Today, we would like to correct the video story with facts.

Correction to Leader Technologies, Michael McKibben, story.

During the description of how Mark Zuckerberg obtained the social networking programming ideas, the animation states that on Oct. 28, 2003, the night Leader Technologies debugged a critical module in their programming source code, Michael McKibben sent a copy of the Leader source code to his son at Harvard (who was living in Winthrop House which was next to Kirkland House where Zuckerberg lived).

McKibben did send his son a technical white paper that included a high-level summary of the functionality of the source code, but it was not the source code—which was under the highest security lock and key at Leader’s R&D facility in Westerville, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus.

The story rightly reveals that McKibben’s patent attorney, James P. Chandler, III, gave a copy of Leader’s source code escrowed with him as Leader’s trade secrets attorney “for safekeeping” to Facebook via the IBM Eclipse Foundation. Indeed, Chandler was the author of the Economic Espionage Act of 1996 (18 U.S. Code § 1831) and Federal Trade Secrets Act of 1996 (18 U.S. Code § 1832). Leader naturally assumed its trade secret source code was in safe hands. Wrong.

On Aug. 09, 2001, Chandler gave a copy of Leader’s escrowed source code for social networking to IBM Eclipse Foundation. On Aug. 29, 2001 (just two weeks before 9/11), Leader’s innovations magically appeared in the very next build of IBM Eclipse Foundation “open source” development environment called the Eclipse IDE (Interface Development Environment).

Zuckerberg had this Aug. 29, 2001 version of Leader’s source code. However, what neither Chandler, IBM Eclipse nor Zuckerberg knew was that the escrowed version that Chandler gave him contained important, incomplete engineering functionality. This engineering would take McKibben another two years to complete—until Oct. 28, 2003.

Actually, Chandler, as Leader’s trade secrets attorney, authorized McKibben to start sending out the white paper about the invention starting on Oct. 29, 2003. Hindsight shows he needed this high level technical write up for IBM Eclipse Foundation and Facebook to use to tell the invention’s story (since they were the thieves and not the inventors). The animation’s story is correct that Zuckerberg started hacking the Harvard House sights on Oct. 28, 2003 (“let the hacking begin” Zuckerberg wrote in his online diary). See Oct. 28, 2003 link above.

In summary, Zuckerberg was given, by Chandler and IBM Eclipse Foundation, a not-fully-functioning version of Leader’s innovations as of Aug. 29, 2001. Two years later, Leader debugged the fully functioning source code on Oct. 28, 2003.

This debugging success triggered Zuckerberg—who was evidently waiting for Leader’s debugged code—to start hacking the House sites at Harvard. The next day, McKibben did send his son a white paper describing, at a high level, the main features of the innovations, but not the source code itself. (McKibben says only a fool would send one’s crowning innovations costing over $10 million and containing 750,000 lines of debugged software source code over Harvard’s notoriously insecure email lines. He says, other than the source code escrow that patent attorney Chandler had, Leader’s source code had never left Leader’s high security facility.)

The fact is, Zuckerberg, Chandler and IBM Eclipse needed the white paper too as a selling tool, in addition to the source code. They launched Facebook at Harvard on Feb. 04, 2004 during the inaugural IBM EclipseCon ‘04 on Feb. 2-5, 2004. Zuckerberg got Leader’s white paper in the hack of McKibben’s son’s Harvard account where he stole his photo. The story in the video says the NSA stopped their Life Log project that day, which makes sense since Facebook introduced scalable social networking features in lieu of Life Log’s unscalable approach.