The arrest happened almost by accident. New Scotland Yard had routinely circulated details of the case to Interpol, the international police intelligence agency. Four days before Christmas in 1989, just two weeks after the diskettes had been posted from London, the Dutch police detained an American citizen at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, who had been behaving strangely.
The American was Joseph Lewis Popp. He was en route from Nairobi, where he had been attending a WHO seminar, to Ohio, where he lived with his parents in the small town of Willowick, near Cleveland. Popp seemed to think that someone was trying to kill him: at Schiphol he had written "Dr. Popp has been poisoned" on the suitcase of another traveler, apparently in an attempt to notify the police. When he had calmed down, the authorities took a discreet look through his bags: in one, they found the company seal for PC Cyborg Corporation.
The police let Popp continue his journey to Ohio, then notified Austen in England about the seal. On January 18, 1990, Austen began extradition proceedings. The charge: "That on December 11, 1989, within the jurisdiction of the Central Criminal Court, you with a view to gain for another, viz. PC Cyborg Corporation of Panama, with menaces made unwarranted demands, viz. a payment of one hundred and eighty nine U.S. dollars or three hundred and seventy eight U.S. dollars from the victim." In Ohio the FBI began a surveillance of Popp's parents' home, and finally arrested him on February 3rd.
Neighbors in Willowick were said to have been surprised at his arrest. He was described as "quiet, intelligent, and a real gentleman." At the time of his arrest he was thirty-nine, a zoologist and anthropologist who had worked as a consultant on animal behavior with UNICEF and WHO. He was a soft-spoken man, darkhaired, with flecks of gray in his beard. He had graduated from Ohio State University in 1972 and obtained a doctorate in anthropology from Harvard in 1979. In the previous few years he had become passionately interested in AIDS.
Austen's extradition request ground through the American courts for nearly a year. In September 1990 Jim Bates was flown over to Cleveland for five days to give evidence at Popp's extradition hearing. It is unusual to have live witnesses at such hearings, but Jim brought the AIDS diskette. He was the principal witness, and it was his task to demonstrate to the court what the diskette was and what it did.
In the hallway outside the small courtroom, Jim sat beside Popp's parents, a friendly and courteous pair. "Do you like Cleveland?" Popp's mother asked. Jim wasn't sure; all he had seen by then was the airport, a hotel room, and the hallway. Inside the courtroom Jim had his first glance at Joseph Popp. His hair was long and unkempt, his beard had grown out, making the ~ray more emphatic. He shuffled around the courtroom, wearing a shabby jacket, a sweater, and faded jeans. He looked, Jim later said, "like a lost soul."
Popp's mental state was the crux of the defense's argument in the extradition hearings: his lawyers argued that he had suffered a nervous breakdown and was unfit to stand trial. Popp never denied writing the AIDS trojan nor sending out the diskettes. But at the time, his lawyers said, he was in the grip of mental illness and was behaving abnormally.
The lawyers also argued that the demand for a license fee for the use of the diskette was not tantamount to blackmail. It was, they agreed, somewhat extreme to wreck a computer's hard disk if the user didn't pay, but operators were warned not to load the diskette if they didn't accept the terms and conditions laid down in the instruction leaflet. And it was quite clearly stated on the same sheet that if they used the diskette and didn't pay, the computer "would stop functioning normally."
There was a basis in law to the argument. Software publishers have long struggled to stop the unauthorized use and copying of their copyright programs. Software piracy is said to cost American publishers as much as $5 billion a year, and many markets Taiwan, Thailand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Brazil, India, and even Japan, among others--have become what are euphemistically referred to as "single-disk" countries: in other words, countries where one legitimate copy of a software program is bought and the rest illegally copied. To combat piracy, publishing houses have used a number of devices: some programs, for example, contain deliberate "errors," which are triggered at set intervals--say, once every year--and which require a call from the user to the publisher to rectify. The publisher can then verify that the user is legitimate and has paid his license fee before telling him how to fix it.
