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Title: The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

Author: Bruce Sterling

Release date: January 1, 1994 [eBook #101]
Most recently updated: December 6, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HACKER
CRACKDOWN: LAW AND DISORDER ON THE ELECTRONIC
FRONTIER ***

Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use

THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

by

Bruce Sterling

COPYRIGHT 1992, by Bruce Sterling

CONTENTS

Preface to the Electronic Release of The Hacker Crackdown

Chronology of the Hacker Crackdown

Introduction

Part 1: CRASHING THE SYSTEM

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

Part 2: THE DIGITAL UNDERGROUND

Steal This Phone
Phreaking and Hacking
The View From Under the Floorboards
Boards: Core of the Underground

Phile Phun
The Rake's Progress
Strongholds of the Elite
Sting Boards
Hot Potatoes
War on the Legion
Terminus
Phile 9-1-1
War Games
Real Cyberpunk

Part 3: LAW AND ORDER

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

Part 4: THE CIVIL LIBERTARIANS

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

A Scholar Investigates
Computers, Freedom, and Privacy

Electronic Afterword to The Hacker Crackdown, Halloween
1993

THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
by Bruce Sterling

Preface to the Electronic Release of The Hacker Crackdown

January 1, 1994—Austin, Texas

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

Out in the traditional world of print, The Hacker Crackdown is ISBN 0-
553-08058-X, and is formally catalogued by the Library of Congress as "1.
Computer crimes—United States. 2. Telephone—United States—Corrupt
practices. 3. Programming (Electronic computers)—United States—Corrupt
practices."

'Corrupt practices,' I always get a kick out of that description. Librarians
are very ingenious people.

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

"No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books."

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

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

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

The critics were very kind to The Hacker Crackdown, and commercially
the book has done well. On the other hand, I didn't write this book in order

to squeeze every last nickel and dime out of the mitts of impoverished
sixteen-year-old cyberpunk high-school-students. Teenagers don't have any
money—(no, not even enough for the six-dollar Hacker Crackdown
paperback, with its attractive bright-red cover and useful index). That's a
major reason why teenagers sometimes succumb to the temptation to do
things they shouldn't, such as swiping my books out of libraries. Kids: this
one is all yours, all right? Go give the print version back. *8-)

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

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

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

You can copy this electronic book. Copy the heck out of it, be my guest,
and give those copies to anybody who wants them. The nascent world of
cyberspace is full of sysadmins, teachers, trainers, cybrarians, netgurus, and
various species of cybernetic activist. If you're one of those people, I know
about you, and I know the hassle you go through to try to help people learn
about the electronic frontier. I hope that possessing this book in electronic
form will lessen your troubles. Granted, this treatment of our electronic
social spectrum is not the ultimate in academic rigor. And politically, it has

something to offend and trouble almost everyone. But hey, I'm told it's
readable, and at least the price is right.

You can upload the book onto bulletin board systems, or Internet nodes,
or electronic discussion groups. Go right ahead and do that, I am giving you
express permission right now. Enjoy yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

Now have fun.

Bruce Sterling—bruces@well.sf.ca.us

THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
by Bruce Sterling

CHRONOLOGY OF THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

1865 U.S. Secret Service (USSS) founded.

1876 Alexander Graham Bell invents telephone.

1878 First teenage males flung off phone system by enraged authorities.

1939 "Futurian" science-fiction group raided by Secret Service.

1971 Yippie phone phreaks start YIPL/TAP magazine.

1972 RAMPARTS magazine seized in blue-box rip-off scandal.

1978 Ward Christenson and Randy Suess create first personal computer
bulletin board system.

1982 William Gibson coins term "cyberspace."

1982 "414 Gang" raided.

1983-1983 AT&T dismantled in divestiture.

1984 Congress passes Comprehensive Crime Control Act giving USSS
jurisdiction over credit card fraud and computer fraud.

1984 "Legion of Doom" formed.

1984. 2600: THE HACKER QUARTERLY founded.

1984. WHOLE EARTH SOFTWARE CATALOG published.

1985. First police "sting" bulletin board systems established.

1985. Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link computer conference (WELL) goes on-
line.

1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act passed.

1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act passed.

1987 Chicago prosecutors form Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force.

1988

July. Secret Service covertly videotapes "SummerCon" hacker convention.

September. "Prophet" cracks BellSouth AIMSX computer network and
downloads E911 Document to his own computer and to Jolnet.

September. AT&T Corporate Information Security informed of Prophet's
action.

October. Bellcore Security informed of Prophet's action.

1989

January. Prophet uploads E911 Document to Knight Lightning.

February 25. Knight Lightning publishes E911 Document in PHRACK
electronic newsletter.

May. Chicago Task Force raids and arrests "Kyrie."

June. "NuPrometheus League" distributes Apple Computer proprietary
software.

June 13. Florida probation office crossed with phone-sex line in switching-
station stunt.

July. "Fry Guy" raided by USSS and Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse
Task Force.

July. Secret Service raids "Prophet," "Leftist," and "Urvile" in Georgia.

1990

January 15. Martin Luther King Day Crash strikes AT&T long-distance
network nationwide.

January 18-19. Chicago Task Force raids Knight Lightning in St. Louis.

January 24. USSS and New York State Police raid "Phiber Optik," "Acid
Phreak," and "Scorpion" in New York City.

February 1. USSS raids "Terminus" in Maryland.

February 3. Chicago Task Force raids Richard Andrews' home.

February 6. Chicago Task Force raids Richard Andrews' business.

February 6. USSS arrests Terminus, Prophet, Leftist, and Urvile.

February 9. Chicago Task Force arrests Knight Lightning.

February 20. AT&T Security shuts down public-access "attctc" computer in
Dallas.

February 21. Chicago Task Force raids Robert Izenberg in Austin.

March 1. Chicago Task Force raids Steve Jackson Games, Inc., "Mentor,"
and "Erik Bloodaxe" in Austin.

May 7,8,9.

USSS and Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau conduct
"Operation Sundevil" raids in Cincinnatti, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami,
Newark, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Tucson, San Diego, San Jose, and
San Francisco.

May. FBI interviews John Perry Barlow re NuPrometheus case.

June. Mitch Kapor and Barlow found Electronic Frontier Foundation;
Barlow publishes CRIME AND PUZZLEMENT manifesto.

July 24-27. Trial of Knight Lightning.

1991

February. CPSR Roundtable in Washington, D.C.

March 25-28. Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in San
Francisco.

May 1. Electronic Frontier Foundation, Steve Jackson, and others file suit
against members of Chicago Task Force.

July 1-2. Switching station phone software crash affects Washington, Los
Angeles, Pittsburgh, San Francisco.

September 17. AT&T phone crash affects New York City and three airports.

Introduction

This is a book about cops, and wild teenage whiz-kids, and lawyers, and
hairy-eyed anarchists, and industrial technicians, and hippies, and high-tech
millionaires, and game hobbyists, and computer security experts, and Secret
Service agents, and grifters, and thieves.

This book is about the electronic frontier of the 1990s. It concerns
activities that take place inside computers and over telephone lines.

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

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

People have worked on this "frontier" for generations now. Some people
became rich and famous from their efforts there. Some just played in it, as
hobbyists. Others soberly pondered it, and wrote about it, and regulated it,
and negotiated over it in international forums, and sued one another about
it, in gigantic, epic court battles that lasted for years. And almost since the
beginning, some people have committed crimes in this place.

But in the past twenty years, this electrical "space," which was once thin
and dark and one-dimensional—little more than a narrow speaking-tube,
stretching from phone to phone—has flung itself open like a gigantic jack-
in-the-box. Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of the glowing
computer screen. This dark electric netherworld has become a vast
flowering electronic landscape. Since the 1960s, the world of the telephone
has cross-bred itself with computers and television, and though there is still
no substance to cyberspace, nothing you can handle, it has a strange kind of

physicality now. It makes good sense today to talk of cyberspace as a place
all its own.

Because people live in it now. Not just a few people, not just a few
technicians and eccentrics, but thousands of people, quite normal people.
And not just for a little while, either, but for hours straight, over weeks, and
months, and years. Cyberspace today is a "Net," a "Matrix," international in
scope and growing swiftly and steadily. It's growing in size, and wealth, and
political importance.

People are making entire careers in modern cyberspace. Scientists and
technicians, of course; they've been there for twenty years now. But
increasingly, cyberspace is filling with journalists and doctors and lawyers
and artists and clerks. Civil servants make their careers there now, "on-line"
in vast government data-banks; and so do spies, industrial, political, and
just plain snoops; and so do police, at least a few of them. And there are
children living there now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the story of the people of cyberspace.

PART ONE: CRASHING THE SYSTEM
On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance telephone switching system
crashed.

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

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

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

Within nine hours, AT&T software engineers more or less understood
what had caused the crash. Replicating the problem exactly, poring over
software line by line, took them a couple of weeks. But because it was hard
to understand technically, the full truth of the matter and its implications
were not widely and thoroughly aired and explained. The root cause of the
crash remained obscure, surrounded by rumor and fear.

The crash was a grave corporate embarrassment. The "culprit" was a bug
in AT&T's own software—not the sort of admission the telecommunications

giant wanted to make, especially in the face of increasing competition. Still,
the truth WAS told, in the baffling technical terms necessary to explain it.

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

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

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

The Crash of January 15 gave the Hacker Crackdown its sense of edge
and its sweaty urgency. It made people, powerful people in positions of
public authority, willing to believe the worst. And, most fatally, it helped to
give investigators a willingness to take extreme measures and the
determination to preserve almost total secrecy.

An obscure software fault in an aging switching system in New York
was to lead to a chain reaction of legal and constitutional trouble all across
the country.

#

Like the crash in the telephone system, this chain reaction was ready and
waiting to happen. During the 1980s, the American legal system was

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

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

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

#

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

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

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

Bell would manipulate the "lips," "teeth," and "tongue," causing the thing to
emit high-pitched falsetto gibberish.

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

By 1875, Bell had learned to produce audible sounds—ugly shrieks and
squawks—by using magnets, diaphragms, and electrical current.

Most "Golden Vaporware" technologies go nowhere.

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

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

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

Contemporary press reports of the stage debut of the telephone showed
pleased astonishment mixed with considerable dread. Bell's stage telephone
was a large wooden box with a crude speaker-nozzle, the whole contraption

about the size and shape of an overgrown Brownie camera. Its buzzing steel
soundplate, pumped up by powerful electromagnets, was loud enough to fill
an auditorium. Bell's assistant Mr. Watson, who could manage on the
keyboards fairly well, kicked in by playing the organ from distant rooms,
and, later, distant cities. This feat was considered marvellous, but very eerie
indeed.

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

At the time, most people thought this notion made good sense. In fact,
Bell's idea was workable. In Hungary, this philosophy of the telephone was
successfully put into everyday practice. In Budapest, for decades, from
1893 until after World War I, there was a government-run information
service called "Telefon Hirmondo-." Hirmondo- was a centralized source of
news and entertainment and culture, including stock reports, plays,
concerts, and novels read aloud. At certain hours of the day, the phone
would ring, you would plug in a loudspeaker for the use of the family, and
Telefon Hirmondo- would be on the air—or rather, on the phone.

Hirmondo- is dead tech today, but Hirmondo- might be considered a
spiritual ancestor of the modern telephone-accessed computer data services,
such as CompuServe, GEnie or Prodigy. The principle behind Hirmondo- is
also not too far from computer "bulletin-board systems" or BBS's, which
arrived in the late 1970s, spread rapidly across America, and will figure
largely in this book.

We are used to using telephones for individual person-to-person speech,
because we are used to the Bell system. But this was just one possibility
among many. Communication networks are very flexible and protean,
especially when their hardware becomes sufficiently advanced. They can be
put to all kinds of uses. And they have been—and they will be.

Bell's telephone was bound for glory, but this was a combination of
political decisions, canny infighting in court, inspired industrial leadership,

receptive local conditions and outright good luck. Much the same is true of
communications systems today.

As Bell and his backers struggled to install their newfangled system in
the real world of nineteenth-century New England, they had to fight against
skepticism and industrial rivalry. There was already a strong electrical
communications network present in America: the telegraph. The head of the
Western Union telegraph system dismissed Bell's prototype as "an electrical
toy" and refused to buy the rights to Bell's patent. The telephone, it seemed,
might be all right as a parlor entertainment—but not for serious business.

Telegrams, unlike mere telephones, left a permanent physical record of
their messages. Telegrams, unlike telephones, could be answered whenever
the recipient had time and convenience. And the telegram had a much
longer distance-range than Bell's early telephone. These factors made
telegraphy seem a much more sound and businesslike technology—at least
to some.

The telegraph system was huge, and well-entrenched. In 1876, the
United States had 214,000 miles of telegraph wire, and 8500 telegraph
offices. There were specialized telegraphs for businesses and stock traders,
government, police and fire departments. And Bell's "toy" was best known
as a stage-magic musical device.

The third stage of technology is known as the "Cash Cow" stage. In the
"cash cow" stage, a technology finds its place in the world, and matures,
and becomes settled and productive. After a year or so, Alexander Graham
Bell and his capitalist backers concluded that eerie music piped from
nineteenth-century cyberspace was not the real selling-point of his
invention. Instead, the telephone was about speech—individual, personal
speech, the human voice, human conversation and human interaction. The
telephone was not to be managed from any centralized broadcast center. It
was to be a personal, intimate technology.

When you picked up a telephone, you were not absorbing the cold output
of a machine—you were speaking to another human being. Once people
realized this, their instinctive dread of the telephone as an eerie, unnatural
device, swiftly vanished. A "telephone call" was not a "call" from a

"telephone" itself, but a call from another human being, someone you
would generally know and recognize. The real point was not what the
machine could do for you (or to you), but what you yourself, a person and
citizen, could do THROUGH the machine. This decision on the part of the
young Bell Company was absolutely vital.

The first telephone networks went up around Boston—mostly among the
technically curious and the well-to-do (much the same segment of the
American populace that, a hundred years later, would be buying personal
computers). Entrenched backers of the telegraph continued to scoff.

But in January 1878, a disaster made the telephone famous. A train
crashed in Tarriffville, Connecticut. Forward-looking doctors in the nearby
city of Hartford had had Bell's "speaking telephone" installed. An alert local
druggist was able to telephone an entire community of local doctors, who
rushed to the site to give aid. The disaster, as disasters do, aroused intense
press coverage. The phone had proven its usefulness in the real world.

After Tarriffville, the telephone network spread like crabgrass. By 1890
it was all over New England. By '93, out to Chicago. By '97, into
Minnesota, Nebraska and Texas. By 1904 it was all over the continent.

The telephone had become a mature technology. Professor Bell (now
generally known as "Dr. Bell" despite his lack of a formal degree) became
quite wealthy. He lost interest in the tedious day-to-day business muddle of
the booming telephone network, and gratefully returned his attention to
creatively hacking-around in his various laboratories, which were now
much larger, better-ventilated, and gratifyingly better-equipped. Bell was
never to have another great inventive success, though his speculations and
prototypes anticipated fiber-optic transmission, manned flight, sonar,
hydrofoil ships, tetrahedral construction, and Montessori education. The
"decibel," the standard scientific measure of sound intensity, was named
after Bell.

Not all Bell's vaporware notions were inspired. He was fascinated by
human eugenics. He also spent many years developing a weird personal
system of astrophysics in which gravity did not exist.

Bell was a definite eccentric. He was something of a hypochondriac, and
throughout his life he habitually stayed up until four A.M., refusing to rise
before noon. But Bell had accomplished a great feat; he was an idol of
millions and his influence, wealth, and great personal charm, combined
with his eccentricity, made him something of a loose cannon on deck. Bell
maintained a thriving scientific salon in his winter mansion in Washington,
D.C., which gave him considerable backstage influence in governmental
and scientific circles. He was a major financial backer of the the magazines
Science and National Geographic, both still flourishing today as important
organs of the American scientific establishment.

Bell's companion Thomas Watson, similarly wealthy and similarly odd,
became the ardent political disciple of a 19th-century science-fiction writer
and would-be social reformer, Edward Bellamy. Watson also trod the boards
briefly as a Shakespearian actor.

There would never be another Alexander Graham Bell, but in years to
come there would be surprising numbers of people like him. Bell was a
prototype of the high-tech entrepreneur. High-tech entrepreneurs will play a
very prominent role in this book: not merely as technicians and
businessmen, but as pioneers of the technical frontier, who can carry the
power and prestige they derive from high-technology into the political and
social arena.

Like later entrepreneurs, Bell was fierce in defense of his own
technological territory. As the telephone began to flourish, Bell was soon
involved in violent lawsuits in the defense of his patents. Bell's Boston
lawyers were excellent, however, and Bell himself, as an elocution teacher
and gifted public speaker, was a devastatingly effective legal witness. In the
eighteen years of Bell's patents, the Bell company was involved in six
hundred separate lawsuits. The legal records printed filled 149 volumes.
The Bell Company won every single suit.

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

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

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

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

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

This centralizing process was not unique. Very similar events had
happened in American steel, oil, and railroads. But AT&T, unlike the other
companies, was to remain supreme. The monopoly robber-barons of those
other industries were humbled and shattered by government trust-busting.

Vail, the former Post Office official, was quite willing to accommodate
the US government; in fact he would forge an active alliance with it. AT&T
would become almost a wing of the American government, almost another
Post Office—though not quite. AT&T would willingly submit to federal

regulation, but in return, it would use the government's regulators as its own
police, who would keep out competitors and assure the Bell system's profits
and preeminence.

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

Vail's system worked. Except perhaps for aerospace, there has been no
technology more thoroughly dominated by Americans than the telephone.
The telephone was seen from the beginning as a quintessentially American
technology. Bell's policy, and the policy of Theodore Vail, was a profoundly
democratic policy of UNIVERSAL ACCESS. Vail's famous corporate
slogan, "One Policy, One System, Universal Service," was a political
slogan, with a very American ring to it.

The American telephone was not to become the specialized tool of
government or business, but a general public utility. At first, it was true,
only the wealthy could afford private telephones, and Bell's company
pursued the business markets primarily. The American phone system was a
capitalist effort, meant to make money; it was not a charity. But from the
first, almost all communities with telephone service had public telephones.
And many stores—especially drugstores—offered public use of their
phones. You might not own a telephone—but you could always get into the
system, if you really needed to.

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

Joseph Stalin, for instance, vetoed plans for a Soviet phone system soon
after the Bolshevik revolution. Stalin was certain that publicly accessible
telephones would become instruments of anti-Soviet counterrevolution and

conspiracy. (He was probably right.) When telephones did arrive in the
Soviet Union, they would be instruments of Party authority, and always
heavily tapped. (Alexander Solzhenitsyn's prison-camp novel The First
Circle describes efforts to develop a phone system more suited to Stalinist
purposes.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Although Bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the telephone company
did not employ women for the sake of advancing female liberation. AT&T
did this for sound commercial reasons. The first telephone operators of the
Bell system were not women, but teenage American boys. They were
telegraphic messenger boys (a group about to be rendered technically

obsolescent), who swept up around the phone office, dunned customers for
bills, and made phone connections on the switchboard, all on the cheap.

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

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

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

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

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

The telephone has achieved a rare and exalted state for a technological
artifact: it has become a HOUSEHOLD OBJECT. The telephone, like the
clock, like pen and paper, like kitchen utensils and running water, has
become a technology that is visible only by its absence. The telephone is

technologically transparent. The global telephone system is the largest and
most complex machine in the world, yet it is easy to use. More remarkable
yet, the telephone is almost entirely physically safe for the user.

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

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

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

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

Communities will fight to defend themselves. People will fight harder
and more bitterly to defend their communities, than they will fight to defend
their own individual selves. And this is very true of the "electronic
community" that arose around computer networks in the 1980s—or rather,
the VARIOUS electronic communities, in telephony, law enforcement,

computing, and the digital underground that, by the year 1990, were
raiding, rallying, arresting, suing, jailing, fining and issuing angry
manifestos.

None of the events of 1990 were entirely new. Nothing happened in
1990 that did not have some kind of earlier and more understandable
precedent. What gave the Hacker Crackdown its new sense of gravity and
importance was the feeling—the COMMUNITY feeling—that the political
stakes had been raised; that trouble in cyberspace was no longer mere
mischief or inconclusive skirmishing, but a genuine fight over genuine
issues, a fight for community survival and the shape of the future.

These electronic communities, having flourished throughout the 1980s,
were becoming aware of themselves, and increasingly, becoming aware of
other, rival communities. Worries were sprouting up right and left, with
complaints, rumors, uneasy speculations. But it would take a catalyst, a
shock, to make the new world evident. Like Bell's great publicity break, the
Tarriffville Rail Disaster of January 1878, it would take a cause celebre.

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

#

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

And the phone companies take no back seat in high-technology, either.
Other companies' industrial researchers may have won new markets; but the

researchers of Bell Labs have won SEVEN NOBEL PRIZES. One potent
device that Bell Labs originated, the transistor, has created entire GROUPS
of industries. Bell Labs are world-famous for generating "a patent a day,"
and have even made vital discoveries in astronomy, physics and cosmology.

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

During the long heyday of Ma Bell, the Bell employee corps were
nurtured top-to-bottom on a corporate ethos of public service. There was
good money in Bell, but Bell was not ABOUT money; Bell used public
relations, but never mere marketeering. People went into the Bell System
for a good life, and they had a good life. But it was not mere money that led
Bell people out in the midst of storms and earthquakes to fight with toppled
phone-poles, to wade in flooded manholes, to pull the red-eyed graveyard-
shift over collapsing switching-systems. The Bell ethic was the electrical
equivalent of the postman's: neither rain, nor snow, nor gloom of night
would stop these couriers.

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

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

But unlike other companies, Bell was above and beyond the vulgar
commercial fray. Through its regional operating companies, Bell was

omnipresent, local, and intimate, all over America; but the central ivory
towers at its corporate heart were the tallest and the ivoriest around.

There were other phone companies in America, to be sure; the so-called
independents. Rural cooperatives, mostly; small fry, mostly tolerated,
sometimes warred upon. For many decades, "independent" American phone
companies lived in fear and loathing of the official Bell monopoly (or the
"Bell Octopus," as Ma Bell's nineteenth-century enemies described her in
many angry newspaper manifestos). Some few of these independent
entrepreneurs, while legally in the wrong, fought so bitterly against the
Octopus that their illegal phone networks were cast into the street by Bell
agents and publicly burned.

The pure technical sweetness of the Bell System gave its operators,
inventors and engineers a deeply satisfying sense of power and mastery.
They had devoted their lives to improving this vast nation-spanning
machine; over years, whole human lives, they had watched it improve and
grow. It was like a great technological temple. They were an elite, and they
knew it—even if others did not; in fact, they felt even more powerful
BECAUSE others did not understand.

The deep attraction of this sensation of elite technical power should
never be underestimated. "Technical power" is not for everybody; for many
people it simply has no charm at all. But for some people, it becomes the
core of their lives. For a few, it is overwhelming, obsessive; it becomes
something close to an addiction. People—especially clever teenage boys
whose lives are otherwise mostly powerless and put-upon—love this
sensation of secret power, and are willing to do all sorts of amazing things
to achieve it. The technical POWER of electronics has motivated many
strange acts detailed in this book, which would otherwise be inexplicable.

So Bell had power beyond mere capitalism. The Bell service ethos
worked, and was often propagandized, in a rather saccharine fashion. Over
the decades, people slowly grew tired of this. And then, openly impatient
with it. By the early 1980s, Ma Bell was to find herself with scarcely a real
friend in the world. Vail's industrial socialism had become hopelessly out-
of-fashion politically. Bell would be punished for that. And that punishment
would fall harshly upon the people of the telephone community.

#

In 1983, Ma Bell was dismantled by federal court action. The pieces of
Bell are now separate corporate entities. The core of the company became
AT&T Communications, and also AT&T Industries (formerly Western
Electric, Bell's manufacturing arm). AT&T Bell Labs became Bell
Communications Research, Bellcore. Then there are the Regional Bell
Operating Companies, or RBOCs, pronounced "arbocks."

Bell was a titan and even these regional chunks are gigantic enterprises:
Fortune 50 companies with plenty of wealth and power behind them. But
the clean lines of "One Policy, One System, Universal Service" have been
shattered, apparently forever.

The "One Policy" of the early Reagan Administration was to shatter a
system that smacked of noncompetitive socialism. Since that time, there has
been no real telephone "policy" on the federal level. Despite the breakup,
the remnants of Bell have never been set free to compete in the open
marketplace.

The RBOCs are still very heavily regulated, but not from the top.
Instead, they struggle politically, economically and legally, in what seems
an endless turmoil, in a patchwork of overlapping federal and state
jurisdictions. Increasingly, like other major American corporations, the
RBOCs are becoming multinational, acquiring important commercial
interests in Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific Rim. But this, too, adds
to their legal and political predicament.

The people of what used to be Ma Bell are not happy about their fate.
They feel ill-used. They might have been grudgingly willing to make a full
transition to the free market; to become just companies amid other
companies. But this never happened. Instead, AT&T and the RBOCS ("the
Baby Bells") feel themselves wrenched from side to side by state regulators,
by Congress, by the FCC, and especially by the federal court of Judge
Harold Greene, the magistrate who ordered the Bell breakup and who has
been the de facto czar of American telecommunications ever since 1983.

Bell people feel that they exist in a kind of paralegal limbo today. They
don't understand what's demanded of them. If it's "service," why aren't they
treated like a public service? And if it's money, then why aren't they free to
compete for it? No one seems to know, really. Those who claim to know
keep changing their minds. Nobody in authority seems willing to grasp the
nettle for once and all.

Telephone people from other countries are amazed by the American
telephone system today. Not that it works so well; for nowadays even the
French telephone system works, more or less. They are amazed that the
American telephone system STILL works AT ALL, under these strange
conditions.

Bell's "One System" of long-distance service is now only about eighty
percent of a system, with the remainder held by Sprint, MCI, and the
midget long-distance companies. Ugly wars over dubious corporate
practices such as "slamming" (an underhanded method of snitching clients
from rivals) break out with some regularity in the realm of long-distance
service. The battle to break Bell's long-distance monopoly was long and
ugly, and since the breakup the battlefield has not become much prettier.
AT&T's famous shame-and-blame advertisements, which emphasized the
shoddy work and purported ethical shadiness of their competitors, were
much remarked on for their studied psychological cruelty.

There is much bad blood in this industry, and much long-treasured
resentment. AT&T's post-breakup corporate logo, a striped sphere, is known
in the industry as the "Death Star" (a reference from the movie Star Wars, in
which the "Death Star" was the spherical high-tech fortress of the harsh-
breathing imperial ultra-baddie, Darth Vader.) Even AT&T employees are
less than thrilled by the Death Star. A popular (though banned) T-shirt
among AT&T employees bears the old-fashioned Bell logo of the Bell
System, plus the newfangled striped sphere, with the before-and-after
comments: "This is your brain—This is your brain on drugs!" AT&T made
a very well-financed and determined effort to break into the personal
computer market; it was disastrous, and telco computer experts are
derisively known by their competitors as "the pole-climbers." AT&T and
the Baby Bell arbocks still seem to have few friends.

Under conditions of sharp commercial competition, a crash like that of
January 15, 1990 was a major embarrassment to AT&T. It was a direct blow
against their much-treasured reputation for reliability. Within days of the
crash AT&T's Chief Executive Officer, Bob Allen, officially apologized, in
terms of deeply pained humility:

"AT&T had a major service disruption last Monday. We didn't live up to
our own standards of quality, and we didn't live up to yours. It's as simple as
that. And that's not acceptable to us. Or to you.... We understand how much
people have come to depend upon AT&T service, so our AT&T Bell
Laboratories scientists and our network engineers are doing everything
possible to guard against a recurrence.... We know there's no way to make
up for the inconvenience this problem may have caused you."

Mr Allen's "open letter to customers" was printed in lavish ads all over
the country: in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Times, Los
Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco
Chronicle Examiner, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Detroit Free
Press, Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Atlanta
Journal Constitution, Minneapolis Star Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer Press
Dispatch, Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer, Tacoma News Tribune, Miami
Herald, Pittsburgh Press, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Denver Post, Phoenix
Republic Gazette and Tampa Tribune.

In another press release, AT&T went to some pains to suggest that this
"software glitch" might have happened just as easily to MCI, although, in
fact, it hadn't. (MCI's switching software was quite different from AT&T's
—though not necessarily any safer.) AT&T also announced their plans to
offer a rebate of service on Valentine's Day to make up for the loss during
the Crash.

"Every technical resource available, including Bell Labs scientists and
engineers, has been devoted to assuring it will not occur again," the public
was told. They were further assured that "The chances of a recurrence are
small—a problem of this magnitude never occurred before."

In the meantime, however, police and corporate security maintained their
own suspicions about "the chances of recurrence" and the real reason why a

"problem of this magnitude" had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere.
Police and security knew for a fact that hackers of unprecedented
sophistication were illegally entering, and reprogramming, certain digital
switching stations. Rumors of hidden "viruses" and secret "logic bombs" in
the switches ran rampant in the underground, with much chortling over
AT&T's predicament, and idle speculation over what unsung hacker genius
was responsible for it. Some hackers, including police informants, were
trying hard to finger one another as the true culprits of the Crash.

Telco people found little comfort in objectivity when they contemplated
these possibilities. It was just too close to the bone for them; it was
embarrassing; it hurt so much, it was hard even to talk about.

There has always been thieving and misbehavior in the phone system.
There has always been trouble with the rival independents, and in the local
loops. But to have such trouble in the core of the system, the long-distance
switching stations, is a horrifying affair. To telco people, this is all the
difference between finding roaches in your kitchen and big horrid sewer-
rats in your bedroom.

From the outside, to the average citizen, the telcos still seem gigantic
and impersonal. The American public seems to regard them as something
akin to Soviet apparats. Even when the telcos do their best corporate-citizen
routine, subsidizing magnet high-schools and sponsoring news-shows on
public television, they seem to win little except public suspicion.

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

In late '88 and throughout 1989, telco representatives grew shrill in their
complaints to those few American law enforcement officials who make it
their business to try to understand what telephone people are talking about.

Telco security officials had discovered the computer-hacker underground,
infiltrated it thoroughly, and become deeply alarmed at its growing
expertise. Here they had found a target that was not only loathsome on its
face, but clearly ripe for counterattack.

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

#

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

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

bequeathed them by Dr. Bell and Mr. Vail. The more efficient, high-tech,
computerized, and impersonal the telcos became, it seemed, the more they
were met by sullen public resentment and amoral greed.

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

Yet operational secrecy was even more so. If word got out that a
nationwide crackdown was coming, the hackers might simply vanish;
destroy the evidence, hide their computers, go to earth, and wait for the
campaign to blow over. Even the young hackers were crafty and suspicious,
and as for the professional grifters, they tended to split for the nearest state-
line at the first sign of trouble. For the crackdown to work well, they would
all have to be caught red-handed, swept upon suddenly, out of the blue,
from every corner of the compass.

And there was another strong motive for secrecy. In the worst-case
scenario, a blown campaign might leave the telcos open to a devastating
hacker counter-attack. If there were indeed hackers loose in America who
had caused the January 15 Crash—if there were truly gifted hackers, loose
in the nation's long-distance switching systems, and enraged or frightened
by the crackdown—then they might react unpredictably to an attempt to
collar them. Even if caught, they might have talented and vengeful friends
still running around loose. Conceivably, it could turn ugly. Very ugly. In
fact, it was hard to imagine just how ugly things might turn, given that
possibility.

Counter-attack from hackers was a genuine concern for the telcos. In
point of fact, they would never suffer any such counter-attack. But in
months to come, they would be at some pains to publicize this notion and to
utter grim warnings about it.

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

And publicity was such a useful thing. Corporate security officers,
including telco security, generally work under conditions of great
discretion. And corporate security officials do not make money for their
companies. Their job is to PREVENT THE LOSS of money, which is much
less glamorous than actually winning profits.

If you are a corporate security official, and you do your job brilliantly,
then nothing bad happens to your company at all. Because of this, you
appear completely superfluous. This is one of the many unattractive aspects
of security work. It's rare that these folks have the chance to draw some
healthy attention to their own efforts.

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

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

It does not seem to have occurred to any telco official that the hackers
accused would demand a day in court; that journalists would smile upon the
hackers as "good copy;" that wealthy high-tech entrepreneurs would offer
moral and financial support to crackdown victims; that constitutional

lawyers would show up with briefcases, frowning mightily. This possibility
does not seem to have ever entered the game-plan.

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

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

#

To the average citizen, the idea of the telephone is represented by, well, a
TELEPHONE: a device that you talk into. To a telco professional, however,
the telephone itself is known, in lordly fashion, as a "subset." The "subset"
in your house is a mere adjunct, a distant nerve ending, of the central
switching stations, which are ranked in levels of heirarchy, up to the long-
distance electronic switching stations, which are some of the largest
computers on earth.

Let us imagine that it is, say, 1925, before the introduction of computers,
when the phone system was simpler and somewhat easier to grasp. Let's
further imagine that you are Miss Leticia Luthor, a fictional operator for Ma
Bell in New York City of the 20s.

Basically, you, Miss Luthor, ARE the "switching system." You are sitting
in front of a large vertical switchboard, known as a "cordboard," made of
shiny wooden panels, with ten thousand metal-rimmed holes punched in
them, known as jacks. The engineers would have put more holes into your
switchboard, but ten thousand is as many as you can reach without actually
having to get up out of your chair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After four or five years of this work, you get married, and you have to
quit your job, this being the natural order of womanhood in the American
1920s. The phone company has to train somebody else—maybe two people,

since the phone system has grown somewhat in the meantime. And this
costs money.

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

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

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

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

There are, however, quite serious drawbacks to the use of computer-
chips. When they do break down, it is a daunting challenge to figure out
what the heck has gone wrong with them. A broken cordboard generally had
a problem in it big enough to see. A broken chip has invisible, microscopic

faults. And the faults in bad software can be so subtle as to be practically
theological.

If you want a mechanical system to do something new, then you must
travel to where it is, and pull pieces out of it, and wire in new pieces. This
costs money. However, if you want a chip to do something new, all you
have to do is change its software, which is easy, fast and dirt-cheap. You
don't even have to see the chip to change its program. Even if you did see
the chip, it wouldn't look like much. A chip with program X doesn't look
one whit different from a chip with program Y.

With the proper codes and sequences, and access to specialized phone-
lines, you can change electronic switching systems all over America from
anywhere you please.

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

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

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

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

Although an Electronic Switching Station can't talk, it does need an
interface, some way to relate to its, er, employers. This interface is known
as the "master control center." (This interface might be better known simply
as "the interface," since it doesn't actually "control" phone calls directly.
However, a term like "Master Control Center" is just the kind of rhetoric
that telco maintenance engineers—and hackers—find particularly
satisfying.)

Using the master control center, a phone engineer can test local and
trunk lines for malfunctions. He (rarely she) can check various alarm
displays, measure traffic on the lines, examine the records of telephone
usage and the charges for those calls, and change the programming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is simply no way to assure that software is free of flaws. Though
software is mathematical in nature, it cannot by "proven" like a
mathematical theorem; software is more like language, with inherent

ambiguities, with different definitions, different assumptions, different
levels of meaning that can conflict.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

System 6, because AT&T suspected there might be shakedown problems
with the new and unprecedently sophisticated System 7 network.

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, while it was busy bookkeeping with the status map, the
tiny flaw in the brand-new software came into play. The flaw caused the

4ESS switch to interact, subtly but drastically, with incoming telephone
calls from human users. If—and only if—two incoming phone-calls
happened to hit the switch within a hundredth of a second, then a small
patch of data would be garbled by the flaw.

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

However, the "OK, ready for work" signal was the VERY THING THAT
HAD CAUSED THE SWITCH TO GO DOWN IN THE FIRST PLACE.
And ALL the System 7 switches had the same flaw in their status-map
software. As soon as they stopped to make the bookkeeping note that their
fellow switch was "OK," then they too would become vulnerable to the
slight chance that two phone-calls would hit them within a hundredth of a
second.

At approximately 2:25 P.M. EST on Monday, January 15, one of AT&T's
4ESS toll switching systems in New York City had an actual, legitimate,
minor problem. It went into fault recovery routines, announced "I'm going
down," then announced, "I'm back, I'm OK." And this cheery message then
blasted throughout the network to many of its fellow 4ESS switches.

Many of the switches, at first, completely escaped trouble. These lucky
switches were not hit by the coincidence of two phone calls within a
hundredth of a second. Their software did not fail—at first. But three
switches—in Atlanta, St. Louis, and Detroit—were unlucky, and were
caught with their hands full. And they went down. And they came back up,
almost immediately. And they too began to broadcast the lethal message
that they, too, were "OK" again, activating the lurking software bug in yet
other switches.

As more and more switches did have that bit of bad luck and collapsed,
the call-traffic became more and more densely packed in the remaining

switches, which were groaning to keep up with the load. And of course, as
the calls became more densely packed, the switches were MUCH MORE
LIKELY to be hit twice within a hundredth of a second.

It only took four seconds for a switch to get well. There was no
PHYSICAL damage of any kind to the switches, after all. Physically, they
were working perfectly. This situation was "only" a software problem.

But the 4ESS switches were leaping up and down every four to six
seconds, in a virulent spreading wave all over America, in utter, manic,
mechanical stupidity. They kept KNOCKING one another down with their
contagious "OK" messages.

It took about ten minutes for the chain reaction to cripple the network.
Even then, switches would periodically luck-out and manage to resume
their normal work. Many calls—millions of them—were managing to get
through. But millions weren't.

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

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

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

By Tuesday they were pulling all the brand-new 4ESS software and
replacing it with an earlier version of System 7.

If these had been human operators, rather than computers at work,
someone would simply have eventually stopped screaming. It would have
been OBVIOUS that the situation was not "OK," and common sense would
have kicked in. Humans possess common sense—at least to some extent.
Computers simply don't.

On the other hand, computers can handle hundreds of calls per second.
Humans simply can't. If every single human being in America worked for
the phone company, we couldn't match the performance of digital switches:
direct-dialling, three-way calling, speed-calling, call-waiting, Caller ID, all
the rest of the cornucopia of digital bounty. Replacing computers with
operators is simply not an option any more.

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

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

And they would look in a lot of places.

Come 1991, however, the outlines of an apparent new reality would
begin to emerge from the fog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stranded passengers in New York and New Jersey were further
infuriated to discover that they could not even manage to make a long
distance phone call, to explain their delay to loved ones or business
associates. Thanks to the crash, about four and a half million domestic calls,
and half a million international calls, failed to get through.

The September 17 NYC Crash, unlike the previous ones, involved not a
whisper of "hacker" misdeeds. On the contrary, by 1991, AT&T itself was
suffering much of the vilification that had formerly been directed at
hackers. Congressmen were grumbling. So were state and federal
regulators. And so was the press.

For their part, ancient rival MCI took out snide full-page newspaper ads
in New York, offering their own long-distance services for the "next time
that AT&T goes down."

"You wouldn't find a classy company like AT&T using such advertising,"
protested AT&T Chairman Robert Allen, unconvincingly. Once again, out
came the full-page AT&T apologies in newspapers, apologies for "an
inexcusable culmination of both human and mechanical failure." (This time,
however, AT&T offered no discount on later calls. Unkind critics suggested
that AT&T were worried about setting any precedent for refunding the
financial losses caused by telephone crashes.)

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

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

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

PART TWO: THE DIGITAL UNDERGROUND

The date was May 9, 1990. The Pope was touring Mexico City. Hustlers
from the Medellin Cartel were trying to buy black-market Stinger missiles
in Florida. On the comics page, Doonesbury character Andy was dying of
AIDS. And then ... a highly unusual item whose novelty and calculated
rhetoric won it headscratching attention in newspapers all over America.

The US Attorney's office in Phoenix, Arizona, had issued a press release
announcing a nationwide law enforcement crackdown against "illegal
computer hacking activities." The sweep was officially known as
"Operation Sundevil."

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

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

"Today, the Secret Service is sending a clear message to those computer
hackers who have decided to violate the laws of this nation in the mistaken
belief that they can successfully avoid detection by hiding behind the
relative anonymity of their computer terminals. ( ... ) "Underground groups

have been formed for the purpose of exchanging information relevant to
their criminal activities. These groups often communicate with each other
through message systems between computers called 'bulletin boards.' "Our
experience shows that many computer hacker suspects are no longer
misguided teenagers, mischievously playing games with their computers in
their bedrooms. Some are now high tech computer operators using
computers to engage in unlawful conduct."

Who were these "underground groups" and "high-tech operators?"
Where had they come from? What did they want? Who WERE they? Were
they "mischievous?" Were they dangerous? How had "misguided teenagers"
managed to alarm the United States Secret Service? And just how
widespread was this sort of thing?

Of all the major players in the Hacker Crackdown: the phone companies,
law enforcement, the civil libertarians, and the "hackers" themselves—the
"hackers" are by far the most mysterious, by far the hardest to understand,
by far the WEIRDEST.

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

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

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

But the genuine roots of the modern hacker UNDERGROUND can
probably be traced most successfully to a now much-obscured hippie
anarchist movement known as the Yippies. The Yippies, who took their
name from the largely fictional "Youth International Party," carried out a
loud and lively policy of surrealistic subversion and outrageous political
mischief. Their basic tenets were flagrant sexual promiscuity, open and
copious drug use, the political overthrow of any powermonger over thirty
years of age, and an immediate end to the war in Vietnam, by any means
necessary, including the psychic levitation of the Pentagon.

The two most visible Yippies were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.
Rubin eventually became a Wall Street broker. Hoffman, ardently sought by
federal authorities, went into hiding for seven years, in Mexico, France, and
the United States. While on the lam, Hoffman continued to write and
publish, with help from sympathizers in the American anarcho-leftist
underground. Mostly, Hoffman survived through false ID and odd jobs.
Eventually he underwent facial plastic surgery and adopted an entirely new
identity as one "Barry Freed." After surrendering himself to authorities in
1980, Hoffman spent a year in prison on a cocaine conviction.

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

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

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

During the Vietnam War, there was a federal surtax imposed on
telephone service; Hoffman and his cohorts could, and did, argue that in

systematically stealing phone service they were engaging in civil
disobedience: virtuously denying tax funds to an illegal and immoral war.

But this thin veil of decency was soon dropped entirely. Ripping-off the
System found its own justification in deep alienation and a basic outlaw
contempt for conventional bourgeois values. Ingenious, vaguely politicized
varieties of rip-off, which might be described as "anarchy by convenience,"
became very popular in Yippie circles, and because rip-off was so useful, it
was to survive the Yippie movement itself.

In the early 1970s, it required fairly limited expertise and ingenuity to
cheat payphones, to divert "free" electricity and gas service, or to rob
vending machines and parking meters for handy pocket change. It also
required a conspiracy to spread this knowledge, and the gall and nerve
actually to commit petty theft, but the Yippies had these qualifications in
plenty. In June 1971, Abbie Hoffman and a telephone enthusiast
sarcastically known as "Al Bell" began publishing a newsletter called Youth
International Party Line. This newsletter was dedicated to collating and
spreading Yippie rip-off techniques, especially of phones, to the joy of the
freewheeling underground and the insensate rage of all straight people. As a
political tactic, phone-service theft ensured that Yippie advocates would
always have ready access to the long-distance telephone as a medium,
despite the Yippies' chronic lack of organization, discipline, money, or even
a steady home address.

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

TAP articles, once highly politicized, became pitilessly jargonized and
technical, in homage or parody to the Bell System's own technical
documents, which TAP studied closely, gutted, and reproduced without

permission. The TAP elite revelled in gloating possession of the specialized
knowledge necessary to beat the system.

"Al Bell" dropped out of the game by the late 70s, and "Tom Edison"
took over; TAP readers (some 1400 of them, all told) now began to show
more interest in telex switches and the growing phenomenon of computer
systems.

In 1983, "Tom Edison" had his computer stolen and his house set on fire
by an arsonist. This was an eventually mortal blow to TAP (though the
legendary name was to be resurrected in 1990 by a young Kentuckian
computer-outlaw named "Predat0r.")

#

Ever since telephones began to make money, there have been people
willing to rob and defraud phone companies. The legions of petty phone
thieves vastly outnumber those "phone phreaks" who "explore the system"
for the sake of the intellectual challenge. The New York metropolitan area
(long in the vanguard of American crime) claims over 150,000 physical
attacks on pay telephones every year! Studied carefully, a modern payphone
reveals itself as a little fortress, carefully designed and redesigned over
generations, to resist coin-slugs, zaps of electricity, chunks of coin-shaped
ice, prybars, magnets, lockpicks, blasting caps. Public pay-phones must
survive in a world of unfriendly, greedy people, and a modern payphone is
as exquisitely evolved as a cactus.

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

Despite the blurring, one can still draw a few useful behavioral
distinctions between "phreaks" and "hackers." Hackers are intensely

interested in the "system" per se, and enjoy relating to machines. "Phreaks"
are more social, manipulating the system in a rough-and-ready fashion in
order to get through to other human beings, fast, cheap and under the table.

Phone phreaks love nothing so much as "bridges," illegal conference
calls of ten or twelve chatting conspirators, seaboard to seaboard, lasting for
many hours—and running, of course, on somebody else's tab, preferably a
large corporation's.

As phone-phreak conferences wear on, people drop out (or simply leave
the phone off the hook, while they sashay off to work or school or
babysitting), and new people are phoned up and invited to join in, from
some other continent, if possible. Technical trivia, boasts, brags, lies, head-
trip deceptions, weird rumors, and cruel gossip are all freely exchanged.

The lowest rung of phone-phreaking is the theft of telephone access
codes. Charging a phone call to somebody else's stolen number is, of
course, a pig-easy way of stealing phone service, requiring practically no
technical expertise. This practice has been very widespread, especially
among lonely people without much money who are far from home. Code
theft has flourished especially in college dorms, military bases, and,
notoriously, among roadies for rock bands. Of late, code theft has spread
very rapidly among Third Worlders in the US, who pile up enormous
unpaid long-distance bills to the Caribbean, South America, and Pakistan.

The simplest way to steal phone-codes is simply to look over a victim's
shoulder as he punches-in his own code-number on a public payphone. This
technique is known as "shoulder-surfing," and is especially common in
airports, bus terminals, and train stations. The code is then sold by the thief
for a few dollars. The buyer abusing the code has no computer expertise,
but calls his Mom in New York, Kingston or Caracas and runs up a huge
bill with impunity. The losses from this primitive phreaking activity are far,
far greater than the monetary losses caused by computer-intruding hackers.

In the mid-to-late 1980s, until the introduction of sterner telco security
measures, COMPUTERIZED code theft worked like a charm, and was
virtually omnipresent throughout the digital underground, among phreaks
and hackers alike. This was accomplished through programming one's

computer to try random code numbers over the telephone until one of them
worked. Simple programs to do this were widely available in the
underground; a computer running all night was likely to come up with a
dozen or so useful hits. This could be repeated week after week until one
had a large library of stolen codes.

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

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

Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple Computer, Inc.,
once dabbled in selling blue-boxes in college dorms in California. For
many, in the early days of phreaking, blue-boxing was scarcely perceived as
"theft," but rather as a fun (if sneaky) way to use excess phone capacity
harmlessly. After all, the long-distance lines were JUST SITTING
THERE.... Whom did it hurt, really? If you're not DAMAGING the system,
and you're not USING UP ANY TANGIBLE RESOURCE, and if nobody
FINDS OUT what you did, then what real harm have you done? What
exactly HAVE you "stolen," anyway? If a tree falls in the forest and nobody
hears it, how much is the noise worth? Even now this remains a rather dicey
question.

Blue-boxing was no joke to the phone companies, however. Indeed,
when Ramparts magazine, a radical publication in California, printed the

wiring schematics necessary to create a mute box in June 1972, the
magazine was seized by police and Pacific Bell phone-company officials.
The mute box, a blue-box variant, allowed its user to receive long-distance
calls free of charge to the caller. This device was closely described in a
Ramparts article wryly titled "Regulating the Phone Company In Your
Home." Publication of this article was held to be in violation of Californian
State Penal Code section 502.7, which outlaws ownership of wire-fraud
devices and the selling of "plans or instructions for any instrument,
apparatus, or device intended to avoid telephone toll charges."

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

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

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

Cellular phones are especially vulnerable; their chips can be re-
programmed to present a false caller ID and avoid billing. Doing so also
avoids police tapping, making cellular-phone abuse a favorite among drug-

dealers. "Call-sell operations" using pirate cellular phones can, and have,
been run right out of the backs of cars, which move from "cell" to "cell" in
the local phone system, retailing stolen long-distance service, like some
kind of demented electronic version of the neighborhood ice-cream truck.

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

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

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

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

Cellular phone-calls, cordless phones, and ship-to-shore telephony can
all be monitored by various forms of radio; this kind of "passive
monitoring" is spreading explosively today. Technically eavesdropping on
other people's cordless and cellular phone-calls is the fastest-growing area
in phreaking today. This practice strongly appeals to the lust for power and
conveys gratifying sensations of technical superiority over the
eavesdropping victim. Monitoring is rife with all manner of tempting evil
mischief. Simple prurient snooping is by far the most common activity. But
credit-card numbers unwarily spoken over the phone can be recorded,
stolen and used. And tapping people's phone-calls (whether through active
telephone taps or passive radio monitors) does lend itself conveniently to
activities like blackmail, industrial espionage, and political dirty tricks.

It should be repeated that telecommunications fraud, the theft of phone
service, causes vastly greater monetary losses than the practice of entering
into computers by stealth. Hackers are mostly young suburban American
white males, and exist in their hundreds—but "phreaks" come from both
sexes and from many nationalities, ages and ethnic backgrounds, and are
flourishing in the thousands.

#

The term "hacker" has had an unfortunate history. This book, The
Hacker Crackdown, has little to say about "hacking" in its finer, original
sense. The term can signify the free-wheeling intellectual exploration of the
highest and deepest potential of computer systems. Hacking can describe
the determination to make access to computers and information as free and
open as possible. Hacking can involve the heartfelt conviction that beauty
can be found in computers, that the fine aesthetic in a perfect program can
liberate the mind and spirit. This is "hacking" as it was defined in Steven
Levy's much-praised history of the pioneer computer milieu, Hackers,
published in 1984.

Hackers of all kinds are absolutely soaked through with heroic anti-
bureaucratic sentiment. Hackers long for recognition as a praiseworthy
cultural archetype, the postmodern electronic equivalent of the cowboy and
mountain man. Whether they deserve such a reputation is something for
history to decide. But many hackers—including those outlaw hackers who

are computer intruders, and whose activities are defined as criminal—
actually attempt to LIVE UP TO this techno-cowboy reputation. And given
that electronics and telecommunications are still largely unexplored
territories, there is simply NO TELLING what hackers might uncover.

For some people, this freedom is the very breath of oxygen, the
inventive spontaneity that makes life worth living and that flings open doors
to marvellous possibility and individual empowerment. But for many
people —and increasingly so—the hacker is an ominous figure, a smart-
aleck sociopath ready to burst out of his basement wilderness and savage
other people's lives for his own anarchical convenience.

Any form of power without responsibility, without direct and formal
checks and balances, is frightening to people—and reasonably so. It should
be frankly admitted that hackers ARE frightening, and that the basis of this
fear is not irrational.

Fear of hackers goes well beyond the fear of merely criminal activity.

Subversion and manipulation of the phone system is an act with
disturbing political overtones. In America, computers and telephones are
potent symbols of organized authority and the technocratic business elite.

But there is an element in American culture that has always strongly
rebelled against these symbols; rebelled against all large industrial
computers and all phone companies. A certain anarchical tinge deep in the
American soul delights in causing confusion and pain to all bureaucracies,
including technological ones.

There is sometimes malice and vandalism in this attitude, but it is a deep
and cherished part of the American national character. The outlaw, the rebel,
the rugged individual, the pioneer, the sturdy Jeffersonian yeoman, the
private citizen resisting interference in his pursuit of happiness—these are
figures that all Americans recognize, and that many will strongly applaud
and defend.

Many scrupulously law-abiding citizens today do cutting-edge work
with electronics—work that has already had tremendous social influence

and will have much more in years to come. In all truth, these talented,
hardworking, law-abiding, mature, adult people are far more disturbing to
the peace and order of the current status quo than any scofflaw group of
romantic teenage punk kids. These law-abiding hackers have the power,
ability, and willingness to influence other people's lives quite unpredictably.
They have means, motive, and opportunity to meddle drastically with the
American social order. When corralled into governments, universities, or
large multinational companies, and forced to follow rulebooks and wear
suits and ties, they at least have some conventional halters on their freedom
of action. But when loosed alone, or in small groups, and fired by
imagination and the entrepreneurial spirit, they can move mountains—
causing landslides that will likely crash directly into your office and living
room.

These people, as a class, instinctively recognize that a public, politicized
attack on hackers will eventually spread to them—that the term "hacker,"
once demonized, might be used to knock their hands off the levers of power
and choke them out of existence. There are hackers today who fiercely and
publicly resist any besmirching of the noble title of hacker. Naturally and
understandably, they deeply resent the attack on their values implicit in
using the word "hacker" as a synonym for computer-criminal.

This book, sadly but in my opinion unavoidably, rather adds to the
degradation of the term. It concerns itself mostly with "hacking" in its
commonest latter-day definition, i.e., intruding into computer systems by
stealth and without permission. The term "hacking" is used routinely today
by almost all law enforcement officials with any professional interest in
computer fraud and abuse. American police describe almost any crime
committed with, by, through, or against a computer as hacking.

Most importantly, "hacker" is what computer-intruders choose to call
THEMSELVES. Nobody who "hacks" into systems willingly describes
himself (rarely, herself) as a "computer intruder," "computer trespasser,"
"cracker," "wormer," "darkside hacker" or "high tech street gangster."
Several other demeaning terms have been invented in the hope that the
press and public will leave the original sense of the word alone. But few
people actually use these terms. (I exempt the term "cyberpunk," which a

few hackers and law enforcement people actually do use. The term
"cyberpunk" is drawn from literary criticism and has some odd and unlikely
resonances, but, like hacker, cyberpunk too has become a criminal
pejorative today.)

In any case, breaking into computer systems was hardly alien to the
original hacker tradition. The first tottering systems of the 1960s required
fairly extensive internal surgery merely to function day-by-day. Their users
"invaded" the deepest, most arcane recesses of their operating software
almost as a matter of routine. "Computer security" in these early, primitive
systems was at best an afterthought. What security there was, was entirely
physical, for it was assumed that anyone allowed near this expensive,
arcane hardware would be a fully qualified professional expert.

In a campus environment, though, this meant that grad students, teaching
assistants, undergraduates, and eventually, all manner of dropouts and
hangers-on ended up accessing and often running the works.

Universities, even modern universities, are not in the business of
maintaining security over information. On the contrary, universities, as
institutions, pre-date the "information economy" by many centuries and are
not-for-profit cultural entities, whose reason for existence (purportedly) is
to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then teach
it. Universities are meant to PASS THE TORCH OF CIVILIZATION, not
just download data into student skulls, and the values of the academic
community are strongly at odds with those of all would-be information
empires. Teachers at all levels, from kindergarten up, have proven to be
shameless and persistent software and data pirates. Universities do not
merely "leak information" but vigorously broadcast free thought.

This clash of values has been fraught with controversy. Many hackers of
the 1960s remember their professional apprenticeship as a long guerilla war
against the uptight mainframe-computer "information priesthood." These
computer-hungry youngsters had to struggle hard for access to computing
power, and many of them were not above certain, er, shortcuts. But, over
the years, this practice freed computing from the sterile reserve of lab-
coated technocrats and was largely responsible for the explosive growth of
computing in general society—especially PERSONAL computing.

Access to technical power acted like catnip on certain of these
youngsters. Most of the basic techniques of computer intrusion: password
cracking, trapdoors, backdoors, trojan horses—were invented in college
environments in the 1960s, in the early days of network computing. Some
off-the-cuff experience at computer intrusion was to be in the informal
resume of most "hackers" and many future industry giants. Outside of the
tiny cult of computer enthusiasts, few people thought much about the
implications of "breaking into" computers. This sort of activity had not yet
been publicized, much less criminalized.

In the 1960s, definitions of "property" and "privacy" had not yet been
extended to cyberspace. Computers were not yet indispensable to society.
There were no vast databanks of vulnerable, proprietary information stored
in computers, which might be accessed, copied without permission, erased,
altered, or sabotaged. The stakes were low in the early days—but they grew
every year, exponentially, as computers themselves grew.

By the 1990s, commercial and political pressures had become
overwhelming, and they broke the social boundaries of the hacking
subculture. Hacking had become too important to be left to the hackers.
Society was now forced to tackle the intangible nature of cyberspace-as-
property, cyberspace as privately-owned unreal-estate. In the new, severe,
responsible, high-stakes context of the "Information Society" of the 1990s,
"hacking" was called into question.

What did it mean to break into a computer without permission and use
its computational power, or look around inside its files without hurting
anything? What were computer-intruding hackers, anyway—how should
society, and the law, best define their actions? Were they just BROWSERS,
harmless intellectual explorers? Were they VOYEURS, snoops, invaders of
privacy? Should they be sternly treated as potential AGENTS OF
ESPIONAGE, or perhaps as INDUSTRIAL SPIES? Or were they best
defined as TRESPASSERS, a very common teenage misdemeanor? Was
hacking THEFT OF SERVICE? (After all, intruders were getting someone
else's computer to carry out their orders, without permission and without
paying). Was hacking FRAUD? Maybe it was best described as
IMPERSONATION. The commonest mode of computer intrusion was (and

is) to swipe or snoop somebody else's password, and then enter the
computer in the guise of another person—who is commonly stuck with the
blame and the bills.

Perhaps a medical metaphor was better—hackers should be defined as
"sick," as COMPUTER ADDICTS unable to control their irresponsible,
compulsive behavior.

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

When you are a hacker, it is your own inner conviction of your elite
status that enables you to break, or let us say "transcend," the rules. It is not
that ALL rules go by the board. The rules habitually broken by hackers are
UNIMPORTANT rules—the rules of dopey greedhead telco bureaucrats
and pig-ignorant government pests.

Hackers have their OWN rules, which separate behavior which is cool
and elite, from behavior which is rodentlike, stupid and losing. These
"rules," however, are mostly unwritten and enforced by peer pressure and
tribal feeling. Like all rules that depend on the unspoken conviction that
everybody else is a good old boy, these rules are ripe for abuse. The
mechanisms of hacker peer-pressure, "teletrials" and ostracism, are rarely
used and rarely work. Back-stabbing slander, threats, and electronic
harassment are also freely employed in down-and-dirty intrahacker feuds,
but this rarely forces a rival out of the scene entirely. The only real solution
for the problem of an utterly losing, treacherous and rodentlike hacker is to
TURN HIM IN TO THE POLICE. Unlike the Mafia or Medellin Cartel, the
hacker elite cannot simply execute the bigmouths, creeps and troublemakers
among their ranks, so they turn one another in with astonishing frequency.

There is no tradition of silence or OMERTA in the hacker underworld.
Hackers can be shy, even reclusive, but when they do talk, hackers tend to

brag, boast and strut. Almost everything hackers do is INVISIBLE; if they
don't brag, boast, and strut about it, then NOBODY WILL EVER KNOW.
If you don't have something to brag, boast, and strut about, then nobody in
the underground will recognize you and favor you with vital cooperation
and respect.

The way to win a solid reputation in the underground is by telling other
hackers things that could only have been learned by exceptional cunning
and stealth. Forbidden knowledge, therefore, is the basic currency of the
digital underground, like seashells among Trobriand Islanders. Hackers
hoard this knowledge, and dwell upon it obsessively, and refine it, and
bargain with it, and talk and talk about it.

Many hackers even suffer from a strange obsession to TEACH—to
spread the ethos and the knowledge of the digital underground. They'll do
this even when it gains them no particular advantage and presents a grave
personal risk.

And when that risk catches up with them, they will go right on teaching
and preaching—to a new audience this time, their interrogators from law
enforcement. Almost every hacker arrested tells everything he knows—all
about his friends, his mentors, his disciples—legends, threats, horror
stories, dire rumors, gossip, hallucinations. This is, of course, convenient
for law enforcement—except when law enforcement begins to believe
hacker legendry.

Phone phreaks are unique among criminals in their willingness to call up
law enforcement officials—in the office, at their homes—and give them an
extended piece of their mind. It is hard not to interpret this as BEGGING
FOR ARREST, and in fact it is an act of incredible foolhardiness. Police are
naturally nettled by these acts of chutzpah and will go well out of their way
to bust these flaunting idiots. But it can also be interpreted as a product of a
world-view so elitist, so closed and hermetic, that electronic police are
simply not perceived as "police," but rather as ENEMY PHONE
PHREAKS who should be scolded into behaving "decently."

Hackers at their most grandiloquent perceive themselves as the elite
pioneers of a new electronic world. Attempts to make them obey the

democratically established laws of contemporary American society are seen
as repression and persecution. After all, they argue, if Alexander Graham
Bell had gone along with the rules of the Western Union telegraph
company, there would have been no telephones. If Jobs and Wozniak had
believed that IBM was the be-all and end-all, there would have been no
personal computers. If Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson had tried
to "work within the system" there would have been no United States.

Not only do hackers privately believe this as an article of faith, but they
have been known to write ardent manifestos about it. Here are some
revealing excerpts from an especially vivid hacker manifesto: "The Techno-
Revolution" by "Dr. Crash," which appeared in electronic form in Phrack
Volume 1, Issue 6, Phile 3.

"To fully explain the true motives behind hacking, we must first take a
quick look into the past. In the 1960s, a group of MIT students built the first
modern computer system. This wild, rebellious group of young men were
the first to bear the name 'hackers.' The systems that they developed were
intended to be used to solve world problems and to benefit all of mankind.
"As we can see, this has not been the case. The computer system has been
solely in the hands of big businesses and the government. The wonderful
device meant to enrich life has become a weapon which dehumanizes
people. To the government and large businesses, people are no more than
disk space, and the government doesn't use computers to arrange aid for the
poor, but to control nuclear death weapons. The average American can only
have access to a small microcomputer which is worth only a fraction of
what they pay for it. The businesses keep the true state-of-the-art equipment
away from the people behind a steel wall of incredibly high prices and
bureaucracy. It is because of this state of affairs that hacking was born. ( ... )
"Of course, the government doesn't want the monopoly of technology
broken, so they have outlawed hacking and arrest anyone who is caught. (
... ) The phone company is another example of technology abused and kept
from people with high prices. ( ... ) "Hackers often find that their existing
equipment, due to the monopoly tactics of computer companies, is
inefficient for their purposes. Due to the exorbitantly high prices, it is
impossible to legally purchase the necessary equipment. This need has
given still another segment of the fight: Credit Carding. Carding is a way of

obtaining the necessary goods without paying for them. It is again due to
the companies' stupidity that Carding is so easy, and shows that the world's
businesses are in the hands of those with considerably less technical know-
how than we, the hackers. ( ... ) "Hacking must continue. We must train
newcomers to the art of hacking. (....) And whatever you do, continue the
fight. Whether you know it or not, if you are a hacker, you are a
revolutionary. Don't worry, you're on the right side."

The defense of "carding" is rare. Most hackers regard credit-card theft as
"poison" to the underground, a sleazy and immoral effort that, worse yet, is
hard to get away with. Nevertheless, manifestos advocating credit-card
theft, the deliberate crashing of computer systems, and even acts of violent
physical destruction such as vandalism and arson do exist in the
underground. These boasts and threats are taken quite seriously by the
police. And not every hacker is an abstract, Platonic computer-nerd. Some
few are quite experienced at picking locks, robbing phone-trucks, and
breaking and entering buildings.

Hackers vary in their degree of hatred for authority and the violence of
their rhetoric. But, at a bottom line, they are scofflaws. They don't regard
the current rules of electronic behavior as respectable efforts to preserve
law and order and protect public safety. They regard these laws as immoral
efforts by soulless corporations to protect their profit margins and to crush
dissidents. "Stupid" people, including police, businessmen, politicians, and
journalists, simply have no right to judge the actions of those possessed of
genius, techno-revolutionary intentions, and technical expertise.

#

Hackers are generally teenagers and college kids not engaged in earning
a living. They often come from fairly well-to-do middle-class backgrounds,
and are markedly anti-materialistic (except, that is, when it comes to
computer equipment). Anyone motivated by greed for mere money (as
opposed to the greed for power, knowledge and status) is swiftly written-off
as a narrow-minded breadhead whose interests can only be corrupt and
contemptible. Having grown up in the 1970s and 1980s, the young
Bohemians of the digital underground regard straight society as awash in

plutocratic corruption, where everyone from the President down is for sale
and whoever has the gold makes the rules.

Interestingly, there's a funhouse-mirror image of this attitude on the other
side of the conflict. The police are also one of the most markedly anti-
materialistic groups in American society, motivated not by mere money but
by ideals of service, justice, esprit-de-corps, and, of course, their own brand
of specialized knowledge and power. Remarkably, the propaganda war
between cops and hackers has always involved angry allegations that the
other side is trying to make a sleazy buck. Hackers consistently sneer that
anti-phreak prosecutors are angling for cushy jobs as telco lawyers and that
computer-crime police are aiming to cash in later as well-paid computer-
security consultants in the private sector.

For their part, police publicly conflate all hacking crimes with robbing
payphones with crowbars. Allegations of "monetary losses" from computer
intrusion are notoriously inflated. The act of illicitly copying a document
from a computer is morally equated with directly robbing a company of,
say, half a million dollars. The teenage computer intruder in possession of
this "proprietary" document has certainly not sold it for such a sum, would
likely have little idea how to sell it at all, and quite probably doesn't even
understand what he has. He has not made a cent in profit from his felony
but is still morally equated with a thief who has robbed the church poorbox
and lit out for Brazil.

Police want to believe that all hackers are thieves. It is a tortuous and
almost unbearable act for the American justice system to put people in jail
because they want to learn things which are forbidden for them to know. In
an American context, almost any pretext for punishment is better than
jailing people to protect certain restricted kinds of information.
Nevertheless, POLICING INFORMATION is part and parcel of the
struggle against hackers.

This dilemma is well exemplified by the remarkable activities of
"Emmanuel Goldstein," editor and publisher of a print magazine known as
2600: The Hacker Quarterly. Goldstein was an English major at Long
Island's State University of New York in the '70s, when he became involved
with the local college radio station. His growing interest in electronics

caused him to drift into Yippie TAP circles and thus into the digital
underground, where he became a self-described techno-rat. His magazine
publishes techniques of computer intrusion and telephone "exploration" as
well as gloating exposes of telco misdeeds and governmental failings.

Goldstein lives quietly and very privately in a large, crumbling Victorian
mansion in Setauket, New York. The seaside house is decorated with telco
decals, chunks of driftwood, and the basic bric-a-brac of a hippie crash-pad.
He is unmarried, mildly unkempt, and survives mostly on TV dinners and
turkey-stuffing eaten straight out of the bag. Goldstein is a man of
considerable charm and fluency, with a brief, disarming smile and the kind
of pitiless, stubborn, thoroughly recidivist integrity that America's
electronic police find genuinely alarming.

Goldstein took his nom-de-plume, or "handle," from a character in
Orwell's 1984, which may be taken, correctly, as a symptom of the gravity
of his sociopolitical worldview. He is not himself a practicing computer
intruder, though he vigorously abets these actions, especially when they are
pursued against large corporations or governmental agencies. Nor is he a
thief, for he loudly scorns mere theft of phone service, in favor of
"exploring and manipulating the system." He is probably best described and
understood as a DISSIDENT.

Weirdly, Goldstein is living in modern America under conditions very
similar to those of former East European intellectual dissidents. In other
words, he flagrantly espouses a value-system that is deeply and irrevocably
opposed to the system of those in power and the police. The values in 2600
are generally expressed in terms that are ironic, sarcastic, paradoxical, or
just downright confused. But there's no mistaking their radically anti-
authoritarian tenor. 2600 holds that technical power and specialized
knowledge, of any kind obtainable, belong by right in the hands of those
individuals brave and bold enough to discover them—by whatever means
necessary. Devices, laws, or systems that forbid access, and the free spread
of knowledge, are provocations that any free and self-respecting hacker
should relentlessly attack. The "privacy" of governments, corporations and
other soulless technocratic organizations should never be protected at the
expense of the liberty and free initiative of the individual techno-rat.

However, in our contemporary workaday world, both governments and
corporations are very anxious indeed to police information which is secret,
proprietary, restricted, confidential, copyrighted, patented, hazardous,
illegal, unethical, embarrassing, or otherwise sensitive. This makes
Goldstein persona non grata, and his philosophy a threat.

Very little about the conditions of Goldstein's daily life would astonish,
say, Vaclav Havel. (We may note in passing that President Havel once had
his word-processor confiscated by the Czechoslovak police.) Goldstein
lives by SAMIZDAT, acting semi-openly as a data-center for the
underground, while challenging the powers-that-be to abide by their own
stated rules: freedom of speech and the First Amendment.

Goldstein thoroughly looks and acts the part of techno-rat, with
shoulder-length ringlets and a piratical black fisherman's-cap set at a rakish
angle. He often shows up like Banquo's ghost at meetings of computer
professionals, where he listens quietly, half-smiling and taking thorough
notes.

Computer professionals generally meet publicly, and find it very difficult
to rid themselves of Goldstein and his ilk without extralegal and
unconstitutional actions. Sympathizers, many of them quite respectable
people with responsible jobs, admire Goldstein's attitude and surreptitiously
pass him information. An unknown but presumably large proportion of
Goldstein's 2,000-plus readership are telco security personnel and police,
who are forced to subscribe to 2600 to stay abreast of new developments in
hacking. They thus find themselves PAYING THIS GUY'S RENT while
grinding their teeth in anguish, a situation that would have delighted Abbie
Hoffman (one of Goldstein's few idols).

Goldstein is probably the best-known public representative of the hacker
underground today, and certainly the best-hated. Police regard him as a
Fagin, a corrupter of youth, and speak of him with untempered loathing. He
is quite an accomplished gadfly. After the Martin Luther King Day Crash of
1990, Goldstein, for instance, adeptly rubbed salt into the wound in the
pages of 2600. "Yeah, it was fun for the phone phreaks as we watched the
network crumble," he admitted cheerfully. "But it was also an ominous sign
of what's to come.... Some AT&T people, aided by well-meaning but

ignorant media, were spreading the notion that many companies had the
same software and therefore could face the same problem someday. Wrong.
This was entirely an AT&T software deficiency. Of course, other companies
could face entirely DIFFERENT software problems. But then, so too could
AT&T."

After a technical discussion of the system's failings, the Long Island
techno-rat went on to offer thoughtful criticism to the gigantic
multinational's hundreds of professionally qualified engineers. "What we
don't know is how a major force in communications like AT&T could be so
sloppy. What happened to backups? Sure, computer systems go down all
the time, but people making phone calls are not the same as people logging
on to computers. We must make that distinction. It's not acceptable for the
phone system or any other essential service to 'go down.' If we continue to
trust technology without understanding it, we can look forward to many
variations on this theme.

"AT&T owes it to its customers to be prepared to INSTANTLY switch to
another network if something strange and unpredictable starts occurring.
The news here isn't so much the failure of a computer program, but the
failure of AT&T's entire structure."

The very idea of this.... this PERSON.... offering "advice" about
"AT&T's entire structure" is more than some people can easily bear. How
dare this near-criminal dictate what is or isn't "acceptable" behavior from
AT&T? Especially when he's publishing, in the very same issue, detailed
schematic diagrams for creating various switching-network signalling tones
unavailable to the public.

"See what happens when you drop a 'silver box' tone or two down your
local exchange or through different long distance service carriers," advises
2600 contributor "Mr. Upsetter" in "How To Build a Signal Box." "If you
experiment systematically and keep good records, you will surely discover
something interesting."

This is, of course, the scientific method, generally regarded as a
praiseworthy activity and one of the flowers of modern civilization. One
can indeed learn a great deal with this sort of structured intellectual activity.

Telco employees regard this mode of "exploration" as akin to flinging sticks
of dynamite into their pond to see what lives on the bottom.

2600 has been published consistently since 1984. It has also run a
bulletin board computer system, printed 2600 T-shirts, taken fax calls.... The
Spring 1991 issue has an interesting announcement on page 45: "We just
discovered an extra set of wires attached to our fax line and heading up the
pole. (They've since been clipped.) Your faxes to us and to anyone else
could be monitored." In the worldview of 2600, the tiny band of techno-rat
brothers (rarely, sisters) are a besieged vanguard of the truly free and
honest. The rest of the world is a maelstrom of corporate crime and high-
level governmental corruption, occasionally tempered with well-meaning
ignorance. To read a few issues in a row is to enter a nightmare akin to
Solzhenitsyn's, somewhat tempered by the fact that 2600 is often extremely
funny.

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

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

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

Large-scale mainframe computers have been connected since the 1960s,
but PERSONAL computers, run by individuals out of their homes, were
first networked in the late 1970s. The "board" created by Ward Christensen
and Randy Suess in February 1978, in Chicago, Illinois, is generally
regarded as the first personal-computer bulletin board system worthy of the
name.

Boards run on many different machines, employing many different kinds
of software. Early boards were crude and buggy, and their managers, known
as "system operators" or "sysops," were hard-working technical experts
who wrote their own software. But like most everything else in the world of
electronics, boards became faster, cheaper, better-designed, and generally
far more sophisticated throughout the 1980s. They also moved swiftly out
of the hands of pioneers and into those of the general public. By 1985 there
were something in the neighborhood of 4,000 boards in America. By 1990
it was calculated, vaguely, that there were about 30,000 boards in the US,
with uncounted thousands overseas.

Computer bulletin boards are unregulated enterprises. Running a board
is a rough-and-ready, catch-as-catch-can proposition. Basically, anybody
with a computer, modem, software and a phone-line can start a board. With
second-hand equipment and public-domain free software, the price of a
board might be quite small—less than it would take to publish a magazine
or even a decent pamphlet. Entrepreneurs eagerly sell bulletin-board
software, and will coach nontechnical amateur sysops in its use.

Boards are not "presses." They are not magazines, or libraries, or
phones, or CB radios, or traditional cork bulletin boards down at the local
laundry, though they have some passing resemblance to those earlier media.
Boards are a new medium—they may even be a LARGE NUMBER of new
media.

Consider these unique characteristics: boards are cheap, yet they can
have a national, even global reach. Boards can be contacted from anywhere
in the global telephone network, at NO COST to the person running the
board—the caller pays the phone bill, and if the caller is local, the call is
free. Boards do not involve an editorial elite addressing a mass audience.
The "sysop" of a board is not an exclusive publisher or writer—he is
managing an electronic salon, where individuals can address the general
public, play the part of the general public, and also exchange private mail
with other individuals. And the "conversation" on boards, though fluid,
rapid, and highly interactive, is not spoken, but written. It is also relatively
anonymous, sometimes completely so.

And because boards are cheap and ubiquitous, regulations and licensing
requirements would likely be practically unenforceable. It would almost be
easier to "regulate," "inspect," and "license" the content of private mail—
probably more so, since the mail system is operated by the federal
government. Boards are run by individuals, independently, entirely at their
own whim.

For the sysop, the cost of operation is not the primary limiting factor.
Once the investment in a computer and modem has been made, the only
steady cost is the charge for maintaining a phone line (or several phone
lines). The primary limits for sysops are time and energy. Boards require
upkeep. New users are generally "validated"—they must be issued
individual passwords, and called at home by voice-phone, so that their
identity can be verified. Obnoxious users, who exist in plenty, must be
chided or purged. Proliferating messages must be deleted when they grow
old, so that the capacity of the system is not overwhelmed. And software
programs (if such things are kept on the board) must be examined for
possible computer viruses. If there is a financial charge to use the board
(increasingly common, especially in larger and fancier systems) then
accounts must be kept, and users must be billed. And if the board crashes—
a very common occurrence—then repairs must be made.

Boards can be distinguished by the amount of effort spent in regulating
them. First, we have the completely open board, whose sysop is off
chugging brews and watching re-runs while his users generally degenerate

over time into peevish anarchy and eventual silence. Second comes the
supervised board, where the sysop breaks in every once in a while to tidy
up, calm brawls, issue announcements, and rid the community of dolts and
troublemakers. Third is the heavily supervised board, which sternly urges
adult and responsible behavior and swiftly edits any message considered
offensive, impertinent, illegal or irrelevant. And last comes the completely
edited "electronic publication," which is presented to a silent audience
which is not allowed to respond directly in any way.

Boards can also be grouped by their degree of anonymity. There is the
completely anonymous board, where everyone uses pseudonyms
—"handles"—and even the sysop is unaware of the user's true identity. The
sysop himself is likely pseudonymous on a board of this type. Second, and
rather more common, is the board where the sysop knows (or thinks he
knows) the true names and addresses of all users, but the users don't know
one another's names and may not know his. Third is the board where
everyone has to use real names, and roleplaying and pseudonymous
posturing are forbidden.

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

Boards can be grouped by their degree of community. Some boards
emphasize the exchange of private, person-to-person electronic mail. Others
emphasize public postings and may even purge people who "lurk," merely
reading posts but refusing to openly participate. Some boards are intimate
and neighborly. Others are frosty and highly technical. Some are little more

than storage dumps for software, where users "download" and "upload"
programs, but interact among themselves little if at all.

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

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

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

And some boards are UNDERGROUND.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damage Inc.
D&B Communications.
The Danger Gang.

Dec Hunters.
Digital Gang.
DPAK.

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

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

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

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

Justice League of America.

Kaos Inc.
Knights Of Shadow.
Knights Of The Round Table.

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

Master Hackers.
MAD!
The Marauders.
MD/PhD.

Metal Communications, Inc.
MetalliBashers, Inc.
MBI.
Metro Communications.
Midwest Pirates Guild.

NASA Elite.
The NATO Association.
Neon Knights.
Nihilist Order.

Order Of The Rose.
OSS.

Pacific Pirates Guild.
Phantom Access Associates.
PHido PHreaks.
The Phirm.
Phlash.
PhoneLine Phantoms.
Phone Phreakers Of America.
Phortune 500.

Phreak Hack Delinquents.
Phreak Hack Destroyers.

Phreakers, Hackers, And Laundromat Employees Gang (PHALSE Gang).
Phreaks Against Geeks.
Phreaks Against Phreaks Against Geeks.
Phreaks and Hackers of America.
Phreaks Anonymous World Wide.
Project Genesis.
The Punk Mafia.

The Racketeers.
Red Dawn Text Files.
Roscoe Gang.

SABRE.
Secret Circle of Pirates.
Secret Service.
707 Club.
Shadow Brotherhood.
Sharp Inc.
65C02 Elite.

Spectral Force.
Star League.
Stowaways.
Strata-Crackers.

Team Hackers '86.
Team Hackers '87.

TeleComputist Newsletter Staff.
Tribunal Of Knowledge.

Triple Entente.
Turn Over And Die Syndrome (TOADS).

300 Club.
1200 Club.
2300 Club.
2600 Club.
2601 Club.

2AF.

The United Soft WareZ Force.
United Technical Underground.

Ware Brigade.
The Warelords.
WASP.

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

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

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

Second, governments and police. NASA Elite, NATO Association. "Feds
R Us" and "Secret Service" are fine bits of fleering boldness. OSS—the

Office of Strategic Services was the forerunner of the CIA.

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

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

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

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

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

It's quite possible that this entire list refers to as few as a thousand
people. It is not a complete list of underground groups—there has never
been such a list, and there never will be. Groups rise, flourish, decline,
share membership, maintain a cloud of wannabes and casual hangers-on.
People pass in and out, are ostracized, get bored, are busted by police, or
are cornered by telco security and presented with huge bills. Many
"underground groups" are software pirates, "warez d00dz," who might

break copy protection and pirate programs, but likely wouldn't dare to
intrude on a computer-system.

It is hard to estimate the true population of the digital underground.
There is constant turnover. Most hackers start young, come and go, then
drop out at age 22—the age of college graduation. And a large majority of
"hackers" access pirate boards, adopt a handle, swipe software and perhaps
abuse a phone-code or two, while never actually joining the elite.

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

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

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

One might find a useful parallel to the digital underground in the drug
underground. There was a time, now much-obscured by historical
revisionism, when Bohemians freely shared joints at concerts, and hip,
small-scale marijuana dealers might turn people on just for the sake of
enjoying a long stoned conversation about the Doors and Allen Ginsberg.
Now drugs are increasingly verboten, except in a high-stakes, highly-
criminal world of highly addictive drugs. Over years of disenchantment and
police harassment, a vaguely ideological, free-wheeling drug underground

has relinquished the business of drug-dealing to a far more savage criminal
hard-core. This is not a pleasant prospect to contemplate, but the analogy is
fairly compelling.

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

Here is a partial table-of-contents of philes from an underground board,
somewhere in the heart of middle America, circa 1991. The descriptions are
mostly self-explanatory.

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

The files above are do-it-yourself manuals about computer intrusion. The
above is only a small section of a much larger library of hacking and
phreaking techniques and history. We now move into a different and
perhaps surprising area.

+------------+
|Anarchy|
+------------+

ANARC.ZIP 3641 06-11-91 Anarchy Files
ANARCHST.ZIP 63703 06-11-91 Anarchist Book
ANARCHY.ZIP 2076 06-11-91 Anarchy At Home
ANARCHY3.ZIP 6982 06-11-91 Anarchy No 3
ANARCTOY.ZIP 2361 06-11-91 Anarchy Toys
ANTIMODM.ZIP 2877 06-11-91 Anti-modem Weapons
ATOM.ZIP 4494 06-11-91 How To Make An Atom Bomb
BARBITUA.ZIP 3982 06-11-91 Barbiturate Formula
BLCKPWDR.ZIP 2810 06-11-91 Black Powder Formulas
BOMB.ZIP 3765 06-11-91 How To Make Bombs
BOOM.ZIP 2036 06-11-91 Things That Go Boom
CHLORINE.ZIP 1926 06-11-91 Chlorine Bomb
COOKBOOK.ZIP 1500 06-11-91 Anarchy Cook Book
DESTROY.ZIP 3947 06-11-91 Destroy Stuff
DUSTBOMB.ZIP 2576 06-11-91 Dust Bomb
ELECTERR.ZIP 3230 06-11-91 Electronic Terror
EXPLOS1.ZIP 2598 06-11-91 Explosives 1
EXPLOSIV.ZIP 18051 06-11-91 More Explosives
EZSTEAL.ZIP 4521 06-11-91 Ez-stealing
FLAME.ZIP 2240 06-11-91 Flame Thrower
FLASHLT.ZIP 2533 06-11-91 Flashlight Bomb
FMBUG.ZIP 2906 06-11-91 How To Make An Fm Bug
OMEEXPL.ZIP 2139 06-11-91 Home Explosives
HOW2BRK.ZIP 3332 06-11-91 How To Break In
LETTER.ZIP 2990 06-11-91 Letter Bomb
LOCK.ZIP 2199 06-11-91 How To Pick Locks

MRSHIN.ZIP 3991 06-11-91 Briefcase Locks
NAPALM.ZIP 3563 06-11-91 Napalm At Home
NITRO.ZIP 3158 06-11-91 Fun With Nitro
PARAMIL.ZIP 2962 06-11-91 Paramilitary Info
PICKING.ZIP 3398 06-11-91 Picking Locks
PIPEBOMB.ZIP 2137 06-11-91 Pipe Bomb
POTASS.ZIP 3987 06-11-91 Formulas With Potassium
PRANK.TXT 11074 08-03-90 More Pranks To Pull On Idiots!
REVENGE.ZIP 4447 06-11-91 Revenge Tactics
ROCKET.ZIP 2590 06-11-91 Rockets For Fun
SMUGGLE.ZIP 3385 06-11-91 How To Smuggle

HOLY COW! The damned thing is full of stuff about bombs!

What are we to make of this?

First, it should be acknowledged that spreading knowledge about
demolitions to teenagers is a highly and deliberately antisocial act. It is not,
however, illegal.

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

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

professional experience, and are often highly fanciful. But the gloating
menace of these philes is not to be entirely dismissed.

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

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

#

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

The world of boards suddenly opens up. Computer games can be quite
expensive, real budget-breakers for a kid, but pirated games, stripped of
copy protection, are cheap or free. They are also illegal, but it is very rare,

almost unheard of, for a small-scale software pirate to be prosecuted. Once
"cracked" of its copy protection, the program, being digital data, becomes
infinitely reproducible. Even the instructions to the game, any manuals that
accompany it, can be reproduced as text files, or photocopied from
legitimate sets. Other users on boards can give many useful hints in game-
playing tactics. And a youngster with an infinite supply of free computer
games can certainly cut quite a swath among his modem-less friends.

And boards are pseudonymous. No one need know that you're fourteen
years old—with a little practice at subterfuge, you can talk to adults about
adult things, and be accepted and taken seriously! You can even pretend to
be a girl, or an old man, or anybody you can imagine. If you find this kind
of deception gratifying, there is ample opportunity to hone your ability on
boards.

But local boards can grow stale. And almost every board maintains a list
of phone-numbers to other boards, some in distant, tempting, exotic locales.
Who knows what they're up to, in Oregon or Alaska or Florida or
California? It's very easy to find out—just order the modem to call through
its software—nothing to this, just typing on a keyboard, the same thing you
would do for most any computer game. The machine reacts swiftly and in a
few seconds you are talking to a bunch of interesting people on another
seaboard.

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

How horrifying to have made friends in another state and to be deprived
of their company—and their software—just because telephone companies
demand absurd amounts of money! How painful, to be restricted to boards
in one's own AREA CODE—what the heck is an "area code" anyway, and
what makes it so special? A few grumbles, complaints, and innocent
questions of this sort will often elicit a sympathetic reply from another
board user—someone with some stolen codes to hand. You dither a while,
knowing this isn't quite right, then you make up your mind to try them
anyhow—AND THEY WORK! Suddenly you're doing something even

your parents can't do. Six months ago you were just some kid—now, you're
the Crimson Flash of Area Code 512! You're bad—you're nationwide!

Maybe you'll stop at a few abused codes. Maybe you'll decide that
boards aren't all that interesting after all, that it's wrong, not worth the risk
—but maybe you won't. The next step is to pick up your own repeat-
dialling program—to learn to generate your own stolen codes. (This was
dead easy five years ago, much harder to get away with nowadays, but not
yet impossible.) And these dialling programs are not complex or
intimidating—some are as small as twenty lines of software.

Now, you too can share codes. You can trade codes to learn other
techniques. If you're smart enough to catch on, and obsessive enough to
want to bother, and ruthless enough to start seriously bending rules, then
you'll get better, fast. You start to develop a rep. You move up to a heavier
class of board—a board with a bad attitude, the kind of board that naive
dopes like your classmates and your former self have never even heard of!
You pick up the jargon of phreaking and hacking from the board. You read a
few of those anarchy philes—and man, you never realized you could be a
real OUTLAW without ever leaving your bedroom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

opened to a world ... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an
addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from day-to-day
incompetencies is sought ... a board is found. 'This is it ... this is where I
belong ... ' "I know everyone here ... even if I've never met them, never
talked to them, may never hear from them again ... I know you all ... ( ... )

"This is our world now ... the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without
paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons,
and you call us criminals. We explore ... and you call us criminals. We seek
after knowledge ... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias ... and you call us criminals. You
build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat and lie to us and try
to make us believe that it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals.

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

#

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

The sysop of 8BBS was an ardent free-speech enthusiast who simply felt
that ANY attempt to restrict the expression of his users was unconstitutional
and immoral. Swarms of the technically curious entered 8BBS and emerged

as phreaks and hackers, until, in 1982, a friendly 8BBS alumnus passed the
sysop a new modem which had been purchased by credit-card fraud. Police
took this opportunity to seize the entire board and remove what they
considered an attractive nuisance.

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

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

"414 Private" was the home board for the first GROUP to attract
conspicuous trouble, the teenage "414 Gang," whose intrusions into Sloan-
Kettering Cancer Center and Los Alamos military computers were to be a
nine-days-wonder in 1982.

At about this time, the first software piracy boards began to open up,
trading cracked games for the Atari 800 and the Commodore C64. Naturally
these boards were heavily frequented by teenagers. And with the 1983
release of the hacker-thriller movie War Games, the scene exploded. It
seemed that every kid in America had demanded and gotten a modem for
Christmas. Most of these dabbler wannabes put their modems in the attic
after a few weeks, and most of the remainder minded their P's and Q's and
stayed well out of hot water. But some stubborn and talented diehards had
this hacker kid in War Games figured for a happening dude. They simply
could not rest until they had contacted the underground—or, failing that,
created their own.

In the mid-80s, underground boards sprang up like digital fungi.
ShadowSpawn Elite. Sherwood Forest I, II, and III. Digital Logic Data

Service in Florida, sysoped by no less a man than "Digital Logic" himself;
Lex Luthor of the Legion of Doom was prominent on this board, since it
was in his area code. Lex's own board, "Legion of Doom," started in 1984.
The Neon Knights ran a network of Apple-hacker boards: Neon Knights
North, South, East and West. Free World II was run by "Major Havoc."
Lunatic Labs is still in operation as of this writing. Dr. Ripco in Chicago, an
anything-goes anarchist board with an extensive and raucous history, was
seized by Secret Service agents in 1990 on Sundevil day, but up again
almost immediately, with new machines and scarcely diminished vigor.

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

Phrack, being free of charge and lively reading, began to circulate
throughout the underground. As Taran King and Knight Lightning left high
school for college, Phrack began to appear on mainframe machines linked
to BITNET, and, through BITNET to the "Internet," that loose but
extremely potent not-for-profit network where academic, governmental and
corporate machines trade data through the UNIX TCP/IP protocol. (The
"Internet Worm" of November 2-3,1988, created by Cornell grad student
Robert Morris, was to be the largest and best-publicized computer-intrusion
scandal to date. Morris claimed that his ingenious "worm" program was
meant to harmlessly explore the Internet, but due to bad programming, the
Worm replicated out of control and crashed some six thousand Internet
computers. Smaller-scale and less ambitious Internet hacking was a
standard for the underground elite.)

Most any underground board not hopelessly lame and out-of-it would
feature a complete run of Phrack—and, possibly, the lesser-known
standards of the underground: the Legion of Doom Technical Journal, the
obscene and raucous Cult of the Dead Cow files, P/HUN magazine, Pirate,
the Syndicate Reports, and perhaps the highly anarcho-political Activist
Times Incorporated.

Possession of Phrack on one's board was prima facie evidence of a bad
attitude. Phrack was seemingly everywhere, aiding, abetting, and spreading
the underground ethos. And this did not escape the attention of corporate
security or the police.

We now come to the touchy subject of police and boards. Police, do, in
fact, own boards. In 1989, there were police-sponsored boards in California,
Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, Texas, and Virginia:
boards such as "Crime Bytes," "Crimestoppers," "All Points" and "Bullet-
N-Board." Police officers, as private computer enthusiasts, ran their own
boards in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Missouri,
Maryland, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas. Police
boards have often proved helpful in community relations. Sometimes
crimes are reported on police boards.

Sometimes crimes are COMMITTED on police boards. This has
sometimes happened by accident, as naive hackers blunder onto police
boards and blithely begin offering telephone codes. Far more often,
however, it occurs through the now almost-traditional use of "sting boards."
The first police sting-boards were established in 1985: "Underground
Tunnel" in Austin, Texas, whose sysop Sgt. Robert Ansley called himself
"Pluto"—"The Phone Company" in Phoenix, Arizona, run by Ken MacLeod
of the Maricopa County Sheriff's office—and Sgt. Dan Pasquale's board in
Fremont, California. Sysops posed as hackers, and swiftly garnered coteries
of ardent users, who posted codes and loaded pirate software with abandon,
and came to a sticky end.

Sting boards, like other boards, are cheap to operate, very cheap by the
standards of undercover police operations. Once accepted by the local
underground, sysops will likely be invited into other pirate boards, where
they can compile more dossiers. And when the sting is announced and the

worst offenders arrested, the publicity is generally gratifying. The resultant
paranoia in the underground—perhaps more justly described as a
"deterrence effect"—tends to quell local lawbreaking for quite a while.

Obviously police do not have to beat the underbrush for hackers. On the
contrary, they can go trolling for them. Those caught can be grilled. Some
become useful informants. They can lead the way to pirate boards all across
the country.

And boards all across the country showed the sticky fingerprints of
Phrack, and of that loudest and most flagrant of all underground groups, the
"Legion of Doom."

The term "Legion of Doom" came from comic books. The Legion of
Doom, a conspiracy of costumed super-villains headed by the chrome-
domed criminal ultra-mastermind Lex Luthor, gave Superman a lot of four-
color graphic trouble for a number of decades. Of course, Superman, that
exemplar of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, always won in the long
run. This didn't matter to the hacker Doomsters—"Legion of Doom" was
not some thunderous and evil Satanic reference, it was not meant to be
taken seriously. "Legion of Doom" came from funny-books and was
supposed to be funny.

"Legion of Doom" did have a good mouthfilling ring to it, though. It
sounded really cool. Other groups, such as the "Farmers of Doom," closely
allied to LoD, recognized this grandiloquent quality, and made fun of it.
There was even a hacker group called "Justice League of America," named
after Superman's club of true-blue crimefighting superheros.

But they didn't last; the Legion did.

The original Legion of Doom, hanging out on Quasi Moto's Plovernet
board, were phone phreaks. They weren't much into computers. "Lex
Luthor" himself (who was under eighteen when he formed the Legion) was
a COSMOS expert, COSMOS being the "Central System for Mainframe
Operations," a telco internal computer network. Lex would eventually
become quite a dab hand at breaking into IBM mainframes, but although
everyone liked Lex and admired his attitude, he was not considered a truly

accomplished computer intruder. Nor was he the "mastermind" of the
Legion of Doom—LoD were never big on formal leadership. As a regular
on Plovernet and sysop of his "Legion of Doom BBS," Lex was the
Legion's cheerleader and recruiting officer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Message (A), couched in typical techno-bureaucratese, appears tedious
and almost unreadable. (A) scarcely seems threatening or menacing.
Message (B), on the other hand, is a dreadful thing, prima facie evidence of
a dire conspiracy, definitely not the kind of thing you want your teenager
reading.

The INFORMATION, however, is identical. It is PUBLIC information,
presented before the federal government in an open hearing. It is not
"secret." It is not "proprietary." It is not even "confidential." On the
contrary, the development of advanced software systems is a matter of great
public pride to Bellcore.

However, when Bellcore publicly announces a project of this kind, it
expects a certain attitude from the public—something along the lines of
GOSH WOW, YOU GUYS ARE GREAT, KEEP THAT UP, WHATEVER
IT IS—certainly not cruel mimickry, one-upmanship and outrageous
speculations about possible security holes.

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

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

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

LoD members also ran their own boards. "Silver Spy" started his own
board, "Catch-22," considered one of the heaviest around. So did "Mentor,"
with his "Phoenix Project." When they didn't run boards themselves, they
showed up on other people's boards, to brag, boast, and strut. And where
they themselves didn't go, their philes went, carrying evil knowledge and an
even more evil attitude.

As early as 1986, the police were under the vague impression that
EVERYONE in the underground was Legion of Doom. LoD was never that
large—considerably smaller than either "Metal Communications" or "The
Administration," for instance—but LoD got tremendous press. Especially in
Phrack, which at times read like an LoD fan magazine; and Phrack was
everywhere, especially in the offices of telco security. You couldn't GET
busted as a phone phreak, a hacker, or even a lousy codes kid or warez
dood, without the cops asking if you were LoD.

This was a difficult charge to deny, as LoD never distributed
membership badges or laminated ID cards. If they had, they would likely
have died out quickly, for turnover in their membership was considerable.
LoD was less a high-tech street-gang than an ongoing state-of-mind. LoD
was the Gang That Refused to Die. By 1990, LoD had RULED for ten
years, and it seemed WEIRD to police that they were continually busting
people who were only sixteen years old. All these teenage small-timers
were pleading the tiresome hacker litany of "just curious, no criminal
intent." Somewhere at the center of this conspiracy there had to be some
serious adult masterminds, not this seemingly endless supply of myopic
suburban white kids with high SATs and funny haircuts.

There was no question that most any American hacker arrested would
"know" LoD. They knew the handles of contributors to LoD Tech Journal,
and were likely to have learned their craft through LoD boards and LoD
activism. But they'd never met anyone from LoD. Even some of the rotating
cadre who were actually and formally "in LoD" knew one another only by
board-mail and pseudonyms. This was a highly unconventional profile for a
criminal conspiracy. Computer networking, and the rapid evolution of the
digital underground, made the situation very diffuse and confusing.

Furthermore, a big reputation in the digital underground did not coincide
with one's willingness to commit "crimes." Instead, reputation was based on
cleverness and technical mastery. As a result, it often seemed that the
HEAVIER the hackers were, the LESS likely they were to have committed
any kind of common, easily prosecutable crime. There were some hackers
who could really steal. And there were hackers who could really hack. But
the two groups didn't seem to overlap much, if at all. For instance, most
people in the underground looked up to "Emmanuel Goldstein" of 2600 as a
hacker demigod. But Goldstein's publishing activities were entirely legal—
Goldstein just printed dodgy stuff and talked about politics, he didn't even
hack. When you came right down to it, Goldstein spent half his time
complaining that computer security WASN'T STRONG ENOUGH and
ought to be drastically improved across the board!

Truly heavy-duty hackers, those with serious technical skills who had
earned the respect of the underground, never stole money or abused credit

cards. Sometimes they might abuse phone-codes—but often, they seemed to
get all the free phone-time they wanted without leaving a trace of any kind.

The best hackers, the most powerful and technically accomplished, were
not professional fraudsters. They raided computers habitually, but wouldn't
alter anything, or damage anything. They didn't even steal computer
equipment—most had day-jobs messing with hardware, and could get all
the cheap secondhand equipment they wanted. The hottest hackers, unlike
the teenage wannabes, weren't snobs about fancy or expensive hardware.
Their machines tended to be raw second-hand digital hot-rods full of
custom add-ons that they'd cobbled together out of chickenwire, memory
chips and spit. Some were adults, computer software writers and
consultants by trade, and making quite good livings at it. Some of them
ACTUALLY WORKED FOR THE PHONE COMPANY—and for those,
the "hackers" actually found under the skirts of Ma Bell, there would be
little mercy in 1990.

It has long been an article of faith in the underground that the "best"
hackers never get caught. They're far too smart, supposedly. They never get
caught because they never boast, brag, or strut. These demigods may read
underground boards (with a condescending smile), but they never say
anything there. The "best" hackers, according to legend, are adult computer
professionals, such as mainframe system administrators, who already know
the ins and outs of their particular brand of security. Even the "best" hacker
can't break in to just any computer at random: the knowledge of security
holes is too specialized, varying widely with different software and
hardware. But if people are employed to run, say, a UNIX mainframe or a
VAX/VMS machine, then they tend to learn security from the inside out.
Armed with this knowledge, they can look into most anybody else's UNIX
or VMS without much trouble or risk, if they want to. And, according to
hacker legend, of course they want to, so of course they do. They just don't
make a big deal of what they've done. So nobody ever finds out.

It is also an article of faith in the underground that professional telco
people "phreak" like crazed weasels. OF COURSE they spy on Madonna's
phone calls—I mean, WOULDN'T YOU? Of course they give themselves

free long-distance—why the hell should THEY pay, they're running the
whole shebang!

It has, as a third matter, long been an article of faith that any hacker
caught can escape serious punishment if he confesses HOW HE DID IT.
Hackers seem to believe that governmental agencies and large corporations
are blundering about in cyberspace like eyeless jellyfish or cave
salamanders. They feel that these large but pathetically stupid organizations
will proffer up genuine gratitude, and perhaps even a security post and a big
salary, to the hot-shot intruder who will deign to reveal to them the supreme
genius of his modus operandi.

In the case of longtime LoD member "Control-C," this actually
happened, more or less. Control-C had led Michigan Bell a merry chase,
and when captured in 1987, he turned out to be a bright and apparently
physically harmless young fanatic, fascinated by phones. There was no
chance in hell that Control-C would actually repay the enormous and
largely theoretical sums in long-distance service that he had accumulated
from Michigan Bell. He could always be indicted for fraud or computer-
intrusion, but there seemed little real point in this—he hadn't physically
damaged any computer. He'd just plead guilty, and he'd likely get the usual
slap-on-the-wrist, and in the meantime it would be a big hassle for
Michigan Bell just to bring up the case. But if kept on the payroll, he might
at least keep his fellow hackers at bay.

There were uses for him. For instance, a contrite Control-C was featured
on Michigan Bell internal posters, sternly warning employees to shred their
trash. He'd always gotten most of his best inside info from "trashing"—
raiding telco dumpsters, for useful data indiscreetly thrown away. He signed
these posters, too. Control-C had become something like a Michigan Bell
mascot. And in fact, Control-C DID keep other hackers at bay. Little
hackers were quite scared of Control-C and his heavy-duty Legion of Doom
friends. And big hackers WERE his friends and didn't want to screw up his
cushy situation.

No matter what one might say of LoD, they did stick together. When
"Wasp," an apparently genuinely malicious New York hacker, began
crashing Bellcore machines, Control-C received swift volunteer help from

"the Mentor" and the Georgia LoD wing made up of "The Prophet,"
"Urvile," and "Leftist." Using Mentor's Phoenix Project board to coordinate,
the Doomsters helped telco security to trap Wasp, by luring him into a
machine with a tap and line-trace installed. Wasp lost. LoD won! And my,
did they brag.

Urvile, Prophet and Leftist were well-qualified for this activity, probably
more so even than the quite accomplished Control-C. The Georgia boys
knew all about phone switching-stations. Though relative johnny-come-
latelies in the Legion of Doom, they were considered some of LoD's
heaviest guys, into the hairiest systems around. They had the good fortune
to live in or near Atlanta, home of the sleepy and apparently tolerant
BellSouth RBOC.

As RBOC security went, BellSouth were "cake." US West (of Arizona,
the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest) were tough and aggressive,
probably the heaviest RBOC around. Pacific Bell, California's PacBell,
were sleek, high-tech, and longtime veterans of the LA phone-phreak wars.
NYNEX had the misfortune to run the New York City area, and were warily
prepared for most anything. Even Michigan Bell, a division of the
Ameritech RBOC, at least had the elementary sense to hire their own
hacker as a useful scarecrow. But BellSouth, even though their corporate
P.R. proclaimed them to have "Everything You Expect From a Leader,"
were pathetic.

When rumor about LoD's mastery of Georgia's switching network got
around to BellSouth through Bellcore and telco security scuttlebutt, they at
first refused to believe it. If you paid serious attention to every rumor out
and about these hacker kids, you would hear all kinds of wacko saucer-nut
nonsense: that the National Security Agency monitored all American phone
calls, that the CIA and DEA tracked traffic on bulletin-boards with word-
analysis programs, that the Condor could start World War III from a
payphone.

If there were hackers into BellSouth switching-stations, then how come
nothing had happened? Nothing had been hurt. BellSouth's machines
weren't crashing. BellSouth wasn't suffering especially badly from fraud.
BellSouth's customers weren't complaining. BellSouth was headquartered in

Atlanta, ambitious metropolis of the new high-tech Sunbelt; and BellSouth
was upgrading its network by leaps and bounds, digitizing the works left
right and center. They could hardly be considered sluggish or naive.
BellSouth's technical expertise was second to none, thank you kindly. But
then came the Florida business.

On June 13, 1989, callers to the Palm Beach County Probation
Department, in Delray Beach, Florida, found themselves involved in a
remarkable discussion with a phone-sex worker named "Tina" in New York
State. Somehow, ANY call to this probation office near Miami was instantly
and magically transported across state lines, at no extra charge to the user,
to a pornographic phone-sex hotline hundreds of miles away!

This practical joke may seem utterly hilarious at first hearing, and indeed
there was a good deal of chuckling about it in phone phreak circles,
including the Autumn 1989 issue of 2600. But for Southern Bell (the
division of the BellSouth RBOC supplying local service for Florida,
Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina), this was a smoking gun. For
the first time ever, a computer intruder had broken into a BellSouth central
office switching station and re-programmed it!

Or so BellSouth thought in June 1989. Actually, LoD members had been
frolicking harmlessly in BellSouth switches since September 1987. The
stunt of June 13—call-forwarding a number through manipulation of a
switching station—was child's play for hackers as accomplished as the
Georgia wing of LoD. Switching calls interstate sounded like a big deal, but
it took only four lines of code to accomplish this. An easy, yet more
discreet, stunt, would be to call-forward another number to your own house.
If you were careful and considerate, and changed the software back later,
then not a soul would know. Except you. And whoever you had bragged to
about it.

As for BellSouth, what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them.

Except now somebody had blown the whole thing wide open, and
BellSouth knew.

A now alerted and considerably paranoid BellSouth began searching
switches right and left for signs of impropriety, in that hot summer of 1989.
No fewer than forty-two BellSouth employees were put on 12-hour shifts,
twenty-four hours a day, for two solid months, poring over records and
monitoring computers for any sign of phony access. These forty-two
overworked experts were known as BellSouth's "Intrusion Task Force."

What the investigators found astounded them. Proprietary telco
databases had been manipulated: phone numbers had been created out of
thin air, with no users' names and no addresses. And perhaps worst of all, no
charges and no records of use. The new digital ReMOB (Remote
Observation) diagnostic feature had been extensively tampered with—
hackers had learned to reprogram ReMOB software, so that they could
listen in on any switch-routed call at their leisure! They were using telco
property to SPY!

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

The exact reason WHY these computers were "different" was rather ill-
defined. It certainly wasn't the extent of their security. The security on these
BellSouth computers was lousy; the AIMSX computers, for instance, didn't
even have passwords. But there was no question that BellSouth strongly
FELT that their computers were very different indeed. And if there were
some criminals out there who had not gotten that message, BellSouth was
determined to see that message taught.

After all, a 5ESS switching station was no mere bookkeeping system for
some local chain of florists. Public service depended on these stations.
Public SAFETY depended on these stations.

And hackers, lurking in there call-forwarding or ReMobbing, could spy
on anybody in the local area! They could spy on telco officials! They could

spy on police stations! They could spy on local offices of the Secret
Service....

In 1989, electronic cops and hacker-trackers began using scrambler-
phones and secured lines. It only made sense. There was no telling who was
into those systems. Whoever they were, they sounded scary. This was some
new level of antisocial daring. Could be West German hackers, in the pay of
the KGB. That too had seemed a weird and farfetched notion, until Clifford
Stoll had poked and prodded a sluggish Washington law-enforcement
bureaucracy into investigating a computer intrusion that turned out to be
exactly that—HACKERS, IN THE PAY OF THE KGB! Stoll, the systems
manager for an Internet lab in Berkeley California, had ended up on the
front page of the New Nork Times, proclaimed a national hero in the first
true story of international computer espionage. Stoll's counterspy efforts,
which he related in a bestselling book, The Cuckoo's Egg, in 1989, had
established the credibility of 'hacking' as a possible threat to national
security. The United States Secret Service doesn't mess around when it
suspects a possible action by a foreign intelligence apparat.

The Secret Service scrambler-phones and secured lines put a tremendous
kink in law enforcement's ability to operate freely; to get the word out,
cooperate, prevent misunderstandings. Nevertheless, 1989 scarcely seemed
the time for half-measures. If the police and Secret Service themselves were
not operationally secure, then how could they reasonably demand measures
of security from private enterprise? At least, the inconvenience made people
aware of the seriousness of the threat.

If there was a final spur needed to get the police off the dime, it came in
the realization that the emergency 911 system was vulnerable. The 911
system has its own specialized software, but it is run on the same digital
switching systems as the rest of the telephone network. 911 is not
physically different from normal telephony. But it is certainly culturally
different, because this is the area of telephonic cyberspace reserved for the
police and emergency services.

Your average policeman may not know much about hackers or phone-
phreaks. Computer people are weird; even computer COPS are rather

weird; the stuff they do is hard to figure out. But a threat to the 911 system
is anything but an abstract threat. If the 911 system goes, people can die.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emboldened by success, Fry Guy moved on to credit-card abuse. Fry
Guy was quite an accomplished talker; with a gift for "social engineering."
If you can do "social engineering"—fast-talk, fake-outs, impersonation,

conning, scamming—then card abuse comes easy. (Getting away with it in
the long run is another question).

Fry Guy had run across "Urvile" of the Legion of Doom on the ALTOS
Chat board in Bonn, Germany. ALTOS Chat was a sophisticated board,
accessible through globe-spanning computer networks like BITnet, Tymnet,
and Telenet. ALTOS was much frequented by members of Germany's Chaos
Computer Club. Two Chaos hackers who hung out on ALTOS, "Jaeger" and
"Pengo," had been the central villains of Clifford Stoll's Cuckoo's Egg case:
consorting in East Berlin with a spymaster from the KGB, and breaking into
American computers for hire, through the Internet.

When LoD members learned the story of Jaeger's depredations from
Stoll's book, they were rather less than impressed, technically speaking. On
LoD's own favorite board of the moment, "Black Ice," LoD members
bragged that they themselves could have done all the Chaos break-ins in a
week flat! Nevertheless, LoD were grudgingly impressed by the Chaos rep,
the sheer hairy-eyed daring of hash-smoking anarchist hackers who had
rubbed shoulders with the fearsome big-boys of international Communist
espionage. LoD members sometimes traded bits of knowledge with friendly
German hackers on ALTOS—phone numbers for vulnerable VAX/VMS
computers in Georgia, for instance. Dutch and British phone phreaks, and
the Australian clique of "Phoenix," "Nom," and "Electron," were ALTOS
regulars, too. In underground circles, to hang out on ALTOS was considered
the sign of an elite dude, a sophisticated hacker of the international digital
jet-set.

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

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

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

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

Fry Guy and his cohort, using LoD techniques, stole six thousand dollars
from Western Union between December 1988 and July 1989. They also
dabbled in ordering delivery of stolen goods through card-fraud. Fry Guy
was intoxicated with success. The sixteen-year-old fantasized wildly to
hacker rivals, boasting that he'd used rip-off money to hire himself a big
limousine, and had driven out-of-state with a groupie from his favorite
heavy-metal band, Motley Crue.

Armed with knowledge, power, and a gratifying stream of free money,
Fry Guy now took it upon himself to call local representatives of Indiana
Bell security, to brag, boast, strut, and utter tormenting warnings that his
powerful friends in the notorious Legion of Doom could crash the national
telephone network. Fry Guy even named a date for the scheme: the Fourth
of July, a national holiday.

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

Prophet, Urvile and Leftist also had Secret Service DNR "pen registers"
installed on their own lines.

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

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

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

Fry Guy insisted that the Legion intended to crash the phone system on a
national holiday. And when AT&T crashed on Martin Luther King Day,
1990, this lent a credence to his claim that genuinely alarmed telco security
and the Secret Service.

Fry Guy eventually pled guilty on May 31, 1990. On September 14, he
was sentenced to forty-four months' probation and four hundred hours'
community service. He could have had it much worse; but it made sense to
prosecutors to take it easy on this teenage minor, while zeroing in on the
notorious kingpins of the Legion of Doom.

But the case against LoD had nagging flaws. Despite the best effort of
investigators, it was impossible to prove that the Legion had crashed the
phone system on January 15, because they, in fact, hadn't done so. The
investigations of 1989 did show that certain members of the Legion of

Doom had achieved unprecedented power over the telco switching stations,
and that they were in active conspiracy to obtain more power yet.
Investigators were privately convinced that the Legion of Doom intended to
do awful things with this knowledge, but mere evil intent was not enough to
put them in jail.

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

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

The Atlanta Legion thought most "rules" of cyberspace were for rodents
and losers, but they DID have rules. THEY NEVER CRASHED
ANYTHING, AND THEY NEVER TOOK MONEY. These were rough
rules-of-thumb, and rather dubious principles when it comes to the ethical
subtleties of cyberspace, but they enabled the Atlanta Three to operate with
a relatively clear conscience (though never with peace of mind).

If you didn't hack for money, if you weren't robbing people of actual
funds—money in the bank, that is—then nobody REALLY got hurt, in
LoD's opinion. "Theft of service" was a bogus issue, and "intellectual
property" was a bad joke. But LoD had only elitist contempt for rip-off
artists, "leechers," thieves. They considered themselves clean. In their
opinion, if you didn't smash-up or crash any systems —(well, not on
purpose, anyhow—accidents can happen, just ask Robert Morris) then it
was very unfair to call you a "vandal" or a "cracker." When you were

hanging out on-line with your "pals" in telco security, you could face them
down from the higher plane of hacker morality. And you could mock the
police from the supercilious heights of your hacker's quest for pure
knowledge.

But from the point of view of law enforcement and telco security,
however, Fry Guy was not really dangerous. The Atlanta Three WERE
dangerous. It wasn't the crimes they were committing, but the DANGER,
the potential hazard, the sheer TECHNICAL POWER LoD had
accumulated, that had made the situation untenable. Fry Guy was not LoD.
He'd never laid eyes on anyone in LoD; his only contacts with them had
been electronic. Core members of the Legion of Doom tended to meet
physically for conventions every year or so, to get drunk, give each other
the hacker high-sign, send out for pizza and ravage hotel suites. Fry Guy
had never done any of this. Deborah Daniels assessed Fry Guy accurately as
"an LoD wannabe."

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

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

But the Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was not a simple policing action. It
wasn't meant just to walk the beat in cyberspace—it was a CRACKDOWN,
a deliberate attempt to nail the core of the operation, to send a dire and

potent message that would settle the hash of the digital underground for
good.

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

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

#

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

And William J. Cook in particular was a rising star in electronic crime-
busting. He and his fellow federal prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney's office
in Chicago had a tight relation with the Secret Service, especially go-getting
Chicago-based agent Timothy Foley. While Cook and his Department of
Justice colleagues plotted strategy, Foley was their man on the street.

Throughout the 1980s, the federal government had given prosecutors an
armory of new, untried legal tools against computer crime. Cook and his
colleagues were pioneers in the use of these new statutes in the real-life cut-
and-thrust of the federal courtroom.

On October 2, 1986, the US Senate had passed the "Computer Fraud and
Abuse Act" unanimously, but there were pitifully few convictions under this
statute. Cook's group took their name from this statute, since they were

determined to transform this powerful but rather theoretical Act of Congress
into a real-life engine of legal destruction against computer fraudsters and
scofflaws.

It was not a question of merely discovering crimes, investigating them,
and then trying and punishing their perpetrators. The Chicago unit, like
most everyone else in the business, already KNEW who the bad guys were:
the Legion of Doom and the writers and editors of Phrack. The task at hand
was to find some legal means of putting these characters away.

This approach might seem a bit dubious, to someone not acquainted with
the gritty realities of prosecutorial work. But prosecutors don't put people in
jail for crimes they have committed; they put people in jail for crimes they
have committed THAT CAN BE PROVED IN COURT. Chicago federal
police put Al Capone in prison for income-tax fraud. Chicago is a big town,
with a rough-and-ready bare-knuckle tradition on both sides of the law.

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

This was likely inevitable. By the summer of 1989, law enforcement
were closing in on the Atlanta Three from at least six directions at once.
First, there were the leads from Fry Guy, which had led to the DNR
registers being installed on the lines of the Atlanta Three. The DNR
evidence alone would have finished them off, sooner or later.

But second, the Atlanta lads were already well-known to Control-C and
his telco security sponsors. LoD's contacts with telco security had made
them overconfident and even more boastful than usual; they felt that they
had powerful friends in high places, and that they were being openly
tolerated by telco security. But BellSouth's Intrusion Task Force were hot on
the trail of LoD and sparing no effort or expense.

The Atlanta Three had also been identified by name and listed on the
extensive anti-hacker files maintained, and retailed for pay, by private

security operative John Maxfield of Detroit. Maxfield, who had extensive
ties to telco security and many informants in the underground, was a bete
noire of the Phrack crowd, and the dislike was mutual.

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

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

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

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

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

The Leftist himself had been out after work with his co-workers,
surrounding a couple of pitchers of margaritas. As he came trucking on

tequila-numbed feet up the pavement, toting a bag full of floppy-disks, he
noticed a large number of unmarked cars parked in his driveway. All the
cars sported tiny microwave antennas.

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

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

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

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

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

And so, he levelled with them.

And that, Leftist said later from his federal prison camp in Talladega,
Alabama, was a big mistake. The Atlanta area was unique, in that it had
three members of the Legion of Doom who actually occupied more or less
the same physical locality. Unlike the rest of LoD, who tended to associate

by phone and computer, Atlanta LoD actually WERE "tightly knit." It was
no real surprise that the Secret Service agents apprehending Urvile at the
computer-labs at Georgia Tech, would discover Prophet with him as well.

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

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

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

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

In the artificial fantasy-world of GURPS Special Ops, players entered a
modern fantasy of intrigue and international espionage. On beginning the
game, players started small and powerless, perhaps as minor-league CIA
agents or penny-ante arms dealers. But as players persisted through a series
of game sessions (game sessions generally lasted for hours, over long,
elaborate campaigns that might be pursued for months on end) then they

would achieve new skills, new knowledge, new power. They would acquire
and hone new abilities, such as marksmanship, karate, wiretapping, or
Watergate burglary. They could also win various kinds of imaginary booty,
like Berettas, or martini shakers, or fast cars with ejection seats and
machine-guns under the headlights.

As might be imagined from the complexity of these games, Urvile's
gaming notes were very detailed and extensive. Urvile was a "dungeon-
master," inventing scenarios for his fellow gamers, giant simulated
adventure-puzzles for his friends to unravel. Urvile's game notes covered
dozens of pages with all sorts of exotic lunacy, all about ninja raids on
Libya and break-ins on encrypted Red Chinese supercomputers. His notes
were written on scrap-paper and kept in loose-leaf binders.

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

Not only was it next to impossible to tell Urvile's fantasy game-notes
from cyberspace "reality," but Urvile himself barely made this distinction.
It's no exaggeration to say that to Urvile it was ALL a game. Urvile was
very bright, highly imaginative, and quite careless of other people's notions
of propriety. His connection to "reality" was not something to which he paid
a great deal of attention.

Hacking was a game for Urvile. It was an amusement he was carrying
out, it was something he was doing for fun. And Urvile was an obsessive
young man. He could no more stop hacking than he could stop in the
middle of a jigsaw puzzle, or stop in the middle of reading a Stephen
Donaldson fantasy trilogy. (The name "Urvile" came from a best-selling
Donaldson novel.)

Urvile's airy, bulletproof attitude seriously annoyed his interrogators.
First of all, he didn't consider that he'd done anything wrong. There was
scarcely a shred of honest remorse in him. On the contrary, he seemed

privately convinced that his police interrogators were operating in a
demented fantasy-world all their own. Urvile was too polite and well-
behaved to say this straight-out, but his reactions were askew and
disquieting.

For instance, there was the business about LoD's ability to monitor
phone-calls to the police and Secret Service. Urvile agreed that this was
quite possible, and posed no big problem for LoD. In fact, he and his
friends had kicked the idea around on the "Black Ice" board, much as they
had discussed many other nifty notions, such as building personal flame-
throwers and jury-rigging fistfulls of blasting-caps. They had hundreds of
dial-up numbers for government agencies that they'd gotten through
scanning Atlanta phones, or had pulled from raided VAX/VMS mainframe
computers.

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

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

Then there was the issue of crashing the phone system. No problem,
Urvile admitted sunnily. Atlanta LoD could have shut down phone service
all over Atlanta any time they liked. EVEN THE 911 SERVICE? Nothing
special about that, Urvile explained patiently. Bring the switch to its knees,
with say the UNIX "makedir" bug, and 911 goes down too as a matter of
course. The 911 system wasn't very interesting, frankly. It might be
tremendously interesting to cops (for odd reasons of their own), but as
technical challenges went, the 911 service was yawnsville.

So of course the Atlanta Three could crash service. They probably could
have crashed service all over BellSouth territory, if they'd worked at it for a
while. But Atlanta LoD weren't crashers. Only losers and rodents were
crashers. LoD were ELITE.

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

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

Prophet himself had written the handy Legion of Doom file "UNIX Use
and Security From the Ground Up." UNIX (pronounced "you-nicks") is a
powerful, flexible computer operating-system, for multi-user, multi-tasking
computers. In 1969, when UNIX was created in Bell Labs, such computers
were exclusive to large corporations and universities, but today UNIX is run
on thousands of powerful home machines. UNIX was particularly well-
suited to telecommunications programming, and had become a standard in
the field. Naturally, UNIX also became a standard for the elite hacker and
phone phreak. Lately, Prophet had not been so active as Leftist and Urvile,
but Prophet was a recidivist. In 1986, when he was eighteen, Prophet had
been convicted of "unauthorized access to a computer network" in North
Carolina. He'd been discovered breaking into the Southern Bell Data
Network, a UNIX-based internal telco network supposedly closed to the
public. He'd gotten a typical hacker sentence: six months suspended, 120
hours community service, and three years' probation.

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

In early September 1988, he'd broken into BellSouth's centralized
automation system, AIMSX or "Advanced Information Management
System." AIMSX was an internal business network for BellSouth, where
telco employees stored electronic mail, databases, memos, and calendars,

and did text processing. Since AIMSX did not have public dial-ups, it was
considered utterly invisible to the public, and was not well-secured—it
didn't even require passwords. Prophet abused an account known as
"waa1," the personal account of an unsuspecting telco employee. Disguised
as the owner of waa1, Prophet made about ten visits to AIMSX.

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

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

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

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

Prophet now had his trophy. But he further decided to store yet another
copy of the E911 Document on another person's computer. This unwitting
person was a computer enthusiast named Richard Andrews who lived near

Joliet, Illinois. Richard Andrews was a UNIX programmer by trade, and ran
a powerful UNIX board called "Jolnet," in the basement of his house.

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

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

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

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

We must now catch up on the other aspects of the war on the Legion of
Doom. The war on the Legion was a war on a network—in fact, a network
of three networks, which intertwined and interrelated in a complex fashion.
The Legion itself, with Atlanta LoD, and their hanger-on Fry Guy, were the
first network. The second network was Phrack magazine, with its editors
and contributors.

The third network involved the electronic circle around a hacker known
as "Terminus."

The war against these hacker networks was carried out by a law
enforcement network. Atlanta LoD and Fry Guy were pursued by USSS

agents and federal prosecutors in Atlanta, Indiana, and Chicago. "Terminus"
found himself pursued by USSS and federal prosecutors from Baltimore
and Chicago. And the war against Phrack was almost entirely a Chicago
operation.

The investigation of Terminus involved a great deal of energy, mostly
from the Chicago Task Force, but it was to be the least-known and least-
publicized of the Crackdown operations. Terminus, who lived in Maryland,
was a UNIX programmer and consultant, fairly well-known (under his
given name) in the UNIX community, as an acknowledged expert on AT&T
minicomputers. Terminus idolized AT&T, especially Bellcore, and longed
for public recognition as a UNIX expert; his highest ambition was to work
for Bell Labs.

But Terminus had odd friends and a spotted history. Terminus had once
been the subject of an admiring interview in Phrack (Volume II, Issue 14,
Phile 2—dated May 1987). In this article, Phrack co-editor Taran King
described "Terminus" as an electronics engineer, 5'9", brown-haired, born in
1959—at 28 years old, quite mature for a hacker.

Terminus had once been sysop of a phreak/hack underground board
called "MetroNet," which ran on an Apple II. Later he'd replaced
"MetroNet" with an underground board called "MegaNet," specializing in
IBMs. In his younger days, Terminus had written one of the very first and
most elegant code-scanning programs for the IBM-PC. This program had
been widely distributed in the underground. Uncounted legions of PC-
owning phreaks and hackers had used Terminus's scanner program to rip-off
telco codes. This feat had not escaped the attention of telco security; it
hardly could, since Terminus's earlier handle, "Terminal Technician," was
proudly written right on the program.

When he became a full-time computer professional (specializing in
telecommunications programming), he adopted the handle Terminus, meant
to indicate that he had "reached the final point of being a proficient hacker."
He'd moved up to the UNIX-based "Netsys" board on an AT&T computer,
with four phone lines and an impressive 240 megs of storage. "Netsys"
carried complete issues of Phrack, and Terminus was quite friendly with its
publishers, Taran King and Knight Lightning.

In the early 1980s, Terminus had been a regular on Plovernet, Pirate-80,
Sherwood Forest and Shadowland, all well-known pirate boards, all heavily
frequented by the Legion of Doom. As it happened, Terminus was never
officially "in LoD," because he'd never been given the official LoD high-
sign and back-slap by Legion maven Lex Luthor. Terminus had never
physically met anyone from LoD. But that scarcely mattered much—the
Atlanta Three themselves had never been officially vetted by Lex, either.

As far as law enforcement was concerned, the issues were clear.
Terminus was a full-time, adult computer professional with particular skills
at AT&T software and hardware—but Terminus reeked of the Legion of
Doom and the underground.

On February 1, 1990—half a month after the Martin Luther King Day
Crash—USSS agents Tim Foley from Chicago, and Jack Lewis from the
Baltimore office, accompanied by AT&T security officer Jerry Dalton,
travelled to Middle Town, Maryland. There they grilled Terminus in his
home (to the stark terror of his wife and small children), and, in their
customary fashion, hauled his computers out the door.

The Netsys machine proved to contain a plethora of arcane UNIX
software—proprietary source code formally owned by AT&T. Software
such as: UNIX System Five Release 3.2; UNIX SV Release 3.1; UUCP
communications software; KORN SHELL; RFS; IWB; WWB; DWB; the
C++ programming language; PMON; TOOL CHEST; QUEST; DACT, and
S FIND.

In the long-established piratical tradition of the underground, Terminus
had been trading this illicitly-copied software with a small circle of fellow
UNIX programmers. Very unwisely, he had stored seven years of his
electronic mail on his Netsys machine, which documented all the friendly
arrangements he had made with his various colleagues.

Terminus had not crashed the AT&T phone system on January 15. He
was, however, blithely running a not-for-profit AT&T software-piracy ring.
This was not an activity AT&T found amusing. AT&T security officer Jerry
Dalton valued this "stolen" property at over three hundred thousand dollars.

AT&T's entry into the tussle of free enterprise had been complicated by
the new, vague groundrules of the information economy. Until the break-up
of Ma Bell, AT&T was forbidden to sell computer hardware or software.
Ma Bell was the phone company; Ma Bell was not allowed to use the
enormous revenue from telephone utilities, in order to finance any entry
into the computer market.

AT&T nevertheless invented the UNIX operating system. And somehow
AT&T managed to make UNIX a minor source of income. Weirdly, UNIX
was not sold as computer software, but actually retailed under an obscure
regulatory exemption allowing sales of surplus equipment and scrap. Any
bolder attempt to promote or retail UNIX would have aroused angry legal
opposition from computer companies. Instead, UNIX was licensed to
universities, at modest rates, where the acids of academic freedom ate away
steadily at AT&T's proprietary rights.

Come the breakup, AT&T recognized that UNIX was a potential gold-
mine. By now, large chunks of UNIX code had been created that were not
AT&T's, and were being sold by others. An entire rival UNIX-based
operating system had arisen in Berkeley, California (one of the world's great
founts of ideological hackerdom). Today, "hackers" commonly consider
"Berkeley UNIX" to be technically superior to AT&T's "System V UNIX,"
but AT&T has not allowed mere technical elegance to intrude on the real-
world business of marketing proprietary software. AT&T has made its own
code deliberately incompatible with other folks' UNIX, and has written
code that it can prove is copyrightable, even if that code happens to be
somewhat awkward—"kludgey." AT&T UNIX user licenses are serious
business agreements, replete with very clear copyright statements and non-
disclosure clauses.

AT&T has not exactly kept the UNIX cat in the bag, but it kept a grip on
its scruff with some success. By the rampant, explosive standards of
software piracy, AT&T UNIX source code is heavily copyrighted, well-
guarded, well-licensed. UNIX was traditionally run only on mainframe
machines, owned by large groups of suit-and-tie professionals, rather than
on bedroom machines where people can get up to easy mischief.

And AT&T UNIX source code is serious high-level programming. The
number of skilled UNIX programmers with any actual motive to swipe
UNIX source code is small. It's tiny, compared to the tens of thousands
prepared to rip-off, say, entertaining PC games like "Leisure Suit Larry."

But by 1989, the warez-d00d underground, in the persons of Terminus
and his friends, was gnawing at AT&T UNIX. And the property in question
was not sold for twenty bucks over the counter at the local branch of
Babbage's or Egghead's; this was massive, sophisticated, multi-line, multi-
author corporate code worth tens of thousands of dollars.

It must be recognized at this point that Terminus's purported ring of
UNIX software pirates had not actually made any money from their
suspected crimes. The $300,000 dollar figure bandied about for the contents
of Terminus's computer did not mean that Terminus was in actual illicit
possession of three hundred thousand of AT&T's dollars. Terminus was
shipping software back and forth, privately, person to person, for free. He
was not making a commercial business of piracy. He hadn't asked for
money; he didn't take money. He lived quite modestly.

AT&T employees—as well as freelance UNIX consultants, like
Terminus—commonly worked with "proprietary" AT&T software, both in
the office and at home on their private machines. AT&T rarely sent security
officers out to comb the hard disks of its consultants. Cheap freelance
UNIX contractors were quite useful to AT&T; they didn't have health
insurance or retirement programs, much less union membership in the
Communication Workers of America. They were humble digital drudges,
wandering with mop and bucket through the Great Technological Temple of
AT&T; but when the Secret Service arrived at their homes, it seemed they
were eating with company silverware and sleeping on company sheets!
Outrageously, they behaved as if the things they worked with every day
belonged to them!

And these were no mere hacker teenagers with their hands full of trash-
paper and their noses pressed to the corporate windowpane. These guys
were UNIX wizards, not only carrying AT&T data in their machines and
their heads, but eagerly networking about it, over machines that were far
more powerful than anything previously imagined in private hands. How do

you keep people disposable, yet assure their awestruck respect for your
property? It was a dilemma.

Much UNIX code was public-domain, available for free. Much
"proprietary" UNIX code had been extensively re-written, perhaps altered
so much that it became an entirely new product—or perhaps not.
Intellectual property rights for software developers were, and are,
extraordinarily complex and confused. And software "piracy," like the
private copying of videos, is one of the most widely practiced "crimes" in
the world today.

The USSS were not experts in UNIX or familiar with the customs of its
use. The United States Secret Service, considered as a body, did not have
one single person in it who could program in a UNIX environment—no, not
even one. The Secret Service WERE making extensive use of expert help,
but the "experts" they had chosen were AT&T and Bellcore security
officials, the very victims of the purported crimes under investigation, the
very people whose interest in AT&T's "proprietary" software was most
pronounced.

On February 6, 1990, Terminus was arrested by Agent Lewis.
Eventually, Terminus would be sent to prison for his illicit use of a piece of
AT&T software.

The issue of pirated AT&T software would bubble along in the
background during the war on the Legion of Doom. Some half-dozen of
Terminus's on-line acquaintances, including people in Illinois, Texas and
California, were grilled by the Secret Service in connection with the illicit
copying of software. Except for Terminus, however, none were charged
with a crime. None of them shared his peculiar prominence in the hacker
underground.

But that did not mean that these people would, or could, stay out of
trouble. The transferral of illicit data in cyberspace is hazy and ill-defined
business, with paradoxical dangers for everyone concerned: hackers, signal
carriers, board owners, cops, prosecutors, even random passers-by.
Sometimes, well-meant attempts to avert trouble or punish wrongdoing

bring more trouble than would simple ignorance, indifference or
impropriety.

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

A skilled user of Terminus' UNIX machine could send and receive
electronic mail from almost any major computer network in the world.
Netsys was not called a "board" per se, but rather a "node." "Nodes" were
larger, faster, and more sophisticated than mere "boards," and for hackers,
to hang out on internationally-connected "nodes" was quite the step up from
merely hanging out on local "boards."

Terminus's Netsys node in Maryland had a number of direct links to
other, similar UUCP nodes, run by people who shared his interests and at
least something of his free-wheeling attitude. One of these nodes was
Jolnet, owned by Richard Andrews, who, like Terminus, was an
independent UNIX consultant. Jolnet also ran UNIX, and could be
contacted at high speed by mainframe machines from all over the world.
Jolnet was quite a sophisticated piece of work, technically speaking, but it
was still run by an individual, as a private, not-for-profit hobby. Jolnet was
mostly used by other UNIX programmers—for mail, storage, and access to

networks. Jolnet supplied access network access to about two hundred
people, as well as a local junior college.

Among its various features and services, Jolnet also carried Phrack
magazine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In September 1988, without warning, the E911 Document came
plunging into Boykin's life, forwarded by Richard Andrews. Boykin
immediately recognized that the Document was hot property. He was not a
voice-communications man, and knew little about the ins and outs of the
Baby Bells, but he certainly knew what the 911 System was, and he was
angry to see confidential data about it in the hands of a nogoodnik. This was
clearly a matter for telco security. So, on September 21, 1988, Boykin made
yet ANOTHER copy of the E911 Document and passed this one along to a
professional acquaintance of his, one Jerome Dalton, from AT&T Corporate
Information Security. Jerry Dalton was the very fellow who would later raid
Terminus's house.

From AT&T's security division, the E911 Document went to Bellcore.

Bellcore (or BELL COmmunications REsearch) had once been the
central laboratory of the Bell System. Bell Labs employees had invented the
UNIX operating system. Now Bellcore was a quasi-independent, jointly
owned company that acted as the research arm for all seven of the Baby
Bell RBOCs. Bellcore was in a good position to co-ordinate security
technology and consultation for the RBOCs, and the gentleman in charge of
this effort was Henry M. Kluepfel, a veteran of the Bell System who had
worked there for twenty-four years.

On October 13, 1988, Dalton passed the E911 Document to Henry
Kluepfel. Kluepfel, a veteran expert witness in telecommunications fraud
and computer-fraud cases, had certainly seen worse trouble than this. He
recognized the document for what it was: a trophy from a hacker break-in.

However, whatever harm had been done in the intrusion was presumably
old news. At this point there seemed little to be done. Kluepfel made a
careful note of the circumstances and shelved the problem for the time
being.

Whole months passed.

February 1989 arrived. The Atlanta Three were living it up in Bell
South's switches, and had not yet met their comeuppance. The Legion was
thriving. So was Phrack magazine. A good six months had passed since
Prophet's AIMSX break-in. Prophet, as hackers will, grew weary of sitting
on his laurels. "Knight Lightning" and "Taran King," the editors of Phrack,
were always begging Prophet for material they could publish. Prophet
decided that the heat must be off by this time, and that he could safely brag,
boast, and strut.

So he sent a copy of the E911 Document—yet another one—from Rich
Andrews' Jolnet machine to Knight Lightning's BITnet account at the
University of Missouri. Let's review the fate of the document so far.

0. The original E911 Document. This in the AIMSX system on a
mainframe computer in Atlanta, available to hundreds of people, but all of
them, presumably, BellSouth employees. An unknown number of them may
have their own copies of this document, but they are all professionals and
all trusted by the phone company.

1. Prophet's illicit copy, at home on his own computer in Decatur, Georgia.

2. Prophet's back-up copy, stored on Rich Andrew's Jolnet machine in the
basement of Rich Andrews' house near Joliet Illinois.

3. Charles Boykin's copy on "Killer" in Dallas, Texas, sent by Rich
Andrews from Joliet.

4. Jerry Dalton's copy at AT&T Corporate Information Security in New
Jersey, sent from Charles Boykin in Dallas.

5. Henry Kluepfel's copy at Bellcore security headquarters in New Jersey,
sent by Dalton.

6. Knight Lightning's copy, sent by Prophet from Rich Andrews' machine,
and now in Columbia, Missouri.

We can see that the "security" situation of this proprietary document,
once dug out of AIMSX, swiftly became bizarre. Without any money
changing hands, without any particular special effort, this data had been
reproduced at least six times and had spread itself all over the continent. By
far the worst, however, was yet to come.

In February 1989, Prophet and Knight Lightning bargained
electronically over the fate of this trophy. Prophet wanted to boast, but, at
the same time, scarcely wanted to be caught.

For his part, Knight Lightning was eager to publish as much of the
document as he could manage. Knight Lightning was a fledgling political-
science major with a particular interest in freedom-of-information issues.
He would gladly publish most anything that would reflect glory on the
prowess of the underground and embarrass the telcos. However, Knight
Lightning himself had contacts in telco security, and sometimes consulted
them on material he'd received that might be too dicey for publication.

Prophet and Knight Lightning decided to edit the E911 Document so as
to delete most of its identifying traits. First of all, its large "NOT FOR USE
OR DISCLOSURE" warning had to go. Then there were other matters. For
instance, it listed the office telephone numbers of several BellSouth 911
specialists in Florida. If these phone numbers were published in Phrack, the
BellSouth employees involved would very likely be hassled by phone
phreaks, which would anger BellSouth no end, and pose a definite
operational hazard for both Prophet and Phrack.

So Knight Lightning cut the Document almost in half, removing the
phone numbers and some of the touchier and more specific information. He
passed it back electronically to Prophet; Prophet was still nervous, so
Knight Lightning cut a bit more. They finally agreed that it was ready to go,
and that it would be published in Phrack under the pseudonym, "The
Eavesdropper."

And this was done on February 25, 1989.

The twenty-fourth issue of Phrack featured a chatty interview with co-ed
phone-phreak "Chanda Leir," three articles on BITNET and its links to

other computer networks, an article on 800 and 900 numbers by "Unknown
User," "VaxCat's" article on telco basics (slyly entitled "Lifting Ma Bell's
Veil of Secrecy,)" and the usual "Phrack World News."

The News section, with painful irony, featured an extended account of
the sentencing of "Shadowhawk," an eighteen-year-old Chicago hacker who
had just been put in federal prison by William J. Cook himself.

And then there were the two articles by "The Eavesdropper." The first
was the edited E911 Document, now titled "Control Office Administration
Of Enhanced 911 Services for Special Services and Major Account
Centers." Eavesdropper's second article was a glossary of terms explaining
the blizzard of telco acronyms and buzzwords in the E911 Document.

The hapless document was now distributed, in the usual Phrack routine,
to a good one hundred and fifty sites. Not a hundred and fifty PEOPLE,
mind you—a hundred and fifty SITES, some of these sites linked to UNIX
nodes or bulletin board systems, which themselves had readerships of tens,
dozens, even hundreds of people.

This was February 1989. Nothing happened immediately. Summer came,
and the Atlanta crew were raided by the Secret Service. Fry Guy was
apprehended. Still nothing whatever happened to Phrack. Six more issues of
Phrack came out, 30 in all, more or less on a monthly schedule. Knight
Lightning and co-editor Taran King went untouched.

Phrack tended to duck and cover whenever the heat came down. During
the summer busts of 1987—(hacker busts tended to cluster in summer,
perhaps because hackers were easier to find at home than in college)—
Phrack had ceased publication for several months, and laid low. Several
LoD hangers-on had been arrested, but nothing had happened to the Phrack
crew, the premiere gossips of the underground. In 1988, Phrack had been
taken over by a new editor, "Crimson Death," a raucous youngster with a
taste for anarchy files. 1989, however, looked like a bounty year for the
underground. Knight Lightning and his co-editor Taran King took up the
reins again, and Phrack flourished throughout 1989. Atlanta LoD went
down hard in the summer of 1989, but Phrack rolled merrily on. Prophet's
E911 Document seemed unlikely to cause Phrack any trouble. By January

1990, it had been available in Phrack for almost a year. Kluepfel and
Dalton, officers of Bellcore and AT&T security, had possessed the
document for sixteen months—in fact, they'd had it even before Knight
Lightning himself, and had done nothing in particular to stop its
distribution. They hadn't even told Rich Andrews or Charles Boykin to
erase the copies from their UNIX nodes, Jolnet and Killer.

But then came the monster Martin Luther King Day Crash of January 15,
1990.

A flat three days later, on January 18, four agents showed up at Knight
Lightning's fraternity house. One was Timothy Foley, the second Barbara
Golden, both of them Secret Service agents from the Chicago office. Also
along was a University of Missouri security officer, and Reed Newlin, a
security man from Southwestern Bell, the RBOC having jurisdiction over
Missouri.

Foley accused Knight Lightning of causing the nationwide crash of the
phone system.

Knight Lightning was aghast at this allegation. On the face of it, the
suspicion was not entirely implausible—though Knight Lightning knew that
he himself hadn't done it. Plenty of hot-dog hackers had bragged that they
could crash the phone system, however. "Shadowhawk," for instance, the
Chicago hacker whom William Cook had recently put in jail, had several
times boasted on boards that he could "shut down AT&T's public switched
network."

And now this event, or something that looked just like it, had actually
taken place. The Crash had lit a fire under the Chicago Task Force. And the
former fence-sitters at Bellcore and AT&T were now ready to roll. The
consensus among telco security—already horrified by the skill of the
BellSouth intruders —was that the digital underground was out of hand.
LoD and Phrack must go. And in publishing Prophet's E911 Document,
Phrack had provided law enforcement with what appeared to be a powerful
legal weapon.

Foley confronted Knight Lightning about the E911 Document.

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

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

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

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

The trial of Knight Lightning, which occurred on July 24-27, 1990, was
the crucial show-trial of the Hacker Crackdown. We will examine the trial
at some length in Part Four of this book.

In the meantime, we must continue our dogged pursuit of the E911
Document.

It must have been clear by January 1990 that the E911 Document, in the
form Phrack had published it back in February 1989, had gone off at the

speed of light in at least a hundred and fifty different directions. To attempt
to put this electronic genie back in the bottle was flatly impossible.

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

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

The Atlanta crowd was already in the bag, by the time the Chicago Task
Force had gotten around to Phrack. But the Legion was a hydra-headed
thing. In late 89, a brand-new Legion of Doom board, "Phoenix Project,"
had gone up in Austin, Texas. Phoenix Project was sysoped by no less a
man than the Mentor himself, ably assisted by University of Texas student
and hardened Doomster "Erik Bloodaxe."

As we have seen from his Phrack manifesto, the Mentor was a hacker
zealot who regarded computer intrusion as something close to a moral duty.
Phoenix Project was an ambitious effort, intended to revive the digital
underground to what Mentor considered the full flower of the early 80s.
The Phoenix board would also boldly bring elite hackers face-to-face with
the telco "opposition." On "Phoenix," America's cleverest hackers would
supposedly shame the telco squareheads out of their stick-in-the-mud
attitudes, and perhaps convince them that the Legion of Doom elite were
really an all-right crew. The premiere of "Phoenix Project" was heavily
trumpeted by Phrack,and "Phoenix Project" carried a complete run of
Phrack issues, including the E911 Document as Phrack had published it.

Phoenix Project was only one of many—possibly hundreds—of nodes
and boards all over America that were in guilty possession of the E911
Document. But Phoenix was an outright, unashamed Legion of Doom
board. Under Mentor's guidance, it was flaunting itself in the face of telco
security personnel. Worse yet, it was actively trying to WIN THEM OVER
as sympathizers for the digital underground elite. "Phoenix" had no cards or
codes on it. Its hacker elite considered Phoenix at least technically legal.
But Phoenix was a corrupting influence, where hacker anarchy was eating
away like digital acid at the underbelly of corporate propriety.

The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force now prepared to
descend upon Austin, Texas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who?

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

AT&T had thrust this machine into the marketplace, but, like many of
AT&T's ambitious attempts to enter the computing arena, the 3B2 project

had something less than a glittering success. Izenberg himself had been a
contractor for the division of AT&T that supported the 3B2. The entire
division had been shut down.

Nowadays, the cheapest and quickest way to get help with this fractious
piece of machinery was to join one of Terminus's discussion groups on the
Internet, where friendly and knowledgeable hackers would help you for
free. Naturally the remarks within this group were less than flattering about
the Death Star ... was THAT the problem?

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

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

In a four-hour grilling, Foley urged Izenberg to come clean and admit
that he was in conspiracy with Terminus, and a member of the Legion of
Doom.

Izenberg denied this. He was no weirdo teenage hacker—he was thirty-
two years old, and didn't even have a "handle." Izenberg was a former TV
technician and electronics specialist who had drifted into UNIX consulting
as a full-grown adult. Izenberg had never met Terminus, physically. He'd
once bought a cheap high-speed modem from him, though.

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

modem was stolen, and even if it were, Izenberg hardly saw how that gave
them the right to take every electronic item in his house.

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

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

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

In the meantime, the Izenberg case received absolutely no press
coverage. The Secret Service had walked into an Austin home, removed a
UNIX bulletin-board system, and met with no operational difficulties
whatsoever.

Except that word of a crackdown had percolated through the Legion of
Doom. "The Mentor" voluntarily shut down "The Phoenix Project." It
seemed a pity, especially as telco security employees had, in fact, shown up
on Phoenix, just as he had hoped—along with the usual motley crowd of
LoD heavies, hangers-on, phreaks, hackers and wannabes. There was
"Sandy" Sandquist from US SPRINT security, and some guy named Henry
Kluepfel, from Bellcore itself! Kluepfel had been trading friendly banter
with hackers on Phoenix since January 30th (two weeks after the Martin
Luther King Day Crash). The presence of such a stellar telco official
seemed quite the coup for Phoenix Project.

Still, Mentor could judge the climate. Atlanta in ruins, Phrack in deep
trouble, something weird going on with UNIX nodes—discretion was
advisable. Phoenix Project went off-line.

Kluepfel, of course, had been monitoring this LoD bulletin board for his
own purposes—and those of the Chicago unit. As far back as June 1987,
Kluepfel had logged on to a Texas underground board called "Phreak Klass
2600." There he'd discovered an Chicago youngster named "Shadowhawk,"
strutting and boasting about rifling AT&T computer files, and bragging of
his ambitions to riddle AT&T's Bellcore computers with trojan horse
programs. Kluepfel had passed the news to Cook in Chicago,
Shadowhawk's computers had gone out the door in Secret Service custody,
and Shadowhawk himself had gone to jail.

Now it was Phoenix Project's turn. Phoenix Project postured about
"legality" and "merely intellectual interest," but it reeked of the
underground. It had Phrack on it. It had the E911 Document. It had a lot of
dicey talk about breaking into systems, including some bold and reckless
stuff about a supposed "decryption service" that Mentor and friends were
planning to run, to help crack encrypted passwords off of hacked systems.

Mentor was an adult. There was a bulletin board at his place of work, as
well. Kleupfel logged onto this board, too, and discovered it to be called
"Illuminati." It was run by some company called Steve Jackson Games.

On March 1, 1990, the Austin crackdown went into high gear.

On the morning of March 1—a Thursday—21-year-old University of
Texas student "Erik Bloodaxe," co-sysop of Phoenix Project and an avowed
member of the Legion of Doom, was wakened by a police revolver levelled
at his head.

Bloodaxe watched, jittery, as Secret Service agents appropriated his 300
baud terminal and, rifling his files, discovered his treasured source-code for
Robert Morris's notorious Internet Worm. But Bloodaxe, a wily operator,
had suspected that something of the like might be coming. All his best
equipment had been hidden away elsewhere. The raiders took everything
electronic, however, including his telephone. They were stymied by his

hefty arcade-style Pac-Man game, and left it in place, as it was simply too
heavy to move.

Bloodaxe was not arrested. He was not charged with any crime. A good
two years later, the police still had what they had taken from him, however.

The Mentor was less wary. The dawn raid rousted him and his wife from
bed in their underwear, and six Secret Service agents, accompanied by an
Austin policeman and Henry Kluepfel himself, made a rich haul. Off went
the works, into the agents' white Chevrolet minivan: an IBM PC-AT clone
with 4 meg of RAM and a 120-meg hard disk; a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet
II printer; a completely legitimate and highly expensive SCO-Xenix 286
operating system; Pagemaker disks and documentation; and the Microsoft
Word word-processing program. Mentor's wife had her incomplete
academic thesis stored on the hard-disk; that went, too, and so did the
couple's telephone. As of two years later, all this property remained in
police custody.

Mentor remained under guard in his apartment as agents prepared to raid
Steve Jackson Games. The fact that this was a business headquarters and
not a private residence did not deter the agents. It was still very early; no
one was at work yet. The agents prepared to break down the door, but
Mentor, eavesdropping on the Secret Service walkie-talkie traffic, begged
them not to do it, and offered his key to the building.

The exact details of the next events are unclear. The agents would not let
anyone else into the building. Their search warrant, when produced, was
unsigned. Apparently they breakfasted from the local "Whataburger," as the
litter from hamburgers was later found inside. They also extensively
sampled a bag of jellybeans kept by an SJG employee. Someone tore a
"Dukakis for President" sticker from the wall.

SJG employees, diligently showing up for the day's work, were met at
the door and briefly questioned by U.S. Secret Service agents. The
employees watched in astonishment as agents wielding crowbars and
screwdrivers emerged with captive machines. They attacked outdoor
storage units with boltcutters. The agents wore blue nylon windbreakers

with "SECRET SERVICE" stencilled across the back, with running-shoes
and jeans.

Jackson's company lost three computers, several hard-disks, hundred of
floppy disks, two monitors, three modems, a laser printer, various
powercords, cables, and adapters (and, oddly, a small bag of screws, bolts
and nuts). The seizure of Illuminati BBS deprived SJG of all the programs,
text files, and private e-mail on the board. The loss of two other SJG
computers was a severe blow as well, since it caused the loss of
electronically stored contracts, financial projections, address directories,
mailing lists, personnel files, business correspondence, and, not least, the
drafts of forthcoming games and gaming books.

No one at Steve Jackson Games was arrested. No one was accused of
any crime. No charges were filed. Everything appropriated was officially
kept as "evidence" of crimes never specified.

After the Phrack show-trial, the Steve Jackson Games scandal was the
most bizarre and aggravating incident of the Hacker Crackdown of 1990.
This raid by the Chicago Task Force on a science-fiction gaming publisher
was to rouse a swarming host of civil liberties issues, and gave rise to an
enduring controversy that was still re-complicating itself, and growing in
the scope of its implications, a full two years later.

The pursuit of the E911 Document stopped with the Steve Jackson
Games raid. As we have seen, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of
computer users in America with the E911 Document in their possession.
Theoretically, Chicago had a perfect legal right to raid any of these people,
and could have legally seized the machines of anybody who subscribed to
Phrack. However, there was no copy of the E911 Document on Jackson's
Illuminati board. And there the Chicago raiders stopped dead; they have not
raided anyone since.

It might be assumed that Rich Andrews and Charlie Boykin, who had
brought the E911 Document to the attention of telco security, might be
spared any official suspicion. But as we have seen, the willingness to
"cooperate fully" offers little, if any, assurance against federal anti-hacker
prosecution.

Richard Andrews found himself in deep trouble, thanks to the E911
Document. Andrews lived in Illinois, the native stomping grounds of the
Chicago Task Force. On February 3 and 6, both his home and his place of
work were raided by USSS. His machines went out the door, too, and he
was grilled at length (though not arrested). Andrews proved to be in
purportedly guilty possession of: UNIX SVR 3.2; UNIX SVR 3.1; UUCP;
PMON; WWB; IWB; DWB; NROFF; KORN SHELL '88; C++; and
QUEST, among other items. Andrews had received this proprietary code—
which AT&T officially valued at well over $250,000—through the UNIX
network, much of it supplied to him as a personal favor by Terminus.
Perhaps worse yet, Andrews admitted to returning the favor, by passing
Terminus a copy of AT&T proprietary STARLAN source code.

Even Charles Boykin, himself an AT&T employee, entered some very
hot water. By 1990, he'd almost forgotten about the E911 problem he'd
reported in September 88; in fact, since that date, he'd passed two more
security alerts to Jerry Dalton, concerning matters that Boykin considered
far worse than the E911 Document.

But by 1990, year of the crackdown, AT&T Corporate Information
Security was fed up with "Killer." This machine offered no direct income to
AT&T, and was providing aid and comfort to a cloud of suspicious yokels
from outside the company, some of them actively malicious toward AT&T,
its property, and its corporate interests. Whatever goodwill and publicity
had been won among Killer's 1,500 devoted users was considered no longer
worth the security risk. On February 20, 1990, Jerry Dalton arrived in
Dallas and simply unplugged the phone jacks, to the puzzled alarm of
Killer's many Texan users. Killer went permanently off-line, with the loss of
vast archives of programs and huge quantities of electronic mail; it was
never restored to service. AT&T showed no particular regard for the
"property" of these 1,500 people. Whatever "property" the users had been
storing on AT&T's computer simply vanished completely.

Boykin, who had himself reported the E911 problem, now found himself
under a cloud of suspicion. In a weird private-security replay of the Secret
Service seizures, Boykin's own home was visited by AT&T Security and his
own machines were carried out the door.

However, there were marked special features in the Boykin case.
Boykin's disks and his personal computers were swiftly examined by his
corporate employers and returned politely in just two days—(unlike Secret
Service seizures, which commonly take months or years). Boykin was not
charged with any crime or wrongdoing, and he kept his job with AT&T
(though he did retire from AT&T in September 1991, at the age of 52).

It's interesting to note that the US Secret Service somehow failed to seize
Boykin's "Killer" node and carry AT&T's own computer out the door. Nor
did they raid Boykin's home. They seemed perfectly willing to take the
word of AT&T Security that AT&T's employee, and AT&T's "Killer" node,
were free of hacker contraband and on the up-and-up.

It's digital water-under-the-bridge at this point, as Killer's 3,200
megabytes of Texan electronic community were erased in 1990, and
"Killer" itself was shipped out of the state.

But the experiences of Andrews and Boykin, and the users of their
systems, remained side issues. They did not begin to assume the social,
political, and legal importance that gathered, slowly but inexorably, around
the issue of the raid on Steve Jackson Games.

#

We must now turn our attention to Steve Jackson Games itself, and
explain what SJG was, what it really did, and how it had managed to attract
this particularly odd and virulent kind of trouble. The reader may recall that
this is not the first but the second time that the company has appeared in
this narrative; a Steve Jackson game called GURPS was a favorite pastime
of Atlanta hacker Urvile, and Urvile's science-fictional gaming notes had
been mixed up promiscuously with notes about his actual computer
intrusions.

First, Steve Jackson Games, Inc., was NOT a publisher of "computer
games." SJG published "simulation games," parlor games that were played
on paper, with pencils, and dice, and printed guidebooks full of rules and
statistics tables. There were no computers involved in the games
themselves. When you bought a Steve Jackson Game, you did not receive

any software disks. What you got was a plastic bag with some cardboard
game tokens, maybe a few maps or a deck of cards. Most of their products
were books.

However, computers WERE deeply involved in the Steve Jackson
Games business. Like almost all modern publishers, Steve Jackson and his
fifteen employees used computers to write text, to keep accounts, and to run
the business generally. They also used a computer to run their official
bulletin board system for Steve Jackson Games, a board called Illuminati.
On Illuminati, simulation gamers who happened to own computers and
modems could associate, trade mail, debate the theory and practice of
gaming, and keep up with the company's news and its product
announcements.

Illuminati was a modestly popular board, run on a small computer with
limited storage, only one phone-line, and no ties to large-scale computer
networks. It did, however, have hundreds of users, many of them dedicated
gamers willing to call from out-of-state.

Illuminati was NOT an "underground" board. It did not feature hints on
computer intrusion, or "anarchy files," or illicitly posted credit card
numbers, or long-distance access codes. Some of Illuminati's users,
however, were members of the Legion of Doom. And so was one of Steve
Jackson's senior employees—the Mentor. The Mentor wrote for Phrack, and
also ran an underground board, Phoenix Project—but the Mentor was not a
computer professional. The Mentor was the managing editor of Steve
Jackson Games and a professional game designer by trade. These LoD
members did not use Illuminati to help their HACKING activities. They
used it to help their GAME-PLAYING activities—and they were even more
dedicated to simulation gaming than they were to hacking.

"Illuminati" got its name from a card-game that Steve Jackson himself,
the company's founder and sole owner, had invented. This multi-player
card-game was one of Mr Jackson's best-known, most successful, most
technically innovative products. "Illuminati" was a game of paranoiac
conspiracy in which various antisocial cults warred covertly to dominate the
world. "Illuminati" was hilarious, and great fun to play, involving flying
saucers, the CIA, the KGB, the phone companies, the Ku Klux Klan, the

South American Nazis, the cocaine cartels, the Boy Scouts, and dozens of
other splinter groups from the twisted depths of Mr. Jackson's
professionally fervid imagination. For the uninitiated, any public discussion
of the "Illuminati" card-game sounded, by turns, utterly menacing or
completely insane.

And then there was SJG's "Car Wars," in which souped-up armored hot-
rods with rocket-launchers and heavy machine-guns did battle on the
American highways of the future. The lively Car Wars discussion on the
Illuminati board featured many meticulous, painstaking discussions of the
effects of grenades, land-mines, flamethrowers and napalm. It sounded like
hacker anarchy files run amuck.

Mr Jackson and his co-workers earned their daily bread by supplying
people with make-believe adventures and weird ideas. The more far-out, the
better.

Simulation gaming is an unusual pastime, but gamers have not generally
had to beg the permission of the Secret Service to exist. Wargames and role-
playing adventures are an old and honored pastime, much favored by
professional military strategists. Once little-known, these games are now
played by hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts throughout North America,
Europe and Japan. Gaming-books, once restricted to hobby outlets, now
commonly appear in chain-stores like B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks, and
sell vigorously.

Steve Jackson Games, Inc., of Austin, Texas, was a games company of
the middle rank. In 1989, SJG grossed about a million dollars. Jackson
himself had a good reputation in his industry as a talented and innovative
designer of rather unconventional games, but his company was something
less than a titan of the field—certainly not like the multimillion-dollar TSR
Inc., or Britain's gigantic "Games Workshop." SJG's Austin headquarters
was a modest two-story brick office-suite, cluttered with phones,
photocopiers, fax machines and computers. It bustled with semi-organized
activity and was littered with glossy promotional brochures and dog-eared
science-fiction novels. Attached to the offices was a large tin-roofed
warehouse piled twenty feet high with cardboard boxes of games and
books. Despite the weird imaginings that went on within it, the SJG

headquarters was quite a quotidian, everyday sort of place. It looked like
what it was: a publishers' digs.

Both "Car Wars" and "Illuminati" were well-known, popular games. But
the mainstay of the Jackson organization was their Generic Universal Role-
Playing System, "G.U.R.P.S." The GURPS system was considered solid and
well-designed, an asset for players. But perhaps the most popular feature of
the GURPS system was that it allowed gaming-masters to design scenarios
that closely resembled well-known books, movies, and other works of
fantasy. Jackson had licensed and adapted works from many science fiction
and fantasy authors. There was GURPS Conan, GURPS Riverworld,
GURPS Horseclans, GURPS Witch World, names eminently familiar to
science-fiction readers. And there was GURPS Special Ops, from the world
of espionage fantasy and unconventional warfare.

And then there was GURPS Cyberpunk.

"Cyberpunk" was a term given to certain science fiction writers who had
entered the genre in the 1980s. "Cyberpunk," as the label implies, had two
general distinguishing features. First, its writers had a compelling interest in
information technology, an interest closely akin to science fiction's earlier
fascination with space travel. And second, these writers were "punks," with
all the distinguishing features that that implies: Bohemian artiness, youth
run wild, an air of deliberate rebellion, funny clothes and hair, odd politics,
a fondness for abrasive rock and roll; in a word, trouble.

The "cyberpunk" SF writers were a small group of mostly college-
educated white middle-class litterateurs, scattered through the US and
Canada. Only one, Rudy Rucker, a professor of computer science in Silicon
Valley, could rank with even the humblest computer hacker. But, except for
Professor Rucker, the "cyberpunk" authors were not programmers or
hardware experts; they considered themselves artists (as, indeed, did
Professor Rucker). However, these writers all owned computers, and took
an intense and public interest in the social ramifications of the information
industry.

The cyberpunks had a strong following among the global generation that
had grown up in a world of computers, multinational networks, and cable

television. Their outlook was considered somewhat morbid, cynical, and
dark, but then again, so was the outlook of their generational peers. As that
generation matured and increased in strength and influence, so did the
cyberpunks. As science-fiction writers went, they were doing fairly well for
themselves. By the late 1980s, their work had attracted attention from
gaming companies, including Steve Jackson Games, which was planning a
cyberpunk simulation for the flourishing GURPS gaming-system.

The time seemed ripe for such a product, which had already been proven
in the marketplace. The first games-company out of the gate, with a product
boldly called "Cyberpunk" in defiance of possible infringement-of-
copyright suits, had been an upstart group called R. Talsorian. Talsorian's
Cyberpunk was a fairly decent game, but the mechanics of the simulation
system left a lot to be desired. Commercially, however, the game did very
well.

The next cyberpunk game had been the even more successful
Shadowrun by FASA Corporation. The mechanics of this game were fine,
but the scenario was rendered moronic by sappy fantasy elements like
elves, trolls, wizards, and dragons—all highly ideologically-incorrect,
according to the hard-edged, high-tech standards of cyberpunk science
fiction.

Other game designers were champing at the bit. Prominent among them
was the Mentor, a gentleman who, like most of his friends in the Legion of
Doom, was quite the cyberpunk devotee. Mentor reasoned that the time had
come for a REAL cyberpunk gaming-book—one that the princes of
computer-mischief in the Legion of Doom could play without laughing
themselves sick. This book, GURPS Cyberpunk, would reek of culturally
on-line authenticity.

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

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

And now, that book, stored on a computer, had gone out the door in the
custody of the Secret Service.

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

"It's science fiction," Jackson said.

"No, this is real."

This statement was repeated several times, by several agents. Jackson's
ominously accurate game had passed from pure, obscure, small-scale
fantasy into the impure, highly publicized, large-scale fantasy of the Hacker
Crackdown.

No mention was made of the real reason for the search. According to
their search warrant, the raiders had expected to find the E911 Document
stored on Jackson's bulletin board system. But that warrant was sealed; a
procedure that most law enforcement agencies will use only when lives are
demonstrably in danger. The raiders' true motives were not discovered until
the Jackson search-warrant was unsealed by his lawyers, many months
later. The Secret Service, and the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task
Force, said absolutely nothing to Steve Jackson about any threat to the
police 911 System. They said nothing about the Atlanta Three, nothing
about Phrack or Knight Lightning, nothing about Terminus.

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

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

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

At this point, however, I have another figure to introduce: myself.

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

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

When the Steve Jackson Games seizure occurred, I naturally took an
intense interest. If "cyberpunk" books were being banned by federal police
in my own home town, I reasonably wondered whether I myself might be
next. Would my computer be seized by the Secret Service? At the time, I
was in possession of an aging Apple IIe without so much as a hard disk. If I

were to be raided as an author of computer-crime manuals, the loss of my
feeble word-processor would likely provoke more snickers than sympathy.

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

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

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

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

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

Once upon a time—back in 1939, in New York City—science fiction and
the U.S. Secret Service collided in a comic case of mistaken identity. This

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

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

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

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

PART THREE: LAW AND ORDER

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

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

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

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

There was some justice in this confused perception, though. For one
thing, the confusion was abetted by the Washington office of the Secret
Service, who responded to Freedom of Information Act requests on
"Operation Sundevil" by referring investigators to the publicly known cases
of Knight Lightning and the Atlanta Three. And "Sundevil" was certainly

the largest aspect of the Crackdown, the most deliberate and the best-
organized. As a crackdown on electronic fraud, "Sundevil" lacked the
frantic pace of the war on the Legion of Doom; on the contrary, Sundevil's
targets were picked out with cool deliberation over an elaborate
investigation lasting two full years.

And once again the targets were bulletin board systems.

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

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

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

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

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

But besides their nuisance potential for the spread of illicit knowledge,
bulletin boards have another vitally interesting aspect for the professional
investigator. Bulletin boards are cram-full of EVIDENCE. All that busy
trading of electronic mail, all those hacker boasts, brags and struts, even the
stolen codes and cards, can be neat, electronic, real-time recordings of
criminal activity. As an investigator, when you seize a pirate board, you
have scored a coup as effective as tapping phones or intercepting mail.
However, you have not actually tapped a phone or intercepted a letter. The
rules of evidence regarding phone-taps and mail interceptions are old, stern
and well-understood by police, prosecutors and defense attorneys alike. The
rules of evidence regarding boards are new, waffling, and understood by
nobody at all.

Sundevil was the largest crackdown on boards in world history. On May
7, 8, and 9, 1990, about forty-two computer systems were seized. Of those
forty-two computers, about twenty-five actually were running boards. (The
vagueness of this estimate is attributable to the vagueness of (a) what a
"computer system" is, and (b) what it actually means to "run a board" with
one—or with two computers, or with three.)

About twenty-five boards vanished into police custody in May 1990. As
we have seen, there are an estimated 30,000 boards in America today. If we
assume that one board in a hundred is up to no good with codes and cards
(which rather flatters the honesty of the board-using community), then that
would leave 2,975 outlaw boards untouched by Sundevil. Sundevil seized
about one tenth of one percent of all computer bulletin boards in America.
Seen objectively, this is something less than a comprehensive assault. In
1990, Sundevil's organizers—the team at the Phoenix Secret Service office,
and the Arizona Attorney General's office—had a list of at least THREE
HUNDRED boards that they considered fully deserving of search and
seizure warrants. The twenty-five boards actually seized were merely
among the most obvious and egregious of this much larger list of

candidates. All these boards had been examined beforehand—either by
informants, who had passed printouts to the Secret Service, or by Secret
Service agents themselves, who not only come equipped with modems but
know how to use them.

There were a number of motives for Sundevil. First, it offered a chance
to get ahead of the curve on wire-fraud crimes. Tracking back credit-card
ripoffs to their perpetrators can be appallingly difficult. If these miscreants
have any kind of electronic sophistication, they can snarl their tracks
through the phone network into a mind-boggling, untraceable mess, while
still managing to "reach out and rob someone." Boards, however, full of
brags and boasts, codes and cards, offer evidence in the handy congealed
form.

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

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

Many of these raids occurred, not in the cities proper, but in associated
white-middle class suburbs—places like Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania and

Clark Lake, Michigan. There were a few raids on offices; most took place
in people's homes, the classic hacker basements and bedrooms.

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

Hackers are generally not indicted (if at all) until the evidence in their
seized computers is evaluated—a process that can take weeks, months—
even years. When hackers are arrested on the spot, it's generally an arrest
for other reasons. Drugs and/or illegal weapons show up in a good third of
anti-hacker computer seizures (though not during Sundevil).

That scofflaw teenage hackers (or their parents) should have marijuana
in their homes is probably not a shocking revelation, but the surprisingly
common presence of illegal firearms in hacker dens is a bit disquieting. A
Personal Computer can be a great equalizer for the techno-cowboy—much
like that more traditional American "Great Equalizer," the Personal Sixgun.
Maybe it's not all that surprising that some guy obsessed with power
through illicit technology would also have a few illicit high-velocity-impact
devices around. An element of the digital underground particularly dotes on
those "anarchy philes," and this element tends to shade into the crackpot
milieu of survivalists, gun-nuts, anarcho-leftists and the ultra-libertarian
right-wing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

have been known to vanish as well, including telephones, televisions,
answering machines, Sony Walkmans, desktop printers, compact disks, and
audiotapes.

No fewer than 150 members of the Secret Service were sent into the
field during Sundevil. They were commonly accompanied by squads of
local and/or state police. Most of these officers—especially the locals—had
never been on an anti-hacker raid before. (This was one good reason, in
fact, why so many of them were invited along in the first place.) Also, the
presence of a uniformed police officer assures the raidees that the people
entering their homes are, in fact, police. Secret Service agents wear plain
clothes. So do the telco security experts who commonly accompany the
Secret Service on raids (and who make no particular effort to identify
themselves as mere employees of telephone companies).

A typical hacker raid goes something like this. First, police storm in
rapidly, through every entrance, with overwhelming force, in the
assumption that this tactic will keep casualties to a minimum. Second,
possible suspects are immediately removed from the vicinity of any and all
computer systems, so that they will have no chance to purge or destroy
computer evidence. Suspects are herded into a room without computers,
commonly the living room, and kept under guard—not ARMED guard, for
the guns are swiftly holstered, but under guard nevertheless. They are
presented with the search warrant and warned that anything they say may
be held against them. Commonly they have a great deal to say, especially if
they are unsuspecting parents.

Somewhere in the house is the "hot spot"—a computer tied to a phone
line (possibly several computers and several phones). Commonly it's a
teenager's bedroom, but it can be anywhere in the house; there may be
several such rooms. This "hot spot" is put in charge of a two-agent team, the
"finder" and the "recorder." The "finder" is computer-trained, commonly the
case agent who has actually obtained the search warrant from a judge. He or
she understands what is being sought, and actually carries out the seizures:
unplugs machines, opens drawers, desks, files, floppy-disk containers, etc.
The "recorder" photographs all the equipment, just as it stands—especially
the tangle of wired connections in the back, which can otherwise be a real

nightmare to restore. The recorder will also commonly photograph every
room in the house, lest some wily criminal claim that the police had robbed
him during the search. Some recorders carry videocams or tape recorders;
however, it's more common for the recorder to simply take written notes.
Objects are described and numbered as the finder seizes them, generally on
standard preprinted police inventory forms.

Even Secret Service agents were not, and are not, expert computer users.
They have not made, and do not make, judgements on the fly about
potential threats posed by various forms of equipment. They may exercise
discretion; they may leave Dad his computer, for instance, but they don't
HAVE to. Standard computer-crime search warrants, which date back to the
early 80s, use a sweeping language that targets computers, most anything
attached to a computer, most anything used to operate a computer—most
anything that remotely resembles a computer—plus most any and all
written documents surrounding it. Computer-crime investigators have
strongly urged agents to seize the works.

In this sense, Operation Sundevil appears to have been a complete
success. Boards went down all over America, and were shipped en masse to
the computer investigation lab of the Secret Service, in Washington DC,
along with the 23,000 floppy disks and unknown quantities of printed
material.

But the seizure of twenty-five boards, and the multi-megabyte mountains
of possibly useful evidence contained in these boards (and in their owners'
other computers, also out the door), were far from the only motives for
Operation Sundevil. An unprecedented action of great ambition and size,
Sundevil's motives can only be described as political. It was a public-
relations effort, meant to pass certain messages, meant to make certain
situations clear: both in the mind of the general public, and in the minds of
various constituencies of the electronic community.

First—and this motivation was vital—a "message" would be sent from
law enforcement to the digital underground. This very message was recited
in so many words by Garry M. Jenkins, the Assistant Director of the US
Secret Service, at the Sundevil press conference in Phoenix on May 9,
1990, immediately after the raids. In brief, hackers were mistaken in their

foolish belief that they could hide behind the "relative anonymity of their
computer terminals." On the contrary, they should fully understand that
state and federal cops were actively patrolling the beat in cyberspace—that
they were on the watch everywhere, even in those sleazy and secretive dens
of cybernetic vice, the underground boards.

This is not an unusual message for police to publicly convey to crooks.
The message is a standard message; only the context is new.

In this respect, the Sundevil raids were the digital equivalent of the
standard vice-squad crackdown on massage parlors, porno bookstores,
head-shops, or floating crap-games. There may be few or no arrests in a raid
of this sort; no convictions, no trials, no interrogations. In cases of this sort,
police may well walk out the door with many pounds of sleazy magazines,
X-rated videotapes, sex toys, gambling equipment, baggies of marijuana....

Of course, if something truly horrendous is discovered by the raiders,
there will be arrests and prosecutions. Far more likely, however, there will
simply be a brief but sharp disruption of the closed and secretive world of
the nogoodniks. There will be "street hassle." "Heat." "Deterrence." And, of
course, the immediate loss of the seized goods. It is very unlikely that any
of this seized material will ever be returned. Whether charged or not,
whether convicted or not, the perpetrators will almost surely lack the nerve
ever to ask for this stuff to be given back.

Arrests and trials—putting people in jail—may involve all kinds of
formal legalities; but dealing with the justice system is far from the only
task of police. Police do not simply arrest people. They don't simply put
people in jail. That is not how the police perceive their jobs. Police "protect
and serve." Police "keep the peace," they "keep public order." Like other
forms of public relations, keeping public order is not an exact science.
Keeping public order is something of an art-form.

If a group of tough-looking teenage hoodlums was loitering on a street-
corner, no one would be surprised to see a street-cop arrive and sternly
order them to "break it up." On the contrary, the surprise would come if one
of these ne'er-do-wells stepped briskly into a phone-booth, called a civil
rights lawyer, and instituted a civil suit in defense of his Constitutional

rights of free speech and free assembly. But something much along this line
was one of the many anomolous outcomes of the Hacker Crackdown.

Sundevil also carried useful "messages" for other constituents of the
electronic community. These messages may not have been read aloud from
the Phoenix podium in front of the press corps, but there was little
mistaking their meaning. There was a message of reassurance for the
primary victims of coding and carding: the telcos, and the credit companies.
Sundevil was greeted with joy by the security officers of the electronic
business community. After years of high-tech harassment and spiralling
revenue losses, their complaints of rampant outlawry were being taken
seriously by law enforcement. No more head-scratching or dismissive
shrugs; no more feeble excuses about "lack of computer-trained officers" or
the low priority of "victimless" white-collar telecommunication crimes.

Computer-crime experts have long believed that computer-related
offenses are drastically under-reported. They regard this as a major open
scandal of their field. Some victims are reluctant to come forth, because
they believe that police and prosecutors are not computer-literate, and can
and will do nothing. Others are embarrassed by their vulnerabilities, and
will take strong measures to avoid any publicity; this is especially true of
banks, who fear a loss of investor confidence should an embezzlement-case
or wire-fraud surface. And some victims are so helplessly confused by their
own high technology that they never even realize that a crime has occurred
—even when they have been fleeced to the bone.

The results of this situation can be dire. Criminals escape apprehension
and punishment. The computer-crime units that do exist, can't get work. The
true scope of computer-crime: its size, its real nature, the scope of its
threats, and the legal remedies for it—all remain obscured.

Another problem is very little publicized, but it is a cause of genuine
concern. Where there is persistent crime, but no effective police protection,
then vigilantism can result. Telcos, banks, credit companies, the major
corporations who maintain extensive computer networks vulnerable to
hacking —these organizations are powerful, wealthy, and politically
influential. They are disinclined to be pushed around by crooks (or by most
anyone else, for that matter). They often maintain well-organized private

security forces, commonly run by experienced veterans of military and
police units, who have left public service for the greener pastures of the
private sector. For police, the corporate security manager can be a powerful
ally; but if this gentleman finds no allies in the police, and the pressure is on
from his board-of-directors, he may quietly take certain matters into his
own hands.

Nor is there any lack of disposable hired-help in the corporate security
business. Private security agencies—the 'security business' generally—grew
explosively in the 1980s. Today there are spooky gumshoed armies of
"security consultants," "rent-a-cops," "private eyes," "outside experts"—
every manner of shady operator who retails in "results" and discretion. Or
course, many of these gentlemen and ladies may be paragons of
professional and moral rectitude. But as anyone who has read a hard-boiled
detective novel knows, police tend to be less than fond of this sort of
private-sector competition.

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

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

But reassuring talk is cheap. Sundevil offered action.

The final message of Sundevil was intended for internal consumption by
law enforcement. Sundevil was offered as proof that the community of

American computer-crime police had come of age. Sundevil was proof that
enormous things like Sundevil itself could now be accomplished. Sundevil
was proof that the Secret Service and its local law-enforcement allies could
act like a well-oiled machine—(despite the hampering use of those
scrambled phones). It was also proof that the Arizona Organized Crime and
Racketeering Unit—the sparkplug of Sundevil—ranked with the best in the
world in ambition, organization, and sheer conceptual daring.

And, as a final fillip, Sundevil was a message from the Secret Service to
their longtime rivals in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. By
Congressional fiat, both USSS and FBI formally share jurisdiction over
federal computer-crimebusting activities. Neither of these groups has ever
been remotely happy with this muddled situation. It seems to suggest that
Congress cannot make up its mind as to which of these groups is better
qualified. And there is scarcely a G-man or a Special Agent anywhere
without a very firm opinion on that topic.

#

For the neophyte, one of the most puzzling aspects of the crackdown on
hackers is why the United States Secret Service has anything at all to do
with this matter.

The Secret Service is best known for its primary public role: its agents
protect the President of the United States. They also guard the President's
family, the Vice President and his family, former Presidents, and
Presidential candidates. They sometimes guard foreign dignitaries who are
visiting the United States, especially foreign heads of state, and have been
known to accompany American officials on diplomatic missions overseas.

Special Agents of the Secret Service don't wear uniforms, but the Secret
Service also has two uniformed police agencies. There's the former White
House Police (now known as the Secret Service Uniformed Division, since
they currently guard foreign embassies in Washington, as well as the White
House itself). And there's the uniformed Treasury Police Force.

The Secret Service has been charged by Congress with a number of
little-known duties. They guard the precious metals in Treasury vaults. They

guard the most valuable historical documents of the United States: originals
of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln's Second
Inaugural Address, an American-owned copy of the Magna Carta, and so
forth. Once they were assigned to guard the Mona Lisa, on her American
tour in the 1960s.

The entire Secret Service is a division of the Treasury Department.
Secret Service Special Agents (there are about 1,900 of them) are
bodyguards for the President et al, but they all work for the Treasury. And
the Treasury (through its divisions of the U.S. Mint and the Bureau of
Engraving and Printing) prints the nation's money.

As Treasury police, the Secret Service guards the nation's currency; it is
the only federal law enforcement agency with direct jurisdiction over
counterfeiting and forgery. It analyzes documents for authenticity, and its
fight against fake cash is still quite lively (especially since the skilled
counterfeiters of Medellin, Columbia have gotten into the act). Government
checks, bonds, and other obligations, which exist in untold millions and are
worth untold billions, are common targets for forgery, which the Secret
Service also battles. It even handles forgery of postage stamps.

But cash is fading in importance today as money has become electronic.
As necessity beckoned, the Secret Service moved from fighting the
counterfeiting of paper currency and the forging of checks, to the protection
of funds transferred by wire.

From wire-fraud, it was a simple skip-and-jump to what is formally
known as "access device fraud." Congress granted the Secret Service the
authority to investigate "access device fraud" under Title 18 of the United
States Code (U.S.C. Section 1029).

The term "access device" seems intuitively simple. It's some kind of
high-tech gizmo you use to get money with. It makes good sense to put this
sort of thing in the charge of counterfeiting and wire-fraud experts.

However, in Section 1029, the term "access device" is very generously
defined. An access device is: "any card, plate, code, account number, or
other means of account access that can be used, alone or in conjunction

with another access device, to obtain money, goods, services, or any other
thing of value, or that can be used to initiate a transfer of funds."

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

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

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

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

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

company document to Knight Lightning at Phrack magazine, they were
both charged under Sec. 1029!

There are two limitations on Section 1029. First, the offense must "affect
interstate or foreign commerce" in order to become a matter of federal
jurisdiction. The term "affecting commerce" is not well defined; but you
may take it as a given that the Secret Service can take an interest if you've
done most anything that happens to cross a state line. State and local police
can be touchy about their jurisdictions, and can sometimes be mulish when
the feds show up. But when it comes to computer-crime, the local police are
pathetically grateful for federal help—in fact they complain that they can't
get enough of it. If you're stealing long-distance service, you're almost
certainly crossing state lines, and you're definitely "affecting the interstate
commerce" of the telcos. And if you're abusing credit cards by ordering
stuff out of glossy catalogs from, say, Vermont, you're in for it.

The second limitation is money. As a rule, the feds don't pursue penny-
ante offenders. Federal judges will dismiss cases that appear to waste their
time. Federal crimes must be serious; Section 1029 specifies a minimum
loss of a thousand dollars.

We now come to the very next section of Title 18, which is Section 1030,
"Fraud and related activity in connection with computers." This statute
gives the Secret Service direct jurisdiction over acts of computer intrusion.
On the face of it, the Secret Service would now seem to command the field.
Section 1030, however, is nowhere near so ductile as Section 1029.

The first annoyance is Section 1030(d), which reads:

"(d) The United States Secret Service shall, IN ADDITION TO ANY
OTHER AGENCY HAVING SUCH AUTHORITY, have the authority to
investigate offenses under this section. Such authority of the United States
Secret Service shall be exercised in accordance with an agreement which
shall be entered into by the Secretary of the Treasury AND THE
ATTORNEY GENERAL." (Author's italics.) [Represented by capitals.]

The Secretary of the Treasury is the titular head of the Secret Service,
while the Attorney General is in charge of the FBI. In Section (d), Congress

shrugged off responsibility for the computer-crime turf-battle between the
Service and the Bureau, and made them fight it out all by themselves. The
result was a rather dire one for the Secret Service, for the FBI ended up
with exclusive jurisdiction over computer break-ins having to do with
national security, foreign espionage, federally insured banks, and U.S.
military bases, while retaining joint jurisdiction over all the other computer
intrusions. Essentially, when it comes to Section 1030, the FBI not only gets
the real glamor stuff for itself, but can peer over the shoulder of the Secret
Service and barge in to meddle whenever it suits them.

The second problem has to do with the dicey term "Federal interest
computer." Section 1030(a)(2) makes it illegal to "access a computer
without authorization" if that computer belongs to a financial institution or
an issuer of credit cards (fraud cases, in other words). Congress was quite
willing to give the Secret Service jurisdiction over money-transferring
computers, but Congress balked at letting them investigate any and all
computer intrusions. Instead, the USSS had to settle for the money
machines and the "Federal interest computers." A "Federal interest
computer" is a computer which the government itself owns, or is using.
Large networks of interstate computers, linked over state lines, are also
considered to be of "Federal interest." (This notion of "Federal interest" is
legally rather foggy and has never been clearly defined in the courts. The
Secret Service has never yet had its hand slapped for investigating computer
break-ins that were NOT of "Federal interest," but conceivably someday
this might happen.)

So the Secret Service's authority over "unauthorized access" to
computers covers a lot of territory, but by no means the whole ball of
cyberspatial wax. If you are, for instance, a LOCAL computer retailer, or
the owner of a LOCAL bulletin board system, then a malicious LOCAL
intruder can break in, crash your system, trash your files and scatter viruses,
and the U.S. Secret Service cannot do a single thing about it.

At least, it can't do anything DIRECTLY. But the Secret Service will do
plenty to help the local people who can.

The FBI may have dealt itself an ace off the bottom of the deck when it
comes to Section 1030; but that's not the whole story; that's not the street.

What's Congress thinks is one thing, and Congress has been known to
change its mind. The REAL turf-struggle is out there in the streets where it's
happening. If you're a local street-cop with a computer problem, the Secret
Service wants you to know where you can find the real expertise. While the
Bureau crowd are off having their favorite shoes polished—(wing-tips)—
and making derisive fun of the Service's favorite shoes—("pansy-ass
tassels")—the tassel-toting Secret Service has a crew of ready-and-able
hacker-trackers installed in the capital of every state in the Union. Need
advice? They'll give you advice, or at least point you in the right direction.
Need training? They can see to that, too.

If you're a local cop and you call in the FBI, the FBI (as is widely and
slanderously rumored) will order you around like a coolie, take all the credit
for your busts, and mop up every possible scrap of reflected glory. The
Secret Service, on the other hand, doesn't brag a lot. They're the quiet types.
VERY quiet. Very cool. Efficient. High-tech. Mirrorshades, icy stares, radio
ear-plugs, an Uzi machine-pistol tucked somewhere in that well-cut jacket.
American samurai, sworn to give their lives to protect our President. "The
granite agents." Trained in martial arts, absolutely fearless. Every single one
of 'em has a top-secret security clearance. Something goes a little wrong,
you're not gonna hear any whining and moaning and political buck-passing
out of these guys.

The facade of the granite agent is not, of course, the reality. Secret
Service agents are human beings. And the real glory in Service work is not
in battling computer crime—not yet, anyway—but in protecting the
President. The real glamour of Secret Service work is in the White House
Detail. If you're at the President's side, then the kids and the wife see you on
television; you rub shoulders with the most powerful people in the world.
That's the real heart of Service work, the number one priority. More than
one computer investigation has stopped dead in the water when Service
agents vanished at the President's need.

There's romance in the work of the Service. The intimate access to
circles of great power; the esprit-de-corps of a highly trained and
disciplined elite; the high responsibility of defending the Chief Executive;
the fulfillment of a patriotic duty. And as police work goes, the pay's not

bad. But there's squalor in Service work, too. You may get spat upon by
protesters howling abuse—and if they get violent, if they get too close,
sometimes you have to knock one of them down—discreetly.

The real squalor in Service work is drudgery such as "the quarterlies,"
traipsing out four times a year, year in, year out, to interview the various
pathetic wretches, many of them in prisons and asylums, who have seen fit
to threaten the President's life. And then there's the grinding stress of
searching all those faces in the endless bustling crowds, looking for hatred,
looking for psychosis, looking for the tight, nervous face of an Arthur
Bremer, a Squeaky Fromme, a Lee Harvey Oswald. It's watching all those
grasping, waving hands for sudden movements, while your ears strain at
your radio headphone for the long-rehearsed cry of "Gun!"

It's poring, in grinding detail, over the biographies of every rotten loser
who ever shot at a President. It's the unsung work of the Protective
Research Section, who study scrawled, anonymous death threats with all
the meticulous tools of anti-forgery techniques.

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

Protecting the President has first call on all the Service's resources. But
there's a lot more to the Service's traditions and history than standing guard
outside the Oval Office.

The Secret Service is the nation's oldest general federal law-enforcement
agency. Compared to the Secret Service, the FBI are new-hires and the CIA
are temps. The Secret Service was founded 'way back in 1865, at the
suggestion of Hugh McCulloch, Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of the

Treasury. McCulloch wanted a specialized Treasury police to combat
counterfeiting. Abraham Lincoln agreed that this seemed a good idea, and,
with a terrible irony, Abraham Lincoln was shot that very night by John
Wilkes Booth.

The Secret Service originally had nothing to do with protecting
Presidents. They didn't take this on as a regular assignment until after the
Garfield assassination in 1881. And they didn't get any Congressional
money for it until President McKinley was shot in 1901. The Service was
originally designed for one purpose: destroying counterfeiters.

#

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

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

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

No one knew the exact extent of the threat to the currency. There were
panicked estimates that as much as a third of the entire national currency
was faked. Counterfeiters—known as "boodlers" in the underground slang
of the time—were mostly technically skilled printers who had gone to the
bad. Many had once worked printing legitimate currency. Boodlers operated
in rings and gangs. Technical experts engraved the bogus plates—

commonly in basements in New York City. Smooth confidence men passed
large wads of high-quality, high-denomination fakes, including the really
sophisticated stuff—government bonds, stock certificates, and railway
shares. Cheaper, botched fakes were sold or sharewared to low-level gangs
of boodler wannabes. (The really cheesy lowlife boodlers merely upgraded
real bills by altering face values, changing ones to fives, tens to hundreds,
and so on.)

The techniques of boodling were little-known and regarded with a
certain awe by the mid-nineteenth-century public. The ability to manipulate
the system for rip-off seemed diabolically clever. As the skill and daring of
the boodlers increased, the situation became intolerable. The federal
government stepped in, and began offering its own federal currency, which
was printed in fancy green ink, but only on the back—the original
"greenbacks." And at first, the improved security of the well-designed, well-
printed federal greenbacks seemed to solve the problem; but then the
counterfeiters caught on. Within a few years things were worse than ever: a
CENTRALIZED system where ALL security was bad!

The local police were helpless. The Government tried offering blood
money to potential informants, but this met with little success. Banks,
plagued by boodling, gave up hope of police help and hired private security
men instead. Merchants and bankers queued up by the thousands to buy
privately-printed manuals on currency security, slim little books like Laban
Heath's INFALLIBLE GOVERNMENT COUNTERFEIT DETECTOR.
The back of the book offered Laban Heath's patent microscope for five
bucks.

Then the Secret Service entered the picture. The first agents were a
rough and ready crew. Their chief was one William P. Wood, a former
guerilla in the Mexican War who'd won a reputation busting contractor
fraudsters for the War Department during the Civil War. Wood, who was
also Keeper of the Capital Prison, had a sideline as a counterfeiting expert,
bagging boodlers for the federal bounty money.

Wood was named Chief of the new Secret Service in July 1865. There
were only ten Secret Service agents in all: Wood himself, a handful who'd
worked for him in the War Department, and a few former private

investigators—counterfeiting experts—whom Wood had won over to public
service. (The Secret Service of 1865 was much the size of the Chicago
Computer Fraud Task Force or the Arizona Racketeering Unit of 1990.)
These ten "Operatives" had an additional twenty or so "Assistant
Operatives" and "Informants." Besides salary and per diem, each Secret
Service employee received a whopping twenty-five dollars for each boodler
he captured.

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

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

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

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

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

anything. Wood found himself mired in a seemingly endless round of
federal suits and Congressional lobbying.

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

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

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

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

As for William Brockway (also known as "Colonel Spencer"), he was
finally arrested by the Secret Service in 1880. He did five years in prison,
got out, and was still boodling at the age of seventy-four.

#

Anyone with an interest in Operation Sundevil—or in American
computer-crime generally—could scarcely miss the presence of Gail
Thackeray, Assistant Attorney General of the State of Arizona. Computer-
crime training manuals often cited Thackeray's group and her work; she was
the highest-ranking state official to specialize in computer-related offenses.
Her name had been on the Sundevil press release (though modestly ranked
well after the local federal prosecuting attorney and the head of the Phoenix
Secret Service office).

As public commentary, and controversy, began to mount about the
Hacker Crackdown, this Arizonan state official began to take a higher and
higher public profile. Though uttering almost nothing specific about the
Sundevil operation itself, she coined some of the most striking soundbites

of the growing propaganda war: "Agents are operating in good faith, and I
don't think you can say that for the hacker community," was one. Another
was the memorable "I am not a mad dog prosecutor" (Houston Chronicle,
Sept 2, 1990.) In the meantime, the Secret Service maintained its usual
extreme discretion; the Chicago Unit, smarting from the backlash of the
Steve Jackson scandal, had gone completely to earth.

As I collated my growing pile of newspaper clippings, Gail Thackeray
ranked as a comparative fount of public knowledge on police operations.

I decided that I had to get to know Gail Thackeray. I wrote to her at the
Arizona Attorney General's Office. Not only did she kindly reply to me, but,
to my astonishment, she knew very well what "cyberpunk" science fiction
was.

Shortly after this, Gail Thackeray lost her job. And I temporarily
misplaced my own career as a science-fiction writer, to become a full-time
computer-crime journalist. In early March, 1991, I flew to Phoenix,
Arizona, to interview Gail Thackeray for my book on the hacker
crackdown.

#

"Credit cards didn't used to cost anything to get," says Gail Thackeray.
"Now they cost forty bucks—and that's all just to cover the costs from RIP-
OFF ARTISTS."

Electronic nuisance criminals are parasites. One by one they're not much
harm, no big deal. But they never come just one by one. They come in
swarms, heaps, legions, sometimes whole subcultures. And they bite. Every
time we buy a credit card today, we lose a little financial vitality to a
particular species of bloodsucker.

What, in her expert opinion, are the worst forms of electronic crime, I
ask, consulting my notes. Is it—credit card fraud? Breaking into ATM bank
machines? Phone-phreaking? Computer intrusions? Software viruses?
Access-code theft? Records tampering? Software piracy? Pornographic

bulletin boards? Satellite TV piracy? Theft of cable service? It's a long list.
By the time I reach the end of it I feel rather depressed.

"Oh no," says Gail Thackeray, leaning forward over the table, her whole
body gone stiff with energetic indignation, "the biggest damage is telephone
fraud. Fake sweepstakes, fake charities. Boiler-room con operations. You
could pay off the national debt with what these guys steal.... They target old
people, they get hold of credit ratings and demographics, they rip off the old
and the weak." The words come tumbling out of her.

It's low-tech stuff, your everyday boiler-room fraud. Grifters, conning
people out of money over the phone, have been around for decades. This is
where the word "phony" came from!

It's just that it's so much EASIER now, horribly facilitated by advances
in technology and the byzantine structure of the modern phone system. The
same professional fraudsters do it over and over, Thackeray tells me, they
hide behind dense onion-shells of fake companies ... fake holding
corporations nine or ten layers deep, registered all over the map. They get a
phone installed under a false name in an empty safe-house. And then they
call-forward everything out of that phone to yet another phone, a phone that
may even be in another STATE. And they don't even pay the charges on
their phones; after a month or so, they just split; set up somewhere else in
another Podunkville with the same seedy crew of veteran phone-crooks.
They buy or steal commercial credit card reports, slap them on the PC, have
a program pick out people over sixty-five who pay a lot to charities. A
whole subculture living off this, merciless folks on the con.

"The 'light-bulbs for the blind' people," Thackeray muses, with a special
loathing. "There's just no end to them."

We're sitting in a downtown diner in Phoenix, Arizona. It's a tough town,
Phoenix. A state capital seeing some hard times. Even to a Texan like
myself, Arizona state politics seem rather baroque. There was, and remains,
endless trouble over the Martin Luther King holiday, the sort of stiff-
necked, foot-shooting incident for which Arizona politics seem famous.
There was Evan Mecham, the eccentric Republican millionaire governor
who was impeached, after reducing state government to a ludicrous

shambles. Then there was the national Keating scandal, involving Arizona
savings and loans, in which both of Arizona's U.S. senators, DeConcini and
McCain, played sadly prominent roles.

And the very latest is the bizarre AzScam case, in which state legislators
were videotaped, eagerly taking cash from an informant of the Phoenix city
police department, who was posing as a Vegas mobster.

"Oh," says Thackeray cheerfully. "These people are amateurs here, they
thought they were finally getting to play with the big boys. They don't have
the least idea how to take a bribe! It's not institutional corruption. It's not
like back in Philly."

Gail Thackeray was a former prosecutor in Philadelphia. Now she's a
former assistant attorney general of the State of Arizona. Since moving to
Arizona in 1986, she had worked under the aegis of Steve Twist, her boss in
the Attorney General's office. Steve Twist wrote Arizona's pioneering
computer crime laws and naturally took an interest in seeing them enforced.
It was a snug niche, and Thackeray's Organized Crime and Racketeering
Unit won a national reputation for ambition and technical
knowledgeability.... Until the latest election in Arizona. Thackeray's boss
ran for the top job, and lost. The victor, the new Attorney General,
apparently went to some pains to eliminate the bureaucratic traces of his
rival, including his pet group—Thackeray's group. Twelve people got their
walking papers.

Now Thackeray's painstakingly assembled computer lab sits gathering
dust somewhere in the glass-and-concrete Attorney General's HQ on 1275
Washington Street. Her computer-crime books, her painstakingly garnered
back issues of phreak and hacker zines, all bought at her own expense—are
piled in boxes somewhere. The State of Arizona is simply not particularly
interested in electronic racketeering at the moment.

At the moment of our interview, Gail Thackeray, officially unemployed,
is working out of the county sheriff's office, living on her savings, and
prosecuting several cases—working 60-hour weeks, just as always—for no
pay at all. "I'm trying to train people," she mutters.

Half her life seems to be spent training people—merely pointing out, to
the naive and incredulous (such as myself) that this stuff is ACTUALLY
GOING ON OUT THERE. It's a small world, computer crime. A young
world. Gail Thackeray, a trim blonde Baby-Boomer who favors Grand
Canyon white-water rafting to kill some slow time, is one of the world's
most senior, most veteran "hacker-trackers." Her mentor was Donn Parker,
the California think-tank theorist who got it all started 'way back in the mid-
70s, the "grandfather of the field," "the great bald eagle of computer crime."

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

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

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

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

Hackers are no better. What other group of criminals, she asks
rhetorically, publishes newsletters and holds conventions? She seems

deeply nettled by the sheer brazenness of this behavior, though to an
outsider, this activity might make one wonder whether hackers should be
considered "criminals" at all. Skateboarders have magazines, and they
trespass a lot. Hot rod people have magazines and they break speed limits
and sometimes kill people....

I ask her whether it would be any loss to society if phone phreaking and
computer hacking, as hobbies, simply dried up and blew away, so that
nobody ever did it again.

She seems surprised. "No," she says swiftly. "Maybe a little ... in the old
days ... the MIT stuff.... But there's a lot of wonderful, legal stuff you can
do with computers now, you don't have to break into somebody else's just to
learn. You don't have that excuse. You can learn all you like."

Did you ever hack into a system? I ask.

The trainees do it at Glynco. Just to demonstrate system vulnerabilities.
She's cool to the notion. Genuinely indifferent.

"What kind of computer do you have?"

"A Compaq 286LE," she mutters.

"What kind do you WISH you had?"

At this question, the unmistakable light of true hackerdom flares in Gail
Thackeray's eyes. She becomes tense, animated, the words pour out: "An
Amiga 2000 with an IBM card and Mac emulation! The most common
hacker machines are Amigas and Commodores. And Apples." If she had the
Amiga, she enthuses, she could run a whole galaxy of seized computer-
evidence disks on one convenient multifunctional machine. A cheap one,
too. Not like the old Attorney General lab, where they had an ancient CP/M
machine, assorted Amiga flavors and Apple flavors, a couple IBMS, all the
utility software ... but no Commodores. The workstations down at the
Attorney General's are Wang dedicated word-processors. Lame machines
tied in to an office net—though at least they get on-line to the Lexis and
Westlaw legal data services.

I don't say anything. I recognize the syndrome, though. This computer-
fever has been running through segments of our society for years now. It's a
strange kind of lust: K-hunger, Meg-hunger; but it's a shared disease; it can
kill parties dead, as conversation spirals into the deepest and most deviant
recesses of software releases and expensive peripherals.... The mark of the
hacker beast. I have it too. The whole "electronic community," whatever the
hell that is, has it. Gail Thackeray has it. Gail Thackeray is a hacker cop.
My immediate reaction is a strong rush of indignant pity: WHY DOESN'T
SOMEBODY BUY THIS WOMAN HER AMIGA?! It's not like she's
asking for a Cray X-MP supercomputer mainframe; an Amiga's a sweet
little cookie-box thing. We're losing zillions in organized fraud; prosecuting
and defending a single hacker case in court can cost a hundred grand easy.
How come nobody can come up with four lousy grand so this woman can
do her job? For a hundred grand we could buy every computer cop in
America an Amiga. There aren't that many of 'em.

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

Gail Thackeray was one of the top computer-crime people in America.
And I was just some novelist, and yet I had a better computer than hers.
PRACTICALLY EVERYBODY I KNEW had a better computer than Gail
Thackeray and her feeble laptop 286. It was like sending the sheriff in to
clean up Dodge City and arming her with a slingshot cut from an old rubber
tire.

But then again, you don't need a howitzer to enforce the law. You can do
a lot just with a badge. With a badge alone, you can basically wreak havoc,
take a terrible vengeance on wrongdoers. Ninety percent of "computer
crime investigation" is just "crime investigation:" names, places, dossiers,
modus operandi, search warrants, victims, complainants, informants....

What will computer crime look like in ten years? Will it get better? Did
"Sundevil" send 'em reeling back in confusion?

It'll be like it is now, only worse, she tells me with perfect conviction.
Still there in the background, ticking along, changing with the times: the
criminal underworld. It'll be like drugs are. Like our problems with alcohol.
All the cops and laws in the world never solved our problems with alcohol.
If there's something people want, a certain percentage of them are just going
to take it. Fifteen percent of the populace will never steal. Fifteen percent
will steal most anything not nailed down. The battle is for the hearts and
minds of the remaining seventy percent.

And criminals catch on fast. If there's not "too steep a learning curve"—
if it doesn't require a baffling amount of expertise and practice—then
criminals are often some of the first through the gate of a new technology.
Especially if it helps them to hide. They have tons of cash, criminals. The
new communications tech—like pagers, cellular phones, faxes, Federal
Express—were pioneered by rich corporate people, and by criminals. In the
early years of pagers and beepers, dope dealers were so enthralled this
technology that owing a beeper was practically prima facie evidence of
cocaine dealing. CB radio exploded when the speed limit hit 55 and
breaking the highway law became a national pastime. Dope dealers send
cash by Federal Express, despite, or perhaps BECAUSE OF, the warnings
in FedEx offices that tell you never to try this. Fed Ex uses X-rays and dogs
on their mail, to stop drug shipments. That doesn't work very well.

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

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

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

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

Something that would make the Net sit still, if only for a moment.
Something that would get her up to speed. Seven league boots. That's what
she really needs. "Those guys move in nanoseconds and I'm on the Pony
Express."

And then, too, there's the coming international angle. Electronic crime
has never been easy to localize, to tie to a physical jurisdiction. And phone-
phreaks and hackers loathe boundaries, they jump them whenever they can.
The English. The Dutch. And the Germans, especially the ubiquitous Chaos
Computer Club. The Australians. They've all learned phone-phreaking from
America. It's a growth mischief industry. The multinational networks are
global, but governments and the police simply aren't. Neither are the laws.
Or the legal frameworks for citizen protection.

One language is global, though—English. Phone phreaks speak English;
it's their native tongue even if they're Germans. English may have started in
England but now it's the Net language; it might as well be called "CNNese."

Asians just aren't much into phone phreaking. They're the world masters
at organized software piracy. The French aren't into phone-phreaking either.
The French are into computerized industrial espionage.

In the old days of the MIT righteous hackerdom, crashing systems didn't
hurt anybody. Not all that much, anyway. Not permanently. Now the players

are more venal. Now the consequences are worse. Hacking will begin
killing people soon. Already there are methods of stacking calls onto 911
systems, annoying the police, and possibly causing the death of some poor
soul calling in with a genuine emergency. Hackers in Amtrak computers, or
air-traffic control computers, will kill somebody someday. Maybe a lot of
people. Gail Thackeray expects it.

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

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

I leave Gail Thackeray with a handshake at the door of her office
building—a vast International-Style office building downtown. The
Sheriff's office is renting part of it. I get the vague impression that quite a
lot of the building is empty—real estate crash.

In a Phoenix sports apparel store, in a downtown mall, I meet the "Sun
Devil" himself. He is the cartoon mascot of Arizona State University, whose
football stadium, "Sundevil," is near the local Secret Service HQ—hence
the name Operation Sundevil. The Sun Devil himself is named "Sparky."
Sparky the Sun Devil is maroon and bright yellow, the school colors.
Sparky brandishes a three-tined yellow pitchfork. He has a small mustache,

pointed ears, a barbed tail, and is dashing forward jabbing the air with the
pitchfork, with an expression of devilish glee.

Phoenix was the home of Operation Sundevil. The Legion of Doom ran
a hacker bulletin board called "The Phoenix Project." An Australian hacker
named "Phoenix" once burrowed through the Internet to attack Cliff Stoll,
then bragged and boasted about it to The New York Times. This net of
coincidence is both odd and meaningless.

The headquarters of the Arizona Attorney General, Gail Thackeray's
former workplace, is on 1275 Washington Avenue. Many of the downtown
streets in Phoenix are named after prominent American presidents:
Washington, Jefferson, Madison....

After dark, all the employees go home to their suburbs. Washington,
Jefferson and Madison—what would be the Phoenix inner city, if there were
an inner city in this sprawling automobile-bred town—become the haunts
of transients and derelicts. The homeless. The sidewalks along Washington
are lined with orange trees. Ripe fallen fruit lies scattered like croquet balls
on the sidewalks and gutters. No one seems to be eating them. I try a fresh
one. It tastes unbearably bitter.

The Attorney General's office, built in 1981 during the Babbitt
administration, is a long low two-story building of white cement and wall-
sized sheets of curtain-glass. Behind each glass wall is a lawyer's office,
quite open and visible to anyone strolling by. Across the street is a dour
government building labelled simply ECONOMIC SECURITY, something
that has not been in great supply in the American Southwest lately.

The offices are about twelve feet square. They feature tall wooden cases
full of red-spined lawbooks; Wang computer monitors; telephones; Post-it
notes galore. Also framed law diplomas and a general excess of bad
Western landscape art. Ansel Adams photos are a big favorite, perhaps to
compensate for the dismal specter of the parking lot, two acres of striped
black asphalt, which features gravel landscaping and some sickly-looking
barrel cacti.

It has grown dark. Gail Thackeray has told me that the people who work
late here, are afraid of muggings in the parking lot. It seems cruelly ironic
that a woman tracing electronic racketeers across the interstate labyrinth of
Cyberspace should fear an assault by a homeless derelict in the parking lot
of her own workplace.

Perhaps this is less than coincidence. Perhaps these two seemingly
disparate worlds are somehow generating one another. The poor and
disenfranchised take to the streets, while the rich and computer-equipped,
safe in their bedrooms, chatter over their modems. Quite often the derelicts
kick the glass out and break in to the lawyers' offices, if they see something
they need or want badly enough.

I cross the parking lot to the street behind the Attorney General's office.
A pair of young tramps are bedding down on flattened sheets of cardboard,
under an alcove stretching over the sidewalk. One tramp wears a glitter-
covered T-shirt reading "CALIFORNIA" in Coca-Cola cursive. His nose
and cheeks look chafed and swollen; they glisten with what seems to be
Vaseline. The other tramp has a ragged long-sleeved shirt and lank brown
hair parted in the middle. They both wear blue jeans coated in grime. They
are both drunk.

"You guys crash here a lot?" I ask them.

They look at me warily. I am wearing black jeans, a black pinstriped suit
jacket and a black silk tie. I have odd shoes and a funny haircut.

"It's our first time here," says the red-nosed tramp unconvincingly. There
is a lot of cardboard stacked here. More than any two people could use.

"We usually stay at the Vinnie's down the street," says the brown-haired
tramp, puffing a Marlboro with a meditative air, as he sprawls with his head
on a blue nylon backpack. "The Saint Vincent's."

"You know who works in that building over there?" I ask, pointing.

The brown-haired tramp shrugs. "Some kind of attorneys, it says."

We urge one another to take it easy. I give them five bucks.

A block down the street I meet a vigorous workman who is wheeling
along some kind of industrial trolley; it has what appears to be a tank of
propane on it.

We make eye contact. We nod politely. I walk past him. "Hey! Excuse
me sir!" he says.

"Yes?" I say, stopping and turning.

"Have you seen," the guy says rapidly, "a black guy, about 6'7", scars on
both his cheeks like this—" he gestures—"wears a black baseball cap on
backwards, wandering around here anyplace?"

"Sounds like I don't much WANT to meet him," I say.

"He took my wallet," says my new acquaintance. "Took it this morning.
Y'know, some people would be SCARED of a guy like that. But I'm not
scared. I'm from Chicago. I'm gonna hunt him down. We do things like that
in Chicago."

"Yeah?"

"I went to the cops and now he's got an APB out on his ass," he says
with satisfaction. "You run into him, you let me know."

"Okay," I say. "What is your name, sir?"

"Stanley...."

"And how can I reach you?"

"Oh," Stanley says, in the same rapid voice, "you don't have to reach, uh,
me. You can just call the cops. Go straight to the cops." He reaches into a
pocket and pulls out a greasy piece of pasteboard. "See, here's my report on
him."

I look. The "report," the size of an index card, is labelled PRO-ACT:
Phoenix Residents Opposing Active Crime Threat.... or is it Organized
Against Crime Threat? In the darkening street it's hard to read. Some kind
of vigilante group? Neighborhood watch? I feel very puzzled.

"Are you a police officer, sir?"

He smiles, seems very pleased by the question.

"No," he says.

"But you are a 'Phoenix Resident?'"

"Would you believe a homeless person," Stanley says.

"Really? But what's with the...." For the first time I take a close look at
Stanley's trolley. It's a rubber-wheeled thing of industrial metal, but the
device I had mistaken for a tank of propane is in fact a water-cooler. Stanley
also has an Army duffel-bag, stuffed tight as a sausage with clothing or
perhaps a tent, and, at the base of his trolley, a cardboard box and a battered
leather briefcase.

"I see," I say, quite at a loss. For the first time I notice that Stanley has a
wallet. He has not lost his wallet at all. It is in his back pocket and chained
to his belt. It's not a new wallet. It seems to have seen a lot of wear.

"Well, you know how it is, brother," says Stanley. Now that I know that
he is homeless—A POSSIBLE THREAT—my entire perception of him has
changed in an instant. His speech, which once seemed just bright and
enthusiastic, now seems to have a dangerous tang of mania. "I have to do
this!" he assures me. "Track this guy down.... It's a thing I do ... you know
... to keep myself together!" He smiles, nods, lifts his trolley by its decaying
rubber handgrips.

"Gotta work together, y'know," Stanley booms, his face alight with
cheerfulness, "the police can't do everything!" The gentlemen I met in my
stroll in downtown Phoenix are the only computer illiterates in this book.
To regard them as irrelevant, however, would be a grave mistake.

As computerization spreads across society, the populace at large is
subjected to wave after wave of future shock. But, as a necessary converse,
the "computer community" itself is subjected to wave after wave of
incoming computer illiterates. How will those currently enjoying America's
digital bounty regard, and treat, all this teeming refuse yearning to breathe
free? Will the electronic frontier be another Land of Opportunity—or an
armed and monitored enclave, where the disenfranchised snuggle on their
cardboard at the locked doors of our houses of justice?

Some people just don't get along with computers. They can't read. They
can't type. They just don't have it in their heads to master arcane
instructions in wirebound manuals. Somewhere, the process of
computerization of the populace will reach a limit. Some people—quite
decent people maybe, who might have thrived in any other situation—will
be left irretrievably outside the bounds. What's to be done with these
people, in the bright new shiny electroworld? How will they be regarded,
by the mouse-whizzing masters of cyberspace? With contempt?
Indifference? Fear?

In retrospect, it astonishes me to realize how quickly poor Stanley
became a perceived threat. Surprise and fear are closely allied feelings. And
the world of computing is full of surprises.

I met one character in the streets of Phoenix whose role in this book is
supremely and directly relevant. That personage was Stanley's giant
thieving scarred phantom. This phantasm is everywhere in this book. He is
the specter haunting cyberspace.

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

Stanley's demon can't go away, because he doesn't exist. Despite
singleminded and tremendous effort, he can't be arrested, sued, jailed, or
fired. The only constructive way to do ANYTHING about him is to learn
more about Stanley himself. This learning process may be repellent, it may
be ugly, it may involve grave elements of paranoiac confusion, but it's
necessary. Knowing Stanley requires something more than class-crossing
condescension. It requires more than steely legal objectivity. It requires
human compassion and sympathy.

To know Stanley is to know his demon. If you know the other guy's
demon, then maybe you'll come to know some of your own. You'll be able
to separate reality from illusion. And then you won't do your cause, and
yourself, more harm than good. Like poor damned Stanley from Chicago
did.

#

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

It is also, by federal standards, an organization of great unorthodoxy.
State and local investigators mix with federal agents. Lawyers, financial
auditors and computer-security programmers trade notes with street cops.
Industry vendors and telco security people show up to explain their
gadgetry and plead for protection and justice. Private investigators, think-
tank experts and industry pundits throw in their two cents' worth. The FCIC
is the antithesis of a formal bureaucracy.

Members of the FCIC are obscurely proud of this fact; they recognize
their group as aberrant, but are entirely convinced that this, for them,
outright WEIRD behavior is nevertheless ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY to
get their jobs done.

FCIC regulars —from the Secret Service, the FBI, the IRS, the
Department of Labor, the offices of federal attorneys, state police, the Air

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you spend your entire working life as a "pioneer," the word "pioneer"
begins to lose its meaning. Your way of life looks less and less like an
introduction to something else" more stable and organized, and more and
more like JUST THE WAY THINGS ARE. A "permanent revolution" is
really a contradiction in terms. If "turmoil" lasts long enough, it simply
becomes A NEW KIND OF SOCIETY—still the same game of history, but
new players, new rules.

Apply this to the world of late twentieth-century law enforcement, and
the implications are novel and puzzling indeed. Any bureaucratic rulebook
you write about computer-crime will be flawed when you write it, and
almost an antique by the time it sees print. The fluidity and fast reactions of
the FCIC give them a great advantage in this regard, which explains their
success. Even with the best will in the world (which it does not, in fact,
possess) it is impossible for an organization the size of the U.S. Federal
Bureau of Investigation to get up to speed on the theory and practice of
computer crime. If they tried to train all their agents to do this, it would be
SUICIDAL, as they would NEVER BE ABLE TO DO ANYTHING ELSE.

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

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

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

Since my last visit to Arizona, in May, the local AzScam bribery scandal
had resolved itself in a general muddle of humiliation. The Phoenix chief of
police, whose agents had videotaped nine state legislators up to no good,

had resigned his office in a tussle with the Phoenix city council over the
propriety of his undercover operations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Worse yet, I was forbidden to attend the first conference. And I didn't. I
have no idea what the FCIC was up to behind closed doors that afternoon. I
rather suspect that they were engaging in a frank and thorough confession
of their errors, goof-ups and blunders, as this has been a feature of every
FCIC meeting since their legendary Memphis beer-bust of 1986. Perhaps
the single greatest attraction of FCIC is that it is a place where you can go,
let your hair down, and completely level with people who actually
comprehend what you are talking about. Not only do they understand you,
but they REALLY PAY ATTENTION, they are GRATEFUL FOR YOUR
INSIGHTS, and they FORGIVE YOU, which in nine cases out of ten is
something even your boss can't do, because as soon as you start talking
"ROM," "BBS," or "T-1 trunk," his eyes glaze over.

I had nothing much to do that afternoon. The FCIC were beavering away
in their conference room. Doors were firmly closed, windows too dark to
peer through. I wondered what a real hacker, a computer intruder, would do
at a meeting like this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coincidence or not, it was quite true. Some poor soul had, in fact,
thrown a SPRINT bill into the hotel's trash. Date May 1991, total amount
due: $252.36. Not a business phone, either, but a residential bill, in the
name of someone called Evelyn (not her real name). Evelyn's records
showed a ## PAST DUE BILL ##! Here was her nine-digit account ID.
Here was a stern computer-printed warning:

"TREAT YOUR FONCARD AS YOU WOULD ANY CREDIT CARD.
TO SECURE AGAINST FRAUD, NEVER GIVE YOUR FONCARD
NUMBER OVER THE PHONE UNLESS YOU INITIATED THE CALL.
IF YOU RECEIVE SUSPICIOUS CALLS PLEASE NOTIFY
CUSTOMER SERVICE IMMEDIATELY!"

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

I did, however, have Evelyn's home phone number. And the phone
numbers for a whole crowd of Evelyn's long-distance friends and

acquaintances. In San Diego, Folsom, Redondo, Las Vegas, La Jolla,
Topeka, and Northampton Massachusetts. Even somebody in Australia!

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

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

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

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

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

The first note ended. UNUSUAL PROBLEMS WITH HER PHONE? I
looked swiftly at the next note.

"Bob, not hearing from you for the whole weekend has left me very
perplexed...."

Next draft.

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

She tried again.

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

Try again.

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

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

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

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

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

Easy to find out. All I had to do was call Evelyn up. With a half-clever
story and enough brass-plated gall I could probably trick the truth out of
her. Phone-phreaks and hackers deceive people over the phone all the time.
It's called "social engineering." Social engineering is a very common
practice in the underground, and almost magically effective. Human beings
are almost always the weakest link in computer security. The simplest way

to learn Things You Are Not Meant To Know is simply to call up and
exploit the knowledgeable people. With social engineering, you use the bits
of specialized knowledge you already have as a key, to manipulate people
into believing that you are legitimate. You can then coax, flatter, or frighten
them into revealing almost anything you want to know. Deceiving people
(especially over the phone) is easy and fun. Exploiting their gullibility is
very gratifying; it makes you feel very superior to them.

If I'd been a malicious hacker on a trashing raid, I would now have
Evelyn very much in my power. Given all this inside data, it wouldn't take
much effort at all to invent a convincing lie. If I were ruthless enough, and
jaded enough, and clever enough, this momentary indiscretion of hers—
maybe committed in tears, who knows—could cause her a whole world of
confusion and grief.

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

To do all these awful things would require exactly zero high-tech
expertise. All it would take was the willingness to do it and a certain
amount of bent imagination.

I went back downstairs. The hard-working FCIC, who had labored forty-
five minutes over their schedule, were through for the day, and adjourned to
the hotel bar. We all had a beer.

I had a chat with a guy about "Isis," or rather IACIS, the International
Association of Computer Investigation Specialists. They're into "computer
forensics," the techniques of picking computer-systems apart without
destroying vital evidence. IACIS, currently run out of Oregon, is comprised
of investigators in the U.S., Canada, Taiwan and Ireland. "Taiwan and
Ireland?" I said. Are TAIWAN and IRELAND really in the forefront of this
stuff? Well not exactly, my informant admitted. They just happen to have
been the first ones to have caught on by word of mouth. Still, the

international angle counts, because this is obviously an international
problem. Phone-lines go everywhere.

There was a Mountie here from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He
seemed to be having quite a good time. Nobody had flung this Canadian out
because he might pose a foreign security risk. These are cyberspace cops.
They still worry a lot about "jurisdictions," but mere geography is the least
of their troubles.

NASA had failed to show. NASA suffers a lot from computer intrusions,
in particular from Australian raiders and a well-trumpeted Chaos Computer
Club case, and in 1990 there was a brief press flurry when it was revealed
that one of NASA's Houston branch-exchanges had been systematically
ripped off by a gang of phone-phreaks. But the NASA guys had had their
funding cut. They were stripping everything.

Air Force OSI, its Office of Special Investigations, is the ONLY federal
entity dedicated full-time to computer security. They'd been expected to
show up in force, but some of them had cancelled—a Pentagon budget
pinch.

As the empties piled up, the guys began joshing around and telling war-
stories. "These are cops," Thackeray said tolerantly. "If they're not talking
shop they talk about women and beer."

I heard the story about the guy who, asked for "a copy" of a computer
disk, PHOTOCOPIED THE LABEL ON IT. He put the floppy disk onto the
glass plate of a photocopier. The blast of static when the copier worked
completely erased all the real information on the disk.

Some other poor souls threw a whole bag of confiscated diskettes into
the squad-car trunk next to the police radio. The powerful radio signal
blasted them, too.

We heard a bit about Dave Geneson, the first computer prosecutor, a
mainframe-runner in Dade County, turned lawyer. Dave Geneson was one
guy who had hit the ground running, a signal virtue in making the transition
to computer-crime. It was generally agreed that it was easier to learn the