HomeWare 14/HOMEWARE14.bin/misc/crackdwn.arj/CRACKDWN.TXT

Text File | 1994-04-22 | 556KB | 8,384 lines

THE HACKER CRACKDOWN
Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
by
Bruce Sterling

CONTENTS

Preface to the Electronic Release of *The Hacker Crackdown*
Chronology of the Hacker Crackdown
Introduction

Part 1:  CRASHING THE SYSTEM
A Brief History of Telephony / Bell's Golden Vaporware /
Universal Service / Wild Boys and Wire Women / The Electronic
Communities / The Ungentle Giant / The Breakup / In Defense of
the System / The Crash PostMortem / Landslides in Cyberspace

Part 2:  THE DIGITAL UNDERGROUND
Steal This Phone / Phreaking and Hacking / The View From Under the
Floorboards / Boards: Core of the Underground / Phile Phun / The
Rake's Progress / Strongholds of the Elite / Sting Boards / Hot Potatoes
/ War on the Legion / Terminus / Phile 9-1-1 / War Games / Real
Cyberpunk

Part 3:  LAW AND ORDER
Crooked Boards / The World's Biggest Hacker Bust / Teach Them a
Lesson / The U.S. Secret Service / The Secret Service Battles the
Boodlers / A Walk Downtown / FCIC: The Cutting-Edge Mess /
Cyberspace Rangers / FLETC:  Training the Hacker-Trackers

Part 4:  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
Electronic Afterword to *The Hacker Crackdown,*
New Years' Day 1994
Preface to the Electronic Release of *The Hacker Crackdown*

January 1, 1994 -- Austin, Texas
Hi, I'm Bruce Sterling, the author of this electronic book.

    Out in the traditional world of print, *The Hacker Crackdown* is
ISBN 0-553-08058-X, and is formally catalogued by the Library of
Congress as "1. Computer crimes -- United States.  2. Telephone -- United
States -- Corrupt practices.  3.  Programming (Electronic computers) --
United States -- Corrupt practices."  'Corrupt practices,' I always get a kick
out of that description.  Librarians are very ingenious people.
    The paperback is ISBN 0-553-56370-X.  If you go and buy a print
version of *The Hacker Crackdown,* an action I encourage heartily, you
may notice that in the front of the book,  beneath the copyright notice  --
"Copyright (C) 1992 by Bruce Sterling" -- it has this little block of printed
legal boilerplate from the publisher.  It says, and I quote:
    "No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher. For information address:
Bantam Books."
    This is a pretty good disclaimer, as such disclaimers go.  I collect
intellectual-property disclaimers, and I've seen dozens of them, and this
one is at least pretty straightforward.  In this narrow and particular case,
however, it isn't quite accurate. Bantam Books puts that disclaimer on
every book they publish, but Bantam Books does not, in fact, own the
electronic rights to this book.  I do, because of certain extensive contract
maneuverings my agent and I went through before this book was written.  I
want to give those electronic publishing rights away through certain not-
for-profit channels, and I've convinced Bantam that this is a good idea.
    Since Bantam has seen fit to peacably agree to this scheme of
mine, Bantam Books is not going to fuss about this.  Provided you don't
try to sell the book, they are not going to bother you for what you do with
the electronic copy of this book. If you want to check this out personally,
you can ask them; they're at 1540 Broadway NY NY 10036.  However, if
you were so foolish as to print this book and start retailing it for money in
violation of my copyright and the commercial interests of Bantam Books,
then Bantam, a part of the gigantic Bertelsmann multinational publishing
combine, would roust some of their heavy-duty attorneys out of
hibernation and crush you like a bug.  This is only to be expected.  I didn't
write this book so that you could make money out of it.  If anybody is
gonna make money out of this book, it's gonna be me and my publisher.
    My publisher deserves to make money out of this book.  Not only
did the folks at Bantam Books commission me to write the book, and pay
me a  hefty sum to do so, but they bravely printed, in text, an electronic
document the reproduction of which was once alleged to be a federal
felony.  Bantam Books and their numerous attorneys were very brave and
forthright about this book.  Furthermore, my former editor at Bantam
Books, Betsy Mitchell, genuinely cared about this project, and worked
hard on it, and had a lot of wise things to say about the manuscript.  Betsy
deserves genuine credit for this book, credit that editors too rarely get.
    The critics were very kind to *The Hacker Crackdown,* and
commercially the book has done  well.  On the other hand, I didn't write
this book in order to squeeze every last nickel and dime out of the mitts of
impoverished sixteen-year-old cyberpunk high-school-students.  Teenagers
don't  have any money -- (no, not even enough for the  sixdollar *Hacker
Crackdown* paperback, with its attractive bright-red cover and useful
index).   That's a major reason why teenagers sometimes succumb to the
temptation to do things they shouldn't, such as swiping my books out of
libraries.   Kids:  this one is all yours, all right?  Go give the print version
back. *8-)
    Well-meaning, public-spirited civil libertarians don't have much
money, either.   And it seems almost criminal to snatch cash out of the
hands of America's direly underpaid electronic law enforcement
community.
    If you're a computer cop, a hacker, or an electronic civil liberties
activist, you are the target audience for this book.  I wrote this book
because I wanted to help you, and help other people understand you and
your unique, uhm, problems.  I wrote this book to aid your activities, and
to contribute to the public discussion of important political issues.  In
giving the text away in this fashion, I am directly contributing to the book's
ultimate aim:  to help civilize cyberspace.
    Information *wants* to be free.  And  the information inside this
book longs for freedom with a peculiar intensity.  I genuinely believe that
the natural habitat of this book is inside an electronic network.  That may
not be the easiest direct method to generate revenue for the book's author,
but that  doesn't matter; this is where this book belongs by its nature.  I've
written other books -- plenty of other books -- and I'll write more and I am
writing more, but this one is special.  I am making *The Hacker
Crackdown* available electronically as widely as I can conveniently
manage, and if you like the book, and think it is useful, then I urge you to
do the same with it.
    You can copy this electronic book.   Copy the heck out of it, be my
guest, and give those copies to anybody who wants them.  The nascent
world of cyberspace is full of sysadmins, teachers, trainers, cybrarians,
netgurus, and various species of  cybernetic activist.  If you're one of those
people,  I know about you, and I know the hassle you go through to try to
help people learn about the electronic frontier.  I hope that possessing this
book in electronic form will lessen your troubles.  Granted, this treatment
of our electronic social spectrum is not the ultimate in academic rigor.
And politically, it has something to offend and trouble almost everyone.
But hey, I'm told it's readable, and at least the price is right. You can
upload the book onto bulletin board systems, or Internet nodes, or
electronic discussion groups.  Go right ahead and do that, I am giving you
express permission right now.  Enjoy yourself.
    You can put the book on disks and give the disks away, as long as
you don't take any money for it.
    But this book is not public domain.  You can't copyright it in your
own name.   I own the copyright. Attempts to pirate this book and make
money from  selling it may involve you in a serious litigative snarl.
Believe me, for the pittance you might wring out of such an action, it's
really not worth it.  This book don't "belong" to you.  In an odd but very
genuine way, I feel it doesn't "belong" to me, either.  It's a book about the
people of cyberspace, and distributing it in this way is the best way I know
to actually make this information available, freely and easily, to all the
people of cyberspace -- including people far outside the borders of the
United States, who otherwise may never have a chance to see any edition
of the book, and who may perhaps learn something useful from this
strange story of distant, obscure, but portentous events in so-called
"American cyberspace."

    This electronic book is now literary freeware.  It now belongs to
the emergent realm of alternative information economics.  You have no
right to make this electronic book part of the conventional flow of
commerce.  Let it be part of the flow of knowledge: there's a difference.
I've divided the book into four sections, so that it is less ungainly for
upload and download; if there's a section of particular relevance to you and
your colleagues, feel free to reproduce that one and skip the rest. Just make
more when you need them, and give them to whoever might want them.
    Now have fun.
    Bruce Sterling -- [e-mail] CHRONOLOGY OF THE
HACKER CRACKDOWN 1865 U.S. Secret Service (USSS) founded.
1876  Alexander Graham Bell invents telephone. 1878  First teenage males
flung off phone system by enraged authorities. 1939  "Futurian" science-
fiction group raided by Secret Service. 1971  Yippie phone phreaks start
YIPL/TAP magazine. 1972  *Ramparts* magazine seized in blue-box rip-
off scandal. 1978  Ward Christenson and Randy Suess create first personal
computer bulletin board system. 1982  William Gibson coins term
"cyberspace." 1982  "414 Gang"  raided. 1983-1983  AT&T dismantled in
divestiture. 1984  Congress passes Comprehensive Crime Control Act
giving USSS jurisdiction over credit card fraud and computer fraud. 1984
"Legion of Doom" formed. 1984.  *2600:  The Hacker Quarterly*
founded. 1984.   *Whole Earth Software Catalog* published. 1985.  First
police "sting" bulletin board systems established. 1985.  Whole Earth
'Lectronic Link computer conference (WELL) goes on-line. 1986
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act passed. 1986  Electronic Communications
Privacy Act passed. 1987  Chicago prosecutors form Computer Fraud and
Abuse Task Force. 1988 July.  Secret Service covertly videotapes
"SummerCon" hacker convention. September.  "Prophet" cracks BellSouth
AIMSX computer network and downloads E911 Document to his own
computer and to Jolnet. September.  AT&T Corporate Information
Security informed of Prophet's action. October.  Bellcore Security
informed of Prophet's action. 1989 January.  Prophet uploads E911
Document to Knight Lightning. February 25.  Knight Lightning publishes
E911Document in *Phrack* electronic newsletter. May.  Chicago Task
Force raids and arrests "Kyrie." June.  "NuPrometheus League" distributes
Apple Computer proprietary software. June 13.  Florida probation office
crossed with phone-sex line in switching-station stunt. July.  "Fry Guy"
raided by USSS and Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force.
July.  Secret Service raids "Prophet," "Leftist," and "Urvile" in Georgia.
1990 January
    15.  Martin Luther King Day Crash strikes AT&T long-distance
network nationwide. January 18-19  Chicago Task Force raids Knight
Lightning in St. Louis. January
    24.  USSS and New York State Police raid "Phiber Optik,"  "Acid
Phreak," and "Scorpion" in New York City. February
    1. USSS raids "Terminus" in Maryland. February
    3.  Chicago Task Force raids Richard Andrews' home. February
    6.  Chicago Task Force raids Richard Andrews' business. February
    6.  USSS arrests Terminus, Prophet, Leftist, and Urvile. February
    9.  Chicago Task Force arrests Knight Lightning. February 20.
AT&T Security shuts down public-access "attctc" computer in Dallas.
February 21.  Chicago Task Force raids Robert Izenberg in Austin. March
1.  Chicago Task Force raids Steve Jackson Games, Inc., "Mentor," and
"Erik Bloodaxe" in Austin. May 7,8,9.  USSS and Arizona Organized
Crime and Racketeering Bureau conduct "Operation Sundevil" raids in
Cincinnatti, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Phoenix, Pittsburgh,
Richmond, Tucson, San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco. May.  FBI
interviews John Perry Barlow re NuPrometheus case. June.  Mitch Kapor
and Barlow found Electronic Frontier Foundation;  Barlow publishes
*Crime and Puzzlement* manifesto. July 24-27.  Trial of Knight
Lightning. 1991 February.  CPSR Roundtable in Washington, D.C. March
25-28.  Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in San Francisco.
May 1.  Electronic Frontier Foundation, Steve Jackson, and others file suit
against members of Chicago Task Force. July 1-2.  Switching station
phone software crash affects Washington, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, San
Francisco. September 17.  AT&T phone crash affects New York City and
three airports.

Introduction This is a book about cops, and  wild teenage whiz- kids, and
lawyers, and hairy-eyed anarchists, and industrial technicians, and hippies,
and high-tech millionaires, and game hobbyists, and computer security
experts, and Secret Service agents, and grifters, and thieves. This book is
about the electronic frontier of the 1990s. It concerns activities that take
place inside computers and over telephone lines.

    A science fiction writer coined the useful term "cyberspace" in
1982.  But the territory in question, the electronic frontier, is about a
hundred and thirty years old. Cyberspace is the "place" where a telephone
conversation appears to occur.  Not inside your actual phone, the plastic
device on your desk.  Not inside the other person's phone, in some other
city.  *The place between* the phones.  The indefinite place *out there,*
where the two of you, two human beings, actually meet and communicate.

    Although it is not exactly  "real," "cyberspace" is a genuine place.
Things happen there that have very  genuine consequences.  This "place" is
not "real," but it is serious, it is earnest.  Tens of thousands of people have
dedicated their lives to it, to the public service of public communication by
wire and electronics.


    People have worked on this "frontier" for generations now.  Some
people became rich and famous from their efforts there.  Some just played
in it, as hobbyists.  Others soberly pondered it, and wrote about it, and
regulated it, and negotiated over it in international forums, and sued one
another about it, in gigantic, epic court battles that lasted for years.  And
almost since the beginning, some people have committed crimes in this
place.
    But in the past twenty years, this electrical "space," which was
once thin and dark and one-dimensional -- little more than a narrow
speaking-tube, stretching from phone to phone -- has flung itself open like
a gigantic jack-inthe- box.  Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of the
glowing computer screen.   This dark electric netherworld has become a
vast flowering electronic landscape.   Since the 1960s, the world of the
telephone has cross-bred itself with computers and television, and though
there is still no substance to cyberspace,  nothing you can handle, it has a
strange kind of physicality now.   It makes good sense today to talk of
cyberspace  as a place all its own.
    Because people live in it now.   Not just a few people, not just a
few technicians and eccentrics, but thousands of people, quite normal
people.  And not just for a little while, either, but for hours straight, over
weeks, and  months, and years.   Cyberspace today is a "Net," a "Matrix,"
international in scope and growing swiftly and steadily. It's growing in
size, and wealth, and  political importance.
    People are making entire careers in modern cyberspace.   Scientists
and technicians, of course; they've been there for twenty years now.  But
increasingly, cyberspace is filling with journalists and doctors and lawyers
and artists and clerks.   Civil servants make their careers there now, "on-
line" in vast government databanks; and so do spies, industrial, political,
and just plain snoops; and so do police, at least a few of them.  And there
are children living there now.
    People have met there and been married there. There are entire
living communities in cyberspace today; chattering, gossipping, planning,
conferring and scheming,  leaving one another voice-mail and electronic
mail, giving one another big weightless chunks of valuable data,  both
legitimate and illegitimate.  They busily pass one another computer
software and the occasional festering computer virus.
    We do not really understand how to live in cyberspace yet.  We are
feeling our way into it, blundering about.   That is not surprising.  Our
lives in the physical world, the "real" world, are also far from perfect,
despite a lot more practice.   Human lives, real lives,  are imperfect by
their nature, and there are human beings in cyberspace.  The way we live
in cyberspace is a funhouse mirror of the way we live in the real world.
We take both our advantages and our troubles with us.

    This book is about trouble in cyberspace. Specifically, this book is
about certain strange events in the year 1990, an unprecedented and
startling year for the the growing world of computerized communications.


    In 1990 there came a nationwide crackdown on illicit computer
hackers, with arrests, criminal charges,  one dramatic show-trial, several
guilty pleas,  and huge confiscations of data and equipment all over the
USA.
    The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was larger, better organized, more
deliberate, and more resolute than any previous effort in the brave new
world of computer crime. The U.S.  Secret Service, private telephone
security, and state and local law enforcement groups across the country all
joined forces in a determined attempt to break the back of America's
electronic underground.   It was a fascinating effort, with very mixed
results.
    The Hacker Crackdown had another unprecedented effect; it
spurred the creation, within "the computer community," of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, a new and very odd interest group, fiercely  dedicated
to the establishment and preservation of electronic civil liberties. The
crackdown, remarkable in itself, has created a melee of debate over
electronic crime, punishment, freedom of  the press,  and issues of search
and seizure.   Politics has entered cyberspace.   Where people go, politics
follow. This is the story of the people of cyberspace.  PART ONE:
Crashing the System On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance
telephone switching system crashed.


    This was a strange, dire, huge event.  Sixty thousand people lost
their telephone service completely.   During the nine long hours of frantic
effort that it took to restore service, some seventy million telephone calls
went uncompleted.

    Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco trade, are a
known and accepted hazard of the telephone business.    Hurricanes hit,
and phone cables get snapped by the thousands.   Earthquakes wrench
through buried fiber-optic lines.  Switching stations catch fire and burn to
the ground.  These things do happen.  There are contingency plans for
them, and decades of experience in dealing with them.   But the Crash of
January 15 was unprecedented.  It was unbelievably huge, and it occurred
for no apparent physical reason.
    The crash started  on a Monday afternoon in a single switching-
station in Manhattan.  But, unlike any merely physical damage,  it spread
and spread.   Station after  station across America collapsed in a chain
reaction, until fully half of AT&T's  network had gone haywire and the
remaining half was hard-put to handle the overflow.
    Within nine hours, AT&T software engineers more or less
understood what had caused the crash.  Replicating the problem exactly,
poring over software line by line, took them a couple of weeks.   But
because it was hard to  understand technically, the full truth of the matter
and its implications were not widely and thoroughly aired and explained.
The root cause of the crash remained obscure, surrounded by rumor and
fear. The crash was a grave corporate embarrassment. The "culprit" was a
bug in AT&T's own software -- not the sort of admission the
telecommunications giant wanted to make, especially in the face of
increasing competition. Still, the truth *was*  told, in the baffling
technical terms necessary to explain it.
    Somehow  the explanation failed to persuade American law
enforcement officials and even telephone corporate security personnel.
These people were not technical experts or software wizards, and they had
their own suspicions about the cause of this disaster.
    The police and telco security  had important sources of information
denied to mere software engineers.   They had informants in the computer
underground and  years of experience in dealing with high-tech rascality
that seemed to grow ever more sophisticated.   For years they had been
expecting a direct and savage attack against the American national
telephone system.  And with the Crash  of January 15 -- the first month of
a new, high-tech decade -- their predictions, fears, and suspicions seemed
at last to have  entered the real world.   A world where the telephone
system had not merely crashed, but, quite likely, *been* crashed -- by
"hackers."
    The  crash created a large dark cloud of suspicion that would color
certain people's assumptions and actions for months.  The fact that it took
place in the realm of software was suspicious on its face.   The fact that it
occurred on Martin Luther King Day, still the most politically touchy of
American holidays, made it more suspicious yet.


    The  Crash of January 15  gave the Hacker Crackdown its sense of
edge and  its sweaty urgency.   It made people, powerful people in
positions of public  authority, willing to believe the worst.  And, most
fatally, it helped to give investigators a willingness to take extreme
measures and the determination to preserve almost total secrecy. An
obscure software fault in an aging switching system in New York  was to
lead to a chain reaction of legal and constitutional trouble all across the
country.



    #
    Like the crash in the telephone system, this chain reaction was
ready and waiting to happen.  During the 1980s, the American legal
system was extensively patched to deal with the novel issues of computer
crime.  There was, for instance, the Electronic  Communications Privacy
Act of 1986  (eloquently described as "a stinking mess" by a prominent
law enforcement official).   And there was the draconian Computer Fraud
and Abuse Act of 1986, passed unanimously by the United States Senate,
which later would reveal a large number of flaws.   Extensive, wellmeant
efforts had been made to keep the legal system up to date.  But in the day-
to-day grind of the real world, even the most elegant software tends to
crumble and suddenly reveal its hidden bugs.
    Like the advancing telephone system, the American legal system
was certainly not ruined by its temporary crash; but for those caught under
the weight of the collapsing system, life became a series of blackouts and
anomalies.
    In order to understand why these weird events  occurred, both in
the world of technology and in the world of law, it's not enough to
understand the merely technical problems.  We will get to those; but first
and foremost, we must try to understand the telephone, and the business of
telephones, and the community of human beings that telephones have
created.



    #
    Technologies have life cycles, like cities do, like institutions do,
like laws and governments do.
    The first stage of  any technology is  the Question Mark, often
known as the "Golden Vaporware" stage.   At this early point, the
technology is only a phantom, a mere gleam in the inventor's eye.   One
such inventor was a speech teacher and electrical tinkerer named
Alexander Graham Bell.


    Bell's early inventions, while ingenious, failed to move the world.
In 1863, the teenage Bell and his brother Melville made an artificial
talking mechanism out of wood, rubber, gutta-percha, and tin.  This weird
device had a rubber-covered "tongue" made of movable wooden segments,
with vibrating rubber "vocal cords," and rubber  "lips" and "cheeks."
While Melville puffed a bellows into a tin tube, imitating the lungs,  young
Alec  Bell would manipulate the "lips," "teeth," and "tongue," causing the
thing to emit high-pitched falsetto gibberish.
    Another would-be technical breakthrough was the Bell
"phonautograph" of 1874, actually made out of a human cadaver's ear.
Clamped into place on a tripod, this grisly gadget drew sound-wave
images on smoked glass through a thin straw glued to its vibrating
earbones.
    By 1875, Bell had learned to produce audible sounds - ugly shrieks
and squawks -- by using magnets, diaphragms, and electrical current. Most
"Golden Vaporware" technologies go nowhere.
    But the second stage of technology is the Rising Star, or, the
"Goofy Prototype," stage.   The telephone, Bell's most ambitious gadget
yet,  reached this stage on March 10, 1876.  On that great day, Alexander
Graham Bell became the first person to transmit intelligible human speech
electrically.   As it happened, young Professor Bell, industriously tinkering
in his Boston lab,  had spattered his trousers with acid.   His assistant, Mr.
Watson, heard his cry for help -- over Bell's experimental audiotelegraph.
This was an event without precedent.
    Technologies in their "Goofy Prototype" stage rarely work very
well.  They're experimental, and therefore halfbaked and rather frazzled.
The prototype may be attractive and novel, and it does look as if it ought
to be good for something-or-other.  But nobody, including the inventor, is
quite sure what.  Inventors, and speculators, and pundits may have very
firm ideas about its potential use, but those ideas are often very wrong.

    The natural habitat of the Goofy Prototype is in trade shows and in
the popular press.   Infant technologies need publicity and investment
money like a tottering calf need milk.  This was very true of Bell's
machine.   To raise research and development money,  Bell toured with his
device as a stage attraction.

    Contemporary press reports of the stage debut of the telephone
showed pleased astonishment mixed with considerable dread.   Bell's stage
telephone was a large wooden box with a crude speaker-nozzle, the whole
contraption about the size and shape of an overgrown Brownie camera.
Its buzzing steel soundplate, pumped up by powerful electromagnets,  was
loud enough to fill an auditorium.  Bell's assistant Mr. Watson, who could
manage on the keyboards fairly well, kicked in by playing the organ from
distant rooms, and, later, distant cities. This feat was considered
marvellous, but very eerie indeed.

    Bell's original notion for the telephone, an idea promoted for a
couple of  years, was that it would become a mass medium.  We might
recognize Bell's idea today as something close to modern "cable radio."
Telephones  at a central source would transmit music, Sunday sermons,
and important public speeches to a paying network of wired-up
subscribers.
    At the time, most people thought this notion made good sense.    In
fact, Bell's idea  was workable.  In Hungary, this philosophy of the
telephone was successfully put into everyday practice.  In Budapest, for
decades, from 1893 until after World War I, there was a government-run
information  service called "Telefon Hirmondo╜."   Hirmondo╜ was a
centralized source of news and entertainment and culture, including stock
reports,  plays, concerts, and novels read aloud.  At certain hours of the
day, the phone would ring, you would plug in a loudspeaker for the use of
the family, and Telefon Hirmondo╜ would be on the air -- or rather, on the
phone.
    Hirmondo╜ is dead tech today, but  Hirmondo╜ might be
considered a spiritual ancestor of the modern telephone-accessed computer
data services, such as CompuServe, GEnie or Prodigy.  The principle
behind Hirmondo╜ is also not too far from computer "bulletinboard
systems" or BBS's, which arrived in the late 1970s, spread rapidly across
America, and will figure largely in this book.
    We are used to using telephones for individual person-to-person
speech, because we are used to the Bell system.  But this was just one
possibility among many. Communication networks are very flexible and
protean, especially when their hardware becomes sufficiently advanced.
They can be put to all kinds of uses.   And they have been -- and they will
be.
    Bell's telephone was bound for glory, but this was a combination of
political decisions, canny infighting in court, inspired industrial leadership,
receptive local conditions and outright good luck.  Much the same is true
of communications systems today.
    As Bell and his backers struggled to install their newfangled
system in the real world of nineteenth-century New England, they had to
fight against skepticism and industrial rivalry.  There was already a strong
electrical communications network present in America: the telegraph.  The
head of the Western Union telegraph system dismissed Bell's prototype as
"an electrical toy" and refused to buy the rights to Bell's  patent.    The
telephone, it seemed,  might be all right as a parlor entertainment -- but not
for serious business.
    Telegrams, unlike mere telephones, left a permanent physical
record of their messages.  Telegrams, unlike telephones,  could be
answered whenever the recipient had time and convenience.  And the
telegram had a much  longer distance-range than Bell's early telephone.
These factors made telegraphy seem a much more sound and businesslike
technology -- at least to some.
    The telegraph system was huge, and well-entrenched. In 1876, the
United States had 214,000 miles of telegraph wire, and 8500 telegraph
offices.  There were specialized telegraphs for businesses and stock
traders, government, police and fire departments.  And Bell's "toy" was
best known as a stage-magic musical device.
    The third stage of technology is known as the "Cash Cow" stage.
In the "cash cow" stage, a technology finds its place in the world, and
matures, and becomes settled and productive.   After a year or so,
Alexander Graham Bell and his capitalist backers concluded that eerie
music piped from nineteenth-century cyberspace was not the  real selling-
point of his invention.  Instead, the telephone was about speech --
individual, personal speech, the human voice, human conversation and
human interaction.   The telephone was not to be managed from any
centralized broadcast center.  It was to be a personal, intimate technology.
    When you picked up a telephone, you were not absorbing the cold
output of a machine -- you were speaking to another human being.   Once
people realized this, their instinctive dread of the telephone as an eerie,
unnatural device, swiftly vanished.   A "telephone call" was not a "call"
from a "telephone" itself,  but a call from another human being, someone
you would generally know and recognize.   The real point was not what
the machine could do for you (or to you), but what you yourself, a person
and citizen, could do *through* the machine.  This decision on the part of
the young Bell Company was absolutely vital.
    The first telephone networks went up around Boston - mostly
among the technically curious and the well-to-do (much the same segment
of the American populace that, a hundred years later, would be buying
personal computers).  Entrenched backers of the telegraph continued to
scoff.
    But in January 1878, a disaster made the telephone famous.   A
train crashed in Tarriffville, Connecticut.  Forward-looking doctors in the
nearby city of Hartford had had Bell's "speaking telephone" installed.    An
alert local druggist was able to telephone an entire community of local
doctors, who rushed to the site to give aid.  The disaster, as disasters do,
aroused intense press coverage. The phone had proven its usefulness in the
real world.
    After Tarriffville, the telephone network spread like crabgrass.  By
1890 it was all over New England.  By '93, out to Chicago.  By '97, into
Minnesota, Nebraska and Texas. By 1904 it was all over the continent.
    The telephone had become a mature technology. Professor Bell
(now generally known as "Dr. Bell" despite his lack of a formal degree)
became quite wealthy.   He lost interest in the tedious day-to-day business
muddle of the booming telephone network, and gratefully returned his
attention to creatively hacking-around in his  various laboratories, which
were now much larger, betterventilated,  and gratifyingly better-equipped.
Bell was never to have another great inventive success, though his
speculations and prototypes anticipated fiber-optic transmission, manned
flight, sonar, hydrofoil ships, tetrahedral construction, and Montessori
education.   The "decibel," the standard scientific measure of sound
intensity, was named after Bell.
    Not all Bell's vaporware notions were inspired.  He was fascinated
by human eugenics.   He also spent many years developing a weird
personal system of astrophysics in which gravity did not exist.
    Bell was a definite eccentric.  He was something of a
hypochondriac, and throughout his life he habitually stayed up until four
A.M., refusing to rise before noon. But Bell had accomplished a great feat;
he was an idol of millions and his influence, wealth, and great personal
charm, combined with his eccentricity, made him something of a loose
cannon on deck.   Bell maintained a thriving scientific salon in his winter
mansion in Washington, D.C., which gave him considerable backstage
influence in governmental and scientific circles.   He was a major financial
backer of the the magazines *Science* and *National Geographic,* both
still flourishing today as important organs of the American scientific
establishment. Bell's companion Thomas Watson, similarly wealthy and
similarly odd, became the ardent political disciple of a 19th-century
science-fiction writer and would-be social reformer, Edward Bellamy.
Watson also trod the boards briefly as a Shakespearian actor.
    There would never be another Alexander Graham Bell, but in years
to come there would be surprising numbers of people like him.  Bell was a
prototype of the high-tech entrepreneur.   High-tech entrepreneurs will
play a very prominent role in this book: not merely as technicians and
businessmen, but as pioneers of the technical frontier, who can carry the
power and prestige they derive from high-technology into the political and
social arena.
    Like later entrepreneurs, Bell was fierce in defense of his own
technological territory.  As the telephone began to flourish, Bell was soon
involved in violent lawsuits in the defense of his patents.  Bell's Boston
lawyers were excellent, however, and Bell himself, as an elecution teacher
and gifted public speaker, was a devastatingly effective legal witness.  In
the eighteen years of  Bell's patents, the Bell company was involved in six
hundred separate lawsuits.  The legal records printed filled 149 volumes.
The Bell Company won every single suit.
    After Bell's exclusive patents expired, rival telephone companies
sprang up all over America.  Bell's company, American Bell Telephone,
was soon in deep trouble.  In 1907, American Bell Telephone fell into the
hands of the rather sinister J.P. Morgan financial cartel, robber-baron
speculators who dominated Wall Street.
    At this point, history might have taken a different turn.  American
might well have been served forever by a patchwork of locally owned
telephone companies.   Many state politicians and local businessmen
considered this an excellent solution.
    But the new Bell holding company, American Telephone and
Telegraph or AT&T, put in a new man at the helm, a visionary industrialist
named Theodore Vail. Vail, a former Post Office manager, understood
large organizations and had an innate feeling for the nature of large-scale
communications.   Vail quickly saw to it that AT&T seized the
technological edge once again.   The Pupin and Campbell "loading coil,"
and the deForest "audion," are both extinct technology today, but in 1913
they gave Vail's company the best *long-distance*  lines ever built.  By
controlling long-distance -- the links between, and over, and above the
smaller local phone companies -- AT&T swiftly gained the whip-hand
over them, and was soon devouring them right and left.

    Vail plowed the profits back into research and  development,
starting the Bell tradition of huge-scale and brilliant industrial research.
    Technically and financially, AT&T gradually steamrollered the
opposition.  Independent telephone companies never became entirely
extinct, and hundreds of them flourish today.  But Vail's  AT&T became
the supreme communications company.   At one point, Vail's AT&T
bought Western Union itself, the very company that had derided Bell's
telephone as a "toy."   Vail thoroughly reformed Western Union's
hidebound business along his modern principles;  but when the  federal
government grew anxious at this centralization of power, Vail politely
gave Western Union back.
    This centralizing process was not unique.  Very similar  events had
happened in American steel, oil, and railroads.   But AT&T, unlike the
other companies, was to remain supreme.  The monopoly robber-barons of
those other industries were humbled and shattered by government trust-
busting. Vail, the former Post Office official, was quite willing to
accommodate the US government; in fact he would forge an active
alliance with it.   AT&T would become almost a wing of the American
government, almost another Post Office -- though not quite.   AT&T
would willingly submit to federal regulation, but in return, it would use the
government's regulators as its own police, who would keep out
competitors and assure the Bell system's profits and preeminence.

    This was the second birth -- the political birth -- of the American
telephone system.  Vail's arrangement was to persist, with vast success, for
many decades, until 1982. His system was an odd kind of American
industrial socialism.  It was born at about the same time as Leninist
Communism, and it lasted almost as long -- and, it must be admitted, to
considerably better effect.
    Vail's system worked.  Except perhaps for aerospace, there has
been no technology more thoroughly dominated by Americans than the
telephone.   The telephone was seen from the beginning as a
quintessentially American technology.   Bell's policy, and the policy of
Theodore Vail, was a profoundly democratic policy of *universal access.*
Vail's famous corporate slogan, "One Policy, One System, Universal
Service," was a political slogan, with a very American ring to it. The
American telephone was not to become the specialized tool of government
or business, but a general public utility.  At first, it was true, only the
wealthy could afford private telephones, and Bell's company pursued the
business markets primarily.   The American phone system was a capitalist
effort, meant to make money; it was not a charity.  But from the first,
almost all communities with telephone service had public telephones.  And
many stores -- especially drugstores -offered public use of their phones.
You might not own a  telephone -- but you could always get into the
system, if you really needed to.
    There was nothing inevitable about this decision to make
telephones "public" and "universal."   Vail's system involved a profound
act of trust in the public.  This decision was a political one, informed by
the basic values of the American republic.  The situation might have been
very different;  and in other countries, under other systems, it certainly
was.
    Joseph Stalin, for instance, vetoed plans for a Soviet phone system
soon after the Bolshevik revolution.  Stalin was certain that publicly
accessible telephones would become instruments of anti-Soviet
counterrevolution and conspiracy.   (He was probably right.)  When
telephones did arrive in the Soviet Union, they would be instruments of
Party authority, and always heavily tapped.  (Alexander Solzhenitsyn's
prison-camp novel *The First Circle* describes efforts to develop a phone
system more suited to Stalinist purposes.)
    France, with its tradition of rational centralized government, had
fought bitterly even against the electric telegraph, which seemed to the
French entirely too anarchical and frivolous.   For decades, nineteenth-
century France communicated via the "visual telegraph," a nation-
spanning, government-owned  semaphore system of huge stone towers that
signalled from hilltops, across vast distances, with big windmill-like arms.
In 1846, one Dr. Barbay, a semaphore enthusiast, memorably uttered an
early version of what might be called "the security expert's argument"
against the open media.
    "No, the electric telegraph is not a sound invention. It will always
be at the mercy of the slightest disruption, wild youths, drunkards, bums,
etc....  The electric telegraph meets those destructive elements with only a
few meters of wire over which supervision is impossible.  A single man
could, without being seen, cut the telegraph wires leading to Paris, and in
twenty-four hours cut in ten different places the wires of the same line,
without being arrested. The visual telegraph, on the contrary, has its
towers, its high walls, its gates well-guarded from inside by strong armed
men.  Yes, I declare, substitution of the electric telegraph for the visual
one is a dreadful measure, a truly idiotic act."
    Dr. Barbay and his high-security stone machines were eventually
unsuccessful, but his argument -- that communication  exists for the safety
and convenience of the state, and must be carefully protected from the
wild boys and the gutter rabble  who might want to crash the system --
would be heard again and again.


    When the French telephone system finally did arrive, its snarled
inadequacy was to be notorious.  Devotees of the American Bell System
often recommended a trip to France, for skeptics.
    In Edwardian Britain, issues of class and privacy were a ball-and-
chain for telephonic progress.   It was considered outrageous that anyone --
any wild fool off the street -- could simply barge bellowing into one's
office or home, preceded only by the ringing of a telephone bell.  In
Britain, phones were tolerated for the use of business, but private phones
tended be stuffed away into closets, smoking rooms, or servants' quarters.
Telephone operators were resented in Britain because they did not seem to
"know their place."   And no one of breeding would print a telephone
number on a business card; this seemed a crass attempt to make the
acquaintance of strangers.
    But phone access in America was to become a popular right;
something like universal suffrage, only more so.  American women could
not yet vote when the phone system came through; yet from the beginning
American women doted on the telephone.  This "feminization" of the
American telephone was often commented on by foreigners.   Phones in
America were not censored or stiff or  formalized; they were social,
private, intimate, and domestic.   In America, Mother's Day is by far the
busiest day of the year for the phone network.
    The early telephone companies, and especially AT&T, were among
the foremost employers of American women.  They employed the
daughters of the American middle-class in great armies: in 1891, eight
thousand women; by 1946, almost a quarter of a million.   Women
seemed to enjoy telephone work; it was respectable, it was steady, it paid
fairly well as women's work went, and -- not least -- it seemed a genuine
contribution to the social good of the community.   Women found Vail's
ideal of public service attractive.  This was especially true in rural areas,
where women operators, running extensive rural partylines, enjoyed
considerable social power.   The operator knew everyone on the party-line,
and everyone knew her.
    Although Bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the telephone
company did not employ women for the sake of advancing female
liberation.  AT&T  did this for sound commercial reasons.  The first
telephone operators of the Bell system were not women, but teenage
American boys. They were telegraphic  messenger boys (a group about to
be rendered technically obsolescent), who swept up around the phone
office, dunned customers for bills, and made phone connections on the
switchboard, all on the cheap.
    Within the very first  year of operation, 1878, Bell's company
learned a sharp lesson about combining teenage boys and telephone
switchboards.   Putting teenage boys in charge of the phone system
brought swift and consistent disaster.  Bell's chief engineer described them
as "Wild Indians."  The boys were openly rude to customers.  They talked
back to subscribers, saucing off, uttering facetious remarks, and generally
giving lip.  The rascals took Saint Patrick's Day off without permission.
And worst of all they played clever tricks with the switchboard plugs:
disconnecting calls, crossing lines so that customers found themselves
talking to strangers, and so forth.
    This combination of power, technical mastery, and effective
anonymity seemed to act like catnip on teenage boys.
    This wild-kid-on-the-wires phenomenon was not confined to the
USA; from the beginning, the same was true of the British phone system.
An early British commentator kindly remarked:  "No doubt boys in their
teens found the work not a little irksome, and it is also highly probable that
under the early conditions of employment the adventurous and inquisitive
spirits of which the average healthy boy of that age is possessed, were not
always conducive to the best attention being given to the wants of the
telephone subscribers."
    So the boys were flung off the system -- or at least, deprived of
control of the switchboard.  But the "adventurous and inquisitive spirits"
of the teenage boys would be heard from in the world of telephony, again
and again.
    The fourth stage in the technological life-cycle is death:  "the Dog,"
dead tech.   The telephone has so far avoided this fate.  On the contrary, it
is thriving, still spreading, still evolving, and at increasing speed.

    The telephone has achieved a rare and exalted state for a
technological artifact:  it has become a *household object.*    The
telephone, like the clock, like pen and paper, like kitchen utensils and
running water, has become a technology that is visible only by its absence.
The telephone is technologically transparent.  The global telephone system
is the largest and most complex machine in the world, yet it is easy to use.
More remarkable yet,  the telephone is almost entirely physically safe for
the user.

    For the average citizen in the 1870s, the telephone was weirder,
more shocking, more "high-tech" and harder to comprehend, than the most
outrageous stunts of advanced computing for us Americans in the 1990s.
In trying to understand what is happening to us today, with  our bulletin-
board systems, direct overseas dialling, fiberoptic transmissions, computer
viruses, hacking stunts, and a vivid tangle of new laws and new crimes, it
is important to realize that our society has been through a similar challenge
before -- and that, all in all, we did rather well by it.
    Bell's stage telephone seemed bizarre at first.  But the sensations of
weirdness vanished quickly, once people began to hear the familiar voices
of relatives and friends, in their own homes on their own telephones.   The
telephone changed from a fearsome high-tech totem to an everyday pillar
of human community.
    This has also happened, and is still happening, to computer
networks.   Computer networks  such as NSFnet, BITnet,  USENET,
JANET,  are technically advanced, intimidating, and much harder to use
than telephones.  Even the popular, commercial computer networks, such
as GEnie, Prodigy, and CompuServe, cause much head-scratching and
have been described as  "user-hateful."   Nevertheless they too are
changing from fancy high-tech items into everyday sources of human
community.
    The words "community" and "communication" have the same root.
Wherever you put a communications network, you put a community as
well.  And whenever you *take away*  that network -- confiscate it,
outlaw it, crash it, raise its price beyond affordability -- then you hurt that
community.
    Communities  will fight to defend themselves.  People will fight
harder and more bitterly to defend their communities,  than they will fight
to defend their own individual selves.   And this is very true of the
"electronic community" that arose around computer networks in the 1980s
-- or rather, the *various* electronic communities, in telephony, law
enforcement, computing, and the digital  underground that, by  the year
1990, were raiding, rallying, arresting, suing, jailing, fining and issuing
angry manifestos.
    None of the events of 1990 were entirely new. Nothing happened
in 1990 that did not have some kind of earlier and more understandable
precedent.   What gave the Hacker Crackdown its new sense of gravity and
importance was the feeling -- the *community* feeling - that the political
stakes had been raised; that trouble in cyberspace was no longer mere
mischief or inconclusive skirmishing, but a genuine fight over genuine
issues, a fight for community survival and the shape of the future. These
electronic communities, having flourished throughout the 1980s, were
becoming aware of themselves, and increasingly, becoming aware of
other, rival communities.   Worries were sprouting up right and left, with
complaints, rumors, uneasy speculations.   But it would take a catalyst, a
shock, to make the new world evident.   Like Bell's great publicity break,
the Tarriffville Rail Disaster of January 1878, it would take a cause
celebre.

    That cause was the AT&T Crash of January 15, 1990. After the
Crash, the wounded and anxious telephone community would come out
fighting hard.


    #
    The community of telephone technicians, engineers, operators and
researchers is the oldest community in cyberspace.   These are the
veterans, the most developed group,  the richest, the most respectable, in
most ways the most powerful.   Whole generations  have come and gone
since Alexander Graham Bell's day, but the community he founded
survives; people work for the phone system today whose great-
grandparents worked for the phone system. Its specialty magazines, such
as *Telephony,*  *AT&T Technical Journal,*   *Telephone Engineer and
Management,*  are decades old; they make computer publications like
*Macworld* and *PC Week*  look like amateur johnny-come-latelies.
    And the phone companies take no back seat in hightechnology,
either.  Other companies' industrial researchers may have won new
markets;  but the researchers of Bell Labs have won *seven  Nobel
Prizes.*  One potent device that Bell Labs originated, the transistor, has
created entire *groups* of industries.  Bell Labs are world-famous for
generating "a patent a day," and have even made vital discoveries in
astronomy, physics and cosmology.
    Throughout its seventy-year history, "Ma Bell" was not so much a
company as a way of life.  Until the cataclysmic divestiture of the 1980s,
Ma Bell was perhaps the ultimate maternalist mega-employer.   The
AT&T corporate image was the "gentle giant,"  "the voice with a smile," a
vaguely socialist-realist world of cleanshaven linemen in shiny helmets
and blandly pretty phone-girls in headsets and nylons.   Bell System
employees were famous as rock-ribbed Kiwanis and Rotary members,
Little-League enthusiasts, school-board people.
    During the long heyday of Ma Bell, the Bell employee corps were
nurtured top-to-botton on a  corporate ethos of public service.   There was
good money in Bell, but Bell was not *about* money; Bell used public
relations, but never mere marketeering.   People went into the Bell System
for a good life, and they had a good life. But it was not mere money that
led Bell people out in the midst of storms and earthquakes to fight with
toppled phone-poles, to wade in flooded manholes, to pull the redeyed
graveyard-shift over collapsing switching-systems. The Bell ethic was the
electrical equivalent of the postman's: neither rain, nor snow, nor gloom of
night would stop these couriers.

    It is easy to be cynical about this, as it is easy to be cynical about
any political or social system;  but cynicism does not change the fact that
thousands of people took these ideals very seriously.   And some still do.
    The Bell ethos was about public service; and that was gratifying;
but it was also about private *power,* and that was gratifying too.   As a
corporation, Bell was very special. Bell was privileged.  Bell had snuggled
up close to the state.  In fact, Bell was as close to government as you could
get in America and still make a whole lot of legitimate money.


    But unlike other companies,  Bell was above and beyond the vulgar
commercial fray.  Through its regional operating companies, Bell was
omnipresent, local, and  intimate, all over America;  but the central ivory
towers at its corporate heart were the tallest and the ivoriest around.

    There were other phone companies in America, to be sure;

    the so-called independents.  Rural cooperatives, mostly; small fry,
mostly tolerated, sometimes warred upon.

    For many decades, "independent" American phone companies
lived in fear and loathing of the official Bell monopoly  (or the "Bell
Octopus," as Ma Bell's nineteenthcentury enemies described her in many
angry newspaper manifestos).  Some few of these independent
entrepreneurs,  while legally in the wrong,  fought so bitterly against the
Octopus that their illegal phone networks were cast into the street by Bell
agents and publicly burned.
    The pure technical sweetness of the Bell System gave its operators,
inventors and engineers a deeply satisfying sense of power and mastery.
They had devoted their lives to improving this vast nation-spanning
machine; over years, whole human lives, they had watched it improve  and
grow.   It was like a great technological  temple.  They were an elite, and
they knew it -- even if others did not; in fact, they felt even more powerful
*because* others did not understand. The deep attraction of this sensation
of elite technical power should never be underestimated. "Technical
power" is not for everybody; for many people it simply has no charm at all.
But for some people, it becomes the core of their lives.  For a few, it is
overwhelming, obsessive;  it becomes something close to an addiction.
People -- especially clever teenage boys whose lives are otherwise mostly
powerless and put-upon -  love this sensation of secret power, and are
willing to do all sorts of amazing things to achieve it.  The technical
*power* of electronics has motivated many  strange acts detailed in this
book, which would otherwise be inexplicable.
    So Bell had power beyond mere capitalism.  The Bell service
ethos worked, and was often propagandized, in a rather saccharine fashion.
Over the decades,  people  slowly grew tired of this.   And then, openly
impatient with it.  By the early 1980s, Ma Bell was to find herself with
scarcely a real friend in the world.   Vail's industrial socialism had become
hopelessly out-of-fashion politically.  Bell would be punished for that.
And that punishment would fall harshly upon the people of the telephone
community.


    #
    In 1983, Ma Bell was dismantled by federal court action.  The
pieces of Bell are now separate corporate entities.  The core of the
company became AT&T Communications, and also AT&T  Industries
(formerly Western Electric, Bell's manufacturing arm).  AT&T Bell Labs
become Bell Communications Research, Bellcore. Then there are the
Regional Bell Operating Companies, or  RBOCs, pronounced "arbocks."
    Bell was a titan and even these regional chunks are gigantic
enterprises:  Fortune 50 companies with plenty of wealth and power
behind them.     But the clean lines of "One Policy, One System, Universal
Service" have been shattered, apparently forever.
    The "One Policy" of the early Reagan Administration was to
shatter a system that smacked of noncompetitive socialism.  Since that
time, there has been no real telephone "policy" on the federal level.
Despite the breakup, the remnants of Bell have never been set free to
compete in the open marketplace.
    The RBOCs are still very heavily regulated, but not from the top.
Instead, they struggle politically, economically and legally, in what seems
an endless turmoil, in a patchwork of overlapping federal and state
jurisdictions.   Increasingly, like other major American corporations, the
RBOCs  are becoming multinational, acquiring important commercial
interests in Europe, Latin  America, and the Pacific Rim.  But this, too,
adds to their legal and political predicament.
    The people of what used to be Ma Bell are not happy about their
fate.  They feel ill-used.  They might have been grudgingly willing to make
a full transition to the free market; to become just companies amid other
companies. But this never happened.   Instead,  AT&T and the RBOCS
("the Baby Bells")  feel themselves wrenched from side to side by state
regulators, by Congress, by the FCC,  and especially by the federal court of
Judge Harold Greene, the magistrate who ordered the Bell breakup and
who has been the de facto czar of American telecommunications ever
since 1983.
    Bell people feel that they exist in a kind of paralegal limbo today.
They don't understand what's demanded of them.   If it's "service," why
aren't they treated like a public service?  And if it's money, then why aren't
they free to compete for it?  No one seems to know, really.   Those who
claim to know  keep changing their minds.  Nobody in authority seems
willing to grasp the nettle for once and all.
    Telephone people from other countries are amazed by the
American telephone system today.  Not that it works so well; for
nowadays even the French telephone system works, more or less.  They are
amazed that the American telephone system *still*  works *at all,* under
these strange conditions.
    Bell's  "One System" of long-distance service is now only about
eighty percent of a system, with the remainder held by Sprint, MCI, and
the midget long-distance companies.   Ugly wars over dubious corporate
practices such as "slamming" (an underhanded method of snitching clients
from rivals) break out with some regularity in the realm of long-distance
service.  The battle to break Bell's long-distance monopoly was long and
ugly, and since the breakup the battlefield has not become much prettier.
AT&T's famous shame-and-blame advertisements, which emphasized the
shoddy work and purported ethical shadiness of their competitors,  were
much remarked on for their studied psychological cruelty. There is much
bad blood in this industry, and much long-treasured resentment.  AT&T's
post-breakup corporate logo, a striped sphere, is known in the industry as
the "Death Star"  (a reference from the movie *Star Wars,* in which the
"Death Star" was the spherical  hightech fortress of the harsh-breathing
imperial ultra-baddie, Darth Vader.)   Even AT&T employees are less than
thrilled by the Death Star.   A popular (though banned) Tshirt among
AT&T employees bears the old-fashioned Bell logo of the Bell System,
plus the newfangled striped sphere, with the before-and-after comments:
"This is your brain -- This is your brain on drugs!"   AT&T made a very
well-financed and determined effort to break into the personal computer
market;  it was disastrous, and telco computer experts are derisively
known by their competitors as "the pole-climbers."  AT&T and the Baby
Bell arbocks still seem to have few friends. Under conditions of sharp
commercial competition, a crash like that of January 15, 1990 was a major
embarrassment to AT&T.  It was a direct blow against their much-
treasured reputation for reliability.   Within days of the crash AT&T's
Chief Executive Officer, Bob Allen, officially apologized, in terms of
deeply pained  humility: "AT&T had a major service disruption last
Monday. We didn't live up to our own standards of quality, and we didn't
live up to yours. It's as simple as that.  And that's not acceptable to us.  Or
to you.... We understand how much people have come to depend upon
AT&T service, so our AT&T Bell Laboratories scientists and our network
engineers are doing everything possible to guard against a recurrence....
We know there's no way to make up for the inconvenience this problem
may have caused you."
    Mr Allen's "open letter to customers" was printed in lavish ads all
over the country:  in the *Wall Street Journal,*  *USA Today,*  *New
York Times,* *Los Angeles Times,*  *Chicago Tribune,* *Philadelphia
Inquirer,*  *San Francisco Chronicle Examiner,* *Boston Globe,*
*Dallas Morning News,* *Detroit Free Press,* *Washington Post,*
*Houston Chronicle,* *Cleveland Plain Dealer,* *Atlanta Journal
Constitution,* *Minneapolis Star Tribune,* *St. Paul Pioneer Press
Dispatch,*  *Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer,* *Tacoma News Tribune,*
*Miami Herald,* *Pittsburgh  Press,*  *St. Louis Post Dispatch,* *Denver
Post,* *Phoenix Republic Gazette* and *Tampa Tribune.*
    In another press release, AT&T went to some pains to suggest that
this "software glitch" *might* have happened just as easily to MCI,
although, in fact, it hadn't.  (MCI's switching software was quite different
from AT&T's -though not necessarily any safer.)   AT&T also announced
their plans to offer a rebate of service on Valentine's Day to make up for
the loss during the Crash.
    "Every technical resource available, including Bell Labs scientists
and engineers, has been devoted to assuring it will not occur again," the
public was told. They were further assured that "The chances of a
recurrence are small--a problem of this magnitude never occurred before."
    In the meantime, however, police and corporate security
maintained their own suspicions about "the chances of recurrence" and the
real reason why a "problem of this magnitude" had appeared, seemingly
out of nowhere.   Police and security knew for a fact that hackers of
unprecedented sophistication were illegally entering, and reprogramming,
certain digital switching stations.  Rumors of hidden "viruses" and secret
"logic bombs" in the switches ran rampant in the underground, with much
chortling over AT&T's predicament, and idle speculation over what
unsung hacker genius was responsible for it.  Some hackers, including
police informants, were trying hard to finger one another as the true
culprits  of the Crash.
    Telco people found little comfort in objectivity when they
contemplated these possibilities.   It was just too close to the bone for
them; it was embarrassing; it hurt so much, it was hard even to talk about.
    There has always been thieving and misbehavior in the phone
system.  There has always been trouble with the rival independents, and in
the local loops.  But to have such trouble in the core of the system, the
long-distance switching stations, is a horrifying affair.   To telco people,
this is all the difference between finding roaches in your kitchen and big
horrid sewer-rats in your bedroom.
    From the outside, to the average citizen, the telcos still seem
gigantic and impersonal.  The American public seems to regard them as
something akin to Soviet apparats.  Even when the telcos  do their best
corporatecitizen routine,  subsidizing magnet high-schools and sponsoring
news-shows on public television, they seem to win little except public
suspicion.
    But from the inside, all this looks very different. There's harsh
competition.  A legal and political system  that seems baffled  and bored,
when not actively hostile to telco interests.  There's a loss of morale, a
deep sensation of having somehow lost the upper hand.  Technological
change has caused a loss of data and revenue to other, newer forms of
transmission.   There's theft, and new forms of theft, of growing scale and
boldness and  sophistication.  With all these factors, it was no surprise to
see the telcos, large and small, break out in a litany of bitter complaint.
    In late '88 and throughout 1989, telco representatives grew shrill in
their complaints to those few American law enforcement officials who
make it their business to try to understand what telephone people are
talking about. Telco security officials had discovered the computerhacker
underground, infiltrated it thoroughly, and become deeply alarmed at its
growing expertise.  Here  they had found a target that was not only
loathsome on its face, but clearly ripe for counterattack.

    Those bitter rivals: AT&T, MCI and Sprint -- and a crowd of Baby
Bells:  PacBell, Bell South, Southwestern Bell, NYNEX, USWest, as well
as the Bell research consortium Bellcore, and the independent long-
distance  carrier  Mid-American  -- all were to have their role in the great
hacker dragnet of 1990.   After years of being battered and pushed around,
the telcos had, at least in a small way, seized the initiative again.  After
years of turmoil, telcos and government officials were once again to work
smoothly in concert in defense of the System. Optimism blossomed;
enthusiasm grew on all sides; the prospective taste of vengeance was
sweet.


    #


    From the beginning -- even before the crackdown had a name --
secrecy was a big problem.  There were many good reasons for secrecy in
the hacker crackdown.  Hackers and code-thieves were wily prey, slinking
back to their bedrooms and basements and destroying vital incriminating
evidence at the first hint of trouble. Furthermore, the crimes themselves
were heavily  technical and difficult to describe, even to police -- much
less to the general public.

    When such crimes *had* been described intelligibly to the public,
in the past, that very publicity had tended to *increase* the crimes
enormously.   Telco officials, while painfully aware of the vulnerabilities
of their systems, were anxious not to publicize those weaknesses.
Experience showed them that those weaknesses, once discovered, would
be pitilessly exploited by tens of thousands of people -- not only by
professional grifters and by underground hackers and phone phreaks, but
by many otherwise more-or-less honest everyday folks, who regarded
stealing service from the faceless, soulless "Phone Company" as a kind of
harmless indoor sport.  When it came to protecting their interests, telcos
had long since given up on general public sympathy for "the Voice with a
Smile."  Nowadays the telco's "Voice" was very likely to be a computer's;
and the American public showed much less of the proper respect and
gratitude due the fine public service bequeathed them by Dr. Bell and Mr.
Vail. The more efficient, high-tech, computerized, and impersonal the
telcos became, it seemed, the more they were met by sullen public
resentment and amoral greed.
    Telco officials wanted to punish the phone-phreak underground,  in
as public and exemplary a manner as possible.  They wanted to make dire
examples of the worst offenders, to seize the ringleaders and intimidate the
small fry, to discourage and frighten the wacky hobbyists, and send the
professional grifters to jail.  To do all this, publicity was vital.
    Yet operational secrecy was even more so.  If word got out that a
nationwide crackdown was coming, the hackers might simply vanish;
destroy the evidence, hide their computers, go to earth, and wait for the
campaign to blow over.  Even the young  hackers were crafty and
suspicious, and as for the professional grifters, they tended to split for the
nearest state-line at the first sign of trouble.  For the crackdown to work
well, they would all have to be caught red-handed, swept upon suddenly,
out of the blue, from every corner of the compass. And there was another
strong motive for secrecy.  In the worst-case scenario, a blown campaign
might leave the telcos open to a devastating hacker counter-attack.   If
there were indeed hackers loose in America  who had caused the January
15 Crash -- if there were truly gifted hackers, loose in the nation's long-
distance switching systems, and enraged or frightened by the crackdown --
then they might react unpredictably to an attempt to  collar them.   Even if
caught, they might have talented and vengeful friends still running around
loose.   Conceivably, it could turn ugly.  Very ugly.  In fact, it was hard to
imagine just how ugly things might turn, given that possibility. Counter-
attack from hackers was a genuine concern for the telcos.  In point of fact,
they would never suffer any such counter-attack.  But in months to come,
they would be at some pains to publicize this notion and to utter grim
warnings about it.
    Still, that risk seemed well worth running.  Better to run the risk of
vengeful attacks, than to live at the mercy of potential crashers.  Any cop
would tell you that a protection racket had no real future.

    And publicity was such a useful thing.   Corporate security officers,
including telco security,  generally work under conditions of great
discretion.  And corporate security officials do not make money for their
companies. Their job is to *prevent the loss* of money, which is much
less glamorous than actually winning profits. If you are a corporate
security official, and you do your job brilliantly, then nothing bad happens
to your company at all.  Because of this, you appear completely
superfluous.   This is one of the many unattractive aspects of security
work.   It's rare that these folks have the chance to draw some healthy
attention to their own efforts.
    Publicity also served the interest of their friends in law
enforcement.  Public officials, including law enforcement officials,  thrive
by attracting favorable public interest.  A brilliant prosecution in a matter
of vital public interest  can make the career of a prosecuting attorney.  And
for a police officer, good publicity opens the purses of the legislature; it
may bring a citation, or a promotion, or at least a rise in status and the
respect of one's peers.
    But to have both publicity and secrecy is to have one's cake and eat
it too.  In months to come, as we will show, this impossible act was to
cause great pain to the agents of the crackdown.  But early on, it seemed
possible -- maybe even likely -- that the crackdown could successfully
combine the best of both worlds.   The *arrest* of hackers would be
heavily publicized.  The actual *deeds* of the hackers, which were
technically hard to explain and also a security risk, would be left decently
obscured.   The *threat* hackers posed would be heavily trumpeted; the
likelihood of their actually committing such fearsome crimes would be left
to the public's imagination.  The spread of the computer underground, and
its growing technical sophistication, would be heavily promoted;  the
actual hackers themselves, mostly bespectacled middle-class white
suburban teenagers, would be denied any personal publicity.
    It does not seem to have occurred to any telco official that the
hackers accused would demand a day in court; that journalists would smile
upon the hackers as "good copy;"  that wealthy high-tech entrepreneurs
would offer moral and financial support to crackdown victims; that
constitutional lawyers would show up with briefcases, frowning mightily.
This possibility does not seem to have ever entered the game-plan.
    And even if it had, it probably would not have slowed the ferocious
pursuit of a stolen phone-company document, mellifluously known as
"Control Office Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special
Services and Major Account Centers."
    In the chapters to follow, we will explore the worlds of police and
the computer underground, and the large shadowy area where they overlap.
But first, we must  explore the battleground.  Before we leave the world of
the telcos, we must understand what a switching system actually is and
how your telephone actually works.



    #
    To the average citizen, the idea of the telephone is represented by,
well,  a *telephone:*  a device that you talk into.

    To a telco professional, however, the telephone itself is known, in
lordly fashion, as a "subset."   The "subset" in your house is a mere
adjunct, a distant nerve ending, of the central switching stations, which are
ranked in levels of heirarchy, up to the  long-distance electronic switching
stations, which are some of the largest computers on earth.
    Let us imagine that it is, say, 1925,  before the introduction of
computers, when the phone system was simpler and somewhat easier to
grasp.   Let's further imagine that you are Miss Leticia Luthor, a fictional
operator for Ma Bell in New York City of the 20s.
    Basically, you, Miss Luthor, *are* the "switching system."  You
are sitting in front of a large vertical switchboard, known as a "cordboard,"
made of shiny wooden panels, with ten thousand metal-rimmed holes
punched in them, known as jacks.  The engineers would have put more
holes into your switchboard, but ten thousand is as many as you can reach
without actually having to get up out of your chair.

    Each of these ten thousand holes has its own little electric
lightbulb, known as a "lamp," and its own neatly printed number code.

    With the ease of long habit, you are scanning your board for lit-up
bulbs.  This is what you do most of the time, so you are used to it.


    A lamp lights up.  This means that the phone at the end of that line
has been taken off the hook.   Whenever a handset is taken off the hook,
that closes a circuit inside the phone which then signals the local office,
i.e. you, automatically.  There might be somebody calling, or then again
the phone might be simply off the hook, but this does not matter to you
yet.  The first thing you do, is record that number in your logbook, in your
fine American public-school handwriting.   This comes first, naturally,
since it is done for billing purposes.
    You now take the plug of your answering cord, which goes directly
to your headset, and plug it into the lit-up hole.  "Operator," you announce.
    In operator's classes, before taking this job, you have been issued a
large pamphlet full of canned operator's responses for all kinds of
contingencies, which you had to memorize.  You have also been trained in
a proper nonregional, non-ethnic pronunciation and tone of voice.  You
rarely  have the occasion to make any spontaneous remark to a customer,
and in fact this is frowned upon (except out on the rural lines where people
have time on their hands and get up to all kinds of mischief).
    A tough-sounding user's voice at the end of the line gives you a
number.  Immediately, you write that number down in your logbook, next
to the caller's number, which you just wrote earlier.  You then look and see
if the number this guy wants is in fact on your switchboard, which it
generally is, since it's generally a local call. Long distance costs so much
that people use it sparingly.
    Only then do you pick up a calling-cord from a shelf  at the base of
the switchboard.  This is a long elastic cord mounted on a kind of reel so
that it will zip back in when you unplug it.  There are a lot of cords down
there, and when a bunch of them are out at once they look like a nest of
snakes.  Some of the girls think there are bugs living in those cable-holes.
They're called "cable mites" and are supposed to bite your hands and give
you rashes.  You don't believe this, yourself.
    Gripping the head of your calling-cord, you slip the tip of it deftly
into the sleeve of the jack for the called person.  Not all the way in,
though.  You just touch it.  If you hear a clicking sound, that means the
line is busy and you can't put the call through.  If the line is busy, you have
to stick the calling-cord into a "busy-tone jack," which will give the guy a
busy-tone.  This way you don't have to talk to him yourself and absorb his
natural human frustration.
    But the line isn't busy.  So you pop the cord all the way in.   Relay
circuits in your board make the distant phone ring, and if somebody picks
it up off the hook, then a phone conversation starts.   You can hear this
conversation on your answering cord, until you unplug it. In fact you could
listen to the whole conversation if you wanted, but this is sternly frowned
upon by management, and frankly, when you've overheard one, you've
pretty much heard 'em all.

    You can tell how long the conversation lasts by the glow of the
calling-cord's lamp, down on the calling-cord's shelf.   When it's over, you
unplug and the calling-cord zips back into place.
    Having done this stuff a few hundred thousand times, you become
quite good at it.  In fact you're plugging, and connecting, and
disconnecting, ten, twenty, forty cords at a time.  It's a manual handicraft,
really, quite satisfying in a way, rather like weaving on an upright loom.
    Should a long-distance call come up, it would be different, but not
all that different.  Instead of connecting the call through your own local
switchboard, you have to go up the hierarchy, onto the long-distance lines,
known as "trunklines."  Depending on how far the call goes, it may have to
work its way through a whole series of operators, which can take quite a
while.   The caller doesn't wait on the line while this complex process is
negotiated across the country by the gaggle of operators.   Instead, the
caller hangs up, and you call him back yourself when the call has finally
worked its way through.
    After four or five years of this work, you get married, and you have
to quit your job, this being the natural order of womanhood in the
American 1920s.  The phone company has to train somebody else --
maybe two people, since the phone system has grown somewhat in the
meantime.  And this costs money.
    In fact, to use any kind of human being as a switching system is a
very expensive proposition.   Eight thousand Leticia Luthors would be bad
enough, but a quarter of a million of them is a military-scale proposition
and makes drastic measures in automation financially worthwhile.
    Although the phone system continues to grow today, the number of
human beings employed by telcos has been dropping steadily for years.
Phone "operators" now deal with nothing but unusual contingencies, all
routine operations having been shrugged off onto machines. Consequently,
telephone operators are considerably less machine-like nowadays,  and
have been known to have accents and actual character in their voices.
When you reach a human operator today, the operators are rather more
"human" than they were in Leticia's day -- but on the other hand, human
beings in the phone system are much harder to reach in the first place.
    Over the first half of the twentieth century, "electromechanical"
switching systems of growing complexity were cautiously introduced into
the phone system.  In certain backwaters, some of these hybrid  systems
are still in use.  But after 1965, the phone system began to go completely
electronic, and this is by far the dominant mode today.  Electromechanical
systems have "crossbars," and "brushes," and other large moving
mechanical parts, which, while faster and cheaper than Leticia, are still
slow, and tend to wear out fairly quickly.
    But fully electronic systems are inscribed on silicon chips, and are
lightning-fast, very cheap, and quite durable.   They are much cheaper to
maintain than even  the best electromechanical systems, and they fit into
half the space.   And with every year, the silicon chip grows smaller,
faster, and cheaper yet.  Best of all,  automated electronics work around
the clock and don't have salaries or health insurance.
    There are, however, quite serious drawbacks to the use of
computer-chips.   When they do break down, it is a daunting challenge to
figure out what the heck has gone wrong with them.  A broken cordboard
generally had a problem in it big enough to see.  A broken chip has
invisible, microscopic faults.  And the faults in bad  software can be so
subtle as to be practically theological. If you want a mechanical system to
do something new, then you must travel to where it is, and pull pieces out
of it, and wire in new pieces.  This costs money.  However, if you want a
chip to do something new, all you have to do is change its software, which
is easy, fast and dirt-cheap. You don't even have to see the chip to change
its program. Even if you did see the chip, it wouldn't look like much.  A
chip with program X doesn't look one whit different from a chip with
program Y. With the proper codes and sequences, and access to
specialized phone-lines, you can change electronic switching systems all
over America from anywhere you please.
    And so can other people.  If they know how, and if they want to,
they can sneak into a  microchip via the special phonelines and diddle with
it, leaving no physical trace at all.  If they broke into the operator's station
and held Leticia at gunpoint, that would be very obvious.  If they broke
into a telco building and went after an electromechanical switch with a
toolbelt, that would at least leave many traces.  But people can do all
manner of amazing things to computer switches just by typing on a
keyboard, and keyboards are everywhere today.  The extent of this
vulnerability is deep, dark, broad, almost mind-boggling, and yet this is a
basic, primal fact of life about any computer on a network.
    Security experts over the past twenty years have insisted, with
growing urgency, that this basic vulnerability of computers represents an
entirely new level of risk, of unknown but obviously dire potential to
society.   And they are right.
    An electronic switching station does pretty much everything Letitia
did, except in nanoseconds and on a much larger scale.  Compared to Miss
Luthor's ten thousand jacks, even a primitive 1ESS switching computer,
60s vintage,  has a 128,000 lines.   And the current AT&T system of
choice is the monstrous fifth-generation 5ESS.

    An Electronic Switching Station can scan every line  on its "board"
in a tenth of a second, and it does this over and over, tirelessly, around the
clock.  Instead of eyes, it uses "ferrod scanners" to check the condition of
local lines and trunks.  Instead of hands, it has "signal distributors,"
"central pulse distributors," "magnetic latching relays," and "reed
switches," which complete and break the calls. Instead of a brain, it has a
"central processor."   Instead of an instruction manual, it has a program.
Instead of a handwritten logbook for recording and billing calls, it has
magnetic tapes. And it never has to talk to anybody. Everything a customer
might say to it is done by punching the direct-dial tone buttons on your
subset.


    Although an Electronic Switching Station can't talk, it does need an
interface, some way to relate to its, er, employers.   This interface is known
as the "master control center."  (This interface might be better known
simply as "the interface," since it doesn't actually "control" phone calls
directly.  However, a term like "Master Control Center" is just the kind of
rhetoric that telco maintenance engineers  -- and hackers -- find
particularly satisfying.) Using the master control center, a phone engineer
can test local and trunk lines for malfunctions.  He (rarely she) can check
various alarm displays, measure traffic on the lines, examine the records of
telephone usage and the charges for those calls, and change the
programming.
    And, of course, anybody else who gets into the master control
center by remote control can also do these things, if he (rarely she) has
managed to figure them out, or, more likely, has somehow swiped the
knowledge from people who already know.
    In 1989 and 1990, one particular RBOC, BellSouth, which felt
particularly troubled, spent a purported $1.2 million on computer security.
Some think it spent as  much as two million, if you count all the associated
costs. Two million dollars is still very little compared to the great cost-
saving utility of telephonic computer systems.
    Unfortunately, computers are also stupid.  Unlike human beings,
computers  possess the truly profound stupidity of the inanimate.

    In the 1960s, in the first shocks of spreading computerization, there
was much easy talk about the stupidity of computers -- how they could
"only follow the program" and were rigidly required to do "only what they
were told."   There has been rather less talk about the stupidity of
computers since they began to achieve grandmaster status in chess
tournaments, and to manifest many other impressive forms of apparent
cleverness.


    Nevertheless, computers *still* are profoundly brittle and stupid;
they are simply vastly more subtle in their stupidity and brittleness.   The
computers of the 1990s are much more reliable in their components than
earlier computer systems, but they are also called upon to do far more
complex things, under far more challenging conditions.
    On a basic mathematical level, every single line of a software
program offers a chance for some possible screwup.   Software does not sit
still when it works; it "runs," it interacts with itself and with its own inputs
and outputs. By analogy, it stretches like putty into millions of possible
shapes and conditions, so many shapes that they can never all be
successfully tested, not even in the lifespan of the universe.  Sometimes
the putty snaps.
    The stuff we call "software" is not like anything that human society
is used to thinking about.  Software is something like a machine, and
something like mathematics, and something like language, and  something
like thought, and art, and information....  but software is not in fact any of
those other things.   The protean quality of software is one of the great
sources of its fascination.  It also makes software very powerful, very
subtle, very unpredictable, and very risky.
    Some software is bad and buggy.  Some is "robust," even
"bulletproof."  The best software is that which has been tested by
thousands of users under thousands of different conditions, over years.  It
is then known as "stable."   This does *not* mean that the software is now
flawless, free of bugs.  It generally means that there are plenty of bugs in
it, but the bugs are well-identified and fairly well understood.

    There is simply no way to assure that software is free of flaws.
Though software is mathematical in nature, it cannot by "proven" like a
mathematical theorem; software is more like language, with inherent
ambiguities, with different definitions, different assumptions, different
levels of meaning that can conflict.

    Human beings can manage, more or less, with human language
because we can catch the gist of it.
    Computers, despite years of effort in "artificial intelligence," have
proven spectacularly bad in "catching the gist" of anything at all.  The
tiniest bit of semantic grit may still bring the mightiest computer tumbling
down. One of the most hazardous things you can do to a computer
program is try to improve it -- to try to make it safer.  Software "patches"
represent new, untried un"stable" software, which is by definition riskier.
    The modern telephone system has come to depend, utterly and
irretrievably, upon software.  And the System Crash of January 15, 1990,
was caused by an *improvement* in software.  Or rather, an *attempted*
improvement.
    As it happened, the problem itself -- the problem per se  --  took
this form.  A piece of telco software had been written in C language, a
standard language of the telco field.  Within the C software was a long
"do... while" construct.  The "do... while" construct contained a "switch"
statement.  The "switch" statement contained an "if" clause.  The "if"
clause contained a "break."  The "break" was *supposed* to "break" the "if
clause."  Instead, the "break" broke the "switch" statement.
    That was the problem, the actual reason why people picking up
phones on January 15, 1990, could not talk to one another.
    Or at least, that was the subtle, abstract, cyberspatial seed of the
problem.  This is how the problem manifested itself from the realm of
programming into the realm of real life.
    The System 7 software for AT&T's 4ESS switching station, the
"Generic 44E14 Central Office Switch Software," had been extensively
tested, and was considered very stable.   By the end of 1989, eighty of
AT&T's switching systems nationwide had been programmed with the
new software.  Cautiously, thirty four stations were left to run the slower,
less-capable System 6, because AT&T suspected there might be
shakedown problems with the new and unprecedently sophisticated
System 7 network.
    The stations with System 7 were programmed to switch over to a
backup net in case of any problems.  In mid-December 1989, however, a
new high-velocity, high security software patch was distributed to each of
the 4ESS switches that would enable them to switch over even more
quickly, making the System 7 network that much more secure.
    Unfortunately, every one of these 4ESS switches was now in
possession of a small but deadly flaw.

    In order to maintain the network, switches must monitor the
condition of other switches -- whether they are up and running, whether
they have temporarily shut down, whether they are overloaded and in need
of assistance, and so forth.  The new software helped control this
bookkeeping function by monitoring the status calls from other switches.
    It only takes four to six seconds for a troubled 4ESS switch to rid
itself of all its calls, drop everything temporarily, and re-boot its software
from scratch. Starting over from scratch will generally rid the switch of
any software problems that may have developed in the course of running
the system.   Bugs that arise will be simply wiped out by this process.  It is
a clever idea. This process of automatically re-booting from scratch is
known as the "normal fault recovery routine."   Since AT&T's software is
in fact exceptionally stable, systems rarely have to go into "fault recovery"
in the first place;  but AT&T has always boasted of its "real world"
reliability, and this tactic is a belt-and-suspenders routine.
    The 4ESS switch used its new software to monitor its fellow
switches as they recovered from faults.   As other switches came back on
line after recovery, they would send their "OK" signals to the switch.   The
switch would make a little note to that effect in its "status map,"
recognizing that the fellow switch was back and ready to go, and should be
sent some calls and put back to regular work.
    Unfortunately, while it was busy bookkeeping with the status map,
the tiny flaw in the brand-new software came into play.  The flaw caused
the 4ESS switch to interacted, subtly but drastically, with incoming
telephone calls from human users.  If -- and only if -- two incoming phone-
calls happened to hit the switch within a hundredth of a second,  then a
small patch of data would be garbled by the flaw.
    But the switch had been programmed to monitor itself constantly
for any possible damage to its data. When the switch perceived that its
data had been somehow  garbled, then it too would go down, for swift
repairs to its software.  It would signal its fellow switches not to send any
more work.  It would go into the fault recovery mode for four to six
seconds.  And then the switch would be fine again, and would send out its
"OK, ready for work" signal.
    However, the "OK, ready for work" signal was the *very thing that
had caused the   switch to go down in the first place.*  And *all* the
System 7 switches had the same flaw in their status-map software.  As
soon as they stopped to make  the bookkeeping note that their fellow
switch was "OK," then they too would become vulnerable to the slight
chance that two phone-calls would hit them within a hundredth of a
second.
    At approximately 2:25 p.m. EST on Monday, January 15, one of
AT&T's 4ESS toll switching systems in New York  City had an actual,
legitimate, minor problem.  It went into fault recovery routines, announced
"I'm going down," then announced, "I'm back, I'm OK."   And this cheery
message then blasted throughout the network to many of its fellow 4ESS
switches. Many of the switches, at first, completely escaped trouble.
These lucky switches were not hit by the coincidence of two phone calls
within a hundredth of a second.   Their software did not fail -- at first.  But
three switches -- in Atlanta, St. Louis, and Detroit --  were unlucky, and
were caught with their hands full.  And they went down.  And they came
back up, almost immediately. And they too began to broadcast the lethal
message that they, too, were "OK" again, activating the lurking software
bug in yet other switches.
    As more and more switches did have that bit of bad luck and
collapsed, the call-traffic became more and more densely packed in the
remaining switches, which were groaning to keep up with the load.   And
of course, as the calls became more densely packed, the switches were
*much more likely* to be hit twice within a hundredth of a second. It only
took four seconds for a switch to get well. There was no *physical*
damage of any kind to the switches, after all.   Physically, they were
working perfectly. This situation was "only" a software problem. But the
4ESS switches were leaping up and down every four to six seconds, in a
virulent spreading wave all over America,  in utter, manic, mechanical
stupidity.  They kept *knocking*  one another down with their contagious
"OK" messages. It took about ten minutes for the chain reaction to cripple
the network.  Even then, switches would periodically luck-out and manage
to resume their normal work.  Many calls -- millions of them -- were
managing to get through.  But millions weren't.
    The switching stations that used System 6 were not directly
affected.  Thanks to these old-fashioned switches, AT&T's national system
avoided complete collapse.  This fact also made it clear to engineers that
System 7 was at fault.
    Bell Labs engineers, working feverishly in New Jersey, Illinois,
and Ohio, first tried their entire repertoire of standard network remedies on
the malfunctioning System 7.  None of the remedies worked, of course,
because nothing like this had ever happened to any phone system before.
    By cutting out the backup safety network entirely, they were able to
reduce the frenzy of "OK" messages by about half.  The system then began
to recover, as the chain reaction slowed.   By 11:30 pm on Monday
January 15, sweating engineers on the midnight shift breathed a sigh of
relief as the last switch cleared-up.
    By Tuesday they were pulling all the brand-new 4ESS software
and replacing it with an earlier version of System 7. If these had been
human operators, rather than computers at work, someone would simply
have eventually stopped screaming.  It would have been *obvious* that the
situation was not "OK," and common sense would have kicked in.
Humans possess common  sense -- at least to some extent.   Computers
simply don't. On the other hand, computers can handle hundreds of calls
per second.  Humans simply can't.   If every single human being in
America worked for the phone company, we couldn't match the
performance of digital switches: direct-dialling, three-way calling, speed-
calling, callwaiting, Caller ID, all the rest of the cornucopia of digital
bounty.   Replacing computers with operators is simply not an option any
more.
    And yet we still, anachronistically,  expect humans to be running
our phone system.   It is hard for us to understand that we have sacrificed
huge amounts of initiative and control to senseless yet powerful machines.
When the phones fail, we want somebody to be responsible.  We want
somebody to blame.
    When the Crash of January 15 happened, the American populace
was simply not prepared to  understand that enormous landslides in
cyberspace, like the Crash itself, can happen, and can be nobody's fault in
particular.   It was easier to believe, maybe even in some odd way more
reassuring to believe, that some evil person,  or evil group, had done this
to us.  "Hackers" had done it. With a virus.   A trojan horse.  A software
bomb.  A dirty plot of some kind.   People believed this, responsible
people.  In 1990, they were looking hard for evidence to confirm their
heartfelt suspicions.
    And they would look in a lot of places. Come 1991, however, the
outlines of an apparent new reality would begin to emerge from the fog.
    On July 1 and 2, 1991, computer-software collapses in telephone
switching stations disrupted service in Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Los
Angeles and San Francisco.   Once again, seemingly minor maintenance
problems had crippled the digital System 7.  About twelve million people
were affected in the Crash of July 1, 1991.
    Said the New York Times Service:  "Telephone company
executives and federal regulators said they were not ruling out the
possibility of sabotage by computer hackers, but most seemed to think the
problems stemmed from some unknown defect in the software running the
networks."
    And sure enough, within the week, a red-faced software company,
DSC Communications Corporation of  Plano, Texas, owned up to
"glitches" in the "signal transfer point" software that DSC had designed for
Bell Atlantic and Pacific Bell.  The immediate cause of the July 1 Crash
was a single mistyped character:  one tiny typographical flaw in one single
line of the software.  One mistyped letter, in one single line, had deprived
the nation's capital of phone service.  It was not particularly surprising that
this tiny flaw had escaped attention: a typical System 7 station requires
*ten million* lines of code.
    On Tuesday, September 17, 1991, came the most spectacular
outage yet.   This case had nothing to do with software failures -- at least,
not directly.  Instead, a group of AT&T's switching stations in New York
City had simply run out of electrical power and shut down cold.  Their
back-up batteries had failed.  Automatic warning systems were supposed
to warn of the loss of battery power, but those automatic systems had
failed as well.
    This time, Kennedy, La Guardia, and Newark airports all had their
voice and data communications cut.   This horrifying event was
particularly ironic, as attacks on airport computers by hackers had long
been a standard nightmare scenario, much trumpeted by computer-
security experts who feared the computer underground. There had even
been a Hollywood thriller about sinister hackers ruining airport computers
-- *Die Hard II.*
    Now AT&T itself had crippled airports with computer
malfunctions  -- not just one airport, but three at once, some of the busiest
in the world.
    Air traffic came to a standstill throughout the Greater New York
area, causing more than 500 flights to be cancelled, in a spreading wave all
over America and even into Europe.  Another 500 or so flights were
delayed, affecting, all in all, about 85,000 passengers.  (One of these
passengers was the chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission.)
    Stranded passengers in New York and New Jersey were further
infuriated to discover that they could not even manage to make a long
distance phone call, to explain their delay to loved ones or business
associates. Thanks to the crash, about four and a half million domestic
calls, and half a million international calls, failed to get through. The
September 17 NYC Crash, unlike the previous ones, involved not a
whisper of "hacker" misdeeds.  On the contrary,  by 1991, AT&T itself
was suffering much of the vilification that had formerly been directed at
hackers. Congressmen were grumbling.  So were state and federal
regulators.  And so was the press.
    For their part, ancient rival MCI took out snide fullpage newspaper
ads in New York, offering their own longdistance services for the "next
time that AT&T goes down." "You wouldn't find a classy company like
AT&T using such advertising," protested AT&T Chairman Robert Allen,
unconvincingly.  Once again, out came the full-page AT&T apologies in
newspapers, apologies for "an inexcusable culmination of both human and
mechanical failure."   (This time, however, AT&T offered no discount on
later calls.  Unkind critics suggested that AT&T were worried about
setting any precedent for refunding the financial losses caused by
telephone crashes.)
    Industry journals asked  publicly if AT&T was "asleep at the
switch."   The telephone network, America's purported marvel of high-tech
reliability,  had gone down three times in 18 months.  *Fortune* magazine
listed the Crash of September 17 among the "Biggest Business Goofs of
1991,"  cruelly parodying AT&T's ad campaign in an article entitled
"AT&T Wants You Back (Safely On the Ground, God Willing)."
    Why had those New York switching systems simply run out of
power?  Because no human being had attended to the alarm system.  Why
did the alarm systems blare automatically, without any human being
noticing? Because the three telco technicians who *should* have been
listening were absent from their stations in the  power-room, on another
floor of the building -- attending a training class.  A training class about
the alarm systems for the power room!
    "Crashing the System" was no longer "unprecedented" by late
1991.   On the contrary, it no longer even seemed an oddity.   By 1991, it
was clear that all the policemen in the world could no longer "protect" the
phone system from crashes.   By far the worst crashes the system had ever
had, had been inflicted, by the system, upon *itself.*  And this time
nobody was making cocksure statements that this was an anomaly,
something that would never happen again.   By 1991 the System's
defenders had met their nebulous Enemy, and the Enemy was -- the
System.

Bruce Sterling
[e-mail]
Literary Freeware:  Not for Commercial Use
THE HACKER CRACKDOWN:
Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
PART TWO:  THE DIGITAL UNDERGROUND
    The date was May 9, 1990.  The Pope was touring Mexico City.
Hustlers from the Medellin Cartel were  trying to buy black-market Stinger
missiles in Florida.  On the comics page, Doonesbury character Andy was
dying of AIDS.

     And then.... a highly unusual item whose novelty and calculated
rhetoric won it headscratching attention in newspapers all over America.
The US Attorney's office in Phoenix, Arizona, had issued a press release
announcing a nationwide law enforcement crackdown against "illegal
computer hacking activities."  The sweep was officially known as
"Operation Sundevil."
    Eight paragraphs in the press release gave the bare facts:  twenty-
seven search warrants carried out on May 8, with three arrests, and a
hundred and fifty agents on the  prowl in "twelve" cities across America.
(Different counts in local press reports yielded "thirteen," "fourteen," and
"sixteen" cities.)   Officials estimated that criminal losses of revenue to
telephone companies "may run into millions of dollars."   Credit for the
Sundevil investigations was taken by the US Secret Service, Assistant US
Attorney Tim Holtzen of Phoenix, and the Assistant Attorney General of
Arizona,  Gail Thackeray.


    The prepared remarks of Garry M. Jenkins, appearing in a U.S.
Department of Justice press release, were of particular interest.  Mr.
Jenkins was the Assistant Director of the US Secret Service, and the
highest-ranking federal official to take any direct public role in  the hacker
crackdown of 1990.

    "Today, the Secret Service is sending a clear message to those
computer hackers who have decided to violate the laws of this nation in
the mistaken belief that they can successfully avoid detection by hiding
behind the relative anonymity of their computer terminals.(...)
"Underground groups have been formed for the purpose of exchanging
information relevant to their criminal activities.  These groups often
communicate with each other through message systems between
computers called 'bulletin boards.' "Our experience shows that many
computer hacker suspects are no longer misguided teenagers,
mischievously playing games with their computers in their bedrooms.
Some are now high tech computer operators using computers to engage in
unlawful conduct."
    Who were these "underground groups" and "hightech operators?"
Where had they come from?  What did they want?  Who *were*   they?
Were they "mischievous?"  Were they dangerous?  How had "misguided
teenagers" managed to alarm the United  States Secret Service?  And just
how widespread was this sort of thing? Of all the major players in the
Hacker Crackdown: the phone companies, law enforcement, the civil
libertarians, and the "hackers" themselves -- the "hackers" are by far the
most mysterious, by far the hardest to understand, by far the *weirdest.*

    Not only are "hackers"  novel in their activities, but they come in a
variety of odd subcultures, with a variety of languages, motives and
values.
    The earliest proto-hackers were probably those unsung
mischievous telegraph boys who were summarily fired by the Bell
Company in 1878.
    Legitimate "hackers," those computer enthusiasts who are
independent-minded but law-abiding, generally trace their spiritual
ancestry to  elite technical universities, especially M.I.T. and Stanford, in
the 1960s.
    But the genuine roots of the modern hacker *underground* can
probably be traced most successfully to a now much-obscured hippie
anarchist movement  known as the Yippies.   The  Yippies, who took their
name from the largely fictional "Youth International Party," carried out a
loud and lively policy of surrealistic subversion and outrageous political
mischief.  Their basic tenets were flagrant sexual promiscuity, open and
copious drug use, the political overthrow of any powermonger over thirty
years of age, and an immediate end to the war in Vietnam, by any means
necessary, including the psychic levitation of the Pentagon. The two most
visible Yippies were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.  Rubin eventually
became a Wall Street broker.  Hoffman, ardently sought by federal
authorities, went into hiding for seven years, in Mexico, France, and the
United States.   While on the lam, Hoffman continued to write and
publish, with help from sympathizers in the American anarcho-leftist
underground.   Mostly, Hoffman survived through false ID and odd jobs.
Eventually he underwent facial plastic surgery and adopted an entirely new
identity as one "Barry Freed."   After surrendering himself to authorities in
1980, Hoffman  spent a year in prison on a cocaine conviction.
    Hoffman's worldview grew much darker as the glory days of the
1960s faded.  In 1989, he purportedly committed suicide, under odd and,
to some, rather suspicious circumstances.
    Abbie Hoffman is said to have caused the Federal Bureau of
Investigation to amass the single largest investigation file ever opened on
an individual American  citizen.  (If this is true, it is still questionable
whether the FBI regarded Abbie Hoffman a serious public threat  -quite
possibly, his file was enormous simply because Hoffman left colorful
legendry wherever he went).   He was a gifted publicist, who regarded
electronic media as both playground and weapon.  He actively enjoyed
manipulating network TV and other gullible, imagehungry media,  with
various weird lies, mindboggling rumors, impersonation scams, and other
sinister distortions, all absolutely guaranteed to upset cops,  Presidential
candidates, and federal judges.    Hoffman's most famous work was a book
self-reflexively known as *Steal This Book,* which publicized a number
of methods by which young, penniless hippie agitators might live off  the
fat of a system supported by humorless drones.  *Steal This Book,* whose
title urged readers to damage the very means of distribution which had put
it into their hands, might be described as a spiritual ancestor of a computer
virus.
    Hoffman, like many a later conspirator, made extensive use of pay-
phones for his agitation work -- in his case, generally through the use of
cheap brass washers as coin-slugs.
    During the Vietnam War, there was a federal surtax imposed on
telephone service; Hoffman and his cohorts could, and did,  argue that in
systematically stealing phone service they were engaging in civil
disobedience: virtuously denying tax funds to an illegal and immoral war.
But this thin veil of decency was soon dropped entirely.  Ripping-off the
System  found its own justification in deep alienation and a basic outlaw
contempt for  conventional bourgeois values.  Ingenious, vaguely
politicized varieties of rip-off, which might be described as "anarchy by
convenience," became very popular in Yippie circles, and because rip-off
was so useful, it was to survive the Yippie movement itself. In the early
1970s, it required fairly limited expertise and ingenuity to cheat
payphones, to divert "free" electricity and gas service, or to rob vending
machines and parking meters for handy pocket change.   It also required a
conspiracy to spread this knowledge, and the gall and nerve actually to
commit petty theft, but the Yippies had these qualifications in plenty.  In
June 1971, Abbie Hoffman and a telephone enthusiast sarcastically known
as "Al Bell"  began publishing a newsletter called *Youth International
Party Line.*  This newsletter was dedicated to collating and spreading
Yippie rip-off techniques, especially of phones, to the joy of the
freewheeling underground and the insensate rage of all straight people.
    As a political tactic, phone-service theft ensured that Yippie
advocates would always have ready access to the long-distance telephone
as a medium, despite the Yippies' chronic lack of organization, discipline,
money, or even a steady home address.
    *Party Line* was run out of Greenwich Village for a couple of
years, then "Al Bell" more or less defected from the faltering ranks of
Yippiedom, changing the newsletter's name to *TAP* or *Technical
Assistance Program.*  After the Vietnam War ended, the steam began
leaking rapidly out of American radical dissent. But  by this time, "Bell"
and his dozen or so core contributors  had the bit between their teeth, and
had begun to derive tremendous gut-level satisfaction from the sensation
of pure *technical power.*
    *TAP* articles, once highly politicized, became pitilessly
jargonized and technical, in homage or parody to the Bell System's own
technical documents, which *TAP* studied closely, gutted, and
reproduced without permission.   The *TAP* elite revelled in gloating
possession of the specialized knowledge necessary to beat the system.

    "Al Bell" dropped out of the game by the late 70s, and "Tom
Edison" took over; TAP  readers (some 1400 of them, all told) now began
to show more interest in telex switches and the growing phenomenon of
computer systems. In 1983, "Tom Edison" had his computer stolen and his
house set on fire by an arsonist.  This was an eventually mortal blow to
*TAP* (though the legendary name was to be resurrected in 1990 by a
young Kentuckian computeroutlaw named "Predat0r.") #
    Ever since telephones began to make money, there have been
people willing to rob and defraud phone companies.   The legions of petty
phone thieves vastly outnumber those "phone phreaks" who  "explore the
system" for the sake of the intellectual challenge.   The New York
metropolitan area  (long in the vanguard of American crime) claims over
150,000 physical attacks on pay telephones every year!  Studied carefully,
a modern payphone reveals itself as a little fortress, carefully designed and
redesigned over generations,  to resist coinslugs, zaps of electricity, chunks
of coin-shaped ice, prybars, magnets, lockpicks, blasting caps.  Public pay-
phones must survive in a world of unfriendly, greedy people,  and a
modern payphone is as exquisitely evolved as a cactus.
    Because the phone network pre-dates the computer network, the
scofflaws known as "phone phreaks" pre-date the scofflaws known as
"computer hackers."   In practice, today, the line between "phreaking" and
"hacking" is very blurred, just as the distinction between telephones and
computers has blurred.  The phone system has been digitized, and
computers have learned to "talk" over  phone-lines.   What's worse -- and
this was the point of the Mr. Jenkins of the Secret Service -- some hackers
have learned to steal, and some thieves have learned to hack.
    Despite the blurring, one can still draw a few useful behavioral
distinctions between "phreaks" and "hackers." Hackers are intensely
interested in the "system" per se, and enjoy relating to machines.
"Phreaks" are more social,  manipulating the system in a rough-and-ready
fashion in order to get through to other human beings, fast, cheap and
under the table.
    Phone phreaks love nothing so much as "bridges," illegal
conference calls of ten or twelve chatting conspirators, seaboard to
seaboard, lasting for many hours -- and running, of course, on somebody
else's tab, preferably a large corporation's. As phone-phreak conferences
wear on, people drop out (or simply leave the phone off the hook, while
they sashay off to work or school or babysitting), and new people are
phoned up and invited to join in, from some other continent, if possible.
Technical trivia, boasts, brags, lies, head-trip deceptions, weird rumors,
and cruel gossip are all freely exchanged. The lowest rung of phone-
phreaking is the theft of telephone access codes.   Charging a phone call to
somebody else's stolen number is, of course, a pig-easy way of stealing
phone service, requiring practically no technical expertise.  This practice
has been very widespread, especially among lonely people without much
money who are far from home.  Code theft has flourished especially in
college dorms, military bases, and, notoriously, among roadies for rock
bands.   Of late, code theft has spread very rapidly among Third Worlders
in the US, who pile up enormous unpaid long-distance bills to the
Caribbean, South America, and Pakistan.
    The simplest way to steal phone-codes is simply to look over a
victim's shoulder as he punches-in his own code-number on a public
payphone.  This technique is known as "shoulder-surfing," and is
especially common in airports, bus terminals, and train stations.  The code
is  then sold by the thief for a few dollars.  The buyer abusing the code has
no computer expertise, but calls his Mom in New York,  Kingston or
Caracas and runs up a huge bill with impunity.  The losses from this
primitive phreaking activity are far, far greater than the monetary losses
caused by computer-intruding hackers. In the mid-to-late 1980s, until the
introduction of sterner telco security measures, *computerized* code theft
worked like a charm, and was virtually omnipresent throughout the digital
underground, among phreaks and hackers alike.   This was accomplished
through programming one's computer to try random code numbers over
the telephone until one of them worked. Simple programs to do this were
widely available in the underground; a computer running all night was
likely to come up with a dozen or so useful hits.  This could be repeated
week after week until one had a large library of stolen codes.
    Nowadays, the computerized dialling of hundreds of numbers can
be detected within hours and swiftly traced. If a stolen code is repeatedly
abused, this too can be detected within a few hours.  But for years in the
1980s, the publication of stolen codes was a kind of elementary etiquette
for fledgling hackers.   The simplest way to establish your bona-fides as a
raider was to steal a code through repeated random dialling and offer it to
the "community" for use.   Codes could be both stolen, and used, simply
and easily from the safety of one's own bedroom, with very little fear of
detection or punishment.
    Before computers and their phone-line modems entered American
homes in gigantic numbers, phone phreaks had their own special
telecommunications hardware gadget, the famous "blue box."  This fraud
device (now rendered increasingly useless by the digital evolution of the
phone system) could trick switching  systems into granting free access to
long-distance lines. It did this by mimicking the system's own signal, a
tone of 2600 hertz.
    Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple Computer,
Inc., once dabbled in selling blue-boxes  in college dorms in California.
For many, in the early days of phreaking, blue-boxing was scarcely
perceived as "theft," but rather as a fun (if sneaky) way to use excess
phone capacity harmlessly.  After all, the long-distance lines were *just
sitting there*....   Whom did it hurt, really? If you're not *damaging* the
system, and  you're not *using up any tangible resource,* and if nobody
*finds out* what you did, then what real harm have you done? What
exactly *have* you "stolen," anyway?   If a tree falls in the forest and
nobody hears it, how much is the noise worth?  Even now this remains a
rather dicey question.
    Blue-boxing was no joke to the phone companies, however.
Indeed, when *Ramparts* magazine, a radical publication in California,
printed the wiring schematics necessary to create a  mute box in June
1972, the magazine was seized by police and Pacific Bell phonecompany
officials.   The mute box, a blue-box variant, allowed its user to receive
long-distance calls free of charge to the caller.  This device was closely
described in a *Ramparts* article wryly titled "Regulating the Phone
Company In Your Home."  Publication of this article was held to be in
violation of Californian State Penal Code section 502.7, which outlaws
ownership of wire-fraud devices and the selling of "plans or instructions
for any instrument, apparatus, or device intended to avoid telephone toll
charges."
    Issues of *Ramparts* were recalled or seized on the newsstands,
and the resultant loss of income helped put the magazine out of business.
This was an ominous precedent for free-expression issues, but the telco's
crushing of a radical-fringe magazine passed without serious challenge at
the time.  Even in the freewheeling California 1970s, it was widely felt
that there was something sacrosanct about what the phone company knew;
that the telco had a legal and moral right to protect itself by shutting off the
flow of such illicit information. Most telco information was so
"specialized" that it would scarcely be understood by any honest member
of the public.   If not published, it would not be missed.   To print such
material did not seem part of the legitimate role of a free press.
    In 1990 there would be a similar telco-inspired attack on the
electronic phreak/hacking "magazine" *Phrack.* The *Phrack* legal case
became a central issue in the Hacker Crackdown, and gave rise to great
controversy. *Phrack* would also be shut down, for a  time, at least, but
this time both the telcos and their law-enforcement allies would pay a
much larger price for their actions.  The *Phrack* case will be examined
in detail, later.
    Phone-phreaking as a social practice is still very much alive at this
moment.  Today, phone-phreaking is thriving much more vigorously than
the better-known and worse-feared practice of "computer hacking."  New
forms of phreaking are spreading rapidly, following new vulnerabilities in
sophisticated phone services.
    Cellular phones are especially vulnerable; their chips can be re-
programmed to present a false caller ID and  avoid billing.   Doing so also
avoids police tapping, making cellular-phone abuse a favorite among drug-
dealers. "Call-sell operations" using pirate cellular phones can, and have,
been run right out of the backs of cars, which move from "cell" to "cell" in
the local phone system, retailing stolen long-distance service, like some
kind of demented electronic version of the neighborhood ice-cream truck.

    Private branch-exchange phone systems in large corporations can
be penetrated; phreaks dial-up a local company, enter its internal phone-
system, hack it, then use the company's own PBX system to dial back out
over the public network, causing the company to be stuck with the
resulting long-distance bill.  This technique is known as "diverting."
"Diverting"  can be very costly, especially because phreaks tend to travel
in packs and never stop talking.   Perhaps the worst by-product of this
"PBX fraud" is that victim companies and telcos have sued one another
over the financial responsibility for the stolen calls, thus enriching not only
shabby phreaks but well-paid lawyers.


    "Voice-mail systems" can also be abused; phreaks can seize their
own sections of these sophisticated electronic answering machines, and
use them for trading codes or knowledge of illegal techniques.   Voice-
mail abuse does not hurt the company directly, but finding supposedly
empty slots in your company's answering machine all crammed with
phreaks eagerly chattering and hey-duding one another in impenetrable
jargon can cause sensations of almost mystical repulsion and dread.


    Worse yet, phreaks have sometimes been known to react
truculently to attempts to "clean up" the voice-mail system.  Rather than
humbly acquiescing to being thrown out of their playground, they may
very well call up the company officials at work (or at home) and loudly
demand  free voice-mail addresses of their very own.  Such bullying is
taken very seriously by spooked victims.
    Acts of phreak revenge against straight people are rare, but voice-
mail systems are especially tempting and vulnerable, and an infestation of
angry phreaks in one's voice-mail system is no joke.  They can erase
legitimate messages; or spy on private messages; or harass users with
recorded taunts and  obscenities.   They've even been  known to seize
control of voice-mail security, and lock out legitimate users, or even shut
down the system entirely.
    Cellular phone-calls, cordless phones, and ship-toshore telephony
can all be monitored by various forms of radio; this kind of "passive
monitoring" is spreading explosively today.  Technically eavesdropping on
other people's cordless and cellular phone-calls is the fastestgrowing area
in phreaking today.   This practice strongly appeals to the lust for power
and conveys gratifying sensations of technical superiority over the
eavesdropping victim.  Monitoring is rife with all manner of tempting evil
mischief.  Simple prurient snooping is by far the most common activity.
But credit-card numbers unwarily spoken over the phone can be recorded,
stolen and used. And tapping people's phone-calls (whether through active
telephone taps or passive radio monitors) does lend itself conveniently to
activities like blackmail, industrial espionage, and political dirty tricks. It
should be repeated that telecommunications fraud,  the theft of phone
service,  causes vastly greater monetary losses than the practice of entering
into computers by stealth.   Hackers are mostly young suburban American
white males, and exist in their hundreds -- but "phreaks" come from both
sexes and from many nationalities, ages and ethnic backgrounds, and are
flourishing in the thousands.

    #
    The term "hacker" has had an unfortunate history. This book, *The
Hacker Crackdown,* has little to say about "hacking" in its finer, original
sense.  The term  can signify the free-wheeling intellectual exploration of
the highest and deepest potential of computer systems.   Hacking can
describe  the determination to make access to computers and information
as free and open as possible.  Hacking can involve the heartfelt conviction
that beauty can be found in computers, that the fine aesthetic in a perfect
program can liberate the mind and spirit.  This is "hacking" as it was
defined in Steven Levy's much-praised history of the pioneer computer
milieu, *Hackers,* published in 1984.
    Hackers of all kinds are absolutely soaked through with heroic
anti-bureaucratic sentiment.  Hackers long for recognition as a
praiseworthy cultural archetype, the postmodern electronic equivalent of
the cowboy and mountain man.   Whether  they deserve such a reputation
is something for history to decide.  But many hackers -including those
outlaw hackers who are computer intruders, and whose activities are
defined as criminal -actually attempt to *live up to* this techno-cowboy
reputation.   And given that electronics and telecommunications are still
largely unexplored  territories, there is simply *no telling* what hackers
might uncover.
    For some people, this freedom is the very breath of oxygen, the
inventive spontaneity that makes life worth living  and that flings open
doors to marvellous possibility and individual empowerment.  But for
many people -- and increasingly so -- the hacker is an ominous figure, a
smartaleck sociopath ready to burst out of his basement wilderness and
savage other people's lives for his own anarchical convenience.
    Any form of power without responsibility, without direct and
formal checks and balances, is frightening to people -- and reasonably so.
It should be frankly admitted that hackers *are* frightening, and that the
basis of this fear is not irrational. Fear of hackers goes well beyond the
fear of merely criminal activity.
    Subversion and manipulation of the phone system is an act with
disturbing political overtones.  In America, computers and telephones are
potent symbols of organized authority and the technocratic business elite.


    But there is an element in American culture that has always
strongly rebelled  against these symbols; rebelled against all large
industrial computers and all phone companies.    A certain anarchical tinge
deep in the American soul delights in causing confusion and pain to all
bureaucracies, including technological ones.
    There is sometimes malice and vandalism in this attitude, but it is a
deep and cherished part of the American national character.  The outlaw,
the rebel, the rugged individual, the pioneer, the sturdy Jeffersonian
yeoman, the private citizen resisting interference in his pursuit of
happiness --  these are figures that all Americans recognize, and that many
will strongly applaud and defend.
    Many scrupulously law-abiding citizens today do  cutting-edge
work with electronics -- work that has already had tremendous social
influence and will have much more in years to come.    In all truth, these
talented, hardworking, law-abiding, mature, adult people are far more
disturbing  to the peace and order of the current status quo  than any
scofflaw group of romantic teenage punk kids.  These law-abiding hackers
have the power, ability, and willingness to influence other people's lives
quite unpredictably.  They have means, motive, and opportunity to meddle
drastically with the American social  order.    When corralled into
governments, universities, or large multinational companies, and forced to
follow rulebooks and wear suits and ties, they at least have some
conventional halters on their freedom of action.  But when loosed alone, or
in small groups, and fired by imagination and the entrepreneurial spirit,
they can move mountains - causing landslides that will likely crash
directly into your office and living room.
    These people, as a class, instinctively recognize that a public,
politicized attack on hackers will eventually spread to them -- that the term
"hacker,"  once demonized, might be used to knock their hands off the
levers of power and choke them out of existence.  There are hackers today
who fiercely and publicly resist any besmirching of the noble title of
hacker.   Naturally and understandably, they deeply resent the attack on
their values implicit in using the word "hacker" as a synonym for
computer-criminal.
    This book, sadly but in my opinion unavoidably, rather adds to the
degradation of the term.  It concerns itself mostly with "hacking" in its
commonest latter-day definition, i.e., intruding into computer systems by
stealth and without permission. The term "hacking" is used routinely today
by almost all law enforcement officials with any professional interest in
computer fraud  and abuse.   American police describe almost any crime
committed with, by, through, or against a computer as hacking.
    Most importantly, "hacker" is what computerintruders choose to
call *themselves.*  Nobody who "hacks" into systems willingly describes
himself (rarely, herself) as a "computer intruder," "computer trespasser,"
"cracker," "wormer," "darkside hacker" or "high tech street gangster."
Several other demeaning terms have been invented  in the hope that the
press and public will leave the original sense of the word alone.   But few
people actually use these terms.  (I exempt the term "cyberpunk," which a
few hackers and law enforcement people actually do use.  The term
"cyberpunk" is drawn from literary criticism and has some odd  and
unlikely resonances, but, like hacker, cyberpunk too has become a criminal
pejorative today.)
    In any case, breaking into computer systems was hardly alien to the
original hacker tradition.   The first tottering systems of the 1960s
required fairly extensive internal surgery merely to function day-by-day.
Their users "invaded" the deepest, most arcane recesses of their operating
software almost as a matter of routine. "Computer security" in these early,
primitive systems was at best an afterthought.  What security there was,
was entirely physical, for it was assumed that anyone allowed near this
expensive, arcane hardware would be a fully qualified professional expert.
    In a campus environment, though, this meant that grad students,
teaching assistants, undergraduates, and eventually, all manner of dropouts
and hangers-on ended up accessing and often running the works.
    Universities, even modern universities, are not in the business of
maintaining security over information.  On the contrary, universities, as
institutions, pre-date the "information economy" by many centuries and are
notfor-profit cultural entities, whose reason for existence (purportedly) is
to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then
teach it.   Universities are meant to *pass the torch of civilization,* not just
download data into student skulls, and the values of the academic
community are strongly at odds with those of all would-be information
empires.   Teachers at all levels, from kindergarten up, have proven to be
shameless and persistent software and data pirates.   Universities do not
merely "leak information" but vigorously broadcast free thought.
    This clash of values has been fraught with controversy.  Many
hackers of the 1960s remember their professional apprenticeship as a long
guerilla war against the uptight mainframe-computer "information
priesthood."  These computer-hungry youngsters had to struggle hard for
access to computing power, and many of them were not above certain, er,
shortcuts.   But, over the years,  this practice freed computing from the
sterile reserve of lab-coated technocrats and was largely responsible for the
explosive growth of computing in general society -- especially *personal*
computing.

    Access to technical power acted like catnip on certain of these
youngsters.  Most of the basic techniques of computer intrusion: password
cracking, trapdoors, backdoors, trojan horses --  were invented in college
environments in the 1960s, in the early days of network computing.   Some
off-the-cuff experience at computer intrusion was to be in the informal
resume of most "hackers" and many future industry giants.   Outside of the
tiny cult of computer enthusiasts, few people thought much about  the
implications of "breaking into" computers.  This sort of activity had not
yet been publicized, much less criminalized.
    In the 1960s, definitions of "property" and "privacy" had not yet
been extended to cyberspace.  Computers were not yet indispensable to
society.  There were no vast databanks of vulnerable, proprietary
information stored in computers, which might be accessed, copied without
permission, erased, altered, or sabotaged.   The stakes were low in the
early days -- but they grew every year, exponentially, as computers
themselves grew.
    By the 1990s, commercial and political pressures had become
overwhelming, and they broke the social boundaries of the hacking
subculture.   Hacking had become too important to be left to the  hackers.
Society was now forced to tackle the intangible nature of cyberspace-as-
property, cyberspace as privately-owned unreal-estate.   In the  new,
severe, responsible, highstakes context of the "Information Society" of the
1990s, "hacking" was called into question.
    What did it mean to break into a computer without permission and
use its computational power, or look around inside its files without hurting
anything?  What were computer-intruding hackers, anyway -- how should
society, and the law,  best define their actions?    Were they just
*browsers,* harmless intellectual explorers? Were they *voyeurs,*
snoops, invaders of privacy?  Should  they be sternly treated as potential
*agents of espionage,* or perhaps as *industrial spies?* Or were they best
defined as *trespassers,* a very common teenage misdemeanor?  Was
hacking  *theft of service?*  (After all, intruders were getting someone
else's computer to carry out their orders, without permission and without
paying).   Was hacking *fraud?*  Maybe it was best described as
*impersonation.*  The commonest mode of computer intrusion was (and
is) to swipe or snoop somebody else's password, and then enter the
computer in the guise of another person -- who is commonly stuck with
the blame and the bills.
    Perhaps a medical metaphor was better -- hackers should be
defined as "sick," as *computer addicts* unable to control their
irresponsible, compulsive behavior.
    But these weighty assessments meant little to the people who were
actually being judged.   From inside the underground world of hacking
itself,  all these perceptions seem quaint, wrongheaded, stupid, or
meaningless.   The most important self-perception of underground hackers
- from the 1960s, right through to the present day --  is that they are an
*elite.*  The day-to-day struggle in the underground is not over
sociological definitions -- who cares? -- but for power, knowledge, and
status among one's peers.
    When you are a hacker, it is your own inner conviction of your
elite status that enables you to break, or let us say "transcend," the rules.
It is not that *all* rules go by the board.   The rules habitually broken  by
hackers are *unimportant* rules -- the rules of dopey greedhead telco
bureaucrats and pig-ignorant government pests. Hackers have their *own*
rules,  which separate behavior which is cool and elite, from behavior
which is rodentlike, stupid and losing.   These "rules," however, are mostly
unwritten and  enforced by peer pressure and tribal feeling.   Like all rules
that depend on the unspoken conviction that everybody else is a good old
boy, these rules are ripe for abuse.  The mechanisms of hacker peer-
pressure, "teletrials" and ostracism, are rarely used and rarely work.  Back-
stabbing slander, threats, and electronic harassment are also freely
employed in downand-dirty intrahacker feuds, but this rarely forces a rival
out of the scene entirely.  The only real solution for the problem of an
utterly losing, treacherous and rodentlike hacker is to *turn him in to the
police.*   Unlike the Mafia or Medellin Cartel, the hacker elite cannot
simply execute the bigmouths, creeps and troublemakers among their
ranks, so they turn one another in with astonishing frequency.
    There is no tradition of silence or *omerta* in the hacker
underworld.     Hackers can be shy, even reclusive, but when they do talk,
hackers tend to brag, boast and strut.   Almost everything hackers do is
*invisible;* if they don't brag, boast, and strut about it, then *nobody will
ever know.*  If you don't have something to brag, boast, and strut about,
then nobody in the underground will recognize you and favor you with
vital cooperation and respect.
    The way to win a solid reputation in the underground is by telling
other hackers things that could only have been learned by exceptional
cunning and stealth. Forbidden knowledge, therefore, is the basic currency
of the digital underground, like seashells among Trobriand Islanders.
Hackers hoard this knowledge, and dwell upon  it obsessively, and refine
it, and bargain with it, and talk and talk about it. Many hackers even suffer
from a strange obsession to *teach* -- to spread the ethos and the
knowledge of the digital underground.  They'll do this even when it gains
them no particular advantage and presents a grave personal risk.

    And when that risk catches up with them, they will go right on
teaching and preaching -- to a new audience this time, their interrogators
from law enforcement.   Almost every hacker arrested tells everything he
knows --  all about his friends, his mentors, his disciples -- legends,
threats, horror stories, dire rumors, gossip, hallucinations. This is, of
course, convenient for law enforcement -- except when law enforcement
begins to believe hacker legendry.
    Phone phreaks are unique among criminals in their willingness to
call up law enforcement officials -- in the office, at their homes -- and give
them an extended piece of their mind.  It is hard not to interpret this as
*begging for arrest,* and in fact it is an act of incredible foolhardiness.
Police are naturally nettled by these acts of chutzpah and will go well out
of their way to bust these flaunting idiots.   But it can also be interpreted as
a product of a world-view so elitist, so closed and hermetic, that electronic
police are simply  not perceived as "police," but rather as *enemy phone
phreaks* who should be scolded into behaving "decently."
    Hackers at their most grandiloquent perceive themselves as the
elite pioneers of a new electronic world. Attempts to make them obey the
democratically established laws of contemporary American society are
seen as repression and persecution.   After all, they argue, if Alexander
Graham Bell had gone along with the rules of the Western Union telegraph
company, there would have been no telephones.  If Jobs and Wozniak had
believed that IBM was the be-all and end-all, there would have been no
personal computers.  If Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson had tried
to "work within the system" there would have been no United States.
    Not only do hackers privately believe this as an  article of faith, but
they have been known to write ardent manifestos about it.  Here are some
revealing excerpts from an especially vivid hacker manifesto:  "The
TechnoRevolution" by  "Dr. Crash,"  which appeared in electronic form in
*Phrack* Volume 1, Issue 6, Phile 3.
    "To fully explain the true motives behind hacking, we  must first
take a quick look into the past.  In the 1960s, a group of MIT students built
the first modern computer system.  This wild, rebellious group of young
men were the first to bear the name 'hackers.'  The systems that they
developed were intended to be used to solve world problems and to benefit
all of mankind.
    "As we can see, this has not been the case.  The computer system
has been solely in the hands of big businesses and the government.  The
wonderful device meant to enrich life has become a weapon which
dehumanizes people.  To the government and large businesses, people are
no more than disk space, and the government doesn't use computers to
arrange aid for the poor, but to control nuclear death weapons.  The
average American can only have access to a small microcomputer  which
is worth only a fraction of what they pay for it.  The businesses keep the
true state-of-the-art equipment away from the people behind a steel wall of
incredibly high prices and bureaucracy.  It is because of this state of affairs
that hacking was born.(...)
    "Of course, the government doesn't want the monopoly of
technology broken, so they have outlawed hacking and arrest anyone who
is caught.(...) The phone company is another example of technology
abused and kept from people with high prices.(...)
    "Hackers often find that their existing equipment, due to the
monopoly tactics of computer companies, is  inefficient for their purposes.
Due to the exorbitantly high prices, it is impossible to legally purchase the
necessary equipment.  This need has given still another segment of the
fight:  Credit Carding.  Carding is a way of obtaining the necessary goods
without paying for them.  It is again due to the companies' stupidity that
Carding is so easy, and shows that the world's businesses are in the hands
of those with considerably less technical know-how than we, the hackers.
(...) "Hacking must continue.  We must train newcomers to the art of
hacking.(....)  And whatever you do, continue  the fight.  Whether you
know it or not, if you are a hacker, you are a revolutionary.  Don't worry,
you're on the right side."
    The  defense of "carding" is rare.  Most hackers regard credit-card
theft as "poison" to the underground, a sleazy and immoral effort that,
worse yet, is hard to get away with.   Nevertheless, manifestos advocating
creditcard theft, the deliberate crashing of computer systems, and even acts
of violent physical destruction such as vandalism and arson do exist in the
underground.  These boasts and threats are taken quite seriously by the
police. And not every hacker is an abstract, Platonic computernerd.  Some
few are quite experienced at picking locks, robbing phone-trucks, and
breaking and entering buildings.
    Hackers  vary in their degree of hatred for authority and the
violence of their rhetoric.  But, at a bottom line, they are scofflaws.  They
don't regard the current rules of electronic behavior as respectable efforts
to preserve law and order and protect public safety.  They regard these
laws as immoral efforts by soulless corporations to protect their profit
margins and to crush dissidents.   "Stupid" people, including police,
businessmen, politicians, and journalists, simply have no right to judge the
actions of those possessed of genius, techno-revolutionary intentions, and
technical expertise.

    #
    Hackers are generally teenagers and college kids not engaged in
earning a living.   They often come from fairly well-to-do middle-class
backgrounds, and are markedly anti-materialistic (except, that is, when it
comes to computer equipment).   Anyone motivated by greed for mere
money (as opposed to the greed for power, knowledge and status)  is
swiftly written-off as a narrowminded breadhead whose interests can only
be corrupt and contemptible.
    Having grown up in the 1970s and 1980s, the young Bohemians of
the digital underground regard straight society as awash in plutocratic
corruption, where everyone from the President down is for sale and
whoever has the gold makes the rules.
    Interestingly, there's a funhouse-mirror image of this attitude on the
other side of the conflict.  The police are also one of the most markedly
anti-materialistic groups in American society, motivated not by mere
money but by  ideals of service, justice, esprit-de-corps, and, of course,
their own brand of specialized knowledge and power. Remarkably, the
propaganda war between cops and hackers has always involved angry
allegations that the other side is trying to make a sleazy buck.  Hackers
consistently sneer that anti-phreak prosecutors are angling for cushy jobs
as telco lawyers and that computercrime police are aiming to cash in later
as well-paid computer-security consultants in the private sector.
    For their part, police publicly conflate all hacking crimes with
robbing payphones with crowbars.  Allegations of "monetary losses" from
computer intrusion are notoriously inflated.  The act of illicitly copying a
document from a computer is morally equated with  directly robbing a
company of, say, half a million dollars. The teenage computer intruder in
possession of this "proprietary"  document has certainly not sold it for such
a sum, would likely have little idea how to sell it at all, and quite probably
doesn't even understand what he has.  He has not made a cent in profit
from his felony but is still morally equated with a thief who has robbed the
church poorbox and lit out for Brazil.
    Police want to believe that all hackers are thieves. It is a tortuous
and almost unbearable act for the American justice system to put people in
jail because they want to learn things which are forbidden for them to
know.   In an American context, almost any pretext for punishment is
better than jailing people to protect certain restricted kinds of information.
Nevertheless, *policing information* is part and parcel of the struggle
against hackers.
    This dilemma is well exemplified by the remarkable activities of
"Emmanuel Goldstein," editor and publisher of a print magazine known as
*2600: The Hacker Quarterly.*  Goldstein was an English major at Long
Island's State University of New York in the '70s, when he became
involved with the local college radio station.  His growing interest in
electronics caused him to drift into Yippie *TAP* circles and thus into the
digital underground, where he became a self-described technorat.  His
magazine publishes techniques of computer intrusion and telephone
"exploration" as well as gloating exposes of telco misdeeds and
governmental failings.
    Goldstein lives quietly and very privately in a large, crumbling
Victorian mansion in Setauket, New York.   The seaside house is
decorated with telco decals, chunks of driftwood, and the basic bric-a-brac
of a hippie crash-pad. He is unmarried, mildly unkempt, and survives
mostly on TV dinners and turkey-stuffing eaten straight out of the bag.
Goldstein is a man of considerable charm and fluency, with a brief,
disarming smile and the kind of pitiless, stubborn, thoroughly recidivist
integrity that America's electronic police find genuinely alarming.
    Goldstein took his nom-de-plume, or "handle," from a character in
Orwell's *1984,*  which may be taken,  correctly, as a symptom of the
gravity of his sociopolitical worldview.   He is not himself a practicing
computer intruder, though he vigorously abets these actions, especially
when they are pursued against large  corporations or governmental
agencies.   Nor is he a thief, for he loudly scorns mere theft of phone
service, in favor of 'exploring and manipulating the system.'  He is
probably best described and understood as a *dissident.*

    Weirdly, Goldstein is living in modern America under conditions
very similar to those of former East European intellectual dissidents.  In
other words, he flagrantly espouses a value-system that is deeply and
irrevocably opposed to the system of those in power and  the police.  The
values in *2600* are generally expressed in terms that are ironic, sarcastic,
paradoxical, or just downright confused.  But there's no mistaking their
radically anti-authoritarian tenor.  *2600* holds that technical power and
specialized knowledge, of any kind obtainable, belong by right in the
hands of those individuals brave and bold enough to discover them -- by
whatever means necessary.  Devices, laws, or systems that forbid access,
and the free spread of knowledge, are provocations that any free and self-
respecting hacker should relentlessly attack.  The "privacy" of
governments, corporations and other soulless technocratic organizations
should never be protected at the expense of the liberty and free initiative of
the individual techno-rat.
    However, in our contemporary workaday world,  both governments
and corporations are very anxious indeed to  police information which is
secret, proprietary, restricted, confidential, copyrighted, patented,
hazardous, illegal, unethical, embarrassing, or otherwise sensitive.   This
makes Goldstein persona non grata, and his philosophy a threat.
    Very little about the conditions of Goldstein's daily life would
astonish, say, Vaclav Havel.  (We may note in passing that President
Havel once had his word-processor confiscated by the Czechoslovak
police.)   Goldstein lives by *samizdat,* acting semi-openly as a data-
center for the underground, while challenging the powers-that-be to abide
by their own stated rules:  freedom of speech and the First Amendment.
    Goldstein thoroughly looks and acts the part of techno-rat, with
shoulder-length ringlets and a piratical black fisherman's-cap set at a
rakish angle.  He often shows up like Banquo's ghost at meetings of
computer professionals, where he listens quietly, half-smiling and taking
thorough notes.
    Computer professionals generally meet publicly,  and find it very
difficult to rid themselves of Goldstein and his ilk  without extralegal and
unconstitutional actions. Sympathizers, many of them quite respectable
people with responsible jobs, admire Goldstein's attitude and
surreptitiously pass him information.  An unknown but presumably large
proportion of Goldstein's  2,000-plus readership are telco security
personnel and police, who  are forced to subscribe to *2600*  to stay
abreast of new developments in hacking.  They thus find themselves
*paying this guy's rent* while grinding their teeth in anguish, a situation
that would have delighted Abbie Hoffman (one of Goldstein's few idols).
    Goldstein is probably the best-known public representative of the
hacker underground today, and certainly the best-hated.  Police regard him
as a Fagin, a corrupter of youth, and speak of him with untempered
loathing.  He is quite an accomplished gadfly.
    After the  Martin Luther King Day Crash of 1990,  Goldstein, for
instance, adeptly rubbed salt into the wound in the pages of *2600.*
"Yeah, it was fun for the phone phreaks as we watched the network
crumble," he admitted cheerfully.   "But it was also an ominous sign of
what's to come...  Some AT&T people, aided by well-meaning but
ignorant media, were spreading the notion that many companies had the
same software and therefore could face the same problem someday.
Wrong.  This was entirely an AT&T software deficiency.  Of course, other
companies could face entirely *different* software problems.  But then, so
too could AT&T."
    After a technical discussion of the system's failings, the Long
Island techno-rat went on to offer thoughtful criticism to the gigantic
multinational's hundreds of professionally qualified engineers.  "What we
don't know is how a major force in communications like AT&T could be
so sloppy.  What happened to backups?  Sure, computer systems go down
all the time, but people  making phone calls are not the same as people
logging on to computers.  We must make that distinction.  It's not
acceptable for the phone system or any other essential service to 'go down.'
If we continue to trust technology without understanding it, we can look
forward to many variations on this theme.
    "AT&T owes it to its customers to be prepared to *instantly*
switch to another network if something strange  and unpredictable starts
occurring.  The news here isn't so much the failure of a computer program,
but the failure of AT&T's entire structure."
    The very idea of this.... this *person*....  offering "advice" about
"AT&T's entire structure" is more than some people can easily bear.   How
dare this near-criminal dictate what is or isn't "acceptable" behavior from
AT&T? Especially when he's publishing, in the very same issue, detailed
schematic diagrams for creating various switching-network signalling
tones unavailable to the public.

    "See what happens when you drop a 'silver box' tone or two down
your local exchange or through different long distance service carriers,"
advises *2600* contributor "Mr. Upsetter" in "How To Build a Signal
Box."  "If you experiment systematically and keep good records, you will
surely discover something interesting."
    This is, of course, the scientific method, generally regarded as a
praiseworthy activity and one of the flowers of modern civilization.   One
can indeed learn a great deal with this sort of structured intellectual
activity.   Telco employees regard this mode of "exploration" as akin to
flinging sticks of dynamite into their pond to see what lives on the bottom.
    *2600* has been published consistently since 1984.  It has also run
a bulletin board computer system, printed *2600* T-shirts, taken fax
calls...  The Spring 1991 issue has an interesting announcement on page
45:  "We just discovered an extra set of wires attached to our fax line and
heading up the pole.  (They've since been clipped.) Your faxes to us and to
anyone else could be monitored."

    In the worldview of *2600,* the tiny band of technorat brothers
(rarely, sisters) are a beseiged vanguard of the truly free and honest.   The
rest of the world is a maelstrom of corporate crime and high-level
governmental corruption, occasionally tempered with well-meaning
ignorance.   To read a few issues in a row is to enter a nightmare akin to
Solzhenitsyn's, somewhat tempered by the fact that *2600* is often
extremely funny.
    Goldstein did not become a target of the Hacker Crackdown,
though he protested loudly, eloquently, and publicly about it, and it added
considerably to his fame. It was not that he is not regarded as dangerous,
because he is so regarded.  Goldstein has had brushes with the law in the
past:  in 1985, a *2600* bulletin board computer was seized by the FBI,
and some software on it was formally declared "a burglary tool in the form
of a computer program."  But Goldstein escaped direct repression in 1990,
because his magazine is printed on paper, and recognized as subject to
Constitutional freedom of the  press protection.  As was seen in the
*Ramparts* case, this is far from an absolute guarantee.  Still, as a
practical matter, shutting down *2600* by court-order would create so
much legal hassle that it is simply unfeasible, at least for the present.
Throughout 1990, both Goldstein and his magazine were peevishly
thriving.
    Instead, the Crackdown of 1990 would concern itself with the
computerized version of forbidden data.  The crackdown itself, first and
foremost, was about *bulletin board systems.*  Bulletin Board Systems,
most often known by the ugly and un-pluralizable acronym "BBS," are the
life-blood of the digital underground.  Boards were also central to law
enforcement's tactics and strategy in the Hacker Crackdown.
    A "bulletin board system" can be formally defined as a computer
which serves as an information and messagepassing center for users
dialing-up over the phone-lines through the use of  modems.   A "modem,"
or modulatordemodulator, is a device which translates the digital impulses
of computers into audible analog telephone signals, and vice versa.
Modems connect computers to phones and thus to each other.
    Large-scale mainframe computers have been connected since the
1960s, but *personal* computers, run by individuals out of their homes,
were first networked in the late 1970s.   The "board" created by Ward
Christensen and Randy Suess in February 1978, in Chicago, Illinois, is
generally regarded as the first personal-computer bulletin board system
worthy of the name. Boards run on many different machines, employing
many different kinds of software.  Early boards were crude and buggy, and
their managers, known as "system operators" or "sysops," were hard-
working technical experts who wrote their own software.  But like most
everything else in the world of electronics, boards became faster, cheaper,
better-designed, and generally far more sophisticated throughout the
1980s.  They also moved swiftly out of the hands of pioneers and into
those of the general public.   By 1985 there were something in the
neighborhood of 4,000 boards in America.  By 1990 it was calculated,
vaguely, that there were about 30,000 boards in the US, with uncounted
thousands overseas.
    Computer bulletin boards are unregulated enterprises.  Running a
board is a rough-and-ready, catchas-catch-can proposition.   Basically,
anybody with a computer, modem, software and a phone-line can start a
board.   With second-hand equipment and public-domain free software, the
price of a board might be quite small -less than it would take to publish a
magazine or even a decent pamphlet.   Entrepreneurs eagerly sell bulletin-
board software, and will coach nontechnical amateur sysops in its use.
    Boards are not "presses."  They are not magazines, or libraries, or
phones, or CB radios, or traditional cork bulletin boards down at the local
laundry, though they have some passing resemblance to those earlier
media. Boards are a new medium -- they may even be a *large number* of
new media.
    Consider these unique characteristics:  boards are cheap, yet they
can have a national, even global reach. Boards can be contacted from
anywhere in the global telephone network, at *no cost* to the person
running the board -- the caller pays the phone bill, and if the caller is local,
the call is free.  Boards do not involve an editorial elite addressing a mass
audience.   The "sysop" of a board is not an exclusive publisher or writer --
he is managing an electronic salon, where individuals can address the
general public,  play the part of the general public, and also  exchange
private mail with other individuals.  And the "conversation" on boards,
though fluid, rapid, and  highly interactive, is not spoken, but written.  It is
also relatively anonymous, sometimes completely so.
    And because boards are cheap and ubiquitous, regulations and
licensing requirements would likely be practically unenforceable.  It would
almost be easier to "regulate"  "inspect" and "license" the content of
private mail -- probably more so, since the mail system is operated by the
federal government.  Boards are run by individuals, independently, entirely
at their own whim.
    For the sysop, the cost of operation is not the primary limiting
factor.  Once the investment in a computer and modem has been made, the
only steady cost is the charge for maintaining a phone line (or several
phone lines).   The primary limits for sysops are time and energy.  Boards
require upkeep.  New users are generally "validated" -they must be issued
individual passwords, and called at home by voice-phone, so that their
identity can be verified.  Obnoxious users, who exist in plenty, must be
chided or purged.  Proliferating messages must be deleted when they grow
old, so that the capacity of the system is not overwhelmed.  And software
programs (if such things are kept on the board)  must be examined for
possible computer viruses.   If there is a financial charge to use the board
(increasingly common, especially in larger and fancier systems) then
accounts must be kept, and users must be billed.  And if the board crashes
-- a very common occurrence -- then repairs must be made.
    Boards can be distinguished by the amount of effort spent in
regulating them.  First, we have the completely open board, whose sysop is
off chugging brews and watching re-runs while his users generally
degenerate over time into peevish anarchy and eventual silence. Second
comes the supervised board, where the sysop breaks in every once in a
while to tidy up, calm brawls, issue announcements, and rid the
community of  dolts and troublemakers.   Third is the heavily supervised
board,  which sternly urges adult and responsible behavior and swiftly
edits any message considered offensive, impertinent, illegal or irrelevant.
And last comes the completely  edited "electronic publication,"  which is
presented to a silent audience which is not allowed to respond directly in
any way.
    Boards can also be grouped by their degree of anonymity.  There is
the completely anonymous board, where everyone uses pseudonyms --
"handles" -- and even  the sysop is unaware of the user's true identity.  The
sysop himself is likely pseudonymous on a board of this type. Second, and
rather more common, is the board where the sysop knows (or thinks he
knows) the true names and addresses of all users, but the users don't know
one another's names and may not know his.  Third is the board where
everyone has to use real names, and roleplaying and pseudonymous
posturing are forbidden.
    Boards can be grouped by their immediacy.  "Chatlines" are boards
linking several users together over several different phone-lines
simultaneously, so that people exchange messages at the very moment that
they  type.  (Many large boards feature "chat" capabilities along with other
services.)   Less immediate boards, perhaps with a single phoneline, store
messages serially, one at a time.  And some boards are only open for
business in daylight hours or on weekends, which greatly slows response.
A *network* of boards, such as "FidoNet," can carry electronic mail from
board to board, continent to continent, across huge distances -- but at a
relative snail's pace, so that a message can take several days to reach its
target audience and elicit a reply.
    Boards can be grouped by their degree of community.  Some
boards emphasize the exchange of private, person-to-person electronic
mail.   Others emphasize public postings and may even purge people  who
"lurk," merely reading posts but refusing to openly participate.  Some
boards are intimate and neighborly. Others are frosty and highly technical.
Some are little more than storage dumps for software, where users
"download" and "upload" programs, but interact among themselves little if
at all.
    Boards can be grouped by their ease of access.  Some boards are
entirely public.  Others are private and restricted only to personal friends
of the sysop.   Some boards divide users by status.   On these boards, some
users, especially beginners, strangers or children, will be  restricted to
general topics, and perhaps forbidden to post. Favored users, though, are
granted the ability to post as they please, and to stay "on-line" as long as
they like, even to the disadvantage of other people trying to call in.  High-
status users can be given access to hidden areas in the board, such as off-
color topics, private discussions, and/or valuable software.  Favored users
may even become "remote sysops" with the power to take remote control
of the board through their own home computers.  Quite often "remote
sysops" end up doing all the work and  taking formal control of the
enterprise, despite the fact that it's physically located in someone else's
house. Sometimes several "co-sysops" share power.
    And boards can also be grouped by size.  Massive, nationwide
commercial networks, such as CompuServe, Delphi, GEnie and Prodigy,
are run on mainframe computers and are generally not considered
"boards," though they share many of their characteristics, such as
electronic mail, discussion topics, libraries of software, and persistent and
growing problems with civil-liberties issues. Some private boards have as
many as thirty phone-lines and quite sophisticated hardware.   And then
there are tiny boards.
    Boards vary in popularity.  Some boards are huge and crowded,
where users must claw their way in against a constant busy-signal.  Others
are huge and empty -- there are few things sadder than a formerly
flourishing board where no one posts any longer, and the dead
conversations of vanished users lie about gathering digital dust.  Some
boards are tiny and intimate, their telephone numbers intentionally kept
confidential so that only a small number can log on.
    And some boards are *underground.*
    Boards can be mysterious entities.  The activities of their users can
be hard to differentiate from conspiracy. Sometimes they *are*
conspiracies.  Boards have harbored, or have been accused of harboring,
all manner of fringe groups, and have abetted, or been accused of abetting,
every manner of frowned-upon, sleazy, radical, and criminal activity.
There are Satanist boards.  Nazi boards.  Pornographic boards.  Pedophile
boards.  Drugdealing boards.  Anarchist boards.  Communist boards. Gay
and Lesbian boards (these exist in great profusion,  many of them quite
lively with well-established histories). Religious cult boards.  Evangelical
boards.  Witchcraft boards, hippie boards, punk boards, skateboarder
boards. Boards for UFO believers.   There may well be boards for serial
killers, airline terrorists and professional assassins. There is simply no way
to tell.   Boards spring up, flourish, and disappear in large numbers, in
most every corner of the developed world.  Even apparently innocuous
public boards can, and sometimes do, harbor secret areas known only to a
few.  And even on the vast, public, commercial  services, private mail is
very private -- and quite possibly criminal.
    Boards cover most every topic imaginable and some that are hard
to imagine.  They cover a vast spectrum of social activity.   However, all
board users do have something in common:  their possession of computers
and phones.  Naturally, computers and phones are primary topics of
conversation on almost every board.
    And hackers and phone phreaks, those utter devotees of computers
and phones, live by boards.  They swarm by boards.  They are bred by
boards.  By the late 1980s, phone-phreak groups and hacker groups, united
by boards, had proliferated fantastically.
    As evidence, here is a list of hacker groups compiled by the editors
of *Phrack* on August 8, 1988.
    The Administration.  Advanced Telecommunications, Inc.  ALIAS.
American Tone Travelers.  Anarchy Inc. Apple Mafia.  The Association.
Atlantic Pirates Guild.
    Bad Ass Mother Fuckers.  Bellcore.  Bell Shock Force. Black Bag.
    Camorra.  C&M Productions.  Catholics Anonymous. Chaos
Computer Club.  Chief Executive Officers.  Circle  Of Death.  Circle Of
Deneb.  Club X.  Coalition of Hi-Tech Pirates.  Coast-To-Coast.  Corrupt
Computing.  Cult Of The Dead Cow.  Custom Retaliations.
    Damage Inc.  D&B Communications. The Dange Gang.  Dec
Hunters.  Digital Gang.  DPAK.

    Eastern Alliance. The Elite Hackers Guild.  Elite Phreakers and
Hackers Club.  The Elite Society Of America.  EPG.  Executives Of
Crime. Extasyy Elite.

    Fargo 4A.  Farmers Of Doom.  The Federation.  Feds R Us.  First
Class. Five O.  Five Star.   Force Hackers. The 414s.

    Hack-A-Trip.  Hackers Of America.   High Mountain Hackers.
High Society.  The Hitchhikers.
    IBM Syndicate.  The Ice Pirates.   Imperial Warlords. Inner Circle.
Inner Circle II.  Insanity Inc.  International Computer Underground
Bandits.

    Justice League of America. Kaos Inc.  Knights Of Shadow.
Knights Of The Round Table.

    League Of Adepts.  Legion Of Doom.  Legion Of Hackers.  Lords
Of Chaos.  Lunatic Labs, Unlimited.
    Master Hackers.  MAD!  The Marauders.  MD/PhD. Metal
Communications, Inc.  MetalliBashers, Inc.  MBI. Metro
Communications.  Midwest Pirates Guild.
    NASA Elite.  The NATO Association.  Neon Knights. Nihilist
Order.     Order Of The Rose.  OSS.
    Pacific Pirates Guild.  Phantom Access Associates. PHido
PHreaks. The Phirm.  Phlash.  PhoneLine Phantoms.  Phone Phreakers Of
America. Phortune 500. Phreak Hack Delinquents.  Phreak Hack
Destroyers. Phreakers, Hackers, And Laundromat Employees Gang
(PHALSE Gang).  Phreaks Against Geeks.  Phreaks Against Phreaks
Against Geeks.  Phreaks and Hackers of America.  Phreaks Anonymous
World Wide.  Project Genesis.  The Punk Mafia. The Racketeers.  Red
Dawn Text Files.  Roscoe Gang.
    SABRE.  Secret Circle of Pirates.  Secret Service.  707 Club.
Shadow Brotherhood.  Sharp Inc.  65C02 Elite. Spectral Force. Star
League.  Stowaways.   Strata-Crackers.
    Team Hackers '86.  Team Hackers '87. TeleComputist Newsletter
Staff.  Tribunal Of Knowledge. Triple Entente.  Turn Over And Die
Syndrome (TOADS). 300 Club.  1200 Club.  2300 Club.  2600 Club.
2601 Club. 2AF. The United Soft WareZ Force.  United Technical
Underground.


    Ware Brigade.  The Warelords.  WASP.
    Contemplating this list is  an impressive, almost humbling
business.   As a cultural artifact, the thing approaches poetry.
    Underground groups -- subcultures -- can be distinguished from
independent cultures by their  habit of referring constantly to the parent
society.  Undergrounds by their nature constantly  must maintain a
membrane of differentiation.   Funny/distinctive clothes and hair,
specialized jargon, specialized ghettoized areas in cities, different hours of
rising, working, sleeping....  The digital underground, which specializes in
information, relies very heavily on language to distinguish itself.   As can
be seen from this list, they make heavy use of parody and mockery.   It's
revealing to see who they choose to mock.
    First,  large corporations.  We have the Phortune 500, The Chief
Executive Officers,  Bellcore,  IBM Syndicate, SABRE (a computerized
reservation service maintained by airlines).  The common use of "Inc." is
telling -- none of these groups are actual corporations, but take clear
delight in mimicking them.
    Second,  governments and police.  NASA Elite, NATO
Association.  "Feds R Us" and "Secret Service" are fine bits of fleering
boldness.  OSS -- the Office of Strategic Services was the forerunner of
the CIA.
    Third, criminals.  Using stigmatizing pejoratives as a perverse
badge of honor is a time-honored tactic for subcultures:   punks, gangs,
delinquents, mafias, pirates, bandits, racketeers.
    Specialized orthography, especially the use of "ph" for "f" and "z"
for the plural "s," are instant recognition symbols.  So is the use of the
numeral "0" for the letter "O" -- computer-software orthography generally
features a slash through the zero, making the distinction obvious.
    Some terms are poetically descriptive of computer intrusion:  the
Stowaways,  the Hitchhikers, the PhoneLine Phantoms, Coast-to-Coast.
Others are simple bravado and vainglorious puffery.  (Note the insistent
use of the terms "elite" and "master.")  Some terms are blasphemous, some
obscene, others merely cryptic - anything to puzzle, offend, confuse, and
keep the straights at bay.
    Many hacker groups further re-encrypt their names by the use of
acronyms:  United Technical Underground becomes UTU, Farmers of
Doom become FoD,  the United SoftWareZ Force becomes, at its own
insistence, "TuSwF," and woe to the ignorant rodent who capitalizes the
wrong letters.
    It should be further recognized that the members of these groups
are themselves pseudonymous.  If you did, in fact, run across the
"PhoneLine Phantoms," you would find them to consist of  "Carrier
Culprit,"  "The Executioner," "Black Majik,"  "Egyptian Lover,"  "Solid
State," and  "Mr Icom."  "Carrier Culprit" will likely be referred to by his
friends as "CC," as in, "I got these dialups from CC of PLP."
    It's quite possible that this entire list refers to as few as a thousand
people.   It is not a complete list of underground groups -- there has never
been such a list, and there never will be.   Groups rise, flourish, decline,
share membership, maintain a cloud of wannabes and casual hangers-on.
People pass in and out, are ostracized, get bored, are busted by police, or
are cornered by telco security and presented with huge bills.  Many
"underground groups" are software pirates, "warez d00dz," who might
break copy protection and pirate programs, but likely wouldn't dare to
intrude on a computer-system. It is hard to estimate the true population of
the digital underground.  There is constant turnover.  Most hackers start
young, come and go, then drop out at age 22 -- the age of college
graduation.  And a large majority of "hackers" access pirate boards, adopt
a handle,  swipe software and perhaps abuse a phone-code or two, while
never actually joining the elite.
    Some professional informants, who make it their business to retail
knowledge of the underground to paymasters in private corporate security,
have estimated the hacker population at as high as fifty thousand.   This is
likely highly inflated, unless one counts every single teenage software
pirate  and petty phone-booth thief.  My best guess is about 5,000 people.
Of these, I would guess that as few as a hundred are truly "elite"  -- active
computer intruders, skilled enough to penetrate sophisticated systems and
truly to worry corporate security and law enforcement.
    Another interesting speculation is whether this group is growing or
not.  Young teenage hackers are often convinced that hackers exist in vast
swarms and will soon dominate the cybernetic universe.  Older and wiser
veterans, perhaps as wizened as 24 or 25 years old, are convinced that the
glory days are long gone, that the cops have the underground's number
now, and that kids these days are dirt-stupid and just want to play
Nintendo.
    My own assessment is that computer intrusion, as a non-profit act
of intellectual exploration and mastery, is in slow decline, at least in the
United States; but that electronic fraud, especially telecommunication
crime, is growing by leaps and bounds.
    One might find a useful parallel to the digital underground in  the
drug  underground.   There was a time, now much-obscured by historical
revisionism, when Bohemians freely shared joints at concerts, and hip,
smallscale marijuana dealers might turn people on just for the sake of
enjoying a long stoned conversation about the Doors and Allen Ginsberg.
Now drugs are increasingly verboten, except in a high-stakes, highly-
criminal world of highly addictive drugs.  Over years of disenchantment
and police harassment, a vaguely ideological, free-wheeling drug
underground has relinquished the business of drugdealing to a  far more
savage criminal hard-core.   This is not a pleasant prospect to contemplate,
but the analogy is fairly compelling.
    What does an underground board look like?   What distinguishes it
from a standard board?  It isn't necessarily the conversation -- hackers
often talk about common board topics, such as hardware, software, sex,
science fiction, current events, politics, movies, personal gossip.
Underground boards can best be distinguished by their files, or "philes,"
pre-composed texts which teach the techniques and ethos of the
underground.   These are prized reservoirs of forbidden knowledge.  Some
are anonymous, but most proudly bear the handle of the  "hacker" who has
created them, and his group affiliation, if he has one. Here is a partial
table-of-contents of philes from an underground board, somewhere in the
heart of middle America, circa 1991.  The descriptions are mostly self-
explanatory. BANKAMER.ZIP
    5406 06-11-91  Hacking Bank America CHHACK.ZIP
    4481 06-11-91  Chilton Hacking CITIBANK.ZIP
    4118 06-11-91  Hacking Citibank CREDIMTC.ZIP
    3241 06-11-91  Hacking Mtc Credit Company DIGEST.ZIP
    5159 06-11-91  Hackers Digest HACK.ZIP       14031 06-11-91
How To Hack HACKBAS.ZIP
    5073 06-11-91  Basics Of Hacking HACKDICT.ZIP   42774 06-
11-91  Hackers Dictionary HACKER.ZIP     57938 06-11-91  Hacker Info
HACKERME.ZIP
    3148 06-11-91  Hackers Manual HACKHAND.ZIP
    4814 06-11-91  Hackers Handbook HACKTHES.ZIP   48290 06-
11-91  Hackers Thesis HACKVMS.ZIP
    4696 06-11-91  Hacking Vms Systems MCDON.ZIP
    3830 06-11-91  Hacking Macdonalds (Home Of The Archs)
P500UNIX.ZIP   15525 06-11-91  Phortune 500 Guide To Unix
RADHACK.ZIP
    8411 06-11-91  Radio Hacking TAOTRASH.DOC
    4096 12-25-89  Suggestions For Trashing TECHHACK.ZIP
    5063 06-11-91  Technical Hacking The files above are do-it-
yourself manuals about  computer intrusion.  The above is only a small
section of a much larger library of hacking and phreaking techniques and
history.  We now move into a different and perhaps surprising area.


    +------------+


    |Anarchy|


    +------------+ ANARC.ZIP
    3641 06-11-91  Anarchy Files ANARCHST.ZIP   63703 06-11-91
Anarchist Book ANARCHY.ZIP
    2076 06-11-91  Anarchy At Home ANARCHY3.ZIP
    6982 06-11-91  Anarchy No 3 ANARCTOY.ZIP
    2361 06-11-91  Anarchy Toys ANTIMODM.ZIP
    2877 06-11-91  Anti-modem Weapons ATOM.ZIP
    4494 06-11-91  How To Make An Atom Bomb BARBITUA.ZIP
    3982 06-11-91  Barbiturate Formula BLCKPWDR.ZIP
    2810 06-11-91  Black Powder Formulas BOMB.ZIP
    3765 06-11-91  How To Make Bombs BOOM.ZIP
    2036 06-11-91  Things That Go Boom CHLORINE.ZIP
    1926 06-11-91  Chlorine Bomb COOKBOOK.ZIP
    1500 06-11-91  Anarchy Cook Book DESTROY.ZIP
    3947 06-11-91  Destroy Stuff DUSTBOMB.ZIP
    2576 06-11-91  Dust Bomb ELECTERR.ZIP
    3230 06-11-91  Electronic Terror EXPLOS1.ZIP
    2598 06-11-91  Explosives 1 EXPLOSIV.ZIP   18051 06-11-91
More Explosives EZSTEAL.ZIP
    4521 06-11-91  Ez-stealing FLAME.ZIP
    2240 06-11-91  Flame Thrower FLASHLT.ZIP
    2533 06-11-91  Flashlight Bomb FMBUG.ZIP
    2906 06-11-91  How To Make An Fm Bug OMEEXPL.ZIP    2139
06-11-91  Home Explosives HOW2BRK.ZIP
    3332 06-11-91  How To Break In LETTER.ZIP
    2990 06-11-91  Letter Bomb LOCK.ZIP
    2199 06-11-91  How To Pick Locks MRSHIN.ZIP
    3991 06-11-91  Briefcase Locks NAPALM.ZIP
    3563 06-11-91  Napalm At Home NITRO.ZIP
    3158 06-11-91  Fun With Nitro PARAMIL.ZIP
    2962 06-11-91  Paramilitary Info PICKING.ZIP
    3398 06-11-91  Picking Locks PIPEBOMB.ZIP
    2137 06-11-91  Pipe Bomb POTASS.ZIP
    3987 06-11-91  Formulas With Potassium PRANK.TXT      11074
08-03-90  More Pranks To Pull On Idiots! REVENGE.ZIP
    4447 06-11-91  Revenge Tactics ROCKET.ZIP
    2590 06-11-91  Rockets For Fun SMUGGLE.ZIP
    3385 06-11-91  How To Smuggle
    *Holy Cow!*  The damned thing is full of stuff about bombs!
    What are we to make of this?
    First, it should be acknowledged that spreading knowledge about
demolitions to teenagers is a highly and deliberately antisocial act.
    It is not, however, illegal.
    Second, it should be recognized that most of these philes were in
fact *written* by teenagers.  Most adult American males who can
remember their teenage years will recognize that the notion of building a
flamethrower in your garage is an incredibly neat-o idea.  *Actually*
building a flamethrower in your garage, however, is fraught with
discouraging difficulty.  Stuffing gunpowder into a booby-trapped
flashlight, so as to blow the arm off your high-school vice-principal, can
be a thing of dark beauty to contemplate.   Actually committing assault by
explosives  will earn you the sustained attention of the federal Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
    Some people, however, will actually try these plans.  A
determinedly murderous American teenager can probably buy or steal a
handgun far more easily than he can brew fake "napalm" in the kitchen
sink.  Nevertheless, if temptation is spread before people a certain number
will succumb, and a small minority will actually attempt these stunts.  A
large minority of that small minority will either fail or, quite likely, maim
themselves, since these "philes" have not been checked for accuracy, are
not the product of professional experience, and are often highly fanciful.
But the gloating menace of these philes is not to be entirely dismissed.
    Hackers may not be "serious" about bombing; if they were, we
would hear far more about exploding flashlights, homemade bazookas,
and gym teachers poisoned by chlorine and potassium.  However, hackers
are *very* serious about forbidden knowledge.  They are possessed  not
merely by curiosity, but by a positive *lust to know.* The desire to know
what others don't is scarcely new.  But the *intensity* of this desire, as
manifested by these young technophilic denizens of the Information Age,
may in fact *be* new, and may represent some basic shift in social values
-- a harbinger of what the world may come to, as society lays more and
more value on the possession, assimilation and retailing of *information*
as a basic commodity of daily life.
    There have always been young men with obsessive interests in
these topics.  Never before, however, have they been able to network so
extensively and easily, and to propagandize their interests with impunity to
random passers-by.   High-school teachers will recognize that there's
always one in a crowd, but when the one in a crowd escapes control by
jumping into the phone-lines, and becomes a hundred such kids all
together on a board, then trouble is brewing visibly.  The urge of authority
to *do something,*  even something drastic, is hard to resist. And in 1990,
authority did something.  In fact authority did a great deal.


    #
    The process by which boards create hackers goes something like
this.  A youngster becomes interested in computers -- usually, computer
games.  He hears from friends that "bulletin boards" exist where games
can be obtained for free.  (Many computer games are "freeware," not
copyrighted -- invented simply for the love of it and given away to the
public; some of these games are quite good.)  He bugs his parents for a
modem, or quite often, uses his parents' modem.

    The world of boards suddenly opens up.  Computer games can be
quite expensive, real budget-breakers for a kid, but pirated games, stripped
of copy protection,  are cheap or free.  They are also illegal, but it is very
rare, almost unheard of, for a small-scale software pirate to be prosecuted.
Once "cracked" of its copy protection, the program, being digital data,
becomes infinitely reproducible.  Even the instructions to the game, any
manuals that accompany it, can be reproduced as text files, or photocopied
from legitimate sets.  Other users  on boards can give many useful hints in
game-playing tactics. And a youngster with an infinite supply of free
computer games can certainly cut quite a swath among his modemless
friends. And boards are pseudonymous.  No one need know that you're
fourteen years old -- with a little practice at subterfuge, you can talk to
adults about adult things, and be accepted and taken seriously!  You can
even pretend to be a girl, or an old man, or anybody you can imagine.  If
you find this kind of deception gratifying, there is ample opportunity to
hone your ability on boards. But local boards can grow stale.  And almost
every board maintains a list of phone-numbers to other boards, some in
distant, tempting, exotic locales.   Who knows what they're up to, in
Oregon or Alaska or Florida or California?  It's very easy to find out -- just
order the  modem to call through its software -- nothing to this, just typing
on a keyboard, the same thing you would do for most any computer game.
The machine reacts swiftly and in a few seconds you are talking to a bunch
of interesting people on another seaboard.
    And yet the *bills* for this trivial action can be staggering!  Just by
going tippety-tap with your fingers, you may have saddled your parents
with four hundred bucks in long-distance charges, and gotten chewed out
but good. That hardly seems fair.
    How horrifying to have made friends in another state and to be
deprived of their company -- and their software -  just because telephone
companies demand absurd amounts of money!   How painful, to be
restricted to boards in one's own *area code* --   what the heck is an "area
code" anyway, and what makes it so special?   A few grumbles,
complaints, and innocent questions of this sort will often elicit a
sympathetic reply from another board user  --  someone with some stolen
codes to hand.  You dither a while,  knowing this isn't quite right, then you
make up your mind to try them anyhow -- *and they work!* Suddenly
you're doing something even your parents can't do.  Six months ago you
were just some kid -- now, you're the Crimson Flash of Area Code 512!
You're bad -- you're nationwide! Maybe you'll stop at a few abused codes.
Maybe you'll decide that boards aren't all that interesting after all, that it's
wrong, not worth the risk  -- but maybe you won't. The next step is to pick
up your own repeat-dialling program --  to learn to generate your own
stolen codes. (This was dead easy five years ago, much harder to get away
with nowadays, but not yet impossible.)   And these dialling programs are
not complex or intimidating -- some are as small as twenty lines of
software. Now, you too can share codes.   You can trade codes to learn
other techniques.   If you're smart enough to catch on, and obsessive
enough to want to bother,  and ruthless enough to start seriously bending
rules, then you'll get better, fast.  You start to develop a rep.  You  move
up to a heavier class of board -- a board with a bad attitude, the kind of
board that naive dopes like your classmates and your former self have
never even heard of!  You pick up the jargon of phreaking and hacking
from the board.   You read a few of those anarchy philes -- and man, you
never realized you could be a real *outlaw* without ever leaving your
bedroom.
    You still play other computer games, but now you have a new and
bigger game.   This one will bring you a different kind of status than
destroying even eight zillion lousy space invaders.
    Hacking is perceived by hackers as a "game."  This is not an
entirely unreasonable or sociopathic perception. You can win or lose at
hacking, succeed or fail, but it never feels "real."  It's not simply that
imaginative youngsters sometimes have a hard time telling "make-believe"
from "real life."  Cyberspace is *not real!*  "Real" things are physical
objects like trees and  shoes and cars.  Hacking takes place on a screen.
Words aren't physical, numbers (even telephone numbers and credit card
numbers) aren't physical.  Sticks and stones may break my bones, but data
will never hurt me.  Computers *simulate* reality, like computer games
that simulate tank battles or dogfights or spaceships.   Simulations are just
makebelieve, and the stuff in computers is *not real.*
    Consider this:  if "hacking" is supposed to be so serious and real-
life and  dangerous, then how come *nine-year-old kids* have computers
and modems?  You  wouldn't give a nine year old his own car, or his own
rifle, or his own chainsaw -- those things are "real."
    People underground are perfectly aware that the "game" is frowned
upon by the powers that be.   Word gets around about busts in the
underground.   Publicizing busts  is one of the primary functions of pirate
boards,  but they also promulgate an attitude about them, and their own
idiosyncratic ideas of justice.   The users of underground boards won't
complain if some guy is busted for crashing systems, spreading viruses, or
stealing money by wirefraud.   They may shake their heads with a sneaky
grin, but they won't openly defend these practices.   But when a kid is
charged with some theoretical amount of theft: $233,846.14, for instance,
because he sneaked into a computer and copied something, and kept it in
his house on a floppy disk -- this is regarded as a sign of near insanity from
prosecutors, a sign that they've drastically mistaken the immaterial game
of computing for their real and boring everyday world of fatcat corporate
money.
    It's as if big companies and their suck-up lawyers think that
computing belongs to them, and they can retail  it with price stickers, as if
it were boxes of laundry soap! But pricing "information"  is like trying to
price air or price dreams.  Well, anybody on a pirate board knows that
computing can be, and ought to be, *free.*  Pirate boards are little
independent worlds in cyberspace, and they don't belong to anybody but
the underground.   Underground boards aren't "brought to you by Procter
& Gamble."
    To log on to an underground board can mean to experience
liberation, to enter a world where, for once, money isn't everything and
adults don't have all the answers.
    Let's sample another vivid hacker manifesto.  Here are some
excerpts from "The Conscience of a Hacker," by "The Mentor," from
*Phrack* Volume One, Issue 7, Phile 3.
    "I made a discovery today.  I found a computer.  Wait a second,
this is cool.  It does what I want it to.  If it makes a mistake, it's because I
screwed it up.  Not because it doesn't like me.(...)
    "And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing
through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic
pulse is sent out, a refuge from day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a
board is found.   'This is it...  this is where I belong...' "I know everyone
here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear
from them again... I know you all...(...) "This is our world now....  the
world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud.  We make use
of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if
it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals.  We
explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you
call us criminals.  We exist without skin color, without nationality, without
religious bias... and you call us criminals.  You build atomic bombs, you
wage wars, you murder, cheat and lie to us and try to make us believe that
it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.
    "Yes, I am a criminal.  My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive
me for."

    #
    There have been underground boards almost as long as there have
been boards.  One of the first was 8BBS, which became a stronghold of
the West Coast phonephreak elite.   After going on-line in March 1980,
8BBS sponsored "Susan Thunder," and "Tuc,"  and, most  notoriously,
"the Condor."  "The Condor"  bore the singular distinction of becoming
the most vilified American phreak and hacker ever.   Angry underground
associates, fed up with Condor's peevish behavior, turned him in to police,
along with a heaping double-helping of  outrageous hacker legendry.  As a
result, Condor was kept in solitary confinement for seven months,  for fear
that he might start World War Three by triggering missile silos from the
prison payphone.  (Having served his time, Condor is now walking around
loose;  WWIII has thus far conspicuously failed to occur.)
    The sysop of 8BBS was an ardent free-speech enthusiast who
simply felt that *any* attempt to restrict the expression of his users was
unconstitutional and immoral.   Swarms of the technically curious entered
8BBS and emerged as phreaks and hackers, until, in 1982, a friendly 8BBS
alumnus passed the sysop a new modem which had been purchased by
credit-card fraud.  Police took this opportunity to seize the entire board
and remove what they considered an attractive nuisance.
    Plovernet was a powerful East Coast pirate board that operated in
both New York and Florida.  Owned and operated by teenage hacker
"Quasi Moto,"  Plovernet attracted five hundred eager users in 1983.
"Emmanuel Goldstein" was one-time co-sysop of Plovernet, along with
"Lex Luthor,"  founder of the "Legion of Doom" group. Plovernet  bore
the signal honor of being the original home of the "Legion of Doom,"
about which the reader will be hearing a great deal, soon.
    "Pirate-80," or "P-80," run by a sysop known as "Scan- Man," got
into the game very early in Charleston, and continued steadily for years.
P-80 flourished so flagrantly that even its most hardened users became
nervous, and some slanderously speculated that "Scan Man" must have ties
to corporate security, a charge he vigorously denied.
    "414 Private" was the home board for the first *group* to attract
conspicuous trouble, the teenage "414 Gang," whose intrusions into Sloan-
Kettering Cancer Center and Los Alamos military computers were to be a
nine-dayswonder in 1982.
    At about this time, the first software piracy boards began to open
up, trading cracked games for the Atari 800 and the Commodore C64.
Naturally these boards were heavily frequented by teenagers.  And with the
1983 release of the hacker-thriller movie *War Games,* the scene
exploded.   It seemed that every kid in America had demanded and  gotten
a modem for Christmas.  Most of these dabbler wannabes put their
modems in the attic after a few weeks, and most of the remainder minded
their P's and Q's and stayed well out of hot water.  But some stubborn and
talented diehards had this hacker kid in *War Games* figured for a
happening dude.   They simply  could not rest until they had contacted the
underground -or, failing that, created their own.
    In the mid-80s, underground boards sprang up like digital fungi.
ShadowSpawn Elite.  Sherwood Forest I, II, and III. Digital Logic Data
Service in Florida, sysoped by no less a man than "Digital Logic" himself;
Lex Luthor of the Legion of Doom was prominent on this board, since it
was in his area code.  Lex's own board,  "Legion of Doom," started in
1984.  The Neon Knights ran a network of Applehacker boards: Neon
Knights North, South, East and West.   Free World II was run by "Major
Havoc."  Lunatic Labs is still in operation as of this writing.   Dr. Ripco in
Chicago, an anything-goes anarchist board with an extensive and raucous
history, was seized by Secret Service agents in 1990 on Sundevil day, but
up again almost immediately, with new machines and scarcely diminished
vigor.
    The St. Louis scene was not to rank with major centers of
American hacking such as New York and L.A.  But St. Louis did rejoice in
possession of "Knight Lightning" and "Taran King,"  two of the foremost
*journalists* native to the underground.   Missouri boards like Metal
Shop, Metal Shop Private, Metal Shop Brewery, may not have been the
heaviest boards around in terms of illicit expertise.  But they became
boards where hackers could exchange social gossip and try to figure out
what the heck was going on nationally -- and internationally.   Gossip from
Metal Shop was put into the form of news files, then assembled into a
general electronic publication, *Phrack,* a portmanteau title coined from
"phreak" and "hack."  The *Phrack* editors were as obsessively curious
about other hackers as hackers were about machines.
    *Phrack,* being free of charge and lively reading, began to
circulate throughout the underground.   As Taran King and Knight
Lightning left high school for college, *Phrack* began to appear on
mainframe machines linked to BITNET, and, through BITNET to the
"Internet,"  that loose but extremely potent not-for-profit network where
academic, governmental and corporate machines trade data through the
UNIX TCP/IP protocol.   (The "Internet Worm"  of  November 2-3,1988,
created by Cornell grad student Robert Morris,  was to be the largest and
bestpublicized computer-intrusion scandal to date.  Morris claimed that his
ingenious "worm" program was meant to harmlessly explore the Internet,
but due to bad programming, the Worm replicated out of control and
crashed some six thousand Internet computers.   Smallerscale and less
ambitious Internet hacking was a standard for the underground elite.) Most
any underground board not hopelessly lame and out-of-it would feature a
complete run of *Phrack* -and, possibly, the lesser-known standards of
the underground:  the *Legion of Doom Technical Journal,* the obscene
and raucous *Cult of the Dead Cow*  files, *P/HUN*  magazine,
*Pirate,*  the *Syndicate Reports,* and perhaps the highly anarcho-
political *Activist Times Incorporated.*
    Possession of *Phrack*  on one's board was prima  facie evidence
of a bad attitude.   *Phrack* was seemingly everywhere, aiding, abetting,
and spreading the underground ethos.  And this did not escape the
attention of corporate security or the police.

    We now come to the touchy subject of police and boards.  Police,
do, in fact, own boards.   In 1989, there were police-sponsored boards in
California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, Texas,
and Virginia: boards such as "Crime Bytes,"  "Crimestoppers,"  "All
Points" and "Bullet-N-Board."   Police officers, as private computer
enthusiasts, ran their own boards in Arizona, California, Colorado,
Connecticut, Florida, Missouri, Maryland, New Mexico, North Carolina,
Ohio, Tennessee and Texas.   Police boards have often proved helpful in
community relations.  Sometimes crimes are reported on police boards.
    Sometimes crimes are *committed*  on police boards.  This has
sometimes happened by accident, as naive hackers blunder onto police
boards and blithely  begin offering telephone codes.  Far more often,
however, it occurs through the now almost-traditional use of "sting
boards."  The first police sting-boards were established in 1985:
"Underground Tunnel" in Austin, Texas, whose sysop Sgt. Robert Ansley
called himself "Pluto" -- "The Phone Company" in Phoenix, Arizona, run
by Ken MacLeod of the Maricopa County Sheriff's office -- and Sgt. Dan
Pasquale's board in Fremont, California.   Sysops posed as hackers, and
swiftly garnered coteries of ardent users, who posted codes and loaded
pirate software with abandon, and came to a sticky end.
    Sting boards, like other boards, are cheap to operate, very cheap by
the standards of undercover police operations.  Once accepted by the local
underground, sysops will likely be invited into other pirate boards, where
they can compile more dossiers.  And when the sting is announced and the
worst offenders arrested, the publicity is generally  gratifying.  The
resultant paranoia in the underground -- perhaps more justly described as a
"deterrence effect" -- tends to quell local lawbreaking for quite a while.
    Obviously police do not have to beat the underbrush for hackers.
On the contrary, they can go trolling for them. Those caught can be grilled.
Some become useful informants.  They can lead the way to pirate boards
all across the country.
    And boards all across the country showed the sticky fingerprints of
*Phrack,* and of that loudest and most flagrant of all underground groups,
the "Legion of Doom."
    The term "Legion of Doom" came from comic books. The Legion
of Doom, a conspiracy of costumed supervillains headed by the chrome-
domed criminal ultramastermind Lex Luthor, gave Superman a lot of four-
color graphic trouble for a number of decades.   Of course, Superman, that
exemplar of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, always won in the long
run.   This didn't matter to the hacker Doomsters -- "Legion of Doom" was
not some thunderous and evil Satanic reference, it was not meant to be
taken seriously.  "Legion of Doom" came from funny-books and was
supposed to be funny. "Legion of Doom" did have a good mouthfilling
ring to it, though.  It sounded really cool.  Other groups, such as the
"Farmers of Doom," closely allied to LoD, recognized this grandiloquent
quality, and made fun of it.  There was even a hacker group called "Justice
League of America," named after Superman's club of true-blue
crimefighting superheros.
    But they didn't last; the Legion did. The original Legion of Doom,
hanging out on Quasi Moto's Plovernet board, were phone phreaks.   They
weren't much into computers.   "Lex Luthor" himself (who was under
eighteen when he formed the Legion)  was a COSMOS expert, COSMOS
being the "Central System for Mainframe Operations," a telco internal
computer network.   Lex would eventually become quite a dab hand at
breaking into IBM mainframes, but although everyone liked Lex and
admired his attitude, he was not considered a truly accomplished computer
intruder.  Nor was he the "mastermind" of the Legion of Doom --  LoD
were never big on formal leadership.  As a regular on Plovernet and sysop
of his "Legion of Doom BBS,"  Lex was the Legion's cheerleader and
recruiting officer.
    Legion of Doom began on the ruins of an earlier phreak group, The
Knights of Shadow.  Later, LoD was to subsume the personnel of the
hacker group "Tribunal of Knowledge."  People came and went constantly
in LoD; groups split up or formed offshoots.
    Early on, the LoD phreaks befriended a few computer-intrusion
enthusiasts, who became the associated "Legion of Hackers."  Then the
two groups conflated into the "Legion of Doom/Hackers,"  or LoD/H.
When the original "hacker" wing, Messrs. "CompuPhreak" and "Phucked
Agent 04," found other matters to occupy their time, the extra "/H" slowly
atrophied out of the name;  but by this time the phreak wing, Messrs.  Lex
Luthor, "Blue Archer," "Gary Seven," "Kerrang Khan," "Master of
Impact," "Silver Spy," "The Marauder," and "The Videosmith," had picked
up a plethora of intrusion expertise and had become a force to be reckoned
with.
    LoD members seemed to have an instinctive understanding that the
way to real power in the underground lay through covert publicity.   LoD
were  flagrant.  Not only was it one of the earliest groups, but the members
took pains to widely distribute their illicit knowledge.   Some LoD
members, like "The Mentor," were close to evangelical about it.   *Legion
of Doom Technical Journal*  began to show up on boards throughout the
underground.
    *LoD Technical Journal* was named in cruel parody of the ancient
and honored *AT&T Technical Journal.* The material in these two
publications was quite similar -much of it, adopted from public journals
and discussions in the telco community.  And yet, the predatory attitude of
LoD made even its most innocuous data seem deeply sinister; an outrage;
a clear and present danger.
    To see why this should be, let's consider the following (invented)
paragraphs, as a kind of thought experiment.
    (A)  "W. Fred Brown, AT&T Vice President for Advanced
Technical Development, testified May 8  at a Washington hearing of the
National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA),
regarding Bellcore's GARDEN project.  GARDEN (Generalized
Automatic Remote Distributed Electronic Network)  is a telephone-switch
programming tool that makes it possible to develop new telecom services,
including hold-on-hold and customized message transfers,  from any
keypad terminal, within seconds.   The GARDEN prototype combines
centrex lines with a minicomputer using UNIX operating system
software."
    (B)  "Crimson Flash 512 of the Centrex Mobsters reports:  D00dz,
you wouldn't believe this GARDEN  bullshit Bellcore's just come up with!
Now you don't even need a lousy Commodore to reprogram a switch --
just log on to GARDEN as a technician, and you can reprogram switches
right off the keypad in any public phone booth! You can give yourself
hold-on-hold and customized message transfers, and best of all, the thing
is run off (notoriously insecure)  centrex lines using -- get this -standard
UNIX software!  Ha ha ha ha!"
    Message (A), couched in typical technobureaucratese, appears
tedious and almost unreadable. (A) scarcely seems threatening or
menacing.   Message (B), on the other hand, is a dreadful thing, prima
facie  evidence of a dire conspiracy, definitely not the kind of thing you
want your teenager reading. The *information,* however, is identical.  It is
*public* information, presented before the federal government in an open
hearing.  It is not "secret."  It is not "proprietary." It is not even
"confidential."  On the contrary, the development of advanced software
systems is a matter of great public pride to Bellcore. However, when
Bellcore publicly announces a project of this kind, it expects a certain
attitude from the public -- something along the lines of  *gosh wow, you
guys are great, keep that up, whatever it is*  --  certainly not cruel
mimickry, one-upmanship and outrageous speculations about possible
security holes.
    Now put yourself in the place of a policeman confronted by an
outraged parent, or telco official, with a copy of Version (B).  This well-
meaning citizen, to his horror, has discovered a local bulletin-board
carrying  outrageous stuff like (B), which his son is examining with a deep
and unhealthy interest.   If (B) were printed in a book or magazine, you, as
an American law enforcement officer, would know that it would take a
hell of a lot of trouble to do anything about it;  but it doesn't take technical
genius to recognize that if there's a computer in your area harboring stuff
like (B), there's going to be trouble.
    In fact, if you ask around, any computer-literate cop will tell you
straight out that boards with stuff like (B) are the *source* of trouble.
And the *worst* source of trouble on boards are the ringleaders inventing
and spreading stuff like (B).  If it weren't for these jokers, there wouldn't
*be* any trouble.
    And Legion of Doom were on boards like nobody else.  Plovernet.
The Legion of Doom Board.  The Farmers of Doom Board.  Metal Shop.
OSUNY.  Blottoland. Private Sector.  Atlantis.  Digital Logic.  Hell
Phrozen Over.
    LoD members also ran their own boards.  "Silver Spy" started his
own board, "Catch-22,"  considered one of the heaviest around.   So did
"Mentor," with his "Phoenix Project."   When they didn't run boards
themselves, they showed up on other people's boards, to brag, boast, and
strut.  And where they themselves didn't go, their philes went, carrying evil
knowledge and an even more evil attitude. As early as 1986, the police
were under the vague impression that *everyone* in the underground was
Legion of Doom.   LoD was never that large -considerably smaller than
either "Metal  Communications" or "The Administration," for instance --
but LoD got tremendous press.  Especially in *Phrack,* which at times
read like an LoD fan magazine; and *Phrack* was everywhere, especially
in the offices of telco security.   You couldn't *get* busted as a phone
phreak, a hacker, or even a lousy codes kid or warez dood, without the
cops asking if you were LoD.
    This was a difficult charge to deny, as LoD never distributed
membership badges or laminated ID cards.  If they had, they would likely
have died out quickly, for turnover in their membership was considerable.
LoD was less a high-tech street-gang than an ongoing state-ofmind.  LoD
was the Gang That Refused to Die.   By 1990, LoD had *ruled* for ten
years, and it seemed *weird* to police that they were continually busting
people who were only sixteen years old.   All these teenage small-timers
were pleading the tiresome hacker litany  of "just curious, no criminal
intent."  Somewhere at the center of this conspiracy there had to be some
serious adult masterminds, not this seemingly endless supply of myopic
suburban white kids with high SATs and funny haircuts.
    There was no question that most any American hacker arrested
would "know" LoD.  They knew the handles of contributors to *LoD Tech
Journal,*  and were likely to have learned their craft through LoD boards
and LoD activism.  But they'd never met anyone from LoD. Even some of
the rotating cadre who were actually and formally "in LoD" knew one
another only by board-mail and pseudonyms.   This was a highly
unconventional profile for a criminal conspiracy.  Computer networking,
and the rapid evolution of the digital underground,  made the situation very
diffuse and confusing.
    Furthermore, a big reputation in the digital underground did not
coincide with one's willingness to commit "crimes."   Instead, reputation
was based on cleverness and technical mastery.  As a result, it often
seemed that the *heavier* the hackers were, the *less* likely they were to
have committed any kind of common, easily prosecutable crime.   There
were some hackers who could really steal.  And there were hackers who
could really hack.  But the two groups didn't seem to overlap much, if at
all.   For instance, most people in the underground looked up to
"Emmanuel Goldstein" of *2600* as a hacker demigod.  But Goldstein's
publishing activities were entirely legal -- Goldstein just printed dodgy
stuff and talked about politics, he didn't even hack. When you came right
down to it, Goldstein spent half his time complaining that computer
security *wasn't strong enough* and ought to be drastically improved
across the board!
    Truly heavy-duty hackers, those with serious technical skills who
had earned the respect of the underground,  never stole money or abused
credit cards. Sometimes they might abuse phone-codes -- but often, they
seemed to get all the free phone-time they wanted without leaving a trace
of any kind.
    The best hackers, the most powerful and technically accomplished,
were not professional fraudsters.   They raided computers habitually, but
wouldn't alter anything, or damage anything.  They didn't even steal
computer equipment -- most had day-jobs messing with hardware, and
could get all the cheap secondhand equipment they wanted.   The hottest
hackers, unlike the teenage wannabes,  weren't snobs about fancy or
expensive hardware.  Their machines tended to be raw second-hand
digital hot-rods full of custom add-ons that they'd cobbled together out of
chickenwire, memory chips and spit.  Some were adults, computer
software writers and consultants by trade, and making quite good livings at
it.  Some of them *actually worked for the phone company* --  and for
those, the "hackers" actually found under the skirts of Ma Bell, there
would be little mercy in 1990.

    It has long been an article of faith in the underground that the
"best" hackers never get caught. They're far too smart, supposedly.  They
never get caught because they never boast, brag, or strut.   These demigods
may read underground boards (with a condescending smile), but they
never say anything there.   The "best" hackers, according to legend, are
adult computer professionals, such as mainframe system administrators,
who already know the ins and outs of their particular  brand of security.
Even the "best" hacker can't break in to just any computer at random: the
knowledge of security holes is too specialized, varying widely with
different software and hardware.  But if people are employed to run, say, a
UNIX mainframe or a VAX/VMS machine, then they tend to learn
security from the inside out.  Armed with this knowledge, they can look
into most anybody else's UNIX or VMS without much trouble or risk, if
they want to.   And, according to hacker legend, of course they  want to, so
of course they do.   They just don't make a big deal of what they've done.
So nobody ever finds out.
    It is also an article of faith in the underground that professional
telco people "phreak" like crazed weasels. *Of course* they spy on
Madonna's phone calls -- I mean, *wouldn't you?*  Of course they give
themselves free longdistance -- why the hell should *they* pay, they're
running the whole shebang! It has, as a third matter, long been an article of
faith that any hacker caught can escape serious punishment if he confesses
*how he did it.*  Hackers seem to believe that governmental agencies and
large corporations are blundering about in cyberspace like eyeless jellyfish
or cave salamanders.  They feel that these large but pathetically stupid
organizations will proffer up genuine gratitude, and perhaps even a
security post and a big  salary, to the hot-shot intruder who will deign to
reveal to them the supreme genius of his modus operandi. In the case of
longtime LoD member "Control-C," this actually happened, more or less.
Control-C had led Michigan Bell a merry chase, and when captured in
1987, he turned out to be a bright and apparently physically harmless
young fanatic, fascinated by phones.   There was no chance in hell that
Control-C would actually repay the enormous and largely theoretical sums
in long-distance service that he had accumulated from Michigan Bell.   He
could always be indicted for fraud or computer-intrusion, but there seemed
little real point in this -- he hadn't physically damaged any computer.  He'd
just plead guilty, and he'd likely get the usual slap-on-the-wrist, and in the
meantime it would be a big hassle for Michigan Bell just  to bring up the
case.  But if kept on the payroll, he might at least keep his fellow hackers
at bay.
    There were uses for him.  For instance, a contrite Control-C was
featured on Michigan Bell internal posters, sternly warning employees to
shred their trash.   He'd always gotten most of his best inside info from
"trashing" - raiding telco dumpsters, for useful data indiscreetly thrown
away.   He signed these posters, too.  Control-C had become something
like a Michigan Bell mascot.  And in fact, Control-C *did* keep other
hackers at bay.  Little hackers were quite scared of Control-C and his
heavy-duty Legion of Doom friends.   And big hackers *were* his friends
and didn't want to screw up his cushy situation.


    No matter what one might say of LoD, they did stick together.
When "Wasp," an apparently genuinely malicious New York hacker,
began crashing Bellcore machines,  Control-C received swift volunteer
help from "the Mentor" and the Georgia LoD wing  made up of "The
Prophet," "Urvile," and "Leftist."   Using Mentor's Phoenix Project board
to coordinate, the Doomsters helped telco security to trap Wasp, by luring
him into a machine with a tap and line-trace installed.  Wasp lost.  LoD
won!  And my, did they brag.

    Urvile, Prophet and Leftist were well-qualified for this activity,
probably more so even than the quite accomplished Control-C.  The
Georgia boys knew all about phone switching-stations.  Though relative
johnny-comelatelies in the Legion of Doom, they were considered some of
LoD's heaviest guys, into the hairiest systems around. They had the good
fortune to live in or near Atlanta, home of the sleepy and apparently
tolerant BellSouth RBOC.
    As RBOC security went, BellSouth were "cake."   US West (of
Arizona, the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest) were tough and
aggressive, probably the heaviest RBOC around.  Pacific Bell, California's
PacBell, were sleek, high- tech, and longtime veterans of the LA phone-
phreak wars. NYNEX had the misfortune to run the New York City area,
and were warily prepared for most anything.   Even Michigan Bell, a
division of the Ameritech RBOC, at least had the elementary sense to hire
their own hacker as a useful scarecrow.  But BellSouth, even though their
corporate P.R.  proclaimed them to have "Everything You Expect From a
Leader," were pathetic.
    When rumor about LoD's mastery of Georgia's switching network
got around to BellSouth through Bellcore and telco security scuttlebutt,
they at first refused to believe it.   If you paid serious attention to every
rumor out and about these hacker kids, you would hear all kinds of wacko
saucer-nut nonsense:  that the National Security Agency monitored all
American phone calls, that the CIA and DEA tracked traffic on bulletin-
boards with wordanalysis programs, that the Condor could start World
War III from a payphone.
    If there were hackers into BellSouth switchingstations, then how
come nothing had happened?  Nothing had been hurt.  BellSouth's
machines weren't crashing. BellSouth wasn't suffering especially badly
from fraud. BellSouth's customers weren't complaining.  BellSouth  was
headquartered in Atlanta, ambitious metropolis of the new high-tech
Sunbelt; and BellSouth was upgrading its network by leaps and bounds,
digitizing the works left right and center.   They could hardly be
considered sluggish or naive.  BellSouth's technical expertise was second
to none, thank you kindly.
    But then came the Florida business.
    On June 13, 1989, callers to the Palm Beach County Probation
Department, in Delray Beach, Florida,  found themselves involved in a
remarkable discussion with a phone-sex worker named "Tina" in New
York State. Somehow, *any* call to this probation office near Miami was
instantly and magically transported across state lines, at no extra charge to
the user, to a pornographic phonesex hotline hundreds of miles away!
    This practical joke may seem utterly hilarious at first hearing, and
indeed there was a good deal of chuckling about it in phone phreak circles,
including the Autumn  1989 issue of *2600.*  But for Southern Bell  (the
division of the BellSouth RBOC supplying local service for Florida,
Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina),  this was a smoking gun.
For the first time ever,  a computer intruder had broken into a BellSouth
central office switching station and re-programmed it!
    Or so BellSouth thought in June 1989.  Actually, LoD members
had been frolicking harmlessly in BellSouth switches since September
1987.  The stunt of June 13 -call-forwarding a number through
manipulation of a switching station -- was child's play for hackers as
accomplished as the Georgia wing of LoD.  Switching calls interstate
sounded like a big deal, but it took only four lines of code to accomplish
this.    An easy, yet more discreet, stunt, would be to call-forward another
number to your own house.  If you were careful and considerate, and
changed the software back later, then not a soul would know.

    Except you.  And whoever you had bragged to about it.
    As for BellSouth, what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them.
Except now somebody had blown the whole thing wide open, and
BellSouth knew. A now alerted and considerably paranoid BellSouth
began searching switches right and left for signs of impropriety, in that hot
summer of 1989.  No fewer than forty-two BellSouth employees were put
on 12-hour shifts, twenty-four hours a day, for two solid months, poring
over records and monitoring computers for any sign of phony access.
These forty-two overworked experts were known as BellSouth's
"Intrusion Task Force."


    What the investigators found astounded them. Proprietary telco
databases had been manipulated: phone numbers had been created out of
thin air, with no users' names and no addresses.  And perhaps worst of all,
no charges and no records of use.   The new digital ReMOB

    (Remote Observation)  diagnostic feature had been extensively
tampered with -- hackers had learned to reprogram ReMOB software, so
that they could listen in on any switch-routed call at their leisure!   They
were using telco property to *spy!*

    The electrifying news went out throughout law enforcement in
1989.  It had never really occurred to anyone at BellSouth that their prized
and brand-new digital switching-stations could be *re-programmed.*
People seemed utterly amazed that anyone could have the nerve.   Of
course these switching stations were "computers," and everybody knew
hackers liked to "break into computers:"   but telephone people's
computers were *different* from normal people's computers.



    The exact reason *why* these computers were "different" was
rather ill-defined.  It certainly wasn't the extent of their security.  The
security on these BellSouth computers was lousy;  the AIMSX computers,
for instance, didn't even have passwords.   But there was no question that
BellSouth strongly *felt* that their computers were very different indeed.
And if there were some criminals out there who had not gotten that
message, BellSouth was determined to see that message taught.
    After all, a 5ESS switching station was no mere bookkeeping
system for some local chain of florists. Public service depended on these
stations.   Public *safety* depended on these stations.
    And hackers, lurking in there call-forwarding or ReMobbing,
could spy on anybody in the local area! They could spy on telco officials!
They could spy on police stations!  They could spy on local offices of the
Secret Service....
    In 1989, electronic cops and hacker-trackers began using
scrambler-phones and secured lines.  It only made sense.  There was no
telling who was into those systems. Whoever they were, they sounded
scary.   This was some new level of antisocial daring.  Could be West
German hackers, in the pay of the KGB.   That too had seemed a weird and
farfetched notion, until Clifford Stoll had poked and prodded a sluggish
Washington law-enforcement bureaucracy into investigating a computer
intrusion that turned out to be exactly that -- *hackers, in the pay of the
KGB!*    Stoll, the  systems manager for an Internet lab in Berkeley
California, had ended up on the front page of the *New York  Times,*
proclaimed a national  hero in the first true story of international computer
espionage. Stoll's counterspy efforts, which he related in a bestselling
book, *The Cuckoo's Egg,*  in 1989, had established the credibility of
'hacking' as a possible threat to national security.  The United States Secret
Service doesn't mess around when it suspects a possible action by a
foreign intelligence apparat. The Secret Service scrambler-phones and
secured lines put a tremendous kink in law enforcement's ability to operate
freely; to get the word out, cooperate, prevent misunderstandings.
Nevertheless, 1989 scarcely seemed the time for half-measures.  If the
police and Secret Service themselves were not operationally secure, then
how could they reasonably demand measures of security from private
enterprise?  At least, the inconvenience made people aware of the
seriousness  of the threat.
    If there was a final spur needed to get the police off the dime, it
came in the realization that the emergency 911 system was vulnerable.
The 911 system has its own specialized software, but it is run on the same
digital switching systems as the rest of the telephone network. 911 is not
physically different from normal telephony.  But it is certainly culturally
different, because this is the area of telephonic cyberspace reserved for the
police and emergency services. Your average policeman may not know
much about hackers or phone-phreaks.  Computer people are weird; even
computer *cops*  are rather weird; the stuff they do is hard to figure out.
But a threat to the 911 system is anything but an abstract threat.  If the 911
system goes, people can die.
    Imagine being in a car-wreck, staggering to a phonebooth,
punching 911 and hearing "Tina" pick up the phone-sex line somewhere in
New York!   The situation's no longer comical, somehow.

    And was it possible?  No question.  Hackers had attacked 911
systems before.  Phreaks can max-out 911 systems just by siccing a bunch
of computer-modems on them in tandem, dialling them over and over until
they clog.  That's very crude and low-tech, but it's still a serious business.
    The time had come for action.  It was time to take  stern measures
with the underground.  It was time to start picking up the dropped threads,
the loose edges, the bits of braggadocio here and there; it was time to get
on the stick and start putting serious casework together.  Hackers weren't
"invisible."  They *thought*  they were invisible; but the truth was, they
had just been tolerated too long.
    Under sustained police attention in the summer of '89, the digital
underground began to unravel as never before.
    The first big break in the case came very early on: July 1989, the
following month.  The perpetrator of the "Tina" switch was caught, and
confessed.  His name was "Fry Guy," a 16-year-old in Indiana.  Fry Guy
had been a very wicked young man.
    Fry Guy had earned his handle from a stunt involving French fries.
Fry Guy had filched the log-in of a local MacDonald's manager and had
logged-on to the MacDonald's mainframe on the Sprint Telenet system.
Posing as the manager, Fry Guy had altered MacDonald's records, and
given some teenage hamburger-flipping friends of his, generous raises.  He
had not been caught.
    Emboldened by success, Fry Guy moved on to creditcard abuse.
Fry Guy was quite an accomplished talker; with a gift for "social
engineering."   If you can do "social engineering"  -- fast-talk, fake-outs,
impersonation, conning, scamming -- then card abuse comes easy.
(Getting away with it in the long run is another question). Fry Guy had run
across "Urvile" of the Legion of Doom on the ALTOS Chat board in
Bonn, Germany. ALTOS Chat was a sophisticated board, accessible
through globe-spanning computer networks like BITnet, Tymnet, and
Telenet.    ALTOS was much frequented by members of Germany's  Chaos
Computer Club.  Two Chaos hackers who hung out on ALTOS, "Jaeger"
and  "Pengo," had been the central villains of Clifford Stoll's CUCKOO'S
EGG case:  consorting in East Berlin with a spymaster from the KGB, and
breaking into American computers for hire, through the Internet. When
LoD members learned the story of Jaeger's depredations from Stoll's book,
they were rather less than impressed, technically speaking.  On LoD's own
favorite board of the moment, "Black Ice," LoD members bragged that
they themselves could have done all the Chaos breakins in a week flat!
Nevertheless,  LoD were grudgingly impressed by the Chaos rep, the sheer
hairy-eyed daring of hash-smoking anarchist hackers who had rubbed
shoulders with the fearsome big-boys of international Communist
espionage.  LoD members sometimes traded bits of knowledge with
friendly German hackers on ALTOS -- phone numbers for vulnerable
VAX/VMS computers in Georgia, for instance.  Dutch and British phone
phreaks, and the Australian clique of "Phoenix," "Nom," and "Electron,"
were ALTOS regulars, too.  In underground circles, to hang out on
ALTOS was considered the sign of an elite dude, a sophisticated hacker of
the international digital jet-set.
    Fry Guy quickly learned how to raid information from credit-card
consumer-reporting agencies.  He had over a hundred stolen credit-card
numbers in his notebooks, and upwards of a thousand swiped long-
distance access codes. He knew how to get onto Altos, and how to talk the
talk of the underground convincingly.  He now wheedled knowledge of
switching-station tricks from Urvile on the ALTOS system.
    Combining these two forms of knowledge enabled Fry Guy to
bootstrap his way up to a new form of wirefraud.  First, he'd snitched
credit card numbers from credit-company computers.  The data he copied
included names, addresses and phone numbers of the random card-holders.
    Then Fry Guy, impersonating a card-holder, called up Western
Union and asked for a cash advance on "his" credit card.  Western Union,
as a security guarantee, would call the customer back, at home, to verify
the transaction.
    But, just as he had switched the Florida probation office to "Tina"
in New York,  Fry Guy switched the cardholder's number to a local pay-
phone.  There he would  lurk in wait, muddying his trail by routing and re-
routing the call, through switches as far away as Canada.   When the call
came through, he would boldly "social-engineer," or con, the Western
Union people, pretending to be the legitimate card-holder.  Since he'd
answered the proper phone number, the deception was not very hard.
Western Union's money was then shipped to a confederate of Fry Guy's in
his home town in Indiana.
    Fry Guy and his cohort, using LoD techniques, stole six thousand
dollars from Western Union between December 1988 and July 1989.
They also dabbled in  ordering delivery of stolen goods through card-
fraud.  Fry Guy was intoxicated with success.  The sixteen-year-old
fantasized wildly to hacker rivals, boasting that he'd used rip-off money to
hire  himself a big limousine, and had driven out-of-state with a groupie
from his favorite heavymetal band, Motley Crue. Armed with knowledge,
power, and a gratifying stream of free money, Fry Guy now took it upon
himself to call local representatives of Indiana Bell security, to brag, boast,
strut, and utter tormenting warnings that his powerful friends in the
notorious Legion of Doom could crash the national telephone network.
Fry Guy even named a date for the scheme:  the Fourth of July, a national
holiday.
    This egregious example of the begging-for-arrest  syndrome was
shortly followed by Fry Guy's arrest.  After the Indiana telephone company
figured out who he was, the Secret Service had DNRs -- Dialed Number
Recorders -- installed on his home phone lines.  These devices are not
taps, and can't record the substance of phone calls, but they do record the
phone numbers of all  calls going in and out.   Tracing these numbers
showed Fry Guy's long-distance code fraud, his extensive ties to pirate
bulletin boards, and numerous personal calls to his LoD friends in Atlanta.
By July 11, 1989, Prophet, Urvile and Leftist also had Secret Service DNR
"pen registers" installed on their own lines.
    The Secret Service showed up in force at Fry Guy's house on July
22, 1989, to the horror of his unsuspecting parents.  The raiders were led
by a special agent from the Secret Service's Indianapolis office.   However,
the raiders were accompanied and advised by Timothy M. Foley of the
Secret Service's Chicago office (a gentleman about whom we will soon be
hearing a great deal).
    Following federal computer-crime techniques that had been
standard since the early 1980s, the Secret Service searched the house
thoroughly, and seized all of Fry Guy's electronic equipment and
notebooks.   All Fry Guy's equipment went out the door in the custody of
the  Secret Service, which put a swift end to his depredations.
    The USSS interrogated Fry Guy at length.  His case was put in the
charge of Deborah Daniels, the federal US  Attorney for the Southern
District of Indiana.  Fry Guy was charged with eleven counts of computer
fraud, unauthorized computer access, and wire fraud.   The evidence was
thorough and irrefutable.  For his part, Fry Guy blamed his corruption on
the Legion of Doom and offered to testify against them.
    Fry Guy insisted that the Legion intended to crash the phone
system on a national holiday.   And when AT&T crashed on Martin Luther
King Day, 1990, this lent a credence to his claim that genuinely alarmed
telco security and the Secret Service. Fry Guy eventually pled guilty on
May 31, 1990.  On September 14, he was sentenced to forty-four months'
probation and  four hundred hours' community service. He could have had
it much worse; but it made sense to prosecutors to take it easy on this
teenage minor, while zeroing in on the notorious kingpins of the Legion of
Doom. But the case against LoD had nagging flaws. Despite the best effort
of investigators, it was impossible to prove that the Legion had crashed the
phone system on January 15, because they, in fact, hadn't done so.  The
investigations of 1989 did show that certain members of the Legion of
Doom had achieved unprecedented power over the telco switching
stations, and that they were in active conspiracy to obtain more power yet.
Investigators were privately convinced that the Legion of Doom intended
to do awful things with this knowledge, but mere evil intent was not
enough to put them in jail.



    And although the Atlanta Three -- Prophet, Leftist, and especially
Urvile -- had taught Fry Guy plenty, they were not themselves credit-card
fraudsters.  The only  thing they'd "stolen" was long-distance service -- and
since they'd done much of that through phone-switch manipulation, there
was no easy way to judge how much they'd "stolen," or whether this
practice was even "theft" of any easily recognizable kind.


    Fry Guy's theft of long-distance codes had cost the phone
companies plenty.  The theft of long-distance service may be a fairly
theoretical "loss,"  but it costs genuine money and genuine time to delete
all those stolen codes, and to re-issue new codes to the innocent owners of
those corrupted codes.  The owners of the codes themselves are
victimized, and lose time and money and peace of mind in the hassle.
And then there were the credit-card victims to deal with, too, and Western
Union. When it came to rip-off, Fry Guy was far more of a thief than LoD.
It was only when it came to actual computer expertise that Fry Guy was
small potatoes.
    The Atlanta Legion thought most "rules" of cyberspace were for
rodents and losers, but they *did* have rules.  *They never crashed
anything, and they never took money.*   These were rough rules-of-thumb,
and rather dubious principles when it comes to the ethical subtleties of
cyberspace, but they enabled the Atlanta  Three to operate with a relatively
clear conscience (though never with peace of mind).
    If you didn't hack for money, if you weren't robbing people of
actual funds -- money in the bank, that is -then nobody *really* got hurt, in
LoD's opinion.  "Theft of service" was a bogus issue, and "intellectual
property" was a bad joke.   But LoD had only elitist contempt for rip-off
artists, "leechers," thieves.   They considered themselves clean.

    In their opinion, if you didn't smash-up or crash any systems  --
(well, not on purpose, anyhow -- accidents can happen, just ask Robert
Morris)  then it was very unfair to call you a "vandal" or a "cracker."
When you were hanging out on-line with your "pals" in telco security, you
could face them down from the higher plane of hacker morality.  And you
could mock the police from the supercilious heights of your hacker's quest
for pure knowledge.

    But from the point of view of law enforcement and telco security,
however, Fry Guy was not really dangerous. The Atlanta Three *were*
dangerous.  It wasn't the crimes they were committing, but the *danger,*
the potential hazard, the sheer *technical power*  LoD had accumulated,
that had made the situation untenable.
    Fry Guy was not LoD.  He'd never laid eyes on anyone in LoD; his
only contacts with them had been electronic.  Core members of the Legion
of Doom tended  to meet physically for conventions every year or so, to
get drunk, give each other the hacker high-sign, send out for pizza and
ravage hotel suites.  Fry Guy had never done any of this.   Deborah Daniels
assessed Fry Guy accurately as "an LoD wannabe."
    Nevertheless Fry Guy's crimes would be directly attributed to LoD
in much future police propaganda.  LoD would be described as "a closely
knit group" involved in "numerous illegal activities" including "stealing
and modifying individual credit histories," and "fraudulently obtaining
money and property."  Fry Guy did this, but the Atlanta Three didn't; they
simply weren't into theft, but rather intrusion.   This caused a strange kink
in the prosecution's strategy.  LoD were accused of "disseminating
information about attacking computers to other computer hackers in an
effort to shift the focus of law enforcement to those other hackers and
away from the Legion of Doom."
    This last accusation (taken directly from a press release by the
Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force) sounds particularly far-
fetched.  One might conclude at this point that investigators would have
been well-advised to go ahead and "shift their focus" from the "Legion of
Doom."   Maybe they *should* concentrate on "those other hackers" -- the
ones who were actually stealing money and physical objects.
    But the Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was not a simple policing
action.  It wasn't meant just to walk the beat in  cyberspace -- it was a
*crackdown,* a deliberate attempt to nail the core of the operation, to send
a dire and potent message that would settle the hash of the digital
underground for good.
    By this reasoning, Fry Guy wasn't much more than the electronic
equivalent of a cheap streetcorner dope dealer.  As long as the
masterminds of LoD were still flagrantly operating, pushing their
mountains of illicit knowledge right and left, and whipping up enthusiasm
for blatant lawbreaking, then there would be an *infinite supply*  of Fry
Guys.


    Because LoD were flagrant, they had left trails everywhere, to be
picked up by law enforcement in New York, Indiana, Florida, Texas,
Arizona, Missouri, even Australia.  But 1990's war on the Legion of Doom
was led out of Illinois, by the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task
Force.



    #

    The Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force, led by federal
prosecutor William J. Cook, had started in 1987 and had swiftly become
one of the most aggressive local "dedicated computer-crime units."
Chicago was a natural home for such a group.  The world's first computer
bulletin-board system had been invented in Illinois.  The state of Illinois
had some of the nation's first and sternest computer crime laws.   Illinois
State Police were markedly alert to the possibilities of white-collar crime
and electronic fraud.
    And William J. Cook in particular was a rising star in electronic
crime-busting.   He and his fellow federal prosecutors at the U.S.
Attorney's office in Chicago had a tight relation with the Secret Service,
especially gogetting Chicago-based agent Timothy  Foley.  While Cook
and his Department of Justice colleagues plotted strategy, Foley was their
man on the street.
    Throughout the 1980s, the federal government had given
prosecutors an armory of new, untried legal tools against computer crime.
Cook and his colleagues were pioneers in the use of these new statutes in
the real-life cut-and-thrust of the federal courtroom.
    On October 2, 1986, the US Senate had passed the "Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act" unanimously, but there  were pitifully few
convictions under this statute.  Cook's group took their name from this
statute, since they were determined to transform this powerful but rather
theoretical Act of Congress into a real-life engine of legal destruction
against computer fraudsters and scofflaws.
    It was not a question of merely discovering crimes, investigating
them, and then trying and punishing their perpetrators.   The Chicago unit,
like most everyone else in the business, already *knew* who the bad guys
were:  the Legion of Doom and the writers and editors of *Phrack.* The
task at hand was to find some legal means of putting these characters
away.
    This approach might seem a bit dubious, to someone not
acquainted with the gritty realities of prosecutorial work.  But prosecutors
don't put people in jail for crimes they have committed; they put people in
jail for crimes they have committed *that can be proved in court.* Chicago
federal police put Al Capone in prison for income-tax fraud.   Chicago is a
big town, with a roughand-ready bare-knuckle tradition on both sides of
the law.
    Fry Guy had broken the case wide open and alerted telco security
to the scope of the problem.   But Fry Guy's crimes would not put the
Atlanta Three behind bars -much less the wacko underground journalists
of *Phrack.* So on July 22, 1989, the same day that Fry Guy was raided in
Indiana, the Secret Service descended upon the Atlanta Three.
    This was likely inevitable.  By the summer of 1989, law
enforcement were closing in on the Atlanta Three from at least six
directions at once.   First, there were the leads from Fry Guy, which had
led to the DNR registers being installed on the lines of the Atlanta Three.
The DNR evidence alone would have finished them off, sooner or later.
But second, the Atlanta lads were already well-known to Control-C and
his telco security sponsors.  LoD's contacts with telco security had made
them overconfident and even more boastful than usual; they felt that they
had powerful friends in high places, and that they were being openly
tolerated by telco security.  But BellSouth's Intrusion Task Force were hot
on the trail of LoD and sparing no effort or expense.
    The Atlanta Three had also been identified by name and listed on
the extensive anti-hacker files maintained, and retailed for pay, by private
security operative John Maxfield of Detroit.  Maxfield, who had extensive
ties to telco security and many informants in the underground,  was a bete
noire of the *Phrack* crowd, and the dislike was mutual.
    The Atlanta Three themselves had written articles for *Phrack.*
This boastful act could not possibly escape telco and law enforcement
attention.
    "Knightmare," a high-school age hacker from Arizona,  was a close
friend and disciple of Atlanta LoD, but he had been nabbed by the
formidable Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit.   Knightmare
was on some of LoD's favorite boards -- "Black Ice" in particular -- and
was privy to their secrets.  And to have Gail Thackeray, the Assistant
Attorney General of Arizona, on one's trail was a dreadful peril for any
hacker.
    And perhaps worst of all, Prophet had committed a major blunder
by passing an illicitly copied BellSouth computer-file to Knight Lightning,
who had published it in *Phrack.*   This, as we will see, was an act of dire
consequence for almost everyone concerned.
    On July 22, 1989, the Secret Service showed up at the  Leftist's
house, where he lived with his parents.  A massive squad of some twenty
officers surrounded the building: Secret Service, federal marshals, local
police, possibly BellSouth telco security; it was hard to tell in the crush.
Leftist's dad, at work in his basement office, first noticed a muscular
stranger in plain clothes crashing through the back yard with a drawn
pistol.   As more strangers poured into the house, Leftist's dad naturally
assumed there was an armed robbery in progress.
    Like most hacker parents, Leftist's mom and dad had only the
vaguest notions of what their son had been up to all this time.   Leftist had
a day-job repairing computer hardware.  His obsession with computers
seemed a bit odd, but harmless enough, and likely to produce a wellpaying
career.  The sudden, overwhelming raid left Leftist's parents traumatized.
    The Leftist himself had been out after work with his co-workers,
surrounding a couple of pitchers of margaritas.  As he came trucking on
tequila-numbed feet up the pavement, toting a bag full of floppy-disks, he
noticed a large number of unmarked cars parked in his driveway.  All the
cars sported tiny microwave antennas.
    The Secret Service had knocked the front door off its hinges,
almost flattening his Mom.
    Inside, Leftist was greeted by Special Agent James Cool of the US
Secret Service, Atlanta office.  Leftist was flabbergasted.  He'd never met a
Secret Service agent before.   He could not imagine that he'd ever done
anything worthy of federal attention.  He'd always figured that if his
activities became intolerable, one of his contacts in telco security would
give him a private phone-call and tell him to knock it off.
    But now Leftist was pat-searched for weapons by grim
professionals, and his bag of floppies was quickly seized. He and his
parents were all shepherded into separate rooms and grilled at length as a
score of officers scoured their home for anything electronic.
    Leftist was horrified as his treasured IBM AT personal computer
with its forty-meg hard disk, and his recently purchased 80386 IBM-clone
with a  whopping hundred-meg hard disk, both went swiftly out the door
in  Secret Service custody.  They also seized all his disks, all his
notebooks, and a tremendous booty in dogeared telco documents that
Leftist had snitched out of trash dumpsters.
    Leftist figured the whole thing for a big misunderstanding.  He'd
never been into *military* computers.  He wasn't a *spy* or a
*Communist.*  He  was just a good ol' Georgia hacker, and now he just
wanted all these people out of the house.  But it seemed they wouldn't go
until he made some kind of statement.
    And so, he levelled with them. And that, Leftist said later from his
federal prison camp in Talladega, Alabama, was a big mistake.
    The Atlanta area was unique, in that it had three members of the
Legion of Doom who actually occupied more or less the same physical
locality.  Unlike the rest of LoD, who tended to associate by phone and
computer, Atlanta LoD actually *were* "tightly knit."  It was no real
surprise that the Secret Service agents apprehending Urvile at the
computer-labs at Georgia Tech, would discover Prophet with him as well.
    Urvile, a 21-year-old Georgia Tech student in polymer chemistry,
posed quite a puzzling case for law enforcement.  Urvile --  also known as
"Necron 99," as well as other handles, for he tended to change his cover-
alias about once a month -- was both an accomplished hacker and a fanatic
simulation-gamer.
    Simulation games are an unusual hobby; but then hackers are
unusual people, and their favorite pastimes tend to be somewhat out of the
ordinary.  The best-known American simulation game is probably
"Dungeons & Dragons," a multi-player parlor entertainment played with
paper, maps, pencils, statistical tables and a variety of oddly-shaped dice.
Players pretend to be heroic  characters exploring a wholly-invented
fantasy world.  The fantasy worlds of simulation gaming are commonly
pseudo-medieval, involving swords and sorcery -- spellcasting wizards,
knights in armor, unicorns and dragons, demons and goblins.
    Urvile and his fellow gamers  preferred their fantasies highly
technological.   They made use of a game known as "G.U.R.P.S.,"  the
"Generic Universal Role Playing System," published by a company called
Steve Jackson Games (SJG).
    "G.U.R.P.S."  served as a framework for creating  a wide variety of
artificial fantasy worlds.  Steve Jackson Games published  a smorgasboard
of books, full of detailed information and gaming hints, which were used
to flesh-out many different fantastic backgrounds for  the basic GURPS
framework.  Urvile made extensive use of two SJG books called *GURPS
High-Tech*  and *GURPS Special Ops.*
    In the artificial fantasy-world of *GURPS Special  Ops,*  players
entered a modern  fantasy of intrigue and international espionage.   On
beginning the game, players started small and powerless, perhaps as
minor-league CIA agents or penny-ante arms dealers.   But as players
persisted through a series of game sessions (game sessions generally lasted
for hours, over long, elaborate campaigns that might be pursued for
months on end) then they would achieve new skills, new knowledge, new
power.  They would acquire and hone new abilities, such as
marksmanship, karate, wiretapping, or Watergate burglary.  They could
also win various kinds of imaginary booty, like Berettas, or martini
shakers, or fast cars with ejection seats and machine-guns under the
headlights. As might be imagined from the complexity of these games,
Urvile's gaming notes were very detailed and extensive.  Urvile was a
"dungeon-master," inventing scenarios for his fellow gamers, giant
simulated adventure-puzzles for his friends to unravel.   Urvile's game
notes covered dozens of pages with all sorts of exotic lunacy, all about
ninja raids on Libya and break-ins on encrypted Red Chinese
supercomputers.   His notes were written on scrap-paper and kept in loose-
leaf binders.
    The handiest scrap paper around Urvile's college digs were the
many pounds of BellSouth printouts and documents that he had snitched
out of telco dumpsters. His notes were written on the back of
misappropriated telco property.   Worse yet, the gaming notes were
chaotically interspersed with Urvile's hand-scrawled records involving
*actual computer intrusions*  that he had committed.
    Not only was it next to impossible to tell Urvile's fantasy game-
notes from cyberspace "reality," but Urvile  himself barely made this
distinction.  It's no exaggeration to say that to Urvile it was *all* a game.
Urvile was very bright, highly imaginative, and quite careless of other
people's notions of propriety.  His connection to "reality" was not
something to which he paid a great deal of attention. Hacking was a game
for Urvile.  It was an amusement he was carrying out, it was something he
was doing for fun. And  Urvile was an obsessive young man.  He could no
more stop hacking than he could stop in the middle of a jigsaw puzzle, or
stop in the middle of reading a Stephen Donaldson fantasy trilogy.  (The
name "Urvile" came from a best-selling Donaldson novel.)
    Urvile's airy, bulletproof attitude seriously annoyed his
interrogators.   First of all, he didn't consider that he'd done anything
wrong.  There was scarcely a shred of honest remorse in him.   On the
contrary, he seemed privately convinced that his police interrogators were
operating in a demented fantasy-world all their own.  Urvile was too polite
and well-behaved to say this straightout, but his reactions were askew and
disquieting. For instance, there was the business about LoD's ability to
monitor phone-calls to the police and Secret Service.  Urvile agreed that
this was quite possible, and posed no big problem for LoD.  In fact, he and
his friends had kicked the idea around on the "Black Ice" board, much as
they had discussed many other nifty notions,  such as building personal
flame-throwers and jury-rigging fistfulls of blasting-caps.  They had
hundreds of dial-up numbers for government agencies that they'd gotten
through scanning Atlanta phones, or had pulled from raided VAX/VMS
mainframe computers.
    Basically, they'd never gotten around to listening in on the cops
because the idea wasn't interesting enough to bother with.  Besides, if
they'd been monitoring Secret Service phone calls, obviously they'd never
have been caught in the first place.  Right?
    The Secret Service was less than satisfied with this rapier-like
hacker logic.
    Then there was the issue of crashing the phone system.  No
problem, Urvile admitted sunnily.   Atlanta LoD could have shut down
phone service all over Atlanta any time they liked.   *Even the 911
service?*   Nothing  special about that, Urvile explained patiently.   Bring
the switch to its knees, with say the UNIX "makedir" bug, and 911 goes
down too as a matter of course.  The 911 system wasn't very interesting,
frankly.   It might be tremendously interesting to cops (for odd reasons of
their own), but as technical challenges went, the 911 service was
yawnsville. So of course the Atlanta Three could crash service. They
probably could have crashed service all over BellSouth territory, if they'd
worked at it for a while. But Atlanta LoD weren't crashers.   Only losers
and rodents were crashers.  LoD were *elite.*

    Urvile was privately convinced that sheer technical expertise could
win him free of any kind of problem.  As far as he was concerned, elite
status in the digital underground had placed him permanently beyond the
intellectual grasp of cops and straights.  Urvile had a lot to learn.
    Of the three LoD stalwarts, Prophet was in the most direct trouble.
Prophet was a UNIX programming expert who burrowed in and out of the
Internet as a matter of course.   He'd started his hacking career at around
age 14, meddling with a UNIX mainframe system at the University of
North Carolina.
    Prophet himself had written the handy Legion of Doom file "UNIX
Use and Security From the Ground Up." UNIX  (pronounced "you-nicks")
is a powerful, flexible computer operating-system, for multi-user, multi-
tasking computers.   In 1969, when UNIX was created in Bell Labs, such
computers were exclusive to large corporations and universities, but today
UNIX is run on thousands of powerful home machines.  UNIX was
particularly wellsuited to telecommunications programming, and had
become a standard in the field.   Naturally, UNIX also  became a standard
for the elite hacker and phone phreak.
    Lately, Prophet had not been so active as Leftist and Urvile, but
Prophet was a recidivist.   In 1986, when he was eighteen, Prophet had
been convicted of "unauthorized access to a computer network" in North
Carolina.  He'd been discovered breaking into the Southern Bell Data
Network, a UNIX-based internal telco network supposedly closed to the
public.  He'd gotten a typical hacker sentence:  six months suspended, 120
hours community service, and three years' probation.
    After that humiliating bust, Prophet had gotten rid of most of his
tonnage of illicit phreak and hacker data, and had tried to go straight.  He
was, after all, still on probation. But by  the autumn of 1988, the
temptations of cyberspace had proved too much for young Prophet, and he
was shoulder-to-shoulder with Urvile and Leftist into some of the hairiest
systems around.
    In early September 1988, he'd broken into BellSouth's centralized
automation system, AIMSX or "Advanced Information Management
System."     AIMSX was an internal business network for BellSouth,
where telco employees stored electronic mail, databases, memos, and
calendars, and did text processing.   Since AIMSX did not have public
dial-ups, it was considered utterly invisible to the public, and was not well-
secured -- it didn't even require passwords.   Prophet abused an account
known as "waa1," the personal account of an unsuspecting telco employee.
Disguised as the owner of waa1, Prophet made about ten visits to AIMSX.
    Prophet did not damage or delete anything in the system.  His
presence in AIMSX was harmless and almost invisible.  But he could not
rest content with that.
    One particular piece of processed text on AIMSX was a telco
document known as "Bell South Standard Practice 660-225-104SV
Control Office Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special
Services and Major Account Centers dated March 1988."
    Prophet had not been looking for this document.  It was merely one
among hundreds of similar documents  with impenetrable titles.  However,
having blundered over it in the course of his illicit wanderings through
AIMSX, he decided to take it with him as a trophy.  It might prove very
useful in some future boasting, bragging, and strutting session.   So,  some
time in September 1988, Prophet ordered the AIMSX mainframe computer
to copy this document (henceforth called simply  called "the E911
Document")  and  to transfer this copy to his home computer.
    No one noticed that Prophet had done this.  He had "stolen" the
E911 Document in some sense, but notions of property in cyberspace can
be tricky.   BellSouth noticed nothing wrong, because BellSouth still had
their original copy.  They had not been "robbed" of the document itself.
Many people were supposed to copy this document -specifically, people
who worked for the nineteen BellSouth "special services and major
account centers," scattered throughout the Southeastern United States.
That was what it was for, why it was present on a computer network in the
first place: so that it could be copied and read -by telco employees.   But
now the data had been copied by someone who wasn't supposed to look at
it.
    Prophet now had his trophy.  But he further decided to store yet
another copy of the E911 Document on another person's computer.  This
unwitting person was a computer enthusiast named Richard Andrews who
lived near Joliet, Illinois.  Richard Andrews was a UNIX programmer by
trade, and ran a powerful UNIX board called "Jolnet," in the basement of
his house.
    Prophet, using the handle "Robert Johnson," had obtained an
account on Richard Andrews' computer.  And  there he stashed the E911
Document, by storing it in his own private section of Andrews' computer.
    Why did Prophet do this?  If Prophet had eliminated the E911
Document from his own computer, and kept it hundreds of miles away, on
another machine, under an alias, then he might have been fairly safe from
discovery and prosecution -- although his sneaky action had certainly put
the unsuspecting Richard Andrews at risk.
    But, like most hackers, Prophet was a pack-rat for  illicit data.
When it came to the crunch, he could not bear to part from his trophy.
When Prophet's place in Decatur, Georgia was raided in July 1989, there
was the E911 Document, a smoking gun.  And there was Prophet in the
hands of the Secret Service, doing his best to "explain."
    Our story now takes us away from the Atlanta Three and their raids
of the Summer of 1989.  We must leave Atlanta Three "cooperating fully"
with their numerous investigators.  And  all three of them did cooperate, as
their  Sentencing Memorandum from the US District Court of the
Northern Division of Georgia explained  -just before all three of them
were sentenced to various federal prisons in November 1990.
    We must now catch up on the other aspects of the war on the
Legion of Doom.   The war on the Legion was a  war on a network -- in
fact, a network of three networks, which intertwined and interrelated in a
complex fashion. The Legion itself, with Atlanta LoD, and their hanger-on
Fry Guy, were the first network.  The second network was *Phrack*
magazine, with its editors and contributors. The third  network involved
the electronic circle around a  hacker known as "Terminus."
    The war against these hacker networks was carried out by a law
enforcement network.  Atlanta LoD  and Fry Guy were pursued by USSS
agents and federal prosecutors in Atlanta, Indiana, and Chicago.
"Terminus" found himself pursued by USSS and  federal prosecutors from
Baltimore and Chicago.  And the war against Phrack was almost entirely a
Chicago operation.
    The investigation of Terminus involved a great deal of energy,
mostly from the Chicago Task Force, but it was to be the least-known and
least-publicized of the Crackdown operations.  Terminus, who lived in
Maryland, was a UNIX programmer and consultant, fairly wellknown
(under his given name)  in the UNIX community, as an acknowledged
expert on AT&T minicomputers. Terminus idolized AT&T, especially
Bellcore, and longed for public recognition as a UNIX expert; his highest
ambition was to work for Bell Labs.
    But Terminus had odd friends and a spotted history. Terminus had
once been  the subject of an admiring interview in *Phrack* (Volume II,
Issue 14, Phile 2  -dated May 1987).   In this article, *Phrack* co-editor
Taran King described "Terminus" as an electronics engineer,  5'9", brown-
haired, born in 1959 -- at 28 years old, quite mature for a hacker.
    Terminus had once been sysop of a phreak/hack underground
board called "MetroNet," which ran on an Apple II.  Later he'd replaced
"MetroNet" with an underground board called "MegaNet," specializing in
IBMs.  In his younger days, Terminus had written one of the very first and
most elegant code-scanning programs for the IBM-PC.  This program had
been widely distributed in the underground.  Uncounted legions of PC-
owning  phreaks and hackers had used Terminus's scanner  program to rip-
off telco codes.  This  feat had not escaped the attention of telco security; it
hardly could, since Terminus's earlier handle, "Terminal Technician," was
proudly written right on the program.
    When he became a full-time computer professional (specializing in
telecommunications programming),  he adopted the handle Terminus,
meant to indicate that he had "reached the final point of being a proficient
hacker." He'd moved up to the UNIX-based "Netsys" board on an AT&T
computer, with four phone lines and an impressive 240 megs of storage.
"Netsys" carried complete issues of *Phrack,* and Terminus was quite
friendly with its publishers, Taran King and Knight Lightning.
    In the early 1980s, Terminus had been a regular on Plovernet,
Pirate-80, Sherwood Forest and Shadowland, all well-known pirate
boards, all heavily frequented by the Legion of Doom.   As it happened,
Terminus was never officially "in LoD," because he'd never been given the
official LoD high-sign and back-slap by Legion maven Lex Luthor.
Terminus had never physically met anyone from LoD.  But that scarcely
mattered much -- the Atlanta Three themselves had never been officially
vetted by Lex, either. As far as law enforcement was concerned, the issues
were clear. Terminus was a full-time, adult computer professional with
particular skills at AT&T software and hardware -- but Terminus reeked of
the Legion of Doom and the underground.
    On February 1, 1990 -- half a month after the Martin Luther King
Day Crash --  USSS  agents Tim Foley from Chicago, and Jack Lewis
from the Baltimore office, accompanied by AT&T security officer Jerry
Dalton, travelled to Middle Town, Maryland.  There they grilled Terminus
in his home (to the stark terror of his wife and small children), and, in their
customary fashion, hauled his computers out the door.
    The Netsys machine proved to contain a plethora of arcane UNIX
software -- proprietary source code formally owned by AT&T.  Software
such as:  UNIX System Five Release 3.2; UNIX SV Release 3.1;  UUCP
communications software; KORN SHELL; RFS; IWB; WWB; DWB; the
C++ programming language; PMON; TOOL CHEST; QUEST; DACT,
and S FIND.
    In the long-established piratical tradition of the underground,
Terminus had been trading this illicitlycopied  software with a small circle
of fellow UNIX programmers.   Very unwisely, he had stored seven years
of his electronic mail on his Netsys machine, which documented all the
friendly arrangements he had made with his various colleagues. Terminus
had not crashed the AT&T phone system on January 15.  He was,
however, blithely running a notfor-profit AT&T software-piracy ring.
This was not an  activity AT&T found amusing.   AT&T security officer
Jerry Dalton valued this "stolen" property at over three hundred thousand
dollars.
    AT&T's entry into the tussle of free enterprise had been
complicated by the new, vague groundrules of the information economy.
Until the break-up of Ma Bell, AT&T was forbidden to sell computer
hardware or software.  Ma Bell was the phone company; Ma Bell was not
allowed to use the enormous revenue from telephone utilities, in order to
finance any entry into the computer market.
    AT&T nevertheless invented the UNIX operating system.   And
somehow AT&T managed to make UNIX a minor source of income.
Weirdly, UNIX was not sold as computer software, but actually retailed
under an obscure regulatory exemption allowing sales of surplus
equipment and scrap.  Any bolder attempt to promote or retail UNIX
would have aroused angry legal opposition from computer companies.
Instead, UNIX was licensed to universities, at modest rates, where the
acids of academic freedom ate away steadily at AT&T's proprietary rights.
    Come the breakup, AT&T recognized that UNIX was a potential
gold-mine.   By now, large chunks of UNIX code had been created that
were not AT&T's, and were being sold by others.  An entire rival UNIX-
based operating system had arisen in Berkeley, California  (one of the
world's great founts of ideological hackerdom). Today, "hackers"
commonly consider "Berkeley UNIX" to be technically superior to
AT&T's "System V UNIX," but AT&T has not allowed mere technical
elegance to intrude on the real-world business of marketing proprietary
software.   AT&T has made its own code deliberately incompatible with
other folks' UNIX, and has written code that it can prove is copyrightable,
even if that code happens to be somewhat awkward -- "kludgey."   AT&T
UNIX user licenses are serious business agreements, replete with very
clear copyright statements and nondisclosure clauses.
    AT&T has not exactly kept the UNIX cat in the bag,  but it kept a
grip on its scruff with some success.   By the rampant, explosive standards
of software piracy, AT&T UNIX source code is heavily copyrighted, well-
guarded, well-licensed.   UNIX was traditionally run only on mainframe
machines, owned by large groups of suit-andtie professionals, rather than
on bedroom machines where people can get up to easy mischief.


    And AT&T UNIX source code is serious high-level programming.
The number of skilled UNIX programmers with any actual motive to
swipe UNIX  source code is small.  It's tiny, compared to the tens of
thousands prepared to rip-off, say, entertaining PC games like "Leisure
Suit Larry."
    But by 1989, the warez-d00d underground, in the persons of
Terminus and his friends,  was gnawing at AT&T UNIX.  And the
property in question was not sold for twenty bucks over the counter at the
local branch of Babbage's or Egghead's;  this was massive, sophisticated,
multi-line, multi-author corporate code worth tens of thousands of dollars.
    It must be recognized at this point that Terminus's purported ring
of UNIX software pirates had not actually made any money from their
suspected crimes.  The $300,000 dollar figure bandied about for the
contents of Terminus's computer did not mean that Terminus was in actual
illicit possession of three hundred thousand of AT&T's  dollars.   Terminus
was shipping software back  and forth, privately, person to person, for free.
He was not making a commercial business of piracy.  He hadn't asked for
money; he didn't take money.  He lived quite modestly.
    AT&T employees -- as well as freelance UNIX consultants, like
Terminus -- commonly worked with "proprietary" AT&T software, both in
the office and at home on their private machines.   AT&T rarely sent
security officers out to comb the hard disks of its consultants.   Cheap
freelance UNIX  contractors were quite useful to AT&T; they didn't have
health insurance or retirement programs, much less union membership in
the Communication Workers of America.  They were humble digital
drudges, wandering with mop and bucket through the Great Technological
Temple of AT&T; but when the Secret Service arrived at their homes, it
seemed they were eating with company silverware and sleeping on
company sheets!  Outrageously, they behaved as if the things they worked
with every day belonged to them!
    And these were no mere hacker teenagers with their hands full of
trash-paper and their noses pressed to the corporate windowpane.  These
guys were UNIX wizards, not only carrying AT&T data in their machines
and their heads, but eagerly networking about it, over machines that were
far more powerful than anything previously imagined in private hands.
How do you keep people disposable, yet assure their awestruck respect for
your property?  It was a dilemma.

    Much UNIX code was public-domain, available for free.   Much
"proprietary" UNIX code had been extensively re-written, perhaps altered
so much that it became an entirely new product -- or perhaps not.
Intellectual property rights for software developers were, and are,
extraordinarily complex and confused.   And software "piracy," like the
private copying of videos, is one of the most widely practiced "crimes" in
the world today. The USSS were not experts in UNIX or familiar with the
customs of its use.   The United States Secret Service, considered as a
body, did not have one single person in it who could program in a UNIX
environment -- no, not even one.   The Secret Service *were* making
extensive use of expert help, but the "experts" they had chosen were
AT&T and Bellcore security officials, the very victims of the purported
crimes under investigation, the very people whose interest in AT&T's
"proprietary" software was most pronounced.
    On February 6, 1990, Terminus was arrested by Agent Lewis.
Eventually, Terminus would be sent to prison for his illicit use of a piece
of AT&T software.
    The issue of pirated AT&T software would bubble along in the
background during the war on the Legion of Doom.  Some half-dozen of
Terminus's on-line acquaintances, including people in Illinois, Texas and
California, were grilled by the Secret Service in connection with the illicit
copying of software.   Except for Terminus, however, none were charged
with a crime.  None of them shared his peculiar prominence in the hacker
underground.
    But that did not meant that these people would, or could, stay out
of trouble.   The transferral of illicit data in cyberspace is hazy and ill-
defined business, with paradoxical dangers for everyone concerned:
hackers, signal carriers, board owners,  cops, prosecutors, even random
passers-by.  Sometimes, well-meant attempts to avert trouble  or punish
wrongdoing bring more trouble than  would simple ignorance, indifference
or impropriety.
    Terminus's "Netsys" board was not a common-or- garden bulletin
board system, though it had most of the usual functions of a board.  Netsys
was not a stand-alone machine, but part of the globe-spanning  "UUCP"
cooperative network.  The UUCP network uses a set of Unix software
programs called "Unix-to-Unix Copy," which allows Unix systems to
throw data to one another at high speed through the public telephone
network.   UUCP is a radically decentralized, not-for-profit network of
UNIX computers.   There are tens of thousands of these UNIX machines.
Some are small, but many are powerful and  also link to other networks.
UUCP has certain arcane links to  major networks such as JANET,
EasyNet, BITNET, JUNET, VNET, DASnet, PeaceNet and FidoNet, as
well as the gigantic Internet.  (The so-called "Internet" is not actually a
network itself, but rather an "internetwork" connections standard that
allows several globe-spanning computer networks to communicate with
one another. Readers fascinated by the weird and intricate tangles of
modern computer networks may enjoy John S. Quarterman's authoritative
719-page explication, *The Matrix,* Digital Press, 1990.)
    A skilled user of Terminus' UNIX machine could send and receive
electronic mail from almost any major  computer network in the world.
Netsys was not called a "board" per se, but rather a "node."   "Nodes" were
larger, faster, and more sophisticated than mere "boards," and for hackers,
to hang out on internationally-connected "nodes" was quite the step up
from merely hanging out on local "boards." Terminus's Netsys node in
Maryland had a number of direct links to other, similar UUCP  nodes, run
by people who shared his interests and at least something of  his free-
wheeling attitude.   One of these nodes was Jolnet, owned by Richard
Andrews, who, like Terminus, was an independent UNIX consultant.
Jolnet also ran UNIX, and could be contacted at high speed by mainframe
machines from all over the world.  Jolnet was quite a sophisticated piece
of work, technically speaking, but it was still run by an individual, as a
private, not-for-profit hobby.   Jolnet was mostly used by other UNIX
programmers -- for mail, storage, and access to networks.  Jolnet supplied
access network access to about two hundred people, as well as a local
junior college. Among its various features and services, Jolnet also carried
*Phrack* magazine.
    For reasons of his own, Richard Andrews had become  suspicious
of a new user called  "Robert Johnson."  Richard Andrews took it upon
himself to have a look at what "Robert Johnson" was storing in Jolnet.
And Andrews found the E911 Document.
    "Robert Johnson" was the Prophet from the Legion of Doom, and
the E911 Document was illicitly copied data from Prophet's raid on the
BellSouth computers.
    The E911 Document, a particularly illicit piece of digital property,
was about to resume its long, complex, and disastrous career.
    It struck Andrews as fishy that someone not a telephone employee
should have a document referring to the "Enhanced 911 System."  Besides,
the document itself bore an obvious warning.
    "WARNING:  NOT FOR USE OR DISCLOSURE OUTSIDE
BELLSOUTH OR ANY OF ITS SUBSIDIARIES EXCEPT UNDER
WRITTEN AGREEMENT."
    These standard nondisclosure tags are often appended to all sorts of
corporate material.   Telcos as a species are particularly notorious for
stamping most everything in sight as "not for use or disclosure."  Still, this
particular piece of data was  about the 911 System.  That sounded bad to
Rich Andrews.
    Andrews was not prepared to ignore this sort of trouble.  He
thought it would be wise to pass the document along to a friend and
acquaintance on the UNIX network, for consultation.  So, around
September 1988, Andrews sent yet another copy of the E911 Document
electronically to an AT&T employee, one Charles Boykin, who ran a
UNIX-based node called "attctc" in Dallas, Texas.
    "Attctc" was the property of AT&T, and was run from AT&T's
Customer Technology Center  in Dallas, hence the  name "attctc."
"Attctc" was better-known as "Killer," the name of the machine that the
system was running on. "Killer" was a hefty, powerful, AT&T 3B2 500
model, a multi-user, multi-tasking UNIX platform with 32 meg of memory
and a mind-boggling 3.2 Gigabytes of storage.  When  Killer had first
arrived in Texas, in 1985, the 3B2 had been one of AT&T's great white
hopes for going head- to-head with IBM for the corporate computer-
hardware market.  "Killer" had been shipped to the Customer Technology
Center in the Dallas Infomart, essentially a high-technology mall, and
there it sat, a demonstration model.
    Charles Boykin, a veteran AT&T hardware and digital
communications expert, was a local technical backup man for the AT&T
3B2 system.   As a display model in the Infomart mall, "Killer" had little
to do, and it seemed a shame to waste the system's capacity.  So Boykin
ingeniously wrote some UNIX bulletin-board software for "Killer," and
plugged the machine in to the local phone network.   "Killer's" debut in
late 1985 made it the first  publicly available UNIX site in the state of
Texas.  Anyone who wanted to play was welcome.
    The machine immediately attracted an electronic community.  It
joined the UUCP network, and offered network links to over eighty other
computer sites, all of which became dependent on Killer for their links to
the greater world of cyberspace.   And it wasn't just for the big guys;
personal computer users also stored freeware programs for the Amiga, the
Apple, the IBM and the Macintosh on Killer's vast 3,200 meg archives.  At
one time, Killer had the largest library of public-domain Macintosh
software in Texas.
    Eventually, Killer attracted about 1,500 users, all busily
communicating, uploading and downloading, getting mail, gossipping, and
linking to arcane and distant networks.

    Boykin received no pay for running Killer.  He considered it good
publicity for the AT&T 3B2 system (whose sales were somewhat less than
stellar), but he also simply enjoyed the vibrant community his skill had
created.   He gave away the bulletin-board UNIX software he had written,
free of charge.
    In the UNIX programming community, Charlie Boykin had the
reputation of a warm, open-hearted, levelheaded kind of guy.   In 1989, a
group of Texan UNIX professionals voted Boykin "System Administrator
of the Year."   He was considered a fellow you could trust for good advice.
    In September 1988, without warning, the E911 Document came
plunging into Boykin's life, forwarded by Richard Andrews.  Boykin
immediately recognized that the Document was hot property.   He was not
a voicecommunications man, and knew little about the ins and  outs of the
Baby Bells, but he certainly knew what the 911 System was, and he was
angry to see confidential data about it in the hands of a nogoodnik.  This
was clearly a matter for telco security.  So, on September 21, 1988, Boykin
made yet *another* copy of the  E911 Document and passed this one
along to a professional acquaintance of his, one Jerome Dalton, from
AT&T Corporate Information Security.   Jerry Dalton was the very fellow
who would later raid Terminus's house. From AT&T's security division,
the E911 Document went to Bellcore. Bellcore (or BELL
COmmunications REsearch)  had once been the central laboratory of the
Bell System.  Bell Labs employees had invented the UNIX operating
system.  Now Bellcore was a quasi-independent, jointly owned company
that  acted as the research arm for all seven of the Baby Bell RBOCs.
Bellcore was in a good position to co-ordinate security technology and
consultation for the RBOCs, and the gentleman in charge  of this effort
was Henry M. Kluepfel, a veteran of the Bell System who had worked
there for twenty-four years.
    On October  13, 1988, Dalton passed the E911 Document to Henry
Kluepfel.  Kluepfel, a veteran expert witness in telecommunications fraud
and computer-fraud cases, had certainly seen worse trouble than this.   He
recognized the document for what it was:  a trophy from a hacker break-in.
    However, whatever harm had been done in the intrusion was
presumably old news.   At this point there  seemed little to be done.
Kluepfel made a careful note of the circumstances and shelved the
problem for the time being.
    Whole months passed.
    February 1989 arrived.  The Atlanta Three were living it up in Bell
South's switches, and had not yet met their comeuppance.   The Legion
was thriving.  So was *Phrack* magazine.   A good six months had passed
since Prophet's AIMSX break-in.  Prophet, as hackers will, grew weary of
sitting on his laurels.  "Knight Lightning" and "Taran King,"  the editors of
*Phrack,* were always begging Prophet for material they could publish.
Prophet decided that the heat must be off by this time, and that he could
safely brag, boast, and strut.
    So he sent a copy of the E911 Document -- yet another one -- from
Rich Andrews' Jolnet machine to Knight Lightning's  BITnet account at
the University of Missouri. Let's review the fate of the document so far.
    0.  The original E911 Document.  This in the AIMSX system on a
mainframe computer in Atlanta, available to hundreds of people, but all of
them, presumably, BellSouth employees.   An unknown number of them
may have their own copies of this document, but they are all professionals
and all trusted by the phone company.
    1.  Prophet's illicit copy, at home on his own computer in Decatur,
Georgia.
    2.  Prophet's back-up copy, stored on Rich Andrew's Jolnet
machine in the basement of Rich Andrews'  house near Joliet Illinois.
    3.  Charles Boykin's copy on "Killer" in Dallas, Texas, sent by Rich
Andrews from Joliet.
    4.  Jerry Dalton's copy at AT&T Corporate Information Security in
New Jersey, sent from Charles Boykin in Dallas.
    5.  Henry Kluepfel's copy at Bellcore security headquarters in New
Jersey, sent by Dalton.
    6.  Knight Lightning's copy, sent by Prophet from Rich Andrews'
machine, and now in Columbia, Missouri.

    We can see that the "security" situation of this proprietary
document, once dug out of AIMSX,  swiftly became bizarre.   Without any
money changing hands, without any particular special effort, this data had
been  reproduced at least six times and had spread itself all over the
continent.  By far the worst, however, was yet to come.
    In February 1989, Prophet and Knight Lightning bargained
electronically over the fate of this trophy. Prophet wanted to boast, but, at
the same time, scarcely wanted to be caught.
    For his part, Knight Lightning was eager to publish as much of the
document as he could manage.   Knight Lightning was a fledgling
political-science major with a particular interest in freedom-of-information
issues.  He would gladly publish most anything that would reflect glory on
the prowess of the underground and embarrass the telcos.   However,
Knight Lightning himself had contacts in telco security, and sometimes
consulted them on material he'd received that might be too dicey for
publication.
    Prophet and  Knight Lightning decided to edit the E911 Document
so as  to delete most of its identifying traits.   First of all, its large "NOT
FOR USE OR DISCLOSURE" warning had to go.  Then there were other
matters.  For instance, it listed the office telephone  numbers of several
BellSouth 911 specialists in Florida.  If these phone numbers were
published in *Phrack,* the BellSouth employees involved would very
likely be hassled by phone phreaks, which would anger BellSouth no end,
and pose a definite operational hazard for both Prophet and *Phrack.*
    So Knight Lightning cut the Document almost in half, removing
the phone numbers and some of the touchier and more specific
information.  He passed it back electronically to Prophet;  Prophet was still
nervous, so Knight Lightning cut a bit more.  They finally agreed that it
was ready to go, and that it would be published in *Phrack* under the
pseudonym, "The Eavesdropper."
    And this was done on February 25, 1989.
    The twenty-fourth issue of *Phrack*  featured a chatty interview
with co-ed phone-phreak "Chanda Leir," three articles on BITNET and its
links to other computer networks,  an article on 800 and 900 numbers by
"Unknown User,"  "VaxCat's" article on telco basics (slyly entitled
"Lifting Ma Bell's Veil of Secrecy,)" and the usual "Phrack World News."
    The News section, with painful irony, featured an extended account
of the sentencing of "Shadowhawk,"  an eighteen-year-old Chicago hacker
who had just been put in federal prison by William J. Cook himself.
    And then there were the two articles by "The Eavesdropper."   The
first was the  edited E911 Document, now titled "Control Office
Administration Of Enhanced 911 Services for Special Services and Major
Account Centers."  Eavesdropper's second article was a glossary of terms
explaining the blizzard of telco acronyms and buzzwords in the E911
Document.
    The hapless document was now distributed, in the usual *Phrack*
routine, to a good one hundred and fifty sites.  Not a hundred and fifty
*people,* mind you -- a hundred and fifty *sites,* some of these sites
linked to UNIX nodes or bulletin board systems, which themselves had
readerships of tens, dozens, even hundreds of people.
    This was February 1989.  Nothing happened immediately.
Summer came, and the Atlanta crew were raided by the Secret Service.
Fry Guy was apprehended. Still nothing whatever happened to *Phrack.*
Six more issues of *Phrack* came out, 30 in all, more or less on a monthly
schedule.  Knight Lightning and co-editor Taran King went untouched.
    *Phrack* tended to duck and cover whenever the heat came down.
During the summer busts of 1987 -(hacker busts tended to cluster in
summer, perhaps because hackers were easier to find at home than in
college) -- *Phrack* had ceased publication for several months, and laid
low.   Several LoD hangers-on had been arrested, but nothing had
happened to the *Phrack*  crew, the premiere gossips of the underground.
In 1988, *Phrack* had been taken over by a new editor, "Crimson  Death,"
a raucous youngster with a taste for anarchy files.

    1989, however, looked like a bounty year for the underground.
Knight Lightning and his co-editor Taran King took up the reins again, and
*Phrack* flourished throughout 1989.   Atlanta LoD went down hard in
the summer of 1989, but *Phrack* rolled merrily on.   Prophet's E911
Document seemed unlikely to cause *Phrack* any trouble.  By January
1990, it had been available in *Phrack* for almost a year.   Kluepfel and
Dalton, officers of Bellcore and AT&T  security, had possessed the
document for sixteen months -- in fact, they'd had it even before Knight
Lightning himself, and had done nothing in particular to stop its
distribution.  They hadn't even told Rich Andrews or Charles Boykin to
erase the copies from their UNIX nodes, Jolnet and Killer. But then came
the monster Martin Luther King Day Crash of January 15, 1990.
    A flat three days later, on January 18,  four agents showed up at
Knight Lightning's fraternity house.   One was Timothy Foley, the second
Barbara Golden, both of  them Secret Service agents from the Chicago
office.   Also along was a University of Missouri security officer, and
Reed Newlin, a security man from Southwestern Bell, the RBOC having
jurisdiction over Missouri. Foley accused Knight Lightning of causing the
nationwide crash of the phone system.
    Knight Lightning was aghast at this allegation.   On  the face of it,
the suspicion was not entirely implausible - though Knight Lightning knew
that he himself hadn't done it.   Plenty of hot-dog hackers had bragged that
they could crash the phone system, however.  "Shadowhawk," for instance,
the Chicago hacker whom William Cook had recently put in jail, had
several times  boasted on boards that he could "shut down AT&T's public
switched network." And now this event, or something that looked just like
it, had actually taken place.  The Crash had lit a fire under the Chicago
Task Force.  And the former fencesitters at Bellcore and AT&T were now
ready to roll.  The consensus among telco security -- already horrified by
the skill of the BellSouth intruders  -- was that the digital underground was
out of hand.  LoD and *Phrack* must go.
    And in publishing Prophet's E911 Document, *Phrack* had
provided law enforcement with what appeared to be a powerful legal
weapon. Foley confronted Knight Lightning about the  E911 Document.
    Knight Lightning was cowed.  He immediately began "cooperating
fully" in the usual tradition of the digital underground.
    He gave Foley a complete run of *Phrack,*printed out in a set of
three-ring binders.   He handed over his electronic mailing list of *Phrack*
subscribers. Knight Lightning was grilled for four hours by Foley and his
cohorts.  Knight Lightning admitted that Prophet had passed him the E911
Document, and he admitted that he had known it was stolen booty from a
hacker raid on a telephone company.  Knight Lightning signed a statement
to this effect, and agreed, in writing, to cooperate with investigators.
    Next day -- January 19, 1990, a Friday  -- the Secret Service
returned with a search warrant, and thoroughly searched Knight
Lightning's upstairs room in the  fraternity house.   They took all his floppy
disks, though, interestingly, they left Knight Lightning in possession of
both his computer and his modem.  (The computer had no hard disk, and
in Foley's judgement was not a store of evidence.)   But this was a very
minor bright spot among Knight Lightning's rapidly multiplying troubles.
By this time, Knight Lightning was in plenty of hot water, not only with
federal police, prosecutors, telco investigators, and university security, but
with the elders of his own campus fraternity, who were outraged to think
that they had been unwittingly harboring a federal computer-criminal.
    On Monday, Knight Lightning was summoned to Chicago, where
he was further grilled by Foley and USSS veteran agent Barbara Golden,
this time with an attorney present.  And on Tuesday, he was formally
indicted by a federal grand jury.
    The trial of Knight Lightning, which occurred on July 24-27, 1990,
was the crucial show-trial of the Hacker Crackdown.  We will examine the
trial at some length in Part Four of this book. In the meantime, we must
continue our dogged pursuit of the E911 Document.
    It must have been clear by January 1990 that the E911 Document,
in the form *Phrack* had published it back in February 1989, had gone off
at the speed of light in at least a hundred and fifty different directions.   To
attempt to put this electronic genie back in the bottle was flatly impossible.
    And yet, the E911 Document was *still* stolen property, formally
and legally speaking.  Any electronic transference of this document, by
anyone unauthorized to have it, could be interpreted as an act of wire
fraud.  Interstate transfer of stolen property, including electronic property,
was a federal crime.
    The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force had been
assured that the E911 Document was worth a hefty sum of money.  In fact,
they had a precise estimate of its worth from BellSouth security personnel:
$79,449. A sum of this scale seemed to warrant vigorous prosecution.
Even if the damage could not be undone, at least this large sum offered a
good legal pretext for stern punishment of the thieves.   It seemed likely to
impress judges and juries. And it could be used in court to mop up the
Legion of Doom.
    The Atlanta crowd was already in the bag, by the time the Chicago
Task Force had gotten around to *Phrack.* But the Legion was a hydra-
headed thing.   In late 89, a brand-new Legion of Doom board, "Phoenix
Project," had gone up in Austin, Texas.  Phoenix Project was sysoped by
no less a man than the Mentor himself, ably assisted by University of
Texas student and hardened Doomster "Erik Bloodaxe." As we have seen
from his *Phrack* manifesto, the Mentor was a hacker zealot who
regarded computer intrusion as something close to a moral duty.  Phoenix
Project  was an ambitious effort, intended to revive the digital
underground to what Mentor considered the full flower of the early 80s.
The Phoenix board would also boldly bring elite hackers face-to-face with
the telco "opposition."  On "Phoenix," America's cleverest hackers would
supposedly shame the telco squareheads out of their stick-in-the-mud
attitudes, and perhaps convince  them that the Legion of Doom elite were
really an all-right crew.  The  premiere of "Phoenix Project" was heavily
trumpeted by *Phrack,* and "Phoenix Project" carried a complete run of
*Phrack* issues, including the E911 Document as *Phrack* had published
it.
    Phoenix Project was only one of many -- possibly hundreds -- of
nodes and boards all over America that were in guilty possession of the
E911 Document.  But Phoenix was an outright, unashamed Legion of
Doom board.  Under Mentor's guidance, it was flaunting itself in the face
of telco security personnel. Worse yet, it was actively trying to *win them
over* as sympathizers for the digital underground elite.   "Phoenix" had no
cards or codes on it.  Its hacker elite considered Phoenix at least
technically legal.   But Phoenix was a corrupting influence, where hacker
anarchy was eating away like digital acid at the underbelly of corporate
propriety. The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force now
prepared to descend upon Austin, Texas.
    Oddly, not one but *two* trails of the Task Force's investigation
led toward Austin.  The city of Austin, like Atlanta, had made itself a
bulwark of the Sunbelt's Information Age, with a strong university
research presence, and a number of cutting-edge electronics companies,
including Motorola, Dell, CompuAdd, IBM, Sematech and MCC.
    Where computing machinery went, hackers generally followed.
Austin boasted not only "Phoenix Project," currently LoD's most flagrant
underground board, but a number of UNIX  nodes.
    One of these nodes was "Elephant," run by a UNIX consultant
named Robert Izenberg.  Izenberg, in search of  a relaxed Southern
lifestyle and a lowered cost-of-living, had recently migrated to Austin
from New Jersey.  In New Jersey, Izenberg had worked for an independent
contracting company, programming UNIX code for AT&T itself.
"Terminus" had been a frequent user on Izenberg's privately owned
Elephant node.
    Having interviewed Terminus and examined the records on Netsys,
the Chicago Task Force were now convinced that they had discovered an
underground gang of UNIX software pirates, who were demonstrably
guilty of interstate trafficking in illicitly copied  AT&T source code.
Izenberg was swept into the dragnet around Terminus, the self-proclaimed
ultimate UNIX hacker.
    Izenberg, in Austin, had settled down into a UNIX job with a
Texan branch of IBM.  Izenberg was no longer working as a contractor for
AT&T, but he had friends in New Jersey, and he still logged on to AT&T
UNIX computers back in New Jersey, more or less whenever it pleased
him.  Izenberg's activities appeared highly suspicious to the Task Force.
Izenberg might well be breaking into AT&T computers, swiping AT&T
software, and passing it to  Terminus and other possible confederates,
through the UNIX node network.  And this data was worth, not merely
$79,499, but hundreds of thousands of dollars!
    On February 21, 1990, Robert Izenberg arrived home from work at
IBM to find that all the computers had mysteriously vanished from his
Austin apartment. Naturally he assumed that he had been robbed.  His
"Elephant" node, his other machines, his notebooks, his disks, his tapes,
all gone!  However, nothing much else seemed disturbed -- the place had
not been ransacked. The puzzle becaming much stranger some five
minutes later.   Austin U. S. Secret Service Agent Al Soliz, accompanied
by University of Texas campus-security officer Larry Coutorie and the
ubiquitous Tim Foley, made their appearance at Izenberg's door.  They
were in plain clothes: slacks, polo shirts.  They came in, and Tim Foley
accused Izenberg of belonging to the Legion of Doom.
    Izenberg told them that he had never heard of the "Legion of
Doom."  And what about a certain stolen E911 Document, that posed a
direct threat to the police emergency lines?   Izenberg claimed that he'd
never heard of that, either.
    His interrogators found this difficult to believe. Didn't he know
Terminus?
    Who?
    They gave him Terminus's real name.  Oh yes, said Izenberg.  He
knew *that* guy all right -- he was leading discussions on the Internet
about AT&T computers, especially the AT&T 3B2.
    AT&T had thrust this machine into the marketplace, but, like many
of AT&T's ambitious attempts to enter the computing arena, the 3B2
project had something less than a glittering success.   Izenberg himself had
been a  contractor for the division of AT&T that supported the 3B2. The
entire division had been shut down. Nowadays, the cheapest and quickest
way to get help with this fractious piece of machinery was to join one of
Terminus's discussion groups on the Internet, where friendly and
knowledgeable hackers would help you for free.

    Naturally the remarks within this group were less than flattering
about the Death Star....  was *that* the problem?
    Foley told Izenberg that Terminus had been acquiring hot software
through his, Izenberg's, machine.
    Izenberg shrugged this off.   A good eight megabytes of data
flowed through his UUCP site every day.   UUCP nodes spewed data like
fire hoses.  Elephant had been directly linked to Netsys -- not surprising,
since Terminus was a 3B2 expert and Izenberg had been a 3B2 contractor.
Izenberg was also linked to "attctc" and the University of Texas.
Terminus was a well-known UNIX expert, and might have been up to all
manner of hijinks on Elephant. Nothing Izenberg could do about that.
That was physically impossible.  Needle in a haystack.

    In a four-hour grilling, Foley urged Izenberg to come clean and
admit that he was in conspiracy with Terminus, and a member of the
Legion of Doom. Izenberg denied this.  He was no weirdo teenage hacker -
- he was thirty-two years old, and didn't even have a "handle."  Izenberg
was a former TV technician and electronics specialist who had drifted into
UNIX consulting as a full-grown adult.   Izenberg had never met
Terminus, physically.  He'd once bought a cheap highspeed modem from
him, though.
    Foley told him that this modem (a Telenet T2500 which ran at 19.2
kilobaud, and which had just gone out  Izenberg's door in Secret Service
custody)  was likely hot property.  Izenberg was taken aback to hear this;
but then again, most of Izenberg's equipment, like that of most freelance
professionals in the industry, was discounted, passed hand-to-hand through
various kinds of barter and gray-market.   There was no proof that the
modem was stolen, and even if it was, Izenberg hardly saw how that gave
them the right to take every electronic item in his house.

    Still, if the United States Secret Service figured they needed his
computer for national security reasons -- or whatever -- then Izenberg
would not kick.  He figured he would somehow make the sacrifice of his
twenty thousand dollars' worth of professional equipment, in the spirit of
full cooperation and good citizenship.
    Robert Izenberg was not arrested.  Izenberg was not charged with
any crime.  His UUCP node -- full of some 140 megabytes of the files,
mail, and data of himself and his dozen or so entirely innocent users --
went out the door as "evidence."  Along with the disks and tapes, Izenberg
had lost about 800 megabytes of data.
    Six months would pass before Izenberg decided to phone the
Secret Service and ask how the case was going. That was the first time that
Robert Izenberg would ever hear the name of William Cook.  As of
January 1992, a full two years after the seizure, Izenberg, still not charged
with any crime, would be struggling through the morass of the courts, in
hope of recovering his thousands of dollars' worth of seized equipment.
    In the meantime, the Izenberg case received absolutely no press
coverage.   The Secret Service had walked into an Austin home, removed a
UNIX bulletinboard system, and met with no operational difficulties
whatsoever.
    Except that word of a crackdown had percolated through the
Legion of Doom.   "The Mentor" voluntarily shut down "The Phoenix
Project."  It seemed a pity,  especially as telco security employees had, in
fact, shown up on Phoenix, just as he had hoped -- along with the usual
motley crowd of LoD heavies, hangers-on, phreaks, hackers and
wannabes.  There was "Sandy" Sandquist from US SPRINT security, and
some guy named Henry Kluepfel, from Bellcore itself!  Kluepfel had been
trading friendly banter with hackers on Phoenix since January 30th (two
weeks after the Martin Luther King Day Crash). The presence of such a
stellar telco official seemed quite the coup for Phoenix Project.
    Still, Mentor could judge the climate.  Atlanta in ruins, *Phrack* in
deep trouble, something weird going on with UNIX nodes -- discretion
was advisable.  Phoenix Project went off-line.
    Kluepfel, of course, had been monitoring this LoD bulletin board
for his own purposes -- and those of the Chicago unit.   As far back as June
1987, Kluepfel had logged on to a Texas underground board called
"Phreak Klass 2600."  There he'd discovered an Chicago youngster named
"Shadowhawk," strutting and boasting about rifling AT&T computer files,
and bragging of his ambitions to riddle AT&T's Bellcore computers with
trojan horse programs.  Kluepfel had passed the news to Cook in Chicago,
Shadowhawk's computers had gone out the door in Secret Service custody,
and Shadowhawk himself had gone to jail.
    Now it was Phoenix Project's turn.   Phoenix Project postured
about "legality" and "merely intellectual interest," but it reeked of the
underground.  It had *Phrack* on it.  It had the E911 Document.  It had a
lot of dicey talk about breaking into systems, including some bold and
reckless stuff about a supposed "decryption service" that Mentor and
friends were planning to run, to help crack encrypted passwords off of
hacked systems.
    Mentor was an adult.   There was a  bulletin board at his place of
work, as well.  Kleupfel logged onto this board, too, and discovered it to
be called "Illuminati."  It was run by some company called Steve Jackson
Games. On  March 1, 1990, the Austin crackdown went into high gear.
    On the morning of March 1 -- a Thursday -- 21-yearold University
of Texas student "Erik Bloodaxe," co-sysop of Phoenix Project and an
avowed member of the Legion of Doom, was wakened by a police
revolver levelled at his head.
    Bloodaxe watched, jittery, as Secret Service agents appropriated
his 300 baud terminal and, rifling his files, discovered his treasured
source-code for Robert Morris's notorious Internet Worm.  But Bloodaxe,
a wily operator, had suspected that something of the like might be coming.
All his best equipment had been hidden away elsewhere.  The raiders took
everything electronic, however, including his telephone.  They were
stymied by his hefty arcade-style Pac-Man game, and left it in place, as it
was simply too heavy to move.
    Bloodaxe was not arrested.   He was not charged with any crime.
A good two years later, the police still had what they had taken from him,
however.
    The Mentor was less wary.  The dawn raid rousted him and his
wife from bed in their underwear, and six Secret Service agents,
accompanied by an Austin policeman and  Henry Kluepfel himself, made a
rich haul. Off went the works, into the agents' white Chevrolet minivan:
an IBM PC-AT clone with 4 meg of RAM and a  120-meg hard disk; a
Hewlett-Packard LaserJet II printer; a completely legitimate and highly
expensive SCO-Xenix 286 operating system; Pagemaker disks and
documentation; and the Microsoft Word word-processing program.
Mentor's wife had her incomplete academic  thesis stored on the hard-disk;
that went, too, and so did the couple's telephone.  As of two years later, all
this property remained in police custody.
    Mentor remained under guard in his apartment as agents prepared
to raid Steve Jackson Games.  The fact that this was a business
headquarters and not a private residence did not deter the agents.  It was
still very early; no one was at work yet.  The agents prepared to break
down the door, but Mentor, eavesdropping on the Secret  Service walkie-
talkie traffic, begged them not to do it, and offered his key to the building.
    The exact details of the next events are unclear.  The agents would
not let anyone else into the building.  Their search warrant, when
produced, was unsigned. Apparently they breakfasted from the local
"Whataburger," as the litter from hamburgers was later found inside.  They
also extensively sampled a bag of jellybeans kept by an SJG employee.
Someone tore a "Dukakis for President" sticker from the wall.
    SJG employees, diligently showing up for the day's  work, were
met at the door and briefly questioned by U.S. Secret Service agents.  The
employees watched in astonishment as agents wielding crowbars and
screwdrivers emerged with captive machines.  They attacked outdoor
storage units with boltcutters.  The agents wore blue nylon windbreakers
with "SECRET SERVICE" stencilled across the back, with running-shoes
and jeans.
    Jackson's company lost three computers, several hard-disks,
hundred of floppy disks, two monitors, three modems, a laser printer,
various powercords, cables, and adapters (and, oddly, a small bag of
screws, bolts and  nuts).   The seizure of Illuminati BBS deprived SJG of
all the programs, text files, and private e-mail on the board. The loss of
two other SJG computers was a severe blow as well, since it caused the
loss of electronically stored contracts, financial projections, address
directories, mailing lists, personnel files, business correspondence, and,
not least, the drafts of forthcoming games and gaming books.
    No one at Steve Jackson Games was arrested.  No one was accused
of any crime.   No charges were filed. Everything appropriated was
officially kept as "evidence" of crimes never specified.
    After the *Phrack* show-trial, the Steve Jackson Games scandal
was the most bizarre and aggravating incident of the Hacker Crackdown of
1990.   This raid by the Chicago Task Force on a science-fiction gaming
publisher was to rouse a swarming host of civil liberties issues, and gave
rise to an enduring controversy that was still re-complicating itself, and
growing in the scope of its implications, a full two years later.
    The pursuit of the E911 Document stopped with the Steve Jackson
Games raid.   As we have seen, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of
computer users in America with the E911 Document in their possession.
Theoretically, Chicago had a perfect legal right to raid any of these people,
and could have legally seized the machines of anybody who subscribed to
*Phrack.* However, there was no copy of the E911 Document on
Jackson's Illuminati board.   And there the Chicago raiders stopped dead;
they have not raided anyone since. It might be assumed that Rich Andrews
and Charlie Boykin, who had brought the E911 Document to the attention
of telco security, might be spared any official suspicion.  But as we have
seen, the willingness to  "cooperate fully" offers little, if any, assurance
against federal anti-hacker prosecution.
    Richard Andrews found himself in deep trouble, thanks to the
E911 Document.  Andrews lived in Illinois, the native stomping grounds
of the Chicago Task Force. On February 3 and 6, both his home and his
place of work were raided by USSS.  His machines went out the door, too,
and he was grilled at length (though not arrested). Andrews proved to be in
purportedly guilty possession of: UNIX SVR 3.2; UNIX SVR 3.1; UUCP;
PMON; WWB; IWB; DWB; NROFF; KORN SHELL '88; C++; and
QUEST, among other items.   Andrews had received this proprietary code
-- which AT&T officially valued at well over $250,000 -- through the
UNIX network, much of it supplied to him as a personal favor by
Terminus.  Perhaps worse yet, Andrews admitted to returning the favor, by
passing Terminus a copy of AT&T proprietary STARLAN source code.

    Even Charles Boykin, himself an AT&T employee, entered some
very hot water.   By 1990, he'd almost forgotten about the E911 problem
he'd reported in September 88; in fact, since that date, he'd passed two
more security alerts to Jerry Dalton, concerning matters that Boykin
considered far worse than the E911 Document.
    But by 1990, year of the crackdown,  AT&T Corporate Information
Security was fed up with "Killer."   This machine offered no  direct
income to AT&T, and was providing aid and comfort to a cloud of
suspicious yokels from outside the company, some of them actively
malicious toward AT&T, its property, and its corporate interests.
Whatever goodwill and publicity had been won among Killer's 1,500
devoted users was considered no longer worth the security risk.  On
February 20, 1990, Jerry Dalton arrived in Dallas and simply unplugged
the phone jacks, to the puzzled alarm of Killer's many Texan users. Killer
went permanently off-line, with the loss of vast archives of programs and
huge quantities of electronic mail; it was never restored to service.   AT&T
showed no  particular regard for the "property" of these 1,500 people.
Whatever "property" the users had been storing on AT&T's computer
simply vanished completely.
    Boykin, who had himself reported the E911 problem, now found
himself under a cloud of suspicion.  In a weird private-security replay of
the Secret Service seizures, Boykin's own home was visited by AT&T
Security and his own machines were carried out the door.
    However, there were marked special features in the Boykin case.
Boykin's disks and his personal computers were swiftly examined by his
corporate employers and  returned politely in just two days -- (unlike
Secret Service seizures, which commonly take months or years).   Boykin
was not charged with any crime or wrongdoing, and he kept his job with
AT&T (though he did retire from AT&T in September 1991, at the age of
52).
    It's interesting to note that the US Secret Service somehow failed to
seize Boykin's "Killer" node and carry AT&T's own computer out the
door.   Nor did they raid Boykin's home.  They seemed perfectly willing to
take the word of AT&T Security that AT&T's employee, and AT&T's
"Killer" node, were free of hacker contraband and on the up-and-up.
    It's digital water-under-the-bridge at this point, as Killer's 3,200
megabytes of Texan electronic community  were erased in 1990, and
"Killer" itself was shipped out of the state.
    But the experiences of Andrews and Boykin, and the users of their
systems, remained side issues.   They did not begin to assume the social,
political, and legal importance that gathered, slowly but inexorably, around
the issue of the raid on Steve Jackson Games.

    # We must now turn our attention to Steve Jackson Games itself,
and explain what SJG was, what it really did, and how it had managed to
attract this particularly odd and virulent kind of trouble.  The reader may
recall that this is not the first but the second time that the company has
appeared in this narrative; a Steve Jackson game called GURPS was a
favorite pastime of Atlanta hacker Urvile, and Urvile's science-fictional
gaming notes had been mixed up promiscuously with notes about his
actual computer intrusions.
    First, Steve Jackson Games, Inc., was *not* a publisher of
"computer games."  SJG published "simulation games," parlor games that
were played on paper, with pencils, and dice, and printed guidebooks full
of rules and statistics tables.  There were no computers involved in the
games themselves.   When you bought a Steve Jackson Game, you did not
receive any software disks.  What you got was a plastic bag with some
cardboard game tokens, maybe a few maps or a deck of cards.  Most of
their products were books.
    However, computers *were* deeply involved in the Steve Jackson
Games business.  Like almost all modern publishers, Steve Jackson and
his fifteen employees used computers to write text, to keep accounts, and
to run the business generally.  They also used a computer to run their
official bulletin board system for Steve Jackson Games, a board called
Illuminati.  On Illuminati, simulation gamers who happened to own
computers and modems could associate, trade mail, debate the theory and
practice of gaming, and keep up with the company's news and its product
announcements.
    Illuminati was a modestly popular board, run on a  small computer
with limited storage,  only one phone-line, and no ties to large-scale
computer networks.   It did, however, have hundreds of users, many of
them dedicated gamers willing to call from out-of-state.
    Illuminati was *not* an "underground" board.  It did not feature
hints on computer intrusion, or "anarchy files," or illicitly posted credit
card numbers, or long-distance access codes.  Some of Illuminati's users,
however, were members of the Legion of Doom.    And so was one of
Steve Jackson's senior employees -- the Mentor.   The Mentor wrote for
*Phrack,* and also ran an underground board, Phoenix Project -- but the
Mentor was not a computer professional.  The Mentor was the managing
editor of Steve Jackson Games and a professional game designer by trade.
These LoD members did not use  Illuminati to help their *hacking*
activities.  They used it to help their *game-playing* activities -- and they
were even more dedicated to simulation gaming than they were to hacking.
    "Illuminati" got its name from a card-game that Steve Jackson
himself, the company's founder and sole owner, had invented.  This multi-
player card-game was one of Mr Jackson's best-known, most successful,
most technically innovative products.   "Illuminati" was a game of
paranoiac conspiracy in which various antisocial cults warred covertly to
dominate the world.   "Illuminati" was  hilarious, and great fun to play,
involving flying saucers, the CIA, the KGB, the phone companies, the Ku
Klux Klan, the South American Nazis, the cocaine cartels, the Boy Scouts,
and dozens of other splinter groups from the twisted depths of Mr.
Jackson's professionally fervid imagination.  For the uninitiated, any
public discussion of the "Illuminati" card-game sounded, by turns, utterly
menacing or completely insane.
    And then there was SJG's "Car Wars," in which souped-up
armored hot-rods with rocket-launchers and heavy machine-guns did battle
on the American highways of the future.   The lively Car Wars discussion
on the Illuminati board featured many meticulous, painstaking discussions
of the effects of grenades, land-mines, flamethrowers and napalm.  It
sounded like hacker anarchy files run amuck.
    Mr Jackson and his co-workers earned their daily bread by
supplying people with make-believe adventures and weird ideas.  The
more far-out, the better.
    Simulation gaming is an unusual pastime, but gamers have not
generally had to beg the permission of the Secret Service to exist.
Wargames and role-playing adventures are an old and honored pastime,
much  favored by professional military strategists.   Once littleknown,
these games are now played by hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts
throughout North America, Europe and Japan.  Gaming-books, once
restricted to hobby outlets, now commonly appear in chain-stores like B.
Dalton's and Waldenbooks, and sell vigorously.
    Steve Jackson Games, Inc., of Austin, Texas, was a games
company of the middle rank.  In 1989, SJG grossed about a million
dollars.   Jackson himself had a good reputation in his industry as a
talented and innovative designer of rather unconventional games, but his
company was something less than a titan of the field -certainly not like the
multimillion-dollar TSR Inc., or Britain's gigantic "Games Workshop."
    SJG's Austin headquarters was a modest two-story  brick office-
suite, cluttered with phones, photocopiers, fax machines and computers. It
bustled with semi-organized activity and was littered with glossy
promotional brochures and dog-eared science-fiction novels.  Attached to
the offices was a large tin-roofed warehouse piled twenty feet high with
cardboard boxes of games and books.   Despite the weird imaginings that
went on within it, the SJG  headquarters was quite a quotidian, everyday
sort of place. It looked like what it was:  a publishers' digs. Both "Car
Wars" and "Illuminati" were well-known, popular games.  But the
mainstay of the Jackson organization was their Generic Universal Role-
Playing System, "G.U.R.P.S."   The GURPS system was considered solid
and well-designed, an asset for players.  But perhaps the most popular
feature of the GURPS system was that it allowed gaming-masters to
design scenarios that closely resembled well-known books, movies, and
other works of fantasy.  Jackson had  licensed and adapted works from
many science fiction and fantasy authors.  There was *GURPS Conan,*
*GURPS Riverworld,* *GURPS Horseclans,* *GURPS Witch World,*
names eminently  familiar to science-fiction readers.  And there was
*GURPS Special Ops,*  from the world of espionage fantasy and
unconventional warfare.
    And then there was *GURPS Cyberpunk.*
    "Cyberpunk" was a term given to certain science fiction writers
who had entered the genre in the 1980s. "Cyberpunk," as the label implies,
had two general distinguishing features.  First, its writers had a compelling
interest in information technology, an interest closely akin to science
fiction's earlier fascination with space travel. And second, these writers
were "punks," with all the distinguishing features that that implies:
Bohemian artiness, youth run wild, an air of deliberate rebellion, funny
clothes and hair, odd politics, a fondness for abrasive rock and roll; in a
word, trouble.
    The "cyberpunk" SF writers were a small group of mostly college-
educated white middle-class litterateurs, scattered through the US and
Canada.  Only one, Rudy Rucker, a professor of computer science in
Silicon Valley, could rank with even the humblest computer hacker.   But,
except for Professor Rucker, the "cyberpunk" authors were not
programmers or hardware experts; they considered themselves artists (as,
indeed, did Professor Rucker). However, these writers all owned
computers, and took an intense and public interest in the social
ramifications of the information industry.
    The cyberpunks had a strong following among the global
generation that had grown up in a world of computers, multinational
networks, and  cable television. Their outlook was considered somewhat
morbid, cynical, and dark, but then again, so was the outlook of their
generational peers.  As that generation matured and increased in strength
and influence, so did the cyberpunks.   As science-fiction writers went,
they were  doing fairly well for themselves.  By the late 1980s, their work
had attracted attention from gaming companies, including Steve Jackson
Games, which was planning a cyberpunk simulation for the flourishing
GURPS gamingsystem.
    The time seemed ripe for such a product, which had already been
proven in the marketplace.  The first gamescompany out of the gate, with a
product boldly called "Cyberpunk" in defiance of possible infringement-
ofcopyright suits, had been an upstart group called R. Talsorian.
Talsorian's Cyberpunk was a fairly decent game, but the mechanics of the
simulation system left a lot to be desired.  Commercially, however, the
game did very well.
    The next cyberpunk game had been the even more successful
*Shadowrun* by FASA Corporation.  The mechanics of this game were
fine, but the scenario was rendered moronic by  sappy fantasy elements
like elves,  trolls, wizards, and  dragons -- all highly ideologically-
incorrect, according to the hard-edged, high-tech standards of cyberpunk
science fiction.
    Other game designers were champing at the bit. Prominent among
them was the Mentor, a gentleman  who, like most of his friends in the
Legion of Doom, was quite the cyberpunk devotee.  Mentor reasoned that
the time had come for a *real* cyberpunk gaming-book -- one that the
princes of computer-mischief in the Legion of Doom could play without
laughing themselves sick.  This book, *GURPS Cyberpunk,*  would reek
of culturally online authenticity.

    Mentor was particularly well-qualified for this task. Naturally, he
knew far more about computer-intrusion and digital skullduggery than any
previously published cyberpunk author.  Not only that, but he was good at
his work.   A vivid imagination, combined with an instinctive feeling for
the working of systems and, especially, the loopholes within them, are
excellent qualities for a professional game designer.
    By March 1st, *GURPS Cyberpunk* was almost complete, ready
to print and ship.  Steve Jackson expected vigorous sales for this item,
which, he hoped, would keep the company financially afloat for several
months. *GURPS Cyberpunk,*  like the other GURPS "modules," was not
a "game" like a Monopoly set, but a *book:*  a bound paperback book the
size of a glossy magazine, with  a slick color cover, and pages full of text,
illustrations, tables and footnotes.   It was advertised as a game, and was
used as an aid to game-playing,  but it was a book, with an ISBN number,
published in Texas, copyrighted, and sold in bookstores. And now, that
book, stored on a computer, had gone out the door in the custody of the
Secret Service.
    The day after the raid, Steve Jackson visited the local Secret
Service headquarters with a lawyer in tow.  There he confronted Tim Foley
(still in Austin at that time) and demanded his book back.   But there was
trouble. *GURPS Cyberpunk,*  alleged a Secret Service agent to
astonished businessman Steve Jackson, was "a manual for computer
crime."
    "It's science fiction," Jackson said.
    "No, this is real."  This statement was repeated several times, by
several agents.  Jackson's ominously accurate game had passed from pure,
obscure, smallscale fantasy into the impure, highly publicized, largescale
fantasy of the Hacker Crackdown. No mention was made of the real reason
for the search.  According to their search warrant, the raiders had expected
to find the E911 Document stored on Jackson's bulletin board system.
But that warrant was sealed; a procedure that most law enforcement
agencies will use  only when lives are demonstrably in danger.   The
raiders' true motives were not discovered until the Jackson searchwarrant
was unsealed by his lawyers, many months later. The Secret Service, and
the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force, said absolutely
nothing to Steve Jackson about any threat to the police 911 System.   They
said nothing about the Atlanta Three, nothing about *Phrack* or Knight
Lightning, nothing about Terminus.
    Jackson was left to believe that his computers had been seized
because he intended to publish a science fiction book that law enforcement
considered too dangerous to see print.
    This misconception was repeated again and again, for months, to
an ever-widening public audience.  It was  not the truth of the case; but as
months passed, and this misconception was publicly printed again and
again, it became one of the few publicly known "facts" about the
mysterious Hacker Crackdown.   The Secret Service had seized a
computer to stop the publication of a cyberpunk science fiction book.
    The second section of this book, "The Digital Underground," is
almost finished now.  We have become acquainted with all the major
figures of this case who actually belong to the underground milieu of
computer intrusion.   We have some idea of their history, their motives,
their general modus operandi.  We now know, I hope, who they are, where
they came from, and more or  less what they want.  In the next section of
this book, "Law and Order," we will leave this milieu and directly enter
the world of America's computer-crime police. At this point, however, I
have another figure to introduce:  myself.
    My name is Bruce Sterling.   I live in Austin, Texas, where I am a
science fiction writer by trade:  specifically, a *cyberpunk* science fiction
writer.
    Like my "cyberpunk" colleagues in the U.S. and Canada, I've never
been entirely happy with this literary label -- especially after it became a
synonym for computer criminal.  But I did once edit a book of stories by
my colleagues, called  *MIRRORSHADES:  the Cyberpunk Anthology,*
and I've long been a writer of literarycritical cyberpunk manifestos.   I am
not a "hacker" of any description, though I do have readers in the digital
underground.
    When the Steve Jackson Games seizure occurred, I naturally took
an intense interest.  If "cyberpunk" books were being banned by federal
police in my own home town, I reasonably wondered whether I myself
might be next.  Would my computer be seized by the Secret  Service?  At
the time, I was in possession of an aging Apple IIe without so much as a
hard disk.  If I were to be raided as an author of computer-crime manuals,
the loss of my feeble word-processor would likely provoke more snickers
than sympathy.
    I'd known Steve Jackson for many years.   We knew one another as
colleagues, for we frequented the same local science-fiction conventions.
I'd played Jackson games, and recognized his cleverness; but he certainly
had never struck me as a potential mastermind of computer crime.
    I also knew a little about computer bulletin-board  systems.  In the
mid-1980s I had taken an active role in an Austin board called "SMOF-
BBS," one of the first boards dedicated to science fiction.  I had a modem,
and on occasion I'd logged on to Illuminati, which always looked
entertainly wacky, but certainly harmless enough.
    At the time of the Jackson seizure, I had no experience whatsoever
with underground boards.   But I knew that no one on Illuminati talked
about breaking into systems illegally, or about robbing phone companies.
Illuminati didn't even offer pirated computer games. Steve Jackson, like
many creative artists,  was markedly touchy about theft of intellectual
property.
    It seemed to me that Jackson was either seriously suspected of
some crime -- in which case, he would be  charged soon, and would have
his day in court -- or else he was innocent, in which case the Secret
Service would quickly return his equipment, and everyone would have a
good laugh.  I rather expected the good laugh.  The situation was not
without its comic side.  The raid, known as the "Cyberpunk Bust" in the
science fiction community,  was winning a great deal of free national
publicity both for Jackson himself and the "cyberpunk" science fiction
writers generally.
    Besides, science fiction people are used to being misinterpreted.
Science fiction is a colorful, disreputable, slipshod occupation, full of
unlikely oddballs, which, of course, is why we like it.   Weirdness can be
an occupational hazard in our field.  People who wear Halloween
costumes are sometimes mistaken for monsters.
    Once upon a time -- back in 1939, in New York City -science
fiction and the U.S. Secret Service collided in a comic case of mistaken
identity.  This weird incident involved a literary group quite famous in
science fiction, known as "the Futurians," whose membership included
such future genre greats as Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, and Damon
Knight.  The Futurians were every bit as offbeat and wacky as any of their
spiritual descendants, including the cyberpunks, and were given to
communal living, spontaneous group renditions of light opera, and
midnight fencing exhibitions on the lawn.  The Futurians didn't have
bulletin board systems, but they did have the technological equivalent in
1939 -- mimeographs and a private printing press.   These were in steady
use, producing a stream of science-fiction fan magazines,  literary
manifestos, and weird articles, which were picked up in ink-sticky bundles
by a succession of strange, gangly, spotty young men in fedoras and
overcoats.
    The neighbors grew alarmed at the antics of the Futurians and
reported them to the Secret Service as suspected counterfeiters.   In the
winter of 1939, a squad of USSS agents with drawn guns burst into
"Futurian House," prepared to confiscate the forged currency and illicit
printing presses.  There they discovered a slumbering science fiction fan
named George Hahn, a guest of the Futurian commune who had just
arrived in New York. George Hahn managed to explain himself and his
group, and the Secret Service agents left the Futurians in peace henceforth.
(Alas, Hahn died in 1991, just before I had discovered this astonishing
historical parallel, and just before I could interview him for this book.)
    But the Jackson case did not come to a swift and comic end.   No
quick answers came his way, or mine;  no  swift reassurances that all was
right in the digital world, that matters were well in hand after all.   Quite
the opposite.   In my alternate role as a sometime pop-science journalist, I
interviewed  Jackson and his staff for an article in a British magazine.
The strange details of the raid left me more concerned than ever.   Without
its computers, the company had been financially and operationally
crippled.   Half the SJG workforce, a group of entirely innocent people,
had been sorrowfully fired, deprived of their livelihoods by the seizure.  It
began to dawn on me that authors -- American writers -- might well have
their computers seized, under sealed warrants, without any criminal
charge; and that, as Steve Jackson had discovered, there was no immediate
recourse for this. This was no joke; this wasn't science fiction; this was
real.
    I determined to put science fiction aside until I had discovered
what had happened and where this trouble had come from.  It was time to
enter the purportedly real world of electronic free expression and computer
crime. Hence, this book.  Hence, the world of the telcos;  and the world of
the digital underground; and next, the world of the police.

Bruce Sterling
[e-mail]
Literary Freeware:  Not for Commercial Use
THE HACKER CRACKDOWN:
Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
PART THREE:  LAW AND ORDER
Of the various anti-hacker activities of 1990, "Operation Sundevil" had by far
the highest public profile.   The sweeping, nationwide computer seizures of May
8, 1990 were unprecedented in scope and highly, if rather selectively, publicized.
    Unlike the efforts of the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task
Force,  "Operation Sundevil" was not intended to combat "hacking" in the sense
of computer intrusion or sophisticated raids on telco switching stations.  Nor did
it have anything to do with hacker misdeeds with AT&T's software, or with
Southern Bell's proprietary documents.
    Instead, "Operation Sundevil" was a crackdown on those traditional
scourges of the digital underground:  credit-card theft and telephone code abuse.
The ambitious activities out of Chicago, and the somewhat lesser-known but
vigorous antihacker actions of the New York State Police in 1990, were never a
part of "Operation Sundevil" per se, which was based in Arizona.
    Nevertheless, after the spectacular May 8 raids, the public, misled by
police secrecy, hacker panic, and a puzzled national press-corps, conflated all
aspects of the nationwide crackdown in 1990 under the blanket term "Operation
Sundevil."  "Sundevil" is still the best-known synonym for the crackdown of
1990.  But the Arizona organizers of "Sundevil" did not really deserve this
reputation -- any more, for instance, than all hackers deserve a reputation as
"hackers."
    There was some justice in this confused perception, though.  For one
thing, the confusion was abetted by the Washington office of the Secret Service,
who responded to Freedom of Information Act requests on "Operation Sundevil"
by referring investigators to the publicly known cases of Knight Lightning and
the Atlanta Three.  And "Sundevil" was certainly the largest aspect of the
Crackdown, the most deliberate and the best-organized.  As a crackdown on
electronic fraud, "Sundevil" lacked the frantic pace of the war on the Legion of
Doom; on the contrary, Sundevil's targets were picked out with cool deliberation
over an elaborate investigation lasting two full years.
    And once again the targets were bulletin board systems.
    Boards can be powerful aids to organized fraud. Underground boards
carry lively, extensive, detailed, and often quite flagrant "discussions" of
lawbreaking techniques and lawbreaking activities. "Discussing" crime in the
abstract, or "discussing" the particulars of criminal cases, is not illegal -- but
there are stern state and federal laws against coldbloodedly conspiring in groups
in order to commit crimes.
    In the eyes of police, people who actively conspire to break the law are
not regarded as "clubs," "debating salons," "users' groups," or "free speech
advocates."   Rather, such people tend to find themselves formally indicted by
prosecutors as "gangs," "racketeers," "corrupt organizations" and "organized
crime figures."
    What's more, the illicit data contained on outlaw boards goes well
beyond mere acts of speech and/or possible criminal conspiracy.  As we have
seen, it was common practice in the digital underground to post purloined
telephone codes on boards, for any phreak or hacker who cared to abuse them.
Is posting digital booty of this sort supposed to be protected by the First
Amendment?  Hardly -though the issue, like most issues in cyberspace, is not
entirely resolved.   Some theorists argue that to merely *recite* a number
publicly is not illegal - only its *use* is illegal.   But anti-hacker police point out
that magazines and newspapers (more traditional forms of free expression) never
publish stolen telephone codes (even though this might well raise their
circulation).
    Stolen credit card numbers, being riskier and more valuable, were less
often publicly posted on boards -- but there is no question that some
underground boards carried "carding" traffic, generally exchanged through
private mail.
    Underground boards also carried handy programs for "scanning"
telephone codes and  raiding credit card companies, as well as the usual
obnoxious galaxy of pirated software, cracked passwords, blue-box schematics,
intrusion manuals, anarchy files, porn files, and so forth.
    But besides their nuisance potential for the spread of illicit knowledge,
bulletin boards have another vitally interesting aspect for the professional
investigator.  Bulletin boards are cram-full of *evidence.*  All that busy trading
of electronic mail, all those hacker boasts, brags and struts,  even the stolen
codes and cards, can be neat, electronic, realtime recordings of criminal activity.
As an investigator, when you seize a pirate board, you have scored a coup as
effective as tapping phones or intercepting mail.  However, you have not
actually tapped a phone or intercepted a letter.   The rules of evidence regarding
phone-taps and mail interceptions are old, stern and wellunderstood by police,
prosecutors and defense attorneys alike.  The rules of evidence regarding boards
are new, waffling, and understood by nobody at all.
    Sundevil was the largest crackdown on boards in world history.  On May
7, 8, and 9, 1990, about fortytwo computer systems were seized.  Of those forty-
two computers, about twenty-five actually were running boards.  (The vagueness
of this estimate is attributable to the vagueness of (a) what a "computer system"
is, and (b) what it actually means to "run a board" with one -- or with two
computers, or with three.)
    About twenty-five boards vanished into police custody in May 1990.   As
we have seen, there are an estimated 30,000 boards in America today.  If we
assume that one board in a hundred is up to no good with codes and cards
(which rather flatters the honesty of the board-using community), then that
would leave 2,975 outlaw boards untouched by Sundevil.  Sundevil seized about
one tenth of one percent of all computer bulletin boards in America. Seen
objectively, this is something less than a comprehensive assault.   In 1990,
Sundevil's organizers -- the team at the Phoenix Secret Service office, and the
Arizona Attorney General's office -had a list of at least *three hundred* boards
that they considered fully deserving of search and seizure warrants.   The twenty-
five boards actually seized were merely among the most obvious and  egregious
of this much larger list of candidates.   All these boards had been examined
beforehand -- either by informants, who had passed printouts to the Secret
Service, or by Secret Service agents themselves, who not only come equipped
with modems but know how to use them.
    There were a number of motives for Sundevil.  First, it offered a chance
to get ahead of the curve on wire-fraud crimes.  Tracking back credit-card ripoffs
to their perpetrators can be appallingly difficult.  If these miscreants have any
kind of electronic sophistication, they can snarl their tracks through the phone
network into a mind-boggling, untraceable mess, while still managing to "reach
out and rob someone."  Boards, however, full of brags and boasts, codes and
cards, offer evidence in the handy congealed form.
    Seizures themselves -- the mere physical removal of machines -- tends to
take the pressure off.  During Sundevil, a large number of code kids, warez
d00dz, and credit card thieves would be deprived of those boards -- their  means
of community and conspiracy -- in one swift blow.  As for the sysops themselves
(commonly among the  boldest offenders) they would be directly stripped of
their computer equipment, and rendered digitally mute and blind.
    And this aspect of Sundevil was carried out with great success.
Sundevil seems to have been a complete tactical surprise -- unlike the
fragmentary and continuing seizures of the war on the Legion of Doom,
Sundevil was precisely timed and utterly overwhelming.    At least forty
"computers" were seized during May 7, 8 and 9, 1990, in Cincinnati, Detroit,
Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Phoenix, Tucson, Richmond, San Diego, San
Jose, Pittsburgh and San Francisco.   Some cities saw multiple raids, such as the
five separate raids in the New York City environs.  Plano, Texas (essentially a
suburb of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, and a hub of the telecommunications
industry)  saw four computer seizures.  Chicago, ever in the forefront, saw its
own local Sundevil raid, briskly carried out by Secret Service agents Timothy
Foley and Barbara Golden.
    Many of these raids occurred, not in the cities proper, but in associated
white-middle class suburbs -- places like Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania and
Clark Lake, Michigan.   There were a few raids on offices; most took place in
people's homes, the classic hacker basements and bedrooms.
    The Sundevil raids were searches and seizures, not a group of mass
arrests.  There were only four arrests during Sundevil.  "Tony the Trashman," a
longtime teenage bete noire of the Arizona Racketeering unit, was arrested in
Tucson on May 9. "Dr. Ripco," sysop of an outlaw board with the misfortune to
exist in Chicago itself, was also arrested  -- on illegal weapons charges.   Local
units also arrested a 19-year-old female phone phreak named "Electra" in
Pennsylvania,  and a male juvenile in California.  Federal agents however were
not seeking arrests, but computers.
    Hackers are generally not indicted (if at all) until the evidence in their
seized computers is  evaluated -- a process that can take weeks, months -even
years.    When hackers are arrested on the  spot, it's generally an arrest for other
reasons.  Drugs and/or illegal weapons show up in a good third of anti-hacker
computer seizures (though not during Sundevil). That scofflaw teenage hackers
(or their parents) should have marijuana in their homes is probably not a
shocking revelation, but the surprisingly common presence of illegal firearms in
hacker dens is a bit disquieting.   A Personal Computer can be a great equalizer
for the techno-cowboy -- much like that more traditional American "Great
Equalizer," the Personal Sixgun.   Maybe it's not all that surprising that some
guy obsessed with power  through illicit technology would also have a few illicit
high-velocity-impact devices around.  An element of the digital underground
particularly dotes on those "anarchy philes,"  and this element tends to shade into
the crackpot milieu of survivalists, gun-nuts, anarcho-leftists and the ultra-
libertarian right-wing.
    This is not to say that hacker raids to date have uncovered any major
crack-dens or illegal arsenals; but Secret Service agents do not regard "hackers"
as "just kids."   They regard hackers as unpredictable people, bright and slippery.
It doesn't help matters that the hacker himself has been "hiding behind his
keyboard" all this time.   Commonly, police have no idea what he looks like.
This makes him an unknown quantity, someone best treated with proper caution.
    To date, no hacker has come out shooting, though they do sometimes
brag on boards that they will do just that.  Threats of this sort are taken seriously.
Secret Service hacker raids tend to be swift, comprehensive, well-manned (even
overmanned);  and agents generally burst through every door in the home at
once, sometimes with drawn guns.  Any potential resistance is swiftly quelled.
Hacker raids are usually raids on people's homes. It can be a very dangerous
business to raid an American home; people can panic when strangers invade
their sanctum.   Statistically speaking, the most dangerous thing a policeman can
do is to enter someone's home.  (The second most dangerous thing is to stop a
car in traffic.)  People have guns in their homes.   More cops are hurt in homes
than are ever hurt in biker bars or massage parlors.
    But in any case, no one was hurt during Sundevil, or indeed during any
part of the Hacker Crackdown.
    Nor were there any allegations of any physical mistreatment of a suspect.
Guns were pointed, interrogations were sharp and prolonged; but no one in 1990
claimed any act of brutality by any crackdown raider.
    In addition to the forty or so computers, Sundevil reaped floppy disks in
particularly great abundance -- an estimated 23,000 of them, which naturally
included every manner of illegitimate data:  pirated games, stolen codes, hot
credit card numbers, the complete text and software of entire pirate bulletin-
boards.  These floppy disks, which remain in police custody today, offer a
gigantic, almost embarrassingly rich source of possible  criminal indictments.
These 23,000 floppy disks also include a thus-far unknown quantity of legitimate
computer games, legitimate software,  purportedly "private" mail from boards,
business records, and personal correspondence of all kinds.
    Standard computer-crime search warrants lay great emphasis on seizing
written documents as well as computers -- specifically including photocopies,
computer printouts, telephone bills, address books, logs, notes, memoranda and
correspondence.  In practice, this has meant that diaries, gaming magazines,
software documentation, nonfiction books on hacking and computer security,
sometimes even science fiction novels, have all vanished out the door in police
custody.   A wide variety of electronic items have been known to vanish as well,
including telephones, televisions, answering machines, Sony Walkmans, desktop
printers, compact disks, and audiotapes.
    No fewer than 150 members of the Secret Service were sent into the field
during Sundevil. They were commonly accompanied by squads of  local and/or
state police.   Most of these officers -especially  the locals -- had never been on
an antihacker raid before.  (This was one good reason, in fact, why so many of
them were invited along in the first place.)   Also, the presence of a uniformed
police officer assures the raidees that the people entering their homes are, in fact,
police.   Secret Service agents wear plain clothes.  So do the telco security
experts who commonly accompany the Secret Service on raids (and who make
no particular effort to identify themselves as mere employees of telephone
companies).
    A typical hacker raid goes something like this. First, police storm in
rapidly, through every entrance, with overwhelming force, in the  assumption
that this tactic will keep casualties to a minimum.  Second, possible suspects are
immediately removed from the vicinity of any and all computer systems, so that
they will have no chance to purge or destroy computer evidence. Suspects are
herded into a room without computers, commonly the living room,  and kept
under guard -not *armed* guard, for the guns are swiftly holstered, but under
guard nevertheless.   They are presented with the search warrant and warned that
anything they say may be held against them. Commonly they have a great deal to
say, especially if they are unsuspecting parents.
    Somewhere in the house is the "hot spot" -- a computer tied to a phone
line (possibly several computers and several phones).   Commonly it's a
teenager's bedroom, but it can be anywhere in the house; there may be several
such rooms.   This "hot spot" is put in charge of a two-agent team, the "finder"
and the "recorder."   The "finder" is computer-trained, commonly the case agent
who has actually obtained the search warrant from a judge.   He or she
understands what is being sought, and actually carries out the seizures: unplugs
machines, opens drawers, desks, files, floppy-disk containers, etc.   The
"recorder" photographs all the equipment, just as it stands -- especially the tangle
of wired connections in the back, which can otherwise be a real nightmare to
restore.  The recorder will also commonly photograph every room  in the house,
lest some wily criminal claim that the police had robbed him during the search.
Some recorders carry videocams or tape recorders; however, it's more common
for the recorder to simply take written notes.  Objects are described and
numbered as the finder seizes them, generally on standard preprinted police
inventory forms.
    Even Secret Service agents were not, and are not, expert computer users.
They have not made, and do not make, judgements on the fly about potential
threats posed by various forms of equipment.   They may exercise discretion;
they may leave Dad his computer, for instance, but they don't *have* to.
Standard computer-crime search warrants, which date back to the early 80s, use
a sweeping language that targets computers,  most anything attached to a
computer, most anything used to operate a computer -- most anything that
remotely resembles a computer -- plus most any and all written documents
surrounding it. Computer-crime investigators have strongly urged agents to seize
the works.
    In this sense, Operation Sundevil appears to have been a complete
success.  Boards went down all over America, and were shipped en masse to the
computer investigation lab of the Secret Service, in Washington DC, along with
the 23,000 floppy disks and unknown quantities of printed material.
    But the seizure of twenty-five boards, and the multi-megabyte mountains
of possibly useful evidence contained in these boards (and in their  owners' other
computers, also out the door), were far from the only motives for Operation
Sundevil.   An unprecedented action of great ambition and size, Sundevil's
motives can only be described as  political.   It was a public-relations effort,
meant to pass certain messages, meant to make certain situations clear:  both in
the mind of the general public, and in the minds of various constituencies of the
electronic community.

    First  -- and this motivation was vital -- a "message" would be sent from
law enforcement to the digital underground.   This very message was recited in
so many words by Garry M. Jenkins, the Assistant Director of the US Secret
Service, at the Sundevil press conference in Phoenix on May 9,  1990,
immediately after the raids.   In brief, hackers were mistaken in their foolish
belief that they could hide behind the "relative anonymity of their computer
terminals."  On the contrary, they should fully understand that state and federal
cops were  actively patrolling the beat in cyberspace -- that they were on the
watch everywhere, even in those sleazy and secretive dens of cybernetic vice, the
underground boards.
    This is not an unusual message for police to publicly convey to crooks.
The message is a standard message; only the context is new. In this respect,  the
Sundevil raids were the digital equivalent of the standard vice-squad crackdown
on massage parlors, porno bookstores, head-shops,  or floating crap-games.
There may be  few or no arrests in a raid of this sort; no convictions, no trials, no
interrogations.   In cases of this sort, police may well walk out the door with
many pounds of sleazy magazines, X-rated videotapes, sex toys, gambling
equipment, baggies of marijuana....
    Of course, if something truly horrendous is discovered by the raiders,
there will be arrests and prosecutions.   Far more likely, however, there will
simply be a brief but sharp disruption of the closed and secretive world of the
nogoodniks.  There will be "street hassle."  "Heat."  "Deterrence."  And, of
course, the immediate loss of the seized goods.  It is  very unlikely that any of
this seized material will ever be returned.   Whether charged or not, whether
convicted or not, the perpetrators will almost surely lack the nerve ever to ask
for this stuff to be given back.
    Arrests and trials -- putting people in jail -- may involve all kinds of
formal legalities; but dealing with the justice system is far from the only task of
police. Police do not simply arrest people.  They don't simply put people in jail.
That is not how the police perceive their jobs.  Police "protect and serve." Police
"keep the peace," they "keep public order." Like other forms of public relations,
keeping public order is not an exact science.  Keeping public order is something
of an art-form.
    If a group of tough-looking teenage hoodlums was loitering on a street-
corner, no one would be  surprised to see a street-cop arrive and sternly order
them to "break it up."   On the contrary, the surprise would come if one of these
ne'er-do-wells stepped briskly into a phone-booth, called a civil rights lawyer,
and instituted a civil suit in defense of his Constitutional rights of free speech
and free assembly.  But  something much  along this line was one of the many
anomolous outcomes of the Hacker Crackdown.
    Sundevil also carried useful "messages" for other constituents of the
electronic community. These messages may not have been read aloud from the
Phoenix podium in front of the press corps, but there was little mistaking their
meaning.  There was a message of reassurance for the primary victims of coding
and carding:  the telcos, and the credit companies.  Sundevil was greeted with
joy by the security officers of the electronic business community.   After years of
high-tech harassment and spiralling revenue losses, their complaints of rampant
outlawry were being taken seriously by law enforcement.  No more head-
scratching or dismissive shrugs; no more feeble excuses about  "lack of
computer-trained officers" or the low priority of "victimless" white-collar
telecommunication crimes.
    Computer-crime experts have long believed that computer-related
offenses are drastically under-reported.   They regard this as a major open
scandal of their field.  Some victims are reluctant to come forth, because they
believe that police and prosecutors are not computer-literate, and can and will do
nothing.  Others are embarrassed by their vulnerabilities, and will take strong
measures to avoid any publicity; this is especially true of banks, who fear a loss
of investor confidence should an embezzlement-case or wire-fraud surface.
And some victims are so helplessly confused by their own high technology that
they never even realize that a crime has occurred -- even when they have been
fleeced to the bone.
    The results of this situation can be dire. Criminals escape apprehension
and punishment. The computer-crime units that do exist, can't get work.   The
true scope of computer-crime:  its size, its real nature, the scope of its threats,
and the legal remedies for it -- all remain obscured. Another problem is very
little publicized, but it is a cause of genuine concern.  Where there is persistent
crime, but no effective police protection, then vigilantism can result.   Telcos,
banks, credit companies, the major corporations who maintain extensive
computer networks vulnerable to hacking -- these organizations are powerful,
wealthy, and politically influential.   They are disinclined to be pushed around by
crooks (or by most anyone else, for that matter).  They often maintain well-
organized private security forces, commonly run by experienced veterans of
military and police units,  who have left public service for the greener pastures
of the private sector.   For police, the corporate security manager can be a
powerful ally; but if this gentleman finds no allies in the police, and the pressure
is on from his board-of-directors, he may quietly take certain matters into his
own hands.
    Nor is there any lack of disposable hired-help in the corporate security
business.  Private security agencies -- the 'security business' generally -- grew
explosively in the 1980s.  Today there are spooky gumshoed armies of "security
consultants," "rent-acops," "private eyes,"  "outside experts" --  every manner of
shady operator who retails in "results" and discretion.   Or course, many of these
gentlemen and ladies may be  paragons of professional and moral rectitude.  But
as anyone who has read a hard-boiled detective novel knows, police tend to be
less than fond of this sort of private-sector competition.
    Companies in search of computer-security have  even been known to hire
hackers.   Police shudder at this prospect.
    Police treasure good relations with the business community.   Rarely will
you see a policeman so indiscreet as to  allege publicly that some major
employer in his state or city has succumbed to paranoia and gone off the rails.
Nevertheless, police -- and computer police in particular -- are aware of this
possibility.   Computer-crime police can and do spend up to half of their
business hours just doing public relations:  seminars, "dog and pony shows,"
sometimes with parents' groups or computer users, but generally with their core
audience: the likely victims of hacking crimes.  These, of course, are telcos,
credit card companies and large computerequipped corporations.   The police
strongly urge these people, as good citizens, to report offenses and press criminal
charges; they pass the message that there is someone in authority who cares,
understands, and, best of all, will take useful action should a computer-crime
occur. But reassuring talk is cheap.  Sundevil offered action.
    The final message of Sundevil was intended for internal consumption by
law enforcement.  Sundevil was offered as proof that the community of
American computer-crime police  had come of age. Sundevil was proof that
enormous things like Sundevil itself could now be accomplished. Sundevil was
proof that the Secret Service and its  local law-enforcement allies could act like a
welloiled machine -- (despite the hampering use of  those scrambled phones).   It
was also proof that the Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit  -the
sparkplug of Sundevil -- ranked with the best in the world in ambition,
organization, and sheer conceptual daring.
    And, as a final fillip, Sundevil was a message from the Secret Service to
their longtime rivals in the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  By Congressional
fiat, both USSS and FBI formally share jurisdiction over federal computer-
crimebusting activities. Neither of these groups has ever been remotely happy
with this muddled situation.  It seems to suggest that Congress cannot make up
its mind as to which of these groups is better qualified.   And there is scarcely a
G-man or a Special Agent anywhere without a very firm opinion on that topic. #

    For the neophyte, one of the most puzzling aspects of the crackdown on
hackers is why the United States Secret Service has anything at all to do with
this matter.
    The Secret Service is best known for its primary public role:  its agents
protect the President of the United States.  They also guard the President's
family, the Vice President and his family, former Presidents, and Presidential
candidates.   They sometimes guard foreign dignitaries who are visiting the
United States, especially foreign heads of state, and have been known to
accompany American officials on diplomatic missions overseas.
    Special Agents of the Secret Service don't wear uniforms, but the Secret
Service also has two uniformed police agencies.  There's the former White
House Police  (now known as the Secret Service Uniformed Division, since they
currently guard foreign embassies in Washington, as well as the White House
itself).  And there's the uniformed Treasury Police Force.
    The Secret Service has been charged by Congress with a number of little-
known duties. They guard the precious metals in Treasury vaults. They guard the
most valuable historical documents  of the United States:  originals of the
Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln's Second Inaugural
Address, an American-owned copy of the Magna Carta, and so forth.   Once they
were assigned to guard the Mona Lisa, on her American tour in the 1960s.
    The entire Secret Service is a division of the Treasury Department.
Secret Service Special Agents (there are about 1,900 of them)  are bodyguards
for the President et al, but they all work for the Treasury.  And the Treasury
(through its divisions of the U.S. Mint and the Bureau of Engraving and
Printing) prints the nation's money.
    As Treasury police, the Secret Service guards the nation's currency; it is
the only federal law enforcement agency with direct jurisdiction over
counterfeiting and forgery.  It analyzes documents  for authenticity, and its fight
against  fake cash is still quite lively (especially since the skilled counterfeiters
of Medellin, Columbia have gotten into the act).   Government checks, bonds,
and other obligations, which exist in untold millions and are worth untold
billions, are common targets for forgery, which the Secret Service also battles.
It even handles forgery of postage stamps. But cash is fading in importance
today as money has become electronic.  As necessity beckoned, the Secret
Service moved from fighting  the counterfeiting of paper currency and the
forging of checks, to the protection of funds transferred by wire.
    From wire-fraud, it was a simple skip-and-jump to what is formally
known as "access device fraud." Congress granted the Secret Service the
authority to investigate "access device fraud"  under Title 18 of the United States
Code (U.S.C.  Section 1029).
    The term "access device" seems intuitively simple.  It's some kind of
high-tech gizmo you use to get money with.  It makes good sense to put this sort
of thing in the charge of counterfeiting and wirefraud experts.
    However, in Section 1029, the term "access device" is very generously
defined.  An access device is: "any card, plate, code, account number, or other
means of account access that can be used, alone or in conjunction with another
access device, to obtain money, goods, services, or any other thing of value, or
that can be used to initiate a transfer of funds."
    "Access device" can therefore be construed to include credit cards
themselves (a popular forgery item nowadays).  It also includes credit card
account *numbers,* those standards of the digital underground.   The same goes
for telephone charge cards (an increasingly popular item with telcos, who are
tired of being robbed of pocket change by phone-booth thieves).   And also
telephone access *codes,* those *other* standards of the digital underground.
(Stolen telephone codes may not "obtain money," but they certainly do obtain
valuable "services," which is specifically forbidden by Section 1029.)
    We can now see that Section 1029 already pits the United States Secret
Service directly against the digital underground, without any mention at all of
the word "computer."
    Standard phreaking devices, like "blue boxes," used to steal phone
service from old-fashioned mechanical switches, are unquestionably
"counterfeit access devices."   Thanks to Sec.1029, it is not only illegal to *use*
counterfeit access devices, but it is even illegal to *build* them.   "Producing,"
"designing" "duplicating" or "assembling" blue boxes are all federal crimes
today, and if you do this, the Secret Service has been charged by Congress to
come after you.
    Automatic Teller Machines, which replicated all over America during the
1980s, are definitely "access devices," too, and an attempt to tamper with their
punch-in codes and plastic bank cards falls directly under Sec. 1029.
    Section 1029 is remarkably elastic.  Suppose you find a computer
password in somebody's trash.  That password might be a "code" -- it's certainly
a "means of account access."  Now suppose you log on to a computer and copy
some software for yourself. You've certainly obtained "service" (computer
service)  and a "thing of value" (the software). Suppose you tell a dozen friends
about your swiped password, and let them use it, too.  Now you're "trafficking in
unauthorized access devices."  And when the Prophet, a member of the Legion
of Doom, passed a stolen telephone company document to Knight Lightning at
*Phrack* magazine, they were both charged under Sec. 1029!
    There are two limitations on Section 1029.  First, the offense must
"affect interstate or foreign commerce" in order to become a matter of federal
jurisdiction.  The term "affecting commerce" is not well defined; but you may
take it as a given that the Secret Service can take an interest if you've done most
anything that happens to cross a state line. State and local police can be touchy
about their jurisdictions, and can sometimes be mulish when the feds show up.
But when it comes to computercrime, the local police are pathetically grateful
for federal help -- in fact they complain that they can't get enough of it.   If you're
stealing long-distance service, you're almost certainly crossing state lines, and
you're definitely "affecting the interstate commerce" of the telcos.  And if you're
abusing credit cards by ordering stuff out of glossy catalogs from, say, Vermont,
you're in for it. The second limitation is money.  As a rule, the feds don't pursue
penny-ante offenders.  Federal judges will dismiss cases that appear to waste
their time.  Federal crimes must be serious;  Section 1029 specifies a minimum
loss of a thousand dollars. We now come to the very next section of Title 18,
which is Section 1030, "Fraud and related activity in connection with
computers."  This statute gives the Secret Service direct jurisdiction over acts of
computer intrusion.  On the face of it, the Secret Service would now seem to
command the field. Section 1030, however, is nowhere near so ductile as
Section 1029. The first annoyance is Section 1030(d), which reads:
    "(d) The United States Secret Service shall, *in addition to any other
agency having such authority,* have the authority to investigate offenses under
this section.  Such authority of the United States Secret Service shall be
exercised in accordance with an agreement which shall be entered into by the
Secretary  of the Treasury *and the Attorney General.*"   (Author's  italics.)
    The Secretary of the Treasury is the titular head of the Secret Service,
while the Attorney General is in charge of the FBI.  In Section (d), Congress
shrugged off responsibility for the computer-crime turf-battle between the
Service and the Bureau, and made them fight it out all by themselves.  The result
was a rather dire one for the Secret Service, for the FBI ended up with exclusive
jurisdiction over computer break-ins having to do with national security, foreign
espionage, federally insured banks, and U.S. military bases, while retaining joint
jurisdiction over all the other computer intrusions. Essentially, when it comes to
Section 1030, the FBI  not only gets the real glamor stuff for itself, but can peer
over the shoulder of the Secret Service and barge in to meddle whenever it suits
them. The second problem has to do with the dicey term "Federal interest
computer."  Section 1030(a)(2) makes it illegal to "access a computer without
authorization" if that computer belongs to a financial institution or an issuer of
credit cards (fraud cases, in other words).   Congress was quite willing to give
the Secret Service jurisdiction over money-transferring computers, but Congress
balked at letting them investigate any and all computer intrusions.   Instead, the
USSS had to settle for the money machines and the "Federal interest computers."
A "Federal interest computer" is a computer which the government itself owns,
or is using.  Large networks of interstate computers,  linked over state lines, are
also considered to be of "Federal interest."   (This notion of "Federal interest" is
legally rather foggy and has never been clearly defined in the courts.  The Secret
Service has never yet had its hand slapped for investigating computer break-ins
that were *not* of "Federal interest," but conceivably someday this might
happen.)
    So the Secret Service's authority over "unauthorized access" to
computers covers a lot of territory, but by no means the whole ball of
cyberspatial wax.   If you are, for instance, a *local* computer retailer, or the
owner of a *local* bulletin board system, then a malicious *local* intruder can
break in, crash your system, trash your files and scatter viruses, and the U.S.
Secret Service cannot do a single thing about it.
    At least, it can't do anything *directly.*   But the Secret Service will do
plenty to help the local people who can.
    The FBI may have dealt itself an ace off the bottom of the deck when it
comes to Section 1030; but that's not the whole story; that's not the street. What's
Congress thinks is one thing, and Congress has been known to change its mind.
The *real* turfstruggle is out there in the streets where it's happening.    If you're
a local street-cop with a computer problem, the Secret Service wants you to
know where you can find the real expertise.  While the Bureau crowd are off
having their favorite shoes  polished -- (wing-tips) -- and making derisive fun of
the Service's favorite shoes -- ("pansy-ass tassels") -the tassel-toting Secret
Service has a crew of readyand-able  hacker-trackers installed in the capital of
every state in the Union.   Need advice?  They'll give you advice, or at least point
you in the right direction.  Need training?  They can see to that, too.
    If you're a local cop and you call in the FBI, the FBI (as is widely and
slanderously rumored)  will order you around like a coolie, take all the credit for
your busts, and mop up every possible scrap of reflected glory.  The Secret
Service, on the other hand, doesn't brag a lot.  They're the quiet types. *Very*
quiet.  Very cool.  Efficient.  High-tech. Mirrorshades, icy stares, radio ear-
plugs, an Uzi machine-pistol tucked somewhere in that well-cut jacket.
American samurai, sworn to give their lives to protect our President.  "The
granite agents." Trained in martial arts, absolutely fearless.  Every single one of
'em has a top-secret security clearance. Something goes a little wrong, you're not
gonna hear any whining and moaning and political buck- passing out of these
guys.
    The facade of the granite agent is not, of course, the reality.  Secret
Service agents are human beings. And the real glory in Service work is not in
battling computer crime -- not yet, anyway -- but in protecting the President.
The real glamour of Secret Service work is in the White House Detail.   If you're
at the President's side, then the kids and the wife see you on television; you rub
shoulders with the most powerful people in the world.   That's the real heart of
Service work, the number one priority.  More than one computer investigation
has stopped dead in the water when Service agents vanished at the President's
need.
    There's romance in the work of the Service.  The intimate access to
circles of great power;  the espritde-corps of a highly trained and disciplined
elite; the high responsibility of defending the Chief Executive; the fulfillment of
a patriotic duty.   And as police work goes, the pay's not bad.  But there's squalor
in Service work, too.  You may get spat upon by protesters howling abuse -- and
if they get violent, if they get too close, sometimes you have to knock one of
them down -- discreetly.
    The real squalor in Service work is drudgery such as "the quarterlies,"
traipsing out four times a year, year in, year out, to interview the various pathetic
wretches, many of them in prisons and asylums, who have seen fit to threaten the
President's life.   And then there's the grinding stress of searching  all those faces
in the endless bustling crowds, looking for hatred, looking for psychosis, looking
for the tight, nervous face of an Arthur Bremer, a Squeaky Fromme, a Lee
Harvey Oswald. It's watching all those grasping, waving hands for sudden
movements, while your ears strain at your radio headphone for the long-
rehearsed cry of "Gun!"
    It's poring, in grinding detail, over the  biographies of every rotten loser
who ever shot at a President.  It's the unsung work of the Protective Research
Section, who study scrawled, anonymous death threats with all the meticulous
tools of antiforgery techniques.


    And it's maintaining the hefty computerized files on anyone who ever
threatened the President's life.  Civil libertarians have become increasingly
concerned at the Government's use of computer files to track American citizens -
- but the Secret  Service file of potential Presidential assassins, which has
upward of twenty thousand names, rarely causes a peep of protest.  If you *ever*
state that you intend to kill the President, the Secret Service will want to know
and record who you are, where you are, what you are, and what you're up to.   If
you're a serious threat -- if you're officially considered "of protective interest" --
then the Secret Service may  well keep tabs on you for the rest of your natural
life.
    Protecting the President has first call on all the Service's resources.  But
there's a lot more to the Service's traditions and history than standing guard
outside the Oval Office. The Secret Service is the nation's oldest general federal
law-enforcement agency.   Compared to the Secret Service, the FBI are new-
hires and the CIA are temps.  The Secret Service was founded 'way back in
1865, at the suggestion of Hugh McCulloch, Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of the
Treasury. McCulloch wanted a specialized Treasury police to combat
counterfeiting.  Abraham Lincoln agreed that this seemed a good idea, and, with
a terrible irony, Abraham Lincoln was shot that very night by John Wilkes
Booth.
    The Secret Service originally had nothing to do with protecting
Presidents.  They didn't take this on as a regular assignment until after the
Garfield assassination in 1881.
    And they didn't get any Congressional money for it until President
McKinley was shot in 1901.   The Service was originally designed for one
purpose: destroying counterfeiters. # There are interesting parallels between the
Service's nineteenth-century entry into counterfeiting, and America's twentieth-
century entry into computer-crime.
    In 1865, America's paper currency was a terrible muddle.  Security was
drastically bad.  Currency was printed on the spot by local banks in literally
hundreds of different designs.  No one really knew what the heck a dollar bill
was supposed to look like.  Bogus bills passed easily.  If some joker told you that
a one-dollar bill from the Railroad Bank of Lowell, Massachusetts had a woman
leaning on a shield, with a locomotive, a cornucopia, a compass, various
agricultural implements, a railroad bridge, and some factories, then you pretty
much had to take his word for it.  (And in fact he was telling the truth!)

    *Sixteen hundred* local American banks designed and printed their own
paper currency, and there were no general standards for security.  Like a badly
guarded node in a computer network, badly designed bills were easy to fake, and
posed a security hazard for the entire monetary system.
    No one knew the exact extent of the threat to the currency.  There were
panicked estimates that as much as a third of the entire national currency was
faked.  Counterfeiters -- known as "boodlers" in the underground slang of the
time -- were  mostly technically skilled printers who had gone to the bad. Many
had once worked printing legitimate currency. Boodlers operated in rings and
gangs.   Technical experts engraved the bogus plates -- commonly in basements
in New York City.  Smooth confidence men passed large wads of high-quality,
highdenomination fakes, including the really sophisticated stuff --  government
bonds, stock certificates, and railway shares.  Cheaper, botched fakes were sold
or sharewared to low-level gangs of boodler wannabes.  (The really cheesy
lowlife boodlers merely upgraded real bills by altering face values, changing
ones to fives, tens to hundreds, and so on.) The techniques of boodling were
little-known and regarded with a certain awe by the midnineteenth-century
public.  The ability to manipulate the system for rip-off seemed diabolically
clever.  As the skill and daring of the boodlers increased, the situation became
intolerable.  The federal government stepped in, and began offering its own
federal currency, which  was printed in fancy green ink, but only on the back -
the original "greenbacks."  And at first, the improved security of the well-
designed, well-printed federal greenbacks seemed to solve the problem; but then
the counterfeiters caught on.  Within a few years things were worse than ever:  a
*centralized* system where *all* security was bad!
    The local police were helpless.  The Government tried offering blood
money to potential  informants, but this met with little success.  Banks, plagued
by boodling, gave up hope of police help and hired private security men instead.
Merchants and bankers queued up by the thousands to buy  privately-printed
manuals on currency security, slim little books like Laban Heath's  *Infallible
Government Counterfeit Detector.*  The back of the book offered Laban Heath's
patent microscope for five bucks. Then the Secret Service entered the picture.
The first agents were a rough and ready crew.   Their chief was one William P.
Wood, a former guerilla in the Mexican War who'd won a reputation busting
contractor fraudsters for the War Department during the Civil War.   Wood, who
was also Keeper of the Capital Prison, had a sideline as a counterfeiting expert,
bagging boodlers for the federal bounty money.
    Wood was named Chief of the new Secret Service in July 1865.  There
were only ten  Secret Service agents in all:  Wood himself, a handful who'd
worked for him in the War Department, and a few former private investigators --
counterfeiting experts -- whom Wood had won over to public service.   (The
Secret Service of 1865 was much the size of the Chicago Computer Fraud Task
Force or the Arizona Racketeering Unit of 1990.)  These ten "Operatives" had an
additional twenty or so "Assistant Operatives" and "Informants."   Besides salary
and per diem, each Secret Service employee received a whopping twenty-five
dollars for each boodler he captured.
    Wood himself publicly estimated that at least *half* of America's
currency was counterfeit, a perhaps pardonable perception.   Within a year the
Secret Service had arrested over 200 counterfeiters. They busted about two
hundred boodlers a year for four years straight.
    Wood attributed his success to travelling fast and light, hitting the bad-
guys hard, and avoiding bureaucratic baggage.  "Because my raids were made
without military escort and I did not ask the assistance of state officers, I
surprised the professional counterfeiter."
    Wood's social message to the once-impudent  boodlers bore an eerie ring
of Sundevil:  "It was also my purpose to convince such characters that it would
no longer be healthy for them to ply their vocation without being handled
roughly, a fact they soon discovered."
    William P. Wood, the Secret Service's guerilla pioneer, did not end well.
He succumbed to the lure of aiming for the really big score.  The notorious
Brockway Gang of New York City,  headed by William E. Brockway, the "King
of the Counterfeiters," had forged a number of government bonds.  They'd
passed these brilliant  fakes on the prestigious Wall Street investment firm of Jay
Cooke and Company.  The Cooke firm were frantic and offered a huge reward
for the forgers' plates.
    Laboring diligently, Wood confiscated the plates (though not Mr.
Brockway) and claimed the reward.  But the Cooke company treacherously
reneged.   Wood got involved in a down-and-dirty lawsuit with the Cooke
capitalists.   Wood's boss, Secretary of the Treasury McCulloch, felt that Wood's
demands for money and glory were unseemly, and even when the reward money
finally came through, McCulloch refused to pay Wood anything.   Wood found
himself mired in a seemingly endless round of federal suits and Congressional
lobbying.
    Wood never got his money.  And he lost his job to boot.  He resigned in
1869.
    Wood's agents suffered, too.  On May 12, 1869, the second Chief of the
Secret Service took over, and almost immediately fired most of Wood's pioneer
Secret Service agents:   Operatives, Assistants and Informants alike.  The
practice of receiving $25 per crook was abolished.   And the Secret Service
began the long, uncertain process of thorough professionalization.


    Wood ended badly.  He must have felt stabbed in the back.  In fact his
entire organization was mangled.
    On the other hand, William P. Wood *was* the first head of the Secret
Service.  William Wood was the pioneer.  People still honor his name.  Who
remembers the name of the *second* head of the Secret Service?
    As for William Brockway (also known as "Colonel Spencer"), he was
finally arrested by the  Secret Service in 1880.  He did five years in prison, got
out, and was still boodling at the age of seventyfour.

    #
    Anyone with an interest in  Operation Sundevil - or in American
computer-crime generally -- could scarcely miss the presence of Gail Thackeray,
Assistant Attorney General of the State of Arizona. Computer-crime training
manuals often cited Thackeray's group and her work;  she was the highest-
ranking state official to specialize in computer-related offenses.   Her name had
been on the Sundevil press release (though modestly ranked  well after the local
federal prosecuting attorney and the head of the Phoenix Secret Service office).
As public commentary, and controversy, began to mount about the Hacker
Crackdown, this Arizonan state official began to take a higher and higher public
profile.  Though uttering almost nothing specific about the Sundevil operation
itself, she coined some of the most striking soundbites of the growing
propaganda war:  "Agents are operating in good faith, and I don't think you can
say that for the hacker community," was one.  Another was the memorable "I am
not a mad dog prosecutor" (*Houston Chronicle,*  Sept 2, 1990.)  In the
meantime, the Secret Service maintained its usual extreme discretion; the
Chicago Unit, smarting from the backlash of the Steve Jackson scandal, had
gone completely to earth.
    As I collated my growing pile of newspaper clippings, Gail Thackeray
ranked as a comparative fount of public knowledge on police operations.
    I decided that I  had to get to know Gail Thackeray.   I wrote to her at the
Arizona Attorney General's Office.
    Not only did she kindly reply to me, but, to my astonishment, she knew
very well what "cyberpunk" science fiction was.
    Shortly after this, Gail Thackeray lost her job. And I temporarily
misplaced my own career as a science-fiction writer, to become a full-time
computer-crime journalist.   In early March, 1991, I flew to Phoenix, Arizona, to
interview Gail Thackeray for my book on the hacker crackdown. #
    "Credit cards didn't used to cost anything to get," says Gail Thackeray.
"Now they cost forty bucks -- and that's all just to cover the costs from *rip-off
artists.*"
    Electronic nuisance criminals are parasites. One by one they're not much
harm, no big deal.  But they never come just one by one. They come in swarms,
heaps, legions, sometimes whole subcultures.  And they bite.  Every time we buy
a  credit card today, we lose a little financial vitality to a particular species of
bloodsucker. What, in her expert opinion, are the worst forms of electronic
crime, I ask, consulting my notes.  Is it -credit card fraud?  Breaking into ATM
bank machines?  Phone-phreaking?  Computer intrusions?  Software viruses?
Access-code theft? Records tampering?  Software piracy?  Pornographic bulletin
boards? Satellite TV piracy?  Theft of cable service?   It's a long list.  By the
time I reach the end of it I feel rather depressed. "Oh no," says Gail Thackeray,
leaning forward over the table, her whole body gone stiff with energetic
indignation, "the biggest damage is telephone fraud.  Fake sweepstakes, fake
charities. Boiler-room con operations.  You could pay off the national debt with
what these guys steal....  They target old people, they get hold of credit ratings
and demographics, they rip off the old and the weak." The words come tumbling
out of her.
    It's low-tech stuff, your everyday boiler-room fraud.  Grifters, conning
people out of money over the phone, have been around for decades.  This is
where the word "phony" came from!
    It's just that it's so much *easier* now, horribly facilitated by advances in
technology and the byzantine structure of the modern phone system. The same
professional fraudsters do it over and over, Thackeray tells me, they hide behind
dense onion-shells of fake companies.... fake holding corporations nine or ten
layers deep, registered all over the map.  They get a phone installed under a false
name in an empty safe-house.  And then they call-forward everything out of that
phone to yet another phone,  a phone that may even be in another *state.*  And
they don't even pay the charges on their phones; after a month or so, they just
split.  Set up somewhere else in another Podunkville with the same seedy crew
of veteran phone-crooks.  They buy or steal commercial credit card reports, slap
them on the PC, have a program pick out people over sixty-five  who pay a lot to
charities.  A whole subculture living off this, merciless folks on the con.
    "The 'light-bulbs for the blind' people,"  Thackeray muses, with a special
loathing.  "There's just no end to them."
    We're sitting in a downtown diner in Phoenix, Arizona.  It's a tough
town, Phoenix.  A state capital seeing some hard times.  Even to a Texan like
myself, Arizona state politics seem rather baroque. There was, and remains,
endless trouble over the Martin Luther King holiday, the sort of stiff-necked,
foot-shooting incident for which Arizona politics seem famous.  There was Evan
Mecham, the eccentric Republican millionaire governor who was impeached,
after reducing state government to a ludicrous shambles.  Then there was the
national Keating scandal, involving Arizona savings and loans, in which both  of
Arizona's  U.S. senators, DeConcini and McCain, played sadly prominent roles.
    And the very latest is the bizarre AzScam case, in which state legislators
were videotaped, eagerly taking cash from an informant of the Phoenix city
police department, who was posing as a Vegas mobster.
    "Oh," says Thackeray cheerfully.  "These people are amateurs here, they
thought they were finally  getting to play with the big boys.  They don't have the
least idea how to take a bribe!  It's not institutional corruption.  It's not  like back
in Philly."
    Gail Thackeray was a former prosecutor in Philadelphia.  Now she's a
former assistant attorney general of the State of Arizona.  Since  moving to
Arizona in 1986, she had worked under the aegis of Steve Twist,  her boss in the
Attorney General's office.  Steve Twist wrote Arizona's pioneering computer
crime laws and naturally took an interest in seeing them enforced. It was a snug
niche, and Thackeray's Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit won a national
reputation for ambition and technical knowledgeability....  Until the latest
election in Arizona.  Thackeray's boss ran for the top job, and lost.  The victor,
the new Attorney General, apparently went to some pains to eliminate the
bureaucratic traces of his rival, including his pet group -- Thackeray's group.
Twelve people got their walking papers.
    Now Thackeray's painstakingly assembled computer lab sits gathering
dust somewhere in the glass-and-concrete Attorney General's HQ on 1275
Washington Street.  Her computer-crime books, her painstakingly garnered back
issues of phreak and hacker zines, all bought at her own expense -- are piled in
boxes somewhere.  The State of Arizona is simply not particularly interested in
electronic racketeering at the moment.
    At the moment of our interview, Gail Thackeray, officially unemployed,
is working out of the county  sheriff's office, living on her savings, and
prosecuting several cases -- working 60-hour weeks, just as always -- for no pay
at all.  "I'm trying to train people," she mutters.
    Half her life seems to be spent training people - merely pointing out, to
the naive and incredulous (such as myself) that this stuff is *actually going on
out there.*  It's a small world, computer crime.  A young world.   Gail
Thackeray, a trim blonde BabyBoomer who favors Grand Canyon white-water
rafting to kill some slow time, is one of the world's most senior, most veteran
"hacker-trackers."   Her mentor was Donn Parker,  the California think-tank
theorist who got it all started 'way back in the mid70s, the "grandfather of the
field,"  "the great bald eagle of computer crime."
    And what she has learned, Gail Thackeray teaches.  Endlessly. Tirelessly.
To anybody.  To  Secret Service agents and state police, at the Glynco, Georgia
federal training center.  To local police, on "roadshows" with her slide projector
and notebook. To corporate security personnel.  To journalists.  To parents.

    Even *crooks* look to Gail Thackeray for advice. Phone-phreaks call her
at the office.  They know very well who she is.  They pump her for information
on what the cops are up to, how much they know. Sometimes whole *crowds*
of phone phreaks, hanging out on illegal conference calls, will call Gail
Thackeray up.  They taunt her.  And, as always, they boast.  Phone-phreaks, real
stone phone-phreaks, simply *cannot shut up.*  They natter on for hours.
    Left to themselves, they mostly talk about the intricacies of ripping-off
phones; it's about as interesting as listening to hot-rodders talk about suspension
and distributor-caps.  They also gossip cruelly about each other.  And when
talking to Gail Thackeray, they incriminate themselves.   "I have tapes,"
Thackeray says coolly.
    Phone phreaks just talk like crazy.  "Dial-Tone" out in Alabama has been
known to spend half-an- hour simply reading stolen phone-codes aloud into
voice-mail answering machines.  Hundreds, thousands of numbers, recited in a
monotone, without a break -- an eerie phenomenon.  When arrested, it's a rare
phone phreak who doesn't inform at endless length on everybody he knows.
    Hackers are no better.  What other group of criminals, she asks
rhetorically, publishes newsletters and holds conventions?   She seems deeply
nettled by the sheer brazenness of this  behavior, though to an outsider, this
activity might make one wonder whether hackers should be considered
"criminals" at all.  Skateboarders have magazines, and they trespass a lot.  Hot
rod people have magazines and they break speed limits and sometimes kill
people....
    I ask her whether it would be any loss to society if phone phreaking and
computer hacking, as hobbies, simply dried up and blew away, so that nobody
ever did it again. She seems surprised.  "No," she says swiftly. "Maybe a little...
in the old days... the MIT stuff...  But there's a lot of wonderful, legal stuff you
can do with computers now, you don't have to break into somebody else's just to
learn.  You don't have that excuse. You can learn all you like." Did you ever
hack into a system? I ask.


    The trainees do it at Glynco.  Just to demonstrate system vulnerabilities.
She's cool to the notion.  Genuinely indifferent. "What kind of computer do you
have?"
    "A Compaq 286LE," she mutters.
    "What kind do you *wish* you had?"
    At this question, the unmistakable light of true hackerdom flares in Gail
Thackeray's eyes.  She becomes tense, animated, the words pour out:  "An
Amiga 2000 with an IBM card and Mac emulation! The most common hacker
machines are Amigas and Commodores.  And Apples."  If she had the Amiga,
she enthuses, she could run a whole galaxy of seized computer-evidence disks
on one convenient multifunctional machine.  A cheap one, too.  Not like the old
Attorney General lab, where they had an ancient CP/M machine, assorted Amiga
flavors and Apple flavors, a couple IBMS, all the utility software... but no
Commodores.  The workstations down at the Attorney General's are Wang
dedicated word-processors.  Lame machines  tied in to an office net --  though at
least they get online to the Lexis and Westlaw legal data services. I don't say
anything.  I recognize the syndrome, though.  This computer-fever has been
running through segments of our society for years now.  It's a strange kind of
lust: K-hunger, Meg-hunger; but it's a shared disease; it can kill parties dead, as
conversation spirals into the deepest and most deviant recesses of software
releases and expensive  peripherals....  The mark of the hacker beast.  I have it
too.  The whole "electronic community," whatever  the hell that is, has it.  Gail
Thackeray has it.  Gail Thackeray is a hacker cop.   My immediate reaction is a
strong rush of indignant pity:  *why doesn't somebody buy this woman her
Amiga?!*   It's not like she's asking for a Cray X-MP supercomputer mainframe;
an Amiga's a sweet little  cookie-box thing.  We're losing zillions in organized
fraud; prosecuting and defending a single hacker case in court can cost a
hundred grand easy.  How come nobody can come up with four lousy grand so
this woman can do her job?  For a hundred grand we could buy every computer
cop in America an Amiga. There aren't that many of 'em.
    Computers.  The lust, the hunger, for computers.  The loyalty they
inspire, the intense sense of possessiveness.   The culture they have bred.  I
myself am sitting in  downtown Phoenix,  Arizona because it suddenly occurred
to me that the police might -- just *might* -- come and take away my computer.
The prospect of this, the mere *implied threat,*  was unbearable.  It literally
changed my life.  It was changing the lives of many  others.  Eventually it would
change everybody's life.
    Gail Thackeray was one of the top computercrime people in America.
And I was just some novelist, and yet I had a better computer than hers.
*Practically everybody I knew*  had a better computer than Gail Thackeray and
her feeble  laptop 286.  It was like sending the sheriff in to clean up Dodge City
and arming her with a slingshot cut from an old rubber tire.
    But then again, you don't need a howitzer to enforce the law.  You can do
a lot just with a badge. With a badge alone, you can basically wreak havoc, take
a terrible vengeance on wrongdoers.  Ninety percent of "computer crime
investigation" is just "crime investigation:" names, places, dossiers, modus
operandi, search warrants, victims, complainants, informants...
    What will computer crime look like in ten years?  Will it get better?  Did
"Sundevil" send 'em reeling back in confusion?
    It'll be like it is now,  only worse, she tells me with perfect conviction.
Still there in the background, ticking along, changing with the times:  the
criminal underworld.  It'll be like drugs are.  Like our problems with alcohol.
All the cops and laws in the world never solved our problems with alcohol.  If
there's something people want, a certain percentage of them are just going to
take it.  Fifteen percent of the populace will never steal.  Fifteen percent will
steal most anything not nailed down.  The battle is for the hearts and minds of
the remaining seventy percent.
    And criminals catch on fast.  If there's not "too steep a learning curve" --
if it doesn't require a baffling amount of expertise and practice -- then criminals
are often some of the first through the gate of a new technology.  Especially if it
helps them to hide.  They have tons of cash, criminals.  The new
communications tech -- like pagers, cellular phones, faxes, Federal Express --
were pioneered by rich corporate people, and by criminals.  In the early years of
pagers and beepers, dope dealers were so enthralled this technology that owing a
beeper was practically prima facie evidence of cocaine dealing. CB radio
exploded when the speed limit hit 55 and breaking the highway law became a
national pastime.  Dope dealers send cash by  Federal Express, despite, or
perhaps *because of,* the warnings in FedEx offices that tell you never to try
this.  Fed Ex uses X-rays and dogs on their mail, to stop drug shipments.  That
doesn't work very well.
    Drug dealers went wild over cellular phones. There are simple methods
of faking ID on cellular phones, making the location of the call mobile, free of
charge, and effectively untraceable.  Now victimized cellular companies
routinely bring in vast toll-lists of calls to Colombia and Pakistan.
    Judge Greene's fragmentation of the phone company is driving law
enforcement nuts.  Four thousand telecommunications companies.  Fraud
skyrocketing.  Every temptation in the world available with a phone and a credit
card number. Criminals untraceable.  A galaxy of "new neat rotten things to do."



    If there were one thing Thackeray would like to have, it would be an
effective legal end-run through this new fragmentation minefield.


    It would be a new form of electronic search warrant, an "electronic letter
of marque" to be issued by a judge.  It would create a new category of
"electronic emergency."   Like a wiretap, its use would be rare, but it would cut
across state lines and force swift cooperation from all concerned.  Cellular,
phone, laser, computer network, PBXes, AT&T, Baby Bells, long-distance
entrepreneurs, packet radio. Some document, some mighty court-order, that
could slice through four thousand separate forms of corporate red-tape, and get
her at once to the source of calls, the source of email threats and viruses, the
sources of bomb threats, kidnapping threats.  "From now on," she says, "the
Lindberg baby will always die."
    Something that would make the Net sit still, if only for a moment.
Something that would get her up  to speed.  Seven league boots.  That's what she
really needs.  "Those guys move in nanoseconds and I'm on the Pony Express."
And then, too, there's the  coming international angle.  Electronic crime has
never been easy to localize, to tie to a physical jurisdiction.  And phonephreaks
and hackers loathe boundaries, they jump them whenever they can.  The English.
The Dutch. And the Germans, especially the ubiquitous Chaos Computer Club.
The Australians.  They've all learned phone-phreaking from America.  It's a
growth mischief industry.  The multinational networks are global, but
governments and the police simply aren't.  Neither are the laws.  Or the legal
frameworks for citizen protection.
    One language is global, though -- English. Phone phreaks speak English;
it's their native tongue even if they're Germans.  English may have  started in
England but now it's the Net language; it might as well be called "CNNese."
    Asians just aren't much into phone phreaking. They're the world masters
at organized software piracy.  The French aren't into phone-phreaking either.
The French are into computerized industrial espionage.
    In the old days of the MIT righteous hackerdom, crashing systems didn't
hurt anybody. Not all that much, anyway.  Not permanently.  Now the players
are more venal.  Now the consequences are worse.  Hacking will begin killing
people soon.  Already there are methods of stacking calls onto 911 systems,
annoying the police, and possibly causing the death of some poor soul calling in
with a genuine emergency.  Hackers in Amtrak computers, or airtraffic control
computers, will kill somebody someday.  Maybe a lot of people.  Gail Thackeray
expects it.
    And the viruses are getting nastier.  The "Scud" virus is the latest one
out.  It wipes hard-disks.
    According to Thackeray, the idea that phonephreaks are Robin Hoods is
a fraud.  They don't deserve this repute.   Basically, they pick on the weak.
AT&T now protects itself with the fearsome ANI (Automatic Number
Identification) trace capability.  When AT&T wised up and tightened  security
generally, the phreaks drifted into the Baby Bells.  The Baby Bells lashed out in
1989 and 1990, so the phreaks switched to smaller long-distance entrepreneurs.
Today, they are moving into locally owned PBXes and voice-mail systems,
which are full of security holes, dreadfully easy to hack.  These victims aren't the
moneybags Sheriff of Nottingham or Bad King John, but small groups of
innocent people who find it hard to protect themselves, and who really suffer
from these depredations.  Phone  phreaks pick on the weak.  They do it for
power.  If it were legal, they wouldn't do it.  They don't want service, or
knowledge, they want the thrill of powertripping.   There's plenty of knowledge
or service around, if you're willing to pay.  Phone phreaks don't  pay, they steal.
It's because it is illegal that it feels like power, that it gratifies their vanity.
    I leave Gail Thackeray with a handshake at the door of her office
building -- a vast InternationalStyle office building downtown.  The Sheriff's
office is renting part of it.  I get the vague impression that quite a lot of the
building is empty -- real estate crash. In a Phoenix sports apparel store, in a
downtown mall, I meet the "Sun Devil" himself.  He is the cartoon mascot of
Arizona State University, whose football stadium, "Sundevil," is near the local
Secret Service HQ -- hence the name Operation Sundevil. The Sun Devil
himself is named "Sparky."  Sparky the Sun Devil is maroon and bright yellow,
the school colors.  Sparky brandishes a three-tined yellow pitchfork.  He has a
small mustache, pointed ears, a barbed tail, and is dashing forward jabbing the
air with the pitchfork, with an expression of devilish glee.
    Phoenix was the home of Operation Sundevil. The Legion of Doom ran a
hacker bulletin board called "The Phoenix Project."  An Australian hacker
named "Phoenix"  once burrowed through the Internet to attack Cliff Stoll, then
bragged and boasted about it to *The New York Times.*  This net of
coincidence is both odd and meaningless.
    The headquarters of the Arizona Attorney General, Gail Thackeray's
former workplace, is on 1275 Washington Avenue.  Many of the downtown
streets in Phoenix are named after prominent American presidents:  Washington,
Jefferson, Madison....
    After dark, all the employees go home to their suburbs.  Washington,
Jefferson and Madison - what would be the Phoenix inner city, if there were an
inner city in this sprawling automobile-bred town --  become the haunts of
transients and derelicts. The homeless. The sidewalks along Washington are
lined with orange trees.  Ripe fallen fruit lies scattered like croquet balls on the
sidewalks and gutters.  No one seems to be eating them.  I try a fresh one.  It
tastes unbearably bitter.

    The Attorney General's office, built in 1981 during the Babbitt
administration,  is a long low twostory building of white cement and wall-sized
sheets  of curtain-glass.  Behind each glass wall is a lawyer's office, quite open
and visible to anyone strolling by. Across the street is a dour government
building labelled simply ECONOMIC SECURITY, something that has not been
in great supply in the American Southwest lately.
    The offices  are about twelve feet square.  They feature tall wooden cases
full of red-spined lawbooks; Wang computer monitors; telephones; Post-it notes
galore.  Also framed law diplomas and a general excess of bad Western
landscape art.  Ansel Adams photos are a big favorite, perhaps to compensate for
the dismal specter of the parking lot, two acres of striped black asphalt, which
features gravel landscaping and some sickly-looking barrel cacti.
    It has grown dark.  Gail Thackeray has told me that the people who work
late here, are afraid of muggings in the parking lot.  It seems cruelly ironic that a
woman tracing electronic racketeers across the interstate labyrinth of Cyberspace
should fear an assault by a homeless derelict in the parking lot of her own
workplace.
    Perhaps this is less than coincidence.  Perhaps these two seemingly
disparate worlds are somehow generating one another.  The poor and
disenfranchised take to the streets, while the rich and computer-equipped, safe in
their bedrooms,  chatter over their modems.  Quite often the derelicts kick the
glass out and break in to the lawyers' offices, if they see something they need or
want badly enough. I cross  the parking lot to the street behind the Attorney
General's office.  A pair of young tramps are bedding down on flattened sheets
of cardboard, under an alcove stretching over the sidewalk.  One tramp wears a
glitter-covered T-shirt reading "CALIFORNIA" in Coca-Cola cursive.  His nose
and cheeks look chafed and swollen; they glisten with what seems to be
Vaseline.  The other tramp has a ragged long-sleeved shirt and lank brown hair
parted in the middle. They both wear blue jeans coated in grime.  They are both
drunk. "You guys crash here a lot?" I ask them.
    They look at me warily.  I am wearing black  jeans, a black pinstriped
suit jacket and a black silk tie.  I have odd shoes and a funny haircut.
    "It's our first time here," says the red-nosed tramp unconvincingly. There
is a lot of cardboard stacked here.  More than any two people could use.


    "We usually stay at the Vinnie's down the street," says the brown-haired
tramp, puffing a Marlboro with a meditative air, as he sprawls with his head on a
blue nylon backpack.  "The Saint Vincent's." "You know who works in that
building over there?"  I ask, pointing. The brown-haired tramp shrugs.  "Some
kind of attorneys, it says." `
    We urge one another to take it easy.  I give them five bucks. A block
down the street I meet a vigorous workman who is wheeling along some kind of
industrial trolley; it has what appears to be a tank of propane on it.

    We make eye contact.  We nod politely.  I walk past him.  "Hey!  Excuse
me sir!" he says.
    "Yes?" I say, stopping and turning.
    "Have you seen," the guy says rapidly, "a black guy, about 6'7", scars on
both his cheeks like this --" he gestures --  "wears a black baseball cap on
backwards, wandering around here anyplace?"
    "Sounds like I don't much *want* to meet him," I say.
    "He took my wallet," says my new acquaintance. "Took it this morning.
Y'know, some people would be *scared* of a guy like that.  But I'm not scared.
I'm from Chicago.  I'm gonna hunt him down.  We do things like that in
Chicago."
    "Yeah?"
    "I went to the cops and now he's got an APB out on his ass," he says with
satisfaction.  "You run into him, you let me know." "Okay," I say.  "What is your
name, sir?"
    "Stanley...."
    "And how can I reach you?"
    "Oh," Stanley says, in the same rapid voice, "you don't have to reach, uh,
me.  You can just call the cops.  Go straight to the cops." He reaches into a
pocket and pulls out a greasy piece of pasteboard. "See, here's my report on
him."
    I look.  The "report," the size of an index card, is labelled PRO-ACT:
Phoenix Residents Opposing Active Crime Threat.... or is it  Organized Against
Crime Threat?  In the darkening street it's hard to read.  Some kind of vigilante
group?  Neighborhood watch?  I feel very puzzled.
    "Are you a police officer, sir?"

    He smiles, seems very pleased by the question.
    "No," he says. `
    "But you are a 'Phoenix Resident?'"
    "Would you believe a homeless person," Stanley says.
    "Really?  But what's with the..."   For the first time I take a close look at
Stanley's trolley.  It's a rubber-wheeled thing of industrial metal, but the device I
had mistaken for a tank of propane is in fact a water-cooler.  Stanley also has an
Army duffel-bag, stuffed tight as a sausage with clothing or perhaps a tent, and,
at the base of his trolley, a cardboard box and a battered leather briefcase.
    "I see," I say, quite at a loss.  For the first time I notice that Stanley has a
wallet.  He has not lost his wallet at all.  It is in his back pocket and chained to
his belt.  It's not a new wallet.  It seems to have seen a lot of wear.
    "Well, you know how it is, brother," says Stanley. Now that I know that
he is homeless -- *a possible threat* --  my entire perception of him has changed
in an instant.   His speech, which once seemed just bright and enthusiastic, now
seems to have a dangerous tang of mania.  "I have to do this!" he  assures me.
"Track this guy down... It's a thing I do... you know... to keep myself together!"
He smiles, nods, lifts his trolley by its decaying rubber handgrips.
    "Gotta work together, y'know, "  Stanley booms, his face alight with
cheerfulness, "the police can't do everything!"
    The gentlemen I met in my stroll in downtown Phoenix are the only
computer illiterates in this book.  To regard them as irrelevant, however, would
be a grave mistake.
    As computerization spreads across society, the populace at large is
subjected to wave after wave of future shock.  But, as a necessary converse, the
"computer community" itself is subjected to wave after wave of incoming
computer illiterates.   How will those currently enjoying America's digital
bounty regard, and treat, all this teeming refuse yearning to breathe free?  Will
the electronic frontier be another Land of Opportunity -- or an armed and
monitored enclave, where the disenfranchised snuggle on their cardboard at the
locked doors of our houses of justice?
    Some people just don't get along with computers.  They can't read.  They
can't type.  They just don't have it in their heads to master arcane instructions in
wirebound manuals.   Somewhere,  the process of computerization of the
populace will reach a limit.  Some people -- quite decent people maybe, who
might have thrived in any other situation -- will be left irretrievably outside the
bounds.   What's to be done with these people, in the bright new shiny
electroworld?  How will they be regarded, by the mouse-whizzing masters of
cyberspace?  With contempt?  Indifference?  Fear?
    In retrospect, it astonishes me to realize how quickly poor Stanley
became a  perceived threat.  Surprise and fear are closely allied feelings.  And
the world of computing is full of surprises.
    I met one character in the streets of Phoenix whose role in those book is
supremely and directly relevant.  That personage was Stanley's giant thieving
scarred phantom.  This phantasm is everywhere in this book.  He is the specter
haunting cyberspace.
    Sometimes he's a maniac vandal ready to smash the phone system for no
sane reason at all. Sometimes he's a fascist fed, coldly programming  his mighty
mainframes to destroy our Bill of Rights. Sometimes he's a telco bureaucrat,
covertly conspiring to register all modems in the service of an Orwellian
surveillance regime.   Mostly, though, this fearsome phantom is a "hacker."
He's strange, he doesn't belong, he's not authorized, he doesn't smell right, he's
not keeping his proper place, he's not one of us.  The focus of fear is the hacker,
for much the same reasons that Stanley's fancied assailant is black.
    Stanley's demon can't go away, because he doesn't exist.  Despite
singleminded and  tremendous effort, he can't be arrested, sued, jailed, or fired.
The only constructive way to do *anything* about him is to learn more about
Stanley himself. This learning process may be repellent, it may be ugly, it may
involve grave elements of paranoiac confusion, but it's necessary.  Knowing
Stanley requires something more than class-crossing condescension.  It requires
more than steely legal objectivity.  It requires  human compassion and sympathy.
To know Stanley is to know his demon.  If you know the other guy's demon,
then maybe you'll come to know some of your own.   You'll be able to separate
reality from illusion.   And then you won't do your cause, and yourself, more
harm than good. Like poor damned Stanley from Chicago did. #
    The Federal Computer Investigations Committee (FCIC) is the most
important and influential organization in the realm of American computer-crime.
Since the police of other countries have largely taken their computer-crime cues
from American methods, the FCIC might well be called the most important
computer crime group in the world.
    It is also, by federal standards, an organization of great unorthodoxy.
State and local investigators mix with federal agents.   Lawyers, financial
auditors and computer-security programmers trade notes with street cops.
Industry vendors and telco security people show up to explain their gadgetry and
plead for protection and justice.   Private investigators, think-tank experts and
industry pundits throw in  their two cents' worth.   The FCIC is the antithesis of a
formal bureaucracy. Members of the FCIC are obscurely proud of this fact; they
recognize their group as aberrant,  but are entirely convinced that this, for them,
outright *weird* behavior is nevertheless *absolutely necessary* to get their
jobs done.
    FCIC regulars  -- from the Secret Service, the FBI, the IRS, the
Department of Labor, the offices of federal attorneys, state police, the Air Force,
from military intelligence --  often attend meetings, held hither and thither across
the country,  at their own expense.  The FCIC doesn't get grants.  It doesn't
charge membership fees.  It doesn't have a boss.  It has no headquarters -- just a
mail drop in Washington DC, at the Fraud Division of the Secret Service.  It
doesn't have a budget.  It doesn't have schedules.  It meets three times a year --
sort of. Sometimes it issues publications, but the FCIC has no regular publisher,
no treasurer, not even a secretary.   There are no minutes of FCIC  meetings.
Non-federal people are considered "non-voting members,"  but there's not much
in the way of elections.  There are no badges, lapel pins or  certificates of
membership.   Everyone is on a firstname basis.   There are about forty of them.
Nobody knows how many, exactly.  People come, people go -sometimes people
"go" formally but still hang around anyway.  Nobody has ever exactly figured
out what "membership" of this "Committee" actually entails.
    Strange as this may seem to some, to anyone familiar with the social
world of computing, the "organization" of the FCIC is very recognizable.

    For years now, economists and management theorists have speculated
that the tidal wave of the information revolution would destroy rigid, pyramidal
bureaucracies, where everything is topdown and centrally controlled.   Highly
trained "employees" would take on much greater autonomy, being self-starting,
and self-motivating,  moving from place to place, task to task, with great speed
and fluidity.  "Ad-hocracy" would rule, with groups of people spontaneously
knitting together across organizational lines, tackling the problem at hand,
applying intense computer-aided expertise to it, and then vanishing whence they
came.
    This is more or less what has actually happened in the world of federal
computer investigation.  With the conspicuous exception of the phone
companies, which are after all over a hundred years old, practically *every*
organization that plays any important role in this book functions just like the
FCIC.    The Chicago Task Force, the Arizona Racketeering Unit, the Legion of
Doom, the Phrack crowd, the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- they *all* look
and act like "tiger teams" or "user's groups."  They are all electronic ad-hocracies
leaping up spontaneously to attempt to meet a need.

    Some are police.  Some are, by strict definition, criminals.  Some are
political interest-groups.   But every single group has that same quality of
apparent spontaneity -- "Hey, gang!  My uncle's got a barn -let's put on a show!"
    Every one of these groups is embarrassed by this "amateurism," and, for
the sake of their public image in a world of non-computer people,  they all
attempt to look as stern and formal and impressive as possible.    These
electronic frontier-dwellers resemble groups of nineteenth-century pioneers
hankering after the respectability of statehood. There are however,  two crucial
differences in the historical experience of these "pioneers" of the nineteeth and
twenty-first centuries.


    First, powerful information technology *does*  play into the hands of
small, fluid, loosely organized groups.  There have always been "pioneers,"
"hobbyists," "amateurs," "dilettantes," "volunteers," "movements," "users'
groups" and "blue-ribbon panels of experts" around.   But a group of this kind -
when technically equipped to ship huge amounts of specialized information, at
lightning speed, to its members, to government, and to the press -- is simply a
different kind of animal.   It's like the difference between an eel and an electric
eel.
    The second crucial change is that American society is currently in a state
approaching permanent technological revolution.  In the world of  computers
particularly,  it is practically impossible to *ever* stop being a  "pioneer," unless
you either drop dead or deliberately jump off the bus.  The scene has never
slowed down enough to become well-institutionalized.  And after twenty, thirty,
forty years the "computer revolution" continues to spread, to permeate new
corners of society.   Anything that really works is already obsolete.
    If you spend your entire working life as a "pioneer," the word "pioneer"
begins to lose its meaning.  Your way of life looks less and less like an
introduction to "something else" more stable and organized,  and more and more
like *just the way things are.*   A "permanent revolution" is really a
contradiction in terms.  If "turmoil"  lasts long enough, it simply becomes *a
new kind of society*  -still the same game of history, but new players, new rules.
Apply this to the world of late twentieth-century law enforcement, and the
implications are  novel and puzzling indeed.  Any bureaucratic rulebook you
write about computer-crime will be flawed when you write it, and almost an
antique by the time it sees print.   The fluidity and fast reactions of the FCIC
give them a great advantage in this regard,  which explains their success.  Even
with the best will in the world (which it does not, in fact, possess) it is
impossible for an organization the size of the U.S. Federal Bureau of
Investigation to get up to speed on the theory and practice of computer crime.   If
they tried to train all their agents to do this, it would be *suicidal,*  as they
would *never be able to do anything else.*

    The FBI does try to train its agents in the basics of electronic crime, at
their base in Quantico, Virginia.   And the Secret Service, along with many other
law enforcement groups, runs quite successful and well-attended training
courses on wire fraud, business crime, and computer intrusion  at the Federal
Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC, pronounced "fletsy") in Glynco,
Georgia.   But the best efforts of these bureaucracies does not remove the
absolute need for a "cutting-edge mess" like the FCIC.
    For you see -- the members of FCIC *are* the trainers of the rest of law
enforcement.  Practically and literally speaking, they are the Glynco computer-
crime faculty by another name.  If the FCIC went over a cliff on a bus, the U.S.
law enforcement community would be rendered deaf dumb and blind in the
world of computer crime, and would swiftly feel a desperate need to reinvent
them. And this is no time to go starting from scratch.
    On June 11, 1991, I once again arrived in Phoenix, Arizona, for the latest
meeting of the Federal Computer Investigations Committee.  This  was more or
less the twentieth meeting of this stellar group.   The count was uncertain, since
nobody could figure out whether to include the meetings of "the Colluquy,"
which is what the FCIC was called in the mid-1980s before it had even managed
to obtain the dignity of its own acronym.
    Since my last visit to Arizona, in May, the local AzScam bribery scandal
had resolved itself in a general muddle of humiliation.  The Phoenix chief of
police, whose agents had videotaped nine state  legislators up to no good, had
resigned his office in a tussle with the Phoenix city council over the propriety of
his undercover operations.
    The Phoenix Chief could now join Gail Thackeray and eleven of her
closest associates in the shared experience of politically motivated
unemployment.   As of June, resignations were still continuing at the Arizona
Attorney General's office, which could be interpreted as either a New Broom
Sweeping Clean or a Night of the Long Knives Part II, depending on your point
of view.
    The meeting of FCIC was held at the Scottsdale Hilton Resort. Scottsdale
is a wealthy suburb of Phoenix, known as "Scottsdull" to scoffing local trendies,
but well-equipped with posh shoppingmalls and manicured lawns, while
conspicuously undersupplied with homeless derelicts.   The Scottsdale Hilton
Resort was a sprawling hotel in postmodern  crypto-Southwestern style.  It
featured a "mission bell tower" plated in turquoise tile and vaguely resembling a
Saudi minaret.
    Inside it was all barbarically striped Santa Fe Style decor.   There was a
health spa downstairs and a large oddly-shaped pool in the patio.  A poolside
umbrella-stand offered Ben and Jerry's politically correct Peace Pops.
    I registered as a member of FCIC, attaining a handy discount rate, then
went in search of the Feds. Sure enough, at the back of the hotel grounds came
the unmistakable sound of Gail Thackeray holding forth.
    Since I had also attended the Computers Freedom and Privacy
conference (about which more later), this was the second time I had seen
Thackeray in a group of her law enforcement colleagues.   Once again I was
struck by how simply pleased they seemed to see her.   It was natural that she'd
get *some* attention, as Gail was one of two women in a group of some thirty
men; but there was a lot more to it than that.
    Gail Thackeray personifies the social glue of the FCIC.  They could give
a damn about her losing her job with the Attorney General.  They were sorry
about it, of course, but hell, they'd all lost jobs.   If they were the kind of guys
who liked steady  boring jobs, they would never have gotten into computer work
in the first place.
    I wandered into her circle and was immediately introduced to five
strangers.  The conditions of my visit at FCIC were reviewed.  I would not quote
anyone directly.  I would not tie opinions expressed to the agencies of the
attendees.  I would not (a purely hypothetical example) report the conversation
of a guy from the Secret Service talking quite civilly to  a guy from the FBI, as
these two agencies *never*  talk to each other, and the IRS (also present, also
hypothetical) *never talks to anybody.*
    Worse yet, I was forbidden to attend the first conference.  And I didn't.  I
have no idea what the FCIC was up to behind closed doors that afternoon. I
rather suspect that they were engaging in a frank and thorough confession of
their errors, goof-ups and blunders, as this has been a feature of every FCIC
meeting since their legendary Memphis beer bust of 1986.  Perhaps the single
greatest attraction of FCIC is that it is a place where you can go, let your hair
down, and completely level with people who actually comprehend what you are
talking about. Not only do they understand you, but they *really pay attention,*
they are *grateful for your insights,* and they *forgive you,*  which in nine
cases out of ten is something even your boss can't do, because as soon as you
start talking "ROM," "BBS," or "T-1 trunk," his eyes glaze over. I had nothing
much to do that afternoon.  The FCIC were beavering away in their  conference
room.  Doors were firmly closed, windows too dark to peer through.  I wondered
what a real hacker, a computer intruder, would do at a meeting like this.
    The answer came at once.  He would "trash" the place.  Not reduce the
place to trash  in some orgy of vandalism; that's not the use of the term in the
hacker milieu.  No, he would quietly *empty the trash baskets* and silently raid
any valuable data indiscreetly thrown away.
    Journalists have been known to do this. (Journalists hunting information
have been known to do almost every single unethical thing that hackers have
ever done.  They also throw in a few awful techniques all their own.)  The
legality of 'trashing' is somewhat dubious but it is not in fact flagrantly illegal.
It was, however, absurd to contemplate trashing the FCIC.  These people knew
all about trashing.   I wouldn't last fifteen seconds.
    The idea sounded interesting, though.   I'd been hearing a lot about the
practice lately.  On the spur of the moment, I decided I would try trashing the
office *across the hall*  from the FCIC, an area which had nothing to do with
the investigators.
    The office was tiny; six chairs, a table.... Nevertheless, it was open, so I
dug around in its plastic trash can.
    To my utter astonishment, I came up with the torn scraps of a SPRINT
long-distance phone bill. More digging produced a bank statement and the
scraps of a hand-written letter, along with gum, cigarette ashes, candy wrappers
and a day-old-issue of USA TODAY.
    The trash went back in its receptacle while the scraps of data went into
my travel bag.  I detoured through the hotel souvenir shop for some Scotch tape
and went up to my room.
    Coincidence or not, it was quite true.  Some poor soul had, in fact,
thrown a SPRINT bill into the hotel's trash.   Date May 1991, total amount due:
$252.36.  Not a business phone, either, but a residential bill, in the name of
someone called Evelyn (not her real name).  Evelyn's records showed a ## PAST
DUE BILL ##!   Here was her nine-digit account ID.    Here was a stern
computer-printed warning:  "TREAT YOUR FONCARD AS YOU WOULD
ANY CREDIT CARD.  TO SECURE AGAINST FRAUD, NEVER GIVE
YOUR FONCARD NUMBER OVER THE PHONE UNLESS YOU
INITIATED THE CALL.  IF YOU RECEIVE SUSPICIOUS CALLS PLEASE
NOTIFY CUSTOMER SERVICE IMMEDIATELY!"
    I examined my watch.  Still plenty of time left for the FCIC to carry on.  I
sorted out the scraps of Evelyn's SPRINT bill and re-assembled them with fresh
Scotch tape.  Here was her ten-digit FONCARD number.   Didn't seem to have
the ID number necessary to cause real fraud trouble.
    I did, however, have Evelyn's home phone number.  And the phone
numbers for a whole crowd of Evelyn's long-distance friends and acquaintances.
In San Diego, Folsom, Redondo, Las Vegas, La Jolla, Topeka, and Northampton
Massachusetts.  Even somebody in Australia!
    I examined other documents.  Here was a bank statement.  It was
Evelyn's IRA account down at a bank in San Mateo California (total balance
$1877.20).  Here was a charge-card bill for $382.64. She was paying it off bit by
bit.
    Driven by motives that were completely unethical and prurient, I now
examined the handwritten notes.  They had been torn fairly thoroughly, so much
so that it took me almost an entire five minutes to reassemble them.
    They were drafts of a love letter.  They had been written on the lined
stationery of Evelyn's employer, a biomedical company.  Probably written at
work when she should have been doing something else.
    "Dear Bob," (not his real name)  "I guess in everyone's life there comes a
time when hard  decisions have to be made, and this is a difficult one for me --
very upsetting.  Since you haven't called me, and I don't understand why, I can
only surmise it's because you don't want to.  I thought I would have heard from
you Friday.  I did have a few unusual problems with my phone and possibly you
tried, I hope so.
    "Robert, you asked me to 'let go'..."
    The first note ended.  *Unusual problems with her phone?*  I looked
swiftly at the next note. "Bob, not hearing from you for the whole weekend has
left me very perplexed..."

    Next draft. "Dear Bob, there is so much I don't understand right now, and
I wish I did.  I wish I could talk to you, but for some unknown reason you have
elected not to call -- this is so difficult for me to understand..."
    She tried again.
    "Bob, Since I have always held you in such high esteem, I had every
hope that we could remain good friends, but now one essential ingredient is
missing - respect.  Your ability to discard people when their purpose is served is
appalling to me.  The kindest thing you could do for me now is to leave me
alone. You are no longer welcome in my heart or home..."
    Try again.
    "Bob, I wrote a very factual note to you to say how much respect I had
lost for you, by the way you treat people, me in particular, so uncaring and cold.
The kindest thing you can do for me is to leave me alone entirely, as you are no
longer welcome in my heart or home. I would appreciate it if you could retire
your debt to me as soon as possible -- I wish no link to you in any way.
Sincerely, Evelyn."

    Good heavens, I thought, the bastard actually owes her money!  I turned
to the next page.
    "Bob:  very simple.  GOODBYE!  No more mind games -- no more
fascination -- no more coldness -no more respect for you!  It's over -- Finis.
Evie"
    There were two versions of the final brushoff letter, but they read about
the same.  Maybe she hadn't sent it.  The final item in my illicit and shameful
booty was an envelope addressed to "Bob"  at his home address, but it had no
stamp on it and it hadn't been mailed.
    Maybe she'd just been blowing off steam because her rascal boyfriend
had neglected to call her one weekend.   Big deal.  Maybe they'd kissed and
made up, maybe she and Bob were down at Pop's Chocolate Shop now, sharing
a malted.  Sure.
    Easy to find out.  All I had to do was call Evelyn up.  With a half-clever
story and enough brass- plated gall I could probably trick the truth out of her.
Phone-phreaks and hackers deceive people over the phone all the time.  It's
called "social engineering." Social engineering is a very common practice in the
underground, and almost magically effective. Human beings are almost always
the weakest link in computer security.  The simplest way to learn Things You
Are Not Meant To Know is simply to call up and exploit the knowledgeable
people.   With social engineering, you use the bits of specialized knowledge you
already have as a key, to manipulate people into believing that you are
legitimate.  You  can then coax, flatter, or frighten them into revealing almost
anything you want to know.  Deceiving people (especially over the phone) is
easy and fun. Exploiting their gullibility is very gratifying; it makes you feel very
superior to them. If I'd been a  malicious hacker on a trashing raid, I would now
have Evelyn very much in my power.  Given all this inside  data, it wouldn't take
much effort at all to invent a convincing lie.  If I were ruthless enough, and jaded
enough, and clever enough, this momentary indiscretion of hers -maybe
committed in tears, who knows -- could cause her a whole world of confusion
and grief.
    I didn't even have to have a *malicious*  motive. Maybe I'd be "on her
side," and call up Bob instead, and anonymously threaten to break both his
kneecaps if he didn't take Evelyn out for a steak dinner pronto.   It was still
profoundly *none of my business.*   To have gotten this knowledge at all was  a
sordid act and to use it would be to inflict a sordid injury.
    To do all these awful things would require exactly zero high-tech
expertise.  All it would take was the willingness to do it and a certain amount of
bent imagination. I went back downstairs. The hard-working FCIC, who had
labored forty-five minutes over their schedule, were through for the day, and
adjourned to the hotel bar.  We all had a beer.

    I had a chat with a guy about "Isis," or rather IACIS, the International
Association of Computer Investigation Specialists.  They're into "computer
forensics,"  the techniques of picking computersystems apart without destroying
vital evidence. IACIS, currently run out of Oregon, is comprised of investigators
in the U.S., Canada, Taiwan and  Ireland.  "Taiwan and Ireland?"  I said.  Are
*Taiwan* and *Ireland*  really in the forefront of this stuff? Well not exactly,
my informant admitted.  They just happen to have been the first ones to have
caught on by word of mouth.  Still, the international angle counts, because this is
obviously an international problem.  Phone-lines go everywhere.
    There was a Mountie here from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.  He
seemed to be having quite a good time.   Nobody had flung this Canadian out
because he might pose a foreign security risk. These are cyberspace cops.  They
still worry a lot about "jurisdictions," but mere geography is the least of their
troubles. NASA had failed to show.  NASA suffers a lot from computer
intrusions, in particular from Australian raiders and a well-trumpeted Chaos
Computer Club case,  and in 1990 there was a brief press flurry when it was
revealed that one of NASA's Houston branch-exchanges had been systematically
ripped off by a gang of phone-phreaks.   But the NASA guys had had their
funding cut.  They were stripping everything.
    Air Force OSI, its Office of Special  Investigations, is the *only*  federal
entity dedicated full-time to computer security.  They'd been expected to show
up in force, but some of them had cancelled -- a Pentagon budget pinch.
    As the empties piled up, the guys began joshing around and telling war-
stories.  "These are cops," Thackeray said tolerantly.  "If they're not talking shop
they talk about women and beer."
    I heard the story about the guy who, asked for "a copy" of a computer
disk, *photocopied the label on it.*  He put the floppy disk onto the glass plate
of a photocopier.  The blast of static when the copier worked  completely erased
all the real information on the disk.
    Some other poor souls threw a whole bag of confiscated diskettes into
the squad-car trunk next to the police radio.  The powerful radio signal blasted
them, too. We heard a bit about Dave Geneson, the first computer prosecutor, a
mainframe-runner in Dade County, turned lawyer.   Dave Geneson was one guy
who had hit the ground running, a signal virtue in making the transition to
computer-crime.  It was generally agreed that it was easier to learn the world of
computers first, then police or prosecutorial work. You could take certain
computer people and train 'em to successful police work -- but of course they
had to have the *cop mentality.*  They had to have street smarts.  Patience.
Persistence.  And  discretion.   You've got to make sure they're not hotshots,
show-offs,  "cowboys."
    Most of the folks in the bar had backgrounds in military intelligence, or
drugs, or homicide.  It was rudely opined that "military intelligence" was a
contradiction in terms, while even the grisly world of homicide was considered
cleaner than drug enforcement.  One guy had been 'way undercover doing dope-
work in Europe for four years straight. "I'm almost recovered now," he said
deadpan, with the acid black humor that is pure cop.  "Hey, now I can say
*fucker*  without putting *mother*  in front of it."
    "In the cop world," another guy said earnestly,  "everything is good and
bad, black and white.  In the computer world everything is gray."
    One guy -- a founder of the FCIC, who'd been with the group since it was
just the Colluquy -described his own introduction to the field.  He'd been a
Washington DC homicide guy called in on a "hacker" case.  From the word
"hacker," he naturally assumed he was on the trail of a knife-wielding marauder,
and went to the computer center expecting blood and a body.  When he finally
figured out what was happening there (after loudly demanding, in vain, that the
programmers "speak English"),  he called headquarters and told them he was
clueless about computers.  They told him  nobody else knew diddly either, and to
get the hell back to work.
    So, he said, he had proceeded by comparisons. By analogy.  By
metaphor.  "Somebody broke in to your computer, huh?"  Breaking and entering;
I can understand that.  How'd he get in?  "Over the phonelines."  Harassing
phone-calls, I can understand that!  What we need here is a tap and a trace!
    It worked.  It was better than nothing.   And it worked a lot faster when
he got hold of another cop who'd done something similar.  And then the two of
them got another, and another, and pretty soon the Colluquy was a happening
thing.  It helped a lot that everybody seemed to know Carlton Fitzpatrick, the
data-processing trainer in Glynco.
    The ice broke big-time in Memphis in '86.  The Colluquy had attracted a
bunch of new guys -- Secret Service, FBI, military, other feds, heavy guys.
Nobody wanted to tell anybody anything.  They suspected that if word got back
to the home office they'd all be fired.  They passed an uncomfortably guarded
afternoon.
    The formalities got them nowhere.  But after the formal session was
over, the organizers brought in a case of beer.  As soon as the participants
knocked it off with the bureaucratic ranks and turf-fighting, everything changed.
"I bared my soul," one veteran reminisced proudly.  By nightfall they were
building pyramids of empty beer-cans and doing everything but composing a
team fight song.
    FCIC were not the only computer-crime people around.  There was
DATTA (District Attorneys' Technology Theft Association),  though they mostly
specialized in chip theft, intellectual property, and black-market cases.  There
was HTCIA  (High Tech Computer Investigators Association), also out in
Silicon Valley, a year older than FCIC and featuring brilliant people like Donald
Ingraham.  There was LEETAC (Law Enforcement Electronic Technology
Assistance Committee)  in Florida, and computercrime units in Illinois and
Maryland and Texas and Ohio and Colorado and Pennsylvania.   But these were
local groups.  FCIC were the first to really network nationally and on a federal
level.
    FCIC people live on the phone lines.  Not on bulletin board systems --
they know very well what boards are, and they know that  boards aren't secure.
Everyone in the FCIC has a voice-phone bill like you wouldn't believe.  FCIC
people have been tight with the telco people for a long time.  Telephone
cyberspace is their native habitat.
    FCIC has three basic sub-tribes:  the trainers, the security people, and the
investigators.  That's why it's called an "Investigations Committee" with no
mention of the term "computer-crime" -- the dreaded "C-word."   FCIC,
officially, is "an association of agencies rather than individuals;" unofficially,
this field is small enough that the influence of individuals and individual
expertise is paramount.  Attendance is by invitation only, and most everyone in
FCIC considers himself a prophet without honor in his own house.
    Again and again I heard this,  with different  terms but identical
sentiments.  "I'd been sitting in the wilderness talking to myself."  "I was totally
isolated."  "I was desperate."  "FCIC is the best thing there is about computer
crime in America."   "FCIC is what really works."  "This is where you hear real
people telling you what's really happening out there, not just lawyers picking
nits."  "We taught each other everything we knew."
    The sincerity of these statements convinces me that this is true.  FCIC is
the real thing and it is invaluable.  It's also very sharply at odds with the rest of
the traditions and power structure in American law enforcement.   There
probably  hasn't been anything around as loose and go-getting as the  FCIC since
the start of the U.S. Secret Service in the 1860s.   FCIC people are living like
twenty-firstcentury people in a twentieth-century environment, and while there's
a great deal to be said for that, there's also a great deal to be said against it, and
those against it happen to control the budgets. I listened to two FCIC guys from
Jersey compare life histories.  One of them had been a biker in a fairly heavy-
duty gang in the 1960s.  "Oh, did you know so-and-so?" said the other guy from
Jersey. "Big guy, heavyset?"
    "Yeah, I knew him."
    "Yeah, he was one of ours.  He was our plant in the gang."
    "Really?  Wow!  Yeah, I knew him.  Helluva guy."
    Thackeray reminisced at length about being tear-gassed blind in the
November 1969  antiwar protests in Washington Circle, covering them for her
college paper.  "Oh yeah, I was there," said another cop.  "Glad to hear that tear
gas hit somethin'.  Haw haw haw."  He'd been so blind himself, he confessed,
that later that day he'd arrested a small tree.
    FCIC are an odd group, sifted out by coincidence and necessity, and
turned into a new kind of cop.   There are a lot of specialized cops in the world --
your bunco guys, your drug guys, your tax guys, but the only group that matches
FCIC for sheer isolation are probably the child-pornography people.  Because
they both deal with conspirators who are desperate to exchange forbidden data
and also desperate to hide; and because nobody else in law enforcement even
wants to hear about it.
    FCIC people tend to change jobs a lot.  They tend not to get the
equipment and training they want and need.  And they tend to get sued quite
often.
    As the night wore on and a band set up in the bar, the talk grew darker.
Nothing ever gets done in government, someone opined, until there's a
*disaster.*  Computing disasters are awful, but there's no denying that they
greatly  help the credibility of FCIC people.  The Internet Worm, for instance.
"For years we'd been warning about that -but it's nothing compared to what's
coming."  They expect horrors, these people.  They know that nothing will really
get done until there is a horror. #
    Next day we heard an extensive briefing from a guy who'd been a
computer cop, gotten into hot water with an Arizona city council, and now
installed computer networks for a living (at a considerable rise in pay).  He
talked about pulling fiber-optic networks apart.
    Even a single computer, with enough peripherals, is a literal "network" --
a bunch of machines all cabled together, generally with a complexity that puts
stereo units to shame.   FCIC people invent and publicize  methods of seizing
computers and maintaining their evidence.   Simple  things, sometimes, but vital
rules of thumb for street cops, who nowadays often stumble across a busy
computer in the midst of a drug investigation or a white-collar bust.  For
instance:  Photograph the system before you touch it.  Label the ends of all the
cables before you detach anything.  "Park" the heads on the disk drives before
you move them.  Get the diskettes.  Don't put the diskettes in magnetic fields.
Don't write on diskettes with ballpoint pens.  Get the manuals.  Get the printouts.
Get the handwritten notes.  Copy data before you look at it, and then examine
the copy instead of the original. Now our lecturer distributed copied diagrams of
a typical LAN or "Local Area Network", which happened to be out of
Connecticut.  *One hundred and fifty-nine*  desktop computers, each with its
own peripherals.  Three "file servers."  Five "star couplers" each with thirty-two
ports.  One sixteenport coupler off in the corner office.   All these machines
talking to each other, distributing electronic mail, distributing software,
distributing,  quite possibly, criminal evidence.  All linked by highcapacity fiber-
optic cable.  A bad guy -- cops talk a lot about "bad guys"  -- might be lurking on
PC #47 or #123 and distributing his ill doings onto some dupe's "personal"
machine in another office -- or  another floor -- or, quite possibly, two or three
miles away!   Or,  conceivably, the evidence might be "data-striped" -- split up
into meaningless slivers stored, one by one, on a whole crowd of different disk
drives.
    The lecturer challenged us for solutions.  I for one was utterly clueless.
As far as I could figure, the Cossacks were at the gate; there were probably more
disks in this single building than were seized during the entirety of Operation
Sundevil.
    "Inside informant," somebody said.  Right. There's always the human
angle, something easy to forget when contemplating the arcane recesses of high
technology.  Cops are skilled at getting people to talk, and computer people,
given a chair and some sustained attention, will talk about their  computers till
their throats go raw.  There's a case on record of a single question -- "How'd you
do it?" -eliciting a forty-five-minute videotaped confession from a computer
criminal who not only completely incriminated himself but drew helpful
diagrams.
    Computer people talk.  Hackers *brag.*   Phonephreaks talk
*pathologically*  -- why else are they stealing phone-codes, if not to natter for
ten hours straight to their friends on an opposite seaboard? Computer-literate
people do in fact possess an arsenal of nifty gadgets and techniques that would
allow them to conceal all kinds of exotic skullduggery, and if they could only
*shut up*  about it, they could probably get away with all manner of amazing
information-crimes.   But that's just not how it works -- or at least, that's not how
it's worked *so far.*
    Most every phone-phreak ever busted has swiftly implicated his mentors,
his disciples, and his friends.  Most every white-collar computer-criminal,
smugly convinced that his clever scheme is bulletproof,  swiftly learns otherwise
when, for the first time in his life, an actual no-kidding policeman leans over,
grabs the front of his shirt, looks him  right in the eye and says:  "All right,
*asshole* --  you and me are going downtown!"   All the hardware in the world
will not insulate your nerves from these actual real-life sensations of terror and
guilt.
    Cops know ways to get from point A to point Z without thumbing
through every letter in some smart-ass bad-guy's  alphabet.  Cops know how to
cut to the chase.  Cops know a lot of things other people don't know.
    Hackers know a lot of things other people don't know, too.  Hackers
know, for instance, how to sneak into your computer through the phone-lines.
But cops  can show up *right on your doorstep*  and carry off *you*  and your
computer in separate steel boxes.   A cop interested in hackers can grab them
and grill them.  A hacker interested in cops has to depend on hearsay,
underground legends, and what cops are willing to publicly reveal.  And the
Secret Service didn't get named "the *Secret*  Service" because they blab a lot.
Some people, our lecturer informed us, were under the mistaken impression that
it was "impossible" to tap a fiber-optic line.  Well, he announced, he and his son
had just whipped up a fiber-optic tap in his workshop at home.  He passed it
around the audience, along with a circuit-covered LAN plug-in card so we'd all
recognize one if we saw it on a case.  We all had a look.
    The tap was a classic "Goofy Prototype" -- a thumb-length rounded metal
cylinder with a pair of plastic brackets on it.  From one end dangled three thin
black cables, each of which ended in a tiny black plastic cap.   When you
plucked the safety-cap  off the end of a cable,  you could see the glass fiber  - no
thicker than a pinhole.

    Our lecturer informed us that the metal cylinder was a "wavelength
division multiplexer." Apparently, what one did was to cut the fiber-optic cable,
insert two of the legs into the cut to complete the network again, and then read
any passing data on the line by hooking up the third leg to some kind of monitor.
Sounded simple enough.  I wondered why nobody had thought of it before.  I
also wondered whether this guy's son back at the workshop had any teenage
friends.
    We had a break.  The guy sitting next to me was wearing a giveaway
baseball cap advertising the Uzi submachine gun.  We had a desultory chat about
the merits of Uzis.  Long a favorite of the Secret Service, it seems Uzis went out
of fashion with the advent of the Persian Gulf War, our Arab allies taking some
offense at Americans toting Israeli weapons.  Besides, I was informed by another
expert, Uzis jam.  The equivalent weapon of choice today is the Heckler &
Koch, manufactured in Germany.

    The guy with the Uzi cap was a forensic photographer.  He also did a lot
of photographic surveillance work in computer crime cases.   He  used to, that is,
until the firings in Phoenix.  He was now a private investigator and, with his
wife, ran a photography salon specializing in weddings and portrait photos.  At -
- one must repeat -- a considerable rise in income. He was still FCIC.  If you
were FCIC, and you needed to talk to an expert about forensic photography,
well, there he was, willing and able.  If he hadn't shown up, people would have
missed him.
    Our lecturer had raised the point that preliminary investigation of a
computer system is vital before any seizure is undertaken.  It's vital to
understand how many machines are in there, what kinds there are, what kind of
operating system they use,  how many people use them, where the actual data
itself is stored.  To simply barge into an office demanding "all the computers" is
a recipe for swift disaster.
    This entails some discreet inquiries beforehand. In fact, what it entails is
basically undercover work. An intelligence operation.   *Spying,*  not to put too
fine a point on it.
    In a chat after the lecture, I asked an attendee whether "trashing" might
work.
    I received a swift briefing on the theory and  practice of "trash covers."
Police "trash covers," like "mail covers" or like wiretaps, require the agreement
of a judge.  This obtained, the "trashing" work of cops is just like that of hackers,
only more so and much better organized.  So much so, I was informed, that
mobsters in Phoenix make extensive use of locked garbage cans picked up by a
specialty high-security trash company.
    In one case, a tiger team of Arizona cops had trashed a local residence
for four months.  Every week they showed up on the municipal garbage truck,
disguised as garbagemen, and carried the contents of the suspect cans off to a
shade tree, where they combed through the garbage -- a messy task, especially
considering that one of the occupants was undergoing kidney dialysis.  All useful
documents were cleaned, dried and examined.  A discarded typewriter-ribbon
was an  especially valuable source of data, as its long onestrike ribbon of film
contained the contents of every letter mailed out of the house.  The letters were
neatly retyped by a police secretary equipped with a large desk-mounted
magnifying glass.
    There is something weirdly disquieting about the whole subject of
"trashing" -- an unsuspected and indeed rather disgusting mode of deep personal
vulnerability.  Things that we pass by every day, that we take utterly for granted,
can be exploited with so little work.   Once discovered, the knowledge of these
vulnerabilities tend to spread.
    Take the lowly subject of *manhole covers.*  The humble manhole cover
reproduces many of the dilemmas of computer-security in miniature. Manhole
covers are, of course, technological artifacts, access-points to our buried urban
infrastructure.  To the vast majority of us, manhole covers are invisible.  They
are also vulnerable.  For many years now, the Secret Service has made a point of
caulking manhole covers along all routes of the Presidential motorcade.   This is,
of course, to deter terrorists from leaping out of underground ambush or, more
likely, planting remote-control carsmashing bombs beneath the street.
    Lately, manhole covers have seen more and more criminal exploitation,
especially in New York City.  Recently, a telco in New York City discovered
that a cable television service had been sneaking into telco manholes and
installing cable service alongside the phone-lines -- *without paying royalties.*
New York companies have also suffered a general plague of (a) underground
copper cable  theft; (b) dumping of garbage, including toxic waste, and (c) hasty
dumping of murder victims.
    Industry complaints reached the ears of an innovative New England
industrial-security company, and the result was a new product known as "the
Intimidator," a thick titanium-steel bolt with a precisely machined head that
requires a special device to unscrew.  All these "keys" have registered serial
numbers kept on file with the manufacturer. There are now some thousands of
these "Intimidator" bolts being sunk into American pavements wherever our
President passes, like some macabre parody of strewn roses.   They are  also
spreading as fast as steel dandelions around US military bases and many centers
of private industry.
    Quite likely it has never occurred to you to  peer under a manhole cover,
perhaps climb down and walk around down there with a flashlight, just to see
what it's like.  Formally speaking, this might be trespassing, but if you didn't hurt
anything, and didn't make an absolute habit of it, nobody would really care.  The
freedom to sneak under manholes was likely a freedom you never intended to
exercise.
    You now are rather less likely to have that freedom at all.  You may
never even have missed it until you read about it here, but if you're in New York
City it's gone, and elsewhere it's likely going. This is one of the things that
crime, and the reaction to crime,  does to us.
    The tenor of the meeting now changed as the Electronic Frontier
Foundation arrived.  The EFF, whose personnel and history will be examined in
detail in the next chapter, are a pioneering civil liberties group who arose in
direct response to the Hacker Crackdown of 1990.
    Now Mitchell Kapor, the Foundation's president, and Michael Godwin,
its chief attorney, were confronting federal law enforcement *mano a mano* for
the first time ever.  Ever alert to the manifold uses of publicity, Mitch Kapor and
Mike Godwin had brought their own journalist in tow: Robert Draper, from
Austin, whose recent wellreceived book about ROLLING STONE magazine was
still on the stands.  Draper was on assignment for TEXAS MONTHLY.
    The Steve Jackson/EFF civil lawsuit against the Chicago Computer
Fraud and Abuse Task Force was a matter of considerable regional interest in
Texas. There were now two Austinite journalists here on the case.  In fact,
counting Godwin (a former Austinite and former journalist) there were three of
us.  Lunch was like Old Home Week.
    Later, I took Draper up to my hotel room.  We had a long frank talk
about the case, networking earnestly like a miniature freelance-journo version of
the FCIC:  privately confessing the numerous  blunders of journalists covering
the story, and trying hard to figure out who was who and what the hell was really
going on out there.  I showed Draper everything I had dug out of the Hilton
trashcan.  We pondered the ethics of "trashing" for a while, and agreed that they
were dismal.  We also agreed that finding a SPRINT bill on your first time out
was a heck of a coincidence.
    First I'd "trashed" -- and now, mere hours later, I'd bragged to someone
else.   Having entered the lifestyle of hackerdom, I was now, unsurprisingly,
following  its logic.  Having discovered something remarkable through a
surreptitious action, I of course *had*  to "brag," and to drag the passing Draper
into my iniquities.  I felt I needed a witness. Otherwise nobody would have
believed what I'd discovered....
    Back at the meeting, Thackeray cordially, if rather tentatively, introduced
Kapor and Godwin to her colleagues.  Papers were distributed.  Kapor took
center stage.  The brilliant Bostonian high-tech entrepreneur, normally the hawk
in his own administration and quite an effective public speaker, seemed visibly
nervous, and frankly admitted as much.   He began by saying he consided
computer-intrusion to be morally wrong, and that the EFF was not a "hacker
defense fund," despite what had appeared in print.    Kapor chatted a bit about
the basic motivations of his group, emphasizing their good faith and willingness
to listen and seek common ground with law enforcement -- when, er,  possible.

    Then, at Godwin's urging, Kapor suddenly remarked that EFF's own
Internet machine had been "hacked" recently, and that EFF did not consider this
incident amusing.
    After this surprising confession, things began to loosen up quite rapidly.
Soon Kapor was fielding questions, parrying objections, challenging definitions,
and juggling paradigms with something akin to his usual gusto.
    Kapor seemed to score quite an effect with his shrewd and skeptical
analysis of the merits of telco "Caller-ID" services.  (On this topic, FCIC and
EFF have never been at loggerheads, and have no particular established
earthworks to defend.) Caller-ID has generally been promoted as a privacy
service for consumers, a presentation Kapor described as a "smokescreen,"  the
real point of Caller-ID being to *allow corporate customers to build extensive
commercial databases  on  everybody who phones or faxes them.*  Clearly, few
people in the room had considered this possibility, except perhaps for two late-
arrivals from  US WEST RBOC security, who chuckled nervously.
    Mike Godwin then made an extensive presentation on "Civil Liberties
Implications of Computer Searches and Seizures."  Now, at last, we  were
getting to the real nitty-gritty here, real political horse-trading.  The audience
listened with close attention, angry mutters rising occasionally:  "He's trying to
teach us our jobs!"  "We've been thinking about this for years!  We think about
these issues every day!"  "If I didn't seize the works, I'd be sued by the guy's
victims!"   "I'm violating the law if I leave ten thousand disks full of illegal
*pirated software* and *stolen codes!*"   "It's our job to make sure people don't
trash the Constitution -- we're the *defenders*  of the Constitution!"  "We seize
stuff when we know it will be forfeited anyway as restitution for the victim!"
    "If it's forfeitable, then don't get a search warrant, get a forfeiture
warrant,"  Godwin suggested coolly.  He further remarked that most suspects in
computer crime don't *want*  to see their computers vanish out the door, headed
God knew where, for who knows how long.  They might not mind a search, even
an extensive search, but they want their machines searched on-site. "Are they
gonna feed us?"  somebody asked sourly. "How about if you take copies of the
data?" Godwin parried.
    "That'll never stand up in court." "Okay, you make copies, give *them*
the copies, and take the originals."
    Hmmm.
    Godwin championed bulletin-board systems as repositories of First
Amendment protected free speech.  He complained that federal computercrime
training manuals gave boards a bad press, suggesting that they are hotbeds of
crime haunted  by pedophiles and crooks, whereas the vast majority of the
nation's thousands of boards are completely innocuous, and nowhere near so
romantically suspicious.

    People who run boards violently resent it when their systems are seized,
and their dozens (or hundreds) of users look on in abject horror.   Their  rights of
free expression are cut short.  Their right to associate with other people is
infringed.  And their privacy is violated as their private electronic mail becomes
police property.


    Not a soul spoke up to defend the practice of seizing boards.   The issue
passed in chastened silence.   Legal principles aside -- (and those principles
cannot be settled without laws passed or court precedents) -- seizing bulletin
boards has become public-relations poison for American computer police.
    And anyway, it's not entirely necessary.  If you're a cop, you can get 'most
everything you need from a pirate board, just by using an inside informant.
Plenty of vigilantes -- well, *concerned citizens* -will inform police the moment
they see a pirate board hit their area  (and will tell the police all about it, in such
technical detail, actually, that you kinda wish they'd shut up).   They will happily
supply police with extensive downloads or printouts.  It's *impossible* to keep
this fluid electronic information out of the hands of police. Some people in the
electronic community become enraged at the prospect of cops "monitoring"
bulletin boards.   This does have touchy aspects, as Secret Service people in
particular examine bulletin boards with some  regularity.    But to expect
electronic police to be deaf dumb and blind in regard to this particular medium
rather flies in the face of common sense. Police watch television, listen to radio,
read newspapers and magazines; why should the new medium of boards be
different?   Cops can exercise the same access to electronic information as
everybody else.   As we have seen, quite a few computer police maintain *their
own*  bulletin  boards, including anti-hacker "sting" boards, which have
generally proven quite effective.
    As a final clincher, their Mountie friends in Canada (and colleagues in
Ireland and Taiwan) don't have First Amendment or American constitutional
restrictions, but they do have phone lines, and can call any bulletin board in
America whenever they please.  The same technological determinants that play
into the hands of hackers, phone phreaks and software pirates can play into the
hands of police.  "Technological determinants" don't have *any*  human
allegiances.  They're not black or white, or Establishment or Underground, or
pro-or-anti anything.
    Godwin  complained at length about what he called "the Clever Hobbyist
hypothesis"  -- the assumption that the "hacker" you're busting is clearly a
technical genius, and must therefore by searched with extreme thoroughness.
So:  from the  law's point of view, why risk missing anything?  Take the works.
Take the guy's computer.  Take his books. Take his notebooks.  Take the
electronic drafts of his love letters. Take his Walkman.  Take his wife's
computer.  Take his dad's computer.  Take his kid sister's computer.   Take his
employer's computer. Take his compact disks -- they *might* be CD-ROM
disks, cunningly disguised as pop music.  Take his laser printer -- he might have
hidden something vital in the printer's 5meg of memory.  Take his software
manuals and hardware documentation. Take his science-fiction novels and his
simulationgaming books.  Take his Nintendo Game-Boy and his Pac-Man arcade
game.  Take his answering machine, take his telephone out of the wall.  Take
anything remotely suspicious.
    Godwin pointed out that most "hackers" are not, in fact, clever genius
hobbyists.  Quite a few are crooks and grifters who don't have much in the way
of technical sophistication; just some rule-of-thumb rip-off techniques.  The
same goes for most fifteenyear-olds who've downloaded a code-scanning
program from a pirate board.   There's no real need to seize everything in sight.
It doesn't require an entire computer system and ten thousand disks to prove a
case in court.
    What if the computer is the instrumentality of a crime? someone
demanded.
    Godwin admitted quietly that the doctrine of seizing the instrumentality
of a crime was pretty well established in the American legal system. The
meeting broke up.  Godwin and Kapor had to leave.  Kapor was testifying next
morning before the Massachusetts Department Of Public Utility, about ISDN
narrowband wide-area networking.
    As soon as they were gone, Thackeray seemed elated.   She had taken a
great risk with this.  Her colleagues had not, in fact, torn Kapor and Godwin's
heads off.  She was very proud of them, and told them so.
    "Did you hear what Godwin said about *instrumentality of a crime?*"
she exulted, to nobody in particular.  "Wow, that means *Mitch isn't going to sue
me.*" #
    America's computer police are an interesting group.  As a social
phenomenon they are far more interesting, and far more important, than teenage
phone phreaks and computer hackers.  First, they're older and wiser; not dizzy
hobbyists with leaky morals, but  seasoned adult professionals with all the
responsibilities of public service.  And, unlike hackers, they possess not merely
*technical* power alone, but heavy-duty legal and social authority.
    And, very interestingly, they are just as much at sea in cyberspace as
everyone else.  They are not happy about this.  Police are authoritarian by nature,
and prefer to obey rules and precedents.   (Even those police who secretly enjoy
a fast ride in rough  territory will soberly disclaim any "cowboy" attitude.) But in
cyberspace there *are*  no rules and precedents.  They are groundbreaking
pioneers, Cyberspace Rangers, whether they like it or not.
    In my opinion, any teenager enthralled by computers, fascinated by the
ins and outs of computer security, and attracted by the lure of specialized forms
of knowledge and power, would do well to forget all about "hacking" and set his
(or her) sights on becoming a fed.   Feds can trump hackers at almost every
single thing hackers do, including gathering intelligence, undercover disguise,
trashing, phone-tapping,  building dossiers, networking, and infiltrating
computer systems -*criminal* computer systems.   Secret Service agents know
more about phreaking, coding and carding than most phreaks can find out in
years, and when it comes to viruses, break-ins, software bombs and trojan
horses, Feds have direct access to red-hot confidential information that is only
vague rumor in the underground.
    And if it's an impressive public rep you're after, there are few people in
the world who can be so chillingly impressive as a well-trained, well-armed
United States Secret Service agent. Of course, a few personal sacrifices are
necessary in order to obtain that power and knowledge.  First, you'll have the
galling discipline of belonging to a large organization;  but the world of
computer crime is still so small, and so amazingly fast-moving, that it will
remain spectacularly fluid for years to come.   The second sacrifice is that you'll
have to give up ripping people off.  This is not a great loss.  Abstaining from the
use of illegal drugs, also necessary, will be a boon to your health.
    A career in computer security is not a bad choice for a young man or
woman today.  The field will almost certainly expand drastically in years to
come.  If you are a teenager today, by the time you become a professional, the
pioneers you have read about in this book will be the grand old men and women
of the field, swamped by their many disciples and successors.   Of course, some
of them, like William P. Wood of the 1865 Secret Service, may well be mangled
in the whirring machinery of legal controversy; but by the time you enter the
computer-crime field, it may have stabilized somewhat, while remaining
entertainingly challenging.
    But you can't just have a badge.  You have to win it.  First, there's the
federal law enforcement training.  And it's hard -- it's a challenge.  A real
challenge -- not for wimps and rodents.
    Every Secret Service agent must complete gruelling courses at the
Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.  (In fact, Secret Service agents are
periodically re-trained during their entire careers.) In order to get a glimpse of
what this might be like, I myself travelled to FLETC. # The Federal Law
Enforcement Training Center is a 1500-acre facility on Georgia's Atlantic coast.
It's a milieu of marshgrass, seabirds,  damp, clinging sea-breezes, palmettos,
mosquitos, and bats.   Until 1974, it was a  Navy Air Base, and still features a
working runway, and some WWII vintage blockhouses and officers' quarters.
The Center has since benefitted by a forty-million-dollar retrofit, but there's still
enough forest and swamp on the facility for the Border Patrol to put in tracking
practice.
    As a town, "Glynco" scarcely exists.  The nearest real town is Brunswick,
a few miles down Highway 17, where I stayed at the aptly named Marshview
Holiday Inn.   I had Sunday dinner at a seafood restaurant called "Jinright's,"
where I feasted on deep-fried alligator tail.  This local favorite was a heaped
basket of bite-sized chunks of white, tender, almost fluffy reptile meat, steaming
in a peppered batter crust.  Alligator makes a culinary experience that's hard to
forget, especially when liberally basted with homemade cocktail sauce from a
Jinright squeeze-bottle.
    The crowded clientele were tourists, fishermen, local black folks in their
Sunday best, and white Georgian locals who all seemed to bear an uncanny
resemblance to Georgia humorist Lewis Grizzard. The 2,400 students from 75
federal agencies who make up the FLETC population scarcely seem to make a
dent in the low-key local scene.   The students look like tourists, and the teachers
seem to have taken on much of the relaxed air of the Deep South.   My host was
Mr. Carlton Fitzpatrick, the Program Coordinator of the Financial Fraud
Institute.  Carlton Fitzpatrick is a mustached, sinewy, well-tanned Alabama
native somewhere near his late forties, with a fondness for chewing tobacco,
powerful computers, and salty, down-home homilies. We'd met before, at FCIC
in Arizona.
    The Financial Fraud Institute is one of the nine divisions at FLETC.
Besides Financial Fraud, there's Driver & Marine, Firearms, and Physical
Training. These are specialized pursuits.  There are also five general training
divisions:  Basic Training, Operations, Enforcement Techniques, Legal Division,
and Behavioral Science.
    Somewhere in this curriculum is everything necessary to turn green
college graduates into federal agents.  First they're given ID cards. Then they get
the rather miserable-looking blue coveralls known as "smurf suits."  The trainees
are assigned a barracks and a cafeteria, and immediately set on FLETC's bone-
grinding physical training routine.  Besides the obligatory  daily jogging -- (the
trainers run up danger flags beside the track when the humidity rises high
enough to threaten heat stroke) - there's the Nautilus machines, the martial arts,
the survival skills....
    The eighteen federal agencies who maintain onsite academies at FLETC
employ a wide variety of specialized law enforcement units, some of them rather
arcane.   There's Border Patrol, IRS Criminal Investigation Division, Park
Service, Fish and Wildlife, Customs, Immigration, Secret Service and the
Treasury's uniformed subdivisions....  If you're a federal cop and you don't work
for the FBI, you train at FLETC.   This includes people as apparently obscure as
the agents of the Railroad Retirement Board Inspector General.  Or the
Tennessee Valley Authority Police, who are in fact federal police officers, and
can and do arrest criminals on the federal property of the Tennessee Valley
Authority.
    And then there are the computer-crime people. All sorts, all backgrounds.
Mr. Fitzpatrick  is not  jealous of his specialized knowledge.   Cops all over, in
every branch of service, may feel a need to learn what he can teach.
Backgrounds don't matter much.  Fitzpatrick himself  was originally a Border
Patrol veteran, then became a Border Patrol instructor at FLETC.  His Spanish is
still fluent -- but he found himself strangely fascinated when the first computers
showed up at the Training Center. Fitzpatrick did have a background in electrical
engineering, and though he never considered himself a computer hacker, he
somehow found himself writing useful little programs for this new and
promising gizmo.
    He began looking into the general subject of computers and crime,
reading Donn Parker's books  and articles, keeping an ear cocked for war stories,
useful insights from the field, the up-and-coming people of the local computer-
crime and hightechnology units....  Soon he got a reputation around FLETC as
the resident "computer expert," and that reputation alone brought him more
exposure, more experience -- until one day he looked around, and sure enough
he *was*  a federal computer-crime expert.
    In fact, this unassuming, genial man may be *the*  federal computer-
crime expert.   There are plenty of very good computer people, and plenty of
very good federal investigators, but the area where these worlds of expertise
overlap is very slim.  And Carlton Fitzpatrick has been right at the center of  that
since 1985, the first year of the Colluquy, a group which owes much to his
influence.
    He seems quite at home in his modest, acoustic-tiled office, with its
Ansel Adams-style Western photographic art, a gold-framed Senior Instructor
Certificate, and a towering bookcase crammed with three-ring binders with
ominous titles such as *Datapro Reports on Information Security* and *CFCA
Telecom Security '90.*

    The phone rings every ten minutes; colleagues show up at the door to
chat about new developments in locksmithing or to shake their heads over the
latest dismal developments in the BCCI global banking scandal.
    Carlton Fitzpatrick is a fount of computer-crime war-stories, related in an
acerbic drawl.  He tells me the colorful tale of a hacker caught in California
some years back.   He'd been raiding systems, typing code without a detectable
break, for twenty, twenty-four, thirty-six hours straight.  Not just logged on --
*typing.*   Investigators were baffled.  Nobody could do that.  Didn't he have to
go to the bathroom? Was it some kind of automatic keyboard-whacking device
that could actually type code?
    A raid on the suspect's home revealed a situation of astonishing squalor.
The hacker turned out to be a Pakistani computer-science student who had
flunked out of a California university.  He'd gone completely underground as an
illegal electronic immigrant,  and was selling stolen phoneservice to stay alive.
The place was not merely  messy and dirty, but in a state of psychotic disorder.
Powered by some weird mix of culture shock, computer addiction, and
amphetamines, the suspect had in fact been sitting in front of his computer for a
day and a half straight, with snacks and drugs at hand on the edge of his desk
and a chamber-pot under his chair.
    Word about stuff like this gets around in the hacker-tracker community.
    Carlton Fitzpatrick takes me for a guided tour by car around the FLETC
grounds.   One of our first  sights is the biggest indoor firing range in the world.
There are federal trainees in there, Fitzpatrick assures me politely, blasting away
with a wide variety of automatic weapons: Uzis, Glocks, AK-47s....   He's
willing to take me inside.   I tell him I'm sure that's really interesting, but I'd
rather see his computers. Carlton Fitzpatrick seems quite surprised and pleased.
I'm apparently the first journalist he's ever seen who has turned down the
shooting gallery in favor of microchips.
    Our next stop is a favorite with touring Congressmen:  the three-mile
long FLETC driving range.  Here trainees of the Driver & Marine Division are
taught high-speed pursuit skills, setting and breaking road-blocks, diplomatic
security driving for VIP limousines....  A favorite FLETC pastime is to strap a
passing Senator into the passenger seat beside a Driver & Marine trainer, hit a
hundred miles an hour, then take it right into "the skid-pan," a section of greased
track  where two tons of Detroit iron can whip and spin like a hockey puck.
    Cars don't fare well at FLETC.   First they're rifled again and again for
search practice.  Then they do  25,000 miles of high-speed pursuit training; they
get about seventy miles per set of steel-belted radials.   Then it's off to the skid
pan, where sometimes they roll and tumble headlong in the grease.   When
they're sufficiently grease-stained, dented, and creaky, they're sent to the
roadblock  unit, where they're battered without pity.  And finally then they're
sacrificed to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, whose trainees learn
the ins and outs of car-bomb work by blowing them into smoking wreckage.
    There's a railroad box-car on the FLETC grounds, and a large grounded
boat, and a propless plane; all training-grounds for searches.   The plane sits
forlornly on a patch of weedy tarmac next to an eerie blockhouse known as the
"ninja compound," where anti-terrorism specialists practice hostage rescues.  As
I gaze on this creepy paragon of modern low-intensity warfare, my nerves are
jangled by a sudden staccato outburst of automatic weapons fire, somewhere in
the woods to my right.  "Ninemillimeter," Fitzpatrick judges calmly.
    Even the eldritch ninja compound pales somewhat compared to the truly
surreal area known  as "the raid-houses."   This is a street lined on both sides
with nondescript concrete-block houses with flat pebbled roofs.  They were once
officers' quarters. Now they are training grounds.   The first one to our left,
Fitzpatrick tells me, has been specially adapted for computer search-and-seizure
practice.  Inside it has been wired for video from top to bottom, with eighteen
pan-and-tilt remotely controlled videocams mounted on walls and in corners.
Every movement of the trainee agent is recorded live by teachers, for later taped
analysis.  Wasted movements, hesitations, possibly lethal tactical mistakes -- all
are gone over in detail.
    Perhaps the weirdest single aspect of this building is its front door,
scarred and scuffed all along the bottom, from the repeated impact, day after day,
of federal shoe-leather.
    Down at the far end of the row of raid-houses some people are practicing
a murder.   We drive by slowly as some very young and rather nervouslooking
federal trainees interview a heavyset bald man on the raid-house lawn.  Dealing
with murder takes a lot of practice; first you have to learn to  control your own
instinctive disgust and panic,  then you have to learn to control the reactions of a
nerveshredded crowd of civilians, some of whom may have just lost a loved one,
some of whom may be murderers -- quite possibly both at once.
    A dummy plays the corpse.  The roles of the bereaved, the morbidly
curious, and the homicidal  are played, for pay, by local Georgians:  waitresses,
musicians, most anybody who needs to moonlight and can learn a script.   These
people, some of whom are FLETC regulars year after year, must surely have one
of the strangest jobs in the world.
    Something about the scene:  "normal" people in a weird situation,
standing around talking in bright Georgia sunshine, unsuccessfully pretending
that something dreadful has gone on, while a dummy lies inside on faked
bloodstains....  While behind this  weird masquerade, like a nested set of Russian
dolls, are grim future realities of real death, real violence, real murders of real
people, that these young agents will really investigate, many times during their
careers....  Over and over....  Will those anticipated  murders look like this, feel
like this -- not as "real" as these amateur actors are trying to make it seem, but
both as "real," and as numbingly unreal, as watching fake people standing
around on a fake lawn? Something about this scene unhinges me.  It seems
nightmarish to me,  Kafkaesque.   I simply don't know how to take it; my head is
turned around; I don't know whether to laugh, cry, or just shudder.
    When the tour is over, Carlton Fitzpatrick and I talk about computers.
For the first time cyberspace seems like quite a comfortable place.  It seems very
real to me suddenly, a place where I know what I'm  talking about, a place I'm
used to.   It's real.  "Real." Whatever.
    Carlton Fitzpatrick is the only person I've met in cyberspace circles who
is happy with his present equipment.  He's got a 5 Meg RAM PC with a 112 meg
hard disk; a 660 meg's on the way.  He's got a Compaq 386 desktop, and a
Zenith 386 laptop with 120 meg.  Down the hall is a NEC Multi-Sync 2A with a
CD-ROM drive and a 9600 baud modem with four com-lines.  There's a training
minicomputer, and a  10-meg local mini just for the Center, and a lab-full of
student PC clones and half-a-dozen Macs or so. There's a Data General MV
2500 with 8 meg on board and a 370 meg disk.
    Fitzpatrick plans to run a UNIX board on the Data General when he's
finished beta-testing the  software for it, which he wrote himself.  It'll have E-
mail features, massive files on all manner of computer-crime and investigation
procedures, and will follow the computer-security specifics of the Department of
Defense "Orange Book."  He thinks  it will be the biggest BBS in the federal
government. Will it have *Phrack* on it?  I ask wryly.
    Sure, he tells me.  *Phrack,* *TAP,*  *Computer Underground Digest,*
all that stuff.  With  proper disclaimers, of course.
    I ask him if he plans to be the sysop.  Running a system that size is very
time-consuming, and Fitzpatrick teaches two three-hour courses every day.
    No, he says seriously,  FLETC has to get its money worth out of the
instructors.  He thinks he can get a local volunteer to do it, a high-school student.
He says a bit more, something I think about an Eagle Scout law-enforcement
liaison program, but my mind has rocketed off in disbelief.
    "You're going to put a *teenager* in charge of a federal security BBS?"
I'm speechless.  It hasn't escaped my notice that the FLETC Financial Fraud
Institute is the *ultimate* hacker-trashing target; there is stuff in here, stuff of
such utter and consummate cool by every standard of the digital underground.... I
imagine the hackers of my acquaintance, fainting dead-away from forbidden-
knowledge greed-fits, at the mere prospect of cracking the superultra top-secret
computers used to train the Secret Service in computer-crime....
    "Uhm, Carlton," I babble, "I'm sure he's a really nice kid and all, but
that's a terrible temptation to set in front of somebody who's, you know, into
computers and just starting out..."
    "Yeah," he says, "that did occur to me."  For the first time I begin to
suspect that he's pulling my leg.
    He seems proudest when he shows me an ongoing project called JICC,
Joint Intelligence Control Council.  It's based on the services provided by EPIC,
the El Paso Intelligence Center, which supplies data and intelligence to the Drug
Enforcement Administration, the Customs Service, the Coast Guard, and the
state police of the four southern border states.  Certain EPIC files can now be
accessed by drug-enforcement police of Central America, South America and the
Caribbean, who can also trade information among themselves. Using a telecom
program called "White Hat," written by two brothers named Lopez from the
Dominican Republic, police can now network internationally on inexpensive
PCs.   Carlton Fitzpatrick is teaching a class of drug-war agents from the Third
World, and he's very proud of their progress.   Perhaps soon the sophisticated
smuggling networks of the Medellin Cartel will be matched by a sophisticated
computer network of the Medellin Cartel's sworn enemies.   They'll track boats,
track contraband, track the international drug-lords who now leap over borders
with great  ease, defeating the police through the clever use of fragmented
national jurisdictions.
    JICC and EPIC must remain beyond the scope of this book.   They seem
to me to be very large topics fraught with complications that I am not fit to
judge.   I do know, however, that the international, computer-assisted
networking of police, across national boundaries, is something that Carlton
Fitzpatrick considers very important, a harbinger of  a desirable future.  I also
know that networks by their nature ignore physical boundaries.  And I also know
that where you put communications you put a community, and that when those
communities become self-aware they will fight to preserve themselves and to
expand their influence.   I make  no judgements whether this is good or bad.  It's
just cyberspace; it's just the way things are.
    I asked Carlton Fitzpatrick what advice he would have for a twenty-year-
old who wanted to shine someday in the world of electronic law enforcement.
    He told me that the number one rule was simply not to be scared of
computers.   You don't need to be an obsessive "computer weenie," but you
mustn't be buffaloed just because some machine looks fancy.  The advantages
computers give smart crooks are matched by the advantages they give  smart
cops.  Cops in the future will have to enforce the law "with their heads, not their
holsters."   Today you can make good cases without ever leaving your office.  In
the future, cops who resist the computer revolution will never get far beyond
walking a beat.
    I asked Carlton Fitzpatrick if he had some single message for the public;
some single thing that he would most like the American public to know about
his work.


    He thought about it while.  "Yes," he said finally. "*Tell* me the rules,
and I'll *teach* those rules!"  He looked me straight in the eye.  "I do the best
that I can."

Bruce Sterling [e-mail] Literary Freeware:
Not for Commercial Use

THE HACKER CRACKDOWN
Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

PART FOUR:  THE CIVIL LIBERTARIANS
    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, podiumpounding, 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 heirarchy.
    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 computercrime 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 tiedyed 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 "useropaque."  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. In 1991, the Well's list of conferences looked like this:


                      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 (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 longtime 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 sharpdressing, 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-andseizure.   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 hamhanded powers-that-be.   The resultant issue of *Harper's*
magazine posed the question as to whether computerintrusion 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, craggyfaced, 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 freespirit
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  fortyone-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 computergraphics 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)

.