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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Hacker Crackdown, by Bruce Sterling

+

+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

+

+** This is a COPYRIGHTED Project Gutenberg eBook, Details Below **

+**     Please follow the copyright guidelines in this file.     **

+

+Title: Hacker Crackdown

+       Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

+

+Author: Bruce Sterling

+

+Posting Date: February 9, 2012 [EBook #101]

+Release Date: January, 1994

+

+Language: English

+

+

+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HACKER CRACKDOWN ***

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+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 Post-Mortem

+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, Halloween 1993

+

+

+

+

+THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

+

+Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

+

+by Bruce Sterling

+

+

+

+

+

+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 six-dollar 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.

+

+[Project Gutenberg has reassembled the file, with Sterling's permission.]

+

+Just make more when you need them, and give them to whoever might want them.

+

+Now have fun.

+

+Bruce Sterling--bruces@well.sf.ca.us

+

+

+THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

+

+Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

+

+by Bruce Sterling

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+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 E911 Document 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-in-the-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 data-banks;

+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, gossiping, 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, well-meant 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

+audio-telegraph.  This was an event without precedent.

+

+Technologies in their "Goofy Prototype" stage rarely

+work very well.  They're experimental, and therefore

+half- baked 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

+"bulletin- board 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, better-ventilated, 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 elocution

+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 party-lines,

+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,

+fiber-optic 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 high-technology, 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-bottom 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 red-eyed 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 nineteenth-century

+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 became 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

+high- tech 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) T-shirt 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 corporate-citizen 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 computer-

+hacker 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

+non-regional, 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 interact, 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 P.M. 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, call-

+waiting, 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 full-page

+newspaper ads in New York, offering their own long-distance

+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.

+

+

+

+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 "high-tech 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, image-hungry 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 computer-outlaw 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 coin-slugs,

+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 phone-company 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-to-shore

+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 fastest-growing 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 smart-aleck 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 computer-intruders

+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 not-

+for-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, high-stakes

+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 down-and-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 Techno-Revolution" 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

+credit-card 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 computer-nerd.  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 narrow-

+minded 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

+computer-crime 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

+techno-rat.  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 techno-rat 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 message-

+passing center for users dialing-up over the phone-lines

+through the use of  modems.  A "modem," or modulator-

+demodulator, 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, catch-as-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.  "Chat-lines"

+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.  Drug- dealing 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 Danger 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, small-scale 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 drug-dealing

+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 modem-less 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 make-believe,

+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 wire-fraud.  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 phone-phreak 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-days-wonder 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 Apple-

+hacker 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 best-publicized 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.  Smaller-scale 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 super- villains headed by the chrome-domed

+criminal ultra- mastermind 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. "Compu-Phreak"

+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 techno-bureaucratese,

+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-of-mind.  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 long-

+distance--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-come-latelies 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 word-analysis programs,

+that the Condor could start World War III from a payphone.

+

+If there were hackers into BellSouth switching-stations, 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 phone-sex 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 Nork 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 phone-booth,

+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 credit-card 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 break-ins 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 wire-fraud.  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 card-holder'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 heavy-metal 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 go-getting 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 rough-and-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 well-

+paying 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--spell-casting 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 straight-out, 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 well-suited 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 well-known

+(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 illicitly-copied 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 not-for-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 non-disclosure 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-and-tie

+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 mean 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, level-headed 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 voice-communications 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 fence-sitters 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 high-speed 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 were, 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 bulletin-

+board 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-year-old 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 little-known,

+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 gaming-system.

+

+The time seemed ripe for such a product, which had already been proven

+in the marketplace.  The first games- company out of the gate,

+with a product boldly called "Cyberpunk" in defiance of possible

+infringement-of-copyright 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 on-line 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, small-scale fantasy into the impure, highly publicized,

+large-scale 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 search-warrant

+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 literary-critical 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.

+

+

+

+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 anti-hacker 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, real-time 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 well-understood 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 forty-two 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 over-manned);  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 anti-hacker 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-a- cops," "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 computer-equipped 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 well-oiled 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

+wire-fraud 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 computer-crime, 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.) [Represented by capitals.]

+

+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

+turf-struggle 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 ready-and-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 esprit-de-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 anti-forgery 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,

+high-denomination 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 mid- nineteenth-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 seventy-four.

+

+#

+

+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 Baby-Boomer 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 mid-70s, 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

+on- line 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 computer-crime 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 Lindbergh 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 phone-phreaks

+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 air-traffic 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 phone-phreaks 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 power-tripping.  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 International-Style 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 two-story 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 this 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 first-name 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 top-down 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 shopping-malls

+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 computer-

+systems 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 hot-shots, 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 phone-lines."

+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 computer-crime 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-first-century 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 sixteen-port 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 high-capacity

+fiber-optic cable.  A bad guy--cops talk a about "bad guys"

+--might be lurking on PC #47 lot 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.  Phone-phreaks

+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 one-strike 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

+car-smashing 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 well-received 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 computer-crime 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 simulation-

+gaming 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 fifteen-year-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)--

+here's the Nautilus machines, the martial arts, the survival skills. . . .

+

+The eighteen federal agencies who maintain on-site 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 high-technology 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 phone-service

+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.

+"Nine-millimeter," 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 nervous-looking

+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 nerve-shredded 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."

+

+

+

+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, podium-pounding, persuading, touring,

+negotiating, posing for publicity photos, submitting to interviews,

+squinting in the limelight as they tried a tentative, but growingly

+sophisticated, buck-and-wing upon the public stage.

+

+It's not hard to see why the civil libertarians should have

+this competitive advantage.

+

+The  hackers  of the digital underground are an hermetic elite.

+They find it hard to make any remotely convincing case for

+their actions in front of the general public.  Actually,

+hackers roundly despise the "ignorant" public, and have never

+trusted the judgement of "the system."  Hackers do propagandize,

+but only among themselves, mostly in giddy, badly spelled manifestos

+of class warfare, youth rebellion or naive techie utopianism.

+Hackers must strut and boast in order to establish and preserve

+their underground reputations.  But if they speak out too loudly

+and publicly, they will break the fragile surface-tension of the underground,

+and they will be harrassed or arrested.  Over the longer term,

+most hackers stumble, get busted, get betrayed, or simply give up.

+As a political force, the digital underground is hamstrung.

+

+The telcos, for their part, are an ivory tower under protracted seige.

+They have plenty of money with which to push their calculated public image,

+but they waste much energy and goodwill attacking one another with

+slanderous and demeaning ad campaigns.  The telcos have suffered

+at the hands of politicians, and, like hackers, they don't trust

+the public's judgement.  And this distrust may be well-founded.

+Should the general public of the high-tech 1990s come to understand

+its own best interests in telecommunications, that might well pose

+a grave threat to the specialized technical power and authority

+that the telcos have relished for over a century.  The telcos do

+have strong advantages: loyal employees, specialized expertise,

+influence in the halls of power, tactical allies in law enforcement,

+and unbelievably vast amounts of money.  But politically speaking, they lack

+genuine grassroots support; they simply don't seem to have many friends.

+

+Cops know a lot of things other people don't know.

+But cops willingly reveal only those aspects of their

+knowledge that they feel will meet their institutional

+purposes and further public order.  Cops have respect,

+they have responsibilities, they have power in the streets

+and even power in the home, but cops don't do particularly

+well in limelight.  When pressed, they will step out in the

+public gaze to threaten bad-guys, or to cajole prominent citizens,

+or perhaps to sternly lecture the naive and misguided.

+But then they go back within their time-honored fortress

+of the station-house, the courtroom and the rule-book.

+

+The electronic civil libertarians, however, have proven to be

+born political animals.  They seemed to grasp very early on

+the postmodern truism that communication is power.  Publicity is power.

+Soundbites are power.  The ability to shove one's issue onto the public

+agenda--and KEEP IT THERE--is power.  Fame is power.  Simple personal

+fluency and eloquence can be power, if you can somehow catch the

+public's eye and ear.

+

+The civil libertarians had no monopoly on "technical power"--

+though they all owned computers, most were not particularly

+advanced computer experts.  They had a good deal of money,

+but nowhere near the earthshaking wealth and the galaxy

+of resources possessed by telcos or federal agencies.

+They had no ability to arrest people.  They carried

+out no phreak and hacker covert dirty-tricks.

+

+But they really knew how to network.

+

+Unlike the other groups in this book, the civil libertarians

+have operated very much in the open, more or less right

+in the public hurly-burly.  They have lectured audiences galore

+and talked to countless journalists, and have learned to

+refine their spiels.  They've kept the cameras clicking,

+kept those faxes humming, swapped that email,

+run those photocopiers on overtime, licked envelopes

+and spent small fortunes on airfare and long-distance.

+In an information society, this open, overt, obvious activity

+has proven to be a profound advantage.

+

+In 1990, the civil libertarians of cyberspace assembled

+out of nowhere in particular, at warp speed.  This "group"

+(actually, a networking gaggle of interested parties

+which scarcely deserves even that loose term) has almost nothing

+in the way of formal organization.  Those formal civil libertarian

+organizations which did take an interest in cyberspace issues,

+mainly the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility

+and the American Civil Liberties Union, were carried along

+by events in 1990, and acted mostly as adjuncts,

+underwriters or launching-pads.

+

+The civil libertarians nevertheless enjoyed the greatest success

+of any of the groups in the Crackdown of 1990.  At this writing,

+their future looks rosy and the political initiative is firmly in their hands.

+This should be kept in mind as we study the highly unlikely lives

+and lifestyles of the people who actually made this happen.

+

+#

+

+In June 1989, Apple Computer, Inc., of Cupertino,

+California, had a problem.  Someone had illicitly copied

+a small piece of Apple's proprietary software, software

+which controlled an internal chip driving the Macintosh

+screen display.  This Color QuickDraw source code was

+a closely guarded piece of Apple's intellectual property.

+Only trusted Apple insiders were supposed to possess it.

+

+But the "NuPrometheus League" wanted things otherwise.

+This person (or persons) made several illicit copies

+of this source code, perhaps as many as two dozen.

+He (or she, or they) then put those illicit floppy disks

+into envelopes and mailed them to people all over America:

+people in the computer industry who were associated with,

+but not directly employed by, Apple Computer.

+

+The NuPrometheus caper was a complex, highly ideological,

+and very hacker-like crime.  Prometheus, it will be recalled,

+stole the fire of the Gods and gave this potent gift to the

+general ranks of downtrodden mankind.  A similar god-in-the-manger

+attitude was implied for the corporate elite of Apple Computer,

+while the "Nu" Prometheus had himself cast in the role of rebel demigod.

+The illicitly copied data was given away for free.

+

+The new Prometheus, whoever he was, escaped the

+fate of the ancient Greek Prometheus, who was chained

+to a rock for centuries by the vengeful gods while an eagle

+tore and ate his liver.  On the other hand, NuPrometheus

+chickened out somewhat by comparison with his role model.

+The small chunk of Color QuickDraw code he had filched

+and replicated was more or less useless to Apple's

+industrial rivals (or, in fact, to anyone else).

+Instead of giving fire to mankind, it was more as if

+NuPrometheus had photocopied the schematics for part of a Bic lighter.

+The act was not a genuine work of industrial espionage.

+It was best interpreted as a symbolic, deliberate slap

+in the face for the Apple corporate 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 computer-crime case,

+it might be well to say a word or two about the Grateful Dead.

+The Grateful Dead are perhaps the most successful and long-lasting

+of the numerous cultural emanations from the Haight-Ashbury district

+of San Francisco, in the glory days of Movement politics and

+lysergic transcendance.  The Grateful Dead are a nexus, a veritable

+whirlwind, of  applique decals, psychedelic vans, tie-dyed T-shirts,

+earth-color denim, frenzied dancing and open and unashamed drug use.

+The symbols, and the realities, of Californian freak power surround

+the Grateful Dead like knotted macrame.

+

+The Grateful Dead and their thousands of Deadhead devotees

+are radical Bohemians.  This much is widely understood.

+Exactly what this implies in the 1990s is rather more problematic.

+

+The Grateful Dead are among the world's most popular

+and wealthy entertainers:  number 20, according to Forbes magazine,

+right between M.C. Hammer and Sean Connery.  In 1990, this jeans-clad

+group of purported raffish outcasts earned seventeen million dollars.

+They have been earning sums much along this line for quite some time now.

+

+And while the Dead are not investment bankers or three-piece-suit

+tax specialists--they are, in point of fact, hippie musicians--

+this money has not been squandered in senseless Bohemian excess.

+The Dead have been quietly active for many years, funding various

+worthy activities in their  extensive and widespread cultural community.

+

+The Grateful Dead are not conventional players in the American

+power establishment.  They nevertheless are something of a force

+to be reckoned with.  They have a lot of money and a lot of friends

+in many places, both likely and unlikely.

+

+The Dead may be known for back-to-the-earth environmentalist rhetoric,

+but this hardly makes them anti-technological Luddites.  On the contrary,

+like most rock musicians, the Grateful Dead have spent their entire adult

+lives in the company of complex electronic equipment.  They have funds to burn

+on any sophisticated tool and toy that might happen to catch their fancy.

+And their fancy is quite extensive.

+

+The Deadhead community boasts any number of recording engineers,

+lighting experts, rock video mavens, electronic technicians

+of all descriptions.  And the drift goes both ways.  Steve Wozniak,

+Apple's co-founder, used to throw rock festivals.  Silicon Valley rocks out.

+

+These are the 1990s, not the 1960s.  Today, for a surprising number of people

+all over America, the supposed dividing line between Bohemian and technician

+simply no longer exists.  People of this sort may have a set of windchimes

+and a dog with a knotted kerchief 'round its neck, but they're also quite

+likely to own a multimegabyte Macintosh running MIDI synthesizer software

+and trippy fractal simulations.  These days, even Timothy Leary himself,

+prophet of LSD, does virtual-reality computer-graphics demos in

+his lecture tours.

+

+John Perry Barlow is not a member of the Grateful Dead.  He is, however,

+a ranking Deadhead.

+

+Barlow describes himself as a "techno-crank."  A vague term like

+"social activist" might not be far from the mark, either.

+But Barlow might be better described as a "poet"--if one keeps in mind

+Percy Shelley's archaic definition of poets as "unacknowledged legislators

+of the world."

+

+Barlow once made a stab at acknowledged legislator status.  In 1987,

+he narrowly missed the Republican nomination for a seat in the

+Wyoming State Senate.  Barlow is a Wyoming native, the third-generation

+scion of a well-to-do cattle-ranching family.  He is in his early forties,

+married and the father of three daughters.

+

+Barlow is not much troubled by other people's narrow notions of consistency.

+In the late 1980s, this Republican rock lyricist cattle rancher sold his ranch

+and became a computer telecommunications devotee.

+

+The free-spirited Barlow made this transition with ease.  He genuinely

+enjoyed computers.  With a beep of his modem, he leapt from small-town

+Pinedale, Wyoming, into electronic contact with a large and lively crowd

+of bright, inventive, technological sophisticates from all over the world.

+Barlow found the social milieu of computing attractive: its fast-lane pace,

+its blue-sky rhetoric, its open-endedness.  Barlow began dabbling in

+computer journalism, with marked success, as he was a quick study,

+and both shrewd and eloquent.  He frequently travelled to San Francisco

+to network with Deadhead friends.  There Barlow made extensive contacts

+throughout the Californian computer community, including friendships

+among the wilder spirits at Apple.

+

+In May 1990, Barlow received a visit from a local Wyoming agent of the FBI.

+The NuPrometheus case had reached Wyoming.

+

+Barlow was troubled to find himself under investigation in an

+area of his interests once quite free of federal attention.

+He had to struggle to explain the very nature of computer-crime

+to a headscratching local FBI man who specialized in cattle-rustling.

+Barlow, chatting helpfully and demonstrating the wonders of his modem

+to the puzzled fed, was alarmed to find all "hackers" generally under

+FBI suspicion as an evil influence in the electronic community.

+The FBI, in pursuit of a hacker called "NuPrometheus," were tracing

+attendees of a suspect group called the Hackers Conference.

+

+The Hackers Conference, which had been started in 1984, was a

+yearly Californian meeting of digital pioneers and enthusiasts.

+The hackers of the Hackers Conference had little if anything to do

+with the hackers of the digital underground.  On the contrary,

+the hackers of this conference were mostly well-to-do Californian

+high-tech CEOs, consultants, journalists and entrepreneurs.

+(This group of hackers were the exact sort of "hackers"

+most likely to react with militant fury at any criminal

+degradation of the term "hacker.")

+

+Barlow, though he was not arrested or accused of a crime,

+and though his computer had certainly not gone out the door,

+was very troubled by this anomaly.  He carried the word to the Well.

+

+Like the Hackers Conference, "the Well" was an emanation of the

+Point Foundation.  Point Foundation, the inspiration of a wealthy

+Californian 60s radical named Stewart Brand, was to be a major

+launch-pad of the civil libertarian effort.

+

+Point Foundation's cultural efforts, like those of their fellow Bay Area

+Californians the Grateful Dead, were multifaceted and multitudinous.

+Rigid ideological consistency had never been a strong suit of the

+Whole Earth Catalog.  This Point publication had enjoyed a strong

+vogue during the late 60s and early 70s, when it offered hundreds

+of practical (and not so practical) tips on communitarian living,

+environmentalism, and getting back-to-the-land.  The Whole Earth Catalog,

+and its sequels, sold two and half million copies and won a

+National Book Award.

+

+With the slow collapse of American radical dissent, the Whole Earth Catalog

+had slipped to a more modest corner of the cultural radar; but in its

+magazine incarnation, CoEvolution Quarterly, the Point Foundation

+continued to offer a magpie potpourri of "access to tools and ideas."

+

+CoEvolution Quarterly, which started in 1974, was never a widely

+popular magazine.  Despite periodic outbreaks of millenarian fervor,

+CoEvolution Quarterly failed to revolutionize Western civilization

+and replace leaden centuries of history with bright new Californian paradigms.

+Instead, this propaganda arm of Point Foundation cakewalked a fine line between

+impressive brilliance and New Age flakiness.  CoEvolution Quarterly carried

+no advertising, cost a lot, and came out on cheap newsprint with modest

+black-and-white graphics.  It was poorly distributed, and spread mostly

+by subscription and word of mouth.

+

+It could not seem to grow beyond 30,000 subscribers.

+And yet--it never seemed to shrink much, either.

+Year in, year out, decade in, decade out, some strange

+demographic minority accreted to support the magazine.

+The enthusiastic readership did not seem to have much

+in the way of coherent politics or  ideals.  It was sometimes

+hard to understand what held them together (if the often bitter

+debate in the letter-columns could be described as "togetherness").

+

+But if the magazine did not flourish, it was resilient; it got by.

+Then, in 1984, the birth-year of the Macintosh computer,

+CoEvolution Quarterly suddenly hit the rapids.  Point Foundation

+had discovered the computer revolution.  Out came the Whole Earth

+Software Catalog of 1984, arousing headscratching doubts among

+the tie-dyed faithful, and rabid enthusiasm among the nascent

+"cyberpunk" milieu, present company included.  Point Foundation

+started its yearly Hackers Conference, and began to take an

+extensive interest in the strange new possibilities of

+digital counterculture.  CoEvolution Quarterlyfolded its teepee,

+replaced by Whole Earth Software Review and eventually by Whole Earth

+Review (the magazine's present incarnation, currently under

+the editorship of virtual-reality maven Howard Rheingold).

+

+1985 saw the birth of the "WELL"--the "Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link."

+The Well was Point Foundation's bulletin board system.

+

+As boards went, the Well was an anomaly from the beginning,

+and remained one.  It was local to San Francisco.

+It was huge, with multiple phonelines and enormous files

+of commentary.  Its complex UNIX-based software might be

+most charitably described as "user-opaque."  It was run on

+a mainframe out of the rambling offices of a non-profit

+cultural foundation in Sausalito.  And it was crammed with

+fans of the Grateful Dead.

+

+Though the Well was peopled by chattering hipsters of the Bay Area

+counterculture, it was by no means a "digital underground" board.

+Teenagers were fairly scarce; most Well users (known as "Wellbeings")

+were thirty- and forty-something Baby Boomers.  They tended to work

+in the information industry: hardware, software, telecommunications,

+media, entertainment.  Librarians, academics, and journalists were

+especially common on the Well, attracted by Point Foundation's

+open-handed distribution of "tools and ideas."

+

+There were no anarchy files on the Well, scarcely a

+dropped hint about access codes or credit-card theft.

+No one used handles.  Vicious "flame-wars" were held to

+a comparatively civilized rumble.  Debates were sometimes sharp,

+but no Wellbeing ever claimed that a rival had disconnected his phone,

+trashed his house, or posted his credit card numbers.

+

+The Well grew slowly as the 1980s advanced.  It charged a modest sum

+for access and storage, and lost money for years--but not enough to hamper

+the Point Foundation, which was nonprofit anyway.  By 1990, the Well

+had about five thousand users.  These users wandered about a gigantic

+cyberspace smorgasbord of "Conferences", each conference itself consisting

+of a welter of "topics," each topic containing dozens, sometimes hundreds

+of comments, in a tumbling, multiperson debate that could last for months

+or years on end.

+

+

+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   (g software)

+Software Support       (g ssc)

+Unix                   (g unix)      Windows           (g windows)

+Word Processing        (g word)

+

+Technical - Communications

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

+Bioinfo                (g bioinfo)   Info              (g boing)

+Media                  (g media)     NAPLPS            (g naplps)

+Netweaver              (g netweaver) Networld (g networld)

+Packet Radio           (g packet)    Photography       (g pho)

+Radio                  (g rad)       Science           (g science)

+Technical Writers      (g tec)       Telecommunications(g tele)

+Usenet                 (g usenet)    Video             (g vid)

+Virtual Reality        (g vr)

+

+The WELL Itself

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

+Deeper                 (g deeper)    Entry             (g ent)

+General                (g gentech)   Help              (g help)

+Hosts                  (g hosts)     Policy            (g policy)

+System News            (g news)      Test              (g test)

+

+The list itself is dazzling, bringing to the untutored eye

+a dizzying impression of a bizarre milieu of mountain-climbing

+Hawaiian holistic photographers trading true-life confessions

+with bisexual word-processing Tibetans.

+

+But this confusion is more apparent than real.  Each of these conferences

+was a little cyberspace world in itself, comprising dozens and perhaps

+hundreds of sub-topics.  Each conference was commonly frequented by

+a fairly small, fairly like-minded community of perhaps a few dozen people.

+It was humanly impossible to encompass the entire Well (especially since

+access to the Well's mainframe computer was billed by the hour).

+Most long-time users contented themselves with a few favorite

+topical neighborhoods, with the occasional foray elsewhere

+for a taste of exotica.  But especially important news items,

+and hot topical debates, could catch the attention of the entire

+Well community.

+

+Like any community, the Well had its celebrities, and John Perry Barlow,

+the silver-tongued and silver-modemed lyricist of the Grateful Dead,

+ranked prominently among them.  It was here on the Well that Barlow

+posted his true-life tale of computer-crime encounter with the FBI.

+

+The story, as might be expected, created a great stir.  The Well was

+already primed for hacker controversy.  In December 1989, Harper's magazine

+had hosted a debate on the Well about the ethics of illicit computer intrusion.

+While over forty various computer-mavens took part, Barlow proved a star

+in the debate.  So did "Acid Phreak" and "Phiber Optik," a pair of young

+New York hacker-phreaks whose skills at telco switching-station intrusion

+were matched only by their apparently limitless hunger for fame.

+The advent of these two boldly swaggering outlaws in the precincts

+of the Well created a sensation akin to that of Black Panthers

+at a cocktail party for the radically chic.

+

+Phiber Optik in particular was to seize the day in 1990.

+A devotee of the 2600 circle and stalwart of the New York

+hackers' group "Masters of Deception," Phiber Optik was

+a splendid exemplar of the computer intruder as committed dissident.

+The eighteen-year-old Optik, a high-school dropout and part-time

+computer repairman, was young, smart, and ruthlessly obsessive,

+a sharp-dressing, sharp-talking digital dude who was utterly

+and airily contemptuous of anyone's rules but his own.

+By late 1991, Phiber Optik had appeared in Harper's,

+Esquire, The New York Times, in countless public debates

+and conventions, even on a television show hosted by Geraldo Rivera.

+

+Treated with gingerly respect by Barlow and other Well mavens,

+Phiber Optik swiftly became a Well celebrity.  Strangely, despite

+his thorny attitude and utter single-mindedness, Phiber Optik seemed

+to arouse strong protective instincts in most of the people who met him.

+He was great copy for journalists, always fearlessly ready to swagger,

+and, better yet, to actually DEMONSTRATE some off-the-wall digital stunt.

+He was a born media darling.

+

+Even cops seemed to recognize that there was something peculiarly unworldly

+and uncriminal about this particular troublemaker.  He was so bold,

+so flagrant, so young, and so obviously doomed, that even those

+who strongly disapproved of his actions grew anxious for his welfare,

+and began to flutter about him as if he were an endangered seal pup.

+

+In January 24, 1990 (nine days after the Martin Luther King Day Crash),

+Phiber Optik, Acid Phreak, and a third NYC scofflaw named Scorpion were

+raided by the Secret Service.  Their computers went out the door,

+along with the usual blizzard of papers, notebooks, compact disks,

+answering machines, Sony Walkmans, etc.  Both Acid Phreak and

+Phiber Optik were accused of having caused the Crash.

+

+The mills of justice ground slowly.  The case eventually fell into

+the hands of the New York State Police.  Phiber had lost his machinery

+in the raid, but there were no charges filed against him for over a year.

+His predicament was extensively publicized on the Well, where it caused

+much resentment for police tactics.  It's one thing to merely hear about

+a hacker raided or busted; it's another to see the police attacking someone

+you've come to know personally, and who has explained his motives at length.

+Through the Harper's debate on the Well, it had become clear to the

+Wellbeings that Phiber Optik was not in fact going to "hurt anything."

+In their own salad days, many Wellbeings had tasted tear-gas in pitched

+street-battles with police.  They were inclined to indulgence for

+acts of civil disobedience.

+

+Wellbeings were also startled to learn of the draconian thoroughness

+of a typical hacker search-and-seizure.  It took no great stretch of

+imagination for them to envision themselves suffering much the same treatment.

+

+As early as January 1990, sentiment on the Well had already begun to sour,

+and people had begun to grumble that "hackers" were getting a raw deal

+from the ham-handed powers-that-be.  The resultant issue of Harper's

+magazine posed the question as to whether computer-intrusion was a "crime"

+at all.  As Barlow put it later:  "I've begun to wonder if we wouldn't

+also regard spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves."

+

+In February 1991, more than a year after the raid on his home,

+Phiber Optik was finally arrested, and was charged with first-degree

+Computer Tampering and Computer Trespass, New York state offenses.

+He was also charged with a theft-of-service misdemeanor, involving a complex

+free-call scam to a 900 number.  Phiber Optik pled guilty to the misdemeanor

+charge, and was sentenced to  35 hours of community service.

+

+This passing harassment from the unfathomable world of straight people

+seemed to bother Optik himself little if at all.  Deprived of his computer

+by the January search-and-seizure, he simply bought himself a portable

+computer so the cops could no longer monitor the phone where he lived

+with his Mom, and he went right on with his depredations, sometimes on

+live radio or in front of television cameras.

+

+The crackdown raid may have done little to dissuade Phiber Optik,

+but its galling affect on the Wellbeings was profound.  As 1990 rolled on,

+the slings and arrows mounted:  the Knight Lightning raid,

+the Steve Jackson raid, the nation-spanning Operation Sundevil.

+The rhetoric of law enforcement made it clear that there was,

+in fact, a concerted crackdown on hackers in progress.

+

+The hackers of the Hackers Conference, the Wellbeings, and their ilk,

+did not really mind the occasional public misapprehension of "hacking;"

+if anything, this membrane of differentiation from straight society

+made the "computer community" feel different, smarter, better.

+They had never before been confronted, however, by a concerted

+vilification campaign.

+

+Barlow's central role in the counter-struggle was one of the major

+anomalies of 1990.  Journalists investigating the controversy

+often stumbled over the truth about Barlow, but they commonly

+dusted themselves off and hurried on as if nothing had happened.

+It was as if it were TOO MUCH TO BELIEVE that a 1960s freak

+from the Grateful Dead had taken on a federal law enforcement operation

+head-to-head and ACTUALLY SEEMED TO BE WINNING!

+

+Barlow had no easily detectable power-base for a political struggle

+of this kind.  He had no formal legal or technical credentials.

+Barlow was, however, a computer networker of truly stellar brilliance.

+He had a poet's gift of concise, colorful phrasing.  He also had a

+journalist's shrewdness, an off-the-wall, self-deprecating wit,

+and a phenomenal wealth of simple personal charm.

+

+The kind of influence Barlow possessed is fairly common currency

+in literary, artistic, or musical circles.  A gifted critic can

+wield great artistic influence simply through defining

+the temper of the times, by coining the catch-phrases

+and the terms of debate that become the common currency of the period.

+(And as it happened, Barlow WAS a part-time art critic,

+with a special fondness for the Western art of Frederic Remington.)

+

+Barlow was the first commentator to adopt William Gibson's

+striking science-fictional term "cyberspace" as a synonym

+for the present-day nexus of computer and telecommunications networks.

+Barlow was insistent that cyberspace should be regarded as

+a qualitatively new world, a "frontier."  According to Barlow,

+the world of electronic communications, now made visible through

+the computer screen, could no longer be usefully regarded

+as just a tangle of high-tech wiring.  Instead, it had become

+a PLACE, cyberspace, which demanded a new set of metaphors,

+a new set of rules and behaviors.  The term, as Barlow employed it,

+struck a useful chord, and this concept of cyberspace was picked up

+by Time, Scientific American, computer police, hackers, and even

+Constitutional scholars.  "Cyberspace" now seems likely to become

+a permanent fixture of the language.

+

+Barlow was very striking in person: a tall, craggy-faced, bearded,

+deep-voiced Wyomingan in a dashing Western ensemble of jeans, jacket,

+cowboy boots, a knotted throat-kerchief and an ever-present Grateful Dead

+cloisonne lapel pin.

+

+Armed with a modem, however, Barlow was truly in his element.

+Formal hierarchies were not Barlow's strong suit; he rarely missed

+a chance to belittle the "large organizations and their drones,"

+with their uptight, institutional mindset.  Barlow was very much

+of the free-spirit persuasion, deeply unimpressed by brass-hats

+and jacks-in-office.  But when it came to the digital grapevine,

+Barlow was a cyberspace ad-hocrat par excellence.

+

+There was not a mighty army of Barlows.  There was only one Barlow,

+and he was a fairly anomolous individual.  However, the situation only

+seemed to REQUIRE a single Barlow.  In fact, after 1990, many people

+must have concluded that a single Barlow was far more than

+they'd ever bargained for.

+

+Barlow's querulous mini-essay about his encounter with the FBI

+struck a strong chord on the Well.  A number of other free spirits

+on the fringes of Apple Computing had come under suspicion,

+and they liked it not one whit better than he did.

+

+One of these was Mitchell Kapor, the co-inventor of the spreadsheet

+program "Lotus 1-2-3" and the founder of Lotus Development Corporation.

+Kapor had written-off the passing indignity of being fingerprinted

+down at his own local Boston FBI headquarters, but Barlow's post

+made the full national scope of the FBI's dragnet clear to Kapor.

+The issue now had Kapor's full attention.  As the Secret Service

+swung into anti-hacker operation nationwide in 1990, Kapor watched

+every move with deep skepticism and growing alarm.

+

+As it happened, Kapor had already met Barlow, who had interviewed Kapor

+for a California computer journal.  Like most people who met Barlow,

+Kapor had been very taken with him.  Now Kapor took it upon himself

+to drop in on Barlow for a heart-to-heart talk about the situation.

+

+Kapor was a regular on the Well.  Kapor had been a devotee of the

+Whole Earth Catalogsince the beginning, and treasured a complete run

+of the magazine.  And Kapor not only had a modem, but a private jet.

+In pursuit of the scattered high-tech investments of Kapor Enterprises Inc.,

+his personal, multi-million dollar holding company, Kapor commonly crossed

+state lines with about as much thought as one might give to faxing a letter.

+

+The Kapor-Barlow council of June 1990, in Pinedale, Wyoming, was the start

+of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  Barlow swiftly wrote a manifesto,

+"Crime and Puzzlement," which announced his, and Kapor's, intention

+to form a political organization to "raise and disburse funds for education,

+lobbying, and litigation in the areas relating to digital speech and the

+extension of the Constitution into Cyberspace."

+

+Furthermore, proclaimed the manifesto, the foundation would

+"fund, conduct, and support legal efforts to demonstrate

+that the Secret Service has exercised prior restraint on publications,

+limited free speech, conducted improper seizure of equipment and data,

+used undue force, and generally conducted itself in a fashion which

+is arbitrary, oppressive, and unconstitutional."

+

+"Crime and Puzzlement" was distributed far and wide through computer

+networking channels, and also printed in the Whole Earth Review.

+The sudden declaration of a coherent, politicized counter-strike

+from the ranks of hackerdom electrified the community.  Steve Wozniak

+(perhaps a bit stung by the  NuPrometheus scandal) swiftly offered

+to match any funds Kapor offered the Foundation.

+

+John Gilmore, one of the pioneers of Sun Microsystems, immediately offered

+his own extensive financial and personal support.  Gilmore, an ardent

+libertarian, was to prove an eloquent advocate of electronic privacy issues,

+especially freedom from governmental and corporate computer-assisted

+surveillance of private citizens.

+

+A second meeting in San Francisco rounded up further allies:

+Stewart Brand of the Point Foundation, virtual-reality pioneers

+Jaron Lanier and Chuck Blanchard, network entrepreneur and venture

+capitalist Nat Goldhaber.  At this dinner meeting, the activists settled on

+a formal title: the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Incorporated.

+Kapor became its president. A new EFF Conference was opened on

+the Point Foundation's Well, and the Well was declared

+"the home of the Electronic Frontier Foundation."

+

+Press coverage was immediate and intense.  Like their

+nineteenth-century spiritual ancestors, Alexander Graham Bell

+and Thomas Watson, the high-tech computer entrepreneurs

+of the 1970s and 1980s--people such as Wozniak, Jobs, Kapor,

+Gates, and H. Ross Perot, who had raised themselves by their bootstraps

+to dominate a glittering new industry--had always made very good copy.

+

+But while the Wellbeings rejoiced, the press in general seemed

+nonplussed by the self-declared "civilizers of cyberspace."

+EFF's insistence that the war against "hackers" involved grave

+Constitutional civil liberties issues seemed somewhat farfetched,

+especially since none of EFF's organizers were lawyers

+or established politicians.  The business press in particular

+found it easier to seize on the apparent core of the story--

+that high-tech entrepreneur Mitchell Kapor had established

+a "defense fund for hackers."  Was EFF a genuinely important

+political development--or merely a clique of wealthy eccentrics,

+dabbling in matters better left to the proper authorities?

+The jury was still out.

+

+But the stage was now set for open confrontation.

+And the first and the most critical battle was the

+hacker show-trial of "Knight Lightning."

+

+#

+

+It has been my practice throughout this book to refer to hackers

+only by their "handles."  There is little to gain by giving

+the real names of these people, many of whom are juveniles,

+many of whom have never been convicted of any crime, and many

+of whom had unsuspecting parents who have already suffered enough.

+

+But the trial of Knight Lightning on July 24-27, 1990,

+made this particular "hacker" a nationally known public figure.

+It can do no particular harm to himself or his family if I repeat

+the long-established fact that his name is Craig Neidorf (pronounced NYE-dorf).

+

+Neidorf's jury trial took place in the United States District Court,

+Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, with the

+Honorable Nicholas J. Bua presiding.  The United States of America

+was the plaintiff, the defendant Mr. Neidorf.  The defendant's attorney

+was Sheldon T. Zenner of the Chicago firm of Katten, Muchin and Zavis.

+

+The prosecution was led by the stalwarts of the Chicago Computer Fraud

+and Abuse Task Force:  William J. Cook, Colleen D. Coughlin, and

+David A. Glockner, all Assistant United States Attorneys.

+The Secret Service Case Agent was Timothy M. Foley.

+

+It will be recalled that Neidorf was the co-editor of an underground hacker

+"magazine" called Phrack.  Phrack was an entirely electronic publication,

+distributed through bulletin boards and over electronic networks.

+It was amateur publication given away for free.  Neidorf had never made

+any money for his work in Phrack.  Neither had his unindicted co-editor

+"Taran King" or any of the numerous Phrack contributors.

+

+The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force, however,

+had decided to prosecute Neidorf as a fraudster.

+To formally admit that Phrack was a "magazine"

+and Neidorf a "publisher" was to open a prosecutorial

+Pandora's Box of First Amendment issues.  To do this

+was to play into the hands of Zenner and his EFF advisers,

+which now included a phalanx of prominent New York civil rights

+lawyers as well as the formidable legal staff of Katten, Muchin and Zavis.

+Instead, the prosecution relied heavily on the issue of access device fraud:

+Section 1029 of Title 18, the section from which the Secret Service drew

+its most direct jurisdiction over computer crime.

+

+Neidorf's alleged crimes centered around the E911 Document.

+He was accused of having entered into a fraudulent scheme with the Prophet,

+who, it will be recalled, was the Atlanta LoD member who had illicitly

+copied the E911 Document from the BellSouth AIMSX system.

+

+The Prophet himself was also a co-defendant in the Neidorf case,

+part-and-parcel of the alleged "fraud scheme" to "steal" BellSouth's

+E911 Document (and to pass the Document across state lines,

+which helped establish the Neidorf trial as a federal case).

+The Prophet, in the spirit of full co-operation, had agreed

+to testify against Neidorf.

+

+In fact, all three of the Atlanta crew stood ready to testify against Neidorf.

+Their own federal prosecutors in Atlanta had charged the Atlanta Three with:

+(a) conspiracy, (b) computer fraud, (c) wire fraud, (d) access device fraud,

+and (e) interstate transportation of stolen property (Title 18, Sections 371,

+1030, 1343, 1029, and 2314).

+

+Faced with this blizzard of trouble, Prophet and Leftist had ducked

+any public trial and had pled guilty to reduced charges--one conspiracy

+count apiece.  Urvile had pled guilty to that odd bit of Section 1029

+which makes it illegal to possess "fifteen or more" illegal access devices

+(in his case, computer passwords).  And their sentences were scheduled

+for September 14, 1990--well after the Neidorf trial.  As witnesses,

+they could presumably be relied upon to behave.

+

+Neidorf, however, was pleading innocent.  Most everyone else caught up

+in the crackdown had "cooperated fully" and pled guilty in hope

+of reduced sentences.  (Steve Jackson was a notable exception,

+of course, and had strongly protested his innocence from the

+very beginning.  But Steve Jackson could not get a day in court--

+Steve Jackson had never been charged with any crime in the first place.)

+

+Neidorf had been urged to plead guilty.  But Neidorf was a political science

+major and was disinclined to go to jail for "fraud" when he had not made

+any money, had not broken into any computer, and had been publishing

+a magazine that he considered protected under the First Amendment.

+

+Neidorf's trial was the ONLY legal action of the entire Crackdown

+that actually involved bringing the issues at hand out for a public test

+in front of a jury of American citizens.

+

+Neidorf, too, had cooperated with investigators.  He had voluntarily

+handed over much of the evidence that had led to his own indictment.

+He had already admitted in writing that he knew that the E911 Document

+had been stolen before he had "published" it in Phrack--or, from the

+prosecution's point of view, illegally transported stolen property by wire

+in something purporting to be a "publication."

+

+But even if the "publication" of the E911 Document was not held to be a crime,

+that wouldn't let Neidorf off the hook.  Neidorf had still received

+the E911 Document when Prophet had transferred it to him from Rich Andrews'

+Jolnet node.  On that occasion, it certainly hadn't been "published"--

+it was hacker booty, pure and simple, transported across state lines.

+

+The Chicago Task Force led a Chicago grand jury to indict Neidorf

+on a set of charges that could have put him in jail for thirty years.

+When some of these charges were successfully challenged before Neidorf

+actually went to trial, the Chicago Task Force rearranged his

+indictment so that he faced a possible jail term of over sixty years!

+As a first offender, it was very unlikely that Neidorf would in fact

+receive a sentence so drastic; but the Chicago Task Force clearly

+intended to see Neidorf put in prison, and his conspiratorial "magazine"

+put permanently out of commission.  This was a federal case, and Neidorf

+was charged with the fraudulent theft of property worth almost

+eighty thousand dollars.

+

+William Cook was a strong believer in high-profile prosecutions

+with symbolic overtones.  He often published articles on his work

+in the security trade press, arguing that "a clear message had

+to be sent to the public at large and the computer community

+in particular that unauthorized attacks on computers and the theft

+of computerized information would not be tolerated by the courts."

+

+The issues were complex, the prosecution's tactics somewhat unorthodox,

+but the Chicago Task Force had proved sure-footed to date.  "Shadowhawk"

+had been bagged on the wing in 1989 by the Task Force, and sentenced

+to nine months in prison, and a $10,000 fine.  The Shadowhawk case involved

+charges under Section 1030, the "federal interest computer" section.

+

+Shadowhawk had not in fact been a devotee of "federal-interest" computers

+per se.  On the contrary, Shadowhawk, who owned an AT&T home computer,

+seemed to cherish a special aggression toward AT&T.  He had bragged on

+the underground boards "Phreak Klass 2600" and "Dr. Ripco" of his skills

+at raiding AT&T, and of his intention to crash AT&T's national phone system.

+Shadowhawk's brags were noticed by Henry Kluepfel of Bellcore Security,

+scourge of the outlaw boards, whose relations with the Chicago Task Force

+were long and intimate.

+

+The Task Force successfully established that Section 1030 applied to

+the teenage Shadowhawk, despite the objections of his defense attorney.

+Shadowhawk had entered a computer "owned" by U.S. Missile Command

+and merely "managed" by AT&T.  He had also entered an AT&T computer

+located at Robbins Air Force Base in Georgia.  Attacking AT&T was

+of "federal interest" whether Shadowhawk had intended it or not.

+

+The Task Force also convinced the court that a piece of AT&T

+software that Shadowhawk had illicitly copied from Bell Labs,

+the "Artificial Intelligence C5 Expert System," was worth a cool

+one million dollars.  Shadowhawk's attorney had argued that

+Shadowhawk had not sold the program and had made no profit from

+the illicit copying.  And in point of fact, the C5 Expert System

+was experimental software, and had no established market value

+because it had never been on the market in the first place.

+AT&T's own assessment of a "one million dollar" figure for its

+own intangible property was accepted without challenge

+by the court, however.  And the court concurred with

+the government prosecutors that Shadowhawk showed clear

+"intent to defraud" whether he'd gotten any money or not.

+Shadowhawk went to jail.

+

+The Task Force's other best-known triumph had been the conviction

+and jailing of "Kyrie."  Kyrie, a true denizen of the digital

+criminal underground, was a 36-year-old Canadian woman,

+convicted and jailed for telecommunications fraud in Canada.

+After her release from prison, she had fled the wrath of Canada Bell

+and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and eventually settled,

+very unwisely, in Chicago.

+

+"Kyrie," who also called herself "Long Distance Information,"

+specialized in voice-mail abuse.  She assembled large numbers

+of hot long-distance codes, then read them aloud into a series

+of corporate voice-mail systems.  Kyrie and her friends were

+electronic squatters in corporate voice-mail systems,

+using them much as if they were pirate bulletin boards,

+then moving on when their vocal chatter clogged the system

+and the owners necessarily wised up.  Kyrie's camp followers

+were a loose tribe of some hundred and fifty phone-phreaks,

+who followed her trail of piracy from machine to machine,

+ardently begging for her services and expertise.

+

+Kyrie's disciples passed her stolen credit-card numbers,

+in exchange for her stolen "long distance information."

+Some of Kyrie's clients paid her off in cash, by scamming

+credit-card cash advances from Western Union.

+

+Kyrie travelled incessantly, mostly through airline tickets

+and hotel rooms that she scammed through stolen credit cards.

+Tiring of this, she found refuge with a fellow female phone

+phreak in Chicago.  Kyrie's hostess, like a surprising number

+of phone phreaks, was blind.  She was also physically disabled.

+Kyrie allegedly made the best of her new situation by applying for,

+and receiving, state welfare funds under a false identity as

+a qualified caretaker for the handicapped.

+

+Sadly, Kyrie's two children by a former marriage had also vanished

+underground with her; these pre-teen digital refugees had no legal

+American identity, and had never spent a day in school.

+

+Kyrie was addicted to technical mastery and enthralled by her own

+cleverness and the ardent worship of her teenage followers.

+This foolishly led her to phone up Gail Thackeray in Arizona,

+to boast, brag, strut, and offer to play informant.

+Thackeray, however, had already learned far more

+than enough about Kyrie, whom she roundly despised

+as an adult criminal corrupting minors, a "female Fagin."

+Thackeray passed her tapes of Kyrie's boasts to the Secret Service.

+

+Kyrie was raided and arrested in Chicago in May 1989.

+She confessed at great length and pled guilty.

+

+In August 1990, Cook and his Task Force colleague Colleen Coughlin

+sent Kyrie to jail for 27 months, for computer and telecommunications fraud.

+This was a markedly severe sentence by the usual wrist-slapping standards

+of "hacker" busts.  Seven of Kyrie's foremost teenage disciples were also

+indicted and convicted.  The Kyrie "high-tech street gang," as Cook

+described it, had been crushed.  Cook and his colleagues had been

+the first ever to put someone in prison for voice-mail abuse.

+Their pioneering efforts had won them attention and kudos.

+

+In his article on Kyrie, Cook drove the message home to the readers

+of Security Management magazine, a trade journal for corporate

+security professionals.  The case, Cook said, and Kyrie's stiff sentence,

+"reflect a new reality for hackers and computer crime victims in the

+'90s. . . .  Individuals and corporations who report computer

+and telecommunications crimes can now expect that their cooperation

+with federal law enforcement will result in meaningful punishment.

+Companies and the public at large must report computer-enhanced

+crimes if they want prosecutors and the course to protect their rights

+to the tangible and intangible property developed and stored on computers."

+

+Cook had made it his business to construct this "new reality for hackers."

+He'd also made it his business to police corporate property rights

+to the intangible.

+

+Had the Electronic Frontier Foundation been a "hacker defense fund"

+as that term was generally understood, they presumably would have stood up

+for Kyrie.  Her 1990 sentence did indeed send a "message" that federal heat

+was coming down on "hackers."  But Kyrie found no defenders at EFF,

+or anywhere else, for that matter.  EFF was not a bail-out fund

+for electronic crooks.

+

+The Neidorf case paralleled the Shadowhawk case in certain ways.

+The victim once again was allowed to set the value of the "stolen" property.

+Once again Kluepfel was both investigator and technical advisor.

+Once again no money had changed hands, but the "intent to defraud" was central.

+

+The prosecution's case showed signs of weakness early on.  The Task Force

+had originally hoped to prove Neidorf the center of a nationwide

+Legion of Doom criminal conspiracy.  The Phrack editors threw physical

+get-togethers every summer, which attracted hackers from across the country;

+generally two dozen or so of the magazine's favorite contributors and readers.

+(Such conventions were common in the hacker community; 2600 Magazine,

+for instance, held public meetings of hackers in New York, every month.)

+LoD heavy-dudes were always a strong presence at these Phrack-sponsored

+"Summercons."

+

+In July 1988, an Arizona hacker named "Dictator" attended Summercon

+in Neidorf's home town of St. Louis.  Dictator was one of Gail Thackeray's

+underground informants; Dictator's underground board in Phoenix was

+a sting operation for the Secret Service.  Dictator brought an undercover

+crew of Secret Service agents to Summercon.  The agents bored spyholes

+through the wall of Dictator's hotel room in St Louis, and videotaped

+the frolicking hackers through a one-way mirror.  As it happened,

+however, nothing illegal had occurred on videotape, other than the

+guzzling of beer by a couple of minors.  Summercons were social events,

+not sinister cabals.  The tapes showed fifteen hours of raucous laughter,

+pizza-gobbling, in-jokes and back-slapping.

+

+Neidorf's lawyer, Sheldon Zenner, saw the Secret Service tapes

+before the trial.  Zenner was shocked by the complete harmlessness

+of this meeting, which Cook had earlier characterized as a sinister

+interstate conspiracy to commit fraud.  Zenner wanted to show the

+Summercon tapes to the jury.  It took protracted maneuverings

+by the Task Force to keep the tapes from the jury as "irrelevant."

+

+The E911 Document was also proving a weak reed.  It had originally

+been valued at $79,449.  Unlike Shadowhawk's arcane Artificial Intelligence

+booty, the E911 Document was not software--it was written in English.

+Computer-knowledgeable people found this value--for a twelve-page

+bureaucratic document--frankly incredible.  In his "Crime and Puzzlement"

+manifesto for EFF, Barlow commented:  "We will probably never know how

+this figure was reached or by whom, though I like to imagine an appraisal

+team consisting of Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon."

+

+As it happened, Barlow was unduly pessimistic.  The EFF did, in fact,

+eventually discover exactly how this figure was reached, and by whom--

+but only in 1991, long after the Neidorf trial was over.

+

+Kim Megahee, a Southern Bell security manager,

+had arrived at the document's value by simply adding up

+the "costs associated with the production" of the E911 Document.

+Those "costs" were as follows:

+

+1.  A technical writer had been hired to research and write the E911 Document.

+    200 hours of work, at $35 an hour, cost : $7,000.  A Project Manager had

+    overseen the technical writer.  200 hours, at $31 an hour, made: $6,200.

+

+2.  A week of typing had cost $721 dollars.  A week of formatting had

+    cost $721.  A week of graphics formatting had cost $742.

+

+3.  Two days of editing cost $367.

+

+4.  A box of order labels cost five dollars.

+

+5.  Preparing a purchase order for the Document, including typing

+    and the obtaining of an authorizing signature from within the

+    BellSouth bureaucracy, cost $129.

+

+6.  Printing cost $313.  Mailing the Document to fifty people

+    took fifty hours by a clerk, and cost $858.

+

+7.  Placing the Document in an index took two clerks an hour each,

+    totalling $43.

+

+Bureaucratic overhead alone, therefore, was alleged to have cost

+a whopping $17,099.  According to Mr. Megahee, the typing

+of a twelve-page document had taken a full week.  Writing it

+had taken five weeks, including an overseer who apparently

+did nothing else but watch the author for five weeks.

+Editing twelve pages had taken two days.  Printing and mailing

+an electronic document (which was already available on the

+Southern Bell Data Network to any telco employee who needed it),

+had cost over a thousand dollars.

+

+But this was just the beginning.  There were also the HARDWARE EXPENSES.

+Eight hundred fifty dollars for a VT220 computer monitor.

+THIRTY-ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS for a sophisticated VAXstation II computer.

+Six thousand dollars for a computer printer.  TWENTY-TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS

+for a copy of "Interleaf" software.  Two thousand five hundred dollars

+for VMS software.  All this to create the twelve-page Document.

+

+Plus ten percent of the cost of the software and the hardware, for maintenance.

+(Actually, the ten percent maintenance costs, though mentioned, had been left

+off the final $79,449 total, apparently through a merciful oversight).

+

+Mr. Megahee's letter had been mailed directly to William Cook himself,

+at the office of the Chicago federal attorneys.  The United States Government

+accepted these telco figures without question.

+

+As incredulity mounted, the value of the E911 Document was officially

+revised downward.  This time, Robert Kibler of BellSouth Security

+estimated the value of the twelve pages as a mere $24,639.05--based,

+purportedly, on "R&D costs."  But this specific estimate,

+right down to the nickel, did not move the skeptics at all;

+in fact it provoked open scorn and a torrent of sarcasm.

+

+The financial issues concerning theft of proprietary information

+have always been peculiar.  It could be argued that BellSouth

+had not "lost" its E911 Document at all in the first place,

+and therefore had not suffered any monetary damage from this "theft."

+And Sheldon Zenner did in fact argue this at Neidorf's trial--

+that Prophet's raid had not been "theft," but was better understood

+as illicit copying.

+

+The money, however, was not central to anyone's true purposes in this trial.

+It was not Cook's strategy to convince the jury that the E911 Document

+was a major act of theft and should be punished for that reason alone.

+His strategy was to argue that the E911 Document was DANGEROUS.

+It was his intention to establish that the E911 Document was "a road-map"

+to the Enhanced 911 System.  Neidorf had deliberately and recklessly

+distributed a dangerous weapon.  Neidorf and the Prophet did not care

+(or perhaps even gloated at the sinister idea) that the E911 Document

+could be used by hackers to disrupt 911 service, "a life line for every

+person certainly in the Southern Bell region of the United States,

+and indeed, in many communities throughout the United States,"

+in Cook's own words.  Neidorf had put people's lives in danger.

+

+In pre-trial maneuverings, Cook had established that the E911 Document

+was too hot to appear in the public proceedings of the Neidorf trial.

+The JURY ITSELF would not be allowed to ever see this Document,

+lest it slip into the official court records, and thus into the hands

+of the general public, and, thus, somehow, to malicious hackers

+who might lethally abuse it.

+

+Hiding the E911 Document from the jury may have been a

+clever legal maneuver, but it had a severe flaw.  There were,

+in point of fact, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people,

+already in possession of the E911 Document, just as Phrack

+had published it.  Its true nature was already obvious

+to a wide section of the interested public (all of whom,

+by the way, were, at least theoretically, party to

+a gigantic wire-fraud conspiracy).  Most everyone

+in the electronic community who had a modem and any

+interest in the Neidorf case already had a copy of the Document.

+It had already been available in Phrack for over a year.

+

+People, even quite normal people without any particular

+prurient interest in forbidden knowledge, did not shut their eyes

+in terror at the thought of beholding a "dangerous" document

+from a telephone company.  On the contrary, they tended to trust

+their own judgement and simply read the Document for themselves.

+And they were not impressed.

+

+One such person was John Nagle.  Nagle was a  forty-one-year-old

+professional programmer with a masters' degree in computer science

+from Stanford.  He had worked for Ford Aerospace, where he had invented

+a computer-networking technique known as the "Nagle Algorithm,"

+and for the prominent Californian computer-graphics firm "Autodesk,"

+where he was a major stockholder.

+

+Nagle was also a prominent figure on the Well, much respected

+for his technical knowledgeability.

+

+Nagle had followed the civil-liberties debate closely,

+for he was an ardent telecommunicator.  He was no particular friend

+of computer intruders, but he believed electronic publishing

+had a great deal to offer society at large, and attempts

+to restrain its growth, or to censor free electronic expression,

+strongly roused his ire.

+

+The Neidorf case, and the E911 Document, were both being discussed

+in detail on the Internet, in an electronic publication called Telecom Digest.

+Nagle, a longtime Internet maven, was a regular reader of Telecom Digest.

+Nagle had never seen a copy of Phrack, but the implications of the case

+disturbed him.

+

+While in a Stanford bookstore hunting books on robotics,

+Nagle happened across a book called The Intelligent Network.

+Thumbing through it at random, Nagle came across an entire chapter

+meticulously detailing the workings of E911 police emergency systems.

+This extensive text was being sold openly, and yet in Illinois

+a young man was in danger of going to prison for publishing

+a thin six-page document about 911 service.

+

+Nagle made an ironic comment to this effect in Telecom Digest.

+From there, Nagle was put in touch with Mitch Kapor,

+and then with Neidorf's lawyers.

+

+Sheldon Zenner was delighted to find a computer telecommunications expert

+willing to speak up for Neidorf, one who was not a wacky teenage "hacker."

+Nagle was fluent, mature, and respectable; he'd once had a federal

+security clearance.

+

+Nagle was asked to fly to Illinois to join the defense team.

+

+Having joined the defense as an expert witness, Nagle read the entire

+E911 Document for himself.  He made his own judgement about its potential

+for menace.

+

+The time has now come for you yourself, the reader, to have a look

+at the E911 Document.  This six-page piece of work was the pretext

+for a federal prosecution that could have sent an electronic publisher

+to prison for thirty, or even sixty, years.  It was the pretext

+for the search and seizure of Steve Jackson Games, a legitimate publisher

+of printed books.  It was also the formal pretext for the search

+and seizure of the Mentor's bulletin board, "Phoenix Project,"

+and for the raid on the home of Erik Bloodaxe.  It also had much

+to do with the seizure of Richard Andrews' Jolnet node

+and the shutdown of Charles Boykin's AT&T node.

+The E911 Document was the single most important piece

+of evidence in the Hacker Crackdown.  There can be no real

+and legitimate substitute for the Document itself.

+

+

+==Phrack Inc.==

+

+Volume Two, Issue 24, File 5 of 13

+

+Control Office Administration

+Of Enhanced 911 Services For

+Special Services and Account Centers

+

+by the Eavesdropper

+

+March, 1988

+

+

+Description of Service

+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

+The control office for Emergency 911 service is assigned in

+accordance with the existing standard guidelines to one of

+the following centers:

+

+o  Special Services Center (SSC)

+o  Major Accounts Center (MAC)

+o  Serving Test Center (STC)

+o  Toll Control Center (TCC)

+

+The SSC/MAC designation is used in this document interchangeably

+for any of these four centers.  The Special Services Centers (SSCs)

+or Major Account Centers (MACs) have been designated as the trouble

+reporting contact for all E911 customer (PSAP) reported troubles.

+Subscribers who have trouble on an E911 call will continue

+to contact local repair service (CRSAB) who will refer the

+trouble to the SSC/MAC, when appropriate.

+

+Due to the critical nature of E911 service, the control

+and timely repair of troubles is demanded.  As the primary

+E911 customer contact, the SSC/MAC is in the unique position

+to monitor the status of the trouble and insure its resolution.

+

+System Overview

+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

+The number 911 is intended as a nationwide universal

+telephone number which provides the public with direct

+access to a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP).  A PSAP

+is also referred to as an Emergency Service Bureau (ESB).

+A PSAP is an agency or facility which is authorized by a

+municipality to receive and respond to police, fire and/or

+ambulance services.  One or more attendants are located

+at the PSAP facilities to receive and handle calls of an

+emergency nature in accordance with the local municipal

+requirements.

+

+An important advantage of E911 emergency service is

+improved (reduced) response times for emergency

+services.  Also close coordination among agencies

+providing various emergency services is a valuable

+capability provided by E911 service.

+

+1A ESS is used as the tandem office for the E911 network to

+route all 911 calls to the correct (primary) PSAP designated

+to serve the calling station.  The E911 feature was

+developed primarily to provide routing to the correct PSAP

+for all 911 calls.  Selective routing allows a 911 call

+originated from a particular station located in a particular

+district, zone, or town, to be routed to the primary PSAP

+designated to serve that customer station regardless of

+wire center boundaries.  Thus, selective routing eliminates

+the problem of wire center boundaries not coinciding with

+district or other political boundaries.

+

+The services available with the E911 feature include:

+

+Forced Disconnect       Default Routing

+Alternative Routing     Night Service

+Selective Routing       Automatic Number

+Identification (ANI)

+Selective Transfer      Automatic Location

+Identification (ALI)

+

+

+Preservice/Installation Guidelines

+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

+When a contract for an E911 system has been signed, it is

+the responsibility of Network Marketing to establish an

+implementation/cutover committee which should include

+a representative from the SSC/MAC.  Duties of the E911

+Implementation Team include coordination of all phases

+of the E911 system deployment and the formation of an

+on-going E911 maintenance subcommittee.

+

+Marketing is responsible for providing the following

+customer specific information to the SSC/MAC prior to

+the start of call through testing:

+

+o  All PSAP's (name, address, local contact)

+o  All PSAP circuit ID's

+o  1004 911 service request including PSAP details on each PSAP

+   (1004 Section K, L, M)

+o  Network configuration

+o  Any vendor information (name, telephone number, equipment)

+

+The SSC/MAC needs to know if the equipment and sets

+at the PSAP are maintained by the BOCs, an independent

+company, or an outside vendor, or any combination.

+This information is then entered on the PSAP profile sheets

+and reviewed quarterly for changes, additions and deletions.

+

+Marketing will secure the Major Account Number (MAN)

+and provide this number to Corporate Communications

+so that the initial issue of the service orders carry

+the MAN and can be tracked by the SSC/MAC via CORDNET.

+PSAP circuits are official services by definition.

+

+All service orders required for the installation of the E911

+system should include the MAN assigned to the city/county

+which has purchased the system.

+

+In accordance with the basic SSC/MAC strategy for provisioning,

+the SSC/MAC will be Overall Control Office (OCO) for all Node

+to PSAP circuits (official services) and any other services

+for this customer.  Training must be scheduled for all SSC/MAC

+involved personnel during the pre-service stage of the project.

+

+The E911 Implementation Team will form the on-going

+maintenance subcommittee prior to the initial

+implementation of the E911 system.  This sub-committee

+will establish post implementation quality assurance

+procedures to ensure that the E911 system continues to

+provide quality service to the customer.

+Customer/Company training, trouble reporting interfaces

+for the customer, telephone company and any involved

+independent telephone companies needs to be addressed

+and implemented prior to E911 cutover.  These functions

+can be best addressed by the formation of a sub-

+committee of the E911 Implementation Team to set up

+guidelines for and to secure service commitments of

+interfacing organizations.  A SSC/MAC supervisor should

+chair this subcommittee and include the following

+organizations:

+

+1) Switching Control Center

+ - E911 translations

+ - Trunking

+ - End office and Tandem office hardware/software

+2) Recent Change Memory Administration Center

+ - Daily RC update activity for TN/ESN translations

+ - Processes validity errors and rejects

+3) Line and Number Administration

+ - Verification of TN/ESN translations

+4) Special Service Center/Major Account Center

+ - Single point of contact for all PSAP and Node to host troubles

+ - Logs, tracks & statusing of all trouble reports

+ - Trouble referral, follow up, and escalation

+ - Customer notification of status and restoration

+ - Analyzation of "chronic" troubles

+ - Testing, installation and maintenance of E911 circuits

+5) Installation and Maintenance (SSIM/I&M)

+ - Repair and maintenance of PSAP equipment and Telco owned sets

+6) Minicomputer Maintenance Operations Center

+ - E911 circuit maintenance (where applicable)

+7) Area Maintenance Engineer

+ - Technical assistance on voice (CO-PSAP) network related E911 troubles

+

+

+Maintenance Guidelines

+~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

+The CCNC will test the Node circuit from the 202T at the

+Host site to the 202T at the Node site.  Since Host to Node

+(CCNC to MMOC) circuits are official company services,

+the CCNC will refer all Node circuit troubles to the

+SSC/MAC. The SSC/MAC is responsible for the testing

+and follow up to restoration of these circuit troubles.

+

+Although Node to PSAP circuit are official services, the

+MMOC will refer PSAP circuit troubles to the appropriate

+SSC/MAC.  The SSC/MAC is responsible for testing and

+follow up to restoration of PSAP circuit troubles.

+

+The SSC/MAC will also receive reports from

+CRSAB/IMC(s) on subscriber 911 troubles when they are

+not line troubles.  The SSC/MAC is responsible for testing

+and restoration of these troubles.

+

+Maintenance responsibilities are as follows:

+

+SCC@           Voice Network (ANI to PSAP)

+@SCC responsible for tandem switch

+

+SSIM/I&M        PSAP Equipment (Modems, CIU's, sets)

+Vendor          PSAP Equipment (when CPE)

+SSC/MAC         PSAP to Node circuits, and tandem to

+                PSAP voice circuits (EMNT)

+MMOC            Node site (Modems, cables, etc)

+

+Note:  All above work groups are required to resolve troubles

+by interfacing with appropriate work groups for resolution.

+

+The Switching Control Center (SCC) is responsible for

+E911/1AESS translations in tandem central offices.

+These translations route E911 calls, selective transfer,

+default routing, speed calling, etc., for each PSAP.

+The SCC is also responsible for troubleshooting on

+the voice network (call originating to end office tandem equipment).

+

+For example, ANI failures in the originating offices would

+be a responsibility of the SCC.

+

+Recent Change Memory Administration Center (RCMAC) performs

+the daily tandem translation updates (recent change)

+for routing of individual telephone numbers.

+

+Recent changes are generated from service order activity

+(new service, address changes, etc.) and compiled into

+a daily file by the E911 Center (ALI/DMS E911 Computer).

+

+SSIM/I&M is responsible for the installation and repair of

+PSAP equipment. PSAP equipment includes ANI Controller,

+ALI Controller, data sets, cables, sets, and other peripheral

+equipment that is not vendor owned. SSIM/I&M is responsible

+for establishing maintenance test kits, complete with spare parts

+for PSAP maintenance. This includes test gear, data sets,

+and ANI/ALI Controller parts.

+

+Special Services Center (SSC) or Major Account Center

+(MAC) serves as the trouble reporting contact for all

+(PSAP) troubles reported by customer.  The SSC/MAC

+refers troubles to proper organizations for handling and

+tracks status of troubles, escalating when necessary.

+The SSC/MAC will close out troubles with customer.

+The SSC/MAC will analyze all troubles and tracks "chronic"

+PSAP troubles.

+

+Corporate Communications Network Center (CCNC) will

+test and refer troubles on all node to host circuits.

+All E911 circuits are classified as official company property.

+

+The Minicomputer Maintenance Operations Center

+(MMOC) maintains the E911 (ALI/DMS) computer

+hardware at the Host site.  This MMOC is also responsible

+for monitoring the system and reporting certain PSAP

+and system problems to the local MMOC's, SCC's or

+SSC/MAC's.  The MMOC personnel also operate software

+programs that maintain the TN data base under the

+direction of the E911 Center. The maintenance of the

+NODE computer (the interface between the PSAP and the

+ALI/DMS computer) is a function of the MMOC at the

+NODE site.  The MMOC's at the NODE sites may also be

+involved in the testing of NODE to Host circuits.

+The MMOC will also assist on Host to PSAP and data network

+related troubles not resolved through standard trouble

+clearing procedures.

+

+Installation And Maintenance Center (IMC) is responsible

+for referral of E911 subscriber troubles that are not subscriber

+line problems.

+

+E911 Center - Performs the role of System Administration

+and is responsible for overall operation of the E911

+computer software.  The E911 Center does A-Z trouble

+analysis and provides statistical information on the

+performance of the system.

+

+This analysis includes processing PSAP inquiries (trouble

+reports) and referral of network troubles.  The E911 Center

+also performs daily processing of tandem recent change

+and provides information to the RCMAC for tandem input.

+The E911 Center is responsible for daily processing

+of the ALI/DMS computer data base and provides error files,

+etc. to the Customer Services department for investigation and correction.

+The E911 Center participates in all system implementations and on-going

+maintenance effort and assists in the development of procedures,

+training and education of information to all groups.

+

+Any group receiving a 911 trouble from the SSC/MAC should

+close out the trouble with the SSC/MAC or provide a status

+if the trouble has been referred to another group.

+This will allow the SSC/MAC to provide a status back

+to the customer or escalate as appropriate.

+

+Any group receiving a trouble from the Host site (MMOC

+or CCNC) should close the trouble back to that group.

+

+The MMOC should notify the appropriate SSC/MAC

+when the Host, Node, or all Node circuits are down so that

+the SSC/MAC can reply to customer reports that may be

+called in by the PSAPs.  This will eliminate duplicate

+reporting of troubles. On complete outages the MMOC

+will follow escalation procedures for a Node after two (2)

+hours and for a PSAP after four (4) hours.  Additionally the

+MMOC will notify the appropriate SSC/MAC when the

+Host, Node, or all Node circuits are down.

+

+The PSAP will call the SSC/MAC to report E911 troubles.

+The person reporting the E911 trouble may not have a

+circuit I.D. and will therefore report the PSAP name and

+address.  Many PSAP troubles are not circuit specific.  In

+those instances where the caller cannot provide a circuit

+I.D., the SSC/MAC will be required to determine the

+circuit I.D. using the PSAP profile.  Under no circumstances

+will the SSC/MAC Center refuse to take the trouble.

+The E911 trouble should be handled as quickly as possible,

+with the SSC/MAC providing as much assistance as

+possible while taking the trouble report from the caller.

+

+The SSC/MAC will screen/test the trouble to determine the

+appropriate handoff organization based on the following criteria:

+

+PSAP equipment problem:  SSIM/I&M

+Circuit problem:  SSC/MAC

+Voice network problem:  SCC (report trunk group number)

+Problem affecting multiple PSAPs (No ALI report from

+all PSAPs):  Contact the MMOC to check for NODE or

+Host computer problems before further testing.

+

+The SSC/MAC will track the status of reported troubles

+and escalate as appropriate.  The SSC/MAC will close out

+customer/company reports with the initiating contact.

+Groups with specific maintenance responsibilities,

+defined above, will investigate "chronic" troubles upon

+request from the SSC/MAC and the ongoing maintenance subcommittee.

+

+All "out of service" E911 troubles are priority one type reports.

+One link down to a PSAP is considered a priority one trouble

+and should be handled as if the PSAP was isolated.

+

+The PSAP will report troubles with the ANI controller, ALI

+controller or set equipment to the SSC/MAC.

+

+NO ANI:  Where the PSAP reports NO ANI (digital

+display screen is blank) ask if this condition exists on all

+screens and on all calls.  It is important to differentiate

+between blank screens and screens displaying 911-00XX,

+or all zeroes.

+

+When the PSAP reports all screens on all calls, ask if there

+is any voice contact with callers.  If there is no voice

+contact the trouble should be referred to the SCC

+immediately since 911 calls are not getting through which

+may require alternate routing of calls to another PSAP.

+

+When the PSAP reports this condition on all screens

+but not all calls and has voice contact with callers,

+the report should be referred to SSIM/I&M for dispatch.

+The SSC/MAC should verify with the SCC that ANI

+is pulsing before dispatching SSIM.

+

+When the PSAP reports this condition on one screen for

+all calls (others work fine) the trouble should be referred

+to SSIM/I&M for dispatch, because the trouble is isolated to

+one piece of equipment at the customer premise.

+

+An ANI failure (i.e. all zeroes) indicates that the ANI has

+not been received by the PSAP from the tandem office or

+was lost by the PSAP ANI controller.  The PSAP may

+receive "02" alarms which can be caused by the ANI

+controller logging more than three all zero failures on the

+same trunk.  The PSAP has been instructed to report this

+condition to the SSC/MAC since it could indicate an

+equipment trouble at the PSAP which might be affecting

+all subscribers calling into the PSAP.  When all zeroes are

+being received on all calls or "02" alarms continue, a tester

+should analyze the condition to determine the appropriate

+action to be taken.  The tester must perform cooperative

+testing with the SCC when there appears to be a problem

+on the Tandem-PSAP trunks before requesting dispatch.

+

+When an occasional all zero condition is reported,

+the SSC/MAC should dispatch SSIM/I&M to routine

+equipment on a "chronic" troublesweep.

+

+The PSAPs are instructed to report incidental ANI failures

+to the BOC on a PSAP inquiry trouble ticket (paper) that

+is sent to the Customer Services E911 group and forwarded

+to E911 center when required.  This usually involves only a

+particular telephone number and is not a condition that

+would require a report to the SSC/MAC.  Multiple ANI

+failures which our from the same end office (XX denotes

+end office), indicate a hard trouble condition may exist

+in the end office or end office tandem trunks.  The PSAP will

+report this type of condition to the SSC/MAC and the

+SSC/MAC should refer the report to the SCC responsible

+for the tandem office.  NOTE: XX is the ESCO (Emergency

+Service Number) associated with the incoming 911 trunks

+into the tandem.  It is important that the C/MAC tell the

+SCC what is displayed at the PSAP (i.e. 911-0011) which

+indicates to the SCC which end office is in trouble.

+

+Note:  It is essential that the PSAP fill out inquiry form

+on every ANI failure.

+

+The PSAP will report a trouble any time an address is not

+received on an address display (screen blank) E911 call.

+(If a record is not in the 911 data base or an ANI failure

+is encountered, the screen will provide a display noticing

+such condition).  The SSC/MAC should verify with the PSAP

+whether the NO ALI condition is on one screen or all screens.

+

+When the condition is on one screen (other screens

+receive ALI information) the SSC/MAC will request

+SSIM/I&M to dispatch.

+

+If no screens are receiving ALI information, there is usually

+a circuit trouble between the PSAP and the Host computer.

+The SSC/MAC should test the trouble and refer for restoral.

+

+Note:  If the SSC/MAC receives calls from multiple

+PSAP's, all of which are receiving NO ALI, there is a

+problem with the Node or Node to Host circuits or the

+Host computer itself.  Before referring the trouble the

+SSC/MAC should call the MMOC to inquire if the Node

+or Host is in trouble.

+

+Alarm conditions on the ANI controller digital display at

+the PSAP are to be reported by the PSAP's.  These alarms

+can indicate various trouble conditions so the SSC/MAC

+should ask the PSAP if any portion of the E911 system

+is not functioning properly.

+

+The SSC/MAC should verify with the PSAP attendant that

+the equipment's primary function is answering E911 calls.

+If it is, the SSC/MAC should request a dispatch SSIM/I&M.

+If the equipment is not primarily used for E911,

+then the SSC/MAC should advise PSAP to contact their CPE vendor.

+

+Note:  These troubles can be quite confusing when the

+PSAP has vendor equipment mixed in with equipment

+that the BOC maintains.  The Marketing representative

+should provide the SSC/MAC information concerning any

+unusual or exception items where the PSAP should

+contact their vendor.  This information should be included

+in the PSAP profile sheets.

+

+ANI or ALI controller down:  When the host computer sees

+the PSAP equipment down and it does not come back up,

+the MMOC will report the trouble to the SSC/MAC;

+the equipment is down at the PSAP, a dispatch will be required.

+

+PSAP link (circuit) down:  The MMOC will provide the

+SSC/MAC with the circuit ID that the Host computer

+indicates in trouble.  Although each PSAP has two circuits,

+when either circuit is down the condition must be treated

+as an emergency since failure of the second circuit will

+cause the PSAP to be isolated.

+

+Any problems that the MMOC identifies from the Node

+location to the Host computer will be handled directly

+with the appropriate MMOC(s)/CCNC.

+

+Note:  The customer will call only when a problem is

+apparent to the PSAP. When only one circuit is down to

+the PSAP, the customer may not be aware there is a

+trouble, even though there is one link down,

+notification should appear on the PSAP screen.

+Troubles called into the SSC/MAC from the MMOC

+or other company employee should not be closed out

+by calling the PSAP since it may result in the

+customer responding that they do not have a trouble.

+These reports can only be closed out by receiving

+information that the trouble was fixed and by checking

+with the company employee that reported the trouble.

+The MMOC personnel will be able to verify that the

+trouble has cleared by reviewing a printout from the host.

+

+When the CRSAB receives a subscriber complaint

+(i.e., cannot dial 911) the RSA should obtain as much

+information as possible while the customer is on the line.

+

+For example, what happened when the subscriber dialed 911?

+The report is automatically directed to the IMC for subscriber line testing.

+When no line trouble is found, the IMC will refer the trouble condition

+to the SSC/MAC.  The SSC/MAC will contact Customer Services E911 Group

+and verify that the subscriber should be able to call 911 and obtain the ESN.

+The SSC/MAC will verify the ESN via 2SCCS.  When both verifications match,

+the SSC/MAC will refer the report to the SCC responsible for the 911 tandem

+office for investigation and resolution.  The MAC is responsible for tracking

+the trouble and informing the IMC when it is resolved.

+

+

+For more information, please refer to E911 Glossary of Terms.

+End of Phrack File

+_____________________________________

+

+

+The reader is forgiven if he or she was entirely unable to read

+this document.  John Perry Barlow had a great deal of fun at its expense,

+in "Crime and Puzzlement:"  "Bureaucrat-ese of surpassing opacity. . . .

+To read the whole thing straight through without entering coma requires

+either a machine or a human who has too much practice thinking like one.

+Anyone who can understand it fully and fluidly had altered his consciousness

+beyond the ability to ever again read Blake, Whitman, or Tolstoy. . . .

+the document contains little of interest to anyone who is not a student

+of advanced organizational sclerosis."

+

+With the Document itself to hand, however, exactly as it was published

+(in its six-page edited form) in Phrack, the reader may be able to verify

+a few statements of fact about its nature.  First, there is no software,

+no computer code, in the Document.  It is not computer-programming language

+like FORTRAN or C++, it is English; all the sentences have nouns and verbs

+and punctuation.  It does not explain how to break into the E911 system.

+It does not suggest ways to destroy or damage the E911 system.

+

+There are no access codes in the Document.  There are no computer passwords.

+It does not explain how to steal long distance service.  It does not explain

+how to break in to telco switching stations.  There is nothing in it about

+using a personal computer or a modem for any purpose at all, good or bad.

+

+Close study will reveal that this document is not about machinery.

+The E911 Document is about ADMINISTRATION. It describes how one creates

+and administers certain units of telco bureaucracy:

+Special Service Centers and Major Account Centers (SSC/MAC).

+It describes how these centers should distribute responsibility

+for the E911 service, to other units of telco bureaucracy,

+in a chain of command, a formal hierarchy.  It describes

+who answers customer complaints, who screens calls,

+who reports equipment failures, who answers those reports,

+who handles maintenance, who chairs subcommittees,

+who gives orders, who follows orders, WHO tells WHOM what to do.

+The Document is not a "roadmap" to computers.

+The Document is a roadmap to PEOPLE.

+

+As an aid to breaking into computer systems, the Document is USELESS.

+As an aid to harassing and deceiving telco people, however, the Document

+might prove handy (especially with its Glossary, which I have not included).

+An intense and protracted study of this Document and its Glossary,

+combined with many other such documents, might teach one to speak like

+a telco employee.  And telco people live by SPEECH--they live by phone

+communication.  If you can mimic their language over the phone,

+you can "social-engineer" them.  If you can con telco people, you can

+wreak havoc among them.  You can force them to no longer trust one another;

+you can break the telephonic ties that bind their community; you can make

+them paranoid.  And people will fight harder to defend their community

+than they will fight to defend their individual selves.

+

+This was the genuine, gut-level threat posed by Phrack magazine.

+The real struggle was over the control of telco language,

+the control of telco knowledge.  It was a struggle to defend the social

+"membrane of differentiation" that forms the walls of the telco

+community's ivory tower --the special jargon that allows telco

+professionals to recognize one another, and to exclude charlatans,

+thieves, and upstarts.  And the prosecution brought out this fact.

+They repeatedly made reference to the threat posed to telco professionals

+by hackers using "social engineering."

+

+However, Craig Neidorf was not on trial for learning to speak like

+a professional telecommunications expert.  Craig Neidorf was on trial

+for access device fraud and transportation of stolen property.

+He was on trial for stealing a document that was purportedly

+highly sensitive and purportedly worth tens of thousands of dollars.

+

+#

+

+John Nagle read the E911 Document.  He drew his own conclusions.

+And he presented Zenner and his defense team with an overflowing box

+of similar material, drawn mostly from Stanford University's

+engineering libraries.  During the trial, the defense team--Zenner,

+half-a-dozen other attorneys, Nagle, Neidorf, and computer-security

+expert Dorothy Denning, all pored over the E911 Document line-by-line.

+

+On the afternoon of July 25, 1990, Zenner began to cross-examine

+a woman named Billie Williams, a service manager for Southern Bell

+in Atlanta.  Ms. Williams had been responsible for the E911 Document.

+(She was not its author--its original "author" was a Southern Bell

+staff manager named Richard Helms.  However, Mr. Helms should not bear

+the entire blame; many telco staff people and maintenance personnel

+had amended the Document.  It had not been so much "written" by a

+single author, as built by committee out of concrete-blocks of jargon.)

+

+Ms. Williams had been called as a witness for the prosecution,

+and had gamely tried to explain the basic technical structure

+of the E911 system, aided by charts.

+

+Now it was Zenner's turn.  He first established that the

+"proprietary stamp" that BellSouth had used on the E911 Document

+was stamped on EVERY SINGLE DOCUMENT that BellSouth wrote--

+THOUSANDS of documents.  "We do not publish anything other

+than for our own company," Ms. Williams explained.

+"Any company document of this nature is considered proprietary."

+Nobody was in charge of singling out special high-security publications

+for special high-security protection.  They were ALL special,

+no matter how trivial, no matter what their subject matter--

+the stamp was put on as soon as any document was written,

+and the stamp was never removed.

+

+Zenner now asked whether the charts she had been using to explain

+the mechanics of E911 system were "proprietary," too.

+Were they PUBLIC INFORMATION, these charts, all about PSAPs,

+ALIs, nodes, local end switches?  Could he take the charts out

+in the street and show them to anybody, "without violating

+some proprietary notion that BellSouth has?"

+

+Ms Williams showed some confusion, but finally areed that the charts were,

+in fact, public.

+

+"But isn't this what you said was basically what appeared in Phrack?"

+

+Ms. Williams denied this.

+

+Zenner now pointed out that the E911 Document as published in Phrack

+was only half the size of the original E911 Document (as Prophet

+had purloined it).  Half of it had been deleted--edited by Neidorf.

+

+Ms. Williams countered that "Most of the information that is

+in the text file is redundant."

+

+Zenner continued to probe.  Exactly what bits of knowledge in the Document

+were, in fact, unknown to the public?  Locations of E911 computers?

+Phone numbers for telco personnel?  Ongoing maintenance subcommittees?

+Hadn't Neidorf removed much of this?

+

+Then he pounced.  "Are you familiar with Bellcore Technical Reference

+Document TR-TSY-000350?"  It was, Zenner explained, officially titled

+"E911 Public Safety Answering Point Interface Between 1-1AESS Switch

+and Customer Premises Equipment."  It contained highly detailed

+and specific technical information about the E911 System.

+It was published by Bellcore and publicly available for about $20.

+

+He showed the witness a Bellcore catalog which listed thousands

+of documents from Bellcore and from all the Baby Bells, BellSouth included.

+The catalog, Zenner pointed out, was free.  Anyone with a credit card

+could call the Bellcore toll-free 800 number and simply order any

+of these documents, which would be shipped to any customer without question.

+Including, for instance, "BellSouth E911 Service Interfaces to

+Customer Premises Equipment at a Public Safety Answering Point."

+

+Zenner gave the witness a copy of "BellSouth E911 Service Interfaces,"

+which cost, as he pointed out, $13, straight from the catalog.

+"Look at it carefully," he urged Ms. Williams, "and tell me

+if it doesn't contain about twice as much detailed information

+about the E911 system of BellSouth than appeared anywhere in Phrack."

+

+"You want me to. . . ."  Ms. Williams trailed off.  "I don't understand."

+

+"Take a careful look," Zenner persisted.  "Take a look at that document,

+and tell me when you're done looking at it if, indeed, it doesn't contain

+much more detailed information about the E911 system than appeared in Phrack."

+

+"Phrack wasn't taken from this," Ms. Williams said.

+

+"Excuse me?" said Zenner.

+

+"Phrack wasn't taken from this."

+

+"I can't hear you," Zenner said.

+

+"Phrack was not taken from this document.  I don't understand

+your question to me."

+

+"I guess you don't," Zenner said.

+

+At this point, the prosecution's case had been gutshot.

+Ms. Williams was distressed.  Her confusion was quite genuine.

+Phrack had not been taken from any publicly available Bellcore document.

+Phrack's E911 Document had been stolen from her own company's computers,

+from her own company's text files, that her own colleagues had written,

+and revised, with much labor.

+

+But the "value" of the Document had been blown to smithereens.

+It wasn't worth eighty grand.  According to Bellcore it was worth

+thirteen bucks.  And the looming menace that it supposedly posed

+had been reduced in instants to a scarecrow.  Bellcore itself

+was selling material far more detailed and "dangerous,"

+to anybody with a credit card and a phone.

+

+Actually, Bellcore was not giving this information to just anybody.

+They gave it to ANYBODY WHO ASKED, but not many did ask.

+Not many people knew that Bellcore had a free catalog and an 800 number.

+John Nagle knew, but certainly the average teenage phreak didn't know.

+"Tuc," a friend of Neidorf's and sometime Phrack contributor, knew,

+and Tuc had been very helpful to the defense, behind the scenes.

+But the Legion of Doom didn't know--otherwise, they would never

+have wasted so much time raiding dumpsters.  Cook didn't know.

+Foley didn't know.  Kluepfel didn't know.  The right hand

+of Bellcore knew not what the left hand was doing.  The right

+hand was battering hackers without mercy, while the left hand

+was distributing Bellcore's intellectual property to anybody

+who was interested in telephone technical trivia--apparently,

+a pathetic few.

+

+The digital underground was so amateurish and poorly organized

+that they had never discovered this heap of unguarded riches.

+The ivory tower of the telcos was so wrapped-up in the fog

+of its own technical obscurity that it had left all the

+windows open and flung open the doors. No one had even noticed.

+

+Zenner sank another nail in the coffin.  He produced a printed issue

+of Telephone Engineer & Management, a prominent industry journal

+that comes out twice a month and costs $27 a year.  This particular issue

+of TE&M, called "Update on 911," featured a galaxy of technical details

+on 911 service and a glossary far more extensive than Phrack's.

+

+The trial rumbled on, somehow, through its own momentum.

+Tim Foley testified about his interrogations of Neidorf.

+Neidorf's written admission that he had known the E911 Document

+was pilfered was officially read into the court record.

+

+An interesting side issue came up:  "Terminus" had once passed Neidorf

+a piece of UNIX AT&T software, a log-in sequence, that had been cunningly

+altered so that it could trap passwords.  The UNIX software itself was

+illegally copied AT&T property, and the alterations "Terminus" had made to it,

+had transformed it into a device for facilitating computer break-ins.  Terminus

+himself would eventually plead guilty to theft of this piece of software,

+and the Chicago group would send Terminus to prison for it.  But it was

+of dubious relevance in the Neidorf case.  Neidorf hadn't written the program.

+He wasn't accused of ever having used it.  And Neidorf wasn't being charged

+with software theft or owning a password trapper.

+

+On the next day, Zenner took the offensive.  The civil libertarians

+now had their own arcane, untried legal weaponry to launch into action--

+the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, 18 US Code,

+Section 2701 et seq.  Section 2701 makes it a crime to intentionally

+access without authorization a facility in which an electronic communication

+service is provided--it is, at heart, an anti-bugging and anti-tapping law,

+intended to carry the traditional protections of telephones into other

+electronic channels of communication.  While providing penalties for amateur

+snoops, however, Section 2703 of the ECPA also lays some formal difficulties

+on the bugging and tapping activities of police.

+

+The Secret Service, in the person of Tim Foley, had served Richard Andrews

+with a federal grand jury subpoena, in their pursuit of Prophet,

+the E911 Document, and the Terminus software ring.  But according to

+the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a "provider of remote

+computing service" was legally entitled to "prior notice" from

+the government if a subpoena was used.  Richard Andrews and his

+basement UNIX node, Jolnet, had not received any "prior notice."

+Tim Foley had purportedly violated the ECPA and committed

+an electronic crime!  Zenner now sought the judge's permission

+to cross-examine Foley on the topic of Foley's own electronic misdeeds.

+

+Cook argued that Richard Andrews' Jolnet was a privately owned

+bulletin board, and not within the purview of ECPA.  Judge Bua

+granted the motion of the government to prevent cross-examination

+on that point, and Zenner's offensive fizzled.  This, however,

+was the first direct assault on the legality of the actions

+of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force itself--

+the first suggestion that they themselves had broken the law,

+and might, perhaps, be called to account.

+

+Zenner, in any case, did not really need the ECPA.

+Instead, he grilled Foley on the glaring contradictions in

+the supposed value of the E911 Document.  He also brought up

+the embarrassing fact that the supposedly red-hot E911 Document

+had been sitting around for months, in Jolnet, with Kluepfel's knowledge,

+while Kluepfel had done nothing about it.

+

+In the afternoon, the Prophet was brought in to testify

+for the prosecution.  (The Prophet, it will be recalled,

+had also been indicted in the case as partner in a fraud

+scheme with Neidorf.)  In Atlanta, the Prophet had already

+pled guilty to one charge of conspiracy, one charge of wire fraud

+and one charge of interstate transportation of stolen property.

+The wire fraud charge, and the stolen property charge,

+were both directly based on the E911 Document.

+

+The twenty-year-old Prophet proved a sorry customer,

+answering questions politely but in a barely audible mumble,

+his voice trailing off at the ends of sentences.

+He was constantly urged to speak up.

+

+Cook, examining Prophet, forced him to admit that

+he had once had a "drug problem," abusing amphetamines,

+marijuana, cocaine, and LSD.  This may have established

+to the jury that "hackers" are, or can be, seedy lowlife characters,

+but it may have damaged Prophet's credibility somewhat.

+Zenner later suggested that drugs might have damaged Prophet's memory.

+The interesting fact also surfaced that Prophet had never

+physically met Craig Neidorf.  He didn't even know

+Neidorf's last name--at least, not until the trial.

+

+Prophet confirmed the basic facts of his hacker career.

+He was a member of the Legion of Doom.  He had abused codes,

+he had broken into switching stations and re-routed calls,

+he had hung out on pirate bulletin boards.  He had raided

+the BellSouth AIMSX computer, copied the E911 Document,

+stored it on Jolnet, mailed it to Neidorf.  He and Neidorf

+had edited it, and Neidorf had known where it came from.

+

+Zenner, however, had Prophet confirm that Neidorf was not a member

+of the Legion of Doom, and had not urged Prophet to break into

+BellSouth computers.  Neidorf had never urged Prophet to defraud anyone,

+or to steal anything.  Prophet also admitted that he had never known Neidorf

+to break in to any computer.  Prophet said that no one in the Legion of Doom

+considered Craig Neidorf a "hacker" at all.  Neidorf was not a UNIX maven,

+and simply lacked the necessary skill and ability to break into computers.

+Neidorf just published a magazine.

+

+On Friday, July 27, 1990, the case against Neidorf collapsed.

+Cook moved to dismiss the indictment, citing "information currently

+available to us that was not available to us at the inception of the trial."

+Judge Bua praised the prosecution for this action, which he described as

+"very responsible," then dismissed a juror and declared a mistrial.

+

+Neidorf was a free man.  His defense, however, had cost himself

+and his family dearly.  Months of his life had been consumed in anguish;

+he had seen his closest friends shun him as a federal criminal.

+He owed his lawyers over a hundred thousand dollars, despite

+a generous payment to the defense by Mitch Kapor.

+

+Neidorf was not found innocent.  The trial was simply dropped.

+Nevertheless, on September 9, 1991, Judge Bua granted Neidorf's

+motion for the "expungement and sealing" of his indictment record.

+The United States Secret Service was ordered to delete and destroy

+all fingerprints, photographs, and other records of arrest

+or processing relating to Neidorf's indictment, including

+their paper documents and their computer records.

+

+Neidorf went back to school, blazingly determined to become a lawyer.

+Having seen the justice system at work, Neidorf lost much of his enthusiasm

+for merely technical power.  At this writing, Craig Neidorf is working

+in Washington as a salaried researcher for the American Civil Liberties Union.

+

+#

+

+The outcome of the Neidorf trial changed the EFF

+from voices-in-the-wilderness to the media darlings

+of the new frontier.

+

+Legally speaking, the Neidorf case was not a sweeping triumph

+for anyone concerned.  No constitutional principles had been established.

+The issues of "freedom of the press" for electronic publishers remained

+in legal limbo.  There were public misconceptions about the case.

+Many people thought Neidorf had been found innocent and relieved

+of all his legal debts by Kapor.  The truth was that the government

+had simply dropped the case, and Neidorf's family had gone deeply

+into hock to support him.

+

+But the Neidorf case did provide a single, devastating, public sound-bite:

+THE FEDS SAID IT WAS WORTH EIGHTY GRAND, AND IT WAS ONLY WORTH THIRTEEN BUCKS.

+

+This is the Neidorf case's single most memorable element.  No serious report

+of the case missed this particular element.  Even cops could not read this

+without a wince and a shake of the head.  It left the public credibility

+of the crackdown agents in tatters.

+

+The crackdown, in fact, continued, however.  Those two charges

+against Prophet, which had been based on the E911 Document,

+were quietly forgotten at his sentencing--even though Prophet

+had already pled guilty to them.  Georgia federal prosecutors

+strongly argued for jail time for the Atlanta Three, insisting on

+"the need to send a message to the community," "the message that

+hackers around the country need to hear."

+

+There was a great deal in their sentencing memorandum

+about the awful things that various other hackers had done

+(though the Atlanta Three themselves had not, in fact,

+actually committed these crimes).  There was also much

+speculation about the awful things that the Atlanta Three

+MIGHT have done and WERE CAPABLE of doing (even though

+they had not, in fact, actually done them).

+The prosecution's argument carried the day.

+The Atlanta Three were sent to prison:

+Urvile and Leftist both got 14 months each,

+while Prophet (a second offender) got 21 months.

+

+The Atlanta Three were also assessed staggering fines as "restitution":

+$233,000 each.  BellSouth claimed that the defendants had "stolen"

+"approximately $233,880 worth" of "proprietary computer access information"--

+specifically, $233,880 worth of computer passwords and connect addresses.

+BellSouth's astonishing claim of the extreme value of its own computer

+passwords and addresses was accepted at face value by the Georgia court.

+Furthermore (as if to emphasize its theoretical nature) this enormous sum

+was not divvied up among the Atlanta Three, but each of them had to pay

+all of it.

+

+A striking aspect of the sentence was that the Atlanta Three were

+specifically forbidden to use computers, except for work or under supervision.

+Depriving hackers of home computers and modems makes some sense if one

+considers hackers as "computer addicts," but EFF, filing an amicus brief

+in the case, protested that this punishment was unconstitutional--

+it deprived the Atlanta Three of their rights of free association

+and free expression through electronic media.

+

+Terminus, the "ultimate hacker," was finally sent to prison for a year

+through the dogged efforts of the Chicago Task Force.  His crime,

+to which he pled guilty, was the transfer of the UNIX password trapper,

+which was officially valued by AT&T at $77,000, a figure which aroused

+intense skepticism among those familiar with UNIX "login.c" programs.

+

+The jailing of Terminus and the Atlanta Legionnaires of Doom, however,

+did not cause the EFF any sense of embarrassment or defeat.

+On the contrary, the civil libertarians were rapidly gathering strength.

+

+An early and potent supporter was Senator Patrick Leahy,

+Democrat from Vermont, who had been a Senate sponsor

+of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.  Even before

+the Neidorf trial, Leahy had spoken out in defense of hacker-power

+and freedom of the keyboard:  "We cannot unduly inhibit the inquisitive

+13-year-old who, if left to experiment today, may tomorrow develop

+the telecommunications or computer technology to lead the United States

+into the 21st century.  He represents our future and our best hope

+to remain a technologically competitive nation."

+

+It was a handsome statement, rendered perhaps rather more effective

+by the fact that the crackdown raiders DID NOT HAVE any Senators

+speaking out for THEM.  On the contrary, their highly secretive

+actions and tactics, all "sealed search warrants" here and

+"confidential ongoing investigations" there, might have won

+them a burst of glamorous publicity at first, but were crippling

+them in the on-going propaganda war.  Gail Thackeray was reduced

+to unsupported bluster:  "Some of these people who are loudest

+on the bandwagon may just slink into the background,"

+she predicted in Newsweek--when all the facts came out,

+and the cops were vindicated.

+

+But all the facts did not come out.  Those facts that did,

+were not very flattering.  And the cops were not vindicated.

+And Gail Thackeray lost her job.  By the end of 1991,

+William Cook had also left public employment.

+

+1990 had belonged to the crackdown, but by '91 its agents

+were in severe disarray, and the libertarians were on a roll.

+People were flocking to the cause.

+

+A particularly interesting ally had been Mike Godwin of Austin, Texas.

+Godwin was an individual almost as difficult to describe as Barlow;

+he had been editor of the student newspaper of the University of Texas,

+and a computer salesman, and a programmer, and in 1990 was back

+in law school, looking for a law degree.

+

+Godwin was also a bulletin board maven.  He was very well-known

+in the Austin board community under his handle "Johnny Mnemonic,"

+which he adopted from a cyberpunk science fiction story by William Gibson.

+Godwin was an ardent cyberpunk science fiction fan.  As a fellow Austinite

+of similar age and similar interests, I myself had known Godwin socially

+for many years.  When William Gibson and myself had been writing our

+collaborative SF novel, The Difference Engine, Godwin had been our

+technical advisor in our effort to link our Apple word-processors

+from Austin to Vancouver.  Gibson and I were so pleased by his generous

+expert help that we named a character in the novel "Michael Godwin"

+in his honor.

+

+The handle "Mnemonic" suited Godwin very well.  His erudition

+and his mastery of trivia were impressive to the point of stupor;

+his ardent curiosity seemed insatiable, and his desire to debate

+and argue seemed the central drive of his life.  Godwin had even

+started his own Austin debating society, wryly known as the

+"Dull Men's Club."  In person, Godwin could be overwhelming;

+a flypaper-brained polymath  who could not seem to let any idea go.

+On bulletin boards, however, Godwin's closely reasoned,

+highly grammatical, erudite posts suited the medium well,

+and he became a local board celebrity.

+

+Mike Godwin was the man most responsible for the public national exposure

+of the Steve Jackson case.  The Izenberg seizure in Austin had received

+no press coverage at all.  The March 1 raids on Mentor, Bloodaxe, and

+Steve Jackson Games had received a brief front-page splash in the

+front page of the Austin American-Statesman, but it was confused

+and ill-informed:  the warrants were sealed, and the Secret Service

+wasn't talking.  Steve Jackson seemed doomed to obscurity.

+Jackson had not been arrested; he was not charged with any crime;

+he was not on trial.  He had lost some computers in an ongoing

+investigation--so what?  Jackson tried hard to attract attention

+to the true extent of his plight, but he was drawing a blank;

+no one in a position to help him seemed able to get a mental grip

+on the issues.

+

+Godwin, however, was uniquely, almost magically, qualified

+to carry Jackson's case to the outside world. Godwin was

+a board enthusiast, a science fiction fan, a former journalist,

+a computer salesman, a lawyer-to-be, and an Austinite.

+Through a coincidence yet more amazing, in his last year

+of law school Godwin had specialized in federal prosecutions

+and criminal procedure.  Acting entirely on his own, Godwin made

+up a press packet which summarized the issues and provided useful

+contacts for reporters.  Godwin's behind-the-scenes effort

+(which he carried out mostly to prove a point in a local board debate)

+broke the story again in the Austin American-Statesman and then in Newsweek.

+

+Life was never the same for Mike Godwin after that.  As he joined the growing

+civil liberties debate on the Internet, it was obvious to all parties involved

+that here was one guy who, in the midst of complete murk and confusion,

+GENUINELY UNDERSTOOD EVERYTHING HE WAS TALKING ABOUT.  The disparate elements

+of Godwin's dilettantish existence suddenly fell together as neatly as

+the facets of a Rubik's cube.

+

+When the time came to hire a full-time EFF staff attorney,

+Godwin was the obvious choice.  He took the Texas bar exam,

+left Austin, moved to Cambridge, became a full-time, professional,

+computer civil libertarian, and was soon touring the nation on behalf

+of EFF, delivering well-received addresses on the issues to crowds

+as disparate as academics, industrialists, science fiction fans,

+and federal cops.

+

+Michael Godwin is currently the chief legal counsel of

+the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

+

+#

+

+Another early and influential participant in the controversy

+was Dorothy Denning.  Dr. Denning was unique among investigators

+of the computer underground in that she did not enter the debate

+with any set of politicized motives.  She was a professional

+cryptographer and computer security expert whose primary interest

+in hackers was SCHOLARLY.  She had a B.A. and M.A. in mathematics,

+and a Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue.  She had worked for SRI

+International, the California think-tank that was also the home of

+computer-security maven Donn Parker, and had authored an influential text

+called Cryptography and Data Security.  In 1990, Dr. Denning was working for

+Digital Equipment Corporation in their Systems Reseach Center.  Her husband,

+Peter Denning, was also a computer security expert, working for NASA's

+Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science.  He had edited the

+well-received Computers Under Attack:  Intruders, Worms and Viruses.

+

+Dr. Denning took it upon herself to contact the digital underground,

+more or less with an anthropological interest.  There she discovered

+that these computer-intruding hackers, who had been characterized

+as unethical, irresponsible, and a serious danger to society,

+did in fact have their own subculture and their own rules.

+They were not particularly well-considered rules, but they were,

+in fact, rules.  Basically, they didn't take money and they

+didn't break anything.

+

+Her dispassionate reports on her researches did a great deal

+to influence serious-minded computer professionals--the sort

+of people who merely rolled their eyes at the cyberspace

+rhapsodies of a John Perry Barlow.

+

+For young hackers of the digital underground, meeting Dorothy Denning

+was a genuinely mind-boggling experience.  Here was this neatly coiffed,

+conservatively dressed, dainty little personage, who reminded most

+hackers of their moms or their aunts.  And yet she was an IBM systems

+programmer with profound expertise in computer architectures

+and high-security information flow, who had personal friends

+in the FBI and the National Security Agency.

+

+Dorothy Denning was a shining example of the American mathematical

+intelligentsia, a genuinely brilliant person from the central ranks

+of the computer-science elite.  And here she was, gently questioning

+twenty-year-old hairy-eyed phone-phreaks over the deeper ethical

+implications of their behavior.

+

+Confronted by this genuinely nice lady, most hackers sat up very straight

+and did their best to keep the anarchy-file stuff down to a faint whiff

+of brimstone.  Nevertheless, the hackers WERE in fact prepared to seriously

+discuss serious issues with Dorothy Denning.  They were willing to speak

+the unspeakable and defend the indefensible, to blurt out their convictions

+that information cannot be owned, that the databases of governments and large

+corporations were a threat to the rights and privacy of individuals.

+

+Denning's articles made it clear to many that "hacking"

+was not simple vandalism by some evil clique of psychotics.

+"Hacking" was not an aberrant menace that could be charmed away

+by ignoring it, or swept out of existence by jailing a few ringleaders.

+Instead, "hacking" was symptomatic of a growing, primal struggle over

+knowledge and power in the age of information.

+

+Denning pointed out that the attitude of hackers were at least partially

+shared by forward-looking management theorists in the business community:

+people like Peter Drucker and Tom Peters.  Peter Drucker, in his book

+The New Realities, had stated that "control of information by the government

+is no longer possible. Indeed, information is now transnational.

+Like money, it has no `fatherland.'"

+

+And management maven Tom Peters had chided large corporations for uptight,

+proprietary attitudes in his bestseller, Thriving on Chaos:

+"Information hoarding, especially by politically motivated,

+power-seeking staffs, had been commonplace throughout American industry,

+service and manufacturing alike. It will be an impossible

+millstone aroung the neck of tomorrow's organizations."

+

+Dorothy Denning had shattered the social membrane of the

+digital underground.  She attended the Neidorf trial,

+where she was prepared to testify for the defense as an expert witness.

+She was a behind-the-scenes organizer of two of the most important

+national meetings of the computer civil libertarians.  Though not

+a zealot of any description, she brought disparate elements of the

+electronic community into a surprising and fruitful collusion.

+

+Dorothy Denning is currently the Chair of the Computer Science Department

+at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

+

+#

+

+There were many stellar figures in the civil libertarian community.

+There's no question, however, that its single most influential figure

+was Mitchell D. Kapor.  Other people might have formal titles,

+or governmental positions, have more experience with crime,

+or with the law, or with the arcanities of computer security

+or constitutional theory.  But by 1991 Kapor had transcended

+any such narrow role.  Kapor had become "Mitch."

+

+Mitch had become the central civil-libertarian ad-hocrat.

+Mitch had stood up first, he had spoken out loudly, directly,

+vigorously and angrily, he had put his own reputation,

+and his very considerable personal fortune, on the line.

+By mid-'91 Kapor was the best-known advocate of his cause

+and was known PERSONALLY by almost every single human being in America

+with any direct influence on the question of civil liberties in cyberspace.

+Mitch had built bridges, crossed voids, changed paradigms, forged metaphors,

+made phone-calls and swapped business cards to such spectacular effect

+that it had become impossible for anyone to take any action in the

+"hacker question" without wondering what Mitch might think--

+and say--and tell his friends.

+

+The EFF had simply NETWORKED the situation into an entirely new status quo.

+And in fact this had been EFF's deliberate strategy from the beginning.

+Both Barlow and Kapor loathed bureaucracies and had deliberately

+chosen to work almost entirely through the electronic spiderweb of

+"valuable personal contacts."

+

+After a year of EFF, both Barlow and Kapor had every reason

+to look back with satisfaction.  EFF had established its own Internet node,

+"eff.org," with a well-stocked electronic archive of documents on

+electronic civil rights, privacy issues, and academic freedom.

+EFF was also publishing EFFector, a quarterly printed journal,

+as well as EFFector Online, an electronic newsletter with

+over 1,200 subscribers.  And EFF was thriving on the Well.

+

+EFF had a national headquarters in Cambridge and a full-time staff.

+It had become a membership organization and was attracting

+grass-roots support.  It had also attracted the support

+of some thirty civil-rights lawyers, ready and eager

+to do pro bono work in defense of the Constitution in Cyberspace.

+

+EFF had lobbied successfully in Washington and in Massachusetts

+to change state and federal legislation on computer networking.

+Kapor in particular had become a veteran expert witness,

+and had joined the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board

+of the National Academy of Science and Engineering.

+

+EFF had sponsored meetings such as "Computers, Freedom and Privacy"

+and the CPSR Roundtable.  It had carried out a press offensive that,

+in the words of EFFector, "has affected the climate of opinion about

+computer networking and begun to reverse the slide into

+`hacker hysteria' that was beginning to grip the nation."

+

+It had helped Craig Neidorf avoid prison.

+

+And, last but certainly not least, the Electronic Frontier Foundation

+had filed a federal lawsuit in the name of Steve Jackson,

+Steve Jackson Games Inc., and three users of the Illuminati

+bulletin board system.  The defendants were, and are,

+the United States Secret Service, William Cook, Tim Foley,

+Barbara Golden and Henry Kleupfel.

+

+The case, which is in pre-trial procedures in an Austin federal court

+as of this writing, is a civil action for damages to redress

+alleged violations of the First and Fourth Amendments to the

+United States Constitution, as well as the Privacy Protection Act

+of 1980 (42 USC 2000aa et seq.), and the Electronic Communications

+Privacy Act (18 USC 2510 et seq and 2701 et seq).

+

+EFF had established that it had credibility.  It had also established

+that it had teeth.

+

+In the fall of 1991 I travelled to Massachusetts to speak personally

+with Mitch Kapor.  It was my final interview for this book.

+

+#

+

+The city of Boston has always been one of the major intellectual centers

+of the American republic.  It is a very old city by American standards,

+a place of skyscrapers overshadowing seventeenth-century graveyards,

+where the high-tech start-up companies of Route 128 co-exist with the

+hand-wrought pre-industrial grace of "Old Ironsides," the USS CONSTITUTION.

+

+The Battle of Bunker Hill, one of the first and bitterest armed clashes

+of the American Revolution, was fought in Boston's environs.  Today there is

+a monumental spire on Bunker Hill, visible throughout much of the city.

+The willingness of the republican revolutionaries to take up arms and fire

+on their oppressors has left a  cultural legacy that two full centuries

+have not effaced.  Bunker Hill is still a potent center of American political

+symbolism, and the Spirit of '76  is still a potent image for those who seek

+to mold public opinion.

+

+Of course, not everyone who wraps himself in the flag is necessarily

+a patriot.  When I visited the spire in September 1991, it bore a huge,

+badly-erased, spray-can grafitto around its bottom reading

+"BRITS OUT--IRA PROVOS."  Inside this hallowed edifice was

+a glass-cased diorama of thousands of tiny toy soldiers,

+rebels and redcoats, fighting and dying over the green hill,

+the riverside marshes, the rebel trenchworks.  Plaques indicated the

+movement of troops, the shiftings of strategy.  The Bunker Hill Monument

+is occupied at its very center by the toy soldiers of a military

+war-game simulation.

+

+The Boston metroplex is a place of great universities,

+prominent among the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

+where the term "computer hacker" was first coined.  The Hacker Crackdown

+of 1990 might be interpreted as a political struggle among American cities:

+traditional strongholds of longhair intellectual liberalism,

+such as Boston, San Francisco, and Austin, versus the bare-knuckle

+industrial pragmatism of Chicago and Phoenix (with Atlanta and New York

+wrapped in internal struggle).

+

+The headquarters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is on

+155 Second Street in Cambridge, a Bostonian suburb north

+of the River Charles.  Second Street has weedy sidewalks of dented,

+sagging brick and elderly cracked asphalt; large street-signs warn

+"NO PARKING DURING DECLARED SNOW EMERGENCY."  This is an old area

+of modest manufacturing industries; the EFF is catecorner from the

+Greene Rubber Company.  EFF's building is two stories of red brick;

+its large wooden windows feature gracefully arched tops and stone sills.

+

+The glass window beside the Second Street entrance bears three sheets

+of neatly laser-printed paper, taped against the glass.  They read:

+ON Technology.  EFF.  KEI.

+

+"ON Technology" is Kapor's software company, which currently specializes

+in "groupware" for the Apple Macintosh computer.  "Groupware" is intended

+to promote efficient social interaction among office-workers linked

+by computers.  ON Technology's most successful software products to date

+are "Meeting Maker" and "Instant Update."

+

+"KEI" is Kapor Enterprises Inc., Kapor's personal holding company,

+the commercial entity that formally controls his extensive investments

+in other hardware and software corporations.

+

+"EFF" is a political action group--of a special sort.

+

+Inside, someone's bike has been chained to the handrails

+of a modest flight of stairs.  A wall of modish glass brick

+separates this anteroom from the offices.  Beyond the brick,

+there's an alarm system mounted on the wall, a sleek, complex little

+number that resembles a cross between a thermostat and a CD player.

+Piled against the wall are box after box of a recent special issue

+of Scientific American, "How to Work, Play, and Thrive in Cyberspace,"

+with extensive coverage of electronic networking techniques

+and political issues, including an article by Kapor himself.

+These boxes are addressed to Gerard Van der Leun, EFF's

+Director of Communications, who will shortly mail those magazines

+to every member of the EFF.

+

+The joint headquarters of EFF, KEI, and ON Technology,

+which Kapor currently rents, is a modestly bustling place.

+It's very much the same physical size as Steve Jackson's gaming company.

+It's certainly a far cry from the gigantic gray steel-sided railway

+shipping barn, on the Monsignor O'Brien Highway, that is owned

+by Lotus Development Corporation.

+

+Lotus is, of course, the software giant that Mitchell Kapor founded

+in the late 70s.  The software program Kapor co-authored,

+"Lotus 1-2-3," is still that company's most profitable product.

+"Lotus 1-2-3" also bears a singular distinction in the

+digital underground: it's probably the most pirated piece

+of application software in world history.

+

+Kapor greets me cordially in his own office, down a hall.

+Kapor, whose name is pronounced KAY-por, is in his early forties,

+married and the father of two.  He has a round face, high forehead,

+straight nose, a slightly tousled mop of black hair peppered with gray.

+His large brown eyes are wideset, reflective, one might almost say soulful.

+He disdains ties, and commonly wears Hawaiian shirts and tropical prints,

+not so much garish as simply cheerful and just that little bit anomalous.

+

+There is just the whiff of hacker brimstone about Mitch Kapor.

+He may not have the hard-riding, hell-for-leather, guitar-strumming

+charisma of his Wyoming colleague John Perry Barlow, but there's

+something about the guy that still stops one short.  He has the air

+of the Eastern city dude in the bowler hat, the dreamy,

+Longfellow-quoting poker shark who only HAPPENS to know

+the exact mathematical odds against drawing to an inside straight.

+Even among his computer-community colleagues, who are hardly known

+for mental sluggishness, Kapor strikes one forcefully as a very

+intelligent man.  He speaks rapidly, with vigorous gestures,

+his Boston accent sometimes slipping to the sharp nasal tang

+of his youth in Long Island.

+

+Kapor, whose Kapor Family Foundation does much of his philanthropic work,

+is a strong supporter of Boston's Computer Museum.  Kapor's interest

+in the history of his industry has brought him some remarkable curios,

+such as the "byte" just outside his office door.  This "byte"--

+eight digital bits--has been salvaged from the wreck of an

+electronic computer of the pre-transistor age.  It's a standing gunmetal

+rack about the size of a small toaster-oven:  with eight slots

+of hand-soldered breadboarding featuring thumb-sized vacuum tubes.

+If it fell off a table it could easily break your foot,

+but it was state-of-the-art computation in the 1940s.

+(It would take exactly 157,184 of these primordial toasters

+to hold the first part of this book.)

+

+There's also a coiling, multicolored, scaly dragon that some

+inspired techno-punk artist has cobbled up entirely out of transistors,

+capacitors, and brightly plastic-coated wiring.

+

+Inside the office, Kapor excuses himself briefly to do a little

+mouse-whizzing housekeeping on his personal Macintosh IIfx.

+If its giant screen were an open window, an agile person

+could climb through it without much trouble at all.

+There's a coffee-cup at Kapor's elbow, a memento of his

+recent trip to Eastern Europe, which has a black-and-white

+stencilled photo and the legend CAPITALIST FOOLS TOUR.

+It's Kapor, Barlow, and two California venture-capitalist luminaries

+of their acquaintance, four windblown, grinning Baby Boomer

+dudes in leather jackets, boots, denim, travel bags,

+standing on airport tarmac somewhere behind the formerly Iron Curtain.

+They look as if they're having the absolute time of their lives.

+

+Kapor is in a reminiscent mood.  We talk a bit about his youth--

+high school days as a "math nerd," Saturdays attending Columbia University's

+high-school science honors program, where he had his first experience

+programming computers.  IBM 1620s, in 1965 and '66.  "I was very interested,"

+says Kapor, "and then I went off to college and got distracted by drugs sex

+and rock and roll, like anybody with half a brain would have then!"

+After college he was a progressive-rock DJ in Hartford, Connecticut,

+for a couple of years.

+

+I ask him if he ever misses his rock and roll days--if he ever wished

+he could go back to radio work.

+

+He shakes his head flatly.  "I stopped thinking about going back

+to be a DJ the day after Altamont."

+

+Kapor moved to Boston in 1974 and got a job programming mainframes in COBOL.

+He hated it.  He quit and became a teacher of transcendental meditation.

+(It was Kapor's long flirtation with Eastern mysticism that gave the

+world "Lotus.")

+

+In 1976 Kapor went to Switzerland, where the Transcendental Meditation

+movement had rented a gigantic Victorian hotel in St-Moritz.  It was

+an all-male group--a hundred and twenty of them--determined upon

+Enlightenment or Bust.  Kapor had given the transcendant his best shot.

+He was becoming disenchanted by "the nuttiness in the organization."

+"They were teaching people to levitate," he says, staring at the floor.

+His voice drops an octave, becomes flat.  "THEY DON'T LEVITATE."

+

+Kapor chose Bust.  He went back to the States and acquired a degree

+in counselling psychology.  He worked a while in a hospital,

+couldn't stand that either.  "My rep was," he says  "a very bright kid

+with a lot of potential who hasn't found himself.  Almost thirty.

+Sort of lost."

+

+Kapor was unemployed when he bought his first personal computer--an Apple II.

+He sold his stereo to raise cash and drove to New Hampshire to avoid the

+sales tax.

+

+"The day after I purchased it," Kapor tells me, "I was hanging out

+in a computer store and I saw another guy, a man in his forties,

+well-dressed guy, and eavesdropped on his conversation with the salesman.

+He didn't know anything about computers.  I'd had a year programming.

+And I could program in BASIC.  I'd taught myself.  So I went up to him,

+and I actually sold myself to him as a consultant."  He pauses.

+"I don't know where I got the nerve to do this.  It was uncharacteristic.

+I just said, `I think I can help you, I've been listening,

+this is what you need to do and I think I can do it for you.'

+And he took me on!  He was my first client!  I became a computer

+consultant the first day after I bought the Apple II."

+

+Kapor had found his true vocation.  He attracted more clients

+for his consultant service, and started an Apple users' group.

+

+A friend of Kapor's, Eric Rosenfeld, a graduate student at MIT,

+had a problem.  He was doing a thesis on an arcane form of

+financial statistics, but could not wedge himself into the crowded queue

+for time on MIT's mainframes.  (One might note at this point that if

+Mr. Rosenfeld had dishonestly broken into the MIT mainframes,

+Kapor himself might have never invented Lotus 1-2-3 and

+the PC business might have been set back for years!)

+Eric Rosenfeld did have an Apple II, however,

+and he thought it might be possible to scale the problem down.

+Kapor, as favor, wrote a program for him in BASIC that did the job.

+

+It then occurred to the two of them, out of the blue,

+that it might be possible to SELL this program.

+They marketed it themselves, in plastic baggies,

+for about a hundred bucks a pop, mail order.

+"This was a total cottage industry by a marginal consultant,"

+Kapor says proudly.  "That's how I got started, honest to God."

+

+Rosenfeld, who later became a very prominent figure on Wall Street,

+urged Kapor to go to MIT's business school for an MBA.

+Kapor did seven months there, but never got his MBA.

+He picked up some useful tools--mainly a firm grasp

+of the principles of accounting--and, in his own words,

+"learned to talk MBA."  Then he dropped out and went to Silicon Valley.

+

+The inventors of VisiCalc, the Apple computer's premier business program,

+had shown an interest in Mitch Kapor.  Kapor worked diligently for them

+for six months, got tired of California, and went back to Boston

+where they had better bookstores.  The VisiCalc group had made

+the critical error of bringing in "professional management."

+"That drove them into the ground," Kapor says.

+

+"Yeah, you don't hear a lot about VisiCalc these days," I muse.

+

+Kapor looks surprised.  "Well, Lotus. . . we BOUGHT it."

+

+"Oh.  You BOUGHT it?"

+

+"Yeah."

+

+"Sort of like the Bell System buying Western Union?"

+

+Kapor grins.  "Yep!  Yep!  Yeah, exactly!"

+

+Mitch Kapor was not in full command of the destiny of himself

+or his industry.  The hottest software commodities of the early 1980s

+were COMPUTER GAMES--the Atari seemed destined to enter every teenage home

+in America.  Kapor got into business software simply because he didn't have

+any particular feeling for computer games.  But he was supremely fast

+on his feet, open to new ideas and inclined to trust his instincts.

+And his instincts were good.  He chose good people to deal with--

+gifted programmer Jonathan Sachs (the co-author of Lotus 1-2-3).

+Financial wizard Eric Rosenfeld, canny Wall Street analyst

+and venture capitalist Ben Rosen.  Kapor was the founder and CEO of Lotus,

+one of the most spectacularly successful business ventures of the

+later twentieth century.

+

+He is now an extremely wealthy man.  I ask him if he actually

+knows how much money he has.

+

+"Yeah," he says.  "Within a percent or two."

+

+How much does he actually have, then?

+

+He shakes his head.  "A lot.  A lot.  Not something I talk about.

+Issues of money and class are  things that cut pretty close to the bone."

+

+I don't pry.  It's beside the point.  One might presume, impolitely,

+that Kapor has at least forty million--that's what he got the year

+he left Lotus.  People who ought to know claim Kapor has about

+a hundred and fifty million, give or take a market swing

+in his stock holdings. If Kapor had stuck with Lotus,

+as his colleague friend and rival Bill Gates has stuck

+with his own software start-up, Microsoft, then Kapor

+would likely have much the same fortune Gates has--

+somewhere in the neighborhood of three billion,

+give or take a few hundred million.  Mitch Kapor

+has all the money he wants.  Money has lost whatever charm

+it ever held for him--probably not much in the first place.

+When Lotus became too uptight, too bureaucratic, too far

+from the true sources of his own satisfaction, Kapor walked.

+He simply severed all connections with the company and went out the door.

+It stunned everyone--except those who knew him best.

+

+Kapor has not had to strain his resources to wreak a thorough

+transformation in cyberspace politics.  In its first year,

+EFF's budget was about a quarter of a million dollars.

+Kapor is running EFF out of his pocket change.

+

+Kapor takes pains to tell me that he does not consider himself

+a civil libertarian per se.  He has spent quite some time

+with true-blue civil libertarians lately, and there's a

+political-correctness to them that bugs him.  They seem

+to him to spend entirely too much time in legal nitpicking

+and not enough vigorously exercising civil rights in the

+everyday real world.

+

+Kapor is an entrepreneur.  Like all hackers, he prefers his involvements

+direct, personal, and hands-on.  "The fact that EFF has a node on the

+Internet is a great thing.  We're a publisher.  We're a distributor

+of information."  Among the items the eff.org Internet node carries

+is back issues of Phrack.  They had an internal debate about that in EFF,

+and finally decided to take the plunge.  They might carry other

+digital underground publications--but if they do, he says,

+"we'll certainly carry Donn Parker, and anything Gail Thackeray

+wants to put up.  We'll turn it into a public library, that has

+the whole spectrum of use.  Evolve in the direction of people making up

+their own minds."  He grins.  "We'll try to label all the editorials."

+

+Kapor is determined to tackle the technicalities of the Internet

+in the service of the public interest.  "The problem with being a node

+on the Net today is that you've got to have a captive technical specialist.

+We have Chris Davis around, for the care and feeding of the balky beast!

+We couldn't do it ourselves!"

+

+He pauses.  "So one direction in which technology has to evolve

+is much more standardized units, that a non-technical person

+can feel comfortable with.  It's the same shift as from minicomputers to PCs.

+I can see a future in which any person can have a Node on the Net.

+Any person can be a publisher.  It's better than the media we now have.

+It's possible.  We're working actively."

+

+Kapor is in his element now, fluent, thoroughly in command in his material.

+"You go tell a hardware Internet hacker that everyone should have a node

+on the Net," he says, "and the first thing they're going to say is,

+`IP doesn't scale!'"  ("IP" is the interface protocol for the Internet.

+As it currently exists, the IP software is simply not capable of

+indefinite expansion; it will run out of usable addresses, it will saturate.)

+"The answer," Kapor says, "is:  evolve the protocol!  Get the smart people

+together and figure out what to do.  Do we add ID?  Do we add new protocol?

+Don't just say, WE CAN'T DO IT."

+

+Getting smart people together to figure out what to do is a skill

+at which Kapor clearly excels.  I counter that people on the Internet

+rather enjoy their elite technical status, and don't seem particularly

+anxious to democratize the Net.

+

+Kapor agrees, with a show of scorn.  "I tell them that this is the snobbery

+of the people on the Mayflower looking down their noses at the people

+who came over ON THE SECOND BOAT!  Just because they got here a year,

+or five years, or ten years before everybody else, that doesn't give

+them ownership of cyberspace!  By what right?"

+

+I remark that the telcos are an electronic network, too,

+and they seem to guard their specialized knowledge pretty closely.

+

+Kapor ripostes that the telcos and the Internet are entirely

+different animals.  "The Internet is an open system,

+everything is published, everything gets argued about,

+basically by anybody who can get in.  Mostly, it's exclusive

+and elitist just because it's so difficult.  Let's make it easier to use."

+

+On the other hand, he allows with a swift change of emphasis,

+the so-called elitists do have a point as well. "Before people start coming in,

+who are new, who want to make suggestions, and criticize the Net as

+`all screwed up'. . . .  They should at least take the time to understand

+the culture on its own terms.  It has its own history--show some respect

+for it.  I'm a conservative, to that extent."

+

+The Internet is Kapor's paradigm for the future of telecommunications.

+The Internet is decentralized, non-hierarchical, almost anarchic.

+There are no bosses, no chain of command, no secret data.

+If each node obeys the general interface standards,

+there's simply no need for any central network authority.

+

+Wouldn't that spell the doom of AT&T as an institution?  I ask.

+

+That prospect doesn't faze Kapor for a moment.  "Their  big advantage,

+that they have now, is that they have all of the wiring.

+But two things are happening.  Anyone with right-of-way

+is putting down fiber--Southern Pacific Railroad,

+people like that--there's enormous `dark fiber' laid in."

+("Dark Fiber" is fiber-optic cable, whose enormous capacity

+so exceeds the demands of current usage that much of the

+fiber still has no light-signals on it--it's still `dark,'

+awaiting future use.)

+

+"The other thing that's happening is the local-loop stuff

+is going to go wireless.  Everyone from Bellcore to the cable TV

+companies to AT&T wants to put in these things called

+`personal communication systems.'  So you could have local competition--

+you could have multiplicity of people, a bunch of neighborhoods,

+sticking stuff up on poles.  And a bunch of other people laying in dark fiber.

+So what happens to the telephone companies?  There's enormous pressure

+on them from both sides.

+

+"The more I look at this, the more I believe that in a post-industrial,

+digital world, the idea of regulated monopolies is bad.  People will

+look back on it and say that in the 19th and 20th centuries

+the idea of public utilities was an okay compromise.

+You needed one set of wires in the ground.  It was too economically

+inefficient, otherwise.  And that meant one entity running it.

+But now, with pieces being wireless--the connections are going

+to be via high-level interfaces, not via wires.  I mean, ULTIMATELY

+there are going to be wires--but the wires are just a commodity.

+Fiber, wireless.  You no longer NEED a utility."

+

+Water utilities?  Gas utilities?

+

+Of course we still need those, he agrees.  "But when what you're moving

+is information, instead of physical substances, then you can play by

+a different set of rules.  We're evolving those rules now!

+Hopefully you can have a much more decentralized system,

+and one in which there's more competition in the marketplace.

+

+"The role of government will be to make sure that nobody cheats.

+The proverbial `level playing field.'  A policy that prevents monopolization.

+It should result in better service, lower prices, more choices,

+and local empowerment."  He smiles.  "I'm very big on local empowerment."

+

+Kapor is a man with a vision.  It's a very novel vision which he

+and his allies are working out in considerable detail and with great energy.

+Dark, cynical, morbid cyberpunk that I am, I cannot avoid considering

+some of the darker implications of "decentralized, nonhierarchical,

+locally empowered" networking.

+

+I remark that some pundits have suggested that electronic networking--faxes,

+phones, small-scale photocopiers--played a strong role in dissolving

+the power of centralized communism and causing the collapse of the Warsaw Pact.

+

+Socialism is totally discredited, says Kapor, fresh back from

+the Eastern Bloc.  The idea that faxes did it, all by themselves,

+is rather wishful thinking.

+

+Has it occurred to him that electronic networking might corrode

+America's industrial and political infrastructure to the point

+where the whole thing becomes untenable, unworkable--and the old order

+just collapses headlong, like in Eastern Europe?

+

+"No," Kapor says flatly.  "I think that's extraordinarily unlikely.

+In part, because ten or fifteen years ago, I had similar hopes

+about personal computers--which utterly failed to materialize."

+He grins wryly, then his eyes narrow. "I'm VERY opposed to techno-utopias.

+Every time I see one, I either run away, or try to kill it."

+

+It dawns on me then that Mitch Kapor is not trying to

+make the world safe for democracy.  He certainly is not

+trying to make it safe for anarchists or utopians--

+least of all for computer intruders or electronic rip-off artists.

+What he really hopes to do is make the world safe for

+future Mitch Kapors.  This world of decentralized, small-scale nodes,

+with instant global access for the best and brightest,

+would be a perfect milieu for the shoestring attic capitalism

+that made Mitch Kapor what he is today.

+

+Kapor is a very bright man.  He has a rare combination

+of visionary intensity with a strong practical streak.

+The Board of the EFF:  John Barlow, Jerry Berman of the ACLU,

+Stewart Brand, John Gilmore, Steve Wozniak, and Esther Dyson,

+the doyenne of East-West computer entrepreneurism--share his gift,

+his vision, and his formidable networking talents.

+They are people of the 1960s, winnowed-out by its turbulence

+and rewarded with wealth and influence.  They are some of the best

+and the brightest that the electronic community has to offer.

+But can they do it, in the real world?  Or are they only dreaming?

+They are so few.  And there is so much against them.

+

+I leave Kapor and his networking employees struggling cheerfully

+with the promising intricacies of their newly installed Macintosh

+System 7 software.  The next day is Saturday.  EFF is closed.

+I pay a few visits to points of interest downtown.

+

+One of them is the birthplace of the telephone.

+

+It's marked by a bronze plaque in a plinth of black-and-white speckled granite.  It sits in the

+plaza of the John F. Kennedy Federal Building, the very place where Kapor was

+once fingerprinted by the FBI.

+

+The plaque has a bas-relief picture of Bell's original telephone.

+"BIRTHPLACE OF THE TELEPHONE," it reads.  "Here, on June 2, 1875,

+Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson first transmitted sound over wires.

+

+"This successful experiment was completed in a fifth floor garret

+at what was then 109 Court Street and marked the beginning of

+world-wide telephone service."

+

+109 Court Street is long gone.  Within sight of Bell's plaque,

+across a street, is one of the central offices of NYNEX,

+the local  Bell RBOC, on 6 Bowdoin Square.

+

+I cross the street and circle the telco building, slowly,

+hands in my jacket pockets.  It's a bright, windy, New England

+autumn day.  The central office is a handsome 1940s-era megalith

+in late Art Deco, eight stories high.

+

+Parked outside the back is a power-generation truck.

+The generator strikes me as rather anomalous.  Don't they

+already have their own generators in this eight-story monster?

+Then the suspicion strikes me that NYNEX must have heard

+of the September 17 AT&T power-outage which crashed New York City.

+Belt-and-suspenders, this generator.  Very telco.

+

+Over the glass doors of the front entrance is a handsome bronze

+bas-relief of Art Deco vines, sunflowers, and birds, entwining

+the Bell logo and the legend NEW ENGLAND TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH COMPANY

+--an entity which no longer officially exists.

+

+The doors are locked securely.  I peer through the shadowed glass.

+Inside is an official poster reading:

+

+

+"New England Telephone a NYNEX Company

+

+ATTENTION

+

+"All persons while on New England Telephone

+Company premises are required to visibly wear their

+identification cards (C.C.P. Section 2, Page 1).

+

+"Visitors, vendors, contractors, and all others are

+required to visibly wear a daily pass.

+

+"Thank you.

+

+Kevin C. Stanton.

+Building Security Coordinator."

+

+

+Outside, around the corner, is a pull-down ribbed metal security door,

+a locked delivery entrance.  Some passing stranger has grafitti-tagged

+this door, with a single word in red spray-painted cursive:

+

+Fury

+

+#

+

+My book on the Hacker Crackdown is almost over now.

+I have deliberately saved the best for last.

+

+In February 1991, I attended the CPSR Public Policy Roundtable,

+in Washington, DC.  CPSR, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility,

+was a sister organization of EFF, or perhaps its aunt, being older

+and perhaps somewhat wiser in the ways of the world of politics.

+

+Computer Professionals for  Social Responsibility began in 1981

+in Palo Alto, as an informal discussion group of Californian

+computer scientists and technicians, united by nothing more

+than an electronic mailing list.  This typical high-tech

+ad-hocracy received the dignity of its own acronym in 1982,

+and was formally incorporated in 1983.

+

+CPSR lobbied government and public alike with an educational

+outreach effort, sternly warning against any foolish

+and unthinking trust in complex computer systems.

+CPSR insisted that mere computers should never be

+considered a magic panacea for humanity's social,

+ethical or political problems.  CPSR members were especially

+troubled about the stability, safety, and dependability

+of military computer systems, and very especially troubled

+by those systems controlling nuclear arsenals.  CPSR was

+best-known for its persistent and well-publicized attacks on the

+scientific credibility of the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars").

+

+In 1990, CPSR was the nation's veteran cyber-political activist group,

+with over two thousand members in twenty- one local chapters across the US.

+It was especially active in Boston, Silicon Valley, and Washington DC,

+where its Washington office sponsored the Public Policy Roundtable.

+

+The Roundtable, however, had been funded by EFF, which had passed CPSR

+an extensive grant for operations. This was the first large-scale,

+official meeting of what was to become the electronic civil

+libertarian community.

+

+Sixty people attended, myself included--in this instance, not so much

+as a journalist as a cyberpunk author.  Many of the luminaries

+of the field took part: Kapor and Godwin as a matter of course.

+Richard Civille and Marc Rotenberg of CPSR.  Jerry Berman of the ACLU.

+John Quarterman, author of The Matrix. Steven Levy, author of Hackers.

+George Perry and Sandy Weiss of Prodigy Services, there to network

+about the civil-liberties troubles their young commercial

+network was experiencing.  Dr. Dorothy Denning.  Cliff Figallo,

+manager of the Well.  Steve Jackson was there, having finally

+found his ideal target audience, and so was Craig Neidorf,

+"Knight Lightning" himself, with his attorney, Sheldon Zenner.

+Katie Hafner, science journalist, and co-author of Cyberpunk:

+Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. Dave Farber,

+ARPAnet pioneer and fabled Internet guru.  Janlori Goldman

+of the ACLU's Project on Privacy and Technology.  John Nagle

+of Autodesk and the Well.  Don Goldberg of the House Judiciary Committee.

+Tom Guidoboni, the defense attorney in the Internet Worm case.

+Lance Hoffman, computer-science professor at The George Washington

+University.  Eli Noam of Columbia.  And a host of others no less distinguished.

+

+Senator Patrick Leahy delivered the keynote address,

+expressing his determination to keep ahead of the curve

+on the issue of electronic free speech.  The address was

+well-received, and the sense of excitement was palpable.

+Every panel discussion was interesting--some were entirely

+compelling.  People networked with an almost frantic interest.

+

+I myself had a most interesting and cordial lunch discussion with

+Noel and Jeanne Gayler, Admiral Gayler being a former director

+of the National Security Agency.  As this was the first known encounter

+between an actual no-kidding cyberpunk and a chief executive of

+America's largest and best-financed electronic espionage apparat,

+there was naturally a bit of eyebrow-raising on both sides.

+

+Unfortunately, our discussion was off-the-record.  In fact

+all  the discussions at the CPSR were officially off-the-record,

+the idea being to do some serious networking in an atmosphere

+of complete frankness, rather than to stage a media circus.

+

+In any case, CPSR Roundtable, though interesting and intensely valuable,

+was as nothing compared to the truly mind-boggling event that transpired

+a mere month later.

+

+#

+

+"Computers, Freedom and Privacy."  Four hundred people from

+every conceivable corner of America's electronic community.

+As a science fiction writer, I have been to some weird gigs in my day,

+but this thing is truly BEYOND THE PALE.  Even "Cyberthon,"

+Point Foundation's "Woodstock of Cyberspace" where Bay Area

+psychedelia collided headlong with the emergent world

+of computerized virtual reality, was like a Kiwanis Club gig

+compared to this astonishing do.

+

+The "electronic community" had reached an apogee.

+Almost every principal in this book is in attendance.

+Civil Libertarians.  Computer Cops.  The Digital Underground.

+Even a few discreet telco people.  Colorcoded dots

+for lapel tags are distributed.  Free Expression issues.

+Law Enforcement.  Computer Security.  Privacy.  Journalists.

+Lawyers.  Educators.  Librarians.  Programmers.

+Stylish punk-black dots for the hackers and phone phreaks.

+Almost everyone here seems to wear eight or nine dots,

+to have six or seven professional hats.

+

+It is a community.  Something like Lebanon perhaps,

+but a digital nation. People who had feuded all year

+in the national press, people who entertained the deepest

+suspicions of one another's motives and ethics, are now

+in each others' laps.  "Computers, Freedom and Privacy"

+had every reason in the world to turn ugly, and yet except

+for small irruptions of puzzling nonsense from the

+convention's token lunatic, a surprising bonhomie reigned.

+CFP was like a wedding-party in which two lovers,

+unstable bride and charlatan groom, tie the knot

+in a clearly disastrous matrimony.

+

+It is clear to both families--even to neighbors and random guests--

+that this is not a workable relationship, and yet the young couple's

+desperate attraction can brook no further delay.  They simply cannot

+help themselves.  Crockery will fly, shrieks from their newlywed home

+will wake the city block, divorce waits in the wings like a vulture

+over the Kalahari, and yet this is a wedding, and there is going

+to be a child from it.  Tragedies end in death; comedies in marriage.

+The Hacker Crackdown is ending in marriage.  And there will be a child.

+

+From the beginning, anomalies reign.  John Perry Barlow,

+cyberspace ranger, is here.  His color photo in

+The New York Times Magazine, Barlow scowling

+in a grim Wyoming snowscape, with long black coat,

+dark hat, a Macintosh SE30 propped on a fencepost

+and an awesome frontier rifle tucked under one arm,

+will be the single most striking visual image

+of the Hacker Crackdown.  And he is CFP's guest of honor--

+along with Gail Thackeray of the FCIC!  What on earth do

+they expect these dual guests to do with each other?  Waltz?

+

+Barlow delivers the first address.  Uncharacteristically,

+he is hoarse--the sheer volume of roadwork has worn him down.

+He speaks briefly, congenially, in a plea for conciliation,

+and takes his leave to a storm of applause.

+

+Then Gail Thackeray takes the stage.  She's visibly nervous.

+She's been on the Well a lot lately.  Reading those Barlow posts.

+Following Barlow is a challenge to anyone.  In honor of the famous

+lyricist for the Grateful Dead, she announces reedily, she is going to read--

+A POEM.  A poem she has composed herself.

+

+It's an awful poem, doggerel in the rollicking meter of Robert W. Service's

+The Cremation of Sam McGee, but it is in fact, a poem.  It's the Ballad

+of the Electronic Frontier!  A poem about the Hacker Crackdown and the

+sheer unlikelihood of CFP.  It's full of in-jokes.  The score or so cops

+in the audience, who are sitting together in a nervous claque,

+are absolutely cracking-up.  Gail's poem is the funniest goddamn thing

+they've ever heard.  The hackers and civil-libs, who had this woman figured

+for Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS, are staring with their jaws hanging loosely.

+Never in the wildest reaches of their imagination had they figured

+Gail Thackeray was capable of such a totally off-the-wall move.

+You can see them punching their mental CONTROL-RESET buttons.

+Jesus!  This woman's a hacker weirdo!  She's JUST LIKE US!

+God, this changes everything!

+

+Al Bayse, computer technician for the FBI, had been the only cop

+at the CPSR Roundtable, dragged there with his arm bent by

+Dorothy Denning.  He was guarded and tightlipped at CPSR Roundtable;

+a "lion thrown to the Christians."

+

+At CFP, backed by a claque of cops, Bayse suddenly waxes eloquent

+and even droll, describing the FBI's "NCIC 2000", a gigantic digital catalog

+of criminal records, as if he has suddenly become some weird hybrid

+of George Orwell and George Gobel.  Tentatively, he makes an arcane

+joke about statistical analysis.  At least a third of the crowd laughs aloud.

+

+"They didn't laugh at that at my last speech," Bayse observes.

+He had been addressing cops--STRAIGHT cops, not computer people.

+It had been a worthy meeting, useful one supposes, but nothing like THIS.

+There has never been ANYTHING like this.  Without any prodding,

+without any preparation, people in the audience simply begin to ask questions.

+Longhairs, freaky people, mathematicians.  Bayse is answering, politely,

+frankly, fully, like a man walking on air.  The ballroom's atmosphere

+crackles with surreality.  A female lawyer behind me breaks into a sweat

+and a hot waft of surprisingly potent and musky perfume flows off

+her pulse-points.

+

+People are giddy with laughter.  People are interested,

+fascinated, their eyes so wide and dark that they seem eroticized.

+Unlikely daisy-chains form in the halls, around the bar, on the escalators:

+cops with hackers, civil rights with FBI, Secret Service with phone phreaks.

+

+Gail Thackeray is at her crispest in a white wool sweater with a

+tiny Secret Service logo.  "I found Phiber Optik at the payphones,

+and when he saw my sweater, he turned into a PILLAR OF SALT!" she chortles.

+

+Phiber discusses his case at much length with his arresting officer,

+Don Delaney of the New York State Police.  After an hour's chat,

+the two of them look ready to begin singing "Auld Lang Syne."

+Phiber finally finds the courage to get his worst complaint off his chest.

+It isn't so much the arrest.  It was the CHARGE.  Pirating service

+off 900 numbers.  I'm a PROGRAMMER, Phiber insists.  This lame charge

+is going to hurt my reputation.  It would have been cool to be busted

+for something happening, like Section 1030 computer intrusion.

+Maybe some kind of crime that's scarcely been invented yet.

+Not lousy phone fraud.  Phooey.

+

+Delaney seems regretful.  He had a mountain of possible criminal charges

+against Phiber Optik.  The kid's gonna plead guilty anyway.  He's a

+first timer, they always plead.  Coulda charged the kid with most anything,

+and gotten the same result in the end.  Delaney seems genuinely sorry

+not to have gratified Phiber in this harmless fashion.  Too late now.

+Phiber's pled already.  All water under the bridge.  Whaddya gonna do?

+

+Delaney's got a good grasp on the hacker mentality.

+He held a press conference after he busted a bunch of

+Masters of Deception kids.  Some journo had asked him:

+"Would you describe these people as GENIUSES?"

+Delaney's deadpan answer, perfect:  "No, I would describe

+these people as DEFENDANTS."  Delaney busts a kid for

+hacking codes with repeated random dialling.  Tells the

+press that NYNEX can track this stuff in no time flat nowadays,

+and a kid has to be STUPID to do something so easy to catch.

+Dead on again:  hackers don't mind being thought of as Genghis Khan

+by the straights, but if there's anything that really gets 'em

+where they live, it's being called DUMB.

+

+Won't be as much fun for Phiber next time around.

+As a second offender he's gonna see prison.

+Hackers break the law.  They're not geniuses, either.

+They're gonna be defendants.  And yet, Delaney muses over

+a drink in the hotel bar, he has found it impossible to treat

+them as common criminals.  Delaney knows criminals.  These kids,

+by comparison, are clueless--there is just no crook vibe off of them,

+they don't smell right, they're just not BAD.

+

+Delaney has seen a lot of action.  He did Vietnam.

+He's been shot at, he has shot people.  He's a homicide

+cop from New York.  He has the appearance of a man who

+has not only seen the shit hit the fan but has seen it splattered

+across whole city blocks and left to ferment for years.

+This guy has been around.

+

+He listens to Steve Jackson tell his story.  The dreamy

+game strategist has been dealt a bad hand.  He has played

+it for all he is worth.  Under his nerdish SF-fan exterior

+is a core of iron.  Friends of his say Steve Jackson believes

+in the rules, believes in fair play.  He will never compromise

+his principles, never give up.  "Steve," Delaney says to

+Steve Jackson, "they had some balls, whoever busted you.

+You're all right!"  Jackson, stunned, falls silent and

+actually blushes with pleasure.

+

+Neidorf has grown up a lot in the past year.  The kid is

+a quick study, you gotta give him that.  Dressed by his mom,

+the fashion manager for a national clothing chain,

+Missouri college techie-frat Craig Neidorf out-dappers

+everyone at this gig but the toniest East Coast lawyers.

+The iron jaws of prison clanged shut without him and now

+law school beckons for Neidorf.  He looks like a larval Congressman.

+

+Not a "hacker," our Mr. Neidorf.  He's not interested

+in computer science.  Why should he be?  He's not

+interested in writing C code the rest of his life,

+and besides, he's seen where the chips fall.

+To the world of computer science he and Phrack

+were just a curiosity.  But to the world of law. . . .

+The kid has learned where the bodies are buried.

+He carries his notebook of press clippings wherever he goes.

+

+Phiber Optik makes fun of Neidorf for a Midwestern geek,

+for believing that "Acid Phreak" does acid and listens to acid rock.

+Hell no.  Acid's never done ACID!  Acid's into ACID HOUSE MUSIC.

+Jesus.  The very idea of doing LSD.  Our PARENTS did LSD, ya clown.

+

+Thackeray suddenly turns upon Craig Neidorf the full lighthouse

+glare of her attention and begins a determined half-hour attempt

+to WIN THE BOY OVER.  The Joan of Arc of Computer Crime is

+GIVING CAREER ADVICE TO KNIGHT LIGHTNING!  "Your experience

+would be very valuable--a real asset," she tells him with

+unmistakeable sixty-thousand-watt sincerity.  Neidorf is fascinated.

+He listens with unfeigned attention.  He's nodding and saying yes ma'am.

+Yes, Craig, you too can forget all about money and enter the glamorous

+and horribly underpaid world of PROSECUTING COMPUTER CRIME!

+You can put your former friends in prison--ooops. . . .

+

+You cannot go on dueling at modem's length indefinitely.

+You cannot beat one another senseless with rolled-up press-clippings.

+Sooner or later you have to come directly to grips.

+And yet the very act of assembling here has changed

+the entire situation drastically.  John Quarterman,

+author of The Matrix, explains the Internet at his symposium.

+It is the largest news network in the world, it is growing

+by leaps and bounds, and yet you cannot measure Internet because

+you cannot stop it in place.  It cannot stop, because there

+is no one anywhere in the world with the authority to stop Internet.

+It changes, yes, it grows, it embeds itself across the post-industrial,

+postmodern world and it generates community wherever it

+touches, and it is doing this all by itself.

+

+Phiber is different.  A very fin de siecle kid, Phiber Optik.

+Barlow says he looks like an Edwardian dandy.  He does rather.

+Shaven neck, the sides of his skull cropped hip-hop close,

+unruly tangle of black hair on top that looks pomaded,

+he stays up till four a.m.  and misses all the sessions,

+then hangs out in payphone booths with his acoustic coupler

+gutsily CRACKING SYSTEMS RIGHT IN THE MIDST OF THE HEAVIEST

+LAW ENFORCEMENT DUDES IN THE U.S., or at least PRETENDING to. . . .

+Unlike "Frank Drake."  Drake, who wrote Dorothy Denning out

+of nowhere, and asked for an interview for his cheapo

+cyberpunk fanzine, and then started grilling her on her ethics.

+She was squirmin', too. . . .  Drake, scarecrow-tall with his

+floppy blond mohawk, rotting tennis shoes and black leather jacket

+lettered ILLUMINATI in red, gives off an unmistakeable air

+of the bohemian literatus.  Drake is the kind of guy

+who reads British industrial design magazines and appreciates

+William Gibson because the quality of the prose is so tasty.

+Drake could never touch a phone or a keyboard again,

+and he'd still have the nose-ring and the blurry photocopied

+fanzines and the sampled industrial music.  He's a radical punk

+with a desktop-publishing rig and an Internet address.

+Standing next to Drake, the diminutive Phiber looks like he's

+been physically coagulated out of phone-lines.  Born to phreak.

+

+Dorothy Denning approaches Phiber suddenly.  The two of them

+are about the same height and body-build.  Denning's blue eyes

+flash behind the round window-frames of her glasses.

+"Why did you say I was `quaint?'" she asks Phiber, quaintly.

+

+It's a perfect description but Phiber is nonplussed. . .

+"Well, I uh, you know. . . ."

+

+"I also think you're quaint, Dorothy," I say, novelist to the rescue,

+the journo gift of gab. . . .  She is neat and dapper and yet there's

+an arcane quality to her, something like a Pilgrim Maiden behind

+leaded glass; if she were six inches high Dorothy Denning would look

+great inside a china cabinet. . .The Cryptographeress. . .

+The Cryptographrix. . .whatever. . . .  Weirdly, Peter Denning looks

+just like his wife, you could pick this gentleman out of a thousand guys

+as the soulmate of Dorothy Denning.  Wearing tailored slacks,

+a spotless fuzzy varsity sweater, and a neatly knotted academician's tie. . . .

+This fineboned, exquisitely polite, utterly civilized and hyperintelligent

+couple seem to have emerged from some cleaner and finer parallel universe,

+where humanity exists to do the Brain Teasers column in Scientific American.

+Why does this Nice Lady hang out with these unsavory characters?

+

+Because the time has come for it, that's why.

+Because she's the best there is at what she does.

+

+Donn Parker is here, the Great Bald Eagle of Computer Crime. . . .

+With his bald dome, great height, and enormous Lincoln-like hands,

+the great visionary pioneer of the field plows through the lesser mortals

+like an icebreaker. . . .  His eyes are fixed on the future with the

+rigidity of a bronze statue. . . .  Eventually, he tells his audience,

+all business crime will be computer crime, because businesses will do

+everything through computers.  "Computer crime" as a category will vanish.

+

+In the meantime, passing fads will flourish and fail and evaporate. . . .

+Parker's commanding, resonant voice is sphinxlike, everything is viewed

+from some eldritch valley of deep historical abstraction. . . .

+Yes, they've come and they've gone, these passing flaps in the world

+of digital computation. . . .  The radio-frequency emanation scandal. . .

+KGB and MI5 and CIA do it every day, it's easy, but nobody else ever has. . . .

+The salami-slice fraud, mostly mythical. . . .  "Crimoids," he calls them. . . .

+Computer viruses are the current crimoid champ, a lot less dangerous than

+most people let on, but the novelty is fading and there's a crimoid vacuum at

+the moment, the press is visibly hungering for something more outrageous. . . .

+The Great Man shares with us a few speculations on the coming crimoids. . . .

+Desktop Forgery!  Wow. . . .  Computers stolen just for the sake of the

+information within them--data-napping!  Happened in Britain a while ago,

+could be the coming thing. . . .  Phantom nodes in the Internet!

+

+Parker handles his overhead projector sheets with an ecclesiastical air. . . .

+He wears a grey double-breasted suit, a light blue shirt, and a

+very quiet tie of understated maroon and blue paisley. . . .

+Aphorisms emerge from him with slow, leaden emphasis. . . .

+There is no such thing as an adequately secure computer

+when one faces a sufficiently powerful adversary. . . .

+Deterrence is the most socially useful aspect of security. . . .

+People are the primary weakness in all information systems. . . .

+The entire baseline of computer security must be shifted upward. . . .

+Don't ever violate your security by publicly describing

+your security measures. . . .

+

+People in the audience are beginning to squirm, and yet

+there is something about the elemental purity of this guy's

+philosophy that compels uneasy respect. . . .  Parker sounds

+like the only sane guy left in the lifeboat, sometimes.

+The guy who can prove rigorously, from deep moral principles,

+that Harvey there, the one with the broken leg and the checkered past,

+is the one who has to be, err. . .that is, Mr. Harvey is best placed

+to make the necessary sacrifice for the security and indeed

+the very survival of the rest of this lifeboat's crew. . . .

+Computer security, Parker informs us mournfully, is a

+nasty topic, and we wish we didn't have to have  it. . . .

+The security expert, armed with method and logic, must think--imagine--

+everything that the adversary might do before the adversary might

+actually do it.  It is as if the criminal's dark brain were an

+extensive subprogram within the shining cranium of Donn Parker.

+He is a Holmes whose Moriarty does not quite yet exist

+and so must be perfectly simulated.

+

+CFP is a stellar gathering, with the giddiness of a wedding.

+It is a happy time, a happy ending, they know their world

+is changing forever tonight, and they're proud to have been there

+to see it happen, to talk, to think, to help.

+

+And yet as night falls, a certain elegiac quality manifests itself,

+as the crowd gathers beneath the chandeliers with their wineglasses

+and dessert plates.  Something is ending here, gone forever,

+and it takes a while to pinpoint it.

+

+It is the End of the Amateurs.

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Hacker Crackdown, by Bruce Sterling

+

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diff --git a/common/src/leap/soledad/common/tests/test_async.py b/common/src/leap/soledad/common/tests/test_async.py
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..03b8c553
--- /dev/null
+++ b/common/src/leap/soledad/common/tests/test_async.py
@@ -0,0 +1,144 @@
+# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
+# test_async.py
+# Copyright (C) 2013, 2014 LEAP
+#
+# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
+# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
+# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
+# (at your option) any later version.
+#
+# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
+# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
+# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
+# GNU General Public License for more details.
+#
+# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
+# along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
+
+
+import os
+import hashlib
+
+from twisted.internet import defer
+
+from leap.soledad.common.tests.util import BaseSoledadTest
+from leap.soledad.client import adbapi
+from leap.soledad.client.sqlcipher import SQLCipherOptions
+
+
+class ASyncSQLCipherRetryTestCase(BaseSoledadTest):
+    """
+    Test asynchronous SQLCipher operation.
+    """
+
+    NUM_DOCS = 5000
+
+    def _get_dbpool(self):
+        tmpdb = os.path.join(self.tempdir, "test.soledad")
+        opts = SQLCipherOptions(tmpdb, "secret", create=True)
+        return adbapi.getConnectionPool(opts)
+
+    def _get_sample(self):
+        if not getattr(self, "_sample", None):
+            dirname = os.path.dirname(os.path.realpath(__file__))
+            sample_file = os.path.join(dirname, "hacker_crackdown.txt")
+            with open(sample_file) as f:
+                self._sample = f.readlines()
+        return self._sample
+
+    def test_concurrent_puts_fail_with_few_retries_and_small_timeout(self):
+        """
+        Test if concurrent updates to the database with small timeout and
+        small number of retries fail with "database is locked" error.
+
+        Many concurrent write attempts to the same sqlcipher database may fail
+        when the timeout is small and there are no retries. This test will
+        pass if any of the attempts to write the database fail.
+
+        This test is much dependent on the environment and its result intends
+        to contrast with the test for the workaround for the "database is
+        locked" problem, which is addressed by the "test_concurrent_puts" test
+        below.
+
+        If this test ever fails, it means that either (1) the platform where
+        you are running is it very powerful and you should try with an even
+        lower timeout value, or (2) the bug has been solved by a better
+        implementation of the underlying database pool, and thus this test
+        should be removed from the test suite.
+        """
+
+        old_timeout = adbapi.SQLCIPHER_CONNECTION_TIMEOUT
+        old_max_retries = adbapi.SQLCIPHER_MAX_RETRIES
+
+        adbapi.SQLCIPHER_CONNECTION_TIMEOUT = 1
+        adbapi.SQLCIPHER_MAX_RETRIES = 1
+
+        dbpool = self._get_dbpool()
+
+        def _create_doc(doc):
+            return dbpool.runU1DBQuery("create_doc", doc)
+
+        def _insert_docs():
+            deferreds = []
+            for i in range(self.NUM_DOCS):
+                payload = self._get_sample()[i]
+                chash = hashlib.sha256(payload).hexdigest()
+                doc = {"number": i, "payload": payload, 'chash': chash}
+                d = _create_doc(doc)
+                deferreds.append(d)
+            return defer.gatherResults(deferreds, consumeErrors=True)
+
+        def _errback(e):
+            if e.value[0].getErrorMessage() == "database is locked":
+                adbapi.SQLCIPHER_CONNECTION_TIMEOUT = old_timeout
+                adbapi.SQLCIPHER_MAX_RETRIES = old_max_retries 
+                return defer.succeed("")
+            raise Exception
+
+        d = _insert_docs()
+        d.addCallback(lambda _: dbpool.runU1DBQuery("get_all_docs"))
+        d.addErrback(_errback)
+        return d
+
+    def test_concurrent_puts(self):
+        """
+        Test that many concurrent puts succeed.
+
+        Currently, there's a known problem with the concurrent database pool
+        which is that many concurrent attempts to write to the database may
+        fail when the lock timeout is small and when there are no (or few)
+        retries. We currently workaround this problem by increasing the
+        timeout and the number of retries.
+
+        Should this test ever fail, it probably means that the timeout and/or
+        number of retries should be increased for the platform you're running
+        the test. If the underlying database pool is ever fixed, then the test
+        above will fail and we should remove this comment from here.
+        """
+
+        dbpool = self._get_dbpool()
+
+        def _create_doc(doc):
+            return dbpool.runU1DBQuery("create_doc", doc)
+
+        def _insert_docs():
+            deferreds = []
+            for i in range(self.NUM_DOCS):
+                payload = self._get_sample()[i]
+                chash = hashlib.sha256(payload).hexdigest()
+                doc = {"number": i, "payload": payload, 'chash': chash}
+                d = _create_doc(doc)
+                deferreds.append(d)
+            return defer.gatherResults(deferreds, consumeErrors=True)
+
+
+        def _count_docs(results):
+            _, docs = results
+            if self.NUM_DOCS == len(docs):
+                return defer.succeed("")
+            raise Exception
+
+        d = _insert_docs()
+        d.addCallback(lambda _: dbpool.runU1DBQuery("get_all_docs"))
+        d.addCallback(_count_docs)
+        return d