Is hate code speech?

[proff@suburbia.net]

IS YOUR FAVORITE COMPUTER PROGRAM RACIST?

Texas programmer sues former employer over offensive code.


When Willa Jackson started working the night shift at Integrated
Systech in Austin, Texas, she felt she was entering a world filled with
opportunity. Jackson had just completed three years of intensive course
work in computer programming at a local community college and, at the
age of 47, had recently been hired by the successful software
developer. Her night-shift position at IS was to be Jackson's first
non-minimum wage job.


But that optimism soon turned to shame and then anger as Jackson
discovered that many of her colleagues at IS were accustomed to making
racist jokes in the office. In fact, the epithets were never actually
uttered in Jackson's presence, they were encoded within the dozens of
software applications being developed at IS.


Her painful discovery occurred less than one month after she began
working as an entry-level programming assistant. It was Jackson's
responsibility to find bugs in sections of code that other,
higher-level IS programmers produced during the day. But when Jackson
-- an African-American woman who hopes to one day launch her own
software startup -- began to dig deeper into a faulty section of source
code she was mortified by what she found.


Programmers at the company had been using racist monikers and explicit
sexual language in the variables used by their programs to sort
information. In one instance, a program had been instructed to "fetch
watermelons" and "somefriedchicken" when handling a certain procedure.
The handler had even been dubbed "pickaninny" and was only one of
several dozen like sequences embedded in IS programs designed for home
and office use.


When Jackson showed the racist code to her supervisor she was assured
that IS would act decisively to reprimand and possibly even dismiss the
offending employee. But as weeks passed and no one approached Jackson
with a follow-up to her complaint, she began to suspect that no
disciplinary action would be forthcoming. At that point, Jackson began
to pore over the mountains of used code that IS had stockpiled over the
past six years.


Much to her dismay, Jackson discovered derogatory and occasionally
violent terms inside the programming language used by almost all IS
software programs. "It went all the way back to the first version of
ISDisk," explains an incredulous Jackson, "and they never bothered to
hide it." Shortly after she had printed out over a thousand pages of
tainted code, Jackson hired an attorney and filed a $10 million dollar
lawsuit against the profitable software firm.


Just who is responsible for the recurring use of discriminatory
language in the company's computer code is still a mystery. IS
executives have issued several public apologies since the lawsuit
began, but they have yet to cooperate with the investigation into its
allegedly hostile work environment. In 1996, Texaco paid out $140
million to resolve a similar lawsuit brought by its minority employees.
But labor law experts speculate that the IS case may never be resolved
due to the unprecedented circumstances of the alleged misconduct.


"No jury in this state will believe that the code Jackson found is
speech," argues Mitch Shapson, an attorney with  the labor relations
firm of Stennis, Shapson & Velasquez. "Even if they did think the
messages hidden inside the programs were offensive," continues Shapson,
"it would be like trying an auto manufacturer for putting a
Swastika-shaped part in your car's engine."


Jackson, who is now working as a full-time programmer at Dell Computers
in San Antonio, is not willing to give up her fight against IS despite
the slim chances of a legal victory. "At this point, I'm not interested
in the money," claims an unbowed Jackson, "I only want the public to
think twice about the kinds of hateful messages that may be hidden
inside the software they use everyday."