Date: Thu, 17 Dec 92 16:08:10 CST
>From: Joe.Abernathy@HOUSTON.CHRON.COM(Joe Abernathy)
Subject: File 2--Secret Service Raids Dorm
 
Federal Agents Raid Dorm, Seize Computer Equipment
By JOE ABERNATHY Copyright 1992, Houston Chronicle
 
The Secret Service has raided a dorm room at Texas Tech University,
seizing the computers of two Houston-area students who allegedly used
an international computer network to steal computer software.
 
Agents refused to release the names of the two area men and a third
from Austin, who were not arrested in the late-morning raid Monday at
the university in Lubbock. Their cases will be presented to a grand
jury in January.
 
They are expected to be charged with computer crime, interstate
transport of stolen property and copyright infringement.
 
"The university detected it," said Resident Agent R. David Freriks of
the Secret Service office in Dallas, which handled the case. He said
that Texas Tech computer system operators contacted the Secret Service
when personal credit information was found mixed with the software
mysteriously filling up their fixed-disk data storage devices.
 
The raid is the first to fall under a much broader felony definition
of computer software piracy that could affect many Americans. This
October revision to the copyright law was hotly debated by computer
experts, who contended that it sets the felony threshold far too low.
 
Agents allege that the three used a chat system hosted on the Internet
computer network, which connects up to 15 million people in more than
40 nations, to make contacts with whom they could trade pirated
software. The software was transferred over the network, into Texas
Tech's computers, and eventually into their personal computers. The
Secret Service seized those three personal computers and associated
peripherals which an agent valued at roughly $5,000.
 
The software Publishers Association, a software industry group
chartered to fight piracy, contends that the industry lost $1.2
billion in sales in 1991 to pirates.
 
Although these figures are widely questioned for their accuracy,
piracy is widespread among Houston's 450-plus computer bulletin
boards, and even more so on the global Internet.
 
"There are a lot of underground sites on the Internet run by
university system administrators, and they have tons of pirated
software available to download -- gigabytes of software," said Scott
Chasin, a former computer hacker who is now a computer security
consultant. "There's no way that one agency or authority can go
through and try to sweep all the bad software off the Internet,
because the Internet's too big."
 
The mission of the Secret Service does not normally include the
pursuit of software piracy, but rather the use of "electronic access
devices" such as passwords in the commission of a crime. This gives
the service purview over many computer and telecommunications crimes,
which often go hand-in-hand, with occasional bleedover into other
areas.
 
Freriks said that the investigation falls under a revision of the
copyright laws that allows felony charges to be brought against anyone
who trades more than 10 pieces of copyrighted software -- a threshold
that would cover many millions of Americans who may trade copies of
computer programs with their friends.
 
"The ink is barely dry on the amendment, and you've already got law
enforcement in there, guns blazing, because somebody's got a dozen
copies of stolen software," said Marc Rotenberg, director of Computer
Professionals for Social Responsibility, in Washington, D.C. "That was
a bad provision when it was passed, and was considered bad for
precisely this reason, giving a justification for over-reaching by law
enforcement."
 
Freriks noted that the raid also involved one of the first uses of an
expanded right to use forfeiture against computer crime, although he
was unable to state from where this authority evolved after a civil
rights lawyer questioned his assertion that it was contained in the
copyright law revision.
 
"One of our complaints has always been that you catch 'em, slap 'em on
the wrist, and then hand back the smoking gun," he said. "Now all that
equipment belongs to the government."
 
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