The professor's harassment claims seem disingenuous

Submitted by Yoel Natan (United States), Dec 2, 2004 at 19:16

Back in the 1990's, it was safe to claim that the police looked into a harassment situation without anyone calling one's bluff. However, now that most police departments are computerized, it is possible to call and ask for police report numbers over the phone. Police can also search their daily blotters. Thus, not providing a police report or blotter number in response to requests casts serious doubt on whether the police were contacted at all over the harassment that Professor Dabashi alleges.

The professor's claims of harassment by mail, phone and email seem both hyperbolic and anachronistic. Previously it was safe to falsely claim one was being harassed, or exaggerate the amount of harassment, because the authenticity of the attacks could not be easily determined. Nowadays, however, there is DNA analysis of saliva on envelopes and stamps, computerized matching of fingerprints on letters, scientific analysis and profiling based on threat-letter contents, audio-analysis of voice mail recordings, and caller-ID phone tracing.

The professor's claims of computer hacking seem dated—as in nineties-ish. In the 1990's, networkers were a bit naïve and named computers and computer accounts after the person to which they were assigned. Moreover, the network administrator's user name was by default "Administrator," meaning that a hacker merely had to come up with the correct password to penetrate the entire network.

Nowadays, Administrators make their networks less transparent by disabling the "Administrator" account, and by giving all the computer names and accounts generic names like ps1234. What this means is a hacker would be hard pressed to locate, much less hack, Professor Dabashi's computer, without having first compromised an entire computer network at Columbia. Thus it becomes harder to believe that Professor Dabashi's computer was hacked without there being a shred of evidence to support this claim.

Finally, Dabashi's complaint of receiving "tons" of emails sounds dated, too. One wonders how all those emails sneaked past modern anti-spam software installed both on email servers and Columbia's local network. Furthermore, these emails are generally traceable by looking at the detailed email header information. The police would have found this information quite useful for catching the stalkers and harassers, if, in fact, "tons" of spam emails ever existed.

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