Bruce Sterling

GURPS' LABOUR LOST

Some months ago, I wrote an article about the raid on Steve

Jackson Games, which appeared in my "Comment" column in the

British science fiction monthly, INTERZONE (#44, Feb 1991).

This updated version, specially re-written for dissemination by

EFF, reflects the somewhat greater knowledge I've gained to

date, in the course of research on an upcoming nonfiction book,

THE HACKER CRACKDOWN: Law and Disorder on the Electronic

Frontier.

The bizarre events suffered by Mr. Jackson and his co-workers,

in my own home town of Austin, Texas, were directly responsible

for my decision to put science fiction aside and to tackle the

purportedly real world of computer crime and electronic

free-expression.

The national crackdown on computer hackers in 1990 was the

largest and best-coordinated attack on computer mischief in

American history. There was Arizona's "Operation Sundevil,"

the sweeping May 8 nationwide raid against outlaw bulletin

boards. The BellSouth E911 case (of which the Jackson raid was

a small and particularly egregious part) was coordinated out of

Chicago. The New York State Police were also very active in

1990.

All this vigorous law enforcement activity meant very little to

the narrow and intensely clannish world of science fiction.

All we knew -- and this misperception persisted, uncorrected,

for months -- was that Mr. Jackson had been raided because of

his intention to publish a gaming book about "cyberpunk"

science fiction. The Jackson raid received extensive coverage

in science fiction news magazines (yes, we have these) and

became notorious in the world of SF as "the Cyberpunk Bust."

My INTERZONE article attempted to make the Jackson case

intelligible to the British SF audience.

What possible reason could lead an American federal law

enforcement agency to raid the headquarters of a science-fiction

gaming company? Why did armed teams of city police, corporate

security men, and federal agents roust two Texan

computer-hackers from their beds at dawn, and then deliberately

confiscate thousands of dollars' worth of computer equipment,

including the hackers' common household telephones? Why was an

unpublished book called G.U.R.P.S. Cyberpunk seized by the US

Secret Service and declared "a manual for computer crime?"

These weird events were not parodies or fantasies; no, this was

real.

The first order of business in untangling this bizarre drama is

to understand the players -- who come in entire teams.

Dramatis Personae

PLAYER ONE: The Law Enforcement Agencies.

America's defense against the threat of computer crime is a

confusing hodgepodge of state, municipal, and federal agencies.

Ranked first, by size and power, are the Central Intelligence

Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), large, potent and

secretive organizations who, luckily, play almost no role in the

Jackson story.

The second rank of such agencies include the Internal Revenue

Service (IRS), the National Aeronatics and Space Administration

(NASA), the Justice Department, the Department of Labor, and

various branches of the defense establishment, especially the

Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI). Premier

among these groups, however, is the highly-motivated US Secret

Service (USSS), best-known to Britons as the suited,

mirrorshades-toting, heavily-armed bodyguards of the President

of the United States.

Guarding high-ranking federal officials and foreign dignitaries

is a hazardous, challenging and eminently necessary task, which

has won USSS a high public profile. But Abraham Lincoln created

this oldest of federal law enforcement agencies in order to foil

counterfeiting. Due to the historical tribulations of the

Treasury Department (of which USSS is a part), the Secret

Service also guards historical documents, analyzes forgeries,

combats wire fraud, and battles "computer fraud and abuse."

These may seem unrelated assignments, but the Secret Service is

fiercely aware of its duties. It is also jealous of its

bureaucratic turf, especially in computer-crime, where it

formally shares jurisdiction with its traditional rival, the

johnny-come-lately FBI.

As the use of plastic money has spread, and their

long-established role as protectors of the currency has faded in

importance, the Secret Service has moved aggressively into the

realm of electronic crime. Unlike the lordly NSA, CIA, and FBI,

which generally can't be bothered with domestic computer

mischief, the Secret Service is noted for its street-level

enthusiasm.

The third-rank of law enforcement are the local "dedicated

computer crime units." There are very few such groups,

pitifully undermanned. They struggle hard for their funding and

the vital light of publicity. It's difficult to make

white-collar computer crimes seem pressing, to an American

public that lives in terror of armed and violent street-crime.

These local groups are small -- often, one or two officers,

computer hobbyists, who have drifted into electronic

crimebusting because they alone are game to devote time and

effort to bringing law to the electronic frontier. California's

Silicon Valley has three computer-crime units. There are

others in Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Maryland, Texas, Colorado,

and a formerly very active one in Arizona -- all told, though,

perhaps only fifty people nationwide.

The locals do have one great advantage, though. They all know

one another. Though scattered across the country, they are

linked by both public-sector and private-sector professional

societies, and have a commendable subcultural esprit-de-corps.

And in the well-manned Secret Service, they have willing

national-level assistance.

PLAYER TWO: The Telephone Companies.

In the early 80s, after years of bitter federal court battle,

America's telephone monopoly was pulverized. "Ma Bell," the

national phone company, became AT&T, AT&T Industries, and the

regional "Baby Bells," all purportedly independent companies,

who compete with new communications companies and other

long-distance providers. As a class, however, they are all

sorely harassed by fraudsters, phone phreaks, and computer

hackers, and they all maintain computer-security experts. In a

lot of cases these "corporate security divisions" consist of

just one or two guys, who drifted into the work from backgrounds

in traditional security or law enforcement. But, linked by

specialized security trade journals and private sector trade

groups, they all know one another.

PLAYER THREE: The Computer Hackers.

The American "hacker" elite consists of about a hundred people,

who all know one another. These are the people who know enough

about computer intrusion to baffle corporate security and alarm

police (and who, furthermore, are willing to put their intrusion

skills into actual practice). The somewhat older

subculture of "phone-phreaking," once native only to the phone

system, has blended into hackerdom as phones have become digital

and computers have been netted-together by telephones. "Phone

phreaks," always tarred with the stigma of rip-off artists, are

nowadays increasingly hacking PBX systems and cellular phones.

These practices, unlike computer-intrusion, offer direct and

easy profit to fraudsters.

There are legions of minor "hackers," such as the "kodez kidz,"

who purloin telephone access codes to make free (i.e., stolen)

phone calls. Code theft can be done with home computers, and

almost looks like real "hacking," though "kodez kidz" are

regarded with lordly contempt by the elite. "Warez d00dz," who

copy and pirate computer games and software, are a thriving

subspecies of "hacker," but they played no real role in the

crackdown of 1990 or the Jackson case. As for the dire minority

who create computer viruses, the less said the better.

The princes of hackerdom skate the phone-lines, and computer

networks, as a lifestyle. They hang out in loose,

modem-connected gangs like the "Legion of Doom" and the "Masters

of Destruction." The craft of hacking is taught through

"bulletin board systems," personal computers that carry

electronic mail and can be accessed by phone. Hacker bulletin

boards generally sport grim, scary, sci-fi heavy metal names

like BLACK ICE -- PRIVATE or SPEED DEMON ELITE. Hackers

themselves often adopt romantic and highly suspicious tough-guy

monickers like "Necron 99," "Prime Suspect," "Erik Bloodaxe,"

"Malefactor" and "Phase Jitter." This can be seen as a kind of

cyberpunk folk-poetry -- after all, baseball players also have

colorful nicknames. But so do the Mafia and the Medellin

Cartel.

PLAYER FOUR: The Simulation Gamers.

Wargames and role-playing adventures are an old and honored

pastime, much favored by professional military strategists and

H.G. Wells, and now played by hundreds of thousands of

enthusiasts throughout North America, Europe and Japan. In

today's market, many simulation games are computerized, making

simulation gaming a favorite pastime of hackers, who dote on

arcane intellectual challenges and the thrill of doing simulated

mischief.

Modern simulation games frequently have a heavily

science-fictional cast. Over the past decade or so, fueled by

very respectable royalties, the world of simulation gaming has

increasingly permeated the world of science-fiction publishing.

TSR, Inc., proprietors of the best-known role-playing game,

"Dungeons and Dragons," own the venerable science-fiction

magazine "Amazing." 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, is a games company

of the middle rank. In early 1990, it employed fifteen people.

In 1989, SJG grossed about half a million dollars. SJG's Austin

headquarters is a modest two-story brick office-suite, cluttered

with phones, photocopiers, fax machines and computers. A

publisher's digs, it bustles with semi-organized activity and is

littered with glossy promotional brochures and dog-eared SF

novels. Attached to the offices is a large tin-roofed warehouse

piled twenty feet high with cardboard boxes of games and books.

This building was the site of the "Cyberpunk Bust."

A look at the company's wares, neatly stacked on endless rows of

cheap shelving, quickly shows SJG's long involvement with the

Science Fiction community. SJG's main product, the Generic

Universal Role-Playing System or G.U.R.P.S., features licensed

and adapted works from many genre writers. There is GURPS Witch

World, GURPS Conan, GURPS Riverworld, GURPS Horseclans, many

names eminently familiar to SF fans. (GURPS Difference Engine

is currently in the works.) GURPS Cyberpunk, however, was to

be another story entirely.

PLAYER FIVE: The Science Fiction Writers.

The "cyberpunk" SF writers are a small group of mostly

college-educated white litterateurs, without conspicuous

criminal records, scattered through the US and Canada. Only

one, Rudy Rucker, a professor of computer science in Silicon

Valley, would rank with even the humblest computer hacker.

However, these writers all own computers and take an intense,

public, and somewhat morbid interest in the social ramifications

of the information industry. Despite their small numbers, they

all know one another, and are linked by antique print-medium

publications with unlikely names like SCIENCE FICTION EYE, ISAAC

ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, OMNI and INTERZONE.

PLAYER SIX: The Civil Libertarians.

This small but rapidly growing group consists of heavily

politicized computer enthusiasts and heavily cyberneticized

political activists: a mix of wealthy high-tech entrepreneurs,

veteran West Coast troublemaking hippies, touchy journalists,

and toney East Coast civil rights lawyers. They are all getting

to know one another.

We now return to our story. By 1988, law enforcement

officials, led by contrite teenage informants, had thoroughly

permeated the world of underground bulletin boards, and were

alertly prowling the nets compiling dossiers on wrongdoers.

While most bulletin board systems are utterly harmless, some few

had matured into alarming reservoirs of forbidden knowledge.

One such was BLACK ICE -- PRIVATE, located "somewhere in the 607

area code," frequented by members of the "Legion of Doom" and

notorious even among hackers for the violence of its rhetoric,

which discussed sabotage of phone-lines, drug-manufacturing

techniques, and the assembly of home-made bombs, as well as a

plethora of rules-of-thumb for penetrating computer security.

Of course, the mere discussion of these notions is not illegal

-- many cyberpunk SF stories positively dote on such ideas, as

do hundreds of spy epics, techno-thrillers and adventure novels.

It was no coincidence that "ICE," or "Intrusion Countermeasures

Electronics," was a term invented by cyberpunk writer Tom

Maddox, and "BLACK ICE," or a computer-defense that fries the

brain of the unwary trespasser, was a coinage of William Gibson.

A reference manual from the US National Institute of Justice,

"Dedicated Computer Crime Units" by J. Thomas McEwen, suggests

that federal attitudes toward bulletin-board systems are

ambivalent at best:

"There are several examples of how bulletin boards have been

used in support of criminal activities.... (B)ulletin boards

were used to relay illegally obtained access codes into computer

service companies. Pedophiles have been known to leave

suggestive messages on bulletin boards, and other sexually

oriented messages have been found on bulletin boards. Members

of cults and sects have also communicated through bulletin

boards. While the storing of information on bulletin boards may

not be illegal, the use of bulletin boards has certainly

advanced many illegal activities."

Here is a troubling concept indeed: invisible electronic

pornography, to be printed out at home and read by sects and

cults. It makes a mockery of the traditional law-enforcement

techniques concerning the publication and prosecution of smut.

In fact, the prospect of large numbers of antisocial

conspirators, congregating in the limbo of cyberspace without

official oversight of any kind, is enough to trouble the sleep

of anyone charged with maintaining public order.

Even the sternest free-speech advocate will likely do some

headscratching at the prospect of digitized "anarchy files"

teaching lock-picking, pipe-bombing, martial arts techniques,

and highly unorthodox uses for shotgun shells, especially when

these neat-o temptations are distributed freely to any teen (or

pre-teen) with a modem.

These may be largely conjectural problems at present, but the

use of bulletin boards to foment hacker mischief is real. Worse

yet, the bulletin boards themselves are linked, sharing their

audience and spreading the wicked knowledge of security flaws in

the phone network, and in a wide variety of academic, corporate

and governmental computer systems.

This strength of the hackers is also a weakness, however. If

the boards are monitored by alert informants and/or officers,

the whole wicked tangle can be seized all along its extended

electronic vine, rather like harvesting pumpkins.

The war against hackers, including the "Cyberpunk Bust," was

primarily a war against hacker bulletin boards. It was, first

and foremost, an attack against the enemy's means of

information.

This basic strategic insight supplied the tactics for the

crackdown of 1990. The variant groups in the national

subculture of cyber-law would be kept apprised, persuaded to

action, and diplomatically martialled into effective strike

position. Then, in a burst of energy and a glorious blaze of

publicity, the whole nest of scofflaws would be wrenched up root

and branch. Hopefully, the damage would be permanent; if not,

the swarming wretches would at least keep their heads down.

"Operation Sundevil," the Phoenix-inspired crackdown of May

8,1990, concentrated on telephone code-fraud and credit-card

abuse, and followed this seizure plan with some success. Boards

went down all over America, terrifying the underground and

swiftly depriving them of at least some of their criminal

instruments. It also saddled analysts with some 24,000 floppy

disks, and confronted harried Justice Department prosecutors

with the daunting challenge of a gigantic nationwide hacker

show-trial involving highly technical issues in dozens of

jurisdictions. As of July 1991, it must be questioned whether

the climate is right for an action of this sort, especially

since several of the most promising prosecutees have already

been jailed on other charges.

"Sundevil" aroused many dicey legal and constitutional

questions, but at least its organizers were spared the spectacle

of seizure victims loudly proclaiming their innocence -- (if one

excepts Bruce Esquibel, sysop of "Dr. Ripco," an anarchist board

in Chicago).

The activities of March 1, 1990, however, including the Jackson

case, were the inspiration of the Chicago-based Computer Fraud

and Abuse Task Force. At telco urging, the Chicago group were

pursuing the purportedly vital "E911 document" with headlong

energy. As legal evidence, this proprietary Bell South

document was to prove a very weak reed in the Craig Neidorf

trial, which ended in a humiliating dismissal and a triumph for

Neidorf. As of March 1990, however, this purloined data-file

seemed a red-hot chunk of contraband, and the decision was made

to track it down wherever it might have gone, and to shut down

any board that had touched it -- or even come close to it.

In the meantime, however -- early 1990 -- Mr. Loyd Blankenship,

an employee of Steve Jackson Games, an accomplished hacker, and

a sometime member and file-writer for the Legion of Doom, was

contemplating a "cyberpunk" simulation-module 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 sucked,

and the nerds who wrote the manual were the kimd of half-hip

twits who wrote their own fake rock lyrics and, worse yet,

published them. The game sold like crazy, though.

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 lame

fantasy elements like orcs, dwarves, trolls, magicians, and

dragons -- all highly ideologically-incorrect, according to the

hard-edged, high-tech standards of cyberpunk science fiction.

No true cyberpunk fan could play this game without vomiting,

despite FASA's nifty T-shirts and street-samurai lead figurines.

Lured by the scent of money, other game companies were champing

at the bit. Blankenship 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.

Hot discussion soon raged on the Steve Jackson Games electronic

bulletin board, the "Illuminati BBS." This board was named

after a bestselling SJG card-game, involving antisocial sects

and cults who war covertly for the domination of the world.

Gamers and hackers alike loved this board, with its meticulously

detailed discussions of pastimes like SJG's "Car Wars," in which

souped-up armored hot-rods with rocket-launchers and heavy

machine-guns do battle on the American highways of the future.

While working, with considerable creative success, for SJG,

Blankenship himself was running his own computer bulletin board,

"The Phoenix Project," from his house. It had been ages --

months, anyway -- since Blankenship, an increasingly sedate

husband and author, had last entered a public phone-booth

without a supply of pocket-change. However, his intellectual

interest in computer-security remained intense. He was pleased

to notice the presence on "Phoenix" of Henry Kluepfel, a

phone-company security professional for Bellcore. Such

contacts were risky for telco employees; at least one such

gentleman who reached out to the hacker underground had been

accused of divided loyalties and summarily fired. Kluepfel, on

the other hand, was bravely engaging in friendly banter with

heavy-dude hackers and eager telephone-wannabes. Blankenship

did nothing to spook him away, and Kluepfel, for his part,

passed dark warnings about "Phoenix Project" to the Chicago

group. "Phoenix Project" glowed with the radioactive presence

of the E911 document, passed there in a copy of Craig Neidorf's

electronic hacker fan-magazine, Phrack.

"Illuminati" was prominently mentioned on the Phoenix Project.

Phoenix users were urged to visit Illuminati, to discuss the

upcoming "cyberpunk" game and possibly lend their expertise.

It was also frankly hoped that they would spend some money on

SJG games.

Illuminati and Phoenix had become two ripe pumpkins on the

criminal vine.

Hacker busts were nothing new. They had always been somewhat

problematic for the authorities. The offenders were generally

high-IQ white juveniles with no criminal record. Public

sympathy for the phone companies was limited at best. Trials

often ended in puzzled dismissals or a slap on the wrist. But

the harassment suffered by "the business community" -- always

the best friend of law enforcement -- was real, and highly

annoying both financially and in its sheer irritation to the

target corporation.

Through long experience, law enforcement had come up with an

unorthodox but workable tactic. This was to avoid any trial at

all, or even an arrest. Instead, somber teams of grim police

would swoop upon the teenage suspect's home and box up his

computer as "evidence." If he was a good boy, and promised

contritely to stay out of trouble forthwith, the highly

expensive equipment might be returned to him in short order. If

he was a hard-case, though, too bad. His toys could stay

boxed-up and locked away for a couple of years.

The busts in Austin were an intensification of this

tried-and-true technique. There were adults involved in this

case, though, reeking of a hardened bad-attitude. The supposed

threat to the 911 system, apparently posed by the E911 document,

had nerved law enforcement to extraordinary effort. The 911

system is, of course, the emergency dialling system used by the

police themselves. Any threat to it was a direct and insolent

hacker menace to the electronic home-turf of American law

enforcement.

Had Steve Jackson been arrested and directly accused of a plot

to destroy the 911 system, the resultant embarrassment would

likely have been sharp, but brief. The Chicago group, instead,

chose total operational security. They may have suspected that

their search for E911, once publicized, would cause that

"dangerous" document to spread like wildfire throughout the

underground. Instead, they allowed the misapprehension to

spread that they had raided Steve Jackson to stop the

publication of a book: GURPS Cyberpunk. This was a grave

public-relations blunder which caused the darkest fears and

suspicions to spread -- not in the hacker underground, but

among the general public.

On March 1, 1990, 21-year-old hacker Chris Goggans (aka "Erik

Bloodaxe") was wakened by a police revolver levelled at his

head. He watched, jittery, as Secret Service agents

appropriated his 300 baud terminal and, rifling his files,

discovered his treasured source-code for the notorious Internet

Worm. Goggans, a co-sysop of "Phoenix Project" and a wily

operator, had suspected that something of the like might be

coming. All his best equipment had been hidden away elsewhere.

They took his phone, though, and considered hauling away his

hefty arcade-style Pac-Man game, before deciding that it was

simply too heavy. Goggans was not arrested. To date, he has

never been charged with a crime. The police still have what

they took, though.

Blankenship was less wary. He had shut down "Phoenix" as rumors

reached him of a crackdown coming. Still, a dawn raid rousted

him and his wife from bed in their underwear, and six Secret

Service agents, accompanied by a bemused Austin cop and a

corporate security agent from Bellcore, 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; the Microsoft Word word-processing program;

Mrs. Blankenship's incomplete academic thesis stored on disk;

and the couple's telephone. All this property remains in police

custody today.

The agents then bundled Blankenship into a car and it was off

the Steve Jackson Games in the bleak light of dawn. The fact

that this was a business headquarters, and not a private

residence, did not deter the agents. It was still early; no one

was at work yet. The agents prepared to break down the door,

until Blankenship offered his key.

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. They watched in astonishment as agents

wielding crowbars and screwdrivers emerged with captive

machines. The agents wore blue nylon windbreakers with "SECRET

SERVICE" stencilled across the back, with running-shoes and

jeans. Confiscating computers can be heavy physical work.

No one at Steve Jackson Games was arrested. No one was accused

of any crime. There were no charges filed. Everything

appropriated was officially kept as "evidence" of crimes never

specified. Steve Jackson will not face a conspiracy trial over

the contents of his science-fiction gaming book. On the

contrary, the raid's organizers have been accused of grave

misdeeds in a civil suit filed by EFF, and if there is any trial

over GURPS Cyberpunk it seems likely to be theirs.

The day after the raid, Steve Jackson visited the local Secret

Service headquarters with a lawyer in tow. There was trouble

over GURPS Cyberpunk, which had been discovered on the

hard-disk of a seized machine. 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. This is not a fantasy, no, this is real.

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, the E911 document.

Indeed, this fact was not discovered until the Jackson

search-warrant was unsealed by his EFF lawyers, months later.

Jackson was left to believe that his board 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 audience. The effect of this statement on the

science fiction community was, to say the least, striking.

GURPS Cyberpunk, now published and available from Steve Jackson

Games (Box 18957, Austin, Texas 78760), does discuss some of the

commonplaces of computer-hacking, such as searching through

trash for useful clues, or snitching passwords by boldly lying

to gullible users. Reading it won't make you a hacker, any

more than reading Spycatcher will make you an agent of MI5.

Still, this bold insistence by the Secret Service on its

authenticity has made GURPS Cyberpunk the Satanic Verses of

simulation gaming, and has made Steve Jackson the first

martyr-to-the-cause for the computer world's civil libertarians.

From the beginning, Steve Jackson declared that he had committed

no crime, and had nothing to hide. Few believed him, for it

seemed incredible that such a tremendous effort by the

government would be spent on someone entirely innocent.

Surely there were a few stolen long-distance codes in

"Illuminati," a swiped credit-card number or two -- something.

Those who rallied to the defense of Jackson were publicly warned

that they would be caught with egg on their face when the real

truth came out, "later." But "later" came and went. The fact

is that Jackson was innocent of any crime. There was no case

against him; his activities were entirely legal. He had simply

been consorting with the wrong sort of people.

In fact he was the wrong sort of people. His attitude stank.

He showed no contrition; he scoffed at authority; he gave aid

and comfort to the enemy; he was trouble. Steve Jackson comes

from subcultures -- gaming, science fiction -- that have always

smelled to high heaven of troubling weirdness and deep-dyed

unorthodoxy. He was important enough to attract repression,

but not important enough, apparently, to deserve a straight

answer from those who had raided his property and destroyed his

livelihood.

The American law-enforcement community lacks the manpower and

resources to prosecute hackers successfully, one by one, on the

merits of the cases against them. The cyber-police to date

have settled instead for a cheap "hack" of the legal system: a

quasi-legal tactic of seizure and "deterrence." Humiliate and

harass a few ringleaders, the philosophy goes, and the rest will

fall into line. After all, most hackers are just kids. The few

grown-ups among them are sociopathic geeks, not real players in

the political and legal game. And in the final analysis, a

small company like Jackson's lacks the resources to make any

real trouble for the Secret Service.

But Jackson, with his conspiracy-soaked bulletin board and his

seedy SF-fan computer-freak employees, is not "just a kid." He

is a publisher, and he was battered by the police in the full

light of national publicity, under the shocked gaze of

journalists, gaming fans, libertarian activists and millionaire

computer entrepreneurs, many of whom were not "deterred," but

genuinely aghast.

"What," reasons the author, "is to prevent the Secret Service

from carting off my word-processor as 'evidence' of some

non-existent crime?"

"What would I do," thinks the small-press owner, "if someone

took my laser-printer?"

Even the computer magnate in his private jet remembers his

heroic days in Silicon Valley when he was soldering semi-legal

circuit boards in a small garage.

Hence the establishment of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The sherriff had shown up in Tombstone to clean up that outlaw

town, but the response of the citizens was swift and

well-financed.

Steve Jackson was provided with a high-powered lawyer

specializing in Constitutional freedom-of-the-press issues.

Faced with this, a markedly un-contrite Secret Service returned

Jackson's machinery, after months of delay -- some of it broken,

with valuable data lost. Jackson sustained many thousands of

dollars in business losses, from failure to meet deadlines and

loss of computer-assisted production.

Half the employees of Steve Jackson Games were sorrowfully

laid-off. Some had been with the company for years -- not

statistics, these people, not "hackers" of any stripe, but

bystanders, citizens, deprived of their livelihoods by the

zealousness of the March 1 seizure. Some have since been

re-hired -- perhaps all will be, if Jackson can pull his company

out of its persistent financial hole. Devastated by the raid,

the company would surely have collapsed in short order -- but

SJG's distributors, touched by the company's plight and feeling

some natural subcultural solidarity, advanced him money to

scrape along.

In retrospect, it is hard to see much good for anyone at all in

the activities of March 1. Perhaps the Jackson case has served

as a warning light for trouble in our legal system; but that's

not much recompense for Jackson himself. His own unsought fame

may be helpful, but it doesn't do much for his unemployed

co-workers. In the meantime, "hackers" have been vilified and

demonized as a national threat. "Cyberpunk," a literary term,

has become a synonym for computer criminal. The cyber-police

have leapt where angels fear to tread. And the phone companies

have badly overstated their case and deeply embarrassed their

protectors.

But sixteen months later, Steve Jackson suspects he may yet pull

through. Illuminati is still on-line. GURPS Cyberpunk, while

it failed to match Satanic Verses, sold fairly briskly. And

SJG headquarters, the site of the raid, will soon be the site of

Cyberspace Weenie Roast to start an Austin chapter of the

Electronic Frontier Foundation. Bring your own beer.