Andre Hedrick, Linux's ATA/IDE driver maintainer, opposed CPRM-in-ATA on different grounds than EFF — ratifying it openly beat pushing it into undocumented vendor commands

Where the Electronic Frontier Foundation's strategy was to defeat CPRM-in-ATA outright at the committee level, Andre Hedrick — the Linux kernel's IDE/ATA driver maintainer, who sat on the T13 committee and had tracked the proposal for months — is reported as taking a distinct position. He is described as warning that if the standards committee refused to ratify documented commands for the mechanism, manufacturers could simply implement the same functionality through undocumented "Vendor Unique" ATA commands, which would be far harder for Linux (or anyone) to detect, audit, or block. He is quoted as calling the unratified command sets "the real Trojan Horse," and on his preferred alternative of open documentation paired with host-side filtering of unknown commands: "Control over a technology is more important than it existing. If you know it's there, you're empowered."

This complicates a simple "industry vs. EFF" framing of the T13 rejection (claim-t13-rejected-generic-functionality-proposal-april-2001-supermajority-rule) — the Linux-aligned technical objection inside the committee ran on different logic than the public-advocacy objection outside it, arguing for documented ratification rather than blanket refusal. Both quoted phrases came through a fetch-and-summarize tool rather than a direct archived read, so they stay [unverified-quote — needs direct read] (a 2026-07-31 cross-model re-probe of the cited article found the "Trojan Horse" phrasing but could not locate the "Control over a technology…" quote in it at all — that quote may not come from this article), and the claim about Hedrick's underlying rationale stays [unverified-mechanism — needs primary] per the sourcing floor for a contested claim about a named individual's position — routed to question-verify-cprm-t13-rejection-4c-entity-eff. This extends, without duplicating, the routing note already logged in claim-davidoff-2001-opposed-cprm-drm, which named "Andre Hedrick's objection" as unestablished.