Freaks Macintosh Archive/Freaks Macintosh Archive.bin/Freaks Macintosh Archives/Textfiles/books/HackerCrackdownAfterward.sit.hq/Hacker's Crackdown - Afterword

Text File | 1997-11-02 | 22KB | 258 lines

Afterword: The Hacker Crackdown Three Years Later

Three years in cyberspace is like thirty years anyplace real. It feels as if a generation has passed since I wrote this
book. In terms of the generations of computing machinery involved, that's pretty much the case.

The basic shape of cyberspace has changed drastically since 1990. A new U.S. Administration is in power whose
personnel are, if anything, only too aware of the nature and potential of electronic networks. It's now clear to all
players concerned that the status quo is dead-and-gone in American media and telecommunications, and almost any
territory on the electronic frontier is up for grabs. Interactive multimedia, cable-phone alliances, the Information
Superhighway, fiber-to-the-curb, laptops and palmtops, the explosive growth of cellular and the Internet -- the earth
trembles visibly.

The year 1990 was not a pleasant one for AT&T. By 1993, however, AT&T had successfully devoured the computer
company NCR in an unfriendly takeover, finally giving the pole-climbers a major piece of the digital action. AT&T
managed to rid itself of ownership of the troublesome UNIX operating system, selling it to Novell, a netware
company, which was itself preparing for a savage market dust-up with operating-system titan Microsoft.
Furthermore, AT&T acquired McCaw Cellular in a gigantic merger, giving AT&T a potential wireless whip-hand
over its former progeny, the RBOCs. The RBOCs themselves were now AT&T's clearest potential rivals, as the
Chinese firewalls between regulated monopoly and frenzied digital entrepreneurism began to melt and collapse
headlong.

AT&T, mocked by industry analysts in 1990, was reaping awestruck praise by commentators in 1993. AT&T had
managed to avoid any more major software crashes in its switching stations. AT&T's newfound reputation as "the
nimble giant" was all the sweeter, since AT&T's traditional rival giant in the world of multinational computing, IBM,
was almost prostrate by 1993. IBM's vision of the commercial computer-network of the future, "Prodigy," had
managed to spend $900 million without a whole heck of a lot to show for it, while AT&T, by contrast, was boldly
speculating on the possibilities of personal communicators and hedging its bets with investments in handwritten
interfaces. In 1990 AT&T had looked bad; but in 1993 AT&T looked like the future.

At least, AT&T's advertising looked like the future. Similar public attention was riveted on the massive $22 billion
megamerger between RBOC Bell Atlantic and cable-TV giant Tele-Communications Inc. Nynex was buying into
cable company Viacom International. BellSouth was buying stock in Prime Management, Southwestern Bell
acquiring a cable company in Washington DC, and so forth. By stark contrast, the Internet, a noncommercial entity
which officially did not even exist, had no advertising budget at all. And yet, almost below the level of governmental
and corporate awareness, the Internet was stealthily devouring everything in its path, growing at a rate that defied
comprehension. Kids who might have been eager computer-intruders a mere five years earlier were now surfing the
Internet, where their natural urge to explore led them into cyberspace landscapes of such mindboggling vastness that
the very idea of hacking passwords seemed rather a waste of time.

By 1993, there had not been a solid, knock 'em down, panic-striking, teenage-hacker computer-intrusion scandal in
many long months. There had, of course, been some striking and well-publicized acts of illicit computer access, but
they had been committed by adult white-collar industry insiders in clear pursuit of personal or commercial advantage.
The kids, by contrast, all seemed to be on IRC, Internet Relay Chat.

Or, perhaps, frolicking out in the endless glass-roots network of personal bulletin board systems. In 1993, there were
an estimated 60,000 boards in America; the population of boards had fully doubled since Operation Sundevil in 1990.
The hobby was transmuting fitfully into a genuine industry. The board community were no longer obscure hobbyists;
many were still hobbyists and proud of it, but board sysops and advanced board users had become a far more
cohesive and politically aware community, no longer allowing themselves to be obscure.

The specter of cyberspace in the late 1980s, of outwitted authorities trembling in fear before teenage hacker
whiz-kids, seemed downright antiquated by 1993. Law enforcement emphasis had changed, and the favorite
electronic villain of 1993 was not the vandal child, but the victimizer of children, the digital child pornographer.
"Operation Longarm," a child-pornography computer raid carried out by the previously little-known cyberspace
rangers of the U.S. Customs Service, was almost the size of Operation Sundevil, but received very little notice by
comparison.

The huge and well-organized "Operation Disconnect," an FBI strike against telephone rip-off con-artists, was actually
larger than Sundevil. "Operation Disconnect" had its brief moment in the sun of publicity, and then vanished utterly.
It was unfortunate that a law enforcement affair as apparently well-conducted as Operation Disconnect, which pursued
telecom adult career criminals a hundred times more morally repugnant than teenage hackers, should have received so
little attention and fanfare, especially compared to the abortive Sundevil and the basically disastrous efforts of the
Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force. But the life of an electronic policeman is seldom easy.

If any law enforcement event truly deserved full-scale press coverage (while somehow managing to escape it), it was
the amazing saga of New York State Police Senior Investigator Don Delaney Versus the Orchard Street
Finger-Hackers. This story probably represents the real future of professional telecommunications crime in America.
The finger-hackers sold, and still sell, stolen long-distance phone service to a captive clientele of illegal aliens in New
York City. This clientele is desperate to call home, yet as a group, illegal aliens have few legal means of obtaining
standard phone service, since their very presence in the United States is against the law. The finger-hackers of
Orchard Street were very unusual "hackers," with an astonishing lack of any kind of genuine technological
knowledge. And yet these New York call-sell thieves showed a street-level ingenuity appalling in its single-minded
sense of larceny.

There was no dissident-hacker rhetoric about freedom-of-information among the finger-hackers. Most of them came
out of the cocaine-dealing fraternity, and they retailed stolen calls with the same street-crime techniques of lookouts
and bagholders that a crack gang would employ. This was down-and-dirty, urban, ethnic, organized crime, carried
out by crime families every day, for cash on the barrelhead, in the harsh world of the streets. The finger-hackers
dominated certain payphones in certain strikingly unsavory neighborhoods. They provided a service no one else
would give to a clientele with little to lose.

With such a vast supply of electronic crime at hand, Don Delaney rocketed from a background in homicide to teaching
telecom crime at FLETC in less than three years. Few can rival Delaney's hands-on, street-level experience in phone
fraud. Anyone in 1993 who still believes telecommunications crime to be something rare and arcane should have a
few words with Mr Delaney. Don Delaney has also written two fine essays, on telecom fraud and computer crime, in
Joseph Grau's Criminal and Civil Investigations Handbook (McGraw Hill 1993).

Phrack was still publishing in 1993, now under the able editorship of Erik Bloodaxe. Bloodaxe made a determined
attempt to get law enforcement and corporate security to pay real money for their electronic copies of Phrack, but, as
usual, these stalwart defenders of intellectual property preferred to pirate the magazine. Bloodaxe has still not gotten
back any of his property from the seizure raids of March 1, 1990. Neither has the Mentor, who is still the managing
editor of Steve Jackson Games.

Nor has Robert Izenberg, who has suspended his court struggle to get his machinery back. Mr Izenberg has
calculated that his $20,000 of equipment seized in 1990 is, in 1993, worth $4,000 at most. The missing software,
also gone out his door, was long ago replaced. He might, he says, sue for the sake of principle, but he feels that the
people who seized his machinery have already been discredited, and won't be doing any more seizures. And even if
his machinery were returned -- and in good repair, which is doubtful -- it will be essentially worthless by 1995.
Robert Izenberg no longer works for IBM, but has a job programming for a major telecommunications company in
Austin.

Steve Jackson won his case against the Secret Service on March 12, 1993, just over three years after the federal raid
on his enterprise. Thanks to the delaying tactics available through the legal doctrine of "qualified immunity," Jackson
was tactically forced to drop his suit against the individuals William Cook, Tim Foley, Barbara Golden and Henry
Kluepfel. (Cook, Foley, Golden and Kluepfel did, however, testify during the trial.)

The Secret Service fought vigorously in the case, battling Jackson's lawyers right down the line, on the (mostly
previously untried) legal turf of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Privacy Protection Act of 1980.
The Secret Service denied they were legally or morally responsible for seizing the work of a publisher. They claimed
that (1) Jackson's gaming "books" weren't real books anyhow, and (2) the Secret Service didn't realize SJG Inc was
a "publisher" when they raided his offices, and (3) the books only vanished by accident because they merely
happened to be inside the computers the agents were appropriating.

The Secret Service also denied any wrongdoing in reading and erasing all the supposedly "private" e-mail inside
Jackson's seized board, Illuminati. The USSS attorneys claimed the seizure did not violate the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act, because they weren't actually "intercepting" electronic mail that was moving on a wire,
but only electronic mail that was quietly sitting on a disk inside Jackson's computer. They also claimed that USSS
agents hadn't read any of the private mail on Illuminati; and anyway, even supposing that they had, they were allowed
to do that by the subpoena.

The Jackson case became even more peculiar when the Secret Service attorneys went so far as to allege that the federal
raid against the gaming company had actually improved Jackson's business thanks to the ensuing nationwide
publicity.

It was a long and rather involved trial. The judge seemed most perturbed, not by the arcane matters of electronic law,
but by the fact that the Secret Service could have avoided almost all the consequent trouble simply by giving Jackson
his computers back in short order. The Secret Service easily could have looked at everything in Jackson's computers,
recorded everything, and given the machinery back, and there would have been no major scandal or federal court suit.
On the contrary, everybody simply would have had a good laugh. Unfortunately, it appeared that this idea had never
entered the heads of the Chicago-based investigators. They seemed to have concluded unilaterally, and without due
course of law, that the world would be better off if Steve Jackson didn't have computers. Golden and Foley claimed
that they had both never even heard of the Privacy Protection Act. Cook had heard of the Act, but he'd decided on his
own that the Privacy Protection Act had nothing to do with Steve Jackson.

The Jackson case was also a very politicized trial, both sides deliberately angling for a long-term legal precedent that
would stake-out big claims for their interests in cyberspace. Jackson and his EFF advisors tried hard to establish that
the least e-mail remark of the lonely electronic pamphleteer deserves the same somber civil-rights protection as that
afforded The New York Times. By stark contrast, the Secret Service's attorneys argued boldly that the contents of an
electronic bulletin board have no more expectation of privacy than a heap of postcards. In the final analysis, very little
was firmly nailed down. Formally, the legal rulings in the Jackson case apply only in the federal Western District of
Texas. It was, however, established that these were real civil-liberties issues that powerful people were prepared to go
to the courthouse over; the seizure of bulletin board systems, though it still goes on, can be a perilous act for the
seizer. The Secret Service owes Steve Jackson $50,000 in damages, and a thousand dollars each to three of Jackson's
angry and offended board users. And Steve Jackson, rather than owning the single-line bulletin board system
"Illuminati" seized in 1990, now rejoices in possession of a huge privately-owned Internet node, "io.com," with
dozens of phone-lines on its own T-1 trunk.

Jackson has made the entire blow-by-blow narrative of his case available electronically, for interested parties. And
yet, the Jackson case may still not be over; a Secret Service appeal seems likely and the EFF is also gravely
dissatisfied with the ruling on electronic interception.

The WELL, home of the American electronic civil libertarian movement, added two thousand more users and dropped
its aging Sequent computer in favor of a snappy new Sun Sparcstation. Search-and-seizure dicussions on the WELL
are now taking a decided back-seat to the current hot topic in digital civil liberties, unbreakable public-key encryption
for private citizens.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation left its modest home in Boston to move inside the Washington Beltway of the
Clinton Administration. Its new executive director, ECPA pioneer and longtime ACLU activist Jerry Berman, gained
a reputation of a man adept as dining with tigers, as the EFF devoted its attention to networking at the highest levels
of the computer and telecommunications industry. EFF's pro-encryption lobby and anti-wiretapping initiative were
especially impressive, successfully assembling a herd of highly variegated industry camels under the same EFF tent,
in open and powerful opposition to the electronic ambitions of the FBI and the NSA.

EFF had transmuted at light-speed from an insurrection to an institution. EFF Co-Founder Mitch Kapor once again
sidestepped the bureaucratic consequences of his own success, by remaining in Boston and adapting the role of EFF
guru and gray eminence. John Perry Barlow, for his part, left Wyoming, quit the Republican Party, and moved to
New York City, accompanied by his swarm of cellular phones. Mike Godwin left Boston for Washington as EFF's
official legal adviser to the electronically afflicted.

After the Neidorf trial, Dorothy Denning further proved her firm scholastic independence-of-mind by speaking up
boldly on the usefulness and social value of federal wiretapping. Many civil libertarians, who regarded the practice of
wiretapping with deep occult horror, were crestfallen to the point of comedy when nationally known "hacker
sympathizer" Dorothy Denning sternly defended police and public interests in official eavesdropping. However, no
amount of public uproar seemed to swerve the "quaint" Dr. Denning in the slightest. She not only made up her own
mind, she made it up in public and then stuck to her guns.

In 1993, the stalwarts of the Masters of Deception, Phiber Optik, Acid Phreak and Scorpion, finally fell afoul of the
machineries of legal prosecution. Acid Phreak and Scorpion were sent to prison for six months, six months of home
detention, 750 hours of community service, and, oddly, a $50 fine for conspiracy to commit computer crime. Phiber
Optik, the computer intruder with perhaps the highest public profile in the entire world, took the longest to plead
guilty, but, facing the possibility of ten years in jail, he finally did so. He was sentenced to a year and a day in prison.

As for the Atlanta wing of the Legion of Doom, Prophet, Leftist and Urvile... Urvile now works for a software
company in Atlanta. He is still on probation and still repaying his enormous fine. In fifteen months, he will once
again be allowed to own a personal computer. He is still a convicted federal felon, but has not had any legal
difficulties since leaving prison. He has lost contact with Prophet and Leftist. Unfortunately, so have I, though not
through lack of honest effort.

Knight Lightning, now 24, is a technical writer for the federal government in Washington DC. He has still not been
accepted into law school, but having spent more than his share of time in the company of attorneys, he's come to
think that maybe an MBA would be more to the point. He still owes his attorneys $30,000, but the sum is dwindling
steadily since he is manfully working two jobs. Knight Lightning customarily wears a suit and tie and carries a valise.
He has a federal security clearance.

Unindicted Phrack co-editor Taran King is also a technical writer in Washington DC, and recently got married.

Terminus did his time, got out of prison, and currently lives in Silicon Valley where he is running a full-scale Internet
node, "netsys.com." He programs professionally for a company specializing in satellite links for the Internet.

Carlton Fitzpatrick still teaches at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, but FLETC found that the issues
involved in sponsoring and running a bulletin board system are rather more complex than they at first appear to be.

Gail Thackeray briefly considered going into private security, but then changed tack, and joined the Maricopa County
District Attorney's Office (with a salary). She is still vigorously prosecuting electronic racketeering in Phoenix,
Arizona.

The fourth consecutive Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference will take place in March 1994 in Chicago.

As for Bruce Sterling... well *8-). I thankfully abandoned my brief career as a true-crime journalist and wrote a new
science fiction novel, Heavy Weather, and assembled a new collection of short stories, Globalhead. I also write
nonfiction regularly, for the popular-science column in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

I like life better on the far side of the boundary between fantasy and reality; but I've come to recognize that reality has
an unfortunate way of annexing fantasy for its own purposes. That's why I'm on the Police Liaison Committee for
EFF-Austin, a local electronic civil liberties group ([e-mail]). I don't think I will ever get over my
experience of the Hacker Crackdown, and I expect to be involved in electronic civil liberties activism for the rest of
my life.

It wouldn't be hard to find material for another book on computer crime and civil liberties issues. I truly believe that I
could write another book much like this one, every year. Cyberspace is very big. There's a lot going on out there, far
more than can be adequately covered by the tiny, though growing, cadre of network-literate reporters. I do wish I
could do more work on this topic, because the various people of cyberspace are an element of our society that
definitely requires sustained study and attention.

But there's only one of me, and I have a lot on my mind, and, like most science fiction writers, I have a lot more
imagination than discipline. Having done my stint as an electronic-frontier reporter, my hat is off to those stalwart few
who do it every day. I may return to this topic some day, but I have no real plans to do so. However, I didn't have
any real plans to write "Hacker Crackdown," either. Things happen, nowadays. There are landslides in cyberspace.
I'll just have to try and stay alert and on my feet.

The electronic landscape changes with astounding speed. We are living through the fastest technological
transformation in human history. I was glad to have a chance to document cyberspace during one moment in its long
mutation; a kind of strobe-flash of the maelstrom. This book is already out-of-date, though, and it will be quite
obsolete in another five years. It seems a pity.

However, in about fifty years, I think this book might seem quite interesting. And in a hundred years, this book
should seem mind-bogglingly archaic and bizarre, and will probably seem far weirder to an audience in 2092 than it
ever seemed to the contemporary readership.

Keeping up in cyberspace requires a great deal of sustained attention. Personally, I keep tabs with the milieu by
reading the invaluable electronic magazine Computer underground Digest ([e-mail] with the subject
header: SUB CuD and a message that says: SUB CuD your name your.full.internet@address). I also read Jack
Rickard's bracingly iconoclastic Boardwatch Magazine for print news of the BBS and online community. And,
needless to say, I read Wired, the first magazine of the 1990s that actually looks and acts like it really belongs in this
decade. There are other ways to learn, of course, but these three outlets will guide your efforts very well.

When I myself want to publish something electronically, which I'm doing with increasing frequency, I generally put
it on the gopher at Texas Internet Consulting, who are my, well, Texan Internet consultants (tic.com). This book can
be found there. I think it is a worthwhile act to let this work go free.

From thence, one's bread floats out onto the dark waters of cyberspace, only to return someday, tenfold. And of
course, thoroughly soggy, and riddled with an entire amazing ecosystem of bizarre and gnawingly hungry
cybermarine life-forms. For this author at least, that's all that really counts.

Thanks for your attention *8-)

Bruce Sterling [e-mail] -- New Years' Day 1994, Austin Texas