The Final Outcome of the Knight Lightning Case
by Evan Schuman
Chicago - The United States has suffered what amounts to an embarrassing
defeat in the first jury trial test of its crackdown on the so-called Legion of
Doom.
The government asked the judge to dismiss the charges against Craig
Neidorf, the 20-year-old editor of an electronic newsletter called Phrack.
Neidorf was indicted on an accusation of conspiring to steal - and
electronically publish - a proprietary document from Bellsouth involving the
911 emergency system.
The Justice Department began a crackdown early this year of what it
said was a rash of computer fraud, break-ins and other computer related
white collar offenses.
The Neidorf case was often cited by federal officials defending their
actions, saying tht this case demonstrated the dangers of these high-tech
efforts, citing "the potential to disrupt the telephone service of a four-state
area and the 911 emergency lines."
UNUSUAL STUFF
But on the fifth day of Neidorf's trial, the government took the highly
unusual step of asking the judge to dismiss its own charges against the
defendant.
Neidorf had pleaded not guilty, admitting that he had publihed the
document, but effectively maintaining two defenses. The first defense was
that the document was innocuous and its dissemination posed a hardship
and danger to no one. Secondly, Neidorf argued hat, even if the document
had been dangerous, constitutional First Amendment protections would have applied to him, in the same way that a newspaper reporter would be
protected if publshing the same story.
The government had maintained that the documents had been
proprietary and that their wide disemination would have opened the
possibility of someone actually disrupting the 911 system.
But as prosecution witnesses took the stand, they admitted under
cross-examination that the supposedly sensitive information in the
documents had actually been sold to the public by Bellsouth through a toll-free telephone number.
Neidorf's defense attorney, Sheldon Zenner of Chicago, said the
government decided to drop the case after he shared with the government
copies of trade magzine stories written by Bellsouth officials publicizing the
very same information that Bellsouth winesses were characteriing as
secret.
Officials in the U.S. Attorney's Office confirmed that the dismissal was
sought beause of new information learned about the proprietary nature of
the document.
Zenner, who said he is investigating bringing a civil lawsuit against
Bellcore and Bellsouth for the harm done to his client, pointed much of the
blame at the U.S. Attorney's Office for not investigating the case intelligently before going to a grand jury for an indictment - let alone bringing the case to trial.
"There was a guy at Bellcore who persuaded the government that this
was an absoutely dangerous document," Zenner said. "The frightening part is
that no one in the government had the wherewithal and/or the technical
expertise to determine whether he was telling the truth or not. They just
accepted his truth as to the [proprietary nature of the] document."
He said one of the government's top witnesses was a Bellsouth
employee who told jurors of the document's secret nature. "She had a
complete unfamilarity with other Bell documents that are available to the
public that contained either comparable information or even greater detail,
he said. "We started out by showing her the Bellcore catalogue of publicly
available documents."
The witness testified that she had not been aware of the catalogue and
that the information had been offered publicly. The U.S. Attorney's Office
said the catalogue was one of the factors leading to th dismissal request,
according to one of the trial prosecutors handling the case.
While the governmnt had asked that the charges against Neidorf be
dismissed, the government wanted to have the option of retrying Neidorf
should he be convinced of a similar accuation within a year. To
accommodate both requests, the trial judge technically declared a mistrial by
dismissing one of the jurors. The result is that Neidorf is not convicted of
anything, but should the government try to bring the charges back, Neidorf
could not claim that his constitutional right not to face double jeopardy was
being violated.
|