From: "Michael D. Crawford" <crawford@goingware.com>
Organization: GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
Subject: Free Dmitry
Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 00:52:06 -0400

Friends,

I have long held the belief that computer programs are constitutionally
protected free speech.  They are, after all, how us programmers
communicate with each other.  This is also the opinion of at least one
federal court, although it is yet to be tested by the Supreme Court.

However, on July 16, Russian computer programmer Dmitry Sklarov was
arrested by the FBI for writing a computer program and presenting a
paper on it at a security conference in Las Vegas.

His paper, "eBooks Security: Theory and Practice", exposed the woefully
inadequate security schemes used to copy protect Adobe eBooks ("secure"
electronic publications, basically encrypted PDF files).

If you have PowerPoint, you can get his presentation here:

http://www.download.ru/defcon.ppt

You can purchase, and download a free trial version of Advanced eBook
Processor here:

http://www.elcomsoft.com/aebpr.html

Rather thank thanking him for revealing their engineering flaws, Adobe
made a complaint to the FBI, and the FBI arrested him under the Digital
Millenium Copyright Act.  He is being held without bail, out of
communication with his wife and children, in a foreign country, facing a
$500,000 fine and five years in federal prison.

The digital millenium copyright act is clearly unconstitutional, not
just in that it violates free speech for programmers, but that it
violates fair use - the right of citizens to make limited copies of
copyrighted materials for certain uses such as backup and academic
research.

If you want to know more about Dmitry's case, please visit:

http://www.boycottadobe.com/

You'll find pictures there of Dmitry, and of his wife and children, who
I am sure miss him greatly.

And please consider joining the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is
pressing two other court cases to try to have the DMCA ruled
unconstitutional and will lend his support to Dmitry once the U.S.
Marshalls tell them where he is, you can do so here:

http://www.eff.org/support/

I leave you with the following words of wisdom, spoken 100 years ago.

Make a Bonfire of Your Reputations
http://www.goingware.com/reputation/

It's hard for me to write this letter as I just applied for a position as
Photoshop Software Engineering Manager at Adobe Systems, the creator of
eBooks.  Times have been hard for me and my little family for quite some time,
and that would be a good job for me for which I feel I am quite qualified, but I
know it would be wrong to fail to speak out on this abuse of Dmitry's
constitutional rights, and the rights of software engineers everywhere.

Please pass this mail on to anyone who might be interested to hear it.

Ever Faithful,

Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc. - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com/
crawford@goingware.com

   Tilting at Windmills for a Better Tomorrow.

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