textfiles/etext/MODERN/hack11a.txt

**This is a COPYRIGHTED Project Gutnberg Etext, Details Below**

Please take a look at the important information in this header.
We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an
electronic path open for the next readers.  Do not remove this.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations*

Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and
further information is included below.  We need your donations.


Hacker Crackdown, by Bruce Sterling

January, 1994  [Etext #101]


*The Project Gutenberg Etext of Hacker Crackdown by Sterling*
******This file should be named hack10a.txt or hack10a.zip*****

Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, hack11.txt
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, hack10aa.txt

The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so.  To be sure you have an
up to date first edition [xxxxx10x.xxx] please check file sizes
in the first week of the next month.  Since our ftp program has
a bug in it that scrambles the date [tried to fix and failed] a
look at the file size will have to do, but we will try to see a
new copy has at least one byte more or less.


Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)

We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
fifty hours is one conservative estimate for how long it we take
to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.  This
projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If our value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar, then we produce 2
million dollars per hour this year we, will have to do four text
files per month:  thus upping our productivity from one million.
The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext
Files by the December 31, 2001.  [10,000 x 100,000,000=Trillion]
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is 10% of the expected number of computer users by the end
of the year 2001.

We need your donations more than ever!

All donations should be made to "Project Gutenberg/IBC", and are
tax deductible to the extent allowable by law ("IBC" is Illinois
Benedictine College).  (Subscriptions to our paper newsletter go
to IBC, too)

For these and other matters, please mail to:

Project Gutenberg
P. O. Box  2782
Champaign, IL 61825

Internet:      dircompg@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
Bitnet:        dircompg@uiucux1
CompuServe:    >internet:dircompg@.ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
Attmail:       internet!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!dircompg

When all other email fails try our Michael S. Hart, Executive
Director:
hart@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu (internet)   hart@uiucvmd   (bitnet)

We would prefer to send you this information by email
(Internet, Bitnet, Compuserve, ATTMAIL or MCImail).

******
If you have an FTP program (or emulator), please
FTP directly to the Project Gutenberg archives:
[Mac users, do NOT point and click. . .type]

ftp mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu
login:  anonymous
password:  your@login
cd etext/etext90 though etext/etext94
or cd etext94 [for new books]  [now in cd etext/etext93]
or cd etext/articles 
dir [to see files]
get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files]
GET 0INDEX.GUT
for a list of books
and
GET NEW GUT for general information
and
MGET GUT* for newsletters.

**Information prepared by the Project Gutenberg legal advisor**
(Three Pages)

***START** SMALL PRINT! for COPYRIGHT PROTECTED ETEXTS ***
TITLE AND COPYRIGHT NOTICE:

  Hacker Crackdown, by Bruce Sterling
  COPYRIGHT 1992, by Bruce Sterling

This etext is distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart through
the Project Gutenberg Association at Illinois Benedictine College

(the "Project") under the Project's "Project Gutenberg" trademark
and with the permission of the etext's copyright owner.

LICENSE
You can (and are encouraged!) to copy and distribute this
Project Gutenberg-tm etext.  Since, unlike many other of the
Project's etexts, it is copyright protected, and since the
materials and methods you use will effect the Project's
reputation,
your right to copy and distribute it is limited by the copyright
laws and by the conditions of this "Small Print!" statement.

  [A]  ALL COPIES: The Project permits you to distribute
copies of this etext electronically or on any machine readable
medium now known or hereafter discovered so long as you:

     (1)  Honor the refund and replacement provisions of this
"Small Print!" statement; and

     (2)  Pay a royalty to the Project of 20% of the net
profits you derive calculated using the method you already use
to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you don't derive
profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are payable to "Project
Gutenberg Association / Illinois Benedictine College" within
the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were legally
required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent periodic) tax
return.

  [B]  EXACT AND MODIFIED COPIES: The copies you distribute
must either be exact copies of this etext, including this
Small Print statement, or can be in binary, compressed, mark-
up, or proprietary form (including any form resulting from
word processing or hypertext software), so long as *EITHER*:

     (1)  The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
does *not* contain characters other than those intended by the
author of the work, although tilde (~), asterisk (*) and
underline (_) characters may be used to convey punctuation
intended by the author, and additional characters may be used
to indicate hypertext links; OR

     (2)  The etext is readily convertible by the reader at no
expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent form by the
program that displays the etext (as is the case, for instance,
with most word processors); OR

     (3)  You provide or agree to provide on request at no
additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the etext in plain
ASCII.

LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
This etext may contain a "Defect" in the form of incomplete,
inaccurate or corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright
or other infringement, a defective or damaged disk, computer
virus, or codes that damage or cannot be read by your
equipment.  But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund"
described below, the Project (and any other party you may
receive this etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext)
disclaims all liability to you for damages, costs and
expenses, including legal fees, and YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR
NEGLIGENCE OR UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF
WARRANTY OR CONTRACT, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT,
CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU
GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from.  If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy.  If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.

THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS".  NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of
implied warranties or the exclusion or limitation of
consequential damages, so the above disclaimers and exclusions
may not apply to you, and you may have other legal rights.

INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors,
officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost
and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or
indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause:
[1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification,
or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.

WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
in machine readable form.  The Project gratefully accepts
contributions in money, time, scanning machines, OCR software,
public domain etexts, royalty free copyright licenses,
and whatever else you can think of.  Money should be paid to
"Project Gutenberg Association / Illinois Benedictine College".

This "Small Print!" by Charles B. Kramer, Attorney
Internet (72600.2026@compuserve.com); TEL: (212-254-5093)
*SMALL PRINT! Ver.04.29.93 FOR COPYRIGHT PROTECTED ETEXTS*END*



This is a PRELIMINARY Project Gutenberg Etext of Hacker
Crackdown.
You may NOT repost this book until midnight, December 31, 1993.
That is the deal we made with Bruce Sterling.  This PRELIMINARY
copy is for editing, comments, suggestions, corrections, etc.
Please note the official release date is not even until January
31, 1994, and you should be sure to get a new copy after then,
to insure you are getting all the corrections you all send in.


Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.sf.ca.us

Literary Freeware:  Not for Commercial Use



                      THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

           Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

                        by Bruce Sterling




CONTENTS


Preface to the Electronic Release of THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

Chronology of the Hacker Crackdown

Introduction

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

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

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

Part 4:  THE CIVIL LIBERTARIANS
NuPrometheus + FBI = Grateful Dead / Whole Earth + Computer
Revolution = WELL / Phiber Runs Underground and Acid Spikes the
Well / The Trial of Knight Lightning / Shadowhawk Plummets to
Earth / Kyrie in the Confessional / $79,499 / A Scholar
Investigates / Computers, Freedom, and Privacy

Electronic Afterword to THE HACKER CRACKDOWN, Halloween 1993





Preface to the Electronic Release of THE HACKER CRACKDOWN


October 31, 1993--Austin, Texas

  Hi, I'm Bruce Sterling, the author of this electronic
book.  Out in the traditional world of print, this book is still
a part of the traditional commercial economy, because it happens
to be widely available in paperback (for a while, at least).

  Out in the 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.

  If you go and buy the print version of THE HACKER
CRACKDOWN, an action I encourage heartily, you may notice that in
the front of the book, right under the copyright sign--"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 or
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.
Unfortunately, it doesn't have much to do with reality.  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.  And I've chosen to give them away.

  Bantam Books is not going to fuss about this.  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 HACKER CRACKDOWN.  That's a major reason why they
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 paper copy 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 grotesquely 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 not the ultimate in
academic rigor.  And politically, it has something to offend and
trouble almost everyone.  But hey, I'm told it's readable, and at
least the price is right.

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

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

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

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

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

  Now have fun.

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





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, and 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 NOBLE 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 become Bell Communications Research, Bellcore.
Then there are the Regional Bell Operating Companies, or RBOCs,
pronounced "arbocks."

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

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

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

  The people of what used to be Ma Bell are not happy about
their fate.  They feel ill-used.  They might have been grudgingly
willing to make a full transition to the free market; to become
just companies amid other companies.  But this never happened.
Instead, AT&T and the RBOCS ("the Baby Bells") feel themselves
wrenched from side to side by state regulators, by Congress, by
the FCC, and especially by the federal court of Judge Harold
Greene, the magistrate who ordered the Bell breakup and who has
been the de facto czar of American telecommunications ever since
1983.  Bell people feel that they exist in a kind of paralegal
limbo today.  They don't understand what's demanded of them.  If
it's "service," why aren't they treated like a public service?
And if it's money, then why aren't they free to compete for it?
No one seems to know, really.  Those who claim to know keep
changing their minds.  Nobody in authority seems willing to grasp
the nettle for once and all.

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

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

  There is much bad blood in this industry, and much long-
treasured resentment.  AT&T's post-breakup corporate logo, a
striped sphere, is known in the industry as the "Death Star" (a
reference from the movie STAR WARS, in which the "Death Star" was
the spherical 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 TIME/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 hierarchy, up to the
long-distance electronic switching stations, which are some of
the largest computers on earth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  In operator's classes, before taking this job, you have
been issued a large pamphlet full of canned operator's responses
for all kinds of contingencies, which you had to memorize.  You
have also been trained in a proper 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 interacted, subtly but
drastically, with incoming telephone calls from human users.
If--and only if--two incoming phone-calls happened to hit the
switch within a hundredth of a second, then a small patch of data
would be garbled by the flaw.

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

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

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

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

  As more and more switches did have that bit of bad luck
and collapsed, the call-traffic became more and more densely
packed in the remaining switches, which were groaning to keep up
with the load.  And of course, as the calls became more densely
packed, the switches were MUCH MORE LIKELY to be hit twice within
a hundredth of a second.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  On the other hand, computers can handle hundreds of calls
per second.  Humans simply can't.  If every single human being in
America worked for the phone company, we couldn't match the
performance of digital switches:  direct-dialling, three-way
calling, speed-calling, 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 FIND OUT
what you did, then what real harm have you done?  What exactly
HAVE you "stolen," anyway?  If a tree falls in the forest and
nobody hears it, how much is the noise worth?  Even now this
remains a rather dicey question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

  Hackers of all kinds are absolutely soaked through with
heroic anti-bureaucratic sentiment.  Hackers long for recognition
as a praiseworthy cultural archetype, the postmodern electronic
equivalent of the cowboy and mountain man.  Whether they deserve
such a reputation is something for history to decide.  But many
hackers--including those outlaw hackers who are computer
intruders, and whose activities are defined as criminal--actually
attempt to LIVE UP TO this techno-cowboy reputation.  And given
that electronics and telecommunications are still largely
unexplored territories, there is simply NO TELLING what hackers
might uncover.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  This book, sadly but in my opinion unavoidably, rather
adds to the degradation of the term.  It concerns itself mostly
with "hacking" in its commonest latter-day definition, i.e.,
intruding into computer systems by stealth and without
permission.

  The term "hacking" is used routinely today by almost all
law enforcement officials with any professional interest in
computer fraud and abuse.  American police describe almost any
crime committed with, by, through, or against a computer as
hacking.

  Most importantly, "hacker" is what computer-intruders
choose to call THEMSELVES.  Nobody who "hacks" into systems
willingly describes himself (rarely, herself) as a "computer
intruder," "computer trespasser," "cracker," "wormer," "darkside
hacker" or "high tech street gangster."  Several other demeaning
terms have been invented in the hope that the press and public
will leave the original sense of the word alone.  But few people
actually use these terms.  (I exempt the term "cyberpunk," which
a few hackers and law enforcement people actually do use.  The
term "cyberpunk" is drawn from literary criticism and has some
odd and unlikely resonances, but, like hacker, cyberpunk too has
become a criminal pejorative today.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  There is no tradition of silence or OMERTA in the hacker
underworld.  Hackers can be shy, even reclusive, but when they do
talk, hackers tend to brag, boast and strut.  Almost everything
hackers do is INVISIBLE; if they don't brag, boast, and strut
about it, then NOBODY WILL EVER KNOW.  If you don't have
something to brag, boast, and strut about, then nobody in the
underground will recognize you and favor you with vital
cooperation and respect.

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

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

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

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

  Hackers at their most grandiloquent perceive themselves
as the elite pioneers of a new electronic world.  Attempts to
make them obey the democratically established laws of
contemporary American society are seen as repression and
persecution.  After all, they argue, if Alexander Graham Bell had
gone along with the rules of the Western Union telegraph company,
there would have been no telephones.  If Jobs and Wozniak had
believed that IBM was the be-all and end-all, there would have
been no personal computers.  If Benjamin Franklin and Thomas
Jefferson had tried to "work within the system" there would have
been no United States.

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



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

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

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

  "Hackers often find that their existing equipment, due to
the monopoly tactics of computer companies, is inefficient for
their purposes.  Due to the exorbitantly high prices, it is
impossible to legally purchase the necessary equipment.  This
need has given still another segment of the fight:  Credit
Carding.  Carding is a way of obtaining the necessary goods
without paying for them.  It is again due to the companies'
stupidity that Carding is so easy, and shows that the world's
businesses are in the hands of those with considerably less
technical know-how than we, the hackers. (...)

  "Hacking must continue.  We must train newcomers to the
art of hacking.(...)  And whatever you do, continue the fight.
Whether you know it or not, if you are a hacker, you are a
revolutionary.  Don't worry, you're on the right side."



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

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




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

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

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

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

  This dilemma is well exemplified by the remarkable
activities of "Emmanuel Goldstein," editor and publisher of a
print magazine known as 2600: THE HACKER QUARTERLY.  Goldstein
was an English major at Long Island's State University of New
York in the '70s, when he became involved with the local college
radio station.  His growing interest in electronics caused him to
drift into Yippie _TAP_ circles and thus into the digital
underground, where he became a self-described techno-rat.  His
magazine publishes techniques of computer intrusion and telephone
"exploration" as well as gloating exposes of telco misdeeds and
governmental failings.

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

  Goldstein took his nom-de-plume, or "handle," from a
character in Orwell's _1984_, which may be taken, correctly, as a
symptom of the gravity of his sociopolitical worldview.  He is
not himself a practicing computer intruder, though he vigorously
abets these actions, especially when they are pursued against
large corporations or governmental agencies.  Nor is he a thief,
for he loudly scorns mere theft of phone service, in favor of
'exploring and manipulating the system.'  He is probably best
described and understood as a DISSIDENT.

  Weirdly, Goldstein is living in modern America under
conditions very similar to those of former East European
intellectual dissidents.  In other words, he flagrantly espouses
a value-system that is deeply and irrevocably opposed to the
system of those in power and the police.  The values in _2600_
are generally expressed in terms that are ironic, sarcastic,
paradoxical, or just downright confused.  But there's no
mistaking their radically anti-authoritarian tenor.  _2600_ holds
that technical power and specialized knowledge, of any kind
obtainable, belong by right in the hands of those individuals
brave and bold enough to discover them--by whatever means
necessary.  Devices, laws, or systems that forbid access, and the
free spread of knowledge, are provocations that any free and
self-respecting hacker should relentlessly attack.  The "privacy"
of governments, corporations and other soulless technocratic
organizations should never be protected at the expense of the
liberty and free initiative of the individual techno-rat.

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

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

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

  Computer professionals generally meet publicly, and find
it very difficult to rid themselves of Goldstein and his ilk
without extralegal and unconstitutional actions.  Sympathizers,
many of them quite respectable people with responsible jobs,
admire Goldstein's attitude and surreptitiously pass him
information.  An unknown but presumably large proportion of
Goldstein's 2,000-plus readership are telco security personnel
and police, who are forced to subscribe to _2600_ to stay
abreast of new developments in hacking.  They thus find
themselves PAYING THIS GUY'S RENT while grinding their teeth in
anguish, a situation that would have delighted Abbie Hoffman (one
of Goldstein's few idols).

  Goldstein is probably the best-known public
representative of the hacker underground today, and certainly the
best-hated.  Police regard him as a Fagin, a corrupter of youth,
and speak of him with untempered loathing.  He is quite an
accomplished gadfly.

  After the Martin Luther King Day Crash of 1990,
Goldstein, for instance, adeptly rubbed salt into the wound in
the pages of _2600_.  "Yeah, it was fun for the phone phreaks as
we watched the network crumble," he admitted cheerfully.  "But it
was also an ominous sign of what's to come...  Some AT&T people,
aided by well-meaning but ignorant media, were spreading the
notion that many companies had the same software and therefore
could face the same problem someday.  Wrong.  This was entirely
an AT&T software deficiency.  Of course, other companies could
face entirely DIFFERENT software problems.  But then, so too
could AT&T."

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

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

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

  "See what happens when you drop a 'silver box' tone or
two down your local exchange or through different long distance
service carriers," advises _2600_ contributor "Mr. Upsetter" in
"How To Build a Signal Box."  "If you experiment systematically
and keep good records, you will surely discover something
interesting."

  This is, of course, the scientific method, generally
regarded as a praiseworthy activity and one of the flowers of
modern civilization.  One can indeed learn a great deal with this
sort of structured intellectual activity.  Telco employees regard
this mode of "exploration" as akin to flinging sticks of dynamite
into their pond to see what lives on the bottom.

  _2600_ has been published consistently since 1984.  It
has also run a bulletin board computer system, printed _2600_ T-
shirts, taken fax calls...  The Spring 1991 issue has an
interesting announcement on page 45:  "We just discovered an
extra set of wires attached to our fax line and heading up the
pole.  (They've since been clipped.)  Your faxes to us and to
anyone else could be monitored."

  In the worldview of _2600_, the tiny band of techno-rat
brothers (rarely, sisters) are a beseiged vanguard of the truly
free and honest.  The rest of the world is a maelstrom of
corporate crime and high-level governmental corruption,
occasionally tempered with well-meaning ignorance.  To read a few
issues in a row is to enter a nightmare akin to Solzhenitsyn's,
somewhat tempered by the fact that _2600_ is often extremely
funny.

  Goldstein did not become a target of the Hacker
Crackdown, though he protested loudly, eloquently, and publicly
about it, and it added considerably to his fame.  It was not that
he is not regarded as dangerous, because he is so regarded.
Goldstein has had brushes with the law in the past:  in 1985, a
_2600_ bulletin board computer was seized by the FBI, and some
software on it was formally declared "a burglary tool in the form
of a computer program."  But Goldstein escaped direct repression
in 1990, because his magazine is printed on paper, and recognized
as subject to Constitutional freedom of the press protection.  As
was seen in the RAMPARTS case, this is far from an absolute
guarantee.  Still, as a practical matter, shutting down _2600_ by
court-order would create so much legal hassle that it is simply
unfeasible, at least for the present.  Throughout 1990, both
Goldstein and his magazine were peevishly thriving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Boards can be distinguished by the amount of effort spent
in regulating them.  First, we have the completely open board,
whose sysop is off chugging brews and watching re-runs while his
users generally degenerate over time into peevish anarchy and
eventual silence.  Second comes the supervised board, where the
sysop breaks in every once in a while to tidy up, calm brawls,
issue announcements, and rid the community of dolts and
troublemakers.  Third is the heavily supervised board, which
sternly urges adult and responsible behavior and swiftly edits
any message considered offensive, impertinent, illegal or
irrelevant.  And last comes the completely edited "electronic
publication," which is presented to a silent audience which is
not allowed to respond directly in any way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  And some boards are UNDERGROUND.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Justice League of America.

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

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

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

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

  Order Of The Rose.  OSS.

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

  The Racketeers.  Red Dawn Text Files.  Roscoe Gang.

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

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

  The United Soft WareZ Force.  United Technical
Underground.

  Ware Brigade.  The Warelords.  WASP.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  One might find a useful parallel to the digital
underground in the drug underground.  There was a time, now much-
obscured by historical revisionism, when Bohemians freely shared
joints at concerts, and hip, 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 WORD!  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 YORK TIMES, proclaimed
a national hero in the first true story of international computer
espionage.  Stoll's counterspy efforts, which he related in a
bestselling book, THE CUCKOO'S EGG, in 1989, had established the
credibility of 'hacking' as a possible threat to national
security.  The United States Secret Service doesn't mess around
when it suspects a possible action by a foreign intelligence
apparat.

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

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

  Your average policeman may not know much about hackers or
phone-phreaks.  Computer people are weird; even computer COPS are
rather weird; the stuff they do is hard to figure out.  But a
threat to the 911 system is anything but an abstract threat.  If
the 911 system goes, people can die.

  Imagine being in a car-wreck, staggering to a 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 was, Izenberg hardly saw how
that gave them the right to take every electronic item in his
house.

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

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

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

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

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

  Still, Mentor could judge the climate.  Atlanta in ruins,
PHRACK in deep trouble, something weird going on with UNIX
nodes--discretion was advisable.  Phoenix Project went off-line.

  Kluepfel, of course, had been monitoring this LoD
bulletin board for his own purposes--and those of the Chicago
unit.  As far back as June 1987, Kluepfel had logged on to a
Texas underground board called "Phreak Klass 2600."  There he'd
discovered an Chicago youngster named "Shadowhawk," strutting and
boasting about rifling AT&T computer files, and bragging of his
ambitions to riddle AT&T's Bellcore computers with trojan horse
programs.  Kluepfel had passed the news to Cook in Chicago,
Shadowhawk's computers had gone out the door in Secret Service
custody, and Shadowhawk himself had gone to jail.

  Now it was Phoenix Project's turn.  Phoenix Project
postured about "legality" and "merely intellectual interest," but
it reeked of the underground.  It had PHRACK on it.  It had the
E911 Document.  It had a lot of dicey talk about breaking into
systems, including some bold and reckless stuff about a supposed
"decryption service" that Mentor and friends were planning to
run, to help crack encrypted passwords off of hacked systems.

  Mentor was an adult.  There was a bulletin board at his
place of work, as well.  Kleupfel logged onto this board, too,
and discovered it to be called "Illuminati."  It was run by some
company called Steve Jackson Games.

  On March 1, 1990, the Austin crackdown went into high
gear.

  On the morning of March 1--a Thursday--21-year-old
University of Texas student "Erik Bloodaxe," co-sysop of Phoenix
Project and an avowed member of the Legion of Doom, was wakened
by a police revolver levelled at his head.

  Bloodaxe watched, jittery, as Secret Service agents
appropriated his 300 baud terminal and, rifling his files,
discovered his treasured source-code for Robert Morris's
notorious Internet Worm.  But Bloodaxe, a wily operator, had
suspected that something of the like might be coming.  All his
best equipment had been hidden away elsewhere.  The raiders took
everything electronic, however, including his telephone.  They
were stymied by his hefty arcade-style Pac-Man game, and left it
in place, as it was simply too heavy to move.

  Bloodaxe was not arrested.  He was not charged with any
crime.  A good two years later, the police still had what they
had taken from him, however.

  The Mentor was less wary.  The dawn raid rousted him and
his wife from bed in their underwear, and six Secret Service
agents, accompanied by an Austin policeman and Henry Kluepfel
himself, made a rich haul.  Off went the works, into the agents'
white Chevrolet minivan:  an IBM PC-AT clone with 4 meg of RAM
and a 120-meg hard disk; a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet II printer; a
completely legitimate and highly expensive SCO-Xenix 286
operating system; Pagemaker disks and documentation; and the
Microsoft Word word-processing program.  Mentor's wife had her
incomplete academic thesis stored on the hard-disk; that went,
too, and so did the couple's telephone.  As of two years later,
all this property remained in police custody.

  Mentor remained under guard in his apartment as agents
prepared to raid Steve Jackson Games.  The fact that this was a
business headquarters and not a private residence did not deter
the agents.  It was still very early; no one was at work yet.
The agents prepared to break down the door, but Mentor,
eavesdropping on the Secret Service walkie-talkie traffic, begged
them not to do it, and offered his key to the building.

  The exact details of the next events are unclear.  The
agents would not let anyone else into the building.  Their search
warrant, when produced, was unsigned.  Apparently they
breakfasted from the local "Whataburger," as the litter from
hamburgers was later found inside.  They also extensively sampled
a bag of jellybeans kept by an SJG employee.  Someone tore a
"Dukakis for President" sticker from the wall.

  SJG employees, diligently showing up for the day's work,
were met at the door and briefly questioned by U.S. Secret
Service agents.  The employees watched in astonishment as agents
wielding crowbars and screwdrivers emerged with captive machines.
They attacked outdoor storage units with boltcutters.  The agents
wore blue nylon windbreakers with "SECRET SERVICE" stencilled
across the back, with running-shoes and jeans.

  Jackson's company lost three computers, several hard-
disks, hundred of floppy disks, two monitors, three modems, a
laser printer, various powercords, cables, and adapters (and,
oddly, a small bag of screws, bolts and nuts).  The seizure of
Illuminati BBS deprived SJG of all the programs, text files, and
private e-mail on the board.  The loss of two other SJG computers
was a severe blow as well, since it caused the loss of
electronically stored contracts, financial projections, address
directories, mailing lists, personnel files, business
correspondence, and, not least, the drafts of forthcoming games
and gaming books.

  No one at Steve Jackson Games was arrested.  No one was
accused of any crime.  No charges were filed.  Everything
appropriated was officially kept as "evidence" of crimes never
specified.

  After the PHRACK show-trial, the Steve Jackson Games
scandal was the most bizarre and aggravating incident of the
Hacker Crackdown of 1990.  This raid by the Chicago Task Force on
a science-fiction gaming publisher was to rouse a swarming host
of civil liberties issues, and gave rise to an enduring
controversy that was still re-complicating itself, and growing in
the scope of its implications, a full two years later.

  The pursuit of the E911 Document stopped with the Steve
Jackson Games raid.  As we have seen, there were hundreds,
perhaps thousands of computer users in America with the E911
Document in their possession.  Theoretically, Chicago had a
perfect legal right to raid any of these people, and could have
legally seized the machines of anybody who subscribed to PHRACK.
However, there was no copy of the E911 Document on Jackson's
Illuminati board.  And there the Chicago raiders stopped dead;
they have not raided anyone since.

  It might be assumed that Rich Andrews and Charlie Boykin,
who had brought the E911 Document to the attention of telco
security, might be spared any official suspicion.  But as we have
seen, the willingness to "cooperate fully" offers little, if any,
assurance against federal anti-hacker prosecution.

  Richard Andrews found himself in deep trouble, thanks to
the E911 Document.  Andrews lived in Illinois, the native
stomping grounds of the Chicago Task Force.  On February 3 and 6,
both his home and his place of work were raided by USSS.  His
machines went out the door, too, and he was grilled at length
(though not arrested).  Andrews proved to be in purportedly
guilty possession of:  UNIX SVR 3.2; UNIX SVR 3.1; UUCP; PMON;
WWB; IWB; DWB; NROFF; KORN SHELL '88; C++; and QUEST, among other
items.  Andrews had received this proprietary code--which AT&T
officially valued at well over $250,000--through the UNIX
network, much of it supplied to him as a personal favor by
Terminus.  Perhaps worse yet, Andrews admitted to returning the
favor, by passing Terminus a copy of AT&T proprietary STARLAN
source code.

  Even Charles Boykin, himself an AT&T employee, entered
some very hot water.  By 1990, he'd almost forgotten about the
E911 problem he'd reported in September 88; in fact, since that
date, he'd passed two more security alerts to Jerry Dalton,
concerning matters that Boykin considered far worse than the E911
Document.

  But by 1990, year of the crackdown, AT&T Corporate
Information Security was fed up with "Killer."  This machine
offered no direct income to AT&T, and was providing aid and
comfort to a cloud of suspicious yokels from outside the company,
some of them actively malicious toward AT&T, its property, and
its corporate interests.  Whatever goodwill and publicity had
been won among Killer's 1,500 devoted users was considered no
longer worth the security risk.  On February 20, 1990, Jerry
Dalton arrived in Dallas and simply unplugged the phone jacks, to
the puzzled alarm of Killer's many Texan users.  Killer went
permanently off-line, with the loss of vast archives of programs
and huge quantities of electronic mail; it was never restored to
service.  AT&T showed no particular regard for the "property" of
these 1,500 people.  Whatever "property" the users had been
storing on AT&T's computer simply vanished completely.

  Boykin, who had himself reported the E911 problem, now
found himself under a cloud of suspicion.  In a weird private-
security replay of the Secret Service seizures, Boykin's own home
was visited by AT&T Security and his own machines were carried
out the door.

  However, there were marked special features in the Boykin
case.  Boykin's disks and his personal computers were swiftly
examined by his corporate employers and returned politely in just
two days--(unlike Secret Service seizures, which commonly take
months or years).  Boykin was not charged with any crime or
wrongdoing, and he kept his job with AT&T (though he did retire
from AT&T in September 1991, at the age of 52).

  It's interesting to note that the US Secret Service
somehow failed to seize Boykin's "Killer" node and carry AT&T's
own computer out the door.  Nor did they raid Boykin's home.
They seemed perfectly willing to take the word of AT&T Security
that AT&T's employee, and AT&T's "Killer" node, were free of
hacker contraband and on the up-and-up.

  It's digital water-under-the-bridge at this point, as
Killer's 3,200 megabytes of Texan electronic community were
erased in 1990, and "Killer" itself was shipped out of the state.

  But the experiences of Andrews and Boykin, and the users
of their systems, remained side issues.  They did not begin to
assume the social, political, and legal importance that gathered,
slowly but inexorably, around the issue of the raid on Steve
Jackson Games.




  We must now turn our attention to Steve Jackson Games
itself, and explain what SJG was, what it really did, and how it
had managed to attract this particularly odd and virulent kind of
trouble.  The reader may recall that this is not the first but
the second time that the company has appeared in this narrative;
a Steve Jackson game called GURPS was a favorite pastime of
Atlanta hacker Urvile, and Urvile's science-fictional gaming
notes had been mixed up promiscuously with notes about his actual
computer intrusions.

  First, Steve Jackson Games, Inc., was NOT a publisher of
"computer games."  SJG published "simulation games," parlor games
that were played on paper, with pencils, and dice, and printed
guidebooks full of rules and statistics tables.  There were no
computers involved in the games themselves.  When you bought a
Steve Jackson Game, you did not receive any software disks.  What
you got was a plastic bag with some cardboard game tokens, maybe
a few maps or a deck of cards.  Most of their products were
books.

  However, computers WERE deeply involved in the Steve
Jackson Games business.  Like almost all modern publishers, Steve
Jackson and his fifteen employees used computers to write text,
to keep accounts, and to run the business generally.  They also
used a computer to run their official bulletin board system for
Steve Jackson Games, a board called Illuminati.  On Illuminati,
simulation gamers who happened to own computers and modems could
associate, trade mail, debate the theory and practice of gaming,
and keep up with the company's news and its product
announcements.

  Illuminati was a modestly popular board, run on a small
computer with limited storage, only one phone-line, and no ties
to large-scale computer networks.  It did, however, have hundreds
of users, many of them dedicated gamers willing to call from out-
of-state.

  Illuminati was NOT an "underground" board.  It did not
feature hints on computer intrusion, or "anarchy files," or
illicitly posted credit card numbers, or long-distance access
codes.  Some of Illuminati's users, however, were members of the
Legion of Doom.  And so was one of Steve Jackson's senior
employees--the Mentor.  The Mentor wrote for PHRACK, and also ran
an underground board, Phoenix Project--but the Mentor was not a
computer professional.  The Mentor was the managing editor of
Steve Jackson Games and a professional game designer by trade.
These LoD members did not use Illuminati to help their HACKING
activities.  They used it to help their GAME-PLAYING activities--
and they were even more dedicated to simulation gaming than they
were to hacking.

  "Illuminati" got its name from a card-game that Steve
Jackson himself, the company's founder and sole owner, had
invented.  This multi-player card-game was one of Mr Jackson's
best-known, most successful, most technically innovative
products.  "Illuminati" was a game of paranoiac conspiracy in
which various antisocial cults warred covertly to dominate the
world.  "Illuminati" was hilarious, and great fun to play,
involving flying saucers, the CIA, the KGB, the phone companies,
the Ku Klux Klan, the South American Nazis, the cocaine cartels,
the Boy Scouts, and dozens of other splinter groups from the
twisted depths of Mr. Jackson's professionally fervid
imagination.  For the uninitiated, any public discussion of the
"Illuminati" card-game sounded, by turns, utterly menacing or
completely insane.

  And then there was SJG's "Car Wars," in which souped-up
armored hot-rods with rocket-launchers and heavy machine-guns did
battle on the American highways of the future.  The lively Car
Wars discussion on the Illuminati board featured many meticulous,
painstaking discussions of the effects of grenades, land-mines,
flamethrowers and napalm.  It sounded like hacker anarchy files
run amuck.

  Mr. Jackson and his co-workers earned their daily bread
by supplying people with make-believe adventures and weird ideas.
The more far-out, the better.

  Simulation gaming is an unusual pastime, but gamers have
not generally had to beg the permission of the Secret Service to
exist.  Wargames and role-playing adventures are an old and
honored pastime, much favored by professional military
strategists.  Once little-known, these games are now played by
hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts throughout North America,
Europe and Japan.  Gaming-books, once restricted to hobby
outlets, now commonly appear in chain-stores like B. Dalton's and
Waldenbooks, and sell vigorously.

  Steve Jackson Games, Inc., of Austin, Texas, was a games
company of the middle rank.  In 1989, SJG grossed about a million
dollars.  Jackson himself had a good reputation in his industry
as a talented and innovative designer of rather unconventional
games, but his company was something less than a titan of the
field--certainly not like the multimillion-dollar TSR Inc., or
Britain's gigantic "Games Workshop."

  SJG's Austin headquarters was a modest two-story brick
office-suite, cluttered with phones, photocopiers, fax machines
and computers. It bustled with semi-organized activity and was
littered with glossy promotional brochures and dog-eared science-
fiction novels.  Attached to the offices was a large tin-roofed
warehouse piled twenty feet high with cardboard boxes of games
and books.  Despite the weird imaginings that went on within it,
the SJG headquarters was quite a quotidian, everyday sort of
place.  It looked like what it was:  a publishers' digs.

  Both "Car Wars" and "Illuminati" were well-known, popular
games.  But the mainstay of the Jackson organization was their
Generic Universal Role-Playing System, "G.U.R.P.S."  The GURPS
system was considered solid and well-designed, an asset for
players.  But perhaps the most popular feature of the GURPS
system was that it allowed gaming-masters to design scenarios
that closely resembled well-known books, movies, and other works
of fantasy.  Jackson had licensed and adapted works from many
science fiction and fantasy authors.  There was GURPS CONAN,
GURPS RIVERWORLD, GURPS HORSECLANS, GURPS WITCH WORLD, names
eminently familiar to science-fiction readers.  And there was
GURPS SPECIAL OPS, from the world of espionage fantasy and
unconventional warfare.

  And then there was GURPS CYBERPUNK.

  "Cyberpunk" was a term given to certain science fiction
writers who had entered the genre in the 1980s.  "Cyberpunk," as
the label implies, had two general distinguishing features.
First, its writers had a compelling interest in information
technology, an interest closely akin to science fiction's earlier
fascination with space travel.  And second, these writers were
"punks," with all the distinguishing features that that implies:
Bohemian artiness, youth run wild, an air of deliberate
rebellion, funny clothes and hair, odd politics, a fondness for
abrasive rock and roll; in a word, trouble.

  The "cyberpunk" SF writers were a small group of mostly
college-educated white middle-class litterateurs, scattered
through the US and Canada.  Only one, Rudy Rucker, a professor of
computer science in Silicon Valley, could rank with even the
humblest computer hacker.  But, except for Professor Rucker, the
"cyberpunk" authors were not programmers or hardware experts;
they considered themselves artists (as, indeed, did Professor
Rucker).  However, these writers all owned computers, and took an
intense and public interest in the social ramifications of the
information industry.

  The cyberpunks had a strong following among the global
generation that had grown up in a world of computers,
multinational networks, and cable television.  Their outlook was
considered somewhat morbid, cynical, and dark, but then again, so
was the outlook of their generational peers.  As that generation
matured and increased in strength and influence, so did the
cyberpunks.  As science-fiction writers went, they were doing
fairly well for themselves.  By the late 1980s, their work had
attracted attention from gaming companies, including Steve
Jackson Games, which was planning a cyberpunk simulation for the
flourishing GURPS gaming-system.

  The time seemed ripe for such a product, which had
already been proven in the marketplace.  The first games-company
out of the gate, with a product boldly called "Cyberpunk" in
defiance of possible infringement-of-copyright suits, had been an
upstart group called R. Talsorian.  Talsorian's Cyberpunk was a
fairly decent game, but the mechanics of the simulation system
left a lot to be desired.  Commercially, however, the game did
very well.

  The next cyberpunk game had been the even more successful
SHADOWRUN by FASA Corporation.  The mechanics of this game were
fine, but the scenario was rendered moronic by sappy fantasy
elements like elves, trolls, wizards, and dragons--all highly
ideologically-incorrect, according to the hard-edged, high-tech
standards of cyberpunk science fiction.

  Other game designers were champing at the bit.  Prominent
among them was the Mentor, a gentleman who, like most of his
friends in the Legion of Doom, was quite the cyberpunk devotee.
Mentor reasoned that the time had come for a REAL cyberpunk
gaming-book--one that the princes of computer-mischief in the
Legion of Doom could play without laughing themselves sick.  This
book, GURPS CYBERPUNK, would reek of culturally 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 emphasis.)



  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 WOMEN 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 those book is supremely and directly relevant.  That personage
was Stanley's giant thieving scarred phantom.  This phantasm is
everywhere in this book.  He is the specter haunting cyberspace.

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

  Stanley's demon can't go away, because he doesn't exist.
Despite singleminded and tremendous effort, he can't be arrested,
sued, jailed, or fired.  The only constructive way to do ANYTHING
about him is to learn more about Stanley himself.  This learning
process may be repellent, it may be ugly, it may involve grave
elements of paranoiac confusion, but it's necessary.  Knowing
Stanley requires something more than class-crossing
condescension.  It requires more than steely legal objectivity.
It requires human compassion and sympathy.

  To know Stanley is to know his demon.  If you know the
other guy's demon, then maybe you'll come to know some of your
own.  You'll be able to separate reality from illusion.  And then
you won't do your cause, and yourself, more harm than good.  Like
poor damned Stanley from Chicago did.




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

  It is also, by federal standards, an organization of
great unorthodoxy.  State and local investigators mix with
federal agents.  Lawyers, financial auditors and computer-
security programmers trade notes with street cops.  Industry
vendors and telco security people show up to explain their
gadgetry and plead for protection and justice.  Private
investigators, think-tank experts and industry pundits throw in
their two cents' worth.  The FCIC is the antithesis of a formal
bureaucracy.

  Members of the FCIC are obscurely proud of this fact;
they recognize their group as aberrant, but are entirely
convinced that this, for them, outright WEIRD behavior is
nevertheless ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY to get their jobs done.

  FCIC regulars--from the Secret Service, the FBI, the IRS,
the Department of Labor, the offices of federal attorneys, state
police, the Air Force, from military intelligence--often attend
meetings, held hither and thither across the country, at their
own expense.  The FCIC doesn't get grants.  It doesn't charge
membership fees.  It doesn't have a boss.  It has no
headquarters--just a mail drop in Washington DC, at the Fraud
Division of the Secret Service.  It doesn't have a budget.  It
doesn't have schedules.  It meets three times a year--sort of.
Sometimes it issues publications, but the FCIC has no regular
publisher, no treasurer, not even a secretary.  There are no
minutes of FCIC meetings.  Non-federal people are considered
"non-voting members," but there's not much in the way of
elections.  There are no badges, lapel pins or certificates of
membership.  Everyone is on a 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 playthe
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 is 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 registerethey REALLY PAY
ATTENTION, they are GRATEFUL FOR YOUR INSIGHTS, and they FORGIVE
YOU, which in nine cases out of ten is something even your boss
can't do, because as soon as you start talking "ROM," "BBS," or
"T-1 trunk," his eyes glaze over.

  I had nothing much to do that afternoon.  The FCIC were
beavering away in their conference room.  Doors were firmly
closed, windows too dark to peer through.  I wondered what a real
hacker, a computer intruder, would do at a meeting like this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Coincidence or not, it was quite true.  Some poor soul
had, in fact, thrown a SPRINT bill into the hotel's trash.  Date
May 1991, total amount due: $252.36.  Not a business phone,
either, but a residential bill, in the name of someone called
Evelyn (not her real name).  Evelyn's records showed a ## PAST
DUE BILL ##!  Here was her nine-digit account ID.  Here was a
stern computer-printed warning:



 "TREAT YOUR FONCARD AS YOU WOULD ANY CREDIT CARD.  TO SECURE
AGAINST FRAUD, NEVER GIVE YOUR FONCARD NUMBER OVER THE PHONE
UNLESS YOU INITIATED THE CALL.  IF YOU RECEIVE SUSPICIOUS CALLS
PLEASE NOTIFY CUSTOMER SERVICE IMMEDIATELY!"



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The first note ended.  UNUSUAL PROBLEMS WITH HER PHONE? I
looked swiftly at the next note.

  "Bob, not hearing from you for the whole weekend has left
me very perplexed..."

  Next draft.

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

  She tried again.

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

  Try again.

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

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

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

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

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

  Easy to find out.  All I had to do was call Evelyn up.
With a half-clever story and enough brass-plated gall I could
probably trick the truth out of her.  Phone-phreaks and hackers
deceive people over the phone all the time.  It's called "social
engineering."  Social engineering is a very common practice in
the underground, and almost magically effective.  Human beings
are almost always the weakest link in computer security.  The
simplest way to learn Things You Are Not Meant To Know is simply
to call up and exploit the knowledgeable people.  With social
engineering, you use the bits of specialized knowledge you
already have as a key, to manipulate people into believing that
you are legitimate.  You can then coax, flatter, or frighten them
into revealing almost anything you want to know.  Deceiving
people (especially over the phone) is easy and fun.  Exploiting
their gullibility is very gratifying; it makes you feel very
superior to them.

  If I'd been a malicious hacker on a trashing raid, I
would now have Evelyn very much in my power.  Given all this
inside data, it wouldn't take much effort at all to invent a
convincing lie.  If I were ruthless enough, and jaded enough, and
clever enough, this momentary indiscretion of hers--maybe
committed in tears, who knows--could cause her a whole world of
confusion and grief.

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

  To do all these awful things would require exactly zero
high-tech expertise.  All it would take was the willingness to do
it and a certain amount of bent imagination.

  I went back downstairs. The hard-working FCIC, who had
labored forty-five minutes over their schedule, were through for
the day, and adjourned to the hotel bar.  We all had a beer.

  I had a chat with a guy about "Isis," or rather IACIS,
the International Association of Computer Investigation
Specialists.  They're into "computer forensics," the techniques
of picking computer-systems apart without destroying vital
evidence.  IACIS, currently run out of Oregon, is comprised of
investigators in the U.S., Canada, Taiwan and Ireland.  "Taiwan
and Ireland?"  I said.  Are TAIWAN and IRELAND really in the
forefront of this stuff?  Well not exactly, my informant
admitted.  They just happen to have been the first ones to have
caught on by word of mouth.  Still, the international angle
counts, because this is obviously an international problem.
Phone-lines go everywhere.

  There was a Mountie here from the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police.  He seemed to be having quite a good time.  Nobody had
flung this Canadian out because he might pose a foreign security
risk.  These are cyberspace cops.  They still worry a lot about
"jurisdictions," but mere geography is the least of their
troubles.

  NASA had failed to show.  NASA suffers a lot from
computer intrusions, in particular from Australian raiders and a
well-trumpeted Chaos Computer Club case, and in 1990 there was a
brief press flurry when it was revealed that one of NASA's
Houston branch-exchanges had been systematically ripped off by a
gang of phone-phreaks.  But the NASA guys had had their funding
cut.  They were stripping everything.

  Air Force OSI, its Office of Special Investigations, is
the ONLY federal entity dedicated full-time to computer security.
They'd been expected to show up in force, but some of them had
cancelled--a Pentagon budget pinch.

  As the empties piled up, the guys began joshing around
and telling war-stories.  "These are cops," Thackeray said
tolerantly.  "If they're not talking shop they talk about women
and beer."

  I heard the story about the guy who, asked for "a copy"
of a computer disk, PHOTOCOPIED THE LABEL ON IT.  He put the
floppy disk onto the glass plate of a photocopier.  The blast of
static when the copier worked completely erased all the real
information on the disk.

  Some other poor souls threw a whole bag of confiscated
diskettes into the squad-car trunk next to the police radio.  The
powerful radio signal blasted them, too.

   We heard a bit about Dave Geneson, the first computer
prosecutor, a mainframe-runner in Dade County, turned lawyer.
Dave Geneson was one guy who had hit the ground running, a signal
virtue in making the transition to computer-crime.  It was
generally agreed that it was easier to learn the world of
computers first, then police or prosecutorial work.  You could
take certain computer people and train 'em to successful police
work--but of course they had to have the COP MENTALITY.  They had
to have street smarts.  Patience.  Persistence.  And discretion.
You've got to make sure they're not hot-shots, show-offs,
"cowboys."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  FCIC were not the only computer-crime people around.
There was DATTA (District Attorneys' Technology Theft
Association), though they mostly specialized in chip theft,
intellectual property, and black-market cases.  There was HTCIA
(High Tech Computer Investigators Association), also out in
Silicon Valley, a year older than FCIC and featuring brilliant
people like Donald Ingraham.  There was LEETAC (Law Enforcement
Electronic Technology Assistance Committee) in Florida, and
computer-crime units in Illinois and Maryland and Texas and Ohio
and Colorado and Pennsylvania.  But these were local groups.
FCIC were the first to really network nationally and on a federal
level.

  FCIC people live on the phone lines.  Not on bulletin
board systems--they know very well what boards are, and they know
that boards aren't secure.  Everyone in the FCIC has a voice-
phone bill like you wouldn't believe.  FCIC people have been
tight with the telco people for a long time.  Telephone
cyberspace is their native habitat.

  FCIC has three basic sub-tribes:  the trainers, the
security people, and the investigators.  That's why it's called
an "Investigations Committee" with no mention of the term
"computer-crime"--the dreaded "C-word."  FCIC, officially, is "an
association of agencies rather than individuals;" unofficially,
this field is small enough that the influence of individuals and
individual expertise is paramount.  Attendance is by invitation
only, and most everyone in FCIC considers himself a prophet
without honor in his own house.

  Again and again I heard this, with different terms but
identical sentiments.  "I'd been sitting in the wilderness
talking to myself."  "I was totally isolated."  "I was
desperate."  "FCIC is the best thing there is about computer
crime in America."  "FCIC is what really works."  "This is where
you hear real people telling you what's really happening out
there, not just lawyers picking nits."  "We taught each other
everything we knew."

  The sincerity of these statements convinces me that this
is true.  FCIC is the real thing and it is invaluable.  It's also
very sharply at odds with the rest of the traditions and power
structure in American law enforcement.  There probably hasn't
been anything around as loose and go-getting as the FCIC since
the start of the U.S. Secret Service in the 1860s.  FCIC people
are living like twenty-first-century people in a twentieth-
century environment, and while there's a great deal to be said
for that, there's also a great deal to be said against it, and
those against it happen to control the budgets.

  I listened to two FCIC guys from Jersey compare life
histories.  One of them had been a biker in a fairly heavy-duty
gang in the 1960s.  "Oh, did you know so-and-so?" said the other
guy from Jersey.  "Big guy, heavyset?"

  "Yeah, I knew him."

  "Yeah, he was one of ours.  He was our plant in the
gang."

  "Really?  Wow!  Yeah, I knew him.  Helluva guy."

  Thackeray reminisced at length about being tear-gassed
blind in the November 1969 antiwar protests in Washington
Circle, covering them for her college paper.  "Oh yeah, I was
there," said another cop.  "Glad to hear that tear gas hit
somethin'.  Haw haw haw."  He'd been so blind himself, he
confessed, that later that day he'd arrested a small tree.

  FCIC are an odd group, sifted out by coincidence and
necessity, and turned into a new kind of cop.  There are a lot of
specialized cops in the world--your bunco guys, your drug guys,
your tax guys, but the only group that matches FCIC for sheer
isolation are probably the child-pornography people.  Because
they both deal with conspirators who are desperate to exchange
forbidden data and also desperate to hide; and because nobody
else in law enforcement even wants to hear about it.

  FCIC people tend to change jobs a lot.  They tend not to
get the equipment and training they want and need.  And they tend
to get sued quite often.

  As the night wore on and a band set up in the bar, the
talk grew darker.  Nothing ever gets done in government, someone
opined, until there's a DISASTER.  Computing disasters are awful,
but there's no denying that they greatly help the credibility of
FCIC people.  The Internet Worm, for instance.  "For years we'd
been warning about that--but it's nothing compared to what's
coming."  They expect horrors, these people.  They know that
nothing will really get done until there is a horror.




  Next day we heard an extensive briefing from a guy who'd
been a computer cop, gotten into hot water with an Arizona city
council, and now installed computer networks for a living (at a
considerable rise in pay).  He talked about pulling fiber-optic
networks apart.

  Even a single computer, with enough peripherals, is a
literal "network"--a bunch of machines all cabled together,
generally with a complexity that puts stereo units to shame.
FCIC people invent and publicize methods of seizing computers
and maintaining their evidence.  Simple things, sometimes, but
vital rules of thumb for street cops, who nowadays often stumble
across a busy computer in the midst of a drug investigation or a
white-collar bust.  For instance:  Photograph the system before
you touch it.  Label the ends of all the cables before you detach
anything.  "Park" the heads on the disk drives before you move
them.  Get the diskettes.  Don't put the diskettes in magnetic
fields.  Don't write on diskettes with ballpoint pens.  Get the
manuals.  Get the printouts.  Get the handwritten notes.  Copy
data before you look at it, and then examine the copy instead of
the original.

  Now our lecturer distributed copied diagrams of a typical
LAN or "Local Area Network", which happened to be out of
Connecticut.  ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-NINE desktop computers, each
with its own peripherals.  Three "file servers."  Five "star
couplers" each with thirty-two ports.  One sixteen-port coupler
off in the corner office.  All these machines talking to each
other, distributing electronic mail, distributing software,
distributing, quite possibly, criminal evidence.  All linked by
high-capacity fiber-optic cable.  A bad guy--cops talk a lot
about "bad guys"--might be lurking on PC #47 or #123 and
distributing his ill doings onto some dupe's "personal" machine
in another office--or another floor--or, quite possibly, two or
three miles away!  Or, conceivably, the evidence might be "data-
striped"--split up into meaningless slivers stored, one by one,
on a whole crowd of different disk drives.

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

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

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

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

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

  Hackers know a lot of things other people don't know,
too.  Hackers know, for instance, how to sneak into your computer
through the phone-lines.  But cops can show up RIGHT UP YOUR
DOORSTEP and carry off YOU and your computer in separate steel
boxes.  A cop interested in hackers can grab them and grill them.
A hacker interested in cops has to depend on hearsay, underground
legends, and what cops are willing to publicly reveal.  And the
Secret Service didn't get named "the SECRET Service" because
they blab a lot.

  Some people, our lecturer informed us, were under the
mistaken impression that it was "impossible" to tap a fiber-optic
line.  Well, he announced, he and his son had just whipped up a
fiber-optic tap in his workshop at home.  He passed it around the
audience, along with a circuit-covered LAN plug-in card so we'd
all recognize one if we saw it on a case.  We all had a look.

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

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

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

  The guy with the Uzi cap was a forensic photographer.  He
also did a lot of photographic surveillance work in computer
crime cases.  He used to, that is, until the firings in Phoenix.
He was now a private investigator and, with his wife, ran a
photography salon specializing in weddings and portrait photos.
At--one must repeat--a considerable rise in income.

  He was still FCIC.  If you were FCIC, and you needed to
talk to an expert about forensic photography, well, there he was,
willing and able.  If he hadn't shown up, people would have
missed him.

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

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

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

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

  In one case, a tiger team of Arizona cops had trashed a
local residence for four months.  Every week they showed up on
the municipal garbage truck, disguised as garbagemen, and carried
the contents of the suspect cans off to a shade tree, where they
combed through the garbage--a messy task, especially considering
that one of the occupants was undergoing kidney dialysis.  All
useful documents were cleaned, dried and examined.  A discarded
typewriter-ribbon was an especially valuable source of data, as
its long one-strike ribbon of film contained the contents of
every letter mailed out of the house.  The letters were neatly
retyped by a police secretary equipped with a large desk-mounted
magnifying glass.

  There is something weirdly disquieting about the whole
subject of "trashing"--an unsuspected and indeed rather
disgusting mode of deep personal vulnerability.  Things that we
pass by every day, that we take utterly for granted, can be
exploited with so little work.  Once discovered, the knowledge of
these vulnerabilities tend to spread.

  Take the lowly subject of MANHOLE COVERS.  The humble
manhole cover reproduces many of the dilemmas of computer-
security in miniature.  Manhole covers are, of course,
technological artifacts, access-points to our buried urban
infrastructure.  To the vast majority of us, manhole covers are
invisible.  They are also vulnerable.  For many years now, the
Secret Service has made a point of caulking manhole covers along
all routes of the Presidential motorcade.  This is, of course, to
deter terrorists from leaping out of underground ambush or, more
likely, planting remote-control car-smashing bombs beneath the
street.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Kapor seemed to score quite an effect with his shrewd and
skeptical analysis of the merits of telco "Caller-ID" services.
(On this topic, FCIC and EFF have never been at loggerheads, and
have no particular established earthworks to defend.)  Caller-ID
has generally been promoted as a privacy service for consumers, a
presentation Kapor described as a "smokescreen," the real point
of Caller-ID being to ALLOW CORPORATE CUSTOMERS TO BUILD
EXTENSIVE COMMERCIAL DATABASES ON EVERYBODY WHO PHONES OR FAXES
THEM.  Clearly, few people in the room had considered this
possibility, except perhaps for two late-arrivals from US WEST
RBOC security, who chuckled nervously.

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

  "If it's forfeitable, then don't get a search warrant,
get a forfeiture warrant," Godwin suggested coolly.  He further
remarked that most suspects in computer crime don't WANT to see
their computers vanish out the door, headed God knew where, for
who knows how long.  They might not mind a search, even an
extensive search, but they want their machines searched on-site.

  "Are they gonna feed us?" somebody asked sourly.

  "How about if you take copies of the data?" Godwin
parried.

  "That'll never stand up in court."

  "Okay, you make copies, give THEM the copies, and take
the originals."

  Hmmm.

  Godwin championed bulletin-board systems as repositories
of First Amendment protected free speech.  He complained that
federal computer-crime training manuals gave boards a bad press,
suggesting that they are hotbeds of crime haunted by pedophiles
and crooks, whereas the vast majority of the nation's thousands
of boards are completely innocuous, and nowhere near so
romantically suspicious.

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

  Not a soul spoke up to defend the practice of seizing
boards.  The issue passed in chastened silence.  Legal principles
aside--(and those principles cannot be settled without laws
passed or court precedents)--seizing bulletin boards has become
public-relations poison for American computer police.

  And anyway, it's not entirely necessary.  If you're a
cop, you can get 'most everything you need from a pirate board,
just by using an inside informant.  Plenty of vigilantes--well,
CONCERNED CITIZENS--will inform police the moment they see a
pirate board hit their area (and will tell the police all about
it, in such technical detail, actually, that you kinda wish
they'd shut up).  They will happily supply police with extensive
downloads or printouts.  It's IMPOSSIBLE to keep this fluid
electronic information out of the hands of police.

  Some people in the electronic community become enraged at
the prospect of cops "monitoring" bulletin boards.  This does
have touchy aspects, as Secret Service people in particular
examine bulletin boards with some regularity.  But to expect
electronic police to be deaf dumb and blind in regard to this
particular medium rather flies in the face of common sense.
Police watch television, listen to radio, read newspapers and
magazines; why should the new medium of boards be different?
Cops can exercise the same access to electronic information as
everybody else.  As we have seen, quite a few computer police
maintain THEIR OWN bulletin boards, including anti-hacker "sting"
boards, which have generally proven quite effective.

  As a final clincher, their Mountie friends in Canada (and
colleagues in Ireland and Taiwan) don't have First Amendment or
American constitutional restrictions, but they do have phone
lines, and can call any bulletin board in America whenever they
please.  The same technological determinants that play into the
hands of hackers, phone phreaks and software pirates can play
into the hands of police.  "Technological determinants" don't
have ANY human allegiances.  They're not black or white, or
Establishment or Underground, or pro-or-anti anything.

  Godwin complained at length about what he called "the
Clever Hobbyist hypothesis"--the assumption that the "hacker"
you're busting is clearly a technical genius, and must therefore
by searched with extreme thoroughness.  So:  from the law's point
of view, why risk missing anything?  Take the works.  Take the
guy's computer.  Take his books.  Take his notebooks.  Take the
electronic drafts of his love letters.  Take his Walkman.  Take
his wife's computer.  Take his dad's computer.  Take his kid
sister's computer.  Take his employer's computer.  Take his
compact disks--they MIGHT be CD-ROM disks, cunningly disguised as
pop music.  Take his laser printer--he might have hidden
something vital in the printer's 5 meg of memory.  Take his
software manuals and hardware documentation.  Take his science-
fiction novels and his simulation-gaming books.  Take his
Nintendo Game-Boy and his Pac-Man arcade game.  Take his
answering machine, take his telephone out of the wall.  Take
anything remotely suspicious.

  Godwin pointed out that most "hackers" are not, in fact,
clever genius hobbyists.  Quite a few are crooks and grifters who
don't have much in the way of technical sophistication; just some
rule-of-thumb rip-off techniques.  The same goes for most
fifteen-year-olds who've downloaded a code-scanning program from
a pirate board.  There's no real need to seize everything in
sight.  It doesn't require an entire computer system and ten
thousand disks to prove a case in court.

  What if the computer is the instrumentality of a crime?
someone demanded.

  Godwin admitted quietly that the doctrine of seizing the
instrumentality of a crime was pretty well established in the
American legal system.

  The meeting broke up.  Godwin and Kapor had to leave.
Kapor was testifying next morning before the Massachusetts
Department Of Public Utility, about ISDN narrowband wide-area
networking.

  As soon as they were gone, Thackeray seemed elated.  She
had taken a great risk with this.  Her colleagues had not, in
fact, torn Kapor and Godwin's heads off.  She was very proud of
them, and told them so.

  "Did you hear what Godwin said about INSTRUMENTALITY OF A
CRIME?" she exulted, to nobody in particular.  "Wow, that means
MITCH ISN'T GOING TO SUE ME."




  America's computer police are an interesting group.  As a
social phenomenon they are far more interesting, and far more
important, than teenage phone phreaks and computer hackers.
First, they're older and wiser; not dizzy hobbyists with leaky
morals, but seasoned adult professionals with all the
responsibilities of public service.  And, unlike hackers, they
possess not merely TECHNICAL power alone, but heavy-duty legal
and social authority.

  And, very interestingly, they are just as much at sea in
cyberspace as everyone else.  They are not happy about this.
Police are authoritarian by nature, and prefer to obey rules and
precedents.  (Even those police who secretly enjoy a fast ride in
rough territory will soberly disclaim any "cowboy" attitude.)
But in cyberspace there ARE no rules and precedents.  They are
groundbreaking pioneers, Cyberspace Rangers, whether they like it
or not.

  In my opinion, any teenager enthralled by computers,
fascinated by the ins and outs of computer security, and
attracted by the lure of specialized forms of knowledge and
power, would do well to forget all about "hacking" and set his
(or her) sights on becoming a fed.  Feds can trump hackers at
almost every single thing hackers do, including gathering
intelligence, undercover disguise, trashing, phone-tapping,
building dossiers, networking, and infiltrating computer systems-
-CRIMINAL computer systems.  Secret Service agents know more
about phreaking, coding and carding than most phreaks can find
out in years, and when it comes to viruses, break-ins, software
bombs and trojan horses, Feds have direct access to red-hot
confidential information that is only vague rumor in the
underground.

  And if it's an impressive public rep you're after, there
are few people in the world who can be so chillingly impressive
as a well-trained, well-armed United States Secret Service agent.

  Of course, a few personal sacrifices are necessary in
order to obtain that power and knowledge.  First, you'll have the
galling discipline of belonging to a large organization; but the
world of computer crime is still so small, and so amazingly fast-
moving, that it will remain spectacularly fluid for years to
come.  The second sacrifice is that you'll have to give up
ripping people off.  This is not a great loss.  Abstaining from
the use of illegal drugs, also necessary, will be a boon to your
health.

  A career in computer security is not a bad choice for a
young man or woman today.  The field will almost certainly expand
drastically in years to come.  If you are a teenager today, by
the time you become a professional, the pioneers you have read
about in this book will be the grand old men and women of the
field, swamped by their many disciples and successors.  Of
course, some of them, like William P. Wood of the 1865 Secret
Service, may well be mangled in the whirring machinery of legal
controversy; but by the time you enter the computer-crime field,
it may have stabilized somewhat, while remaining entertainingly
challenging.

  But you can't just have a badge.  You have to win it.
First, there's the federal law enforcement training.  And it's
hard--it's a challenge.  A real challenge--not for wimps and
rodents.

  Every Secret Service agent must complete gruelling
courses at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.  (In
fact, Secret Service agents are periodically re-trained during
their entire careers.)

  In order to get a glimpse of what this might be like, I
myself travelled to FLETC.




  The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center is a 1500-
acre facility on Georgia's Atlantic coast.  It's a milieu of
marshgrass, seabirds, damp, clinging sea-breezes, palmettos,
mosquitos, and bats.  Until 1974, it was a Navy Air Base, and
still features a working runway, and some WWII vintage
blockhouses and officers' quarters.  The Center has since
benefitted by a forty-million-dollar retrofit, but there's still
enough forest and swamp on the facility for the Border Patrol to
put in tracking practice.

  As a town, "Glynco" scarcely exists.  The nearest real
town is Brunswick, a few miles down Highway 17, where I stayed at
the aptly named Marshview Holiday Inn.  I had Sunday dinner at a
seafood restaurant called "Jinright's," where I feasted on deep-
fried alligator tail.  This local favorite was a heaped basket of
bite-sized chunks of white, tender, almost fluffy reptile meat,
steaming in a peppered batter crust.  Alligator makes a culinary
experience that's hard to forget, especially when liberally
basted with homemade cocktail sauce from a Jinright squeeze-
bottle.

  The crowded clientele were tourists, fishermen, local
black folks in their Sunday best, and white Georgian locals who
all seemed to bear an uncanny resemblance to Georgia humorist
Lewis Grizzard.

  The 2,400 students from 75 federal agencies who make up
the FLETC population scarcely seem to make a dent in the low-key
local scene.  The students look like tourists, and the teachers
seem to have taken on much of the relaxed air of the Deep South.
My host was Mr. Carlton Fitzpatrick, the Program Coordinator of
the Financial Fraud Institute.  Carlton Fitzpatrick is a
mustached, sinewy, well-tanned Alabama native somewhere near his
late forties, with a fondness for chewing tobacco, powerful
computers, and salty, down-home homilies.  We'd met before, at
FCIC in Arizona.

  The Financial Fraud Institute is one of the nine
divisions at FLETC. Besides Financial Fraud, there's Driver &
Marine, Firearms, and Physical Training.  These are specialized
pursuits.  There are also five general training divisions:  Basic
Training, Operations, Enforcement Techniques, Legal Division, and
Behavioral Science.

  Somewhere in this curriculum is everything necessary to
turn green college graduates into federal agents.  First they're
given ID cards. Then they get the rather miserable-looking blue
coveralls known as "smurf suits."  The trainees are assigned a
barracks and a cafeteria, and immediately set on FLETC's bone-
grinding physical training routine.  Besides the obligatory daily
jogging--(the trainers run up danger flags beside the track when
the humidity rises high enough to threaten heat stroke)--there's
the Nautilus machines, the martial arts, the survival skills....

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

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

  He began looking into the general subject of computers
and crime, reading Donn Parker's books and articles, keeping an
ear cocked for war stories, useful insights from the field, the
up-and-coming people of the local computer-crime and high-
technology units....  Soon he got a reputation around FLETC as
the resident "computer expert," and that reputation alone brought
him more exposure, more experience--until one day he looked
around, and sure enough he WAS a federal computer-crime expert.

  In fact, this unassuming, genial man may be THE federal
computer-crime expert.  There are plenty of very good computer
people, and plenty of very good federal investigators, but the
area where these worlds of expertise overlap is very slim.  And
Carlton Fitzpatrick has been right at the center of that since
1985, the first year of the Colluquy, a group which owes much to
his influence.

  He seems quite at home in his modest, acoustic-tiled
office, with its Ansel Adams-style Western photographic art, a
gold-framed Senior Instructor Certificate, and a towering
bookcase crammed with three-ring binders with ominous titles such
as DATAPRO REPORTS ON INFORMATION SECURITY and CFCA TELECOM
SECURITY '90.

  The phone rings every ten minutes; colleagues show up at
the door to chat about new developments in locksmithing or to
shake their heads over the latest dismal developments in the BCCI
global banking scandal.

  Carlton Fitzpatrick is a fount of computer-crime war-
stories, related in an acerbic drawl.  He tells me the colorful
tale of a hacker caught in California some years back.  He'd been
raiding systems, typing code without a detectable break, for
twenty, twenty-four, thirty-six hours straight.  Not just logged
on--TYPING.  Investigators were baffled.  Nobody could do that.
Didn't he have to go to the bathroom?  Was it some kind of
automatic keyboard-whacking device that could actually type code?

  A raid on the suspect's home revealed a situation of
astonishing squalor.  The hacker turned out to be a Pakistani
computer-science student who had flunked out of a California
university.  He'd gone completely underground as an illegal
electronic immigrant, and was selling stolen phone-service to
stay alive.  The place was not merely messy and dirty, but in a
state of psychotic disorder.  Powered by some weird mix of
culture shock, computer addiction, and amphetamines, the suspect
had in fact been sitting in front of his computer for a day and a
half straight, with snacks and drugs at hand on the edge of his
desk and a chamber-pot under his chair.

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

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

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

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

  There's a railroad box-car on the FLETC grounds, and a
large grounded boat, and a propless plane; all training-grounds
for searches.  The plane sits forlornly on a patch of weedy
tarmac next to an eerie blockhouse known as the "ninja compound,"
where anti-terrorism specialists practice hostage rescues.  As I
gaze on this creepy paragon of modern low-intensity warfare, my
nerves are jangled by a sudden staccato outburst of automatic
weapons fire, somewhere in the woods to my right.  "Nine-
millimeter," Fitzpatrick judges calmly.

  Even the eldritch ninja compound pales somewhat compared
to the truly surreal area known as "the raid-houses."  This is a
street lined on both sides with nondescript concrete-block houses
with flat pebbled roofs.  They were once officers' quarters.  Now
they are training grounds.  The first one to our left,
Fitzpatrick tells me, has been specially adapted for computer
search-and-seizure practice.  Inside it has been wired for video
from top to bottom, with eighteen pan-and-tilt remotely
controlled videocams mounted on walls and in corners.  Every
movement of the trainee agent is recorded live by teachers, for
later taped analysis.  Wasted movements, hesitations, possibly
lethal tactical mistakes--all are gone over in detail.

  Perhaps the weirdest single aspect of this building is
its front door, scarred and scuffed all along the bottom, from
the repeated impact, day after day, of federal shoe-leather.

  Down at the far end of the row of raid-houses some people
are practicing a murder.  We drive by slowly as some very young
and rather nervous-looking federal trainees interview a heavyset
bald man on the raid-house lawn.  Dealing with murder takes a lot
of practice; first you have to learn to control your own
instinctive disgust and panic, then you have to learn to control
the reactions of a nerve-shredded crowd of civilians, some of
whom may have just lost a loved one, some of whom may be
murderers--quite possibly both at once.

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

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

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

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

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

  Will it have PHRACK on it?  I ask wryly.

  Sure, he tells me.  PHRACK, _TAP_, COMPUTER UNDERGROUND
DIGESTM, all that stuff.  With proper disclaimers, of course.

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

  No, he says seriously, FLETC has to get its money worth
out of the instructors.  He thinks he can get a local volunteer
to do it, a high-school student.

  He says a bit more, something I think about an Eagle
Scout law-enforcement liaison program, but my mind has rocketed
off in disbelief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




PART FOUR:  THE CIVIL LIBERTARIANS


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  But they really knew how to network.

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  With the slow collapse of American radical dissent, the
WHOLE EARTH CATALOG had slipped to a more modest corner of the
cultural radar; but in its magazine incarnation, COEVOLUTION
QUARTERLY, the Point Foundation continued to offer a magpie
potpourri of "access to tools and ideas."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  In 1991, the Well's list of conferences looked like this:



                     CONFERENCES ON THE WELL

               WELL "Screenzine" Digest - (g zine)

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

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

                      Business - Education
                     ----------------------


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


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



                 Social - Political - Humanities
                ---------------------------------


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


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




                Arts - Recreation - Entertainment
               -----------------------------------


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


* Open from midnight to 6am
** Updated daily



                             Grateful Dead
                             -------------


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


* Private conference - mail tnf for entry



                            Computers
                           -----------


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



                   Technical - Communications
                  ----------------------------


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



                         The WELL Itself
                         ---------------


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



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

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

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

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

  Phiber Optik in particular was to seize the day in 1990.
A devotee of the _2600_ circle and stalwart of the New York
hackers' group "Masters of Deception," Phiber Optik was a
splendid exemplar of the computer intruder as committed
dissident.  The eighteen-year-old Optik, a high-school dropout
and part-time computer repairman, was young, smart, and
ruthlessly obsessive, a sharp-dressing, sharp-talking digital
dude who was utterly and airily contemptuous of anyone's rules
but his own.  By late 1991, Phiber Optik had appeared in
HARPER'S, ESQUIRE, THE NEW YORK TIMES, in countless public
debates and conventions, even on a television show hosted by
Geraldo Rivera.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Barlow's central role in the counter-struggle was one of
the major anomalies of 1990.  Journalists investigating the
controversy often stumbled over the truth about Barlow, but they
commonly dusted themselves off and hurried on as if nothing had
happened.  It was as if it were TWO MUCH TO BELIEVE that a 1960s
freak from the Grateful Dead had taken on a federal law
enforcement operation head-to-head and ACTUALLY SEEMED TO BE
WINNING!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  3.  Two days of editing cost $367.

  4.  A box of order labels cost five dollars.

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

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

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

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

  But this was just the beginning.  There were also the
HARDWARE EXPENSES.  Eight hundred fifty dollars for a VT220
computer monitor.  THIRTY-ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS for a
sophisticated VAXstation II computer.  Six thousand dollars for a
computer printer.  TWENTY-TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS for a copy of
"Interleaf" software.  Two thousand five hundred dollars for VMS
software.  All this to create the twelve-page Document.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Having joined the defense as an expert witness, Nagle
read the entire E911 Document for himself.  He made his own
judgement about its potential for menace.

  The time has now come for you yourself, the reader, to
have a look at the E911 Document.  This six-page piece of work
was the pretext for a federal prosecution that could have sent an
electronic publisher to prison for thirty, or even sixty, years.
It was the pretext for the search and seizure of Steve Jackson
Games, a legitimate publisher of printed books.  It was also the
formal pretext for the search and seizure of the Mentor's
bulletin board, "Phoenix Project," and for the raid on the home
of Erik Bloodaxe.  It also had much to do with the seizure of
Richard Andrews' Jolnet node and the shutdown of Charles Boykin's
AT&T node.  The E911 Document was the single most important piece
of evidence in the Hacker Crackdown.  There can be no real and
legitimate substitute for the Document itself.


                         ==Phrack Inc.==


               Volume Two, Issue 24, File 5 of 13


      Control Office Administration
      Of Enhanced 911 Services For
      Special Services and Account Centers
      by the Eavesdropper


                           March, 1988


Description of Service
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


The control office for Emergency 911 service is assigned in
accordance with the existing standard guidelines to one of the
following centers:



  o  Special Services Center (SSC)
  o  Major Accounts Center (MAC)
  o  Serving Test Center (STC)
  o  Toll Control Center (TCC)



The SSC/MAC designation is used in this document interchangeably
for any of these four centers.  The Special Services Centers
(SSCs) or Major Account Centers (MACs) have been designated as
the trouble reporting contact for all E911 customer (PSAP)
reported troubles.  Subscribers who have trouble on an E911 call
will continue to contact local repair service (CRSAB) who will
refer the trouble to the SSC/MAC, when appropriate.

Due to the critical nature of E911 service, the control and
timely repair of troubles is demanded.  As the primary E911
customer contact, the SSC/MAC is in the unique position to
monitor the status of the trouble and insure its resolution.


System Overview
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


The number 911 is intended as a nationwide universal telephone
number which provides the public with direct access to a Public
Safety Answering Point (PSAP).  A PSAP is also referred to as an
Emergency Service Bureau (ESB).  A PSAP is an agency or facility
which is authorized by a municipality to receive and respond to
police, fire and/or ambulance services.  One or more attendants
are located at the PSAP facilities to receive and handle calls of
an emergency nature in accordance with the local municipal
requirements.

An important advantage of E911 emergency service is improved
(reduced) response times for emergency services.  Also close
coordination among agencies providing various emergency services
is a valuable capability provided by E911 service.

1A ESS is used as the tandem office for the E911 network to route
all 911 calls to the correct (primary) PSAP designated to serve
the calling station.  The E911 feature was developed primarily to
provide routing to the correct PSAP for all 911 calls.  Selective
routing allows a 911 call originated from a particular station
located in a particular district, zone, or town, to be routed to
the primary PSAP designated to serve that customer station
regardless of wire center boundaries.  Thus, selective routing
eliminates the problem of wire center boundaries not coinciding
with district or other political boundaries.

The services available with the E911 feature include:



  Forced Disconnect       Default Routing
  Alternative Routing     Night Service
        Selective Routing       Automatic Number       
Identification (ANI)
        Selective Transfer      Automatic Location     
Identification (ALI)



Preservice/Installation Guidelines
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


When a contract for an E911 system has been signed, it is the
responsibility of Network Marketing to establish an
implementation/cutover committee which should include a
representative from the SSC/MAC.  Duties of the E911
Implementation Team include coordination of all phases of the
E911 system deployment and the formation of an on-going E911
maintenance subcommittee.

Marketing is responsible for providing the following customer
specific information to the SSC/MAC prior to the start of call
through testing:



o  All PSAP's (name, address, local contact)
o  All PSAP circuit ID's
o  1004 911 service request including PSAP details on each PSAP
(1004 Section K, L, M)
o  Network configuration
o  Any vendor information (name, telephone number, equipment)



The SSC/MAC needs to know if the equipment and sets at the PSAP
are maintained by the BOCs, an independent company, or an outside
vendor, or any combination. This information is then entered on
the PSAP profile sheets and reviewed quarterly for changes,
additions and deletions.

Marketing will secure the Major Account Number (MAN) and provide
this number to Corporate Communications so that the initial issue
of the service orders carry the MAN and can be tracked by the
SSC/MAC via CORDNET.  PSAP circuits are official services by
definition.

All service orders required for the installation of the E911
system should include the MAN assigned to the city/county which
has purchased the system.

In accordance with the basic SSC/MAC strategy for provisioning,
the SSC/MAC will be Overall Control Office (OCO) for all Node to
PSAP circuits (official services) and any other services for this
customer.  Training must be scheduled for all SSC/MAC involved
personnel during the pre-service stage of the project.

The E911 Implementation Team will form the on-going maintenance
subcommittee prior to the initial implementation of the E911
system.  This sub-committee will establish post implementation
quality assurance procedures to ensure that the E911 system
continues to provide quality service to the customer.
Customer/Company training, trouble reporting interfaces for the
customer, telephone company and any involved independent
telephone companies needs to be addressed and implemented prior
to E911 cutover.  These functions can be best addressed by the
formation of a sub-committee of the E911 Implementation Team to
set up guidelines for and to secure service commitments of
interfacing organizations.  A SSC/MAC supervisor should chair
this subcommittee and include the following organizations:



1) Switching Control Center
  - E911 translations
  - Trunking
  - End office and Tandem office hardware/software
2) Recent Change Memory Administration Center
  - Daily RC update activity for TN/ESN translations
  - Processes validity errors and rejects
3) Line and Number Administration
  - Verification of TN/ESN translations
4) Special Service Center/Major Account Center
  - Single point of contact for all PSAP and Node to host
    troubles
  - Logs, tracks & statusing of all trouble reports
  - Trouble referral, follow up, and escalation
  - Customer notification of status and restoration
  - Analyzation of "chronic" troubles
  - Testing, installation and maintenance of E911 circuits
5) Installation and Maintenance (SSIM/I&M)
  - Repair and maintenance of PSAP equipment and Telco
    owned sets
6) Minicomputer Maintenance Operations Center
  - E911 circuit maintenance (where applicable)
7) Area Maintenance Engineer
  - Technical assistance on voice (CO-PSAP) network related
    E911 troubles





Maintenance Guidelines
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


The CCNC will test the Node circuit from the 202T at the Host
site to the 202T at the Node site.  Since Host to Node (CCNC to
MMOC) circuits are official company services, the CCNC will refer
all Node circuit troubles to the SSC/MAC. The SSC/MAC is
responsible for the testing and follow up to restoration of these
circuit troubles.

Although Node to PSAP circuit are official services, the MMOC
will refer PSAP circuit troubles to the appropriate SSC/MAC.  The
SSC/MAC is responsible for testing and follow up to restoration
of PSAP circuit troubles.

The SSC/MAC will also receive reports from CRSAB/IMC(s) on
subscriber 911 troubles when they are not line troubles.  The
SSC/MAC is responsible for testing and restoration of these
troubles.

Maintenance responsibilities are as follows:



SCC*            Voice Network (ANI to PSAP)
                *SCC responsible for tandem switch
SSIM/I&M        PSAP Equipment (Modems, CIU's, sets)
Vendor          PSAP Equipment (when CPE)
SSC/MAC         PSAP to Node circuits, and tandem to PSAP voice
                circuits (EMNT)
MMOC            Node site (Modems, cables, etc)


Note:  All above work groups are required to resolve troubles by
interfacing with appropriate work groups for resolution.



The Switching Control Center (SCC) is responsible for E911/1AESS
translations in tandem central offices.  These translations route
E911 calls, selective transfer, default routing, speed calling,
etc., for each PSAP.  The SCC is also responsible for
troubleshooting on the voice network (call originating to end
office tandem equipment).

For example, ANI failures in the originating offices would be a
responsibility of the SCC.

Recent Change Memory Administration Center (RCMAC) performs the
daily tandem translation updates (recent change) for routing of
individual telephone numbers.

Recent changes are generated from service order activity (new
service, address changes, etc.) and compiled into a daily file by
the E911 Center (ALI/DMS E911 Computer).

SSIM/I&M is responsible for the installation and repair of PSAP
equipment. PSAP equipment includes ANI Controller, ALI
Controller, data sets, cables, sets, and other peripheral
equipment that is not vendor owned.  SSIM/I&M is responsible for
establishing maintenance test kits, complete with spare parts for
PSAP maintenance.  This includes test gear, data sets, and
ANI/ALI Controller parts.

Special Services Center (SSC) or Major Account Center (MAC)
serves as the trouble reporting contact for all (PSAP) troubles
reported by customer.  The SSC/MAC refers troubles to proper
organizations for handling and tracks status of troubles,
escalating when necessary.  The SSC/MAC will close out troubles
with customer.  The SSC/MAC will analyze all troubles and tracks
"chronic" PSAP troubles.

Corporate Communications Network Center (CCNC) will test and
refer troubles on all node to host circuits.  All E911 circuits
are classified as official company property.

The Minicomputer Maintenance Operations Center (MMOC) maintains
the E911 (ALI/DMS) computer hardware at the Host site.  This MMOC
is also responsible for monitoring the system and reporting
certain PSAP and system problems to the local MMOC's, SCC's or
SSC/MAC's.  The MMOC personnel also operate software programs
that maintain the TN data base under the direction of the E911
Center. The maintenance of the NODE computer (the interface
between the PSAP and the ALI/DMS computer) is a function of the
MMOC at the NODE site.  The MMOC's at the NODE sites may also be
involved in the testing of NODE to Host circuits. The MMOC will
also assist on Host to PSAP and data network related troubles not
resolved through standard trouble clearing procedures.

Installation And Maintenance Center (IMC) is responsible for
referral of E911 subscriber troubles that are not subscriber line
problems.

E911 Center - Performs the role of System Administration and is
responsible for overall operation of the E911 computer software.
The E911 Center does A-Z trouble analysis and provides
statistical information on the performance of the system.

This analysis includes processing PSAP inquiries (trouble
reports) and referral of network troubles.  The E911 Center also
performs daily processing of tandem recent change and provides
information to the RCMAC for tandem input.  The E911 Center is
responsible for daily processing of the ALI/DMS computer data
base and provides error files, etc. to the Customer Services
department for investigation and correction.  The E911 Center
participates in all system implementations and on-going
maintenance effort and assists in the development of procedures,
training and education of information to all groups.

Any group receiving a 911 trouble from the SSC/MAC should close
out the trouble with the SSC/MAC or provide a status if the
trouble has been referred to another group.  This will allow the
SSC/MAC to provide a status back to the customer or escalate as
appropriate.

Any group receiving a trouble from the Host site (MMOC or CCNC)
should close the trouble back to that group.

The MMOC should notify the appropriate SSC/MAC when the Host,
Node, or all Node circuits are down so that the SSC/MAC can reply
to customer reports that may be called in by the PSAPs.  This
will eliminate duplicate reporting of troubles. On complete
outages the MMOC will follow escalation procedures for a Node
after two (2) hours and for a PSAP after four (4) hours.
Additionally the MMOC will notify the appropriate SSC/MAC when
the Host, Node, or all Node circuits are down.

The PSAP will call the SSC/MAC to report E911 troubles.  The
person reporting the E911 trouble may not have a circuit I.D. and
will therefore report the PSAP name and address.  Many PSAP
troubles are not circuit specific.  In those instances where the
caller cannot provide a circuit I.D., the SSC/MAC will be
required to determine the circuit I.D. using the PSAP profile.
Under no circumstances will the SSC/MAC Center refuse to take the
trouble.  The E911 trouble should be handled as quickly as
possible, with the SSC/MAC providing as much assistance as
possible while taking the trouble report from the caller.

The SSC/MAC will screen/test the trouble to determine the
appropriate handoff organization based on the following criteria:



  PSAP equipment problem:  SSIM/I&M
  Circuit problem:  SSC/MAC
  Voice network problem:  SCC (report trunk group number)



Problem affecting multiple PSAPs (No ALI report from all PSAPs):
Contact the MMOC to check for NODE or Host computer problems
before further testing.

The SSC/MAC will track the status of reported troubles and
escalate as appropriate.  The SSC/MAC will close out
customer/company reports with the initiating contact.  Groups
with specific maintenance responsibilities, defined above, will
investigate "chronic" troubles upon request from the SSC/MAC and
the ongoing maintenance subcommittee.

All "out of service" E911 troubles are priority one type reports.
One link down to a PSAP is considered a priority one trouble and
should be handled as if the PSAP was isolated.

The PSAP will report troubles with the ANI controller, ALI
controller or set equipment to the SSC/MAC.

NO ANI:  Where the PSAP reports NO ANI (digital display screen is
blank) ask if this condition exists on all screens and on all
calls.  It is important to differentiate between blank screens
and screens displaying 911-00XX, or all zeroes.

When the PSAP reports all screens on all calls, ask if there is
any voice contact with callers.  If there is no voice contact the
trouble should be referred to the SCC immediately since 911 calls
are not getting through which may require alternate routing of
calls to another PSAP.

When the PSAP reports this condition on all screens but not all
calls and has voice contact with callers, the report should be
referred to SSIM/I&M for dispatch.  The SSC/MAC should verify
with the SCC that ANI is pulsing before dispatching SSIM.

When the PSAP reports this condition on one screen for all calls
(others work fine) the trouble should be referred to SSIM/I&M for
dispatch, because the trouble is isolated to one piece of
equipment at the customer premise.

An ANI failure (i.e. all zeroes) indicates that the ANI has not
been received by the PSAP from the tandem office or was lost by
the PSAP ANI controller.  The PSAP may receive "02" alarms which
can be caused by the ANI controller logging more than three all
zero failures on the same trunk.  The PSAP has been instructed to
report this condition to the SSC/MAC since it could indicate an
equipment trouble at the PSAP which might be affecting all
subscribers calling into the PSAP.  When all zeroes are being
received on all calls or "02" alarms continue, a tester should
analyze the condition to determine the appropriate action to be
taken.  The tester must perform cooperative testing with the SCC
when there appears to be a problem on the Tandem-PSAP trunks
before requesting dispatch.

When an occasional all zero condition is reported, the SSC/MAC
should dispatch SSIM/I&M to routine equipment on a "chronic"
troublesweep.

The PSAPs are instructed to report incidental ANI failures to the
BOC on a PSAP inquiry trouble ticket (paper) that is sent to the
Customer Services E911 group and forwarded to E911 center when
required.  This usually involves only a particular telephone
number and is not a condition that would require a report to the
SSC/MAC.  Multiple ANI failures which our from the same end
office (XX denotes end office), indicate a hard trouble condition
may exist in the end office or end office tandem trunks.  The
PSAP will report this type of condition to the SSC/MAC and the
SSC/MAC should refer the report to the SCC responsible for the
tandem office.  NOTE: XX is the ESCO (Emergency Service Number)
associated with the incoming 911 trunks into the tandem.  It is
important that the C/MAC tell the SCC what is displayed at the
PSAP (i.e. 911-0011) which indicates to the SCC which end office
is in trouble.

Note:  It is essential that the PSAP fill out inquiry form on
every ANI failure.

The PSAP will report a trouble any time an address is not
received on an address display (screen blank) E911 call.  (If a
record is not in the 911 data base or an ANI failure is
encountered, the screen will provide a display noticing such
condition).  The SSC/MAC should verify with the PSAP whether the
NO ALI condition is on one screen or all screens.

When the condition is on one screen (other screens receive ALI
information) the SSC/MAC will request SSIM/I&M to dispatch.

If no screens are receiving ALI information, there is usually a
circuit trouble between the PSAP and the Host computer.  The
SSC/MAC should test the trouble and refer for restoral.

Note:  If the SSC/MAC receives calls from multiple PSAP's, all of
which are receiving NO ALI, there is a problem with the Node or
Node to Host circuits or the Host computer itself.  Before
referring the trouble the SSC/MAC should call the MMOC to inquire
if the Node or Host is in trouble.

Alarm conditions on the ANI controller digital display at the
PSAP are to be reported by the PSAP's.  These alarms can indicate
various trouble conditions so the SSC/MAC should ask the PSAP if
any portion of the E911 system is not functioning properly.

The SSC/MAC should verify with the PSAP attendant that the
equipment's primary function is answering E911 calls.  If it is,
the SSC/MAC should request a dispatch SSIM/I&M.  If the equipment
is not primarily used for E911, then the SSC/MAC should advise
PSAP to contact their CPE vendor.

Note:  These troubles can be quite confusing when the PSAP has
vendor equipment mixed in with equipment that the BOC maintains.
The Marketing representative should provide the SSC/MAC
information concerning any unusual or exception items where the
PSAP should contact their vendor.  This information should be
included in the PSAP profile sheets.

ANI or ALI controller down:  When the host computer sees the PSAP
equipment down and it does not come back up, the MMOC will report
the trouble to the SSC/MAC; the equipment is down at the PSAP, a
dispatch will be required.

PSAP link (circuit) down:  The MMOC will provide the SSC/MAC with
the circuit ID that the Host computer indicates in trouble.
Although each PSAP has two circuits, when either circuit is down
the condition must be treated as an emergency since failure of
the second circuit will cause the PSAP to be isolated.

Any problems that the MMOC identifies from the Node location to
the Host computer will be handled directly with the appropriate
MMOC(s)/CCNC.

Note:  The customer will call only when a problem is apparent to
the PSAP. When only one circuit is down to the PSAP, the customer
may not be aware there is a trouble, even though there is one
link down, notification should appear on the PSAP screen.
Troubles called into the SSC/MAC from the MMOC or other company
employee should not be closed out by calling the PSAP since it
may result in the customer responding that they do not have a
trouble.  These reports can only be closed out by receiving
information that the trouble was fixed and by checking with the
company employee that reported the trouble.  The MMOC personnel
will be able to verify that the trouble has cleared by reviewing
a printout from the host.

When the CRSAB receives a subscriber complaint (i.e., cannot dial
911) the RSA should obtain as much information as possible while
the customer is on the line.

For example, what happened when the subscriber dialed 911?  The
report is automatically directed to the IMC for subscriber line
testing.  When no line trouble is found, the IMC will refer the
trouble condition to the SSC/MAC.  The SSC/MAC will contact
Customer Services E911 Group and verify that the subscriber
should be able to call 911 and obtain the ESN.  The SSC/MAC will
verify the ESN via 2SCCS.  When both verifications match, the
SSC/MAC will refer the report to the SCC responsible for the 911
tandem office for investigation and resolution.  The MAC is
responsible for tracking the trouble and informing the IMC when
it is resolved.

For more information, please refer to E911 Glossary of Terms.


          End of Phrack File


_____________________________________



  The reader is forgiven if he or she was entirely unable
to read this document.  John Perry Barlow had a great deal of fun
at its expense, in "Crime and Puzzlement:"  "Bureaucrat-ese of
surpassing opacity.... To read the whole thing straight through
without entering coma requires either a machine or a human who
has too much practice thinking like one.  Anyone who can
understand it fully and fluidly had altered his consciousness
beyond the ability to ever again read Blake, Whitman, or
Tolstoy.... the document contains little of interest to anyone
who is not a student of advanced organizational sclerosis."

  With the Document itself to hand, however, exactly as it
was published (in its six-page edited form) in PHRACK, the reader
may be able to verify a few statements of fact about its nature.
First, there is no software, no computer code, in the Document.
It is not computer-programming language like FORTRAN or C++, it
is English; all the sentences have nouns and verbs and
punctuation.  It does not explain how to break into the E911
system.  It does not suggest ways to destroy or damage the E911
system.

  There are no access codes in the Document.  There are no
computer passwords.  It does not explain how to steal long
distance service.  It does not explain how to break in to telco
switching stations.  There is nothing in it about using a
personal computer or a modem for any purpose at all, good or bad.

  Close study will reveal that this document is not about
machinery.  The E911 Document is about ADMINISTRATION.  It
describes how one creates and administers certain units of telco
bureaucracy:  Special Service Centers and Major Account Centers
(SSC/MAC).  It describes how these centers should distribute
responsibility for the E911 service, to other units of telco
bureaucracy, in a chain of command, a formal hierarchy.  It
describes who answers customer complaints, who screens calls, who
reports equipment failures, who answers those reports, who
handles maintenance, who chairs subcommittees, who gives orders,
who follows orders, WHO tells WHOM what to do.  The Document is
not a "roadmap" to computers.  The Document is a roadmap to
PEOPLE.

  As an aid to breaking into computer systems, the Document
is USELESS.  As an aid to harassing and deceiving telco people,
however, the Document might prove handy (especially with its
Glossary, which I have not included).  An intense and protracted
study of this Document and its Glossary, combined with many other
such documents, might teach one to speak like a telco employee.
And telco people live by SPEECH--they live by phone
communication.  If you can mimic their language over the phone,
you can "social-engineer" them.  If you can con telco people, you
can wreak havoc among them.  You can force them to no longer
trust one another; you can break the telephonic ties that bind
their community; you can make them paranoid.  And people will
fight harder to defend their community than they will fight to
defend their individual selves.

  This was the genuine, gut-level threat posed by PHRACK
magazine.  The real struggle was over the control of telco
language, the control of telco knowledge.  It was a struggle to
defend the social "membrane of differentiation" that forms the
walls of the telco community's ivory tower--the special jargon
that allows telco professionals to recognize one another, and to
exclude charlatans, thieves, and upstarts.  And the prosecution
brought out this fact.  They repeatedly made reference to the
threat posed to telco professionals by hackers using "social
engineering."

  However, Craig Neidorf was not on trial for learning to
speak like a professional telecommunications expert.  Craig
Neidorf was on trial for access device fraud and transportation
of stolen property.  He was on trial for stealing a document that
was purportedly highly sensitive and purportedly worth tens of
thousands of dollars.




  John Nagle read the E911 Document.  He drew his own
conclusions.  And he presented Zenner and his defense team with
an overflowing box of similar material, drawn mostly from
Stanford University's engineering libraries.  During the trial,
the defense team--Zenner, half-a-dozen other attorneys, Nagle,
Neidorf, and computer-security expert Dorothy Denning, all pored
over the E911 Document line-by-line.

  On the afternoon of July 25, 1990, Zenner began to cross-
examine a woman named Billie Williams, a service manager for
Southern Bell in Atlanta.  Ms. Williams had been responsible for
the E911 Document.  (She was not its author--its original
"author" was a Southern Bell staff manager named Richard Helms.
However, Mr. Helms should not bear the entire blame; many telco
staff people and maintenance personnel had amended the Document.
It had not been so much "written" by a single author, as built by
committee out of concrete-blocks of jargon.)

  Ms. Williams had been called as a witness for the
prosecution, and had gamely tried to explain the basic technical
structure of the E911 system, aided by charts.

  Now it was Zenner's turn.  He first established that the
"proprietary stamp" that BellSouth had used on the E911 Document
was stamped on EVERY SINGLE DOCUMENT that BellSouth wrote--
THOUSANDS of documents.  "We do not publish anything other than
for our own company," Ms. Williams explained.  "Any company
document of this nature is considered proprietary."  Nobody was
in charge of singling out special high-security publications for
special high-security protection.  They were ALL special, no
matter how trivial, no matter what their subject matter--the
stamp was put on as soon as any document was written, and the
stamp was never removed.

  Zenner now asked whether the charts she had been using to
explain the mechanics of E911 system were "proprietary," too.
Were they PUBLIC INFORMATION, these charts, all about PSAPs,
ALIs, nodes, local end switches?  Could he take the charts out in
the street and show them to anybody, "without violating some
proprietary notion that BellSouth has?"

  Ms. Williams showed some confusion, but finally agreed
that the charts were, in fact, public.

  "But isn't this what you said was basically what appeared
in PHRACK?"

  Ms. Williams denied this.

  Zenner now pointed out that the E911 Document as
published in Phrack was only half the size of the original E911
Document (as Prophet had purloined it).  Half of it had been
deleted--edited by Neidorf.

  Ms. Williams countered that "Most of the information that
is in the text file is redundant."

  Zenner continued to probe.  Exactly what bits of
knowledge in the Document were, in fact, unknown to the public?
Locations of E911 computers?  Phone numbers for telco personnel?
Ongoing maintenance subcommittees?  Hadn't Neidorf removed much
of this?

  Then he pounced.  "Are you familiar with Bellcore
Technical Reference Document TR-TSY-000350?"  It was, Zenner
explained, officially titled "E911 Public Safety Answering Point
Interface Between 1-1AESS Switch and Customer Premises
Equipment."  It contained highly detailed and specific technical
information about the E911 System.  It was published by Bellcore
and publicly available for about $20.

  He showed the witness a Bellcore catalog which listed
thousands of documents from Bellcore and from all the Baby Bells,
BellSouth included.  The catalog, Zenner pointed out, was free.
Anyone with a credit card could call the Bellcore toll-free 800
number and simply order any of these documents, which would be
shipped to any customer without question.  Including, for
instance, "BellSouth E911 Service Interfaces to Customer Premises
Equipment at a Public Safety Answering Point."

  Zenner gave the witness a copy of "BellSouth E911 Service
Interfaces," which cost, as he pointed out, $13, straight from
the catalog.  "Look at it carefully," he urged Ms. Williams, "and
tell me if it doesn't contain about twice as much detailed
information about the E911 system of BellSouth than appeared
anywhere in PHRACK."

  "You want me to...." Ms. Williams trailed off.  "I don't
understand."

  "Take a careful look," Zenner persisted.  "Take a look at
that document, and tell me when you're done looking at it if,
indeed, it doesn't contain much more detailed information about
the E911 system than appeared in PHRACK."

  "PHRACK wasn't taken from this," Ms. Williams said.

  "Excuse me?" said Zenner.

  "PHRACK wasn't taken from this."

  "I can't hear you," Zenner said.

  "PHRACK was not taken from this document.  I don't
understand your question to me."

  "I guess you don't," Zenner said.

  At this point, the prosecution's case had been gutshot.
Ms. Williams was distressed.  Her confusion was quite genuine.
PHRACK had not been taken from any publicly available Bellcore
document.  PHRACK E911 Document had been stolen from her own
company's computers, from her own company's text files, that her
own colleagues had written, and revised, with much labor.

  But the "value" of the Document had been blown to
smithereens.  It wasn't worth eighty grand.  According to
Bellcore it was worth thirteen bucks.  And the looming menace
that it supposedly posed had been reduced in instants to a
scarecrow.  Bellcore itself was selling material far more
detailed and "dangerous," to anybody with a credit card and a
phone.

  Actually, Bellcore was not giving this information to
just anybody.  They gave it to ANYBODY WHO ASKED, but not many
did ask.  Not many people knew that Bellcore had a free catalog
and an 800 number.  John Nagle knew, but certainly the average
teenage phreak didn't know.  "Tuc," a friend of Neidorf's and
sometime PHRACK contributor, knew, and Tuc had been very helpful
to the defense, behind the scenes.  But the Legion of Doom didn't
know--otherwise, they would never have wasted so much time
raiding dumpsters.  Cook didn't know.  Foley didn't know.
Kluepfel didn't know.  The right hand of Bellcore knew not what
the left hand was doing.  The right hand was battering hackers
without mercy, while the left hand was distributing Bellcore's
intellectual property to anybody who was interested in telephone
technical trivia--apparently, a pathetic few.

  The digital underground was so amateurish and poorly
organized that they had never discovered this heap of unguarded
riches.  The ivory tower of the telcos was so wrapped-up in the
fog of its own technical obscurity that it had left all the
windows open and flung open the doors.  No one had even noticed.

  Zenner sank another nail in the coffin.  He produced a
printed issue of TELEPHONE ENGINEER & MANAGEMENT, a prominent
industry journal that comes out twice a month and costs $27 a
year.  This particular issue of _TE&M_, called "Update on 911,"
featured a galaxy of technical details on 911 service and a
glossary far more extensive than PHRACK'S.

  The trial rumbled on, somehow, through its own momentum.
Tim Foley testified about his interrogations of Neidorf.
Neidorf's written admission that he had known the E911 Document
was pilfered was officially read into the court record.

  An interesting side issue came up:  "Terminus" had once
passed Neidorf a piece of UNIX AT&T software, a log-in sequence,
that had been cunningly altered so that it could trap passwords.
The UNIX software itself was illegally copied AT&T property, and
the alterations "Terminus" had made to it, had transformed it
into a device for facilitating computer break-ins.  Terminus
himself would eventually plead guilty to theft of this piece of
software, and the Chicago group would send Terminus to prison for
it.  But it was of dubious relevance in the Neidorf case.
Neidorf hadn't written the program.  He wasn't accused of ever
having used it.  And Neidorf wasn't being charged with software
theft or owning a password trapper.

  On the next day, Zenner took the offensive.  The civil
libertarians now had their own arcane, untried legal weaponry to
launch into action--the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of
1986, 18 US Code, Section 2701 et seq.  Section 2701 makes it a
crime to intentionally access without authorization a facility in
which an electronic communication service is provided--it is, at
heart, an anti-bugging and anti-tapping law, intended to carry
the traditional protections of telephones into other electronic
channels of communication.  While providing penalties for amateur
snoops, however, Section 2703 of the ECPA also lays some formal
difficulties on the bugging and tapping activities of police.

  The Secret Service, in the person of Tim Foley, had
served Richard Andrews with a federal grand jury subpoena, in
their pursuit of Prophet, the E911 Document, and the Terminus
software ring.  But according to the Electronic Communications
Privacy Act, a "provider of remote computing service" was legally
entitled to "prior notice" from the government if a subpoena was
used.  Richard Andrews and his basement UNIX node, Jolnet, had
not received any "prior notice."  Tim Foley had purportedly
violated the ECPA and committed an electronic crime!  Zenner now
sought the judge's permission to cross-examine Foley on the topic
of Foley's own electronic misdeeds.

  Cook argued that Richard Andrews' Jolnet was a privately
owned bulletin board, and not within the purview of ECPA.  Judge
Bua granted the motion of the government to prevent cross-
examination on that point, and Zenner's offensive fizzled.  This,
however, was the first direct assault on the legality of the
actions of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force itself--the
first suggestion that they themselves had broken the law, and
might, perhaps, be called to account.

  Zenner, in any case, did not really need the ECPA.
Instead, he grilled Foley on the glaring contradictions in the
supposed value of the E911 Document.  He also brought up the
embarrassing fact that the supposedly red-hot E911 Document had
been sitting around for months, in Jolnet, with Kluepfel's
knowledge, while Kluepfel had done nothing about it.

  In the afternoon, the Prophet was brought in to testify
for the prosecution.  (The Prophet, it will be recalled, had also
been indicted in the case as partner in a fraud scheme with
Neidorf.)  In Atlanta, the Prophet had already pled guilty to one
charge of conspiracy, one charge of wire fraud and one charge of
interstate transportation of stolen property.  The wire fraud
charge, and the stolen property charge, were both directly based
on the E911 Document.

  The twenty-year-old Prophet proved a sorry customer,
answering questions politely but in a barely audible mumble, his
voice trailing off at the ends of sentences.  He was constantly
urged to speak up.

  Cook, examining Prophet, forced him to admit that he had
once had a "drug problem," abusing amphetamines, marijuana,
cocaine, and LSD.  This may have established to the jury that
"hackers" are, or can be, seedy lowlife characters, but it may
have damaged Prophet's credibility somewhat.  Zenner later
suggested that drugs might have damaged Prophet's memory.  The
interesting fact also surfaced that Prophet had never physically
met Craig Neidorf.  He didn't even know Neidorf's last name--at
least, not until the trial.

  Prophet confirmed the basic facts of his hacker career.
He was a member of the Legion of Doom.  He had abused codes, he
had broken into switching stations and re-routed calls, he had
hung out on pirate bulletin boards.  He had raided the BellSouth
AIMSX computer, copied the E911 Document, stored it on Jolnet,
mailed it to Neidorf.  He and Neidorf had edited it, and Neidorf
had known where it came from.

  Zenner, however, had Prophet confirm that Neidorf was not
a member of the Legion of Doom, and had not urged Prophet to
break into BellSouth computers.  Neidorf had never urged Prophet
to defraud anyone, or to steal anything.  Prophet also admitted
that he had never known Neidorf to break in to any computer.
Prophet said that no one in the Legion of Doom considered Craig
Neidorf a "hacker" at all.  Neidorf was not a UNIX maven, and
simply lacked the necessary skill and ability to break into
computers.  Neidorf just published a magazine.

  On Friday, July 27, 1990, the case against Neidorf
collapsed.  Cook moved to dismiss the indictment, citing
"information currently available to us that was not available to
us at the inception of the trial."  Judge Bua praised the
prosecution for this action, which he described as "very
responsible," then dismissed a juror and declared a mistrial.

  Neidorf was a free man.  His defense, however, had cost
himself and his family dearly.  Months of his life had been
consumed in anguish; he had seen his closest friends shun him as
a federal criminal.  He owed his lawyers over a hundred thousand
dollars, despite a generous payment to the defense by Mitch
Kapor.

  Neidorf was not found innocent.  The trial was simply
dropped.  Nevertheless, on September 9, 1991, Judge Bua granted
Neidorf's motion for the "expungement and sealing" of his
indictment record.  The United States Secret Service was ordered
to delete and destroy all fingerprints, photographs, and other
records of arrest or processing relating to Neidorf's indictment,
including their paper documents and their computer records.

  Neidorf went back to school, blazingly determined to
become a lawyer.  Having seen the justice system at work, Neidorf
lost much of his enthusiasm for merely technical power.  At this
writing, Craig Neidorf is working in Washington as a salaried
researcher for the American Civil Liberties Union.




  The outcome of the Neidorf trial changed the EFF from
voices-in-the-wilderness to the media darlings of the new
frontier.

  Legally speaking, the Neidorf case was not a sweeping
triumph for anyone concerned.  No constitutional principles had
been established.  The issues of "freedom of the press" for
electronic publishers remained in legal limbo.  There were public
misconceptions about the case.  Many people thought Neidorf had
been found innocent and relieved of all his legal debts by Kapor.
The truth was that the government had simply dropped the case,
and Neidorf's family had gone deeply into hock to support him.

  But the Neidorf case did provide a single, devastating,
public sound-bite:  THE FEDS SAID IT WAS WORTH EIGHTY GRAND, AND
IT WAS ONLY WORTH THIRTEEN BUCKS.

  This is the Neidorf case's single most memorable element.
No serious report of the case missed this particular element.
Even cops could not read this without a wince and a shake of the
head.  It left the public credibility of the crackdown agents in
tatters.

  The crackdown, in fact, continued, however.  Those two
charges against Prophet, which had been based on the E911
Document, were quietly forgotten at his sentencing--even though
Prophet had already pled guilty to them.  Georgia federal
prosecutors strongly argued for jail time for the Atlanta Three,
insisting on "the need to send a message to the community," "the
message that hackers around the country need to hear."

  There was a great deal in their sentencing memorandum
about the awful things that various other hackers had done
(though the Atlanta Three themselves had not, in fact, actually
committed these crimes).  There was also much speculation about
the awful things that the Atlanta Three MIGHT have done and WERE
CAPABLE of doing (even though they had not, in fact, actually
done them).  The prosecution's argument carried the day.  The
Atlanta Three were sent to prison:  Urvile and Leftist both got
14 months each, while Prophet (a second offender) got 21 months.

  The Atlanta Three were also assessed staggering fines as
"restitution":  $233,000 each.  BellSouth claimed that the
defendants had "stolen" "approximately $233,880 worth" of
"proprietary computer access information"--specifically, $233,880
worth of computer passwords and connect addresses.  BellSouth's
astonishing claim of the extreme value of its own computer
passwords and addresses was accepted at face value by the Georgia
court.  Furthermore (as if to emphasize its theoretical nature)
this enormous sum was not divvied up among the Atlanta Three, but
each of them had to pay all of it.

  A striking aspect of the sentence was that the Atlanta
Three were specifically forbidden to use computers, except for
work or under supervision.  Depriving hackers of home computers
and modems makes some sense if one considers hackers as "computer
addicts," but EFF, filing an amicus brief in the case, protested
that this punishment was unconstitutional--it deprived the
Atlanta Three of their rights of free association and free
expression through electronic media.

  Terminus, the "ultimate hacker," was finally sent to
prison for a year through the dogged efforts of the Chicago Task
Force.  His crime, to which he pled guilty, was the transfer of
the UNIX password trapper, which was officially valued by AT&T at
$77,000, a figure which aroused intense skepticism among those
familiar with UNIX "login.c" programs.

  The jailing of Terminus and the Atlanta Legionnaires of
Doom, however, did not cause the EFF any sense of embarrassment
or defeat.  On the contrary, the civil libertarians were rapidly
gathering strength.

  An early and potent supporter was Senator Patrick Leahy,
Democrat from Vermont, who had been a Senate sponsor of the
Electronic Communications Privacy Act.  Even before the Neidorf
trial, Leahy had spoken out in defense of hacker-power and
freedom of the keyboard:  "We cannot unduly inhibit the
inquisitive 13-year-old who, if left to experiment today, may
tomorrow develop the telecommunications or computer technology to
lead the United States into the 21st century.  He represents our
future and our best hope to remain a technologically competitive
nation."

  It was a handsome statement, rendered perhaps rather more
effective by the fact that the crackdown raiders DID NOT HAVE
any Senators speaking out for THEM.  On the contrary, their
highly secretive actions and tactics, all "sealed search
warrants" here and "confidential ongoing investigations" there,
might have won them a burst of glamorous publicity at first, but
were crippling them in the on-going propaganda war.  Gail
Thackeray was reduced to unsupported bluster:  "Some of these
people who are loudest on the bandwagon may just slink into the
background," she predicted in NEWSWEEK--when all the facts came
out, and the cops were vindicated.

  But all the facts did not come out.  Those facts that
did, were not very flattering.  And the cops were not vindicated.
And Gail Thackeray lost her job.  By the end of 1991, William
Cook had also left public employment.

  1990 had belonged to the crackdown, but by '91 its agents
were in severe disarray, and the libertarians were on a roll.
People were flocking to the cause.

  A particularly interesting ally had been Mike Godwin of
Austin, Texas.  Godwin was an individual almost as difficult to
describe as Barlow; he had been editor of the student newspaper
of the University of Texas, and a computer salesman, and a
programmer, and in 1990 was back in law school, looking for a law
degree.

  Godwin was also a bulletin board maven.  He was very
well-known in the Austin board community under his handle "Johnny
Mnemonic," which he adopted from a cyberpunk science fiction
story by William Gibson.  Godwin was an ardent cyberpunk science
fiction fan.  As a fellow Austinite of similar age and similar
interests, I myself had known Godwin socially for many years.
When William Gibson and myself had been writing our collaborative
SF novel, THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE, Godwin had been our technical
advisor in our effort to link our Apple word-processors from
Austin to Vancouver.  Gibson and I were so pleased by his
generous expert help that we named a character in the novel
"Michael Godwin" in his honor.

  The handle "Mnemonic" suited Godwin very well.  His
erudition and his mastery of trivia were impressive to the point
of stupor; his ardent curiosity seemed insatiable, and his desire
to debate and argue seemed the central drive of his life.  Godwin
had even started his own Austin debating society, wryly known as
the "Dull Men's Club."  In person, Godwin could be overwhelming;
a flypaper-brained polymath who could not seem to let any idea
go.  On bulletin boards, however, Godwin's closely reasoned,
highly grammatical, erudite posts suited the medium well, and he
became a local board celebrity.

  Mike Godwin was the man most responsible for the public
national exposure of the Steve Jackson case.  The Izenberg
seizure in Austin had received no press coverage at all.  The
March 1 raids on Mentor, Bloodaxe, and Steve Jackson Games had
received a brief front-page splash in the front page of the
AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN, but it was confused and ill-informed:
the warrants were sealed, and the Secret Service wasn't talking.
Steve Jackson seemed doomed to obscurity.  Jackson had not been
arrested; he was not charged with any crime; he was not on trial.
He had lost some computers in an ongoing investigation--so what?
Jackson tried hard to attract attention to the true extent of his
plight, but he was drawing a blank; no one in a position to help
him seemed able to get a mental grip on the issues.

  Godwin, however, was uniquely, almost magically,
qualified to carry Jackson's case to the outside world.  Godwin
was a board enthusiast, a science fiction fan, a former
journalist, a computer salesman, a lawyer-to-be, and an
Austinite.  Through a coincidence yet more amazing, in his last
year of law school Godwin had specialized in federal prosecutions
and criminal procedure.  Acting entirely on his own, Godwin made
up a press packet which summarized the issues and provided useful
contacts for reporters.  Godwin's behind-the-scenes effort (which
he carried out mostly to prove a point in a local board debate)
broke the story again in the AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN and then
in NEWSWEEK.

  Life was never the same for Mike Godwin after that.  As
he joined the growing civil liberties debate on the Internet, it
was obvious to all parties involved that here was one guy who, in
the midst of complete murk and confusion, GENUINELY UNDERSTOOD
EVERYTHING HE WAS TALKING ABOUT.  The disparate elements of
Godwin's dilettantish existence suddenly fell together as neatly
as the facets of a Rubik's cube.

  When the time came to hire a full-time EFF staff
attorney, Godwin was the obvious choice.  He took the Texas bar
exam, left Austin, moved to Cambridge, became a full-time,
professional, computer civil libertarian, and was soon touring
the nation on behalf of EFF, delivering well-received addresses
on the issues to crowds as disparate as academics,
industrialists, science fiction fans, and federal cops.

  Michael Godwin is currently the chief legal counsel of
the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts.




  Another early and influential participant in the
controversy was Dorothy Denning.  Dr. Denning was unique among
investigators of the computer underground in that she did not
enter the debate with any set of politicized motives.  She was a
professional cryptographer and computer security expert whose
primary interest in hackers was SCHOLARLY.  She had a B.A. and
M.A. in mathematics, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue.
She had worked for SRI International, the California think-tank
that was also the home of computer-security maven Donn Parker,
and had authored an influential text called CRYPTOGRAPHY AND DATA
SECURITY.  In 1990, Dr. Denning was working for Digital
Equipment Corporation in their Systems Reseach Center.  Her
husband, Peter Denning, was also a computer security expert,
working for NASA's Research Institute for Advanced Computer
Science.  He had edited the well-received COMPUTERS UNDER ATTACK:
INTRUDERS, WORMS AND VIRUSES.

   Dr. Denning took it upon herself to contact the digital
underground, more or less with an anthropological interest.
There she discovered that these computer-intruding hackers, who
had been characterized as unethical, irresponsible, and a serious
danger to society, did in fact have their own subculture and
their own rules.  They were not particularly well-considered
rules, but they were, in fact, rules.  Basically, they didn't
take money and they didn't break anything.

  Her dispassionate reports on her researches did a great
deal to influence serious-minded computer professionals--the sort
of people who merely rolled their eyes at the cyberspace
rhapsodies of a John Perry Barlow.

  For young hackers of the digital underground, meeting
Dorothy Denning was a genuinely mind-boggling experience.  Here
was this neatly coiffed, conservatively dressed, dainty little
personage, who reminded most hackers of their moms or their
aunts.  And yet she was an IBM systems programmer with profound
expertise in computer architectures and high-security information
flow, who had personal friends in the FBI and the National
Security Agency.

  Dorothy Denning was a shining example of the American
mathematical intelligentsia, a genuinely brilliant person from
the central ranks of the computer-science elite.  And here she
was, gently questioning twenty-year-old hairy-eyed phone-phreaks
over the deeper ethical implications of their behavior.

  Confronted by this genuinely nice lady, most hackers sat
up very straight and did their best to keep the anarchy-file
stuff down to a faint whiff of brimstone.  Nevertheless, the
hackers WERE in fact prepared to seriously discuss serious issues
with Dorothy Denning.  They were willing to speak the unspeakable
and defend the indefensible, to blurt out their convictions that
information cannot be owned, that the databases of governments
and large corporations were a threat to the rights and privacy of
individuals.

  Denning's articles made it clear to many that "hacking"
was not simple vandalism by some evil clique of psychotics.
"Hacking" was not an aberrant menace that could be charmed away
by ignoring it, or swept out of existence by jailing a few
ringleaders.  Instead, "hacking" was symptomatic of a growing,
primal struggle over knowledge and power in the age of
information.

  Denning pointed out that the attitude of hackers were at
least partially shared by forward-looking management theorists in
the business community: people like Peter Drucker and Tom Peters.
Peter Drucker, in his book THE NEW REALITIES, had stated that
"control of information by the government is no longer possible.
Indeed, information is now transnational.  Like money, it has no
'fatherland.'"

  And management maven Tom Peters had chided large
corporations for uptight, proprietary attitudes in his
bestseller, THRIVING ON CHAOS:  "Information hoarding, especially
by politically motivated, power-seeking staffs, had been
commonplace throughout American industry, service and
manufacturing alike. It will be an impossible millstone aroung
the neck of tomorrow's organizations."

  Dorothy Denning had shattered the social membrane of the
digital underground.  She attended the Neidorf trial, where she
was prepared to testify for the defense as an expert witness.
She was a behind-the-scenes organizer of two of the most
important national meetings of the computer civil libertarians.
Though not a zealot of any description, she brought disparate
elements of the electronic community into a surprising and
fruitful collusion.

  Dorothy Denning is currently the Chair of the Computer
Science Department at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.




  There were many stellar figures in the civil libertarian
community.  There's no question, however, that its single most
influential figure was Mitchell D. Kapor.  Other people might
have formal titles, or governmental positions, have more
experience with crime, or with the law, or with the arcanities of
computer security or constitutional theory.  But by 1991 Kapor
had transcended any such narrow role.  Kapor had become "Mitch."

  Mitch had become the central civil-libertarian ad-hocrat.
Mitch had stood up first, he had spoken out loudly, directly,
vigorously and angrily, he had put his own reputation, and his
very considerable personal fortune, on the line.  By mid-'91
Kapor was the best-known advocate of his cause and was known
PERSONALLY by almost every single human being in America with any
direct influence on the question of civil liberties in
cyberspace.  Mitch had built bridges, crossed voids, changed
paradigms, forged metaphors, made phone-calls and swapped
business cards to such spectacular effect that it had become
impossible for anyone to take any action in the "hacker question"
without wondering what Mitch might think--and say--and tell his
friends.

  The EFF had simply NETWORKED the situation into an
entirely new status quo.  And in fact this had been EFF's
deliberate strategy from the beginning.  Both Barlow and Kapor
loathed bureaucracies and had deliberately chosen to work almost
entirely through the electronic spiderweb of "valuable personal
contacts."

  After a year of EFF, both Barlow and Kapor had every
reason to look back with satisfaction.  EFF had established its
own Internet node, "eff.org," with a well-stocked electronic
archive of documents on electronic civil rights, privacy issues,
and academic freedom.  EFF was also publishing _EFFector_, a
quarterly printed journal, as well as _EFFector Online_, an
electronic newsletter with over 1,200 subscribers.  And EFF was
thriving on the Well.

  EFF had a national headquarters in Cambridge and a full-
time staff.  It had become a membership organization and was
attracting grass-roots support.  It had also attracted the
support of some thirty civil-rights lawyers, ready and eager to
do pro bono work in defense of the Constitution in Cyberspace.

  EFF had lobbied successfully in Washington and in
Massachusetts to change state and federal legislation on computer
networking.  Kapor in particular had become a veteran expert
witness, and had joined the Computer Science and
Telecommunications Board of the National Academy of Science and
Engineering.

  EFF had sponsored meetings such as "Computers, Freedom
and Privacy" and the CPSR Roundtable.  It had carried out a press
offensive that, in the words of _EFFector_, "has affected the
climate of opinion about computer networking and begun to reverse
the slide into 'hacker hysteria' that was beginning to grip the
nation."

  It had helped Craig Neidorf avoid prison.

  And, last but certainly not least, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation had filed a federal lawsuit in the name of
Steve Jackson, Steve Jackson Games Inc., and three users of the
Illuminati bulletin board system.  The defendants were, and are,
the United States Secret Service, William Cook, Tim Foley,
Barbara Golden and Henry Kleupfel.

  The case, which is in pre-trial procedures in an Austin
federal court as of this writing, is a civil action for damages
to redress alleged violations of the First and Fourth Amendments
to the United States Constitution, as well as the Privacy
Protection Act of 1980 (42 USC 2000aa et seq.), and the
Electronic Communications Privacy Act (18 USC 2510 et seq and
2701 et seq).

  EFF had established that it had credibility.  It had also
established that it had teeth.

  In the fall of 1991 I travelled to Massachusetts to speak
personally with Mitch Kapor.  It was my final interview for this
book.




  The city of Boston has always been one of the major
intellectual centers of the American republic.  It is a very old
city by American standards, a place of skyscrapers overshadowing
seventeenth-century graveyards, where the high-tech start-up
companies of Route 128 co-exist with the hand-wrought pre-
industrial grace of "Old Ironsides," the USS CONSTITUTION.

  The Battle of Bunker Hill, one of the first and bitterest
armed clashes of the American Revolution, was fought in Boston's
environs.  Today there is a monumental spire on Bunker Hill,
visible throughout much of the city.  The willingness of the
republican revolutionaries to take up arms and fire on their
oppressors has left a cultural legacy that two full centuries
have not effaced.  Bunker Hill is still a potent center of
American political symbolism, and the Spirit of '76 is still a
potent image for those who seek to mold public opinion.

  Of course, not everyone who wraps himself in the flag is
necessarily a patriot.  When I visited the spire in September
1991, it bore a huge, badly-erased, spray-can grafitto around its
bottom reading "BRITS OUT--IRA PROVOS."  Inside this hallowed
edifice was a glass-cased diorama of thousands of tiny toy
soldiers, rebels and redcoats, fighting and dying over the green
hill, the riverside marshes, the rebel trenchworks.  Plaques
indicated the movement of troops, the shiftings of strategy.  The
Bunker Hill Monument is occupied at its very center by the toy
soldiers of a military war-game simulation.

  The Boston metroplex is a place of great universities,
prominent among the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where
the term "computer hacker" was first coined.  The Hacker
Crackdown of 1990 might be interpreted as a political struggle
among American cities:  traditional strongholds of longhair
intellectual liberalism, such as Boston, San Francisco, and
Austin, versus the bare-knuckle industrial pragmatism of Chicago
and Phoenix (with Atlanta and New York wrapped in internal
struggle).

  The headquarters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is
on 155 Second Street in Cambridge, a Bostonian suburb north of
the River Charles.  Second Street has weedy sidewalks of dented,
sagging brick and elderly cracked asphalt; large street-signs
warn "NO PARKING DURING DECLARED SNOW EMERGENCY."  This is an old
area of modest manufacturing industries; the EFF is catecorner
from the Greene Rubber Company.  EFF's building is two stories of
red brick; its large wooden windows feature gracefully arched
tops and stone sills.

  The glass window beside the Second Street entrance bears
three sheets of neatly laser-printed paper, taped against the
glass.  They read:  ON Technology.  EFF.  KEI.

  "ON Technology" is Kapor's software company, which
currently specializes in "groupware" for the Apple Macintosh
computer.  "Groupware" is intended to promote efficient social
interaction among office-workers linked by computers.  ON
Technology's most successful software products to date are
"Meeting Maker" and "Instant Update."

  "KEI" is Kapor Enterprises Inc., Kapor's personal holding
company, the commercial entity that formally controls his
extensive investments in other hardware and software
corporations.

  "EFF" is a political action group--of a special sort.

  Inside, someone's bike has been chained to the handrails
of a modest flight of stairs.  A wall of modish glass brick
separates this anteroom from the offices.  Beyond the brick,
there's an alarm system mounted on the wall, a sleek, complex
little number that resembles a cross between a thermostat and a
CD player.  Piled against the wall are box after box of a recent
special issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, "How to Work, Play, and
Thrive in Cyberspace," with extensive coverage of electronic
networking techniques and political issues, including an article
by Kapor himself.  These boxes are addressed to Gerard Van der
Leun, EFF's Director of Communications, who will shortly mail
those magazines to every member of the EFF.

  The joint headquarters of EFF, KEI, and ON Technology,
which Kapor currently rents, is a modestly bustling place.  It's
very much the same physical size as Steve Jackson's gaming
company.  It's certainly a far cry from the gigantic gray steel-
sided railway shipping barn, on the Monsignor O'Brien Highway,
that is owned by Lotus Development Corporation.

  Lotus is, of course, the software giant that Mitchell
Kapor founded in the late 70s.  The software program Kapor co-
authored, "Lotus 1-2-3," is still that company's most profitable
product.  "Lotus 1-2-3" also bears a singular distinction in the
digital underground: it's probably the most pirated piece of
application software in world history.

  Kapor greets me cordially in his own office, down a hall.
Kapor, whose name is pronounced KAY-por, is in his early forties,
married and the father of two.  He has a round face, high
forehead, straight nose, a slightly tousled mop of black hair
peppered with gray.  His large brown eyes are wideset,
reflective, one might almost say soulful.  He disdains ties, and
commonly wears Hawaiian shirts and tropical prints, not so much
garish as simply cheerful and just that little bit anomalous.

  There is just the whiff of hacker brimstone about Mitch
Kapor.  He may not have the hard-riding, hell-for-leather,
guitar-strumming charisma of his Wyoming colleague John Perry
Barlow, but there's something about the guy that still stops one
short.  He has the air of the Eastern city dude in the bowler
hat, the dreamy, Longfellow-quoting poker shark who only HAPPENS
to know the exact mathematical odds against drawing to an inside
straight.  Even among his computer-community colleagues, who are
hardly known for mental sluggishness, Kapor strikes one
forcefully as a very intelligent man.  He speaks rapidly, with
vigorous gestures, his Boston accent sometimes slipping to the
sharp nasal tang of his youth in Long Island.

  Kapor, whose Kapor Family Foundation does much of his
philanthropic work, is a strong supporter of Boston's Computer
Museum.  Kapor's interest in the history of his industry has
brought him some remarkable curios, such as the "byte" just
outside his office door.  This "byte"--eight digital bits--has
been salvaged from the wreck of an electronic computer of the
pre-transistor age.  It's a standing gunmetal rack about the size
of a small toaster-oven:  with eight slots of hand-soldered
breadboarding featuring thumb-sized vacuum tubes.  If it fell off
a table it could easily break your foot, but it was state-of-the-
art computation in the 1940s.  (It would take exactly 157,184 of
these primordial toasters to hold the first part of this book.)

  There's also a coiling, multicolored, scaly dragon that
some inspired techno-punk artist has cobbled up entirely out of
transistors, capacitors, and brightly plastic-coated wiring.

  Inside the office, Kapor excuses himself briefly to do a
little mouse-whizzing housekeeping on his personal Macintosh
IIfx.  If its giant screen were an open window, an agile person
could climb through it without much trouble at all.  There's a
coffee-cup at Kapor's elbow, a memento of his recent trip to
Eastern Europe, which has a black-and-white stencilled photo and
the legend CAPITALIST FOOLS TOUR.  It's Kapor, Barlow, and two
California venture-capitalist luminaries of their acquaintance,
four windblown, grinning Baby Boomer dudes in leather jackets,
boots, denim, travel bags, standing on airport tarmac somewhere
behind the formerly Iron Curtain.  They look as if they're having
the absolute time of their lives.

  Kapor is in a reminiscent mood.  We talk a bit about his
youth--high school days as a "math nerd," Saturdays attending
Columbia University's high-school science honors program, where
he had his first experience programming computers.  IBM 1620s, in
1965 and '66.  "I was very interested," says Kapor, "and then I
went off to college and got distracted by drugs sex and rock and
roll, like anybody with half a brain would have then!"  After
college he was a progressive-rock DJ in Hartford, Connecticut,
for a couple of years.

  I ask him if he ever misses his rock and roll days--if he
ever wished he could go back to radio work.

  He shakes his head flatly.  "I stopped thinking about
going back to be a DJ the day after Altamont."

  Kapor moved to Boston in 1974 and got a job programming
mainframes in COBOL.  He hated it.  He quit and became a teacher
of transcendental meditation.  (It was Kapor's long flirtation
with Eastern mysticism that gave the world "Lotus.")

  In 1976 Kapor went to Switzerland, where the
Transcendental Meditation movement had rented a gigantic
Victorian hotel in St-Moritz.  It was an all-male group--a
hundred and twenty of them--determined upon Enlightenment or
Bust.  Kapor had given the transcendant his best shot.  He was
becoming disenchanted by "the nuttiness in the organization."
"They were teaching people to levitate," he says, staring at the
floor.  His voice drops an octave, becomes flat.  "THEY DON'T
LEVITATE."

   Kapor chose Bust.  He went back to the States and
acquired a degree in counselling psychology.  He worked a while
in a hospital, couldn't stand that either.  "My rep was," he
says, "a very bright kid with a lot of potential who hasn't found
himself.  Almost thirty.  Sort of lost."

  Kapor was unemployed when he bought his first personal
computer--an Apple II.  He sold his stereo to raise cash and
drove to New Hampshire to avoid the sales tax.

  "The day after I purchased it," Kapor tells me, "I was
hanging out in a computer store and I saw another guy, a man in
his forties, well-dressed guy, and eavesdropped on his
conversation with the salesman.  He didn't know anything about
computers.  I'd had a year programming.  And I could program in
BASIC.  I'd taught myself.  So I went up to him, and I actually
sold myself to him as a consultant."  He pauses.  "I don't know
where I got the nerve to do this.  It was uncharacteristic.  I
just said, 'I think I can help you, I've been listening, this is
what you need to do and I think I can do it for you.'  And he
took me on!  He was my first client!  I became a computer
consultant the first day after I bought the Apple II."

  Kapor had found his true vocation.  He attracted more
clients for his consultant service, and started an Apple users'
group.

  A friend of Kapor's, Eric Rosenfeld, a graduate student
at MIT, had a problem.  He was doing a thesis on an arcane form
of financial statistics, but could not wedge himself into the
crowded queue for time on MIT's mainframes.  (One might note at
this point that if Mr. Rosenfeld had dishonestly broken into the
MIT mainframes, Kapor himself might have never invented Lotus 1-
2-3 and the PC business might have been set back for years!)
Eric Rosenfeld did have an Apple II, however, and he thought it
might be possible to scale the problem down.  Kapor, as favor,
wrote a program for him in BASIC that did the job.

  It then occurred to the two of them, out of the blue,
that it might be possible to SELL this program.  They marketed it
themselves, in plastic baggies, for about a hundred bucks a pop,
mail order.  "This was a total cottage industry by a marginal
consultant," Kapor says proudly.  "That's how I got started,
honest to God."

  Rosenfeld, who later became a very prominent figure on
Wall Street, urged Kapor to go to MIT's business school for an
MBA.  Kapor did seven months there, but never got his MBA.  He
picked up some useful tools--mainly a firm grasp of the
principles of accounting--and, in his own words, "learned to talk
MBA."  Then he dropped out and went to Silicon Valley.

  The inventors of VisiCalc, the Apple computer's premier
business program, had shown an interest in Mitch Kapor.  Kapor
worked diligently for them for six months, got tired of
California, and went back to Boston where they had better
bookstores.  The VisiCalc group had made the critical error of
bringing in "professional management."  "That drove them into the
ground," Kapor says.

  "Yeah, you don't hear a lot about VisiCalc these days," I
muse.

  Kapor looks surprised.  "Well, Lotus.... we BOUGHT it."

  "Oh.  You BOUGHT it?"

  "Yeah."

  "Sort of like the Bell System buying Western Union?"

  Kapor grins.  "Yep!  Yep!  Yeah, exactly!"

  Mitch Kapor was not in full command of the destiny of
himself or his industry.  The hottest software commodities of the
early 1980s were COMPUTER GAMES--the Atari seemed destined to
enter every teenage home in America.  Kapor got into business
software simply because he didn't have any particular feeling for
computer games.  But he was supremely fast on his feet, open to
new ideas and inclined to trust his instincts.  And his instincts
were good.  He chose good people to deal with--gifted programmer
Jonathan Sachs (the co-author of Lotus 1-2-3).  Financial wizard
Eric Rosenfeld, canny Wall Street analyst and venture capitalist
Ben Rosen.  Kapor was the founder and CEO of Lotus, one of the
most spectacularly successful business ventures of the later
twentieth century.

  He is now an extremely wealthy man.  I ask him if he
actually knows how much money he has.

  "Yeah," he says.  "Within a percent or two."

  How much does he actually have, then?

  He shakes his head.  "A lot.  A lot.  Not something I
talk about.  Issues of money and class are things that cut pretty
close to the bone."

  I don't pry.  It's beside the point.  One might presume,
impolitely, that Kapor has at least forty million--that's what he
got the year he left Lotus.  People who ought to know claim Kapor
has about a hundred and fifty million, give or take a market
swing in his stock holdings.  If Kapor had stuck with Lotus, as
his colleague friend and rival Bill Gates has stuck with his own
software start-up, Microsoft, then Kapor would likely have much
the same fortune Gates has--somewhere in the neighborhood of
three billion, give or take a few hundred million.  Mitch Kapor
has all the money he wants.  Money has lost whatever charm it
ever held for him--probably not much in the first place.  When
Lotus became too uptight, too bureaucratic, too far from the true
sources of his own satisfaction, Kapor walked.  He simply severed
all connections with the company and went out the door.  It
stunned everyone--except those who knew him best.

  Kapor has not had to strain his resources to wreak a
thorough transformation in cyberspace politics.  In its first
year, EFF's budget was about a quarter of a million dollars.
Kapor is running EFF out of his pocket change.

  Kapor takes pains to tell me that he does not consider
himself a civil libertarian per se.  He has spent quite some time
with true-blue civil libertarians lately, and there's a
political-correctness to them that bugs him.  They seem to him to
spend entirely too much time in legal nitpicking and not enough
vigorously exercising civil rights in the everyday real world.

  Kapor is an entrepreneur.  Like all hackers, he prefers
his involvements direct, personal, and hands-on.  "The fact that
EFF has a node on the Internet is a great thing.  We're a
publisher.  We're a distributor of information."  Among the items
the eff.org Internet node carries is back issues of PHRACK.  They
had an internal debate about that in EFF, and finally decided to
take the plunge.  They might carry other digital underground
publications--but if they do, he says, "we'll certainly carry
Donn Parker, and anything Gail Thackeray wants to put up.  We'll
turn it into a public library, that has the whole spectrum of
use.  Evolve in the direction of people making up their own
minds."  He grins.  "We'll try to label all the editorials."

  Kapor is determined to tackle the technicalities of the
Internet in the service of the public interest.  "The problem
with being a node on the Net today is that you've got to have a
captive technical specialist.  We have Chris Davis around, for
the care and feeding of the balky beast!  We couldn't do it
ourselves!"

  He pauses.  "So one direction in which technology has to
evolve is much more standardized units, that a non-technical
person can feel comfortable with.  It's the same shift as from
minicomputers to PCs.  I can see a future in which any person can
have a Node on the Net.  Any person can be a publisher.  It's
better than the media we now have.  It's possible.  We're working
actively."

  Kapor is in his element now, fluent, thoroughly in
command in his material.  "You go tell a hardware Internet hacker
that everyone should have a node on the Net," he says, "and the
first thing they're going to say is, 'IP doesn't scale!'"  ("IP"
is the interface protocol for the Internet.  As it currently
exists, the IP software is simply not capable of indefinite
expansion; it will run out of usable addresses, it will
saturate.)  "The answer," Kapor says, "is:  evolve the protocol!
Get the smart people together and figure out what to do.  Do we
add ID?  Do we add new protocol?  Don't just say, WE CAN'T DO
IT."

  Getting smart people together to figure out what to do is
a skill at which Kapor clearly excels.  I counter that people on
the Internet rather enjoy their elite technical status, and don't
seem particularly anxious to democratize the Net.

  Kapor agrees, with a show of scorn.  "I tell them that
this is the snobbery of the people on the MAYFLOWER looking down
their noses at the people who came over ON THE SECOND BOAT!  Just
because they got here a year, or five years, or ten years before
everybody else, that doesn't give them ownership of cyberspace!
By what right?"

  I remark that the telcos are an electronic network, too,
and they seem to guard their specialized knowledge pretty
closely.

  Kapor ripostes that the telcos and the Internet are
entirely different animals.  "The Internet is an open system,
everything is published, everything gets argued about, basically
by anybody who can get in.  Mostly, it's exclusive and elitist
just because it's so difficult.  Let's make it easier to use."

  On the other hand, he allows with a swift change of
emphasis, the so-called elitists do have a point as well.
"Before people start coming in, who are new, who want to make
suggestions, and criticize the Net as 'all screwed up'....  They
should at least take the time to understand the culture on its
own terms.  It has its own history--show some respect for it.
I'm a conservative, to that extent."

  The Internet is Kapor's paradigm for the future of
telecommunications.  The Internet is decentralized, non-
hierarchical, almost anarchic.  There are no bosses, no chain of
command, no secret data.  If each node obeys the general
interface standards, there's simply no need for any central
network authority.

  Wouldn't that spell the doom of AT&T as an institution?
I ask.

  That prospect doesn't faze Kapor for a moment.  "Their
big advantage, that they have now, is that they have all of the
wiring.  But two things are happening.  Anyone with right-of-way
is putting down fiber--Southern Pacific Railroad, people like
that--there's enormous 'dark fiber' laid in."  ("Dark Fiber" is
fiber-optic cable, whose enormous capacity so exceeds the demands
of current usage that much of the fiber still has no light-
signals on it--it's still 'dark,' awaiting future use.)

  "The other thing that's happening is the local-loop stuff
is going to go wireless.  Everyone from Bellcore to the cable TV
companies to AT&T wants to put in these things called 'personal
communication systems.'  So you could have local competition--you
could have multiplicity of people, a bunch of neighborhoods,
sticking stuff up on poles.  And a bunch of other people laying
in dark fiber.  So what happens to the telephone companies?
There's enormous pressure on them from both sides.

  "The more I look at this, the more I believe that in a
post-industrial, digital world, the idea of regulated monopolies
is bad.  People will look back on it and say that in the 19th and
20th centuries the idea of public utilities was an okay
compromise.  You needed one set of wires in the ground.  It was
too economically inefficient, otherwise.  And that meant one
entity running it.  But now, with pieces being wireless--the
connections are going to be via high-level interfaces, not via
wires.  I mean, ULTIMATELY there are going to be wires--but the
wires are just a commodity.  Fiber, wireless.  You no longer NEED
a utility."

  Water utilities?  Gas utilities?

  Of course we still need those, he agrees.  "But when what
you're moving is information, instead of physical substances,
then you can play by a different set of rules.  We're evolving
those rules now!  Hopefully you can have a much more
decentralized system, and one in which there's more competition
in the marketplace.

  "The role of government will be to make sure that nobody
cheats.  The proverbial 'level playing field.'  A policy that
prevents monopolization.  It should result in better service,
lower prices, more choices, and local empowerment."  He smiles.
"I'm very big on local empowerment."

  Kapor is a man with a vision.  It's a very novel vision
which he and his allies are working out in considerable detail
and with great energy.  Dark, cynical, morbid cyberpunk that I
am, I cannot avoid considering some of the darker implications of
"decentralized, nonhierarchical, locally empowered" networking.

  I remark that some pundits have suggested that electronic
networking--faxes, phones, small-scale photocopiers--played a
strong role in dissolving the power of centralized communism and
causing the collapse of the Warsaw Pact.

  Socialism is totally discredited, says Kapor, fresh back
from the Eastern Bloc.  The idea that faxes did it, all by
themselves, is rather wishful thinking.

  Has it occurred to him that electronic networking might
corrode America's industrial and political infrastructure to the
point where the whole thing becomes untenable, unworkable--and
the old order just collapses headlong, like in Eastern Europe?

  "No," Kapor says flatly.  "I think that's extraordinarily
unlikely.  In part, because ten or fifteen years ago, I had
similar hopes about personal computers--which utterly failed to
materialize." He grins wryly, then his eyes narrow.  "I'm VERY
opposed to techno-utopias.  Every time I see one, I either run
away, or try to kill it."

  It dawns on me then that Mitch Kapor is not trying to
make the world safe for democracy.  He certainly is not trying to
make it safe for anarchists or utopians--least of all for
computer intruders or electronic rip-off artists.  What he really
hopes to do is make the world safe for future Mitch Kapors.  This
world of decentralized, small-scale nodes, with instant global
access for the best and brightest, would be a perfect milieu for
the shoestring attic capitalism that made Mitch Kapor what he is
today.

  Kapor is a very bright man.  He has a rare combination of
visionary intensity with a strong practical streak.  The Board of
the EFF:  John Barlow, Jerry Berman of the ACLU, Stewart Brand,
John Gilmore, Steve Wozniak, and Esther Dyson, the doyenne of
East-West computer entrepreneurism--share his gift, his vision,
and his formidable networking talents.  They are people of the
1960s, winnowed-out by its turbulence and rewarded with wealth
and influence.  They are some of the best and the brightest that
the electronic community has to offer.  But can they do it, in
the real world?  Or are they only dreaming?  They are so few.
And there is so much against them.

  I leave Kapor and his networking employees struggling
cheerfully with the promising intricacies of their newly
installed Macintosh System 7 software.  The next day is Saturday.
EFF is closed.  I pay a few visits to points of interest
downtown.

  One of them is the birthplace of the telephone.

  It's marked by a bronze plaque in a plinth of black-and-
white speckled granite.  It sits in the plaza of the John F.
Kennedy Federal Building, the very place where Kapor was once
fingerprinted by the FBI.

  The plaque has a bas-relief picture of Bell's original
telephone.  "BIRTHPLACE OF THE TELEPHONE," it reads.  "Here, on
June 2, 1875, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson first
transmitted sound over wires.

  "This successful experiment was completed in a fifth
floor garret at what was then 109 Court Street and marked the
beginning of world-wide telephone service."

  109 Court Street is long gone.  Within sight of Bell's
plaque, across a street, is one of the central offices of NYNEX,
the local Bell RBOC, on 6 Bowdoin Square.

  I cross the street and circle the telco building, slowly,
hands in my jacket pockets.  It's a bright, windy, New England
autumn day.  The central office is a handsome 1940s-era megalith
in late Art Deco, eight stories high.

  Parked outside the back is a power-generation truck.  The
generator strikes me as rather anomalous.  Don't they already
have their own generators in this eight-story monster?  Then the
suspicion strikes me that NYNEX must have heard of the September
17 AT&T power-outage which crashed New York City.  Belt-and-
suspenders, this generator.  Very telco.

  Over the glass doors of the front entrance is a handsome
bronze bas-relief of Art Deco vines, sunflowers, and birds,
entwining the Bell logo and the legend NEW ENGLAND TELEPHONE AND
TELEGRAPH COMPANY--an entity which no longer officially exists.

  The doors are locked securely.  I peer through the
shadowed glass.  Inside is an official poster reading:



             "New England Telephone a NYNEX Company

                            ATTENTION

  "All persons while on New England Telephone Company
premises are required to visibly wear their identification cards
(C.C.P. Section 2, Page 1).

  "Visitors, vendors, contractors, and all others are
required to visibly wear a daily pass.

  "Thank you.

          Kevin C. Stanton,
          Building Security Coordinator."



  Outside, around the corner, is a pull-down ribbed metal
security door, a locked delivery entrance.  Some passing stranger
has grafitti-tagged this door, with a single word in red spray-
painted cursive:

                              FURY






  My book on the Hacker Crackdown is almost over now.  I
have deliberately saved the best for last.

  In February 1991, I attended the CPSR Public Policy
Roundtable, in Washington, DC.  CPSR, Computer Professionals for
Social Responsibility, was a sister organization of EFF, or
perhaps its aunt, being older and perhaps somewhat wiser in the
ways of the world of politics.

  Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility began in
1981 in Palo Alto, as an informal discussion group of Californian
computer scientists and technicians, united by nothing more than
an electronic mailing list.  This typical high-tech ad-hocracy
received the dignity of its own acronym in 1982, and was formally
incorporated in 1983.

  CPSR lobbied government and public alike with an
educational outreach effort, sternly warning against any foolish
and unthinking trust in complex computer systems.  CPSR insisted
that mere computers should never be considered a magic panacea
for humanity's social, ethical or political problems.  CPSR
members were especially troubled about the stability, safety, and
dependability of military computer systems, and very especially
troubled by those systems controlling nuclear arsenals.  CPSR was
best-known for its persistent and well-publicized attacks on the
scientific credibility of the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star
Wars").

  In 1990, CPSR was the nation's veteran cyber-political
activist group, with over two thousand members in twenty-one
local chapters across the US.  It was especially active in
Boston, Silicon Valley, and Washington DC, where its Washington
office sponsored the Public Policy Roundtable.

  The Roundtable, however, had been funded by EFF, which
had passed CPSR an extensive grant for operations.  This was the
first large-scale, official meeting of what was to become the
electronic civil libertarian community.

  Sixty people attended, myself included--in this instance,
not so much as a journalist as a cyberpunk author.  Many of the
luminaries of the field took part:  Kapor and Godwin as a matter
of course.  Richard Civille and Marc Rotenberg of CPSR.  Jerry
Berman of the ACLU.  John Quarterman, author of THE MATRIX.
Steven Levy, author of HACKERS.  George Perry and Sandy Weiss of
Prodigy Services, there to network about the civil-liberties
troubles their young commercial network was experiencing.  Dr.
Dorothy Denning.  Cliff Figallo, manager of the Well.  Steve
Jackson was there, having finally found his ideal target
audience, and so was Craig Neidorf, "Knight Lightning" himself,
with his attorney, Sheldon Zenner.  Katie Hafner, science
journalist, and co-author of CYBERPUNK:  OUTLAWS AND HACKERS ON
THE COMPUTER FRONTIER.  Dave Farber, ARPAnet pioneer and fabled
Internet guru.  Janlori Goldman of the ACLU's Project on Privacy
and Technology.  John Nagle of Autodesk and the Well.  Don
Goldberg of the House Judiciary Committee.  Tom Guidoboni, the
defense attorney in the Internet Worm case.  Lance Hoffman,
computer-science professor at The George Washington University.
Eli Noam of Columbia.  And a host of others no less
distinguished.

  Senator Patrick Leahy delivered the keynote address,
expressing his determination to keep ahead of the curve on the
issue of electronic free speech.  The address was well-received,
and the sense of excitement was palpable.  Every panel discussion
was interesting--some were entirely compelling.  People networked
with an almost frantic interest.

  I myself had a most interesting and cordial lunch
discussion with Noel and Jeanne Gayler, Admiral Gayler being a
former director of the National Security Agency.  As this was the
first known encounter between an actual no-kidding cyberpunk and
a chief executive of America's largest and best-financed
electronic espionage apparat, there was naturally a bit of
eyebrow-raising on both sides.

  Unfortunately, our discussion was off-the-record.  In
fact all the discussions at the CPSR were officially off-the-
record, the idea being to do some serious networking in an
atmosphere of complete frankness, rather than to stage a media
circus.

  In any case, CPSR Roundtable, though interesting and
intensely valuable, was as nothing compared to the truly mind-
boggling event that transpired a mere month later.




  "Computers, Freedom and Privacy."  Four hundred people
from every conceivable corner of America's electronic community.
As a science fiction writer, I have been to some weird gigs in my
day, but this thing is truly BEYOND THE PALE.  Even "Cyberthon,"
Point Foundation's "Woodstock of Cyberspace" where Bay Area
psychedelia collided headlong with the emergent world of
computerized virtual reality, was like a Kiwanis Club gig
compared to this astonishing do.

  The "electronic community" had reached an apogee.  Almost
every principal in this book is in attendance.  Civil
Libertarians.  Computer Cops.  The Digital Underground.  Even a
few discreet telco people.  Colorcoded dots for lapel tags are
distributed.  Free Expression issues.  Law Enforcement.  Computer
Security.  Privacy.  Journalists.  Lawyers.  Educators.
Librarians.  Programmers.  Stylish punk-black dots for the
hackers and phone phreaks.  Almost everyone here seems to wear
eight or nine dots, to have six or seven professional hats.

  It is a community.  Something like Lebanon perhaps, but a
digital nation. People who had feuded all year in the national
press, people who entertained the deepest suspicions of one
another's motives and ethics, are now in each others' laps.
"Computers, Freedom and Privacy" had every reason in the world to
turn ugly, and yet except for small irruptions of puzzling
nonsense from the convention's token lunatic, a surprising
bonhomie reigned.  CFP was like a wedding-party in which two
lovers, unstable bride and charlatan groom, tie the knot in a
clearly disastrous matrimony.

  It is clear to both families--even to neighbors and
random guests--that this is not a workable relationship, and yet
the young couple's desperate attraction can brook no further
delay.  They simply cannot help themselves.  Crockery will fly,
shrieks from their newlywed home will wake the city block,
divorce waits in the wings like a vulture over the Kalahari, and
yet this is a wedding, and there is going to be a child from it.
Tragedies end in death; comedies in marriage.  The Hacker
Crackdown is ending in marriage.  And there will be a child.

  From the beginning, anomalies reign.  John Perry Barlow,
cyberspace ranger, is here.  His color photo in THE NEW YORK
TIMES MAGAZINE, Barlow scowling in a grim Wyoming snowscape, with
long black coat, dark hat, a Macintosh SE30 propped on a
fencepost and an awesome frontier rifle tucked under one arm,
will be the single most striking visual image of the Hacker
Crackdown.  And he is CFP's guest of honor--along with Gail
Thackeray of the FCIC!  What on earth do they expect these dual
guests to do with each other?  Waltz?

  Barlow delivers the first address.  Uncharacteristically,
he is hoarse--the sheer volume of roadwork has worn him down.  He
speaks briefly, congenially, in a plea for conciliation, and
takes his leave to a storm of applause.

  Then Gail Thackeray takes the stage.  She's visibly
nervous.  She's been on the Well a lot lately.  Reading those
Barlow posts.  Following Barlow is a challenge to anyone.  In
honor of the famous lyricist for the Grateful Dead, she announces
reedily, she is going to read--A POEM.  A poem she has composed
herself.

  It's an awful poem, doggerel in the rollicking meter of
Robert W. Service's THE CREMATION OF SAM MCGEE, but it is in
fact, a poem.  It's the BALLAD OF THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER!  A
poem about the Hacker Crackdown and the sheer unlikelihood of
CFP.  It's full of in-jokes.  The score or so cops in the
audience, who are sitting together in a nervous claque, are
absolutely cracking-up.  Gail's poem is the funniest goddamn
thing they've ever heard.  The hackers and civil-libs, who had
this woman figured for Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS, are staring with
their jaws hanging loosely.  Never in the wildest reaches of
their imagination had they figured Gail Thackeray was capable of
such a totally off-the-wall move.  You can see them punching
their mental CONTROL-RESET buttons.  Jesus!  This woman's a
hacker weirdo!  She's JUST LIKE US!  God, this changes
everything!

  Al Bayse, computer technician for the FBI, had been the
only cop at the CPSR Roundtable, dragged there with his arm bent
by Dorothy Denning.  He was guarded and tightlipped at CPSR
Roundtable; a "lion thrown to the Christians."

  At CFP, backed by a claque of cops, Bayse suddenly waxes
eloquent and even droll, describing the FBI's "NCIC 2000", a
gigantic digital catalog of criminal records, as if he has
suddenly become some weird hybrid of George Orwell and George
Gobel.  Tentatively, he makes an arcane joke about statistical
analysis.  At least a third of the crowd laughs aloud.

  "They didn't laugh at that at my last speech," Bayse
observes.  He had been addressing cops--STRAIGHT cops, not
computer people.  It had been a worthy meeting, useful one
supposes, but nothing like THIS.  There has never been ANYTHING
like this.  Without any prodding, without any preparation, people
in the audience simply begin to ask questions.  Longhairs, freaky
people, mathematicians.  Bayse is answering, politely, frankly,
fully, like a man walking on air.  The ballroom's atmosphere
crackles with surreality.  A female lawyer behind me breaks into
a sweat and a hot waft of surprisingly potent and musky perfume
flows off her pulse-points.

  People are giddy with laughter.  People are interested,
fascinated, their eyes so wide and dark that they seem
eroticized.  Unlikely daisy-chains form in the halls, around the
bar, on the escalators:  cops with hackers, civil rights with
FBI, Secret Service with phone phreaks.

  Gail Thackeray is at her crispest in a white wool sweater
with a tiny Secret Service logo.  "I found Phiber Optik at the
payphones, and when he saw my sweater, he turned into a PILLAR OF
SALT!" she chortles.

  Phiber discusses his case at much length with his
arresting officer, Don Delaney of the New York State Police.
After an hour's chat, the two of them look ready to begin singing
"Auld Lang Syne."  Phiber finally finds the courage to get his
worst complaint off his chest.  It isn't so much the arrest.  It
was the CHARGE.  Pirating service off 900 numbers.  I'm a
PROGRAMMER, Phiber insists.  This lame charge is going to hurt my
reputation.  It would have been cool to be busted for something
happening, like Section 1030 computer intrusion.  Maybe some kind
of crime that's scarcely been invented yet.  Not lousy phone
fraud.  Phooey.

  Delaney seems regretful.  He had a mountain of possible
criminal charges against Phiber Optik.  The kid's gonna plead
guilty anyway.  He's a first timer, they always plead.  Coulda
charged the kid with most anything, and gotten the same result in
the end.  Delaney seems genuinely sorry not to have gratified
Phiber in this harmless fashion.  Too late now.  Phiber's pled
already.  All water under the bridge.  Whaddya gonna do?

  Delaney's got a good grasp on the hacker mentality.  He
held a press conference after he busted a bunch of Masters of
Deception kids.  Some journo had asked him:  "Would you describe
these people as GENIUSES?"  Delaney's deadpan answer, perfect:
"No, I would describe these people as DEFENDANTS."  Delaney busts
a kid for hacking codes with repeated random dialling.  Tells the
press that NYNEX can track this stuff in no time flat nowadays,
and a kid has to be STUPID to do something so easy to catch.
Dead on again:  hackers don't mind being thought of as Genghis
Khan by the straights, but if there's anything that really gets
'em where they live, it's being called DUMB.

  Won't be as much fun for Phiber next time around.  As a
second offender he's gonna see prison.  Hackers break the law.
They're not geniuses, either.  They're gonna be defendants.  And
yet, Delaney muses over a drink in the hotel bar, he has found it
impossible to treat them as common criminals.  Delaney knows
criminals.  These kids, by comparison, are clueless--there is
just no crook vibe off of them, they don't smell right, they're
just not BAD.

  Delaney has seen a lot of action.  He did Vietnam.  He's
been shot at, he has shot people.  He's a homicide cop from New
York.  He has the appearance of a man who has not only seen the
shit hit the fan but has seen it splattered across whole city
blocks and left to ferment for years.  This guy has been around.

  He listens to Steve Jackson tell his story.  The dreamy
game strategist has been dealt a bad hand.  He has played it for
all he is worth.  Under his nerdish SF-fan exterior is a core of
iron.  Friends of his say Steve Jackson believes in the rules,
believes in fair play.  He will never compromise his principles,
never give up.  "Steve," Delaney says to Steve Jackson, "they had
some balls, whoever busted you.  You're all right!"  Jackson,
stunned, falls silent and actually blushes with pleasure.

  Neidorf has grown up a lot in the past year.  The kid is
a quick study, you gotta give him that.  Dressed by his mom, the
fashion manager for a national clothing chain, Missouri college
techie-frat Craig Neidorf out-dappers everyone at this gig but
the toniest East Coast lawyers.  The iron jaws of prison clanged
shut without him and now law school beckons for Neidorf.  He
looks like a larval Congressman.

  Not a "hacker," our Mr. Neidorf.  He's not interested in
computer science.  Why should he be?  He's not interested in
writing C code the rest of his life, and besides, he's seen where
the chips fall.  To the world of computer science he and PHRACK
were just a curiosity.  But to the world of law....  The kid has
learned where the bodies are buried.  He carries his notebook of
press clippings wherever he goes.

  Phiber Optik makes fun of Neidorf for a Midwestern geek,
for believing that "Acid Phreak" does acid and listens to acid
rock.  Hell no.  Acid's never done ACID!  Acid's into ACID HOUSE
MUSIC.  Jesus.  The very idea of doing LSD.  Our PARENTS did LSD,
ya clown.

  Thackeray suddenly turns upon Craig Neidorf the full
lighthouse glare of her attention and begins a determined half-
hour attempt to WIN THE BOY OVER.  The Joan of Arc of Computer
Crime is GIVING CAREER ADVICE TO KNIGHT LIGHTNING!  "Your
experience would be very valuable--a real asset," she tells him
with unmistakeable sixty-thousand-watt sincerity.  Neidorf is
fascinated.  He listens with unfeigned attention.  He's nodding
and saying yes ma'am.  Yes, Craig, you too can forget all about
money and enter the glamorous and horribly underpaid world of
PROSECUTING COMPUTER CRIME!  You can put your former friends in
prison--ooops....

  You cannot go on dueling at modem's length indefinitely.
You cannot beat one another senseless with rolled-up press-
clippings.  Sooner or later you have to come directly to grips.
And yet the very act of assembling here has changed the entire
situation drastically.  John Quarterman, author of THE MATRIX,
explains the Internet at his symposium.  It is the largest news
network in the world, it is growing by leaps and bounds, and yet
you cannot measure Internet because you cannot stop it in place.
It cannot stop, because there is no one anywhere in the world
with the authority to stop Internet.  It changes, yes, it grows,
it embeds itself across the post-industrial, postmodern world and
it generates community wherever it touches, and it is doing this
all by itself.

  Phiber is different.  A very fin de siecle kid, Phiber
Optik.  Barlow says he looks like an Edwardian dandy.  He does
rather.  Shaven neck, the sides of his skull cropped hip-hop
close, unruly tangle of black hair on top that looks pomaded, he
stays up till four a.m.  and misses all the sessions, then hangs
out in payphone booths with his acoustic coupler gutsily CRACKING
SYSTEMS RIGHT IN THE MIDST OF THE HEAVIEST LAW ENFORCEMENT DUDES
IN THE U.S., or at least PRETENDING to....  Unlike "Frank Drake."
Drake, who wrote Dorothy Denning out of nowhere, and asked for an
interview for his cheapo cyberpunk fanzine, and then started
grilling her on her ethics.  She was squirmin', too....  Drake,
scarecrow-tall with his floppy blond mohawk, rotting tennis shoes
and black leather jacket lettered ILLUMINATI in red, gives off an
unmistakeable air of the bohemian literatus.  Drake is the kind
of guy who reads British industrial design magazines and
appreciates William Gibson because the quality of the prose is so
tasty.  Drake could never touch a phone or a keyboard again, and
he'd still have the nose-ring and the blurry photocopied fanzines
and the sampled industrial music.  He's a radical punk with a
desktop-publishing rig and an Internet address.  Standing next to
Drake, the diminutive Phiber looks like he's been physically
coagulated out of phone-lines.  Born to phreak.

  Dorothy Denning approaches Phiber suddenly.  The two of
them are about the same height and body-build.  Denning's blue
eyes flash behind the round window-frames of her glasses.  "Why
did you say I was 'quaint?'" she asks Phiber, quaintly.

  It's a perfect description but Phiber is nonplussed...
"Well, I uh, you know...."

  "I also think you're quaint, Dorothy," I say, novelist to
the rescue, the journo gift of gab...  She is neat and dapper and
yet there's an arcane quality to her, something like a Pilgrim
Maiden behind leaded glass; if she were six inches high Dorothy
Denning would look great inside a china cabinet...  The
Cryptographeress....  The Cryptographrix...  whatever...
Weirdly, Peter Denning looks just like his wife, you could pick
this gentleman out of a thousand guys as the soulmate of Dorothy
Denning.  Wearing tailored slacks, a spotless fuzzy varsity
sweater, and a neatly knotted academician's tie.... This
fineboned, exquisitely polite, utterly civilized and
hyperintelligent couple seem to have emerged from some cleaner
and finer parallel universe, where humanity exists to do the
Brain Teasers column in Scientific American.  Why does this Nice
Lady hang out with these unsavory characters?

  Because the time has come for it, that's why.  Because
she's the best there is at what she does.

  Donn Parker is here, the Great Bald Eagle of Computer
Crime....  With his bald dome, great height, and enormous
Lincoln-like hands, the great visionary pioneer of the field
plows through the lesser mortals like an icebreaker....  His eyes
are fixed on the future with the rigidity of a bronze statue....
Eventually, he tells his audience, all business crime will be
computer crime, because businesses will do everything through
computers.  "Computer crime" as a category will vanish.

  In the meantime, passing fads will flourish and fail and
evaporate....  Parker's commanding, resonant voice is sphinxlike,
everything is viewed from some eldritch valley of deep historical
abstraction...  Yes, they've come and they've gone, these passing
flaps in the world of digital computation....  The radio-
frequency emanation scandal... KGB and MI5 and CIA do it every
day, it's easy, but nobody else ever has....  The salami-slice
fraud, mostly mythical...  "Crimoids," he calls them....
Computer viruses are the current crimoid champ, a lot less
dangerous than most people let on, but the novelty is fading and
there's a crimoid vacuum at the moment, the press is visibly
hungering for something more outrageous....  The Great Man shares
with us a few speculations on the coming crimoids....  Desktop
Forgery!  Wow....  Computers stolen just for the sake of the
information within them--data-napping!  Happened in Britain a
while ago, could be the coming thing....  Phantom nodes in the
Internet!

  Parker handles his overhead projector sheets with an
ecclesiastical air...  He wears a grey double-breasted suit, a
light blue shirt, and a very quiet tie of understated maroon and
blue paisley...  Aphorisms emerge from him with slow, leaden
emphasis...  There is no such thing as an adequately secure
computer when one faces a sufficiently powerful adversary....
Deterrence is the most socially useful aspect of security...
People are the primary weakness in all information systems...
The entire baseline of computer security must be shifted
upward....  Don't ever violate your security by publicly
describing your security measures...

  People in the audience are beginning to squirm, and yet
there is something about the elemental purity of this guy's
philosophy that compels uneasy respect....  Parker sounds like
the only sane guy left in the lifeboat, sometimes.  The guy who
can prove rigorously, from deep moral principles, that Harvey
there, the one with the broken leg and the checkered past, is the
one who has to be, err.... that is, Mr. Harvey is best placed to
make the necessary sacrifice for the security and indeed the very
survival of the rest of this lifeboat's crew....  Computer
security, Parker informs us mournfully, is a nasty topic, and we
wish we didn't have to have it...  The security expert, armed
with method and logic, must think--imagine--everything that the
adversary might do before the adversary might actually do it.  It
is as if the criminal's dark brain were an extensive subprogram
within the shining cranium of Donn Parker.  He is a Holmes whose
Moriarty does not quite yet exist and so must be perfectly
simulated.

  CFP is a stellar gathering, with the giddiness of a
wedding.  It is a happy time, a happy ending, they know their
world is changing forever tonight, and they're proud to have been
there to see it happen, to talk, to think, to help.

  And yet as night falls, a certain elegiac quality
manifests itself, as the crowd gathers beneath the chandeliers
with their wineglasses and dessert plates.  Something is ending
here, gone forever, and it takes a while to pinpoint it.

  It is the End of the Amateurs.





Afterword:  The Hacker Crackdown Three Years Later

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  As for Bruce Sterling... well *8-).  I thankfully
abandoned my brief career as a true-crime journalist and wrote a
new science fiction novel, HEAVY WEATHER, and assembled a new
collection of short stories, GLOBALHEAD.  I also write nonfiction
regularly, for the popular-science column in THE MAGAZINE OF
FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION.

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

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

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

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

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

  Keeping up in cyberspace requires a great deal of
sustained attention.  Personally, I keep tabs with the milieu by
reading the invaluable electronic magazine Computer underground
Digest (tk0jut2@mvs.cso.niu.edu with the subject header: SUB CuD
and a message that says:



  SUB CuD your name your.full.internet@address).



I also read Jack Rickard's bracingly iconoclastic BOARDWATCH
MAGAZINE for print news of the BBS and online community.  And,
needless to say, I read WIRED, the first magazine of the 1990s
that actually looks and acts like it really belongs in this
decade.  There are other ways to learn, of course, but these
three outlets will guide your efforts very well.

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

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

  Thanks for your attention  *8-)

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