------------------------------ From: hkhenson@CUP.PORTAL.COM Subject: Letter to AT&T Cancelling Long-Distance Carrier Service Date: Tue, 2 Apr 91 16:51:03 PST ******************************************************************** *** CuD #3.11: File 5 of 5: Letter to AT&T Cancelling Service *** ******************************************************************** {Moderator Comment: Individuals may or may not be able to change policies with their actions, but if enough people act things will change. Keith Hansen cancelled AT&T as his long distance carrier, and although it may seem a token gesture, if enough of us do it (including the moderators), perhaps AT&T will eventually get the message. Or, perhaps not, as cynics would argue. But, what can it hurt? One observer remarked that AT&T and BellSouth/BellCorp are separate entities, and allusion to the Craig Neidorf trial may not be appropriate. But, as Craig Neidorf remarked, AT&T work closely together and in his case AT&T was well aware of the prosecution's evidence and could readily have intervened because of the close working relationship. As we will suggest in a forthcoming CuD article, AT&T in the past has hardly been reticent to challenge the limits of law when it served their purposes. Yet, when their own ox is gored, they seem to demand invocation of the full measure of criminal law and more. Keith's letter is an excellent model for those willing to follow his example.} 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. PS: My wife added the following: I want you to try to understand something--a lesson that can be learned from these cases. We are no longer living in the Industrial Age, when a product could be made in "one-size-fits all," packaged, sold and used without modification or support, like a television. We face massive problems in the Information Age in protecting intellectual property, but we cannot simply transfer old-world, Industrial-Age police attitudes to these problems. Possessing a copy of my program without paying for it is not the same as stealing my television. If you modify my program and make it more usable to the community, I can still go on charging for the use of my program, but I can also incorporate your modifications, and charge for them--especially if I pay you something for the help. If you provide support for my programs (something every major hardware and software manufacturer has had to either severely curtail or--like IBM--abandon altogether without extra charges), then you have made my product more usable. This is what the so-called "hacker" culture is all about. I'm talking about ethical "hackers" here, not the media image of breakin artists or virus-spreading nerds whose only compensation is a malignant satisfaction in destroying computer systems. The "hacker" culture is really a native population of problem solvers whose pleasure is in tailoring products to their own and other's use, and often pushing back the limits on a product. Ethical hackers are willing to pay for their use of products (although it's absurd to charge such a support provider tens of thousands of dollars for source code when he has neither the equipment nor the desire to use source code *as a product*). And they are willing to help others to use them by providing support which ATT could not afford to provide if it charged twice the price for its products! This was the sort of "theft" Len Rose was involved in--custom tailoring of the ATT product, helping customers to use the programs, manipulation of software which he could not use himself in any way except to help others use it. Prosecuting Len Rose was like prosecuting a TV repairman as a thief because he was removing the television from the house to take it to his shop--except that unlike the TV repairman, Len Rose didn't even need to take it into the shop, and his having a copy of it could do nothing except benefit ATT. In the long run, this inappropriate application of Industrial-Age concepts of ownership and prosecution is going to be lethal to you and everyone else in the same boat. While you think you are sending a signal that theft will not be tolerated, what you are actually doing is sending a signal that customer support, personal tailoring of programs and cooperation with ATT in producing a product usable by many more millions of people will not be tolerated. Your problem is partly that no official channels exist for appreciation and remuneration for the type of work Len Rose did as a consultant and support provider, not that "hackers" like him exist and flourish. (Unofficial channels obviously do exist for circulation of ATT materials, else where would he have obtained the source?--a local K-Mart?) And be aware that Len Rose was the least of your worries. Hackers much more powerful than he exist, and you have enraged them when you could have engaged their cooperation. Sincerely, Arel Lucas ******************************************************************** ------------------------------ **END OF CuD #3.11** ********************************************************************