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."

Re:MateWan

[dainbug]

I think the real take away (after reading the story) is that the police; Canadian or United States, look as if they are becoming the gang enforcers of Corporations. If the prosecutors can't produce evidence after 9 months then it begs the question: what evidence was demonstrated to get an arrest warrant in the first place? Show the evidence or let the guy go. Especially if he's stuck in Canada ;)

Re:I have long been annoyed by Cisco business poli

[erroneus]

According to what I read, the "evidence" to support his arrest has not been produced and delivered to the Canadian authorities. The claim of intrusion was made by Cisco to the US Secret Service. (The US Secret Service wouldn't just do this without a complaint or someone in high places issuing the directive after all.)

So this guy was arrested on criminal charges for which no evidence has been provided. This smells "not right" somehow.

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

[squallbsr]

The orchestrating part is where the evidence of the crime (required for the extradition) hasn't been sent to the Canadians yet. They've had 10 months to provide evidence of the crime, but have not been able to produce it. So, the civil case, which was getting close to going to a Jury trial, got settled because the guy got arrested. This is one heck of a coincidence.

Re:I have long been annoyed by Cisco business poli

[raddan]

I contend that you'd be better off using the money saved to develop in-house expertise. Firstly, an organization's network is domain-specific knowledge in the extreme. Secondly, smarter engineers tend to result in better network designs, e.g., the kind that do not have the kind of urgency that they need to be fixed in the middle of the night. Your own people should be better at solving those kinds of problems, or else they're not earning their paychecks. Outsourcing gruntwork, fine. Outsourcing thinking? Bad idea.

After multihoming one of our offices, it was quite a revelation to me when one of our lines went some some months later. Nobody even noticed, except me. That gave me the freedom to fix the problem without having to worry about whether I should tell management to send people home. Also, being able to SSH in from home to fix a routing issue? How f'ing cool is that?