The Secret Service kicked off the nineties with one of the most widely publicized and ultimately disastrous operations - attempting to shut down publisher Steve Jackson because one of his employees had links to the hacker world. It's hard to imagine what was going through the minds of the Secret Service as they seized a computer bulletin board with private mail belonging to hundreds of innocent people and took into custody a fictitious manuscript that they defined as "a handbook for computer crime". It took a while but people finally began to see the tremendous threat to civil liberties that the Secret Service was involved in. This, combined with Operation Sun Devil and the Craig Neidorf/Phrack trial, led to the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation - whose initial purpose was to fight such violations of freedom. In the end, Steve Jackson actually won a lawsuit against the Secret Service and a federal judge chastised them for their actions. In the mainstream press, however, there was little publicity of this important event. Regrettably, this was only the beginning for the Secret Service.