textfiles/law/bellraid.txt

THE FOLLLOWING MATERIAL WAS DOWNLOADED FROM THE NJIT EIES CONFERENCES C866 -
Microcomputer Communications and C685 - The Future of Telecommunications I
think that you may find this disturbing as I and most of my fellow Sysops do.
Please feel free to download it and pass it around. Subject: BBS Confiscation 
I think the following message retrieved from Compuserve deserves widespread
circulation; no further explanation needed:On May 16 I was served with a
search warrant and my system seized because of a message that allegedly had
been left, unknown to me, on one of the public boards. This was done by the
L.A.P.D. under direction of a complaint by Pacific telephone. All Sysop's
should be warned that under present law (or at least the present
interpetation) they are now responsible for ALL information that is left or
exchanged on their system and that ANY illegal or even questionable
activities, messages or even public outpourings are their direct legal
responsibility and that they will be held directly accountable regardless of
whether or not they knew of it, used it, and regardless of any other
circumstances! Yes, it is unjust. Yes, it is legally questionable. But it,
for the moment, seems to be enforcable and is being "actively pursued" as a
felony. I would appreciate it if this message was spread to as many systems
as possible so that the word may be spread to the greatest number of Sysops.
1984 may, indeed, be here... Jack, I'm interested in more details of
this one. Do you have any? It sounds like a crack=down on pirate boards more
than anything else. Id be interested to know whether the alleged message is
supposed to have information in it allowing others to break into someone's
computer system, like phone numbers and passwords. Or if not that, what the
nature of the complaint was. I agree that all sysops should be aware of what
their interpreted liabilities are, nontheless. And that bulletin boards,
including those not in the grey market, will be monitored closely by
industry groups in a counterattack; and that legislation pending in
several states will provide pretty scary penalties for what used to be
considered a lark. I'm not sure about the civil liberties issues here; but
as I've said before, when the game goes hardball everyone loses out...
I dunno where the BBS is (was), but Mission Hills is in area code 818.
Scary story, huh? But I'm not too surprised... I stumbled acrossa long list of credit card numbers on a BBS about a month ago. I meant to
turn it over to the telco but never got around to it, now I am glad I
didn't. The losses are starting to get really big, and the pirate BBSs
spread information faster than the telcos can keep up. It's interesting
that a pirate publication called TAP has been published on paper for years,
giving away tricks to beat Ma Bell and her children out of bucks with credit
card checksum algorithms (which used to be trivial), coin phone control tone
sequences, etc. Now that similar information is published electronically,
free speech (free bauds?) no longer applies, it would seem. This promises to
become a very interesting legal situation. The very worst scenario I can
think of unreels from the complainant, the phone company. The report sounds
like the company is monitoring all the BBS's in L.A. County (or is it Orange
County?) Conceivably, just conceivably, as the ultimate carrier the company
exercised what someone felt was a "public responsibility" not to carry
certain text. The company doesn't want to dirty its lines with ethnic
slurs (from racial epithets to Polish jokes), possible obscenity, or libel.
By analogy, an independent print shop can be sued for libel in most states
for a book that it sends through its presses, though I've never heard of
that happening. Usually both author and publisher are targets in a libel
action. That is, the phone company might be liable by the letter of the law,
but only the author and sysop would be "conventional" defendants. Since the
telephone company is not poor, however, it probably considers itself fair
game every time a new lawyer graduates from USC. And that's not all. The
phone company doesn't want to be a party to distributing a copyrighted
program over its lines in hex. Doesn't want to help distribute information
on how to break a copy-protect scheme. Principally, it doesn't want to aid
hackers in combining their prowess to raid mainframes, which is "theft of
services" or worse. (That happened.) Doesn't even want to be the vehicle by
which dozens of teenagers pile up a $150,000 long-distance tab on an
unwitting customer's monthly bill, which the company or AT&T will have to
eat. (That happened.) It doesn't want to be a party to a cocaine deal or a
prostitution ring. The least fanciful scenario is either that the FBI is
putting pressure on local phone companies to police the BBS's against
hackers raiding mainframes, or that AT&T is demanding scourge work against
hackers raiding the long-distance system (presumably to get free connect
time while raiding mainframes). And so the motives are laudable, the
officials all honorable men. But monitoring the BBS's automatically delids
a can of worms. If in the course of searching the boards a phone company
finds a popular copyrighted program in hex, which it wasn't looking for,
it becomes a witting carrier of copyright infringement unless it takes
action to terminate the infringement. What if it finds a message explaining
how to break a copy-protection scheme? What if...? Hire more lawyers to
decide what the BBS's can get away with, whether the message "RR IS A
PAINTED WHORE" is non-libelous under the Sullivan decision, whether
the content of that board endangers the morals of the minors who flock
to it. FREEZE! The strategy (or experiment) in southern California is to
beat on the heads of the sysops to do their own policing, which is a
"fair-minded" approach. It will shut down a lot of boards. Self-policing
will take off some of the heat, but phone-company monitoring of the BBS's
is a goose-step inside the door and won't go away just because it gets
results. The local companies that do it should be dragged before the public
by their heels, and it wouldn't hurt if BBS users and their sympathizers
waited until the disconnect warning before paying their bills. A lot of
high-handed, reckless stuff that occurs on the BBS's needs to be stopped,
but the lid has to be kept on the can of worms that has been hign-mindedly,
recklessly opened in southern California. A local news story some months ago
told of a woman whose monthly phone bill weighed in at $150,000, up from $45.
She got it straightened out. At dinner tonight my guest Mike, who works for
that phone company, filled in some details. Seems the victim's heavy usage
started after using her ten-digit account number and four-digit personal
number at an airport. LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS, as they said in World War II.
At this airport one of that infamous band of conspirators known as "hackers"
was at prey. Anyway, her numbers then popped up on certain BBS's and the
ensuing flood of calls from California and New York, some concurrent,
weren't flagged by the program that checks credit calls because
different family members are allowed to use the same numbers and therefore
so are "hackers." Apparently the billing office should have checked with some
other office on a $150,000 monthly toll, but didn't because (as I understand
it) of some provision for accelerated usage in the computer program. The
woman had made a spate of calls the previous month that disrupted her $45
norm, allowing the whopper to get into the mail. Don't know whether this
was a malicious trick on the woman or on the phone company. Reminds me of
the time in Ghana when the electric company cut my lights off on the
assumption that I couldn't pay the bill they hadn't yet sent me (it was my
first, covering four months use at a rate equal to my salary.) The "hacker"
victim got away with a funny dinner-party anecdote. I had to negotiate for
three weeks to get my lights turned on again and my account switched from
business to domestic rates. I wound up having to pay half my four-month
industrial billing, which was actually a flat rate. What's to stop the
phone hackers from running up big MCI bills, (under an account under an
assumed name, perhaps...), then just not paying the bills and switching to
SBS or CCSI? Eventually you might exhaust all the various long-distance
services, but it would take quite a while. I bet they all start to have
a large problem with non-bill-payers, particularly because they don't have
the threat of cutting off your phone service.  Sysop Charlie Strom
76703,602 To: All The following message was retrieved from another system:
On Saturday, June 2, there was a meeting of Los Angeles area sysops to find
out the truth behind the confiscation of the Mog-Ur BBS. The Sysop of the
Mog-Ur BBS was there along with his lawyer. Here is a report on what I
learned at the meeting: The messages (there were two of them) containing
the AT&T calling card numbers were left on his board using an option to
leave an anonymous message. The Sysop can tell who leaves such messages,
but the general public can't. Another feature of his BBS software is that
you can specify the length of time (in days) that a message should stay up.
The messages in question were left with a very small number of days and Tom
(the sysop) never got to see them before the system automatically killed them.
During the time the messages were on, a Pacific Bell agent called in and saw
them. PacBell asked the police to get a search warrant for Tom's computer.
This is standard procedure when PacTel finds a BBS handing out phone phreak
information. No effort was made to ask Tom to delete the messages or find out
who left them. Either somehow Tom found out that PacBell was going to show up
or they allowed him t3,602 To: All Tom has retained a lawyer who thinks the
whole thing will be thrown out and is going to try to make PacBell look bad.
If it ever goes to court he says all he has to do is get a jury of normal
people (i.e. no PacBell employees) and present it as a case of John Doe vs.
the phone company. Nobody likes the phone company. The lawyer has documented
cases where this kind of information was left for weeks on UCLA computers and
on CompuServe (I assume in BULLET), and the police did nothing (its easy to
pick on a small computer sysop, but trying to confiscate UCLA or CompuServe
is harder). InfoWorld reporter Peggy Watt was on the scene and a story will
run on the front page of the next issue about it. If there is any difference
between my story and the one in InfoWorld, believe InfoWorld. I have tried to
get this correct, but Peggy talked with Tom and his lawyer a lot longer than
I did, and she took written notes (this is from memory). PacBell has refused
to talk to Peggy, and the LAPD person who conducted the raid is on vacation.
When the superior of the detective was asked about it, the reply was like
"You mean we confiscated $10,000 worth of computers? I didn't know that!".
It was reported earlier that Tom had a section on his BBS called "Underground"
where these kinds of messages were posted before. I have found out it was his
policy to delete any such messages when he saw them. The idea behind the
section was not to rip off the phone company, but to discuss "things you
wouldn't want just anybody to read" (Tom's system didn't require validation
to use, except for the underground section which you had to ask for access
to). Another idea was to provide a place to leave unpopular opinions since it
had the ability to leave anonymous messages. I hope this clears up what this
section was meant for. Thats all for now. The lawyer is pressing for
something to be decided during the next week. (Note from C.S. - see Infoworld
of 6/18/84, page 11.) Would you take Safeway to court for having a phone
number on their bulletin board in the store? I sort of suspect that Pacific
Telesis (sounds like a California cult) will get the case thrown out of
court, but NOT without a lot of heartburn for Tom! It may not be a matter
of whether or not they win the case. These days it's an unfortunate fact of
life that anyone with the money to pay a battery of lawyers can keep you in
court long enough that it doesn't matter if you're in the right or not -
either way you lose...