hkhenson@cup.portal.com (04/13/91)
The following letter may be reproduced and posted as desired. Keith Henson
H. Keith Henson
1794 Cardel Way
San Jose, CA 95124
March 29, 1991
Robert E. Allen
Chairman of the Board
ATT Corporate Offices
550 Madison Ave.
New York, NY 10022
Dear Mr. Allen:
As a loyal ATT long-distance customer all my life, I feel I
owe you an explanation for canceling my ATT long-distance
service.
I have never had a problem with ATT service, operators, or audio
quality. I was more than willing to pay the small premium, and have
been a heavy user of ATT long-distance services for the past 15 years.
I am also a consultant in the computer business who has used Unix and
its derivatives intermittently over the past 10 years. Outside of my
technical work I have long been involved in legal and political issues
related to high technology, especially space. One of my past
activities involved the political defeat of an oppressive United
Nations treaty. I have also taken substantial personal risks in
opposing the organizations of Lyndon LaRouche. During the last three
years I have been personally involved with email privacy issues.
Because of my interest in email privacy, I have closely followed
the abusive activities of Southern Bell and the Secret Service in the
Phrack/Craig Neidorf case and the activities of ATT and the Secret
Service with respect to the recently concluded case involving Len
Rose. Both cases seem to me to be attempts to make draconian "zero
tolerance" examples of people who are -- at most -- gadflies. In
actuality, people who were pointing out deficiencies and methods of
attack on Unix systems should be considered *resources* instead of
villains.
I consider this head-in-the-sand "suppress behavior" instead of
"fix the problems" approach on the part of ATT and the government to
be potentially disastrous to the social fabric. The one thing we
don't need is a number of alienated programmers or engineers mucking
up the infrastructure or teaching real criminals or terrorists how to
do it. I find the deception of various aspects of ATT and the
operating companies to obtain behavior suppression activities from the
government to be disgusting, and certainly not in your long-term
interest.
A specific example of deception is ATT's pricing login.c (the
short program in question in the Len Rose case) at over $77,000 so the
government could obtain a felony conviction for "interstate wire
fraud." Writing a version of login.c is often assigned as a simple
exercise in first-semester programming classes. It exists in
thousands of versions, in hundreds of thousands of copies. The
inflation is consistent with Southern Bell's behavior in claiming a
$79,000 value for the E911 document which they admitted at trial could
be obtained for $13.
I know you can argue that the person involved should not have
plead guilty if he could defend himself using these arguments in
court. Unlike Craig Neidorf, Len Rose lacked parents who could put up
over a hundred thousand dollars to defend him, and your company and
the Secret Service seem to have been involved in destroying his
potential to even feed himself, his wife, and two small children. At
least he gets fed and housed while in jail, and his wife can go on
welfare. All, of course, at the taxpayer's expense.
There are few ways to curtail abuses by the law (unless you happen
to catch them on videotape!) and I know of no effective methods to
express my opinion of Southern Bell's activities even if I lived in
their service area. But I can express my anger at ATT by not
purchasing your services or products, and encouraging others to do the
same.
By the time this reaches your desk, I will have switched my voice
and computer phones to one of the other long-distance carriers. My
consulting practice has often involved selecting hardware and
operating systems. In any case where there is an alternative, I will
not recommend Unix, ATT hardware, or NCR hardware if you manage to buy
them.
Yours in anger,
H. Keith Henson
cc: Telecom Digest, comp.risk, etc.