Technology industry columnist John C. Dvorak has likened the swift reaction by Cisco and ISS to Michael Lynn's Black Hat presentation last week as arresting someone for "yelling fire in a theater that was on fire."

Yes, the horse is out of the barn. The genie's out of the bottle. The cat's out of the bag. Et plus ca change, plus ca même chose.

• Video (.mov)
• Lynn Attorney Letter (.pdf)
• Lynn_Slide_Presentation (.pdf)

Whichever cliche du jour one wants to employ, it is clear that the offending documents are now freely available for all to see, and for all to make judgements upon. There have been no reports to suggest that Lynn's presentation will lead to attacks against Cisco routers. He hardly explicated the details of a credible attack in his presentation, according to reports.

But his former employer's name, Internet Security Systems, was present on one version of his presentation slides, and it appears that legal challenges to him are based on intellectual property and confidentiality grounds. It's already been reported that Lynn's actual presentation used a version that did not include his former's employer's name and did not include some of the code found in the presentation that's widely available and presented here.

SYS-CON Media easily found the presentations described above as well as a video in which people are seen ripping what is purportedly Lynn's presentation out of the Black Hat proceedings book and a letter from a lawyer to a website demanding that Lynn's original presentation be no longer posted. We hereby offer them for our readers' review.

The video described above was apparently posted at www.makezine.com last week, a site owned by O’Reilly Media. We found it, however, at http://www.jamesmcmurry.com, a site links to the O’Reilly site and which also links to a Wired magazine interview with Michael Lynn. The video is widely available throughout the worldwide web, although the author is not identified. Should the author wish to identify himself (presumably a "he" since the voiceover in the video is male), please do so by leaving a feedback to this story.

We found the lawyer’s letter at www.boingboing.com, which in turned was linked to www.infowarrior.com.

Another interesting piece of information comes from the boingboing site, to wit: “Randi, a reader who claims to be an ex-coworker of Lynn's, and the girlfriend of Lynn's roommate, says, ‘A settlement with Cisco has been reached, but ISS is still pursuing criminal charges. The press doesn’t appear to know yet that the FBI is performing an investigation now, starting with seizing equipment from Michael and his roommates. On a happy note, Mike has received quite a few job offers, including from some places you wouldn't expect.’”

SYS-CON Media has not independently verified that the documents accompanying our story do represent actual documents. Although they do, in our opinion, have a ring of authenticity to them, we encourage any of our visitors who have first-hand knowledge of these documents to enter feedback to this story.

All copyrights pertaining to these documents remain the property of their creators, and SYS-CON Media makes no claims as to creation or ownership of this material. We are presenting these documents as a way to aggregate and correlate some of the information that is floating around the worldwide web, so that our visitors, most of whom are highly active members of the global technology development community, can access the major developments surrounding this story as efficiently as possible and comment on it.

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