The Civil Libertarians
**********************
NuPrometheus + FBI = Grateful Dead / Whole Earth + Computer
Revolution = WELL / Phiber Runs Underground and Acid Spikes the
Well / The Trial of Knight Lightning / Shadowhawk Plummets to
Earth / Kyrie in the Confessional / $79,499 / A Scholar
Investigates / Computers, Freedom, and Privacy
The story of the Hacker Crackdown, as we have followed it thus far,
has been technological, subcultural, criminal and legal. The story of
the Civil Libertarians, though it partakes of all those other aspects,
is profoundly and thoroughly *political.*
In 1990, the obscure, long-simmering struggle over the ownership and
nature of cyberspace became loudly and irretrievably public. People
from some of the oddest corners of American society suddenly found
themselves public figures. Some of these people found this situation
much more than they had ever bargained for. They backpedalled, and
tried to retreat back to the mandarin obscurity of their cozy
subcultural niches. This was generally to prove a mistake.
But the civil libertarians seized the day in 1990. They found
themselves organizing, propagandizing, podium-pounding, persuading,
touring, negotiating, posing for publicity photos, submitting to
interviews, squinting in the limelight as they tried a tentative, but
growingly sophisticated, buck-and-wing upon the public stage.
It's not hard to see why the civil libertarians should have this
competitive advantage.
The hackers of the digital underground are an hermetic elite.
They find it hard to make any remotely convincing case for their
actions in front of the general public. Actually, hackers roundly
despise the "ignorant" public, and have never trusted the judgement of
"the system." Hackers do propagandize, but only among themselves,
mostly in giddy, badly spelled manifestos of class warfare, youth
rebellion or naive techie utopianism. Hackers must strut and boast in
order to establish and preserve their underground reputations. But if
they speak out too loudly and publicly, they will break the fragile
surface-tension of the underground, and they will be harrassed or
arrested. Over the longer term, most hackers stumble, get busted, get
betrayed, or simply give up. As a political force, the digital
underground is hamstrung.
The telcos, for their part, are an ivory tower under protracted
seige. They have plenty of money with which to push their calculated
public image, but they waste much energy and goodwill attacking one
another with slanderous and demeaning ad campaigns. The telcos have
suffered at the hands of politicians, and, like hackers, they don't
trust the public's judgement. And this distrust may be well-founded.
Should the general public of the high-tech 1990s come to understand its
own best interests in telecommunications, that might well pose a grave
threat to the specialized technical power and authority that the telcos
have relished for over a century. The telcos do have strong
advantages: loyal employees, specialized expertise, influence in the
halls of power, tactical allies in law enforcement, and unbelievably
vast amounts of money. But politically speaking, they lack genuine
grassroots support; they simply don't seem to have many friends.
Cops know a lot of things other people don't know. But cops
willingly reveal only those aspects of their knowledge that they feel
will meet their institutional purposes and further public order. Cops
have respect, they have responsibilities, they have power in the streets
and even power in the home, but cops don't do particularly well in
limelight. When pressed, they will step out in the public gaze to
threaten bad guys, or to cajole prominent citizens, or perhaps to
sternly lecture the naive and misguided. But then they go back within
their time-honored fortress of the station-house, the courtroom and the
rule-book.
The electronic civil libertarians, however, have proven to be born
political animals. They seemed to grasp very early on the postmodern
truism that communication is power. Publicity is power. Soundbites
are power. The ability to shove one's issue onto the public agenda --
and *keep it there* -- is power. Fame is power. Simple personal
fluency and eloquence can be power, if you can somehow catch the
public's eye and ear.
The civil libertarians had no monopoly on "technical power" --
though they all owned computers, most were not particularly advanced
computer experts. They had a good deal of money, but nowhere near the
earthshaking wealth and the galaxy of resources possessed by telcos or
federal agencies. They had no ability to arrest people. They
carried out no phreak and hacker covert dirty-tricks.
But they really knew how to network.
Unlike the other groups in this book, the civil libertarians have
operated very much in the open, more or less right in the public
hurly-burly. They have lectured audiences galore and talked to
countless journalists, and have learned to refine their spiels.
They've kept the cameras clicking, kept those faxes humming, swapped
that email, run those photocopiers on overtime, licked envelopes and
spent small fortunes on airfare and long-distance. In an information
society, this open, overt, obvious activity has proven to be a profound
advantage.
In 1990, the civil libertarians of cyberspace assembled out of
nowhere in particular, at warp speed. This "group" (actually, a
networking gaggle of interested parties which scarcely deserves even
that loose term) has almost nothing in the way of formal organization.
Those formal civil libertarian organizations which did take an
interest in cyberspace issues, mainly the Computer Professionals for
Social Responsibility and the American Civil Liberties Union, were
carried along by events in 1990, and acted mostly as adjuncts,
underwriters or launching-pads.
The civil libertarians nevertheless enjoyed the greatest success of
any of the groups in the Crackdown of 1990. At this writing, their
future looks rosy and the political initiative is firmly in their
hands. This should be kept in mind as we study the highly unlikely
lives and lifestyles of the people who actually made this happen.
#
In June 1989, Apple Computer, Inc., of Cupertino, California, had a
problem. Someone had illicitly copied a small piece of Apple's
proprietary software, software which controlled an internal chip
driving the Macintosh screen display. This Color QuickDraw source
code was a closely guarded piece of Apple's intellectual property. Only
trusted Apple insiders were supposed to possess it.
But the "NuPrometheus League" wanted things otherwise. This person
(or persons) made several illicit copies of this source code, perhaps
as many as two dozen. He (or she, or they) then put those illicit
floppy disks into envelopes and mailed them to people all over America:
people in the computer industry who were associated with, but not
directly employed by, Apple Computer.
The NuPrometheus caper was a complex, highly ideological, and very
hacker-like crime. Prometheus, it will be recalled, stole the fire of
the Gods and gave this potent gift to the general ranks of downtrodden
mankind. A similar god-in-the-manger attitude was implied for the
corporate elite of Apple Computer, while the "Nu" Prometheus had
himself cast in the role of rebel demigod. The illicitly copied data
was given away for free.
The new Prometheus, whoever he was, escaped the fate of the ancient
Greek Prometheus, who was chained to a rock for centuries by the
vengeful gods while an eagle tore and ate his liver. On the other
hand, NuPrometheus chickened out somewhat by comparison with his role
model. The small chunk of Color QuickDraw code he had filched and
replicated was more or less useless to Apple's industrial rivals (or,
in fact, to anyone else). Instead of giving fire to mankind, it was
more as if NuPrometheus had photocopied the schematics for part of a
Bic lighter. The act was not a genuine work of industrial espionage. It
was best interpreted as a symbolic, deliberate slap in the face for the
Apple corporate hierarchy.
Apple's internal struggles were well-known in the industry. Apple's
founders, Jobs and Wozniak, had both taken their leave long since.
Their raucous core of senior employees had been a barnstorming crew of
1960s Californians, many of them markedly less than happy with the new
button-down multimillion dollar regime at Apple. Many of the
programmers and developers who had invented the Macintosh model in the
early 1980s had also taken their leave of the company. It was they,
not the current masters of Apple's corporate fate, who had invented the
stolen Color QuickDraw code. The NuPrometheus stunt was
well-calculated to wound company morale.
Apple called the FBI. The Bureau takes an interest in high-profile
intellectual-property theft cases, industrial espionage and theft of
trade secrets. These were likely the right people to call, and rumor
has it that the entities responsible were in fact discovered by the
FBI, and then quietly squelched by Apple management. NuPrometheus was
never publicly charged with a crime, or prosecuted, or jailed. But
there were no further illicit releases of Macintosh internal software.
Eventually the painful issue of NuPrometheus was allowed to fade.
In the meantime, however, a large number of puzzled bystanders found
themselves entertaining surprise guests from the FBI.
One of these people was John Perry Barlow. Barlow is a most
unusual man, difficult to describe in conventional terms. He is
perhaps best known as a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, for he
composed lyrics for "Hell in a Bucket," "Picasso Moon," "Mexicali
Blues," "I Need a Miracle," and many more; he has been writing for the
band since 1970.
Before we tackle the vexing question as to why a rock lyricist
should be interviewed by the FBI in a computer crime case, it might be
well to say a word or two about the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead
are perhaps the most successful and long-lasting of the numerous
cultural emanations from the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco,
in the glory days of Movement politics and lysergic transcendance.
The Grateful Dead are a nexus, a veritable whirlwind, of applique
decals, psychedelic vans, tie-dyed T-shirts, earth-color denim,
frenzied dancing and open and unashamed drug use. The symbols, and the
realities, of Californian freak power surround the Grateful Dead like
knotted macrame.
The Grateful Dead and their thousands of Deadhead devotees are
radical Bohemians. This much is widely understood. Exactly what
this implies in the 1990s is rather more problematic.
The Grateful Dead are among the world's most popular and wealthy
entertainers: number 20, according to *Forbes* magazine, right between
M.C. Hammer and Sean Connery. In 1990, this jeans-clad group of
purported raffish outcasts earned seventeen million dollars. They have
been earning sums much along this line for quite some time now.
And while the Dead are not investment bankers or three-piece-suit
tax specialists -- they are, in point of fact, hippie musicians -- this
money has not been squandered in senseless Bohemian excess. The Dead
have been quietly active for many years, funding various worthy
activities in their extensive and widespread cultural community.
The Grateful Dead are not conventional players in the American power
establishment. They nevertheless are something of a force to be
reckoned with. They have a lot of money and a lot of friends in many
places, both likely and unlikely.
The Dead may be known for back-to-the-earth environmentalist
rhetoric, but this hardly makes them anti-technological Luddites. On
the contrary, like most rock musicians, the Grateful Dead have spent
their entire adult lives in the company of complex electronic
equipment. They have funds to burn on any sophisticated tool and toy
that might happen to catch their fancy. And their fancy is quite
extensive.
The Deadhead community boasts any number of recording engineers,
lighting experts, rock video mavens, electronic technicians of all
descriptions. And the drift goes both ways. Steve Wozniak, Apple's
co-founder, used to throw rock festivals. Silicon Valley rocks out.
These are the 1990s, not the 1960s. Today, for a surprising number
of people all over America, the supposed dividing line between Bohemian
and technician simply no longer exists. People of this sort may have a
set of windchimes and a dog with a knotted kerchief 'round its neck,
but they're also quite likely to own a multimegabyte Macintosh running
MIDI synthesizer software and trippy fractal simulations. These days,
even Timothy Leary himself, prophet of LSD, does virtual-reality
computer-graphics demos in his lecture tours.
John Perry Barlow is not a member of the Grateful Dead. He is,
however, a ranking Deadhead.
Barlow describes himself as a "techno-crank." A vague term like
"social activist" might not be far from the mark, either. But Barlow
might be better described as a "poet" -- if one keeps in mind Percy
Shelley's archaic definition of poets as "unacknowledged legislators of
the world."
Barlow once made a stab at acknowledged legislator status. In 1987,
he narrowly missed the Republican nomination for a seat in the Wyoming
State Senate. Barlow is a Wyoming native, the third-generation scion of
a well-to-do cattle-ranching family. He is in his early forties,
married and the father of three daughters.
Barlow is not much troubled by other people's narrow notions of
consistency. In the late 1980s, this Republican rock lyricist cattle
rancher sold his ranch and became a computer telecommunications devotee.
The free-spirited Barlow made this transition with ease. He
genuinely enjoyed computers. With a beep of his modem, he leapt from
small-town Pinedale, Wyoming, into electronic contact with a large and
lively crowd of bright, inventive, technological sophisticates from all
over the world. Barlow found the social milieu of computing
attractive: its fast-lane pace, its blue-sky rhetoric, its
open-endedness. Barlow began dabbling in computer journalism, with
marked success, as he was a quick study, and both shrewd and eloquent.
He frequently travelled to San Francisco to network with Deadhead
friends. There Barlow made extensive contacts throughout the
Californian computer community, including friendships among the wilder
spirits at Apple.
In May 1990, Barlow received a visit from a local Wyoming agent of
the FBI. The NuPrometheus case had reached Wyoming.
Barlow was troubled to find himself under investigation in an area
of his interests once quite free of federal attention. He had to
struggle to explain the very nature of computer crime to a
headscratching local FBI man who specialized in cattle-rustling.
Barlow, chatting helpfully and demonstrating the wonders of his modem to
the puzzled fed, was alarmed to find all "hackers" generally under FBI
suspicion as an evil influence in the electronic community. The FBI,
in pursuit of a hacker called "NuPrometheus," were tracing attendees of
a suspect group called the Hackers Conference.
The Hackers Conference, which had been started in 1984, was a
yearly Californian meeting of digital pioneers and enthusiasts. The
hackers of the Hackers Conference had little if anything to do with the
hackers of the digital underground. On the contrary, the hackers of
this conference were mostly well-to-do Californian high-tech CEOs,
consultants, journalists and entrepreneurs. (This group of hackers
were the exact sort of "hackers" most likely to react with militant
fury at any criminal degradation of the term "hacker.")
Barlow, though he was not arrested or accused of a crime, and though
his computer had certainly not gone out the door, was very troubled by
this anomaly. He carried the word to the Well.
Like the Hackers Conference, "the Well" was an emanation of the
Point Foundation. Point Foundation, the inspiration of a wealthy
Californian 60s radical named Stewart Brand, was to be a major
launch-pad of the civil libertarian effort.
Point Foundation's cultural efforts, like those of their fellow Bay
Area Californians the Grateful Dead, were multifaceted and
multitudinous. Rigid ideological consistency had never been a strong
suit of the *Whole Earth Catalog.* This Point publication had enjoyed
a strong vogue during the late 60s and early 70s, when it offered
hundreds of practical (and not so practical) tips on communitarian
living, environmentalism, and getting back-to-the-land. The *Whole
Earth Catalog,* and its sequels, sold two and half million copies and
won a National Book Award.
With the slow collapse of American radical dissent, the *Whole Earth
Catalog* had slipped to a more modest corner of the cultural radar; but
in its magazine incarnation, *CoEvolution Quarterly,* the Point
Foundation continued to offer a magpie potpourri of "access to tools
and ideas."
*CoEvolution Quarterly,* which started in 1974, was never a widely
popular magazine. Despite periodic outbreaks of millenarian fervor,
*CoEvolution Quarterly* failed to revolutionize Western civilization
and replace leaden centuries of history with bright new Californian
paradigms. Instead, this propaganda arm of Point Foundation cakewalked
a fine line between impressive brilliance and New Age flakiness.
*CoEvolution Quarterly* carried no advertising, cost a lot, and came
out on cheap newsprint with modest black-and-white graphics. It was
poorly distributed, and spread mostly by subscription and word of mouth.
It could not seem to grow beyond 30,000 subscribers. And yet -- it
never seemed to shrink much, either. Year in, year out, decade in,
decade out, some strange demographic minority accreted to support the
magazine. The enthusiastic readership did not seem to have much in the
way of coherent politics or ideals. It was sometimes hard to
understand what held them together (if the often bitter debate in the
letter-columns could be described as "togetherness").
But if the magazine did not flourish, it was resilient; it got by.
Then, in 1984, the birth-year of the Macintosh computer, *CoEvolution
Quarterly* suddenly hit the rapids. Point Foundation had discovered
the computer revolution. Out came the *Whole Earth Software Catalog*
of 1984, arousing headscratching doubts among the tie-dyed faithful,
and rabid enthusiasm among the nascent "cyberpunk" milieu, present
company included. Point Foundation started its yearly Hackers
Conference, and began to take an extensive interest in the strange new
possibilities of digital counterculture. *CoEvolution Quarterly*
folded its teepee, replaced by *Whole Earth Software Review* and
eventually by *Whole Earth Review* (the magazine's present
incarnation, currently under the editorship of virtual-reality maven
Howard Rheingold).
1985 saw the birth of the "WELL" -- the "Whole Earth 'Lectronic
Link." The Well was Point Foundation's bulletin board system.
As boards went, the Well was an anomaly from the beginning, and
remained one. It was local to San Francisco. It was huge, with
multiple phonelines and enormous files of commentary. Its complex
UNIX-based software might be most charitably described as "user-opaque."
It was run on a mainframe out of the rambling offices of a non-profit
cultural foundation in Sausalito. And it was crammed with fans of the
Grateful Dead.
Though the Well was peopled by chattering hipsters of the Bay Area
counterculture, it was by no means a "digital underground" board.
Teenagers were fairly scarce; most Well users (known as "Wellbeings")
were thirty- and forty-something Baby Boomers. They tended to work in
the information industry: hardware, software, telecommunications,
media, entertainment. Librarians, academics, and journalists were
especially common on the Well, attracted by Point Foundation's
open-handed distribution of "tools and ideas."
There were no anarchy files on the Well, scarcely a dropped hint
about access codes or credit card theft. No one used handles.
Vicious "flame-wars" were held to a comparatively civilized rumble.
Debates were sometimes sharp, but no Wellbeing ever claimed that a
rival had disconnected his phone, trashed his house, or posted his
credit card numbers.
The Well grew slowly as the 1980s advanced. It charged a modest sum
for access and storage, and lost money for years -- but not enough to
hamper the Point Foundation, which was nonprofit anyway. By 1990, the
Well had about five thousand users. These users wandered about a
gigantic cyberspace smorgasbord of "Conferences", each conference
itself consisting of a welter of "topics," each topic containing dozens,
sometimes hundreds of comments, in a tumbling, multiperson debate that
could last for months or years on end.
CONFERENCES ON THE WELL
WELL ``Screenzine'' Digest (g zine)
Best of the WELL - vintage material - (g best)
Index listing of new topics in all conferences - (g newtops)
Business - Education
----------------------
Apple Library Users Group(g alug) Agriculture (g agri)
Brainstorming (g brain) Classifieds (g cla)
Computer Journalism (g cj) Consultants (g consult)
Consumers (g cons) Design (g design)
Desktop Publishing (g desk) Disability (g disability)
Education (g ed) Energy (g energy91)
Entrepreneurs (g entre) Homeowners (g home)
Indexing (g indexing) Investments (g invest)
Kids91 (g kids) Legal (g legal)
One Person Business (g one)
Periodical/newsletter (g per)
Telecomm Law (g tcl) The Future (g fut)
Translators (g trans) Travel (g tra)
Work (g work)
Electronic Frontier Foundation (g eff)
Computers, Freedom & Privacy (g cfp)
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (g cpsr)
Social - Political - Humanities
---------------------------------
Aging (g gray) AIDS (g aids)
Amnesty International (g amnesty) Archives (g arc)
Berkeley (g berk) Buddhist (g wonderland)
Christian (g cross) Couples (g couples)
Current Events (g curr) Dreams (g dream)
Drugs (g dru) East Coast (g east)
Emotional Health**** (g private) Erotica (g eros)
Environment (g env) Firearms (g firearms)
First Amendment (g first) Fringes of Reason (g fringes)
Gay (g gay) Gay (Private)# (g gaypriv)
Geography (g geo) German (g german)
Gulf War (g gulf) Hawaii (g aloha)
Health (g heal) History (g hist)
Holistic (g holi) Interview (g inter)
Italian (g ital) Jewish (g jew)
Liberty (g liberty) Mind (g mind)
Miscellaneous (g misc) Men on the WELL** (g mow)
Network Integration (g origin) Nonprofits (g non)
North Bay (g north) Northwest (g nw)
Pacific Rim (g pacrim) Parenting (g par)
Peace (g pea) Peninsula (g pen)
Poetry (g poetry) Philosophy (g phi)
Politics (g pol) Psychology (g psy)
Psychotherapy (g therapy) Recovery## (g recovery)
San Francisco (g sanfran) Scams (g scam)
Sexuality (g sex) Singles (g singles)
Southern (g south) Spanish (g spanish)
Spirituality (g spirit) Tibet (g tibet)
Transportation (g transport) True Confessions (g tru)
Unclear (g unclear) WELL Writer's Workshop***(g www)
Whole Earth (g we) Women on the WELL*(g wow)
Words (g words) Writers (g wri)
**** Private Conference - mail wooly for entry
*** Private conference - mail sonia for entry
** Private conference - mail flash for entry
* Private conference - mail reva for entry
# Private Conference - mail hudu for entry
## Private Conference - mail dhawk for entry
Arts - Recreation - Entertainment
-----------------------------------
ArtCom Electronic Net (g acen)
Audio-Videophilia (g aud)
Bicycles (g bike) Bay Area Tonight**(g bat)
Boating (g wet) Books (g books)
CD's (g cd) Comics (g comics)
Cooking (g cook) Flying (g flying)
Fun (g fun) Games (g games)
Gardening (g gard) Kids (g kids)
Nightowls* (g owl) Jokes (g jokes)
MIDI (g midi) Movies (g movies)
Motorcycling (g ride) Motoring (g car)
Music (g mus) On Stage (g onstage)
Pets (g pets) Radio (g rad)
Restaurant (g rest) Science Fiction (g sf)
Sports (g spo) Star Trek (g trek)
Television (g tv) Theater (g theater)
Weird (g weird) Zines/Factsheet Five(g f5)
* Open from midnight to 6am
** Updated daily
Grateful Dead
---------------
Grateful Dead (g gd) Deadplan* (g dp)
Deadlit (g deadlit) Feedback (g feedback)
GD Hour (g gdh) Tapes (g tapes)
Tickets (g tix) Tours (g tours)
* Private conference - mail tnf for entry
Computers
-----------
AI/Forth/Realtime (g realtime) Amiga (g amiga)
Apple (g app) Computer Books (g cbook)
Art & Graphics (g gra) Hacking (g hack)
HyperCard (g hype) IBM PC (g ibm)
LANs (g lan) Laptop (g lap)
Macintosh (g mac) Mactech (g mactech)
Microtimes (g microx) Muchomedia (g mucho)
NeXt (g next) OS/2 (g os2)
Printers (g print) Programmer's Net (g net)
Siggraph (g siggraph) Software Design (g sdc)
Software/Programming (g software)
Software Support (g ssc)
Unix (g unix) Windows (g windows)
Word Processing (g word)
Technical - Communications
----------------------------
Bioinfo (g bioinfo) Info (g boing)
Media (g media) NAPLPS (g naplps)
Netweaver (g netweaver) Networld (g networld)
Packet Radio (g packet) Photography (g pho)
Radio (g rad) Science (g science)
Technical Writers (g tec) Telecommunications(g tele)
Usenet (g usenet) Video (g vid)
Virtual Reality (g vr)
The WELL Itself
---------------
Deeper (g deeper) Entry (g ent)
General (g gentech) Help (g help)
Hosts (g hosts) Policy (g policy)
System News (g news) Test (g test)
The list itself is dazzling, bringing to the untutored eye a
dizzying impression of a bizarre milieu of mountain-climbing Hawaiian
holistic photographers trading true-life confessions with bisexual
word-processing Tibetans.
But this confusion is more apparent than real. Each of these
conferences was a little cyberspace world in itself, comprising dozens
and perhaps hundreds of sub-topics. Each conference was commonly
frequented by a fairly small, fairly like-minded community of perhaps a
few dozen people. It was humanly impossible to encompass the entire
Well (especially since access to the Well's mainframe computer was
billed by the hour). Most long-time users contented themselves with a
few favorite topical neighborhoods, with the occasional foray elsewhere
for a taste of exotica. But especially important news items, and hot
topical debates, could catch the attention of the entire Well community.
Like any community, the Well had its celebrities, and John Perry
Barlow, the silver-tongued and silver-modemed lyricist of the Grateful
Dead, ranked prominently among them. It was here on the Well that
Barlow posted his true-life tale of computer crime encounter with the
FBI.
The story, as might be expected, created a great stir. The Well was
already primed for hacker controversy. In December 1989, *Harper's*
magazine had hosted a debate on the Well about the ethics of illicit
computer intrusion. While over forty various computer-mavens took
part, Barlow proved a star in the debate. So did "Acid Phreak" and
"Phiber Optik," a pair of young New York hacker-phreaks whose skills at
telco switching-station intrusion were matched only by their apparently
limitless hunger for fame. The advent of these two boldly swaggering
outlaws in the precincts of the Well created a sensation akin to that
of Black Panthers at a cocktail party for the radically chic.
Phiber Optik in particular was to seize the day in 1990. A devotee
of the *2600* circle and stalwart of the New York hackers' group
"Masters of Deception," Phiber Optik was a splendid exemplar of the
computer intruder as committed dissident. The eighteen-year-old
Optik, a high-school dropout and part-time computer repairman, was
young, smart, and ruthlessly obsessive, a sharp-dressing, sharp-talking
digital dude who was utterly and airily contemptuous of anyone's rules
but his own. By late 1991, Phiber Optik had appeared in *Harper's,*
*Esquire,* *The New York Times,* in countless public debates and
conventions, even on a television show hosted by Geraldo Rivera.
Treated with gingerly respect by Barlow and other Well mavens,
Phiber Optik swiftly became a Well celebrity. Strangely, despite his
thorny attitude and utter single-mindedness, Phiber Optik seemed to
arouse strong protective instincts in most of the people who met him.
He was great copy for journalists, always fearlessly ready to swagger,
and, better yet, to actually *demonstrate* some off-the-wall digital
stunt. He was a born media darling.
Even cops seemed to recognize that there was something peculiarly
unworldly and uncriminal about this particular troublemaker. He was
so bold, so flagrant, so young, and so obviously doomed, that even
those who strongly disapproved of his actions grew anxious for his
welfare, and began to flutter about him as if he were an endangered
seal pup.
In January 24, 1990 (nine days after the Martin Luther King Day
Crash), Phiber Optik, Acid Phreak, and a third NYC scofflaw named
Scorpion were raided by the Secret Service. Their computers went out
the door, along with the usual blizzard of papers, notebooks, compact
disks, answering machines, Sony Walkmans, etc. Both Acid Phreak and
Phiber Optik were accused of having caused the Crash.
The mills of justice ground slowly. The case eventually fell into
the hands of the New York State Police. Phiber had lost his machinery
in the raid, but there were no charges filed against him for over a
year. His predicament was extensively publicized on the Well, where
it caused much resentment for police tactics. It's one thing to merely
hear about a hacker raided or busted; it's another to see the police
attacking someone you've come to know personally, and who has explained
his motives at length. Through the *Harper's* debate on the Well, it
had become clear to the Wellbeings that Phiber Optik was not in fact
going to "hurt anything." In their own salad days, many Wellbeings
had tasted tear-gas in pitched street-battles with police. They were
inclined to indulgence for acts of civil disobedience.
Wellbeings were also startled to learn of the draconian thoroughness
of a typical hacker search-and-seizure. It took no great stretch of
imagination for them to envision themselves suffering much the same
treatment.
As early as January 1990, sentiment on the Well had already begun to
sour, and people had begun to grumble that "hackers" were getting a raw
deal from the ham-handed powers-that-be. The resultant issue of
*Harper's* magazine posed the question as to whether computer-intrusion
was a "crime" at all. As Barlow put it later: "I've begun to wonder
if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T
owned all the caves."
In February 1991, more than a year after the raid on his home,
Phiber Optik was finally arrested, and was charged with first-degree
Computer Tampering and Computer Trespass, New York state offenses. He
was also charged with a theft-of-service misdemeanor, involving a
complex free-call scam to a 900 number. Phiber Optik pled guilty to
the misdemeanor charge, and was sentenced to 35 hours of community
service.
This passing harassment from the unfathomable world of straight
people seemed to bother Optik himself little if at all. Deprived of
his computer by the January search-and-seizure, he simply bought
himself a portable computer so the cops could no longer monitor the
phone where he lived with his Mom, and he went right on with his
depredations, sometimes on live radio or in front of television cameras.
The crackdown raid may have done little to dissuade Phiber Optik,
but its galling affect on the Wellbeings was profound. As 1990 rolled
on, the slings and arrows mounted: the Knight Lightning raid, the
Steve Jackson raid, the nation-spanning Operation Sundevil. The
rhetoric of law enforcement made it clear that there was, in fact, a
concerted crackdown on hackers in progress.
The hackers of the Hackers Conference, the Wellbeings, and their
ilk, did not really mind the occasional public misapprehension of
"hacking"; if anything, this membrane of differentiation from straight
society made the "computer community" feel different, smarter, better.
They had never before been confronted, however, by a concerted
vilification campaign.
Barlow's central role in the counter-struggle was one of the major
anomalies of 1990. Journalists investigating the controversy often
stumbled over the truth about Barlow, but they commonly dusted
themselves off and hurried on as if nothing had happened. It was as
if it were *too much to believe* that a 1960s freak from the Grateful
Dead had taken on a federal law enforcement operation head-to-head and
*actually seemed to be winning!*
Barlow had no easily detectable power-base for a political struggle
of this kind. He had no formal legal or technical credentials.
Barlow was, however, a computer networker of truly stellar brilliance.
He had a poet's gift of concise, colorful phrasing. He also had a
journalist's shrewdness, an off-the-wall, self-deprecating wit, and a
phenomenal wealth of simple personal charm.
The kind of influence Barlow possessed is fairly common currency in
literary, artistic, or musical circles. A gifted critic can wield
great artistic influence simply through defining the temper of the
times, by coining the catch-phrases and the terms of debate that
become the common currency of the period. (And as it happened, Barlow
*was* a part-time art critic, with a special fondness for the Western
art of Frederic Remington.)
Barlow was the first commentator to adopt William Gibson's striking
science-fictional term "cyberspace" as a synonym for the present-day
nexus of computer and telecommunications networks. Barlow was
insistent that cyberspace should be regarded as a qualitatively new
world, a "frontier." According to Barlow, the world of electronic
communications, now made visible through the computer screen, could no
longer be usefully regarded as just a tangle of high-tech wiring.
Instead, it had become a *place,* cyberspace, which demanded a new
set of metaphors, a new set of rules and behaviors. The term, as
Barlow employed it, struck a useful chord, and this concept of
cyberspace was picked up by *Time,* *Scientific American,* computer
police, hackers, and even Constitutional scholars. "Cyberspace" now
seems likely to become a permanent fixture of the language.
Barlow was very striking in person: a tall, craggy-faced, bearded,
deep-voiced Wyomingan in a dashing Western ensemble of jeans, jacket,
cowboy boots, a knotted throat-kerchief and an ever-present Grateful
Dead cloisonne lapel pin.
Armed with a modem, however, Barlow was truly in his element.
Formal hierarchies were not Barlow's strong suit; he rarely missed a
chance to belittle the "large organizations and their drones," with
their uptight, institutional mindset. Barlow was very much of the
free-spirit persuasion, deeply unimpressed by brass-hats and
jacks-in-office. But when it came to the digital grapevine, Barlow was
a cyberspace ad-hocrat par excellence.
There was not a mighty army of Barlows. There was only one Barlow,
and he was a fairly anomolous individual. However, the situation only
seemed to *require* a single Barlow. In fact, after 1990, many
people must have concluded that a single Barlow was far more than they'd
ever bargained for.
Barlow's querulous mini-essay about his encounter with the FBI
struck a strong chord on the Well. A number of other free spirits on
the fringes of Apple Computing had come under suspicion, and they liked
it not one whit better than he did.
One of these was Mitchell Kapor, the co-inventor of the spreadsheet
program "Lotus 1-2-3" and the founder of Lotus Development Corporation.
Kapor had written-off the passing indignity of being fingerprinted
down at his own local Boston FBI headquarters, but Barlow's post made
the full national scope of the FBI's dragnet clear to Kapor. The
issue now had Kapor's full attention. As the Secret Service swung
into anti-hacker operation nationwide in 1990, Kapor watched every move
with deep skepticism and growing alarm.
As it happened, Kapor had already met Barlow, who had interviewed
Kapor for a California computer journal. Like most people who met
Barlow, Kapor had been very taken with him. Now Kapor took it upon
himself to drop in on Barlow for a heart-to-heart talk about the
situation.
Kapor was a regular on the Well. Kapor had been a devotee of the
*Whole Earth Catalog* since the beginning, and treasured a complete run
of the magazine. And Kapor not only had a modem, but a private jet. In
pursuit of the scattered high-tech investments of Kapor Enterprises
Inc., his personal, multi-million dollar holding company, Kapor
commonly crossed state lines with about as much thought as one might
give to faxing a letter.
The Kapor-Barlow council of June 1990, in Pinedale, Wyoming, was the
start of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Barlow swiftly wrote a
manifesto, "Crime and Puzzlement," which announced his, and Kapor's,
intention to form a political organization to "raise and disburse funds
for education, lobbying, and litigation in the areas relating to
digital speech and the extension of the Constitution into Cyberspace."
Furthermore, proclaimed the manifesto, the foundation would "fund,
conduct, and support legal efforts to demonstrate that the Secret
Service has exercised prior restraint on publications, limited free
speech, conducted improper seizure of equipment and data, used undue
force, and generally conducted itself in a fashion which is arbitrary,
oppressive, and unconstitutional."
"Crime and Puzzlement" was distributed far and wide through computer
networking channels, and also printed in the *Whole Earth Review.* The
sudden declaration of a coherent, politicized counter-strike from the
ranks of hackerdom electrified the community. Steve Wozniak (perhaps
a bit stung by the NuPrometheus scandal) swiftly offered to match any
funds Kapor offered the Foundation.
John Gilmore, one of the pioneers of Sun Microsystems, immediately
offered his own extensive financial and personal support. Gilmore, an
ardent libertarian, was to prove an eloquent advocate of electronic
privacy issues, especially freedom from governmental and corporate
computer-assisted surveillance of private citizens.
A second meeting in San Francisco rounded up further allies:
Stewart Brand of the Point Foundation, virtual-reality pioneers Jaron
Lanier and Chuck Blanchard, network entrepreneur and venture capitalist
Nat Goldhaber. At this dinner meeting, the activists settled on a
formal title: the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Incorporated. Kapor
became its president. A new EFF Conference was opened on the Point
Foundation's Well, and the Well was declared "the home of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation."
Press coverage was immediate and intense. Like their
nineteenth-century spiritual ancestors, Alexander Graham Bell and
Thomas Watson, the high-tech computer entrepreneurs of the 1970s and
1980s -- people such as Wozniak, Jobs, Kapor, Gates, and H. Ross Perot,
who had raised themselves by their bootstraps to dominate a glittering
new industry -- had always made very good copy.
But while the Wellbeings rejoiced, the press in general seemed
nonplussed by the self-declared "civilizers of cyberspace." EFF's
insistence that the war against "hackers" involved grave Constitutional
civil liberties issues seemed somewhat farfetched, especially since
none of EFF's organizers were lawyers or established politicians.
The business press in particular found it easier to seize on the
apparent core of the story -- that high-tech entrepreneur Mitchell
Kapor had established a "defense fund for hackers." Was EFF a
genuinely important political development -- or merely a clique of
wealthy eccentrics, dabbling in matters better left to the proper
authorities? The jury was still out.
But the stage was now set for open confrontation. And the first and
the most critical battle was the hacker show-trial of "Knight
Lightning."
#
It has been my practice throughout this book to refer to hackers
only by their "handles." There is little to gain by giving the real
names of these people, many of whom are juveniles, many of whom have
never been convicted of any crime, and many of whom had unsuspecting
parents who have already suffered enough.
But the trial of Knight Lightning on July 24-27, 1990, made this
particular "hacker" a nationally known public figure. It can do no
particular harm to himself or his family if I repeat the
long-established fact that his name is Craig Neidorf (pronounced
NYE-dorf).
Neidorf's jury trial took place in the United States District Court,
Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, with the Honorable
Nicholas J. Bua presiding. The United States of America was the
plaintiff, the defendant Mr. Neidorf. The defendant's attorney was
Sheldon T. Zenner of the Chicago firm of Katten, Muchin and Zavis.
The prosecution was led by the stalwarts of the Chicago Computer
Fraud and Abuse Task Force: William J. Cook, Colleen D. Coughlin, and
David A. Glockner, all Assistant United States Attorneys. The Secret
Service Case Agent was Timothy M. Foley.
It will be recalled that Neidorf was the co-editor of an underground
hacker "magazine" called *Phrack*. *Phrack* was an entirely electronic
publication, distributed through bulletin boards and over electronic
networks. It was amateur publication given away for free. Neidorf had
never made any money for his work in *Phrack.* Neither had his
unindicted co-editor "Taran King" or any of the numerous *Phrack*
contributors.
The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force, however, had
decided to prosecute Neidorf as a fraudster. To formally admit that
*Phrack* was a "magazine" and Neidorf a "publisher" was to open a
prosecutorial Pandora's Box of First Amendment issues. To do this was
to play into the hands of Zenner and his EFF advisers, which now
included a phalanx of prominent New York civil rights lawyers as well
as the formidable legal staff of Katten, Muchin and Zavis. Instead,
the prosecution relied heavily on the issue of access device fraud:
Section 1029 of Title 18, the section from which the Secret Service
drew its most direct jurisdiction over computer crime.
Neidorf's alleged crimes centered around the E911 Document. He was
accused of having entered into a fraudulent scheme with the Prophet,
who, it will be recalled, was the Atlanta LoD member who had illicitly
copied the E911 Document from the BellSouth AIMSX system.
The Prophet himself was also a co-defendant in the Neidorf case,
part-and-parcel of the alleged "fraud scheme" to "steal" BellSouth's
E911 Document (and to pass the Document across state lines, which helped
establish the Neidorf trial as a federal case). The Prophet, in the
spirit of full co-operation, had agreed to testify against Neidorf.
In fact, all three of the Atlanta crew stood ready to testify
against Neidorf. Their own federal prosecutors in Atlanta had charged
the Atlanta Three with: (a) conspiracy, (b) computer fraud, (c) wire
fraud, (d) access device fraud, and (e) interstate transportation of
stolen property (Title 18, Sections 371, 1030, 1343, 1029, and 2314).
Faced with this blizzard of trouble, Prophet and Leftist had ducked
any public trial and had pled guilty to reduced charges -- one
conspiracy count apiece. Urvile had pled guilty to that odd bit of
Section 1029 which makes it illegal to possess "fifteen or more"
illegal access devices (in his case, computer passwords). And their
sentences were scheduled for September 14, 1990 -- well after the
Neidorf trial. As witnesses, they could presumably be relied upon to
behave.
Neidorf, however, was pleading innocent. Most everyone else
caught up in the crackdown had "cooperated fully" and pled guilty in
hope of reduced sentences. (Steve Jackson was a notable exception, of
course, and had strongly protested his innocence from the very
beginning. But Steve Jackson could not get a day in court -- Steve
Jackson had never been charged with any crime in the first place.)
Neidorf had been urged to plead guilty. But Neidorf was a political
science major and was disinclined to go to jail for "fraud" when he
had not made any money, had not broken into any computer, and had been
publishing a magazine that he considered protected under the First
Amendment.
Neidorf's trial was the *only* legal action of the entire Crackdown
that actually involved bringing the issues at hand out for a public
test in front of a jury of American citizens.
Neidorf, too, had cooperated with investigators. He had voluntarily
handed over much of the evidence that had led to his own indictment.
He had already admitted in writing that he knew that the E911 Document
had been stolen before he had "published" it in *Phrack* -- or, from
the prosecution's point of view, illegally transported stolen property
by wire in something purporting to be a "publication."
But even if the "publication" of the E911 Document was not held to
be a crime, that wouldn't let Neidorf off the hook. Neidorf had
still received the E911 Document when Prophet had transferred it to
him from Rich Andrews' Jolnet node. On that occasion, it certainly
hadn't been "published" -- it was hacker booty, pure and simple,
transported across state lines.
The Chicago Task Force led a Chicago grand jury to indict Neidorf
on a set of charges that could have put him in jail for thirty years.
When some of these charges were successfully challenged before Neidorf
actually went to trial, the Chicago Task Force rearranged his
indictment so that he faced a possible jail term of over sixty years!
As a first offender, it was very unlikely that Neidorf would in fact
receive a sentence so drastic; but the Chicago Task Force clearly
intended to see Neidorf put in prison, and his conspiratorial
"magazine" put permanently out of commission. This was a federal case,
and Neidorf was charged with the fraudulent theft of property worth
almost eighty thousand dollars.
William Cook was a strong believer in high-profile prosecutions with
symbolic overtones. He often published articles on his work in the
security trade press, arguing that "a clear message had to be sent to
the public at large and the computer community in particular that
unauthorized attacks on computers and the theft of computerized
information would not be tolerated by the courts."
The issues were complex, the prosecution's tactics somewhat
unorthodox, but the Chicago Task Force had proved sure-footed to date.
"Shadowhawk" had been bagged on the wing in 1989 by the Task Force, and
sentenced to nine months in prison, and a $10,000 fine. The Shadowhawk
case involved charges under Section 1030, the "federal interest
computer" section.
Shadowhawk had not in fact been a devotee of "federal interest"
computers per se. On the contrary, Shadowhawk, who owned an AT&T home
computer, seemed to cherish a special aggression toward AT&T. He had
bragged on the underground boards "Phreak Klass 2600" and "Dr. Ripco"
of his skills at raiding AT&T, and of his intention to crash AT&T's
national phone system. Shadowhawk's brags were noticed by Henry
Kluepfel of Bellcore Security, scourge of the outlaw boards, whose
relations with the Chicago Task Force were long and intimate.
The Task Force successfully established that Section 1030 applied to
the teenage Shadowhawk, despite the objections of his defense attorney.
Shadowhawk had entered a computer "owned" by U.S. Missile Command and
merely "managed" by AT&T. He had also entered an AT&T computer
located at Robbins Air Force Base in Georgia. Attacking AT&T was of
"federal interest" whether Shadowhawk had intended it or not.
The Task Force also convinced the court that a piece of AT&T
software that Shadowhawk had illicitly copied from Bell Labs, the
"Artificial Intelligence C5 Expert System," was worth a cool one
million dollars. Shadowhawk's attorney had argued that Shadowhawk had
not sold the program and had made no profit from the illicit copying.
And in point of fact, the C5 Expert System was experimental software,
and had no established market value because it had never been on the
market in the first place. AT&T's own assessment of a "one million
dollar" figure for its own intangible property was accepted without
challenge by the court, however. And the court concurred with the
government prosecutors that Shadowhawk showed clear "intent to defraud"
whether he'd gotten any money or not. Shadowhawk went to jail.
The Task Force's other best-known triumph had been the conviction
and jailing of "Kyrie." Kyrie, a true denizen of the digital criminal
underground, was a 36-year-old Canadian woman, convicted and jailed for
telecommunications fraud in Canada. After her release from prison,
she had fled the wrath of Canada Bell and the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police, and eventually settled, very unwisely, in Chicago.
"Kyrie," who also called herself "Long Distance Information,"
specialized in voice-mail abuse. She assembled large numbers of hot
long-distance codes, then read them aloud into a series of corporate
voice-mail systems. Kyrie and her friends were electronic squatters
in corporate voice-mail systems, using them much as if they were pirate
bulletin boards, then moving on when their vocal chatter clogged the
system and the owners necessarily wised up. Kyrie's camp followers
were a loose tribe of some hundred and fifty phone-phreaks, who
followed her trail of piracy from machine to machine, ardently begging
for her services and expertise.
Kyrie's disciples passed her stolen credit card numbers, in exchange
for her stolen "long distance information." Some of Kyrie's clients
paid her off in cash, by scamming credit card cash advances from Western
Union.
Kyrie travelled incessantly, mostly through airline tickets and
hotel rooms that she scammed through stolen credit cards. Tiring of
this, she found refuge with a fellow female phone phreak in Chicago.
Kyrie's hostess, like a surprising number of phone phreaks, was blind.
She was also physically disabled. Kyrie allegedly made the best of
her new situation by applying for, and receiving, state welfare funds
under a false identity as a qualified caretaker for the handicapped.
Sadly, Kyrie's two children by a former marriage had also vanished
underground with her; these pre-teen digital refugees had no legal
American identity, and had never spent a day in school.
Kyrie was addicted to technical mastery and enthralled by her own
cleverness and the ardent worship of her teenage followers. This
foolishly led her to phone up Gail Thackeray in Arizona, to boast,
brag, strut, and offer to play informant. Thackeray, however, had
already learned far more than enough about Kyrie, whom she roundly
despised as an adult criminal corrupting minors, a "female Fagin."
Thackeray passed her tapes of Kyrie's boasts to the Secret Service.
Kyrie was raided and arrested in Chicago in May 1989. She confessed
at great length and pled guilty.
In August 1990, Cook and his Task Force colleague Colleen Coughlin
sent Kyrie to jail for 27 months, for computer and telecommunications
fraud. This was a markedly severe sentence by the usual wrist-slapping
standards of "hacker" busts. Seven of Kyrie's foremost teenage
disciples were also indicted and convicted. The Kyrie "high-tech
street gang," as Cook described it, had been crushed. Cook and his
colleagues had been the first ever to put someone in prison for
voice-mail abuse. Their pioneering efforts had won them attention and
kudos.
In his article on Kyrie, Cook drove the message home to the readers
of *Security Management* magazine, a trade journal for corporate
security professionals. The case, Cook said, and Kyrie's stiff
sentence, "reflect a new reality for hackers and computer crime
victims in the '90s... Individuals and corporations who report computer
and telecommunications crimes can now expect that their cooperation
with federal law enforcement will result in meaningful punishment.
Companies and the public at large must report computer-enhanced crimes
if they want prosecutors and the course to protect their rights to the
tangible and intangible property developed and stored on computers."
Cook had made it his business to construct this "new reality for
hackers." He'd also made it his business to police corporate property
rights to the intangible.
Had the Electronic Frontier Foundation been a "hacker defense fund"
as that term was generally understood, they presumably would have stood
up for Kyrie. Her 1990 sentence did indeed send a "message" that
federal heat was coming down on "hackers." But Kyrie found no
defenders at EFF, or anywhere else, for that matter. EFF was not a
bail-out fund for electronic crooks.
The Neidorf case paralleled the Shadowhawk case in certain ways.
The victim once again was allowed to set the value of the "stolen"
property. Once again Kluepfel was both investigator and technical
advisor. Once again no money had changed hands, but the "intent to
defraud" was central.
The prosecution's case showed signs of weakness early on. The Task
Force had originally hoped to prove Neidorf the center of a nationwide
Legion of Doom criminal conspiracy. The *Phrack* editors threw
physical get-togethers every summer, which attracted hackers from
across the country; generally two dozen or so of the magazine's
favorite contributors and readers. (Such conventions were common in
the hacker community; 2600 Magazine, for instance, held public meetings
of hackers in New York, every month.) LoD heavy-dudes were always a
strong presence at these *Phrack*-sponsored "Summercons."
In July 1988, an Arizona hacker named "Dictator" attended Summercon
in Neidorf's home town of St. Louis. Dictator was one of Gail
Thackeray's underground informants; Dictator's underground board in
Phoenix was a sting operation for the Secret Service. Dictator brought
an undercover crew of Secret Service agents to Summercon. The agents
bored spyholes through the wall of Dictator's hotel room in St Louis,
and videotaped the frolicking hackers through a one-way mirror. As it
happened, however, nothing illegal had occurred on videotape, other
than the guzzling of beer by a couple of minors. Summercons were
social events, not sinister cabals. The tapes showed fifteen hours of
raucous laughter, pizza-gobbling, in-jokes and back-slapping.
Neidorf's lawyer, Sheldon Zenner, saw the Secret Service tapes
before the trial. Zenner was shocked by the complete harmlessness of
this meeting, which Cook had earlier characterized as a sinister
interstate conspiracy to commit fraud. Zenner wanted to show the
Summercon tapes to the jury. It took protracted maneuverings by the
Task Force to keep the tapes from the jury as "irrelevant."
The E911 Document was also proving a weak reed. It had originally
been valued at $79,449. Unlike Shadowhawk's arcane Artificial
Intelligence booty, the E911 Document was not software -- it was
written in English. Computer-knowledgeable people found this value --
for a twelve-page bureaucratic document -- frankly incredible. In his
"Crime and Puzzlement" manifesto for EFF, Barlow commented: "We will
probably never know how this figure was reached or by whom, though I
like to imagine an appraisal team consisting of Franz Kafka, Joseph
Heller, and Thomas Pynchon."
As it happened, Barlow was unduly pessimistic. The EFF did, in
fact, eventually discover exactly how this figure was reached, and by
whom -- but only in 1991, long after the Neidorf trial was over.
Kim Megahee, a Southern Bell security manager, had arrived at the
document's value by simply adding up the "costs associated with the
production" of the E911 Document. Those "costs" were as follows:
1. A technical writer had been hired to research and write the E911
Document. 200 hours of work, at $35 an hour, cost : $7,000. A Project
Manager had overseen the technical writer. 200 hours, at $31 an hour,
made: $6,200.
2. A week of typing had cost $721 dollars. A week of formatting
had cost $721. A week of graphics formatting had cost $742.
3. Two days of editing cost $367.
4. A box of order labels cost five dollars.
5. Preparing a purchase order for the Document, including typing
and the obtaining of an authorizing signature from within the BellSouth
bureaucracy, cost $129.
6. Printing cost $313. Mailing the Document to fifty people took
fifty hours by a clerk, and cost $858.
7. Placing the Document in an index took two clerks an hour each,
totalling $43.
Bureaucratic overhead alone, therefore, was alleged to have cost a
whopping $17,099. According to Mr. Megahee, the typing of a
twelve-page document had taken a full week. Writing it had taken five
weeks, including an overseer who apparently did nothing else but watch
the author for five weeks. Editing twelve pages had taken two days.
Printing and mailing an electronic document (which was already
available on the Southern Bell Data Network to any telco employee who
needed it), had cost over a thousand dollars.
But this was just the beginning. There were also the *hardware
expenses.* Eight hundred fifty dollars for a VT220 computer monitor.
*Thirty-one thousand dollars* for a sophisticated VAXstation II
computer. Six thousand dollars for a computer printer. *Twenty-two
thousand dollars* for a copy of "Interleaf" software. Two thousand
five hundred dollars for VMS software. All this to create the
twelve-page Document.
Plus ten percent of the cost of the software and the hardware, for
maintenance. (Actually, the ten percent maintenance costs, though
mentioned, had been left off the final $79,449 total, apparently
through a merciful oversight).
Mr. Megahee's letter had been mailed directly to William Cook
himself, at the office of the Chicago federal attorneys. The United
States Government accepted these telco figures without question.
As incredulity mounted, the value of the E911 Document was
officially revised downward. This time, Robert Kibler of BellSouth
Security estimated the value of the twelve pages as a mere $24,639.05
-- based, purportedly, on "R&D costs." But this specific estimate,
right down to the nickel, did not move the skeptics at all; in fact it
provoked open scorn and a torrent of sarcasm.
The financial issues concerning theft of proprietary information
have always been peculiar. It could be argued that BellSouth had not
"lost" its E911 Document at all in the first place, and therefore had
not suffered any monetary damage from this "theft." And Sheldon Zenner
did in fact argue this at Neidorf's trial -- that Prophet's raid had
not been "theft," but was better understood as illicit copying.
The money, however, was not central to anyone's true purposes in
this trial. It was not Cook's strategy to convince the jury that the
E911 Document was a major act of theft and should be punished for that
reason alone. His strategy was to argue that the E911 Document was
*dangerous.* It was his intention to establish that the E911 Document
was "a road-map" to the Enhanced 911 System. Neidorf had deliberately
and recklessly distributed a dangerous weapon. Neidorf and the
Prophet did not care (or perhaps even gloated at the sinister idea)
that the E911 Document could be used by hackers to disrupt 911 service,
"a life line for every person certainly in the Southern Bell region of
the United States, and indeed, in many communities throughout the United
States," in Cook's own words. Neidorf had put people's lives in danger.
In pre-trial maneuverings, Cook had established that the E911
Document was too hot to appear in the public proceedings of the Neidorf
trial. The *jury itself* would not be allowed to ever see this
Document, lest it slip into the official court records, and thus into
the hands of the general public, and, thus, somehow, to malicious
hackers who might lethally abuse it.
Hiding the E911 Document from the jury may have been a clever legal
maneuver, but it had a severe flaw. There were, in point of fact,
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people, already in possession of the
E911 Document, just as *Phrack* had published it. Its true nature was
already obvious to a wide section of the interested public (all of
whom, by the way, were, at least theoretically, party to a gigantic
wire-fraud conspiracy). Most everyone in the electronic community who
had a modem and any interest in the Neidorf case already had a copy of
the Document. It had already been available in *Phrack* for over a year.
People, even quite normal people without any particular prurient
interest in forbidden knowledge, did not shut their eyes in terror at
the thought of beholding a "dangerous" document from a telephone
company. On the contrary, they tended to trust their own judgement and
simply read the Document for themselves. And they were not impressed.
One such person was John Nagle. Nagle was a forty-one-year-old
professional programmer with a masters' degree in computer science from
Stanford. He had worked for Ford Aerospace, where he had invented a
computer-networking technique known as the "Nagle Algorithm," and for
the prominent Californian computer-graphics firm "Autodesk," where he
was a major stockholder.
Nagle was also a prominent figure on the Well, much respected for
his technical knowledgeability.
Nagle had followed the civil-liberties debate closely, for he was an
ardent telecommunicator. He was no particular friend of computer
intruders, but he believed electronic publishing had a great deal to
offer society at large, and attempts to restrain its growth, or to
censor free electronic expression, strongly roused his ire.
The Neidorf case, and the E911 Document, were both being discussed
in detail on the Internet, in an electronic publication called *Telecom
Digest.* Nagle, a longtime Internet maven, was a regular reader of
*Telecom Digest.* Nagle had never seen a copy of *Phrack,* but the
implications of the case disturbed him.
While in a Stanford bookstore hunting books on robotics, Nagle
happened across a book called *The Intelligent Network.* Thumbing
through it at random, Nagle came across an entire chapter meticulously
detailing the workings of E911 police emergency systems. This extensive
text was being sold openly, and yet in Illinois a young man was in
danger of going to prison for publishing a thin six-page document about
911 service.
Nagle made an ironic comment to this effect in *Telecom Digest.*
From there, Nagle was put in touch with Mitch Kapor, and then with
Neidorf's lawyers.
Sheldon Zenner was delighted to find a computer telecommunications
expert willing to speak up for Neidorf, one who was not a wacky
teenage "hacker." Nagle was fluent, mature, and respectable; he'd once
had a federal security clearance.
Nagle was asked to fly to Illinois to join the defense team.
Having joined the defense as an expert witness, Nagle read the
entire E911 Document for himself. He made his own judgement about its
potential for menace.
The time has now come for you yourself, the reader, to have a look
at the E911 Document. This six-page piece of work was the pretext for
a federal prosecution that could have sent an electronic publisher to
prison for thirty, or even sixty, years. It was the pretext for the
search and seizure of Steve Jackson Games, a legitimate publisher of
printed books. It was also the formal pretext for the search and
seizure of the Mentor's bulletin board, "Phoenix Project," and for the
raid on the home of Erik Bloodaxe. It also had much to do with the
seizure of Richard Andrews' Jolnet node and the shutdown of Charles
Boykin's AT&T node. The E911 Document was the single most important
piece of evidence in the Hacker Crackdown. There can be no real and
legitimate substitute for the Document itself.
==Phrack Inc.==
Volume Two, Issue 24, File 5 of 13
Control Office Administration
Of Enhanced 911 Services For
Special Services and Account Centers
by the Eavesdropper
March, 1988
Description of Service
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The control office for Emergency 911 service is assigned in
accordance with the existing standard guidelines to one of
the following centers:
o Special Services Center (SSC)
o Major Accounts Center (MAC)
o Serving Test Center (STC)
o Toll Control Center (TCC)
The SSC/MAC designation is used in this document
interchangeably for any of these four centers. The Special
Services Centers (SSCs) or Major Account Centers
(MACs) have been designated as the trouble reporting
contact for all E911 customer (PSAP) reported troubles.
Subscribers who have trouble on an E911 call will continue
to contact local repair service (CRSAB) who will refer the
trouble to the SSC/MAC, when appropriate.
Due to the critical nature of E911 service, the control and
timely repair of troubles is demanded. As the primary
E911 customer contact, the SSC/MAC is in the unique
position to monitor the status of the trouble and insure its
resolution.
System Overview
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The number 911 is intended as a nationwide universal
telephone number which provides the public with direct
access to a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP). A PSAP
is also referred to as an Emergency Service Bureau (ESB).
A PSAP is an agency or facility which is authorized by a
municipality to receive and respond to police, fire and/or
ambulance services. One or more attendants are located
at the PSAP facilities to receive and handle calls of an
emergency nature in accordance with the local municipal
requirements.
An important advantage of E911 emergency service is
improved (reduced) response times for emergency
services. Also close coordination among agencies
providing various emergency services is a valuable
capability provided by E911 service.
1A ESS is used as the tandem office for the E911 network to
route all 911 calls to the correct (primary) PSAP designated
to serve the calling station. The E911 feature was
developed primarily to provide routing to the correct PSAP
for all 911 calls. Selective routing allows a 911 call
originated from a particular station located in a particular
district, zone, or town, to be routed to the primary PSAP
designated to serve that customer station regardless of
wire center boundaries. Thus, selective routing eliminates
the problem of wire center boundaries not coinciding with
district or other political boundaries.
The services available with the E911 feature include:
Forced Disconnect Default Routing
Alternative Routing Night Service
Selective Routing Automatic Number
Identification (ANI)
Selective Transfer Automatic Location
Identification (ALI)
Preservice/Installation Guidelines
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When a contract for an E911 system has been signed, it is
the responsibility of Network Marketing to establish an
implementation/cutover committee which should include
a representative from the SSC/MAC. Duties of the E911
Implementation Team include coordination of all phases
of the E911 system deployment and the formation of an
on-going E911 maintenance subcommittee.
Marketing is responsible for providing the following
customer specific information to the SSC/MAC prior to
the start of call through testing:
o All PSAP's (name, address, local contact)
o All PSAP circuit ID's
o 1004 911 service request including PSAP details on each
PSAP (1004 Section K, L, M)
o Network configuration
o Any vendor information (name, telephone number,
equipment)
The SSC/MAC needs to know if the equipment and sets at
the PSAP are maintained by the BOCs, an independent
company, or an outside vendor, or any combination. This
information is then entered on the PSAP profile sheets
and reviewed quarterly for changes, additions and
deletions.
Marketing will secure the Major Account Number (MAN)
and provide this number to Corporate Communications
so that the initial issue of the service orders carry the
MAN and can be tracked by the SSC/MAC via
CORDNET. PSAP circuits are official services by
definition.
All service orders required for the installation of the E911
system should include the MAN assigned to the
city/county which has purchased the system.
In accordance with the basic SSC/MAC strategy for
provisioning, the SSC/MAC will be Overall Control Office
(OCO) for all Node to PSAP circuits (official services) and
any other services for this customer. Training must be
scheduled for all SSC/MAC involved personnel during the
pre-service stage of the project.
The E911 Implementation Team will form the on-going
maintenance subcommittee prior to the initial
implementation of the E911 system. This sub-committee
will establish post implementation quality assurance
procedures to ensure that the E911 system continues to
provide quality service to the customer.
Customer/Company training, trouble reporting interfaces
for the customer, telephone company and any involved
independent telephone companies needs to be addressed
and implemented prior to E911 cutover. These functions
can be best addressed by the formation of a sub-committee
of the E911 Implementation Team to set up
guidelines for and to secure service commitments of
interfacing organizations. A SSC/MAC supervisor should
chair this subcommittee and include the following
organizations:
1) Switching Control Center
- E911 translations
- Trunking
- End office and Tandem office hardware/software
2) Recent Change Memory Administration Center
- Daily RC update activity for TN/ESN translations
- Processes validity errors and rejects
3) Line and Number Administration
- Verification of TN/ESN translations
4) Special Service Center/Major Account Center
- Single point of contact for all PSAP and Node to host
troubles
- Logs, tracks & statusing of all trouble reports
- Trouble referral, follow up, and escalation
- Customer notification of status and restoration
- Analyzation of ``chronic'' troubles
- Testing, installation and maintenance of E911 circuits
5) Installation and Maintenance (SSIM/I&M)
- Repair and maintenance of PSAP equipment and
Telco owned sets
6) Minicomputer Maintenance Operations Center
- E911 circuit maintenance (where applicable)
7) Area Maintenance Engineer
- Technical assistance on voice (CO-PSAP) network
related E911 troubles
Maintenance Guidelines
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The CCNC will test the Node circuit from the 202T at the
Host site to the 202T at the Node site. Since Host to Node
(CCNC to MMOC) circuits are official company services,
the CCNC will refer all Node circuit troubles to the
SSC/MAC. The SSC/MAC is responsible for the testing
and follow up to restoration of these circuit troubles.
Although Node to PSAP circuit are official services, the
MMOC will refer PSAP circuit troubles to the appropriate
SSC/MAC. The SSC/MAC is responsible for testing and
follow up to restoration of PSAP circuit troubles.
The SSC/MAC will also receive reports from
CRSAB/IMC(s) on subscriber 911 troubles when they are
not line troubles. The SSC/MAC is responsible for testing
and restoration of these troubles.
Maintenance responsibilities are as follows:
SCC* Voice Network (ANI to PSAP)
*SCC responsible for tandem switch
SSIM/I&M PSAP Equipment (Modems, CIU's, sets)
Vendor PSAP Equipment (when CPE)
SSC/MAC PSAP to Node circuits, and tandem to
PSAP voice circuits (EMNT)
MMOC Node site (Modems, cables, etc)
Note: All above work groups are required to resolve
troubles by interfacing with appropriate work groups for
resolution.
The Switching Control Center (SCC) is responsible for
E911/1AESS translations in tandem central offices. These
translations route E911 calls, selective transfer, default
routing, speed calling, etc., for each PSAP. The SCC is also
responsible for troubleshooting on the voice network (call
originating to end office tandem equipment).
For example, ANI failures in the originating offices would
be a responsibility of the SCC.
Recent Change Memory Administration Center
(RCMAC) performs the daily tandem translation updates
(recent change) for routing of individual telephone
numbers.
Recent changes are generated from service order activity
(new service, address changes, etc.) and compiled into a
daily file by the E911 Center (ALI/DMS E911 Computer).
SSIM/I&M is responsible for the installation and repair of
PSAP equipment. PSAP equipment includes ANI
Controller, ALI Controller, data sets, cables, sets, and
other peripheral equipment that is not vendor owned.
SSIM/I&M is responsible for establishing maintenance
test kits, complete with spare parts for PSAP maintenance.
This includes test gear, data sets, and ANI/ALI Controller
parts.
Special Services Center (SSC) or Major Account Center
(MAC) serves as the trouble reporting contact for all
(PSAP) troubles reported by customer. The SSC/MAC
refers troubles to proper organizations for handling and
tracks status of troubles, escalating when necessary. The
SSC/MAC will close out troubles with customer. The
SSC/MAC will analyze all troubles and tracks ``chronic''
PSAP troubles.
Corporate Communications Network Center (CCNC) will
test and refer troubles on all node to host circuits. All E911
circuits are classified as official company property.
The Minicomputer Maintenance Operations Center
(MMOC) maintains the E911 (ALI/DMS) computer
hardware at the Host site. This MMOC is also responsible
for monitoring the system and reporting certain PSAP and
system problems to the local MMOC's, SCC's or
SSC/MAC's. The MMOC personnel also operate software
programs that maintain the TN data base under the
direction of the E911 Center. The maintenance of the
NODE computer (the interface between the PSAP and the
ALI/DMS computer) is a function of the MMOC at the
NODE site. The MMOC's at the NODE sites may also be
involved in the testing of NODE to Host circuits. The
MMOC will also assist on Host to PSAP and data network
related troubles not resolved through standard trouble
clearing procedures.
Installation And Maintenance Center (IMC) is
responsible for referral of E911 subscriber troubles that
are not subscriber line problems.
E911 Center - Performs the role of System Administration
and is responsible for overall operation of the E911
computer software. The E911 Center does A-Z trouble
analysis and provides statistical information on the
performance of the system.
This analysis includes processing PSAP inquiries (trouble
reports) and referral of network troubles. The E911 Center
also performs daily processing of tandem recent change
and provides information to the RCMAC for tandem
input. The E911 Center is responsible for daily processing
of the ALI/DMS computer data base and provides error
files, etc. to the Customer Services department for
investigation and correction. The E911 Center participates
in all system implementations and on-going maintenance
effort and assists in the development of procedures,
training and education of information to all groups.
Any group receiving a 911 trouble from the SSC/MAC
should close out the trouble with the SSC/MAC or provide
a status if the trouble has been referred to another group.
This will allow the SSC/MAC to provide a status back to
the customer or escalate as appropriate.
Any group receiving a trouble from the Host site (MMOC
or CCNC) should close the trouble back to that group.
The MMOC should notify the appropriate SSC/MAC
when the Host, Node, or all Node circuits are down so that
the SSC/MAC can reply to customer reports that may be
called in by the PSAPs. This will eliminate duplicate
reporting of troubles. On complete outages the MMOC
will follow escalation procedures for a Node after two (2)
hours and for a PSAP after four (4) hours. Additionally the
MMOC will notify the appropriate SSC/MAC when the
Host, Node, or all Node circuits are down.
The PSAP will call the SSC/MAC to report E911 troubles.
The person reporting the E911 trouble may not have a
circuit I.D. and will therefore report the PSAP name and
address. Many PSAP troubles are not circuit specific. In
those instances where the caller cannot provide a circuit
I.D., the SSC/MAC will be required to determine the
circuit I.D. using the PSAP profile. Under no
circumstances will the SSC/MAC Center refuse to take
the trouble. The E911 trouble should be handled as
quickly as possible, with the SSC/MAC providing as much
assistance as possible while taking the trouble report from
the caller.
The SSC/MAC will screen/test the trouble to determine
the appropriate handoff organization based on the
following criteria:
PSAP equipment problem: SSIM/I&M
Circuit problem: SSC/MAC
Voice network problem: SCC (report trunk group number)
Problem affecting multiple PSAPs (No ALI report from
all PSAPs): Contact the MMOC to check for NODE or
Host computer problems before further testing.
The SSC/MAC will track the status of reported troubles
and escalate as appropriate. The SSC/MAC will close out
customer/company reports with the initiating contact.
Groups with specific maintenance responsibilities,
defined above, will investigate ``chronic'' troubles upon
request from the SSC/MAC and the ongoing maintenance
subcommittee.
All ``out of service'' E911 troubles are priority one type
reports. One link down to a PSAP is considered a priority
one trouble and should be handled as if the PSAP was
isolated.
The PSAP will report troubles with the ANI controller, ALI
controller or set equipment to the SSC/MAC.
NO ANI: Where the PSAP reports NO ANI (digital
display screen is blank) ask if this condition exists on all
screens and on all calls. It is important to differentiate
between blank screens and screens displaying 911-00XX,
or all zeroes.
When the PSAP reports all screens on all calls, ask if there
is any voice contact with callers. If there is no voice
contact the trouble should be referred to the SCC
immediately since 911 calls are not getting through which
may require alternate routing of calls to another PSAP.
When the PSAP reports this condition on all screens but
not all calls and has voice contact with callers, the report
should be referred to SSIM/I&M for dispatch. The
SSC/MAC should verify with the SCC that ANI is pulsing
before dispatching SSIM.
When the PSAP reports this condition on one screen for
all calls (others work fine) the trouble should be referred to
SSIM/I&M for dispatch, because the trouble is isolated to
one piece of equipment at the customer premise.
An ANI failure (i.e. all zeroes) indicates that the ANI has
not been received by the PSAP from the tandem office or
was lost by the PSAP ANI controller. The PSAP may
receive ``02'' alarms which can be caused by the ANI
controller logging more than three all zero failures on the
same trunk. The PSAP has been instructed to report this
condition to the SSC/MAC since it could indicate an
equipment trouble at the PSAP which might be affecting
all subscribers calling into the PSAP. When all zeroes are
being received on all calls or ``02'' alarms continue, a tester
should analyze the condition to determine the appropriate
action to be taken. The tester must perform cooperative
testing with the SCC when there appears to be a problem
on the Tandem-PSAP trunks before requesting dispatch.
When an occasional all zero condition is reported, the
SSC/MAC should dispatch SSIM/I&M to routine
equipment on a ``chronic'' troublesweep.
The PSAPs are instructed to report incidental ANI failures
to the BOC on a PSAP inquiry trouble ticket (paper) that is
sent to the Customer Services E911 group and forwarded
to E911 center when required. This usually involves only a
particular telephone number and is not a condition that
would require a report to the SSC/MAC. Multiple ANI
failures which our from the same end office (XX denotes
end office), indicate a hard trouble condition may exist in
the end office or end office tandem trunks. The PSAP will
report this type of condition to the SSC/MAC and the
SSC/MAC should refer the report to the SCC responsible
for the tandem office. NOTE: XX is the ESCO (Emergency
Service Number) associated with the incoming 911 trunks
into the tandem. It is important that the C/MAC tell the
SCC what is displayed at the PSAP (i.e. 911-0011) which
indicates to the SCC which end office is in trouble.
Note: It is essential that the PSAP fill out inquiry form on
every ANI failure.
The PSAP will report a trouble any time an address is not
received on an address display (screen blank) E911 call.
(If a record is not in the 911 data base or an ANI failure is
encountered, the screen will provide a display noticing
such condition). The SSC/MAC should verify with the
PSAP whether the NO ALI condition is on one screen or all
screens.
When the condition is on one screen (other screens
receive ALI information) the SSC/MAC will request
SSIM/I&M to dispatch.
If no screens are receiving ALI information, there is
usually a circuit trouble between the PSAP and the Host
computer. The SSC/MAC should test the trouble and
refer for restoral.
Note: If the SSC/MAC receives calls from multiple
PSAP's, all of which are receiving NO ALI, there is a
problem with the Node or Node to Host circuits or the
Host computer itself. Before referring the trouble the
SSC/MAC should call the MMOC to inquire if the Node
or Host is in trouble.
Alarm conditions on the ANI controller digital display at
the PSAP are to be reported by the PSAP's. These alarms
can indicate various trouble conditions so the SSC/MAC
should ask the PSAP if any portion of the E911 system is
not functioning properly.
The SSC/MAC should verify with the PSAP attendant that
the equipment's primary function is answering E911 calls.
If it is, the SSC/MAC should request a dispatch
SSIM/I&M. If the equipment is not primarily used for
E911, then the SSC/MAC should advise PSAP to contact
their CPE vendor.
Note: These troubles can be quite confusing when the
PSAP has vendor equipment mixed in with equipment
that the BOC maintains. The Marketing representative
should provide the SSC/MAC information concerning any
unusual or exception items where the PSAP should
contact their vendor. This information should be included
in the PSAP profile sheets.
ANI or ALI controller down: When the host computer
sees the PSAP equipment down and it does not come back
up, the MMOC will report the trouble to the SSC/MAC;
the equipment is down at the PSAP, a dispatch will be
required.
PSAP link (circuit) down: The MMOC will provide the
SSC/MAC with the circuit ID that the Host computer
indicates in trouble. Although each PSAP has two circuits,
when either circuit is down the condition must be treated
as an emergency since failure of the second circuit will
cause the PSAP to be isolated.
Any problems that the MMOC identifies from the Node
location to the Host computer will be handled directly with
the appropriate MMOC(s)/CCNC.
Note: The customer will call only when a problem is
apparent to the PSAP. When only one circuit is down to
the PSAP, the customer may not be aware there is a
trouble, even though there is one link down, notification
should appear on the PSAP screen. Troubles called into
the SSC/MAC from the MMOC or other company
employee should not be closed out by calling the PSAP
since it may result in the customer responding that they
do not have a trouble. These reports can only be closed
out by receiving information that the trouble was fixed
and by checking with the company employee that
reported the trouble. The MMOC personnel will be able
to verify that the trouble has cleared by reviewing a
printout from the host.
When the CRSAB receives a subscriber complaint (i.e.,
cannot dial 911) the RSA should obtain as much
information as possible while the customer is on the line.
For example, what happened when the subscriber dialed
911? The report is automatically directed to the IMC for
subscriber line testing. When no line trouble is found, the
IMC will refer the trouble condition to the SSC/MAC. The
SSC/MAC will contact Customer Services E911 Group and
verify that the subscriber should be able to call 911 and
obtain the ESN. The SSC/MAC will verify the ESN via
2SCCS. When both verifications match, the SSC/MAC
will refer the report to the SCC responsible for the 911
tandem office for investigation and resolution. The MAC
is responsible for tracking the trouble and informing the
IMC when it is resolved.
For more information, please refer to E911 Glossary of
Terms.
End of Phrack File
The reader is forgiven if he or she was entirely unable to read this
document. John Perry Barlow had a great deal of fun at its expense,
in "Crime and Puzzlement:" "Bureaucrat-ese of surpassing opacity... To
read the whole thing straight through without entering coma requires
either a machine or a human who has too much practice thinking like
one. Anyone who can understand it fully and fluidly had altered his
consciousness beyone the ability to ever again read Blake, Whitman, or
Tolstoy... the document contains little of interest to anyone who is
not a student of advanced organizational sclerosis."
With the Document itself to hand, however, exactly as it was
published (in its six-page edited form) in *Phrack,* the reader may be
able to verify a few statements of fact about its nature. First,
there is no software, no computer code, in the Document. It is not
computer-programming language like FORTRAN or C++, it is English; all
the sentences have nouns and verbs and punctuation. It does not
explain how to break into the E911 system. It does not suggest ways to
destroy or damage the E911 system.
There are no access codes in the Document. There are no computer
passwords. It does not explain how to steal long distance service. It
does not explain how to break in to telco switching stations. There is
nothing in it about using a personal computer or a modem for any
purpose at all, good or bad.
Close study will reveal that this document is not about machinery.
The E911 Document is about *administration.* It describes how one
creates and administers certain units of telco bureaucracy: Special
Service Centers and Major Account Centers (SSC/MAC). It describes how
these centers should distribute responsibility for the E911 service, to
other units of telco bureaucracy, in a chain of command, a formal
hierarchy. It describes who answers customer complaints, who screens
calls, who reports equipment failures, who answers those reports, who
handles maintenance, who chairs subcommittees, who gives orders, who
follows orders, *who* tells *whom* what to do. The Document is not a
"roadmap" to computers. The Document is a roadmap to *people.*
As an aid to breaking into computer systems, the Document is
*useless.* As an aid to harassing and deceiving telco people,
however, the Document might prove handy (especially with its Glossary,
which I have not included). An intense and protracted study of this
Document and its Glossary, combined with many other such documents,
might teach one to speak like a telco employee. And telco people live
by *speech* -- they live by phone communication. If you can mimic
their language over the phone, you can "social-engineer" them. If you
can con telco people, you can wreak havoc among them. You can force
them to no longer trust one another; you can break the telephonic ties
that bind their community; you can make them paranoid. And people
will fight harder to defend their community than they will fight to
defend their individual selves.
This was the genuine, gut-level threat posed by *Phrack* magazine.
The real struggle was over the control of telco language, the control
of telco knowledge. It was a struggle to defend the social "membrane of
differentiation" that forms the walls of the telco community's ivory
tower -- the special jargon that allows telco professionals to
recognize one another, and to exclude charlatans, thieves, and
upstarts. And the prosecution brought out this fact. They repeatedly
made reference to the threat posed to telco professionals by hackers
using "social engineering."
However, Craig Neidorf was not on trial for learning to speak like a
professional telecommunications expert. Craig Neidorf was on trial for
access device fraud and transportation of stolen property. He was on
trial for stealing a document that was purportedly highly sensitive and
purportedly worth tens of thousands of dollars.
#
John Nagle read the E911 Document. He drew his own conclusions.
And he presented Zenner and his defense team with an overflowing box
of similar material, drawn mostly from Stanford University's engineering
libraries. During the trial, the defense team -- Zenner, half-a-dozen
other attorneys, Nagle, Neidorf, and computer-security expert Dorothy
Denning, all pored over the E911 Document line-by-line.
On the afternoon of July 25, 1990, Zenner began to cross-examine a
woman named Billie Williams, a service manager for Southern Bell in
Atlanta. Ms. Williams had been responsible for the E911 Document.
(She was not its author -- its original "author" was a Southern Bell
staff manager named Richard Helms. However, Mr. Helms should not bear
the entire blame; many telco staff people and maintenance personnel had
amended the Document. It had not been so much "written" by a single
author, as built by committee out of concrete-blocks of jargon.)
Ms. Williams had been called as a witness for the prosecution, and
had gamely tried to explain the basic technical structure of the E911
system, aided by charts.
Now it was Zenner's turn. He first established that the
"proprietary stamp" that BellSouth had used on the E911 Document was
stamped on *every single document* that BellSouth wrote -- *thousands*
of documents. "We do not publish anything other than for our own
company," Ms. Williams explained. "Any company document of this nature
is considered proprietary." Nobody was in charge of singling out
special high-security publications for special high-security
protection. They were *all* special, no matter how trivial, no matter
what their subject matter -- the stamp was put on as soon as any
document was written, and the stamp was never removed.
Zenner now asked whether the charts she had been using to explain
the mechanics of E911 system were "proprietary," too. Were they
*public information,* these charts, all about PSAPs, ALIs, nodes,
local end switches? Could he take the charts out in the street and show
them to anybody, "without violating some proprietary notion that
BellSouth has?"
Ms Williams showed some confusion, but finally agreed that the
charts were, in fact, public.
"But isn't this what you said was basically what appeared in
*Phrack?*"
Ms. Williams denied this.
Zenner now pointed out that the E911 Document as published in Phrack
was only half the size of the original E911 Document (as Prophet had
purloined it). Half of it had been deleted -- edited by Neidorf.
Ms. Williams countered that "Most of the information that is in the
text file is redundant."
Zenner continued to probe. Exactly what bits of knowledge in the
Document were, in fact, unknown to the public? Locations of E911
computers? Phone numbers for telco personnel? Ongoing maintenance
subcommittees? Hadn't Neidorf removed much of this?
Then he pounced. "Are you familiar with Bellcore Technical
Reference Document TR-TSY-000350?" It was, Zenner explained,
officially titled "E911 Public Safety Answering Point Interface Between
1-1AESS Switch and Customer Premises Equipment." It contained highly
detailed and specific technical information about the E911 System. It
was published by Bellcore and publicly available for about $20.
He showed the witness a Bellcore catalog which listed thousands of
documents from Bellcore and from all the Baby Bells, BellSouth
included. The catalog, Zenner pointed out, was free. Anyone with a
credit card could call the Bellcore toll-free 800 number and simply
order any of these documents, which would be shipped to any customer
without question. Including, for instance, "BellSouth E911 Service
Interfaces to Customer Premises Equipment at a Public Safety Answering
Point."
Zenner gave the witness a copy of "BellSouth E911 Service
Interfaces," which cost, as he pointed out, $13, straight from the
catalog. "Look at it carefully," he urged Ms. Williams, "and tell me
if it doesn't contain about twice as much detailed information about
the E911 system of BellSouth than appeared anywhere in *Phrack.*"
"You want me to..." Ms. Williams trailed off. "I don't understand."
"Take a careful look," Zenner persisted. "Take a look at that
document, and tell me when you're done looking at it if, indeed, it
doesn't contain much more detailed information about the E911 system
than appeared in *Phrack.*"
"*Phrack* wasn't taken from this," Ms. Williams said.
"Excuse me?" said Zenner.
"*Phrack* wasn't taken from this."
"I can't hear you," Zenner said.
"*Phrack* was not taken from this document. I don't understand your
question to me."
"I guess you don't," Zenner said.
At this point, the prosecution's case had been gutshot. Ms.
Williams was distressed. Her confusion was quite genuine. *Phrack*
had not been taken from any publicly available Bellcore document.
*Phrack*'s E911 Document had been stolen from her own company's
computers, from her own company's text files, that her own colleagues
had written, and revised, with much labor.
But the "value" of the Document had been blown to smithereens. It
wasn't worth eighty grand. According to Bellcore it was worth thirteen
bucks. And the looming menace that it supposedly posed had been
reduced in instants to a scarecrow. Bellcore itself was selling
material far more detailed and "dangerous," to anybody with a credit
card and a phone.
Actually, Bellcore was not giving this information to just anybody.
They gave it to *anybody who asked,* but not many did ask. Not many
people knew that Bellcore had a free catalog and an 800 number. John
Nagle knew, but certainly the average teenage phreak didn't know.
"Tuc," a friend of Neidorf's and sometime *Phrack* contributor, knew,
and Tuc had been very helpful to the defense, behind the scenes. But
the Legion of Doom didn't know -- otherwise, they would never have
wasted so much time raiding dumpsters. Cook didn't know. Foley didn't
know. Kluepfel didn't know. The right hand of Bellcore knew not what
the left hand was doing. The right hand was battering hackers without
mercy, while the left hand was distributing Bellcore's intellectual
property to anybody who was interested in telephone technical trivia --
apparently, a pathetic few.
The digital underground was so amateurish and poorly organized that
they had never discovered this heap of unguarded riches. The ivory
tower of the telcos was so wrapped-up in the fog of its own technical
obscurity that it had left all the windows open and flung open the
doors. No one had even noticed.
Zenner sank another nail in the coffin. He produced a printed issue
of *Telephone Engineer & Management,* a prominent industry journal that
comes out twice a month and costs $27 a year. This particular issue of
*TE&M,* called "Update on 911," featured a galaxy of technical details
on 911 service and a glossary far more extensive than *Phrack*'s.
The trial rumbled on, somehow, through its own momentum. Tim Foley
testified about his interrogations of Neidorf. Neidorf's written
admission that he had known the E911 Document was pilfered was
officially read into the court record.
An interesting side issue came up: "Terminus" had once passed
Neidorf a piece of UNIX AT&T software, a log-in sequence, that had been
cunningly altered so that it could trap passwords. The UNIX software
itself was illegally copied AT&T property, and the alterations
"Terminus" had made to it, had transformed it into a device for
facilitating computer break-ins. Terminus himself would eventually
plead guilty to theft of this piece of software, and the Chicago group
would send Terminus to prison for it. But it was of dubious relevance
in the Neidorf case. Neidorf hadn't written the program. He wasn't
accused of ever having used it. And Neidorf wasn't being charged with
software theft or owning a password trapper.
On the next day, Zenner took the offensive. The civil libertarians
now had their own arcane, untried legal weaponry to launch into action
-- the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, 18 US Code,
Section 2701 et seq. Section 2701 makes it a crime to intentionally
access without authorization a facility in which an electronic
communication service is provided -- it is, at heart, an anti-bugging
and anti-tapping law, intended to carry the traditional protections of
telephones into other electronic channels of communication. While
providing penalties for amateur snoops, however, Section 2703 of the
ECPA also lays some formal difficulties on the bugging and tapping
activities of police.
The Secret Service, in the person of Tim Foley, had served Richard
Andrews with a federal grand jury subpoena, in their pursuit of
Prophet, the E911 Document, and the Terminus software ring. But
according to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a "provider of
remote computing service" was legally entitled to "prior notice" from
the government if a subpoena was used. Richard Andrews and his basement
UNIX node, Jolnet, had not received any "prior notice." Tim Foley had
purportedly violated the ECPA and committed an electronic crime!
Zenner now sought the judge's permission to cross-examine Foley on the
topic of Foley's own electronic misdeeds.
Cook argued that Richard Andrews' Jolnet was a privately owned
bulletin board, and not within the purview of ECPA. Judge Bua granted
the motion of the government to prevent cross-examination on that point,
and Zenner's offensive fizzled. This, however, was the first direct
assault on the legality of the actions of the Computer Fraud and Abuse
Task Force itself -- the first suggestion that they themselves had
broken the law, and might, perhaps, be called to account.
Zenner, in any case, did not really need the ECPA. Instead, he
grilled Foley on the glaring contradictions in the supposed value of
the E911 Document. He also brought up the embarrassing fact that the
supposedly red-hot E911 Document had been sitting around for months, in
Jolnet, with Kluepfel's knowledge, while Kluepfel had done nothing
about it.
In the afternoon, the Prophet was brought in to testify for the
prosecution. (The Prophet, it will be recalled, had also been indicted
in the case as partner in a fraud scheme with Neidorf.) In Atlanta,
the Prophet had already pled guilty to one charge of conspiracy, one
charge of wire fraud and one charge of interstate transportation of
stolen property. The wire fraud charge, and the stolen property
charge, were both directly based on the E911 Document.
The twenty-year-old Prophet proved a sorry customer, answering
questions politely but in a barely audible mumble, his voice trailing
off at the ends of sentences. He was constantly urged to speak up.
Cook, examining Prophet, forced him to admit that he had once had a
"drug problem," abusing amphetamines, marijuana, cocaine, and LSD.
This may have established to the jury that "hackers" are, or can be,
seedy lowlife characters, but it may have damaged Prophet's credibility
somewhat. Zenner later suggested that drugs might have damaged
Prophet's memory. The interesting fact also surfaced that Prophet had
never physically met Craig Neidorf. He didn't even know Neidorf's last
name -- at least, not until the trial.
Prophet confirmed the basic facts of his hacker career. He was a
member of the Legion of Doom. He had abused codes, he had broken into
switching stations and re-routed calls, he had hung out on pirate
bulletin boards. He had raided the BellSouth AIMSX computer, copied the
E911 Document, stored it on Jolnet, mailed it to Neidorf. He and
Neidorf had edited it, and Neidorf had known where it came from.
Zenner, however, had Prophet confirm that Neidorf was not a member
of the Legion of Doom, and had not urged Prophet to break into
BellSouth computers. Neidorf had never urged Prophet to defraud anyone,
or to steal anything. Prophet also admitted that he had never known
Neidorf to break in to any computer. Prophet said that no one in the
Legion of Doom considered Craig Neidorf a "hacker" at all. Neidorf
was not a UNIX maven, and simply lacked the necessary skill and ability
to break into computers. Neidorf just published a magazine.
On Friday, July 27, 1990, the case against Neidorf collapsed. Cook
moved to dismiss the indictment, citing "information currently
available to us that was not available to us at the inception of the
trial." Judge Bua praised the prosecution for this action, which he
described as "very responsible," then dismissed a juror and declared a
mistrial.
Neidorf was a free man. His defense, however, had cost himself and
his family dearly. Months of his life had been consumed in anguish; he
had seen his closest friends shun him as a federal criminal. He owed
his lawyers over a hundred thousand dollars, despite a generous payment
to the defense by Mitch Kapor.
Neidorf was not found innocent. The trial was simply dropped.
Nevertheless, on September 9, 1991, Judge Bua granted Neidorf's motion
for the "expungement and sealing" of his indictment record. The United
States Secret Service was ordered to delete and destroy all
fingerprints, photographs, and other records of arrest or processing
relating to Neidorf's indictment, including their paper documents and
their computer records.
Neidorf went back to school, blazingly determined to become a
lawyer. Having seen the justice system at work, Neidorf lost much of
his enthusiasm for merely technical power. At this writing, Craig
Neidorf is working in Washington as a salaried researcher for the
American Civil Liberties Union.
#
The outcome of the Neidorf trial changed the EFF from
voices-in-the-wilderness to the media darlings of the new frontier.
Legally speaking, the Neidorf case was not a sweeping triumph for
anyone concerned. No constitutional principles had been established.
The issues of "freedom of the press" for electronic publishers remained
in legal limbo. There were public misconceptions about the case. Many
people thought Neidorf had been found innocent and relieved of all his
legal debts by Kapor. The truth was that the government had simply
dropped the case, and Neidorf's family had gone deeply into hock to
support him.
But the Neidorf case did provide a single, devastating, public
sound-bite: *The feds said it was worth eighty grand, and it was only
worth thirteen bucks.*
This is the Neidorf case's single most memorable element. No
serious report of the case missed this particular element. Even cops
could not read this without a wince and a shake of the head. It left
the public credibility of the crackdown agents in tatters.
The crackdown, in fact, continued, however. Those two charges
against Prophet, which had been based on the E911 Document, were
quietly forgotten at his sentencing -- even though Prophet had already
pled guilty to them. Georgia federal prosecutors strongly argued for
jail time for the Atlanta Three, insisting on "the need to send a
message to the community," "the message that hackers around the
country need to hear."
There was a great deal in their sentencing memorandum about the
awful things that various other hackers had done (though the Atlanta
Three themselves had not, in fact, actually committed these crimes).
There was also much speculation about the awful things that the Atlanta
Three *might* have done and *were capable* of doing (even though
they had not, in fact, actually done them). The prosecution's argument
carried the day. The Atlanta Three were sent to prison: Urvile and
Leftist both got 14 months each, while Prophet (a second offender) got
21 months.
The Atlanta Three were also assessed staggering fines as
"restitution": $233,000 each. BellSouth claimed that the defendants
had "stolen" "approximately $233,880 worth" of "proprietary computer
access information" -- specifically, $233,880 worth of computer
passwords and connect addresses. BellSouth's astonishing claim of the
extreme value of its own computer passwords and addresses was accepted
at face value by the Georgia court. Furthermore (as if to emphasize
its theoretical nature) this enormous sum was not divvied up among the
Atlanta Three, but each of them had to pay all of it.
A striking aspect of the sentence was that the Atlanta Three were
specifically forbidden to use computers, except for work or under
supervision. Depriving hackers of home computers and modems makes some
sense if one considers hackers as "computer addicts," but EFF, filing
an amicus brief in the case, protested that this punishment was
unconstitutional -- it deprived the Atlanta Three of their rights of
free association and free expression through electronic media.
Terminus, the "ultimate hacker," was finally sent to prison for a
year through the dogged efforts of the Chicago Task Force. His crime,
to which he pled guilty, was the transfer of the UNIX password
trapper, which was officially valued by AT&T at $77,000, a figure which
aroused intense skepticism among those familiar with UNIX "login.c"
programs.
The jailing of Terminus and the Atlanta Legionnaires of Doom,
however, did not cause the EFF any sense of embarrassment or defeat.
On the contrary, the civil libertarians were rapidly gathering strength.
An early and potent supporter was Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat
from Vermont, who had been a Senate sponsor of the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act. Even before the Neidorf trial, Leahy had
spoken out in defense of hacker-power and freedom of the keyboard: "We
cannot unduly inhibit the inquisitive 13-year-old who, if left to
experiment today, may tomorrow develop the telecommunications or
computer technology to lead the United States into the 21st century.
He represents our future and our best hope to remain a technologically
competitive nation."
It was a handsome statement, rendered perhaps rather more effective
by the fact that the crackdown raiders *did not have* any Senators
speaking out for *them.* On the contrary, their highly secretive
actions and tactics, all "sealed search warrants" here and
"confidential ongoing investigations" there, might have won them a
burst of glamorous publicity at first, but were crippling them in the
on-going propaganda war. Gail Thackeray was reduced to unsupported
bluster: "Some of these people who are loudest on the bandwagon may
just slink into the background," she predicted in *Newsweek* -- when
all the facts came out, and the cops were vindicated.
But all the facts did not come out. Those facts that did, were not
very flattering. And the cops were not vindicated. And Gail Thackeray
lost her job. By the end of 1991, William Cook had also left public
employment.
1990 had belonged to the crackdown, but by '91 its agents were in
severe disarray, and the libertarians were on a roll. People were
flocking to the cause.
A particularly interesting ally had been Mike Godwin of Austin,
Texas. Godwin was an individual almost as difficult to describe as
Barlow; he had been editor of the student newspaper of the University
of Texas, and a computer salesman, and a programmer, and in 1990 was
back in law school, looking for a law degree.
Godwin was also a bulletin board maven. He was very well-known in
the Austin board community under his handle "Johnny Mnemonic," which he
adopted from a cyberpunk science fiction story by William Gibson.
Godwin was an ardent cyberpunk science fiction fan. As a fellow
Austinite of similar age and similar interests, I myself had known
Godwin socially for many years. When William Gibson and myself had
been writing our collaborative SF novel, *The Difference Engine,*
Godwin had been our technical advisor in our effort to link our Apple
word-processors from Austin to Vancouver. Gibson and I were so pleased
by his generous expert help that we named a character in the novel
"Michael Godwin" in his honor.
The handle "Mnemonic" suited Godwin very well. His erudition and his
mastery of trivia were impressive to the point of stupor; his ardent
curiosity seemed insatiable, and his desire to debate and argue seemed
the central drive of his life. Godwin had even started his own Austin
debating society, wryly known as the "Dull Men's Club." In person,
Godwin could be overwhelming; a flypaper-brained polymath who could
not seem to let any idea go. On bulletin boards, however, Godwin's
closely reasoned, highly grammatical, erudite posts suited the medium
well, and he became a local board celebrity.
Mike Godwin was the man most responsible for the public national
exposure of the Steve Jackson case. The Izenberg seizure in Austin
had received no press coverage at all. The March 1 raids on Mentor,
Bloodaxe, and Steve Jackson Games had received a brief front-page
splash in the front page of the *Austin American-Statesman,* but it
was confused and ill-informed: the warrants were sealed, and the
Secret Service wasn't talking. Steve Jackson seemed doomed to
obscurity. Jackson had not been arrested; he was not charged with any
crime; he was not on trial. He had lost some computers in an ongoing
investigation -- so what? Jackson tried hard to attract attention to
the true extent of his plight, but he was drawing a blank; no one in a
position to help him seemed able to get a mental grip on the issues.
Godwin, however, was uniquely, almost magically, qualified to carry
Jackson's case to the outside world. Godwin was a board enthusiast, a
science fiction fan, a former journalist, a computer salesman, a
lawyer-to-be, and an Austinite. Through a coincidence yet more
amazing, in his last year of law school Godwin had specialized in
federal prosecutions and criminal procedure. Acting entirely on his
own, Godwin made up a press packet which summarized the issues and
provided useful contacts for reporters. Godwin's behind-the-scenes
effort (which he carried out mostly to prove a point in a local board
debate) broke the story again in the *Austin American-Statesman* and
then in *Newsweek.*
Life was never the same for Mike Godwin after that. As he joined the
growing civil liberties debate on the Internet, it was obvious to all
parties involved that here was one guy who, in the midst of complete
murk and confusion, *genuinely understood everything he was talking
about.* The disparate elements of Godwin's dilettantish existence
suddenly fell together as neatly as the facets of a Rubik's cube.
When the time came to hire a full-time EFF staff attorney, Godwin
was the obvious choice. He took the Texas bar exam, left Austin, moved
to Cambridge, became a full-time, professional, computer civil
libertarian, and was soon touring the nation on behalf of EFF,
delivering well-received addresses on the issues to crowds as disparate
as academics, industrialists, science fiction fans, and federal cops.
Michael Godwin is currently the chief legal counsel of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
#
Another early and influential participant in the controversy was
Dorothy Denning. Dr. Denning was unique among investigators of the
computer underground in that she did not enter the debate with any set
of politicized motives. She was a professional cryptographer and
computer security expert whose primary interest in hackers was
*scholarly.* She had a B.A. and M.A. in mathematics, and a Ph.D. in
computer science from Purdue. She had worked for SRI International, the
California think-tank that was also the home of computer security maven
Donn Parker, and had authored an influential text called *Cryptography
and Data Security.* In 1990, Dr. Denning was working for Digital
Equipment Corporation in their Systems Reseach Center. Her husband,
Peter Denning, was also a computer security expert, working for NASA's
Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science. He had edited the
well-received *Computers Under Attack: Intruders, Worms and Viruses.*
Dr. Denning took it upon herself to contact the digital underground,
more or less with an anthropological interest. There she discovered
that these computer-intruding hackers, who had been characterized as
unethical, irresponsible, and a serious danger to society, did in fact
have their own subculture and their own rules. They were not
particularly well-considered rules, but they were, in fact, rules.
Basically, they didn't take money and they didn't break anything.
Her dispassionate reports on her researches did a great deal to
influence serious-minded computer professionals -- the sort of people
who merely rolled their eyes at the cyberspace rhapsodies of a John
Perry Barlow.
For young hackers of the digital underground, meeting Dorothy
Denning was a genuinely mind-boggling experience. Here was this
neatly coiffed, conservatively dressed, dainty little personage, who
reminded most hackers of their moms or their aunts. And yet she was an
IBM systems programmer with profound expertise in computer
architectures and high-security information flow, who had personal
friends in the FBI and the National Security Agency.
Dorothy Denning was a shining example of the American mathematical
intelligentsia, a genuinely brilliant person from the central ranks of
the computer-science elite. And here she was, gently questioning
twenty-year-old hairy-eyed phone-phreaks over the deeper ethical
implications of their behavior.
Confronted by this genuinely nice lady, most hackers sat up very
straight and did their best to keep the anarchy-file stuff down to a
faint whiff of brimstone. Nevertheless, the hackers *were* in fact
prepared to seriously discuss serious issues with Dorothy Denning.
They were willing to speak the unspeakable and defend the indefensible,
to blurt out their convictions that information cannot be owned, that
the databases of governments and large corporations were a threat to
the rights and privacy of individuals.
Denning's articles made it clear to many that "hacking" was not
simple vandalism by some evil clique of psychotics. "Hacking" was not
an aberrant menace that could be charmed away by ignoring it, or swept
out of existence by jailing a few ringleaders. Instead, "hacking" was
symptomatic of a growing, primal struggle over knowledge and power in
the age of information.
Denning pointed out that the attitude of hackers were at least
partially shared by forward-looking management theorists in the
business community: people like Peter Drucker and Tom Peters. Peter
Drucker, in his book *The New Realities,* had stated that "control of
information by the government is no longer possible. Indeed,
information is now transnational. Like money, it has no `fatherland.' "
And management maven Tom Peters had chided large corporations for
uptight, proprietary attitudes in his bestseller, *Thriving on Chaos:*
"Information hoarding, especially by politically motivated,
power-seeking staffs, had been commonplace throughout American industry,
service and manufacturing alike. It will be an impossible millstone
aroung the neck of tomorrow's organizations."
Dorothy Denning had shattered the social membrane of the digital
underground. She attended the Neidorf trial, where she was prepared
to testify for the defense as an expert witness. She was a
behind-the-scenes organizer of two of the most important national
meetings of the computer civil libertarians. Though not a zealot of
any description, she brought disparate elements of the electronic
community into a surprising and fruitful collusion.
Dorothy Denning is currently the Chair of the Computer Science
Department at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
#
There were many stellar figures in the civil libertarian community.
There's no question, however, that its single most influential figure
was Mitchell D. Kapor. Other people might have formal titles, or
governmental positions, have more experience with crime, or with the
law, or with the arcanities of computer security or constitutional
theory. But by 1991 Kapor had transcended any such narrow role. Kapor
had become "Mitch."
Mitch had become the central civil-libertarian ad-hocrat. Mitch had
stood up first, he had spoken out loudly, directly, vigorously and
angrily, he had put his own reputation, and his very considerable
personal fortune, on the line. By mid-'91 Kapor was the best-known
advocate of his cause and was known *personally* by almost every single
human being in America with any direct influence on the question of
civil liberties in cyberspace. Mitch had built bridges, crossed
voids, changed paradigms, forged metaphors, made phone-calls and
swapped business cards to such spectacular effect that it had become
impossible for anyone to take any action in the "hacker question"
without wondering what Mitch might think -- and say -- and tell his
friends.
The EFF had simply *networked* the situation into an entirely new
status quo. And in fact this had been EFF's deliberate strategy from
the beginning. Both Barlow and Kapor loathed bureaucracies and had
deliberately chosen to work almost entirely through the electronic
spiderweb of "valuable personal contacts."
After a year of EFF, both Barlow and Kapor had every reason to look
back with satisfaction. EFF had established its own Internet node,
"eff.org," with a well-stocked electronic archive of documents on
electronic civil rights, privacy issues, and academic freedom. EFF
was also publishing *EFFector,* a quarterly printed journal, as well
as *EFFector Online,* an electronic newsletter with over 1,200
subscribers. And EFF was thriving on the Well.
EFF had a national headquarters in Cambridge and a full-time staff.
It had become a membership organization and was attracting grass roots
support. It had also attracted the support of some thirty civil-rights
lawyers, ready and eager to do pro bono work in defense of the
Constitution in Cyberspace.
EFF had lobbied successfully in Washington and in Massachusetts to
change state and federal legislation on computer networking. Kapor in
particular had become a veteran expert witness, and had joined the
Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academy
of Science and Engineering.
EFF had sponsored meetings such as "Computers, Freedom and Privacy"
and the CPSR Roundtable. It had carried out a press offensive that,
in the words of *EFFector,* "has affected the climate of opinion about
computer networking and begun to reverse the slide into `hacker
hysteria' that was beginning to grip the nation."
It had helped Craig Neidorf avoid prison.
And, last but certainly not least, the Electronic Frontier
Foundation had filed a federal lawsuit in the name of Steve Jackson,
Steve Jackson Games Inc., and three users of the Illuminati bulletin
board system. The defendants were, and are, the United States Secret
Service, William Cook, Tim Foley, Barbara Golden and Henry Kleupfel.
The case, which is in pre-trial procedures in an Austin federal
court as of this writing, is a civil action for damages to redress
alleged violations of the First and Fourth Amendments to the United
States Constitution, as well as the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 (42
USC 2000aa et seq.), and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (18
USC 2510 et seq and 2701 et seq).
EFF had established that it had credibility. It had also
established that it had teeth.
In the fall of 1991 I travelled to Massachusetts to speak personally
with Mitch Kapor. It was my final interview for this book.
#
The city of Boston has always been one of the major intellectual
centers of the American republic. It is a very old city by American
standards, a place of skyscrapers overshadowing seventeenth-century
graveyards, where the high-tech start-up companies of Route 128 co-exist
with the hand-wrought pre-industrial grace of "Old Ironsides," the USS
*Constitution.*
The Battle of Bunker Hill, one of the first and bitterest armed
clashes of the American Revolution, was fought in Boston's environs.
Today there is a monumental spire on Bunker Hill, visible throughout
much of the city. The willingness of the republican revolutionaries
to take up arms and fire on their oppressors has left a cultural
legacy that two full centuries have not effaced. Bunker Hill is still
a potent center of American political symbolism, and the Spirit of '76
is still a potent image for those who seek to mold public opinion.
Of course, not everyone who wraps himself in the flag is necessarily
a patriot. When I visited the spire in September 1991, it bore a huge,
badly-erased, spray-can grafitto around its bottom reading "BRITS OUT
-- IRA PROVOS." Inside this hallowed edifice was a glass-cased
diorama of thousands of tiny toy soldiers, rebels and redcoats,
fighting and dying over the green hill, the riverside marshes, the
rebel trenchworks. Plaques indicated the movement of troops, the
shiftings of strategy. The Bunker Hill Monument is occupied at its
very center by the toy soldiers of a military war-game simulation.
The Boston metroplex is a place of great universities, prominent
among the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the term
"computer hacker" was first coined. The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 might
be interpreted as a political struggle among American cities:
traditional strongholds of longhair intellectual liberalism, such as
Boston, San Francisco, and Austin, versus the bare-knuckle industrial
pragmatism of Chicago and Phoenix (with Atlanta and New York wrapped
in internal struggle).
The headquarters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is on 155
Second Street in Cambridge, a Bostonian suburb north of the River
Charles. Second Street has weedy sidewalks of dented, sagging brick and
elderly cracked asphalt; large street-signs warn "NO PARKING DURING
DECLARED SNOW EMERGENCY." This is an old area of modest manufacturing
industries; the EFF is catecorner from the Greene Rubber Company.
EFF's building is two stories of red brick; its large wooden windows
feature gracefully arched tops and stone sills.
The glass window beside the Second Street entrance bears three
sheets of neatly laser-printed paper, taped against the glass. They
read: ON Technology. EFF. KEI.
"ON Technology" is Kapor's software company, which currently
specializes in "groupware" for the Apple Macintosh computer.
"Groupware" is intended to promote efficient social interaction among
office-workers linked by computers. ON Technology's most successful
software products to date are "Meeting Maker" and "Instant Update."
"KEI" is Kapor Enterprises Inc., Kapor's personal holding company,
the commercial entity that formally controls his extensive investments
in other hardware and software corporations.
"EFF" is a political action group -- of a special sort.
Inside, someone's bike has been chained to the handrails of a modest
flight of stairs. A wall of modish glass brick separates this anteroom
from the offices. Beyond the brick, there's an alarm system mounted on
the wall, a sleek, complex little number that resembles a cross between
a thermostat and a CD player. Piled against the wall are box after box
of a recent special issue of *Scientific American,* "How to Work, Play,
and Thrive in Cyberspace," with extensive coverage of electronic
networking techniques and political issues, including an article by
Kapor himself. These boxes are addressed to Gerard Van der Leun,
EFF's Director of Communications, who will shortly mail those magazines
to every member of the EFF.
The joint headquarters of EFF, KEI, and ON Technology, which Kapor
currently rents, is a modestly bustling place. It's very much the
same physical size as Steve Jackson's gaming company. It's certainly a
far cry from the gigantic gray steel-sided railway shipping barn, on
the Monsignor O'Brien Highway, that is owned by Lotus Development
Corporation.
Lotus is, of course, the software giant that Mitchell Kapor founded
in the late 70s. The software program Kapor co-authored, "Lotus
1-2-3," is still that company's most profitable product. "Lotus 1-2-3"
also bears a singular distinction in the digital underground: it's
probably the most pirated piece of application software in world
history.
Kapor greets me cordially in his own office, down a hall. Kapor,
whose name is pronounced KAY-por, is in his early forties, married and
the father of two. He has a round face, high forehead, straight nose,
a slightly tousled mop of black hair peppered with gray. His large
brown eyes are wideset, reflective, one might almost say soulful. He
disdains ties, and commonly wears Hawaiian shirts and tropical prints,
not so much garish as simply cheerful and just that little bit
anomalous.
There is just the whiff of hacker brimstone about Mitch Kapor. He
may not have the hard-riding, hell-for-leather, guitar-strumming
charisma of his Wyoming colleague John Perry Barlow, but there's
something about the guy that still stops one short. He has the air of
the Eastern city dude in the bowler hat, the dreamy, Longfellow-quoting
poker shark who only *happens* to know the exact mathematical odds
against drawing to an inside straight. Even among his
computer-community colleagues, who are hardly known for mental
sluggishness, Kapor strikes one forcefully as a very intelligent man.
He speaks rapidly, with vigorous gestures, his Boston accent sometimes
slipping to the sharp nasal tang of his youth in Long Island.
Kapor, whose Kapor Family Foundation does much of his philanthropic
work, is a strong supporter of Boston's Computer Museum. Kapor's
interest in the history of his industry has brought him some remarkable
curios, such as the "byte" just outside his office door. This "byte"
-- eight digital bits -- has been salvaged from the wreck of an
electronic computer of the pre-transistor age. It's a standing
gunmetal rack about the size of a small toaster-oven: with eight slots
of hand-soldered breadboarding featuring thumb-sized vacuum tubes. If
it fell off a table it could easily break your foot, but it was
state-of-the-art computation in the 1940s. (It would take exactly
157,184 of these primordial toasters to hold the first part of this
book.)
There's also a coiling, multicolored, scaly dragon that some
inspired techno-punk artist has cobbled up entirely out of transistors,
capacitors, and brightly plastic-coated wiring.
Inside the office, Kapor excuses himself briefly to do a little
mouse-whizzing housekeeping on his personal Macintosh IIfx. If its
giant screen were an open window, an agile person could climb through
it without much trouble at all. There's a coffee-cup at Kapor's elbow,
a memento of his recent trip to Eastern Europe, which has a
black-and-white stencilled photo and the legend CAPITALIST FOOLS TOUR.
It's Kapor, Barlow, and two California venture-capitalist luminaries
of their acquaintance, four windblown, grinning Baby Boomer dudes in
leather jackets, boots, denim, travel bags, standing on airport tarmac
somewhere behind the formerly Iron Curtain. They look as if they're
having the absolute time of their lives.
Kapor is in a reminiscent mood. We talk a bit about his youth --
high school days as a "math nerd," Saturdays attending Columbia
University's high-school science honors program, where he had his first
experience programming computers. IBM 1620s, in 1965 and '66. "I was
very interested," says Kapor, "and then I went off to college and got
distracted by drugs, sex and rock and roll, like anybody with half a
brain would have then!" After college he was a progressive-rock DJ in
Hartford, Connecticut, for a couple of years.
I ask him if he ever misses his rock and roll days -- if he ever
wished he could go back to radio work.
He shakes his head flatly. "I stopped thinking about going back to
be a DJ the day after Altamont."
Kapor moved to Boston in 1974 and got a job programming mainframes
in COBOL. He hated it. He quit and became a teacher of transcendental
meditation. (It was Kapor's long flirtation with Eastern mysticism that
gave the world "Lotus.")
In 1976 Kapor went to Switzerland, where the Transcendental
Meditation movement had rented a gigantic Victorian hotel in St-Moritz.
It was an all-male group -- a hundred and twenty of them -- determined
upon Enlightenment or Bust. Kapor had given the transcendant his best
shot. He was becoming disenchanted by "the nuttiness in the
organization." "They were teaching people to levitate," he says,
staring at the floor. His voice drops an octave, becomes flat. "*They
don't levitate.*"
Kapor chose Bust. He went back to the States and acquired a degree
in counselling psychology. He worked a while in a hospital, couldn't
stand that either. "My rep was," he says "a very bright kid with a
lot of potential who hasn't found himself. Almost thirty. Sort of
lost."
Kapor was unemployed when he bought his first personal computer --
an Apple II. He sold his stereo to raise cash and drove to New
Hampshire to avoid the sales tax.
"The day after I purchased it," Kapor tells me, "I was hanging out
in a computer store and I saw another guy, a man in his forties,
well-dressed guy, and eavesdropped on his conversation with the
salesman. He didn't know anything about computers. I'd had a year
programming. And I could program in BASIC. I'd taught myself. So I
went up to him, and I actually sold myself to him as a consultant." He
pauses. "I don't know where I got the nerve to do this. It was
uncharacteristic. I just said, `I think I can help you, I've been
listening, this is what you need to do and I think I can do it for
you.' And he took me on! He was my first client! I became a computer
consultant the first day after I bought the Apple II."
Kapor had found his true vocation. He attracted more clients for
his consultant service, and started an Apple users' group.
A friend of Kapor's, Eric Rosenfeld, a graduate student at MIT, had
a problem. He was doing a thesis on an arcane form of financial
statistics, but could not wedge himself into the crowded queue for time
on MIT's mainframes. (One might note at this point that if Mr.
Rosenfeld had dishonestly broken into the MIT mainframes, Kapor himself
might have never invented Lotus 1-2-3 and the PC business might have
been set back for years!) Eric Rosenfeld did have an Apple II,
however, and he thought it might be possible to scale the problem down.
Kapor, as favor, wrote a program for him in BASIC that did the job.
It then occurred to the two of them, out of the blue, that it might
be possible to *sell* this program. They marketed it themselves, in
plastic baggies, for about a hundred bucks a pop, mail order. "This
was a total cottage industry by a marginal consultant," Kapor says
proudly. "That's how I got started, honest to God."
Rosenfeld, who later became a very prominent figure on Wall Street,
urged Kapor to go to MIT's business school for an MBA. Kapor did
seven months there, but never got his MBA. He picked up some useful
tools -- mainly a firm grasp of the principles of accounting -- and, in
his own words, "learned to talk MBA." Then he dropped out and went to
Silicon Valley.
The inventors of VisiCalc, the Apple computer's premier business
program, had shown an interest in Mitch Kapor. Kapor worked
diligently for them for six months, got tired of California, and went
back to Boston where they had better bookstores. The VisiCalc group
had made the critical error of bringing in "professional management."
"That drove them into the ground," Kapor says.
"Yeah, you don't hear a lot about VisiCalc these days," I muse.
Kapor looks surprised. "Well, Lotus... we *bought* it."
"Oh. You *bought* it?"
"Yeah."
"Sort of like the Bell System buying Western Union?"
Kapor grins. "Yep! Yep! Yeah, exactly!"
Mitch Kapor was not in full command of the destiny of himself or his
industry. The hottest software commodities of the early 1980s were
*computer games* -- the Atari seemed destined to enter every teenage
home in America. Kapor got into business software simply because he
didn't have any particular feeling for computer games. But he was
supremely fast on his feet, open to new ideas and inclined to trust his
instincts. And his instincts were good. He chose good people to deal
with -- gifted programmer Jonathan Sachs (the co-author of Lotus
1-2-3). Financial wizard Eric Rosenfeld, canny Wall Street analyst
and venture capitalist Ben Rosen. Kapor was the founder and CEO of
Lotus, one of the most spectacularly successful business ventures of
the later twentieth century.
He is now an extremely wealthy man. I ask him if he actually knows
how much money he has.
"Yeah," he says. "Within a percent or two."
How much does he actually have, then?
He shakes his head. "A lot. A lot. Not something I talk about.
Issues of money and class are things that cut pretty close to the
bone."
I don't pry. It's beside the point. One might presume, impolitely,
that Kapor has at least forty million -- that's what he got the year he
left Lotus. People who ought to know claim Kapor has about a hundred
and fifty million, give or take a market swing in his stock holdings.
If Kapor had stuck with Lotus, as his colleague friend and rival Bill
Gates has stuck with his own software start-up, Microsoft, then Kapor
would likely have much the same fortune Gates has -- somewhere in the
neighborhood of three billion, give or take a few hundred million.
Mitch Kapor has all the money he wants. Money has lost whatever charm
it ever held for him -- probably not much in the first place. When
Lotus became too uptight, too bureaucratic, too far from the true
sources of his own satisfaction, Kapor walked. He simply severed all
connections with the company and went out the door. It stunned
everyone -- except those who knew him best.
Kapor has not had to strain his resources to wreak a thorough
transformation in cyberspace politics. In its first year, EFF's budget
was about a quarter of a million dollars. Kapor is running EFF out of
his pocket change.
Kapor takes pains to tell me that he does not consider himself a
civil libertarian per se. He has spent quite some time with true-blue
civil libertarians lately, and there's a political-correctness to them
that bugs him. They seem to him to spend entirely too much time in
legal nitpicking and not enough vigorously exercising civil rights in
the everyday real world.
Kapor is an entrepreneur. Like all hackers, he prefers his
involvements direct, personal, and hands-on. "The fact that EFF has a
node on the Internet is a great thing. We're a publisher. We're a
distributor of information." Among the items the eff.org Internet node
carries is back issues of *Phrack.* They had an internal debate about
that in EFF, and finally decided to take the plunge. They might carry
other digital underground publications -- but if they do, he says,
"we'll certainly carry Donn Parker, and anything Gail Thackeray wants
to put up. We'll turn it into a public library, that has the whole
spectrum of use. Evolve in the direction of people making up their own
minds." He grins. "We'll try to label all the editorials."
Kapor is determined to tackle the technicalities of the Internet in
the service of the public interest. "The problem with being a node on
the Net today is that you've got to have a captive technical
specialist. We have Chris Davis around, for the care and feeding of
the balky beast! We couldn't do it ourselves!"
He pauses. "So one direction in which technology has to evolve is
much more standardized units, that a non-technical person can feel
comfortable with. It's the same shift as from minicomputers to PCs. I
can see a future in which any person can have a Node on the Net. Any
person can be a publisher. It's better than the media we now have.
It's possible. We're working actively."
Kapor is in his element now, fluent, thoroughly in command in his
material. "You go tell a hardware Internet hacker that everyone
should have a node on the Net," he says, "and the first thing they're
going to say is, `IP doesn't scale!"' ("IP" is the interface protocol
for the Internet. As it currently exists, the IP software is simply
not capable of indefinite expansion; it will run out of usable
addresses, it will saturate.) "The answer," Kapor says, "is: evolve
the protocol! Get the smart people together and figure out what to do.
Do we add ID? Do we add new protocol? Don't just say, *we can't do
it.*"
Getting smart people together to figure out what to do is a skill at
which Kapor clearly excels. I counter that people on the Internet
rather enjoy their elite technical status, and don't seem particularly
anxious to democratize the Net.
Kapor agrees, with a show of scorn. "I tell them that this is the
snobbery of the people on the *Mayflower* looking down their noses at
the people who came over *on the second boat!* Just because they got
here a year, or five years, or ten years before everybody else, that
doesn't give them ownership of cyberspace! By what right?"
I remark that the telcos are an electronic network, too, and they
seem to guard their specialized knowledge pretty closely.
Kapor ripostes that the telcos and the Internet are entirely
different animals. "The Internet is an open system, everything is
published, everything gets argued about, basically by anybody who can
get in. Mostly, it's exclusive and elitist just because it's so
difficult. Let's make it easier to use."
On the other hand, he allows with a swift change of emphasis, the
so-called elitists do have a point as well. "Before people start coming
in, who are new, who want to make suggestions, and criticize the Net as
`all screwed up'... They should at least take the time to understand
the culture on its own terms. It has its own history -- show some
respect for it. I'm a conservative, to that extent."
The Internet is Kapor's paradigm for the future of
telecommunications. The Internet is decentralized, non-hierarchical,
almost anarchic. There are no bosses, no chain of command, no secret
data. If each node obeys the general interface standards, there's
simply no need for any central network authority.
Wouldn't that spell the doom of AT&T as an institution? I ask.
That prospect doesn't faze Kapor for a moment. "Their big
advantage, that they have now, is that they have all of the wiring.
But two things are happening. Anyone with right-of-way is putting down
fiber -- Southern Pacific Railroad, people like that -- there's
enormous `dark fiber' laid in." ("Dark Fiber" is fiber-optic cable,
whose enormous capacity so exceeds the demands of current usage that
much of the fiber still has no light-signals on it -- it's still
`dark,' awaiting future use.)
"The other thing that's happening is the local-loop stuff is going
to go wireless. Everyone from Bellcore to the cable TV companies to
AT&T wants to put in these things called `personal communication
systems.' So you could have local competition -- you could have
multiplicity of people, a bunch of neighborhoods, sticking stuff up on
poles. And a bunch of other people laying in dark fiber. So what
happens to the telephone companies? There's enormous pressure on them
from both sides.
"The more I look at this, the more I believe that in a
post-industrial, digital world, the idea of regulated monopolies is
bad. People will look back on it and say that in the 19th and 20th
centuries the idea of public utilities was an okay compromise. You
needed one set of wires in the ground. It was too economically
inefficient, otherwise. And that meant one entity running it. But now,
with pieces being wireless -- the connections are going to be via
high-level interfaces, not via wires. I mean, *ultimately* there are
going to be wires -- but the wires are just a commodity. Fiber,
wireless. You no longer *need* a utility."
Water utilities? Gas utilities?
Of course we still need those, he agrees. "But when what you're
moving is information, instead of physical substances, then you can
play by a different set of rules. We're evolving those rules now!
Hopefully you can have a much more decentralized system, and one in
which there's more competition in the marketplace.
"The role of government will be to make sure that nobody cheats.
The proverbial `level playing field.' A policy that prevents
monopolization. It should result in better service, lower prices, more
choices, and local empowerment." He smiles. "I'm very big on local
empowerment."
Kapor is a man with a vision. It's a very novel vision which he and
his allies are working out in considerable detail and with great
energy. Dark, cynical, morbid cyberpunk that I am, I cannot avoid
considering some of the darker implications of "decentralized,
nonhierarchical, locally empowered" networking.
I remark that some pundits have suggested that electronic networking
-- faxes, phones, small-scale photocopiers -- played a strong role in
dissolving the power of centralized communism and causing the collapse
of the Warsaw Pact.
Socialism is totally discredited, says Kapor, fresh back from the
Eastern Bloc. The idea that faxes did it, all by themselves, is rather
wishful thinking.
Has it occurred to him that electronic networking might corrode
America's industrial and political infrastructure to the point where
the whole thing becomes untenable, unworkable -- and the old order just
collapses headlong, like in Eastern Europe?
"No," Kapor says flatly. "I think that's extraordinarily unlikely.
In part, because ten or fifteen years ago, I had similar hopes about
personal computers -- which utterly failed to materialize." He grins
wryly, then his eyes narrow. "I'm *very* opposed to techno-utopias.
Every time I see one, I either run away, or try to kill it."
It dawns on me then that Mitch Kapor is not trying to make the world
safe for democracy. He certainly is not trying to make it safe for
anarchists or utopians -- least of all for computer intruders or
electronic rip-off artists. What he really hopes to do is make the
world safe for future Mitch Kapors. This world of decentralized,
small-scale nodes, with instant global access for the best and
brightest, would be a perfect milieu for the shoestring attic
capitalism that made Mitch Kapor what he is today.
Kapor is a very bright man. He has a rare combination of visionary
intensity with a strong practical streak. The Board of the EFF: John
Barlow, Jerry Berman of the ACLU, Stewart Brand, John Gilmore, Steve
Wozniak, and Esther Dyson, the doyenne of East-West computer
entrepreneurism -- share his gift, his vision, and his formidable
networking talents. They are people of the 1960s, winnowed-out by
its turbulence and rewarded with wealth and influence. They are some
of the best and the brightest that the electronic community has to
offer. But can they do it, in the real world? Or are they only
dreaming? They are so few. And there is so much against them.
I leave Kapor and his networking employees struggling cheerfully
with the promising intricacies of their newly installed Macintosh
System 7 software. The next day is Saturday. EFF is closed. I pay a
few visits to points of interest downtown.
One of them is the birthplace of the telephone.
It's marked by a bronze plaque in a plinth of black-and-white
speckled granite. It sits in the plaza of the John F. Kennedy Federal
Building, the very place where Kapor was once fingerprinted by the FBI.
The plaque has a bas-relief picture of Bell's original telephone.
"BIRTHPLACE OF THE TELEPHONE," it reads. "Here, on June 2, 1875,
Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson first transmitted sound over
wires.
"This successful experiment was completed in a fifth floor garret at
what was then 109 Court Street and marked the beginning of world-wide
telephone service."
109 Court Street is long gone. Within sight of Bell's plaque,
across a street, is one of the central offices of NYNEX, the local
Bell RBOC, on 6 Bowdoin Square.
I cross the street and circle the telco building, slowly, hands in
my jacket pockets. It's a bright, windy, New England autumn day. The
central office is a handsome 1940s-era megalith in late Art Deco, eight
stories high.
Parked outside the back is a power-generation truck. The generator
strikes me as rather anomalous. Don't they already have their own
generators in this eight-story monster? Then the suspicion strikes me
that NYNEX must have heard of the September 17 AT&T power-outage which
crashed New York City. Belt-and-suspenders, this generator. Very
telco.
Over the glass doors of the front entrance is a handsome bronze
bas-relief of Art Deco vines, sunflowers, and birds, entwining the Bell
logo and the legend NEW ENGLAND TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH COMPANY -- an
entity which no longer officially exists.
The doors are locked securely. I peer through the shadowed glass.
Inside is an official poster reading:
"New England Telephone a NYNEX Company
"ATTENTION
"All persons while on New England Telephone Company premises are
required to visibly wear their identification cards (C.C.P. Section 2,
Page 1).
"Visitors, vendors, contractors, and all others are required to
visibly wear a daily pass.
"Thank you. Kevin C. Stanton. Building Security Coordinator."
Outside, around the corner, is a pull-down ribbed metal security
door, a locked delivery entrance. Some passing stranger has
grafitti-tagged this door, with a single word in red spray-painted
cursive:
*Fury*
#
My book on the Hacker Crackdown is almost over now. I have
deliberately saved the best for last.
In February 1991, I attended the CPSR Public Policy Roundtable, in
Washington, DC. CPSR, Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility, was a sister organization of EFF, or perhaps its aunt,
being older and perhaps somewhat wiser in the ways of the world of
politics.
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility began in 1981 in
Palo Alto, as an informal discussion group of Californian computer
scientists and technicians, united by nothing more than an electronic
mailing list. This typical high-tech ad-hocracy received the dignity
of its own acronym in 1982, and was formally incorporated in 1983.
CPSR lobbied government and public alike with an educational
outreach effort, sternly warning against any foolish and unthinking
trust in complex computer systems. CPSR insisted that mere computers
should never be considered a magic panacea for humanity's social,
ethical or political problems. CPSR members were especially troubled
about the stability, safety, and dependability of military computer
systems, and very especially troubled by those systems controlling
nuclear arsenals. CPSR was best-known for its persistent and
well-publicized attacks on the scientific credibility of the Strategic
Defense Initiative ("Star Wars").
In 1990, CPSR was the nation's veteran cyber-political activist
group, with over two thousand members in twenty-one local chapters
across the US. It was especially active in Boston, Silicon Valley, and
Washington DC, where its Washington office sponsored the Public Policy
Roundtable.
The Roundtable, however, had been funded by EFF, which had passed
CPSR an extensive grant for operations. This was the first large-scale,
official meeting of what was to become the electronic civil libertarian
community.
Sixty people attended, myself included -- in this instance, not so
much as a journalist as a cyberpunk author. Many of the luminaries of
the field took part: Kapor and Godwin as a matter of course. Richard
Civille and Marc Rotenberg of CPSR. Jerry Berman of the ACLU. John
Quarterman, author of *The Matrix.* Steven Levy, author of *Hackers.*
George Perry and Sandy Weiss of Prodigy Services, there to network
about the civil-liberties troubles their young commercial network was
experiencing. Dr. Dorothy Denning. Cliff Figallo, manager of the
Well. Steve Jackson was there, having finally found his ideal target
audience, and so was Craig Neidorf, "Knight Lightning" himself, with
his attorney, Sheldon Zenner. Katie Hafner, science journalist, and
co-author of *Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer
Frontier.* Dave Farber, ARPAnet pioneer and fabled Internet guru.
Janlori Goldman of the ACLU's Project on Privacy and Technology. John
Nagle of Autodesk and the Well. Don Goldberg of the House Judiciary
Committee. Tom Guidoboni, the defense attorney in the Internet Worm
case. Lance Hoffman, computer-science professor at The George
Washington University. Eli Noam of Columbia. And a host of others no
less distinguished.
Senator Patrick Leahy delivered the keynote address, expressing his
determination to keep ahead of the curve on the issue of electronic
free speech. The address was well-received, and the sense of
excitement was palpable. Every panel discussion was interesting -- some
were entirely compelling. People networked with an almost frantic
interest.
I myself had a most interesting and cordial lunch discussion with
Noel and Jeanne Gayler, Admiral Gayler being a former director of the
National Security Agency. As this was the first known encounter between
an actual no-kidding cyberpunk and a chief executive of America's
largest and best-financed electronic espionage apparat, there was
naturally a bit of eyebrow-raising on both sides.
Unfortunately, our discussion was off-the-record. In fact all the
discussions at the CPSR were officially off-the-record, the idea being
to do some serious networking in an atmosphere of complete frankness,
rather than to stage a media circus.
In any case, CPSR Roundtable, though interesting and intensely
valuable, was as nothing compared to the truly mind-boggling event that
transpired a mere month later.
#
"Computers, Freedom and Privacy." Four hundred people from every
conceivable corner of America's electronic community. As a science
fiction writer, I have been to some weird gigs in my day, but this
thing is truly *beyond the pale.* Even "Cyberthon," Point Foundation's
"Woodstock of Cyberspace" where Bay Area psychedelia collided headlong
with the emergent world of computerized virtual reality, was like a
Kiwanis Club gig compared to this astonishing do.
The "electronic community" had reached an apogee. Almost every
principal in this book is in attendance. Civil Libertarians. Computer
Cops. The Digital Underground. Even a few discreet telco people.
Colorcoded dots for lapel tags are distributed. Free Expression
issues. Law Enforcement. Computer Security. Privacy. Journalists.
Lawyers. Educators. Librarians. Programmers. Stylish punk-black
dots for the hackers and phone phreaks. Almost everyone here seems to
wear eight or nine dots, to have six or seven professional hats.
It is a community. Something like Lebanon perhaps, but a digital
nation. People who had feuded all year in the national press, people
who entertained the deepest suspicions of one another's motives and
ethics, are now in each others' laps. "Computers, Freedom and Privacy"
had every reason in the world to turn ugly, and yet except for small
irruptions of puzzling nonsense from the convention's token lunatic, a
surprising bonhomie reigned. CFP was like a wedding-party in which two
lovers, unstable bride and charlatan groom, tie the knot in a clearly
disastrous matrimony.
It is clear to both families -- even to neighbors and random guests
-- that this is not a workable relationship, and yet the young couple's
desperate attraction can brook no further delay. They simply cannot
help themselves. Crockery will fly, shrieks from their newly wed home
will wake the city block, divorce waits in the wings like a vulture
over the Kalahari, and yet this is a wedding, and there is going to be
a child from it. Tragedies end in death; comedies in marriage. The
Hacker Crackdown is ending in marriage. And there will be a child.
From the beginning, anomalies reign. John Perry Barlow, cyberspace
ranger, is here. His color photo in *The New York Times Magazine,*
Barlow scowling in a grim Wyoming snowscape, with long black coat, dark
hat, a Macintosh SE30 propped on a fencepost and an awesome frontier
rifle tucked under one arm, will be the single most striking visual
image of the Hacker Crackdown. And he is CFP's guest of honor --
along with Gail Thackeray of the FCIC! What on earth do they expect
these dual guests to do with each other? Waltz?
Barlow delivers the first address. Uncharacteristically, he is
hoarse -- the sheer volume of roadwork has worn him down. He speaks
briefly, congenially, in a plea for conciliation, and takes his leave
to a storm of applause.
Then Gail Thackeray takes the stage. She's visibly nervous. She's
been on the Well a lot lately. Reading those Barlow posts. Following
Barlow is a challenge to anyone. In honor of the famous lyricist for
the Grateful Dead, she announces reedily, she is going to read -- *a
poem.* A poem she has composed herself.
It's an awful poem, doggerel in the rollicking meter of Robert W.
Service's *The Cremation of Sam McGee,* but it is in fact, a poem.
It's the *Ballad of the Electronic Frontier!* A poem about the Hacker
Crackdown and the sheer unlikelihood of CFP. It's full of in-jokes.
The score or so cops in the audience, who are sitting together in a
nervous claque, are absolutely cracking-up. Gail's poem is the
funniest goddamn thing they've ever heard. The hackers and civil-libs,
who had this woman figured for Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS, are staring
with their jaws hanging loosely. Never in the wildest reaches of their
imagination had they figured Gail Thackeray was capable of such a
totally off-the-wall move. You can see them punching their mental
CONTROL-RESET buttons. Jesus! This woman's a hacker weirdo! She's
*just like us!* God, this changes everything!
Al Bayse, computer technician for the FBI, had been the only cop at
the CPSR Roundtable, dragged there with his arm bent by Dorothy
Denning. He was guarded and tightlipped at CPSR Roundtable; a "lion
thrown to the Christians."
At CFP, backed by a claque of cops, Bayse suddenly waxes eloquent
and even droll, describing the FBI's "NCIC 2000", a gigantic digital
catalog of criminal records, as if he has suddenly become some weird
hybrid of George Orwell and George Gobel. Tentatively, he makes an
arcane joke about statistical analysis. At least a third of the crowd
laughs aloud.
"They didn't laugh at that at my last speech," Bayse observes. He
had been addressing cops -- *straight* cops, not computer people. It
had been a worthy meeting, useful one supposes, but nothing like
*this.* There has never been *anything* like this. Without any
prodding, without any preparation, people in the audience simply begin
to ask questions. Longhairs, freaky people, mathematicians. Bayse is
answering, politely, frankly, fully, like a man walking on air. The
ballroom's atmosphere crackles with surreality. A female lawyer
behind me breaks into a sweat and a hot waft of surprisingly potent and
musky perfume flows off her pulse-points.
People are giddy with laughter. People are interested, fascinated,
their eyes so wide and dark that they seem eroticized. Unlikely
daisy-chains form in the halls, around the bar, on the escalators:
cops with hackers, civil rights with FBI, Secret Service with phone
phreaks.
Gail Thackeray is at her crispest in a white wool sweater with a
tiny Secret Service logo. "I found Phiber Optik at the payphones, and
when he saw my sweater, he turned into a *pillar of salt!*" she
chortles.
Phiber discusses his case at much length with his arresting officer,
Don Delaney of the New York State Police. After an hour's chat, the
two of them look ready to begin singing "Auld Lang Syne." Phiber
finally finds the courage to get his worst complaint off his chest. It
isn't so much the arrest. It was the *charge.* Pirating service off
900 numbers. I'm a *programmer,* Phiber insists. This lame charge is
going to hurt my reputation. It would have been cool to be busted for
something happening, like Section 1030 computer intrusion. Maybe some
kind of crime that's scarcely been invented yet. Not lousy phone
fraud. Phooey.
Delaney seems regretful. He had a mountain of possible criminal
charges against Phiber Optik. The kid's gonna plead guilty anyway.
He's a first timer, they always plead. Coulda charged the kid with
most anything, and gotten the same result in the end. Delaney seems
genuinely sorry not to have gratified Phiber in this harmless fashion.
Too late now. Phiber's pled already. All water under the bridge.
Whaddya gonna do?
Delaney's got a good grasp on the hacker mentality. He held a press
conference after he busted a bunch of Masters of Deception kids. Some
journo had asked him: "Would you describe these people as *geniuses?*"
Delaney's deadpan answer, perfect: "No, I would describe these people
as *defendants.*" Delaney busts a kid for hacking codes with repeated
random dialling. Tells the press that NYNEX can track this stuff in no
time flat nowadays, and a kid has to be *stupid* to do something so
easy to catch. Dead on again: hackers don't mind being thought of as
Genghis Khan by the straights, but if there's anything that really
gets 'em where they live, it's being called *dumb.*
Won't be as much fun for Phiber next time around. As a second
offender he's gonna see prison. Hackers break the law. They're not
geniuses, either. They're gonna be defendants. And yet, Delaney muses
over a drink in the hotel bar, he has found it impossible to treat them
as common criminals. Delaney knows criminals. These kids, by
comparison, are clueless -- there is just no crook vibe off of them,
they don't smell right, they're just not *bad.*
Delaney has seen a lot of action. He did Vietnam. He's been shot
at, he has shot people. He's a homicide cop from New York. He has the
appearance of a man who has not only seen the shit hit the fan but has
seen it splattered across whole city blocks and left to ferment for
years. This guy has been around.
He listens to Steve Jackson tell his story. The dreamy game
strategist has been dealt a bad hand. He has played it for all he is
worth. Under his nerdish SF-fan exterior is a core of iron. Friends
of his say Steve Jackson believes in the rules, believes in fair play.
He will never compromise his principles, never give up. "Steve,"
Delaney says to Steve Jackson, "they had some balls, whoever busted you.
You're all right!" Jackson, stunned, falls silent and actually
blushes with pleasure.
Neidorf has grown up a lot in the past year. The kid is a quick
study, you gotta give him that. Dressed by his mom, the fashion
manager for a national clothing chain, Missouri college techie-frat
Craig Neidorf out-dappers everyone at this gig but the toniest East
Coast lawyers. The iron jaws of prison clanged shut without him and now
law school beckons for Neidorf. He looks like a larval Congressman.
Not a "hacker," our Mr. Neidorf. He's not interested in computer
science. Why should he be? He's not interested in writing C code the
rest of his life, and besides, he's seen where the chips fall. To the
world of computer science he and *Phrack* were just a curiosity. But
to the world of law... The kid has learned where the bodies are
buried. He carries his notebook of press clippings wherever he goes.
Phiber Optik makes fun of Neidorf for a Midwestern geek, for
believing that "Acid Phreak" does acid and listens to acid rock. Hell
no. Acid's never done *acid!* Acid's into *acid house music.* Jesus.
The very idea of doing LSD. Our *parents* did LSD, ya clown.
Thackeray suddenly turns upon Craig Neidorf the full lighthouse
glare of her attention and begins a determined half-hour attempt to
*win the boy over.* The Joan of Arc of Computer Crime is *giving
career advice to Knight Lightning!* "Your experience would be very
valuable -- a real asset," she tells him with unmistakeable
sixty-thousand-watt sincerity. Neidorf is fascinated. He listens with
unfeigned attention. He's nodding and saying yes ma'am. Yes, Craig,
you too can forget all about money and enter the glamorous and horribly
underpaid world of PROSECUTING COMPUTER CRIME! You can put your former
friends in prison -- ooops...
You cannot go on dueling at modem's length indefinitely. You
cannot beat one another senseless with rolled-up press-clippings.
Sooner or later you have to come directly to grips. And yet the very
act of assembling here has changed the entire situation drastically.
John Quarterman, author of *The Matrix,* explains the Internet at his
symposium. It is the largest news network in the world, it is growing
by leaps and bounds, and yet you cannot measure Internet because you
cannot stop it in place. It cannot stop, because there is no one
anywhere in the world with the authority to stop Internet. It changes,
yes, it grows, it embeds itself across the post-industrial, postmodern
world and it generates community wherever it touches, and it is doing
this all by itself.
Phiber is different. A very fin de siecle kid, Phiber Optik.
Barlow says he looks like an Edwardian dandy. He does rather. Shaven
neck, the sides of his skull cropped hip-hop close, unruly tangle of
black hair on top that looks pomaded, he stays up till four a.m. and
misses all the sessions, then hangs out in payphone booths with his
acoustic coupler gutsily CRACKING SYSTEMS RIGHT IN THE MIDST OF THE
HEAVIEST LAW ENFORCEMENT DUDES IN THE U.S., or at least *pretending*
to... Unlike "Frank Drake." Drake, who wrote Dorothy Denning out of
nowhere, and asked for an interview for his cheapo cyberpunk fanzine,
and then started grilling her on her ethics. She was squirmin',
too... Drake, scarecrow-tall with his floppy blond mohawk, rotting
tennis shoes and black leather jacket lettered ILLUMINATI in red, gives
off an unmistakeable air of the bohemian literatus. Drake is the kind
of guy who reads British industrial design magazines and appreciates
William Gibson because the quality of the prose is so tasty. Drake
could never touch a phone or a keyboard again, and he'd still have the
nose-ring and the blurry photocopied fanzines and the sampled
industrial music. He's a radical punk with a desktop-publishing rig
and an Internet address. Standing next to Drake, the diminutive Phiber
looks like he's been physically coagulated out of phone-lines. Born to
phreak.
Dorothy Denning approaches Phiber suddenly. The two of them are
about the same height and body-build. Denning's blue eyes flash behind
the round window-frames of her glasses. "Why did you say I was
`quaint?' " she asks Phiber, quaintly.
It's a perfect description but Phiber is nonplussed... "Well, I uh,
you know..."
"I also think you're quaint, Dorothy," I say, novelist to the
rescue, the journo gift of gab... She is neat and dapper and yet
there's an arcane quality to her, something like a Pilgrim Maiden
behind leaded glass; if she were six inches high Dorothy Denning would
look great inside a china cabinet... The Cryptographeress... The
Cryptographrix... whatever... Weirdly, Peter Denning looks just like
his wife, you could pick this gentleman out of a thousand guys as the
soulmate of Dorothy Denning. Wearing tailored slacks, a spotless fuzzy
varsity sweater, and a neatly knotted academician's tie... This
fineboned, exquisitely polite, utterly civilized and hyperintelligent
couple seem to have emerged from some cleaner and finer parallel
universe, where humanity exists to do the Brain Teasers column in
Scientific American. Why does this Nice Lady hang out with these
unsavory characters?
Because the time has come for it, that's why. Because she's the best
there is at what she does.
Donn Parker is here, the Great Bald Eagle of Computer Crime... With
his bald dome, great height, and enormous Lincoln-like hands, the great
visionary pioneer of the field plows through the lesser mortals like an
icebreaker... His eyes are fixed on the future with the rigidity of a
bronze statue... Eventually, he tells his audience, all business crime
will be computer crime, because businesses will do everything through
computers. "Computer crime" as a category will vanish.
In the meantime, passing fads will flourish and fail and
evaporate... Parker's commanding, resonant voice is sphinxlike,
everything is viewed from some eldritch valley of deep historical
abstraction... Yes, they've come and they've gone, these passing flaps
in the world of digital computation... The radio-frequency emanation
scandal... KGB and MI5 and CIA do it every day, it's easy, but nobody
else ever has... The salami-slice fraud, mostly mythical...
"Crimoids," he calls them... Computer viruses are the current crimoid
champ, a lot less dangerous than most people let on, but the novelty is
fading and there's a crimoid vacuum at the moment, the press is visibly
hungering for something more outrageous... The Great Man shares with
us a few speculations on the coming crimoids... Desktop Forgery!
Wow... Computers stolen just for the sake of the information within
them -- data-napping! Happened in Britain a while ago, could be the
coming thing... Phantom nodes in the Internet!
Parker handles his overhead projector sheets with an ecclesiastical
air... He wears a grey double-breasted suit, a light blue shirt, and a
very quiet tie of understated maroon and blue paisley... Aphorisms
emerge from him with slow, leaden emphasis... There is no such thing
as an adequately secure computer when one faces a sufficiently powerful
adversary... Deterrence is the most socially useful aspect of
security... People are the primary weakness in all information
systems... The entire baseline of computer security must be shifted
upward... Don't ever violate your security by publicly describing your
security measures...
People in the audience are beginning to squirm, and yet there is
something about the elemental purity of this guy's philosophy that
compels uneasy respect... Parker sounds like the only sane guy left in
the lifeboat, sometimes. The guy who can prove rigorously, from deep
moral principles, that Harvey there, the one with the broken leg and
the checkered past, is the one who has to be, err... that is, Mr.
Harvey is best placed to make the necessary sacrifice for the security
and indeed the very survival of the rest of this lifeboat's crew...
Computer security, Parker informs us mournfully, is a nasty topic, and
we wish we didn't have to have it... The security expert, armed with
method and logic, must think -- imagine -- everything that the
adversary might do before the adversary might actually do it. It is
as if the criminal's dark brain were an extensive subprogram within the
shining cranium of Donn Parker. He is a Holmes whose Moriarty does
not quite yet exist and so must be perfectly simulated.
CFP is a stellar gathering, with the giddiness of a wedding. It is
a happy time, a happy ending, they know their world is changing forever
tonight, and they're proud to have been there to see it happen, to
talk, to think, to help.
And yet as night falls, a certain elegiac quality manifests itself,
as the crowd gathers beneath the chandeliers with their wineglasses and
dessert plates. Something is ending here, gone forever, and it takes a
while to pinpoint it.
It is the End of the Amateurs.
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