Hacker 2/HACKER2.mdf/cud/cud510d.txt

Text File | 1995-01-03 | 8KB | 135 lines

Date: Thu, 28 Jan 93 0:15:02 EST

Day Two of the Steve Jackson Games trial, from
Shari Steele.

Hi everyone.

Well, day two of the Steve Jackson Games trial was a long one -- the
judge heard plaintiffs' case from 8:30 a.m. until 6:30 p.m.  By the
end of the day, the plaintiffs had finished.

The day started off with Steve Jackson back on the stand.  Steve
talked about how all copies of the slated-to-be-released-soon fantasy
game GURPS Cyberpunk had been seized.  He went to the Secret Service
office in Austin the next day with a box of formatted floppies to copy
all of the seized disks, accompanied by a local attorney.  When he
arrived, Agent Foley set the ground rules.  Steve would only be
permitted to copy files from the one computer that had been sitting on
Loyd Blankenship's desk (which did not contain the BBS).  He was not
permitted to physically touch the computer.  He was to state which
files he wanted to copy, and Secret Service agents would read the text
of the files first and then determine if he could have a copy.
Sitting down next to an agent at the computer, Steve asked for a
directory listing to determine which files to request.  The agent did
not know how to call up a directory list.  (For those of you
unfamiliar with Cc: [e-mail], these [e-mail]
DOS, this is VERY BASIC stuff.)

Steve further testified that agents reading the files made derogatory
comments.  (At one point, reading a file from GURPS Cyberpunk that
Steve had requested to copy, Agent Foley asked if Steve realized he
was writing a handbook for computer crime.)  After less than two
hours, and with only nine files out of several hundred copied, Agent
Foley called an end to the copying.  One week later, Steve laid off
eight out of his 18 employees.  As Steve described, this whole
incident has "made me grouchier, angrier and harder to get along
with."  The Secret Service never told him why they were investigating
him.  If they had asked, he would have given them access to the
materials they wanted.

Cross examination on Steve revealed that SJG had had two bad years
financially before the Secret Service raid -- in fact, Steve admitted
about looking into chapter 11 bankruptcy at the end of 1989.  In
addition, there was evidence that GURPS Cyberpunk was not going to
make deadline days before the raid took place.  The defense then tried
to imply that the company, which made profits in 1991 and 1992, may
have been *helped* by the publicity of the raid.  The judge did not
seem to buy it.

The three other plaintiffs were each called in turn.  They each
testified about personal e-mail that had been deleted from the system
and how they had expected their communications to be as private as
telephone calls.  They described fearing the Secret Service would
investigate them personally, since there was no comforting explanation
for why the raid took place.  One plaintiff told how he never could
solicit feedback on a manuscript he had written for SJG, since
feedback was generally given on the seized BBS.

The next witness called was Wayne Bell, the programmer who developed
the WWIV software that ran the BBS.  Wayne testified that he looked at
the backup disk Steve had made when the files were returned from the
Secret Service.  According to that file, all electronic mail had been
deleted from the system.  Some of it, at least, had been deleted on
March 20, 1993 (almost 3 weeks after the Secret Service had seized the
computer), since that was the last day the mail file had been
accessed.  The mail file itself had not been deleted, and some
fragments of files could be recovered using Norton's utilities.  These
facts indicated that the mail had been deleted one message at a time
after it had been displayed on a user's screen, implying that the
Secret Service had read all of the mail on the system.  This testimony
was very technical, and I'm not sure the judge really understood what
was going on.

Our old friend Henry Kluepfel, Director of Network Security Technology
at Belcore, was next to take the stand.  He advanced a new theory.
The application for the search warrant contained facts supplied in
large part by Hank.  Yet the facts of the case indicated that the BBS
running out of Loyd Blankenship's home, called the Phoenix Project,
was the one that contained the evil 911 document, not the Illuminati
BBS running out of SJG.
 Hank testified that after February 7, he couldn't figure out where
the Phoenix Project resided -- there was no answer at its old number.
Since Loyd Blankenship also had sysop privileges at the Illuminati
BBS, and both BBSs ran on the same software (WWIV), Hank concluded
that it was possible that Illuminati was actually the Phoenix Project,
or that the Phoenix Project BBS was hidden behind a door on
Illuminati.  Hank testified that it was quite common to hide BBSs
within other BBSs. (?)  Anyway, during cross, Pete Kennedy asked how
many users the two BBSs had in common according to the user lists Hank
had printed out from both boards.  Loyd was the only mutual user!
Hank also went into a lengthy (and boring) description of an evil
password decryption scheme Erik Bloodaxe and Loyd were plotting on the
Phoenix Project.  (BTW, Hank's handle during his investigation was
rot.doc.)

Next up was William Cook, retired US Attorney out of Chicago.
Cook's testimony was the most helpful of the day.  He put together
the warrant, and claimed the evil E-911 document was worth the same
$79,000 that was shot down in Craig Neidorf's trial.  So Cook got to
go through a bit of the expenditure breakdown, until the judge put an
end to it and warned Pete Kennedy to move on.  Cook testified that he
did not know SJG was a publisher and had made no efforts to determine
what type of a business it was.  He did not advise the Secret Service
of the Privacy Protection Act, which protects publishers from having
their works-in-progress seized.  He didn't advise the SS that there
was e-mail involved.  And he never advised the SS of the wiretap
statute.  He next said two things that I found extremely interesting.
First, he told of the Computer Emergency Response Team (C.E.R.T.), an
arm of the defense department that is "responsible for policing the
Internet."  Gulp!  (They apparently were the group that visited Craig
in Missouri.)  The other interesting thing to me was, when Pete
Kennedy said, "Isn't it true that no charges have been brought against
Loyd Blankenship?", Cook replied, "There is still an ongoing
investigation.  No charges have yet been filed."  They don't usually
admit that stuff!  One victorious moment worth mentioning:  Cook said
that if the Secret Service had been told that SJG was a publishing
company, they should have ceased doing the search.  Yesterday we saw
part of a homemade video courtesy of the SS themselves that clearly
had an SJG employee telling an SS agent that they were a publishing
company.  Cook also interpreted ECPA (Electronic Communications
Privacy Act) as not applying here, since these were stored
communications, not in transit.  The judge made a big deal of asking
him if this conclusion of unread e-mail not being in transit was his
own interpretation of the statute, or if he was getting it from
somewhere.  Cook admitted it was his own interpretation.

The final person to testify was an accountant who explained why SJG is
seeking over $2 million in damages and Steve Jackson is seeking over
$150,000 in lost royalties.

Tomorrow . . . the government begins its case.
Shari

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