THE HACKER CRACKDOWN
********************
by Bruce Sterling

Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use

Copyright (c) 1992, 1994 Bruce Sterling -- bruces

Preface to the Electronic Release
Chronology of the Hacker Crackdown
Introduction
CRASHING THE SYSTEM
THE DIGITAL UNDERGROUND
LAW AND ORDER
THE CIVIL LIBERTARIANS
Afterword The Hacker Crackdown Three Years Later

Preface to the Electronic Release
*********************************

January 1, 1994 -- Austin, Texas

Hi, I'm Bruce Sterling, the author of this electronic book.

Out in the traditional world of print, *The Hacker Crackdown* is
ISBN 0-553-08058-X, and is formally catalogued by the Library of
Congress as "1. Computer crimes -- United States. 2. Telephone -United States -- Corrupt practices. 3. Programming (Electronic
computers) -- United States -- Corrupt practices." 'Corrupt
practices,' I always get a kick out of that description. Librarians
are very ingenious people.

The paperback is ISBN 0-553-56370-X. If you go and buy a print
version of *The Hacker Crackdown,* an action I encourage heartily, you
may notice that in the front of the book, beneath the copyright notice
-- "Copyright (C) 1992 by Bruce Sterling" -- it has this little block
of printed legal boilerplate from the publisher. It says, and I quote:

"No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher. For information address:
Bantam Books."

This is a pretty good disclaimer, as such disclaimers go. I collect
intellectual-property disclaimers, and I've seen dozens of them, and
this one is at least pretty straightforward. In this narrow and
particular case, however, it isn't quite accurate. Bantam Books puts
that disclaimer on every book they publish, but Bantam Books does not,
in fact, own the electronic rights to this book. I do, because of
certain extensive contract maneuverings my agent and I went through
before this book was written. I want to give those electronic
publishing rights away through certain not-for-profit channels, and
I've convinced Bantam that this is a good idea.

Since Bantam has seen fit to peacably agree to this scheme of mine,
Bantam Books is not going to fuss about this. Provided you don't try
to sell the book, they are not going to bother you for what you do with
the electronic copy of this book. If you want to check this out
personally, you can ask them; they're at 1540 Broadway NY NY 10036.
However, if you were so foolish as to print this book and start
retailing it for money in violation of my copyright and the commercial
interests of Bantam Books, then Bantam, a part of the gigantic
Bertelsmann multinational publishing combine, would roust some of their
heavy-duty attorneys out of hibernation and crush you like a bug. This
is only to be expected. I didn't write this book so that you could
make money out of it. If anybody is gonna make money out of this book,
it's gonna be me and my publisher.

My publisher deserves to make money out of this book. Not only did
the folks at Bantam Books commission me to write the book, and pay me a
hefty sum to do so, but they bravely printed, in text, an electronic
document the reproduction of which was once alleged to be a federal
felony. Bantam Books and their numerous attorneys were very brave and
forthright about this book. Furthermore, my former editor at Bantam
Books, Betsy Mitchell, genuinely cared about this project, and worked
hard on it, and had a lot of wise things to say about the manuscript.
Betsy deserves genuine credit for this book, credit that editors too
rarely get.

The critics were very kind to *The Hacker Crackdown,* and
commercially the book has done well. On the other hand, I didn't write
this book in order to squeeze every last nickel and dime out of the
mitts of impoverished sixteen-year-old cyberpunk high-school-students.
Teenagers don't have any money -- (no, not even enough for the
sixdollar *Hacker Crackdown* paperback, with its attractive bright-red
cover and useful index). That's a major reason why teenagers
sometimes succumb to the temptation to do things they shouldn't, such
as swiping my books out of libraries. Kids: this one is all yours,
all right? Go give the print version back. `*8-)'

Well-meaning, public-spirited civil libertarians don't have much
money, either. And it seems almost criminal to snatch cash out of the
hands of America's direly underpaid electronic law enforcement
community.

If you're a computer cop, a hacker, or an electronic civil liberties
activist, you are the target audience for this book. I wrote this book
because I wanted to help you, and help other people understand you and
your unique, uhm, problems. I wrote this book to aid your activities,
and to contribute to the public discussion of important political
issues. In giving the text away in this fashion, I am directly
contributing to the book's ultimate aim: to help civilize cyberspace.

Information *wants* to be free. And the information inside this
book longs for freedom with a peculiar intensity. I genuinely believe
that the natural habitat of this book is inside an electronic network.
That may not be the easiest direct method to generate revenue for the
book's author, but that doesn't matter; this is where this book
belongs by its nature. I've written other books -- plenty of other
books -- and I'll write more and I am writing more, but this one is
special. I am making *The Hacker Crackdown* available electronically
as widely as I can conveniently manage, and if you like the book, and
think it is useful, then I urge you to do the same with it.

You can copy this electronic book. Copy the heck out of it, be my
guest, and give those copies to anybody who wants them. The nascent
world of cyberspace is full of sysadmins, teachers, trainers,
cybrarians, netgurus, and various species of cybernetic activists. If
you're one of those people, I know about you, and I know the hassle
you go through to try to help people learn about the electronic
frontier. I hope that possessing this book in electronic form will
lessen your troubles. Granted, this treatment of our electronic social
spectrum is not the ultimate in academic rigor. And politically, it has
something to offend and trouble almost everyone. But hey, I'm told it's
readable, and at least the price is right. You can upload the book onto
bulletin board systems, or Internet nodes, or electronic discussion
groups. Go right ahead and do that, I am giving you express permission
right now. Enjoy yourself.

You can put the book on disks and give the disks away, as long as
you don't take any money for it.

But this book is not public domain. You can't copyright it in your
own name. I own the copyright. Attempts to pirate this book and make
money from selling it may involve you in a serious litigative snarl.
Believe me, for the pittance you might wring out of such an action, it's
really not worth it. This book don't "belong" to you. In an odd but
very genuine way, I feel it doesn't "belong" to me, either. It's a
book about the people of cyberspace, and distributing it in this way is
the best way I know to actually make this information available, freely
and easily, to all the people of cyberspace -- including people far
outside the borders of the United States, who otherwise may never have
a chance to see any edition of the book, and who may perhaps learn
something useful from this strange story of distant, obscure, but
portentous events in so-called "American cyberspace."

This electronic book is now literary freeware. It now belongs to
the emergent realm of alternative information economics. You have no
right to make this electronic book part of the conventional flow of
commerce. Let it be part of the flow of knowledge: there's a
difference. I've divided the book into four sections, so that it is
less ungainly for upload and download; if there's a section of
particular relevance to you and your colleagues, feel free to reproduce
that one and skip the rest. Just make more when you need them, and give
them to whoever might want them.

Now have fun.

Bruce Sterling -- bruces

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 databanks; and so do spies,
industrial, political, and just plain snoops; and so do police, at
least a few of them. And there are children living there now.

People have met there and been married there. There are entire
living communities in cyberspace today; chattering, gossipping,
planning, conferring and scheming, leaving one another voice-mail and
electronic mail, giving one another big weightless chunks of valuable
data, both legitimate and illegitimate. They busily pass one another
computer software and the occasional festering computer virus.

We do not really understand how to live in cyberspace yet. We are
feeling our way into it, blundering about. That is not surprising.
Our lives in the physical world, the "real" world, are also far from
perfect, despite a lot more practice. Human lives, real lives, are
imperfect by their nature, and there are human beings in cyberspace.
The way we live in cyberspace is a funhouse mirror of the way we live
in the real world. We take both our advantages and our troubles with us.

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

In 1990 there came a nationwide crackdown on illicit computer
hackers, with arrests, criminal charges, one dramatic show-trial,
several guilty pleas, and huge confiscations of data and equipment all
over the USA.

The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was larger, better organized, more
deliberate, and more resolute than any previous effort in the brave new
world of computer crime. The U.S. Secret Service, private telephone
security, and state and local law enforcement groups across the country
all joined forces in a determined attempt to break the back of America's
electronic underground. It was a fascinating effort, with very mixed
results.

The Hacker Crackdown had another unprecedented effect; it spurred
the creation, within "the computer community," of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, a new and very odd interest group, fiercely
dedicated to the establishment and preservation of electronic civil
liberties. The crackdown, remarkable in itself, has created a melee of
debate over electronic crime, punishment, freedom of the press, and
issues of search and seizure. Politics has entered cyberspace.
Where people go, politics follow. This is the story of the people of
cyberspace.

Crashing The System
*******************

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

On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance telephone switching system
crashed.

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

Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco trade, are a
known and accepted hazard of the telephone business. Hurricanes hit,
and phone cables get snapped by the thousands. Earthquakes wrench
through buried fiber-optic lines. Switching stations catch fire and
burn to the ground. These things do happen. There are contingency
plans for them, and decades of experience in dealing with them. But
the Crash of January 15 was unprecedented. It was unbelievably huge,
and it occurred for no apparent physical reason.

The crash started on a Monday afternoon in a single
switching-station in Manhattan. But, unlike any merely physical
damage, it spread and spread. Station after station across America
collapsed in a chain reaction, until fully half of AT&T's network had
gone haywire and the remaining half was hard-put to handle the overflow.

Within nine hours, AT&T software engineers more or less understood
what had caused the crash. Replicating the problem exactly, poring
over software line by line, took them a couple of weeks. But because
it was hard to understand technically, the full truth of the matter
and its implications were not widely and thoroughly aired and explained.
The root cause of the crash remained obscure, surrounded by rumor and
fear. The crash was a grave corporate embarrassment. The "culprit" was a
bug in AT&T's own software -- not the sort of admission the
telecommunications giant wanted to make, especially in the face of
increasing competition. Still, the truth *was* told, in the baffling
technical terms necessary to explain it.

Somehow the explanation failed to persuade American law enforcement
officials and even telephone corporate security personnel. These people
were not technical experts or software wizards, and they had their own
suspicions about the cause of this disaster.

The police and telco security had important sources of information
denied to mere software engineers. They had informants in the computer
underground and years of experience in dealing with high-tech rascality
that seemed to grow ever more sophisticated. For years they had been
expecting a direct and savage attack against the American national
telephone system. And with the Crash of January 15 -- the first month
of a new, high-tech decade -- their predictions, fears, and suspicions
seemed at last to have entered the real world. A world where the
telephone system had not merely crashed, but, quite likely, *been*
crashed -- by "hackers."

The crash created a large dark cloud of suspicion that would color
certain people's assumptions and actions for months. The fact that it
took place in the realm of software was suspicious on its face. The
fact that it occurred on Martin Luther King Day, still the most
politically touchy of American holidays, made it more suspicious yet.

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

#

Like the crash in the telephone system, this chain reaction was
ready and waiting to happen. During the 1980s, the American legal
system was extensively patched to deal with the novel issues of computer
crime. There was, for instance, the Electronic Communications Privacy
Act of 1986 (eloquently described as "a stinking mess" by a prominent
law enforcement official). And there was the draconian Computer Fraud
and Abuse Act of 1986, passed unanimously by the United States Senate,
which later would reveal a large number of flaws. Extensive, wellmeant
efforts had been made to keep the legal system up to date. But in the
day-to-day grind of the real world, even the most elegant software
tends to crumble and suddenly reveal its hidden bugs.

Like the advancing telephone system, the American legal system was
certainly not ruined by its temporary crash; but for those caught under
the weight of the collapsing system, life became a series of blackouts
and anomalies.

In order to understand why these weird events occurred, both in the
world of technology and in the world of law, it's not enough to
understand the merely technical problems. We will get to those; but
first and foremost, we must try to understand the telephone, and the
business of telephones, and the community of human beings that
telephones have created.

#

Technologies have life cycles, like cities do, like institutions do,
like laws and governments do.

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

Bell's early inventions, while ingenious, failed to move the world.
In 1863, the teenage Bell and his brother Melville made an artificial
talking mechanism out of wood, rubber, gutta-percha, and tin. This
weird device had a rubber-covered "tongue" made of movable wooden
segments, with vibrating rubber "vocal cords," and rubber "lips" and
"cheeks." While Melville puffed a bellows into a tin tube, imitating
the lungs, young Alec Bell would manipulate the "lips," "teeth," and
"tongue," causing the thing to emit high-pitched falsetto gibberish.

Another would-be technical breakthrough was the Bell "phonautograph"
of 1874, actually made out of a human cadaver's ear. Clamped into place
on a tripod, this grisly gadget drew sound-wave images on smoked glass
through a thin straw glued to its vibrating earbones.

By 1875, Bell had learned to produce audible sounds -- ugly shrieks
and squawks -- by using magnets, diaphragms, and electrical current.
Most "Golden Vaporware" technologies go nowhere.

But the second stage of technology is the Rising Star, or, the
"Goofy Prototype," stage. The telephone, Bell's most ambitious gadget
yet, reached this stage on March 10, 1876. On that great day,
Alexander Graham Bell became the first person to transmit intelligible
human speech electrically. As it happened, young Professor Bell,
industriously tinkering in his Boston lab, had spattered his trousers
with acid. His assistant, Mr. Watson, heard his cry for help -- over
Bell's experimental audiotelegraph. This was an event without precedent.

Technologies in their "Goofy Prototype" stage rarely work very well.
They're experimental, and therefore halfbaked and rather frazzled. The
prototype may be attractive and novel, and it does look as if it ought
to be good for something-or-other. But nobody, including the inventor,
is quite sure what. Inventors, and speculators, and pundits may have
very firm ideas about its potential use, but those ideas are often very
wrong.

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

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

Bell's original notion for the telephone, an idea promoted for a
couple of years, was that it would become a mass medium. We might
recognize Bell's idea today as something close to modern "cable radio."
Telephones at a central source would transmit music, Sunday sermons,
and important public speeches to a paying network of wired-up
subscribers.

At the time, most people thought this notion made good sense. In
fact, Bell's idea was workable. In Hungary, this philosophy of the
telephone was successfully put into everyday practice. In Budapest, for
decades, from 1893 until after World War I, there was a government-run
information service called "Telefon Hirmondo(C)." Hirmondo(C) 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(C) would be on the air
-- or rather, on the phone.

Hirmondo(C) is dead tech today, but Hirmondo(C) might be considered
a spiritual ancestor of the modern telephone-accessed computer data
services, such as CompuServe, GEnie or Prodigy. The principle behind
Hirmondo(C) 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
elecution teacher and gifted public speaker, was a devastatingly
effective legal witness. In the eighteen years of Bell's patents, the
Bell company was involved in six hundred separate lawsuits. The legal
records printed filled 149 volumes. The Bell Company won every single
suit.

After Bell's exclusive patents expired, rival telephone companies
sprang up all over America. Bell's company, American Bell Telephone,
was soon in deep trouble. In 1907, American Bell Telephone fell into
the hands of the rather sinister J.P. Morgan financial cartel,
robber-baron speculators who dominated Wall Street.

At this point, history might have taken a different turn. American
might well have been served forever by a patchwork of locally owned
telephone companies. Many state politicians and local businessmen
considered this an excellent solution.

But the new Bell holding company, American Telephone and Telegraph
or AT&T, put in a new man at the helm, a visionary industrialist named
Theodore Vail. Vail, a former Post Office manager, understood large
organizations and had an innate feeling for the nature of large-scale
communications. Vail quickly saw to it that AT&T seized the
technological edge once again. The Pupin and Campbell "loading coil,"
and the deForest "audion," are both extinct technology today, but in
1913 they gave Vail's company the best *long-distance* lines ever
built. By controlling long-distance -- the links between, and over,
and above the smaller local phone companies -- AT&T swiftly gained the
whip-hand over them, and was soon devouring them right and left.

Vail plowed the profits back into research and development,
starting the Bell tradition of huge-scale and brilliant industrial
research.

Technically and financially, AT&T gradually steamrollered the
opposition. Independent telephone companies never became entirely
extinct, and hundreds of them flourish today. But Vail's AT&T became
the supreme communications company. At one point, Vail's AT&T bought
Western Union itself, the very company that had derided Bell's
telephone as a "toy." Vail thoroughly reformed Western Union's
hidebound business along his modern principles; but when the federal
government grew anxious at this centralization of power, Vail politely
gave Western Union back.

This centralizing process was not unique. Very similar events had
happened in American steel, oil, and railroads. But AT&T, unlike the
other companies, was to remain supreme. The monopoly robber-barons of
those other industries were humbled and shattered by government
trust-busting. Vail, the former Post Office official, was quite willing
to accommodate the US government; in fact he would forge an active
alliance with it. AT&T would become almost a wing of the American
government, almost another Post Office -- though not quite. AT&T
would willingly submit to federal regulation, but in return, it would
use the government's regulators as its own police, who would keep out
competitors and assure the Bell system's profits and preeminence.

This was the second birth -- the political birth -- of the American
telephone system. Vail's arrangement was to persist, with vast
success, for many decades, until 1982. His system was an odd kind of
American industrial socialism. It was born at about the same time as
Leninist Communism, and it lasted almost as long -- and, it must be
admitted, to considerably better effect.

Vail's system worked. Except perhaps for aerospace, there has been
no technology more thoroughly dominated by Americans than the
telephone. The telephone was seen from the beginning as a
quintessentially American technology. Bell's policy, and the policy of
Theodore Vail, was a profoundly democratic policy of *universal access.*
Vail's famous corporate slogan, "One Policy, One System, Universal
Service," was a political slogan, with a very American ring to it. The
American telephone was not to become the specialized tool of government
or business, but a general public utility. At first, it was true, only
the wealthy could afford private telephones, and Bell's company pursued
the business markets primarily. The American phone system was a
capitalist effort, meant to make money; it was not a charity. But from
the first, almost all communities with telephone service had public
telephones. And many stores -- especially drugstores -- offered public
use of their phones. You might not own a telephone -- but you could
always get into the system, if you really needed to.

There was nothing inevitable about this decision to make telephones
"public" and "universal." Vail's system involved a profound act of
trust in the public. This decision was a political one, informed by
the basic values of the American republic. The situation might have
been very different; and in other countries, under other systems, it
certainly was.

Joseph Stalin, for instance, vetoed plans for a Soviet phone system
soon after the Bolshevik revolution. Stalin was certain that publicly
accessible telephones would become instruments of anti-Soviet
counterrevolution and conspiracy. (He was probably right.) When
telephones did arrive in the Soviet Union, they would be instruments of
Party authority, and always heavily tapped. (Alexander Solzhenitsyn's
prison-camp novel *The First Circle* describes efforts to develop a
phone system more suited to Stalinist purposes.)

France, with its tradition of rational centralized government, had
fought bitterly even against the electric telegraph, which seemed to the
French entirely too anarchical and frivolous. For decades,
nineteenth-century France communicated via the "visual telegraph," a
nation-spanning, government-owned semaphore system of huge stone
towers that signalled from hilltops, across vast distances, with big
windmill-like arms. In 1846, one Dr. Barbay, a semaphore enthusiast,
memorably uttered an early version of what might be called "the
security expert's argument" against the open media.

"No, the electric telegraph is not a sound invention. It will always
be at the mercy of the slightest disruption, wild youths, drunkards,
bums, etc... The electric telegraph meets those destructive elements
with only a few meters of wire over which supervision is impossible. A
single man could, without being seen, cut the telegraph wires leading
to Paris, and in twenty-four hours cut in ten different places the
wires of the same line, without being arrested. The visual telegraph,
on the contrary, has its towers, its high walls, its gates well-guarded
from inside by strong armed men. Yes, I declare, substitution of the
electric telegraph for the visual one is a dreadful measure, a truly
idiotic act."

Dr. Barbay and his high-security stone machines were eventually
unsuccessful, but his argument -- that communication exists for the
safety and convenience of the state, and must be carefully protected
from the wild boys and the gutter rabble who might want to crash the
system -- would be heard again and again.

When the French telephone system finally did arrive, its snarled
inadequacy was to be notorious. Devotees of the American Bell System
often recommended a trip to France, for skeptics.

In Edwardian Britain, issues of class and privacy were a
ball-and-chain for telephonic progress. It was considered outrageous
that anyone -- any wild fool off the street -- could simply barge
bellowing into one's office or home, preceded only by the ringing of a
telephone bell. In Britain, phones were tolerated for the use of
business, but private phones tended be stuffed away into closets,
smoking rooms, or servants' quarters. Telephone operators were resented
in Britain because they did not seem to "know their place." And no
one of breeding would print a telephone number on a business card; this
seemed a crass attempt to make the acquaintance of strangers.

But phone access in America was to become a popular right; something
like universal suffrage, only more so. American women could not yet
vote when the phone system came through; yet from the beginning
American women doted on the telephone. This "feminization" of the
American telephone was often commented on by foreigners. Phones in
America were not censored or stiff or formalized; they were social,
private, intimate, and domestic. In America, Mother's Day is by far
the busiest day of the year for the phone network.

The early telephone companies, and especially AT&T, were among the
foremost employers of American women. They employed the daughters of
the American middle-class in great armies: in 1891, eight thousand
women; by 1946, almost a quarter of a million. Women seemed to enjoy
telephone work; it was respectable, it was steady, it paid fairly well
as women's work went, and -- not least -- it seemed a genuine
contribution to the social good of the community. Women found Vail's
ideal of public service attractive. This was especially true in rural
areas, where women operators, running extensive rural partylines,
enjoyed considerable social power. The operator knew everyone on the
party-line, and everyone knew her.

Although Bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the telephone
company did not employ women for the sake of advancing female
liberation. AT&T did this for sound commercial reasons. The first
telephone operators of the Bell system were not women, but teenage
American boys. They were telegraphic messenger boys (a group about to
be rendered technically obsolescent), who swept up around the phone
office, dunned customers for bills, and made phone connections on the
switchboard, all on the cheap.

Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell's company
learned a sharp lesson about combining teenage boys and telephone
switchboards. Putting teenage boys in charge of the phone system
brought swift and consistent disaster. Bell's chief engineer described
them as "Wild Indians." The boys were openly rude to customers. They
talked back to subscribers, saucing off, uttering facetious remarks,
and generally giving lip. The rascals took Saint Patrick's Day off
without permission. And worst of all they played clever tricks with the
switchboard plugs: disconnecting calls, crossing lines so that
customers found themselves talking to strangers, and so forth.

This combination of power, technical mastery, and effective
anonymity seemed to act like catnip on teenage boys.

This wild-kid-on-the-wires phenomenon was not confined to the USA;
from the beginning, the same was true of the British phone system. An
early British commentator kindly remarked: "No doubt boys in their
teens found the work not a little irksome, and it is also highly
probable that under the early conditions of employment the adventurous
and inquisitive spirits of which the average healthy boy of that age is
possessed, were not always conducive to the best attention being given
to the wants of the telephone subscribers."

So the boys were flung off the system -- or at least, deprived of
control of the switchboard. But the "adventurous and inquisitive
spirits" of the teenage boys would be heard from in the world of
telephony, again and again.

The fourth stage in the technological life-cycle is death: "the
Dog," dead tech. The telephone has so far avoided this fate. On the
contrary, it is thriving, still spreading, still evolving, and at
increasing speed.

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

For the average citizen in the 1870s, the telephone was weirder,
more shocking, more "high-tech" and harder to comprehend, than the most
outrageous stunts of advanced computing for us Americans in the 1990s.
In trying to understand what is happening to us today, with our
bulletin board systems, direct overseas dialling, fiberoptic
transmissions, computer viruses, hacking stunts, and a vivid tangle of
new laws and new crimes, it is important to realize that our society
has been through a similar challenge before -- and that, all in all, we
did rather well by it.

Bell's stage telephone seemed bizarre at first. But the sensations
of weirdness vanished quickly, once people began to hear the familiar
voices of relatives and friends, in their own homes on their own
telephones. The telephone changed from a fearsome high-tech totem to
an everyday pillar of human community.

This has also happened, and is still happening, to computer
networks. Computer networks such as NSFnet, BITnet, USENET, JANET,
are technically advanced, intimidating, and much harder to use than
telephones. Even the popular, commercial computer networks, such as
GEnie, Prodigy, and CompuServe, cause much head-scratching and have
been described as "user-hateful." Nevertheless they too are changing
from fancy high-tech items into everyday sources of human community.

The words "community" and "communication" have the same root.
Wherever you put a communications network, you put a community as well.
And whenever you *take away* that network -- confiscate it, outlaw
it, crash it, raise its price beyond affordability -- then you hurt that
community.

Communities will fight to defend themselves. People will fight
harder and more bitterly to defend their communities, than they will
fight to defend their own individual selves. And this is very true of
the "electronic community" that arose around computer networks in the
1980s -- or rather, the *various* electronic communities, in telephony,
law enforcement, computing, and the digital underground that, by the
year 1990, were raiding, rallying, arresting, suing, jailing, fining
and issuing angry manifestos.

None of the events of 1990 were entirely new. Nothing happened in
1990 that did not have some kind of earlier and more understandable
precedent. What gave the Hacker Crackdown its new sense of gravity and
importance was the feeling -- the *community* feeling - that the
political stakes had been raised; that trouble in cyberspace was no
longer mere mischief or inconclusive skirmishing, but a genuine fight
over genuine issues, a fight for community survival and the shape of
the future. These electronic communities, having flourished throughout
the 1980s, were becoming aware of themselves, and increasingly,
becoming aware of other, rival communities. Worries were sprouting up
right and left, with complaints, rumors, uneasy speculations. But it
would take a catalyst, a shock, to make the new world evident. Like
Bell's great publicity break, the Tarriffville Rail Disaster of January
1878, it would take a cause celebre.

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

#

The community of telephone technicians, engineers, operators and
researchers is the oldest community in cyberspace. These are the
veterans, the most developed group, the richest, the most respectable,
in most ways the most powerful. Whole generations have come and gone
since Alexander Graham Bell's day, but the community he founded
survives; people work for the phone system today whose
great-grandparents worked for the phone system. Its specialty
magazines, such as *Telephony,* *AT&T Technical Journal,* *Telephone
Engineer and Management,* are decades old; they make computer
publications like *Macworld* and *PC Week* look like amateur
johnny-come-latelies.

And the phone companies take no back seat in hightechnology, either.
Other companies' industrial researchers may have won new markets; but
the researchers of Bell Labs have won *seven Nobel Prizes.* One
potent device that Bell Labs originated, the transistor, has created
entire *groups* of industries. Bell Labs are world-famous for
generating "a patent a day," and have even made vital discoveries in
astronomy, physics and cosmology.

Throughout its seventy-year history, "Ma Bell" was not so much a
company as a way of life. Until the cataclysmic divestiture of the
1980s, Ma Bell was perhaps the ultimate maternalist mega-employer. The
AT&T corporate image was the "gentle giant," "the voice with a smile,"
a vaguely socialist-realist world of cleanshaven linemen in shiny
helmets and blandly pretty phone-girls in headsets and nylons. Bell
System employees were famous as rock-ribbed Kiwanis and Rotary members,
Little-League enthusiasts, school-board people.

During the long heyday of Ma Bell, the Bell employee corps were
nurtured top-to-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 redeyed graveyard-shift over collapsing switching-systems. The Bell
ethic was the electrical equivalent of the postman's: neither rain, nor
snow, nor gloom of night would stop these couriers.

It is easy to be cynical about this, as it is easy to be cynical
about any political or social system; but cynicism does not change the
fact that thousands of people took these ideals very seriously. And
some still do.

The Bell ethos was about public service; and that was gratifying;
but it was also about private *power,* and that was gratifying too.
As a corporation, Bell was very special. Bell was privileged. Bell had
snuggled up close to the state. In fact, Bell was as close to
government as you could get in America and still make a whole lot of
legitimate money.

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

There were other phone companies in America, to be sure; the
so-called independents. Rural cooperatives, mostly; small fry, mostly
tolerated, sometimes warred upon.

For many decades, "independent" American phone companies lived in
fear and loathing of the official Bell monopoly (or the "Bell
Octopus," as Ma Bell's 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 hightech fortress of the harsh-breathing imperial
ultra-baddie, Darth Vader.) Even AT&T employees are less than
thrilled by the Death Star. A popular (though banned) 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
corporatecitizen routine, subsidizing magnet high-schools and
sponsoring news-shows on public television, they seem to win little
except public suspicion.

But from the inside, all this looks very different. There's harsh
competition. A legal and political system that seems baffled and
bored, when not actively hostile to telco interests. There's a loss of
morale, a deep sensation of having somehow lost the upper hand.
Technological change has caused a loss of data and revenue to other,
newer forms of transmission. There's theft, and new forms of theft,
of growing scale and boldness and sophistication. With all these
factors, it was no surprise to see the telcos, large and small, break
out in a litany of bitter complaint.

In late '88 and throughout 1989, telco representatives grew shrill in
their complaints to those few American law enforcement officials who
make it their business to try to understand what telephone people are
talking about. Telco security officials had discovered the
computerhacker underground, infiltrated it thoroughly, and become
deeply alarmed at its growing expertise. Here they had found a target
that was not only loathsome on its face, but clearly ripe for
counterattack.

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

#

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

When such crimes *had* been described intelligibly to the public, in
the past, that very publicity had tended to *increase* the crimes
enormously. Telco officials, while painfully aware of the
vulnerabilities of their systems, were anxious not to publicize those
weaknesses. Experience showed them that those weaknesses, once
discovered, would be pitilessly exploited by tens of thousands of
people -- not only by professional grifters and by underground hackers
and phone phreaks, but by many otherwise more-or-less honest everyday
folks, who regarded stealing service from the faceless, soulless "Phone
Company" as a kind of harmless indoor sport. When it came to
protecting their interests, telcos had long since given up on general
public sympathy for "the Voice with a Smile." Nowadays the telco's
"Voice" was very likely to be a computer's; and the American public
showed much less of the proper respect and gratitude due the fine
public service bequeathed them by Dr. Bell and Mr. Vail. The more
efficient, high-tech, computerized, and impersonal the telcos became,
it seemed, the more they were met by sullen public resentment and
amoral greed.

Telco officials wanted to punish the phone-phreak underground, in
as public and exemplary a manner as possible. They wanted to make dire
examples of the worst offenders, to seize the ringleaders and
intimidate the small fry, to discourage and frighten the wacky
hobbyists, and send the professional grifters to jail. To do all this,
publicity was vital.

Yet operational secrecy was even more so. If word got out that a
nationwide crackdown was coming, the hackers might simply vanish;
destroy the evidence, hide their computers, go to earth, and wait for
the campaign to blow over. Even the young hackers were crafty and
suspicious, and as for the professional grifters, they tended to split
for the nearest state-line at the first sign of trouble. For the
crackdown to work well, they would all have to be caught red-handed,
swept upon suddenly, out of the blue, from every corner of the compass.
And there was another strong motive for secrecy. In the worst-case
scenario, a blown campaign might leave the telcos open to a devastating
hacker counter-attack. If there were indeed hackers loose in America
who had caused the January 15 Crash -- if there were truly gifted
hackers, loose in the nation's long-distance switching systems, and
enraged or frightened by the crackdown -- then they might react
unpredictably to an attempt to collar them. Even if caught, they
might have talented and vengeful friends still running around loose.
Conceivably, it could turn ugly. Very ugly. In fact, it was hard to
imagine just how ugly things might turn, given that possibility.
Counter-attack from hackers was a genuine concern for the telcos. In
point of fact, they would never suffer any such counter-attack. But in
months to come, they would be at some pains to publicize this notion
and to utter grim warnings about it.

Still, that risk seemed well worth running. Better to run the risk
of vengeful attacks, than to live at the mercy of potential crashers.
Any cop would tell you that a protection racket had no real future.

And publicity was such a useful thing. Corporate security officers,
including telco security, generally work under conditions of great
discretion. And corporate security officials do not make money for
their companies. Their job is to *prevent the loss* of money, which is
much less glamorous than actually winning profits. If you are a
corporate security official, and you do your job brilliantly, then
nothing bad happens to your company at all. Because of this, you
appear completely superfluous. This is one of the many unattractive
aspects of security work. It's rare that these folks have the chance
to draw some healthy attention to their own efforts.

Publicity also served the interest of their friends in law
enforcement. Public officials, including law enforcement officials,
thrive by attracting favorable public interest. A brilliant
prosecution in a matter of vital public interest can make the career
of a prosecuting attorney. And for a police officer, good publicity
opens the purses of the legislature; it may bring a citation, or a
promotion, or at least a rise in status and the respect of one's peers.

But to have both publicity and secrecy is to have one's cake and eat
it too. In months to come, as we will show, this impossible act was to
cause great pain to the agents of the crackdown. But early on, it
seemed possible -- maybe even likely -- that the crackdown could
successfully combine the best of both worlds. The *arrest* of hackers
would be heavily publicized. The actual *deeds* of the hackers, which
were technically hard to explain and also a security risk, would be
left decently obscured. The *threat* hackers posed would be heavily
trumpeted; the likelihood of their actually committing such fearsome
crimes would be left to the public's imagination. The spread of the
computer underground, and its growing technical sophistication, would
be heavily promoted; the actual hackers themselves, mostly
bespectacled middle-class white suburban teenagers, would be denied any
personal publicity.

It does not seem to have occurred to any telco official that the
hackers accused would demand a day in court; that journalists would
smile upon the hackers as "good copy;" that wealthy high-tech
entrepreneurs would offer moral and financial support to crackdown
victims; that constitutional lawyers would show up with briefcases,
frowning mightily. This possibility does not seem to have ever entered
the game-plan.

And even if it had, it probably would not have slowed the ferocious
pursuit of a stolen phone-company document, mellifluously known as
"Control Office Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special
Services and Major Account Centers."

In the chapters to follow, we will explore the worlds of police and
the computer underground, and the large shadowy area where they overlap.
But first, we must explore the battleground. Before we leave the
world of the telcos, we must understand what a switching system
actually is and how your telephone actually works.

#

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

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

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

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

A lamp lights up. This means that the phone at the end of that line
has been taken off the hook. Whenever a handset is taken off the hook,
that closes a circuit inside the phone which then signals the local
office, i.e. you, automatically. There might be somebody calling, or
then again the phone might be simply off the hook, but this does not
matter to you yet. The first thing you do, is record that number in
your logbook, in your fine American public-school handwriting. This
comes first, naturally, since it is done for billing purposes.

You now take the plug of your answering cord, which goes directly to
your headset, and plug it into the lit-up hole. "Operator," you
announce.

In operator's classes, before taking this job, you have been issued a
large pamphlet full of canned operator's responses for all kinds of
contingencies, which you had to memorize. You have also been trained in
a proper nonregional, non-ethnic pronunciation and tone of voice. You
rarely have the occasion to make any spontaneous remark to a customer,
and in fact this is frowned upon (except out on the rural lines where
people have time on their hands and get up to all kinds of mischief).

A tough-sounding user's voice at the end of the line gives you a
number. Immediately, you write that number down in your logbook, next
to the caller's number, which you just wrote earlier. You then look
and see if the number this guy wants is in fact on your switchboard,
which it generally is, since it's generally a local call. Long distance
costs so much that people use it sparingly.

Only then do you pick up a calling-cord from a shelf at the base of
the switchboard. This is a long elastic cord mounted on a kind of reel
so that it will zip back in when you unplug it. There are a lot of
cords down there, and when a bunch of them are out at once they look
like a nest of snakes. Some of the girls think there are bugs living
in those cable-holes. They're called "cable mites" and are supposed to
bite your hands and give you rashes. You don't believe this, yourself.

Gripping the head of your calling-cord, you slip the tip of it deftly
into the sleeve of the jack for the called person. Not all the way in,
though. You just touch it. If you hear a clicking sound, that means
the line is busy and you can't put the call through. If the line is
busy, you have to stick the calling-cord into a "busy-tone jack," which
will give the guy a busy-tone. This way you don't have to talk to him
yourself and absorb his natural human frustration.

But the line isn't busy. So you pop the cord all the way in. Relay
circuits in your board make the distant phone ring, and if somebody
picks it up off the hook, then a phone conversation starts. You can
hear this conversation on your answering cord, until you unplug it. In
fact you could listen to the whole conversation if you wanted, but this
is sternly frowned upon by management, and frankly, when you've
overheard one, you've pretty much heard 'em all.

You can tell how long the conversation lasts by the glow of the
calling-cord's lamp, down on the calling-cord's shelf. When it's
over, you unplug and the calling-cord zips back into place.

Having done this stuff a few hundred thousand times, you become
quite good at it. In fact you're plugging, and connecting, and
disconnecting, ten, twenty, forty cords at a time. It's a manual
handicraft, really, quite satisfying in a way, rather like weaving on
an upright loom.

Should a long-distance call come up, it would be different, but not
all that different. Instead of connecting the call through your own
local switchboard, you have to go up the hierarchy, onto the
long-distance lines, known as "trunklines." Depending on how far the
call goes, it may have to work its way through a whole series of
operators, which can take quite a while. The caller doesn't wait on
the line while this complex process is negotiated across the country by
the gaggle of operators. Instead, the caller hangs up, and you call
him back yourself when the call has finally worked its way through.

After four or five years of this work, you get married, and you have
to quit your job, this being the natural order of womanhood in the
American 1920s. The phone company has to train somebody else -- maybe
two people, since the phone system has grown somewhat in the meantime.
And this costs money.

In fact, to use any kind of human being as a switching system is a
very expensive proposition. Eight thousand Leticia Luthors would be
bad enough, but a quarter of a million of them is a military-scale
proposition and makes drastic measures in automation financially
worthwhile.

Although the phone system continues to grow today, the number of
human beings employed by telcos has been dropping steadily for years.
Phone "operators" now deal with nothing but unusual contingencies, all
routine operations having been shrugged off onto machines. Consequently,
telephone operators are considerably less machine-like nowadays, and
have been known to have accents and actual character in their voices.
When you reach a human operator today, the operators are rather more
"human" than they were in Leticia's day -- but on the other hand, human
beings in the phone system are much harder to reach in the first place.

Over the first half of the twentieth century, "electromechanical"
switching systems of growing complexity were cautiously introduced into
the phone system. In certain backwaters, some of these hybrid systems
are still in use. But after 1965, the phone system began to go
completely electronic, and this is by far the dominant mode today.
Electromechanical systems have "crossbars," and "brushes," and other
large moving mechanical parts, which, while faster and cheaper than
Leticia, are still slow, and tend to wear out fairly quickly.

But fully electronic systems are inscribed on silicon chips, and are
lightning-fast, very cheap, and quite durable. They are much cheaper
to maintain than even the best electromechanical systems, and they fit
into half the space. And with every year, the silicon chip grows
smaller, faster, and cheaper yet. Best of all, automated electronics
work around the clock and don't have salaries or health insurance.

There are, however, quite serious drawbacks to the use of
computer-chips. When they do break down, it is a daunting challenge to
figure out what the heck has gone wrong with them. A broken cordboard
generally had a problem in it big enough to see. A broken chip has
invisible, microscopic faults. And the faults in bad software can be
so subtle as to be practically theological. If you want a mechanical
system to do something new, then you must travel to where it is, and
pull pieces out of it, and wire in new pieces. This costs money.
However, if you want a chip to do something new, all you have to do is
change its software, which is easy, fast and dirt-cheap. You don't even
have to see the chip to change its program. Even if you did see the
chip, it wouldn't look like much. A chip with program X doesn't look
one whit different from a chip with program Y. With the proper codes
and sequences, and access to specialized phone-lines, you can change
electronic switching systems all over America from anywhere you please.

And so can other people. If they know how, and if they want to,
they can sneak into a microchip via the special phonelines and diddle
with it, leaving no physical trace at all. If they broke into the
operator's station and held Leticia at gunpoint, that would be very
obvious. If they broke into a telco building and went after an
electromechanical switch with a toolbelt, that would at least leave
many traces. But people can do all manner of amazing things to
computer switches just by typing on a keyboard, and keyboards are
everywhere today. The extent of this vulnerability is deep, dark,
broad, almost mind-boggling, and yet this is a basic, primal fact of
life about any computer on a network.

Security experts over the past twenty years have insisted, with
growing urgency, that this basic vulnerability of computers represents
an entirely new level of risk, of unknown but obviously dire potential
to society. And they are right.

An electronic switching station does pretty much everything Letitia
did, except in nanoseconds and on a much larger scale. Compared to Miss
Luthor's ten thousand jacks, even a primitive 1ESS switching computer,
60s vintage, has a 128,000 lines. And the current AT&T system of
choice is the monstrous fifth-generation 5ESS.

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

Although an Electronic Switching Station can't talk, it does need an
interface, some way to relate to its, er, employers. This interface
is known as the "master control center." (This interface might be
better known simply as "the interface," since it doesn't actually
"control" phone calls directly. However, a term like "Master Control
Center" is just the kind of rhetoric that telco maintenance engineers
-- and hackers -- find particularly satisfying.) Using the master
control center, a phone engineer can test local and trunk lines for
malfunctions. He (rarely she) can check various alarm displays,
measure traffic on the lines, examine the records of telephone usage
and the charges for those calls, and change the programming.

And, of course, anybody else who gets into the master control center
by remote control can also do these things, if he (rarely she) has
managed to figure them out, or, more likely, has somehow swiped the
knowledge from people who already know.

In 1989 and 1990, one particular RBOC, BellSouth, which felt
particularly troubled, spent a purported $1.2 million on computer
security. Some think it spent as much as two million, if you count all
the associated costs. Two million dollars is still very little compared
to the great cost-saving utility of telephonic computer systems.

Unfortunately, computers are also stupid. Unlike human beings,
computers possess the truly profound stupidity of the inanimate.

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

Nevertheless, computers *still* are profoundly brittle and stupid;
they are simply vastly more subtle in their stupidity and brittleness.
The computers of the 1990s are much more reliable in their components
than earlier computer systems, but they are also called upon to do far
more complex things, under far more challenging conditions.

On a basic mathematical level, every single line of a software
program offers a chance for some possible screwup. Software does not
sit still when it works; it "runs," it interacts with itself and with
its own inputs and outputs. By analogy, it stretches like putty into
millions of possible shapes and conditions, so many shapes that they
can never all be successfully tested, not even in the lifespan of the
universe. Sometimes the putty snaps.

The stuff we call "software" is not like anything that human society
is used to thinking about. Software is something like a machine, and
something like mathematics, and something like language, and something
like thought, and art, and information... but software is not in fact
any of those other things. The protean quality of software is one of
the great sources of its fascination. It also makes software very
powerful, very subtle, very unpredictable, and very risky.

Some software is bad and buggy. Some is "robust," even
"bulletproof." The best software is that which has been tested by
thousands of users under thousands of different conditions, over years.
It is then known as "stable." This does *not* mean that the software
is now flawless, free of bugs. It generally means that there are
plenty of bugs in it, but the bugs are well-identified and fairly well
understood.

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

Human beings can manage, more or less, with human language because
we can catch the gist of it.

Computers, despite years of effort in "artificial intelligence," have
proven spectacularly bad in "catching the gist" of anything at all. The
tiniest bit of semantic grit may still bring the mightiest computer
tumbling down. One of the most hazardous things you can do to a computer
program is try to improve it -- to try to make it safer. Software
"patches" represent new, untried un"stable" software, which is by
definition riskier.

The modern telephone system has come to depend, utterly and
irretrievably, upon software. And the System Crash of January 15, 1990,
was caused by an *improvement* in software. Or rather, an *attempted*
improvement.

As it happened, the problem itself -- the problem per se -- took
this form. A piece of telco software had been written in C language, a
standard language of the telco field. Within the C software was a long
"do... while" construct. The "do... while" construct contained a
"switch" statement. The "switch" statement contained an "if" clause.
The "if" clause contained a "break." The "break" was *supposed* to
"break" the "if" clause. Instead, the "break" broke the "switch"
statement.

That was the problem, the actual reason why people picking up phones
on January 15, 1990, could not talk to one another.

Or at least, that was the subtle, abstract, cyberspatial seed of the
problem. This is how the problem manifested itself from the realm of
programming into the realm of real life.

The System 7 software for AT&T's 4ESS switching station, the
"Generic 44E14 Central Office Switch Software," had been extensively
tested, and was considered very stable. By the end of 1989, eighty of
AT&T's switching systems nationwide had been programmed with the new
software. Cautiously, thirty four stations were left to run the slower,
less-capable System 6, because AT&T suspected there might be shakedown
problems with the new and unprecedently sophisticated System 7 network.

The stations with System 7 were programmed to switch over to a
backup net in case of any problems. In mid-December 1989, however, a
new high-velocity, high security software patch was distributed to each
of the 4ESS switches that would enable them to switch over even more
quickly, making the System 7 network that much more secure.

Unfortunately, every one of these 4ESS switches was now in
possession of a small but deadly flaw.

In order to maintain the network, switches must monitor the
condition of other switches -- whether they are up and running, whether
they have temporarily shut down, whether they are overloaded and in need
of assistance, and so forth. The new software helped control this
bookkeeping function by monitoring the status calls from other switches.

It only takes four to six seconds for a troubled 4ESS switch to rid
itself of all its calls, drop everything temporarily, and re-boot its
software from scratch. Starting over from scratch will generally rid
the switch of any software problems that may have developed in the
course of running the system. Bugs that arise will be simply wiped
out by this process. It is a clever idea. This process of
automatically re-booting from scratch is known as the "normal fault
recovery routine." Since AT&T's software is in fact exceptionally
stable, systems rarely have to go into "fault recovery" in the first
place; but AT&T has always boasted of its "real world" reliability,
and this tactic is a belt-and-suspenders routine.

The 4ESS switch used its new software to monitor its fellow switches
as they recovered from faults. As other switches came back on line
after recovery, they would send their "OK" signals to the switch. The
switch would make a little note to that effect in its "status map,"
recognizing that the fellow switch was back and ready to go, and should
be sent some calls and put back to regular work.

Unfortunately, while it was busy bookkeeping with the status map,
the tiny flaw in the brand-new software came into play. The flaw caused
the 4ESS switch to interacted, subtly but drastically, with incoming
telephone calls from human users. If -- and only if -- two incoming
phone-calls happened to hit the switch within a hundredth of a second,
then a small patch of data would be garbled by the flaw.

But the switch had been programmed to monitor itself constantly for
any possible damage to its data. When the switch perceived that its
data had been somehow garbled, then it too would go down, for swift
repairs to its software. It would signal its fellow switches not to
send any more work. It would go into the fault recovery mode for four
to six seconds. And then the switch would be fine again, and would
send out its "OK, ready for work" signal.

However, the "OK, ready for work" signal was the *very thing that
had caused the switch to go down in the first place.* And *all* the
System 7 switches had the same flaw in their status-map software. As
soon as they stopped to make the bookkeeping note that their fellow
switch was "OK," then they too would become vulnerable to the slight
chance that two phone-calls would hit them within a hundredth of a
second.

At approximately 2:25 p.m. EST on Monday, January 15, one of AT&T's
4ESS toll switching systems in New York City had an actual,
legitimate, minor problem. It went into fault recovery routines,
announced "I'm going down," then announced, "I'm back, I'm OK." And
this cheery message then blasted throughout the network to many of its
fellow 4ESS switches. Many of the switches, at first, completely
escaped trouble. These lucky switches were not hit by the coincidence
of two phone calls within a hundredth of a second. Their software did
not fail -- at first. But three switches -- in Atlanta, St. Louis, and
Detroit -- were unlucky, and were caught with their hands full. And
they went down. And they came back up, almost immediately. And they
too began to broadcast the lethal message that they, too, were "OK"
again, activating the lurking software bug in yet other switches.

As more and more switches did have that bit of bad luck and
collapsed, the call-traffic became more and more densely packed in the
remaining switches, which were groaning to keep up with the load. And
of course, as the calls became more densely packed, the switches were
*much more likely* to be hit twice within a hundredth of a second. It
only took four seconds for a switch to get well. There was no *physical*
damage of any kind to the switches, after all. Physically, they were
working perfectly. This situation was "only" a software problem. But the
4ESS switches were leaping up and down every four to six seconds, in a
virulent spreading wave all over America, in utter, manic, mechanical
stupidity. They kept *knocking* one another down with their contagious
"OK" messages. It took about ten minutes for the chain reaction to
cripple the network. Even then, switches would periodically luck-out
and manage to resume their normal work. Many calls -- millions of them
-- were managing to get through. But millions weren't.

The switching stations that used System 6 were not directly
affected. Thanks to these old-fashioned switches, AT&T's national
system avoided complete collapse. This fact also made it clear to
engineers that System 7 was at fault.

Bell Labs engineers, working feverishly in New Jersey, Illinois, and
Ohio, first tried their entire repertoire of standard network remedies
on the malfunctioning System 7. None of the remedies worked, of course,
because nothing like this had ever happened to any phone system before.

By cutting out the backup safety network entirely, they were able to
reduce the frenzy of "OK" messages by about half. The system then began
to recover, as the chain reaction slowed. By 11:30 pm on Monday
January 15, sweating engineers on the midnight shift breathed a sigh of
relief as the last switch cleared-up.

By Tuesday they were pulling all the brand-new 4ESS software and
replacing it with an earlier version of System 7. If these had been
human operators, rather than computers at work, someone would simply
have eventually stopped screaming. It would have been *obvious* that
the situation was not "OK," and common sense would have kicked in.
Humans possess common sense -- at least to some extent. Computers
simply don't. On the other hand, computers can handle hundreds of calls
per second. Humans simply can't. If every single human being in
America worked for the phone company, we couldn't match the performance
of digital switches: direct-dialling, three-way calling, speed-calling,
callwaiting, Caller ID, all the rest of the cornucopia of digital
bounty. Replacing computers with operators is simply not an option any
more.

And yet we still, anachronistically, expect humans to be running
our phone system. It is hard for us to understand that we have
sacrificed huge amounts of initiative and control to senseless yet
powerful machines. When the phones fail, we want somebody to be
responsible. We want somebody to blame.

When the Crash of January 15 happened, the American populace was
simply not prepared to understand that enormous landslides in
cyberspace, like the Crash itself, can happen, and can be nobody's
fault in particular. It was easier to believe, maybe even in some odd
way more reassuring to believe, that some evil person, or evil group,
had done this to us. "Hackers" had done it. With a virus. A trojan
horse. A software bomb. A dirty plot of some kind. People believed
this, responsible people. In 1990, they were looking hard for evidence
to confirm their heartfelt suspicions.

And they would look in a lot of places. Come 1991, however, the
outlines of an apparent new reality would begin to emerge from the fog.

On July 1 and 2, 1991, computer-software collapses in telephone
switching stations disrupted service in Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Los
Angeles and San Francisco. Once again, seemingly minor maintenance
problems had crippled the digital System 7. About twelve million people
were affected in the Crash of July 1, 1991.

Said the New York Times Service: "Telephone company executives and
federal regulators said they were not ruling out the possibility of
sabotage by computer hackers, but most seemed to think the problems
stemmed from some unknown defect in the software running the networks."

And sure enough, within the week, a red-faced software company, DSC
Communications Corporation of Plano, Texas, owned up to "glitches" in
the "signal transfer point" software that DSC had designed for Bell
Atlantic and Pacific Bell. The immediate cause of the July 1 Crash was
a single mistyped character: one tiny typographical flaw in one single
line of the software. One mistyped letter, in one single line, had
deprived the nation's capital of phone service. It was not
particularly surprising that this tiny flaw had escaped attention: a
typical System 7 station requires *ten million* lines of code.

On Tuesday, September 17, 1991, came the most spectacular outage
yet. This case had nothing to do with software failures -- at least,
not directly. Instead, a group of AT&T's switching stations in New York
City had simply run out of electrical power and shut down cold. Their
back-up batteries had failed. Automatic warning systems were supposed
to warn of the loss of battery power, but those automatic systems had
failed as well.

This time, Kennedy, La Guardia, and Newark airports all had their
voice and data communications cut. This horrifying event was
particularly ironic, as attacks on airport computers by hackers had long
been a standard nightmare scenario, much trumpeted by computer-security
experts who feared the computer underground. There had even been a
Hollywood thriller about sinister hackers ruining airport computers -*Die Hard II.*

Now AT&T itself had crippled airports with computer malfunctions -not just one airport, but three at once, some of the busiest in the
world.

Air traffic came to a standstill throughout the Greater New York
area, causing more than 500 flights to be cancelled, in a spreading
wave all over America and even into Europe. Another 500 or so flights
were delayed, affecting, all in all, about 85,000 passengers. (One of
these passengers was the chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission.)

Stranded passengers in New York and New Jersey were further
infuriated to discover that they could not even manage to make a long
distance phone call, to explain their delay to loved ones or business
associates. Thanks to the crash, about four and a half million domestic
calls, and half a million international calls, failed to get through.
The September 17 NYC Crash, unlike the previous ones, involved not a
whisper of "hacker" misdeeds. On the contrary, by 1991, AT&T itself
was suffering much of the vilification that had formerly been directed
at hackers. Congressmen were grumbling. So were state and federal
regulators. And so was the press.

For their part, ancient rival MCI took out snide fullpage newspaper
ads in New York, offering their own longdistance services for the "next
time that AT&T goes down." "You wouldn't find a classy company like
AT&T using such advertising," protested AT&T Chairman Robert Allen,
unconvincingly. Once again, out came the full-page AT&T apologies in
newspapers, apologies for "an inexcusable culmination of both human and
mechanical failure." (This time, however, AT&T offered no discount on
later calls. Unkind critics suggested that AT&T were worried about
setting any precedent for refunding the financial losses caused by
telephone crashes.)

Industry journals asked publicly if AT&T was "asleep at the
switch." The telephone network, America's purported marvel of
high-tech reliability, had gone down three times in 18 months.
*Fortune* magazine listed the Crash of September 17 among the "Biggest
Business Goofs of 1991," cruelly parodying AT&T's ad campaign in an
article entitled "AT&T Wants You Back (Safely On the Ground, God
Willing)."

Why had those New York switching systems simply run out of power?
Because no human being had attended to the alarm system. Why did the
alarm systems blare automatically, without any human being noticing?
Because the three telco technicians who *should* have been listening
were absent from their stations in the power-room, on another floor of
the building -- attending a training class. A training class about the
alarm systems for the power room!

"Crashing the System" was no longer "unprecedented" by late 1991.
On the contrary, it no longer even seemed an oddity. By 1991, it was
clear that all the policemen in the world could no longer "protect" the
phone system from crashes. By far the worst crashes the system had
ever had, had been inflicted, by the system, upon *itself.* And this
time nobody was making cocksure statements that this was an anomaly,
something that would never happen again. By 1991 the System's
defenders had met their nebulous Enemy, and the Enemy was -- the System.

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

The date was May 9, 1990. The Pope was touring Mexico City.
Hustlers from the Medellin Cartel were trying to buy black-market
Stinger missiles in Florida. On the comics page, Doonesbury character
Andy was dying of AIDS.

And then... a highly unusual item whose novelty and calculated
rhetoric won it headscratching attention in newspapers all over America.
The US Attorney's office in Phoenix, Arizona, had issued a press release
announcing a nationwide law enforcement crackdown against "illegal
computer hacking activities." The sweep was officially known as
"Operation Sundevil."

Eight paragraphs in the press release gave the bare facts:
twenty-seven search warrants carried out on May 8, with three arrests,
and a hundred and fifty agents on the prowl in "twelve" cities across
America. (Different counts in local press reports yielded "thirteen,"
"fourteen," and "sixteen" cities.) Officials estimated that criminal
losses of revenue to telephone companies "may run into millions of
dollars." Credit for the Sundevil investigations was taken by the US
Secret Service, Assistant US Attorney Tim Holtzen of Phoenix, and the
Assistant Attorney General of Arizona, Gail Thackeray.

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

"Today, the Secret Service is sending a clear message to those
computer hackers who have decided to violate the laws of this nation in
the mistaken belief that they can successfully avoid detection by hiding
behind the relative anonymity of their computer terminals.(...)
"Underground groups have been formed for the purpose of exchanging
information relevant to their criminal activities. These groups often
communicate with each other through message systems between computers
called 'bulletin boards.' "Our experience shows that many computer
hacker suspects are no longer misguided teenagers, mischievously
playing games with their computers in their bedrooms. Some are now high
tech computer operators using computers to engage in unlawful conduct."

Who were these "underground groups" and "hightech operators?" Where
had they come from? What did they want? Who *were* they? Were they
"mischievous?" Were they dangerous? How had "misguided teenagers"
managed to alarm the United States Secret Service? And just how
widespread was this sort of thing? Of all the major players in the
Hacker Crackdown: the phone companies, law enforcement, the civil
libertarians, and the "hackers" themselves -- the "hackers" are by far
the most mysterious, by far the hardest to understand, by far the
*weirdest.*

Not only are "hackers" novel in their activities, but they come in a
variety of odd subcultures, with a variety of languages, motives and
values.

The earliest proto-hackers were probably those unsung mischievous
telegraph boys who were summarily fired by the Bell Company in 1878.

Legitimate "hackers," those computer enthusiasts who are
independent-minded but law-abiding, generally trace their spiritual
ancestry to elite technical universities, especially M.I.T. and
Stanford, in the 1960s.

But the genuine roots of the modern hacker *underground* can
probably be traced most successfully to a now much-obscured hippie
anarchist movement known as the Yippies. The Yippies, who took their
name from the largely fictional "Youth International Party," carried
out a loud and lively policy of surrealistic subversion and outrageous
political mischief. Their basic tenets were flagrant sexual
promiscuity, open and copious drug use, the political overthrow of any
powermonger over thirty years of age, and an immediate end to the war
in Vietnam, by any means necessary, including the psychic levitation of
the Pentagon. The two most visible Yippies were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry
Rubin. Rubin eventually became a Wall Street broker. Hoffman,
ardently sought by federal authorities, went into hiding for seven
years, in Mexico, France, and the United States. While on the lam,
Hoffman continued to write and publish, with help from sympathizers in
the American anarcho-leftist underground. Mostly, Hoffman survived
through false ID and odd jobs. Eventually he underwent facial plastic
surgery and adopted an entirely new identity as one "Barry Freed."
After surrendering himself to authorities in 1980, Hoffman spent a
year in prison on a cocaine conviction.

Hoffman's worldview grew much darker as the glory days of the 1960s
faded. In 1989, he purportedly committed suicide, under odd and, to
some, rather suspicious circumstances.

Abbie Hoffman is said to have caused the Federal Bureau of
Investigation to amass the single largest investigation file ever
opened on an individual American citizen. (If this is true, it is
still questionable whether the FBI regarded Abbie Hoffman a serious
public threat -- quite possibly, his file was enormous simply because
Hoffman left colorful legendry wherever he went). He was a gifted
publicist, who regarded electronic media as both playground and weapon.
He actively enjoyed manipulating network TV and other gullible,
imagehungry media, with various weird lies, mindboggling rumors,
impersonation scams, and other sinister distortions, all absolutely
guaranteed to upset cops, Presidential candidates, and federal judges.
Hoffman's most famous work was a book self-reflexively known as
*Steal This Book,* which publicized a number of methods by which young,
penniless hippie agitators might live off the fat of a system
supported by humorless drones. *Steal This Book,* whose title urged
readers to damage the very means of distribution which had put it into
their hands, might be described as a spiritual ancestor of a computer
virus.

Hoffman, like many a later conspirator, made extensive use of
pay-phones for his agitation work -- in his case, generally through the
use of cheap brass washers as coin-slugs.

During the Vietnam War, there was a federal surtax imposed on
telephone service; Hoffman and his cohorts could, and did, argue that
in systematically stealing phone service they were engaging in civil
disobedience: virtuously denying tax funds to an illegal and immoral
war. But this thin veil of decency was soon dropped entirely.
Ripping-off the System found its own justification in deep alienation
and a basic outlaw contempt for conventional bourgeois values.
Ingenious, vaguely politicized varieties of rip-off, which might be
described as "anarchy by convenience," became very popular in Yippie
circles, and because rip-off was so useful, it was to survive the
Yippie movement itself. In the early 1970s, it required fairly limited
expertise and ingenuity to cheat payphones, to divert "free"
electricity and gas service, or to rob vending machines and parking
meters for handy pocket change. It also required a conspiracy to
spread this knowledge, and the gall and nerve actually to commit petty
theft, but the Yippies had these qualifications in plenty. In June
1971, Abbie Hoffman and a telephone enthusiast sarcastically known as
"Al Bell" began publishing a newsletter called *Youth International
Party Line.* This newsletter was dedicated to collating and spreading
Yippie rip-off techniques, especially of phones, to the joy of the
freewheeling underground and the insensate rage of all straight people.

As a political tactic, phone-service theft ensured that Yippie
advocates would always have ready access to the long-distance telephone
as a medium, despite the Yippies' chronic lack of organization,
discipline, money, or even a steady home address.

*Party Line* was run out of Greenwich Village for a couple of years,
then "Al Bell" more or less defected from the faltering ranks of
Yippiedom, changing the newsletter's name to *TAP* or *Technical
Assistance Program.* After the Vietnam War ended, the steam began
leaking rapidly out of American radical dissent. But by this time,
"Bell" and his dozen or so core contributors had the bit between their
teeth, and had begun to derive tremendous gut-level satisfaction from
the sensation of pure *technical power.*

*TAP* articles, once highly politicized, became pitilessly
jargonized and technical, in homage or parody to the Bell System's own
technical documents, which *TAP* studied closely, gutted, and
reproduced without permission. The *TAP* elite revelled in gloating
possession of the specialized knowledge necessary to beat the system.

"Al Bell" dropped out of the game by the late 70s, and "Tom Edison"
took over; *TAP* readers (some 1400 of them, all told) now began to
show more interest in telex switches and the growing phenomenon of
computer systems. In 1983, "Tom Edison" had his computer stolen and his
house set on fire by an arsonist. This was an eventually mortal blow to
*TAP* (though the legendary name was to be resurrected in 1990 by a
young Kentuckian 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
coinslugs, zaps of electricity, chunks of coin-shaped ice, prybars,
magnets, lockpicks, blasting caps. Public pay-phones must survive in a
world of unfriendly, greedy people, and a modern payphone is as
exquisitely evolved as a cactus.

Because the phone network pre-dates the computer network, the
scofflaws known as "phone phreaks" pre-date the scofflaws known as
"computer hackers." In practice, today, the line between "phreaking"
and "hacking" is very blurred, just as the distinction between
telephones and computers has blurred. The phone system has been
digitized, and computers have learned to "talk" over phone-lines.
What's worse -- and this was the point of the Mr. Jenkins of the Secret
Service -- some hackers have learned to steal, and some thieves have
learned to hack.

Despite the blurring, one can still draw a few useful behavioral
distinctions between "phreaks" and "hackers." Hackers are intensely
interested in the "system" per se, and enjoy relating to machines.
"Phreaks" are more social, manipulating the system in a rough-and-ready
fashion in order to get through to other human beings, fast, cheap and
under the table.

Phone phreaks love nothing so much as "bridges," illegal conference
calls of ten or twelve chatting conspirators, seaboard to seaboard,
lasting for many hours -- and running, of course, on somebody else's
tab, preferably a large corporation's. As phone-phreak conferences wear
on, people drop out (or simply leave the phone off the hook, while they
sashay off to work or school or babysitting), and new people are phoned
up and invited to join in, from some other continent, if possible.
Technical trivia, boasts, brags, lies, head-trip deceptions, weird
rumors, and cruel gossip are all freely exchanged. The lowest rung of
phone-phreaking is the theft of telephone access codes. Charging a
phone call to somebody else's stolen number is, of course, a pig-easy
way of stealing phone service, requiring practically no technical
expertise. This practice has been very widespread, especially among
lonely people without much money who are far from home. Code theft has
flourished especially in college dorms, military bases, and,
notoriously, among roadies for rock bands. Of late, code theft has
spread very rapidly among Third Worlders in the US, who pile up
enormous unpaid long-distance bills to the Caribbean, South America,
and Pakistan.

The simplest way to steal phone-codes is simply to look over a
victim's shoulder as he punches-in his own code-number on a public
payphone. This technique is known as "shoulder-surfing," and is
especially common in airports, bus terminals, and train stations. The
code is then sold by the thief for a few dollars. The buyer abusing
the code has no computer expertise, but calls his Mom in New York,
Kingston or Caracas and runs up a huge bill with impunity. The losses
from this primitive phreaking activity are far, far greater than the
monetary losses caused by computer-intruding hackers. In the
mid-to-late 1980s, until the introduction of sterner telco security
measures, *computerized* code theft worked like a charm, and was
virtually omnipresent throughout the digital underground, among phreaks
and hackers alike. This was accomplished through programming one's
computer to try random code numbers over the telephone until one of
them worked. Simple programs to do this were widely available in the
underground; a computer running all night was likely to come up with a
dozen or so useful hits. This could be repeated week after week until
one had a large library of stolen codes.

Nowadays, the computerized dialling of hundreds of numbers can be
detected within hours and swiftly traced. If a stolen code is repeatedly
abused, this too can be detected within a few hours. But for years in
the 1980s, the publication of stolen codes was a kind of elementary
etiquette for fledgling hackers. The simplest way to establish your
bona-fides as a raider was to steal a code through repeated random
dialling and offer it to the "community" for use. Codes could be both
stolen, and used, simply and easily from the safety of one's own
bedroom, with very little fear of detection or punishment.

Before computers and their phone-line modems entered American homes
in gigantic numbers, phone phreaks had their own special
telecommunications hardware gadget, the famous "blue box." This fraud
device (now rendered increasingly useless by the digital evolution of
the phone system) could trick switching systems into granting free
access to long-distance lines. It did this by mimicking the system's
own signal, a tone of 2600 hertz.

Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple Computer, Inc.,
once dabbled in selling blue-boxes in college dorms in California. For
many, in the early days of phreaking, blue-boxing was scarcely
perceived as "theft," but rather as a fun (if sneaky) way to use excess
phone capacity harmlessly. After all, the long-distance lines were
*just sitting there*... Whom did it hurt, really? If you're not
*damaging* the system, and you're not *using up any tangible
resource,* and if nobody *finds out* what you did, then what real harm
have you done? What exactly *have* you "stolen," anyway? If a tree
falls in the forest and nobody hears it, how much is the noise worth?
Even now this remains a rather dicey question.

Blue-boxing was no joke to the phone companies, however. Indeed,
when *Ramparts* magazine, a radical publication in California, printed
the wiring schematics necessary to create a mute box in June 1972, the
magazine was seized by police and Pacific Bell phonecompany officials.
The mute box, a blue-box variant, allowed its user to receive
long-distance calls free of charge to the caller. This device was
closely described in a *Ramparts* article wryly titled "Regulating the
Phone Company In Your Home." Publication of this article was held to
be in violation of Californian State Penal Code section 502.7, which
outlaws ownership of wire-fraud devices and the selling of "plans or
instructions for any instrument, apparatus, or device intended to avoid
telephone toll charges."

Issues of *Ramparts* were recalled or seized on the newsstands, and
the resultant loss of income helped put the magazine out of business.
This was an ominous precedent for free-expression issues, but the
telco's crushing of a radical-fringe magazine passed without serious
challenge at the time. Even in the freewheeling California 1970s, it
was widely felt that there was something sacrosanct about what the
phone company knew; that the telco had a legal and moral right to
protect itself by shutting off the flow of such illicit information.
Most telco information was so "specialized" that it would scarcely be
understood by any honest member of the public. If not published, it
would not be missed. To print such material did not seem part of the
legitimate role of a free press.

In 1990 there would be a similar telco-inspired attack on the
electronic phreak/hacking "magazine" *Phrack.* The *Phrack* legal case
became a central issue in the Hacker Crackdown, and gave rise to great
controversy. *Phrack* would also be shut down, for a time, at least,
but this time both the telcos and their law enforcement allies would
pay a much larger price for their actions. The *Phrack* case will be
examined in detail, later.

Phone-phreaking as a social practice is still very much alive at this
moment. Today, phone-phreaking is thriving much more vigorously than
the better-known and worse-feared practice of "computer hacking." New
forms of phreaking are spreading rapidly, following new vulnerabilities
in sophisticated phone services.

Cellular phones are especially vulnerable; their chips can be
re-programmed to present a false caller ID and avoid billing. Doing
so also avoids police tapping, making cellular-phone abuse a favorite
among drug-dealers. "Call-sell operations" using pirate cellular phones
can, and have, been run right out of the backs of cars, which move from
"cell" to "cell" in the local phone system, retailing stolen
long-distance service, like some kind of demented electronic version of
the neighborhood ice-cream truck.

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

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

Worse yet, phreaks have sometimes been known to react truculently to
attempts to "clean up" the voice-mail system. Rather than humbly
acquiescing to being thrown out of their playground, they may very well
call up the company officials at work (or at home) and loudly demand
free voice-mail addresses of their very own. Such bullying is taken
very seriously by spooked victims.

Acts of phreak revenge against straight people are rare, but
voice-mail systems are especially tempting and vulnerable, and an
infestation of angry phreaks in one's voice-mail system is no joke.
They can erase legitimate messages; or spy on private messages; or
harass users with recorded taunts and obscenities. They've even been
known to seize control of voice-mail security, and lock out legitimate
users, or even shut down the system entirely.

Cellular phone-calls, cordless phones, and ship-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, highstakes context of the
"Information Society" of the 1990s, "hacking" was called into question.

What did it mean to break into a computer without permission and use
its computational power, or look around inside its files without hurting
anything? What were computer-intruding hackers, anyway -- how should
society, and the law, best define their actions? Were they just
*browsers,* harmless intellectual explorers? Were they *voyeurs,*
snoops, invaders of privacy? Should they be sternly treated as
potential *agents of espionage,* or perhaps as *industrial spies?* Or
were they best defined as *trespassers,* a very common teenage
misdemeanor? Was hacking *theft of service?* (After all, intruders
were getting someone else's computer to carry out their orders, without
permission and without paying). Was hacking *fraud?* Maybe it was
best described as *impersonation.* The commonest mode of computer
intrusion was (and is) to swipe or snoop somebody else's password, and
then enter the computer in the guise of another person -- who is
commonly stuck with the blame and the bills.

Perhaps a medical metaphor was better -- hackers should be defined
as "sick," as *computer addicts* unable to control their irresponsible,
compulsive behavior.

But these weighty assessments meant little to the people who were
actually being judged. From inside the underground world of hacking
itself, all these perceptions seem quaint, wrongheaded, stupid, or
meaningless. The most important self-perception of underground hackers
- from the 1960s, right through to the present day -- is that they are
an *elite.* The day-to-day struggle in the underground is not over
sociological definitions -- who cares? -- but for power, knowledge, and
status among one's peers.

When you are a hacker, it is your own inner conviction of your elite
status that enables you to break, or let us say "transcend," the rules.
It is not that *all* rules go by the board. The rules habitually
broken by hackers are *unimportant* rules -- the rules of dopey
greedhead telco bureaucrats and pig-ignorant government pests. Hackers
have their *own* rules, which separate behavior which is cool and
elite, from behavior which is rodentlike, stupid and losing. These
"rules," however, are mostly unwritten and enforced by peer pressure
and tribal feeling. Like all rules that depend on the unspoken
conviction that everybody else is a good old boy, these rules are ripe
for abuse. The mechanisms of hacker peer-pressure, "teletrials" and
ostracism, are rarely used and rarely work. Back-stabbing slander,
threats, and electronic harassment are also freely employed in
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
TechnoRevolution" by "Dr. Crash," which appeared in electronic form in
*Phrack* Volume 1, Issue 6, Phile 3.

"To fully explain the true motives behind hacking, we must first
take a quick look into the past. In the 1960s, a group of MIT students
built the first modern computer system. This wild, rebellious group of
young men were the first to bear the name `hackers.' The systems that
they developed were intended to be used to solve world problems and to
benefit all of mankind.

"As we can see, this has not been the case. The computer system has
been solely in the hands of big businesses and the government. The
wonderful device meant to enrich life has become a weapon which
dehumanizes people. To the government and large businesses, people are
no more than disk space, and the government doesn't use computers to
arrange aid for the poor, but to control nuclear death weapons. The
average American can only have access to a small microcomputer which
is worth only a fraction of what they pay for it. The businesses keep
the true state-of-the-art equipment away from the people behind a steel
wall of incredibly high prices and bureaucracy. It is because of this
state of affairs that hacking was born.(...)

"Of course, the government doesn't want the monopoly of technology
broken, so they have outlawed hacking and arrest anyone who is
caught.(...) The phone company is another example of technology abused
and kept from people with high prices.(...)

"Hackers often find that their existing equipment, due to the
monopoly tactics of computer companies, is inefficient for their
purposes. Due to the exorbitantly high prices, it is impossible to
legally purchase the necessary equipment. This need has given still
another segment of the fight: Credit Carding. Carding is a way of
obtaining the necessary goods without paying for them. It is again due
to the companies' stupidity that Carding is so easy, and shows that the
world's businesses are in the hands of those with considerably less
technical know-how than we, the hackers. (...) "Hacking must continue.
We must train newcomers to the art of hacking.(...) And whatever you
do, continue the fight. Whether you know it or not, if you are a
hacker, you are a revolutionary. Don't worry, you're on the right
side."

The defense of "carding" is rare. Most hackers regard credit-card
theft as "poison" to the underground, a sleazy and immoral effort that,
worse yet, is hard to get away with. Nevertheless, manifestos
advocating 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 narrowminded breadhead whose interests can only
be corrupt and contemptible.

Having grown up in the 1970s and 1980s, the young Bohemians of the
digital underground regard straight society as awash in plutocratic
corruption, where everyone from the President down is for sale and
whoever has the gold makes the rules.

Interestingly, there's a funhouse-mirror image of this attitude on
the other side of the conflict. The police are also one of the most
markedly anti-materialistic groups in American society, motivated not
by mere money but by ideals of service, justice, esprit-de-corps, and,
of course, their own brand of specialized knowledge and power.
Remarkably, the propaganda war between cops and hackers has always
involved angry allegations that the other side is trying to make a
sleazy buck. Hackers consistently sneer that anti-phreak prosecutors
are angling for cushy jobs as telco lawyers and that 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 technorat brothers
(rarely, sisters) are a beseiged vanguard of the truly free and honest.
The rest of the world is a maelstrom of corporate crime and high-level
governmental corruption, occasionally tempered with well-meaning
ignorance. To read a few issues in a row is to enter a nightmare akin
to Solzhenitsyn's, somewhat tempered by the fact that *2600* is often
extremely funny.

Goldstein did not become a target of the Hacker Crackdown, though he
protested loudly, eloquently, and publicly about it, and it added
considerably to his fame. It was not that he is not regarded as
dangerous, because he is so regarded. Goldstein has had brushes with
the law in the past: in 1985, a *2600* bulletin board computer was
seized by the FBI, and some software on it was formally declared "a
burglary tool in the form of a computer program." But Goldstein
escaped direct repression in 1990, because his magazine is printed on
paper, and recognized as subject to Constitutional freedom of the
press protection. As was seen in the *Ramparts* case, this is far from
an absolute guarantee. Still, as a practical matter, shutting down
*2600* by court-order would create so much legal hassle that it is
simply unfeasible, at least for the present. Throughout 1990, both
Goldstein and his magazine were peevishly thriving.

Instead, the Crackdown of 1990 would concern itself with the
computerized version of forbidden data. The crackdown itself, first and
foremost, was about *bulletin board systems.* Bulletin Board Systems,
most often known by the ugly and un-pluralizable acronym "BBS," are the
life-blood of the digital underground. Boards were also central to law
enforcement's tactics and strategy in the Hacker Crackdown.

A "bulletin board system" can be formally defined as a computer
which serves as an information and messagepassing center for users
dialing-up over the phone-lines through the use of modems. A "modem,"
or modulatordemodulator, is a device which translates the digital
impulses of computers into audible analog telephone signals, and vice
versa. Modems connect computers to phones and thus to each other.

Large-scale mainframe computers have been connected since the 1960s,
but *personal* computers, run by individuals out of their homes, were
first networked in the late 1970s. The "board" created by Ward
Christensen and Randy Suess in February 1978, in Chicago, Illinois, is
generally regarded as the first personal-computer bulletin board system
worthy of the name. Boards run on many different machines, employing
many different kinds of software. Early boards were crude and buggy,
and their managers, known as "system operators" or "sysops," were
hard-working technical experts who wrote their own software. But like
most everything else in the world of electronics, boards became faster,
cheaper, better-designed, and generally far more sophisticated
throughout the 1980s. They also moved swiftly out of the hands of
pioneers and into those of the general public. By 1985 there were
something in the neighborhood of 4,000 boards in America. By 1990 it
was calculated, vaguely, that there were about 30,000 boards in the US,
with uncounted thousands overseas.

Computer bulletin boards are unregulated enterprises. Running a
board is a rough-and-ready, 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. "Chatlines" are boards
linking several users together over several different phone-lines
simultaneously, so that people exchange messages at the very moment that
they type. (Many large boards feature "chat" capabilities along with
other services.) Less immediate boards, perhaps with a single
phoneline, store messages serially, one at a time. And some boards are
only open for business in daylight hours or on weekends, which greatly
slows response. A *network* of boards, such as "FidoNet," can carry
electronic mail from board to board, continent to continent, across
huge distances -- but at a relative snail's pace, so that a message can
take several days to reach its target audience and elicit a reply.

Boards can be grouped by their degree of community. Some boards
emphasize the exchange of private, person-to-person electronic mail.
Others emphasize public postings and may even purge people who "lurk,"
merely reading posts but refusing to openly participate. Some boards
are intimate and neighborly. Others are frosty and highly technical.
Some are little more than storage dumps for software, where users
"download" and "upload" programs, but interact among themselves little
if at all.

Boards can be grouped by their ease of access. Some boards are
entirely public. Others are private and restricted only to personal
friends of the sysop. Some boards divide users by status. On these
boards, some users, especially beginners, strangers or children, will
be restricted to general topics, and perhaps forbidden to post.
Favored users, though, are granted the ability to post as they please,
and to stay "on-line" as long as they like, even to the disadvantage of
other people trying to call in. High-status users can be given access
to hidden areas in the board, such as off-color topics, private
discussions, and/or valuable software. Favored users may even become
"remote sysops" with the power to take remote control of the board
through their own home computers. Quite often "remote sysops" end up
doing all the work and taking formal control of the enterprise,
despite the fact that it's physically located in someone else's house.
Sometimes several "co-sysops" share power.

And boards can also be grouped by size. Massive, nationwide
commercial networks, such as CompuServe, Delphi, GEnie and Prodigy, are
run on mainframe computers and are generally not considered "boards,"
though they share many of their characteristics, such as electronic
mail, discussion topics, libraries of software, and persistent and
growing problems with civil-liberties issues. Some private boards have
as many as thirty phone-lines and quite sophisticated hardware. And
then there are tiny boards.

Boards vary in popularity. Some boards are huge and crowded, where
users must claw their way in against a constant busy-signal. Others
are huge and empty -- there are few things sadder than a formerly
flourishing board where no one posts any longer, and the dead
conversations of vanished users lie about gathering digital dust. Some
boards are tiny and intimate, their telephone numbers intentionally kept
confidential so that only a small number can log on.

And some boards are *underground.*

Boards can be mysterious entities. The activities of their users can
be hard to differentiate from conspiracy. Sometimes they *are*
conspiracies. Boards have harbored, or have been accused of harboring,
all manner of fringe groups, and have abetted, or been accused of
abetting, every manner of frowned-upon, sleazy, radical, and criminal
activity. There are Satanist boards. Nazi boards. Pornographic
boards. Pedophile boards. Drugdealing boards. Anarchist boards.
Communist boards. Gay and Lesbian boards (these exist in great
profusion, many of them quite lively with well-established histories).
Religious cult boards. Evangelical boards. Witchcraft boards, hippie
boards, punk boards, skateboarder boards. Boards for UFO believers.
There may well be boards for serial killers, airline terrorists and
professional assassins. There is simply no way to tell. Boards spring
up, flourish, and disappear in large numbers, in most every corner of
the developed world. Even apparently innocuous public boards can, and
sometimes do, harbor secret areas known only to a few. And even on the
vast, public, commercial services, private mail is very private -- and
quite possibly criminal.

Boards cover most every topic imaginable and some that are hard to
imagine. They cover a vast spectrum of social activity. However, all
board users do have something in common: their possession of computers
and phones. Naturally, computers and phones are primary topics of
conversation on almost every board.

And hackers and phone phreaks, those utter devotees of computers and
phones, live by boards. They swarm by boards. They are bred by
boards. By the late 1980s, phone-phreak groups and hacker groups,
united by boards, had proliferated fantastically.

As evidence, here is a list of hacker groups compiled by the editors
of *Phrack* on August 8, 1988.

The Administration. Advanced Telecommunications, Inc. ALIAS.
American Tone Travelers. Anarchy Inc. Apple Mafia. The Association.
Atlantic Pirates Guild.

Bad Ass Mother Fuckers. Bellcore. Bell Shock Force. Black Bag.

Camorra. C&M Productions. Catholics Anonymous. Chaos Computer
Club. Chief Executive Officers. Circle Of Death. Circle Of Deneb.
Club X. Coalition of Hi-Tech Pirates. Coast-To-Coast. Corrupt
Computing. Cult Of The Dead Cow. Custom Retaliations.

Damage Inc. D&B Communications. The Dange Gang. Dec Hunters.
Digital Gang. DPAK.

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

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

Hack-A-Trip. Hackers Of America. High Mountain Hackers. High
Society. The Hitchhikers.

IBM Syndicate. The Ice Pirates. Imperial Warlords. Inner Circle.
Inner Circle II. Insanity Inc. International Computer Underground
Bandits.

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

League Of Adepts. Legion Of Doom. Legion Of Hackers. Lords Of
Chaos. Lunatic Labs, Unlimited.

Master Hackers. MAD! The Marauders. MD/PhD. Metal Communications,
Inc. MetalliBashers, Inc. MBI. Metro Communications. Midwest Pirates
Guild.

NASA Elite. The NATO Association. Neon Knights. Nihilist Order.
Order Of The Rose. OSS.

Pacific Pirates Guild. Phantom Access Associates. PHido PHreaks.
The Phirm. Phlash. PhoneLine Phantoms. Phone Phreakers Of America.
Phortune 500. Phreak Hack Delinquents. Phreak Hack Destroyers.
Phreakers, Hackers, And Laundromat Employees Gang (PHALSE Gang).
Phreaks Against Geeks. Phreaks Against Phreaks Against Geeks. Phreaks
and Hackers of America. Phreaks Anonymous World Wide. Project
Genesis. The Punk Mafia. The Racketeers. Red Dawn Text Files. Roscoe
Gang.

SABRE. Secret Circle of Pirates. Secret Service. 707 Club. Shadow
Brotherhood. Sharp Inc. 65C02 Elite. Spectral Force. Star League.
Stowaways. Strata-Crackers.

Team Hackers '86. Team Hackers '87. TeleComputist Newsletter Staff.
Tribunal Of Knowledge. Triple Entente. Turn Over And Die Syndrome
(TOADS). 300 Club. 1200 Club. 2300 Club. 2600 Club. 2601 Club. 2AF.
The United Soft WareZ Force. United Technical Underground.

Ware Brigade. The Warelords. WASP.

Contemplating this list is an impressive, almost humbling business.
As a cultural artifact, the thing approaches poetry.

Underground groups -- subcultures -- can be distinguished from
independent cultures by their habit of referring constantly to the
parent society. Undergrounds by their nature constantly must maintain
a membrane of differentiation. Funny/distinctive clothes and hair,
specialized jargon, specialized ghettoized areas in cities, different
hours of rising, working, sleeping... The digital underground, which
specializes in information, relies very heavily on language to
distinguish itself. As can be seen from this list, they make heavy
use of parody and mockery. It's revealing to see who they choose to
mock.

First, large corporations. We have the Phortune 500, The Chief
Executive Officers, Bellcore, IBM Syndicate, SABRE (a computerized
reservation service maintained by airlines). The common use of "Inc."
is telling -- none of these groups are actual corporations, but take
clear delight in mimicking them.

Second, governments and police. NASA Elite, NATO Association.
"Feds R Us" and "Secret Service" are fine bits of fleering boldness.
OSS -- the Office of Strategic Services was the forerunner of the CIA.

Third, criminals. Using stigmatizing pejoratives as a perverse
badge of honor is a time-honored tactic for subcultures: punks, gangs,
delinquents, mafias, pirates, bandits, racketeers.

Specialized orthography, especially the use of "ph" for "f" and "z"
for the plural "s," are instant recognition symbols. So is the use of
the numeral "0" for the letter "O" -- computer-software orthography
generally features a slash through the zero, making the distinction
obvious.

Some terms are poetically descriptive of computer intrusion: the
Stowaways, the Hitchhikers, the PhoneLine Phantoms, Coast-to-Coast.
Others are simple bravado and vainglorious puffery. (Note the insistent
use of the terms "elite" and "master.") Some terms are blasphemous,
some obscene, others merely cryptic - anything to puzzle, offend,
confuse, and keep the straights at bay.

Many hacker groups further re-encrypt their names by the use of
acronyms: United Technical Underground becomes UTU, Farmers of Doom
become FoD, the United SoftWareZ Force becomes, at its own insistence,
"TuSwF," and woe to the ignorant rodent who capitalizes the wrong
letters.

It should be further recognized that the members of these groups are
themselves pseudonymous. If you did, in fact, run across the
"PhoneLine Phantoms," you would find them to consist of "Carrier
Culprit," "The Executioner," "Black Majik," "Egyptian Lover," "Solid
State," and "Mr Icom." "Carrier Culprit" will likely be referred to
by his friends as "CC," as in, "I got these dialups from CC of PLP."

It's quite possible that this entire list refers to as few as a
thousand people. It is not a complete list of underground groups -there has never been such a list, and there never will be. Groups
rise, flourish, decline, share membership, maintain a cloud of wannabes
and casual hangers-on. People pass in and out, are ostracized, get
bored, are busted by police, or are cornered by telco security and
presented with huge bills. Many "underground groups" are software
pirates, "warez d00dz," who might break copy protection and pirate
programs, but likely wouldn't dare to intrude on a computer-system. It
is hard to estimate the true population of the digital underground.
There is constant turnover. Most hackers start young, come and go,
then drop out at age 22 -- the age of college graduation. And a large
majority of "hackers" access pirate boards, adopt a handle, swipe
software and perhaps abuse a phone-code or two, while never actually
joining the elite.

Some professional informants, who make it their business to retail
knowledge of the underground to paymasters in private corporate
security, have estimated the hacker population at as high as fifty
thousand. This is likely highly inflated, unless one counts every
single teenage software pirate and petty phone-booth thief. My best
guess is about 5,000 people. Of these, I would guess that as few as a
hundred are truly "elite" -- active computer intruders, skilled enough
to penetrate sophisticated systems and truly to worry corporate
security and law enforcement.

Another interesting speculation is whether this group is growing or
not. Young teenage hackers are often convinced that hackers exist in
vast swarms and will soon dominate the cybernetic universe. Older and
wiser veterans, perhaps as wizened as 24 or 25 years old, are convinced
that the glory days are long gone, that the cops have the underground's
number now, and that kids these days are dirt-stupid and just want to
play Nintendo.

My own assessment is that computer intrusion, as a non-profit act of
intellectual exploration and mastery, is in slow decline, at least in
the United States; but that electronic fraud, especially
telecommunication crime, is growing by leaps and bounds.

One might find a useful parallel to the digital underground in the
drug underground. There was a time, now much-obscured by historical
revisionism, when Bohemians freely shared joints at concerts, and hip,
smallscale marijuana dealers might turn people on just for the sake of
enjoying a long stoned conversation about the Doors and Allen Ginsberg.
Now drugs are increasingly verboten, except in a high-stakes,
highly-criminal world of highly addictive drugs. Over years of
disenchantment and police harassment, a vaguely ideological,
free-wheeling drug underground has relinquished the business of
drugdealing to a far more savage criminal hard-core. This is not a
pleasant prospect to contemplate, but the analogy is fairly compelling.

What does an underground board look like? What distinguishes it
from a standard board? It isn't necessarily the conversation -- hackers
often talk about common board topics, such as hardware, software, sex,
science fiction, current events, politics, movies, personal gossip.
Underground boards can best be distinguished by their files, or
"philes," pre-composed texts which teach the techniques and ethos of the
underground. These are prized reservoirs of forbidden knowledge. Some
are anonymous, but most proudly bear the handle of the "hacker" who has
created them, and his group affiliation, if he has one. Here is a
partial table-of-contents of philes from an underground board,
somewhere in the heart of middle America, circa 1991. The descriptions
are mostly self-explanatory.

5406 06-11-91 Hacking Bank America BANKAMER.ZIP
4481 06-11-91 Chilton Hacking CHHACK.ZIP
4118 06-11-91 Hacking Citibank CITIBANK.ZIP
3241 06-11-91 Hacking Mtc Credit Company CREDIMTC.ZIP
5159 06-11-91 Hackers Digest DIGEST.ZIP
14031 06-11-91 How To Hack HACK.ZIP
5073 06-11-91 Basics Of Hacking HACKBAS.ZIP
42774 06-11-91 Hackers Dictionary HACKDICT.ZIP
57938 06-11-91 Hacker Info HACKER.ZIP
3148 06-11-91 Hackers Manual HACKERME.ZIP
4814 06-11-91 Hackers Handbook HACKHAND.ZIP
48290 06-11-91 Hackers Thesis HACKTHES.ZIP
4696 06-11-91 Hacking Vms Systems HACKVMS.ZIP
3830 06-11-91 Hacking Macdonalds (Home Of The Archs) MCDON.ZIP
15525 06-11-91 Phortune 500 Guide To Unix P500UNIX.ZIP
8411 06-11-91 Radio Hacking RADHACK.ZIP
4096 12-25-89 Suggestions For Trashing TAOTRASH.DOC
5063 06-11-91 Technical Hacking TECHHACK.ZIP

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 |
+------------+
3641 06-11-91 Anarchy Files ANARC.ZIP
63703 06-11-91 Anarchist Book ANARCHST.ZIP

2076 06-11-91 Anarchy At Home ANARCHY.ZIP
6982 06-11-91 Anarchy No 3 ANARCHY3.ZIP
2361 06-11-91 Anarchy Toys ANARCTOY.ZIP
2877 06-11-91 Anti-modem Weapons ANTIMODM.ZIP
4494 06-11-91 How To Make An Atom Bomb ATOM.ZIP
3982 06-11-91 Barbiturate Formula BARBITUA.ZIP
2810 06-11-91 Black Powder Formulas BLCKPWDR.ZIP
3765 06-11-91 How To Make Bombs BOMB.ZIP
2036 06-11-91 Things That Go Boom BOOM.ZIP
1926 06-11-91 Chlorine Bomb CHLORINE.ZIP
1500 06-11-91 Anarchy Cook Book COOKBOOK.ZIP
3947 06-11-91 Destroy Stuff DESTROY.ZIP
2576 06-11-91 Dust Bomb DUSTBOMB.ZIP
3230 06-11-91 Electronic Terror ELECTERR.ZIP
2598 06-11-91 Explosives 1 EXPLOS1.ZIP

18051 06-11-91 More Explosives EXPLOSIV.ZIP
4521 06-11-91 Ez-stealing EZSTEAL.ZIP
2240 06-11-91 Flame Thrower FLAME.ZIP
2533 06-11-91 Flashlight Bomb FLASHLT.ZIP
2906 06-11-91 How To Make An Fm Bug FMBUG.ZIP
2139 06-11-91 Home Explosives OMEEXPL.ZIP
3332 06-11-91 How To Break In HOW2BRK.ZIP
2990 06-11-91 Letter Bomb LETTER.ZIP
2199 06-11-91 How To Pick Locks LOCK.ZIP
3991 06-11-91 Briefcase Locks MRSHIN.ZIP
3563 06-11-91 Napalm At Home NAPALM.ZIP
3158 06-11-91 Fun With Nitro NITRO.ZIP
2962 06-11-91 Paramilitary Info PARAMIL.ZIP
3398 06-11-91 Picking Locks PICKING.ZIP
2137 06-11-91 Pipe Bomb PIPEBOMB.ZIP
3987 06-11-91 Formulas With Potassium POTASS.ZIP
11074 08-03-90 More Pranks To Pull On Idiots! PRANK.TXT
4447 06-11-91 Revenge Tactics REVENGE.ZIP
2590 06-11-91 Rockets For Fun ROCKET.ZIP
3385 06-11-91 How To Smuggle SMUGGLE.ZIP

*Holy Cow!* The damned thing is full of stuff about bombs!

What are we to make of this?

First, it should be acknowledged that spreading knowledge about
demolitions to teenagers is a highly and deliberately antisocial act.

It is not, however, illegal.

Second, it should be recognized that most of these philes were in
fact *written* by teenagers. Most adult American males who can
remember their teenage years will recognize that the notion of building
a flamethrower in your garage is an incredibly neat-o idea. *Actually*
building a flamethrower in your garage, however, is fraught with
discouraging difficulty. Stuffing gunpowder into a booby-trapped
flashlight, so as to blow the arm off your high-school vice-principal,
can be a thing of dark beauty to contemplate. Actually committing
assault by explosives will earn you the sustained attention of the
federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Some people, however, will actually try these plans. A determinedly
murderous American teenager can probably buy or steal a handgun far
more easily than he can brew fake "napalm" in the kitchen sink.
Nevertheless, if temptation is spread before people a certain number
will succumb, and a small minority will actually attempt these stunts.
A large minority of that small minority will either fail or, quite
likely, maim themselves, since these "philes" have not been checked for
accuracy, are not the product of professional experience, and are often
highly fanciful. But the gloating menace of these philes is not to be
entirely dismissed.

Hackers may not be "serious" about bombing; if they were, we would
hear far more about exploding flashlights, homemade bazookas, and gym
teachers poisoned by chlorine and potassium. However, hackers are
*very* serious about forbidden knowledge. They are possessed not
merely by curiosity, but by a positive *lust to know.* The desire to
know what others don't is scarcely new. But the *intensity* of this
desire, as manifested by these young technophilic denizens of the
Information Age, may in fact *be* new, and may represent some basic
shift in social values -- a harbinger of what the world may come to, as
society lays more and more value on the possession, assimilation and
retailing of *information* as a basic commodity of daily life.

There have always been young men with obsessive interests in these
topics. Never before, however, have they been able to network so
extensively and easily, and to propagandize their interests with
impunity to random passers-by. High-school teachers will recognize
that there's always one in a crowd, but when the one in a crowd escapes
control by jumping into the phone-lines, and becomes a hundred such
kids all together on a board, then trouble is brewing visibly. The
urge of authority to *do something,* even something drastic, is hard
to resist. And in 1990, authority did something. In fact authority did
a great deal.

#

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

The world of boards suddenly opens up. Computer games can be quite
expensive, real budget-breakers for a kid, but pirated games, stripped
of copy protection, are cheap or free. They are also illegal, but it
is very rare, almost unheard of, for a small-scale software pirate to
be prosecuted. Once "cracked" of its copy protection, the program,
being digital data, becomes infinitely reproducible. Even the
instructions to the game, any manuals that accompany it, can be
reproduced as text files, or photocopied from legitimate sets. Other
users on boards can give many useful hints in game-playing tactics.
And a youngster with an infinite supply of free computer games can
certainly cut quite a swath among his modemless friends. And boards are
pseudonymous. No one need know that you're fourteen years old -- with
a little practice at subterfuge, you can talk to adults about adult
things, and be accepted and taken seriously! You can even pretend to
be a girl, or an old man, or anybody you can imagine. If you find this
kind of deception gratifying, there is ample opportunity to hone your
ability on boards. But local boards can grow stale. And almost every
board maintains a list of phone-numbers to other boards, some in
distant, tempting, exotic locales. Who knows what they're up to, in
Oregon or Alaska or Florida or California? It's very easy to find out
-- just order the modem to call through its software -- nothing to
this, just typing on a keyboard, the same thing you would do for most
any computer game. The machine reacts swiftly and in a few seconds you
are talking to a bunch of interesting people on another seaboard.

And yet the *bills* for this trivial action can be staggering! Just
by going tippety-tap with your fingers, you may have saddled your
parents with four hundred bucks in long-distance charges, and gotten
chewed out but good. That hardly seems fair.

How horrifying to have made friends in another state and to be
deprived of their company -- and their software -- just because
telephone companies demand absurd amounts of money! How painful, to be
restricted to boards in one's own *area code* -- what the heck is an
"area code" anyway, and what makes it so special? A few grumbles,
complaints, and innocent questions of this sort will often elicit a
sympathetic reply from another board user -- someone with some stolen
codes to hand. You dither a while, knowing this isn't quite right,
then you make up your mind to try them anyhow -- *and they work!*
Suddenly you're doing something even your parents can't do. Six months
ago you were just some kid -- now, you're the Crimson Flash of Area
Code 512! You're bad -- you're nationwide! Maybe you'll stop at a few
abused codes. Maybe you'll decide that boards aren't all that
interesting after all, that it's wrong, not worth the risk -- but
maybe you won't. The next step is to pick up your own repeat-dialling
program -- to learn to generate your own stolen codes. (This was dead
easy five years ago, much harder to get away with nowadays, but not yet
impossible.) And these dialling programs are not complex or
intimidating -- some are as small as twenty lines of software. Now, you
too can share codes. You can trade codes to learn other techniques.
If you're smart enough to catch on, and obsessive enough to want to
bother, and ruthless enough to start seriously bending rules, then
you'll get better, fast. You start to develop a rep. You move up to
a heavier class of board -- a board with a bad attitude, the kind of
board that naive dopes like your classmates and your former self have
never even heard of! You pick up the jargon of phreaking and hacking
from the board. You read a few of those anarchy philes -- and man, you
never realized you could be a real *outlaw* without ever leaving your
bedroom.

You still play other computer games, but now you have a new and
bigger game. This one will bring you a different kind of status than
destroying even eight zillion lousy space invaders.

Hacking is perceived by hackers as a "game." This is not an
entirely unreasonable or sociopathic perception. You can win or lose at
hacking, succeed or fail, but it never feels "real." It's not simply
that imaginative youngsters sometimes have a hard time telling
"make-believe" from "real life." Cyberspace is *not real!* "Real"
things are physical objects like trees and shoes and cars. Hacking
takes place on a screen. Words aren't physical, numbers (even telephone
numbers and credit card numbers) aren't physical. Sticks and stones
may break my bones, but data will never hurt me. Computers *simulate*
reality, like computer games that simulate tank battles or dogfights or
spaceships. Simulations are just makebelieve, and the stuff in
computers is *not real.*

Consider this: if "hacking" is supposed to be so serious and
real-life and dangerous, then how come *nine-year-old kids* have
computers and modems? You wouldn't give a nine year old his own car,
or his own rifle, or his own chainsaw -- those things are "real."

People underground are perfectly aware that the "game" is frowned
upon by the powers that be. Word gets around about busts in the
underground. Publicizing busts is one of the primary functions of
pirate boards, but they also promulgate an attitude about them, and
their own idiosyncratic ideas of justice. The users of underground
boards won't complain if some guy is busted for crashing systems,
spreading viruses, or stealing money by wirefraud. They may shake
their heads with a sneaky grin, but they won't openly defend these
practices. But when a kid is charged with some theoretical amount of
theft: $233,846.14, for instance, because he sneaked into a computer
and copied something, and kept it in his house on a floppy disk -- this
is regarded as a sign of near insanity from prosecutors, a sign that
they've drastically mistaken the immaterial game of computing for their
real and boring everyday world of fatcat corporate money.

It's as if big companies and their suck-up lawyers think that
computing belongs to them, and they can retail it with price stickers,
as if it were boxes of laundry soap! But pricing "information" is like
trying to price air or price dreams. Well, anybody on a pirate board
knows that computing can be, and ought to be, *free.* Pirate boards
are little independent worlds in cyberspace, and they don't belong to
anybody but the underground. Underground boards aren't "brought to
you by Procter & Gamble."

To log on to an underground board can mean to experience liberation,
to enter a world where, for once, money isn't everything and adults
don't have all the answers.

Let's sample another vivid hacker manifesto. Here are some excerpts
from "The Conscience of a Hacker," by "The Mentor," from *Phrack*
Volume One, Issue 7, Phile 3.

"I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this
is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's
because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me.(...)

"And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through
the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic
pulse is sent out, a refuge from day-to-day incompetencies is sought...
a board is found. `This is it... this is where I belong...' "I know
everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may
never hear from them again... I know you all...(...) "This is our world
now... the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the
baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for
what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We
seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without
skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call
us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat
and lie to us and try to make us believe that it's for our own good,
yet we're the criminals.

"Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look
like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will
never forgive me for."

#

There have been underground boards almost as long as there have been
boards. One of the first was 8BBS, which became a stronghold of the
West Coast phonephreak elite. After going on-line in March 1980, 8BBS
sponsored "Susan Thunder," and "Tuc," and, most notoriously, "the
Condor." "The Condor" bore the singular distinction of becoming the
most vilified American phreak and hacker ever. Angry underground
associates, fed up with Condor's peevish behavior, turned him in to
police, along with a heaping double-helping of outrageous hacker
legendry. As a result, Condor was kept in solitary confinement for
seven months, for fear that he might start World War Three by
triggering missile silos from the prison payphone. (Having served his
time, Condor is now walking around loose; WWIII has thus far
conspicuously failed to occur.)

The sysop of 8BBS was an ardent free-speech enthusiast who simply
felt that *any* attempt to restrict the expression of his users was
unconstitutional and immoral. Swarms of the technically curious
entered 8BBS and emerged as phreaks and hackers, until, in 1982, a
friendly 8BBS alumnus passed the sysop a new modem which had been
purchased by credit card fraud. Police took this opportunity to seize
the entire board and remove what they considered an attractive nuisance.

Plovernet was a powerful East Coast pirate board that operated in
both New York and Florida. Owned and operated by teenage hacker "Quasi
Moto," Plovernet attracted five hundred eager users in 1983. "Emmanuel
Goldstein" was one-time co-sysop of Plovernet, along with "Lex Luthor,"
founder of the "Legion of Doom" group. Plovernet bore the signal
honor of being the original home of the "Legion of Doom," about which
the reader will be hearing a great deal, soon.

"Pirate-80," or "P-80," run by a sysop known as "Scan Man," got into
the game very early in Charleston, and continued steadily for years.
P-80 flourished so flagrantly that even its most hardened users became
nervous, and some slanderously speculated that "Scan Man" must have ties
to corporate security, a charge he vigorously denied.

"414 Private" was the home board for the first *group* to attract
conspicuous trouble, the teenage "414 Gang," whose intrusions into
Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Los Alamos military computers were to
be a nine-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 Applehacker boards:
Neon Knights North, South, East and West. Free World II was run by
"Major Havoc." Lunatic Labs is still in operation as of this writing.
Dr. Ripco in Chicago, an anything-goes anarchist board with an
extensive and raucous history, was seized by Secret Service agents in
1990 on Sundevil day, but up again almost immediately, with new
machines and scarcely diminished vigor.

The St. Louis scene was not to rank with major centers of American
hacking such as New York and L.A. But St. Louis did rejoice in
possession of "Knight Lightning" and "Taran King," two of the foremost
*journalists* native to the underground. Missouri boards like Metal
Shop, Metal Shop Private, Metal Shop Brewery, may not have been the
heaviest boards around in terms of illicit expertise. But they became
boards where hackers could exchange social gossip and try to figure out
what the heck was going on nationally -- and internationally. Gossip
from Metal Shop was put into the form of news files, then assembled
into a general electronic publication, *Phrack,* a portmanteau title
coined from "phreak" and "hack." The *Phrack* editors were as
obsessively curious about other hackers as hackers were about machines.

*Phrack,* being free of charge and lively reading, began to
circulate throughout the underground. As Taran King and Knight
Lightning left high school for college, *Phrack* began to appear on
mainframe machines linked to BITNET, and, through BITNET to the
"Internet," that loose but extremely potent not-for-profit network
where academic, governmental and corporate machines trade data through
the UNIX TCP/IP protocol. (The "Internet Worm" of November 2-3,1988,
created by Cornell grad student Robert Morris, was to be the largest
and bestpublicized computer intrusion scandal to date. Morris claimed
that his ingenious "worm" program was meant to harmlessly explore the
Internet, but due to bad programming, the Worm replicated out of
control and crashed some six thousand Internet computers. 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 supervillains headed by the chrome-domed
criminal ultramastermind Lex Luthor, gave Superman a lot of four-color
graphic trouble for a number of decades. Of course, Superman, that
exemplar of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, always won in the long
run. This didn't matter to the hacker Doomsters -- "Legion of Doom"
was not some thunderous and evil Satanic reference, it was not meant to
be taken seriously. "Legion of Doom" came from funny-books and was
supposed to be funny. "Legion of Doom" did have a good mouthfilling
ring to it, though. It sounded really cool. Other groups, such as the
"Farmers of Doom," closely allied to LoD, recognized this grandiloquent
quality, and made fun of it. There was even a hacker group called
"Justice League of America," named after Superman's club of true-blue
crimefighting superheros.

But they didn't last; the Legion did. The original Legion of Doom,
hanging out on Quasi Moto's Plovernet board, were phone phreaks. They
weren't much into computers. "Lex Luthor" himself (who was under
eighteen when he formed the Legion) was a COSMOS expert, COSMOS being
the "Central System for Mainframe Operations," a telco internal
computer network. Lex would eventually become quite a dab hand at
breaking into IBM mainframes, but although everyone liked Lex and
admired his attitude, he was not considered a truly accomplished
computer intruder. Nor was he the "mastermind" of the Legion of Doom
-- LoD were never big on formal leadership. As a regular on Plovernet
and sysop of his "Legion of Doom BBS," Lex was the Legion's
cheerleader and recruiting officer.

Legion of Doom began on the ruins of an earlier phreak group, The
Knights of Shadow. Later, LoD was to subsume the personnel of the
hacker group "Tribunal of Knowledge." People came and went constantly
in LoD; groups split up or formed offshoots.

Early on, the LoD phreaks befriended a few computer-intrusion
enthusiasts, who became the associated "Legion of Hackers." Then the
two groups conflated into the "Legion of Doom/Hackers," or LoD/H. When
the original "hacker" wing, Messrs. "CompuPhreak" and "Phucked Agent
04," found other matters to occupy their time, the extra "/H" slowly
atrophied out of the name; but by this time the phreak wing, Messrs.
Lex Luthor, "Blue Archer," "Gary Seven," "Kerrang Khan," "Master of
Impact," "Silver Spy," "The Marauder," and "The Videosmith," had picked
up a plethora of intrusion expertise and had become a force to be
reckoned with.

LoD members seemed to have an instinctive understanding that the way
to real power in the underground lay through covert publicity. LoD
were flagrant. Not only was it one of the earliest groups, but the
members took pains to widely distribute their illicit knowledge. Some
LoD members, like "The Mentor," were close to evangelical about it.
*Legion of Doom Technical Journal* began to show up on boards
throughout the underground.

*LoD Technical Journal* was named in cruel parody of the ancient and
honored *AT&T Technical Journal.* The material in these two
publications was quite similar -- much of it, adopted from public
journals and discussions in the telco community. And yet, the
predatory attitude of LoD made even its most innocuous data seem deeply
sinister; an outrage; a clear and present danger.

To see why this should be, let's consider the following (invented)
paragraphs, as a kind of thought experiment.

(A) "W. Fred Brown, AT&T Vice President for Advanced Technical
Development, testified May 8 at a Washington hearing of the National
Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), regarding
Bellcore's GARDEN project. GARDEN (Generalized Automatic Remote
Distributed Electronic Network) is a telephone-switch programming tool
that makes it possible to develop new telecom services, including
hold-on-hold and customized message transfers, from any keypad
terminal, within seconds. The GARDEN prototype combines centrex lines
with a minicomputer using UNIX operating system software."

(B) "Crimson Flash 512 of the Centrex Mobsters reports: D00dz, you
wouldn't believe this GARDEN bullshit Bellcore's just come up with!
Now you don't even need a lousy Commodore to reprogram a switch -- just
log on to GARDEN as a technician, and you can reprogram switches right
off the keypad in any public phone booth! You can give yourself
hold-on-hold and customized message transfers, and best of all, the
thing is run off (notoriously insecure) centrex lines using -- get
this -- standard UNIX software! Ha ha ha ha!"

Message (A), couched in typical technobureaucratese, appears tedious
and almost unreadable. (A) scarcely seems threatening or menacing.
Message (B), on the other hand, is a dreadful thing, prima facie
evidence of a dire conspiracy, definitely not the kind of thing you
want your teenager reading. The *information,* however, is identical.
It is *public* information, presented before the federal government in
an open hearing. It is not "secret." It is not "proprietary." It is
not even "confidential." On the contrary, the development of advanced
software systems is a matter of great public pride to Bellcore.
However, when Bellcore publicly announces a project of this kind, it
expects a certain attitude from the public -- something along the lines
of *gosh wow, you guys are great, keep that up, whatever it is* --
certainly not cruel mimickry, one-upmanship and outrageous speculations
about possible security holes.

Now put yourself in the place of a policeman confronted by an
outraged parent, or telco official, with a copy of Version (B). This
well-meaning citizen, to his horror, has discovered a local
bulletin-board carrying outrageous stuff like (B), which his son is
examining with a deep and unhealthy interest. If (B) were printed in
a book or magazine, you, as an American law enforcement officer, would
know that it would take a hell of a lot of trouble to do anything about
it; but it doesn't take technical genius to recognize that if there's
a computer in your area harboring stuff like (B), there's going to be
trouble.

In fact, if you ask around, any computer-literate cop will tell you
straight out that boards with stuff like (B) are the *source* of
trouble. And the *worst* source of trouble on boards are the
ringleaders inventing and spreading stuff like (B). If it weren't for
these jokers, there wouldn't *be* any trouble.

And Legion of Doom were on boards like nobody else. Plovernet. The
Legion of Doom Board. The Farmers of Doom Board. Metal Shop. OSUNY.
Blottoland. Private Sector. Atlantis. Digital Logic. Hell Phrozen
Over.

LoD members also ran their own boards. "Silver Spy" started his own
board, "Catch-22," considered one of the heaviest around. So did
"Mentor," with his "Phoenix Project." When they didn't run boards
themselves, they showed up on other people's boards, to brag, boast, and
strut. And where they themselves didn't go, their philes went,
carrying evil knowledge and an even more evil attitude. As early as
1986, the police were under the vague impression that *everyone* in the
underground was Legion of Doom. LoD was never that large -considerably smaller than either "Metal Communications" or "The
Administration," for instance -- but LoD got tremendous press.
Especially in *Phrack,* which at times read like an LoD fan magazine;
and *Phrack* was everywhere, especially in the offices of telco
security. You couldn't *get* busted as a phone phreak, a hacker, or
even a lousy codes kid or warez dood, without the cops asking if you
were LoD.

This was a difficult charge to deny, as LoD never distributed
membership badges or laminated ID cards. If they had, they would likely
have died out quickly, for turnover in their membership was
considerable. LoD was less a high-tech street-gang than an ongoing
state 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 wordanalysis 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 York Times,*
proclaimed a national hero in the first true story of international
computer espionage. Stoll's counterspy efforts, which he related in a
bestselling book, *The Cuckoo's Egg,* in 1989, had established the
credibility of `hacking' as a possible threat to national security.
The United States Secret Service doesn't mess around when it suspects a
possible action by a foreign intelligence apparat. The Secret Service
scrambler-phones and secured lines put a tremendous kink in law
enforcement's ability to operate freely; to get the word out,
cooperate, prevent misunderstandings. Nevertheless, 1989 scarcely
seemed the time for half-measures. If the police and Secret Service
themselves were not operationally secure, then how could they
reasonably demand measures of security from private enterprise? At
least, the inconvenience made people aware of the seriousness of the
threat.

If there was a final spur needed to get the police off the dime, it
came in the realization that the emergency 911 system was vulnerable.
The 911 system has its own specialized software, but it is run on the
same digital switching systems as the rest of the telephone network.
911 is not physically different from normal telephony. But it is
certainly culturally different, because this is the area of telephonic
cyberspace reserved for the police and emergency services. Your average
policeman may not know much about hackers or phone-phreaks. Computer
people are weird; even computer *cops* are rather weird; the stuff
they do is hard to figure out. But a threat to the 911 system is
anything but an abstract threat. If the 911 system goes, people can
die.

Imagine being in a car-wreck, staggering to a phonebooth, punching
911 and hearing "Tina" pick up the phone-sex line somewhere in New
York! The situation's no longer comical, somehow.

And was it possible? No question. Hackers had attacked 911 systems
before. Phreaks can max-out 911 systems just by siccing a bunch of
computer-modems on them in tandem, dialling them over and over until
they clog. That's very crude and low-tech, but it's still a serious
business.

The time had come for action. It was time to take stern measures
with the underground. It was time to start picking up the dropped
threads, the loose edges, the bits of braggadocio here and there; it
was time to get on the stick and start putting serious casework
together. Hackers weren't "invisible." They *thought* they were
invisible; but the truth was, they had just been tolerated too long.

Under sustained police attention in the summer of '89, the digital
underground began to unravel as never before.

The first big break in the case came very early on: July 1989, the
following month. The perpetrator of the "Tina" switch was caught, and
confessed. His name was "Fry Guy," a 16-year-old in Indiana. Fry Guy
had been a very wicked young man.

Fry Guy had earned his handle from a stunt involving French fries.
Fry Guy had filched the log-in of a local MacDonald's manager and had
logged-on to the MacDonald's mainframe on the Sprint Telenet system.
Posing as the manager, Fry Guy had altered MacDonald's records, and
given some teenage hamburger-flipping friends of his, generous raises.
He had not been caught.

Emboldened by success, Fry Guy moved on to 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 breakins in
a week flat! Nevertheless, LoD were grudgingly impressed by the Chaos
rep, the sheer hairy-eyed daring of hash-smoking anarchist hackers who
had rubbed shoulders with the fearsome big-boys of international
Communist espionage. LoD members sometimes traded bits of knowledge
with friendly German hackers on ALTOS -- phone numbers for vulnerable
VAX/VMS computers in Georgia, for instance. Dutch and British phone
phreaks, and the Australian clique of "Phoenix," "Nom," and "Electron,"
were ALTOS regulars, too. In underground circles, to hang out on ALTOS
was considered the sign of an elite dude, a sophisticated hacker of the
international digital jet-set.

Fry Guy quickly learned how to raid information from credit card
consumer-reporting agencies. He had over a hundred stolen credit card
numbers in his notebooks, and upwards of a thousand swiped long-distance
access codes. He knew how to get onto ALTOS, and how to talk the talk
of the underground convincingly. He now wheedled knowledge of
switching-station tricks from Urvile on the ALTOS system.

Combining these two forms of knowledge enabled Fry Guy to bootstrap
his way up to a new form of wirefraud. First, he'd snitched credit
card numbers from credit-company computers. The data he copied
included names, addresses and phone numbers of the random card-holders.

Then Fry Guy, impersonating a card-holder, called up Western Union
and asked for a cash advance on "his" credit card. Western Union, as a
security guarantee, would call the customer back, at home, to verify
the transaction.

But, just as he had switched the Florida probation office to "Tina"
in New York, Fry Guy switched the cardholder's number to a local
pay-phone. There he would lurk in wait, muddying his trail by routing
and re-routing the call, through switches as far away as Canada. When
the call came through, he would boldly "social-engineer," or con, the
Western Union people, pretending to be the legitimate card-holder.
Since he'd answered the proper phone number, the deception was not very
hard. Western Union's money was then shipped to a confederate of Fry
Guy's in his home town in Indiana.

Fry Guy and his cohort, using LoD techniques, stole six thousand
dollars from Western Union between December 1988 and July 1989. They
also dabbled in ordering delivery of stolen goods through card-fraud.
Fry Guy was intoxicated with success. The sixteen-year-old fantasized
wildly to hacker rivals, boasting that he'd used rip-off money to hire
himself a big limousine, and had driven out-of-state with a groupie
from his favorite heavymetal band, Motley Crue. Armed with knowledge,
power, and a gratifying stream of free money, Fry Guy now took it upon
himself to call local representatives of Indiana Bell security, to
brag, boast, strut, and utter tormenting warnings that his powerful
friends in the notorious Legion of Doom could crash the national
telephone network. Fry Guy even named a date for the scheme: the
Fourth of July, a national holiday.

This egregious example of the begging-for-arrest syndrome was
shortly followed by Fry Guy's arrest. After the Indiana telephone
company figured out who he was, the Secret Service had DNRs -- Dialed
Number Recorders -- installed on his home phone lines. These devices
are not taps, and can't record the substance of phone calls, but they
do record the phone numbers of all calls going in and out. Tracing
these numbers showed Fry Guy's long-distance code fraud, his extensive
ties to pirate bulletin boards, and numerous personal calls to his LoD
friends in Atlanta. By July 11, 1989, Prophet, Urvile and Leftist also
had Secret Service DNR "pen registers" installed on their own lines.

The Secret Service showed up in force at Fry Guy's house on July 22,
1989, to the horror of his unsuspecting parents. The raiders were led
by a special agent from the Secret Service's Indianapolis office.
However, the raiders were accompanied and advised by Timothy M. Foley
of the Secret Service's Chicago office (a gentleman about whom we will
soon be hearing a great deal).

Following federal computer crime techniques that had been standard
since the early 1980s, the Secret Service searched the house
thoroughly, and seized all of Fry Guy's electronic equipment and
notebooks. All Fry Guy's equipment went out the door in the custody of
the Secret Service, which put a swift end to his depredations.

The USSS interrogated Fry Guy at length. His case was put in the
charge of Deborah Daniels, the federal US Attorney for the Southern
District of Indiana. Fry Guy was charged with eleven counts of computer
fraud, unauthorized computer access, and wire fraud. The evidence was
thorough and irrefutable. For his part, Fry Guy blamed his corruption
on the Legion of Doom and offered to testify against them.

Fry Guy insisted that the Legion intended to crash the phone system
on a national holiday. And when AT&T crashed on Martin Luther King
Day, 1990, this lent a credence to his claim that genuinely alarmed
telco security and the Secret Service. Fry Guy eventually pled guilty on
May 31, 1990. On September 14, he was sentenced to forty-four months'
probation and four hundred hours' community service. He could have had
it much worse; but it made sense to prosecutors to take it easy on this
teenage minor, while zeroing in on the notorious kingpins of the Legion
of Doom. But the case against LoD had nagging flaws. Despite the best
effort of investigators, it was impossible to prove that the Legion had
crashed the phone system on January 15, because they, in fact, hadn't
done so. The investigations of 1989 did show that certain members of
the Legion of Doom had achieved unprecedented power over the telco
switching stations, and that they were in active conspiracy to obtain
more power yet. Investigators were privately convinced that the Legion
of Doom intended to do awful things with this knowledge, but mere evil
intent was not enough to put them in jail.

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

Fry Guy's theft of long-distance codes had cost the phone companies
plenty. The theft of long-distance service may be a fairly theoretical
"loss," but it costs genuine money and genuine time to delete all
those stolen codes, and to re-issue new codes to the innocent owners of
those corrupted codes. The owners of the codes themselves are
victimized, and lose time and money and peace of mind in the hassle.
And then there were the credit-card victims to deal with, too, and
Western Union. When it came to rip-off, Fry Guy was far more of a thief
than LoD. It was only when it came to actual computer expertise that
Fry Guy was small potatoes.

The Atlanta Legion thought most "rules" of cyberspace were for
rodents and losers, but they *did* have rules. *They never crashed
anything, and they never took money.* These were rough rules-of-thumb,
and rather dubious principles when it comes to the ethical subtleties of
cyberspace, but they enabled the Atlanta Three to operate with a
relatively clear conscience (though never with peace of mind).

If you didn't hack for money, if you weren't robbing people of
actual funds -- money in the bank, that is -- then nobody *really* got
hurt, in LoD's opinion. "Theft of service" was a bogus issue, and
"intellectual property" was a bad joke. But LoD had only elitist
contempt for rip-off artists, "leechers," thieves. They considered
themselves clean.

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

But from the point of view of law enforcement and telco security,
however, Fry Guy was not really dangerous. The Atlanta Three *were*
dangerous. It wasn't the crimes they were committing, but the *danger,*
the potential hazard, the sheer *technical power* LoD had accumulated,
that had made the situation untenable.

Fry Guy was not LoD. He'd never laid eyes on anyone in LoD; his
only contacts with them had been electronic. Core members of the Legion
of Doom tended to meet physically for conventions every year or so, to
get drunk, give each other the hacker high-sign, send out for pizza and
ravage hotel suites. Fry Guy had never done any of this. Deborah
Daniels assessed Fry Guy accurately as "an LoD wannabe."

Nevertheless Fry Guy's crimes would be directly attributed to LoD in
much future police propaganda. LoD would be described as "a closely
knit group" involved in "numerous illegal activities" including
"stealing and modifying individual credit histories," and "fraudulently
obtaining money and property." Fry Guy did this, but the Atlanta Three
didn't; they simply weren't into theft, but rather intrusion. This
caused a strange kink in the prosecution's strategy. LoD were accused
of "disseminating information about attacking computers to other
computer hackers in an effort to shift the focus of law enforcement to
those other hackers and away from the Legion of Doom."

This last accusation (taken directly from a press release by the
Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force) sounds particularly
far-fetched. One might conclude at this point that investigators would
have been well-advised to go ahead and "shift their focus" from the
"Legion of Doom." Maybe they *should* concentrate on "those other
hackers" -- the ones who were actually stealing money and physical
objects.

But the Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was not a simple policing action.
It wasn't meant just to walk the beat in cyberspace -- it was a
*crackdown,* a deliberate attempt to nail the core of the operation, to
send a dire and potent message that would settle the hash of the digital
underground for good.

By this reasoning, Fry Guy wasn't much more than the electronic
equivalent of a cheap streetcorner dope dealer. As long as the
masterminds of LoD were still flagrantly operating, pushing their
mountains of illicit knowledge right and left, and whipping up
enthusiasm for blatant lawbreaking, then there would be an *infinite
supply* of Fry Guys.

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

#

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force, led by federal prosecutor
William J. Cook, had started in 1987 and had swiftly become one of the
most aggressive local "dedicated computer crime units." Chicago was a
natural home for such a group. The world's first computer bulletin
board system had been invented in Illinois. The state of Illinois had
some of the nation's first and sternest computer crime laws. Illinois
State Police were markedly alert to the possibilities of white-collar
crime and electronic fraud.

And William J. Cook in particular was a rising star in electronic
crime-busting. He and his fellow federal prosecutors at the U.S.
Attorney's office in Chicago had a tight relation with the Secret
Service, especially 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 roughand-ready bare-knuckle tradition on
both sides of the law.

Fry Guy had broken the case wide open and alerted telco security to
the scope of the problem. But Fry Guy's crimes would not put the
Atlanta Three behind bars -- much less the wacko underground journalists
of *Phrack.* So on July 22, 1989, the same day that Fry Guy was raided
in Indiana, the Secret Service descended upon the Atlanta Three.

This was likely inevitable. By the summer of 1989, law enforcement
were closing in on the Atlanta Three from at least six directions at
once. First, there were the leads from Fry Guy, which had led to the
DNR registers being installed on the lines of the Atlanta Three. The
DNR evidence alone would have finished them off, sooner or later. But
second, the Atlanta lads were already well-known to Control-C and his
telco security sponsors. LoD's contacts with telco security had made
them overconfident and even more boastful than usual; they felt that
they had powerful friends in high places, and that they were being
openly tolerated by telco security. But BellSouth's Intrusion Task
Force were hot on the trail of LoD and sparing no effort or expense.

The Atlanta Three had also been identified by name and listed on the
extensive anti-hacker files maintained, and retailed for pay, by private
security operative John Maxfield of Detroit. Maxfield, who had
extensive ties to telco security and many informants in the
underground, was a bete noire of the *Phrack* crowd, and the dislike
was mutual.

The Atlanta Three themselves had written articles for *Phrack.* This
boastful act could not possibly escape telco and law enforcement
attention.

"Knightmare," a high-school age hacker from Arizona, was a close
friend and disciple of Atlanta LoD, but he had been nabbed by the
formidable Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit. Knightmare
was on some of LoD's favorite boards -- "Black Ice" in particular -- and
was privy to their secrets. And to have Gail Thackeray, the Assistant
Attorney General of Arizona, on one's trail was a dreadful peril for any
hacker.

And perhaps worst of all, Prophet had committed a major blunder by
passing an illicitly copied BellSouth computer-file to Knight Lightning,
who had published it in *Phrack.* This, as we will see, was an act of
dire consequence for almost everyone concerned.

On July 22, 1989, the Secret Service showed up at the Leftist's
house, where he lived with his parents. A massive squad of some twenty
officers surrounded the building: Secret Service, federal marshals,
local police, possibly BellSouth telco security; it was hard to tell in
the crush. Leftist's dad, at work in his basement office, first noticed
a muscular stranger in plain clothes crashing through the back yard
with a drawn pistol. As more strangers poured into the house,
Leftist's dad naturally assumed there was an armed robbery in progress.

Like most hacker parents, Leftist's mom and dad had only the vaguest
notions of what their son had been up to all this time. Leftist had a
day-job repairing computer hardware. His obsession with computers
seemed a bit odd, but harmless enough, and likely to produce a
wellpaying career. The sudden, overwhelming raid left Leftist's
parents traumatized.

The Leftist himself had been out after work with his co-workers,
surrounding a couple of pitchers of margaritas. As he came trucking on
tequila-numbed feet up the pavement, toting a bag full of floppy-disks,
he noticed a large number of unmarked cars parked in his driveway. All
the cars sported tiny microwave antennas.

The Secret Service had knocked the front door off its hinges, almost
flattening his Mom.

Inside, Leftist was greeted by Special Agent James Cool of the US
Secret Service, Atlanta office. Leftist was flabbergasted. He'd never
met a Secret Service agent before. He could not imagine that he'd
ever done anything worthy of federal attention. He'd always figured
that if his activities became intolerable, one of his contacts in telco
security would give him a private phone-call and tell him to knock it
off.

But now Leftist was pat-searched for weapons by grim professionals,
and his bag of floppies was quickly seized. He and his parents were all
shepherded into separate rooms and grilled at length as a score of
officers scoured their home for anything electronic.

Leftist was horrified as his treasured IBM AT personal computer with
its forty-meg hard disk, and his recently purchased 80386 IBM-clone
with a whopping hundred-meg hard disk, both went swiftly out the door
in Secret Service custody. They also seized all his disks, all his
notebooks, and a tremendous booty in dogeared telco documents that
Leftist had snitched out of trash dumpsters.

Leftist figured the whole thing for a big misunderstanding. He'd
never been into *military* computers. He wasn't a *spy* or a
*Communist.* He was just a good ol' Georgia hacker, and now he just
wanted all these people out of the house. But it seemed they wouldn't
go until he made some kind of statement.

And so, he levelled with them. And that, Leftist said later from his
federal prison camp in Talladega, Alabama, was a big mistake.

The Atlanta area was unique, in that it had three members of the
Legion of Doom who actually occupied more or less the same physical
locality. Unlike the rest of LoD, who tended to associate by phone and
computer, Atlanta LoD actually *were* "tightly knit." It was no real
surprise that the Secret Service agents apprehending Urvile at the
computer-labs at Georgia Tech, would discover Prophet with him as well.

Urvile, a 21-year-old Georgia Tech student in polymer chemistry,
posed quite a puzzling case for law enforcement. Urvile -- also known
as "Necron 99," as well as other handles, for he tended to change his
cover-alias about once a month -- was both an accomplished hacker and a
fanatic simulation-gamer.

Simulation games are an unusual hobby; but then hackers are unusual
people, and their favorite pastimes tend to be somewhat out of the
ordinary. The best-known American simulation game is probably
"Dungeons & Dragons," a multi-player parlor entertainment played with
paper, maps, pencils, statistical tables and a variety of oddly-shaped
dice. Players pretend to be heroic characters exploring a
wholly-invented fantasy world. The fantasy worlds of simulation gaming
are commonly pseudo-medieval, involving swords and sorcery -spellcasting wizards, knights in armor, unicorns and dragons, demons
and goblins.

Urvile and his fellow gamers preferred their fantasies highly
technological. They made use of a game known as "G.U.R.P.S.," the
"Generic Universal Role Playing System," published by a company called
Steve Jackson Games (SJG).

"G.U.R.P.S." served as a framework for creating a wide variety of
artificial fantasy worlds. Steve Jackson Games published a
smorgasboard of books, full of detailed information and gaming hints,
which were used to flesh-out many different fantastic backgrounds for
the basic GURPS framework. Urvile made extensive use of two SJG books
called *GURPS High-Tech* and *GURPS Special Ops.*

In the artificial fantasy-world of *GURPS Special Ops,* players
entered a modern fantasy of intrigue and international espionage. On
beginning the game, players started small and powerless, perhaps as
minor-league CIA agents or penny-ante arms dealers. But as players
persisted through a series of game sessions (game sessions generally
lasted for hours, over long, elaborate campaigns that might be pursued
for months on end) then they would achieve new skills, new knowledge,
new power. They would acquire and hone new abilities, such as
marksmanship, karate, wiretapping, or Watergate burglary. They could
also win various kinds of imaginary booty, like Berettas, or martini
shakers, or fast cars with ejection seats and machine-guns under the
headlights. As might be imagined from the complexity of these games,
Urvile's gaming notes were very detailed and extensive. Urvile was a
"dungeon-master," inventing scenarios for his fellow gamers, giant
simulated adventure-puzzles for his friends to unravel. Urvile's game
notes covered dozens of pages with all sorts of exotic lunacy, all about
ninja raids on Libya and break-ins on encrypted Red Chinese
supercomputers. His notes were written on scrap-paper and kept in
loose-leaf binders.

The handiest scrap paper around Urvile's college digs were the many
pounds of BellSouth printouts and documents that he had snitched out of
telco dumpsters. His notes were written on the back of misappropriated
telco property. Worse yet, the gaming notes were chaotically
interspersed with Urvile's hand-scrawled records involving *actual
computer intrusions* that he had committed.

Not only was it next to impossible to tell Urvile's fantasy
game-notes from cyberspace "reality," but Urvile himself barely made
this distinction. It's no exaggeration to say that to Urvile it was
*all* a game. Urvile was very bright, highly imaginative, and quite
careless of other people's notions of propriety. His connection to
"reality" was not something to which he paid a great deal of attention.
Hacking was a game for Urvile. It was an amusement he was carrying
out, it was something he was doing for fun. And Urvile was an
obsessive young man. He could no more stop hacking than he could stop
in the middle of a jigsaw puzzle, or stop in the middle of reading a
Stephen Donaldson fantasy trilogy. (The name "Urvile" came from a
best-selling Donaldson novel.)

Urvile's airy, bulletproof attitude seriously annoyed his
interrogators. First of all, he didn't consider that he'd done
anything wrong. There was scarcely a shred of honest remorse in him.
On the contrary, he seemed privately convinced that his police
interrogators were operating in a demented fantasy-world all their own.
Urvile was too polite and well-behaved to say this straightout, but
his reactions were askew and disquieting. For instance, there was the
business about LoD's ability to monitor phone-calls to the police and
Secret Service. Urvile agreed that this was quite possible, and posed
no big problem for LoD. In fact, he and his friends had kicked the
idea around on the "Black Ice" board, much as they had discussed many
other nifty notions, such as building personal flame-throwers and
jury-rigging fistfulls of blasting-caps. They had hundreds of dial-up
numbers for government agencies that they'd gotten through scanning
Atlanta phones, or had pulled from raided VAX/VMS mainframe computers.

Basically, they'd never gotten around to listening in on the cops
because the idea wasn't interesting enough to bother with. Besides, if
they'd been monitoring Secret Service phone calls, obviously they'd
never have been caught in the first place. Right?

The Secret Service was less than satisfied with this rapier-like
hacker logic.

Then there was the issue of crashing the phone system. No problem,
Urvile admitted sunnily. Atlanta LoD could have shut down phone
service all over Atlanta any time they liked. *Even the 911 service?*
Nothing special about that, Urvile explained patiently. Bring the
switch to its knees, with say the UNIX "makedir" bug, and 911 goes down
too as a matter of course. The 911 system wasn't very interesting,
frankly. It might be tremendously interesting to cops (for odd
reasons of their own), but as technical challenges went, the 911
service was yawnsville. So of course the Atlanta Three could crash
service. They probably could have crashed service all over BellSouth
territory, if they'd worked at it for a while. But Atlanta LoD weren't
crashers. Only losers and rodents were crashers. LoD were *elite.*

Urvile was privately convinced that sheer technical expertise could
win him free of any kind of problem. As far as he was concerned, elite
status in the digital underground had placed him permanently beyond the
intellectual grasp of cops and straights. Urvile had a lot to learn.

Of the three LoD stalwarts, Prophet was in the most direct trouble.
Prophet was a UNIX programming expert who burrowed in and out of the
Internet as a matter of course. He'd started his hacking career at
around age 14, meddling with a UNIX mainframe system at the University
of North Carolina.

Prophet himself had written the handy Legion of Doom file "UNIX Use
and Security From the Ground Up." UNIX (pronounced "you-nicks") is a
powerful, flexible computer operating-system, for multi-user,
multi-tasking computers. In 1969, when UNIX was created in Bell Labs,
such computers were exclusive to large corporations and universities,
but today UNIX is run on thousands of powerful home machines. UNIX was
particularly wellsuited to telecommunications programming, and had
become a standard in the field. Naturally, UNIX also became a
standard for the elite hacker and phone phreak.

Lately, Prophet had not been so active as Leftist and Urvile, but
Prophet was a recidivist. In 1986, when he was eighteen, Prophet had
been convicted of "unauthorized access to a computer network" in North
Carolina. He'd been discovered breaking into the Southern Bell Data
Network, a UNIX-based internal telco network supposedly closed to the
public. He'd gotten a typical hacker sentence: six months suspended,
120 hours community service, and three years' probation.

After that humiliating bust, Prophet had gotten rid of most of his
tonnage of illicit phreak and hacker data, and had tried to go
straight. He was, after all, still on probation. But by the autumn of
1988, the temptations of cyberspace had proved too much for young
Prophet, and he was shoulder-to-shoulder with Urvile and Leftist into
some of the hairiest systems around.

In early September 1988, he'd broken into BellSouth's centralized
automation system, AIMSX or "Advanced Information Management System."
AIMSX was an internal business network for BellSouth, where telco
employees stored electronic mail, databases, memos, and calendars, and
did text processing. Since AIMSX did not have public dial-ups, it was
considered utterly invisible to the public, and was not well-secured -it didn't even require passwords. Prophet abused an account known as
"waa1," the personal account of an unsuspecting telco employee.
Disguised as the owner of waa1, Prophet made about ten visits to AIMSX.

Prophet did not damage or delete anything in the system. His
presence in AIMSX was harmless and almost invisible. But he could not
rest content with that.

One particular piece of processed text on AIMSX was a telco document
known as "Bell South Standard Practice 660-225-104SV Control Office
Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special Services and Major
Account Centers dated March 1988."

Prophet had not been looking for this document. It was merely one
among hundreds of similar documents with impenetrable titles. However,
having blundered over it in the course of his illicit wanderings through
AIMSX, he decided to take it with him as a trophy. It might prove very
useful in some future boasting, bragging, and strutting session. So,
some time in September 1988, Prophet ordered the AIMSX mainframe
computer to copy this document (henceforth called simply called "the
E911 Document") and to transfer this copy to his home computer.

No one noticed that Prophet had done this. He had "stolen" the E911
Document in some sense, but notions of property in cyberspace can be
tricky. BellSouth noticed nothing wrong, because BellSouth still had
their original copy. They had not been "robbed" of the document itself.
Many people were supposed to copy this document -- specifically, people
who worked for the nineteen BellSouth "special services and major
account centers," scattered throughout the Southeastern United States.
That was what it was for, why it was present on a computer network in
the first place: so that it could be copied and read -- by telco
employees. But now the data had been copied by someone who wasn't
supposed to look at it.

Prophet now had his trophy. But he further decided to store yet
another copy of the E911 Document on another person's computer. This
unwitting person was a computer enthusiast named Richard Andrews who
lived near Joliet, Illinois. Richard Andrews was a UNIX programmer by
trade, and ran a powerful UNIX board called "Jolnet," in the basement of
his house.

Prophet, using the handle "Robert Johnson," had obtained an account
on Richard Andrews' computer. And there he stashed the E911 Document,
by storing it in his own private section of Andrews' computer.

Why did Prophet do this? If Prophet had eliminated the E911
Document from his own computer, and kept it hundreds of miles away, on
another machine, under an alias, then he might have been fairly safe
from discovery and prosecution -- although his sneaky action had
certainly put the unsuspecting Richard Andrews at risk.

But, like most hackers, Prophet was a pack-rat for illicit data.
When it came to the crunch, he could not bear to part from his trophy.
When Prophet's place in Decatur, Georgia was raided in July 1989, there
was the E911 Document, a smoking gun. And there was Prophet in the
hands of the Secret Service, doing his best to "explain."

Our story now takes us away from the Atlanta Three and their raids
of the Summer of 1989. We must leave Atlanta Three "cooperating fully"
with their numerous investigators. And all three of them did
cooperate, as their Sentencing Memorandum from the US District Court
of the Northern Division of Georgia explained -- just before all three
of them were sentenced to various federal prisons in November 1990.

We must now catch up on the other aspects of the war on the Legion
of Doom. The war on the Legion was a war on a network -- in fact, a
network of three networks, which intertwined and interrelated in a
complex fashion. The Legion itself, with Atlanta LoD, and their
hanger-on Fry Guy, were the first network. The second network was
*Phrack* magazine, with its editors and contributors. The third
network involved the electronic circle around a hacker known as
"Terminus."

The war against these hacker networks was carried out by a law
enforcement network. Atlanta LoD and Fry Guy were pursued by USSS
agents and federal prosecutors in Atlanta, Indiana, and Chicago.
"Terminus" found himself pursued by USSS and federal prosecutors from
Baltimore and Chicago. And the war against Phrack was almost entirely a
Chicago operation.

The investigation of Terminus involved a great deal of energy,
mostly from the Chicago Task Force, but it was to be the least-known and
least-publicized of the Crackdown operations. Terminus, who lived in
Maryland, was a UNIX programmer and consultant, fairly 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 nondisclosure clauses.

AT&T has not exactly kept the UNIX cat in the bag, but it kept a
grip on its scruff with some success. By the rampant, explosive
standards of software piracy, AT&T UNIX source code is heavily
copyrighted, well-guarded, well-licensed. UNIX was traditionally run
only on mainframe machines, owned by large groups of suit-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 meant that these people would, or could, stay out
of trouble. The transferral of illicit data in cyberspace is hazy and
ill-defined business, with paradoxical dangers for everyone concerned:
hackers, signal carriers, board owners, cops, prosecutors, even random
passers-by. Sometimes, well-meant attempts to avert trouble or punish
wrongdoing bring more trouble than would simple ignorance, indifference
or impropriety.

Terminus's "Netsys" board was not a common or garden bulletin board
system, though it had most of the usual functions of a board. Netsys
was not a stand-alone machine, but part of the globe-spanning "UUCP"
cooperative network. The UUCP network uses a set of Unix software
programs called "Unix-to-Unix Copy," which allows Unix systems to throw
data to one another at high speed through the public telephone network.
UUCP is a radically decentralized, not-for-profit network of UNIX
computers. There are tens of thousands of these UNIX machines. Some
are small, but many are powerful and also link to other networks. UUCP
has certain arcane links to major networks such as JANET, EasyNet,
BITNET, JUNET, VNET, DASnet, PeaceNet and FidoNet, as well as the
gigantic Internet. (The so-called "Internet" is not actually a network
itself, but rather an "internetwork" connections standard that allows
several globe-spanning computer networks to communicate with one
another. Readers fascinated by the weird and intricate tangles of
modern computer networks may enjoy John S. Quarterman's authoritative
719-page explication, *The Matrix,* Digital Press, 1990.)

A skilled user of Terminus' UNIX machine could send and receive
electronic mail from almost any major computer network in the world.
Netsys was not called a "board" per se, but rather a "node." "Nodes"
were larger, faster, and more sophisticated than mere "boards," and for
hackers, to hang out on internationally-connected "nodes" was quite the
step up from merely hanging out on local "boards." Terminus's Netsys
node in Maryland had a number of direct links to other, similar UUCP
nodes, run by people who shared his interests and at least something of
his free-wheeling attitude. One of these nodes was Jolnet, owned by
Richard Andrews, who, like Terminus, was an independent UNIX consultant.
Jolnet also ran UNIX, and could be contacted at high speed by mainframe
machines from all over the world. Jolnet was quite a sophisticated
piece of work, technically speaking, but it was still run by an
individual, as a private, not-for-profit hobby. Jolnet was mostly
used by other UNIX programmers -- for mail, storage, and access to
networks. Jolnet supplied access network access to about two hundred
people, as well as a local junior college. Among its various features
and services, Jolnet also carried *Phrack* magazine.

For reasons of his own, Richard Andrews had become suspicious of a
new user called "Robert Johnson." Richard Andrews took it upon
himself to have a look at what "Robert Johnson" was storing in Jolnet.
And Andrews found the E911 Document.

"Robert Johnson" was the Prophet from the Legion of Doom, and the
E911 Document was illicitly copied data from Prophet's raid on the
BellSouth computers.

The E911 Document, a particularly illicit piece of digital property,
was about to resume its long, complex, and disastrous career.

It struck Andrews as fishy that someone not a telephone employee
should have a document referring to the "Enhanced 911 System." Besides,
the document itself bore an obvious warning.

"WARNING: NOT FOR USE OR DISCLOSURE OUTSIDE BELLSOUTH OR ANY OF ITS
SUBSIDIARIES EXCEPT UNDER WRITTEN AGREEMENT."

These standard nondisclosure tags are often appended to all sorts of
corporate material. Telcos as a species are particularly notorious for
stamping most everything in sight as "not for use or disclosure."
Still, this particular piece of data was about the 911 System. That
sounded bad to Rich Andrews.

Andrews was not prepared to ignore this sort of trouble. He thought
it would be wise to pass the document along to a friend and
acquaintance on the UNIX network, for consultation. So, around
September 1988, Andrews sent yet another copy of the E911 Document
electronically to an AT&T employee, one Charles Boykin, who ran a
UNIX-based node called "attctc" in Dallas, Texas.

"Attctc" was the property of AT&T, and was run from AT&T's Customer
Technology Center in Dallas, hence the name "attctc." "Attctc" was
better-known as "Killer," the name of the machine that the system was
running on. "Killer" was a hefty, powerful, AT&T 3B2 500 model, a
multi-user, multi-tasking UNIX platform with 32 meg of memory and a
mind-boggling 3.2 Gigabytes of storage. When Killer had first arrived
in Texas, in 1985, the 3B2 had been one of AT&T's great white hopes for
going head-to-head with IBM for the corporate computer-hardware market.
"Killer" had been shipped to the Customer Technology Center in the
Dallas Infomart, essentially a high-technology mall, and there it sat,
a demonstration model.

Charles Boykin, a veteran AT&T hardware and digital communications
expert, was a local technical backup man for the AT&T 3B2 system. As
a display model in the Infomart mall, "Killer" had little to do, and it
seemed a shame to waste the system's capacity. So Boykin ingeniously
wrote some UNIX bulletin-board software for "Killer," and plugged the
machine in to the local phone network. "Killer's" debut in late 1985
made it the first publicly available UNIX site in the state of Texas.
Anyone who wanted to play was welcome.

The machine immediately attracted an electronic community. It
joined the UUCP network, and offered network links to over eighty other
computer sites, all of which became dependent on Killer for their links
to the greater world of cyberspace. And it wasn't just for the big
guys; personal computer users also stored freeware programs for the
Amiga, the Apple, the IBM and the Macintosh on Killer's vast 3,200 meg
archives. At one time, Killer had the largest library of public-domain
Macintosh software in Texas.

Eventually, Killer attracted about 1,500 users, all busily
communicating, uploading and downloading, getting mail, gossipping, and
linking to arcane and distant networks.

Boykin received no pay for running Killer. He considered it good
publicity for the AT&T 3B2 system (whose sales were somewhat less than
stellar), but he also simply enjoyed the vibrant community his skill had
created. He gave away the bulletin-board UNIX software he had written,
free of charge.

In the UNIX programming community, Charlie Boykin had the reputation
of a warm, open-hearted, levelheaded kind of guy. In 1989, a group of
Texan UNIX professionals voted Boykin "System Administrator of the
Year." He was considered a fellow you could trust for good advice.

In September 1988, without warning, the E911 Document came plunging
into Boykin's life, forwarded by Richard Andrews. Boykin immediately
recognized that the Document was hot property. He was not a 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 fencesitters at
Bellcore and AT&T were now ready to roll. The consensus among telco
security -- already horrified by the skill of the BellSouth intruders
-- was that the digital underground was out of hand. LoD and *Phrack*
must go.

And in publishing Prophet's E911 Document, *Phrack* had provided law
enforcement with what appeared to be a powerful legal weapon. Foley
confronted Knight Lightning about the E911 Document.

Knight Lightning was cowed. He immediately began "cooperating
fully" in the usual tradition of the digital underground.

He gave Foley a complete run of *Phrack,* printed out in a set of
three-ring binders. He handed over his electronic mailing list of
*Phrack* subscribers. Knight Lightning was grilled for four hours by
Foley and his cohorts. Knight Lightning admitted that Prophet had
passed him the E911 Document, and he admitted that he had known it was
stolen booty from a hacker raid on a telephone company. Knight
Lightning signed a statement to this effect, and agreed, in writing, to
cooperate with investigators.

Next day -- January 19, 1990, a Friday -- the Secret Service
returned with a search warrant, and thoroughly searched Knight
Lightning's upstairs room in the fraternity house. They took all his
floppy disks, though, interestingly, they left Knight Lightning in
possession of both his computer and his modem. (The computer had no
hard disk, and in Foley's judgement was not a store of evidence.) But
this was a very minor bright spot among Knight Lightning's rapidly
multiplying troubles. By this time, Knight Lightning was in plenty of
hot water, not only with federal police, prosecutors, telco
investigators, and university security, but with the elders of his own
campus fraternity, who were outraged to think that they had been
unwittingly harboring a federal computer-criminal.

On Monday, Knight Lightning was summoned to Chicago, where he was
further grilled by Foley and USSS veteran agent Barbara Golden, this
time with an attorney present. And on Tuesday, he was formally
indicted by a federal grand jury.

The trial of Knight Lightning, which occurred on July 24-27, 1990,
was the crucial show-trial of the Hacker Crackdown. We will examine the
trial at some length in Part Four of this book. In the meantime, we must
continue our dogged pursuit of the E911 Document.

It must have been clear by January 1990 that the E911 Document, in
the form *Phrack* had published it back in February 1989, had gone off
at the speed of light in at least a hundred and fifty different
directions. To attempt to put this electronic genie back in the
bottle was flatly impossible.

And yet, the E911 Document was *still* stolen property, formally and
legally speaking. Any electronic transference of this document, by
anyone unauthorized to have it, could be interpreted as an act of wire
fraud. Interstate transfer of stolen property, including electronic
property, was a federal crime.

The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force had been assured
that the E911 Document was worth a hefty sum of money. In fact, they
had a precise estimate of its worth from BellSouth security personnel:
$79,449. A sum of this scale seemed to warrant vigorous prosecution.
Even if the damage could not be undone, at least this large sum offered
a good legal pretext for stern punishment of the thieves. It seemed
likely to impress judges and juries. And it could be used in court to
mop up the Legion of Doom.

The Atlanta crowd was already in the bag, by the time the Chicago
Task Force had gotten around to *Phrack.* But the Legion was a
hydra-headed thing. In late 89, a brand-new Legion of Doom board,
"Phoenix Project," had gone up in Austin, Texas. Phoenix Project was
sysoped by no less a man than the Mentor himself, ably assisted by
University of Texas student and hardened Doomster "Erik Bloodaxe." As
we have seen from his *Phrack* manifesto, the Mentor was a hacker
zealot who regarded computer intrusion as something close to a moral
duty. Phoenix Project was an ambitious effort, intended to revive the
digital underground to what Mentor considered the full flower of the
early 80s. The Phoenix board would also boldly bring elite hackers
face-to-face with the telco "opposition." On "Phoenix," America's
cleverest hackers would supposedly shame the telco squareheads out of
their stick-in-the-mud attitudes, and perhaps convince them that the
Legion of Doom elite were really an all-right crew. The premiere of
"Phoenix Project" was heavily trumpeted by *Phrack,* and "Phoenix
Project" carried a complete run of *Phrack* issues, including the E911
Document as *Phrack* had published it.

Phoenix Project was only one of many -- possibly hundreds -- of
nodes and boards all over America that were in guilty possession of the
E911 Document. But Phoenix was an outright, unashamed Legion of Doom
board. Under Mentor's guidance, it was flaunting itself in the face of
telco security personnel. Worse yet, it was actively trying to *win them
over* as sympathizers for the digital underground elite. "Phoenix"
had no cards or codes on it. Its hacker elite considered Phoenix at
least technically legal. But Phoenix was a corrupting influence,
where hacker anarchy was eating away like digital acid at the
underbelly of corporate propriety. The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse
Task Force now prepared to descend upon Austin, Texas.

Oddly, not one but *two* trails of the Task Force's investigation
led toward Austin. The city of Austin, like Atlanta, had made itself a
bulwark of the Sunbelt's Information Age, with a strong university
research presence, and a number of cutting-edge electronics companies,
including Motorola, Dell, CompuAdd, IBM, Sematech and MCC.

Where computing machinery went, hackers generally followed. Austin
boasted not only "Phoenix Project," currently LoD's most flagrant
underground board, but a number of UNIX nodes.

One of these nodes was "Elephant," run by a UNIX consultant named
Robert Izenberg. Izenberg, in search of a relaxed Southern lifestyle
and a lowered cost-of-living, had recently migrated to Austin from New
Jersey. In New Jersey, Izenberg had worked for an independent
contracting company, programming UNIX code for AT&T itself. "Terminus"
had been a frequent user on Izenberg's privately owned Elephant node.

Having interviewed Terminus and examined the records on Netsys, the
Chicago Task Force were now convinced that they had discovered an
underground gang of UNIX software pirates, who were demonstrably guilty
of interstate trafficking in illicitly copied AT&T source code.
Izenberg was swept into the dragnet around Terminus, the self-proclaimed
ultimate UNIX hacker.

Izenberg, in Austin, had settled down into a UNIX job with a Texan
branch of IBM. Izenberg was no longer working as a contractor for
AT&T, but he had friends in New Jersey, and he still logged on to AT&T
UNIX computers back in New Jersey, more or less whenever it pleased
him. Izenberg's activities appeared highly suspicious to the Task
Force. Izenberg might well be breaking into AT&T computers, swiping AT&T
software, and passing it to Terminus and other possible confederates,
through the UNIX node network. And this data was worth, not merely
$79,499, but hundreds of thousands of dollars!

On February 21, 1990, Robert Izenberg arrived home from work at IBM
to find that all the computers had mysteriously vanished from his
Austin apartment. Naturally he assumed that he had been robbed. His
"Elephant" node, his other machines, his notebooks, his disks, his
tapes, all gone! However, nothing much else seemed disturbed -- the
place had not been ransacked. The puzzle becaming much stranger some
five minutes later. Austin U. S. Secret Service Agent Al Soliz,
accompanied by University of Texas campus-security officer Larry
Coutorie and the ubiquitous Tim Foley, made their appearance at
Izenberg's door. They were in plain clothes: slacks, polo shirts.
They came in, and Tim Foley accused Izenberg of belonging to the Legion
of Doom.

Izenberg told them that he had never heard of the "Legion of Doom."
And what about a certain stolen E911 Document, that posed a direct
threat to the police emergency lines? Izenberg claimed that he'd
never heard of that, either.

His interrogators found this difficult to believe. Didn't he know
Terminus?

Who?

They gave him Terminus's real name. Oh yes, said Izenberg. He knew
*that* guy all right -- he was leading discussions on the Internet
about AT&T computers, especially the AT&T 3B2.

AT&T had thrust this machine into the marketplace, but, like many of
AT&T's ambitious attempts to enter the computing arena, the 3B2 project
had something less than a glittering success. Izenberg himself had
been a contractor for the division of AT&T that supported the 3B2. The
entire division had been shut down. Nowadays, the cheapest and quickest
way to get help with this fractious piece of machinery was to join one
of Terminus's discussion groups on the Internet, where friendly and
knowledgeable hackers would help you for free.

Naturally the remarks within this group were less than flattering
about the Death Star... was *that* the problem?

Foley told Izenberg that Terminus had been acquiring hot software
through his, Izenberg's, machine.

Izenberg shrugged this off. A good eight megabytes of data flowed
through his UUCP site every day. UUCP nodes spewed data like fire
hoses. Elephant had been directly linked to Netsys -- not surprising,
since Terminus was a 3B2 expert and Izenberg had been a 3B2 contractor.
Izenberg was also linked to "attctc" and the University of Texas.
Terminus was a well-known UNIX expert, and might have been up to all
manner of hijinks on Elephant. Nothing Izenberg could do about that.
That was physically impossible. Needle in a haystack.

In a four-hour grilling, Foley urged Izenberg to come clean and
admit that he was in conspiracy with Terminus, and a member of the
Legion of Doom. Izenberg denied this. He was no weirdo teenage hacker
-- he was thirty-two years old, and didn't even have a "handle."
Izenberg was a former TV technician and electronics specialist who had
drifted into UNIX consulting as a full-grown adult. Izenberg had
never met Terminus, physically. He'd once bought a cheap highspeed
modem from him, though.

Foley told him that this modem (a Telenet T2500 which ran at 19.2
kilobaud, and which had just gone out Izenberg's door in Secret Service
custody) was likely hot property. Izenberg was taken aback to hear
this; but then again, most of Izenberg's equipment, like that of most
freelance professionals in the industry, was discounted, passed
hand-to-hand through various kinds of barter and gray-market. There
was no proof that the modem was stolen, and even if it was, Izenberg
hardly saw how that gave them the right to take every electronic item
in his house.

Still, if the United States Secret Service figured they needed his
computer for national security reasons -- or whatever -- then Izenberg
would not kick. He figured he would somehow make the sacrifice of his
twenty thousand dollars' worth of professional equipment, in the spirit
of full cooperation and good citizenship.

Robert Izenberg was not arrested. Izenberg was not charged with any
crime. His UUCP node -- full of some 140 megabytes of the files, mail,
and data of himself and his dozen or so entirely innocent users -- went
out the door as "evidence." Along with the disks and tapes, Izenberg
had lost about 800 megabytes of data.

Six months would pass before Izenberg decided to phone the Secret
Service and ask how the case was going. That was the first time that
Robert Izenberg would ever hear the name of William Cook. As of
January 1992, a full two years after the seizure, Izenberg, still not
charged with any crime, would be struggling through the morass of the
courts, in hope of recovering his thousands of dollars' worth of seized
equipment.

In the meantime, the Izenberg case received absolutely no press
coverage. The Secret Service had walked into an Austin home, removed a
UNIX 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 online authenticity.

Mentor was particularly well-qualified for this task. Naturally, he
knew far more about computer intrusion and digital skullduggery than any
previously published cyberpunk author. Not only that, but he was good
at his work. A vivid imagination, combined with an instinctive
feeling for the working of systems and, especially, the loopholes
within them, are excellent qualities for a professional game designer.

By March 1st, *GURPS Cyberpunk* was almost complete, ready to print
and ship. Steve Jackson expected vigorous sales for this item, which,
he hoped, would keep the company financially afloat for several months.
*GURPS Cyberpunk,* like the other GURPS "modules," was not a "game"
like a Monopoly set, but a *book:* a bound paperback book the size of
a glossy magazine, with a slick color cover, and pages full of text,
illustrations, tables and footnotes. It was advertised as a game, and
was used as an aid to game-playing, but it was a book, with an ISBN
number, published in Texas, copyrighted, and sold in bookstores. And
now, that book, stored on a computer, had gone out the door in the
custody of the Secret Service.

The day after the raid, Steve Jackson visited the local Secret
Service headquarters with a lawyer in tow. There he confronted Tim
Foley (still in Austin at that time) and demanded his book back. But
there was trouble. *GURPS Cyberpunk,* alleged a Secret Service agent to
astonished businessman Steve Jackson, was "a manual for computer crime."

"It's science fiction," Jackson said.

"No, this is real." This statement was repeated several times, by
several agents. Jackson's ominously accurate game had passed from pure,
obscure, smallscale fantasy into the impure, highly publicized,
largescale fantasy of the Hacker Crackdown. No mention was made of the
real reason for the search. According to their search warrant, the
raiders had expected to find the E911 Document stored on Jackson's
bulletin board system. But that warrant was sealed; a procedure that
most law enforcement agencies will use only when lives are
demonstrably in danger. The raiders' true motives were not discovered
until the Jackson searchwarrant was unsealed by his lawyers, many
months later. The Secret Service, and the Chicago Computer Fraud and
Abuse Task Force, said absolutely nothing to Steve Jackson about any
threat to the police 911 System. They said nothing about the Atlanta
Three, nothing about *Phrack* or Knight Lightning, nothing about
Terminus.

Jackson was left to believe that his computers had been seized
because he intended to publish a science fiction book that law
enforcement considered too dangerous to see print.

This misconception was repeated again and again, for months, to an
ever-widening public audience. It was not the truth of the case; but
as months passed, and this misconception was publicly printed again and
again, it became one of the few publicly known "facts" about the
mysterious Hacker Crackdown. The Secret Service had seized a computer
to stop the publication of a cyberpunk science fiction book.

The second section of this book, "The Digital Underground," is
almost finished now. We have become acquainted with all the major
figures of this case who actually belong to the underground milieu of
computer intrusion. We have some idea of their history, their motives,
their general modus operandi. We now know, I hope, who they are, where
they came from, and more or less what they want. In the next section
of this book, "Law and Order," we will leave this milieu and directly
enter the world of America's computer crime police. At this point,
however, I have another figure to introduce: myself.

My name is Bruce Sterling. I live in Austin, Texas, where I am a
science fiction writer by trade: specifically, a *cyberpunk* science
fiction writer.

Like my "cyberpunk" colleagues in the U.S. and Canada, I've never
been entirely happy with this literary label -- especially after it
became a synonym for computer criminal. But I did once edit a book of
stories by my colleagues, called *MIRRORSHADES: the Cyberpunk
Anthology,* and I've long been a writer of literarycritical cyberpunk
manifestos. I am not a "hacker" of any description, though I do have
readers in the digital underground.

When the Steve Jackson Games seizure occurred, I naturally took an
intense interest. If "cyberpunk" books were being banned by federal
police in my own home town, I reasonably wondered whether I myself
might be next. Would my computer be seized by the Secret Service? At
the time, I was in possession of an aging Apple IIe without so much as a
hard disk. If I were to be raided as an author of computer crime
manuals, the loss of my feeble word-processor would likely provoke more
snickers than sympathy.

I'd known Steve Jackson for many years. We knew one another as
colleagues, for we frequented the same local science-fiction
conventions. I'd played Jackson games, and recognized his cleverness;
but he certainly had never struck me as a potential mastermind of
computer crime.

I also knew a little about computer bulletin board systems. In the
mid-1980s I had taken an active role in an Austin board called
"SMOF-BBS," one of the first boards dedicated to science fiction. I
had a modem, and on occasion I'd logged on to Illuminati, which always
looked entertainly wacky, but certainly harmless enough.

At the time of the Jackson seizure, I had no experience whatsoever
with underground boards. But I knew that no one on Illuminati talked
about breaking into systems illegally, or about robbing phone companies.
Illuminati didn't even offer pirated computer games. Steve Jackson, like
many creative artists, was markedly touchy about theft of intellectual
property.

It seemed to me that Jackson was either seriously suspected of some
crime -- in which case, he would be charged soon, and would have his
day in court -- or else he was innocent, in which case the Secret
Service would quickly return his equipment, and everyone would have a
good laugh. I rather expected the good laugh. The situation was not
without its comic side. The raid, known as the "Cyberpunk Bust" in the
science fiction community, was winning a great deal of free national
publicity both for Jackson himself and the "cyberpunk" science fiction
writers generally.

Besides, science fiction people are used to being misinterpreted.
Science fiction is a colorful, disreputable, slipshod occupation, full
of unlikely oddballs, which, of course, is why we like it. Weirdness
can be an occupational hazard in our field. People who wear Halloween
costumes are sometimes mistaken for monsters.

Once upon a time -- back in 1939, in New York City -- science
fiction and the U.S. Secret Service collided in a comic case of mistaken
identity. This weird incident involved a literary group quite famous in
science fiction, known as "the Futurians," whose membership included
such future genre greats as Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, and Damon
Knight. The Futurians were every bit as offbeat and wacky as any of
their spiritual descendants, including the cyberpunks, and were given to
communal living, spontaneous group renditions of light opera, and
midnight fencing exhibitions on the lawn. The Futurians didn't have
bulletin board systems, but they did have the technological equivalent
in 1939 -- mimeographs and a private printing press. These were in
steady use, producing a stream of science-fiction fan magazines,
literary manifestos, and weird articles, which were picked up in
ink-sticky bundles by a succession of strange, gangly, spotty young men
in fedoras and overcoats.

The neighbors grew alarmed at the antics of the Futurians and
reported them to the Secret Service as suspected counterfeiters. In
the winter of 1939, a squad of USSS agents with drawn guns burst into
"Futurian House," prepared to confiscate the forged currency and illicit
printing presses. There they discovered a slumbering science fiction
fan named George Hahn, a guest of the Futurian commune who had just
arrived in New York. George Hahn managed to explain himself and his
group, and the Secret Service agents left the Futurians in peace
henceforth. (Alas, Hahn died in 1991, just before I had discovered this
astonishing historical parallel, and just before I could interview him
for this book.)

But the Jackson case did not come to a swift and comic end. No
quick answers came his way, or mine; no swift reassurances that all
was right in the digital world, that matters were well in hand after
all. Quite the opposite. In my alternate role as a sometime
pop-science journalist, I interviewed Jackson and his staff for an
article in a British magazine. The strange details of the raid left me
more concerned than ever. Without its computers, the company had been
financially and operationally crippled. Half the SJG workforce, a
group of entirely innocent people, had been sorrowfully fired, deprived
of their livelihoods by the seizure. It began to dawn on me that
authors -- American writers -- might well have their computers seized,
under sealed warrants, without any criminal charge; and that, as Steve
Jackson had discovered, there was no immediate recourse for this. This
was no joke; this wasn't science fiction; this was real.

I determined to put science fiction aside until I had discovered
what had happened and where this trouble had come from. It was time to
enter the purportedly real world of electronic free expression and
computer crime. Hence, this book. Hence, the world of the telcos; and
the world of the digital underground; and next, the world of the police.

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

Of the various anti-hacker activities of 1990, "Operation Sundevil"
had by far the highest public profile. The sweeping, nationwide
computer seizures of May 8, 1990 were unprecedented in scope and
highly, if rather selectively, publicized.

Unlike the efforts of the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task
Force, "Operation Sundevil" was not intended to combat "hacking" in
the sense of computer intrusion or sophisticated raids on telco
switching stations. Nor did it have anything to do with hacker
misdeeds with AT&T's software, or with Southern Bell's proprietary
documents.

Instead, "Operation Sundevil" was a crackdown on those traditional
scourges of the digital underground: credit card theft and telephone
code abuse. The ambitious activities out of Chicago, and the somewhat
lesser-known but vigorous antihacker actions of the New York State
Police in 1990, were never a part of "Operation Sundevil" per se, which
was based in Arizona.

Nevertheless, after the spectacular May 8 raids, the public, misled
by police secrecy, hacker panic, and a puzzled national press-corps,
conflated all aspects of the nationwide crackdown in 1990 under the
blanket term "Operation Sundevil." "Sundevil" is still the best-known
synonym for the crackdown of 1990. But the Arizona organizers of
"Sundevil" did not really deserve this reputation -- any more, for
instance, than all hackers deserve a reputation as "hackers."

There was some justice in this confused perception, though. For one
thing, the confusion was abetted by the Washington office of the Secret
Service, who responded to Freedom of Information Act requests on
"Operation Sundevil" by referring investigators to the publicly known
cases of Knight Lightning and the Atlanta Three. And "Sundevil" was
certainly the largest aspect of the Crackdown, the most deliberate and
the best-organized. As a crackdown on electronic fraud, "Sundevil"
lacked the frantic pace of the war on the Legion of Doom; on the
contrary, Sundevil's targets were picked out with cool deliberation
over an elaborate investigation lasting two full years.

And once again the targets were bulletin board systems.

Boards can be powerful aids to organized fraud. Underground boards
carry lively, extensive, detailed, and often quite flagrant
"discussions" of lawbreaking techniques and lawbreaking activities.
"Discussing" crime in the abstract, or "discussing" the particulars of
criminal cases, is not illegal -- but there are stern state and federal
laws against coldbloodedly conspiring in groups in order to commit
crimes.

In the eyes of police, people who actively conspire to break the law
are not regarded as "clubs," "debating salons," "users' groups," or
"free speech advocates." Rather, such people tend to find themselves
formally indicted by prosecutors as "gangs," "racketeers," "corrupt
organizations" and "organized crime figures."

What's more, the illicit data contained on outlaw boards goes well
beyond mere acts of speech and/or possible criminal conspiracy. As we
have seen, it was common practice in the digital underground to post
purloined telephone codes on boards, for any phreak or hacker who cared
to abuse them. Is posting digital booty of this sort supposed to be
protected by the First Amendment? Hardly -- though the issue, like
most issues in cyberspace, is not entirely resolved. Some theorists
argue that to merely *recite* a number publicly is not illegal -- only
its *use* is illegal. But anti-hacker police point out that magazines
and newspapers (more traditional forms of free expression) never
publish stolen telephone codes (even though this might well raise their
circulation).

Stolen credit card numbers, being riskier and more valuable, were
less often publicly posted on boards -- but there is no question that
some underground boards carried "carding" traffic, generally exchanged
through private mail.

Underground boards also carried handy programs for "scanning"
telephone codes and raiding credit card companies, as well as the usual
obnoxious galaxy of pirated software, cracked passwords, blue-box
schematics, intrusion manuals, anarchy files, porn files, and so forth.

But besides their nuisance potential for the spread of illicit
knowledge, bulletin boards have another vitally interesting aspect for
the professional investigator. Bulletin boards are cram-full of
*evidence.* All that busy trading of electronic mail, all those hacker
boasts, brags and struts, even the stolen codes and cards, can be
neat, electronic, realtime recordings of criminal activity. As an
investigator, when you seize a pirate board, you have scored a coup as
effective as tapping phones or intercepting mail. However, you have not
actually tapped a phone or intercepted a letter. The rules of
evidence regarding phone-taps and mail interceptions are old, stern and
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 rip-offs to their perpetrators can be appallingly
difficult. If these miscreants have any kind of electronic
sophistication, they can snarl their tracks through the phone network
into a mind-boggling, untraceable mess, while still managing to "reach
out and rob someone." Boards, however, full of brags and boasts, codes
and cards, offer evidence in the handy congealed form.

Seizures themselves -- the mere physical removal of machines -tends to take the pressure off. During Sundevil, a large number of
code kids, warez d00dz, and credit card thieves would be deprived of
those boards -- their means of community and conspiracy -- in one
swift blow. As for the sysops themselves (commonly among the boldest
offenders) they would be directly stripped of their computer equipment,
and rendered digitally mute and blind.

And this aspect of Sundevil was carried out with great success.
Sundevil seems to have been a complete tactical surprise -- unlike the
fragmentary and continuing seizures of the war on the Legion of Doom,
Sundevil was precisely timed and utterly overwhelming. At least forty
"computers" were seized during May 7, 8 and 9, 1990, in Cincinnati,
Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Phoenix, Tucson, Richmond, San
Diego, San Jose, Pittsburgh and San Francisco. Some cities saw
multiple raids, such as the five separate raids in the New York City
environs. Plano, Texas (essentially a suburb of the Dallas/Fort Worth
metroplex, and a hub of the telecommunications industry) saw four
computer seizures. Chicago, ever in the forefront, saw its own local
Sundevil raid, briskly carried out by Secret Service agents Timothy
Foley and Barbara Golden.

Many of these raids occurred, not in the cities proper, but in
associated white-middle class suburbs -- places like Mount Lebanon,
Pennsylvania and Clark Lake, Michigan. There were a few raids on
offices; most took place in people's homes, the classic hacker
basements and bedrooms.

The Sundevil raids were searches and seizures, not a group of mass
arrests. There were only four arrests during Sundevil. "Tony the
Trashman," a longtime teenage bete noire of the Arizona Racketeering
unit, was arrested in Tucson on May 9. "Dr. Ripco," sysop of an outlaw
board with the misfortune to exist in Chicago itself, was also arrested
-- on illegal weapons charges. Local units also arrested a
19-year-old female phone phreak named "Electra" in Pennsylvania, and a
male juvenile in California. Federal agents however were not seeking
arrests, but computers.

Hackers are generally not indicted (if at all) until the evidence in
their seized computers is evaluated -- a process that can take weeks,
months -- even years. When hackers are arrested on the spot, it's
generally an arrest for other reasons. Drugs and/or illegal weapons
show up in a good third of anti-hacker computer seizures (though not
during Sundevil). That scofflaw teenage hackers (or their parents)
should have marijuana in their homes is probably not a shocking
revelation, but the surprisingly common presence of illegal firearms in
hacker dens is a bit disquieting. A Personal Computer can be a great
equalizer for the techno-cowboy -- much like that more traditional
American "Great Equalizer," the Personal Sixgun. Maybe it's not all
that surprising that some guy obsessed with power through illicit
technology would also have a few illicit high-velocity-impact devices
around. An element of the digital underground particularly dotes on
those "anarchy philes," and this element tends to shade into the
crackpot milieu of survivalists, gun-nuts, anarcho-leftists and the
ultra-libertarian right-wing.

This is not to say that hacker raids to date have uncovered any major
crack-dens or illegal arsenals; but Secret Service agents do not regard
"hackers" as "just kids." They regard hackers as unpredictable
people, bright and slippery. It doesn't help matters that the hacker
himself has been "hiding behind his keyboard" all this time.
Commonly, police have no idea what he looks like. This makes him an
unknown quantity, someone best treated with proper caution.

To date, no hacker has come out shooting, though they do sometimes
brag on boards that they will do just that. Threats of this sort are
taken seriously. Secret Service hacker raids tend to be swift,
comprehensive, well-manned (even overmanned); and agents generally
burst through every door in the home at once, sometimes with drawn
guns. Any potential resistance is swiftly quelled. Hacker raids are
usually raids on people's homes. It can be a very dangerous business to
raid an American home; people can panic when strangers invade their
sanctum. Statistically speaking, the most dangerous thing a policeman
can do is to enter someone's home. (The second most dangerous thing is
to stop a car in traffic.) People have guns in their homes. More
cops are hurt in homes than are ever hurt in biker bars or massage
parlors.

But in any case, no one was hurt during Sundevil, or indeed during
any part of the Hacker Crackdown.

Nor were there any allegations of any physical mistreatment of a
suspect. Guns were pointed, interrogations were sharp and prolonged;
but no one in 1990 claimed any act of brutality by any crackdown raider.

In addition to the forty or so computers, Sundevil reaped floppy
disks in particularly great abundance -- an estimated 23,000 of them,
which naturally included every manner of illegitimate data: pirated
games, stolen codes, hot credit card numbers, the complete text and
software of entire pirate bulletin-boards. These floppy disks, which
remain in police custody today, offer a gigantic, almost embarrassingly
rich source of possible criminal indictments. These 23,000 floppy
disks also include a thus-far unknown quantity of legitimate computer
games, legitimate software, purportedly "private" mail from boards,
business records, and personal correspondence of all kinds.

Standard computer crime search warrants lay great emphasis on seizing
written documents as well as computers -- specifically including
photocopies, computer printouts, telephone bills, address books, logs,
notes, memoranda and correspondence. In practice, this has meant that
diaries, gaming magazines, software documentation, nonfiction books on
hacking and computer security, sometimes even science fiction novels,
have all vanished out the door in police custody. A wide variety of
electronic items have been known to vanish as well, including
telephones, televisions, answering machines, Sony Walkmans, desktop
printers, compact disks, and audiotapes.

No fewer than 150 members of the Secret Service were sent into the
field during Sundevil. They were commonly accompanied by squads of
local and/or state police. Most of these officers -- especially the
locals -- had never been on an 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
anomalous 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. Of course, many of these
gentlemen and ladies may be paragons of professional and moral
rectitude. But as anyone who has read a hard-boiled detective novel
knows, police tend to be less than fond of this sort of private-sector
competition.

Companies in search of computer-security have even been known to
hire hackers. Police shudder at this prospect.

Police treasure good relations with the business community. Rarely
will you see a policeman so indiscreet as to allege publicly that some
major employer in his state or city has succumbed to paranoia and gone
off the rails. Nevertheless, police -- and computer police in
particular -- are aware of this possibility. computer crime police
can and do spend up to half of their business hours just doing public
relations: seminars, "dog and pony shows," sometimes with parents'
groups or computer users, but generally with their core audience: the
likely victims of hacking crimes. These, of course, are telcos, credit
card companies and large computerequipped corporations. The police
strongly urge these people, as good citizens, to report offenses and
press criminal charges; they pass the message that there is someone in
authority who cares, understands, and, best of all, will take useful
action should a computer crime occur. But reassuring talk is cheap.
Sundevil offered action.

The final message of Sundevil was intended for internal consumption
by law enforcement. Sundevil was offered as proof that the community of
American computer crime police had come of age. Sundevil was proof that
enormous things like Sundevil itself could now be accomplished.
Sundevil was proof that the Secret Service and its local law
enforcement allies could act like a 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 wirefraud
experts.

However, in Section 1029, the term "access device" is very generously
defined. An access device is: "any card, plate, code, account number,
or other means of account access that can be used, alone or in
conjunction with another access device, to obtain money, goods,
services, or any other thing of value, or that can be used to initiate
a transfer of funds."

"Access device" can therefore be construed to include credit cards
themselves (a popular forgery item nowadays). It also includes credit
card account *numbers,* those standards of the digital underground.
The same goes for telephone charge cards (an increasingly popular item
with telcos, who are tired of being robbed of pocket change by
phone-booth thieves). And also telephone access *codes,* those
*other* standards of the digital underground. (Stolen telephone codes
may not "obtain money," but they certainly do obtain valuable
"services," which is specifically forbidden by Section 1029.)

We can now see that Section 1029 already pits the United States
Secret Service directly against the digital underground, without any
mention at all of the word "computer."

Standard phreaking devices, like "blue boxes," used to steal phone
service from old-fashioned mechanical switches, are unquestionably
"counterfeit access devices." Thanks to Sec. 1029, it is not only
illegal to *use* counterfeit access devices, but it is even illegal to
*build* them. "Producing," "designing," "duplicating," or
"assembling" blue boxes are all federal crimes today, and if you do
this, the Secret Service has been charged by Congress to come after you.

Automatic Teller Machines, which replicated all over America during
the 1980s, are definitely "access devices," too, and an attempt to
tamper with their punch-in codes and plastic bank cards falls directly
under Sec. 1029.

Section 1029 is remarkably elastic. Suppose you find a computer
password in somebody's trash. That password might be a "code" -- it's
certainly a "means of account access." Now suppose you log on to a
computer and copy some software for yourself. You've certainly obtained
"service" (computer service) and a "thing of value" (the software).
Suppose you tell a dozen friends about your swiped password, and let
them use it, too. Now you're "trafficking in unauthorized access
devices." And when the Prophet, a member of the Legion of Doom, passed
a stolen telephone company document to Knight Lightning at *Phrack*
magazine, they were both charged under Sec. 1029!

There are two limitations on Section 1029. First, the offense must
"affect interstate or foreign commerce" in order to become a matter of
federal jurisdiction. The term "affecting commerce" is not well
defined; but you may take it as a given that the Secret Service can
take an interest if you've done most anything that happens to cross a
state line. State and local police can be touchy about their
jurisdictions, and can sometimes be mulish when the feds show up. But
when it comes to 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.)

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 Congress thinks is one thing, and Congress has been
known to change its mind. The *real* turfstruggle is out there in the
streets where it's happening. If you're a local street-cop with a
computer problem, the Secret Service wants you to know where you can
find the real expertise. While the Bureau crowd are off having their
favorite shoes polished -- (wing-tips) -- and making derisive fun of
the Service's favorite shoes -- ("pansy-ass tassels") -- the
tassel-toting Secret Service has a crew of 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 antiforgery techniques.

And it's maintaining the hefty computerized files on anyone who ever
threatened the President's life. Civil libertarians have become
increasingly concerned at the Government's use of computer files to
track American citizens -- but the Secret Service file of potential
Presidential assassins, which has upward of twenty thousand names,
rarely causes a peep of protest. If you *ever* state that you intend
to kill the President, the Secret Service will want to know and record
who you are, where you are, what you are, and what you're up to. If
you're a serious threat -- if you're officially considered "of
protective interest" -- then the Secret Service may well keep tabs on
you for the rest of your natural life.

Protecting the President has first call on all the Service's
resources. But there's a lot more to the Service's traditions and
history than standing guard outside the Oval Office. The Secret Service
is the nation's oldest general federal law enforcement agency.
Compared to the Secret Service, the FBI are new-hires and the CIA are
temps. The Secret Service was founded way back in 1865, at the
suggestion of Hugh McCulloch, Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of the
Treasury. McCulloch wanted a specialized Treasury police to combat
counterfeiting. Abraham Lincoln agreed that this seemed a good idea,
and, with a terrible irony, Abraham Lincoln was shot that very night by
John Wilkes Booth.

The Secret Service originally had nothing to do with protecting
Presidents. They didn't take this on as a regular assignment until
after the Garfield assassination in 1881.

And they didn't get any Congressional money for it until President
McKinley was shot in 1901. The Service was originally designed for one
purpose: destroying counterfeiters.

#

There are interesting parallels between the Service's
nineteenth-century entry into counterfeiting, and America's
twentieth-century entry into computer crime.

In 1865, America's paper currency was a terrible muddle. Security
was drastically bad. Currency was printed on the spot by local banks
in literally hundreds of different designs. No one really knew what
the heck a dollar bill was supposed to look like. Bogus bills passed
easily. If some joker told you that a one-dollar bill from the
Railroad Bank of Lowell, Massachusetts had a woman leaning on a shield,
with a locomotive, a cornucopia, a compass, various agricultural
implements, a railroad bridge, and some factories, then you pretty much
had to take his word for it. (And in fact he was telling the truth!)

*Sixteen hundred* local American banks designed and printed their own
paper currency, and there were no general standards for security. Like
a badly guarded node in a computer network, badly designed bills were
easy to fake, and posed a security hazard for the entire monetary
system.

No one knew the exact extent of the threat to the currency. There
were panicked estimates that as much as a third of the entire national
currency was faked. Counterfeiters -- known as "boodlers" in the
underground slang of the time -- were mostly technically skilled
printers who had gone to the bad. Many had once worked printing
legitimate currency. Boodlers operated in rings and gangs. Technical
experts engraved the bogus plates -- commonly in basements in New York
City. Smooth confidence men passed large wads of high-quality, 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 midnineteenth-century public. The
ability to manipulate the system for rip-off seemed diabolically
clever. As the skill and daring of the boodlers increased, the
situation became intolerable. The federal government stepped in, and
began offering its own federal currency, which was printed in fancy
green ink, but only on the back -- the original "greenbacks." And at
first, the improved security of the well-designed, well-printed federal
greenbacks seemed to solve the problem; but then the counterfeiters
caught on. Within a few years things were worse than ever: a
*centralized* system where *all* security was bad!

The local police were helpless. The Government tried offering blood
money to potential informants, but this met with little success.
Banks, plagued by boodling, gave up hope of police help and hired
private security men instead. Merchants and bankers queued up by the
thousands to buy privately-printed manuals on currency security, slim
little books like Laban Heath's *Infallible Government Counterfeit
Detector.* The back of the book offered Laban Heath's patent
microscope for five bucks. Then the Secret Service entered the picture.
The first agents were a rough and ready crew. Their chief was one
William P. Wood, a former guerilla in the Mexican War who'd won a
reputation busting contractor fraudsters for the War Department during
the Civil War. Wood, who was also Keeper of the Capital Prison, had a
sideline as a counterfeiting expert, bagging boodlers for the federal
bounty money.

Wood was named Chief of the new Secret Service in July 1865. There
were only ten Secret Service agents in all: Wood himself, a handful
who'd worked for him in the War Department, and a few former private
investigators -- counterfeiting experts -- whom Wood had won over to
public service. (The Secret Service of 1865 was much the size of the
Chicago Computer Fraud Task Force or the Arizona Racketeering Unit of
1990.) These ten "Operatives" had an additional twenty or so
"Assistant Operatives" and "Informants." Besides salary and per diem,
each Secret Service employee received a whopping twenty-five dollars
for each boodler he captured.

Wood himself publicly estimated that at least *half* of America's
currency was counterfeit, a perhaps pardonable perception. Within a
year the Secret Service had arrested over 200 counterfeiters. They
busted about two hundred boodlers a year for four years straight.

Wood attributed his success to travelling fast and light, hitting
the bad-guys hard, and avoiding bureaucratic baggage. "Because my
raids were made without military escort and I did not ask the
assistance of state officers, I surprised the professional
counterfeiter."

Wood's social message to the once-impudent boodlers bore an eerie
ring of Sundevil: "It was also my purpose to convince such characters
that it would no longer be healthy for them to ply their vocation
without being handled roughly, a fact they soon discovered."

William P. Wood, the Secret Service's guerilla pioneer, did not end
well. He succumbed to the lure of aiming for the really big score. The
notorious Brockway Gang of New York City, headed by William E.
Brockway, the "King of the Counterfeiters," had forged a number of
government bonds. They'd passed these brilliant fakes on the
prestigious Wall Street investment firm of Jay Cooke and Company. The
Cooke firm were frantic and offered a huge reward for the forgers'
plates.

Laboring diligently, Wood confiscated the plates (though not Mr.
Brockway) and claimed the reward. But the Cooke company treacherously
reneged. Wood got involved in a down-and-dirty lawsuit with the Cooke
capitalists. Wood's boss, Secretary of the Treasury McCulloch, felt
that Wood's demands for money and glory were unseemly, and even when
the reward money finally came through, McCulloch refused to pay Wood
anything. Wood found himself mired in a seemingly endless round of
federal suits and Congressional lobbying.

Wood never got his money. And he lost his job to boot. He resigned
in 1869.

Wood's agents suffered, too. On May 12, 1869, the second Chief of
the Secret Service took over, and almost immediately fired most of
Wood's pioneer Secret Service agents: Operatives, Assistants and
Informants alike. The practice of receiving $25 per crook was
abolished. And the Secret Service began the long, uncertain process
of thorough professionalization.

Wood ended badly. He must have felt stabbed in the back. In fact
his entire organization was mangled.

On the other hand, William P. Wood *was* the first head of the Secret
Service. William Wood was the pioneer. People still honor his name.
Who remembers the name of the *second* head of the Secret Service?

As for William Brockway (also known as "Colonel Spencer"), he was
finally arrested by the Secret Service in 1880. He did five years in
prison, got out, and was still boodling at the age of 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 use 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 mid70s, the "grandfather of the field," "the great
bald eagle of computer crime."

And what she has learned, Gail Thackeray teaches. Endlessly.
Tirelessly. To anybody. To Secret Service agents and state police, at
the Glynco, Georgia federal training center. To local police, on
"roadshows" with her slide projector and notebook. To corporate
security personnel. To journalists. To parents.

Even *crooks* look to Gail Thackeray for advice. Phone-phreaks call
her at the office. They know very well who she is. They pump her for
information on what the cops are up to, how much they know. Sometimes
whole *crowds* of phone phreaks, hanging out on illegal conference
calls, will call Gail Thackeray up. They taunt her. And, as always,
they boast. Phone-phreaks, real stone phone-phreaks, simply *cannot
shut up.* They natter on for hours.

Left to themselves, they mostly talk about the intricacies of
ripping-off phones; it's about as interesting as listening to
hot-rodders talk about suspension and distributor-caps. They also
gossip cruelly about each other. And when talking to Gail Thackeray,
they incriminate themselves. "I have tapes," Thackeray says coolly.

Phone phreaks just talk like crazy. "Dial-Tone" out in Alabama has
been known to spend half an hour simply reading stolen phone-codes
aloud into voice-mail answering machines. Hundreds, thousands of
numbers, recited in a monotone, without a break -- an eerie phenomenon.
When arrested, it's a rare phone phreak who doesn't inform at endless
length on everybody he knows.

Hackers are no better. What other group of criminals, she asks
rhetorically, publishes newsletters and holds conventions? She seems
deeply nettled by the sheer brazenness of this behavior, though to an
outsider, this activity might make one wonder whether hackers should be
considered "criminals" at all. Skateboarders have magazines, and they
trespass a lot. Hot rod people have magazines and they break speed
limits and sometimes kill people...

I ask her whether it would be any loss to society if phone phreaking
and computer hacking, as hobbies, simply dried up and blew away, so
that nobody ever did it again. She seems surprised. "No," she says
swiftly. "Maybe a little... in the old days... the MIT stuff... But
there's a lot of wonderful, legal stuff you can do with computers now,
you don't have to break into somebody else's just to learn. You don't
have that excuse. You can learn all you like." Did you ever hack into a
system? I ask.

The trainees do it at Glynco. Just to demonstrate system
vulnerabilities. She's cool to the notion. Genuinely indifferent.
"What kind of computer do you have?"

"A Compaq 286LE," she mutters.

"What kind do you *wish* you had?"

At this question, the unmistakable light of true hackerdom flares in
Gail Thackeray's eyes. She becomes tense, animated, the words pour
out: "An Amiga 2000 with an IBM card and Mac emulation! The most
common hacker machines are Amigas and Commodores. And Apples." If she
had the Amiga, she enthuses, she could run a whole galaxy of seized
computer-evidence disks on one convenient multifunctional machine. A
cheap one, too. Not like the old Attorney General lab, where they had
an ancient CP/M machine, assorted Amiga flavors and Apple flavors, a
couple IBMs, all the utility software... but no Commodores. The
workstations down at the Attorney General's are Wang dedicated
word-processors. Lame machines tied in to an office net -- though at
least they get online to the Lexis and Westlaw legal data services. I
don't say anything. I recognize the syndrome, though. This
computer-fever has been running through segments of our society for
years now. It's a strange kind of lust: K-hunger, Meg-hunger; but it's
a shared disease; it can kill parties dead, as conversation spirals
into the deepest and most deviant recesses of software releases and
expensive peripherals... The mark of the hacker beast. I have it
too. The whole "electronic community," whatever the hell that is, has
it. Gail Thackeray has it. Gail Thackeray is a hacker cop. My
immediate reaction is a strong rush of indignant pity: *why doesn't
somebody buy this woman her Amiga?!* It's not like she's asking for a
Cray X-MP supercomputer mainframe; an Amiga's a sweet little
cookie-box thing. We're losing zillions in organized fraud;
prosecuting and defending a single hacker case in court can cost a
hundred grand easy. How come nobody can come up with four lousy grand
so this woman can do her job? For a hundred grand we could buy every
computer cop in America an Amiga. There aren't that many of 'em.

Computers. The lust, the hunger, for computers. The loyalty they
inspire, the intense sense of possessiveness. The culture they have
bred. I myself am sitting in downtown Phoenix, Arizona because it
suddenly occurred to me that the police might -- just *might* -- come
and take away my computer. The prospect of this, the mere *implied
threat,* was unbearable. It literally changed my life. It was
changing the lives of many others. Eventually it would change
everybody's life.

Gail Thackeray was one of the top 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 Fed Ex offices that
tell you never to try this. Fed Ex uses X-rays and dogs on their mail,
to stop drug shipments. That doesn't work very well.

Drug dealers went wild over cellular phones. There are simple methods
of faking ID on cellular phones, making the location of the call
mobile, free of charge, and effectively untraceable. Now victimized
cellular companies routinely bring in vast toll-lists of calls to
Colombia and Pakistan.

Judge Greene's fragmentation of the phone company is driving law
enforcement nuts. Four thousand telecommunications companies. Fraud
skyrocketing. Every temptation in the world available with a phone and
a credit card number. Criminals untraceable. A galaxy of "new neat
rotten things to do."

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

It would be a new form of electronic search warrant, an "electronic
letter of marque" to be issued by a judge. It would create a new
category of "electronic emergency." Like a wiretap, its use would be
rare, but it would cut across state lines and force swift cooperation
from all concerned. Cellular, phone, laser, computer network, PBXes,
AT&T, Baby Bells, long-distance entrepreneurs, packet radio. Some
document, some mighty court-order, that could slice through four
thousand separate forms of corporate red-tape, and get her at once to
the source of calls, the source of email threats and viruses, the
sources of bomb threats, kidnapping threats. "From now on," she says,
"the Lindberg baby will always die."

Something that would make the Net sit still, if only for a moment.
Something that would get her up to speed. Seven league boots. That's
what she really needs. "Those guys move in nanoseconds and I'm on the
Pony Express." And then, too, there's the coming international angle.
Electronic crime has never been easy to localize, to tie to a physical
jurisdiction. And 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 airtraffic control computers, will kill
somebody someday. Maybe a lot of people. Gail Thackeray expects it.

And the viruses are getting nastier. The "Scud" virus is the latest
one out. It wipes hard-disks.

According to Thackeray, the idea that phonephreaks are Robin Hoods is
a fraud. They don't deserve this repute. Basically, they pick on the
weak. AT&T now protects itself with the fearsome ANI (Automatic Number
Identification) trace capability. When AT&T wised up and tightened
security generally, the phreaks drifted into the Baby Bells. The Baby
Bells lashed out in 1989 and 1990, so the phreaks switched to smaller
long-distance entrepreneurs. Today, they are moving into locally owned
PBXes and voice-mail systems, which are full of security holes,
dreadfully easy to hack. These victims aren't the moneybags Sheriff of
Nottingham or Bad King John, but small groups of innocent people who
find it hard to protect themselves, and who really suffer from these
depredations. Phone phreaks pick on the weak. They do it for power.
If it were legal, they wouldn't do it. They don't want service, or
knowledge, they want the thrill of powertripping. There's plenty of
knowledge or service around, if you're willing to pay. Phone phreaks
don't pay, they steal. It's because it is illegal that it feels like
power, that it gratifies their vanity.

I leave Gail Thackeray with a handshake at the door of her office
building -- a vast 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 those
book is supremely and directly relevant. That personage was Stanley's
giant thieving scarred phantom. This phantasm is everywhere in this
book. He is the specter haunting cyberspace.

Sometimes he's a maniac vandal ready to smash the phone system for no
sane reason at all. Sometimes he's a fascist fed, coldly programming
his mighty mainframes to destroy our Bill of Rights. Sometimes he's a
telco bureaucrat, covertly conspiring to register all modems in the
service of an Orwellian surveillance regime. Mostly, though, this
fearsome phantom is a "hacker." He's strange, he doesn't belong, he's
not authorized, he doesn't smell right, he's not keeping his proper
place, he's not one of us. The focus of fear is the hacker, for much
the same reasons that Stanley's fancied assailant is black.

Stanley's demon can't go away, because he doesn't exist. Despite
singleminded and tremendous effort, he can't be arrested, sued,
jailed, or fired. The only constructive way to do *anything* about him
is to learn more about Stanley himself. This learning process may be
repellent, it may be ugly, it may involve grave elements of paranoiac
confusion, but it's necessary. Knowing Stanley requires something more
than class-crossing condescension. It requires more than steely legal
objectivity. It requires human compassion and sympathy. To know
Stanley is to know his demon. If you know the other guy's demon, then
maybe you'll come to know some of your own. You'll be able to separate
reality from illusion. And then you won't do your cause, and
yourself, more harm than good. Like poor damned Stanley from Chicago
did.

#

The Federal Computer Investigations Committee (FCIC) is the most
important and influential organization in the realm of American
computer crime. Since the police of other countries have largely taken
their computer crime cues from American methods, the FCIC might well be
called the most important computer crime group in the world.

It is also, by federal standards, an organization of great
unorthodoxy. State and local investigators mix with federal agents.
Lawyers, financial auditors and computer-security programmers trade
notes with street cops. Industry vendors and telco security people show
up to explain their gadgetry and plead for protection and justice.
Private investigators, think-tank experts and industry pundits throw in
their two cents' worth. The FCIC is the antithesis of a formal
bureaucracy. Members of the FCIC are obscurely proud of this fact; they
recognize their group as aberrant, but are entirely convinced that
this, for them, outright *weird* behavior is nevertheless *absolutely
necessary* to get their jobs done.

FCIC regulars -- from the Secret Service, the FBI, the IRS, the
Department of Labor, the offices of federal attorneys, state police,
the Air Force, from military intelligence -- often attend meetings,
held hither and thither across the country, at their own expense. The
FCIC doesn't get grants. It doesn't charge membership fees. It
doesn't have a boss. It has no headquarters -- just a mail drop in
Washington DC, at the Fraud Division of the Secret Service. It doesn't
have a budget. It doesn't have schedules. It meets three times a year
-- sort of. Sometimes it issues publications, but the FCIC has no
regular publisher, no treasurer, not even a secretary. There are no
minutes of FCIC meetings. Non-federal people are considered
"non-voting members," but there's not much in the way of elections.
There are no badges, lapel pins or certificates of membership.
Everyone is on a firstname basis. There are about forty of them.
Nobody knows how many, exactly. People come, people go -- sometimes
people "go" formally but still hang around anyway. Nobody has ever
exactly figured out what "membership" of this "Committee" actually
entails.

Strange as this may seem to some, to anyone familiar with the social
world of computing, the "organization" of the FCIC is very recognizable.

For years now, economists and management theorists have speculated
that the tidal wave of the information revolution would destroy rigid,
pyramidal bureaucracies, where everything is topdown and centrally
controlled. Highly trained "employees" would take on much greater
autonomy, being self-starting, and self-motivating, moving from place
to place, task to task, with great speed and fluidity. "Ad-hocracy"
would rule, with groups of people spontaneously knitting together
across organizational lines, tackling the problem at hand, applying
intense computer-aided expertise to it, and then vanishing whence they
came.

This is more or less what has actually happened in the world of
federal computer investigation. With the conspicuous exception of the
phone companies, which are after all over a hundred years old,
practically *every* organization that plays any important role in this
book functions just like the FCIC. The Chicago Task Force, the
Arizona Racketeering Unit, the Legion of Doom, the Phrack crowd, the
Electronic Frontier Foundation -- they *all* look and act like "tiger
teams" or "user's groups." They are all electronic ad-hocracies
leaping up spontaneously to attempt to meet a need.

Some are police. Some are, by strict definition, criminals. Some
are political interest-groups. But every single group has that same
quality of apparent spontaneity -- "Hey, gang! My uncle's got a barn
-- let's put on a show!"

Every one of these groups is embarrassed by this "amateurism," and,
for the sake of their public image in a world of non-computer people,
they all attempt to look as stern and formal and impressive as
possible. These electronic frontier-dwellers resemble groups of
nineteenth-century pioneers hankering after the respectability of
statehood. There are however, two crucial differences in the
historical experience of these "pioneers" of the nineteeth and
twenty-first centuries.

First, powerful information technology *does* play into the hands of
small, fluid, loosely organized groups. There have always been
"pioneers," "hobbyists," "amateurs," "dilettantes," "volunteers,"
"movements," "users' groups" and "blue-ribbon panels of experts"
around. But a group of this kind -- when technically equipped to ship
huge amounts of specialized information, at lightning speed, to its
members, to government, and to the press -- is simply a different kind
of animal. It's like the difference between an eel and an electric
eel.

The second crucial change is that American society is currently in a
state approaching permanent technological revolution. In the world of
computers particularly, it is practically impossible to *ever* stop
being a "pioneer," unless you either drop dead or deliberately jump
off the bus. The scene has never slowed down enough to become
well-institutionalized. And after twenty, thirty, forty years the
"computer revolution" continues to spread, to permeate new corners of
society. Anything that really works is already obsolete.

If you spend your entire working life as a "pioneer," the word
"pioneer" begins to lose its meaning. Your way of life looks less and
less like an introduction to "something else" more stable and
organized, and more and more like *just the way things are.* A
"permanent revolution" is really a contradiction in terms. If
"turmoil" lasts long enough, it simply becomes *a new kind of society*
-- still the same game of history, but new players, new rules. Apply
this to the world of late twentieth-century law enforcement, and the
implications are novel and puzzling indeed. Any bureaucratic rulebook
you write about computer crime will be flawed when you write it, and
almost an antique by the time it sees print. The fluidity and fast
reactions of the FCIC give them a great advantage in this regard,
which explains their success. Even with the best will in the world
(which it does not, in fact, possess) it is impossible for an
organization the size of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to
get up to speed on the theory and practice of computer crime. If they
tried to train all their agents to do this, it would be *suicidal,* as
they would *never be able to do anything else.*

The FBI does try to train its agents in the basics of electronic
crime, at their base in Quantico, Virginia. And the Secret Service,
along with many other law enforcement groups, runs quite successful and
well-attended training courses on wire fraud, business crime, and
computer intrusion at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center
(FLETC, pronounced "fletsy") in Glynco, Georgia. But the best efforts
of these bureaucracies does not remove the absolute need for a
"cutting-edge mess" like the FCIC.

For you see -- the members of FCIC *are* the trainers of the rest of
law enforcement. Practically and literally speaking, they are the
Glynco computer crime faculty by another name. If the FCIC went over a
cliff on a bus, the U.S. law enforcement community would be rendered
deaf dumb and blind in the world of computer crime, and would swiftly
feel a desperate need to reinvent them. And this is no time to go
starting from scratch.

On June 11, 1991, I once again arrived in Phoenix, Arizona, for the
latest meeting of the Federal Computer Investigations Committee. This
was more or less the twentieth meeting of this stellar group. The
count was uncertain, since nobody could figure out whether to include
the meetings of "the Colluquy," which is what the FCIC was called in
the mid-1980s before it had even managed to obtain the dignity of its
own acronym.

Since my last visit to Arizona, in May, the local AzScam bribery
scandal had resolved itself in a general muddle of humiliation. The
Phoenix chief of police, whose agents had videotaped nine state
legislators up to no good, had resigned his office in a tussle with the
Phoenix city council over the propriety of his undercover operations.

The Phoenix Chief could now join Gail Thackeray and eleven of her
closest associates in the shared experience of politically motivated
unemployment. As of June, resignations were still continuing at the
Arizona Attorney General's office, which could be interpreted as either
a New Broom Sweeping Clean or a Night of the Long Knives Part II,
depending on your point of view.

The meeting of FCIC was held at the Scottsdale Hilton Resort.
Scottsdale is a wealthy suburb of Phoenix, known as "Scottsdull" to
scoffing local trendies, but well-equipped with posh shoppingmalls and
manicured lawns, while conspicuously undersupplied with homeless
derelicts. The Scottsdale Hilton Resort was a sprawling hotel in
postmodern crypto-Southwestern style. It featured a "mission bell
tower" plated in turquoise tile and vaguely resembling a Saudi minaret.

Inside it was all barbarically striped Santa Fe Style decor. There
was a health spa downstairs and a large oddly-shaped pool in the patio.
A poolside umbrella-stand offered Ben and Jerry's politically correct
Peace Pops.

I registered as a member of FCIC, attaining a handy discount rate,
then went in search of the Feds. Sure enough, at the back of the hotel
grounds came the unmistakable sound of Gail Thackeray holding forth.

Since I had also attended the Computers Freedom and Privacy
conference (about which more later), this was the second time I had seen
Thackeray in a group of her law enforcement colleagues. Once again I
was struck by how simply pleased they seemed to see her. It was
natural that she'd get *some* attention, as Gail was one of two women
in a group of some thirty men; but there was a lot more to it than that.

Gail Thackeray personifies the social glue of the FCIC. They could
give a damn about her losing her job with the Attorney General. They
were sorry about it, of course, but hell, they'd all lost jobs. If
they were the kind of guys who liked steady boring jobs, they would
never have gotten into computer work in the first place.

I wandered into her circle and was immediately introduced to five
strangers. The conditions of my visit at FCIC were reviewed. I would
not quote anyone directly. I would not tie opinions expressed to the
agencies of the attendees. I would not (a purely hypothetical example)
report the conversation of a guy from the Secret Service talking quite
civilly to a guy from the FBI, as these two agencies *never* talk to
each other, and the IRS (also present, also hypothetical) *never talks
to anybody.*

Worse yet, I was forbidden to attend the first conference. And I
didn't. I have no idea what the FCIC was up to behind closed doors
that afternoon. I rather suspect that they were engaging in a frank and
thorough confession of their errors, goof-ups and blunders, as this has
been a feature of every FCIC meeting since their legendary Memphis beer
bust of 1986. Perhaps the single greatest attraction of FCIC is that
it is a place where you can go, let your hair down, and completely
level with people who actually comprehend what you are talking about.
Not only do they understand you, but they *really pay attention,* they
are *grateful for your insights,* and they *forgive you,* which in nine
cases out of ten is something even your boss can't do, because as soon
as you start talking "ROM," "BBS," or "T-1 trunk," his eyes glaze over.
I had nothing much to do that afternoon. The FCIC were beavering away
in their conference room. Doors were firmly closed, windows too dark
to peer through. I wondered what a real hacker, a computer intruder,
would do at a meeting like this.

The answer came at once. He would "trash" the place. Not reduce the
place to trash in some orgy of vandalism; that's not the use of the
term in the hacker milieu. No, he would quietly *empty the trash
baskets* and silently raid any valuable data indiscreetly thrown away.

Journalists have been known to do this. (Journalists hunting
information have been known to do almost every single unethical thing
that hackers have ever done. They also throw in a few awful techniques
all their own.) The legality of `trashing' is somewhat dubious but it
is not in fact flagrantly illegal. It was, however, absurd to
contemplate trashing the FCIC. These people knew all about trashing.
I wouldn't last fifteen seconds.

The idea sounded interesting, though. I'd been hearing a lot about
the practice lately. On the spur of the moment, I decided I would try
trashing the office *across the hall* from the FCIC, an area which had
nothing to do with the investigators.

The office was tiny; six chairs, a table... Nevertheless, it was
open, so I dug around in its plastic trash can.

To my utter astonishment, I came up with the torn scraps of a SPRINT
long-distance phone bill. More digging produced a bank statement and the
scraps of a hand-written letter, along with gum, cigarette ashes, candy
wrappers and a day-old-issue of USA TODAY.

The trash went back in its receptacle while the scraps of data went
into my travel bag. I detoured through the hotel souvenir shop for
some Scotch tape and went up to my room.

Coincidence or not, it was quite true. Some poor soul had, in fact,
thrown a SPRINT bill into the hotel's trash. Date May 1991, total
amount due: $252.36. Not a business phone, either, but a residential
bill, in the name of someone called Evelyn (not her real name).
Evelyn's records showed a ## PAST DUE BILL ##! Here was her
nine-digit account ID. Here was a stern computer-printed warning:
"TREAT YOUR FONCARD AS YOU WOULD ANY CREDIT CARD. TO SECURE AGAINST
FRAUD, NEVER GIVE YOUR FONCARD NUMBER OVER THE PHONE UNLESS YOU
INITIATED THE CALL. IF YOU RECEIVE SUSPICIOUS CALLS PLEASE NOTIFY
CUSTOMER SERVICE IMMEDIATELY!"

I examined my watch. Still plenty of time left for the FCIC to
carry on. I sorted out the scraps of Evelyn's SPRINT bill and
re-assembled them with fresh Scotch tape. Here was her ten-digit
FONCARD number. Didn't seem to have the ID number necessary to cause
real fraud trouble.

I did, however, have Evelyn's home phone number. And the phone
numbers for a whole crowd of Evelyn's long-distance friends and
acquaintances. In San Diego, Folsom, Redondo, Las Vegas, La Jolla,
Topeka, and Northampton Massachusetts. Even somebody in Australia!

I examined other documents. Here was a bank statement. It was
Evelyn's IRA account down at a bank in San Mateo California (total
balance $1877.20). Here was a charge-card bill for $382.64. She was
paying it off bit by bit.

Driven by motives that were completely unethical and prurient, I now
examined the handwritten notes. They had been torn fairly thoroughly,
so much so that it took me almost an entire five minutes to reassemble
them.

They were drafts of a love letter. They had been written on the
lined stationery of Evelyn's employer, a biomedical company. Probably
written at work when she should have been doing something else.

"Dear Bob," (not his real name) "I guess in everyone's life there
comes a time when hard decisions have to be made, and this is a
difficult one for me -- very upsetting. Since you haven't called me,
and I don't understand why, I can only surmise it's because you don't
want to. I thought I would have heard from you Friday. I did have a
few unusual problems with my phone and possibly you tried, I hope so.

"Robert, you asked me to `let go'..."

The first note ended. *Unusual problems with her phone?* I looked
swiftly at the next note. "Bob, not hearing from you for the whole
weekend has left me very perplexed..."

Next draft. "Dear Bob, there is so much I don't understand right
now, and I wish I did. I wish I could talk to you, but for some
unknown reason you have elected not to call -- this is so difficult for
me to understand..."

She tried again.

"Bob, Since I have always held you in such high esteem, I had every
hope that we could remain good friends, but now one essential
ingredient is missing -- respect. Your ability to discard people when
their purpose is served is appalling to me. The kindest thing you
could do for me now is to leave me alone. You are no longer welcome in
my heart or home..."

Try again.

"Bob, I wrote a very factual note to you to say how much respect I
had lost for you, by the way you treat people, me in particular, so
uncaring and cold. The kindest thing you can do for me is to leave me
alone entirely, as you are no longer welcome in my heart or home. I
would appreciate it if you could retire your debt to me as soon as
possible -- I wish no link to you in any way. Sincerely, Evelyn."

Good heavens, I thought, the bastard actually owes her money! I
turned to the next page.

"Bob: very simple. GOODBYE! No more mind games -- no more
fascination -- no more coldness -- no more respect for you! It's over
-- Finis. Evie"

There were two versions of the final brushoff letter, but they read
about the same. Maybe she hadn't sent it. The final item in my
illicit and shameful booty was an envelope addressed to "Bob" at his
home address, but it had no stamp on it and it hadn't been mailed.

Maybe she'd just been blowing off steam because her rascal boyfriend
had neglected to call her one weekend. Big deal. Maybe they'd kissed
and made up, maybe she and Bob were down at Pop's Chocolate Shop now,
sharing a malted. Sure.

Easy to find out. All I had to do was call Evelyn up. With a
half-clever story and enough brass-plated gall I could probably trick
the truth out of her. Phone-phreaks and hackers deceive people over the
phone all the time. It's called "social engineering." Social
engineering is a very common practice in the underground, and almost
magically effective. Human beings are almost always the weakest link in
computer security. The simplest way to learn Things You Are Not Meant
To Know is simply to call up and exploit the knowledgeable people.
With social engineering, you use the bits of specialized knowledge you
already have as a key, to manipulate people into believing that you are
legitimate. You can then coax, flatter, or frighten them into
revealing almost anything you want to know. Deceiving people
(especially over the phone) is easy and fun. Exploiting their
gullibility is very gratifying; it makes you feel very superior to
them. If I'd been a malicious hacker on a trashing raid, I would now
have Evelyn very much in my power. Given all this inside data, it
wouldn't take much effort at all to invent a convincing lie. If I were
ruthless enough, and jaded enough, and clever enough, this momentary
indiscretion of hers -- maybe committed in tears, who knows -- could
cause her a whole world of confusion and grief.

I didn't even have to have a *malicious* motive. Maybe I'd be "on
her side," and call up Bob instead, and anonymously threaten to break
both his kneecaps if he didn't take Evelyn out for a steak dinner
pronto. It was still profoundly *none of my business.* To have
gotten this knowledge at all was a sordid act and to use it would be
to inflict a sordid injury.

To do all these awful things would require exactly zero high-tech
expertise. All it would take was the willingness to do it and a
certain amount of bent imagination. I went back downstairs. The
hard-working FCIC, who had labored forty-five minutes over their
schedule, were through for the day, and adjourned to the hotel bar. We
all had a beer.

I had a chat with a guy about "Isis," or rather IACIS, the
International Association of Computer Investigation Specialists.
They're into "computer forensics," the techniques of picking 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
hotshots, show-offs, "cowboys."

Most of the folks in the bar had backgrounds in military
intelligence, or drugs, or homicide. It was rudely opined that
"military intelligence" was a contradiction in terms, while even the
grisly world of homicide was considered cleaner than drug enforcement.
One guy had been 'way undercover doing dope-work in Europe for four
years straight. "I'm almost recovered now," he said deadpan, with the
acid black humor that is pure cop. "Hey, now I can say *fucker*
without putting *mother* in front of it."

"In the cop world," another guy said earnestly, "everything is good
and bad, black and white. In the computer world everything is gray."

One guy -- a founder of the FCIC, who'd been with the group since it
was just the Colluquy -- described his own introduction to the field.
He'd been a Washington DC homicide guy called in on a "hacker" case.
From the word "hacker," he naturally assumed he was on the trail of a
knife-wielding marauder, and went to the computer center expecting
blood and a body. When he finally figured out what was happening there
(after loudly demanding, in vain, that the programmers "speak
English"), he called headquarters and told them he was clueless about
computers. They told him nobody else knew diddly either, and to get
the hell back to work.

So, he said, he had proceeded by comparisons. By analogy. By
metaphor. "Somebody broke in to your computer, huh?" Breaking and
entering; I can understand that. How'd he get in? "Over the
phonelines." Harassing phone-calls, I can understand that! What we
need here is a tap and a trace!

It worked. It was better than nothing. And it worked a lot faster
when he got hold of another cop who'd done something similar. And then
the two of them got another, and another, and pretty soon the Colluquy
was a happening thing. It helped a lot that everybody seemed to know
Carlton Fitzpatrick, the data-processing trainer in Glynco.

The ice broke big-time in Memphis in '86. The Colluquy had
attracted a bunch of new guys -- Secret Service, FBI, military, other
feds, heavy guys. Nobody wanted to tell anybody anything. They
suspected that if word got back to the home office they'd all be fired.
They passed an uncomfortably guarded afternoon.

The formalities got them nowhere. But after the formal session was
over, the organizers brought in a case of beer. As soon as the
participants knocked it off with the bureaucratic ranks and
turf-fighting, everything changed. "I bared my soul," one veteran
reminisced proudly. By nightfall they were building pyramids of empty
beer-cans and doing everything but composing a team fight song.

FCIC were not the only computer crime people around. There was
DATTA (District Attorneys' Technology Theft Association), though they
mostly specialized in chip theft, intellectual property, and
black-market cases. There was HTCIA (High Tech Computer Investigators
Association), also out in Silicon Valley, a year older than FCIC and
featuring brilliant people like Donald Ingraham. There was LEETAC (Law
Enforcement Electronic Technology Assistance Committee) in Florida,
and 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 lot about
"bad guys" -- might be lurking on PC #47 or #123 and distributing his
ill doings onto some dupe's "personal" machine in another office -- or
another floor -- or, quite possibly, two or three miles away! Or,
conceivably, the evidence might be "data-striped" -- split up into
meaningless slivers stored, one by one, on a whole crowd of different
disk drives.

The lecturer challenged us for solutions. I for one was utterly
clueless. As far as I could figure, the Cossacks were at the gate;
there were probably more disks in this single building than were seized
during the entirety of Operation Sundevil.

"Inside informant," somebody said. Right. There's always the human
angle, something easy to forget when contemplating the arcane recesses
of high technology. Cops are skilled at getting people to talk, and
computer people, given a chair and some sustained attention, will talk
about their computers till their throats go raw. There's a case on
record of a single question -- "How'd you do it?" -- eliciting a
forty-five-minute videotaped confession from a computer criminal who
not only completely incriminated himself but drew helpful diagrams.

Computer people talk. Hackers *brag.* Phonephreaks talk
*pathologically* -- why else are they stealing phone-codes, if not to
natter for ten hours straight to their friends on an opposite seaboard?
Computer-literate people do in fact possess an arsenal of nifty gadgets
and techniques that would allow them to conceal all kinds of exotic
skullduggery, and if they could only *shut up* about it, they could
probably get away with all manner of amazing information-crimes. But
that's just not how it works -- or at least, that's not how it's worked
*so far.*

Most every phone-phreak ever busted has swiftly implicated his
mentors, his disciples, and his friends. Most every white-collar
computer-criminal, smugly convinced that his clever scheme is
bulletproof, swiftly learns otherwise when, for the first time in his
life, an actual no-kidding policeman leans over, grabs the front of his
shirt, looks him right in the eye and says: "All right, *asshole* --
you and me are going downtown!" All the hardware in the world will
not insulate your nerves from these actual real-life sensations of
terror and guilt.

Cops know ways to get from point A to point Z without thumbing
through every letter in some smart-ass bad-guy's alphabet. Cops know
how to cut to the chase. Cops know a lot of things other people don't
know.

Hackers know a lot of things other people don't know, too. Hackers
know, for instance, how to sneak into your computer through the
phone-lines. But cops can show up *right on your doorstep* and carry
off *you* and your computer in separate steel boxes. A cop
interested in hackers can grab them and grill them. A hacker
interested in cops has to depend on hearsay, underground legends, and
what cops are willing to publicly reveal. And the Secret Service
didn't get named "the *Secret* Service" because they blab a lot. Some
people, our lecturer informed us, were under the mistaken impression
that it was "impossible" to tap a fiber-optic line. Well, he
announced, he and his son had just whipped up a fiber-optic tap in his
workshop at home. He passed it around the audience, along with a
circuit-covered LAN plug-in card so we'd all recognize one if we saw it
on a case. We all had a look.

The tap was a classic "Goofy Prototype" -- a thumb-length rounded
metal cylinder with a pair of plastic brackets on it. From one end
dangled three thin black cables, each of which ended in a tiny black
plastic cap. When you plucked the safety-cap off the end of a cable,
you could see the glass fiber -- no thicker than a pinhole.

Our lecturer informed us that the metal cylinder was a "wavelength
division multiplexer." Apparently, what one did was to cut the
fiber-optic cable, insert two of the legs into the cut to complete the
network again, and then read any passing data on the line by hooking up
the third leg to some kind of monitor. Sounded simple enough. I
wondered why nobody had thought of it before. I also wondered whether
this guy's son back at the workshop had any teenage friends.

We had a break. The guy sitting next to me was wearing a giveaway
baseball cap advertising the Uzi submachine gun. We had a desultory
chat about the merits of Uzis. Long a favorite of the Secret Service,
it seems Uzis went out of fashion with the advent of the Persian Gulf
War, our Arab allies taking some offense at Americans toting Israeli
weapons. Besides, I was informed by another expert, Uzis jam. The
equivalent weapon of choice today is the Heckler & Koch, manufactured
in Germany.

The guy with the Uzi cap was a forensic photographer. He also did a
lot of photographic surveillance work in computer crime cases. He
used to, that is, until the firings in Phoenix. He was now a private
investigator and, with his wife, ran a photography salon specializing
in weddings and portrait photos. At -- one must repeat -- a
considerable rise in income. He was still FCIC. If you were FCIC, and
you needed to talk to an expert about forensic photography, well, there
he was, willing and able. If he hadn't shown up, people would have
missed him.

Our lecturer had raised the point that preliminary investigation of a
computer system is vital before any seizure is undertaken. It's vital
to understand how many machines are in there, what kinds there are,
what kind of operating system they use, how many people use them,
where the actual data itself is stored. To simply barge into an office
demanding "all the computers" is a recipe for swift disaster.

This entails some discreet inquiries beforehand. In fact, what it
entails is basically undercover work. An intelligence operation.
*Spying,* not to put too fine a point on it.

In a chat after the lecture, I asked an attendee whether "trashing"
might work.

I received a swift briefing on the theory and practice of "trash
covers." Police "trash covers," like "mail covers" or like wiretaps,
require the agreement of a judge. This obtained, the "trashing" work
of cops is just like that of hackers, only more so and much better
organized. So much so, I was informed, that mobsters in Phoenix make
extensive use of locked garbage cans picked up by a specialty
high-security trash company.

In one case, a tiger team of Arizona cops had trashed a local
residence for four months. Every week they showed up on the municipal
garbage truck, disguised as garbagemen, and carried the contents of the
suspect cans off to a shade tree, where they combed through the garbage
-- a messy task, especially considering that one of the occupants was
undergoing kidney dialysis. All useful documents were cleaned, dried
and examined. A discarded typewriter-ribbon was an especially
valuable source of data, as its long 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 carsmashing bombs beneath the
street.

Lately, manhole covers have seen more and more criminal exploitation,
especially in New York City. Recently, a telco in New York City
discovered that a cable television service had been sneaking into telco
manholes and installing cable service alongside the phone-lines -*without paying royalties.* New York companies have also suffered a
general plague of (a) underground copper cable theft; (b) dumping of
garbage, including toxic waste, and (c) hasty dumping of murder victims.

Industry complaints reached the ears of an innovative New England
industrial-security company, and the result was a new product known as
"the Intimidator," a thick titanium-steel bolt with a precisely
machined head that requires a special device to unscrew. All these
"keys" have registered serial numbers kept on file with the
manufacturer. There are now some thousands of these "Intimidator" bolts
being sunk into American pavements wherever our President passes, like
some macabre parody of strewn roses. They are also spreading as fast
as steel dandelions around US military bases and many centers of
private industry.

Quite likely it has never occurred to you to peer under a manhole
cover, perhaps climb down and walk around down there with a flashlight,
just to see what it's like. Formally speaking, this might be
trespassing, but if you didn't hurt anything, and didn't make an
absolute habit of it, nobody would really care. The freedom to sneak
under manholes was likely a freedom you never intended to exercise.

You now are rather less likely to have that freedom at all. You may
never even have missed it until you read about it here, but if you're
in New York City it's gone, and elsewhere it's likely going. This is
one of the things that crime, and the reaction to crime, does to us.

The tenor of the meeting now changed as the Electronic Frontier
Foundation arrived. The EFF, whose personnel and history will be
examined in detail in the next chapter, are a pioneering civil
liberties group who arose in direct response to the Hacker Crackdown of
1990.

Now Mitchell Kapor, the Foundation's president, and Michael Godwin,
its chief attorney, were confronting federal law enforcement *mano a
mano* for the first time ever. Ever alert to the manifold uses of
publicity, Mitch Kapor and Mike Godwin had brought their own journalist
in tow: Robert Draper, from Austin, whose recent wellreceived book
about ROLLING STONE magazine was still on the stands. Draper was on
assignment for TEXAS MONTHLY.

The Steve Jackson/EFF civil lawsuit against the Chicago Computer
Fraud and Abuse Task Force was a matter of considerable regional
interest in Texas. There were now two Austinite journalists here on the
case. In fact, counting Godwin (a former Austinite and former
journalist) there were three of us. Lunch was like Old Home Week.

Later, I took Draper up to my hotel room. We had a long frank talk
about the case, networking earnestly like a miniature freelance-journo
version of the FCIC: privately confessing the numerous blunders of
journalists covering the story, and trying hard to figure out who was
who and what the hell was really going on out there. I showed Draper
everything I had dug out of the Hilton trashcan. We pondered the
ethics of "trashing" for a while, and agreed that they were dismal. We
also agreed that finding a SPRINT bill on your first time out was a
heck of a coincidence.

First I'd "trashed" -- and now, mere hours later, I'd bragged to
someone else. Having entered the lifestyle of hackerdom, I was now,
unsurprisingly, following its logic. Having discovered something
remarkable through a surreptitious action, I of course *had* to
"brag," and to drag the passing Draper into my iniquities. I felt I
needed a witness. Otherwise nobody would have believed what I'd
discovered...

Back at the meeting, Thackeray cordially, if rather tentatively,
introduced Kapor and Godwin to her colleagues. Papers were
distributed. Kapor took center stage. The brilliant Bostonian
high-tech entrepreneur, normally the hawk in his own administration and
quite an effective public speaker, seemed visibly nervous, and frankly
admitted as much. He began by saying he consided computer intrusion
to be morally wrong, and that the EFF was not a "hacker defense fund,"
despite what had appeared in print. Kapor chatted a bit about the
basic motivations of his group, emphasizing their good faith and
willingness to listen and seek common ground with law enforcement -when, er, possible.

Then, at Godwin's urging, Kapor suddenly remarked that EFF's own
Internet machine had been "hacked" recently, and that EFF did not
consider this incident amusing.

After this surprising confession, things began to loosen up quite
rapidly. Soon Kapor was fielding questions, parrying objections,
challenging definitions, and juggling paradigms with something akin to
his usual gusto.

Kapor seemed to score quite an effect with his shrewd and skeptical
analysis of the merits of telco "Caller-ID" services. (On this topic,
FCIC and EFF have never been at loggerheads, and have no particular
established earthworks to defend.) Caller-ID has generally been
promoted as a privacy service for consumers, a presentation Kapor
described as a "smokescreen," the real point of Caller-ID being to
*allow corporate customers to build extensive commercial databases on
everybody who phones or faxes them.* Clearly, few people in the room
had considered this possibility, except perhaps for two late-arrivals
from US WEST RBOC security, who chuckled nervously.

Mike Godwin then made an extensive presentation on "Civil Liberties
Implications of Computer Searches and Seizures." Now, at last, we were
getting to the real nitty-gritty here, real political horse-trading.
The audience listened with close attention, angry mutters rising
occasionally: "He's trying to teach us our jobs!" "We've been
thinking about this for years! We think about these issues every day!"
"If I didn't seize the works, I'd be sued by the guy's victims!"
"I'm violating the law if I leave ten thousand disks full of illegal
*pirated software* and *stolen codes!*" "It's our job to make sure
people don't trash the Constitution -- we're the *defenders* of the
Constitution!" "We seize stuff when we know it will be forfeited
anyway as restitution for the victim!"

"If it's forfeitable, then don't get a search warrant, get a
forfeiture warrant," Godwin suggested coolly. He further remarked
that most suspects in computer crime don't *want* to see their
computers vanish out the door, headed God knew where, for who knows how
long. They might not mind a search, even an extensive search, but they
want their machines searched on-site. "Are they gonna feed us?"
somebody asked sourly. "How about if you take copies of the data?"
Godwin parried.

"That'll never stand up in court." "Okay, you make copies, give
*them* the copies, and take the originals."

Hmmm.

Godwin championed bulletin board systems as repositories of First
Amendment protected free speech. He complained that federal 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 simulationgaming books. Take his Nintendo Game-Boy and
his Pac-Man arcade game. Take his answering machine, take his
telephone out of the wall. Take anything remotely suspicious.

Godwin pointed out that most "hackers" are not, in fact, clever
genius hobbyists. Quite a few are crooks and grifters who don't have
much in the way of technical sophistication; just some rule-of-thumb
rip-off techniques. The same goes for most 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) -- there's the Nautilus machines, the martial arts, the
survival skills...

The eighteen federal agencies who maintain onsite academies at FLETC
employ a wide variety of specialized law enforcement units, some of
them rather arcane. There's Border Patrol, IRS Criminal Investigation
Division, Park Service, Fish and Wildlife, Customs, Immigration, Secret
Service and the Treasury's uniformed subdivisions... If you're a
federal cop and you don't work for the FBI, you train at FLETC. This
includes people as apparently obscure as the agents of the Railroad
Retirement Board Inspector General. Or the Tennessee Valley Authority
Police, who are in fact federal police officers, and can and do arrest
criminals on the federal property of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

And then there are the computer crime people. All sorts, all
backgrounds. Mr. Fitzpatrick is not jealous of his specialized
knowledge. Cops all over, in every branch of service, may feel a need
to learn what he can teach. Backgrounds don't matter much. Fitzpatrick
himself was originally a Border Patrol veteran, then became a Border
Patrol instructor at FLETC. His Spanish is still fluent -- but he
found himself strangely fascinated when the first computers showed up
at the Training Center. Fitzpatrick did have a background in electrical
engineering, and though he never considered himself a computer hacker,
he somehow found himself writing useful little programs for this new and
promising gizmo.

He began looking into the general subject of computers and crime,
reading Donn Parker's books and articles, keeping an ear cocked for
war stories, useful insights from the field, the up-and-coming people
of the local computer crime and 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 phoneservice to stay alive. The place was not merely
messy and dirty, but in a state of psychotic disorder. Powered by some
weird mix of culture shock, computer addiction, and amphetamines, the
suspect had in fact been sitting in front of his computer for a day and
a half straight, with snacks and drugs at hand on the edge of his desk
and a chamber-pot under his chair.

Word about stuff like this gets around in the hacker-tracker
community.

Carlton Fitzpatrick takes me for a guided tour by car around the
FLETC grounds. One of our first sights is the biggest indoor firing
range in the world. There are federal trainees in there, Fitzpatrick
assures me politely, blasting away with a wide variety of automatic
weapons: Uzis, Glocks, AK-47s... He's willing to take me inside. I
tell him I'm sure that's really interesting, but I'd rather see his
computers. Carlton Fitzpatrick seems quite surprised and pleased. I'm
apparently the first journalist he's ever seen who has turned down the
shooting gallery in favor of microchips.

Our next stop is a favorite with touring Congressmen: the three-mile
long FLETC driving range. Here trainees of the Driver & Marine
Division are taught high-speed pursuit skills, setting and breaking
road-blocks, diplomatic security driving for VIP limousines... A
favorite FLETC pastime is to strap a passing Senator into the passenger
seat beside a Driver & Marine trainer, hit a hundred miles an hour,
then take it right into "the skid pan," a section of greased track
where two tons of Detroit iron can whip and spin like a hockey puck.

Cars don't fare well at FLETC. First they're rifled again and
again for search practice. Then they do 25,000 miles of high-speed
pursuit training; they get about seventy miles per set of steel-belted
radials. Then it's off to the skid pan, where sometimes they roll and
tumble headlong in the grease. When they're sufficiently
grease-stained, dented, and creaky, they're sent to the roadblock
unit, where they're battered without pity. And finally then they're
sacrificed to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, whose
trainees learn the ins and outs of car-bomb work by blowing them into
smoking wreckage.

There's a railroad box-car on the FLETC grounds, and a large grounded
boat, and a propless plane; all training-grounds for searches. The
plane sits forlornly on a patch of weedy tarmac next to an eerie
blockhouse known as the "ninja compound," where anti-terrorism
specialists practice hostage rescues. As I gaze on this creepy paragon
of modern low-intensity warfare, my nerves are jangled by a sudden
staccato outburst of automatic weapons fire, somewhere in the woods to
my right. "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 nerveshredded
crowd of civilians, some of whom may have just lost a loved one, some
of whom may be murderers -- quite possibly both at once.

A dummy plays the corpse. The roles of the bereaved, the morbidly
curious, and the homicidal are played, for pay, by local Georgians:
waitresses, musicians, most anybody who needs to moonlight and can
learn a script. These people, some of whom are FLETC regulars year
after year, must surely have one of the strangest jobs in the world.

Something about the scene: "normal" people in a weird situation,
standing around talking in bright Georgia sunshine, unsuccessfully
pretending that something dreadful has gone on, while a dummy lies
inside on faked bloodstains... While behind this weird masquerade,
like a nested set of Russian dolls, are grim future realities of real
death, real violence, real murders of real people, that these young
agents will really investigate, many times during their careers...
Over and over... Will those anticipated murders look like this, feel
like this -- not as "real" as these amateur actors are trying to make
it seem, but both as "real," and as numbingly unreal, as watching fake
people standing around on a fake lawn? Something about this scene
unhinges me. It seems nightmarish to me, Kafkaesque. I simply don't
know how to take it; my head is turned around; I don't know whether to
laugh, cry, or just shudder.

When the tour is over, Carlton Fitzpatrick and I talk about
computers. For the first time cyberspace seems like quite a comfortable
place. It seems very real to me suddenly, a place where I know what
I'm talking about, a place I'm used to. It's real. "Real." Whatever.

Carlton Fitzpatrick is the only person I've met in cyberspace
circles who is happy with his present equipment. He's got a 5 Meg RAM
PC with a 112 meg hard disk; a 660 meg's on the way. He's got a Compaq
386 desktop, and a Zenith 386 laptop with 120 meg. Down the hall is a
NEC Multi-Sync 2A with a CD-ROM drive and a 9600 baud modem with four
com-lines. There's a training minicomputer, and a 10-meg local mini
just for the Center, and a lab-full of student PC clones and
half-a-dozen Macs or so. There's a Data General MV 2500 with 8 meg on
board and a 370 meg disk.

Fitzpatrick plans to run a UNIX board on the Data General when he's
finished beta-testing the software for it, which he wrote himself.
It'll have E-mail features, massive files on all manner of computer
crime and investigation procedures, and will follow the
computer-security specifics of the Department of Defense "Orange Book."
He thinks it will be the biggest BBS in the federal government. Will
it have *Phrack* on it? I ask wryly.

Sure, he tells me. *Phrack,* *TAP,* *Computer Underground Digest,*
all that stuff. With proper disclaimers, of course.

I ask him if he plans to be the sysop. Running a system that size
is very time-consuming, and Fitzpatrick teaches two three-hour courses
every day.

No, he says seriously, FLETC has to get its money worth out of the
instructors. He thinks he can get a local volunteer to do it, a
high-school student. He says a bit more, something I think about an
Eagle Scout law enforcement liaison program, but my mind has rocketed
off in disbelief.

"You're going to put a *teenager* in charge of a federal security
BBS?" I'm speechless. It hasn't escaped my notice that the FLETC
Financial Fraud Institute is the *ultimate* hacker-trashing target;
there is stuff in here, stuff of such utter and consummate cool by
every standard of the digital underground... I imagine the hackers of
my acquaintance, fainting dead-away from forbidden-knowledge
greed-fits, at the mere prospect of cracking the superultra top-secret
computers used to train the Secret Service in computer crime...

"Uhm, Carlton," I babble, "I'm sure he's a really nice kid and all,
but that's a terrible temptation to set in front of somebody who's, you
know, into computers and just starting out..."

"Yeah," he says, "that did occur to me." For the first time I begin
to suspect that he's pulling my leg.

He seems proudest when he shows me an ongoing project called JICC,
Joint Intelligence Control Council. It's based on the services
provided by EPIC, the El Paso Intelligence Center, which supplies data
and intelligence to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Customs
Service, the Coast Guard, and the state police of the four southern
border states. Certain EPIC files can now be accessed by
drug-enforcement police of Central America, South America and the
Caribbean, who can also trade information among themselves. Using a
telecom program called "White Hat," written by two brothers named Lopez
from the Dominican Republic, police can now network internationally on
inexpensive PCs. Carlton Fitzpatrick is teaching a class of drug-war
agents from the Third World, and he's very proud of their progress.
Perhaps soon the sophisticated smuggling networks of the Medellin
Cartel will be matched by a sophisticated computer network of the
Medellin Cartel's sworn enemies. They'll track boats, track
contraband, track the international drug-lords who now leap over borders
with great ease, defeating the police through the clever use of
fragmented national jurisdictions.

JICC and EPIC must remain beyond the scope of this book. They seem
to me to be very large topics fraught with complications that I am not
fit to judge. I do know, however, that the international,
computer-assisted networking of police, across national boundaries, is
something that Carlton Fitzpatrick considers very important, a
harbinger of a desirable future. I also know that networks by their
nature ignore physical boundaries. And I also know that where you put
communications you put a community, and that when those communities
become self-aware they will fight to preserve themselves and to expand
their influence. I make no judgements whether this is good or bad.
It's just cyberspace; it's just the way things are.

I asked Carlton Fitzpatrick what advice he would have for a
twenty-year-old who wanted to shine someday in the world of electronic
law enforcement.

He told me that the number one rule was simply not to be scared of
computers. You don't need to be an obsessive "computer weenie," but
you mustn't be buffaloed just because some machine looks fancy. The
advantages computers give smart crooks are matched by the advantages
they give smart cops. Cops in the future will have to enforce the law
"with their heads, not their holsters." Today you can make good cases
without ever leaving your office. In the future, cops who resist the
computer revolution will never get far beyond walking a beat.

I asked Carlton Fitzpatrick if he had some single message for the
public; some single thing that he would most like the American public
to know about his work.

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

The Civil Libertarians
**********************

NuPrometheus + FBI = Grateful Dead / Whole Earth + Computer
Revolution = WELL / Phiber Runs Underground and Acid Spikes the
Well / The Trial of Knight Lightning / Shadowhawk Plummets to
Earth / Kyrie in the Confessional / $79,499 / A Scholar
Investigates / Computers, Freedom, and Privacy

The story of the Hacker Crackdown, as we have followed it thus far,
has been technological, subcultural, criminal and legal. The story of
the Civil Libertarians, though it partakes of all those other aspects,
is profoundly and thoroughly *political.*

In 1990, the obscure, long-simmering struggle over the ownership and
nature of cyberspace became loudly and irretrievably public. People
from some of the oddest corners of American society suddenly found
themselves public figures. Some of these people found this situation
much more than they had ever bargained for. They backpedalled, and
tried to retreat back to the mandarin obscurity of their cozy
subcultural niches. This was generally to prove a mistake.

But the civil libertarians seized the day in 1990. They found
themselves organizing, propagandizing, podium-pounding, persuading,
touring, negotiating, posing for publicity photos, submitting to
interviews, squinting in the limelight as they tried a tentative, but
growingly sophisticated, buck-and-wing upon the public stage.

It's not hard to see why the civil libertarians should have this
competitive advantage.

The hackers of the digital underground are an hermetic elite.
They find it hard to make any remotely convincing case for their
actions in front of the general public. Actually, hackers roundly
despise the "ignorant" public, and have never trusted the judgement of
"the system." Hackers do propagandize, but only among themselves,
mostly in giddy, badly spelled manifestos of class warfare, youth
rebellion or naive techie utopianism. Hackers must strut and boast in
order to establish and preserve their underground reputations. But if
they speak out too loudly and publicly, they will break the fragile
surface-tension of the underground, and they will be harrassed or
arrested. Over the longer term, most hackers stumble, get busted, get
betrayed, or simply give up. As a political force, the digital
underground is hamstrung.

The telcos, for their part, are an ivory tower under protracted
seige. They have plenty of money with which to push their calculated
public image, but they waste much energy and goodwill attacking one
another with slanderous and demeaning ad campaigns. The telcos have
suffered at the hands of politicians, and, like hackers, they don't
trust the public's judgement. And this distrust may be well-founded.
Should the general public of the high-tech 1990s come to understand its
own best interests in telecommunications, that might well pose a grave
threat to the specialized technical power and authority that the telcos
have relished for over a century. The telcos do have strong
advantages: loyal employees, specialized expertise, influence in the
halls of power, tactical allies in law enforcement, and unbelievably
vast amounts of money. But politically speaking, they lack genuine
grassroots support; they simply don't seem to have many friends.

Cops know a lot of things other people don't know. But cops
willingly reveal only those aspects of their knowledge that they feel
will meet their institutional purposes and further public order. Cops
have respect, they have responsibilities, they have power in the streets
and even power in the home, but cops don't do particularly well in
limelight. When pressed, they will step out in the public gaze to
threaten bad guys, or to cajole prominent citizens, or perhaps to
sternly lecture the naive and misguided. But then they go back within
their time-honored fortress of the station-house, the courtroom and the
rule-book.

The electronic civil libertarians, however, have proven to be born
political animals. They seemed to grasp very early on the postmodern
truism that communication is power. Publicity is power. Soundbites
are power. The ability to shove one's issue onto the public agenda -and *keep it there* -- is power. Fame is power. Simple personal
fluency and eloquence can be power, if you can somehow catch the
public's eye and ear.

The civil libertarians had no monopoly on "technical power" -though they all owned computers, most were not particularly advanced
computer experts. They had a good deal of money, but nowhere near the
earthshaking wealth and the galaxy of resources possessed by telcos or
federal agencies. They had no ability to arrest people. They
carried out no phreak and hacker covert dirty-tricks.

But they really knew how to network.

Unlike the other groups in this book, the civil libertarians have
operated very much in the open, more or less right in the public
hurly-burly. They have lectured audiences galore and talked to
countless journalists, and have learned to refine their spiels.
They've kept the cameras clicking, kept those faxes humming, swapped
that email, run those photocopiers on overtime, licked envelopes and
spent small fortunes on airfare and long-distance. In an information
society, this open, overt, obvious activity has proven to be a profound
advantage.

In 1990, the civil libertarians of cyberspace assembled out of
nowhere in particular, at warp speed. This "group" (actually, a
networking gaggle of interested parties which scarcely deserves even
that loose term) has almost nothing in the way of formal organization.
Those formal civil libertarian organizations which did take an
interest in cyberspace issues, mainly the Computer Professionals for
Social Responsibility and the American Civil Liberties Union, were
carried along by events in 1990, and acted mostly as adjuncts,
underwriters or launching-pads.

The civil libertarians nevertheless enjoyed the greatest success of
any of the groups in the Crackdown of 1990. At this writing, their
future looks rosy and the political initiative is firmly in their
hands. This should be kept in mind as we study the highly unlikely
lives and lifestyles of the people who actually made this happen.

#

In June 1989, Apple Computer, Inc., of Cupertino, California, had a
problem. Someone had illicitly copied a small piece of Apple's
proprietary software, software which controlled an internal chip
driving the Macintosh screen display. This Color QuickDraw source
code was a closely guarded piece of Apple's intellectual property. Only
trusted Apple insiders were supposed to possess it.

But the "NuPrometheus League" wanted things otherwise. This person
(or persons) made several illicit copies of this source code, perhaps
as many as two dozen. He (or she, or they) then put those illicit
floppy disks into envelopes and mailed them to people all over America:
people in the computer industry who were associated with, but not
directly employed by, Apple Computer.

The NuPrometheus caper was a complex, highly ideological, and very
hacker-like crime. Prometheus, it will be recalled, stole the fire of
the Gods and gave this potent gift to the general ranks of downtrodden
mankind. A similar god-in-the-manger attitude was implied for the
corporate elite of Apple Computer, while the "Nu" Prometheus had
himself cast in the role of rebel demigod. The illicitly copied data
was given away for free.

The new Prometheus, whoever he was, escaped the fate of the ancient
Greek Prometheus, who was chained to a rock for centuries by the
vengeful gods while an eagle tore and ate his liver. On the other
hand, NuPrometheus chickened out somewhat by comparison with his role
model. The small chunk of Color QuickDraw code he had filched and
replicated was more or less useless to Apple's industrial rivals (or,
in fact, to anyone else). Instead of giving fire to mankind, it was
more as if NuPrometheus had photocopied the schematics for part of a
Bic lighter. The act was not a genuine work of industrial espionage. It
was best interpreted as a symbolic, deliberate slap in the face for the
Apple corporate hierarchy.

Apple's internal struggles were well-known in the industry. Apple's
founders, Jobs and Wozniak, had both taken their leave long since.
Their raucous core of senior employees had been a barnstorming crew of
1960s Californians, many of them markedly less than happy with the new
button-down multimillion dollar regime at Apple. Many of the
programmers and developers who had invented the Macintosh model in the
early 1980s had also taken their leave of the company. It was they,
not the current masters of Apple's corporate fate, who had invented the
stolen Color QuickDraw code. The NuPrometheus stunt was
well-calculated to wound company morale.

Apple called the FBI. The Bureau takes an interest in high-profile
intellectual-property theft cases, industrial espionage and theft of
trade secrets. These were likely the right people to call, and rumor
has it that the entities responsible were in fact discovered by the
FBI, and then quietly squelched by Apple management. NuPrometheus was
never publicly charged with a crime, or prosecuted, or jailed. But
there were no further illicit releases of Macintosh internal software.
Eventually the painful issue of NuPrometheus was allowed to fade.

In the meantime, however, a large number of puzzled bystanders found
themselves entertaining surprise guests from the FBI.

One of these people was John Perry Barlow. Barlow is a most
unusual man, difficult to describe in conventional terms. He is
perhaps best known as a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, for he
composed lyrics for "Hell in a Bucket," "Picasso Moon," "Mexicali
Blues," "I Need a Miracle," and many more; he has been writing for the
band since 1970.

Before we tackle the vexing question as to why a rock lyricist
should be interviewed by the FBI in a computer crime case, it might be
well to say a word or two about the Grateful Dead. The Grateful Dead
are perhaps the most successful and long-lasting of the numerous
cultural emanations from the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco,
in the glory days of Movement politics and lysergic transcendance.
The Grateful Dead are a nexus, a veritable whirlwind, of applique
decals, psychedelic vans, tie-dyed T-shirts, earth-color denim,
frenzied dancing and open and unashamed drug use. The symbols, and the
realities, of Californian freak power surround the Grateful Dead like
knotted macrame.

The Grateful Dead and their thousands of Deadhead devotees are
radical Bohemians. This much is widely understood. Exactly what
this implies in the 1990s is rather more problematic.

The Grateful Dead are among the world's most popular and wealthy
entertainers: number 20, according to *Forbes* magazine, right between
M.C. Hammer and Sean Connery. In 1990, this jeans-clad group of
purported raffish outcasts earned seventeen million dollars. They have
been earning sums much along this line for quite some time now.

And while the Dead are not investment bankers or three-piece-suit
tax specialists -- they are, in point of fact, hippie musicians -- this
money has not been squandered in senseless Bohemian excess. The Dead
have been quietly active for many years, funding various worthy
activities in their extensive and widespread cultural community.

The Grateful Dead are not conventional players in the American power
establishment. They nevertheless are something of a force to be
reckoned with. They have a lot of money and a lot of friends in many
places, both likely and unlikely.

The Dead may be known for back-to-the-earth environmentalist
rhetoric, but this hardly makes them anti-technological Luddites. On
the contrary, like most rock musicians, the Grateful Dead have spent
their entire adult lives in the company of complex electronic
equipment. They have funds to burn on any sophisticated tool and toy
that might happen to catch their fancy. And their fancy is quite
extensive.

The Deadhead community boasts any number of recording engineers,
lighting experts, rock video mavens, electronic technicians of all
descriptions. And the drift goes both ways. Steve Wozniak, Apple's
co-founder, used to throw rock festivals. Silicon Valley rocks out.

These are the 1990s, not the 1960s. Today, for a surprising number
of people all over America, the supposed dividing line between Bohemian
and technician simply no longer exists. People of this sort may have a
set of windchimes and a dog with a knotted kerchief 'round its neck,
but they're also quite likely to own a multimegabyte Macintosh running
MIDI synthesizer software and trippy fractal simulations. These days,
even Timothy Leary himself, prophet of LSD, does virtual-reality
computer-graphics demos in his lecture tours.

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

Barlow describes himself as a "techno-crank." A vague term like
"social activist" might not be far from the mark, either. But Barlow
might be better described as a "poet" -- if one keeps in mind Percy
Shelley's archaic definition of poets as "unacknowledged legislators of
the world."

Barlow once made a stab at acknowledged legislator status. In 1987,
he narrowly missed the Republican nomination for a seat in the Wyoming
State Senate. Barlow is a Wyoming native, the third-generation scion of
a well-to-do cattle-ranching family. He is in his early forties,
married and the father of three daughters.

Barlow is not much troubled by other people's narrow notions of
consistency. In the late 1980s, this Republican rock lyricist cattle
rancher sold his ranch and became a computer telecommunications devotee.

The free-spirited Barlow made this transition with ease. He
genuinely enjoyed computers. With a beep of his modem, he leapt from
small-town Pinedale, Wyoming, into electronic contact with a large and
lively crowd of bright, inventive, technological sophisticates from all
over the world. Barlow found the social milieu of computing
attractive: its fast-lane pace, its blue-sky rhetoric, its
open-endedness. Barlow began dabbling in computer journalism, with
marked success, as he was a quick study, and both shrewd and eloquent.
He frequently travelled to San Francisco to network with Deadhead
friends. There Barlow made extensive contacts throughout the
Californian computer community, including friendships among the wilder
spirits at Apple.

In May 1990, Barlow received a visit from a local Wyoming agent of
the FBI. The NuPrometheus case had reached Wyoming.

Barlow was troubled to find himself under investigation in an area
of his interests once quite free of federal attention. He had to
struggle to explain the very nature of computer crime to a
headscratching local FBI man who specialized in cattle-rustling.
Barlow, chatting helpfully and demonstrating the wonders of his modem to
the puzzled fed, was alarmed to find all "hackers" generally under FBI
suspicion as an evil influence in the electronic community. The FBI,
in pursuit of a hacker called "NuPrometheus," were tracing attendees of
a suspect group called the Hackers Conference.

The Hackers Conference, which had been started in 1984, was a
yearly Californian meeting of digital pioneers and enthusiasts. The
hackers of the Hackers Conference had little if anything to do with the
hackers of the digital underground. On the contrary, the hackers of
this conference were mostly well-to-do Californian high-tech CEOs,
consultants, journalists and entrepreneurs. (This group of hackers
were the exact sort of "hackers" most likely to react with militant
fury at any criminal degradation of the term "hacker.")

Barlow, though he was not arrested or accused of a crime, and though
his computer had certainly not gone out the door, was very troubled by
this anomaly. He carried the word to the Well.

Like the Hackers Conference, "the Well" was an emanation of the
Point Foundation. Point Foundation, the inspiration of a wealthy
Californian 60s radical named Stewart Brand, was to be a major
launch-pad of the civil libertarian effort.

Point Foundation's cultural efforts, like those of their fellow Bay
Area Californians the Grateful Dead, were multifaceted and
multitudinous. Rigid ideological consistency had never been a strong
suit of the *Whole Earth Catalog.* This Point publication had enjoyed
a strong vogue during the late 60s and early 70s, when it offered
hundreds of practical (and not so practical) tips on communitarian
living, environmentalism, and getting back-to-the-land. The *Whole
Earth Catalog,* and its sequels, sold two and half million copies and
won a National Book Award.

With the slow collapse of American radical dissent, the *Whole Earth
Catalog* had slipped to a more modest corner of the cultural radar; but
in its magazine incarnation, *CoEvolution Quarterly,* the Point
Foundation continued to offer a magpie potpourri of "access to tools
and ideas."

*CoEvolution Quarterly,* which started in 1974, was never a widely
popular magazine. Despite periodic outbreaks of millenarian fervor,
*CoEvolution Quarterly* failed to revolutionize Western civilization
and replace leaden centuries of history with bright new Californian
paradigms. Instead, this propaganda arm of Point Foundation cakewalked
a fine line between impressive brilliance and New Age flakiness.
*CoEvolution Quarterly* carried no advertising, cost a lot, and came
out on cheap newsprint with modest black-and-white graphics. It was
poorly distributed, and spread mostly by subscription and word of mouth.

It could not seem to grow beyond 30,000 subscribers. And yet -- it
never seemed to shrink much, either. Year in, year out, decade in,
decade out, some strange demographic minority accreted to support the
magazine. The enthusiastic readership did not seem to have much in the
way of coherent politics or ideals. It was sometimes hard to
understand what held them together (if the often bitter debate in the
letter-columns could be described as "togetherness").

But if the magazine did not flourish, it was resilient; it got by.
Then, in 1984, the birth-year of the Macintosh computer, *CoEvolution
Quarterly* suddenly hit the rapids. Point Foundation had discovered
the computer revolution. Out came the *Whole Earth Software Catalog*
of 1984, arousing headscratching doubts among the tie-dyed faithful,
and rabid enthusiasm among the nascent "cyberpunk" milieu, present
company included. Point Foundation started its yearly Hackers
Conference, and began to take an extensive interest in the strange new
possibilities of digital counterculture. *CoEvolution Quarterly*
folded its teepee, replaced by *Whole Earth Software Review* and
eventually by *Whole Earth Review* (the magazine's present
incarnation, currently under the editorship of virtual-reality maven
Howard Rheingold).

1985 saw the birth of the "WELL" -- the "Whole Earth 'Lectronic
Link." The Well was Point Foundation's bulletin board system.

As boards went, the Well was an anomaly from the beginning, and
remained one. It was local to San Francisco. It was huge, with
multiple phonelines and enormous files of commentary. Its complex
UNIX-based software might be most charitably described as "user-opaque."
It was run on a mainframe out of the rambling offices of a non-profit
cultural foundation in Sausalito. And it was crammed with fans of the
Grateful Dead.

Though the Well was peopled by chattering hipsters of the Bay Area
counterculture, it was by no means a "digital underground" board.
Teenagers were fairly scarce; most Well users (known as "Wellbeings")
were thirty- and forty-something Baby Boomers. They tended to work in
the information industry: hardware, software, telecommunications,
media, entertainment. Librarians, academics, and journalists were
especially common on the Well, attracted by Point Foundation's
open-handed distribution of "tools and ideas."

There were no anarchy files on the Well, scarcely a dropped hint
about access codes or credit card theft. No one used handles.
Vicious "flame-wars" were held to a comparatively civilized rumble.
Debates were sometimes sharp, but no Wellbeing ever claimed that a
rival had disconnected his phone, trashed his house, or posted his
credit card numbers.

The Well grew slowly as the 1980s advanced. It charged a modest sum
for access and storage, and lost money for years -- but not enough to
hamper the Point Foundation, which was nonprofit anyway. By 1990, the
Well had about five thousand users. These users wandered about a
gigantic cyberspace smorgasbord of "Conferences", each conference
itself consisting of a welter of "topics," each topic containing dozens,
sometimes hundreds of comments, in a tumbling, multiperson debate that
could last for months or years on end.

CONFERENCES ON THE WELL

WELL ``Screenzine'' Digest (g zine)

Best of the WELL - vintage material - (g best)

Index listing of new topics in all conferences - (g newtops)

Business - Education
---------------------
Apple Library Users Group(g alug) Agriculture (g agri)
Brainstorming (g brain) Classifieds (g cla)
Computer Journalism (g cj) Consultants (g consult)
Consumers (g cons) Design (g design)
Desktop Publishing (g desk) Disability (g disability)
Education (g ed) Energy (g energy91)
Entrepreneurs (g entre) Homeowners (g home)
Indexing (g indexing) Investments (g invest)
Kids91 (g kids) Legal (g legal)
One Person Business (g one)
Periodical/newsletter (g per)
Telecomm Law (g tcl) The Future (g fut)
Translators (g trans) Travel (g tra)
Work (g work)

Electronic Frontier Foundation (g eff)
Computers, Freedom & Privacy (g cfp)
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (g cpsr)

Social - Political - Humanities
--------------------------------
Aging (g gray) AIDS (g aids)
Amnesty International (g amnesty) Archives (g arc)
Berkeley (g berk) Buddhist (g wonderland)
Christian (g cross) Couples (g couples)
Current Events (g curr) Dreams (g dream)
Drugs (g dru) East Coast (g east)
Emotional Health**** (g private) Erotica (g eros)
Environment (g env) Firearms (g firearms)
First Amendment (g first) Fringes of Reason (g fringes)
Gay (g gay) Gay (Private)# (g gaypriv)
Geography (g geo) German (g german)
Gulf War (g gulf) Hawaii (g aloha)
Health (g heal) History (g hist)
Holistic (g holi) Interview (g inter)
Italian (g ital) Jewish (g jew)
Liberty (g liberty) Mind (g mind)
Miscellaneous (g misc) Men on the WELL** (g mow)
Network Integration (g origin) Nonprofits (g non)
North Bay (g north) Northwest (g nw)
Pacific Rim (g pacrim) Parenting (g par)
Peace (g pea) Peninsula (g pen)
Poetry (g poetry) Philosophy (g phi)
Politics (g pol) Psychology (g psy)
Psychotherapy (g therapy) Recovery## (g recovery)
San Francisco (g sanfran) Scams (g scam)
Sexuality (g sex) Singles (g singles)
Southern (g south) Spanish (g spanish)
Spirituality (g spirit) Tibet (g tibet)
Transportation (g transport) True Confessions (g tru)
Unclear (g unclear) WELL Writer's Workshop***(g www)
Whole Earth (g we) Women on the WELL*(g wow)
Words (g words) Writers (g wri)

**** Private Conference - mail wooly for entry
*** Private conference - mail sonia for entry
** Private conference - mail flash for entry
* Private conference - mail reva for entry
# Private Conference - mail hudu for entry
## Private Conference - mail dhawk for entry

Arts - Recreation - Entertainment
---------------------------------- ArtCom Electronic Net (g acen)
Audio-Videophilia (g aud)
Bicycles (g bike) Bay Area Tonight**(g bat)
Boating (g wet) Books (g books)
CD's (g cd) Comics (g comics)
Cooking (g cook) Flying (g flying)
Fun (g fun) Games (g games)
Gardening (g gard) Kids (g kids)
Nightowls* (g owl) Jokes (g jokes)
MIDI (g midi) Movies (g movies)
Motorcycling (g ride) Motoring (g car)
Music (g mus) On Stage (g onstage)
Pets (g pets) Radio (g rad)
Restaurant (g rest) Science Fiction (g sf)
Sports (g spo) Star Trek (g trek)
Television (g tv) Theater (g theater)
Weird (g weird) Zines/Factsheet Five(g f5)
* Open from midnight to 6am
** Updated daily

Grateful Dead
-------------- Grateful Dead (g gd) Deadplan* (g dp)
Deadlit (g deadlit) Feedback (g feedback)
GD Hour (g gdh) Tapes (g tapes)
Tickets (g tix) Tours (g tours)

* Private conference - mail tnf for entry

Computers
---------- AI/Forth/Realtime (g realtime) Amiga (g amiga)
Apple (g app) Computer Books (g cbook)
Art & Graphics (g gra) Hacking (g hack)
HyperCard (g hype) IBM PC (g ibm)
LANs (g lan) Laptop (g lap)
Macintosh (g mac) Mactech (g mactech)
Microtimes (g microx) Muchomedia (g mucho)
NeXt (g next) OS/2 (g os2)
Printers (g print) Programmer's Net (g net)
Siggraph (g siggraph) Software Design (g sdc)
Software/Programming (g software)
Software Support (g ssc)
Unix (g unix) Windows (g windows)
Word Processing (g word)

Technical - Communications
--------------------------- Bioinfo (g bioinfo) Info (g boing)
Media (g media) NAPLPS (g naplps)
Netweaver (g netweaver) Networld (g networld)
Packet Radio (g packet) Photography (g pho)
Radio (g rad) Science (g science)
Technical Writers (g tec) Telecommunications(g tele)
Usenet (g usenet) Video (g vid)
Virtual Reality (g vr)

The WELL Itself
-------------- Deeper (g deeper) Entry (g ent)
General (g gentech) Help (g help)
Hosts (g hosts) Policy (g policy)
System News (g news) Test (g test)

The list itself is dazzling, bringing to the untutored eye a
dizzying impression of a bizarre milieu of mountain-climbing Hawaiian
holistic photographers trading true-life confessions with bisexual
word-processing Tibetans.

But this confusion is more apparent than real. Each of these
conferences was a little cyberspace world in itself, comprising dozens
and perhaps hundreds of sub-topics. Each conference was commonly
frequented by a fairly small, fairly like-minded community of perhaps a
few dozen people. It was humanly impossible to encompass the entire
Well (especially since access to the Well's mainframe computer was
billed by the hour). Most long-time users contented themselves with a
few favorite topical neighborhoods, with the occasional foray elsewhere
for a taste of exotica. But especially important news items, and hot
topical debates, could catch the attention of the entire Well community.

Like any community, the Well had its celebrities, and John Perry
Barlow, the silver-tongued and silver-modemed lyricist of the Grateful
Dead, ranked prominently among them. It was here on the Well that
Barlow posted his true-life tale of computer crime encounter with the
FBI.

The story, as might be expected, created a great stir. The Well was
already primed for hacker controversy. In December 1989, *Harper's*
magazine had hosted a debate on the Well about the ethics of illicit
computer intrusion. While over forty various computer-mavens took
part, Barlow proved a star in the debate. So did "Acid Phreak" and
"Phiber Optik," a pair of young New York hacker-phreaks whose skills at
telco switching-station intrusion were matched only by their apparently
limitless hunger for fame. The advent of these two boldly swaggering
outlaws in the precincts of the Well created a sensation akin to that
of Black Panthers at a cocktail party for the radically chic.

Phiber Optik in particular was to seize the day in 1990. A devotee
of the *2600* circle and stalwart of the New York hackers' group
"Masters of Deception," Phiber Optik was a splendid exemplar of the
computer intruder as committed dissident. The eighteen-year-old
Optik, a high-school dropout and part-time computer repairman, was
young, smart, and ruthlessly obsessive, a sharp-dressing, sharp-talking
digital dude who was utterly and airily contemptuous of anyone's rules
but his own. By late 1991, Phiber Optik had appeared in *Harper's,*
*Esquire,* *The New York Times,* in countless public debates and
conventions, even on a television show hosted by Geraldo Rivera.

Treated with gingerly respect by Barlow and other Well mavens,
Phiber Optik swiftly became a Well celebrity. Strangely, despite his
thorny attitude and utter single-mindedness, Phiber Optik seemed to
arouse strong protective instincts in most of the people who met him.
He was great copy for journalists, always fearlessly ready to swagger,
and, better yet, to actually *demonstrate* some off-the-wall digital
stunt. He was a born media darling.

Even cops seemed to recognize that there was something peculiarly
unworldly and uncriminal about this particular troublemaker. He was
so bold, so flagrant, so young, and so obviously doomed, that even
those who strongly disapproved of his actions grew anxious for his
welfare, and began to flutter about him as if he were an endangered
seal pup.

In January 24, 1990 (nine days after the Martin Luther King Day
Crash), Phiber Optik, Acid Phreak, and a third NYC scofflaw named
Scorpion were raided by the Secret Service. Their computers went out
the door, along with the usual blizzard of papers, notebooks, compact
disks, answering machines, Sony Walkmans, etc. Both Acid Phreak and
Phiber Optik were accused of having caused the Crash.

The mills of justice ground slowly. The case eventually fell into
the hands of the New York State Police. Phiber had lost his machinery
in the raid, but there were no charges filed against him for over a
year. His predicament was extensively publicized on the Well, where
it caused much resentment for police tactics. It's one thing to merely
hear about a hacker raided or busted; it's another to see the police
attacking someone you've come to know personally, and who has explained
his motives at length. Through the *Harper's* debate on the Well, it
had become clear to the Wellbeings that Phiber Optik was not in fact
going to "hurt anything." In their own salad days, many Wellbeings
had tasted tear-gas in pitched street-battles with police. They were
inclined to indulgence for acts of civil disobedience.

Wellbeings were also startled to learn of the draconian thoroughness
of a typical hacker search-and-seizure. It took no great stretch of
imagination for them to envision themselves suffering much the same
treatment.

As early as January 1990, sentiment on the Well had already begun to
sour, and people had begun to grumble that "hackers" were getting a raw
deal from the ham-handed powers-that-be. The resultant issue of
*Harper's* magazine posed the question as to whether computer-intrusion
was a "crime" at all. As Barlow put it later: "I've begun to wonder
if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T
owned all the caves."

In February 1991, more than a year after the raid on his home,
Phiber Optik was finally arrested, and was charged with first-degree
Computer Tampering and Computer Trespass, New York state offenses. He
was also charged with a theft-of-service misdemeanor, involving a
complex free-call scam to a 900 number. Phiber Optik pled guilty to
the misdemeanor charge, and was sentenced to 35 hours of community
service.

This passing harassment from the unfathomable world of straight
people seemed to bother Optik himself little if at all. Deprived of
his computer by the January search-and-seizure, he simply bought
himself a portable computer so the cops could no longer monitor the
phone where he lived with his Mom, and he went right on with his
depredations, sometimes on live radio or in front of television cameras.

The crackdown raid may have done little to dissuade Phiber Optik,
but its galling affect on the Wellbeings was profound. As 1990 rolled
on, the slings and arrows mounted: the Knight Lightning raid, the
Steve Jackson raid, the nation-spanning Operation Sundevil. The
rhetoric of law enforcement made it clear that there was, in fact, a
concerted crackdown on hackers in progress.

The hackers of the Hackers Conference, the Wellbeings, and their
ilk, did not really mind the occasional public misapprehension of
"hacking"; if anything, this membrane of differentiation from straight
society made the "computer community" feel different, smarter, better.
They had never before been confronted, however, by a concerted
vilification campaign.

Barlow's central role in the counter-struggle was one of the major
anomalies of 1990. Journalists investigating the controversy often
stumbled over the truth about Barlow, but they commonly dusted
themselves off and hurried on as if nothing had happened. It was as
if it were *too much to believe* that a 1960s freak from the Grateful
Dead had taken on a federal law enforcement operation head-to-head and
*actually seemed to be winning!*

Barlow had no easily detectable power-base for a political struggle
of this kind. He had no formal legal or technical credentials.
Barlow was, however, a computer networker of truly stellar brilliance.
He had a poet's gift of concise, colorful phrasing. He also had a
journalist's shrewdness, an off-the-wall, self-deprecating wit, and a
phenomenal wealth of simple personal charm.

The kind of influence Barlow possessed is fairly common currency in
literary, artistic, or musical circles. A gifted critic can wield
great artistic influence simply through defining the temper of the
times, by coining the catch-phrases and the terms of debate that
become the common currency of the period. (And as it happened, Barlow
*was* a part-time art critic, with a special fondness for the Western
art of Frederic Remington.)

Barlow was the first commentator to adopt William Gibson's striking
science-fictional term "cyberspace" as a synonym for the present-day
nexus of computer and telecommunications networks. Barlow was
insistent that cyberspace should be regarded as a qualitatively new
world, a "frontier." According to Barlow, the world of electronic
communications, now made visible through the computer screen, could no
longer be usefully regarded as just a tangle of high-tech wiring.
Instead, it had become a *place,* cyberspace, which demanded a new
set of metaphors, a new set of rules and behaviors. The term, as
Barlow employed it, struck a useful chord, and this concept of
cyberspace was picked up by *Time,* *Scientific American,* computer
police, hackers, and even Constitutional scholars. "Cyberspace" now
seems likely to become a permanent fixture of the language.

Barlow was very striking in person: a tall, craggy-faced, bearded,
deep-voiced Wyomingan in a dashing Western ensemble of jeans, jacket,
cowboy boots, a knotted throat-kerchief and an ever-present Grateful
Dead cloisonne lapel pin.

Armed with a modem, however, Barlow was truly in his element.
Formal hierarchies were not Barlow's strong suit; he rarely missed a
chance to belittle the "large organizations and their drones," with
their uptight, institutional mindset. Barlow was very much of the
free-spirit persuasion, deeply unimpressed by brass-hats and
jacks-in-office. But when it came to the digital grapevine, Barlow was
a cyberspace ad-hocrat par excellence.

There was not a mighty army of Barlows. There was only one Barlow,
and he was a fairly anomolous individual. However, the situation only
seemed to *require* a single Barlow. In fact, after 1990, many
people must have concluded that a single Barlow was far more than they'd
ever bargained for.

Barlow's querulous mini-essay about his encounter with the FBI
struck a strong chord on the Well. A number of other free spirits on
the fringes of Apple Computing had come under suspicion, and they liked
it not one whit better than he did.

One of these was Mitchell Kapor, the co-inventor of the spreadsheet
program "Lotus 1-2-3" and the founder of Lotus Development Corporation.
Kapor had written-off the passing indignity of being fingerprinted
down at his own local Boston FBI headquarters, but Barlow's post made
the full national scope of the FBI's dragnet clear to Kapor. The
issue now had Kapor's full attention. As the Secret Service swung
into anti-hacker operation nationwide in 1990, Kapor watched every move
with deep skepticism and growing alarm.

As it happened, Kapor had already met Barlow, who had interviewed
Kapor for a California computer journal. Like most people who met
Barlow, Kapor had been very taken with him. Now Kapor took it upon
himself to drop in on Barlow for a heart-to-heart talk about the
situation.

Kapor was a regular on the Well. Kapor had been a devotee of the
*Whole Earth Catalog* since the beginning, and treasured a complete run
of the magazine. And Kapor not only had a modem, but a private jet. In
pursuit of the scattered high-tech investments of Kapor Enterprises
Inc., his personal, multi-million dollar holding company, Kapor
commonly crossed state lines with about as much thought as one might
give to faxing a letter.

The Kapor-Barlow council of June 1990, in Pinedale, Wyoming, was the
start of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Barlow swiftly wrote a
manifesto, "Crime and Puzzlement," which announced his, and Kapor's,
intention to form a political organization to "raise and disburse funds
for education, lobbying, and litigation in the areas relating to
digital speech and the extension of the Constitution into Cyberspace."

Furthermore, proclaimed the manifesto, the foundation would "fund,
conduct, and support legal efforts to demonstrate that the Secret
Service has exercised prior restraint on publications, limited free
speech, conducted improper seizure of equipment and data, used undue
force, and generally conducted itself in a fashion which is arbitrary,
oppressive, and unconstitutional."

"Crime and Puzzlement" was distributed far and wide through computer
networking channels, and also printed in the *Whole Earth Review.* The
sudden declaration of a coherent, politicized counter-strike from the
ranks of hackerdom electrified the community. Steve Wozniak (perhaps
a bit stung by the NuPrometheus scandal) swiftly offered to match any
funds Kapor offered the Foundation.

John Gilmore, one of the pioneers of Sun Microsystems, immediately
offered his own extensive financial and personal support. Gilmore, an
ardent libertarian, was to prove an eloquent advocate of electronic
privacy issues, especially freedom from governmental and corporate
computer-assisted surveillance of private citizens.

A second meeting in San Francisco rounded up further allies:
Stewart Brand of the Point Foundation, virtual-reality pioneers Jaron
Lanier and Chuck Blanchard, network entrepreneur and venture capitalist
Nat Goldhaber. At this dinner meeting, the activists settled on a
formal title: the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Incorporated. Kapor
became its president. A new EFF Conference was opened on the Point
Foundation's Well, and the Well was declared "the home of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation."

Press coverage was immediate and intense. Like their
nineteenth-century spiritual ancestors, Alexander Graham Bell and
Thomas Watson, the high-tech computer entrepreneurs of the 1970s and
1980s -- people such as Wozniak, Jobs, Kapor, Gates, and H. Ross Perot,
who had raised themselves by their bootstraps to dominate a glittering
new industry -- had always made very good copy.

But while the Wellbeings rejoiced, the press in general seemed
nonplussed by the self-declared "civilizers of cyberspace." EFF's
insistence that the war against "hackers" involved grave Constitutional
civil liberties issues seemed somewhat farfetched, especially since
none of EFF's organizers were lawyers or established politicians.
The business press in particular found it easier to seize on the
apparent core of the story -- that high-tech entrepreneur Mitchell
Kapor had established a "defense fund for hackers." Was EFF a
genuinely important political development -- or merely a clique of
wealthy eccentrics, dabbling in matters better left to the proper
authorities? The jury was still out.

But the stage was now set for open confrontation. And the first and
the most critical battle was the hacker show-trial of "Knight
Lightning."

#

It has been my practice throughout this book to refer to hackers
only by their "handles." There is little to gain by giving the real
names of these people, many of whom are juveniles, many of whom have
never been convicted of any crime, and many of whom had unsuspecting
parents who have already suffered enough.

But the trial of Knight Lightning on July 24-27, 1990, made this
particular "hacker" a nationally known public figure. It can do no
particular harm to himself or his family if I repeat the
long-established fact that his name is Craig Neidorf (pronounced
NYE-dorf).

Neidorf's jury trial took place in the United States District Court,
Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, with the Honorable
Nicholas J. Bua presiding. The United States of America was the
plaintiff, the defendant Mr. Neidorf. The defendant's attorney was
Sheldon T. Zenner of the Chicago firm of Katten, Muchin and Zavis.

The prosecution was led by the stalwarts of the Chicago Computer
Fraud and Abuse Task Force: William J. Cook, Colleen D. Coughlin, and
David A. Glockner, all Assistant United States Attorneys. The Secret
Service Case Agent was Timothy M. Foley.

It will be recalled that Neidorf was the co-editor of an underground
hacker "magazine" called *Phrack*. *Phrack* was an entirely electronic
publication, distributed through bulletin boards and over electronic
networks. It was amateur publication given away for free. Neidorf had
never made any money for his work in *Phrack.* Neither had his
unindicted co-editor "Taran King" or any of the numerous *Phrack*
contributors.

The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force, however, had
decided to prosecute Neidorf as a fraudster. To formally admit that
*Phrack* was a "magazine" and Neidorf a "publisher" was to open a
prosecutorial Pandora's Box of First Amendment issues. To do this was
to play into the hands of Zenner and his EFF advisers, which now
included a phalanx of prominent New York civil rights lawyers as well
as the formidable legal staff of Katten, Muchin and Zavis. Instead,
the prosecution relied heavily on the issue of access device fraud:
Section 1029 of Title 18, the section from which the Secret Service
drew its most direct jurisdiction over computer crime.

Neidorf's alleged crimes centered around the E911 Document. He was
accused of having entered into a fraudulent scheme with the Prophet,
who, it will be recalled, was the Atlanta LoD member who had illicitly
copied the E911 Document from the BellSouth AIMSX system.

The Prophet himself was also a co-defendant in the Neidorf case,
part-and-parcel of the alleged "fraud scheme" to "steal" BellSouth's
E911 Document (and to pass the Document across state lines, which helped
establish the Neidorf trial as a federal case). The Prophet, in the
spirit of full co-operation, had agreed to testify against Neidorf.

In fact, all three of the Atlanta crew stood ready to testify
against Neidorf. Their own federal prosecutors in Atlanta had charged
the Atlanta Three with: (a) conspiracy, (b) computer fraud, (c) wire
fraud, (d) access device fraud, and (e) interstate transportation of
stolen property (Title 18, Sections 371, 1030, 1343, 1029, and 2314).

Faced with this blizzard of trouble, Prophet and Leftist had ducked
any public trial and had pled guilty to reduced charges -- one
conspiracy count apiece. Urvile had pled guilty to that odd bit of
Section 1029 which makes it illegal to possess "fifteen or more"
illegal access devices (in his case, computer passwords). And their
sentences were scheduled for September 14, 1990 -- well after the
Neidorf trial. As witnesses, they could presumably be relied upon to
behave.

Neidorf, however, was pleading innocent. Most everyone else
caught up in the crackdown had "cooperated fully" and pled guilty in
hope of reduced sentences. (Steve Jackson was a notable exception, of
course, and had strongly protested his innocence from the very
beginning. But Steve Jackson could not get a day in court -- Steve
Jackson had never been charged with any crime in the first place.)

Neidorf had been urged to plead guilty. But Neidorf was a political
science major and was disinclined to go to jail for "fraud" when he
had not made any money, had not broken into any computer, and had been
publishing a magazine that he considered protected under the First
Amendment.

Neidorf's trial was the *only* legal action of the entire Crackdown
that actually involved bringing the issues at hand out for a public
test in front of a jury of American citizens.

Neidorf, too, had cooperated with investigators. He had voluntarily
handed over much of the evidence that had led to his own indictment.
He had already admitted in writing that he knew that the E911 Document
had been stolen before he had "published" it in *Phrack* -- or, from
the prosecution's point of view, illegally transported stolen property
by wire in something purporting to be a "publication."

But even if the "publication" of the E911 Document was not held to
be a crime, that wouldn't let Neidorf off the hook. Neidorf had
still received the E911 Document when Prophet had transferred it to
him from Rich Andrews' Jolnet node. On that occasion, it certainly
hadn't been "published" -- it was hacker booty, pure and simple,
transported across state lines.

The Chicago Task Force led a Chicago grand jury to indict Neidorf
on a set of charges that could have put him in jail for thirty years.
When some of these charges were successfully challenged before Neidorf
actually went to trial, the Chicago Task Force rearranged his
indictment so that he faced a possible jail term of over sixty years!
As a first offender, it was very unlikely that Neidorf would in fact
receive a sentence so drastic; but the Chicago Task Force clearly
intended to see Neidorf put in prison, and his conspiratorial
"magazine" put permanently out of commission. This was a federal case,
and Neidorf was charged with the fraudulent theft of property worth
almost eighty thousand dollars.

William Cook was a strong believer in high-profile prosecutions with
symbolic overtones. He often published articles on his work in the
security trade press, arguing that "a clear message had to be sent to
the public at large and the computer community in particular that
unauthorized attacks on computers and the theft of computerized
information would not be tolerated by the courts."

The issues were complex, the prosecution's tactics somewhat
unorthodox, but the Chicago Task Force had proved sure-footed to date.
"Shadowhawk" had been bagged on the wing in 1989 by the Task Force, and
sentenced to nine months in prison, and a $10,000 fine. The Shadowhawk
case involved charges under Section 1030, the "federal interest
computer" section.

Shadowhawk had not in fact been a devotee of "federal interest"
computers per se. On the contrary, Shadowhawk, who owned an AT&T home
computer, seemed to cherish a special aggression toward AT&T. He had
bragged on the underground boards "Phreak Klass 2600" and "Dr. Ripco"
of his skills at raiding AT&T, and of his intention to crash AT&T's
national phone system. Shadowhawk's brags were noticed by Henry
Kluepfel of Bellcore Security, scourge of the outlaw boards, whose
relations with the Chicago Task Force were long and intimate.

The Task Force successfully established that Section 1030 applied to
the teenage Shadowhawk, despite the objections of his defense attorney.
Shadowhawk had entered a computer "owned" by U.S. Missile Command and
merely "managed" by AT&T. He had also entered an AT&T computer
located at Robbins Air Force Base in Georgia. Attacking AT&T was of
"federal interest" whether Shadowhawk had intended it or not.

The Task Force also convinced the court that a piece of AT&T
software that Shadowhawk had illicitly copied from Bell Labs, the
"Artificial Intelligence C5 Expert System," was worth a cool one
million dollars. Shadowhawk's attorney had argued that Shadowhawk had
not sold the program and had made no profit from the illicit copying.
And in point of fact, the C5 Expert System was experimental software,
and had no established market value because it had never been on the
market in the first place. AT&T's own assessment of a "one million
dollar" figure for its own intangible property was accepted without
challenge by the court, however. And the court concurred with the
government prosecutors that Shadowhawk showed clear "intent to defraud"
whether he'd gotten any money or not. Shadowhawk went to jail.

The Task Force's other best-known triumph had been the conviction
and jailing of "Kyrie." Kyrie, a true denizen of the digital criminal
underground, was a 36-year-old Canadian woman, convicted and jailed for
telecommunications fraud in Canada. After her release from prison,
she had fled the wrath of Canada Bell and the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police, and eventually settled, very unwisely, in Chicago.

"Kyrie," who also called herself "Long Distance Information,"
specialized in voice-mail abuse. She assembled large numbers of hot
long-distance codes, then read them aloud into a series of corporate
voice-mail systems. Kyrie and her friends were electronic squatters
in corporate voice-mail systems, using them much as if they were pirate
bulletin boards, then moving on when their vocal chatter clogged the
system and the owners necessarily wised up. Kyrie's camp followers
were a loose tribe of some hundred and fifty phone-phreaks, who
followed her trail of piracy from machine to machine, ardently begging
for her services and expertise.

Kyrie's disciples passed her stolen credit card numbers, in exchange
for her stolen "long distance information." Some of Kyrie's clients
paid her off in cash, by scamming credit card cash advances from Western
Union.

Kyrie travelled incessantly, mostly through airline tickets and
hotel rooms that she scammed through stolen credit cards. Tiring of
this, she found refuge with a fellow female phone phreak in Chicago.
Kyrie's hostess, like a surprising number of phone phreaks, was blind.
She was also physically disabled. Kyrie allegedly made the best of
her new situation by applying for, and receiving, state welfare funds
under a false identity as a qualified caretaker for the handicapped.

Sadly, Kyrie's two children by a former marriage had also vanished
underground with her; these pre-teen digital refugees had no legal
American identity, and had never spent a day in school.

Kyrie was addicted to technical mastery and enthralled by her own
cleverness and the ardent worship of her teenage followers. This
foolishly led her to phone up Gail Thackeray in Arizona, to boast,
brag, strut, and offer to play informant. Thackeray, however, had
already learned far more than enough about Kyrie, whom she roundly
despised as an adult criminal corrupting minors, a "female Fagin."
Thackeray passed her tapes of Kyrie's boasts to the Secret Service.

Kyrie was raided and arrested in Chicago in May 1989. She confessed
at great length and pled guilty.

In August 1990, Cook and his Task Force colleague Colleen Coughlin
sent Kyrie to jail for 27 months, for computer and telecommunications
fraud. This was a markedly severe sentence by the usual wrist-slapping
standards of "hacker" busts. Seven of Kyrie's foremost teenage
disciples were also indicted and convicted. The Kyrie "high-tech
street gang," as Cook described it, had been crushed. Cook and his
colleagues had been the first ever to put someone in prison for
voice-mail abuse. Their pioneering efforts had won them attention and
kudos.

In his article on Kyrie, Cook drove the message home to the readers
of *Security Management* magazine, a trade journal for corporate
security professionals. The case, Cook said, and Kyrie's stiff
sentence, "reflect a new reality for hackers and computer crime
victims in the '90s... Individuals and corporations who report computer
and telecommunications crimes can now expect that their cooperation
with federal law enforcement will result in meaningful punishment.
Companies and the public at large must report computer-enhanced crimes
if they want prosecutors and the course to protect their rights to the
tangible and intangible property developed and stored on computers."

Cook had made it his business to construct this "new reality for
hackers." He'd also made it his business to police corporate property
rights to the intangible.

Had the Electronic Frontier Foundation been a "hacker defense fund"
as that term was generally understood, they presumably would have stood
up for Kyrie. Her 1990 sentence did indeed send a "message" that
federal heat was coming down on "hackers." But Kyrie found no
defenders at EFF, or anywhere else, for that matter. EFF was not a
bail-out fund for electronic crooks.

The Neidorf case paralleled the Shadowhawk case in certain ways.
The victim once again was allowed to set the value of the "stolen"
property. Once again Kluepfel was both investigator and technical
advisor. Once again no money had changed hands, but the "intent to
defraud" was central.

The prosecution's case showed signs of weakness early on. The Task
Force had originally hoped to prove Neidorf the center of a nationwide
Legion of Doom criminal conspiracy. The *Phrack* editors threw
physical get-togethers every summer, which attracted hackers from
across the country; generally two dozen or so of the magazine's
favorite contributors and readers. (Such conventions were common in
the hacker community; 2600 Magazine, for instance, held public meetings
of hackers in New York, every month.) LoD heavy-dudes were always a
strong presence at these *Phrack*-sponsored "Summercons."

In July 1988, an Arizona hacker named "Dictator" attended Summercon
in Neidorf's home town of St. Louis. Dictator was one of Gail
Thackeray's underground informants; Dictator's underground board in
Phoenix was a sting operation for the Secret Service. Dictator brought
an undercover crew of Secret Service agents to Summercon. The agents
bored spyholes through the wall of Dictator's hotel room in St Louis,
and videotaped the frolicking hackers through a one-way mirror. As it
happened, however, nothing illegal had occurred on videotape, other
than the guzzling of beer by a couple of minors. Summercons were
social events, not sinister cabals. The tapes showed fifteen hours of
raucous laughter, pizza-gobbling, in-jokes and back-slapping.

Neidorf's lawyer, Sheldon Zenner, saw the Secret Service tapes
before the trial. Zenner was shocked by the complete harmlessness of
this meeting, which Cook had earlier characterized as a sinister
interstate conspiracy to commit fraud. Zenner wanted to show the
Summercon tapes to the jury. It took protracted maneuverings by the
Task Force to keep the tapes from the jury as "irrelevant."

The E911 Document was also proving a weak reed. It had originally
been valued at $79,449. Unlike Shadowhawk's arcane Artificial
Intelligence booty, the E911 Document was not software -- it was
written in English. Computer-knowledgeable people found this value -for a twelve-page bureaucratic document -- frankly incredible. In his
"Crime and Puzzlement" manifesto for EFF, Barlow commented: "We will
probably never know how this figure was reached or by whom, though I
like to imagine an appraisal team consisting of Franz Kafka, Joseph
Heller, and Thomas Pynchon."

As it happened, Barlow was unduly pessimistic. The EFF did, in
fact, eventually discover exactly how this figure was reached, and by
whom -- but only in 1991, long after the Neidorf trial was over.

Kim Megahee, a Southern Bell security manager, had arrived at the
document's value by simply adding up the "costs associated with the
production" of the E911 Document. Those "costs" were as follows:

1. A technical writer had been hired to research and write the E911
Document. 200 hours of work, at $35 an hour, cost : $7,000. A Project
Manager had overseen the technical writer. 200 hours, at $31 an hour,
made: $6,200.

2. A week of typing had cost $721 dollars. A week of formatting
had cost $721. A week of graphics formatting had cost $742.

3. Two days of editing cost $367.

4. A box of order labels cost five dollars.

5. Preparing a purchase order for the Document, including typing
and the obtaining of an authorizing signature from within the BellSouth
bureaucracy, cost $129.

6. Printing cost $313. Mailing the Document to fifty people took
fifty hours by a clerk, and cost $858.

7. Placing the Document in an index took two clerks an hour each,
totalling $43.

Bureaucratic overhead alone, therefore, was alleged to have cost a
whopping $17,099. According to Mr. Megahee, the typing of a
twelve-page document had taken a full week. Writing it had taken five
weeks, including an overseer who apparently did nothing else but watch
the author for five weeks. Editing twelve pages had taken two days.
Printing and mailing an electronic document (which was already
available on the Southern Bell Data Network to any telco employee who
needed it), had cost over a thousand dollars.

But this was just the beginning. There were also the *hardware
expenses.* Eight hundred fifty dollars for a VT220 computer monitor.
*Thirty-one thousand dollars* for a sophisticated VAXstation II
computer. Six thousand dollars for a computer printer. *Twenty-two
thousand dollars* for a copy of "Interleaf" software. Two thousand
five hundred dollars for VMS software. All this to create the
twelve-page Document.

Plus ten percent of the cost of the software and the hardware, for
maintenance. (Actually, the ten percent maintenance costs, though
mentioned, had been left off the final $79,449 total, apparently
through a merciful oversight).

Mr. Megahee's letter had been mailed directly to William Cook
himself, at the office of the Chicago federal attorneys. The United
States Government accepted these telco figures without question.

As incredulity mounted, the value of the E911 Document was
officially revised downward. This time, Robert Kibler of BellSouth
Security estimated the value of the twelve pages as a mere $24,639.05
-- based, purportedly, on "R&D costs." But this specific estimate,
right down to the nickel, did not move the skeptics at all; in fact it
provoked open scorn and a torrent of sarcasm.

The financial issues concerning theft of proprietary information
have always been peculiar. It could be argued that BellSouth had not
"lost" its E911 Document at all in the first place, and therefore had
not suffered any monetary damage from this "theft." And Sheldon Zenner
did in fact argue this at Neidorf's trial -- that Prophet's raid had
not been "theft," but was better understood as illicit copying.

The money, however, was not central to anyone's true purposes in
this trial. It was not Cook's strategy to convince the jury that the
E911 Document was a major act of theft and should be punished for that
reason alone. His strategy was to argue that the E911 Document was
*dangerous.* It was his intention to establish that the E911 Document
was "a road-map" to the Enhanced 911 System. Neidorf had deliberately
and recklessly distributed a dangerous weapon. Neidorf and the
Prophet did not care (or perhaps even gloated at the sinister idea)
that the E911 Document could be used by hackers to disrupt 911 service,
"a life line for every person certainly in the Southern Bell region of
the United States, and indeed, in many communities throughout the United
States," in Cook's own words. Neidorf had put people's lives in danger.

In pre-trial maneuverings, Cook had established that the E911
Document was too hot to appear in the public proceedings of the Neidorf
trial. The *jury itself* would not be allowed to ever see this
Document, lest it slip into the official court records, and thus into
the hands of the general public, and, thus, somehow, to malicious
hackers who might lethally abuse it.

Hiding the E911 Document from the jury may have been a clever legal
maneuver, but it had a severe flaw. There were, in point of fact,
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people, already in possession of the
E911 Document, just as *Phrack* had published it. Its true nature was
already obvious to a wide section of the interested public (all of
whom, by the way, were, at least theoretically, party to a gigantic
wire-fraud conspiracy). Most everyone in the electronic community who
had a modem and any interest in the Neidorf case already had a copy of
the Document. It had already been available in *Phrack* for over a year.

People, even quite normal people without any particular prurient
interest in forbidden knowledge, did not shut their eyes in terror at
the thought of beholding a "dangerous" document from a telephone
company. On the contrary, they tended to trust their own judgement and
simply read the Document for themselves. And they were not impressed.

One such person was John Nagle. Nagle was a forty-one-year-old
professional programmer with a masters' degree in computer science from
Stanford. He had worked for Ford Aerospace, where he had invented a
computer-networking technique known as the "Nagle Algorithm," and for
the prominent Californian computer-graphics firm "Autodesk," where he
was a major stockholder.

Nagle was also a prominent figure on the Well, much respected for
his technical knowledgeability.

Nagle had followed the civil-liberties debate closely, for he was an
ardent telecommunicator. He was no particular friend of computer
intruders, but he believed electronic publishing had a great deal to
offer society at large, and attempts to restrain its growth, or to
censor free electronic expression, strongly roused his ire.

The Neidorf case, and the E911 Document, were both being discussed
in detail on the Internet, in an electronic publication called *Telecom
Digest.* Nagle, a longtime Internet maven, was a regular reader of
*Telecom Digest.* Nagle had never seen a copy of *Phrack,* but the
implications of the case disturbed him.

While in a Stanford bookstore hunting books on robotics, Nagle
happened across a book called *The Intelligent Network.* Thumbing
through it at random, Nagle came across an entire chapter meticulously
detailing the workings of E911 police emergency systems. This extensive
text was being sold openly, and yet in Illinois a young man was in
danger of going to prison for publishing a thin six-page document about
911 service.

Nagle made an ironic comment to this effect in *Telecom Digest.*
From there, Nagle was put in touch with Mitch Kapor, and then with
Neidorf's lawyers.

Sheldon Zenner was delighted to find a computer telecommunications
expert willing to speak up for Neidorf, one who was not a wacky
teenage "hacker." Nagle was fluent, mature, and respectable; he'd once
had a federal security clearance.

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

Having joined the defense as an expert witness, Nagle read the
entire E911 Document for himself. He made his own judgement about its
potential for menace.

The time has now come for you yourself, the reader, to have a look
at the E911 Document. This six-page piece of work was the pretext for
a federal prosecution that could have sent an electronic publisher to
prison for thirty, or even sixty, years. It was the pretext for the
search and seizure of Steve Jackson Games, a legitimate publisher of
printed books. It was also the formal pretext for the search and
seizure of the Mentor's bulletin board, "Phoenix Project," and for the
raid on the home of Erik Bloodaxe. It also had much to do with the
seizure of Richard Andrews' Jolnet node and the shutdown of Charles
Boykin's AT&T node. The E911 Document was the single most important
piece of evidence in the Hacker Crackdown. There can be no real and
legitimate substitute for the Document itself.

==Phrack Inc.==

Volume Two, Issue 24, File 5 of 13

Control Office Administration
Of Enhanced 911 Services For
Special Services and Account Centers

by the Eavesdropper

March, 1988

Description of Service
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The control office for Emergency 911 service is assigned in
accordance with the existing standard guidelines to one of
the following centers:

o Special Services Center (SSC)
o Major Accounts Center (MAC)
o Serving Test Center (STC)
o Toll Control Center (TCC)

The SSC/MAC designation is used in this document
interchangeably for any of these four centers. The Special
Services Centers (SSCs) or Major Account Centers
(MACs) have been designated as the trouble reporting
contact for all E911 customer (PSAP) reported troubles.
Subscribers who have trouble on an E911 call will continue
to contact local repair service (CRSAB) who will refer the
trouble to the SSC/MAC, when appropriate.

Due to the critical nature of E911 service, the control and
timely repair of troubles is demanded. As the primary
E911 customer contact, the SSC/MAC is in the unique
position to monitor the status of the trouble and insure its
resolution.

System Overview
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The number 911 is intended as a nationwide universal
telephone number which provides the public with direct
access to a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP). A PSAP
is also referred to as an Emergency Service Bureau (ESB).
A PSAP is an agency or facility which is authorized by a
municipality to receive and respond to police, fire and/or
ambulance services. One or more attendants are located
at the PSAP facilities to receive and handle calls of an
emergency nature in accordance with the local municipal
requirements.

An important advantage of E911 emergency service is
improved (reduced) response times for emergency
services. Also close coordination among agencies
providing various emergency services is a valuable
capability provided by E911 service.

1A ESS is used as the tandem office for the E911 network to
route all 911 calls to the correct (primary) PSAP designated
to serve the calling station. The E911 feature was
developed primarily to provide routing to the correct PSAP
for all 911 calls. Selective routing allows a 911 call
originated from a particular station located in a particular
district, zone, or town, to be routed to the primary PSAP
designated to serve that customer station regardless of
wire center boundaries. Thus, selective routing eliminates
the problem of wire center boundaries not coinciding with
district or other political boundaries.

The services available with the E911 feature include:

Forced Disconnect Default Routing
Alternative Routing Night Service
Selective Routing Automatic Number
Identification (ANI)
Selective Transfer Automatic Location
Identification (ALI)

Preservice/Installation Guidelines
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When a contract for an E911 system has been signed, it is
the responsibility of Network Marketing to establish an
implementation/cutover committee which should include
a representative from the SSC/MAC. Duties of the E911
Implementation Team include coordination of all phases
of the E911 system deployment and the formation of an
on-going E911 maintenance subcommittee.

Marketing is responsible for providing the following
customer specific information to the SSC/MAC prior to
the start of call through testing:

o All PSAP's (name, address, local contact)
o All PSAP circuit ID's
o 1004 911 service request including PSAP details on each
PSAP (1004 Section K, L, M)
o Network configuration
o Any vendor information (name, telephone number,
equipment)

The SSC/MAC needs to know if the equipment and sets at
the PSAP are maintained by the BOCs, an independent
company, or an outside vendor, or any combination. This
information is then entered on the PSAP profile sheets
and reviewed quarterly for changes, additions and
deletions.

Marketing will secure the Major Account Number (MAN)
and provide this number to Corporate Communications
so that the initial issue of the service orders carry the
MAN and can be tracked by the SSC/MAC via
CORDNET. PSAP circuits are official services by
definition.

All service orders required for the installation of the E911
system should include the MAN assigned to the
city/county which has purchased the system.

In accordance with the basic SSC/MAC strategy for
provisioning, the SSC/MAC will be Overall Control Office
(OCO) for all Node to PSAP circuits (official services) and
any other services for this customer. Training must be
scheduled for all SSC/MAC involved personnel during the
pre-service stage of the project.

The E911 Implementation Team will form the on-going
maintenance subcommittee prior to the initial
implementation of the E911 system. This sub-committee
will establish post implementation quality assurance
procedures to ensure that the E911 system continues to
provide quality service to the customer.
Customer/Company training, trouble reporting interfaces
for the customer, telephone company and any involved
independent telephone companies needs to be addressed
and implemented prior to E911 cutover. These functions
can be best addressed by the formation of a sub-committee
of the E911 Implementation Team to set up
guidelines for and to secure service commitments of
interfacing organizations. A SSC/MAC supervisor should
chair this subcommittee and include the following
organizations:

1) Switching Control Center
- E911 translations
- Trunking
- End office and Tandem office hardware/software
2) Recent Change Memory Administration Center
- Daily RC update activity for TN/ESN translations
- Processes validity errors and rejects
3) Line and Number Administration
- Verification of TN/ESN translations
4) Special Service Center/Major Account Center
- Single point of contact for all PSAP and Node to host
troubles
- Logs, tracks & statusing of all trouble reports
- Trouble referral, follow up, and escalation
- Customer notification of status and restoration
- Analyzation of ``chronic'' troubles
- Testing, installation and maintenance of E911 circuits
5) Installation and Maintenance (SSIM/I&M)
- Repair and maintenance of PSAP equipment and
Telco owned sets
6) Minicomputer Maintenance Operations Center
- E911 circuit maintenance (where applicable)
7) Area Maintenance Engineer
- Technical assistance on voice (CO-PSAP) network
related E911 troubles

Maintenance Guidelines
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The CCNC will test the Node circuit from the 202T at the
Host site to the 202T at the Node site. Since Host to Node
(CCNC to MMOC) circuits are official company services,
the CCNC will refer all Node circuit troubles to the
SSC/MAC. The SSC/MAC is responsible for the testing
and follow up to restoration of these circuit troubles.

Although Node to PSAP circuit are official services, the
MMOC will refer PSAP circuit troubles to the appropriate
SSC/MAC. The SSC/MAC is responsible for testing and
follow up to restoration of PSAP circuit troubles.

The SSC/MAC will also receive reports from
CRSAB/IMC(s) on subscriber 911 troubles when they are
not line troubles. The SSC/MAC is responsible for testing
and restoration of these troubles.

Maintenance responsibilities are as follows:

SCC* Voice Network (ANI to PSAP)
*SCC responsible for tandem switch
SSIM/I&M PSAP Equipment (Modems, CIU's, sets)
Vendor PSAP Equipment (when CPE)
SSC/MAC PSAP to Node circuits, and tandem to
PSAP voice circuits (EMNT)
MMOC Node site (Modems, cables, etc)

Note: All above work groups are required to resolve
troubles by interfacing with appropriate work groups for
resolution.

The Switching Control Center (SCC) is responsible for
E911/1AESS translations in tandem central offices. These
translations route E911 calls, selective transfer, default
routing, speed calling, etc., for each PSAP. The SCC is also
responsible for troubleshooting on the voice network (call
originating to end office tandem equipment).

For example, ANI failures in the originating offices would
be a responsibility of the SCC.

Recent Change Memory Administration Center
(RCMAC) performs the daily tandem translation updates
(recent change) for routing of individual telephone
numbers.

Recent changes are generated from service order activity
(new service, address changes, etc.) and compiled into a
daily file by the E911 Center (ALI/DMS E911 Computer).

SSIM/I&M is responsible for the installation and repair of
PSAP equipment. PSAP equipment includes ANI
Controller, ALI Controller, data sets, cables, sets, and
other peripheral equipment that is not vendor owned.
SSIM/I&M is responsible for establishing maintenance
test kits, complete with spare parts for PSAP maintenance.
This includes test gear, data sets, and ANI/ALI Controller
parts.

Special Services Center (SSC) or Major Account Center
(MAC) serves as the trouble reporting contact for all
(PSAP) troubles reported by customer. The SSC/MAC
refers troubles to proper organizations for handling and
tracks status of troubles, escalating when necessary. The
SSC/MAC will close out troubles with customer. The
SSC/MAC will analyze all troubles and tracks ``chronic''
PSAP troubles.

Corporate Communications Network Center (CCNC) will
test and refer troubles on all node to host circuits. All E911
circuits are classified as official company property.

The Minicomputer Maintenance Operations Center
(MMOC) maintains the E911 (ALI/DMS) computer
hardware at the Host site. This MMOC is also responsible
for monitoring the system and reporting certain PSAP and
system problems to the local MMOC's, SCC's or
SSC/MAC's. The MMOC personnel also operate software
programs that maintain the TN data base under the
direction of the E911 Center. The maintenance of the
NODE computer (the interface between the PSAP and the
ALI/DMS computer) is a function of the MMOC at the
NODE site. The MMOC's at the NODE sites may also be
involved in the testing of NODE to Host circuits. The
MMOC will also assist on Host to PSAP and data network
related troubles not resolved through standard trouble
clearing procedures.

Installation And Maintenance Center (IMC) is
responsible for referral of E911 subscriber troubles that
are not subscriber line problems.

E911 Center - Performs the role of System Administration
and is responsible for overall operation of the E911
computer software. The E911 Center does A-Z trouble
analysis and provides statistical information on the
performance of the system.

This analysis includes processing PSAP inquiries (trouble
reports) and referral of network troubles. The E911 Center
also performs daily processing of tandem recent change
and provides information to the RCMAC for tandem
input. The E911 Center is responsible for daily processing
of the ALI/DMS computer data base and provides error
files, etc. to the Customer Services department for
investigation and correction. The E911 Center participates
in all system implementations and on-going maintenance
effort and assists in the development of procedures,
training and education of information to all groups.

Any group receiving a 911 trouble from the SSC/MAC
should close out the trouble with the SSC/MAC or provide
a status if the trouble has been referred to another group.
This will allow the SSC/MAC to provide a status back to
the customer or escalate as appropriate.

Any group receiving a trouble from the Host site (MMOC
or CCNC) should close the trouble back to that group.

The MMOC should notify the appropriate SSC/MAC
when the Host, Node, or all Node circuits are down so that
the SSC/MAC can reply to customer reports that may be
called in by the PSAPs. This will eliminate duplicate
reporting of troubles. On complete outages the MMOC
will follow escalation procedures for a Node after two (2)
hours and for a PSAP after four (4) hours. Additionally the
MMOC will notify the appropriate SSC/MAC when the
Host, Node, or all Node circuits are down.

The PSAP will call the SSC/MAC to report E911 troubles.
The person reporting the E911 trouble may not have a
circuit I.D. and will therefore report the PSAP name and
address. Many PSAP troubles are not circuit specific. In
those instances where the caller cannot provide a circuit
I.D., the SSC/MAC will be required to determine the
circuit I.D. using the PSAP profile. Under no
circumstances will the SSC/MAC Center refuse to take
the trouble. The E911 trouble should be handled as
quickly as possible, with the SSC/MAC providing as much
assistance as possible while taking the trouble report from
the caller.

The SSC/MAC will screen/test the trouble to determine
the appropriate handoff organization based on the
following criteria:

PSAP equipment problem: SSIM/I&M
Circuit problem: SSC/MAC
Voice network problem: SCC (report trunk group number)
Problem affecting multiple PSAPs (No ALI report from
all PSAPs): Contact the MMOC to check for NODE or
Host computer problems before further testing.

The SSC/MAC will track the status of reported troubles
and escalate as appropriate. The SSC/MAC will close out
customer/company reports with the initiating contact.
Groups with specific maintenance responsibilities,
defined above, will investigate ``chronic'' troubles upon
request from the SSC/MAC and the ongoing maintenance
subcommittee.

All ``out of service'' E911 troubles are priority one type
reports. One link down to a PSAP is considered a priority
one trouble and should be handled as if the PSAP was
isolated.

The PSAP will report troubles with the ANI controller, ALI
controller or set equipment to the SSC/MAC.

NO ANI: Where the PSAP reports NO ANI (digital
display screen is blank) ask if this condition exists on all
screens and on all calls. It is important to differentiate
between blank screens and screens displaying 911-00XX,
or all zeroes.

When the PSAP reports all screens on all calls, ask if there
is any voice contact with callers. If there is no voice
contact the trouble should be referred to the SCC
immediately since 911 calls are not getting through which
may require alternate routing of calls to another PSAP.

When the PSAP reports this condition on all screens but
not all calls and has voice contact with callers, the report
should be referred to SSIM/I&M for dispatch. The
SSC/MAC should verify with the SCC that ANI is pulsing
before dispatching SSIM.

When the PSAP reports this condition on one screen for
all calls (others work fine) the trouble should be referred to
SSIM/I&M for dispatch, because the trouble is isolated to
one piece of equipment at the customer premise.

An ANI failure (i.e. all zeroes) indicates that the ANI has
not been received by the PSAP from the tandem office or
was lost by the PSAP ANI controller. The PSAP may
receive ``02'' alarms which can be caused by the ANI
controller logging more than three all zero failures on the
same trunk. The PSAP has been instructed to report this
condition to the SSC/MAC since it could indicate an
equipment trouble at the PSAP which might be affecting
all subscribers calling into the PSAP. When all zeroes are
being received on all calls or ``02'' alarms continue, a tester
should analyze the condition to determine the appropriate
action to be taken. The tester must perform cooperative
testing with the SCC when there appears to be a problem
on the Tandem-PSAP trunks before requesting dispatch.

When an occasional all zero condition is reported, the
SSC/MAC should dispatch SSIM/I&M to routine
equipment on a ``chronic'' troublesweep.

The PSAPs are instructed to report incidental ANI failures
to the BOC on a PSAP inquiry trouble ticket (paper) that is
sent to the Customer Services E911 group and forwarded
to E911 center when required. This usually involves only a
particular telephone number and is not a condition that
would require a report to the SSC/MAC. Multiple ANI
failures which our from the same end office (XX denotes
end office), indicate a hard trouble condition may exist in
the end office or end office tandem trunks. The PSAP will
report this type of condition to the SSC/MAC and the
SSC/MAC should refer the report to the SCC responsible
for the tandem office. NOTE: XX is the ESCO (Emergency
Service Number) associated with the incoming 911 trunks
into the tandem. It is important that the C/MAC tell the
SCC what is displayed at the PSAP (i.e. 911-0011) which
indicates to the SCC which end office is in trouble.

Note: It is essential that the PSAP fill out inquiry form on
every ANI failure.

The PSAP will report a trouble any time an address is not
received on an address display (screen blank) E911 call.
(If a record is not in the 911 data base or an ANI failure is
encountered, the screen will provide a display noticing
such condition). The SSC/MAC should verify with the
PSAP whether the NO ALI condition is on one screen or all
screens.

When the condition is on one screen (other screens
receive ALI information) the SSC/MAC will request
SSIM/I&M to dispatch.

If no screens are receiving ALI information, there is
usually a circuit trouble between the PSAP and the Host
computer. The SSC/MAC should test the trouble and
refer for restoral.

Note: If the SSC/MAC receives calls from multiple
PSAP's, all of which are receiving NO ALI, there is a
problem with the Node or Node to Host circuits or the
Host computer itself. Before referring the trouble the
SSC/MAC should call the MMOC to inquire if the Node
or Host is in trouble.

Alarm conditions on the ANI controller digital display at
the PSAP are to be reported by the PSAP's. These alarms
can indicate various trouble conditions so the SSC/MAC
should ask the PSAP if any portion of the E911 system is
not functioning properly.

The SSC/MAC should verify with the PSAP attendant that
the equipment's primary function is answering E911 calls.
If it is, the SSC/MAC should request a dispatch
SSIM/I&M. If the equipment is not primarily used for
E911, then the SSC/MAC should advise PSAP to contact
their CPE vendor.

Note: These troubles can be quite confusing when the
PSAP has vendor equipment mixed in with equipment
that the BOC maintains. The Marketing representative
should provide the SSC/MAC information concerning any
unusual or exception items where the PSAP should
contact their vendor. This information should be included
in the PSAP profile sheets.

ANI or ALI controller down: When the host computer
sees the PSAP equipment down and it does not come back
up, the MMOC will report the trouble to the SSC/MAC;
the equipment is down at the PSAP, a dispatch will be
required.

PSAP link (circuit) down: The MMOC will provide the
SSC/MAC with the circuit ID that the Host computer
indicates in trouble. Although each PSAP has two circuits,
when either circuit is down the condition must be treated
as an emergency since failure of the second circuit will
cause the PSAP to be isolated.

Any problems that the MMOC identifies from the Node
location to the Host computer will be handled directly with
the appropriate MMOC(s)/CCNC.

Note: The customer will call only when a problem is
apparent to the PSAP. When only one circuit is down to
the PSAP, the customer may not be aware there is a
trouble, even though there is one link down, notification
should appear on the PSAP screen. Troubles called into
the SSC/MAC from the MMOC or other company
employee should not be closed out by calling the PSAP
since it may result in the customer responding that they
do not have a trouble. These reports can only be closed
out by receiving information that the trouble was fixed
and by checking with the company employee that
reported the trouble. The MMOC personnel will be able
to verify that the trouble has cleared by reviewing a
printout from the host.

When the CRSAB receives a subscriber complaint (i.e.,
cannot dial 911) the RSA should obtain as much
information as possible while the customer is on the line.

For example, what happened when the subscriber dialed
911? The report is automatically directed to the IMC for
subscriber line testing. When no line trouble is found, the
IMC will refer the trouble condition to the SSC/MAC. The
SSC/MAC will contact Customer Services E911 Group and
verify that the subscriber should be able to call 911 and
obtain the ESN. The SSC/MAC will verify the ESN via
2SCCS. When both verifications match, the SSC/MAC
will refer the report to the SCC responsible for the 911
tandem office for investigation and resolution. The MAC
is responsible for tracking the trouble and informing the
IMC when it is resolved.

For more information, please refer to E911 Glossary of
Terms.

End of Phrack File

The reader is forgiven if he or she was entirely unable to read this
document. John Perry Barlow had a great deal of fun at its expense,
in "Crime and Puzzlement:" "Bureaucrat-ese of surpassing opacity... To
read the whole thing straight through without entering coma requires
either a machine or a human who has too much practice thinking like
one. Anyone who can understand it fully and fluidly had altered his
consciousness beyone the ability to ever again read Blake, Whitman, or
Tolstoy... the document contains little of interest to anyone who is
not a student of advanced organizational sclerosis."

With the Document itself to hand, however, exactly as it was
published (in its six-page edited form) in *Phrack,* the reader may be
able to verify a few statements of fact about its nature. First,
there is no software, no computer code, in the Document. It is not
computer-programming language like FORTRAN or C++, it is English; all
the sentences have nouns and verbs and punctuation. It does not
explain how to break into the E911 system. It does not suggest ways to
destroy or damage the E911 system.

There are no access codes in the Document. There are no computer
passwords. It does not explain how to steal long distance service. It
does not explain how to break in to telco switching stations. There is
nothing in it about using a personal computer or a modem for any
purpose at all, good or bad.

Close study will reveal that this document is not about machinery.
The E911 Document is about *administration.* It describes how one
creates and administers certain units of telco bureaucracy: Special
Service Centers and Major Account Centers (SSC/MAC). It describes how
these centers should distribute responsibility for the E911 service, to
other units of telco bureaucracy, in a chain of command, a formal
hierarchy. It describes who answers customer complaints, who screens
calls, who reports equipment failures, who answers those reports, who
handles maintenance, who chairs subcommittees, who gives orders, who
follows orders, *who* tells *whom* what to do. The Document is not a
"roadmap" to computers. The Document is a roadmap to *people.*

As an aid to breaking into computer systems, the Document is
*useless.* As an aid to harassing and deceiving telco people,
however, the Document might prove handy (especially with its Glossary,
which I have not included). An intense and protracted study of this
Document and its Glossary, combined with many other such documents,
might teach one to speak like a telco employee. And telco people live
by *speech* -- they live by phone communication. If you can mimic
their language over the phone, you can "social-engineer" them. If you
can con telco people, you can wreak havoc among them. You can force
them to no longer trust one another; you can break the telephonic ties
that bind their community; you can make them paranoid. And people
will fight harder to defend their community than they will fight to
defend their individual selves.

This was the genuine, gut-level threat posed by *Phrack* magazine.
The real struggle was over the control of telco language, the control
of telco knowledge. It was a struggle to defend the social "membrane of
differentiation" that forms the walls of the telco community's ivory
tower -- the special jargon that allows telco professionals to
recognize one another, and to exclude charlatans, thieves, and
upstarts. And the prosecution brought out this fact. They repeatedly
made reference to the threat posed to telco professionals by hackers
using "social engineering."

However, Craig Neidorf was not on trial for learning to speak like a
professional telecommunications expert. Craig Neidorf was on trial for
access device fraud and transportation of stolen property. He was on
trial for stealing a document that was purportedly highly sensitive and
purportedly worth tens of thousands of dollars.

#

John Nagle read the E911 Document. He drew his own conclusions.
And he presented Zenner and his defense team with an overflowing box
of similar material, drawn mostly from Stanford University's engineering
libraries. During the trial, the defense team -- Zenner, half-a-dozen
other attorneys, Nagle, Neidorf, and computer-security expert Dorothy
Denning, all pored over the E911 Document line-by-line.

On the afternoon of July 25, 1990, Zenner began to cross-examine a
woman named Billie Williams, a service manager for Southern Bell in
Atlanta. Ms. Williams had been responsible for the E911 Document.
(She was not its author -- its original "author" was a Southern Bell
staff manager named Richard Helms. However, Mr. Helms should not bear
the entire blame; many telco staff people and maintenance personnel had
amended the Document. It had not been so much "written" by a single
author, as built by committee out of concrete-blocks of jargon.)

Ms. Williams had been called as a witness for the prosecution, and
had gamely tried to explain the basic technical structure of the E911
system, aided by charts.

Now it was Zenner's turn. He first established that the
"proprietary stamp" that BellSouth had used on the E911 Document was
stamped on *every single document* that BellSouth wrote -- *thousands*
of documents. "We do not publish anything other than for our own
company," Ms. Williams explained. "Any company document of this nature
is considered proprietary." Nobody was in charge of singling out
special high-security publications for special high-security
protection. They were *all* special, no matter how trivial, no matter
what their subject matter -- the stamp was put on as soon as any
document was written, and the stamp was never removed.

Zenner now asked whether the charts she had been using to explain
the mechanics of E911 system were "proprietary," too. Were they
*public information,* these charts, all about PSAPs, ALIs, nodes,
local end switches? Could he take the charts out in the street and show
them to anybody, "without violating some proprietary notion that
BellSouth has?"

Ms Williams showed some confusion, but finally agreed that the
charts were, in fact, public.

"But isn't this what you said was basically what appeared in
*Phrack?*"

Ms. Williams denied this.

Zenner now pointed out that the E911 Document as published in Phrack
was only half the size of the original E911 Document (as Prophet had
purloined it). Half of it had been deleted -- edited by Neidorf.

Ms. Williams countered that "Most of the information that is in the
text file is redundant."

Zenner continued to probe. Exactly what bits of knowledge in the
Document were, in fact, unknown to the public? Locations of E911
computers? Phone numbers for telco personnel? Ongoing maintenance
subcommittees? Hadn't Neidorf removed much of this?

Then he pounced. "Are you familiar with Bellcore Technical
Reference Document TR-TSY-000350?" It was, Zenner explained,
officially titled "E911 Public Safety Answering Point Interface Between
1-1AESS Switch and Customer Premises Equipment." It contained highly
detailed and specific technical information about the E911 System. It
was published by Bellcore and publicly available for about $20.

He showed the witness a Bellcore catalog which listed thousands of
documents from Bellcore and from all the Baby Bells, BellSouth
included. The catalog, Zenner pointed out, was free. Anyone with a
credit card could call the Bellcore toll-free 800 number and simply
order any of these documents, which would be shipped to any customer
without question. Including, for instance, "BellSouth E911 Service
Interfaces to Customer Premises Equipment at a Public Safety Answering
Point."

Zenner gave the witness a copy of "BellSouth E911 Service
Interfaces," which cost, as he pointed out, $13, straight from the
catalog. "Look at it carefully," he urged Ms. Williams, "and tell me
if it doesn't contain about twice as much detailed information about
the E911 system of BellSouth than appeared anywhere in *Phrack.*"

"You want me to..." Ms. Williams trailed off. "I don't understand."

"Take a careful look," Zenner persisted. "Take a look at that
document, and tell me when you're done looking at it if, indeed, it
doesn't contain much more detailed information about the E911 system
than appeared in *Phrack.*"

"*Phrack* wasn't taken from this," Ms. Williams said.

"Excuse me?" said Zenner.

"*Phrack* wasn't taken from this."

"I can't hear you," Zenner said.

"*Phrack* was not taken from this document. I don't understand your
question to me."

"I guess you don't," Zenner said.

At this point, the prosecution's case had been gutshot. Ms.
Williams was distressed. Her confusion was quite genuine. *Phrack*
had not been taken from any publicly available Bellcore document.
*Phrack*'s E911 Document had been stolen from her own company's
computers, from her own company's text files, that her own colleagues
had written, and revised, with much labor.

But the "value" of the Document had been blown to smithereens. It
wasn't worth eighty grand. According to Bellcore it was worth thirteen
bucks. And the looming menace that it supposedly posed had been
reduced in instants to a scarecrow. Bellcore itself was selling
material far more detailed and "dangerous," to anybody with a credit
card and a phone.

Actually, Bellcore was not giving this information to just anybody.
They gave it to *anybody who asked,* but not many did ask. Not many
people knew that Bellcore had a free catalog and an 800 number. John
Nagle knew, but certainly the average teenage phreak didn't know.
"Tuc," a friend of Neidorf's and sometime *Phrack* contributor, knew,
and Tuc had been very helpful to the defense, behind the scenes. But
the Legion of Doom didn't know -- otherwise, they would never have
wasted so much time raiding dumpsters. Cook didn't know. Foley didn't
know. Kluepfel didn't know. The right hand of Bellcore knew not what
the left hand was doing. The right hand was battering hackers without
mercy, while the left hand was distributing Bellcore's intellectual
property to anybody who was interested in telephone technical trivia -apparently, a pathetic few.

The digital underground was so amateurish and poorly organized that
they had never discovered this heap of unguarded riches. The ivory
tower of the telcos was so wrapped-up in the fog of its own technical
obscurity that it had left all the windows open and flung open the
doors. No one had even noticed.

Zenner sank another nail in the coffin. He produced a printed issue
of *Telephone Engineer & Management,* a prominent industry journal that
comes out twice a month and costs $27 a year. This particular issue of
*TE&M,* called "Update on 911," featured a galaxy of technical details
on 911 service and a glossary far more extensive than *Phrack*'s.

The trial rumbled on, somehow, through its own momentum. Tim Foley
testified about his interrogations of Neidorf. Neidorf's written
admission that he had known the E911 Document was pilfered was
officially read into the court record.

An interesting side issue came up: "Terminus" had once passed
Neidorf a piece of UNIX AT&T software, a log-in sequence, that had been
cunningly altered so that it could trap passwords. The UNIX software
itself was illegally copied AT&T property, and the alterations
"Terminus" had made to it, had transformed it into a device for
facilitating computer break-ins. Terminus himself would eventually
plead guilty to theft of this piece of software, and the Chicago group
would send Terminus to prison for it. But it was of dubious relevance
in the Neidorf case. Neidorf hadn't written the program. He wasn't
accused of ever having used it. And Neidorf wasn't being charged with
software theft or owning a password trapper.

On the next day, Zenner took the offensive. The civil libertarians
now had their own arcane, untried legal weaponry to launch into action
-- the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, 18 US Code,
Section 2701 et seq. Section 2701 makes it a crime to intentionally
access without authorization a facility in which an electronic
communication service is provided -- it is, at heart, an anti-bugging
and anti-tapping law, intended to carry the traditional protections of
telephones into other electronic channels of communication. While
providing penalties for amateur snoops, however, Section 2703 of the
ECPA also lays some formal difficulties on the bugging and tapping
activities of police.

The Secret Service, in the person of Tim Foley, had served Richard
Andrews with a federal grand jury subpoena, in their pursuit of
Prophet, the E911 Document, and the Terminus software ring. But
according to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a "provider of
remote computing service" was legally entitled to "prior notice" from
the government if a subpoena was used. Richard Andrews and his basement
UNIX node, Jolnet, had not received any "prior notice." Tim Foley had
purportedly violated the ECPA and committed an electronic crime!
Zenner now sought the judge's permission to cross-examine Foley on the
topic of Foley's own electronic misdeeds.

Cook argued that Richard Andrews' Jolnet was a privately owned
bulletin board, and not within the purview of ECPA. Judge Bua granted
the motion of the government to prevent cross-examination on that point,
and Zenner's offensive fizzled. This, however, was the first direct
assault on the legality of the actions of the Computer Fraud and Abuse
Task Force itself -- the first suggestion that they themselves had
broken the law, and might, perhaps, be called to account.

Zenner, in any case, did not really need the ECPA. Instead, he
grilled Foley on the glaring contradictions in the supposed value of
the E911 Document. He also brought up the embarrassing fact that the
supposedly red-hot E911 Document had been sitting around for months, in
Jolnet, with Kluepfel's knowledge, while Kluepfel had done nothing
about it.

In the afternoon, the Prophet was brought in to testify for the
prosecution. (The Prophet, it will be recalled, had also been indicted
in the case as partner in a fraud scheme with Neidorf.) In Atlanta,
the Prophet had already pled guilty to one charge of conspiracy, one
charge of wire fraud and one charge of interstate transportation of
stolen property. The wire fraud charge, and the stolen property
charge, were both directly based on the E911 Document.

The twenty-year-old Prophet proved a sorry customer, answering
questions politely but in a barely audible mumble, his voice trailing
off at the ends of sentences. He was constantly urged to speak up.

Cook, examining Prophet, forced him to admit that he had once had a
"drug problem," abusing amphetamines, marijuana, cocaine, and LSD.
This may have established to the jury that "hackers" are, or can be,
seedy lowlife characters, but it may have damaged Prophet's credibility
somewhat. Zenner later suggested that drugs might have damaged
Prophet's memory. The interesting fact also surfaced that Prophet had
never physically met Craig Neidorf. He didn't even know Neidorf's last
name -- at least, not until the trial.

Prophet confirmed the basic facts of his hacker career. He was a
member of the Legion of Doom. He had abused codes, he had broken into
switching stations and re-routed calls, he had hung out on pirate
bulletin boards. He had raided the BellSouth AIMSX computer, copied the
E911 Document, stored it on Jolnet, mailed it to Neidorf. He and
Neidorf had edited it, and Neidorf had known where it came from.

Zenner, however, had Prophet confirm that Neidorf was not a member
of the Legion of Doom, and had not urged Prophet to break into
BellSouth computers. Neidorf had never urged Prophet to defraud anyone,
or to steal anything. Prophet also admitted that he had never known
Neidorf to break in to any computer. Prophet said that no one in the
Legion of Doom considered Craig Neidorf a "hacker" at all. Neidorf
was not a UNIX maven, and simply lacked the necessary skill and ability
to break into computers. Neidorf just published a magazine.

On Friday, July 27, 1990, the case against Neidorf collapsed. Cook
moved to dismiss the indictment, citing "information currently
available to us that was not available to us at the inception of the
trial." Judge Bua praised the prosecution for this action, which he
described as "very responsible," then dismissed a juror and declared a
mistrial.

Neidorf was a free man. His defense, however, had cost himself and
his family dearly. Months of his life had been consumed in anguish; he
had seen his closest friends shun him as a federal criminal. He owed
his lawyers over a hundred thousand dollars, despite a generous payment
to the defense by Mitch Kapor.

Neidorf was not found innocent. The trial was simply dropped.
Nevertheless, on September 9, 1991, Judge Bua granted Neidorf's motion
for the "expungement and sealing" of his indictment record. The United
States Secret Service was ordered to delete and destroy all
fingerprints, photographs, and other records of arrest or processing
relating to Neidorf's indictment, including their paper documents and
their computer records.

Neidorf went back to school, blazingly determined to become a
lawyer. Having seen the justice system at work, Neidorf lost much of
his enthusiasm for merely technical power. At this writing, Craig
Neidorf is working in Washington as a salaried researcher for the
American Civil Liberties Union.

#

The outcome of the Neidorf trial changed the EFF from
voices-in-the-wilderness to the media darlings of the new frontier.

Legally speaking, the Neidorf case was not a sweeping triumph for
anyone concerned. No constitutional principles had been established.
The issues of "freedom of the press" for electronic publishers remained
in legal limbo. There were public misconceptions about the case. Many
people thought Neidorf had been found innocent and relieved of all his
legal debts by Kapor. The truth was that the government had simply
dropped the case, and Neidorf's family had gone deeply into hock to
support him.

But the Neidorf case did provide a single, devastating, public
sound-bite: *The feds said it was worth eighty grand, and it was only
worth thirteen bucks.*

This is the Neidorf case's single most memorable element. No
serious report of the case missed this particular element. Even cops
could not read this without a wince and a shake of the head. It left
the public credibility of the crackdown agents in tatters.

The crackdown, in fact, continued, however. Those two charges
against Prophet, which had been based on the E911 Document, were
quietly forgotten at his sentencing -- even though Prophet had already
pled guilty to them. Georgia federal prosecutors strongly argued for
jail time for the Atlanta Three, insisting on "the need to send a
message to the community," "the message that hackers around the
country need to hear."

There was a great deal in their sentencing memorandum about the
awful things that various other hackers had done (though the Atlanta
Three themselves had not, in fact, actually committed these crimes).
There was also much speculation about the awful things that the Atlanta
Three *might* have done and *were capable* of doing (even though
they had not, in fact, actually done them). The prosecution's argument
carried the day. The Atlanta Three were sent to prison: Urvile and
Leftist both got 14 months each, while Prophet (a second offender) got
21 months.

The Atlanta Three were also assessed staggering fines as
"restitution": $233,000 each. BellSouth claimed that the defendants
had "stolen" "approximately $233,880 worth" of "proprietary computer
access information" -- specifically, $233,880 worth of computer
passwords and connect addresses. BellSouth's astonishing claim of the
extreme value of its own computer passwords and addresses was accepted
at face value by the Georgia court. Furthermore (as if to emphasize
its theoretical nature) this enormous sum was not divvied up among the
Atlanta Three, but each of them had to pay all of it.

A striking aspect of the sentence was that the Atlanta Three were
specifically forbidden to use computers, except for work or under
supervision. Depriving hackers of home computers and modems makes some
sense if one considers hackers as "computer addicts," but EFF, filing
an amicus brief in the case, protested that this punishment was
unconstitutional -- it deprived the Atlanta Three of their rights of
free association and free expression through electronic media.

Terminus, the "ultimate hacker," was finally sent to prison for a
year through the dogged efforts of the Chicago Task Force. His crime,
to which he pled guilty, was the transfer of the UNIX password
trapper, which was officially valued by AT&T at $77,000, a figure which
aroused intense skepticism among those familiar with UNIX "login.c"
programs.

The jailing of Terminus and the Atlanta Legionnaires of Doom,
however, did not cause the EFF any sense of embarrassment or defeat.
On the contrary, the civil libertarians were rapidly gathering strength.

An early and potent supporter was Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat
from Vermont, who had been a Senate sponsor of the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act. Even before the Neidorf trial, Leahy had
spoken out in defense of hacker-power and freedom of the keyboard: "We
cannot unduly inhibit the inquisitive 13-year-old who, if left to
experiment today, may tomorrow develop the telecommunications or
computer technology to lead the United States into the 21st century.
He represents our future and our best hope to remain a technologically
competitive nation."

It was a handsome statement, rendered perhaps rather more effective
by the fact that the crackdown raiders *did not have* any Senators
speaking out for *them.* On the contrary, their highly secretive
actions and tactics, all "sealed search warrants" here and
"confidential ongoing investigations" there, might have won them a
burst of glamorous publicity at first, but were crippling them in the
on-going propaganda war. Gail Thackeray was reduced to unsupported
bluster: "Some of these people who are loudest on the bandwagon may
just slink into the background," she predicted in *Newsweek* -- when
all the facts came out, and the cops were vindicated.

But all the facts did not come out. Those facts that did, were not
very flattering. And the cops were not vindicated. And Gail Thackeray
lost her job. By the end of 1991, William Cook had also left public
employment.

1990 had belonged to the crackdown, but by '91 its agents were in
severe disarray, and the libertarians were on a roll. People were
flocking to the cause.

A particularly interesting ally had been Mike Godwin of Austin,
Texas. Godwin was an individual almost as difficult to describe as
Barlow; he had been editor of the student newspaper of the University
of Texas, and a computer salesman, and a programmer, and in 1990 was
back in law school, looking for a law degree.

Godwin was also a bulletin board maven. He was very well-known in
the Austin board community under his handle "Johnny Mnemonic," which he
adopted from a cyberpunk science fiction story by William Gibson.
Godwin was an ardent cyberpunk science fiction fan. As a fellow
Austinite of similar age and similar interests, I myself had known
Godwin socially for many years. When William Gibson and myself had
been writing our collaborative SF novel, *The Difference Engine,*
Godwin had been our technical advisor in our effort to link our Apple
word-processors from Austin to Vancouver. Gibson and I were so pleased
by his generous expert help that we named a character in the novel
"Michael Godwin" in his honor.

The handle "Mnemonic" suited Godwin very well. His erudition and his
mastery of trivia were impressive to the point of stupor; his ardent
curiosity seemed insatiable, and his desire to debate and argue seemed
the central drive of his life. Godwin had even started his own Austin
debating society, wryly known as the "Dull Men's Club." In person,
Godwin could be overwhelming; a flypaper-brained polymath who could
not seem to let any idea go. On bulletin boards, however, Godwin's
closely reasoned, highly grammatical, erudite posts suited the medium
well, and he became a local board celebrity.

Mike Godwin was the man most responsible for the public national
exposure of the Steve Jackson case. The Izenberg seizure in Austin
had received no press coverage at all. The March 1 raids on Mentor,
Bloodaxe, and Steve Jackson Games had received a brief front-page
splash in the front page of the *Austin American-Statesman,* but it
was confused and ill-informed: the warrants were sealed, and the
Secret Service wasn't talking. Steve Jackson seemed doomed to
obscurity. Jackson had not been arrested; he was not charged with any
crime; he was not on trial. He had lost some computers in an ongoing
investigation -- so what? Jackson tried hard to attract attention to
the true extent of his plight, but he was drawing a blank; no one in a
position to help him seemed able to get a mental grip on the issues.

Godwin, however, was uniquely, almost magically, qualified to carry
Jackson's case to the outside world. Godwin was a board enthusiast, a
science fiction fan, a former journalist, a computer salesman, a
lawyer-to-be, and an Austinite. Through a coincidence yet more
amazing, in his last year of law school Godwin had specialized in
federal prosecutions and criminal procedure. Acting entirely on his
own, Godwin made up a press packet which summarized the issues and
provided useful contacts for reporters. Godwin's behind-the-scenes
effort (which he carried out mostly to prove a point in a local board
debate) broke the story again in the *Austin American-Statesman* and
then in *Newsweek.*

Life was never the same for Mike Godwin after that. As he joined the
growing civil liberties debate on the Internet, it was obvious to all
parties involved that here was one guy who, in the midst of complete
murk and confusion, *genuinely understood everything he was talking
about.* The disparate elements of Godwin's dilettantish existence
suddenly fell together as neatly as the facets of a Rubik's cube.

When the time came to hire a full-time EFF staff attorney, Godwin
was the obvious choice. He took the Texas bar exam, left Austin, moved
to Cambridge, became a full-time, professional, computer civil
libertarian, and was soon touring the nation on behalf of EFF,
delivering well-received addresses on the issues to crowds as disparate
as academics, industrialists, science fiction fans, and federal cops.

Michael Godwin is currently the chief legal counsel of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

#

Another early and influential participant in the controversy was
Dorothy Denning. Dr. Denning was unique among investigators of the
computer underground in that she did not enter the debate with any set
of politicized motives. She was a professional cryptographer and
computer security expert whose primary interest in hackers was
*scholarly.* She had a B.A. and M.A. in mathematics, and a Ph.D. in
computer science from Purdue. She had worked for SRI International, the
California think-tank that was also the home of computer security maven
Donn Parker, and had authored an influential text called *Cryptography
and Data Security.* In 1990, Dr. Denning was working for Digital
Equipment Corporation in their Systems Reseach Center. Her husband,
Peter Denning, was also a computer security expert, working for NASA's
Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science. He had edited the
well-received *Computers Under Attack: Intruders, Worms and Viruses.*

Dr. Denning took it upon herself to contact the digital underground,
more or less with an anthropological interest. There she discovered
that these computer-intruding hackers, who had been characterized as
unethical, irresponsible, and a serious danger to society, did in fact
have their own subculture and their own rules. They were not
particularly well-considered rules, but they were, in fact, rules.
Basically, they didn't take money and they didn't break anything.

Her dispassionate reports on her researches did a great deal to
influence serious-minded computer professionals -- the sort of people
who merely rolled their eyes at the cyberspace rhapsodies of a John
Perry Barlow.

For young hackers of the digital underground, meeting Dorothy
Denning was a genuinely mind-boggling experience. Here was this
neatly coiffed, conservatively dressed, dainty little personage, who
reminded most hackers of their moms or their aunts. And yet she was an
IBM systems programmer with profound expertise in computer
architectures and high-security information flow, who had personal
friends in the FBI and the National Security Agency.

Dorothy Denning was a shining example of the American mathematical
intelligentsia, a genuinely brilliant person from the central ranks of
the computer-science elite. And here she was, gently questioning
twenty-year-old hairy-eyed phone-phreaks over the deeper ethical
implications of their behavior.

Confronted by this genuinely nice lady, most hackers sat up very
straight and did their best to keep the anarchy-file stuff down to a
faint whiff of brimstone. Nevertheless, the hackers *were* in fact
prepared to seriously discuss serious issues with Dorothy Denning.
They were willing to speak the unspeakable and defend the indefensible,
to blurt out their convictions that information cannot be owned, that
the databases of governments and large corporations were a threat to
the rights and privacy of individuals.

Denning's articles made it clear to many that "hacking" was not
simple vandalism by some evil clique of psychotics. "Hacking" was not
an aberrant menace that could be charmed away by ignoring it, or swept
out of existence by jailing a few ringleaders. Instead, "hacking" was
symptomatic of a growing, primal struggle over knowledge and power in
the age of information.

Denning pointed out that the attitude of hackers were at least
partially shared by forward-looking management theorists in the
business community: people like Peter Drucker and Tom Peters. Peter
Drucker, in his book *The New Realities,* had stated that "control of
information by the government is no longer possible. Indeed,
information is now transnational. Like money, it has no `fatherland.' "

And management maven Tom Peters had chided large corporations for
uptight, proprietary attitudes in his bestseller, *Thriving on Chaos:*
"Information hoarding, especially by politically motivated,
power-seeking staffs, had been commonplace throughout American industry,
service and manufacturing alike. It will be an impossible millstone
aroung the neck of tomorrow's organizations."

Dorothy Denning had shattered the social membrane of the digital
underground. She attended the Neidorf trial, where she was prepared
to testify for the defense as an expert witness. She was a
behind-the-scenes organizer of two of the most important national
meetings of the computer civil libertarians. Though not a zealot of
any description, she brought disparate elements of the electronic
community into a surprising and fruitful collusion.

Dorothy Denning is currently the Chair of the Computer Science
Department at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

#

There were many stellar figures in the civil libertarian community.
There's no question, however, that its single most influential figure
was Mitchell D. Kapor. Other people might have formal titles, or
governmental positions, have more experience with crime, or with the
law, or with the arcanities of computer security or constitutional
theory. But by 1991 Kapor had transcended any such narrow role. Kapor
had become "Mitch."

Mitch had become the central civil-libertarian ad-hocrat. Mitch had
stood up first, he had spoken out loudly, directly, vigorously and
angrily, he had put his own reputation, and his very considerable
personal fortune, on the line. By mid-'91 Kapor was the best-known
advocate of his cause and was known *personally* by almost every single
human being in America with any direct influence on the question of
civil liberties in cyberspace. Mitch had built bridges, crossed
voids, changed paradigms, forged metaphors, made phone-calls and
swapped business cards to such spectacular effect that it had become
impossible for anyone to take any action in the "hacker question"
without wondering what Mitch might think -- and say -- and tell his
friends.

The EFF had simply *networked* the situation into an entirely new
status quo. And in fact this had been EFF's deliberate strategy from
the beginning. Both Barlow and Kapor loathed bureaucracies and had
deliberately chosen to work almost entirely through the electronic
spiderweb of "valuable personal contacts."

After a year of EFF, both Barlow and Kapor had every reason to look
back with satisfaction. EFF had established its own Internet node,
"eff.org," with a well-stocked electronic archive of documents on
electronic civil rights, privacy issues, and academic freedom. EFF
was also publishing *EFFector,* a quarterly printed journal, as well
as *EFFector Online,* an electronic newsletter with over 1,200
subscribers. And EFF was thriving on the Well.

EFF had a national headquarters in Cambridge and a full-time staff.
It had become a membership organization and was attracting grass roots
support. It had also attracted the support of some thirty civil-rights
lawyers, ready and eager to do pro bono work in defense of the
Constitution in Cyberspace.

EFF had lobbied successfully in Washington and in Massachusetts to
change state and federal legislation on computer networking. Kapor in
particular had become a veteran expert witness, and had joined the
Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academy
of Science and Engineering.

EFF had sponsored meetings such as "Computers, Freedom and Privacy"
and the CPSR Roundtable. It had carried out a press offensive that,
in the words of *EFFector,* "has affected the climate of opinion about
computer networking and begun to reverse the slide into `hacker
hysteria' that was beginning to grip the nation."

It had helped Craig Neidorf avoid prison.

And, last but certainly not least, the Electronic Frontier
Foundation had filed a federal lawsuit in the name of Steve Jackson,
Steve Jackson Games Inc., and three users of the Illuminati bulletin
board system. The defendants were, and are, the United States Secret
Service, William Cook, Tim Foley, Barbara Golden and Henry Kleupfel.

The case, which is in pre-trial procedures in an Austin federal
court as of this writing, is a civil action for damages to redress
alleged violations of the First and Fourth Amendments to the United
States Constitution, as well as the Privacy Protection Act of 1980 (42
USC 2000aa et seq.), and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (18
USC 2510 et seq and 2701 et seq).

EFF had established that it had credibility. It had also
established that it had teeth.

In the fall of 1991 I travelled to Massachusetts to speak personally
with Mitch Kapor. It was my final interview for this book.

#

The city of Boston has always been one of the major intellectual
centers of the American republic. It is a very old city by American
standards, a place of skyscrapers overshadowing seventeenth-century
graveyards, where the high-tech start-up companies of Route 128 co-exist
with the hand-wrought pre-industrial grace of "Old Ironsides," the USS
*Constitution.*

The Battle of Bunker Hill, one of the first and bitterest armed
clashes of the American Revolution, was fought in Boston's environs.
Today there is a monumental spire on Bunker Hill, visible throughout
much of the city. The willingness of the republican revolutionaries
to take up arms and fire on their oppressors has left a cultural
legacy that two full centuries have not effaced. Bunker Hill is still
a potent center of American political symbolism, and the Spirit of '76
is still a potent image for those who seek to mold public opinion.

Of course, not everyone who wraps himself in the flag is necessarily
a patriot. When I visited the spire in September 1991, it bore a huge,
badly-erased, spray-can grafitto around its bottom reading "BRITS OUT
-- IRA PROVOS." Inside this hallowed edifice was a glass-cased
diorama of thousands of tiny toy soldiers, rebels and redcoats,
fighting and dying over the green hill, the riverside marshes, the
rebel trenchworks. Plaques indicated the movement of troops, the
shiftings of strategy. The Bunker Hill Monument is occupied at its
very center by the toy soldiers of a military war-game simulation.

The Boston metroplex is a place of great universities, prominent
among the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the term
"computer hacker" was first coined. The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 might
be interpreted as a political struggle among American cities:
traditional strongholds of longhair intellectual liberalism, such as
Boston, San Francisco, and Austin, versus the bare-knuckle industrial
pragmatism of Chicago and Phoenix (with Atlanta and New York wrapped
in internal struggle).

The headquarters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is on 155
Second Street in Cambridge, a Bostonian suburb north of the River
Charles. Second Street has weedy sidewalks of dented, sagging brick and
elderly cracked asphalt; large street-signs warn "NO PARKING DURING
DECLARED SNOW EMERGENCY." This is an old area of modest manufacturing
industries; the EFF is catecorner from the Greene Rubber Company.
EFF's building is two stories of red brick; its large wooden windows
feature gracefully arched tops and stone sills.

The glass window beside the Second Street entrance bears three
sheets of neatly laser-printed paper, taped against the glass. They
read: ON Technology. EFF. KEI.

"ON Technology" is Kapor's software company, which currently
specializes in "groupware" for the Apple Macintosh computer.
"Groupware" is intended to promote efficient social interaction among
office-workers linked by computers. ON Technology's most successful
software products to date are "Meeting Maker" and "Instant Update."

"KEI" is Kapor Enterprises Inc., Kapor's personal holding company,
the commercial entity that formally controls his extensive investments
in other hardware and software corporations.

"EFF" is a political action group -- of a special sort.

Inside, someone's bike has been chained to the handrails of a modest
flight of stairs. A wall of modish glass brick separates this anteroom
from the offices. Beyond the brick, there's an alarm system mounted on
the wall, a sleek, complex little number that resembles a cross between
a thermostat and a CD player. Piled against the wall are box after box
of a recent special issue of *Scientific American,* "How to Work, Play,
and Thrive in Cyberspace," with extensive coverage of electronic
networking techniques and political issues, including an article by
Kapor himself. These boxes are addressed to Gerard Van der Leun,
EFF's Director of Communications, who will shortly mail those magazines
to every member of the EFF.

The joint headquarters of EFF, KEI, and ON Technology, which Kapor
currently rents, is a modestly bustling place. It's very much the
same physical size as Steve Jackson's gaming company. It's certainly a
far cry from the gigantic gray steel-sided railway shipping barn, on
the Monsignor O'Brien Highway, that is owned by Lotus Development
Corporation.

Lotus is, of course, the software giant that Mitchell Kapor founded
in the late 70s. The software program Kapor co-authored, "Lotus
1-2-3," is still that company's most profitable product. "Lotus 1-2-3"
also bears a singular distinction in the digital underground: it's
probably the most pirated piece of application software in world
history.

Kapor greets me cordially in his own office, down a hall. Kapor,
whose name is pronounced KAY-por, is in his early forties, married and
the father of two. He has a round face, high forehead, straight nose,
a slightly tousled mop of black hair peppered with gray. His large
brown eyes are wideset, reflective, one might almost say soulful. He
disdains ties, and commonly wears Hawaiian shirts and tropical prints,
not so much garish as simply cheerful and just that little bit
anomalous.

There is just the whiff of hacker brimstone about Mitch Kapor. He
may not have the hard-riding, hell-for-leather, guitar-strumming
charisma of his Wyoming colleague John Perry Barlow, but there's
something about the guy that still stops one short. He has the air of
the Eastern city dude in the bowler hat, the dreamy, Longfellow-quoting
poker shark who only *happens* to know the exact mathematical odds
against drawing to an inside straight. Even among his
computer-community colleagues, who are hardly known for mental
sluggishness, Kapor strikes one forcefully as a very intelligent man.
He speaks rapidly, with vigorous gestures, his Boston accent sometimes
slipping to the sharp nasal tang of his youth in Long Island.

Kapor, whose Kapor Family Foundation does much of his philanthropic
work, is a strong supporter of Boston's Computer Museum. Kapor's
interest in the history of his industry has brought him some remarkable
curios, such as the "byte" just outside his office door. This "byte"
-- eight digital bits -- has been salvaged from the wreck of an
electronic computer of the pre-transistor age. It's a standing
gunmetal rack about the size of a small toaster-oven: with eight slots
of hand-soldered breadboarding featuring thumb-sized vacuum tubes. If
it fell off a table it could easily break your foot, but it was
state-of-the-art computation in the 1940s. (It would take exactly
157,184 of these primordial toasters to hold the first part of this
book.)

There's also a coiling, multicolored, scaly dragon that some
inspired techno-punk artist has cobbled up entirely out of transistors,
capacitors, and brightly plastic-coated wiring.

Inside the office, Kapor excuses himself briefly to do a little
mouse-whizzing housekeeping on his personal Macintosh IIfx. If its
giant screen were an open window, an agile person could climb through
it without much trouble at all. There's a coffee-cup at Kapor's elbow,
a memento of his recent trip to Eastern Europe, which has a
black-and-white stencilled photo and the legend CAPITALIST FOOLS TOUR.
It's Kapor, Barlow, and two California venture-capitalist luminaries
of their acquaintance, four windblown, grinning Baby Boomer dudes in
leather jackets, boots, denim, travel bags, standing on airport tarmac
somewhere behind the formerly Iron Curtain. They look as if they're
having the absolute time of their lives.

Kapor is in a reminiscent mood. We talk a bit about his youth -high school days as a "math nerd," Saturdays attending Columbia
University's high-school science honors program, where he had his first
experience programming computers. IBM 1620s, in 1965 and '66. "I was
very interested," says Kapor, "and then I went off to college and got
distracted by drugs, sex and rock and roll, like anybody with half a
brain would have then!" After college he was a progressive-rock DJ in
Hartford, Connecticut, for a couple of years.

I ask him if he ever misses his rock and roll days -- if he ever
wished he could go back to radio work.

He shakes his head flatly. "I stopped thinking about going back to
be a DJ the day after Altamont."

Kapor moved to Boston in 1974 and got a job programming mainframes
in COBOL. He hated it. He quit and became a teacher of transcendental
meditation. (It was Kapor's long flirtation with Eastern mysticism that
gave the world "Lotus.")

In 1976 Kapor went to Switzerland, where the Transcendental
Meditation movement had rented a gigantic Victorian hotel in St-Moritz.
It was an all-male group -- a hundred and twenty of them -- determined
upon Enlightenment or Bust. Kapor had given the transcendant his best
shot. He was becoming disenchanted by "the nuttiness in the
organization." "They were teaching people to levitate," he says,
staring at the floor. His voice drops an octave, becomes flat. "*They
don't levitate.*"

Kapor chose Bust. He went back to the States and acquired a degree
in counselling psychology. He worked a while in a hospital, couldn't
stand that either. "My rep was," he says "a very bright kid with a
lot of potential who hasn't found himself. Almost thirty. Sort of
lost."

Kapor was unemployed when he bought his first personal computer -an Apple II. He sold his stereo to raise cash and drove to New
Hampshire to avoid the sales tax.

"The day after I purchased it," Kapor tells me, "I was hanging out
in a computer store and I saw another guy, a man in his forties,
well-dressed guy, and eavesdropped on his conversation with the
salesman. He didn't know anything about computers. I'd had a year
programming. And I could program in BASIC. I'd taught myself. So I
went up to him, and I actually sold myself to him as a consultant." He
pauses. "I don't know where I got the nerve to do this. It was
uncharacteristic. I just said, `I think I can help you, I've been
listening, this is what you need to do and I think I can do it for
you.' And he took me on! He was my first client! I became a computer
consultant the first day after I bought the Apple II."

Kapor had found his true vocation. He attracted more clients for
his consultant service, and started an Apple users' group.

A friend of Kapor's, Eric Rosenfeld, a graduate student at MIT, had
a problem. He was doing a thesis on an arcane form of financial
statistics, but could not wedge himself into the crowded queue for time
on MIT's mainframes. (One might note at this point that if Mr.
Rosenfeld had dishonestly broken into the MIT mainframes, Kapor himself
might have never invented Lotus 1-2-3 and the PC business might have
been set back for years!) Eric Rosenfeld did have an Apple II,
however, and he thought it might be possible to scale the problem down.
Kapor, as favor, wrote a program for him in BASIC that did the job.

It then occurred to the two of them, out of the blue, that it might
be possible to *sell* this program. They marketed it themselves, in
plastic baggies, for about a hundred bucks a pop, mail order. "This
was a total cottage industry by a marginal consultant," Kapor says
proudly. "That's how I got started, honest to God."

Rosenfeld, who later became a very prominent figure on Wall Street,
urged Kapor to go to MIT's business school for an MBA. Kapor did
seven months there, but never got his MBA. He picked up some useful
tools -- mainly a firm grasp of the principles of accounting -- and, in
his own words, "learned to talk MBA." Then he dropped out and went to
Silicon Valley.

The inventors of VisiCalc, the Apple computer's premier business
program, had shown an interest in Mitch Kapor. Kapor worked
diligently for them for six months, got tired of California, and went
back to Boston where they had better bookstores. The VisiCalc group
had made the critical error of bringing in "professional management."
"That drove them into the ground," Kapor says.

"Yeah, you don't hear a lot about VisiCalc these days," I muse.

Kapor looks surprised. "Well, Lotus... we *bought* it."

"Oh. You *bought* it?"

"Yeah."

"Sort of like the Bell System buying Western Union?"

Kapor grins. "Yep! Yep! Yeah, exactly!"

Mitch Kapor was not in full command of the destiny of himself or his
industry. The hottest software commodities of the early 1980s were
*computer games* -- the Atari seemed destined to enter every teenage
home in America. Kapor got into business software simply because he
didn't have any particular feeling for computer games. But he was
supremely fast on his feet, open to new ideas and inclined to trust his
instincts. And his instincts were good. He chose good people to deal
with -- gifted programmer Jonathan Sachs (the co-author of Lotus
1-2-3). Financial wizard Eric Rosenfeld, canny Wall Street analyst
and venture capitalist Ben Rosen. Kapor was the founder and CEO of
Lotus, one of the most spectacularly successful business ventures of
the later twentieth century.

He is now an extremely wealthy man. I ask him if he actually knows
how much money he has.

"Yeah," he says. "Within a percent or two."

How much does he actually have, then?

He shakes his head. "A lot. A lot. Not something I talk about.
Issues of money and class are things that cut pretty close to the
bone."

I don't pry. It's beside the point. One might presume, impolitely,
that Kapor has at least forty million -- that's what he got the year he
left Lotus. People who ought to know claim Kapor has about a hundred
and fifty million, give or take a market swing in his stock holdings.
If Kapor had stuck with Lotus, as his colleague friend and rival Bill
Gates has stuck with his own software start-up, Microsoft, then Kapor
would likely have much the same fortune Gates has -- somewhere in the
neighborhood of three billion, give or take a few hundred million.
Mitch Kapor has all the money he wants. Money has lost whatever charm
it ever held for him -- probably not much in the first place. When
Lotus became too uptight, too bureaucratic, too far from the true
sources of his own satisfaction, Kapor walked. He simply severed all
connections with the company and went out the door. It stunned
everyone -- except those who knew him best.

Kapor has not had to strain his resources to wreak a thorough
transformation in cyberspace politics. In its first year, EFF's budget
was about a quarter of a million dollars. Kapor is running EFF out of
his pocket change.

Kapor takes pains to tell me that he does not consider himself a
civil libertarian per se. He has spent quite some time with true-blue
civil libertarians lately, and there's a political-correctness to them
that bugs him. They seem to him to spend entirely too much time in
legal nitpicking and not enough vigorously exercising civil rights in
the everyday real world.

Kapor is an entrepreneur. Like all hackers, he prefers his
involvements direct, personal, and hands-on. "The fact that EFF has a
node on the Internet is a great thing. We're a publisher. We're a
distributor of information." Among the items the eff.org Internet node
carries is back issues of *Phrack.* They had an internal debate about
that in EFF, and finally decided to take the plunge. They might carry
other digital underground publications -- but if they do, he says,
"we'll certainly carry Donn Parker, and anything Gail Thackeray wants
to put up. We'll turn it into a public library, that has the whole
spectrum of use. Evolve in the direction of people making up their own
minds." He grins. "We'll try to label all the editorials."

Kapor is determined to tackle the technicalities of the Internet in
the service of the public interest. "The problem with being a node on
the Net today is that you've got to have a captive technical
specialist. We have Chris Davis around, for the care and feeding of
the balky beast! We couldn't do it ourselves!"

He pauses. "So one direction in which technology has to evolve is
much more standardized units, that a non-technical person can feel
comfortable with. It's the same shift as from minicomputers to PCs. I
can see a future in which any person can have a Node on the Net. Any
person can be a publisher. It's better than the media we now have.
It's possible. We're working actively."

Kapor is in his element now, fluent, thoroughly in command in his
material. "You go tell a hardware Internet hacker that everyone
should have a node on the Net," he says, "and the first thing they're
going to say is, `IP doesn't scale!"' ("IP" is the interface protocol
for the Internet. As it currently exists, the IP software is simply
not capable of indefinite expansion; it will run out of usable
addresses, it will saturate.) "The answer," Kapor says, "is: evolve
the protocol! Get the smart people together and figure out what to do.
Do we add ID? Do we add new protocol? Don't just say, *we can't do
it.*"

Getting smart people together to figure out what to do is a skill at
which Kapor clearly excels. I counter that people on the Internet
rather enjoy their elite technical status, and don't seem particularly
anxious to democratize the Net.

Kapor agrees, with a show of scorn. "I tell them that this is the
snobbery of the people on the *Mayflower* looking down their noses at
the people who came over *on the second boat!* Just because they got
here a year, or five years, or ten years before everybody else, that
doesn't give them ownership of cyberspace! By what right?"

I remark that the telcos are an electronic network, too, and they
seem to guard their specialized knowledge pretty closely.

Kapor ripostes that the telcos and the Internet are entirely
different animals. "The Internet is an open system, everything is
published, everything gets argued about, basically by anybody who can
get in. Mostly, it's exclusive and elitist just because it's so
difficult. Let's make it easier to use."

On the other hand, he allows with a swift change of emphasis, the
so-called elitists do have a point as well. "Before people start coming
in, who are new, who want to make suggestions, and criticize the Net as
`all screwed up'... They should at least take the time to understand
the culture on its own terms. It has its own history -- show some
respect for it. I'm a conservative, to that extent."

The Internet is Kapor's paradigm for the future of
telecommunications. The Internet is decentralized, non-hierarchical,
almost anarchic. There are no bosses, no chain of command, no secret
data. If each node obeys the general interface standards, there's
simply no need for any central network authority.

Wouldn't that spell the doom of AT&T as an institution? I ask.

That prospect doesn't faze Kapor for a moment. "Their big
advantage, that they have now, is that they have all of the wiring.
But two things are happening. Anyone with right-of-way is putting down
fiber -- Southern Pacific Railroad, people like that -- there's
enormous `dark fiber' laid in." ("Dark Fiber" is fiber-optic cable,
whose enormous capacity so exceeds the demands of current usage that
much of the fiber still has no light-signals on it -- it's still
`dark,' awaiting future use.)

"The other thing that's happening is the local-loop stuff is going
to go wireless. Everyone from Bellcore to the cable TV companies to
AT&T wants to put in these things called `personal communication
systems.' So you could have local competition -- you could have
multiplicity of people, a bunch of neighborhoods, sticking stuff up on
poles. And a bunch of other people laying in dark fiber. So what
happens to the telephone companies? There's enormous pressure on them
from both sides.

"The more I look at this, the more I believe that in a
post-industrial, digital world, the idea of regulated monopolies is
bad. People will look back on it and say that in the 19th and 20th
centuries the idea of public utilities was an okay compromise. You
needed one set of wires in the ground. It was too economically
inefficient, otherwise. And that meant one entity running it. But now,
with pieces being wireless -- the connections are going to be via
high-level interfaces, not via wires. I mean, *ultimately* there are
going to be wires -- but the wires are just a commodity. Fiber,
wireless. You no longer *need* a utility."

Water utilities? Gas utilities?

Of course we still need those, he agrees. "But when what you're
moving is information, instead of physical substances, then you can
play by a different set of rules. We're evolving those rules now!
Hopefully you can have a much more decentralized system, and one in
which there's more competition in the marketplace.

"The role of government will be to make sure that nobody cheats.
The proverbial `level playing field.' A policy that prevents
monopolization. It should result in better service, lower prices, more
choices, and local empowerment." He smiles. "I'm very big on local
empowerment."

Kapor is a man with a vision. It's a very novel vision which he and
his allies are working out in considerable detail and with great
energy. Dark, cynical, morbid cyberpunk that I am, I cannot avoid
considering some of the darker implications of "decentralized,
nonhierarchical, locally empowered" networking.

I remark that some pundits have suggested that electronic networking
-- faxes, phones, small-scale photocopiers -- played a strong role in
dissolving the power of centralized communism and causing the collapse
of the Warsaw Pact.

Socialism is totally discredited, says Kapor, fresh back from the
Eastern Bloc. The idea that faxes did it, all by themselves, is rather
wishful thinking.

Has it occurred to him that electronic networking might corrode
America's industrial and political infrastructure to the point where
the whole thing becomes untenable, unworkable -- and the old order just
collapses headlong, like in Eastern Europe?

"No," Kapor says flatly. "I think that's extraordinarily unlikely.
In part, because ten or fifteen years ago, I had similar hopes about
personal computers -- which utterly failed to materialize." He grins
wryly, then his eyes narrow. "I'm *very* opposed to techno-utopias.
Every time I see one, I either run away, or try to kill it."

It dawns on me then that Mitch Kapor is not trying to make the world
safe for democracy. He certainly is not trying to make it safe for
anarchists or utopians -- least of all for computer intruders or
electronic rip-off artists. What he really hopes to do is make the
world safe for future Mitch Kapors. This world of decentralized,
small-scale nodes, with instant global access for the best and
brightest, would be a perfect milieu for the shoestring attic
capitalism that made Mitch Kapor what he is today.

Kapor is a very bright man. He has a rare combination of visionary
intensity with a strong practical streak. The Board of the EFF: John
Barlow, Jerry Berman of the ACLU, Stewart Brand, John Gilmore, Steve
Wozniak, and Esther Dyson, the doyenne of East-West computer
entrepreneurism -- share his gift, his vision, and his formidable
networking talents. They are people of the 1960s, winnowed-out by
its turbulence and rewarded with wealth and influence. They are some
of the best and the brightest that the electronic community has to
offer. But can they do it, in the real world? Or are they only
dreaming? They are so few. And there is so much against them.

I leave Kapor and his networking employees struggling cheerfully
with the promising intricacies of their newly installed Macintosh
System 7 software. The next day is Saturday. EFF is closed. I pay a
few visits to points of interest downtown.

One of them is the birthplace of the telephone.

It's marked by a bronze plaque in a plinth of black-and-white
speckled granite. It sits in the plaza of the John F. Kennedy Federal
Building, the very place where Kapor was once fingerprinted by the FBI.

The plaque has a bas-relief picture of Bell's original telephone.
"BIRTHPLACE OF THE TELEPHONE," it reads. "Here, on June 2, 1875,
Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson first transmitted sound over
wires.

"This successful experiment was completed in a fifth floor garret at
what was then 109 Court Street and marked the beginning of world-wide
telephone service."

109 Court Street is long gone. Within sight of Bell's plaque,
across a street, is one of the central offices of NYNEX, the local
Bell RBOC, on 6 Bowdoin Square.

I cross the street and circle the telco building, slowly, hands in
my jacket pockets. It's a bright, windy, New England autumn day. The
central office is a handsome 1940s-era megalith in late Art Deco, eight
stories high.

Parked outside the back is a power-generation truck. The generator
strikes me as rather anomalous. Don't they already have their own
generators in this eight-story monster? Then the suspicion strikes me
that NYNEX must have heard of the September 17 AT&T power-outage which
crashed New York City. Belt-and-suspenders, this generator. Very
telco.

Over the glass doors of the front entrance is a handsome bronze
bas-relief of Art Deco vines, sunflowers, and birds, entwining the Bell
logo and the legend NEW ENGLAND TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH COMPANY -- an
entity which no longer officially exists.

The doors are locked securely. I peer through the shadowed glass.
Inside is an official poster reading:

"New England Telephone a NYNEX Company

"ATTENTION

"All persons while on New England Telephone Company premises are
required to visibly wear their identification cards (C.C.P. Section 2,
Page 1).

"Visitors, vendors, contractors, and all others are required to
visibly wear a daily pass.

"Thank you. Kevin C. Stanton. Building Security Coordinator."

Outside, around the corner, is a pull-down ribbed metal security
door, a locked delivery entrance. Some passing stranger has
grafitti-tagged this door, with a single word in red spray-painted
cursive:

*Fury*

#

My book on the Hacker Crackdown is almost over now. I have
deliberately saved the best for last.

In February 1991, I attended the CPSR Public Policy Roundtable, in
Washington, DC. CPSR, Computer Professionals for Social
Responsibility, was a sister organization of EFF, or perhaps its aunt,
being older and perhaps somewhat wiser in the ways of the world of
politics.

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility began in 1981 in
Palo Alto, as an informal discussion group of Californian computer
scientists and technicians, united by nothing more than an electronic
mailing list. This typical high-tech ad-hocracy received the dignity
of its own acronym in 1982, and was formally incorporated in 1983.

CPSR lobbied government and public alike with an educational
outreach effort, sternly warning against any foolish and unthinking
trust in complex computer systems. CPSR insisted that mere computers
should never be considered a magic panacea for humanity's social,
ethical or political problems. CPSR members were especially troubled
about the stability, safety, and dependability of military computer
systems, and very especially troubled by those systems controlling
nuclear arsenals. CPSR was best-known for its persistent and
well-publicized attacks on the scientific credibility of the Strategic
Defense Initiative ("Star Wars").

In 1990, CPSR was the nation's veteran cyber-political activist
group, with over two thousand members in twenty-one local chapters
across the US. It was especially active in Boston, Silicon Valley, and
Washington DC, where its Washington office sponsored the Public Policy
Roundtable.

The Roundtable, however, had been funded by EFF, which had passed
CPSR an extensive grant for operations. This was the first large-scale,
official meeting of what was to become the electronic civil libertarian
community.

Sixty people attended, myself included -- in this instance, not so
much as a journalist as a cyberpunk author. Many of the luminaries of
the field took part: Kapor and Godwin as a matter of course. Richard
Civille and Marc Rotenberg of CPSR. Jerry Berman of the ACLU. John
Quarterman, author of *The Matrix.* Steven Levy, author of *Hackers.*
George Perry and Sandy Weiss of Prodigy Services, there to network
about the civil-liberties troubles their young commercial network was
experiencing. Dr. Dorothy Denning. Cliff Figallo, manager of the
Well. Steve Jackson was there, having finally found his ideal target
audience, and so was Craig Neidorf, "Knight Lightning" himself, with
his attorney, Sheldon Zenner. Katie Hafner, science journalist, and
co-author of *Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer
Frontier.* Dave Farber, ARPAnet pioneer and fabled Internet guru.
Janlori Goldman of the ACLU's Project on Privacy and Technology. John
Nagle of Autodesk and the Well. Don Goldberg of the House Judiciary
Committee. Tom Guidoboni, the defense attorney in the Internet Worm
case. Lance Hoffman, computer-science professor at The George
Washington University. Eli Noam of Columbia. And a host of others no
less distinguished.

Senator Patrick Leahy delivered the keynote address, expressing his
determination to keep ahead of the curve on the issue of electronic
free speech. The address was well-received, and the sense of
excitement was palpable. Every panel discussion was interesting -- some
were entirely compelling. People networked with an almost frantic
interest.

I myself had a most interesting and cordial lunch discussion with
Noel and Jeanne Gayler, Admiral Gayler being a former director of the
National Security Agency. As this was the first known encounter between
an actual no-kidding cyberpunk and a chief executive of America's
largest and best-financed electronic espionage apparat, there was
naturally a bit of eyebrow-raising on both sides.

Unfortunately, our discussion was off-the-record. In fact all the
discussions at the CPSR were officially off-the-record, the idea being
to do some serious networking in an atmosphere of complete frankness,
rather than to stage a media circus.

In any case, CPSR Roundtable, though interesting and intensely
valuable, was as nothing compared to the truly mind-boggling event that
transpired a mere month later.

#

"Computers, Freedom and Privacy." Four hundred people from every
conceivable corner of America's electronic community. As a science
fiction writer, I have been to some weird gigs in my day, but this
thing is truly *beyond the pale.* Even "Cyberthon," Point Foundation's
"Woodstock of Cyberspace" where Bay Area psychedelia collided headlong
with the emergent world of computerized virtual reality, was like a
Kiwanis Club gig compared to this astonishing do.

The "electronic community" had reached an apogee. Almost every
principal in this book is in attendance. Civil Libertarians. Computer
Cops. The Digital Underground. Even a few discreet telco people.
Colorcoded dots for lapel tags are distributed. Free Expression
issues. Law Enforcement. Computer Security. Privacy. Journalists.
Lawyers. Educators. Librarians. Programmers. Stylish punk-black
dots for the hackers and phone phreaks. Almost everyone here seems to
wear eight or nine dots, to have six or seven professional hats.

It is a community. Something like Lebanon perhaps, but a digital
nation. People who had feuded all year in the national press, people
who entertained the deepest suspicions of one another's motives and
ethics, are now in each others' laps. "Computers, Freedom and Privacy"
had every reason in the world to turn ugly, and yet except for small
irruptions of puzzling nonsense from the convention's token lunatic, a
surprising bonhomie reigned. CFP was like a wedding-party in which two
lovers, unstable bride and charlatan groom, tie the knot in a clearly
disastrous matrimony.

It is clear to both families -- even to neighbors and random guests
-- that this is not a workable relationship, and yet the young couple's
desperate attraction can brook no further delay. They simply cannot
help themselves. Crockery will fly, shrieks from their newly wed home
will wake the city block, divorce waits in the wings like a vulture
over the Kalahari, and yet this is a wedding, and there is going to be
a child from it. Tragedies end in death; comedies in marriage. The
Hacker Crackdown is ending in marriage. And there will be a child.

From the beginning, anomalies reign. John Perry Barlow, cyberspace
ranger, is here. His color photo in *The New York Times Magazine,*
Barlow scowling in a grim Wyoming snowscape, with long black coat, dark
hat, a Macintosh SE30 propped on a fencepost and an awesome frontier
rifle tucked under one arm, will be the single most striking visual
image of the Hacker Crackdown. And he is CFP's guest of honor -along with Gail Thackeray of the FCIC! What on earth do they expect
these dual guests to do with each other? Waltz?

Barlow delivers the first address. Uncharacteristically, he is
hoarse -- the sheer volume of roadwork has worn him down. He speaks
briefly, congenially, in a plea for conciliation, and takes his leave
to a storm of applause.

Then Gail Thackeray takes the stage. She's visibly nervous. She's
been on the Well a lot lately. Reading those Barlow posts. Following
Barlow is a challenge to anyone. In honor of the famous lyricist for
the Grateful Dead, she announces reedily, she is going to read -- *a
poem.* A poem she has composed herself.

It's an awful poem, doggerel in the rollicking meter of Robert W.
Service's *The Cremation of Sam McGee,* but it is in fact, a poem.
It's the *Ballad of the Electronic Frontier!* A poem about the Hacker
Crackdown and the sheer unlikelihood of CFP. It's full of in-jokes.
The score or so cops in the audience, who are sitting together in a
nervous claque, are absolutely cracking-up. Gail's poem is the
funniest goddamn thing they've ever heard. The hackers and civil-libs,
who had this woman figured for Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS, are staring
with their jaws hanging loosely. Never in the wildest reaches of their
imagination had they figured Gail Thackeray was capable of such a
totally off-the-wall move. You can see them punching their mental
CONTROL-RESET buttons. Jesus! This woman's a hacker weirdo! She's
*just like us!* God, this changes everything!

Al Bayse, computer technician for the FBI, had been the only cop at
the CPSR Roundtable, dragged there with his arm bent by Dorothy
Denning. He was guarded and tightlipped at CPSR Roundtable; a "lion
thrown to the Christians."

At CFP, backed by a claque of cops, Bayse suddenly waxes eloquent
and even droll, describing the FBI's "NCIC 2000", a gigantic digital
catalog of criminal records, as if he has suddenly become some weird
hybrid of George Orwell and George Gobel. Tentatively, he makes an
arcane joke about statistical analysis. At least a third of the crowd
laughs aloud.

"They didn't laugh at that at my last speech," Bayse observes. He
had been addressing cops -- *straight* cops, not computer people. It
had been a worthy meeting, useful one supposes, but nothing like
*this.* There has never been *anything* like this. Without any
prodding, without any preparation, people in the audience simply begin
to ask questions. Longhairs, freaky people, mathematicians. Bayse is
answering, politely, frankly, fully, like a man walking on air. The
ballroom's atmosphere crackles with surreality. A female lawyer
behind me breaks into a sweat and a hot waft of surprisingly potent and
musky perfume flows off her pulse-points.

People are giddy with laughter. People are interested, fascinated,
their eyes so wide and dark that they seem eroticized. Unlikely
daisy-chains form in the halls, around the bar, on the escalators:
cops with hackers, civil rights with FBI, Secret Service with phone
phreaks.

Gail Thackeray is at her crispest in a white wool sweater with a
tiny Secret Service logo. "I found Phiber Optik at the payphones, and
when he saw my sweater, he turned into a *pillar of salt!*" she
chortles.

Phiber discusses his case at much length with his arresting officer,
Don Delaney of the New York State Police. After an hour's chat, the
two of them look ready to begin singing "Auld Lang Syne." Phiber
finally finds the courage to get his worst complaint off his chest. It
isn't so much the arrest. It was the *charge.* Pirating service off
900 numbers. I'm a *programmer,* Phiber insists. This lame charge is
going to hurt my reputation. It would have been cool to be busted for
something happening, like Section 1030 computer intrusion. Maybe some
kind of crime that's scarcely been invented yet. Not lousy phone
fraud. Phooey.

Delaney seems regretful. He had a mountain of possible criminal
charges against Phiber Optik. The kid's gonna plead guilty anyway.
He's a first timer, they always plead. Coulda charged the kid with
most anything, and gotten the same result in the end. Delaney seems
genuinely sorry not to have gratified Phiber in this harmless fashion.
Too late now. Phiber's pled already. All water under the bridge.
Whaddya gonna do?

Delaney's got a good grasp on the hacker mentality. He held a press
conference after he busted a bunch of Masters of Deception kids. Some
journo had asked him: "Would you describe these people as *geniuses?*"
Delaney's deadpan answer, perfect: "No, I would describe these people
as *defendants.*" Delaney busts a kid for hacking codes with repeated
random dialling. Tells the press that NYNEX can track this stuff in no
time flat nowadays, and a kid has to be *stupid* to do something so
easy to catch. Dead on again: hackers don't mind being thought of as
Genghis Khan by the straights, but if there's anything that really
gets 'em where they live, it's being called *dumb.*

Won't be as much fun for Phiber next time around. As a second
offender he's gonna see prison. Hackers break the law. They're not
geniuses, either. They're gonna be defendants. And yet, Delaney muses
over a drink in the hotel bar, he has found it impossible to treat them
as common criminals. Delaney knows criminals. These kids, by
comparison, are clueless -- there is just no crook vibe off of them,
they don't smell right, they're just not *bad.*

Delaney has seen a lot of action. He did Vietnam. He's been shot
at, he has shot people. He's a homicide cop from New York. He has the
appearance of a man who has not only seen the shit hit the fan but has
seen it splattered across whole city blocks and left to ferment for
years. This guy has been around.

He listens to Steve Jackson tell his story. The dreamy game
strategist has been dealt a bad hand. He has played it for all he is
worth. Under his nerdish SF-fan exterior is a core of iron. Friends
of his say Steve Jackson believes in the rules, believes in fair play.
He will never compromise his principles, never give up. "Steve,"
Delaney says to Steve Jackson, "they had some balls, whoever busted you.
You're all right!" Jackson, stunned, falls silent and actually
blushes with pleasure.

Neidorf has grown up a lot in the past year. The kid is a quick
study, you gotta give him that. Dressed by his mom, the fashion
manager for a national clothing chain, Missouri college techie-frat
Craig Neidorf out-dappers everyone at this gig but the toniest East
Coast lawyers. The iron jaws of prison clanged shut without him and now
law school beckons for Neidorf. He looks like a larval Congressman.

Not a "hacker," our Mr. Neidorf. He's not interested in computer
science. Why should he be? He's not interested in writing C code the
rest of his life, and besides, he's seen where the chips fall. To the
world of computer science he and *Phrack* were just a curiosity. But
to the world of law... The kid has learned where the bodies are
buried. He carries his notebook of press clippings wherever he goes.

Phiber Optik makes fun of Neidorf for a Midwestern geek, for
believing that "Acid Phreak" does acid and listens to acid rock. Hell
no. Acid's never done *acid!* Acid's into *acid house music.* Jesus.
The very idea of doing LSD. Our *parents* did LSD, ya clown.

Thackeray suddenly turns upon Craig Neidorf the full lighthouse
glare of her attention and begins a determined half-hour attempt to
*win the boy over.* The Joan of Arc of Computer Crime is *giving
career advice to Knight Lightning!* "Your experience would be very
valuable -- a real asset," she tells him with unmistakeable
sixty-thousand-watt sincerity. Neidorf is fascinated. He listens with
unfeigned attention. He's nodding and saying yes ma'am. Yes, Craig,
you too can forget all about money and enter the glamorous and horribly
underpaid world of PROSECUTING COMPUTER CRIME! You can put your former
friends in prison -- ooops...

You cannot go on dueling at modem's length indefinitely. You
cannot beat one another senseless with rolled-up press-clippings.
Sooner or later you have to come directly to grips. And yet the very
act of assembling here has changed the entire situation drastically.
John Quarterman, author of *The Matrix,* explains the Internet at his
symposium. It is the largest news network in the world, it is growing
by leaps and bounds, and yet you cannot measure Internet because you
cannot stop it in place. It cannot stop, because there is no one
anywhere in the world with the authority to stop Internet. It changes,
yes, it grows, it embeds itself across the post-industrial, postmodern
world and it generates community wherever it touches, and it is doing
this all by itself.

Phiber is different. A very fin de siecle kid, Phiber Optik.
Barlow says he looks like an Edwardian dandy. He does rather. Shaven
neck, the sides of his skull cropped hip-hop close, unruly tangle of
black hair on top that looks pomaded, he stays up till four a.m. and
misses all the sessions, then hangs out in payphone booths with his
acoustic coupler gutsily CRACKING SYSTEMS RIGHT IN THE MIDST OF THE
HEAVIEST LAW ENFORCEMENT DUDES IN THE U.S., or at least *pretending*
to... Unlike "Frank Drake." Drake, who wrote Dorothy Denning out of
nowhere, and asked for an interview for his cheapo cyberpunk fanzine,
and then started grilling her on her ethics. She was squirmin',
too... Drake, scarecrow-tall with his floppy blond mohawk, rotting
tennis shoes and black leather jacket lettered ILLUMINATI in red, gives
off an unmistakeable air of the bohemian literatus. Drake is the kind
of guy who reads British industrial design magazines and appreciates
William Gibson because the quality of the prose is so tasty. Drake
could never touch a phone or a keyboard again, and he'd still have the
nose-ring and the blurry photocopied fanzines and the sampled
industrial music. He's a radical punk with a desktop-publishing rig
and an Internet address. Standing next to Drake, the diminutive Phiber
looks like he's been physically coagulated out of phone-lines. Born to
phreak.

Dorothy Denning approaches Phiber suddenly. The two of them are
about the same height and body-build. Denning's blue eyes flash behind
the round window-frames of her glasses. "Why did you say I was
`quaint?' " she asks Phiber, quaintly.

It's a perfect description but Phiber is nonplussed... "Well, I uh,
you know..."

"I also think you're quaint, Dorothy," I say, novelist to the
rescue, the journo gift of gab... She is neat and dapper and yet
there's an arcane quality to her, something like a Pilgrim Maiden
behind leaded glass; if she were six inches high Dorothy Denning would
look great inside a china cabinet... The Cryptographeress... The
Cryptographrix... whatever... Weirdly, Peter Denning looks just like
his wife, you could pick this gentleman out of a thousand guys as the
soulmate of Dorothy Denning. Wearing tailored slacks, a spotless fuzzy
varsity sweater, and a neatly knotted academician's tie... This
fineboned, exquisitely polite, utterly civilized and hyperintelligent
couple seem to have emerged from some cleaner and finer parallel
universe, where humanity exists to do the Brain Teasers column in
Scientific American. Why does this Nice Lady hang out with these
unsavory characters?

Because the time has come for it, that's why. Because she's the best
there is at what she does.

Donn Parker is here, the Great Bald Eagle of Computer Crime... With
his bald dome, great height, and enormous Lincoln-like hands, the great
visionary pioneer of the field plows through the lesser mortals like an
icebreaker... His eyes are fixed on the future with the rigidity of a
bronze statue... Eventually, he tells his audience, all business crime
will be computer crime, because businesses will do everything through
computers. "Computer crime" as a category will vanish.

In the meantime, passing fads will flourish and fail and
evaporate... Parker's commanding, resonant voice is sphinxlike,
everything is viewed from some eldritch valley of deep historical
abstraction... Yes, they've come and they've gone, these passing flaps
in the world of digital computation... The radio-frequency emanation
scandal... KGB and MI5 and CIA do it every day, it's easy, but nobody
else ever has... The salami-slice fraud, mostly mythical...
"Crimoids," he calls them... Computer viruses are the current crimoid
champ, a lot less dangerous than most people let on, but the novelty is
fading and there's a crimoid vacuum at the moment, the press is visibly
hungering for something more outrageous... The Great Man shares with
us a few speculations on the coming crimoids... Desktop Forgery!
Wow... Computers stolen just for the sake of the information within
them -- data-napping! Happened in Britain a while ago, could be the
coming thing... Phantom nodes in the Internet!

Parker handles his overhead projector sheets with an ecclesiastical
air... He wears a grey double-breasted suit, a light blue shirt, and a
very quiet tie of understated maroon and blue paisley... Aphorisms
emerge from him with slow, leaden emphasis... There is no such thing
as an adequately secure computer when one faces a sufficiently powerful
adversary... Deterrence is the most socially useful aspect of
security... People are the primary weakness in all information
systems... The entire baseline of computer security must be shifted
upward... Don't ever violate your security by publicly describing your
security measures...

People in the audience are beginning to squirm, and yet there is
something about the elemental purity of this guy's philosophy that
compels uneasy respect... Parker sounds like the only sane guy left in
the lifeboat, sometimes. The guy who can prove rigorously, from deep
moral principles, that Harvey there, the one with the broken leg and
the checkered past, is the one who has to be, err... that is, Mr.
Harvey is best placed to make the necessary sacrifice for the security
and indeed the very survival of the rest of this lifeboat's crew...
Computer security, Parker informs us mournfully, is a nasty topic, and
we wish we didn't have to have it... The security expert, armed with
method and logic, must think -- imagine -- everything that the
adversary might do before the adversary might actually do it. It is
as if the criminal's dark brain were an extensive subprogram within the
shining cranium of Donn Parker. He is a Holmes whose Moriarty does
not quite yet exist and so must be perfectly simulated.

CFP is a stellar gathering, with the giddiness of a wedding. It is
a happy time, a happy ending, they know their world is changing forever
tonight, and they're proud to have been there to see it happen, to
talk, to think, to help.

And yet as night falls, a certain elegiac quality manifests itself,
as the crowd gathers beneath the chandeliers with their wineglasses and
dessert plates. Something is ending here, gone forever, and it takes a
while to pinpoint it.

It is the End of the Amateurs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I like life better on the far side of the boundary between fantasy
and reality; but I've come to recognize that reality has an
unfortunate way of annexing fantasy for its own purposes. That's why
I'm on the Police Liaison Committee for EFF-Austin, a local electronic
civil liberties group (eff-austinget over my experience of the Hacker Crackdown, and I expect to be
involved in electronic civil liberties activism for the rest of my life.

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

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

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

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

Keeping up in cyberspace requires a great deal of sustained
attention. Personally, I keep tabs with the milieu by reading the
invaluable electronic magazine Computer underground Digest
(tk0jut2that says: SUB CuD your name your.full.internetread Jack Rickard's bracingly iconoclastic *Boardwatch Magazine* for
print news of the BBS and online community. And, needless to say, I
read *Wired,* the first magazine of the 1990s that actually looks and
acts like it really belongs in this decade. There are other ways to
learn, of course, but these three outlets will guide your efforts very
well.

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

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

Thanks for your attention `*8-)'

Bruce Sterling brucesTexas