Bruce Sterling

The Hacker Crackdown

Hi, I'm Bruce Sterling, the author of this

electronic book.

Out in the traditional world of print, *The

Hacker Crackdown* is ISBN 0-553-08058-X, and is

formally catalogued by the Library of Congress as "1.

Computer crimes -- United States. 2. Telephone --

United States -- Corrupt practices. 3. Programming

(Electronic computers) -- United States -- Corrupt

practices." 'Corrupt practices,' I always get a kick out

of that description. Librarians are very ingenious

people.

The paperback is ISBN 0-553-56370-X. If you go

and buy a print version of *The Hacker Crackdown,*

an action I encourage heartily, you may notice that

in the front of the book, beneath the copyright

notice -- "Copyright (C) 1992 by Bruce Sterling" -- it

has this little block of printed legal boilerplate from

the publisher. It says, and I quote:

"No part of this book may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic

or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the publisher.

For information address: Bantam Books."

This is a pretty good disclaimer, as such

disclaimers go. I collect intellectual-property

disclaimers, and I've seen dozens of them, and this

one is at least pretty straightforward. In this narrow

and particular case, however, it isn't quite accurate.

Bantam Books puts that disclaimer on every book

they publish, but Bantam Books does not, in fact,

own the electronic rights to this book. I do, because

of certain extensive contract maneuverings my

agent and I went through before this book was

written. I want to give those electronic publishing

rights away through certain not-for-profit channels,

and I've convinced Bantam that this is a good idea.

Since Bantam has seen fit to peacably agree to

this scheme of mine, Bantam Books is not going to

fuss about this. Provided you don't try to sell the

book, they are not going to bother you for what you

do with the electronic copy of this book. If you want

to check this out personally, you can ask them;

they're at 1540 Broadway NY NY 10036. However, if

you were so foolish as to print this book and start

retailing it for money in violation of my copyright

and the commercial interests of Bantam Books,

then Bantam, a part of the gigantic Bertelsmann

multinational publishing combine, would roust

some of their heavy-duty attorneys out of

hibernation and crush you like a bug. This is only to

be expected. I didn't write this book so that you

could make money out of it. If anybody is gonna

make money out of this book, it's gonna be me and

my publisher.

My publisher deserves to make money out of

this book. Not only did the folks at Bantam Books

commission me to write the book, and pay me a

hefty sum to do so, but they bravely printed, in text,

an electronic document the reproduction of which

was once alleged to be a federal felony. Bantam

Books and their numerous attorneys were very

brave and forthright about this book. Furthermore,

my former editor at Bantam Books, Betsy Mitchell,

genuinely cared about this project, and worked hard

on it, and had a lot of wise things to say about the

manuscript. Betsy deserves genuine credit for this

book, credit that editors too rarely get.

The critics were very kind to *The Hacker

Crackdown,* and commercially the book has done

well. On the other hand, I didn't write this book in

order to squeeze every last nickel and dime out of

the mitts of impoverished sixteen-year-old

cyberpunk high-school-students. Teenagers don't

have any money -- (no, not even enough for the six-

dollar *Hacker Crackdown* paperback, with its

attractive bright-red cover and useful index). That's

a major reason why teenagers sometimes succumb

to the temptation to do things they shouldn't, such

as swiping my books out of libraries. Kids: this one

is all yours, all right? Go give the print version back.

*8-)

Well-meaning, public-spirited civil libertarians

don't have much money, either. And it seems

almost criminal to snatch cash out of the hands of

America's direly underpaid electronic law

enforcement community.

If you're a computer cop, a hacker, or an

electronic civil liberties activist, you are the target

audience for this book. I wrote this book because I

wanted to help you, and help other people

understand you and your unique, uhm, problems. I

wrote this book to aid your activities, and to

contribute to the public discussion of important

political issues. In giving the text away in this

fashion, I am directly contributing to the book's

ultimate aim: to help civilize cyberspace.

Information *wants* to be free. And the

information inside this book longs for freedom with

a peculiar intensity. I genuinely believe that the

natural habitat of this book is inside an electronic

network. That may not be the easiest direct method

to generate revenue for the book's author, but that

doesn't matter; this is where this book belongs by its

nature. I've written other books -- plenty of other

books -- and I'll write more and I am writing more,

but this one is special. I am making *The Hacker

Crackdown* available electronically as widely as I

can conveniently manage, and if you like the book,

and think it is useful, then I urge you to do the same

with it.

You can copy this electronic book. Copy the

heck out of it, be my guest, and give those copies to

anybody who wants them. The nascent world of

cyberspace is full of sysadmins, teachers, trainers,

cybrarians, netgurus, and various species of

cybernetic activist. If you're one of those people, I

know about you, and I know the hassle you go

through to try to help people learn about the

electronic frontier. I hope that possessing this book

in electronic form will lessen your troubles. Granted,

this treatment of our electronic social spectrum is

not the ultimate in academic rigor. And politically, it

has something to offend and trouble almost

everyone. But hey, I'm told it's readable, and at

least the price is right.

You can upload the book onto bulletin board

systems, or Internet nodes, or electronic discussion

groups. Go right ahead and do that, I am giving you

express permission right now. Enjoy yourself.

You can put the book on disks and give the disks

away, as long as you don't take any money for it.

But this book is not public domain. You can't

copyright it in your own name. I own the copyright.

Attempts to pirate this book and make money from

selling it may involve you in a serious litigative snarl.

Believe me, for the pittance you might wring out of

such an action, it's really not worth it. This book

don't "belong" to you. In an odd but very genuine

way, I feel it doesn't "belong" to me, either. It's a

book about the people of cyberspace, and

distributing it in this way is the best way I know to

actually make this information available, freely and

easily, to all the people of cyberspace -- including

people far outside the borders of the United States,

who otherwise may never have a chance to see any

edition of the book, and who may perhaps learn

something useful from this strange story of distant,

obscure, but portentous events in so-called

"American cyberspace."

This electronic book is now literary freeware. It

now belongs to the emergent realm of alternative

information economics. You have no right to make

this electronic book part of the conventional flow of

commerce. Let it be part of the flow of knowledge:

there's a difference. I've divided the book into four

sections, so that it is less ungainly for upload and

download; if there's a section of particular relevance

to you and your colleagues, feel free to reproduce

that one and skip the rest.

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 E911Document

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, gossipping, planning, conferring and

scheming, leaving one another voice-mail and electronic

mail, giving one another big weightless chunks of valuable

data, both legitimate and illegitimate. They busily pass

one another computer software and the occasional

festering computer virus.

We do not really understand how to live in

cyberspace yet. We are feeling our way into it, blundering

about. That is not surprising. Our lives in the physical

world, the "real" world, are also far from perfect, despite a

lot more practice. Human lives, real lives, are imperfect

by their nature, and there are human beings in

cyberspace. The way we live in cyberspace is a funhouse

mirror of the way we live in the real world. We take both

our advantages and our troubles with us.

This book is about trouble in cyberspace.

Specifically, this book is about certain strange events in

the year 1990, an unprecedented and startling year for the

the growing world of computerized communications.

In 1990 there came a nationwide crackdown on illicit

computer hackers, with arrests, criminal charges, one

dramatic show-trial, several guilty pleas, and huge

confiscations of data and equipment all over the USA.

The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was larger, better

organized, more deliberate, and more resolute than any

previous effort in the brave new world of computer crime.

The U.S. Secret Service, private telephone security, and

state and local law enforcement groups across the country

all joined forces in a determined attempt to break the

back of America's electronic underground. It was a

fascinating effort, with very mixed results.

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 elecution

teacher and gifted public speaker, was a devastatingly

effective legal witness. In the eighteen years of Bell's

patents, the Bell company was involved in six hundred

separate lawsuits. The legal records printed filled 149

volumes. The Bell Company won every single suit.

After Bell's exclusive patents expired, rival telephone

companies sprang up all over America. Bell's company,

American Bell Telephone, was soon in deep trouble. In

1907, American Bell Telephone fell into the hands of the

rather sinister J.P. Morgan financial cartel, robber-baron

speculators who dominated Wall Street.

At this point, history might have taken a different

turn. American might well have been served forever by a

patchwork of locally owned telephone companies. Many

state politicians and local businessmen considered this an

excellent solution.

But the new Bell holding company, American

Telephone and Telegraph or AT&T, put in a new man at

the helm, a visionary industrialist named Theodore Vail.

Vail, a former Post Office manager, understood large

organizations and had an innate feeling for the nature of

large-scale communications. Vail quickly saw to it that

AT&T seized the technological edge once again. The

Pupin and Campbell "loading coil," and the deForest

"audion," are both extinct technology today, but in 1913

they gave Vail's company the best *long-distance* lines

ever built. By controlling long-distance -- the links

between, and over, and above the smaller local phone

companies -- AT&T swiftly gained the whip-hand over

them, and was soon devouring them right and left.

Vail plowed the profits back into research and

development, starting the Bell tradition of huge-scale and

brilliant industrial research.

Technically and financially, AT&T gradually

steamrollered the opposition. Independent telephone

companies never became entirely extinct, and hundreds

of them flourish today. But Vail's AT&T became the

supreme communications company. At one point, Vail's

AT&T bought Western Union itself, the very company

that had derided Bell's telephone as a "toy." Vail

thoroughly reformed Western Union's hidebound

business along his modern principles; but when the

federal government grew anxious at this centralization of

power, Vail politely gave Western Union back.

This centralizing process was not unique. Very

similar events had happened in American steel, oil, and

railroads. But AT&T, unlike the other companies, was to

remain supreme. The monopoly robber-barons of those

other industries were humbled and shattered by

government trust-busting.

Vail, the former Post Office official, was quite willing

to accommodate the US government; in fact he would

forge an active alliance with it. AT&T would become

almost a wing of the American government, almost

another Post Office -- though not quite. AT&T would

willingly submit to federal regulation, but in return, it

would use the government's regulators as its own police,

who would keep out competitors and assure the Bell

system's profits and preeminence.

This was the second birth -- the political birth -- of the

American telephone system. Vail's arrangement was to

persist, with vast success, for many decades, until 1982.

His system was an odd kind of American industrial

socialism. It was born at about the same time as Leninist

Communism, and it lasted almost as long -- and, it must

be admitted, to considerably better effect.

Vail's system worked. Except perhaps for aerospace,

there has been no technology more thoroughly dominated

by Americans than the telephone. The telephone was

seen from the beginning as a quintessentially American

technology. Bell's policy, and the policy of Theodore Vail,

was a profoundly democratic policy of *universal access.*

Vail's famous corporate slogan, "One Policy, One System,

Universal Service," was a political slogan, with a very

American ring to it.

The American telephone was not to become the

specialized tool of government or business, but a general

public utility. At first, it was true, only the wealthy could

afford private telephones, and Bell's company pursued

the business markets primarily. The American phone

system was a capitalist effort, meant to make money; it

was not a charity. But from the first, almost all

communities with telephone service had public

telephones. And many stores -- especially drugstores --

offered public use of their phones. You might not own a

telephone -- but you could always get into the system, if

you really needed to.

There was nothing inevitable about this decision to

make telephones "public" and "universal." Vail's system

involved a profound act of trust in the public. This

decision was a political one, informed by the basic values

of the American republic. The situation might have been

very different; and in other countries, under other

systems, it certainly was.

Joseph Stalin, for instance, vetoed plans for a Soviet

phone system soon after the Bolshevik revolution. Stalin

was certain that publicly accessible telephones would

become instruments of anti-Soviet counterrevolution and

conspiracy. (He was probably right.) When telephones

did arrive in the Soviet Union, they would be instruments

of Party authority, and always heavily tapped. (Alexander

Solzhenitsyn's prison-camp novel *The First Circle*

describes efforts to develop a phone system more suited

to Stalinist purposes.)

France, with its tradition of rational centralized

government, had fought bitterly even against the electric

telegraph, which seemed to the French entirely too

anarchical and frivolous. For decades, nineteenth-

century France communicated via the "visual telegraph,"

a nation-spanning, government-owned semaphore

system of huge stone towers that signalled from hilltops,

across vast distances, with big windmill-like arms. In 1846,

one Dr. Barbay, a semaphore enthusiast, memorably

uttered an early version of what might be called "the

security expert's argument" against the open media.

"No, the electric telegraph is not a sound invention.

It will always be at the mercy of the slightest disruption,

wild youths, drunkards, bums, etc.... The electric telegraph

meets those destructive elements with only a few meters

of wire over which supervision is impossible. A single man

could, without being seen, cut the telegraph wires leading

to Paris, and in twenty-four hours cut in ten different

places the wires of the same line, without being arrested.

The visual telegraph, on the contrary, has its towers, its

high walls, its gates well-guarded from inside by strong

armed men. Yes, I declare, substitution of the electric

telegraph for the visual one is a dreadful measure, a truly

idiotic act."

Dr. Barbay and his high-security stone machines

were eventually unsuccessful, but his argument -- that

communication exists for the safety and convenience of

the state, and must be carefully protected from the wild

boys and the gutter rabble who might want to crash the

system -- would be heard again and again.

When the French telephone system finally did arrive,

its snarled inadequacy was to be notorious. Devotees of

the American Bell System often recommended a trip to

France, for skeptics.

In Edwardian Britain, issues of class and privacy were

a ball-and-chain for telephonic progress. It was

considered outrageous that anyone -- any wild fool off the

street -- could simply barge bellowing into one's office or

home, preceded only by the ringing of a telephone bell.

In Britain, phones were tolerated for the use of business,

but private phones tended be stuffed away into closets,

smoking rooms, or servants' quarters. Telephone

operators were resented in Britain because they did not

seem to "know their place." And no one of breeding

would print a telephone number on a business card; this

seemed a crass attempt to make the acquaintance of

strangers.

But phone access in America was to become a

popular right; something like universal suffrage, only

more so. American women could not yet vote when the

phone system came through; yet from the beginning

American women doted on the telephone. This

"feminization" of the American telephone was often

commented on by foreigners. Phones in America were

not censored or stiff or formalized; they were social,

private, intimate, and domestic. In America, Mother's

Day is by far the busiest day of the year for the phone

network.

The early telephone companies, and especially

AT&T, were among the foremost employers of American

women. They employed the daughters of the American

middle-class in great armies: in 1891, eight thousand

women; by 1946, almost a quarter of a million. Women

seemed to enjoy telephone work; it was respectable, it was

steady, it paid fairly well as women's work went, and -- not

least -- it seemed a genuine contribution to the social good

of the community. Women found Vail's ideal of public

service attractive. This was especially true in rural areas,

where women operators, running extensive rural party-

lines, enjoyed considerable social power. The operator

knew everyone on the party-line, and everyone knew her.

Although Bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the

telephone company did not employ women for the sake of

advancing female liberation. AT&T did this for sound

commercial reasons. The first telephone operators of the

Bell system were not women, but teenage American boys.

They were telegraphic messenger boys (a group about to

be rendered technically obsolescent), who swept up

around the phone office, dunned customers for bills, and

made phone connections on the switchboard, all on the

cheap.

Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell's

company learned a sharp lesson about combining

teenage boys and telephone switchboards. Putting

teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift

and consistent disaster. Bell's chief engineer described

them as "Wild Indians." The boys were openly rude to

customers. They talked back to subscribers, saucing off,

uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip. The

rascals took Saint Patrick's Day off without permission.

And worst of all they played clever tricks with the

switchboard plugs: disconnecting calls, crossing lines so

that customers found themselves talking to strangers, and

so forth.

This combination of power, technical mastery, and

effective anonymity seemed to act like catnip on teenage

boys.

This wild-kid-on-the-wires phenomenon was not

confined to the USA; from the beginning, the same was

true of the British phone system. An early British

commentator kindly remarked: "No doubt boys in their

teens found the work not a little irksome, and it is also

highly probable that under the early conditions of

employment the adventurous and inquisitive spirits of

which the average healthy boy of that age is possessed,

were not always conducive to the best attention being

given to the wants of the telephone subscribers."

So the boys were flung off the system -- or at least,

deprived of control of the switchboard. But the

"adventurous and inquisitive spirits" of the teenage boys

would be heard from in the world of telephony, again and

again.

The fourth stage in the technological life-cycle is

death: "the Dog," dead tech. The telephone has so far

avoided this fate. On the contrary, it is thriving, still

spreading, still evolving, and at increasing speed.

The telephone has achieved a rare and exalted state

for a technological artifact: it has become a *household

object.* The telephone, like the clock, like pen and

paper, like kitchen utensils and running water, has

become a technology that is visible only by its absence.

The telephone is technologically transparent. The global

telephone system is the largest and most complex

machine in the world, yet it is easy to use. More

remarkable yet, the telephone is almost entirely

physically safe for the user.

For the average citizen in the 1870s, the telephone

was weirder, more shocking, more "high-tech" and harder

to comprehend, than the most outrageous stunts of

advanced computing for us Americans in the 1990s. In

trying to understand what is happening to us today, with

our bulletin-board systems, direct overseas dialling, fiber-

optic transmissions, computer viruses, hacking stunts, and

a vivid tangle of new laws and new crimes, it is important

to realize that our society has been through a similar

challenge before -- and that, all in all, we did rather well by

it.

Bell's stage telephone seemed bizarre at first. But

the sensations of weirdness vanished quickly, once people

began to hear the familiar voices of relatives and friends,

in their own homes on their own telephones. The

telephone changed from a fearsome high-tech totem to

an everyday pillar of human community.

This has also happened, and is still happening, to

computer networks. Computer networks such as

NSFnet, BITnet, USENET, JANET, are technically

advanced, intimidating, and much harder to use than

telephones. Even the popular, commercial computer

networks, such as GEnie, Prodigy, and CompuServe,

cause much head-scratching and have been described as

"user-hateful." Nevertheless they too are changing from

fancy high-tech items into everyday sources of human

community.

The words "community" and "communication" have

the same root. Wherever you put a communications

network, you put a community as well. And whenever you

*take away* that network -- confiscate it, outlaw it, crash it,

raise its price beyond affordability -- then you hurt that

community.

Communities will fight to defend themselves. People

will fight harder and more bitterly to defend their

communities, than they will fight to defend their own

individual selves. And this is very true of the "electronic

community" that arose around computer networks in the

1980s -- or rather, the *various* electronic communities, in

telephony, law enforcement, computing, and the digital

underground that, by the year 1990, were raiding, rallying,

arresting, suing, jailing, fining and issuing angry

manifestos.

None of the events of 1990 were entirely new.

Nothing happened in 1990 that did not have some kind of

earlier and more understandable precedent. What gave

the Hacker Crackdown its new sense of gravity and

importance was the feeling -- the *community* feeling --

that the political stakes had been raised; that trouble in

cyberspace was no longer mere mischief or inconclusive

skirmishing, but a genuine fight over genuine issues, a

fight for community survival and the shape of the future.

These electronic communities, having flourished

throughout the 1980s, were becoming aware of

themselves, and increasingly, becoming aware of other,

rival communities. Worries were sprouting up right and

left, with complaints, rumors, uneasy speculations. But it

would take a catalyst, a shock, to make the new world

evident. Like Bell's great publicity break, the Tarriffville

Rail Disaster of January 1878, it would take a cause

celebre.

That cause was the AT&T Crash of January 15, 1990.

After the Crash, the wounded and anxious telephone

community would come out fighting hard.

#

The community of telephone technicians, engineers,

operators and researchers is the oldest community in

cyberspace. These are the veterans, the most developed

group, the richest, the most respectable, in most ways the

most powerful. Whole generations have come and gone

since Alexander Graham Bell's day, but the community he

founded survives; people work for the phone system today

whose great-grandparents worked for the phone system.

Its specialty magazines, such as *Telephony,* *AT&T

Technical Journal,* *Telephone Engineer and

Management,* are decades old; they make computer

publications like *Macworld* and *PC Week* look like

amateur johnny-come-latelies.

And the phone companies take no back seat in high-

technology, either. Other companies' industrial

researchers may have won new markets; but the

researchers of Bell Labs have won *seven Nobel Prizes.*

One potent device that Bell Labs originated, the transistor,

has created entire *groups* of industries. Bell Labs are

world-famous for generating "a patent a day," and have

even made vital discoveries in astronomy, physics and

cosmology.

Throughout its seventy-year history, "Ma Bell" was

not so much a company as a way of life. Until the

cataclysmic divestiture of the 1980s, Ma Bell was perhaps

the ultimate maternalist mega-employer. The AT&T

corporate image was the "gentle giant," "the voice with a

smile," a vaguely socialist-realist world of cleanshaven

linemen in shiny helmets and blandly pretty phone-girls

in headsets and nylons. Bell System employees were

famous as rock-ribbed Kiwanis and Rotary members,

Little-League enthusiasts, school-board people.

During the long heyday of Ma Bell, the Bell

employee corps were nurtured top-to-botton 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 Times/Post Intelligencer,*

*Tacoma News Tribune,* *Miami Herald,* *Pittsburgh

Press,* *St. Louis Post Dispatch,* *Denver Post,* *Phoenix

Republic Gazette* and *Tampa Tribune.*

In another press release, AT&T went to some pains to

suggest that this "software glitch" *might* have happened

just as easily to MCI, although, in fact, it hadn't. (MCI's

switching software was quite different from AT&T's --

though not necessarily any safer.) AT&T also announced

their plans to offer a rebate of service on Valentine's Day

to make up for the loss during the Crash.

"Every technical resource available, including Bell

Labs scientists and engineers, has been devoted to

assuring it will not occur again," the public was told. They

were further assured that "The chances of a recurrence

are small--a problem of this magnitude never occurred

before."

In the meantime, however, police and corporate

security maintained their own suspicions about "the

chances of recurrence" and the real reason why a

"problem of this magnitude" had appeared, seemingly out

of nowhere. Police and security knew for a fact that

hackers of unprecedented sophistication were illegally

entering, and reprogramming, certain digital switching

stations. Rumors of hidden "viruses" and secret "logic

bombs" in the switches ran rampant in the underground,

with much chortling over AT&T's predicament, and idle

speculation over what unsung hacker genius was

responsible for it. Some hackers, including police

informants, were trying hard to finger one another as the

true culprits of the Crash.

Telco people found little comfort in objectivity when

they contemplated these possibilities. It was just too close

to the bone for them; it was embarrassing; it hurt so much,

it was hard even to talk about.

There has always been thieving and misbehavior in

the phone system. There has always been trouble with the

rival independents, and in the local loops. But to have

such trouble in the core of the system, the long-distance

switching stations, is a horrifying affair. To telco people,

this is all the difference between finding roaches in your

kitchen and big horrid sewer-rats in your bedroom.

From the outside, to the average citizen, the telcos

still seem gigantic and impersonal. The American public

seems to regard them as something akin to Soviet

apparats. Even when the telcos do their best corporate-

citizen routine, subsidizing magnet high-schools and

sponsoring news-shows on public television, they seem to

win little except public suspicion.

But from the inside, all this looks very different.

There's harsh competition. A legal and political system

that seems baffled and bored, when not actively hostile to

telco interests. There's a loss of morale, a deep sensation

of having somehow lost the upper hand. Technological

change has caused a loss of data and revenue to other,

newer forms of transmission. There's theft, and new

forms of theft, of growing scale and boldness and

sophistication. With all these factors, it was no surprise to

see the telcos, large and small, break out in a litany of

bitter complaint.

In late '88 and throughout 1989, telco representatives

grew shrill in their complaints to those few American law

enforcement officials who make it their business to try to

understand what telephone people are talking about.

Telco security officials had discovered the computer-

hacker underground, infiltrated it thoroughly, and

become deeply alarmed at its growing expertise. Here

they had found a target that was not only loathsome on its

face, but clearly ripe for counterattack.

Those bitter rivals: AT&T, MCI and Sprint -- and a

crowd of Baby Bells: PacBell, Bell South, Southwestern

Bell, NYNEX, USWest, as well as the Bell research

consortium Bellcore, and the independent long-distance

carrier Mid-American -- all were to have their role in the

great hacker dragnet of 1990. After years of being

battered and pushed around, the telcos had, at least in a

small way, seized the initiative again. After years of

turmoil, telcos and government officials were once again

to work smoothly in concert in defense of the System.

Optimism blossomed; enthusiasm grew on all sides; the

prospective taste of vengeance was sweet.

#

From the beginning -- even before the crackdown

had a name -- secrecy was a big problem. There were

many good reasons for secrecy in the hacker crackdown.

Hackers and code-thieves were wily prey, slinking back to

their bedrooms and basements and destroying vital

incriminating evidence at the first hint of trouble.

Furthermore, the crimes themselves were heavily

technical and difficult to describe, even to police -- much

less to the general public.

When such crimes *had* been described intelligibly

to the public, in the past, that very publicity had tended to

*increase* the crimes enormously. Telco officials, while

painfully aware of the vulnerabilities of their systems, were

anxious not to publicize those weaknesses. Experience

showed them that those weaknesses, once discovered,

would be pitilessly exploited by tens of thousands of

people -- not only by professional grifters and by

underground hackers and phone phreaks, but by many

otherwise more-or-less honest everyday folks, who

regarded stealing service from the faceless, soulless

"Phone Company" as a kind of harmless indoor sport.

When it came to protecting their interests, telcos had long

since given up on general public sympathy for "the Voice

with a Smile." Nowadays the telco's "Voice" was very likely

to be a computer's; and the American public showed

much less of the proper respect and gratitude due the fine

public service bequeathed them by Dr. Bell and Mr. Vail.

The more efficient, high-tech, computerized, and

impersonal the telcos became, it seemed, the more they

were met by sullen public resentment and amoral greed.

Telco officials wanted to punish the phone-phreak

underground, in as public and exemplary a manner as

possible. They wanted to make dire examples of the worst

offenders, to seize the ringleaders and intimidate the

small fry, to discourage and frighten the wacky hobbyists,

and send the professional grifters to jail. To do all this,

publicity was vital.

Yet operational secrecy was even more so. If word got

out that a nationwide crackdown was coming, the hackers

might simply vanish; destroy the evidence, hide their

computers, go to earth, and wait for the campaign to blow

over. Even the young hackers were crafty and suspicious,

and as for the professional grifters, they tended to split for

the nearest state-line at the first sign of trouble. For the

crackdown to work well, they would all have to be caught

red-handed, swept upon suddenly, out of the blue, from

every corner of the compass.

And there was another strong motive for secrecy. In

the worst-case scenario, a blown campaign might leave

the telcos open to a devastating hacker counter-attack. If

there were indeed hackers loose in America who had

caused the January 15 Crash -- if there were truly gifted

hackers, loose in the nation's long-distance switching

systems, and enraged or frightened by the crackdown --

then they might react unpredictably to an attempt to

collar them. Even if caught, they might have talented and

vengeful friends still running around loose. Conceivably,

it could turn ugly. Very ugly. In fact, it was hard to

imagine just how ugly things might turn, given that

possibility.

Counter-attack from hackers was a genuine concern

for the telcos. In point of fact, they would never suffer any

such counter-attack. But in months to come, they would

be at some pains to publicize this notion and to utter grim

warnings about it.

Still, that risk seemed well worth running. Better to

run the risk of vengeful attacks, than to live at the mercy of

potential crashers. Any cop would tell you that a

protection racket had no real future.

And publicity was such a useful thing. Corporate

security officers, including telco security, generally work

under conditions of great discretion. And corporate

security officials do not make money for their companies.

Their job is to *prevent the loss* of money, which is much

less glamorous than actually winning profits.

If you are a corporate security official, and you do

your job brilliantly, then nothing bad happens to your

company at all. Because of this, you appear completely

superfluous. This is one of the many unattractive aspects

of security work. It's rare that these folks have the chance

to draw some healthy attention to their own efforts.

Publicity also served the interest of their friends in

law enforcement. Public officials, including law

enforcement officials, thrive by attracting favorable

public interest. A brilliant prosecution in a matter of vital

public interest can make the career of a prosecuting

attorney. And for a police officer, good publicity opens the

purses of the legislature; it may bring a citation, or a

promotion, or at least a rise in status and the respect of

one's peers.

But to have both publicity and secrecy is to have

one's cake and eat it too. In months to come, as we will

show, this impossible act was to cause great pain to the

agents of the crackdown. But early on, it seemed possible

-- maybe even likely -- that the crackdown could

successfully combine the best of both worlds. The

*arrest* of hackers would be heavily publicized. The

actual *deeds* of the hackers, which were technically hard

to explain and also a security risk, would be left decently

obscured. The *threat* hackers posed would be heavily

trumpeted; the likelihood of their actually committing

such fearsome crimes would be left to the public's

imagination. The spread of the computer underground,

and its growing technical sophistication, would be heavily

promoted; the actual hackers themselves, mostly

bespectacled middle-class white suburban teenagers,

would be denied any personal publicity.

It does not seem to have occurred to any telco official

that the hackers accused would demand a day in court;

that journalists would smile upon the hackers as "good

copy;" that wealthy high-tech entrepreneurs would offer

moral and financial support to crackdown victims; that

constitutional lawyers would show up with briefcases,

frowning mightily. This possibility does not seem to have

ever entered the game-plan.

And even if it had, it probably would not have slowed

the ferocious pursuit of a stolen phone-company

document, mellifluously known as "Control Office

Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special

Services and Major Account Centers."

In the chapters to follow, we will explore the worlds of

police and the computer underground, and the large

shadowy area where they overlap. But first, we must

explore the battleground. Before we leave the world of the

telcos, we must understand what a switching system

actually is and how your telephone actually works.

#

To the average citizen, the idea of the telephone is

represented by, well, a *telephone:* a device that you talk

into. To a telco professional, however, the telephone itself

is known, in lordly fashion, as a "subset." The "subset" in

your house is a mere adjunct, a distant nerve ending, of

the central switching stations, which are ranked in levels of

heirarchy, up to the long-distance electronic switching

stations, which are some of the largest computers on

earth.

Let us imagine that it is, say, 1925, before the

introduction of computers, when the phone system was

simpler and somewhat easier to grasp. Let's further

imagine that you are Miss Leticia Luthor, a fictional

operator for Ma Bell in New York City of the 20s.

Basically, you, Miss Luthor, *are* the "switching

system." You are sitting in front of a large vertical

switchboard, known as a "cordboard," made of shiny

wooden panels, with ten thousand metal-rimmed holes

punched in them, known as jacks. The engineers would

have put more holes into your switchboard, but ten

thousand is as many as you can reach without actually

having to get up out of your chair.

Each of these ten thousand holes has its own little

electric lightbulb, known as a "lamp," and its own neatly

printed number code.

With the ease of long habit, you are scanning your

board for lit-up bulbs. This is what you do most of the

time, so you are used to it.

A lamp lights up. This means that the phone at the

end of that line has been taken off the hook. Whenever a

handset is taken off the hook, that closes a circuit inside

the phone which then signals the local office, i.e. you,

automatically. There might be somebody calling, or then

again the phone might be simply off the hook, but this

does not matter to you yet. The first thing you do, is record

that number in your logbook, in your fine American

public-school handwriting. This comes first, naturally,

since it is done for billing purposes.

You now take the plug of your answering cord, which

goes directly to your headset, and plug it into the lit-up

hole. "Operator," you announce.

In operator's classes, before taking this job, you have

been issued a large pamphlet full of canned operator's

responses for all kinds of contingencies, which you had to

memorize. You have also been trained in a proper non-

regional, non-ethnic pronunciation and tone of voice. You

rarely have the occasion to make any spontaneous

remark to a customer, and in fact this is frowned upon

(except out on the rural lines where people have time on

their hands and get up to all kinds of mischief).

A tough-sounding user's voice at the end of the line

gives you a number. Immediately, you write that number

down in your logbook, next to the caller's number, which

you just wrote earlier. You then look and see if the

number this guy wants is in fact on your switchboard,

which it generally is, since it's generally a local call. Long

distance costs so much that people use it sparingly.

Only then do you pick up a calling-cord from a shelf

at the base of the switchboard. This is a long elastic cord

mounted on a kind of reel so that it will zip back in when

you unplug it. There are a lot of cords down there, and

when a bunch of them are out at once they look like a nest

of snakes. Some of the girls think there are bugs living in

those cable-holes. They're called "cable mites" and are

supposed to bite your hands and give you rashes. You

don't believe this, yourself.

Gripping the head of your calling-cord, you slip the

tip of it deftly into the sleeve of the jack for the called

person. Not all the way in, though. You just touch it. If

you hear a clicking sound, that means the line is busy and

you can't put the call through. If the line is busy, you have

to stick the calling-cord into a "busy-tone jack," which will

give the guy a busy-tone. This way you don't have to talk to

him yourself and absorb his natural human frustration.

But the line isn't busy. So you pop the cord all the

way in. Relay circuits in your board make the distant

phone ring, and if somebody picks it up off the hook, then

a phone conversation starts. You can hear this

conversation on your answering cord, until you unplug it.

In fact you could listen to the whole conversation if you

wanted, but this is sternly frowned upon by management,

and frankly, when you've overheard one, you've pretty

much heard 'em all.

You can tell how long the conversation lasts by the

glow of the calling-cord's lamp, down on the calling-cord's

shelf. When it's over, you unplug and the calling-cord

zips back into place.

Having done this stuff a few hundred thousand times,

you become quite good at it. In fact you're plugging, and

connecting, and disconnecting, ten, twenty, forty cords at a

time. It's a manual handicraft, really, quite satisfying in a

way, rather like weaving on an upright loom.

Should a long-distance call come up, it would be

different, but not all that different. Instead of connecting

the call through your own local switchboard, you have to

go up the hierarchy, onto the long-distance lines, known as

"trunklines." Depending on how far the call goes, it may

have to work its way through a whole series of operators,

which can take quite a while. The caller doesn't wait on

the line while this complex process is negotiated across

the country by the gaggle of operators. Instead, the caller

hangs up, and you call him back yourself when the call has

finally worked its way through.

After four or five years of this work, you get married,

and you have to quit your job, this being the natural order

of womanhood in the American 1920s. The phone

company has to train somebody else -- maybe two people,

since the phone system has grown somewhat in the

meantime. And this costs money.

In fact, to use any kind of human being as a switching

system is a very expensive proposition. Eight thousand

Leticia Luthors would be bad enough, but a quarter of a

million of them is a military-scale proposition and makes

drastic measures in automation financially worthwhile.

Although the phone system continues to grow today,

the number of human beings employed by telcos has

been dropping steadily for years. Phone "operators" now

deal with nothing but unusual contingencies, all routine

operations having been shrugged off onto machines.

Consequently, telephone operators are considerably less

machine-like nowadays, and have been known to have

accents and actual character in their voices. When you

reach a human operator today, the operators are rather

more "human" than they were in Leticia's day -- but on the

other hand, human beings in the phone system are much

harder to reach in the first place.

Over the first half of the twentieth century,

"electromechanical" switching systems of growing

complexity were cautiously introduced into the phone

system. In certain backwaters, some of these hybrid

systems are still in use. But after 1965, the phone system

began to go completely electronic, and this is by far the

dominant mode today. Electromechanical systems have

"crossbars," and "brushes," and other large moving

mechanical parts, which, while faster and cheaper than

Leticia, are still slow, and tend to wear out fairly quickly.

But fully electronic systems are inscribed on silicon

chips, and are lightning-fast, very cheap, and quite

durable. They are much cheaper to maintain than even

the best electromechanical systems, and they fit into half

the space. And with every year, the silicon chip grows

smaller, faster, and cheaper yet. Best of all, automated

electronics work around the clock and don't have salaries

or health insurance.

There are, however, quite serious drawbacks to the

use of computer-chips. When they do break down, it is a

daunting challenge to figure out what the heck has gone

wrong with them. A broken cordboard generally had a

problem in it big enough to see. A broken chip has

invisible, microscopic faults. And the faults in bad

software can be so subtle as to be practically theological.

If you want a mechanical system to do something

new, then you must travel to where it is, and pull pieces out

of it, and wire in new pieces. This costs money. However,

if you want a chip to do something new, all you have to do

is change its software, which is easy, fast and dirt-cheap.

You don't even have to see the chip to change its program.

Even if you did see the chip, it wouldn't look like much. A

chip with program X doesn't look one whit different from a

chip with program Y.

With the proper codes and sequences, and access to

specialized phone-lines, you can change electronic

switching systems all over America from anywhere you

please.

And so can other people. If they know how, and if

they want to, they can sneak into a microchip via the

special phonelines and diddle with it, leaving no physical

trace at all. If they broke into the operator's station and

held Leticia at gunpoint, that would be very obvious. If

they broke into a telco building and went after an

electromechanical switch with a toolbelt, that would at

least leave many traces. But people can do all manner of

amazing things to computer switches just by typing on a

keyboard, and keyboards are everywhere today. The

extent of this vulnerability is deep, dark, broad, almost

mind-boggling, and yet this is a basic, primal fact of life

about any computer on a network.

Security experts over the past twenty years have

insisted, with growing urgency, that this basic vulnerability

of computers represents an entirely new level of risk, of

unknown but obviously dire potential to society. And they

are right.

An electronic switching station does pretty much

everything Letitia did, except in nanoseconds and on a

much larger scale. Compared to Miss Luthor's ten

thousand jacks, even a primitive 1ESS switching computer,

60s vintage, has a 128,000 lines. And the current AT&T

system of choice is the monstrous fifth-generation 5ESS.

An Electronic Switching Station can scan every line

on its "board" in a tenth of a second, and it does this over

and over, tirelessly, around the clock. Instead of eyes, it

uses "ferrod scanners" to check the condition of local lines

and trunks. Instead of hands, it has "signal distributors,"

"central pulse distributors," "magnetic latching relays,"

and "reed switches," which complete and break the calls.

Instead of a brain, it has a "central processor." Instead of

an instruction manual, it has a program. Instead of a

handwritten logbook for recording and billing calls, it has

magnetic tapes. And it never has to talk to anybody.

Everything a customer might say to it is done by punching

the direct-dial tone buttons on your subset.

Although an Electronic Switching Station can't talk, it

does need an interface, some way to relate to its, er,

employers. This interface is known as the "master control

center." (This interface might be better known simply as

"the interface," since it doesn't actually "control" phone

calls directly. However, a term like "Master Control

Center" is just the kind of rhetoric that telco maintenance

engineers -- and hackers -- find particularly satisfying.)

Using the master control center, a phone engineer

can test local and trunk lines for malfunctions. He (rarely

she) can check various alarm displays, measure traffic on

the lines, examine the records of telephone usage and the

charges for those calls, and change the programming.

And, of course, anybody else who gets into the master

control center by remote control can also do these things,

if he (rarely she) has managed to figure them out, or, more

likely, has somehow swiped the knowledge from people

who already know.

In 1989 and 1990, one particular RBOC, BellSouth,

which felt particularly troubled, spent a purported $1.2

million on computer security. Some think it spent as

much as two million, if you count all the associated costs.

Two million dollars is still very little compared to the great

cost-saving utility of telephonic computer systems.

Unfortunately, computers are also stupid. Unlike

human beings, computers possess the truly profound

stupidity of the inanimate.

In the 1960s, in the first shocks of spreading

computerization, there was much easy talk about the

stupidity of computers -- how they could "only follow the

program" and were rigidly required to do "only what they

were told." There has been rather less talk about the

stupidity of computers since they began to achieve

grandmaster status in chess tournaments, and to manifest

many other impressive forms of apparent cleverness.

Nevertheless, computers *still* are profoundly

brittle and stupid; they are simply vastly more subtle in

their stupidity and brittleness. The computers of the

1990s are much more reliable in their components than

earlier computer systems, but they are also called upon to

do far more complex things, under far more challenging

conditions.

On a basic mathematical level, every single line of a

software program offers a chance for some possible

screwup. Software does not sit still when it works; it "runs,"

it interacts with itself and with its own inputs and outputs.

By analogy, it stretches like putty into millions of possible

shapes and conditions, so many shapes that they can

never all be successfully tested, not even in the lifespan of

the universe. Sometimes the putty snaps.

The stuff we call "software" is not like anything that

human society is used to thinking about. Software is

something like a machine, and something like

mathematics, and something like language, and

something like thought, and art, and information.... but

software is not in fact any of those other things. The

protean quality of software is one of the great sources of its

fascination. It also makes software very powerful, very

subtle, very unpredictable, and very risky.

Some software is bad and buggy. Some is "robust,"

even "bulletproof." The best software is that which has

been tested by thousands of users under thousands of

different conditions, over years. It is then known as

"stable." This does *not* mean that the software is now

flawless, free of bugs. It generally means that there are

plenty of bugs in it, but the bugs are well-identified and

fairly well understood.

There is simply no way to assure that software is free

of flaws. Though software is mathematical in nature, it

cannot by "proven" like a mathematical theorem; software

is more like language, with inherent ambiguities, with

different definitions, different assumptions, different

levels of meaning that can conflict.

Human beings can manage, more or less, with

human language because we can catch the gist of it.

Computers, despite years of effort in "artificial

intelligence," have proven spectacularly bad in "catching

the gist" of anything at all. The tiniest bit of semantic grit

may still bring the mightiest computer tumbling down.

One of the most hazardous things you can do to a

computer program is try to improve it -- to try to make it

safer. Software "patches" represent new, untried un-

"stable" software, which is by definition riskier.

The modern telephone system has come to depend,

utterly and irretrievably, upon software. And the System

Crash of January 15, 1990, was caused by an

*improvement* in software. Or rather, an *attempted*

improvement.

As it happened, the problem itself -- the problem per

se -- took this form. A piece of telco software had been

written in C language, a standard language of the telco

field. Within the C software was a long "do... while"

construct. The "do... while" construct contained a "switch"

statement. The "switch" statement contained an "if"

clause. The "if" clause contained a "break." The "break"

was *supposed* to "break" the "if clause." Instead, the

"break" broke the "switch" statement.

That was the problem, the actual reason why people

picking up phones on January 15, 1990, could not talk to

one another.

Or at least, that was the subtle, abstract, cyberspatial

seed of the problem. This is how the problem manifested

itself from the realm of programming into the realm of

real life.

The System 7 software for AT&T's 4ESS switching

station, the "Generic 44E14 Central Office Switch

Software," had been extensively tested, and was

considered very stable. By the end of 1989, eighty of

AT&T's switching systems nationwide had been

programmed with the new software. Cautiously, thirty-

four stations were left to run the slower, less-capable

System 6, because AT&T suspected there might be

shakedown problems with the new and unprecedently

sophisticated System 7 network.

The stations with System 7 were programmed to

switch over to a backup net in case of any problems. In

mid-December 1989, however, a new high-velocity, high-

security software patch was distributed to each of the 4ESS

switches that would enable them to switch over even more

quickly, making the System 7 network that much more

secure.

Unfortunately, every one of these 4ESS switches was

now in possession of a small but deadly flaw.

In order to maintain the network, switches must

monitor the condition of other switches -- whether they are

up and running, whether they have temporarily shut down,

whether they are overloaded and in need of assistance,

and so forth. The new software helped control this

bookkeeping function by monitoring the status calls from

other switches.

It only takes four to six seconds for a troubled 4ESS

switch to rid itself of all its calls, drop everything

temporarily, and re-boot its software from scratch.

Starting over from scratch will generally rid the switch of

any software problems that may have developed in the

course of running the system. Bugs that arise will be

simply wiped out by this process. It is a clever idea. This

process of automatically re-booting from scratch is known

as the "normal fault recovery routine." Since AT&T's

software is in fact exceptionally stable, systems rarely have

to go into "fault recovery" in the first place; but AT&T has

always boasted of its "real world" reliability, and this tactic

is a belt-and-suspenders routine.

The 4ESS switch used its new software to monitor its

fellow switches as they recovered from faults. As other

switches came back on line after recovery, they would

send their "OK" signals to the switch. The switch would

make a little note to that effect in its "status map,"

recognizing that the fellow switch was back and ready to

go, and should be sent some calls and put back to regular

work.

Unfortunately, while it was busy bookkeeping with

the status map, the tiny flaw in the brand-new software

came into play. The flaw caused the 4ESS switch to

interacted, subtly but drastically, with incoming telephone

calls from human users. If -- and only if -- two incoming

phone-calls happened to hit the switch within a hundredth

of a second, then a small patch of data would be garbled

by the flaw.

But the switch had been programmed to monitor

itself constantly for any possible damage to its data.

When the switch perceived that its data had been

somehow garbled, then it too would go down, for swift

repairs to its software. It would signal its fellow switches

not to send any more work. It would go into the fault-

recovery mode for four to six seconds. And then the switch

would be fine again, and would send out its "OK, ready for

work" signal.

However, the "OK, ready for work" signal was the

*very thing that had caused the switch to go down in the

first place.* And *all* the System 7 switches had the same

flaw in their status-map software. As soon as they stopped

to make the bookkeeping note that their fellow switch was

"OK," then they too would become vulnerable to the slight

chance that two phone-calls would hit them within a

hundredth of a second.

At approximately 2:25 p.m. EST on Monday, January

15, one of AT&T's 4ESS toll switching systems in New York

City had an actual, legitimate, minor problem. It went into

fault recovery routines, announced "I'm going down," then

announced, "I'm back, I'm OK." And this cheery message

then blasted throughout the network to many of its fellow

4ESS switches.

Many of the switches, at first, completely escaped

trouble. These lucky switches were not hit by the

coincidence of two phone calls within a hundredth of a

second. Their software did not fail -- at first. But three

switches -- in Atlanta, St. Louis, and Detroit -- were

unlucky, and were caught with their hands full. And they

went down. And they came back up, almost immediately.

And they too began to broadcast the lethal message that

they, too, were "OK" again, activating the lurking software

bug in yet other switches.

As more and more switches did have that bit of bad

luck and collapsed, the call-traffic became more and more

densely packed in the remaining switches, which were

groaning to keep up with the load. And of course, as the

calls became more densely packed, the switches were

*much more likely* to be hit twice within a hundredth of a

second.

It only took four seconds for a switch to get well.

There was no *physical* damage of any kind to the

switches, after all. Physically, they were working perfectly.

This situation was "only" a software problem.

But the 4ESS switches were leaping up and down

every four to six seconds, in a virulent spreading wave all

over America, in utter, manic, mechanical stupidity. They

kept *knocking* one another down with their contagious

"OK" messages.

It took about ten minutes for the chain reaction to

cripple the network. Even then, switches would

periodically luck-out and manage to resume their normal

work. Many calls -- millions of them -- were managing to

get through. But millions weren't.

The switching stations that used System 6 were not

directly affected. Thanks to these old-fashioned switches,

AT&T's national system avoided complete collapse. This

fact also made it clear to engineers that System 7 was at

fault.

Bell Labs engineers, working feverishly in New

Jersey, Illinois, and Ohio, first tried their entire repertoire

of standard network remedies on the malfunctioning

System 7. None of the remedies worked, of course,

because nothing like this had ever happened to any

phone system before.

By cutting out the backup safety network entirely,

they were able to reduce the frenzy of "OK" messages by

about half. The system then began to recover, as the

chain reaction slowed. By 11:30 pm on Monday January

15, sweating engineers on the midnight shift breathed a

sigh of relief as the last switch cleared-up.

By Tuesday they were pulling all the brand-new 4ESS

software and replacing it with an earlier version of System

7.

If these had been human operators, rather than

computers at work, someone would simply have

eventually stopped screaming. It would have been

*obvious* that the situation was not "OK," and common

sense would have kicked in. Humans possess common

sense -- at least to some extent. Computers simply don't.

On the other hand, computers can handle hundreds

of calls per second. Humans simply can't. If every single

human being in America worked for the phone company,

we couldn't match the performance of digital switches:

direct-dialling, three-way calling, speed-calling, call-

waiting, Caller ID, all the rest of the cornucopia of digital

bounty. Replacing computers with operators is simply not

an option any more.

And yet we still, anachronistically, expect humans to

be running our phone system. It is hard for us to

understand that we have sacrificed huge amounts of

initiative and control to senseless yet powerful machines.

When the phones fail, we want somebody to be

responsible. We want somebody to blame.

When the Crash of January 15 happened, the

American populace was simply not prepared to

understand that enormous landslides in cyberspace, like

the Crash itself, can happen, and can be nobody's fault in

particular. It was easier to believe, maybe even in some

odd way more reassuring to believe, that some evil person,

or evil group, had done this to us. "Hackers" had done it.

With a virus. A trojan horse. A software bomb. A dirty

plot of some kind. People believed this, responsible

people. In 1990, they were looking hard for evidence to

confirm their heartfelt suspicions.

And they would look in a lot of places.

Come 1991, however, the outlines of an apparent new

reality would begin to emerge from the fog.

On July 1 and 2, 1991, computer-software collapses in

telephone switching stations disrupted service in

Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and San

Francisco. Once again, seemingly minor maintenance

problems had crippled the digital System 7. About twelve

million people were affected in the Crash of July 1, 1991.

Said the New York Times Service: "Telephone

company executives and federal regulators said they were

not ruling out the possibility of sabotage by computer

hackers, but most seemed to think the problems stemmed

from some unknown defect in the software running the

networks."

And sure enough, within the week, a red-faced

software company, DSC Communications Corporation of

Plano, Texas, owned up to "glitches" in the "signal transfer

point" software that DSC had designed for Bell Atlantic

and Pacific Bell. The immediate cause of the July 1 Crash

was a single mistyped character: one tiny typographical

flaw in one single line of the software. One mistyped

letter, in one single line, had deprived the nation's capital

of phone service. It was not particularly surprising that

this tiny flaw had escaped attention: a typical System 7

station requires *ten million* lines of code.

On Tuesday, September 17, 1991, came the most

spectacular outage yet. This case had nothing to do with

software failures -- at least, not directly. Instead, a group

of AT&T's switching stations in New York City had simply

run out of electrical power and shut down cold. Their

back-up batteries had failed. Automatic warning systems

were supposed to warn of the loss of battery power, but

those automatic systems had failed as well.

This time, Kennedy, La Guardia, and Newark airports

all had their voice and data communications cut. This

horrifying event was particularly ironic, as attacks on

airport computers by hackers had long been a standard

nightmare scenario, much trumpeted by computer-

security experts who feared the computer underground.

There had even been a Hollywood thriller about sinister

hackers ruining airport computers -- *Die Hard II.*

Now AT&T itself had crippled airports with computer

malfunctions -- not just one airport, but three at once,

some of the busiest in the world.

Air traffic came to a standstill throughout the Greater

New York area, causing more than 500 flights to be

cancelled, in a spreading wave all over America and even

into Europe. Another 500 or so flights were delayed,

affecting, all in all, about 85,000 passengers. (One of these

passengers was the chairman of the Federal

Communications Commission.)

Stranded passengers in New York and New Jersey

were further infuriated to discover that they could not

even manage to make a long distance phone call, to

explain their delay to loved ones or business associates.

Thanks to the crash, about four and a half million

domestic calls, and half a million international calls, failed

to get through.

The September 17 NYC Crash, unlike the previous

ones, involved not a whisper of "hacker" misdeeds. On the

contrary, by 1991, AT&T itself was suffering much of the

vilification that had formerly been directed at hackers.

Congressmen were grumbling. So were state and federal

regulators. And so was the press.

For their part, ancient rival MCI took out snide full-

page newspaper ads in New York, offering their own long-

distance services for the "next time that AT&T goes down."

"You wouldn't find a classy company like AT&T using

such advertising," protested AT&T Chairman Robert

Allen, unconvincingly. Once again, out came the full-page

AT&T apologies in newspapers, apologies for "an

inexcusable culmination of both human and mechanical

failure." (This time, however, AT&T offered no discount

on later calls. Unkind critics suggested that AT&T were

worried about setting any precedent for refunding the

financial losses caused by telephone crashes.)

Industry journals asked publicly if AT&T was "asleep

at the switch." The telephone network, America's

purported marvel of high-tech reliability, had gone down

three times in 18 months. *Fortune* magazine listed the

Crash of September 17 among the "Biggest Business

Goofs of 1991," cruelly parodying AT&T's ad campaign in

an article entitled "AT&T Wants You Back (Safely On the

Ground, God Willing)."

Why had those New York switching systems simply

run out of power? Because no human being had attended

to the alarm system. Why did the alarm systems blare

automatically, without any human being noticing?

Because the three telco technicians who *should* have

been listening were absent from their stations in the

power-room, on another floor of the building -- attending a

training class. A training class about the alarm systems for

the power room!

"Crashing the System" was no longer

"unprecedented" by late 1991. On the contrary, it no

longer even seemed an oddity. By 1991, it was clear that

all the policemen in the world could no longer "protect"

the phone system from crashes. By far the worst crashes

the system had ever had, had been inflicted, by the

system, upon *itself.* And this time nobody was making

cocksure statements that this was an anomaly, something

that would never happen again. By 1991 the System's

defenders had met their nebulous Enemy, and the Enemy

was -- the System.

PART TWO: THE DIGITAL UNDERGROUND

The date was May 9, 1990. The Pope was touring

Mexico City. Hustlers from the Medellin Cartel were

trying to buy black-market Stinger missiles in Florida. On

the comics page, Doonesbury character Andy was dying of

AIDS. And then.... a highly unusual item whose novelty

and calculated rhetoric won it headscratching attention in

newspapers all over America.

The US Attorney's office in Phoenix, Arizona, had

issued a press release announcing a nationwide law

enforcement crackdown against "illegal computer hacking

activities." The sweep was officially known as "Operation

Sundevil."

Eight paragraphs in the press release gave the bare

facts: twenty-seven search warrants carried out on May 8,

with three arrests, and a hundred and fifty agents on the

prowl in "twelve" cities across America. (Different counts

in local press reports yielded "thirteen," "fourteen," and

"sixteen" cities.) Officials estimated that criminal losses

of revenue to telephone companies "may run into millions

of dollars." Credit for the Sundevil investigations was

taken by the US Secret Service, Assistant US Attorney Tim

Holtzen of Phoenix, and the Assistant Attorney General of

Arizona, Gail Thackeray.

The prepared remarks of Garry M. Jenkins,

appearing in a U.S. Department of Justice press release,

were of particular interest. Mr. Jenkins was the Assistant

Director of the US Secret Service, and the highest-ranking

federal official to take any direct public role in the hacker

crackdown of 1990.

"Today, the Secret Service is sending a clear message

to those computer hackers who have decided to violate

the laws of this nation in the mistaken belief that they can

successfully avoid detection by hiding behind the relative

anonymity of their computer terminals.(...)

"Underground groups have been formed for the

purpose of exchanging information relevant to their

criminal activities. These groups often communicate with

each other through message systems between computers

called 'bulletin boards.'

"Our experience shows that many computer hacker

suspects are no longer misguided teenagers,

mischievously playing games with their computers in their

bedrooms. Some are now high tech computer operators

using computers to engage in unlawful conduct."

Who were these "underground groups" and "high-

tech operators?" Where had they come from? What did

they want? Who *were* they? Were they

"mischievous?" Were they dangerous? How had

"misguided teenagers" managed to alarm the United

States Secret Service? And just how widespread was this

sort of thing?

Of all the major players in the Hacker Crackdown:

the phone companies, law enforcement, the civil

libertarians, and the "hackers" themselves -- the "hackers"

are by far the most mysterious, by far the hardest to

understand, by far the *weirdest.*

Not only are "hackers" novel in their activities, but

they come in a variety of odd subcultures, with a variety of

languages, motives and values.

The earliest proto-hackers were probably those

unsung mischievous telegraph boys who were summarily

fired by the Bell Company in 1878.

Legitimate "hackers," those computer enthusiasts

who are independent-minded but law-abiding, generally

trace their spiritual ancestry to elite technical universities,

especially M.I.T. and Stanford, in the 1960s.

But the genuine roots of the modern hacker

*underground* can probably be traced most successfully

to a now much-obscured hippie anarchist movement

known as the Yippies. The Yippies, who took their name

from the largely fictional "Youth International Party,"

carried out a loud and lively policy of surrealistic

subversion and outrageous political mischief. Their basic

tenets were flagrant sexual promiscuity, open and copious

drug use, the political overthrow of any powermonger over

thirty years of age, and an immediate end to the war in

Vietnam, by any means necessary, including the psychic

levitation of the Pentagon.

The two most visible Yippies were Abbie Hoffman

and Jerry Rubin. Rubin eventually became a Wall Street

broker. Hoffman, ardently sought by federal authorities,

went into hiding for seven years, in Mexico, France, and

the United States. While on the lam, Hoffman continued

to write and publish, with help from sympathizers in the

American anarcho-leftist underground. Mostly, Hoffman

survived through false ID and odd jobs. Eventually he

underwent facial plastic surgery and adopted an entirely

new identity as one "Barry Freed." After surrendering

himself to authorities in 1980, Hoffman spent a year in

prison on a cocaine conviction.

Hoffman's worldview grew much darker as the glory

days of the 1960s faded. In 1989, he purportedly

committed suicide, under odd and, to some, rather

suspicious circumstances.

Abbie Hoffman is said to have caused the Federal

Bureau of Investigation to amass the single largest

investigation file ever opened on an individual American

citizen. (If this is true, it is still questionable whether the

FBI regarded Abbie Hoffman a serious public threat --

quite possibly, his file was enormous simply because

Hoffman left colorful legendry wherever he went). He

was a gifted publicist, who regarded electronic media as

both playground and weapon. He actively enjoyed

manipulating network TV and other gullible, image-

hungry media, with various weird lies, mindboggling

rumors, impersonation scams, and other sinister

distortions, all absolutely guaranteed to upset cops,

Presidential candidates, and federal judges. Hoffman's

most famous work was a book self-reflexively known as

*Steal This Book,* which publicized a number of methods

by which young, penniless hippie agitators might live off

the fat of a system supported by humorless drones. *Steal

This Book,* whose title urged readers to damage the very

means of distribution which had put it into their hands,

might be described as a spiritual ancestor of a computer

virus.

Hoffman, like many a later conspirator, made

extensive use of pay-phones for his agitation work -- in his

case, generally through the use of cheap brass washers as

coin-slugs.

During the Vietnam War, there was a federal surtax

imposed on telephone service; Hoffman and his cohorts

could, and did, argue that in systematically stealing

phone service they were engaging in civil disobedience:

virtuously denying tax funds to an illegal and immoral war.

But this thin veil of decency was soon dropped

entirely. Ripping-off the System found its own

justification in deep alienation and a basic outlaw

contempt for conventional bourgeois values. Ingenious,

vaguely politicized varieties of rip-off, which might be

described as "anarchy by convenience," became very

popular in Yippie circles, and because rip-off was so

useful, it was to survive the Yippie movement itself.

In the early 1970s, it required fairly limited expertise

and ingenuity to cheat payphones, to divert "free"

electricity and gas service, or to rob vending machines and

parking meters for handy pocket change. It also required

a conspiracy to spread this knowledge, and the gall and

nerve actually to commit petty theft, but the Yippies had

these qualifications in plenty. In June 1971, Abbie

Hoffman and a telephone enthusiast sarcastically known

as "Al Bell" began publishing a newsletter called *Youth

International Party Line.* This newsletter was dedicated

to collating and spreading Yippie rip-off techniques,

especially of phones, to the joy of the freewheeling

underground and the insensate rage of all straight people.

As a political tactic, phone-service theft ensured that

Yippie advocates would always have ready access to the

long-distance telephone as a medium, despite the Yippies'

chronic lack of organization, discipline, money, or even a

steady home address.

*Party Line* was run out of Greenwich Village for a

couple of years, then "Al Bell" more or less defected from

the faltering ranks of Yippiedom, changing the

newsletter's name to *TAP* or *Technical Assistance

Program.* After the Vietnam War ended, the steam

began leaking rapidly out of American radical dissent.

But by this time, "Bell" and his dozen or so core

contributors had the bit between their teeth, and had

begun to derive tremendous gut-level satisfaction from

the sensation of pure *technical power.*

*TAP* articles, once highly politicized, became

pitilessly jargonized and technical, in homage or parody to

the Bell System's own technical documents, which *TAP*

studied closely, gutted, and reproduced without

permission. The *TAP* elite revelled in gloating

possession of the specialized knowledge necessary to beat

the system.

"Al Bell" dropped out of the game by the late 70s,

and "Tom Edison" took over; TAP readers (some 1400 of

them, all told) now began to show more interest in telex

switches and the growing phenomenon of computer

systems.

In 1983, "Tom Edison" had his computer stolen and

his house set on fire by an arsonist. This was an eventually

mortal blow to *TAP* (though the legendary name was to

be resurrected in 1990 by a young Kentuckian computer-

outlaw named "Predat0r.")

#

Ever since telephones began to make money, there

have been people willing to rob and defraud phone

companies. The legions of petty phone thieves vastly

outnumber those "phone phreaks" who "explore the

system" for the sake of the intellectual challenge. The

New York metropolitan area (long in the vanguard of

American crime) claims over 150,000 physical attacks on

pay telephones every year! Studied carefully, a modern

payphone reveals itself as a little fortress, carefully

designed and redesigned over generations, to resist coin-

slugs, zaps of electricity, chunks of coin-shaped ice,

prybars, magnets, lockpicks, blasting caps. Public pay-

phones must survive in a world of unfriendly, greedy

people, and a modern payphone is as exquisitely evolved

as a cactus.

Because the phone network pre-dates the computer

network, the scofflaws known as "phone phreaks" pre-date

the scofflaws known as "computer hackers." In practice,

today, the line between "phreaking" and "hacking" is very

blurred, just as the distinction between telephones and

computers has blurred. The phone system has been

digitized, and computers have learned to "talk" over

phone-lines. What's worse -- and this was the point of the

Mr. Jenkins of the Secret Service -- some hackers have

learned to steal, and some thieves have learned to hack.

Despite the blurring, one can still draw a few useful

behavioral distinctions between "phreaks" and "hackers."

Hackers are intensely interested in the "system" per se,

and enjoy relating to machines. "Phreaks" are more

social, manipulating the system in a rough-and-ready

fashion in order to get through to other human beings,

fast, cheap and under the table.

Phone phreaks love nothing so much as "bridges,"

illegal conference calls of ten or twelve chatting

conspirators, seaboard to seaboard, lasting for many hours

-- and running, of course, on somebody else's tab,

preferably a large corporation's.

As phone-phreak conferences wear on, people drop

out (or simply leave the phone off the hook, while they

sashay off to work or school or babysitting), and new

people are phoned up and invited to join in, from some

other continent, if possible. Technical trivia, boasts, brags,

lies, head-trip deceptions, weird rumors, and cruel gossip

are all freely exchanged.

The lowest rung of phone-phreaking is the theft of

telephone access codes. Charging a phone call to

somebody else's stolen number is, of course, a pig-easy

way of stealing phone service, requiring practically no

technical expertise. This practice has been very

widespread, especially among lonely people without much

money who are far from home. Code theft has flourished

especially in college dorms, military bases, and,

notoriously, among roadies for rock bands. Of late, code

theft has spread very rapidly among Third Worlders in the

US, who pile up enormous unpaid long-distance bills to

the Caribbean, South America, and Pakistan.

The simplest way to steal phone-codes is simply to

look over a victim's shoulder as he punches-in his own

code-number on a public payphone. This technique is

known as "shoulder-surfing," and is especially common in

airports, bus terminals, and train stations. The code is

then sold by the thief for a few dollars. The buyer abusing

the code has no computer expertise, but calls his Mom in

New York, Kingston or Caracas and runs up a huge bill

with impunity. The losses from this primitive phreaking

activity are far, far greater than the monetary losses

caused by computer-intruding hackers.

In the mid-to-late 1980s, until the introduction of

sterner telco security measures, *computerized* code

theft worked like a charm, and was virtually omnipresent

throughout the digital underground, among phreaks and

hackers alike. This was accomplished through

programming one's computer to try random code

numbers over the telephone until one of them worked.

Simple programs to do this were widely available in the

underground; a computer running all night was likely to

come up with a dozen or so useful hits. This could be

repeated week after week until one had a large library of

stolen codes.

Nowadays, the computerized dialling of hundreds of

numbers can be detected within hours and swiftly traced.

If a stolen code is repeatedly abused, this too can be

detected within a few hours. But for years in the 1980s, the

publication of stolen codes was a kind of elementary

etiquette for fledgling hackers. The simplest way to

establish your bona-fides as a raider was to steal a code

through repeated random dialling and offer it to the

"community" for use. Codes could be both stolen, and

used, simply and easily from the safety of one's own

bedroom, with very little fear of detection or punishment.

Before computers and their phone-line modems

entered American homes in gigantic numbers, phone

phreaks had their own special telecommunications

hardware gadget, the famous "blue box." This fraud

device (now rendered increasingly useless by the digital

evolution of the phone system) could trick switching

systems into granting free access to long-distance lines. It

did this by mimicking the system's own signal, a tone of

2600 hertz.

Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of

Apple Computer, Inc., once dabbled in selling blue-boxes

in college dorms in California. For many, in the early days

of phreaking, blue-boxing was scarcely perceived as

"theft," but rather as a fun (if sneaky) way to use excess

phone capacity harmlessly. After all, the long-distance

lines were *just sitting there*.... Whom did it hurt, really?

If you're not *damaging* the system, and you're not

*using up any tangible resource,* and if nobody *finds

out* what you did, then what real harm have you done?

What exactly *have* you "stolen," anyway? If a tree falls

in the forest and nobody hears it, how much is the noise

worth? Even now this remains a rather dicey question.

Blue-boxing was no joke to the phone companies,

however. Indeed, when *Ramparts* magazine, a radical

publication in California, printed the wiring schematics

necessary to create a mute box in June 1972, the

magazine was seized by police and Pacific Bell phone-

company officials. The mute box, a blue-box variant,

allowed its user to receive long-distance calls free of

charge to the caller. This device was closely described in a

*Ramparts* article wryly titled "Regulating the Phone

Company In Your Home." Publication of this article was

held to be in violation of Californian State Penal Code

section 502.7, which outlaws ownership of wire-fraud

devices and the selling of "plans or instructions for any

instrument, apparatus, or device intended to avoid

telephone toll charges."

Issues of *Ramparts* were recalled or seized on the

newsstands, and the resultant loss of income helped put

the magazine out of business. This was an ominous

precedent for free-expression issues, but the telco's

crushing of a radical-fringe magazine passed without

serious challenge at the time. Even in the freewheeling

California 1970s, it was widely felt that there was

something sacrosanct about what the phone company

knew; that the telco had a legal and moral right to protect

itself by shutting off the flow of such illicit information.

Most telco information was so "specialized" that it would

scarcely be understood by any honest member of the

public. If not published, it would not be missed. To print

such material did not seem part of the legitimate role of a

free press.

In 1990 there would be a similar telco-inspired attack

on the electronic phreak/hacking "magazine" *Phrack.*

The *Phrack* legal case became a central issue in the

Hacker Crackdown, and gave rise to great controversy.

*Phrack* would also be shut down, for a time, at least, but

this time both the telcos and their law-enforcement allies

would pay a much larger price for their actions. The

*Phrack* case will be examined in detail, later.

Phone-phreaking as a social practice is still very

much alive at this moment. Today, phone-phreaking is

thriving much more vigorously than the better-known and

worse-feared practice of "computer hacking." New forms

of phreaking are spreading rapidly, following new

vulnerabilities in sophisticated phone services.

Cellular phones are especially vulnerable; their chips

can be re-programmed to present a false caller ID and

avoid billing. Doing so also avoids police tapping, making

cellular-phone abuse a favorite among drug-dealers.

"Call-sell operations" using pirate cellular phones can, and

have, been run right out of the backs of cars, which move

from "cell" to "cell" in the local phone system, retailing

stolen long-distance service, like some kind of demented

electronic version of the neighborhood ice-cream truck.

Private branch-exchange phone systems in large

corporations can be penetrated; phreaks dial-up a local

company, enter its internal phone-system, hack it, then

use the company's own PBX system to dial back out over

the public network, causing the company to be stuck with

the resulting long-distance bill. This technique is known

as "diverting." "Diverting" can be very costly, especially

because phreaks tend to travel in packs and never stop

talking. Perhaps the worst by-product of this "PBX fraud"

is that victim companies and telcos have sued one another

over the financial responsibility for the stolen calls, thus

enriching not only shabby phreaks but well-paid lawyers.

"Voice-mail systems" can also be abused; phreaks

can seize their own sections of these sophisticated

electronic answering machines, and use them for trading

codes or knowledge of illegal techniques. Voice-mail

abuse does not hurt the company directly, but finding

supposedly empty slots in your company's answering

machine all crammed with phreaks eagerly chattering

and hey-duding one another in impenetrable jargon can

cause sensations of almost mystical repulsion and dread.

Worse yet, phreaks have sometimes been known to

react truculently to attempts to "clean up" the voice-mail

system. Rather than humbly acquiescing to being thrown

out of their playground, they may very well call up the

company officials at work (or at home) and loudly demand

free voice-mail addresses of their very own. Such bullying

is taken very seriously by spooked victims.

Acts of phreak revenge against straight people are

rare, but voice-mail systems are especially tempting and

vulnerable, and an infestation of angry phreaks in one's

voice-mail system is no joke. They can erase legitimate

messages; or spy on private messages; or harass users with

recorded taunts and obscenities. They've even been

known to seize control of voice-mail security, and lock out

legitimate users, or even shut down the system entirely.

Cellular phone-calls, cordless phones, and ship-to-

shore telephony can all be monitored by various forms of

radio; this kind of "passive monitoring" is spreading

explosively today. Technically eavesdropping on other

people's cordless and cellular phone-calls is the fastest-

growing area in phreaking today. This practice strongly

appeals to the lust for power and conveys gratifying

sensations of technical superiority over the eavesdropping

victim. Monitoring is rife with all manner of tempting evil

mischief. Simple prurient snooping is by far the most

common activity. But credit-card numbers unwarily

spoken over the phone can be recorded, stolen and used.

And tapping people's phone-calls (whether through active

telephone taps or passive radio monitors) does lend itself

conveniently to activities like blackmail, industrial

espionage, and political dirty tricks.

It should be repeated that telecommunications

fraud, the theft of phone service, causes vastly greater

monetary losses than the practice of entering into

computers by stealth. Hackers are mostly young

suburban American white males, and exist in their

hundreds -- but "phreaks" come from both sexes and from

many nationalities, ages and ethnic backgrounds, and are

flourishing in the thousands.

#

The term "hacker" has had an unfortunate history.

This book, *The Hacker Crackdown,* has little to say about

"hacking" in its finer, original sense. The term can signify

the free-wheeling intellectual exploration of the highest

and deepest potential of computer systems. Hacking can

describe the determination to make access to computers

and information as free and open as possible. Hacking

can involve the heartfelt conviction that beauty can be

found in computers, that the fine aesthetic in a perfect

program can liberate the mind and spirit. This is

"hacking" as it was defined in Steven Levy's much-praised

history of the pioneer computer milieu, *Hackers,*

published in 1984.

Hackers of all kinds are absolutely soaked through

with heroic anti-bureaucratic sentiment. Hackers long for

recognition as a praiseworthy cultural archetype, the

postmodern electronic equivalent of the cowboy and

mountain man. Whether they deserve such a reputation

is something for history to decide. But many hackers --

including those outlaw hackers who are computer

intruders, and whose activities are defined as criminal --

actually attempt to *live up to* this techno-cowboy

reputation. And given that electronics and

telecommunications are still largely unexplored

territories, there is simply *no telling* what hackers might

uncover.

For some people, this freedom is the very breath of

oxygen, the inventive spontaneity that makes life worth

living and that flings open doors to marvellous possibility

and individual empowerment. But for many people -- and

increasingly so -- the hacker is an ominous figure, a smart-

aleck sociopath ready to burst out of his basement

wilderness and savage other people's lives for his own

anarchical convenience.

Any form of power without responsibility, without

direct and formal checks and balances, is frightening to

people -- and reasonably so. It should be frankly admitted

that hackers *are* frightening, and that the basis of this

fear is not irrational.

Fear of hackers goes well beyond the fear of merely

criminal activity.

Subversion and manipulation of the phone system is

an act with disturbing political overtones. In America,

computers and telephones are potent symbols of

organized authority and the technocratic business elite.

But there is an element in American culture that has

always strongly rebelled against these symbols; rebelled

against all large industrial computers and all phone

companies. A certain anarchical tinge deep in the

American soul delights in causing confusion and pain to

all bureaucracies, including technological ones.

There is sometimes malice and vandalism in this

attitude, but it is a deep and cherished part of the

American national character. The outlaw, the rebel, the

rugged individual, the pioneer, the sturdy Jeffersonian

yeoman, the private citizen resisting interference in his

pursuit of happiness -- these are figures that all

Americans recognize, and that many will strongly applaud

and defend.

Many scrupulously law-abiding citizens today do

cutting-edge work with electronics -- work that has already

had tremendous social influence and will have much

more in years to come. In all truth, these talented,

hardworking, law-abiding, mature, adult people are far

more disturbing to the peace and order of the current

status quo than any scofflaw group of romantic teenage

punk kids. These law-abiding hackers have the power,

ability, and willingness to influence other people's lives

quite unpredictably. They have means, motive, and

opportunity to meddle drastically with the American social

order. When corralled into governments, universities, or

large multinational companies, and forced to follow

rulebooks and wear suits and ties, they at least have some

conventional halters on their freedom of action. But when

loosed alone, or in small groups, and fired by imagination

and the entrepreneurial spirit, they can move mountains -

- causing landslides that will likely crash directly into your

office and living room.

These people, as a class, instinctively recognize that a

public, politicized attack on hackers will eventually spread

to them -- that the term "hacker," once demonized, might

be used to knock their hands off the levers of power and

choke them out of existence. There are hackers today who

fiercely and publicly resist any besmirching of the noble

title of hacker. Naturally and understandably, they

deeply resent the attack on their values implicit in using

the word "hacker" as a synonym for computer-criminal.

This book, sadly but in my opinion unavoidably,

rather adds to the degradation of the term. It concerns

itself mostly with "hacking" in its commonest latter-day

definition, i.e., intruding into computer systems by stealth

and without permission.

The term "hacking" is used routinely today by

almost all law enforcement officials with any professional

interest in computer fraud and abuse. American police

describe almost any crime committed with, by, through, or

against a computer as hacking.

Most importantly, "hacker" is what computer-

intruders choose to call *themselves.* Nobody who

"hacks" into systems willingly describes himself (rarely,

herself) as a "computer intruder," "computer trespasser,"

"cracker," "wormer," "darkside hacker" or "high tech street

gangster." Several other demeaning terms have been

invented in the hope that the press and public will leave

the original sense of the word alone. But few people

actually use these terms. (I exempt the term "cyberpunk,"

which a few hackers and law enforcement people actually

do use. The term "cyberpunk" is drawn from literary

criticism and has some odd and unlikely resonances, but,

like hacker, cyberpunk too has become a criminal

pejorative today.)

In any case, breaking into computer systems was

hardly alien to the original hacker tradition. The first

tottering systems of the 1960s required fairly extensive

internal surgery merely to function day-by-day. Their

users "invaded" the deepest, most arcane recesses of their

operating software almost as a matter of routine.

"Computer security" in these early, primitive systems was

at best an afterthought. What security there was, was

entirely physical, for it was assumed that anyone allowed

near this expensive, arcane hardware would be a fully

qualified professional expert.

In a campus environment, though, this meant that

grad students, teaching assistants, undergraduates, and

eventually, all manner of dropouts and hangers-on ended

up accessing and often running the works.

Universities, even modern universities, are not in the

business of maintaining security over information. On the

contrary, universities, as institutions, pre-date the

"information economy" by many centuries and are not-

for-profit cultural entities, whose reason for existence

(purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through

techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities

are meant to *pass the torch of civilization,* not just

download data into student skulls, and the values of the

academic community are strongly at odds with those of all

would-be information empires. Teachers at all levels,

from kindergarten up, have proven to be shameless and

persistent software and data pirates. Universities do not

merely "leak information" but vigorously broadcast free

thought.

This clash of values has been fraught with

controversy. Many hackers of the 1960s remember their

professional apprenticeship as a long guerilla war against

the uptight mainframe-computer "information

priesthood." These computer-hungry youngsters had to

struggle hard for access to computing power, and many of

them were not above certain, er, shortcuts. But, over the

years, this practice freed computing from the sterile

reserve of lab-coated technocrats and was largely

responsible for the explosive growth of computing in

general society -- especially *personal* computing.

Access to technical power acted like catnip on

certain of these youngsters. Most of the basic techniques

of computer intrusion: password cracking, trapdoors,

backdoors, trojan horses -- were invented in college

environments in the 1960s, in the early days of network

computing. Some off-the-cuff experience at computer

intrusion was to be in the informal resume of most

"hackers" and many future industry giants. Outside of the

tiny cult of computer enthusiasts, few people thought

much about the implications of "breaking into"

computers. This sort of activity had not yet been

publicized, much less criminalized.

In the 1960s, definitions of "property" and "privacy"

had not yet been extended to cyberspace. Computers

were not yet indispensable to society. There were no vast

databanks of vulnerable, proprietary information stored in

computers, which might be accessed, copied without

permission, erased, altered, or sabotaged. The stakes

were low in the early days -- but they grew every year,

exponentially, as computers themselves grew.

By the 1990s, commercial and political pressures had

become overwhelming, and they broke the social

boundaries of the hacking subculture. Hacking had

become too important to be left to the hackers. Society

was now forced to tackle the intangible nature of

cyberspace-as-property, cyberspace as privately-owned

unreal-estate. In the new, severe, responsible, high-

stakes context of the "Information Society" of the 1990s,

"hacking" was called into question.

What did it mean to break into a computer without

permission and use its computational power, or look

around inside its files without hurting anything? What

were computer-intruding hackers, anyway -- how should

society, and the law, best define their actions? Were

they just *browsers,* harmless intellectual explorers?

Were they *voyeurs,* snoops, invaders of privacy? Should

they be sternly treated as potential *agents of espionage,*

or perhaps as *industrial spies?* Or were they best

defined as *trespassers,* a very common teenage

misdemeanor? Was hacking *theft of service?* (After

all, intruders were getting someone else's computer to

carry out their orders, without permission and without

paying). Was hacking *fraud?* Maybe it was best

described as *impersonation.* The commonest mode of

computer intrusion was (and is) to swipe or snoop

somebody else's password, and then enter the computer

in the guise of another person -- who is commonly stuck

with the blame and the bills.

Perhaps a medical metaphor was better -- hackers

should be defined as "sick," as *computer addicts* unable

to control their irresponsible, compulsive behavior.

But these weighty assessments meant little to the

people who were actually being judged. From inside the

underground world of hacking itself, all these perceptions

seem quaint, wrongheaded, stupid, or meaningless. The

most important self-perception of underground hackers --

from the 1960s, right through to the present day -- is that

they are an *elite.* The day-to-day struggle in the

underground is not over sociological definitions -- who

cares? -- but for power, knowledge, and status among

one's peers.

When you are a hacker, it is your own inner

conviction of your elite status that enables you to break, or

let us say "transcend," the rules. It is not that *all* rules go

by the board. The rules habitually broken by hackers are

*unimportant* rules -- the rules of dopey greedhead telco

bureaucrats and pig-ignorant government pests.

Hackers have their *own* rules, which separate

behavior which is cool and elite, from behavior which is

rodentlike, stupid and losing. These "rules," however, are

mostly unwritten and enforced by peer pressure and

tribal feeling. Like all rules that depend on the unspoken

conviction that everybody else is a good old boy, these

rules are ripe for abuse. The mechanisms of hacker peer-

pressure, "teletrials" and ostracism, are rarely used and

rarely work. Back-stabbing slander, threats, and

electronic harassment are also freely employed in down-

and-dirty intrahacker feuds, but this rarely forces a rival

out of the scene entirely. The only real solution for the

problem of an utterly losing, treacherous and rodentlike

hacker is to *turn him in to the police.* Unlike the Mafia

or Medellin Cartel, the hacker elite cannot simply execute

the bigmouths, creeps and troublemakers among their

ranks, so they turn one another in with astonishing

frequency.

There is no tradition of silence or *omerta* in the

hacker underworld. Hackers can be shy, even reclusive,

but when they do talk, hackers tend to brag, boast and

strut. Almost everything hackers do is *invisible;* if they

don't brag, boast, and strut about it, then *nobody will ever

know.* If you don't have something to brag, boast, and

strut about, then nobody in the underground will

recognize you and favor you with vital cooperation and

respect.

The way to win a solid reputation in the underground

is by telling other hackers things that could only have

been learned by exceptional cunning and stealth.

Forbidden knowledge, therefore, is the basic currency of

the digital underground, like seashells among Trobriand

Islanders. Hackers hoard this knowledge, and dwell upon

it obsessively, and refine it, and bargain with it, and talk

and talk about it.

Many hackers even suffer from a strange obsession

to *teach* -- to spread the ethos and the knowledge of the

digital underground. They'll do this even when it gains

them no particular advantage and presents a grave

personal risk.

And when that risk catches up with them, they will go

right on teaching and preaching -- to a new audience this

time, their interrogators from law enforcement. Almost

every hacker arrested tells everything he knows -- all

about his friends, his mentors, his disciples -- legends,

threats, horror stories, dire rumors, gossip, hallucinations.

This is, of course, convenient for law enforcement -- except

when law enforcement begins to believe hacker legendry.

Phone phreaks are unique among criminals in their

willingness to call up law enforcement officials -- in the

office, at their homes -- and give them an extended piece

of their mind. It is hard not to interpret this as *begging

for arrest,* and in fact it is an act of incredible

foolhardiness. Police are naturally nettled by these acts of

chutzpah and will go well out of their way to bust these

flaunting idiots. But it can also be interpreted as a

product of a world-view so elitist, so closed and hermetic,

that electronic police are simply not perceived as "police,"

but rather as *enemy phone phreaks* who should be

scolded into behaving "decently."

Hackers at their most grandiloquent perceive

themselves as the elite pioneers of a new electronic world.

Attempts to make them obey the democratically

established laws of contemporary American society are

seen as repression and persecution. After all, they argue,

if Alexander Graham Bell had gone along with the rules of

the Western Union telegraph company, there would have

been no telephones. If Jobs and Wozniak had believed

that IBM was the be-all and end-all, there would have

been no personal computers. If Benjamin Franklin and

Thomas Jefferson had tried to "work within the system"

there would have been no United States.

Not only do hackers privately believe this as an

article of faith, but they have been known to write ardent

manifestos about it. Here are some revealing excerpts

from an especially vivid hacker manifesto: "The Techno-

Revolution" by "Dr. Crash," which appeared in electronic

form in *Phrack* Volume 1, Issue 6, Phile 3.

"To fully explain the true motives behind hacking, we

must first take a quick look into the past. In the 1960s, a

group of MIT students built the first modern computer

system. This wild, rebellious group of young men were the

first to bear the name 'hackers.' The systems that they

developed were intended to be used to solve world

problems and to benefit all of mankind.

"As we can see, this has not been the case. The

computer system has been solely in the hands of big

businesses and the government. The wonderful device

meant to enrich life has become a weapon which

dehumanizes people. To the government and large

businesses, people are no more than disk space, and the

government doesn't use computers to arrange aid for the

poor, but to control nuclear death weapons. The average

American can only have access to a small microcomputer

which is worth only a fraction of what they pay for it. The

businesses keep the true state-of-the-art equipment away

from the people behind a steel wall of incredibly high

prices and bureaucracy. It is because of this state of

affairs that hacking was born.(...)

"Of course, the government doesn't want the

monopoly of technology broken, so they have outlawed

hacking and arrest anyone who is caught.(...) The phone

company is another example of technology abused and

kept from people with high prices.(...)

"Hackers often find that their existing equipment,

due to the monopoly tactics of computer companies, is

inefficient for their purposes. Due to the exorbitantly high

prices, it is impossible to legally purchase the necessary

equipment. This need has given still another segment of

the fight: Credit Carding. Carding is a way of obtaining

the necessary goods without paying for them. It is again

due to the companies' stupidity that Carding is so easy,

and shows that the world's businesses are in the hands of

those with considerably less technical know-how than we,

the hackers. (...)

"Hacking must continue. We must train newcomers

to the art of hacking.(....) And whatever you do, continue

the fight. Whether you know it or not, if you are a hacker,

you are a revolutionary. Don't worry, you're on the right

side."

The defense of "carding" is rare. Most hackers

regard credit-card theft as "poison" to the underground, a

sleazy and immoral effort that, worse yet, is hard to get

away with. Nevertheless, manifestos advocating credit-

card theft, the deliberate crashing of computer systems,

and even acts of violent physical destruction such as

vandalism and arson do exist in the underground. These

boasts and threats are taken quite seriously by the police.

And not every hacker is an abstract, Platonic computer-

nerd. Some few are quite experienced at picking locks,

robbing phone-trucks, and breaking and entering

buildings.

Hackers vary in their degree of hatred for authority

and the violence of their rhetoric. But, at a bottom line,

they are scofflaws. They don't regard the current rules of

electronic behavior as respectable efforts to preserve law

and order and protect public safety. They regard these

laws as immoral efforts by soulless corporations to protect

their profit margins and to crush dissidents. "Stupid"

people, including police, businessmen, politicians, and

journalists, simply have no right to judge the actions of

those possessed of genius, techno-revolutionary

intentions, and technical expertise.

#

Hackers are generally teenagers and college kids not

engaged in earning a living. They often come from fairly

well-to-do middle-class backgrounds, and are markedly

anti-materialistic (except, that is, when it comes to

computer equipment). Anyone motivated by greed for

mere money (as opposed to the greed for power,

knowledge and status) is swiftly written-off as a narrow-

minded breadhead whose interests can only be corrupt

and contemptible. Having grown up in the 1970s and

1980s, the young Bohemians of the digital underground

regard straight society as awash in plutocratic corruption,

where everyone from the President down is for sale and

whoever has the gold makes the rules.

Interestingly, there's a funhouse-mirror image of this

attitude on the other side of the conflict. The police are

also one of the most markedly anti-materialistic groups in

American society, motivated not by mere money but by

ideals of service, justice, esprit-de-corps, and, of course,

their own brand of specialized knowledge and power.

Remarkably, the propaganda war between cops and

hackers has always involved angry allegations that the

other side is trying to make a sleazy buck. Hackers

consistently sneer that anti-phreak prosecutors are

angling for cushy jobs as telco lawyers and that computer-

crime police are aiming to cash in later as well-paid

computer-security consultants in the private sector.

For their part, police publicly conflate all hacking

crimes with robbing payphones with crowbars. Allegations

of "monetary losses" from computer intrusion are

notoriously inflated. The act of illicitly copying a

document from a computer is morally equated with

directly robbing a company of, say, half a million dollars.

The teenage computer intruder in possession of this

"proprietary" document has certainly not sold it for such a

sum, would likely have little idea how to sell it at all, and

quite probably doesn't even understand what he has. He

has not made a cent in profit from his felony but is still

morally equated with a thief who has robbed the church

poorbox and lit out for Brazil.

Police want to believe that all hackers are thieves. It

is a tortuous and almost unbearable act for the American

justice system to put people in jail because they want to

learn things which are forbidden for them to know. In an

American context, almost any pretext for punishment is

better than jailing people to protect certain restricted

kinds of information. Nevertheless, *policing

information* is part and parcel of the struggle against

hackers.

This dilemma is well exemplified by the remarkable

activities of "Emmanuel Goldstein," editor and publisher

of a print magazine known as *2600: The Hacker

Quarterly.* Goldstein was an English major at Long

Island's State University of New York in the '70s, when he

became involved with the local college radio station. His

growing interest in electronics caused him to drift into

Yippie *TAP* circles and thus into the digital

underground, where he became a self-described techno-

rat. His magazine publishes techniques of computer

intrusion and telephone "exploration" as well as gloating

exposes of telco misdeeds and governmental failings.

Goldstein lives quietly and very privately in a large,

crumbling Victorian mansion in Setauket, New York. The

seaside house is decorated with telco decals, chunks of

driftwood, and the basic bric-a-brac of a hippie crash-pad.

He is unmarried, mildly unkempt, and survives mostly on

TV dinners and turkey-stuffing eaten straight out of the

bag. Goldstein is a man of considerable charm and

fluency, with a brief, disarming smile and the kind of

pitiless, stubborn, thoroughly recidivist integrity that

America's electronic police find genuinely alarming.

Goldstein took his nom-de-plume, or "handle," from a

character in Orwell's *1984,* which may be taken,

correctly, as a symptom of the gravity of his sociopolitical

worldview. He is not himself a practicing computer

intruder, though he vigorously abets these actions,

especially when they are pursued against large

corporations or governmental agencies. Nor is he a thief,

for he loudly scorns mere theft of phone service, in favor of

'exploring and manipulating the system.' He is probably

best described and understood as a *dissident.*

Weirdly, Goldstein is living in modern America

under conditions very similar to those of former East

European intellectual dissidents. In other words, he

flagrantly espouses a value-system that is deeply and

irrevocably opposed to the system of those in power and

the police. The values in *2600* are generally expressed in

terms that are ironic, sarcastic, paradoxical, or just

downright confused. But there's no mistaking their

radically anti-authoritarian tenor. *2600* holds that

technical power and specialized knowledge, of any kind

obtainable, belong by right in the hands of those

individuals brave and bold enough to discover them -- by

whatever means necessary. Devices, laws, or systems that

forbid access, and the free spread of knowledge, are

provocations that any free and self-respecting hacker

should relentlessly attack. The "privacy" of governments,

corporations and other soulless technocratic organizations

should never be protected at the expense of the liberty

and free initiative of the individual techno-rat.

However, in our contemporary workaday world, both

governments and corporations are very anxious indeed to

police information which is secret, proprietary, restricted,

confidential, copyrighted, patented, hazardous, illegal,

unethical, embarrassing, or otherwise sensitive. This

makes Goldstein persona non grata, and his philosophy a

threat.

Very little about the conditions of Goldstein's daily

life would astonish, say, Vaclav Havel. (We may note in

passing that President Havel once had his word-processor

confiscated by the Czechoslovak police.) Goldstein lives

by *samizdat,* acting semi-openly as a data-center for the

underground, while challenging the powers-that-be to

abide by their own stated rules: freedom of speech and

the First Amendment.

Goldstein thoroughly looks and acts the part of

techno-rat, with shoulder-length ringlets and a piratical

black fisherman's-cap set at a rakish angle. He often

shows up like Banquo's ghost at meetings of computer

professionals, where he listens quietly, half-smiling and

taking thorough notes.

Computer professionals generally meet publicly, and

find it very difficult to rid themselves of Goldstein and his

ilk without extralegal and unconstitutional actions.

Sympathizers, many of them quite respectable people

with responsible jobs, admire Goldstein's attitude and

surreptitiously pass him information. An unknown but

presumably large proportion of Goldstein's 2,000-plus

readership are telco security personnel and police, who

are forced to subscribe to *2600* to stay abreast of new

developments in hacking. They thus find themselves

*paying this guy's rent* while grinding their teeth in

anguish, a situation that would have delighted Abbie

Hoffman (one of Goldstein's few idols).

Goldstein is probably the best-known public

representative of the hacker underground today, and

certainly the best-hated. Police regard him as a Fagin, a

corrupter of youth, and speak of him with untempered

loathing. He is quite an accomplished gadfly.

After the Martin Luther King Day Crash of 1990,

Goldstein, for instance, adeptly rubbed salt into the wound

in the pages of *2600.* "Yeah, it was fun for the phone

phreaks as we watched the network crumble," he admitted

cheerfully. "But it was also an ominous sign of what's to

come... Some AT&T people, aided by well-meaning but

ignorant media, were spreading the notion that many

companies had the same software and therefore could

face the same problem someday. Wrong. This was

entirely an AT&T software deficiency. Of course, other

companies could face entirely *different* software

problems. But then, so too could AT&T."

After a technical discussion of the system's failings,

the Long Island techno-rat went on to offer thoughtful

criticism to the gigantic multinational's hundreds of

professionally qualified engineers. "What we don't know

is how a major force in communications like AT&T could

be so sloppy. What happened to backups? Sure,

computer systems go down all the time, but people

making phone calls are not the same as people logging on

to computers. We must make that distinction. It's not

acceptable for the phone system or any other essential

service to 'go down.' If we continue to trust technology

without understanding it, we can look forward to many

variations on this theme.

"AT&T owes it to its customers to be prepared to

*instantly* switch to another network if something strange

and unpredictable starts occurring. The news here isn't so

much the failure of a computer program, but the failure of

AT&T's entire structure."

The very idea of this.... this *person*.... offering

"advice" about "AT&T's entire structure" is more than

some people can easily bear. How dare this near-criminal

dictate what is or isn't "acceptable" behavior from AT&T?

Especially when he's publishing, in the very same issue,

detailed schematic diagrams for creating various

switching-network signalling tones unavailable to the

public.

"See what happens when you drop a 'silver box' tone

or two down your local exchange or through different long

distance service carriers," advises *2600* contributor "Mr.

Upsetter" in "How To Build a Signal Box." "If you

experiment systematically and keep good records, you will

surely discover something interesting."

This is, of course, the scientific method, generally

regarded as a praiseworthy activity and one of the flowers

of modern civilization. One can indeed learn a great deal

with this sort of structured intellectual activity. Telco

employees regard this mode of "exploration" as akin to

flinging sticks of dynamite into their pond to see what lives

on the bottom.

*2600* has been published consistently since 1984. It

has also run a bulletin board computer system, printed

*2600* T-shirts, taken fax calls... The Spring 1991 issue has

an interesting announcement on page 45: "We just

discovered an extra set of wires attached to our fax line

and heading up the pole. (They've since been clipped.)

Your faxes to us and to anyone else could be monitored."

In the worldview of *2600,* the tiny band of techno-

rat brothers (rarely, sisters) are a 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 work!*

Suddenly you're doing something even your parents can't

do. Six months ago you were just some kid -- now, you're

the Crimson Flash of Area Code 512! You're bad -- you're

nationwide!

Maybe you'll stop at a few abused codes. Maybe

you'll decide that boards aren't all that interesting after all,

that it's wrong, not worth the risk -- but maybe you won't.

The next step is to pick up your own repeat-dialling

program -- to learn to generate your own stolen codes.

(This was dead easy five years ago, much harder to get

away with nowadays, but not yet impossible.) And these

dialling programs are not complex or intimidating -- some

are as small as twenty lines of software.

Now, you too can share codes. You can trade codes

to learn other techniques. If you're smart enough to catch

on, and obsessive enough to want to bother, and ruthless

enough to start seriously bending rules, then you'll get

better, fast. You start to develop a rep. You move up to a

heavier class of board -- a board with a bad attitude, the

kind of board that naive dopes like your classmates and

your former self have never even heard of! You pick up

the jargon of phreaking and hacking from the board. You

read a few of those anarchy philes -- and man, you never

realized you could be a real *outlaw* without ever leaving

your bedroom.

You still play other computer games, but now you

have a new and bigger game. This one will bring you a

different kind of status than destroying even eight zillion

lousy space invaders.

Hacking is perceived by hackers as a "game." This is

not an entirely unreasonable or sociopathic perception.

You can win or lose at hacking, succeed or fail, but it never

feels "real." It's not simply that imaginative youngsters

sometimes have a hard time telling "make-believe" from

"real life." Cyberspace is *not real!* "Real" things are

physical objects like trees and shoes and cars. Hacking

takes place on a screen. Words aren't physical, numbers

(even telephone numbers and credit card numbers)

aren't physical. Sticks and stones may break my bones,

but data will never hurt me. Computers *simulate* reality,

like computer games that simulate tank battles or

dogfights or spaceships. Simulations are just make-

believe, and the stuff in computers is *not real.*

Consider this: if "hacking" is supposed to be so

serious and real-life and dangerous, then how come

*nine-year-old kids* have computers and modems? You

wouldn't give a nine year old his own car, or his own rifle, or

his own chainsaw -- those things are "real."

People underground are perfectly aware that the

"game" is frowned upon by the powers that be. Word gets

around about busts in the underground. Publicizing busts

is one of the primary functions of pirate boards, but they

also promulgate an attitude about them, and their own

idiosyncratic ideas of justice. The users of underground

boards won't complain if some guy is busted for crashing

systems, spreading viruses, or stealing money by wire-

fraud. They may shake their heads with a sneaky grin, but

they won't openly defend these practices. But when a kid

is charged with some theoretical amount of theft:

$233,846.14, for instance, because he sneaked into a

computer and copied something, and kept it in his house

on a floppy disk -- this is regarded as a sign of near-

insanity from prosecutors, a sign that they've drastically

mistaken the immaterial game of computing for their real

and boring everyday world of fatcat corporate money.

It's as if big companies and their suck-up lawyers

think that computing belongs to them, and they can retail

it with price stickers, as if it were boxes of laundry soap!

But pricing "information" is like trying to price air or price

dreams. Well, anybody on a pirate board knows that

computing can be, and ought to be, *free.* Pirate boards

are little independent worlds in cyberspace, and they don't

belong to anybody but the underground. Underground

boards aren't "brought to you by Procter & Gamble."

To log on to an underground board can mean to

experience liberation, to enter a world where, for once,

money isn't everything and adults don't have all the

answers.

Let's sample another vivid hacker manifesto. Here

are some excerpts from "The Conscience of a Hacker," by

"The Mentor," from *Phrack* Volume One, Issue 7, Phile

3.

"I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait

a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a

mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it

doesn't like me.(...)

"And then it happened... a door opened to a world...

rushing through the phone line like heroin through an

addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge

from day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is

found. 'This is it... this is where I belong...'

"I know everyone here... even if I've never met them,

never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I

know you all...(...)

"This is our world now.... the world of the electron and

the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a

service already existing without paying for what could be

dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you

call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals.

We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We

exist without skin color, without nationality, without

religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic

bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat and lie to us and

try to make us believe that it's for our own good, yet we're

the criminals.

"Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity.

My crime is that of judging people by what they say and

think, not what they look like. My crime is that of

outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me

for."

#

There have been underground boards almost as long

as there have been boards. One of the first was 8BBS,

which became a stronghold of the West Coast phone-

phreak elite. After going on-line in March 1980, 8BBS

sponsored "Susan Thunder," and "Tuc," and, most

notoriously, "the Condor." "The Condor" bore the singular

distinction of becoming the most vilified American phreak

and hacker ever. Angry underground associates, fed up

with Condor's peevish behavior, turned him in to police,

along with a heaping double-helping of outrageous

hacker legendry. As a result, Condor was kept in solitary

confinement for seven months, for fear that he might start

World War Three by triggering missile silos from the

prison payphone. (Having served his time, Condor is now

walking around loose; WWIII has thus far conspicuously

failed to occur.)

The sysop of 8BBS was an ardent free-speech

enthusiast who simply felt that *any* attempt to restrict

the expression of his users was unconstitutional and

immoral. Swarms of the technically curious entered 8BBS

and emerged as phreaks and hackers, until, in 1982, a

friendly 8BBS alumnus passed the sysop a new modem

which had been purchased by credit-card fraud. Police

took this opportunity to seize the entire board and remove

what they considered an attractive nuisance.

Plovernet was a powerful East Coast pirate board that

operated in both New York and Florida. Owned and

operated by teenage hacker "Quasi Moto," Plovernet

attracted five hundred eager users in 1983. "Emmanuel

Goldstein" was one-time co-sysop of Plovernet, along with

"Lex Luthor," founder of the "Legion of Doom" group.

Plovernet bore the signal honor of being the original

home of the "Legion of Doom," about which the reader will

be hearing a great deal, soon.

"Pirate-80," or "P-80," run by a sysop known as "Scan-

Man," got into the game very early in Charleston, and

continued steadily for years. P-80 flourished so flagrantly

that even its most hardened users became nervous, and

some slanderously speculated that "Scan Man" must have

ties to corporate security, a charge he vigorously denied.

"414 Private" was the home board for the first *group*

to attract conspicuous trouble, the teenage "414 Gang,"

whose intrusions into Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and

Los Alamos military computers were to be a nine-days-

wonder in 1982.

At about this time, the first software piracy boards

began to open up, trading cracked games for the Atari 800

and the Commodore C64. Naturally these boards were

heavily frequented by teenagers. And with the 1983

release of the hacker-thriller movie *War Games,* the

scene exploded. It seemed that every kid in America had

demanded and gotten a modem for Christmas. Most of

these dabbler wannabes put their modems in the attic

after a few weeks, and most of the remainder minded their

P's and Q's and stayed well out of hot water. But some

stubborn and talented diehards had this hacker kid in

*War Games* figured for a happening dude. They simply

could not rest until they had contacted the underground --

or, failing that, created their own.

In the mid-80s, underground boards sprang up like

digital fungi. ShadowSpawn Elite. Sherwood Forest I, II,

and III. Digital Logic Data Service in Florida, sysoped by

no less a man than "Digital Logic" himself; Lex Luthor of

the Legion of Doom was prominent on this board, since it

was in his area code. Lex's own board, "Legion of Doom,"

started in 1984. The Neon Knights ran a network of Apple-

hacker boards: Neon Knights North, South, East and

West. Free World II was run by "Major Havoc." Lunatic

Labs is still in operation as of this writing. Dr. Ripco in

Chicago, an anything-goes anarchist board with an

extensive and raucous history, was seized by Secret

Service agents in 1990 on Sundevil day, but up again

almost immediately, with new machines and scarcely

diminished vigor.

The St. Louis scene was not to rank with major centers

of American hacking such as New York and L.A. But St.

Louis did rejoice in possession of "Knight Lightning" and

"Taran King," two of the foremost *journalists* native to

the underground. Missouri boards like Metal Shop,

Metal Shop Private, Metal Shop Brewery, may not have

been the heaviest boards around in terms of illicit

expertise. But they became boards where hackers could

exchange social gossip and try to figure out what the heck

was going on nationally -- and internationally. Gossip

from Metal Shop was put into the form of news files, then

assembled into a general electronic publication, *Phrack,*

a portmanteau title coined from "phreak" and "hack." The

*Phrack* editors were as obsessively curious about other

hackers as hackers were about machines.

*Phrack,* being free of charge and lively reading,

began to circulate throughout the underground. As Taran

King and Knight Lightning left high school for college,

*Phrack* began to appear on mainframe machines linked

to BITNET, and, through BITNET to the "Internet," that

loose but extremely potent not-for-profit network where

academic, governmental and corporate machines trade

data through the UNIX TCP/IP protocol. (The "Internet

Worm" of November 2-3,1988, created by Cornell grad

student Robert Morris, was to be the largest and best-

publicized computer-intrusion scandal to date. Morris

claimed that his ingenious "worm" program was meant to

harmlessly explore the Internet, but due to bad

programming, the Worm replicated out of control and

crashed some six thousand Internet computers. Smaller-

scale and less ambitious Internet hacking was a standard

for the underground elite.)

Most any underground board not hopelessly lame

and out-of-it would feature a complete run of *Phrack* --

and, possibly, the lesser-known standards of the

underground: the *Legion of Doom Technical Journal,*

the obscene and raucous *Cult of the Dead Cow* files,

*P/HUN* magazine, *Pirate,* the *Syndicate Reports,*

and perhaps the highly anarcho-political *Activist Times

Incorporated.*

Possession of *Phrack* on one's board was prima

facie evidence of a bad attitude. *Phrack* was seemingly

everywhere, aiding, abetting, and spreading the

underground ethos. And this did not escape the attention

of corporate security or the police.

We now come to the touchy subject of police and

boards. Police, do, in fact, own boards. In 1989, there were

police-sponsored boards in California, Colorado, Florida,

Georgia, Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, Texas, and Virginia:

boards such as "Crime Bytes," "Crimestoppers," "All

Points" and "Bullet-N-Board." Police officers, as private

computer enthusiasts, ran their own boards in Arizona,

California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Missouri,

Maryland, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee

and Texas. Police boards have often proved helpful in

community relations. Sometimes crimes are reported on

police boards.

Sometimes crimes are *committed* on police

boards. This has sometimes happened by accident, as

naive hackers blunder onto police boards and blithely

begin offering telephone codes. Far more often, however,

it occurs through the now almost-traditional use of "sting

boards." The first police sting-boards were established in

1985: "Underground Tunnel" in Austin, Texas, whose

sysop Sgt. Robert Ansley called himself "Pluto" -- "The

Phone Company" in Phoenix, Arizona, run by Ken

MacLeod of the Maricopa County Sheriff's office -- and

Sgt. Dan Pasquale's board in Fremont, California. Sysops

posed as hackers, and swiftly garnered coteries of ardent

users, who posted codes and loaded pirate software with

abandon, and came to a sticky end.

Sting boards, like other boards, are cheap to operate,

very cheap by the standards of undercover police

operations. Once accepted by the local underground,

sysops will likely be invited into other pirate boards, where

they can compile more dossiers. And when the sting is

announced and the worst offenders arrested, the publicity

is generally gratifying. The resultant paranoia in the

underground -- perhaps more justly described as a

"deterrence effect" -- tends to quell local lawbreaking for

quite a while.

Obviously police do not have to beat the underbrush

for hackers. On the contrary, they can go trolling for them.

Those caught can be grilled. Some become useful

informants. They can lead the way to pirate boards all

across the country.

And boards all across the country showed the sticky

fingerprints of *Phrack,* and of that loudest and most

flagrant of all underground groups, the "Legion of Doom."

The term "Legion of Doom" came from comic books.

The Legion of Doom, a conspiracy of costumed super-

villains headed by the chrome-domed criminal ultra-

mastermind Lex Luthor, gave Superman a lot of four-color

graphic trouble for a number of decades. Of course,

Superman, that exemplar of Truth, Justice, and the

American Way, always won in the long run. This didn't

matter to the hacker Doomsters -- "Legion of Doom" was

not some thunderous and evil Satanic reference, it was not

meant to be taken seriously. "Legion of Doom" came

from funny-books and was supposed to be funny.

"Legion of Doom" did have a good mouthfilling ring

to it, though. It sounded really cool. Other groups, such as

the "Farmers of Doom," closely allied to LoD, recognized

this grandiloquent quality, and made fun of it. There was

even a hacker group called "Justice League of America,"

named after Superman's club of true-blue crimefighting

superheros.

But they didn't last; the Legion did.

The original Legion of Doom, hanging out on Quasi

Moto's Plovernet board, were phone phreaks. They

weren't much into computers. "Lex Luthor" himself (who

was under eighteen when he formed the Legion) was a

COSMOS expert, COSMOS being the "Central System for

Mainframe Operations," a telco internal computer

network. Lex would eventually become quite a dab hand

at breaking into IBM mainframes, but although everyone

liked Lex and admired his attitude, he was not considered

a truly accomplished computer intruder. Nor was he the

"mastermind" of the Legion of Doom -- LoD were never

big on formal leadership. As a regular on Plovernet and

sysop of his "Legion of Doom BBS," Lex was the Legion's

cheerleader and recruiting officer.

Legion of Doom began on the ruins of an earlier

phreak group, The Knights of Shadow. Later, LoD was to

subsume the personnel of the hacker group "Tribunal of

Knowledge." People came and went constantly in LoD;

groups split up or formed offshoots.

Early on, the LoD phreaks befriended a few

computer-intrusion enthusiasts, who became the

associated "Legion of Hackers." Then the two groups

conflated into the "Legion of Doom/Hackers," or LoD/H.

When the original "hacker" wing, Messrs. "Compu-

Phreak" and "Phucked Agent 04," found other matters to

occupy their time, the extra "/H" slowly atrophied out of

the name; but by this time the phreak wing, Messrs. Lex

Luthor, "Blue Archer," "Gary Seven," "Kerrang Khan,"

"Master of Impact," "Silver Spy," "The Marauder," and

"The Videosmith," had picked up a plethora of intrusion

expertise and had become a force to be reckoned with.

LoD members seemed to have an instinctive

understanding that the way to real power in the

underground lay through covert publicity. LoD were

flagrant. Not only was it one of the earliest groups, but the

members took pains to widely distribute their illicit

knowledge. Some LoD members, like "The Mentor," were

close to evangelical about it. *Legion of Doom Technical

Journal* began to show up on boards throughout the

underground.

*LoD Technical Journal* was named in cruel parody

of the ancient and honored *AT&T Technical Journal.*

The material in these two publications was quite similar --

much of it, adopted from public journals and discussions

in the telco community. And yet, the predatory attitude of

LoD made even its most innocuous data seem deeply

sinister; an outrage; a clear and present danger.

To see why this should be, let's consider the following

(invented) paragraphs, as a kind of thought experiment.

(A) "W. Fred Brown, AT&T Vice President for

Advanced Technical Development, testified May 8 at a

Washington hearing of the National Telecommunications

and Information Administration (NTIA), regarding

Bellcore's GARDEN project. GARDEN (Generalized

Automatic Remote Distributed Electronic Network) is a

telephone-switch programming tool that makes it possible

to develop new telecom services, including hold-on-hold

and customized message transfers, from any keypad

terminal, within seconds. The GARDEN prototype

combines centrex lines with a minicomputer using UNIX

operating system software."

(B) "Crimson Flash 512 of the Centrex Mobsters

reports: D00dz, you wouldn't believe this GARDEN

bullshit Bellcore's just come up with! Now you don't even

need a lousy Commodore to reprogram a switch -- just log

on to GARDEN as a technician, and you can reprogram

switches right off the keypad in any public phone booth!

You can give yourself hold-on-hold and customized

message transfers, and best of all, the thing is run off

(notoriously insecure) centrex lines using -- get this --

standard UNIX software! Ha ha ha ha!"

Message (A), couched in typical techno-

bureaucratese, appears tedious and almost unreadable.

(A) scarcely seems threatening or menacing. Message

(B), on the other hand, is a dreadful thing, prima facie

evidence of a dire conspiracy, definitely not the kind of

thing you want your teenager reading.

The *information,* however, is identical. It is *public*

information, presented before the federal government in

an open hearing. It is not "secret." It is not "proprietary."

It is not even "confidential." On the contrary, the

development of advanced software systems is a matter of

great public pride to Bellcore.

However, when Bellcore publicly announces a project

of this kind, it expects a certain attitude from the public --

something along the lines of *gosh wow, you guys are

great, keep that up, whatever it is* -- certainly not cruel

mimickry, one-upmanship and outrageous speculations

about possible security holes.

Now put yourself in the place of a policeman

confronted by an outraged parent, or telco official, with a

copy of Version (B). This well-meaning citizen, to his

horror, has discovered a local bulletin-board carrying

outrageous stuff like (B), which his son is examining with a

deep and unhealthy interest. If (B) were printed in a book

or magazine, you, as an American law enforcement officer,

would know that it would take a hell of a lot of trouble to do

anything about it; but it doesn't take technical genius to

recognize that if there's a computer in your area harboring

stuff like (B), there's going to be trouble.

In fact, if you ask around, any computer-literate cop

will tell you straight out that boards with stuff like (B) are

the *source* of trouble. And the *worst* source of trouble

on boards are the ringleaders inventing and spreading

stuff like (B). If it weren't for these jokers, there wouldn't

*be* any trouble.

And Legion of Doom were on boards like nobody

else. Plovernet. The Legion of Doom Board. The Farmers

of Doom Board. Metal Shop. OSUNY. Blottoland.

Private Sector. Atlantis. Digital Logic. Hell Phrozen Over.

LoD members also ran their own boards. "Silver Spy"

started his own board, "Catch-22," considered one of the

heaviest around. So did "Mentor," with his "Phoenix

Project." When they didn't run boards themselves, they

showed up on other people's boards, to brag, boast, and

strut. And where they themselves didn't go, their philes

went, carrying evil knowledge and an even more evil

attitude.

As early as 1986, the police were under the vague

impression that *everyone* in the underground was

Legion of Doom. LoD was never that large --

considerably smaller than either "Metal

Communications" or "The Administration," for instance --

but LoD got tremendous press. Especially in *Phrack,*

which at times read like an LoD fan magazine; and

*Phrack* was everywhere, especially in the offices of telco

security. You couldn't *get* busted as a phone phreak, a

hacker, or even a lousy codes kid or warez dood, without

the cops asking if you were LoD.

This was a difficult charge to deny, as LoD never

distributed membership badges or laminated ID cards. If

they had, they would likely have died out quickly, for

turnover in their membership was considerable. LoD was

less a high-tech street-gang than an ongoing state-of-

mind. LoD was the Gang That Refused to Die. By 1990,

LoD had *ruled* for ten years, and it seemed *weird* to

police that they were continually busting people who were

only sixteen years old. All these teenage small-timers

were pleading the tiresome hacker litany of "just curious,

no criminal intent." Somewhere at the center of this

conspiracy there had to be some serious adult

masterminds, not this seemingly endless supply of myopic

suburban white kids with high SATs and funny haircuts.

There was no question that most any American

hacker arrested would "know" LoD. They knew the

handles of contributors to *LoD Tech Journal,* and were

likely to have learned their craft through LoD boards and

LoD activism. But they'd never met anyone from LoD.

Even some of the rotating cadre who were actually and

formally "in LoD" knew one another only by board-mail

and pseudonyms. This was a highly unconventional

profile for a criminal conspiracy. Computer networking,

and the rapid evolution of the digital underground, made

the situation very diffuse and confusing.

Furthermore, a big reputation in the digital

underground did not coincide with one's willingness to

commit "crimes." Instead, reputation was based on

cleverness and technical mastery. As a result, it often

seemed that the *heavier* the hackers were, the *less*

likely they were to have committed any kind of common,

easily prosecutable crime. There were some hackers who

could really steal. And there were hackers who could

really hack. But the two groups didn't seem to overlap

much, if at all. For instance, most people in the

underground looked up to "Emmanuel Goldstein" of

*2600* as a hacker demigod. But Goldstein's publishing

activities were entirely legal -- Goldstein just printed

dodgy stuff and talked about politics, he didn't even hack.

When you came right down to it, Goldstein spent half his

time complaining that computer security *wasn't strong

enough* and ought to be drastically improved across the

board!

Truly heavy-duty hackers, those with serious

technical skills who had earned the respect of the

underground, never stole money or abused credit cards.

Sometimes they might abuse phone-codes -- but often,

they seemed to get all the free phone-time they wanted

without leaving a trace of any kind.

The best hackers, the most powerful and technically

accomplished, were not professional fraudsters. They

raided computers habitually, but wouldn't alter anything,

or damage anything. They didn't even steal computer

equipment -- most had day-jobs messing with hardware,

and could get all the cheap secondhand equipment they

wanted. The hottest hackers, unlike the teenage

wannabes, weren't snobs about fancy or expensive

hardware. Their machines tended to be raw second-hand

digital hot-rods full of custom add-ons that they'd cobbled

together out of chickenwire, memory chips and spit. Some

were adults, computer software writers and consultants by

trade, and making quite good livings at it. Some of them

*actually worked for the phone company* -- and for those,

the "hackers" actually found under the skirts of Ma Bell,

there would be little mercy in 1990.

It has long been an article of faith in the

underground that the "best" hackers never get caught.

They're far too smart, supposedly. They never get caught

because they never boast, brag, or strut. These demigods

may read underground boards (with a condescending

smile), but they never say anything there. The "best"

hackers, according to legend, are adult computer

professionals, such as mainframe system administrators,

who already know the ins and outs of their particular

brand of security. Even the "best" hacker can't break in to

just any computer at random: the knowledge of security

holes is too specialized, varying widely with different

software and hardware. But if people are employed to run,

say, a UNIX mainframe or a VAX/VMS machine, then

they tend to learn security from the inside out. Armed

with this knowledge, they can look into most anybody

else's UNIX or VMS without much trouble or risk, if they

want to. And, according to hacker legend, of course they

want to, so of course they do. They just don't make a big

deal of what they've done. So nobody ever finds out.

It is also an article of faith in the underground that

professional telco people "phreak" like crazed weasels.

*Of course* they spy on Madonna's phone calls -- I mean,

*wouldn't you?* Of course they give themselves free long-

distance -- why the hell should *they* pay, they're running

the whole shebang!

It has, as a third matter, long been an article of faith

that any hacker caught can escape serious punishment if

he confesses *how he did it.* Hackers seem to believe

that governmental agencies and large corporations are

blundering about in cyberspace like eyeless jellyfish or

cave salamanders. They feel that these large but

pathetically stupid organizations will proffer up genuine

gratitude, and perhaps even a security post and a big

salary, to the hot-shot intruder who will deign to reveal to

them the supreme genius of his modus operandi.

In the case of longtime LoD member "Control-C,"

this actually happened, more or less. Control-C had led

Michigan Bell a merry chase, and when captured in 1987,

he turned out to be a bright and apparently physically

harmless young fanatic, fascinated by phones. There was

no chance in hell that Control-C would actually repay the

enormous and largely theoretical sums in long-distance

service that he had accumulated from Michigan Bell. He

could always be indicted for fraud or computer-intrusion,

but there seemed little real point in this -- he hadn't

physically damaged any computer. He'd just plead guilty,

and he'd likely get the usual slap-on-the-wrist, and in the

meantime it would be a big hassle for Michigan Bell just

to bring up the case. But if kept on the payroll, he might at

least keep his fellow hackers at bay.

There were uses for him. For instance, a contrite

Control-C was featured on Michigan Bell internal posters,

sternly warning employees to shred their trash. He'd

always gotten most of his best inside info from "trashing" --

raiding telco dumpsters, for useful data indiscreetly

thrown away. He signed these posters, too. Control-C had

become something like a Michigan Bell mascot. And in

fact, Control-C *did* keep other hackers at bay. Little

hackers were quite scared of Control-C and his heavy-duty

Legion of Doom friends. And big hackers *were* his

friends and didn't want to screw up his cushy situation.

No matter what one might say of LoD, they did stick

together. When "Wasp," an apparently genuinely

malicious New York hacker, began crashing Bellcore

machines, Control-C received swift volunteer help from

"the Mentor" and the Georgia LoD wing made up of "The

Prophet," "Urvile," and "Leftist." Using Mentor's Phoenix

Project board to coordinate, the Doomsters helped telco

security to trap Wasp, by luring him into a machine with a

tap and line-trace installed. Wasp lost. LoD won! And

my, did they brag.

Urvile, Prophet and Leftist were well-qualified for

this activity, probably more so even than the quite

accomplished Control-C. The Georgia boys knew all about

phone switching-stations. Though relative johnny-come-

latelies in the Legion of Doom, they were considered some

of LoD's heaviest guys, into the hairiest systems around.

They had the good fortune to live in or near Atlanta, home

of the sleepy and apparently tolerant BellSouth RBOC.

As RBOC security went, BellSouth were "cake." US

West (of Arizona, the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest)

were tough and aggressive, probably the heaviest RBOC

around. Pacific Bell, California's PacBell, were sleek, high-

tech, and longtime veterans of the LA phone-phreak wars.

NYNEX had the misfortune to run the New York City area,

and were warily prepared for most anything. Even

Michigan Bell, a division of the Ameritech RBOC, at least

had the elementary sense to hire their own hacker as a

useful scarecrow. But BellSouth, even though their

corporate P.R. proclaimed them to have "Everything You

Expect From a Leader," were pathetic.

When rumor about LoD's mastery of Georgia's

switching network got around to BellSouth through

Bellcore and telco security scuttlebutt, they at first refused

to believe it. If you paid serious attention to every rumor

out and about these hacker kids, you would hear all kinds

of wacko saucer-nut nonsense: that the National Security

Agency monitored all American phone calls, that the CIA

and DEA tracked traffic on bulletin-boards with word-

analysis programs, that the Condor could start World

War III from a payphone.

If there were hackers into BellSouth switching-

stations, then how come nothing had happened? Nothing

had been hurt. BellSouth's machines weren't crashing.

BellSouth wasn't suffering especially badly from fraud.

BellSouth's customers weren't complaining. BellSouth

was headquartered in Atlanta, ambitious metropolis of the

new high-tech Sunbelt; and BellSouth was upgrading its

network by leaps and bounds, digitizing the works left right

and center. They could hardly be considered sluggish or

naive. BellSouth's technical expertise was second to none,

thank you kindly.

But then came the Florida business.

On June 13, 1989, callers to the Palm Beach County

Probation Department, in Delray Beach, Florida, found

themselves involved in a remarkable discussion with a

phone-sex worker named "Tina" in New York State.

Somehow, *any* call to this probation office near Miami

was instantly and magically transported across state lines,

at no extra charge to the user, to a pornographic phone-

sex hotline hundreds of miles away!

This practical joke may seem utterly hilarious at first

hearing, and indeed there was a good deal of chuckling

about it in phone phreak circles, including the Autumn

1989 issue of *2600.* But for Southern Bell (the division of

the BellSouth RBOC supplying local service for Florida,

Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina), this was a

smoking gun. For the first time ever, a computer intruder

had broken into a BellSouth central office switching

station and re-programmed it!

Or so BellSouth thought in June 1989. Actually, LoD

members had been frolicking harmlessly in BellSouth

switches since September 1987. The stunt of June 13 --

call-forwarding a number through manipulation of a

switching station -- was child's play for hackers as

accomplished as the Georgia wing of LoD. Switching calls

interstate sounded like a big deal, but it took only four

lines of code to accomplish this. An easy, yet more

discreet, stunt, would be to call-forward another number to

your own house. If you were careful and considerate, and

changed the software back later, then not a soul would

know. Except you. And whoever you had bragged to about

it.

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

them.

Except now somebody had blown the whole thing

wide open, and BellSouth knew.

A now alerted and considerably paranoid BellSouth

began searching switches right and left for signs of

impropriety, in that hot summer of 1989. No fewer than

forty-two BellSouth employees were put on 12-hour shifts,

twenty-four hours a day, for two solid months, poring over

records and monitoring computers for any sign of phony

access. These forty-two overworked experts were known as

BellSouth's "Intrusion Task Force."

What the investigators found astounded them.

Proprietary telco databases had been manipulated:

phone numbers had been created out of thin air, with no

users' names and no addresses. And perhaps worst of all,

no charges and no records of use. The new digital

ReMOB (Remote Observation) diagnostic feature had

been extensively tampered with -- hackers had learned to

reprogram ReMOB software, so that they could listen in

on any switch-routed call at their leisure! They were using

telco property to *spy!*

The electrifying news went out throughout law

enforcement in 1989. It had never really occurred to

anyone at BellSouth that their prized and brand-new

digital switching-stations could be *re-programmed.*

People seemed utterly amazed that anyone could have

the nerve. Of course these switching stations were

"computers," and everybody knew hackers liked to "break

into computers:" but telephone people's computers were

*different* from normal people's computers.

The exact reason *why* these computers were

"different" was rather ill-defined. It certainly wasn't the

extent of their security. The security on these BellSouth

computers was lousy; the AIMSX computers, for instance,

didn't even have passwords. But there was no question

that BellSouth strongly *felt* that their computers were

very different indeed. And if there were some criminals

out there who had not gotten that message, BellSouth was

determined to see that message taught.

After all, a 5ESS switching station was no mere

bookkeeping system for some local chain of florists.

Public service depended on these stations. Public

*safety* depended on these stations.

And hackers, lurking in there call-forwarding or

ReMobbing, could spy on anybody in the local area!

They could spy on telco officials! They could spy on police

stations! They could spy on local offices of the Secret

Service....

In 1989, electronic cops and hacker-trackers began

using scrambler-phones and secured lines. It only made

sense. There was no telling who was into those systems.

Whoever they were, they sounded scary. This was some

new level of antisocial daring. Could be West German

hackers, in the pay of the KGB. That too had seemed a

weird and farfetched notion, until Clifford Stoll had poked

and prodded a sluggish Washington law-enforcement

bureaucracy into investigating a computer intrusion that

turned out to be exactly that -- *hackers, in the pay of the

KGB!* Stoll, the systems manager for an Internet lab in

Berkeley California, had ended up on the front page of the

*New 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 productК-- or perhaps not.

Intellectual property rights for software developers were,

and are, extraordinarily complex and confused. And

software "piracy," like the private copying of videos, is one

of the most widely practiced "crimes" in the world today.

The USSS were not experts in UNIX or familiar with

the customs of its use. The United States Secret Service,

considered as a body, did not have one single person in it

who could program in a UNIX environment -- no, not even

one. The Secret Service *were* making extensive use of

expert help, but the "experts" they had chosen were AT&T

and Bellcore security officials, the very victims of the

purported crimes under investigation, the very people

whose interest in AT&T's "proprietary" software was most

pronounced.

On February 6, 1990, Terminus was arrested by Agent

Lewis. Eventually, Terminus would be sent to prison for

his illicit use of a piece of AT&T software.

The issue of pirated AT&T software would bubble

along in the background during the war on the Legion of

Doom. Some half-dozen of Terminus's on-line

acquaintances, including people in Illinois, Texas and

California, were grilled by the Secret Service in connection

with the illicit copying of software. Except for Terminus,

however, none were charged with a crime. None of them

shared his peculiar prominence in the hacker

underground.

But that did not meant that these people would, or

could, stay out of trouble. The transferral of illicit data in

cyberspace is hazy and ill-defined business, with

paradoxical dangers for everyone concerned: hackers,

signal carriers, board owners, cops, prosecutors, even

random passers-by. Sometimes, well-meant attempts to

avert trouble or punish wrongdoing bring more trouble

than would simple ignorance, indifference or impropriety.

Terminus's "Netsys" board was not a common-or-

garden bulletin board system, though it had most of the

usual functions of a board. Netsys was not a stand-alone

machine, but part of the globe-spanning "UUCP"

cooperative network. The UUCP network uses a set of

Unix software programs called "Unix-to-Unix Copy," which

allows Unix systems to throw data to one another at high

speed through the public telephone network. UUCP is a

radically decentralized, not-for-profit network of UNIX

computers. There are tens of thousands of these UNIX

machines. Some are small, but many are powerful and

also link to other networks. UUCP has certain arcane links

to major networks such as JANET, EasyNet, BITNET,

JUNET, VNET, DASnet, PeaceNet and FidoNet, as well as

the gigantic Internet. (The so-called "Internet" is not

actually a network itself, but rather an "internetwork"

connections standard that allows several globe-spanning

computer networks to communicate with one another.

Readers fascinated by the weird and intricate tangles of

modern computer networks may enjoy John S.

Quarterman's authoritative 719-page explication, *The

Matrix,* Digital Press, 1990.)

A skilled user of Terminus' UNIX machine could

send and receive electronic mail from almost any major

computer network in the world. Netsys was not called a

"board" per se, but rather a "node." "Nodes" were larger,

faster, and more sophisticated than mere "boards," and

for hackers, to hang out on internationally-connected

"nodes" was quite the step up from merely hanging out on

local "boards."

Terminus's Netsys node in Maryland had a number

of direct links to other, similar UUCP nodes, run by

people who shared his interests and at least something of

his free-wheeling attitude. One of these nodes was Jolnet,

owned by Richard Andrews, who, like Terminus, was an

independent UNIX consultant. Jolnet also ran UNIX, and

could be contacted at high speed by mainframe machines

from all over the world. Jolnet was quite a sophisticated

piece of work, technically speaking, but it was still run by

an individual, as a private, not-for-profit hobby. Jolnet was

mostly used by other UNIX programmers -- for mail,

storage, and access to networks. Jolnet supplied access

network access to about two hundred people, as well as a

local junior college.

Among its various features and services, Jolnet also

carried *Phrack* magazine.

For reasons of his own, Richard Andrews had become

suspicious of a new user called "Robert Johnson." Richard

Andrews took it upon himself to have a look at what

"Robert Johnson" was storing in Jolnet. And Andrews

found the E911 Document.

"Robert Johnson" was the Prophet from the Legion of

Doom, and the E911 Document was illicitly copied data

from Prophet's raid on the BellSouth computers.

The E911 Document, a particularly illicit piece of

digital property, was about to resume its long, complex,

and disastrous career.

It struck Andrews as fishy that someone not a

telephone employee should have a document referring to

the "Enhanced 911 System." Besides, the document itself

bore an obvious warning.

"WARNING: NOT FOR USE OR DISCLOSURE

OUTSIDE BELLSOUTH OR ANY OF ITS SUBSIDIARIES

EXCEPT UNDER WRITTEN AGREEMENT."

These standard nondisclosure tags are often

appended to all sorts of corporate material. Telcos as a

species are particularly notorious for stamping most

everything in sight as "not for use or disclosure." Still, this

particular piece of data was about the 911 System. That

sounded bad to Rich Andrews.

Andrews was not prepared to ignore this sort of

trouble. He thought it would be wise to pass the document

along to a friend and acquaintance on the UNIX network,

for consultation. So, around September 1988, Andrews

sent yet another copy of the E911 Document electronically

to an AT&T employee, one Charles Boykin, who ran a

UNIX-based node called "attctc" in Dallas, Texas.

"Attctc" was the property of AT&T, and was run from

AT&T's Customer Technology Center in Dallas, hence the

name "attctc." "Attctc" was better-known as "Killer," the

name of the machine that the system was running on.

"Killer" was a hefty, powerful, AT&T 3B2 500 model, a

multi-user, multi-tasking UNIX platform with 32 meg of

memory and a mind-boggling 3.2 Gigabytes of storage.

When Killer had first arrived in Texas, in 1985, the 3B2

had been one of AT&T's great white hopes for going head-

to-head with IBM for the corporate computer-hardware

market. "Killer" had been shipped to the Customer

Technology Center in the Dallas Infomart, essentially a

high-technology mall, and there it sat, a demonstration

model.

Charles Boykin, a veteran AT&T hardware and digital

communications expert, was a local technical backup man

for the AT&T 3B2 system. As a display model in the

Infomart mall, "Killer" had little to do, and it seemed a

shame to waste the system's capacity. So Boykin

ingeniously wrote some UNIX bulletin-board software for

"Killer," and plugged the machine in to the local phone

network. "Killer's" debut in late 1985 made it the first

publicly available UNIX site in the state of Texas. Anyone

who wanted to play was welcome.

The machine immediately attracted an electronic

community. It joined the UUCP network, and offered

network links to over eighty other computer sites, all of

which became dependent on Killer for their links to the

greater world of cyberspace. And it wasn't just for the big

guys; personal computer users also stored freeware

programs for the Amiga, the Apple, the IBM and the

Macintosh on Killer's vast 3,200 meg archives. At one

time, Killer had the largest library of public-domain

Macintosh software in Texas.

Eventually, Killer attracted about 1,500 users, all

busily communicating, uploading and downloading,

getting mail, gossipping, and linking to arcane and distant

networks.

Boykin received no pay for running Killer. He

considered it good publicity for the AT&T 3B2 system

(whose sales were somewhat less than stellar), but he also

simply enjoyed the vibrant community his skill had

created. He gave away the bulletin-board UNIX software

he had written, free of charge.

In the UNIX programming community, Charlie

Boykin had the reputation of a warm, open-hearted, 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 italics.)

The Secretary of the Treasury is the titular head

of the Secret Service, while the Attorney General is

in charge of the FBI. In Section (d), Congress

shrugged off responsibility for the computer-crime

turf-battle between the Service and the Bureau, and

made them fight it out all by themselves. The result

was a rather dire one for the Secret Service, for the

FBI ended up with exclusive jurisdiction over

computer break-ins having to do with national

security, foreign espionage, federally insured banks,

and U.S. military bases, while retaining joint

jurisdiction over all the other computer intrusions.

Essentially, when it comes to Section 1030, the FBI

not only gets the real glamor stuff for itself, but can

peer over the shoulder of the Secret Service and

barge in to meddle whenever it suits them.

The second problem has to do with the dicey

term "Federal interest computer." Section 1030(a)(2)

makes it illegal to "access a computer without

authorization" if that computer belongs to a

financial institution or an issuer of credit cards

(fraud cases, in other words). Congress was quite

willing to give the Secret Service jurisdiction over

money-transferring computers, but Congress balked

at letting them investigate any and all computer

intrusions. Instead, the USSS had to settle for the

money machines and the "Federal interest

computers." A "Federal interest computer" is a

computer which the government itself owns, or is

using. Large networks of interstate computers,

linked over state lines, are also considered to be of

"Federal interest." (This notion of "Federal interest"

is legally rather foggy and has never been clearly

defined in the courts. The Secret Service has never

yet had its hand slapped for investigating computer

break-ins that were *not* of "Federal interest," but

conceivably someday this might happen.)

So the Secret Service's authority over

"unauthorized access" to computers covers a lot of

territory, but by no means the whole ball of

cyberspatial wax. If you are, for instance, a *local*

computer retailer, or the owner of a *local* bulletin

board system, then a malicious *local* intruder can

break in, crash your system, trash your files and

scatter viruses, and the U.S. Secret Service cannot

do a single thing about it.

At least, it can't do anything *directly.* But the

Secret Service will do plenty to help the local people

who can.

The FBI may have dealt itself an ace off the

bottom of the deck when it comes to Section 1030;

but that's not the whole story; that's not the street.

What's Congress thinks is one thing, and Congress

has been known to change its mind. The *real* turf-

struggle is out there in the streets where it's

happening. If you're a local street-cop with a

computer problem, the Secret Service wants you to

know where you can find the real expertise. While

the Bureau crowd are off having their favorite shoes

polished -- (wing-tips) -- and making derisive fun of

the Service's favorite shoes -- ("pansy-ass tassels") --

the tassel-toting Secret Service has a crew of ready-

and-able hacker-trackers installed in the capital of

every state in the Union. Need advice? They'll give

you advice, or at least point you in the right

direction. Need training? They can see to that, too.

If you're a local cop and you call in the FBI, the

FBI (as is widely and slanderously rumored) will

order you around like a coolie, take all the credit for

your busts, and mop up every possible scrap of

reflected glory. The Secret Service, on the other

hand, doesn't brag a lot. They're the quiet types.

*Very* quiet. Very cool. Efficient. High-tech.

Mirrorshades, icy stares, radio ear-plugs, an Uzi

machine-pistol tucked somewhere in that well-cut

jacket. American samurai, sworn to give their lives

to protect our President. "The granite agents."

Trained in martial arts, absolutely fearless. Every

single one of 'em has a top-secret security clearance.

Something goes a little wrong, you're not gonna hear

any whining and moaning and political buck-

passing out of these guys.

The facade of the granite agent is not, of course,

the reality. Secret Service agents are human beings.

And the real glory in Service work is not in battling

computer crime -- not yet, anyway -- but in

protecting the President. The real glamour of Secret

Service work is in the White House Detail. If you're

at the President's side, then the kids and the wife see

you on television; you rub shoulders with the most

powerful people in the world. That's the real heart

of Service work, the number one priority. More than

one computer investigation has stopped dead in the

water when Service agents vanished at the

President's need.

There's romance in the work of the Service. The

intimate access to circles of great power; the esprit-

de-corps of a highly trained and disciplined elite; the

high responsibility of defending the Chief Executive;

the fulfillment of a patriotic duty. And as police

work goes, the pay's not bad. But there's squalor in

Service work, too. You may get spat upon by

protesters howling abuse -- and if they get violent, if

they get too close, sometimes you have to knock one

of them down -- discreetly.

The real squalor in Service work is drudgery

such as "the quarterlies," traipsing out four times a

year, year in, year out, to interview the various

pathetic wretches, many of them in prisons and

asylums, who have seen fit to threaten the

President's life. And then there's the grinding stress

of searching all those faces in the endless bustling

crowds, looking for hatred, looking for psychosis,

looking for the tight, nervous face of an Arthur

Bremer, a Squeaky Fromme, a Lee Harvey Oswald.

It's watching all those grasping, waving hands for

sudden movements, while your ears strain at your

radio headphone for the long-rehearsed cry of

"Gun!"

It's poring, in grinding detail, over the

biographies of every rotten loser who ever shot at a

President. It's the unsung work of the Protective

Research Section, who study scrawled, anonymous

death threats with all the meticulous tools of anti-

forgery techniques.

And it's maintaining the hefty computerized

files on anyone who ever threatened the President's

life. Civil libertarians have become increasingly

concerned at the Government's use of computer

files to track American citizens -- but the Secret

Service file of potential Presidential assassins, which

has upward of twenty thousand names, rarely

causes a peep of protest. If you *ever* state that you

intend to kill the President, the Secret Service will

want to know and record who you are, where you are,

what you are, and what you're up to. If you're a

serious threat -- if you're officially considered "of

protective interest" -- then the Secret Service may

well keep tabs on you for the rest of your natural life.

Protecting the President has first call on all the

Service's resources. But there's a lot more to the

Service's traditions and history than standing guard

outside the Oval Office.

The Secret Service is the nation's oldest general

federal law-enforcement agency. Compared to the

Secret Service, the FBI are new-hires and the CIA

are temps. The Secret Service was founded 'way

back in 1865, at the suggestion of Hugh McCulloch,

Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury.

McCulloch wanted a specialized Treasury police to

combat counterfeiting. Abraham Lincoln agreed

that this seemed a good idea, and, with a terrible

irony, Abraham Lincoln was shot that very night by

John Wilkes Booth.

The Secret Service originally had nothing to do

with protecting Presidents. They didn't take this on

as a regular assignment until after the Garfield

assassination in 1881. And they didn't get any

Congressional money for it until President McKinley

was shot in 1901. The Service was originally

designed for one purpose: destroying counterfeiters.

#

There are interesting parallels between the

Service's nineteenth-century entry into

counterfeiting, and America's twentieth-century

entry into computer-crime.

In 1865, America's paper currency was a terrible

muddle. Security was drastically bad. Currency was

printed on the spot by local banks in literally

hundreds of different designs. No one really knew

what the heck a dollar bill was supposed to look like.

Bogus bills passed easily. If some joker told you that

a one-dollar bill from the Railroad Bank of Lowell,

Massachusetts had a woman leaning on a shield,

with a locomotive, a cornucopia, a compass, various

agricultural implements, a railroad bridge, and

some factories, then you pretty much had to take his

word for it. (And in fact he was telling the truth!)

*Sixteen hundred* local American banks

designed and printed their own paper currency, and

there were no general standards for security. Like a

badly guarded node in a computer network, badly

designed bills were easy to fake, and posed a

security hazard for the entire monetary system.

No one knew the exact extent of the threat to

the currency. There were panicked estimates that as

much as a third of the entire national currency was

faked. Counterfeiters -- known as "boodlers" in the

underground slang of the time -- were mostly

technically skilled printers who had gone to the bad.

Many had once worked printing legitimate currency.

Boodlers operated in rings and gangs. Technical

experts engraved the bogus plates -- commonly in

basements in New York City. Smooth confidence

men passed large wads of high-quality, high-

denomination fakes, including the really

sophisticated stuff -- government bonds, stock

certificates, and railway shares. Cheaper, botched

fakes were sold or sharewared to low-level gangs of

boodler wannabes. (The really cheesy lowlife

boodlers merely upgraded real bills by altering face

values, changing ones to fives, tens to hundreds, and

so on.)

The techniques of boodling were little-known

and regarded with a certain awe by the mid-

nineteenth-century public. The ability to

manipulate the system for rip-off seemed

diabolically clever. As the skill and daring of the

boodlers increased, the situation became

intolerable. The federal government stepped in,

and began offering its own federal currency, which

was printed in fancy green ink, but only on the back -

- the original "greenbacks." And at first, the

improved security of the well-designed, well-printed

federal greenbacks seemed to solve the problem;

but then the counterfeiters caught on. Within a few

years things were worse than ever: a *centralized*

system where *all* security was bad!

The local police were helpless. The

Government tried offering blood money to potential

informants, but this met with little success. Banks,

plagued by boodling, gave up hope of police help

and hired private security men instead. Merchants

and bankers queued up by the thousands to buy

privately-printed manuals on currency security, slim

little books like Laban Heath's *Infallible

Government Counterfeit Detector.* The back of the

book offered Laban Heath's patent microscope for

five bucks.

Then the Secret Service entered the picture.

The first agents were a rough and ready crew. Their

chief was one William P. Wood, a former guerilla in

the Mexican War who'd won a reputation busting

contractor fraudsters for the War Department

during the Civil War. Wood, who was also Keeper

of the Capital Prison, had a sideline as a

counterfeiting expert, bagging boodlers for the

federal bounty money.

Wood was named Chief of the new Secret

Service in July 1865. There were only ten Secret

Service agents in all: Wood himself, a handful

who'd worked for him in the War Department, and a

few former private investigators -- counterfeiting

experts -- whom Wood had won over to public

service. (The Secret Service of 1865 was much the

size of the Chicago Computer Fraud Task Force or

the Arizona Racketeering Unit of 1990.) These ten

"Operatives" had an additional twenty or so

"Assistant Operatives" and "Informants." Besides

salary and per diem, each Secret Service employee

received a whopping twenty-five dollars for each

boodler he captured.

Wood himself publicly estimated that at least

*half* of America's currency was counterfeit, a

perhaps pardonable perception. Within a year the

Secret Service had arrested over 200 counterfeiters.

They busted about two hundred boodlers a year for

four years straight.

Wood attributed his success to travelling fast

and light, hitting the bad-guys hard, and avoiding

bureaucratic baggage. "Because my raids were

made without military escort and I did not ask the

assistance of state officers, I surprised the

professional counterfeiter."

Wood's social message to the once-impudent

boodlers bore an eerie ring of Sundevil: "It was also

my purpose to convince such characters that it

would no longer be healthy for them to ply their

vocation without being handled roughly, a fact they

soon discovered."

William P. Wood, the Secret Service's guerilla

pioneer, did not end well. He succumbed to the lure

of aiming for the really big score. The notorious

Brockway Gang of New York City, headed by

William E. Brockway, the "King of the

Counterfeiters," had forged a number of

government bonds. They'd passed these brilliant

fakes on the prestigious Wall Street investment firm

of Jay Cooke and Company. The Cooke firm were

frantic and offered a huge reward for the forgers'

plates.

Laboring diligently, Wood confiscated the

plates (though not Mr. Brockway) and claimed the

reward. But the Cooke company treacherously

reneged. Wood got involved in a down-and-dirty

lawsuit with the Cooke capitalists. Wood's boss,

Secretary of the Treasury McCulloch, felt that

Wood's demands for money and glory were

unseemly, and even when the reward money finally

came through, McCulloch refused to pay Wood

anything. Wood found himself mired in a

seemingly endless round of federal suits and

Congressional lobbying.

Wood never got his money. And he lost his job

to boot. He resigned in 1869.

Wood's agents suffered, too. On May 12, 1869,

the second Chief of the Secret Service took over, and

almost immediately fired most of Wood's pioneer

Secret Service agents: Operatives, Assistants and

Informants alike. The practice of receiving $25 per

crook was abolished. And the Secret Service began

the long, uncertain process of thorough

professionalization.

Wood ended badly. He must have felt stabbed

in the back. In fact his entire organization was

mangled.

On the other hand, William P. Wood *was* the

first head of the Secret Service. William Wood was

the pioneer. People still honor his name. Who

remembers the name of the *second* head of the

Secret Service?

As for William Brockway (also known as

"Colonel Spencer"), he was finally arrested by the

Secret Service in 1880. He did five years in prison,

got out, and was still boodling at the age of seventy-

four.

#

Anyone with an interest in Operation Sundevil -

- or in American computer-crime generally -- could

scarcely miss the presence of Gail Thackeray,

Assistant Attorney General of the State of Arizona.

Computer-crime training manuals often cited

Thackeray's group and her work; she was the

highest-ranking state official to specialize in

computer-related offenses. Her name had been on

the Sundevil press release (though modestly ranked

well after the local federal prosecuting attorney and

the head of the Phoenix Secret Service office).

As public commentary, and controversy, began

to mount about the Hacker Crackdown, this

Arizonan state official began to take a higher and

higher public profile. Though uttering almost

nothing specific about the Sundevil operation itself,

she coined some of the most striking soundbites of

the growing propaganda war: "Agents are operating

in good faith, and I don't think you can say that for

the hacker community," was one. Another was the

memorable "I am not a mad dog prosecutor"

(*Houston Chronicle,* Sept 2, 1990.) In the

meantime, the Secret Service maintained its usual

extreme discretion; the Chicago Unit, smarting from

the backlash of the Steve Jackson scandal, had gone

completely to earth.

As I collated my growing pile of newspaper

clippings, Gail Thackeray ranked as a comparative

fount of public knowledge on police operations.

I decided that I had to get to know Gail

Thackeray. I wrote to her at the Arizona Attorney

General's Office. Not only did she kindly reply to

me, but, to my astonishment, she knew very well

what "cyberpunk" science fiction was.

Shortly after this, Gail Thackeray lost her job.

And I temporarily misplaced my own career as a

science-fiction writer, to become a full-time

computer-crime journalist. In early March, 1991, I

flew to Phoenix, Arizona, to interview Gail Thackeray

for my book on the hacker crackdown.

#

"Credit cards didn't used to cost anything to

get," says Gail Thackeray. "Now they cost forty

bucks -- and that's all just to cover the costs from

*rip-off artists.*"

Electronic nuisance criminals are parasites.

One by one they're not much harm, no big deal. But

they never come just one by one. They come in

swarms, heaps, legions, sometimes whole

subcultures. And they bite. Every time we buy a

credit card today, we lose a little financial vitality to a

particular species of bloodsucker.

What, in her expert opinion, are the worst forms

of electronic crime, I ask, consulting my notes. Is it --

credit card fraud? Breaking into ATM bank

machines? Phone-phreaking? Computer

intrusions? Software viruses? Access-code theft?

Records tampering? Software piracy? Pornographic

bulletin boards? Satellite TV piracy? Theft of cable

service? It's a long list. By the time I reach the end

of it I feel rather depressed.

"Oh no," says Gail Thackeray, leaning forward

over the table, her whole body gone stiff with

energetic indignation, "the biggest damage is

telephone fraud. Fake sweepstakes, fake charities.

Boiler-room con operations. You could pay off the

national debt with what these guys steal.... They

target old people, they get hold of credit ratings and

demographics, they rip off the old and the weak."

The words come tumbling out of her.

It's low-tech stuff, your everyday boiler-room

fraud. Grifters, conning people out of money over

the phone, have been around for decades. This is

where the word "phony" came from!

It's just that it's so much *easier* now, horribly

facilitated by advances in technology and the

byzantine structure of the modern phone system.

The same professional fraudsters do it over and

over, Thackeray tells me, they hide behind dense

onion-shells of fake companies.... fake holding

corporations nine or ten layers deep, registered all

over the map. They get a phone installed under a

false name in an empty safe-house. And then they

call-forward everything out of that phone to yet

another phone, a phone that may even be in

another *state.* And they don't even pay the

charges on their phones; after a month or so, they

just split. Set up somewhere else in another

Podunkville with the same seedy crew of veteran

phone-crooks. They buy or steal commercial credit

card reports, slap them on the PC, have a program

pick out people over sixty-five who pay a lot to

charities. A whole subculture living off this,

merciless folks on the con.

"The 'light-bulbs for the blind' people,"

Thackeray muses, with a special loathing. "There's

just no end to them."

We're sitting in a downtown diner in Phoenix,

Arizona. It's a tough town, Phoenix. A state capital

seeing some hard times. Even to a Texan like

myself, Arizona state politics seem rather baroque.

There was, and remains, endless trouble over the

Martin Luther King holiday, the sort of stiff-necked,

foot-shooting incident for which Arizona politics

seem famous. There was Evan Mecham, the

eccentric Republican millionaire governor who was

impeached, after reducing state government to a

ludicrous shambles. Then there was the national

Keating scandal, involving Arizona savings and

loans, in which both of Arizona's U.S. senators,

DeConcini and McCain, played sadly prominent

roles.

And the very latest is the bizarre AzScam case,

in which state legislators were videotaped, eagerly

taking cash from an informant of the Phoenix city

police department, who was posing as a Vegas

mobster.

"Oh," says Thackeray cheerfully. "These people

are amateurs here, they thought they were finally

getting to play with the big boys. They don't have the

least idea how to take a bribe! It's not institutional

corruption. It's not like back in Philly."

Gail Thackeray was a former prosecutor in

Philadelphia. Now she's a former assistant attorney

general of the State of Arizona. Since moving to

Arizona in 1986, she had worked under the aegis of

Steve Twist, her boss in the Attorney General's

office. Steve Twist wrote Arizona's pioneering

computer crime laws and naturally took an interest

in seeing them enforced. It was a snug niche, and

Thackeray's Organized Crime and Racketeering

Unit won a national reputation for ambition and

technical knowledgeability.... Until the latest

election in Arizona. Thackeray's boss ran for the top

job, and lost. The victor, the new Attorney General,

apparently went to some pains to eliminate the

bureaucratic traces of his rival, including his pet

group -- Thackeray's group. Twelve people got their

walking papers.

Now Thackeray's painstakingly assembled

computer lab sits gathering dust somewhere in the

glass-and-concrete Attorney General's HQ on 1275

Washington Street. Her computer-crime books, her

painstakingly garnered back issues of phreak and

hacker zines, all bought at her own expense -- are

piled in boxes somewhere. The State of Arizona is

simply not particularly interested in electronic

racketeering at the moment.

At the moment of our interview, Gail Thackeray,

officially unemployed, is working out of the county

sheriff's office, living on her savings, and prosecuting

several cases -- working 60-hour weeks, just as always

-- for no pay at all. "I'm trying to train people," she

mutters.

Half her life seems to be spent training people -

- merely pointing out, to the naive and incredulous

(such as myself) that this stuff is *actually going on

out there.* It's a small world, computer crime. A

young world. Gail Thackeray, a trim blonde Baby-

Boomer who favors Grand Canyon white-water

rafting to kill some slow time, is one of the world's

most senior, most veteran "hacker-trackers." Her

mentor was Donn Parker, the California think-tank

theorist who got it all started 'way back in the mid-

70s, the "grandfather of the field," "the great bald

eagle of computer crime."

And what she has learned, Gail Thackeray

teaches. Endlessly. Tirelessly. To anybody. To

Secret Service agents and state police, at the Glynco,

Georgia federal training center. To local police, on

"roadshows" with her slide projector and notebook.

To corporate security personnel. To journalists. To

parents.

Even *crooks* look to Gail Thackeray for advice.

Phone-phreaks call her at the office. They know very

well who she is. They pump her for information on

what the cops are up to, how much they know.

Sometimes whole *crowds* of phone phreaks,

hanging out on illegal conference calls, will call Gail

Thackeray up. They taunt her. And, as always, they

boast. Phone-phreaks, real stone phone-phreaks,

simply *cannot shut up.* They natter on for hours.

Left to themselves, they mostly talk about the

intricacies of ripping-off phones; it's about as

interesting as listening to hot-rodders talk about

suspension and distributor-caps. They also gossip

cruelly about each other. And when talking to Gail

Thackeray, they incriminate themselves. "I have

tapes," Thackeray says coolly.

Phone phreaks just talk like crazy. "Dial-Tone"

out in Alabama has been known to spend half-an-

hour simply reading stolen phone-codes aloud into

voice-mail answering machines. Hundreds,

thousands of numbers, recited in a monotone,

without a break -- an eerie phenomenon. When

arrested, it's a rare phone phreak who doesn't

inform at endless length on everybody he knows.

Hackers are no better. What other group of

criminals, she asks rhetorically, publishes

newsletters and holds conventions? She seems

deeply nettled by the sheer brazenness of this

behavior, though to an outsider, this activity might

make one wonder whether hackers should be

considered "criminals" at all. Skateboarders have

magazines, and they trespass a lot. Hot rod people

have magazines and they break speed limits and

sometimes kill people....

I ask her whether it would be any loss to society

if phone phreaking and computer hacking, as

hobbies, simply dried up and blew away, so that

nobody ever did it again.

She seems surprised. "No," she says swiftly.

"Maybe a little... in the old days... the MIT stuff... But

there's a lot of wonderful, legal stuff you can do with

computers now, you don't have to break into

somebody else's just to learn. You don't have that

excuse. You can learn all you like."

Did you ever hack into a system? I ask.

The trainees do it at Glynco. Just to

demonstrate system vulnerabilities. She's cool to

the notion. Genuinely indifferent.

"What kind of computer do you have?"

"A Compaq 286LE," she mutters.

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

At this question, the unmistakable light of true

hackerdom flares in Gail Thackeray's eyes. She

becomes tense, animated, the words pour out: "An

Amiga 2000 with an IBM card and Mac emulation!

The most common hacker machines are Amigas

and Commodores. And Apples." If she had the

Amiga, she enthuses, she could run a whole galaxy

of seized computer-evidence disks on one

convenient multifunctional machine. A cheap one,

too. Not like the old Attorney General lab, where

they had an ancient CP/M machine, assorted

Amiga flavors and Apple flavors, a couple IBMS, all

the utility software... but no Commodores. The

workstations down at the Attorney General's are

Wang dedicated word-processors. Lame machines

tied in to an office net -- though at least they get on-

line to the Lexis and Westlaw legal data services.

I don't say anything. I recognize the syndrome,

though. This computer-fever has been running

through segments of our society for years now. It's a

strange kind of lust: K-hunger, Meg-hunger; but it's

a shared disease; it can kill parties dead, as

conversation spirals into the deepest and most

deviant recesses of software releases and expensive

peripherals.... The mark of the hacker beast. I have

it too. The whole "electronic community," whatever

the hell that is, has it. Gail Thackeray has it. Gail

Thackeray is a hacker cop. My immediate reaction

is a strong rush of indignant pity: *why doesn't

somebody buy this woman her Amiga?!* It's not

like she's asking for a Cray X-MP supercomputer

mainframe; an Amiga's a sweet little cookie-box

thing. We're losing zillions in organized fraud;

prosecuting and defending a single hacker case in

court can cost a hundred grand easy. How come

nobody can come up with four lousy grand so this

woman can do her job? For a hundred grand we

could buy every computer cop in America an Amiga.

There aren't that many of 'em.

Computers. The lust, the hunger, for

computers. The loyalty they inspire, the intense

sense of possessiveness. The culture they have

bred. I myself am sitting in downtown Phoenix,

Arizona because it suddenly occurred to me that the

police might -- just *might* -- come and take away

my computer. The prospect of this, the mere

*implied threat,* was unbearable. It literally

changed my life. It was changing the lives of many

others. Eventually it would change everybody's life.

Gail Thackeray was one of the top computer-

crime people in America. And I was just some

novelist, and yet I had a better computer than hers.

*Practically everybody I knew* had a better

computer than Gail Thackeray and her feeble

laptop 286. It was like sending the sheriff in to clean

up Dodge City and arming her with a slingshot cut

from an old rubber tire.

But then again, you don't need a howitzer to

enforce the law. You can do a lot just with a badge.

With a badge alone, you can basically wreak havoc,

take a terrible vengeance on wrongdoers. Ninety

percent of "computer crime investigation" is just

"crime investigation:" names, places, dossiers,

modus operandi, search warrants, victims,

complainants, informants...

What will computer crime look like in ten

years? Will it get better? Did "Sundevil" send 'em

reeling back in confusion?

It'll be like it is now, only worse, she tells me

with perfect conviction. Still there in the

background, ticking along, changing with the times:

the criminal underworld. It'll be like drugs are. Like

our problems with alcohol. All the cops and laws in

the world never solved our problems with alcohol. If

there's something people want, a certain percentage

of them are just going to take it. Fifteen percent of

the populace will never steal. Fifteen percent will

steal most anything not nailed down. The battle is

for the hearts and minds of the remaining seventy

percent.

And criminals catch on fast. If there's not "too

steep a learning curve" -- if it doesn't require a

baffling amount of expertise and practice -- then

criminals are often some of the first through the gate

of a new technology. Especially if it helps them to

hide. They have tons of cash, criminals. The new

communications tech -- like pagers, cellular phones,

faxes, Federal Express -- were pioneered by rich

corporate people, and by criminals. In the early

years of pagers and beepers, dope dealers were so

enthralled this technology that owing a beeper was

practically prima facie evidence of cocaine dealing.

CB radio exploded when the speed limit hit 55 and

breaking the highway law became a national

pastime. Dope dealers send cash by Federal

Express, despite, or perhaps *because of,* the

warnings in FedEx offices that tell you never to try

this. Fed Ex uses X-rays and dogs on their mail, to

stop drug shipments. That doesn't work very well.

Drug dealers went wild over cellular phones.

There are simple methods of faking ID on cellular

phones, making the location of the call mobile, free

of charge, and effectively untraceable. Now

victimized cellular companies routinely bring in vast

toll-lists of calls to Colombia and Pakistan.

Judge Greene's fragmentation of the phone

company is driving law enforcement nuts. Four

thousand telecommunications companies. Fraud

skyrocketing. Every temptation in the world

available with a phone and a credit card number.

Criminals untraceable. A galaxy of "new neat rotten

things to do."

If there were one thing Thackeray would like to

have, it would be an effective legal end-run through

this new fragmentation minefield.

It would be a new form of electronic search

warrant, an "electronic letter of marque" to be issued

by a judge. It would create a new category of

"electronic emergency." Like a wiretap, its use

would be rare, but it would cut across state lines and

force swift cooperation from all concerned. Cellular,

phone, laser, computer network, PBXes, AT&T, Baby

Bells, long-distance entrepreneurs, packet radio.

Some document, some mighty court-order, that

could slice through four thousand separate forms of

corporate red-tape, and get her at once to the source

of calls, the source of email threats and viruses, the

sources of bomb threats, kidnapping threats. "From

now on," she says, "the Lindberg baby will always

die."

Something that would make the Net sit still, if

only for a moment. Something that would get her up

to speed. Seven league boots. That's what she really

needs. "Those guys move in nanoseconds and I'm

on the Pony Express."

And then, too, there's the coming international

angle. Electronic crime has never been easy to

localize, to tie to a physical jurisdiction. And phone-

phreaks and hackers loathe boundaries, they jump

them whenever they can. The English. The Dutch.

And the Germans, especially the ubiquitous Chaos

Computer Club. The Australians. They've all

learned phone-phreaking from America. It's a

growth mischief industry. The multinational

networks are global, but governments and the police

simply aren't. Neither are the laws. Or the legal

frameworks for citizen protection.

One language is global, though -- English.

Phone phreaks speak English; it's their native

tongue even if they're Germans. English may have

started in England but now it's the Net language; it

might as well be called "CNNese."

Asians just aren't much into phone phreaking.

They're the world masters at organized software

piracy. The French aren't into phone-phreaking

either. The French are into computerized industrial

espionage.

In the old days of the MIT righteous

hackerdom, crashing systems didn't hurt anybody.

Not all that much, anyway. Not permanently. Now

the players are more venal. Now the consequences

are worse. Hacking will begin killing people soon.

Already there are methods of stacking calls onto 911

systems, annoying the police, and possibly causing

the death of some poor soul calling in with a genuine

emergency. Hackers in Amtrak computers, or 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