K-PACK Transcripts of 23 Feb '96 session.
=================================
 K-PACK
 February 23, 2024
 CM:   February 23, a couple of minutes after noon.  This is 
 Paul Karol speaking.
 Harry Paxton 
 Linda Argote
 Bob Kraut
 David Banks
 Ed Clarke
 CM: We're going to finish up the check list.
 DB:  Right.
 CM: I had a couple questions I wanted to back up on.  Do you 
 have a preference which way you would like to proceed?
 DB:  it's your choice.  Having looked at the first transcript, it 
 seemed to me that we might avoid problems to be assured that 
 we would be able to finish today, if I wrote up a statement that 
 I think answers the questions you had on the check list.  So I 
 can distribute that, I've made copies for everybody, you can 
 read that as an alternative.  if you've got questions why don't 
 you do that now.
 In some sense this has gotten entered into the record officially 
 when I handed it to you.  So you can read it on your own time 
 if that's necessary and call me back for questions, if you want 
 to find out more about it.
 CM:  My questions arose in reviewing the previous transcript, 
 at least things that I was unclear on, or we were all unclear on.  
 We now know that, Serb and Rimm met with Flores 
 unbeknownst to you, and yet it seems that Flores didn't know 
 anything about the proposal even much later on.  Do you have 
 any sense at all what they might have been meeting with him 
 about?
 DB:  I can only conjecture and I don't know.
 CM:  And there was a note about a second meeting of just 
 Rimm with the dept. Of justice over spring break.
 DB:  My understanding is that Rimm returned from spring 
 break in 1995, saying that he had met with the DoJ over the 
 break and he wanted to move forward in seeking funding.
 CM:  Okay, he didn't amplify on that, other than he just said 
 that he had met with them.
 DB:  There were details.  He said that the DoJ had told him 
 that we would need to file a request to find out, to determine 
 whether or not the databases that they had seized contained the 
 type of information that we would be able to analyze.  And 
 without that request they could not even begin to consider 
 funding a project in this area.  Rimm also had specific 
 information about, I think, the wild cat platform or something, 
 that is apparently is used by one of the pornographers whose 
 log files had been seized.  And there were technical questions 
 about how the data in a wild cat platform might be organized, 
 but I don't know what's involved there.
 CM:  The only other item I want to return to ... Was when we 
 were discussing whether or not the DoJ might be interested in 
 the software that had been developed.  And you gave a clear 
 answer, but in rereading it, I realized you were answering 
 what I was not asking properly.  (laughter)  you answered 
 very well about the parsing technique or, and the verification 
 of it, or the descriptions that were downloaded.  Where I was 
 asking about was the scheme for getting at the profiles.
 DB:  Okay, can you please repeat your question, so I'm sure I 
 understand.
 CM:  Okay, the question is:  is there a possibility that the Dept. 
 of Justice could really have been very interest in the parsing 
 routine for getting into what should be anonymous profiles, 
 but were apparently not anonymous profiles of individual 
 users at Carnegie Mellon.  Not that their interested in Carnegie 
 Mellon, but just in the whole idea that a its software package 
 like this was developed.
 DB:  I'm afraid I still don't quite understand the question, 
 because I don't see any way that a parser would be useful in 
 hacking somebody's files.
 CM:  It may be a poor choice of term, maybe you can even 
 help me out here.
 CM:  I think that it would be some type of program for 
 searching the directories for the, for the .ams information that 
 your talking about automatically.
 DB:  Okay.  The parser, the one that was written would have 
 been of no value in that because the parser classifies captions.  
 And the information that would be available in the ams. 
 profile would be only that on a certain date somebody accessed 
 this particular bulletin board, and it would say nothing about a 
 caption that could be useful in, for the parser.
 CM:  Alright, that's why I was after, was the latter.  I'm not 
 interested in the caption.  I'm interested in now a piece of 
 software that can find out who is accessing certain bulletin 
 boards.  And knowing who these people are.  That's what I 
 was asking, is the dept. Of justice perhaps interested in 
 something like that.
 DB:  They never expressed anything like that to me and I don't 
 think that such a thing could be done without a court order or 
 without very much more sophisticated hackers than I can 
 imagine.  I mean, the only reason that Sirbu and Rimm were 
 able to get into the ams.profile files at CMU was the fact that, 
 for reasons that I do not understand, nobody had closed the 
 backdoor.  The default study was world? Readable rather than 
 private.  And if it had been switched the other way and 
 something like 11% of the files were, they wouldn't be 
 hackable even by any event code that the DoJ might have, that 
 I could imagine.
 CM:  Those are my odds and ends.  I don't know if anybody 
 else has some odds and ends.
 CM:  I have one question which I'm not ... The paper or 
 whatever Rimm submitted to you for a grade and the paper 
 that Sirbu, he submitted to Sirbu, presumably for a different 
 grade, did you ever see these two side by side?
 DB:  The paper that used at the basis for grading was the draft 
 of his paper which had been ...
 CM:  The one that went to the gl ... ?
 DB:  The one that had been accepted by the 
 _Georgetown_Law_...
 CM:  I see.  You don't know this maybe, but it is conceivable 
 that Sirbu also used that as for grading.  Or even ...
 DB:  No, I wouldn't ... I imagine that that's probably true, but 
 I do not know.
 CM: So he may have got a little bit of double dipping in there.
 DB:  I would not be surprised, but Sirbu and I never discussed 
 how his course was being graded.
 CM:  OK, that was just a clarification.
 DB:  Of course.
 CM:  I had also promised to verify with SURG that you were 
 not indeed Rimm's advisor and they did confirm that.
 DB:  Yes, in fact I happened to find a copy of the letter that I 
 don't ... I presume this was sent to the second committee of 
 inquiry, but I don't know that officially and there's nothing on 
 this paper that indicates that.  But, it is a note from Jessie 
 Ramey which substantiates that point.  Would you like a copy?
 CM:  Sure. [long pause]  okay, do you want to proceed with 
 the discussion.  We were up to items f and g.  Which we so 
 cutely call effigy in the transcript ... [laughter] ... I'm sorry.
 CM:  I couldn't translate everything that was wrong, but .. 
 This one I managed.
 DB:  Surely, let me start and mention that there were errors in 
 the transcript of the second of February.  And on page 3, line 
 4 "they didn't ask me" should be changed to "they did ask me" 
 ... On page 4 line 14th from the bottom ... "Vilani" should be 
 "Irani" ... Page 5 lines -12 and -13 you just addressed.  That 
 was the question about SURG offices ... Who was in charge of 
 the SURG project ... Page 7 line 20 from the bottom the 
 attribution "Dave" in the paragraph is not correct.  I'm the 
 speaker.  I don't know what was being said there but I was 
 speaking to the rest of you. Nobody addressing me on this.  I 
 was basically telling you that if you requested, you could 
 reconstruct the entire email record from everybody by ... 
 Asking the appropriate people in academic computing to 
 recover the tapes.  Not quite everything, but you can get a 
 pretty fine construction.  On page 10 line 8 "the only data set 
 that hadn't been acquired" should be īthe only data set that had 
 been acquired."  And those are the only sort of substantial 
 errors that I saw.
 There were three small comments mostly responding to your 
 questions, Ed from the last meeting which I though I would 
 just, sort of, nail down because they had been left hanging.  
 You wanted to know the date of the last piece of 
 correspondence in my response to the committee of inquiry.  
 I'm sorry it wasn't more strictly chronological.  That was a 
 floating piece, that was not cced to me, it was sort of hanging 
 in my files.  But if you look at the first paragraph, I'm 
 thanking Sirbu for a Quaker? To an article and that replies to 
 Sirbu's message of June 28.  And Sirbu's message to me of 
 July 14 refers back to my concern that Rimm had lied to us.  
 And so it had to have gone between those dates and I'm 
 moderately confident that it actually came within 2 day of the 
 28th message.  June 28th message.
 I'm not sure this is important, but you wanted to know when 
 the undergraduates had contacted me about the morality of my 
 involvement with the DoJ project.  I had thought it was 
 October, but actually it was a little bit earlier than that it was 
 September the 15th and their first message cites Thomas' post 
 to the Hoffman/Novak cyberporn debate page.  And I didn't 
 tell them anything except that I wasn't allowed to answer, but I 
 didn't believe that I had done anything wrong.
 The third point that I wanted to ... I felt that some of the first 
 committee of the investigation's charges were wildly off base.  
 And a particular example that I mentioned in conversation last 
 time was the basis for accusation E.2.7, the seventh subcharge 
 under E.2.  And in that subcharge, they claim that Rimm 
 suggests that the people who block their files are pedophiles, 
 block access to their computer files are pedophile, and this 
 sincerely bothered me because when you go back and you read 
 footnote 30 in Rimm's paper it reads precisely, "While there is 
 no evidence to suggest that usenet and internet users who block 
 monitoring of their accounts access pornography more 
 frequently that those who do not, one also cannot assume that a 
 notable difference does not exist."  Poor writing, but not 
 wrong.  This is especially true in the context of pedophilia and 
 child pornography, consumption, preferential molesters, 
 pedophiles with a true sexual attraction to children frequently 
 employ innovative mechanisms to evade discovery, as 
 discovery will likely lead to incarceration, and he sights some 
 literature that supports that.  it would take an incredibly 
 twisted reading of the text in footnote 30 to deduce the charge 
 in E.2.7.  And I know that I saw that charge in the, I think, 
 original Hoffman-Novak critique, and it seems that the CoI 
 just sort of threw every charge that had been made publicly 
 into the boiler and just passes them forward undeliberatively.  
 And I think that that is a very bad thing to do.
 CM:  If we put that charge in a broader context and perhaps 
 even remove you from the issue entirely, what do you think 
 the opening part of the sentence "this is especially true in the 
 case of " does, what it means, what is "this is especially true" 
 referring to?
 DB:  "This is especially true" that people who are engaged in 
 pedophilia might try to cover their tracks.  I mean that is not 
 surprising.  I don't see anything in the plain English reading of 
 that sentence that suggests that people who block their accounts 
 are child molesters, which is exactly the charge that's made.  I 
 realize that it's not well written.  I'm not defending it, I had 
 nothing to do with it.  But I am saying that is bothers me, that 
 you're sort of scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up 
 with ... with charges.
 CM:  I don't want dwell on it too much.  But I was ..  I
 [Lost piece of tape.  30 Seconds (timed).]
 CM:  .... he's trying to influence the reader
 DB:  I don't disagree that he's tried to influence the reader.  
 But, if he's deditatively? correct and, I mean he's an 
 undergraduate, he writes badly, and he wants to hype this in 
 the greatest possible way, but to distort the plain English is, I 
 think, very bad.  I mean, good heavens if I were to look at the 
 first paper that you ever wrote, Paul, and try to pick at the 
 pieces about word choices and what you might have suggested 
 to the reader's mind, I don't know.  I don't like Rimm and I 
 don't want to defend him but I, I think there is enough other 
 stuff that's clearly wrong, that to pull these things forward is 
 unworthy of the process.
 CM:  OK let's step back to you now.  and away from 
 management.
 DB:  OK, let me see.  I had gone through ... what's written 
 here is, I hope, a far more articulate account than I discover 
 that I give from the first transcript, but I went through 
 charges A, B, C, D and I was in E when we finished.  Charge 
 E pertains to poor writing in analysis including errors in 
 sampling, coding, analyze, interpreting the findings and the 
 literature.  And as my format throughout this write up goes, I 
 first defend myself against misconduct and secondly I talk 
 about good judgment.  The defense against misconduct is that I 
 did not write the paper.  I was not the advisor in charge of its 
 preparation.  Given that the paper more than double in size 
 after I was dismissed.  Given that the statistical content was 
 mostly removed.  Given that I saw no copy of the paper 
 during the 6 month of rewrites before it was published.  I 
 don't see that I can accept any responsibility for the content, 
 clarity or word choice that appeared.  Additionally, many of 
 the deficiencies named by the committee of investigation, 
 committee of inquiry seem insupportable and ???? have been 
 copied without evaluation from the criticism, some of which 
 are blatantly wrong, unreasonable or perhaps are purely 
 political, that appeared in the media.  And, specifically, may I 
 refer to points 1, 3 and 5 on page 14 if the Committee of 
 inquiry report.  and a more detailed response to these points 
 appears in the larger document which I have already provided 
 to you.  One of these points is the one we just addressed.
 Argument for good judgment, I strongly oppose the media 
 hype tone and sloppy language of the paper.  My comments on 
 these points in each of the 4 meetings and on the drafts that I 
 reviewed were largely ignored.  At one point I had repeated 
 myself so often that I said I was beginning to feel like Cato the 
 elder and I think that's odd enough that somebody might 
 remember it if you wanted to ask them.  I apprised Sirbu of 
 my concern about the quality of the writing on multiple 
 occasions, the last of which was in our meeting with John 
 Lehoczky on Feb. 21, in 1995.  Most of these problems would 
 have been corrected if the paper had been submitted to a 
 referee process and distributed in draft form to the many 
 interested parties.  I learned that paper was not to be refereed 
 when Sirbu and Rimm made their conference call to me at 
 midnight of Nov. 29, the day before I was dismissed form the 
 project, ordering me to cancel my talk the following 
 afternoon.  My immediate reply was the 25 year old law 
 student editors are not competent to referee the paper, Sirbu 
 disagreed, saying that many law student pursuing a second 
 career, my letter to Sirbu of Dec. 1 reprises my arguments for 
 referees and a conventionally open academic handling of the 
 paper.  my opposition to the embargo was so strenuous that it 
 got me removed from the project.
 CM:  Let me interrupt this, you just touched a point that I 
 really want to question you about, and make sure that I 
 understood what you said and I think I do because you just 
 repeated it.  You're saying that both Martin and Margin called 
 you up at midnight, roughly, to get you to stop.
 DB:  AHD, yes ... it was a conference call.
 CM:  It was a conference call.  I wasn't sure that I understood 
 that.  Any other questions about part e?
 DB:  Charge F.  Violations regarding preparation: preparing 
 the manuscripts, submitting it to journals, consultation with 
 colleagues, and dissemination, including giving appropriate 
 credit and attribution to person and literature, identifying 
 specific sources at the point of reference and more generally.
 The defense against misconduct.  There are several surcharges 
 here, media hype, lack of peer review, absence of open 
 communication under the embargo, plagiarism and deception 
 of colleagues.  Rimm's arrogation of CMU's name to enhance 
 prestige, use of the work of others, the example in the charge 
 is legal footnotes, and failure to cite the work of others.  And 
 of these, the first three are not ground for an academic 
 misconduct charge, hyping it to the media, getting a paper 
 through without peer review, and absence of open 
 communication are certainly very bad things to do, but they 
 aren't criminal misconduct, in my understanding.  I was not 
 aware of Mehta and Plaza's work, nor of Napjus's, so the 
 fourth and seventh charges are not pertinent to me.  The 
 failure to cite the contribution of the author of the legal 
 footnotes is not clearly misconduct.  I have provided extensive 
 statistical  contributions to many projects, and received no 
 acknowledgment, and in any case, it has nothing to do with my 
 involvement.
 The argument for good judgment is this area is that as 
 previously noted, I have documentation and witnesses that I 
 opposed the hype, the lack of peer review, the absence of open 
 communication and it led directly to my dissociation from the 
 project.  I knew nothing of the plagiarism.  Early in my 
 participation I asked Rimm to list all the previous work in the 
 area, both on the pornography side and the Internet bulletin 
 board side, and got what I believed to be a complete list, which 
 speaks to my good judgment.  The CoI report gives conflicting 
 dates on Rimm's contacts with Mehta, and one version of those 
 dates, it says, would be after I had separated from the project.  
 If the other version is correct, then I might have to speak to 
 why I didn't know about Mehta's stuff, but I just never heard 
 of it.
 Regarding Rimm's referral to the CMU team, this is a feature 
 of his writing that I asked him to change.  He told me that he 
 wanted to make sure that he was properly according credit to 
 the entire team since so many had contributed to the final 
 work.  He also felt the use of personal pronouns in scholarly 
 writing was bad form.  He didn't want to say I did this, he 
 wanted to say the team did this.  It is my understanding that 
 Don Hale's office encouraged Rimm's conflation of himself 
 with CMU until immediately after the publicity turned 
 negative.  Hale gave Rimm an office in their own building and 
 access to phones and faxes and stuff like that.  Also, I believe 
 Erwin Steinberg appeared on the same _Nightline_ show that 
 interviewed Rimm, which emphasized CMU's willingness to be 
 publicly identified with Rimm's work.  And certainly Lazarus 
 had supported that as well, so if Lazarus, Steinberg, and Hale 
 were all agreeable to this, I think it hypocritical to prosecute 
 me.
 My chief concern about the legal footnotes was that I was not 
 competent to assess their quality and knew nothing about their 
 contributor.  I raised this issue with Sirbu, when I first saw the 
 legal footnotes, both when they first appeared and in my letter 
 of Dec. 1, and I think I also mentioned it in the meeting with 
 John Lehoczky and Sirbu on Feb. 21, but I could be wrong 
 about that.  Since I was removed from the project immediately 
 following their appearance, and given no subsequent draft 
 until after the paper had been published.  I was not aware that 
 the author was not acknowledged.  Any questions about that 
 charge/
 Charge G.  Improper conduct relating to other aspects of 
 preventing and minimizing the risk and harm to research 
 participants.  The defense against misconduct on that:  I 
 instructed Rimm to protect the data.  I warned Sirbu that he 
 should be supervising Rimm's undergraduate helpers' access to 
 the data.  I was not aware that Rimm had obtained logfiles 
 from Robert Thomas.  And perhaps this occurred after my 
 involvement ceased.  And I still don't quite understand how 
 could this happened because Robert Thomas I thought had 
 been arrested before I was involved in all this and has been in 
 jail and I think he's still in jail.  So I'm not quite clear how or 
 when this could have been obtained.  You may have more 
 information about how that worked ???.  Since no data were 
 ever obtained from the DoJ, there is not basis for a misconduct 
 charge on this point.
 Then the argument for good judgment runs as follows:  
 Besides making two efforts to help ensure data security, the 
 first was supporting Rimm's request for funds from SURG to 
 keep  that data more secure than the Andrew system would 
 allow, and secondly volunteering to supervise the 
 anonymization of the ams.profile data.  I warned Rimm on 
 several occasions of the need for security, insisted that we 
 consult with an ethicist, apprised Rimm of his research 
 obligations after he sent me the only logfile data of which I 
 was aware, and warned Sirbu of my fears about undergraduate 
 access.  That's in my letter of Dec. 1 to Sirbu and it was 
 reiterated in my meeting with John Lehoczky.  Regarding the 
 DoJ data, I have some statements in section 4 that I think, 
 describe the defense on the DoJ a little more fully.  They 
 essentially reprise stuff that we have already discussed and I 
 didn't want to just bury it in twice.
 I had asked that two additional charges be placed, and the 
 communication I got from the provost said that he is neither 
 explicitly nor implicitly in large [enlarged] a set of charges 
 that are to be considered and, that's, I guess, his call.  But, let 
 me mention what the two charges that I thought important to 
 consider.  The first which I call charge y, unethical treatment 
 of colleagues.  I asked the original CoI and Paul Christiano to 
 consider adding two additional charges, the first concerns 
 Sirbu's treatment of me.  This is not submitting the DoJ white 
 paper, meeting secretly with the DoJ, allowing Rimm to 
 remove me from the project while retaining the benefit of my 
 contributions, making promises to obtain permission to use 
 material, but then not fulfilling those promises, and so forth.  I 
 have heard nothing back about this, and so I'm letting you all 
 know that, I think this is a worthwhile charge to consider.
 The second charge is improper conduct as an advisor.  I had 
 also asked that Sirbu be charged with failure to perform his 
 minimal duties as an advisor.  And I don't know whether or 
 not these charges have been filed.  And the things that I see 
 under that heading are that undergraduates need supervision 
 and all the difficulties that we are facing today, I think, came 
 pretty directly from a lack of close supervision.  I actually 
 would guess that Rimm has a very strong case against Sirbu or 
 CMU for not, for the very quality of advising that he received.  
 I know that Sirbu was warned by me, in the presence of John 
 Lehoczky, and in the presence of Rimm and Zuckerman, and 
 in email contained in the K-PACK documentation, of virtually 
 every problem that we had to consider over the last 4 weeks.  
 But Sirbu claims in the _New_York_Times_ that he hadn't 
 read the final version of the paper, and that I think is a clear 
 responsibility of an advisor, especially if the paper is going to 
 be the cover article of _Time_ magazine and the feature of 
 _Nightline_.  And what I found particularly repugnant, was 
 that in the in the only public statement that I'm aware of Sirbu 
 making about this which occurred, I think, the day or two days 
 after the _Nightline_ indecent, he hung Rimm out to dry, and I 
 think is proper posture, at least in that early stage before more 
 massive issues of impropriety arose, would be to defend the 
 work of the student.  Or at least to help to spin control it, 
 explain it, put a better light on it.  Because actually, there 
 would have been ways to do that.
 CM:  What do you mean by the expression "Hung Rimm out to 
 dry?"
 DB:  Sirbu said that this is Rimm's paper, not Sirbu's paper.  
 That he hadn't read the paper in the final version.  And this 
 wasn't the paper that he would have written.  And said that in 
 a interview with the _New_York_Times_ about something that 
 appeared on _Nightline_ the day before, and in _Time_ 
 magazine the day before that, strikes me as a very clear way of 
 saying, I'm not responsible for this, I'm not going to defend it, 
 if people are criticizing it don't look to me to back it up.  And 
 I had just never heard of an advisor who was, not tried to 
 support a student on work.  Now you can't defend misconduct, 
 but there is clearly a lot of room to say, well it's an 
 undergraduate paper, but Rimm has identified important 
 things.  His methodology for examining involved with the 
 parser is well breakthrough methodology that bring a whole 
 new tool to the study of pornography.  Previously, we had to 
 rely entirely on interview accounts of what people look at, 
 what they do, and that methodology is entirely superseded by 
 what Rimm was proposing and doing.  This are positive things 
 that could be said.  And I think it would be entirely 
 appropriate for an advisor to stick up for his student.
 CM:  Can I just ask one question?  Do you think Sirbu was 
 aware of those positive aspects in the whole situation?  
 DB:  I sent him email, in which I suggested that he ought to 
 stick up for Rimm.  And said that given that I was kicked off 
 back in November, I don't fell comfortable doing it myself, 
 but I think that you jolly well ought to.  And I forget whether 
 I outlined what it was, but I'm sure that Sirbu knew about it.
 CM:  Do you think Sirbu was telling the truth about having not 
 read the last drafts of the paper before it was published?
 DB:  If he was telling the truth then he was irresponsible as an 
 advisor.  If he was lying, then he was lying and that is a 
 misconduct too.  I don't know what his [not clear] are.  So 
 those are two things that [we'll/you'll] have to discuss off line.  
 I don't know how you want to handle that.  In section 4 ...
 CM:  This is just a clarification, I'm sorry, I've been away so 
 I'm trying to play catch-up as well as I can.  You have seen, or 
 you got letters from Paul Christiano as did Sirbu and some say 
 here are the charges of this committee?  So you are fully 
 aware of what we've been asked to look at.
 DB:  Absolutely not.
 CM:  You've not see that.
 DB:  I have received one copy of the Committee of Inquiry, of 
 the first Committee of Inquiry's report, which lists 7 charges, 
 to which I've replied.
 CM:  I see.
 DB:  I have asked whether the second Committee of Inquiry's 
 findings have anything to do with my defense, and I have 
 received no direct answer.  I have received a summary of 
 some things that maybe are involved, but I don't know of any 
 testimony that I might be able to call upon to defend myself.
 CM:  Okay, I was just trying to see who haws received what.  
 In this case.  Thank you.
 DB:  Surely.  This finishes all of the charges.  I have tried, the 
 last two sets of questionings, to have covered a range of topics, 
 and I wanted, I sort of set them out here, with short responses.  
 I can read them, they just reprise stuff that we have said 
 before.  Whatever you wish.
 CM:  Okay, I was just trying to see who has received what.  In 
 this case.  Thank you.
 DB:  Surely.  This finishes all of the charges.  I have tried, the 
 last two sets of questionings, to have covered a range of topics, 
 and I wanted, I sort of set them out here, with short responses.  
 I can read them, they just reprise stuff that we have said 
 before.  Whatever you wish.
 CM:  I'm comfortable with the discussion we've had on the 
 Dept. Of Justice issue.  I certainly have no more outstanding 
 questions.
 DB:  Let me ask that you all read these portions on, just to be 
 sure that we are saying the same thing, but ... that... the topics 
 that I identified ... maybe this would be good to do ... the 
 topics that I identified as the key ones on which I had been 
 questioned are: the DoJ white paper, why did I stay involved 
 with the project as long as I did, the ams.profile records, 
 Rimm's independent study, and why was the paper so bad?  
 Were there other major topics that I have forgotten or 
 overlooked?
 CM:  Again this is a minor point.  I'm skimming this thought, 
 let me say, Sirbu and Zuckerman didn't back me up.  My 
 understanding is that Zuckerman was sort of out of the game 
 long before the paper for into its final state.  So is Zuckerman 
 appropriately mentioned in 5 ... 4 point ... no 4.5.
 DB:  I believe so.  Zuckerman attended, I believe, 2 and a half 
 of the four meeting that Rimm, Sirbu, I and Zuckerman held 
 in the fall semester.  He had to the best of my understanding 
 received a copy of every draft of the proposal of the paper 
 that got circulated.  I believe we all did.  And Rimm would 
 stop by the office and say, "Here is your copy.  And it said this 
 copy belongs to David Banks its number one of four.  Please 
 do not distribute, duplicate, discuss, whatever."
 CM:  Alright.
 DB:  and I had thought that Zuckerman that Zuckerman was in 
 that loop.  I know that Zuckerman in some of our meetings 
 said that he would get back to Rimm with comments on the 
 writing.  I understand we were all feeding our stuff to Rimm.  
 In each of the meetings, particularly ones in which Zuckerman 
 was present, I said the quality of this writing is very 
 polemical. I may have used the phrase yellow scholarship, like 
 yellow journalism.
 CM:  But, in fact Zuckerman lost contact with the project, no 
 later than you lost contact in what  December or so.  So he 
 didn't have a chance to see anything from December till when 
 it was published in, whenever.
 DB:  I don't know that.
 CM:  You don't know that.
 DB:  I have not heard anything about that.
 CM:  That is just something we need to find out.  Right?
 CM:  OK, Yes.
 DB:  OK, were there any points that may need to be visited?  
 These were the 5, that I remember as being the key points of 
 discussion .. hitherto.
 CM:  There are other key point, but I think they're been 
 handled very well and as I say I don't have any questions left 
 about anything.
 DB:  OK.  Point 5 is not something that properly falls under 
 the scope of this committee.  But, I think I need to make these 
 points regularly, and maybe something will happen someday.  
 I think the misconduct process has been very badly handled, 
 and I want to go on record as indicating what my chief 
 objections to CMU's management o that process are.  The first 
 objection is that the process had taken entirely too long.  The 
 _Faculty_Handbook_ sets explicit limits on the timing of each 
 phase, and those have been grossly surpasses.  K-PACK was 
 not even constituted until after every reasonable counting 
 would have required the Committee of Investigation to have 
 completed its work, and in fact, I had to petition the Faculty 
 Review Committee to get K-PACK established.
 Secondly, George Duncan should never have been appointed to 
 the first Committee of Inquiry, and he should never have 
 consented to serve.  His proper role is as a witness for my 
 defense, and it is unconscionable that he has preferred charges 
 against me for relying upon the advice he gave.
 The Committee of Inquiry should have been named Barbara 
 Lazarus as a respondent.  Her involvement began before mine, 
 and continued after I left.  As the financial source, she had 
 more control over the work than I.  As an officer of the 
 university, she had specific  trusts to prevent misconduct and 
 avert embarrassment.  I believe she read the drafts, knew of 
 the improper data acquisitions, and was more involved that I 
 in every aspect except for the writing of the white paper to the 
 Dept. of Justice.
 The Committee of Inquiry should have honored my request to 
 interview John Lehoczky, who is the only unindicted witness 
 to a frank exchange on the ethics or Sirbu's management of 
 Rimm's project.  Had they done so promptly, John's memory 
 would have been seven months fresher.  And this protracted 
 delay may have eroded the value of a key witness in my 
 defense.
 Paul, I don't think you should be on this committee.  Your on 
 the Faculty review Committee, and I would have to appeal any 
 decisions that this committee makes to you again.
 CM:  This was discussed, and what was going to happen was, if 
 this comes up at faculty review, I would just recuse myself.
 DB:  Uh, that's good, I'm not, it's still not, I think, entirely 
 good practice.
 CM:  Agreed.  What had happened was, when I was appointed, 
 the person who appointed me, was not aware I was on the 
 Faculty Review.  At this stage, the things have been prolonged, 
 they didn't want to spend more time looking for another 
 person to chair the committee.  In addition to that, with the 
 Faculty Review, we discussed the fact that this could, a 
 situation like this could happen to anybody of the Faculty 
 Review, that something is going to come up that they're 
 ultimately associated with, and the solution is you recuse 
 yourself.  So we finally decided that, as unfortunate as the 
 overlap was, we thought we would be handling it properly.
 DB:  There's another reason why the overlap might be 
 improper.  I certainly understand it.  I knew you would have 
 recused yourself by that, that wasn't, it's just technical and 
 legalistic realistic rather than a serious concern like some of 
 the other ones are.  But, the flip side of it is the fact that, as 
 you know, I submitted petition that all charges be dismissed 
 back in December, and it is possible that one reason that the 
 Faculty Review Committee has not answered that petition is 
 that they know that you're involved and will be sensitive to the 
 timing needs that I have.  So, it cuts many ways.
 By the way, maybe this is not the right time to ask but, is the 
 Faculty review committee still thinking about this petition?  Is 
 it hanging fire?  Is it doing anything?
 CM:  I don't know. They may be and they've left me out, 
 which would be appropriate. 
 DB: Sure.  My sixth point is that many of the charged made by 
 the first Committee of Inquiry constitute harassment, 
 scapegoating or at least a blind copying of hysterical charges 
 bandied about in the media.
 Bad writing cannot serve as a basis for misconduct, nor can 
 media hype, nor can any of the kinds of bad judgment shown 
 by many participants;  however, all these charges have been 
 referred, often in verbatim form, from the posts by Hoffman 
 and Novak, Jim Thomas and Brian Reid.  In my case, the DoJ 
 white paper, I don't see hoe that can support a misconduct 
 charge on the most narrow, legalistic ground, but it has been 
 allowed to hang over my head for seven months.  If the CoI 
 report had received the same close public scrutiny that Rimm'
 s paper received, it would have been shown as similarly 
 sloppy.
 CM:  Don't you think the same criticism could be made of the 
 treatment of Sirbu and Rimm?
 DB: I think that many of the criticisms raised by Hoffman and 
 Novak, Thomas and Brian Reid are not well founded.  And the 
 larger document that I gave you showed that a number of 
 points where I think they're just off base.  The footnote that 
 we discussed is one example in which I think somebody sat 
 down and said how can I twist this to make it into a criticism?  
 A similar thing occurred with the concern about ordering the 
 preferences in the hierarchy on the parser categories.  There is 
 an issue there, nut it's a very small and tangential issues, and 
 has this appeared in an uncontroversial paper, there would 
 have been no question raised about it at all.  And in fact, I 
 think that the evidence that I've seen regarding the validity  
 rates of the parser mean that it would be essentially statistically 
 impossible for any reorganizing of the hierarchy to lead to 
 changes in the pedophile classification rates.  You've got 97 
 percent reliability for pedophile classification, and it's really 
 not going to change of you ask first of all, is it soft core 
 pornography, and then if it's pedophile?  I don't see that 
 happening.
 There were a batch of others along this line.  Hoffman and 
 Novak, Jim Thomas and Brian Reid are not disinterested 
 parties.  Brian Reid wrote a critique that began, something 
 using the word vomit, and that's not scholarly writing.  Brian 
 Reid is very much concerned with preserving the absolute 
 freedom of the internet, and was eager, I think, to discredit 
 anything that might be used as ammunition for legislation to 
 bridle the Internet.  Hoffman and Novak, of course, are 
 running their marketing, they've got a five year plan for 
 studying marketing on the Internet, and in some sense, Rimm's 
 work might have been regarded as sort of a direct competitor 
 at the time to the types of methodology that they wanted to 
 bring forward.  I am not saying that they are wrong, and I am 
 not saying that many of the criticisms that have been raised 
 aren't correct.  But I think the CoI is supposed to act as a 
 screen to filter out the political and hysterical and the 
 unprovable stuff, and leave something a little more correct.
 Jim Thomas' stuff.  He seems to be coming as this from an 
 American Psychological Association's morality perspective.  I 
 think if I recall correctly, much of the stuff he cites is from 
 the ethical guidelines for the American Psychological 
 Associaiton, which as far as I know, none of us are a member 
 of.  I have my own set of ethical guidelines that I follow, and I 
 think I conform to all those in my profession.  That's not a 
 clear statement that his argument shouldn't be listened to, but I 
 think he did not know enough of the facts that he confused 
 things.  He seemed to believe, for example, that the parser was 
 based on secret information disclosed by the bulletin board 
 operators on the basis of trust, rather than by getting the 
 merchandising catalogs that they sell to everybody.  And much 
 of his complaint seems to be based exactly on that confusion.  
 And the CoI, the first Committee of Inquiry, at least I told 
 them how that was set up, and I think they should of at least 
 thought hard before forwarding Jim Tomas' verbatim 
 complaints.
 Overall, my whole lesson from the Rimm situation is that the 
 secrecy in which they operated allowed all sorts of 
 impropriety to occur.  And I think this misconduct process 
 ought to have been more open.  I think that none of the errors 
 I listed in the six points above would have occurred.  I can't 
 imagine Christiano appointing George Duncan to the first 
 Committee of inquiry if he knew that the appointment was 
 going to be a matter of public record, and would so be 
 reviewed.  Nor can I imagine George accepting the 
 appointment if he was aware that this would be subject to 
 public scrutiny.  The very long delay in the process I don't 
 think wouldn't have happened if it had been an open process.  
 Many of the other concerns, I don't think the first CoI would 
 have written quite such a slapdash report of they knew that 
 everybody was going to read it and think ? it over carefully.  
 These are all things I don't like.
 Committee of Inquiry and K-PACK are, sorry, I call them 
 Star Chamber Courts.  You all are secret, you're not 
 accountable to anybody for the quality of your judgments.  No 
 matter what you do, I can't name you, which gives you a great 
 deal of latitude, and I am not at all suggesting that any of you 
 as individuals would handle this badly, but as a process that 
 worries me.  I am also uncomfortable that the evidence and 
 documentation that I have provided to K-PACK are not being 
 given to the other defendants.  And I don't know the law, but I 
 think that everyone deserves full access to the testimony and 
 evidence against them, and I would be angry if I were to learn 
 that you all were hearing testimony from somebody else that 
 appeared to flatly contradict me and incriminate me, and 
 perhaps I have contradictory  evidence to rebut that charge 
 with, and unless you tell me about their testimony, I will not 
 be able to respond.  So, those are my concerns on that.
 And, finally, I have questions about confidentiality.  As I read 
 the _Faculty_Handbook_ it suggests that the purpose of the 
 misconduct procedures confidentiality rile, twofold, to protect 
 the reputations of those who are innocent but accused, and to 
 allow CMU to wash its laundry in private.  That's not explicit, 
 that's just what I read as what they were probably thinking.  
 And the implicit scenario is that the misconduct into 
 accusations are low-profile affairs known to only a handful of 
 professionals and can be solved in-house.
 The Rimm debacle broke that mold when CMU announced that 
 five people had been charges as respondents to the 
 investigation, it's refusal to name names afforded me no 
 protection.  The bulletin board discussion groups, my peers 
 and students, the newspapers and my neighbors have no doubt 
 that I am under investigation.  And I think it would be 
 disingenuous for CMU to claim  otherwise.  The gag rules to 
 which K-PACK adheres prevents me from exhibiting evidence 
 that might clear my name, and in this case, the confidentiality 
 rule has been used to silence me as my integrity gets trashed, 
 all allowing CMU time to optimize it's spin-control.  That 
 again, is sort of hyperbole, but that's one construction of 
 what's happened.
 And I would appreciate some formal notification on the 
 following points:
 Am I legally bound to maintain confidentiality?
 How much more damage should my career sustain before it 
 becomes proper for me to overrule the rule and defend 
 myself?
 If I am acquitted, does CMU plan to help restore my 
 reputation, within either the university or my professional 
 community?
 You don't have to respond now.
 CM:  I want to respond in a manner you will find mostly 
 acceptable and very intelligent.  Maybe these are questions that 
 the provost has to answer.  
 CM:  Or his legal advisor.
 DB:  Will you see that they get answered?
 CM:  Mm.
 DB:  Thank you.  In principle, I am concerned about my 
 general reputation with the whole world, but I am specifically 
 concerned about my reputation at CMU and in the statistical 
 community.  This is not an exhaustive list by any means.  I'm 
 trying to sort of indicate the range of the dimension of 
 concern at CMU.
 First of all, I have students who now that that I am principal 
 villain and cc me about this.  Secondly, I got the following 
 email from Alan Kennedy back on July the 6th.  Alan Kennedy 
 is not a close friend of mine, he's an acquaintance, and I think 
 his reaction is probably typical if what happened in the general 
 CMU community.
 CM:  Can you identify him?  I don't know who he is.
 CM:  He is the former head of the Department of English, now 
 a professor of English.
 DB:  David, Something has just cleared up, I think , so I 
 thought I'd write to you about it.  I'm sorry to say that I had 
 begun to form an impression that you were deeply involved in 
 the Martin Rimm project.  Your name had been mentioned a 
 couple of times when the original study was being done I 
 guess, and when the recent fuss opened up it seemed that you 
 had been a part of the advisory team backing Rimm up.  
 Frankly, as the public critique of Rimm has broadened I'd 
 started to get very worried.  But today I heard that you were 
 not in fact part of the exercise, and that it could have gone 
 much better if you had been.  What a relief.  I mention all of 
 this in case you might think that you need to sat something a 
 bit louder in some quarters to distance yourself -- if that is 
 what you would want.  Please don't take offense -- I'm just 
 passing on the 'gossip' as a friend, if that isn't a contradiction 
 in terms.  All the best, Alan.
 I called him back on this and Alan said he had been avoiding 
 me for a while because he thought I had really stepped in 
 something, and he didn't wan to face me about it.  Alan and I 
 happen to have a mutual friend in this who I think knows more 
 about this than he probably should, and I think he explained 
 things to Alan, but for everybody else in the CMU community, 
 I don't know what they're going to find.
 (End Side A, Flip Tape)
 This email is still not quite the correct one that I would wish 
 him to have, because I was involved in the Rimm project and I 
 think that his understanding that I was not in fact part of the 
 exercise is technically wrong.  It's a lot more complicated than 
 that, and without access to the details, I don't know how he can 
 exactly understand what happened.  And I imagine that this is 
 representative of many people.
 The third charge, the third concern, is within my department.  
 I have been very circumspect in my department, and only John 
 Lehoczky is entirely aware of essentially all of the charges 
 against me and all of my responses to those charges.  Robb 
 Kass, the current chair of the department, has a broad and 
 general understanding, but I don't think that he has looked at 
 anything in detail.  Nobody discusses this in my presence.  My 
 feeling is that publicly, many of them think that there is a 
 small probability that I have done something wrong, a larger 
 probability that I exercised poor judgment in improperly 
 acquiescing to something, and a much larger probability that I 
 was sloppy or careless.  I need letters of recommendation 
 from these people.  I am going to be working with them in 
 some degree for the rest of my life, and I would like to 
 recover some portion of their respect.  And I don't think there 
 is any easy way to make that happen.
 In the outside statistical community, the situation is more 
 difficult.  And again, I have sort of some dimensions of 
 concern here.  One dimension is that the entire statistical 
 community of Pittsburgh, or at least everybody who attended 
 my address to the ASA chapter on November 30, are sort of 
 now completely in the loop on my involvement, and not 
 naming names has not protected me from that association.  I 
 also spoke on the regression analyses I did on the bulletin 
 board service data at the Classification Society of North 
 America meeting on June 24, just before the paper appeared.  
 And from the email I received, I now that people all over the 
 U.S. and Canada know of the investigation and assume that I 
 am have been named as a respondent.
 Sort of more concretely, there are a number of journal editors 
 and associate editors who are aware of this.  I sort of never 
 hesitated to discuss the project in the first six months.  I 
 figured it like any other research work I was doing, I would 
 discuss it with anybody who was interested, and the topic was 
 one that made many people interested in it.  The editors and 
 associate editors were certainly enthusiastic, and many of 
 them, several of them,, three of them, suggested that I submit 
 a paper to their journal, and one offered expeditious 
 refereeing as an additional inducement.  Now, over the last 
 several month, I keep getting, you know, trickles of email here 
 and there saying, how do things stand.  Or I go to a 
 conference, the Interface Conference or whatever, and at the 
 mixers they ask me, you know, what's happened, I saw about 
 the Rimm blow up, you are charged in that business.  And I 
 don't think I can say. No I'm not charged, and I don't think I 
 can say no I refuse to answer that on the grounds that CMU's 
 misconduct policy prevents me from saying anything.  I've 
 told them that yes, I am charged, I can't discuss the details.  
 Most of them I told I didn't think I had done anything wrong 
 and expected to be cleared by December 1995, at the latest, 
 and that I was not free to discuss details.  But, that timetable 
 has been derailed.
 This is a third case, Donna Hoffman.  She his one of the 
 leaders of the charge against the Rimm paper, and when it first 
 came out, she immediately called me.  Oh, I should mention 
 that she is an officer of the American Statistical Association, 
 and is a bit of a wheel in that area.  Well, who knows, it's 
 speculation, but well, she's a bit if a wheel.  She called me 
 early on the process, and I told her that I didn't think I had 
 done anything wrong, but was not free to discuss it.  And then 
 she wanted to go on at some length explaining why I was 
 wrong in thinking I hadn't done anything wrong based on her 
 understanding of the things that the report had actually done.  
 And, I basically had to cut her off and say, I can't talk about it, 
 I don't think I did any of the things you think I did, but I can't 
 discuss it.  She tried to meet me again at the annual meeting in 
 August to get more information on this, or, she would like to 
 write a follow-up piece for her cyberporn debate bulletin 
 board that adds more details specifically about the CMU 
 investigation, and I have stonewalled her.  But, she is 
 somebody I am going to have to work with for the rest of my 
 professional career, and I don't know that there is nay way to 
 get back to regular, collegial relations with her.
 And these are the reasons why I think there is concern here.  
 Thank you.
 CM:  I had one observation.  I can see why you can drawn into 
 the thought that we are a Star Chamber, and I can only speak 
 for myself, I'm here to try and, well, best that I can, to find 
 out what's happened.  There's at least as good a chance that I'll 
 be your friend as your accuser.  So, we are attempting to be 
 neutral, but I realize that the delay is not helping you any.  So, 
 we'll just, you know, as we can, we'll go forward?/though it?.
 DB:  I understand that, and as individuals I actually have great 
 esteem, I think for all of you, and I am aware that you are 
 approaching this in the best possible way.  Nonetheless, a Star 
 Chamber, is specifically a secret trial, and this is what this is.
 CM:  I am a student of history.
 DB:  Thank you.  OK.  I'm crying Herald?, and I'm not 
 getting anywhere.
 CM:  I should add to your list of motivations for 
 confidentiality, and that is some of the documentation we have 
 is extremely irrelevant and its ????.  And if this were not 
 confidential, I imagine we would have this room full of 
 contributions from all sides of the issue, which we would be 
 obligated to wade through, and most of which would be 
 completely irrelevant to getting you finished as quick as we 
 are trying to get you finished.
 DB:  That you.  That is true.
 CM:  Any other questions?
 DB:  Do you all anticipate wanting to speak with me again, or 
 do you want to notify me of that eventually occurs.
 CM:   I don't anticipate it.  We'll discuss how we are going to 
 handle passing transcripts back and forth to everyone.  Well, 
 we actually hadn't brought that up, because you, in fact, are 
 the only person we've interviewed so far.
 DB:  Right.
 CM:  So it's not that we haven't given anybody else anything.  
 We have not even contacted, at least we haven't set up the rest 
 of our schedule.  As I mentioned, we really wanted to get to 
 you first, for reasons that we all appreciate.
 Again, do you have anything else for David?
 DB:  OK.  Thank you.  Thank you very much,.
 (Banks exits the room.)
 CM:  One o'clock.