Cisco Accused of Orchestrating Engineer's Arrest

alphadogg writes "Cisco Systems orchestrated the arrest of Multiven founder Peter Alfred-Adekeye last year in order to force a settlement of Multiven's antitrust lawsuit against Cisco, a Multiven executive said on Wednesday. Multiven, an independent provider of service and support for networking gear, sued Cisco in 2008, alleging that the company monopolized the market for its software. Cisco countersued, charging that Alfred-Adekeye hacked into Cisco's computers and stole copyrighted software. In May 2010, Alfred-Adekeye was arrested in Vancouver, Canada, on 97 counts of intentionally accessing a protected computer system without authorization for the purposes of commercial advantage, according to his arrest warrant. He could be sentenced to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted. The arrest came to light only this week after local Vancouver press reported it."

I have long been annoyed by Cisco business policy

[erroneus]

Not only are Cisco devices over-priced from the beginning, they are somehow not liable for the problems they might have when vulnerabilities are discovered. Fixes are only available after Cisco is paid for them and, once again, the fixes come without guarantees as well.

Most people never get close enough to the networking hardware and infrastructure to experience this and so they remain under most people's radar. But as the article states, other vendors do not charge for updates.

By industry standards and practices, they are definitely "not usual." But is it illegal? Are they abusing monopoly power? I guess that's for a court to decide. But if it can be shown that Cisco fabricated evidence that resulted in the criminal arrest of someone who has filed legal action against Cisco, then huge problems should result for Cisco executives including but not limited to prison time. I find this to be a very interesting case indeed. I hope we can follow this case in more detail as new information comes out.

Welcome to the free world.

[Noryungi]

Government by the corporations, for the corporations.
War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength.
With slavery and injustice for all (except the CEO).

Remember that Cisco probably sold a lot of equipment to China to build its 'Great Firewall'.
Dont believe me? Check it out:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/05/leaked-cisco-do/ [wired.com]

I hope Cisco pays through the nose for this.

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Re:I have long been annoyed by Cisco business poli

[eric2hill]

You don't buy Cisco because of the features, you buy Cisco because of TAC. At 2:30 AM when you have 96 phone lines down, the call center opens in 3 hours, and you're getting call supervision with no voice traffic, you call TAC. I got an engineer out of their Sydney office on the phone in 14 minutes, and we had the problem resolved within an hour. (It was a telco provisioning problem.) Having someone on hand to support a problem 24 hours a day, and a supply chain that can send a part out in 4 hours is a safety net worth paying for.

Re:MateWan

[uniquename72]

Woosh! He's not saying it didn't happen; he's saying there's no similarity between that and the case at hand. In fact, comparing the two trivializes the near slave conditions of early American workers.

Re:MateWan

[nomadic]

"Remember the coal labor camps of the early 1900's where workers were brutally beaten and arrested if they didn't serve the company?" Ahh, if only we could return to that libertarian utopia again.

Re:I don't understand how this is 'orchestrating'

[Anonymous Coward]

The issue here from the article is twofold:

1- Cisco had the engineer in question (a key witness in a case taking place in the united states) meet them in Canada before he had to make a statement in the united states. At the same time Cisco also identified to a US prosecutor that a hacker had broken into there computers and was fleeing to Canada- indicating that they had evidence. He was subsequently arrested in Canada, and missed his court appearance in the states. Had they just waited he could have been arrested upon his return to the states, but then he would have been able to make his court appearance.

2- The US prosecutor has not been able to present the evidence of this hacking attempt so that Canadian authorities can send him to the united states to face trial, and they have been so slow at responding to this statement that the Canadian authorities are accusing the US prosecutor of having grossly exaggerated the concreteness of the charges.

Now it COULD simply be that fortuitous timing and a grossly incompetent prosecutor have combined to be radically in cisco's favor, but at least the possibility that cisco may have engineered for this to happen needs to be investigated as it would seem EXTREMELY convenient if not.