicing compliance issues.

Health Market Science has Copyright on a perl mod

[ugmoe]

It looks to me like Health Market Science shares a Copyright with Chip on some of his Perl work.

What did Health Market Science think they were getting for their funding dollars?

AUTHOR
Chip Salzenberg,

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Heath Market Science for funding creation of this module. Thanks also to Larry, Damian, Allison, et al for Perl 6 subroutine syntax, and to Damian for Filter::Simple and Parse::RecDescent.

COPYRIGHT & LICENSE
Copyright 2005 Chip Salzenberg and Health Market Science.

Better yet -- contact the customers!

[BroncoInCalifornia]

The website of Health Market Science of King of Prussia, PA and their contact page and their email address info@healthmarketscience.com.

Here is where these slease balls brag about their customers. Contact them:
http://www.healthmarketscience.com/customers/custo mers.html

warrant

[jotux]

The warrant is halarious. If you read the bottom, it basically says:

the company president called me, and said that one of his employees has accused him of illigal acts. Please go to my employees house, and remove everything that he has that could be used to prove that we have committed illigal acts.

Perl = Legal Trouble??

[Captain Bumpsickle]

What is it with people high up in the Perl community and legal troubles?? Didn't Randal L. Schwartz also get into trouble with a past employer?

This should be reason #1 to use Python.

I'm just joking everyone...nothing to see here...carry on.

Re:Perl = Legal Trouble??

[Mike Buddha]

Didn't Randal L. Schwartz also get into trouble with a past employer?

Yeah, Intel. He was convicted of three felonies. He was running a password cracking program on their servers. He had cracked computers not only on Intel's machines, but on the machines of some of their partners, as well. He'd also installed some backdoor programs on several machines at Intel. It was really stupid of him to do all of this.

SLAPP

[BrookHarty]

I think you should check into SLAPP protection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAPP

Heres the little secret, Judges do not like to read long legal briefs, if someone makes a case and references some case law, they might just get the warrent, action or restraining order.

Its a messed up country where the legal system is in a horrible state by lazy judges/commissioners that have to actually think the about the case. Whats worse, some are voted into office...

Missing Something!

[NickFortune]

Chip isn't a whistleblower. Whistleblowing involves running to external authorities with a story.

Chip complained internally. That's allowed. That's ethical. He was giving his employers a chance to sort out a problem. The open proxy scam might have been in contravention of company policy.

Unlikely with hindsight, I'll grant.

OK, I'm missing your point, I know. I don't even disagree with your advice. All I'm saying is let's watch the terminology. A lot of people will thing "Whistleblower, pah! He had it coming!" when nothing is further from the truth. He got into this mess because he gave his employers the benefit of the doubt.

Re:Missing Something!

[Anonymous Coward]

I *am* a lawyer......

Chip's mistake, from what I can tell, is not consulting with a lawyer before he did anything. The letter he wrote, while a great "f* you" letter to his employer, made a couple of mistakes that almost lawyer would've told him to leave out. Including the threat of legal action.

Once someone threatens you with even possible legal action, most companies go into offense mode. It's not really a choice they have, they have to protect themselves and what they see as their intellectual property. (I say it's not a choice because it's what their counsel tells them. They can also choose to ignore their counsel, but then few companies do that since it defeats the purpose of engaging such counsel in the first place, at least in their minds.)

I feel badly for this guy and will likely contribute to this fund. But I can't help but think there was a better way of handling this situation before it got down to an employee threatening their employer with legal action if they don't stop a behavior they, personally, find objectionable.

If you don't like something your company is doing, let them know you don't like it. If they say, "Tough sh*t," then you have two choices -- leave on your own, or stay and suck it up. Staying and making threats against your employer isn't likely to be tolerated by anyone, anywhere.

Re:Missing Something!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm tired of crap answers like this. What do I expect them to do? Act responsibily and don't abuse the law.

What the fuck is up with nerds on slashdot thinking that companies acting like this should be acceptable, reasonable, or predictable? Yeah, it's all those things as long as you let it. I mean shit, if my company pissed me off and filed false charges against every level of management, would that be acceptable or predictable? Why is it okay for companies to act like this and people just accept that it's normal and acceptable?

This company and the managers behind this action should be skinned alive and hung out to dry. I just contributed 50 bucks and will contribute more after next payday.

And if he loses this, then I know what I will do in the future while working for a company engaged in questionable activity. Legal action first, ask questions later. And trump the lawsuits up too, like the CEO made unwanted gay advances towards me, promises of promotion if I'd only let him have his way with me, etc... Fsck this. Corporate America wants a war, let's bring it to them.

Re:Missing Something!

[putaro]

Chip's mistake, from what I can tell, is not consulting with a lawyer before he did anything

Yah, everybody's mistake is not consulting with a lawyer before tying their shoes or opening their mouths. I think that everyone should have a lawyer with them at all times to make sure that they don't do or say anything actionable.

I say it's not a choice because it's what their counsel tells them.

Maybe the problem is that lawyers tend to see every problem as requiring legal action and more billable hours.

Re:Missing Something!

[UnrepentantHarlequin]

Clean up their act, maybe?

Ethical people tend to believe that others are ethical until and unless (and sometimes even after) they are faced with incontrovertible proof to the contrary. If you tell an ethical person that he's doing something wrong, his response will be "oops, lemme fix that." So, assuming Chip is an ethical person (and the fact that he tried to resolve the matter internally is evidence of that) it's logical to assume that he expected them to say "oops, we'll get right on fixing that" and, in fact, fix the oversights -- not retaliate against him for bringing up the intentional violations of either legal or ethical standards.

Re:Missing Something!

[NickFortune]

Interesting.

HMS fabricated evidence in order to have the police raid Chip's house and sieze his computer equipment.

Chip threatened his own employers with legal action. What do you expect them to do?

Have your expectations regading business ethics fallen so low that you expect all companies to break the law as a matter of routine? Or are you suggesting that this is acceptable behaviour for an employer? Your message reads as though you approve, which may not be what you intended to convey.

HMS was already knowingly engaged in illegal activities. So probably Chip should have expected their response to be similarly illegal. With hindsight, that seems glaringly obvious.

But to simply dismiss that the company's actions with "what do you expect?" is foolish and dangerous. If we grant acceptance to such activities what can we expect the next time some CEO decides to push the envelope?

I mean yeah, ok, ScumBagSoft sent some goons around to beat the guy senseless, rape his wife and kidnap his kids. But, you know, he was like rude to his CEO in public. What'd the guy expect?

Re:Missing Something!

[Shaper_pmp]

FFS strap down that jerking knee before you do someone an injury.

Yes, lawyers get involved in things too easily these days.

Yes, the legal profession is sucking the money, time and vitality from american (world?) culture, and fattening up on their ill-gotten gains.

Yes, lawyers themselves often come off as objectionable, closed-minded, grabby little bastards (with apologies to the GP).

However... this is someone who uncovers prolonged, well-known and deliberate, immoral and illegal behaviour by the company he works for.

The software in question (IIRC) was written by the very people he's writing the memo to.

They clearly understand and appreciate they're doing something shady (if not outright illegal), and he basically calls them on it, to their faces.

If this memo was written as a resignation letter, fair play (although the implications are a little threatening - I know you're doing illegal stuff, here's how much trouble you'd get into if anyone found out, BTW I'm quite clearly pissed off with you and I'm resigning...).

If it wasn't offered as a resignation letter, it's extremely stupidly-written. Sure, the company has gone way overboard and are clearly a bunch of shameless criminal cunts, but read the letter again - did he ever, under any circumstances actually expect them to thank him for the memo and pat him on the head?

No - he's clearly telling them he knows what they're doing, he's clearly stating how much trouble they'd be in, and stating his position as diametrically opposed to them.

Sure, it could harm his professional credibility if/when it came out, so he should have resigned quietly, or gone straight to the authorities. Given the company's position on the matter he's clearly never going to persuade them to stop what they're doing, so his job was pretty much gone from the moment he decided he couldn't tolerate their behaviour.

Sending this not-resignation letter, requesting (presumably) he be assigned to another project, then explicitely threatening them with legal action?

I have all the sympathy in the world, but well, he's basically asking for trouble.

Just to clear up: I have every sympathy for Chip, and I sincerely hope these criminal fuckwads get everything coming to them, but yes, consulting with a lawyer would have been a no-brainer, and yes, he fucked up.

Knee feel any better yet?

Re:Missing Something!

[snorklewacker]

You know, I'm not a big fan of the way lawyers are insinuating themselves into every crevice of modern life ... but this would have been good advice 50 years ago. Threatening legal action before you consult a lawyer is equivalent to going into battle unarmed. Your anti-lawyer rhetoric is really gratuitous here.

Lawyers are expensive. Doing the right thing often is. What Chip is now having to defend against is much more expensive.

Mirror of the donation insturctions

[Fiery]

None of the views expressed in the website constitute the views of the Armstrong & Carosella PC law firm, or any
principals or employees, or agents or experts who have been retained in any capacity in connection with the case.
Information on this site is for educational purposes. Case Caption: Health Market Science, Inc. v Charles H. Salzenberg, Jr..
Court of Common Pleas of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Case Number: 05-11918

Donate today, to the
Chip Salzenberg Defense Fund. Over $40k in legal defense fees incurred since April 23, 2005.
Protect yourself from the same thing happening to you. Learn from this site, mirror it. Please donate. We thank you for your help.
OMITTED from the Company's Pleadings,
UN-INVESTIGATED by the Detective,
it caused IMMEDIATE ACTION by the CEO,
READ the LETTER that started it all!

Why care?

We didn't ask for this fight but we do hope that the telecommuting community learns from it. As a well known contributor to OpenSource and perl for many years, Chip continued his efforts to protect the spirit of opensource and the internet by attempting to inform his employer...sadly it brought on serious consequences in the form of an ugly legal battle with results that can affect all employees and consultants who hook up to an employer's network. We urgently need your help. The Chip Salzenberg Defense Fund is an escrow account sponsored by the law firm of Armstrong and Carosella to help pay the mounting legal defense fees for Chip Salzenberg and his family. The funds will only be used for legal costs to defend Charles Salzenberg and his family against Health Market Science, Inc. Donations are NOT tax deductible. Thank you in advance. We would love to hear from you.

Donate by email

You may send us your email address, name, phone number and pledge amount. We will email you back a "Request for payment".
You'll be able to pay by credit/debit card or using your Paypal account. Send email to: gifts@geeksunite.net.

Donate by Mail

If you would prefer to mail your donation, please send it to the following address:

Chip Salzenberg Defense Fund Escrow
Care of: Armstrong & Carosella
882 S. Matlack Street
Ste. 101
West Chester, PA 19382

Make Checks payable to Chip Salzenberg Defense Fund Escrow" (NOT tax deductible).

If you have questions or need additional information about making a gift to the Chip Salzenberg Defense Fund,
please call 925-457-6634 or email gifts@geeksunite.net.

I think the lesson here is obvious...

[hunterx11]

Perl Programming Considered Harmful

I am continually shocked and dismayed to see people write test cases, install scripts, and other random hackery using Perl. Perl is seductive because of the abundant CPAN modules and its TIMTOWTDI philosophy, so the path of least resistance is followed and a Perl script is written. Sadly, programming in Perl inevitably leads to one's employer taking legal action against the programmer.

The most common problem encountered with Perl programmers is pointing out embarrassing things about their employers. All they are able to do is white-hat hack or whistleblow. While some educators have fixed some of Perl programmers' flaws (closed-minded disciplinarians do much better here), many have added new ones. Most of their problems can never be solved because they're not inadequacies per se, but rather the direct consequences of intelligence and free-thinking.

Time line of events

[cursion]

Pulled this off the site ...

June 21, 2005 Intervener's Too Late? - DA Gives Away Computers Early. Company Already Imaging.

June 20, 2005 Emergency Stays Filed by All Parties - In an Attempt to Keep Property from falling into the Wrong Hands

June 17, 2005 Judge Awards Personal Property to Company - Admits to NOT Reading Salzenberg's Opposition.

June 16, 2005 Company Runs Interference - Files Motion to Intercept Released Computers Contrary to the May 2, Order and the "Return of Property" laws.

June 6, 2005 DA Drops Criminal Investigation - Annouces Return of the Seized Property to Salzenberg.

May 2, 2005 Company Agrees Not to Enforce Exparte Orders - Property to be Returned to Salzenberg unless another motion is filed.

April 26, 2005 Company files Exparte - Receives orders to intercept equipment from police to start imaging.

April 25, 2005 Salzenberg receives back dated letter from company "accepting his resignation"

April 21, 2005 Salenberg's Property Seized within hours of police report made by CEO.

April 20, 2005 Salzenberg and CEO exchange emails and faxes in an attempt to negotiate a face to face conversation. CEO finally gives the OK to Salzenberg bringing an attorney with him.

April 19, 2005 Salzenberg sends compliance letter to CEO. Salzenberg also sends follow up message to COO that he has "not resigned". CEO immediately locks Salzenberg out of company email and network.

April 18, 2005 Another employee leaves company after voicing compliance issues.

Re:Time line of events

[Lew Payne]

Judging from the Company's actions, if Salzenberg wants to litigate the matter of the return of
his personal property in an expeditious manner, he should seek out a criminal law attorney and file a
Jencks motion for the return of said property. It will be heard by a different Judge, and he'll be able
to show the Company's prejudicial actions. I had to file same to have the FBI return my property to
me, and (though expensive) it worked like a charm.

Here's a link to a Jencks Motion for the return of property.

Courts do nothing to stop unethical co. behaviour

[philovivero]

I worked for a company out of Reno, NV (yeh, a hotpot of corrupt companies, I know) and when I found out they were trying to bilk millionaires out of VC capital, I just turned in my laptop and said that was my final day.

The company refused to pay me for my last two weeks of service or any vacation time I had built up.

When I attempted to get the money from them, they produced a list of dates I was not in the office (exceeding my vacation pay plus 10 days for the last two weeks of service). These were days I worked from home (and I actually WORKed from home).

I tried to appeal to the legal system, but got a big runaround. This same company sued other ex-employees for frivolous things, and the courts took this company (that had a history of this sort of thing) quite seriously for years.

The courts have it in their best interest to make sure lawsuits keep happening and go on for extended periods of time. It's job security for them, and they just don't care that it's a drain on the rest of society.

Face it...

[HPNpilot]

Money and power are clinching their position in this country, and VERY rapidly. Combine the "Patriot" act with limiting freedom of the press to gutting of whistleblower laws to widespread corruption and add in a good dose of "liberal" bashing taking the form of "get tough on crime" and you get what we have.

Too late now, I'm afraid, and it will ge a *LOT* worse before getting any better.

What kind of mess have we left for our kids?

Mirror of the original letter

[Fiery]

19 April 2005

Charles H. Salzenberg, Jr.
P O Box 537
Southeastern, PA 19399

Health Market Science
2700 Horizon Dr. Ste 200
King of Prussia, PA 19406

Attn: Mark Brosso, Matt Reichert, Rich Ferris, Rob DiMarco, Dorothy O'Hara
Re: Legality and Morality of Harvesting Operations

It has recently come to my attention that that HMS is continuing the illegal and immoral web harvesting operation that I brought to Rich Ferris's attention over a month ago, in a conversation including Tim McCune. HMS's continued harvesting operations are a threat to me legally, morally, and professionally.

That HMS systematically collects data from web sites without the express permission of their owners is well known (inside HMS). Some web site operators are not pleased when (if) they figure out that their sites are being harvested. They sometimes respond by blocking the network addresses of the harvesting machines. This was a common problem in harvesting when I hired on to HMS in December of 2002. At that time, the accepted strategy for getting around such blocks was to obtain multiple web hosting accounts to act as proxies for HMS's harvesting systems. I did not then realize that knowingly bypassing blocks placed by web server operators was illegal. (As a result of other research, detailed below, I now know that has been illegal all along.)

As bad as HMS's past harvesting practice was, current practice is worse ... much worse. HMS has taken a page from the spammer playbook and is, deliberately and under management direction, hijacking thousands of vulnerable machines all over the Internet, using them and their network bandwidth without the knowledge or permission of their owners as unwitting accomplices in HMS's data harvesting operation.

I have confirmed these facts in conversations with several people with first-hand knowledge, including Tim McCune and John Marquart. I asked Tim McCune about HMS's proxy hijacking in the presence of Rich Ferris, a vice president of HMS and a company founder. In that conversation, Tim McCune confirmed to Rich Ferris and me that proxy hijacking was standard practice. Shocked, I informed Tim and Rich that proxy hijacking is very illegal and immoral. They were unmoved. I also have witnesses for other conversations.

I have also confirmed that the Harvester source code - which I, as a Senior Programmer, am authorized to access - includes Java code which collects lists of such vulnerable computers, called "open proxies," from web sites that maintain lists of them. I have also found the Java code which uses such proxies, without the permission of their owners, to connect to the sites that HMS harvests. The offending source code was written by Rob DiMarco, Tim McCune, and Jason Franklin.

This deplorable activity by HMS has serious legal, moral, and professional implications.

First, the legal.

I am not a lawyer, but I can read the plain English of the Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes, and it is clear to me that hijacking the computers of random people is a crime in Pennsylvania. Under PSC 3933, every instance - every single instance - of hijacking an open proxy is a misdemeanor of the first degree.

HMS is committing these misdemeanors by the tens of thousands, under explicit management direction, and in accord with corporate strategy. One petty theft may draw little attention; but tens of thousands of petty thefts, all made by one company, at explicit management direction, and in accord with company strategy, might well lead to unpleasant legal consequences. Even a small fine is painful when multiplied by a hundred thousand.

HMS thus makes itself an attractive target for prosecution by a state's attorney who wants to show himself tough on corporate crime. HMS could be a stand-in for the spammers who commit the same crimes.

HMS's legal exposure is not limited to Pennsylvania. A number of the sites that HMS harvests are run by governments of other states who would be

Sounds pretty clear to me

[suitepotato]

They got caught with their hand in the cookie jar and immediately attempted a smear campaign to draw attention away from themselves.

Further, on nothing more than the company's say-so, they got a search and seizure warrant from a judge who was obviously unfit for service by the very fact of his signing it. Actual investigation and evidence is required usually for this kind of thing and it seems to be a case of "he-said, got the warrant, screw what the other guy said" sort of thing. Having been the victim of this myself, I am not surprised. Saddened that it continues, but not surprised. People who love increasing the powers of the state for their political aims can just as quickly be the nail getting pounded down by that same state.

What is so shocking is that they think they will get away with it. All that are needed are logs from servers harvested by this scumbag outfit despite their attempts at a polite no through robots.txt, etc., and it will become a landslide against them with the first lawsuit for the intrusion.

If I had any money, I'd send some.

One small recommendation to other readers....

[james_in_denver]

Purchase a small micro-cassette recorder for use when entering potentially "heated" discussions with management. (or sometimes even other employees)

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.....

Re:One small recommendation to other readers....

[Apuleius]

Just make DAMN sure it's legal in your state.

Re:One small recommendation to other readers....

[NitsujTPU]

I looked back and wished I was carrying one of these for years. I had a boss who told me outright that he was behaving in a manner that nobody at the company would approve of, simply because he could, and that I could do nothing about it.

When I complained, he would say "I never said that."

I got a reputation for being difficult to work with, backstabbing, rude... All I ever asked for was a different boss. I only asked because he was rude to me. Not just rude, his conduct was apalling and shocking.

I eventually quit. I'm in a much better position now, so it worked out for the best.

Holy SHIT!

[jcr]

The Judge didn't even READ Salzenberg's opposition?

That's Judicial misconduct, big time. File a complaint with the federal courts.

-jcr

Encrypt your disks...

[mi]

Although your person is pretty well protected by the Constitution, your property is not.

Your computer can be seized -- and pretty quickly. All non-trivial data (including risky photos of your partner) should be encrypted on disk. Major operating systems support this option -- including FreeBSD, Windows, and, no doubt, Linux.

Certainly, "honest people have nothing to hide", but it is not even so much about winning the case (you will, likely, prevail), but also saving yourself a lot of time and money. Your adversary will go through all data found on your machine and your lawyer (don't even think of not hiring one) will be billing you in proportion to the amount of things, the other party brings up. Even if all of it ends up being nothing.

True, the opponent may demand, that you decrypt the data -- but you (your lawyer) can fight that demand -- it will likely be cheaper, than explaining away all messages in your ExEmployer-folder.

Do not rely on mere obscurity -- I found out first-hand, that even FreeBSD is "mainstream" enough for professionals (yes, there is a good market for these services) to know it. They came with software (something from SourceForge) to search through filesystems (very easy -- "grep" for the disk devices). For Linux they'd probably even have GUI.

Treat these guys decently -- they are just doing their jobs. If you do, they are more likely to overlook your older computer, which will let you post about your troubles on Slashdot when they are gone.

Set up encryption. Encrypt your back-ups, before they leave your computer. Do not automate decryption so that it happens by itself on boot (duh!)

When you are done, treat yourself to "Cryptonomicon" for fun and more behind-covering ideas.

How Health Market Sciences screwed with me

[dmuth]

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.

Re:How Health Market Sciences screwed with me

[putaro]

Well, what typically happens is that Engineering is told "You can go hire X heads" (employees). Engineering looks around, tries to find good people, it takes some time, and by the time they are ready to hire someone, upper management goes "Oh, no, you can't have those heads anymore."

It sucks to be on either end, trust me.

Re:How Health Market Sciences screwed with me

[putaro]

Hello! 1950 is calling and they want their business environment back.

In small companies and large budgets are constantly being revised. Publicly traded companies are just as bad if not worse than small companies as they are managed to their quarterly earnings, not to a yearly budget. Within departments projects get approved, disapproved and juggled regularly. Some other department goes over budget and your department pays. The company has a "hiring freeze" or, worse, layoffs.

Get real. Yah, everyone does a yearly budget but it is not a cast in stone contract and it's subject to revision at any time. Head count is constantly tweaked. I've worked, and managed, in large (yes, publicly traded) and small companies and I've seen it again and again and again.

Re:How Health Market Sciences screwed with me

[Sigl]

Wishing a company sued into oblivion for being unorganized is alittle harsh don't you think?

Interesting story though because I've had a similar experience looking for work. I drove 3.5 hrs to interview for a job. When I got there I interviewed with a couple people but they apologized because they forgot the guy I would work for was out for the day. They said he could do a phone interview Wed. Meanwhile I interviewed with another company. I called the first company Wed and they said he would call me Friday. I said OK. The second company made me an offer that was detailed and in the form of an offer letter which I can't say I've seen before. I was impressed. Yet, I wanted to give the other company a chance to play so I told them I would get back to them Monday. Friday came and Monday I accepted the second job. The first company called a couple days later to offer me a job and I told them I already accepted one.

I guess the point is, until they offer me a job there's no way for them to screw with me because I'm not waitin around for them to get organized.

Just like selling a house. You don't take your house off the market because someone promises to make an offer. You only take it off once you've accepted their offer.

The letter that started it all

[TwistedSpring]

Having just read the letter, I can only conclude that HMS was right in seeking legal defence against Salzenberg immediately to protect themselves. Perhaps he should have sought legal advice immediately instead of [i]threatening the company he works for with legal action[/i]. He made some hefty allegations in that letter, and also disclosed that he had been snooping around software that he wasn't involved with but had "the right to access" as a Senior Programmer. IANAL and I obviously haven't read Salzenberg's contract with HMS, but I would imagine that if he's not working on the code and browsing other people's projects from home in the interests of taking legal action, this gives HMS grounds to file a suit against him or at least gives them an incentive to shoot first.

This all looks to me like an ill considered vigilante mission gone horribly wrong. It's like shouting "hay guys, you're all crooked bastards and you should be in jail. I'm thinking about taking you fuckers to court! Can I keep my job though? Don't sue me!" What he should have done was file for legal action immediately, and/or resign from the company on legal/moral grounds. Resignation would have looked a lot better, would have relieved him of some of the moral issues, and would not look like he was about to try and sue the company for a ton of money.

I agree with his stance and his moral position, but this was a perfectly stupid and arrogant way to handle the situation. As a Perl hacker I wish Salzenberg the best, but I can't agree with the way he's fought this battle so far.

Re:Sympathy for the devil / company

[krbvroc1]

Here's an employee who's signed an agreement not to disclose trade secrets, and he's threatened to disclose the source code.

Where did his letter say that? I just read the entire thing and do not recall any threat to disclose source code. He simply said that he looked at the source code, which as a Senior Programmer, he was authorized and verified that some of the claims he made in his internal letter were valid (ie; code doesn't use robots.txt, code culls current list of open relays from online databases, etc).

He said he could not work on an project he felt was violating the law.

As far as the company perspective, I have not seen it so I cannot comment. Personally, his internal memo was much too details for most executives to understand. He should have layed out his concerns at a high level. Actually, he should have first contacted the press and law enforcement.

Criminal and Civil case status and link to docket

[Brian See]

Ok, the Pennsylvania Common Pleas Court is partially online, and the docket sheets are available with a little digging. Too bad the full text isn't available.

CRIMINAL MATTER: Docket Number: CP-46-MD-0002495-2005. Filed 4/27/2005. CASE STATUS: CLOSED. Last event was a hearing on the return of property, on 6/10/2005 before Judge William J. Furber, Jr.

CIVL MATTER: Docet Number: 05-11918 (Judge Hodgson). A deep link to the docket sheet is http://12.40.122.125/FCP2.WEB8/0/P12DIS?CASE-NO=05 -11918. Looks like a motion for a temporary restraining order and for expedited discovery and preservation of documents was filed on April 26, and was granted ex parte (without the defendant being able to argue) by Judge Joseph J. Smyth. The latest emergency motions appear to be filed to reinstate this order, presumably as a result of the computers being released after the criminal matters were dismissed. I am very curious to know what's going on with the intervenors - Radian Guaranty and Lisa Perdichizzi. It's Perdichizzi who filed a motion for sanctions against the Plaintiffs on June 22, and there's nothing on the docket sheets since then.

Re:Spammer gets a moral wake up call

[BoneFlower]

Spammer or not, how he is being treated is wrong.

I don't know about you, but I don't think morals should change simply because you don't like someone.

Certainly, if there is probably cause that he commited a crime, he should be investigated, and then prosecuted if the investigation bears out the initial suspicions, but that isn't what happened here. His home was searched and his property siezed, and *not* returned, based on him doing his damn job. It would be like your boss having you arrested for tresspassing, using your timecard that is punched for that day as evidence you tresspassed.

Re:Spammer gets a moral wake up call

[jcr]

You didn't RTF Letter, did you?

These clowns aren't just harvesting, they're using zombie machines to do it.

-jcr

Ghouls

[Doc Ruby]

"Health Market Science"? They sound like peddlers of human flesh. Diseased flesh. They really do sound like the worst kind of sleazy scumbags, and that's just their name. Harvesting open relays and persecuting a whistleblower, and maybe even bribing a judge, all sound like the least of their crimes. If there were any justice, the local DA would accept Salzenberg's report as a criminal complaint, and call off the dogs. But of course there's no justice, or HMS' mere allegations would never be enough to threaten the security of this person's home, papers and effects.

Re:Salzenberg is not a Spammer! You tell lies.

[Geekgirl2005]

Somebody is trying to tell untruths here. Salzenberg is not a spammer and he did not find out the company's harvesting procedures until he was employed there for a while. Stop telling lies to confuse people. Read the letter.

Oops...

[jcr]

Sorry, my bad.. Looks like they were only ignoring the ROBOTS.TXT files..

-jcr

Re:Oops...

[NitsujTPU]

Uhmmm.

They were running through open proxies in order to avoid blocks set up to block their IP. They also were scanning for such proxies.

So, no they weren't planting trojans all over the place, they were just borrowing everyone else's machines (a jerky thing to do) to get past blocks set up to stop them from being jerks.

Then, when someone called them on it, they resorted to mafioso tactics to make life hard for that guy. To show him who's boss.

Opening Line

[fm6]

When somebody says, "I'm not a lawyer, but I know that..." there's a good chance that something nasty is about to happen.

Chip is engaging in a legal crusade against Health Market Science, and doing it without legal advice. Naturally, HMS does have lawyers, and consults them as to the best way to screw him over. Screwing precedes. Gosh that's a suprise.

Re:Sympathy for the devil / company

[HiThere]

Their basic position isn't unreasonable. Their response was.

They obviously see nothing wrong with the abuse of power, so I suspect that every accusation made against them is correct. (Suspicion isn't proof...but I don't have anything better to judge them on.)

They obviously didn't care how injurious to him their requests were, or perhaps, if one is cynical, they were intentionally being malicious. No proof, fip a coin. In either case I wouldn't want to be associated with them.

It does sound as if they are intentionally committing multiple misdeameanors for money. And they have organized to do so. That's a felony. (If they don't get prosecuted criminally, I'm going to be more cynical than I currently am...although I'm already predicting that management won't be prosecuted, or that they'll get off with a very light wrist slap. Felonies don't seem to get prosecuted if you have a bit of money and power.)

Deep link to miscellaneous matter

[Brian See]

A deep link to the miscellaneous matter is http://ujsportal.pacourts.us/crystal/enterprise9/D SReportsPDF.csp?ct=4&dktno=200068158/a.

Looking at it closer, it might just be the petition for return of property seized pursuant to the warrant. Thinking about the timing, I wouldn't be surprised if the charges never made it to the grand jury...

In any event, the geeksunited.com timeline says that on June 6 the "DA Drops Criminal Investigation".

What about the next day?

[Night Goat]

I've always been kind of hesitant to try something like this myself because I get the feeling that once I got my "gotcha" moment and saved my job, the rest of my days working there would be tainted by my having done this. I just get the feeling that I'd be treated poorly and the management would probably be searching hard for a way to get me fired cleanly. Did you have to put up with much crap after doing this? Maybe you have to weigh the pros and cons before doing this kind of thing.

Re:What about the next day?

[james_in_denver]

LOL, yeah, I knew it would be the end of my job there, so I gave my 2 weeks notice the next day...

Saved from from getting fired.

Though overall? It was more for my own "vindication". The woman was a MAJOR *sshole, had covered up some mistakes that had cost the company several hundred thousand/year...Only problem?? it was coming out of MY budget.

So when I found it and called her on it, it got pretty ugly.

Best part of the story???

The corporate division that was getting taken for a ride, HIRED ME BACK as a consultant just two days later...

Same staff, same meeting room, except THIS time I was sitting on the "other" side of the table...

That first meeting was SO much fun..............

Posting anonymously here because I've lived it

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been in a very similar situation recently, and also ran into huge legal bills, from a contracting client who made outrageous claims. It was the worst experience of my adult life. I can't go into any details, but it was terrible, and the case turned on the same kind of criminal trade secret laws. These trade secret laws are so prone to abuse because they take what are effectively civil issues (ie, business disputes) and get the criminal justice system involved. Let me tell you, all this thing about "innocent until proven guilty" is nonsense. Yes, you are "innocent until proven guilty" when you actually get to trial... but by the time you get to trial you've already gone through hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills. Where does the average guy come up with that kind of money? I'll give you the answer: he sells all of his assets (house, everything) and he still doesn't have that kind of money, so he ends up getting a public defender, and public defender = plea bargain = no trial.

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.

Re:Spammer gets a moral wake up call

[darkonc]

I'm gonna be nice and chaulk the GP to horrid misreading.

Salzenberg was working for a company that started using some seriously shady practices. He did the legally appropriate thing, and brought it to the attention of upper management/officers. They went ballistic and pulled the plug on him insteas of the illegal activity. (what says that they already knew of the illegal activities?).

They then called the cops on hime and got them to sieze his compuers on the flimsiest of evidence.

Re:Odd town names

[fizbin]

That's nothing - near the same place are the towns of "Blue Ball" and "Paradise", and the route between them leads, if not directly through Intercourse, pretty damn close.

Job Posting (SCO Employees Apply Now!)

[libra-dragon]

It was looking good until I got to the last two "Required Qualifications"

Position: Software Developer

HMS is looking for a software developer to contribute to the creation of internal tools, customer web-based applications, and data manipulation software.

This is a hands-on technical position reporting to the Director of Software Development in a small, focused development team.The successful candidate will be involved in the further development of tools and websites that support the company's goal of collecting, integrating and presenting data about healthcare professionals from a wide array of sources.

This position requires an experienced software engineer with at least 5 years hands-on professional experience, and recent experience with Java in a Linux/Unix environment. Experience in object-oriented design and development, as well as prior participation in all phases of the software development life cycle is desired.

Candidates with Perl development experience, strong software design skills and substantial technical breadth will have a distinct advantage.

The superior candidate will have a vibrant, self-motivated, get-it-done attitude; the ability to think critically; a desire to learn in new areas; and the discipline to pay attention to deadlines, details and quality. Good communication and interpersonal skills are crucial for this team-oriented position.

Please submit salary requirements with application.

Required Qualifications:
3+ years experience with Object Oriented Programming
Significant experience with Java
Experience with OO Perl a significant advantage
3+ years hands-on Linux or UNIX
Software design skills, with experience in designing and implementing N-tier software systems
Experience in all phases of SDLC (analysis, design, development, testing, deployment
Strong communication (verbal and written), and interpersonal skills
Bachelor degree (preferably in Computer Science), or equivalent work experience
Experience in abuse of open proxy servers
Complete lack of ethics

Additional Desired Qualifications:
Proficiency with C++
Proficiency in SQL programming
Experience with Oracle
Familiarity with GUI design and development
Some Windows programming experience
Familiarity with GUI design and development

HMS Benefits:
Health, Dental, Life and Disability coverag
401K Plan
Employee Incentive Stock Option plan
Semi-Annual Bonus Plan Excellent working environment
Business casual attire
Small and growing company (currently 75 employees)
Lunch provided daily
To respond, e-mail resume to jobs125@hmsonline.com, citing "Software Developer" in the subject heading.

You think THAT's bad...

[argent]

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.

So this is the right formula? almost a synopsis 8)

[da5idnetlimit.com]

How to get the Hero Lose At The End :

1/ Discuss terribly important matters that can burn your boss with ... your boss. - Ok, honest to god chivalrous move.

2/Issue an official letter that is the corporate equivalent of going to war - Without covering your back...against, sort of chivalrous reflex of only dealing with the thing in front, and damn the backstabbers

3/Gets a beating, quite serious, but he survives...-Please, remember we speak about the hero here.

4/Hero finds master, changes is name and learn how to fight...lets say he learns Python instead - Very dangerous Technique, Python. Sad the old Assembly master is dead, or he would have been glad to contribute to the techniques Little Perl learned

5/The hero - Little Perl - comes back, kills the evil CEO with the martial equivalent of the infinite loop (aka head in the ass) and flees to she sunset with the nice, and finally innocent lawer.

Yeah, almost boring, seen it a thousand time already...
BTW, do you still have my vhs of Shaolin Mountain, the Revenge of the Come Back part 2 ?

Be Careful, The Ice is Thin

[BFlatSeven]

While I certainly can relate to Mr. Salzenberg's predicament, and I applaud him for taking a strong stand against unsavory business practices, I have been unable to substantiate some of the legal claims that he makes in his letter. For instance, he writes that "Federal courts have held that web spiders must obey the established ROBOTS.TXT mechanism by which web site owners limit automated access..." As a developer who has been asked to write harvesting applications, I was very concerned when I read this sentence, so I decided to do a little research. After several hours of research I have been unable to uncover anything that would support this claim. I did, however, manage to find a document published by Berkley that states exactly the opposite: "Website operators who do not wish to avail themselves of the publicity that spiders provide may invoke the Robot Exclusion technical standard, which, like most of the standards on which the Internet is based, is open and voluntary [emphasis mine]". While I agree that harnessing legions of zombie machines is wrong in every sense of the work, let's be careful before we get too carried away - there's a big difference between unsavory and illegal.

Had a similar situation

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Federal Law

[Veteran]

Anyone who has knowledge of a Federal Felony is REQUIRED by law to report that information to federal law enforcement.. Failure to do so makes the person having the knowledge an indictable co-conspirator.

I found out about this several years ago when the company I was working for attempted to get me to file a fraudulent patent application.

Never complain to a company CEO about something like this; they will simply fire you. Always go directly to the Feds. If you do so you are protected by the Federal Whistle blower statutes. Company CEO's involved in illegal activities start gasping for air when they find out the Feds are involved.

RTFC

[JLF65]

Did you even bother to look at the dates? The table is upside down - the events at the top of the list occured MORE RECENTLY. The events at the bottom occured FIRST.

Accomplance after the fact?

[coyote-san]

Excuse me, but aren't you an accomplance if you are a party to a criminal act? It can even be after the original crime, if you knowingly provide ongoing support to the criminal act, explicitly work to cover it up (e.g., by destroying logs), etc.

Then there's conspiracy.... You can be convicted of conspiracy if you knowingly commit just one express act in furtherance of a crime. Even if it's otherwise legal. E.g., it's legal for you to buy a lighter. It's legal for you to give it to another person. It's not legal for you to do this if you know that person plans to use it to commit arson. His prior code would have been safe (since he had no reason to believe it would be used to commit a crime), but ongoing software development when he believed it would be used for criminal acts....

Anyway, to my non-lawyer mind it's easy to see the letter as an attempt to protect himself from a shitload of legal trouble if/when the company's bad acts came to light, not to threaten them unless they coughed up something in exchange.

BTW, by the same analysis they may have just bought themselves a world of pain. An aggressive DA might make a case for witness intimidation, something that might stick even if they're cleared of any other illegal activity.

(P.S., I wouldn't have called the activity "illegal" in the letter. You can raise concerns without making judgments.)

The corruption is extremely widespread.

[Futurepower(R)]

It's all part of a wider corruption. Large corrupters spend huge amounts to get lazy judges elected, and work for the defeat of judges who do a good job.

Part of the way corruption of the courts is accomplished by not giving the courts enough money to operate. A 2003-06-24 op-ed article by Charles Williamson, then president of the Oregon State Bar, in The Oregonian, the Northwest's largest newspaper, said, "The crippling loss of nearly one-third of their staff have left our courts unable to hear criminal cases such as car theft, shoplifting, prostitution, fraud and identity theft."

The corruption of the patent office is part of the same thing. Large corrupt corporations want stupid patents because they can scare others away from coming close to their technology. They don't care if they lose a few court cases. Taking something to court is so expensive that they win just because of the threat.

The book Other People's Money discusses corporate corruption. It's excellent.

35 Books and 3 movies say the Bush administration is the most corrupt the U.S. has ever had: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.

Many Americans don't want to know that their government has become corrupt, so you can expect hostile comments if you try to talk about corruption.

Re:The corruption is extremely widespread.

[Hal_Porter]

Many Americans don't want to know that their government has become corrupt, so you can expect hostile comments if you try to talk about corruption.


Many Michael Moore fans don't want to know that he's a lying bastard. So I'll expect hostile comments when I post this.

See, ad hominem attacks are not too helpful are they?

"Hey I'll just post my web page with my world view. If you agree then you're obviously a good person. If you disagree then it's because you don't want to know the truth, or have been paid off by big business, either way I don't need to listen to you"

Re:Why spelling matters

[IgnoramusMaximus]

reverses the meaning of what I presume is your intention, "well heeled conmen".

A typo indeed.

But most large companies are not run by obvious scumbags because they would be destroyed by the scumbags running the company into the ground. Adelphia is an example of what happens eventually.

Unfortunately that is not true. Large companies, especially the so-called "multinationals" enjoy immense support from politicians and national governments. Partly because politicians of all stripe are corrupt, but mostly because politicians fear large scale job losses and thus engage in various forms of corporate welfare, handing out tax breaks, government-guaranteed loans or outright grants and in many cases alter national laws to suit the mega-corporations. Add to this the fact that crookery can go on for a very long time undetected, masked by phony, on-paper "profits", masquerading as "growth" due to never ending cycle of "buy now, pay later" acquisitions of other companies and in some cases the crooks actually manage to make money for the corporation, if they corrupt the local government sufficiently and are allowed to establish an effective monopoly. Only in the most obvious and extremely unsustainable cases do the businesses actually implode. One has to have to literally levitate the whole company on thin air and have debt to income ratio of hundreds to one before something gives. That is why it took super-human efforts to make Enron fail and that is why the airlines (who lose money continuously, since anyone can remember) are still in operation. Running a business into the ground is only an option for a small operation where there is no way to hide the crookery or obtain government bailouts for any length of time. Note also even the very collapse of a behemoth like Enron managed to generate money for the crooks in form of, literally, hundreds of millions of dollars in "legal and consulting fees". Try that with your mom-and-pop shop.

I do agree that small businesses are not exempt from connivery, but my logic is simply this: if business size is kept in check, so is its power and the impact of individual businesses going rogue or simply failing. An IBM can in one fell swoop throw 16000 families into the gutter without even blinking in order to make a few more bucks for the managment, a 50 employee firm can at most harm 50.

But even deeper then that, there is simply a realization that large corporations are corrupting capitalism by reducing its potency to benefit society as a whole. A cornerstone of the system, the very mechanism by which the "invisible hand" is supposed to do its work is competition. If a company size increases and the number of viable companies in a particular field decreases, this in turn reduces competition and leads to oligopoly or outright monopoly situations, effectively destroying any benefits of the system to consumers, not to mention all the disastrously negative political side-effects. This process is in fact the most serious weakness of capitalism as it appears that the system is incapable of self-correcting this situation, contrary to its tenets.

Simply look around and see how many of the everyday products you use are manufactured by companies which have at most one or two viable competitors: Coke/Pepsi; Intel/AMD; Nvidia/ATI; Boeing/Airbus; etc. There are at most a dozen of car manufactuers whose vehicles you will see (many more brands but they all belong to few parent companies). There are just as few oil companies. The list goes on and on.

There are many such -- by now proven to the point of the absurd -- errors in the Adam Smith's plan which require alterations and overrides to save the whole process from reverting to an essentially feudal/mercantile scenario. Unfortunately it would seem that people either refuse to see the obvious or are more then happy to play along in hopes of securing for themselves a place in the ranks of the new "nobility".

Re:Serious Question

[gerardrj]

Because most of those proxies are running without the machine owner's permission or even knowledge.

Re:What an idiot

[boots@work]

"negative video" seems to propose two unusal theories:

1. HTTP is legally enforceable, but robots.txt is merely a gentleman's agreement. That seems a hard distinction to draw: both are just conventions adopted for interoperability. Both are widely implemented and respected within the industry it is also very common for them to be violated. HTTP has the imprimatur of W3, but not as far as I know of an international treaty organization like (iirc) ITU or ISO.

I'm not aware of any legislation anywhere that says merely violating HTTP would be a crime, although there are laws against unauthorized radio broadcasts or telephone signals.

2. "Whatever is not technically prevented is by definition permitted." If this were really the case, there would be no crime of trespass, since the owner should have made the trespass impossible. Indeed if that were adopted it would overturn the whole concept of property law.

A more useful argument, which was tried in some of the EBay cases, is that a property which is generally available to the public cannot exclude a particular client. The law is not yet clear here, and it's not clear what would be reasonable. Small-print agreements to access a public web site seem dodgy, but excluding a particular client seems fairly clear.

In any case, it sounds like HMS were infringing the copyrights of the sites they scraped, and that probably is cut-and-dried.

12K of RAM? Ha! you were lucky...

[nut]

In my first job we had 132 developers working on a 128-bead abacus. If you had to leave the room, you gobbed on the abacus first so that noone else would touch it.

In the evening we used to sit round and play frogger with real frogs.

When They Kick In Your Front Door

[iamnotanumber6]

When they kick in your front door,
How you gonna come?
With your hands on your head,
Or on the trigger of your gun?
--The Clash

I used to think of these scenarios in terms of 'in Soviet Russia'... but nowadays, my mental picture of someone getting their front door kicked in is situated usually right in the ol' US of A.

And nevermind terrorism, but in the name of fscking trade secrets and Copyright issues?

Seriously, what are people smoking (or not smoking) there, that you can put up with this?

In the past few years, I've heard so many things that make me afraid for the security of my person in the U.S. - even though my biggest crimes are only copying DVDs I rented so I can watch them later, and downloading software I don't own to test out from bittorrent - that I won't even make connecting flights through the U.S. anymore.

Yes this guy wrote a really stupid letter to his employers. But this justifies a total jackboot search and seizure of all his personal stuff, private letters, diaries, and the like? I would feel so violated.

Mod me troll if you like, but, assuming he is innocent of these fairly obviously fabricated accusations, what happened to him is a crime bordering on assault or rape.

And if this happened to me, and the perpetrators weren't thrown in jail, I'd be out shopping for ammunition^H^H^H^H^H writing my congressman.

I sure think it's time that people started making a REALLY BIG NOISE that accusation of intellectual property infringment brought by a wealthy corporation does not override basic human rights to personal security of the average citizen...

Re:When They Kick In Your Front Door

[pzampino]

+1 for ignorance; Do you think a cop or even a Judge knows what is typical/acceptable use of ssh and/or CVS?

Re:Redirects to Google?

[turk182x2001]

Here is the answer..
nslookup www.hmsonline.com
Server: 68.2.16.25
Address: 68.2.16.25#53
Non-authoritative answer:
www.hmsonline.com canonical name = mosquito.hmsonline.com.
Name: mosquito.hmsonline.com
Address: 64.233.161.104

WHOIS results for 64.233.161.104
Generated by www.DNSstuff.com

Location: United States [City: Mountain View, California]

NOTE: More information appears to be available at ZG39-ARIN.

Using 10 day old cached answer (or, you can get fresh results).
Hiding E-mail address (you can get results with the E-mail address).

OrgName: Google Inc.
OrgID: GOGL
Address: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
City: Mountain View
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94043
Country: US

NetRange: 64.233.160.0 - 64.233.191.255
CIDR: 64.233.160.0/19
NetName: GOOGLE
NetHandle: NET-64-233-160-0-1
Parent: NET-64-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS1.GOOGLE.COM
NameServer: NS2.GOOGLE.COM
Comment:
RegDate: 2003-08-18
Updated: 2004-03-05

TechHandle: ZG39-ARIN
TechName: Google Inc.
TechPhone: +1-650-318-0200
TechEmail: ************@google.com

OrgTechHandle: ZG39-ARIN
OrgTechName: Google Inc.
OrgTechPhone: +1-650-318-0200
OrgTechEmail: ************@google.com

The scumbags are having Google absorb the cost of the Slashdot effect they are receiving.

Re:What an idiot

[(negative video)]

HTTP is legally enforceable, but robots.txt is merely a gentleman's agreement. That seems a hard distinction to draw: both are just conventions adopted for interoperability.

The HTTP standards claim to be an exact convention for doing things. Poking random data into random TCP ports is unlikely to even constitute a well-formed request; therefore the presence of a well-formed request constitutes strong evidence that the client has read and understands the HTTP specification.

Regarding robots.txt, read the excerpt I posted. The spec itself says it is optional and unenforced. The difference between the two seems clear.

I'm not aware of any legislation anywhere that says merely violating HTTP would be a crime, ...

The courts accept common conventions. If a building has a sign that says "Joe's Burgers" and an unlocked door, it is not trespass to walk inside and ask to buy a cup of coffee; they can toss you out, but not shoot you in the head. Conversely, if the social convention is that there are no obligations, just an opportunity for generosity, as with the robots standard, then a court cannot legislate generosity from the bench.

"Whatever is not technically prevented is by definition permitted." If this were really the case, there would be no crime of trespass, since the owner should have made the trespass impossible.

In retail sales, putting price tags on articles in public is an "offer to treat", an offer to negotiate. A potential customer can pick the merchandise up and examine it, and it is not valdalism, trespass, or theft. My position is that serving HTTP on its well-known port is also an offer to treat using GET requests.

This is followed by negotiation using the limited access that has been granted. In a store, the buyer fondles and inspects the item and carries it to the seller. In HTTP, the client sends a request.

If the negotation is unsuccessful, rejection is given. In a store, the seller says "No way, $5 is already too cheap! Put it back on the shelf!" With HTTP, the server says "409, cough up a credit card number!"

If negotiation succeeds, the transaction executes. In a store, the person walks away with their new purchase. With HTTP, the server swallows the CC# and transmits the requested data.

Likewise, loitering is analogous to a denial of service attack. Everything has exact parallels with existing jurisprudence. The protocol designers did this on purpose, because they wanted it to be useful for people.

The law is not yet clear here, and it's not clear what would be reasonable.

I think it can be clear. The problem is that too many complaintants don't really know what the hell they're complaining about, and being able to explain something clearly is a rare skill. That combination leaves judges floundering in a sea of ignorance.

In any case, it sounds like HMS were infringing the copyrights of the sites they scraped, and that probably is cut-and-dried.

I inferred that they were gathering lists of people/companies/court results/etc. I think the main problem is that the state agencies were publishing valuable information but not bothering to cover the cost of access, and intimidating people who ran up their bills. To analogize, "Mr. Smith, you've been monopolizing the public records room for two days. Time to go." That's a valid strategy, if inefficient and a bit unjust. But that doesn't make Mr. Smith a criminal if he hires a string of college students to do his research, each of which gets the heave-ho after a couple of days.

It's amazing..

[hyfe]

It's amazing how stories like this crop up so often in the US, and how no-one seems to draw what seems (for me atleast) to be the evident conclusion.

The company gets away with this behaviour because it's damn more powerfull than it's (ex)-employees. However, a company is nothing without its employees. Any sort of collective defence against this sort of behaviour is going to hurt the company like hell. I mean, ever heard of actually sticking up for eachother?

If you're too afraid of unions etc, just call it something else. Bottom line is that it's in the other workers self-interest to insure nothing like this happens ever again.

Individualism is all fine and all, but it kinda breaks down when a much larger individual comes along wanting to use you as a doormat.

Outsourcing is usually corporate corruption.

[Futurepower(R)]

Additional comment:

Note that outsourcing is the same kind of corruption as is thoroughly discussed in the book about corporate corruption mentioned above. Programmers in India can produce good work, that's not the issue.

The issue is that the corrupt corporate manager wants to put a distance between himself and managing programming. Managing programming is time-consuming and requires serious concern and considerable technical knowledge and teamwork. If the programming department remains inside the company, the corrupt manager will be responsible. If the programming is outsourced, a level of deniability is introduced.

That extra level of bureaucracy and distance has four results:

1. Any serious project will be at least a partial failure, because no project plan defines everything. In serious progamming projects, there is a need for additional research and creative decision-making every few hours, and usually much more frequently.
2. The corrupt manager can avoid responsibility, and can easily find a job at a new company by the time the low quality of the software becomes generally known.
3. The contracting company has assured that they will have an Indian competitor (if the outsourcing is to India), because the outsourcing defines for another company what is needed for that particular application.
4. The Indian company can be blamed.

Re:A little back story-let's mix lies up w/ truth

[Geekgirl2005]

Let's mix the truth with the untruth.
1. The fact is no, Lisa Perdichizzi was NOT terminated for incompetance. There is tons of proof for this that will eventually come to light. Brosso gave credit of her work to the young marketing director, This proof is in very tangible form, email and witness testimony.
2. Lisa had got a nice new job with a very nice company and was making twice as much $$ as HMS...her contract was even renewed with this company. So why would Chip or Lisa care about her position at HMS?
3. HMS is a perl company. The major applications run on perl and they are continuing to hire perl programmers.
4. Web harvesting was definitely happening at the company for years. Just not the way Chip thougt. He found out just before the uproar that the methods weren't what he had expected. Again there is proof of this.
5. I think the Anonymous Coward that wrote this posting needs to put his name up there because it sounds like the same story Brosso told Lisa's new employer, after she had been on the job for 4 months.

Watch the court documents...

Re:A little back story-one other thing

[Geekgirl2005]

Oh and one other thing... Thank you all for all your help! Don't let this guy spread lies! Everything think I've said can be verified with hard evidence..and more...

I went to Capsicum and took an inventory of everything, down to what was imaged and what wasn't. It better all still be there too. It was surreal seeing all my equipment and the children's equipment sitting in a giant conference room.

Yes, most of the inventory is on the search warrant is mine. The kids have been without their computers for months. They are now scared when they see strangers in the house because it reminds them of the police raid.

regards, Lisa Perdichizzi

Chip did NOT steal Trade Secrets

[Geekgirl2005]

This is just too early in the morning...the last point I forgot to address.

Chip does not hold grudges against anybody. Not against HMS, not Brosso. Not anyone. It's not in his character. He is sooo honest he gets himself into trouble...as we can see. He would easily help somebody to his own detriment.

Chip did NOT take "trade secrets" from HMS. Again this is not possible...it's just not in his character.

When the cowards give back the evidence they took from us we'll all have a look see.

Thanks for all your creative help and your financial support! We appreciate it and will continue to fight.

Lisa

Why didn't the cops pursue the criminal thing?

[Geekgirl2005]

If there was truly theft of trade secrets why didn't the DA prosecute the case? Why did the DA announce that he was releasing the computers back to Salzenberg?