r, pizza-gobbling, in-jokes and back-slapping.

Neidorf's lawyer, Sheldon Zenner, saw the Secret Service tapes before
the trial. Zenner was shocked by the complete harmlessness of this
meeting, which Cook had earlier characterized as a sinister interstate
conspiracy to commit fraud. Zenner wanted to show the Summercon tapes
to the jury. It took protracted maneuverings by the Task Force to keep
the tapes from the jury as "irrelevant."

The E911 Document was also proving a weak reed. It had originally been
valued at $79,449. Unlike Shadowhawk's arcane Artificial Intelligence
booty, the E911 Document was not software--it was written in English.
Computer-knowledgeable people found this value--for a twelve-page
bureaucratic document--frankly incredible. In his "Crime and
Puzzlement" manifesto for EFF, Barlow commented: "We will probably
never know how this figure was reached or by whom, though I like to
imagine an appraisal team consisting of Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller, and
Thomas Pynchon."

As it happened, Barlow was unduly pessimistic. The EFF did, in fact,
eventually discover exactly how this figure was reached, and by
whom--but only in 1991, long after the Neidorf trial was over.

Kim Megahee, a Southern Bell security manager, had arrived at the
document's value by simply adding up the "costs associated with the
production" of the E911 Document. Those "costs" were as follows:

1. A technical writer had been hired to research and write the E911
Document. 200 hours of work, at $35 an hour, cost : $7,000. A
Project Manager had overseen the technical writer. 200 hours,
at $31 an hour, made: $6,200.

2. A week of typing had cost $721 dollars. A week of formatting had
cost $721. A week of graphics formatting had cost $742.

3. Two days of editing cost $367.

4. A box of order labels cost five dollars.

5. Preparing a purchase order for the Document, including typing
and the obtaining of an authorizing signature from within the
BellSouth bureaucracy, cost $129.

6. Printing cost $313. Mailing the Document to fifty people
took fifty hours by a clerk, and cost $858.

7. Placing the Document in an index took two clerks an hour each,
totalling $43.

Bureaucratic overhead alone, therefore, was alleged to have cost a
whopping $17,099. According to Mr. Megahee, the typing of a
twelve-page document had taken a full week. Writing it had taken five
weeks, including an