Carnal Reason

From the LA Times via Bruce Schneier

Joseph Mangan, 41, is a whistle-blower. As a result he and his family find themselves in a foreign country with unfamiliar laws, fighting a legal battle that has left them almost penniless.

A year ago, Mangan told European aviation authorities that he believed there were problems with a computer chip on the Airbus A380, the biggest and costliest commercial airliner ever built. The A380 is a double-decked engineering marvel that will carry as many as 800 passengers — double the capacity of Boeing Co.’s 747. It is expected to enter airline service next year.

Mangan alleges that flaws in a microprocessor could cause the valves that maintain cabin pressure on the A380 to accidentally open during flight, allowing air to leak out so rapidly that everyone aboard could lose consciousness within seconds.

It’s a lethal scenario similar to the 1999 crash that killed professional golfer Payne Stewart and five others when their Learjet lost cabin pressure and they blacked out. The plane flew on autopilot for hours before crashing in South Dakota.

Mangan was chief engineer for TTTech Computertechnik, a Viennese company that supplies the computer chips and software to control the cabin-pressurization system for the A380, which is being assembled at the Airbus plant in France.

In October, TTTech fired Mangan and filed civil and criminal charges against him for revealing company documents. The company said the information was proprietary and he had no right to disclose it to anyone.

Mangan countersued, saying he had been wrongly terminated for raising legitimate safety concerns.

Unlike U.S. laws that shield whistle-blowers from corporate retaliation, Austrian laws offer no such protection. Last year an Austrian judge imposed an unusual gag order on Mangan, seeking to stop him from talking about the case.

Mangan posted details about the case anyway in his own Internet blog. The Austrian court fined him $185,000 for violating the injunction.

And the Vienna police, who are conducting a criminal investigation into the matter, searched the family’s apartment for four hours, downloading files from Mangan’s computer as his children watched.

Boxes of documents detailing his allegations clutter the living room, but Mangan can’t show the material or talk about the case — at least in Austria.

To discuss his case with The Times, Mangan took a five-hour train ride to Munich, Germany, where the gag order doesn’t apply. “I don’t want to destroy TTTech,” he said. “But I still get nightmares of people dying. I just can’t let that happen.”

To help pay living expenses and legal fees, Mangan sold his house in Kansas. With only about $300 left in his bank account, Mangan missed a Sept. 8 deadline to pay his $185,000 fine and faces up to a year in jail. Next month he’s likely to be called before a judge on his criminal case.

The family expected to be evicted this month from their apartment, but their church in Vienna took up a collection to pay their rent.

At the moment, Mangan is hiding out at a church member’s home because he fears he could be arrested at any time.

Posted on October 1st, 2005 by pwyll
Filed under: General