Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1991 10:19:51 PDT
From:
[email protected]
Subject: File 5--Is Bellcore Guilty of Stealing Copyright Information?
I read about Bellcore's threat against 2600 and wondered why nobody
made the connection between Bellcore and the Secret Service raids in
1990. The letter that Bellcore sent to 2600 was in that same petty
spirit. Bellcore made some vague threats about an unidentified
article that may or may not have been a copyright violation. This is
consistent with what they did a few years ago.
Bellcore's attempt to intimidate 2600 into silence sounds a bit like
the goring ox roaring even before it itself is gored. Bell
Communications Research, known as Bellcore, employed Henry M.
Kluepfel as a security specialist and David Bauer, a R&D security
technoid. Both have testified in hacker trials. Kluepfel was involved
in the Sun Devil and earlier investigations. He was on The Phoenix
Project bbs, where he routinely logged posts and sent them to the
Secret Service. The posters held the copyright, and Kluepfel, a
private citizen, took them without authorization or permission. These
were proprietary, and Bellcore, through its agent Henry Kluepfel,
clearly engaged in a conspiratorial scheme to obtain proprietary
information. Release of the information and subsequent use out of
context may be a criminal copyright infringement under 17 USC 506. Who
can ever forget how those posts were used by the Secret Service to
show that the claim that kermit is a 7-bit protocol is obvious
evidence of a conspiracy? This led to the unjustified raid on Steve
Jackson Games. Given the pattern of Bellcore's paid accomplice to
systematically, willfully, and knowingly engage in acts of obtaining
proprietary information, the RICO Act (18 USC 1962) might be fun to
invoke against Bellcore.
If Bellcore considers Emmanuel Goldstein guilty of obtaining
proprietary information, then I strongly suggest that the users of The
Phoenix Project have an equally valid claim that Bellcore was
responsible for stealing copyright material from users. Maybe all
ex-Phoenix Project users should send Bellcore some letters. The
address listed on the letter to 2600 was
Leonard Charles Suchyta
LCC 2E-311
290 W. Mt. Pleasant Avenue
Livingston, NJ 07039
+++
((MODERATORS' COMMENT: The above poster refers to The Mentor's BBS,
known as The Phoenix Project. Logs and other information taken from
TPP were instrumental in justifying the raid on Steve Jackson games.
In the Secret Service search affidavit for Steve Jackson Games, Henry
Kluepfel was listed as a "source of information." A substantial portion
of this information was derived from 17 messages of logs from The
Phoenix Project written from Jan. 23 through Jan. 29, 1990. CuD #2.11
includes the complete affidavit and commentary.
The reference to a description of Kermit by The Mentor as evidence of
his participation in an encryption conspiracy read:
>Name: The Mentor #1
>date: Fri Jan 26 10:11:23 1990
>
>Kermit is a 7-bit transfer protocol that is used to transfer
>files to/from machines. It is mostly found on mainframes (it's a
>standard command on VAX, for instance). Kermit has the added
>advantage of being able to work through an outdial (because it is
>7-bit).
>
>Mentor
We share the poster's concern with the action of Bellcore's Henry
Kluepfel. In that search affidavit, Timothy Foley wrote that Kluepfel
indicted that TPP's users' list contained the names of two "hackers"
from Illinois' Northern Federal District. To the best of our
knowledge (and to the knowledge of those familiar with the users' list
during this period), the only two names on it from the Northern
District (former US prosecutor William J. Cook's jurisdiction) were
the CuD moderators. Given the rather strange logic by which evidence
is fabricated by some prosecutors, perhaps Bellcore should first apply
to its own employees the same standards of integrity and honesty it
expects from others.
Because of his actions, Henry Kluepfel was named as a co-defendant in
a civil suit brought against him, Bill Cook, Timothy Foley, and
others, by Steve Jackson Games in 1991. The litigation, alleging civil
rights violations, is still pending.
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