Afterword: The Hacker Crackdown Three Years Later
*************************************************

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

   Keeping up in cyberspace requires a great deal of sustained
attention.   Personally, I keep tabs with the milieu by reading the
invaluable electronic magazine  Computer underground Digest 
(tk0jut2@mvs.cso.niu.edu with the subject header: SUB CuD and a message
that says:  SUB CuD your name     your.full.internet@address).  I also
read Jack Rickard's bracingly iconoclastic *Boardwatch  Magazine* for
print news of the BBS and online community.  And, needless to say, I
read *Wired,* the first magazine of the 1990s that actually looks and
acts like it really belongs in this decade.  There are other ways to
learn, of course, but these three outlets will guide your efforts very
well.

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

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

   Thanks for your attention  `*8-)'

   Bruce Sterling  bruces@well.sf.ca.us -- New Years' Day 1994, Austin
Texas