Monday, January 28, 2002

Computer Technician Strikes Plea Bargain Over Computer-Trespass Charges By SCOTT CARLSON A former computer technician at a state-run Georgia college who had been charged with computer trespassing has managed to avoid huge fines and prison time after striking a deal with state prosecutors. The technician, David J. McOwen, installed a distributed-computing program on a set of computers at DeKalb Technical College without permission. After the programs were discovered by university officials, Mr. McOwen was fired, then was charged with eight felony counts of computer theft and computer trespassing. He was liable for fines totaling more than $400,000, and each felony count could have meant up to 15 years in prison. Under the deal negotiated with prosecutors earlier this month, Mr. McOwen will pay $2,100, perform 80 hours of community service, and get a year's probation. "My friends say I look and sound like a new man," Mr. McOwen says. Officials at DeKalb Technical College would not comment on the case, and representatives of the Georgia attorney general's office did not return calls last week. The distributed-computing software that Mr. McOwen installed is common and generally believed to be innocuous. The state contended that the programs ate up valuable bandwidth and calculated that Mr. McOwen should pay a fine of $415,000, or 59 cents per second of use. Distributed-computing programs crunch huge amounts of data by doling the information out to individual computers on the Internet; those remote, scattered computers work out small bits of the problem, then send them back to be compiled and pieced together. The programs generally run on personal computers that are on but idle; the programs often take the form of screen savers and stop running when someone begins using the computer. SETI@home, which analyzes data in a search for extraterrestrial life and is run by the University of California at Berkeley, is a well-known example of distributed computing. Other programs have worked on sequencing the human genome and finding cures for cancer, and the University of Oxford is now sponsoring a distributed-computing project to do research on anthrax. (See an article on The Chronicle's Web site today.) The distributed-computing program that Mr. McOwen downloaded was for testing encryption technologies. He says that he could have won up to $1,000 if his computers cracked the encryption, but adds that he was simply curious about the technology. "You have a better chance of getting struck by lightning" than being the one who breaks the code, he says. Mr. McOwen's case had become something of a cause among those who follow technology. The Electronic Frontier Foundation supported him, and many technology-oriented publications, such as Wired and The Register, wrote sympathetic portraits. "I think we've heard from countries we didn't even know existed," Mr. McOwen says. But he says he decided not to take the case to trial because it would cost too much to retain lawyers and bring in expert witnesses. "You're talking about flying in people all over the world. We're talking about tens of thousands of dollars," he says. A Web site -- FreeMcOwen.com -- distributes news about the case and gives visitors an opportunity to contribute to Mr. McOwen's legal bills. The site was set up by a friend of Mr. McOwen's. Mr. McOwen, a self-described "original geek" who has been working on computers since the 1970s, says that he's more interested in politics and law than computers. He plans to write a book about the case to honor the people around the world who helped him. He calls those people "a distributed blessing." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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