City Manager Calls for Administrative Review of orbz Investigation

BATTLE CREEK, MI—City Manager George Strand has called for a thorough administrative review of the actions taken by employees that eventually led to a major misunderstanding between the City and Ian Gulliver, a 20-year-old administrator of an anti-spam site called orbz.org. Mr. Gulliver shut down his web site, which provided a service to hundreds of system administrators across the county who used his blacklist to block emails from unsecure servers, after a search warrant was requested by the Battle Creek Police Department.

The intention of the search warrant was to identify the source of an email that caused a major slowdown to the City's mail server on February 25, 2002.

At the time the warrant was issued, police believed they were on the trail of a possibly malicious email author. It turns out, however, that the author was a young Samaritan providing a valuable service, said Strand.

This information helped the City identify major flaws in its system administration. The City was operating an outdated version of Lotus Domino and had not taken steps to correct a weakness in the program that turned orbz's routine test into a major headache for the City's Information Services staff.

We acknowledge that the City needs to do a better job maintaining a responsibly secure site. It is unfortunate that it took a search warrant to understand this," said Strand. "I am requesting a thorough review of this situation and corrective steps will be taken. The City's current operations do not represent the goals and values of my office or this community.

Strand has included improving the City's technology savvy among his priorities since he began as City Manager on December 17, 2001.

I knew we had some issues to deal with, and this situation has only illuminated some of them for me. But I ask the online community for some patience and I thank those who have taken the time to send us helpful suggestions about our policies and procedures, said Strand. At this point I just want to reassure those who have been following the case, that I am taking this matter very seriously and, once I have the full information concerning this incident I will be taking appropriate action.

Strand also said he wants orbz.org supporters to know that at no time was the City considering pressing charges against Mr. Gulliver, nor did it ask him to take down the site.

Unfortunately, some comments were made by an employee in the media that were not fully informed. It created the impression that we were treating Mr. Gulliver like a criminal. We were attempting to determine the cause of a system slow down, and did suspect that it could be foul play, which any system administrator would take seriously. However, now that the source is known we have apologized to Mr. Gulliver and urged him to resume his services. It is an unfortunate misunderstanding.

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