Randal Schwartz is something of a legend in the hacking community

Randal Schwartz is something of a legend in the hacking community though his name was never implanted in the mainstream consciousness like Kevins Mitnick and Poulsen. But Schwartz is well known and respected among computing enthusiasts as an early and devoted Perl booster and all around übergeek, though he did manage to do something extraordinarily unwise while working as a consultant to Intel Corporation in 1993, which led to his conviction under Oregon computer crime statutes. We say 'unwise' because there's never been a shred of evidence that he meant to do the company harm when he ran a password cracking utility against their Supercomputer Systems Division (SSD) network, a fact which accounts for the comparatively light sentence he got in exchange for conviction on three felony counts: five years' probation, 480 hours of community service, 90 days of (eventually suspended) jail time, and $68 thousand of restitution to Intel. The whole affair escalated in a most unfortunate manner. It began when Schwartz installed a program bypass the company's firewall in order to access his Intel e-mail account when he was away from the site. He took precautions to make the setup secure, but agreed to stop using it when confronted by a company sysadmin. Unfortunately, a few months later he was discovered using the same sort of utility for the same reason, and Intel probably began to suspect they were going to have trouble with him. On October 28, 1993, Intel sysadmin Mark Morrissey noticed that Schwartz was attacking the machine Snoopy. Following an investigation which revealed numerous earlier lapses, Intel decided to contact the police, and the rest, as they say, is history. Since Schwartz's arrest, a great number of people familiar with the case have maintained that Intel overreacted, and cracked a very small nut with a very large sledgehammer. In his appeal, Schwartz sought to have his conviction overturned with arguments on several rather shaky points, all of which the appellate court rejected.