Steve Martini - Double Tap

“What do you want to know?”

“For starters, how did it come about?”

“I created it seventeen years ago. Of course, back then it had a different name. Probably didn’t have all the bells and whistles it does now, though I haven’t seen their final take on it, so I really can’t say. When I owned it, it was called Paradize. The Defense Department wanted to buy it. They wanted to modify it, use it for their own purposes.” He coughs a short jag, then catches his breath.

“Of course, that was good news for my company, back then. If you could only roll back the calendar. .” Kaprosky muses. “I guess I was a little naïve.” He looks at his wife as if to apologize for the rugged ride through life he has given her. “But I was dealing with the federal government. Who would have thought?”

“Tell us about it.”

“We thought it was a tremendous opportunity,” he recalls. “We signed a contract, not to sell, but to license the program to the Pentagon. They wanted to use it for random processing of large amounts of data, but they wanted some changes. That was fine. .” His voice trails off, and for a moment I think he’s gone to sleep in the chair. But Kaprosky is just catching his breath.

Jean Kaprosky looks at me with a kind of mournful expression and shakes her head.

“Everything was fine for a while, about a year,” he resumes. “Then the government claimed that we had somehow violated the contract. They canceled it and refused to return the source codes or stop using them. Except for a small sum that they paid up front, we received nothing. They claimed that we had failed to make required changes they wanted to the software.”

“Did you?” says Harry.

“No. The problem was they failed to provide any specifications. How do you write parameters for a program when you don’t know what they are? No: the people running the program never intended to pay us.”

“Why?” says Harry. “Why would the government want to take your software without paying for it?”

“The government? No. The government is just a concept. Figment of our imagination,” says Kaprosky. “It took me a long time to figure that out. It’s the people who run it who do the Devil’s work. Ambitious dogs. We think we’re protected because they come and go. But along the way some of them reach out and grab things, things of value. Things that they want for themselves and their friends. I never thought of the government as a friend or benefactor. But I once believed that while they could draft me, tax me, or put me in jail, there were rules they had to follow. Now I know better. You want to know who took the software? His name was Gerald Satz.”

Harry gives me a look. The first possible connection with Ruiz’s case.

“What we found out during the lawsuits,” Kaprosky goes on, “is that the government had already hired another company to come in and make the changes they wanted, using my source codes.”

“What is this thing?” says Harry. “You’ve mentioned it a couple of times: the source code.”

“To an operating program, the source code is like DNA. It’s written in programming language, what you would call human-readable instructions, like a long list, using logic. For it to be used by a computer, the source code has to be translated into machine language, something the computer can read. What is important about this,” Kaprosky explains, “is that you can only make changes to the program if you have access to the source code. The changes are written in the original programming language and then converted to machine language.”

“So if you don’t have the source code, you don’t have anything,” I say.

He nods. “That’s why most software companies only license the finished product. As long as they hold the source code in secret, it’s protected. Once they release it out into the public, they’ve lost any claim to ownership.”

“But you said you gave the source code for Paradize to the federal government,” says Harry.

“Actually, Paradize contained more than a hundred different source codes,” says Kaprosky. “That’s why it took them a year before they cut us off and canceled the contract. We had just delivered the last in the series when they pulled the plug. It was the final piece they needed. And so that you understand, we didn’t give the codes to the government. The contract called for licensing of the program for the government’s use. It did allow access to the source codes, but only for limited purposes and only if they used it under our license.”

From the breast pocket of his coat, he takes a handkerchief and coughs into it, then wipes his lips. “Besides, I figured like everybody else it’s the government, right? They’re not going to steal it. Well, I was wrong.”

“Why would they go to somebody else to rewrite the program?” Harry asks.

“It wasn’t a rewrite. They just wanted to tweak it so they could claim it was their own: an original item.”

“But it was based on your source codes,” says Harry.

“Yeah, well, Try telling that to the federal courts. They don’t seem to care.”

Kaprosky has employed a generation of lawyers in an effort to get the government to pony up damages, including hundreds of millions of dollars for infringement of copyright. He has gotten within a hairsbreadth of delivering the case to a jury on two occasions, only to have the government raise the specter of national security and refuse to disclose the source code for its program. The code is the critical piece of evidence needed to confirm Kaprosky’s claim. Because the software in various forms is currently used by a number of intelligence agencies-the CIA, the NSA, and others-and because in more watered-down forms it has been licensed by the U.S. government to allied foreign intelligence services in other countries, the courts have sustained the national-security defense.

The crowning blow came last year when a federal circuit court in Washington, D.C., threw a blanket over the entire case, denying Kaprosky’s appeal on national security grounds. Three months later the Supreme Court denied a hearing on appeal. That decision in effect leaves Kaprosky and his company without legal recourse. He cannot prove his claim without the evidence that is in the possession of the government. And the courts will not compel the government to turn over the evidence on grounds of national security.

“And you think General Satz played a major role in all of this,” I say.

“Oh, I know he did. That’s not even in question. He was the principal officer in charge of contracts at the time we signed the agreement. He was no fool. When he saw the Paradize program and had a chance to examine it with his technical people, he knew that what he had was golden.

“If information is power, Satz was holding the keys to the kingdom,” Kaprosky continues. “I don’t want to sound immodest, but Paradize was the genie in the bottle, and Satz knew its value. He knew somebody was going to build a commercial empire on it, and it wasn’t going to be me. I don’t know if you’re aware, but the U.S. military-not the soldiers in the field, but the top brass, the ones who survive long enough to make it into top offices in the Pentagon-if you check it out, you’ll discover that they aren’t usually buried in a pauper’s grave when they die. Knocking around in a courtroom for a dozen years, talking to other people, you learn things.”

Kaprosky pauses, then resumes: “I could give you the names of ten corporations, most of them funded almost entirely out of the Pentagon budget, the U.S. military being their biggest customer. In some cases their only customer. Check the board of directors of these companies and you’ll find they are controlled by former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a good number of their cadre. That’s no accident,” Kaprosky notes. “I can tell you about inventions and innovations with military or intelligence applications, some of them so advanced, you begin to wonder if the government isn’t sitting on a time machine in one of its warehouses. Somehow these things always get gobbled up by newly formed corporations. And when you look at the company’s organizational chart, it reads like the roster of the Army-Navy Club. So I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when Satz picked somebody else to write the modifications to my software. But back then I didn’t think stuff like that happened.” He smiles wearily. “I guess you could say I was green.”