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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.

 
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