The Case of the GreenRope Caper
By ALAN SMASON, Exclusive to the CCJN
It reads like a detective novel, but this is the story of how an innocuous Passover holiday greeting message I sent out as a private message triggered a response that brought about the rampant destruction of a viable database for a Jewish religious Scouting group.
An AI-generated image of super sleuth Sherlock Holmes investigating a computer crime.
Under most circumstances like this, the threat to the database would come from without and would probably result in a criminal prosecution. What makes this story particularly intriguing, though, is that the destruction came not only from within the ranks of the organization but was apparently sanctioned at the very highest of levels.
The mission of the National Jewish Committee on Scouting (NJCOS) is to support Jewish Scouts and Jewish Scouting units across the country and was founded 100 years ago in 1926 as part of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), now doing business as Scouting America. The NJCOS is now a 501 c 3 charitable organization chartered out of Illinois and acting as an independent body of Jewish Scouters, adult leaders and former Scouts.
As such, it is the second oldest organized religious group associated with the American Scouting movement behind the National Catholic Committee on Scouting, also run as an independent outside body. I have been a dues-paying member for the past 24 years.
Because of looming financial crises precipitated by the class action lawsuits alleging sexual abuse in Scouting, the NJCOS was advised by the National Council of the BSA that it needed to separate from the main body and, like all other religious relationships groups, would be required to operate independently. Monies jointly managed by the BSA for the NJCOS and scholarship funds were required to be separated before any judgments might be rendered by the courts.
Official logo of the National Jewish Committee on Scouting.
The new independent NJCOS had a fully functional volunteer IT committee that ran its website and I was its chair for nearly a dozen years. A year before the COVID pandemic, the IT committee petitioned GreenRope, a Customer Relationships Manager (CRM) software for a non-profit account. The function of GreenRope would be two-fold: it would replace the email list previously being provided by the Yahoo groups that AT&T was shutting down and it would allow us to maintain a large database that could be segmented by regions or other specialized interests.
Best of all, there was no cost to the NJCOS because we were non-profit. So, I used my own email address and created the master administrator account to get things started. We endured the pandemic and emerged from bankruptcy and quickly amassed a viable GreenRope database of well over 900 accounts. The key to the GreenRope relational database is the email address of each contact. Without an email address, the database cannot connect each Scouter’s email address to anything including even their name.
While some felt the GreenRope functionality was difficult to master, I thought it was a powerful tool that we could use to great benefit. Unfortunately, several people on the NJCOS executive board – especially the president – wanted to control the email lists directly. Over the course of the past three years, the president set up a new set of email lists through Google Groups for communication, all of which he controlled.
But the GreenRope account, which started with 860 contacts had grown over the past few years and was still viable, even though it was only used infrequently by me for communications as the new development chair for the NJCOS.
With Passover about to be celebrated at sundown, I sent out a warm message wishing everyone a great and meaningful holiday a few hours before sundown on April 1. The significance of it being April Fool’s Day never dawned on me, but perhaps it should have.
As heartfelt and in keeping with the observance of the central holiday of the Jewish people, my message was somehow seen as a threat to both the president and the executive vice president of the NJCOS, neither of whom had ever forbade me from using GreenRope for correspondence.
Thursday was the continuation of the first day of Passover and the counting of the Omer began that evening at second night seders held at synagogues and in private homes across the Diaspora.
Friday, April 3, was the second day of Passover, a day when work was still prohibited for the observant Jewish world. But what would transpire that day would make many rational men shake their heads in disbelief.
At 9:38 a.m. the GreenRope account registered to the executive vice president signed on for the first time. He apparently wanted to survey the database and did so, determining the lay of the land. However, only the IT committee members and the president had administrative powers over the database. The executive vice president could look but had no powers to edit or change any of the accounts.
But then at 11:24 a.m., a new sign-in occurred. It was the president’s account, but as both the executive vice president and the president later admitted, it was, in fact, the executive vice president once again surveying the database, only this time with the president’s administrator credentials.
Incredulously, the president had given the go ahead to his executive vice president to destroy the relational database by deleting the hundreds of email addresses associated with each account!
GreenRope CRM logo.
The motivation behind this was apparently to stop me from sending out future emails. There was no call to me or email asking me to stop. There was just this covert operation taken one account at a time and in alphabetical order starting at 11:45 a.m.
By the time a half hour had passed, the executive vice president using the president’s account had reached the C’s, having deleted the email addresses of all database accounts with surnames that began with the letters A and B.
By now he was getting proficient at deleting email addresses, but it still took a lot of time. Sometimes he could delete as many as four in a minute. After two hours of deleting email addresses, he decided to take a break for lunch. By this time, he had reached the accounts whose last names began with G.
Logs show he returned to his task at 3:47 and advanced through the database in alphabetical order, one account at a time, for the next two hours, being careful not to delete several key accounts like mine or his own.
But two hours later at 5:40 p.m., he got careless. He had wiped out the email addresses for most of the accounts but boldly decided to delete the president’s own account. After all, why not? Everything was going to plan. Most of the relational database lay in ruins. He had triumphed and with hubris and overconfidence, he deleted the president’s account with a single click of his mouse.
Whoops. Just as soon as he did that, the GreenRope CRM locked him out. He no longer had the administrative rights to delete email addresses and he was unable to proceed any further.
I can only imagine the expression of horror on his face as he recognized the ineptitude of his action. Not only would his ill-advised actions be exposed to others with administrator credentials like me but, more importantly, he had not finished his assignment. There were still a number of accounts in the database he had yet to destroy.
Actual section of the log with times and date doctored to protect the names.
The next hour’s log shows the executive vice president signing back into the database, but once again as himself. Without the president’s credentials, he lacked administrative authority to delete any other email addresses. After an hour, he logged out.
Curiously, he must have called one of his cohorts who has rudimentary knowledge of IT to see if he could somehow rescue him. His friend is seen logging into the database at 7:21 p.m. Of course, he had no reason to be looking at the database other than at the urging of the executive vice president who probably was grasping at straws to get back into the accounts to finish.
But it was not meant to be. The IT friend logged in and requested a new password. Someone must have told him that requesting a password change might help. He rapidly reset the password three times in a row with no change in his status. He signed out 10 minutes later with the executive vice president also logging out just prior to 8 p.m. The pair soon signed back in but, apparently, they both gave up for the night at 8:15 p.m. (Maybe they should have reset the password a fourth time….)
Shabbat morning, the IT friend was back on the site on April 4, signing in again, but finding that he still lacked administrative access to the database. He eventually logged off in frustration.
By the time Sunday morning rolled around, the executive vice president was attempting to do damage control without revealing his hand. He contacted the IT committees expert on GreenRope as well as the new IT committee chair, asking for their assistance, only saying that he had been using the president’s account but could not access any other accounts any longer.
There was no mention of deleting email addresses or intentionally damaging the database that was the property of the NJCOS.
Neither the IT committee chair or the GreenRope expert had an inkling as to what had transpired. They were unable to assist. That night – a few hours later – I was able to access the database for the first time.
The GreenRope expert told me over the phone that the executive vice president had called earlier that morning but did not admit what he had been doing. When the two of us began investigating the accounts, we noticed a lot of accounts were lacking emails. But, at first, we had no idea how much damage had been done deliberately to the database.
The author in his Scouting uniform.
Then I checked the logs and the extent of the damage and the lengthy time involved became readily apparent. He had deleted approximately 660 email addresses and left the database in ruins.
I thought to myself: “What were they thinking?”
It’s one thing to order someone like me to not send out emails. The valuable database is gone now and the excuse the president and the executive vice president are now using to justify their actions is that the database was outdated.
For the record, the GreenRope database was six years old, but it was hardly outdated. The database was healthy and robust, but more to the point it did not belong to either of the top two officers of the organization. It was the NJCOS’s valuable property and it was their duty to safeguard and protect it, not destroy it.
This clandestine act of vandalism is hardly in keeping with the values we embrace within the Scouting movement or something that would be condoned under the morals and ethics we learn as Jews.
As I said, it all seems downright silly. And petty. (It also violated rabbinic law and Torah law as many of these actions occurred on a yom tov and Shabbat.)
If someone had told me this tale, I would probably react in disbelief. None of this conforms with what we teach our youth through the Scout Oath and Law.
Oh, and in case you wondered what my official response might be, I am now actively running for president of the NJCOS and hope to unseat the top leader who apparently gave his blessings to what I am now labeling – strictly with tongue in cheek – as “the GreenRope Caper.”
