[free-sklyarov] Re: Sklyarov meets Copyright, East meats West

[igor at locosun.com]

Dear Peter,

I'm greatly disappointed by the article
http://www.planetebook.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=177 you posted on
planetbook.com (which otherwise provides a good coverage of the story so
far).

The article is full of speculations about "Eastern mentality" and
contains a number of factual errors.

The saddest of them all is a fact that Dmitry is referred as a "hacker
who raised from the rudimentary and relatively low-key "Here's a neat
little cracking program I've posted" profile" to declaring "a alliance
along with the West Coast technos against software tyranny".

I have known Dmitry for about 10 years. 

Dmitry's an extremely talented researcher working at one the best
Russian Universities (Bauman Moscow State Technical University) as well
as a Senior Cryptoanalyst (his official position) for Elcomsoft. 

He has been known as a lawful citizen who is supporting his wife and two
children. He has never had any connections with any hackers/crackers
groups as nor he has ever participated in any illegal activities. 

As I believe, his appearance at this year's DefCon conference was based
on his natural for any researcher desire to share his discoveries with
the world.

The controversy over the program developed and distributed by Elcomsoft
which lead to Dmitry's arrest should not be used as a sufficient ground
for a criminal prosecution of an individual. 

As far as I know there is no precedence of that nature, in fact, quite
opposite: e.g. during the recent case related to copyright infringement
involved Napster no Napster's employees were arrested as the case was
settled between the companies not via imprisoning the employees.

To sum up:

-- Dmitry has not solely developed nor distributed or sold the
controversial software his was arrested for, therefore the issue should
be resolved between Adobe Inc and Elcomsoft(developer and distributor of
the product) and not by imprisoning a security expert.

-- Dmitry's research underlines certain weaknesses of one of the
products of Adobe Inc. Arresting him for announcing the results of this
work is equivalent of arresting tv reporters from a car reviewing
program for discovering that an alarm/immobiliser does not work as
promised by the manufacturer.

I would appreciate it very much if you can help to draw public attention
to the fact that Dmitry is NOT a HACKER/CRACKER (in common terms) but an
exceptional SECURITY EXPERT and help him to return to his wife Oksana,
son Egor (2.5 year)and daughter Polina (3 months).

Thank you,

Igor Drokov