Maybe he's not certified with Google technologies.

One of the best parts about being deposed is watching the deposition decay into a farce. A circus, even.

When I was deposed, I think this happened when I had to explain about the parody resume, but it’s hard to be sure. In fact, just about every exhibit used in my deposition had errors.

Let’s review them.

Seebach Exhibit 1: A bad copy of the first fax from CaDan I’ve been able to find. Surprisingly, there are no obvious errors in it, apart from the poor copy quality. Very notably absent is the promised disclaimer telling me how to get off of their fax list. (This isn’t a TCPA defense, but might be a defense against claims under Minnesota’s junk fax law. Some people mistakenly think it’s a TCPA defense, but the statute is unambiguous.) Also worth noticing is that it was sent at 11:35 PM on October 10th, 2001 - a Wednesday.

Seebach Exhibit 2: The first “price list” fax I received from CaDan, we think. This one’s missing the second page of the fax - we don’t know why. To the best of my knowledge, the original complaint had both pages. So, an incomplete exhibit. It was sent at 8:21 PM on October 16th, 2001 - a Tuesday.

Seebach Exhibit 3: The “opt-in/opt-out” fax. This exhibit is missing its date - but we have the original, and know that it was sent on August 8th, 2002, at 2:06 AM. That’s a Thursday. (Be patient with my obsession about weekdays; it’s going to be relevant, I promise.) The lack of a date on this exhibit is important, because the discussion of whether or not I responded to it is relevant to their claim that I had a responsibility to tell them to stop breaking the law. The original fax (and the complaint) have the date on them; this was just a bad copy.

Seebach Exhibit 4: This is another fax ad. Sent at 11:36 AM, November 22, 2001 (a Thursday). I cherish this one. There’s a disclaimer on it saying:

If you would no longer like to receive this information please let us know by sending this back to us stating "remove".

Seebach Exhibit 5: Apparently, they tired of introducing their own violations of federal law as exhibits in my deposition; they introduced instead a very strangely copied and/or clipped copy of part of the plethora.net home page. The cover page has no date listed, but the contact page is dated 6/19/03 on their printout. I wonder if they considered the possibility that the content was not the same in June of 2003 as it was in October of 2001?

Seebach Exhibit 6: This is my favorite. I love this. To understand this, go look at my resume page and see if you can pick “my resume” out from the crowd of links. Your goal is to have a resume you can introduce as an exhibit to get an accurate transcript of my work history.

Go ahead and do this. Did you pick the one described by the text “I was once told you cannot get a job without a padded resume. Here’s mine.”? If so, what were you smoking? That one’s a joke. If you tripped to that, congratulations! You’re apparently smarter than the Defendant in this case, who presented the parody resume with complete sincerity, apparently never having read it. For that matter, why wasn’t this introduced during the discussion of my background, earlier in the deposition?

Seebach Exhibit 7: A google search on the word “Peter” and the word “Seebach”. The funny part is the naive question:

(46.18) Q: Showing you what's been marked as Seebach Exhibit 7, this is actually just the first page of a Google search of your name.

A: Mm-hmm. (Note to the reader: I WAS VERY BAD HERE! I was instructed always to answer with a clear “Yes” or “No”. Please do not raze my house to the ground and sow my back yard with salt.)

Q: And it brings up quite a lot of articles that you’ve apparently authored, or at least somebody named Peter Seebach has authored, right?

A: No. Many of these are database entries about me written by other people.

They go on to try to prove that I’m a “hacker”. As we know from previous commentary, Dan Rogers uses the word “hacker” to mean “person who breaks into computers”. Especially Microsoft computers.

Seebach Exhibit 8: A Google search presented as a search on our fax number. This was played up to show that our fax number shows up on sites other than our own - it’s on the POCIA website. This may even be true - but in fact, the exhibit was a search on our modem bank number, not on our fax number. (I had to explain what a dialup number is.) How hard can it be to use Google? Too hard, apparently, for “organizations that are doing the right steps to protect their organization”.

Seebach Exhibit 9: I can’t include Seebach Exhibit 9 here, because it would cause a collapse of the space-time continuum. See, Seebach Exhibit 9 was a print-out of this blog. Presumably included because, hey, it’s a blog, and it sounds really cool, but they didn’t ask any questions about it. They’ve previously said in court documents that my first post about this stuff constitutes a clear statement by me that I am collecting faxes specifically to “make money”.

Seebach Exhibit 10: The Star Tribune article referred to in that first post. Actually a correct copy, but the article never got the corrections I asked for. No questions asked apart from the accuracy of it. Note that I didn’t correct the obviously, stupidly, false statement by Rick Luzaiach - after all, I have no reason to believe he didn’t say it, even if it’s false. The newspaper article doesn’t say he’s right, it just says he said that. Yeah, he’s that kind of guy; he apparently sees the world as a series of people trying to cheat other people. One wonders where he gets that idea. Are all these people like that?

There you have it. Ten exhibits. Ten reasons for which they’re stupid. The attentive reader will be wondering when I explain my obsessive focus on where in the week various dates long-past fell.

Let’s have one last quote:

(48.10)Q: Do you know when you actually received -- and when I say "when," I mean the time of day the faxes from CaDan generally arrived on your machine.

A: All different times.

Q: Well, would it surprise you to know that they were sent after 6:00 p.m. Friday, or Saturday or Sunday?

A: (here, I review the four exhibits) Empirically, they are sent at varied – widely varied times.

Q: Just going by your memory, do you have a recollection:

A: No, no recollection.

The claim that faxes were sent on Friday evenings dates back to the deposition of Dan Rogers, wherein he said, under oath: (as always, the deponent is “A”. “Q”, in this case, is my lawyer, who has been astoundingly patient with the hassles introduced by writing about this in my blog.)

Q: Was this "please deliver to technology manager" line created by the RightFax software?

A: Looks like it might be.

Q: Well, is it or isn’t it?

A: I don’t know. I didn’t send the fax. I didn’t see what it generated.

Q: You testified earlier that you did, in fact, run the fax. Who ran the fax to send these?

A: I don’t know that one. I approve the faxes. I say those are good. Whether I hit the button or Paul hits a button or anybody else hits a button, that can be depending on who’s working on Friday nights, when they’re sent.

Comments [archived]

From: darl
Date: 2003-08-22 18:57:04 -0500

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