NuPrometheus + FBI = Grateful Dead
Whole Earth + Computer Revolution = WELL
Phiber Runs Underground and Acid Spikes the Well
The Trial of Knight Lightning
Shadowhawk Plummets to Earth
Kyrie in the Confessional
$79,499
A Scholar Investigates
Computers, Freedom, and Privacy
Electronic Afterword to The Hacker Crackdown, Halloween 1993
THE HACKER CRACKDOWN
Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
by Bruce Sterling
Preface to the Electronic Release of The Hacker Crackdown
January 1, 1994--Austin, Texas
Hi, I'm Bruce Sterling, the author of this electronic book.
Out in the traditional world of print, The Hacker Crackdown
is ISBN 0-553-08058-X, and is formally catalogued by
the Library of Congress as "1. Computer crimes--United States.
2. Telephone--United States--Corrupt practices.
3. Programming (Electronic computers)--United States--Corrupt practices."
`Corrupt practices,' I always get a kick out of that description.
Librarians are very ingenious people.
The paperback is ISBN 0-553-56370-X. If you go
and buy a print version of The Hacker Crackdown,
an action I encourage heartily, you may notice that
in the front of the book, beneath the copyright notice--
"Copyright (C) 1992 by Bruce Sterling"--
it has this little block of printed legal
boilerplate from the publisher. It says, and I quote:
"No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books."
This is a pretty good disclaimer, as such disclaimers go.
I collect intellectual-property disclaimers, and I've seen dozens of them,
and this one is at least pretty straightforward. In this narrow
and particular case, however, it isn't quite accurate.
Bantam Books puts that disclaimer on every book they publish,
but Bantam Books does not, in fact, own the electronic rights to this book.
I do, because of certain extensive contract maneuverings my agent and I
went through before this book was written. I want to give those electronic
publishing rights away through certain not-for-profit channels,
and I've convinced Bantam that this is a good idea.
Since Bantam has seen fit to peacably agree to this scheme of mine,
Bantam Books is not going to fuss about this. Provided you don't try
to sell the book, they are not going to bother you for what you do with
the electronic copy of this book. If you want to check this out personally,
you can ask them; they're at 1540 Broadway NY NY 10036. However, if you were
so foolish as to print this book and start retailing it for money in violation
of my copyright and the commercial interests of Bantam Books, then Bantam,
a part of the gigantic Bertelsmann multinational publishing combine,
would roust some of their heavy-duty attorneys out of hibernation
and crush you like a bug. This is only to be expected.
I didn't write this book so that you could make money out of it.
If anybody is gonna make money out of this book,
it's gonna be me and my publisher.
My publisher deserves to make money out of this book.
Not only did the folks at Bantam Books commission me
to write the book, and pay me a hefty sum to do so, but
they bravely printed, in text, an electronic document the
reproduction of which was once alleged to be a federal felony.
Bantam Books and their numerous attorneys were very brave
and forthright about this book. Furthermore, my former editor
at Bantam Books, Betsy Mitchell, genuinely cared about this project,
and worked hard on it, and had a lot of wise things to say
about the manuscript. Betsy deserves genuine credit for this book,
credit that editors too rarely get.
The critics were very kind to The Hacker Crackdown,
and commercially the book has done well. On the other hand,
I didn't write this book in order to squeeze every last nickel
and dime out of the mitts of impoverished sixteen-year-old
cyberpunk high-school-students. Teenagers don't have any money--
(no, not even enough for the six-dollar Hacker Crackdown paperback,
with its attractive bright-red cover and useful index).
That's a major reason why teenagers sometimes succumb to the temptation
to do things they shouldn't, such as swiping my books out of libraries.
Kids: this one is all yours, all right? Go give the print version back.
*8-)
Well-meaning, public-spirited civil libertarians don't have much money,
either. And it seems almost criminal to snatch cash out of the hands of
America's direly underpaid electronic law enforcement community.
If you're a computer cop, a hacker, or an electronic civil
liberties activist, you are the target audience for this book.
I wrote this book because I wanted to help you, and help other people
understand you and your unique, uhm, problems. I wrote this book
to aid your activities, and to contribute to the public discussion
of important political issues. In giving the text away in this
fashion, I am directly contributing to the book's ultimate aim:
to help civilize cyberspace.
Information WANTS to be free. And the information inside
this book longs for freedom with a peculiar intensity.
I genuinely believe that the natural habitat of this book
is inside an electronic network. That may not be the easiest
direct method to generate revenue for the book's author,
but that doesn't matter; this is where this book belongs
by its nature. I've written other books--plenty of other books--
and I'll write more and I am writing more, but this one is special.
I am making The Hacker Crackdown available electronically
as widely as I can conveniently manage, and if you like the book,
and think it is useful, then I urge you to do the same with it.
You can copy this electronic book. Copy the heck out of it,
be my guest, and give those copies to anybody who wants them.
The nascent world of cyberspace is full of sysadmins, teachers,
trainers, cybrarians, netgurus, and various species of cybernetic activist.
If you're one of those people, I know about you, and I know the hassle
you go through to try to help people learn about the electronic frontier.
I hope that possessing this book in electronic form will lessen your troubles.
Granted, this treatment of our electronic social spectrum is not the ultimate
in academic rigor. And politically, it has something to offend
and trouble almost everyone. But hey, I'm told it's readable,
and at least the price is right.
You can upload the book onto bulletin board systems, or Internet nodes,
or electronic discussion groups. Go right ahead and do that, I am giving
you express permission right now. Enjoy yourself.
You can put the book on disks and give the disks away,
as long as you don't take any money for it.
But this book is not public domain. You can't copyright it in
your own name. I own the copyright. Attempts to pirate this book
and make money from selling it may involve you in a serious litigative snarl.
Believe me, for the pittance you might wring out of such an action,
it's really not worth it. This book don't "belong" to you.
In an odd but very genuine way, I feel it doesn't "belong" to me, either.
It's a book about the people of cyberspace, and distributing it in this way
is the best way I know to actually make this information available,
freely and easily, to all the people of cyberspace--including people
far outside the borders of the United States, who otherwise may never
have a chance to see any edition of the book, and who may perhaps learn
something useful from this strange story of distant, obscure, but portentous
events in so-called "American cyberspace."
This electronic book is now literary freeware. It now belongs to the
emergent realm of alternative information economics. You have no right
to make this electronic book part of the conventional flow of commerce.
Let it be part of the flow of knowledge: there's a difference.
I've divided the book into four sections, so that it is less ungainly
for upload and download; if there's a section of particular relevance
to you and your colleagues, feel free to reproduce that one and skip the rest.
[Project Gutenberg has reassembled the file, with Sterling's permission.]
Just make more when you need them, and give them to whoever might want them.
Now have fun.
Bruce Sterling--bruces@well.sf.ca.us
THE HACKER CRACKDOWN
Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
by Bruce Sterling
CHRONOLOGY OF THE HACKER CRACKDOWN
1865 U.S. Secret Service (USSS) founded.
1876 Alexander Graham Bell invents telephone.
1878 First teenage males flung off phone system by enraged authorities.
1939 "Futurian" science-fiction group raided by Secret Service.
1971 Yippie phone phreaks start YIPL/TAP magazine.
1972 RAMPARTS magazine seized in blue-box rip-off scandal.
1978 Ward Christenson and Randy Suess create first personal
computer bulletin board system.
1982 William Gibson coins term "cyberspace."
1982 "414 Gang" raided.
1983-1983 AT&T dismantled in divestiture.
1984 Congress passes Comprehensive Crime Control Act giving USSS
jurisdiction over credit card fraud and computer fraud.
1984 "Legion of Doom" formed.
1984. 2600: THE HACKER QUARTERLY founded.
1984. WHOLE EARTH SOFTWARE CATALOG published.
1985. First police "sting" bulletin board systems established.
1985. Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link computer conference (WELL) goes on-line.
1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act passed.
1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act passed.
1987 Chicago prosecutors form Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force.
1988
July. Secret Service covertly videotapes "SummerCon" hacker convention.
September. "Prophet" cracks BellSouth AIMSX computer network
and downloads E911 Document to his own computer and to Jolnet.
September. AT&T Corporate Information Security informed of Prophet's action.
October. Bellcore Security informed of Prophet's action.
1989
January. Prophet uploads E911 Document to Knight Lightning.
February 25. Knight Lightning publishes E911 Document in PHRACK
electronic newsletter.
May. Chicago Task Force raids and arrests "Kyrie."
June. "NuPrometheus League" distributes Apple Computer proprietary software.
June 13. Florida probation office crossed with phone-sex line
in switching-station stunt.
July. "Fry Guy" raided by USSS and Chicago Computer Fraud
and Abuse Task Force.
July. Secret Service raids "Prophet," "Leftist," and "Urvile" in Georgia.
1990
January 15. Martin Luther King Day Crash strikes AT&T long-distance
network nationwide.
January 18-19. Chicago Task Force raids Knight Lightning in St. Louis.
January 24. USSS and New York State Police raid "Phiber Optik,"
"Acid Phreak," and "Scorpion" in New York City.
February 1. USSS raids "Terminus" in Maryland.
February 3. Chicago Task Force raids Richard Andrews' home.
February 6. Chicago Task Force raids Richard Andrews' business.
February 6. USSS arrests Terminus, Prophet, Leftist, and Urvile.
February 9. Chicago Task Force arrests Knight Lightning.
February 20. AT&T Security shuts down public-access
"attctc" computer in Dallas.
February 21. Chicago Task Force raids Robert Izenberg in Austin.
March 1. Chicago Task Force raids Steve Jackson Games, Inc.,
"Mentor," and "Erik Bloodaxe" in Austin.
May 7,8,9.
USSS and Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau conduct
"Operation Sundevil" raids in Cincinnatti, Detroit, Los Angeles,
Miami, Newark, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Tucson, San Diego,
San Jose, and San Francisco.
May. FBI interviews John Perry Barlow re NuPrometheus case.
June. Mitch Kapor and Barlow found Electronic Frontier Foundation;
Barlow publishes CRIME AND PUZZLEMENT manifesto.
July 24-27. Trial of Knight Lightning.
1991
February. CPSR Roundtable in Washington, D.C.
March 25-28. Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in San Francisco.
May 1. Electronic Frontier Foundation, Steve Jackson,
and others file suit against members of Chicago Task Force.
July 1-2. Switching station phone software crash affects
Washington, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, San Francisco.
September 17. AT&T phone crash affects New York City and three airports.
Introduction
This is a book about cops, and wild teenage whiz-kids, and lawyers,
and hairy-eyed anarchists, and industrial technicians, and hippies,
and high-tech millionaires, and game hobbyists, and computer security
experts, and Secret Service agents, and grifters, and thieves.
This book is about the electronic frontier of the 1990s.
It concerns activities that take place inside computers
and over telephone lines.
A science fiction writer coined the useful term "cyberspace" in 1982,
but the territory in question, the electronic frontier, is about
a hundred and thirty years old. Cyberspace is the "place" where
a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone,
the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone,
in some other city. THE PLACE BETWEEN the phones. The indefinite
place OUT THERE, where the two of you, two human beings,
actually meet and communicate.
Although it is not exactly "real," "cyberspace" is a genuine place.
Things happen there that have very genuine consequences. This "place"
is not "real," but it is serious, it is earnest. Tens of thousands
of people have dedicated their lives to it, to the public service
of public communication by wire and electronics.
People have worked on this "frontier" for generations now.
Some people became rich and famous from their efforts there.
Some just played in it, as hobbyists. Others soberly pondered it,
and wrote about it, and regulated it, and negotiated over it in
international forums, and sued one another about it, in gigantic,
epic court battles that lasted for years. And almost since
the beginning, some people have committed crimes in this place.
But in the past twenty years, this electrical "space,"
which was once thin and dark and one-dimensional--little more
than a narrow speaking-tube, stretching from phone to phone--
has flung itself open like a gigantic jack-in-the-box.
Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of the glowing computer screen.
This dark electric netherworld has become a vast flowering electronic landscape.
Since the 1960s, the world of the telephone has cross-bred itself
with computers and television, and though there is still no substance
to cyberspace, nothing you can handle, it has a strange kind
of physicality now. It makes good sense today to talk of cyberspace
as a place all its own.
Because people live in it now. Not just a few people,
not just a few technicians and eccentrics, but thousands
of people, quite normal people. And not just for a little while,
either, but for hours straight, over weeks, and months,
and years. Cyberspace today is a "Net," a "Matrix,"
international in scope and growing swiftly and steadily.
It's growing in size, and wealth, and political importance.
People are making entire careers in modern cyberspace.
Scientists and technicians, of course; they've been there
for twenty years now. But increasingly, cyberspace
is filling with journalists and doctors and lawyers
and artists and clerks. Civil servants make their
careers there now, "on-line" in vast government data-banks;
and so do spies, industrial, political, and just plain snoops;
and so do police, at least a few of them. And there are children
living there now.
People have met there and been married there.
There are entire living communities in cyberspace today;
chattering, gossiping, planning, conferring and scheming,
leaving one another voice-mail and electronic mail,
giving one another big weightless chunks of valuable data,
both legitimate and illegitimate. They busily pass one another
computer software and the occasional festering computer virus.
We do not really understand how to live in cyberspace yet.
We are feeling our way into it, blundering about.
That is not surprising. Our lives in the physical world,
the "real" world, are also far from perfect, despite a lot more practice.
Human lives, real lives, are imperfect by their nature, and there are
human beings in cyberspace. The way we live in cyberspace is
a funhouse mirror of the way we live in the real world.
We take both our advantages and our troubles with us.
This book is about trouble in cyberspace.
Specifically, this book is about certain strange events in
the year 1990, an unprecedented and startling year for the
the growing world of computerized communications.
In 1990 there came a nationwide crackdown on illicit
computer hackers, with arrests, criminal charges,
one dramatic show-trial, several guilty pleas, and
huge confiscations of data and equipment all over the USA.
The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was larger, better organized,
more deliberate, and more resolute than any previous effort
in the brave new world of computer crime. The U.S. Secret Service,
private telephone security, and state and local law enforcement groups
across the country all joined forces in a determined attempt to break
the back of America's electronic underground. It was a fascinating
effort, with very mixed results.
The Hacker Crackdown had another unprecedented effect;
it spurred the creation, within "the computer community,"
of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a new and very odd
interest group, fiercely dedicated to the establishment
and preservation of electronic civil liberties. The crackdown,
remarkable in itself, has created a melee of debate over electronic crime,
punishment, freedom of the press, and issues of search and seizure.
Politics has entered cyberspace. Where people go, politics follow.
This is the story of the people of cyberspace.
PART ONE: Crashing the System
On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance telephone switching system crashed.
This was a strange, dire, huge event. Sixty thousand people lost
their telephone service completely. During the nine long hours
of frantic effort that it took to restore service, some seventy million
telephone calls went uncompleted.
Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco trade,
are a known and accepted hazard of the telephone business.
Hurricanes hit, and phone cables get snapped by the thousands.
Earthquakes wrench through buried fiber-optic lines.
Switching stations catch fire and burn to the ground.
These things do happen. There are contingency plans for them,
and decades of experience in dealing with them.
But the Crash of January 15 was unprecedented.
It was unbelievably huge, and it occurred for
no apparent physical reason.
The crash started on a Monday afternoon in a single
switching-station in Manhattan. But, unlike any merely
physical damage, it spread and spread. Station after
station across America collapsed in a chain reaction,
until fully half of AT&T's network had gone haywire
and the remaining half was hard-put to handle the overflow.
Within nine hours, AT&T software engineers more or less
understood what had caused the crash. Replicating the
problem exactly, poring over software line by line,
took them a couple of weeks. But because it was hard
to understand technically, the full truth of the matter
and its implications were not widely and thoroughly aired
and explained. The root cause of the crash remained obscure,
surrounded by rumor and fear.
The crash was a grave corporate embarrassment.
The "culprit" was a bug in AT&T's own software--not the
sort of admission the telecommunications giant wanted
to make, especially in the face of increasing competition.
Still, the truth WAS told, in the baffling technical terms
necessary to explain it.
Somehow the explanation failed to persuade
American law enforcement officials and even telephone
corporate security personnel. These people were not
technical experts or software wizards, and they had their
own suspicions about the cause of this disaster.
The police and telco security had important sources
of information denied to mere software engineers.
They had informants in the computer underground and
years of experience in dealing with high-tech rascality
that seemed to grow ever more sophisticated.
For years they had been expecting a direct and
savage attack against the American national telephone system.
And with the Crash of January 15--the first month of a
new, high-tech decade--their predictions, fears,
and suspicions seemed at last to have entered the real world.
A world where the telephone system had not merely crashed,
but, quite likely, BEEN crashed--by "hackers."
The crash created a large dark cloud of suspicion
that would color certain people's assumptions and actions
for months. The fact that it took place in the realm of
software was suspicious on its face. The fact that it
occurred on Martin Luther King Day, still the most
politically touchy of American holidays, made it more
suspicious yet.
The Crash of January 15 gave the Hacker Crackdown
its sense of edge and its sweaty urgency. It made people,
powerful people in positions of public authority,
willing to believe the worst. And, most fatally,
it helped to give investigators a willingness
to take extreme measures and the determination
to preserve almost total secrecy.
An obscure software fault in an aging switching system
in New York was to lead to a chain reaction of legal
and constitutional trouble all across the country.
#
Like the crash in the telephone system, this chain reaction
was ready and waiting to happen. During the 1980s,
the American legal system was extensively patched
to deal with the novel issues of computer crime.
There was, for instance, the Electronic Communications
Privacy Act of 1986 (eloquently described as "a stinking mess"
by a prominent law enforcement official). And there was the
draconian Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, passed unanimously
by the United States Senate, which later would reveal
a large number of flaws. Extensive, well-meant efforts
had been made to keep the legal system up to date.
But in the day-to-day grind of the real world,
even the most elegant software tends to crumble
and suddenly reveal its hidden bugs.
Like the advancing telephone system, the American legal system
was certainly not ruined by its temporary crash; but for those
caught under the weight of the collapsing system, life became
a series of blackouts and anomalies.
In order to understand why these weird events occurred,
both in the world of technology and in the world of law,
it's not enough to understand the merely technical problems.
We will get to those; but first and foremost, we must try
to understand the telephone, and the business of telephones,
and the community of human beings that telephones have created.
#
Technologies have life cycles, like cities do,
like institutions do, like laws and governments do.
The first stage of any technology is the Question
Mark, often known as the "Golden Vaporware" stage.
At this early point, the technology is only a phantom,
a mere gleam in the inventor's eye. One such inventor
was a speech teacher and electrical tinkerer named
Alexander Graham Bell.
Bell's early inventions, while ingenious, failed to move the world.
In 1863, the teenage Bell and his brother Melville made an artificial
talking mechanism out of wood, rubber, gutta-percha, and tin.
This weird device had a rubber-covered "tongue" made of movable
wooden segments, with vibrating rubber "vocal cords," and
rubber "lips" and "cheeks." While Melville puffed a bellows
into a tin tube, imitating the lungs, young Alec Bell would
manipulate the "lips," "teeth," and "tongue," causing the thing
to emit high-pitched falsetto gibberish.
Another would-be technical breakthrough was the Bell "phonautograph"
of 1874, actually made out of a human cadaver's ear. Clamped into place
on a tripod, this grisly gadget drew sound-wave images on smoked glass
through a thin straw glued to its vibrating earbones.
By 1875, Bell had learned to produce audible sounds--ugly shrieks
and squawks--by using magnets, diaphragms, and electrical current.
Most "Golden Vaporware" technologies go nowhere.
But the second stage of technology is the Rising Star,
or, the "Goofy Prototype," stage. The telephone, Bell's
most ambitious gadget yet, reached this stage on March
10, 1876. On that great day, Alexander Graham Bell
became the first person to transmit intelligible human
speech electrically. As it happened, young Professor Bell,
industriously tinkering in his Boston lab, had spattered
his trousers with acid. His assistant, Mr. Watson,
heard his cry for help--over Bell's experimental
audio-telegraph. This was an event without precedent.
Technologies in their "Goofy Prototype" stage rarely
work very well. They're experimental, and therefore
half- baked and rather frazzled. The prototype may
be attractive and novel, and it does look as if it ought
to be good for something-or-other. But nobody, including
the inventor, is quite sure what. Inventors, and speculators,
and pundits may have very firm ideas about its potential
use, but those ideas are often very wrong.
The natural habitat of the Goofy Prototype is in trade shows
and in the popular press. Infant technologies need publicity
and investment money like a tottering calf need milk.
This was very true of Bell's machine. To raise research and
development money, Bell toured with his device as a stage attraction.
Contemporary press reports of the stage debut of the telephone
showed pleased astonishment mixed with considerable dread.
Bell's stage telephone was a large wooden box with a crude
speaker-nozzle, the whole contraption about the size and shape
of an overgrown Brownie camera. Its buzzing steel soundplate,
pumped up by powerful electromagnets, was loud enough to fill
an auditorium. Bell's assistant Mr. Watson, who could manage
on the keyboards fairly well, kicked in by playing the organ
from distant rooms, and, later, distant cities. This feat was
considered marvellous, but very eerie indeed.
Bell's original notion for the telephone, an idea promoted
for a couple of years, was that it would become a mass medium.
We might recognize Bell's idea today as something close to modern
"cable radio." Telephones at a central source would transmit music,
Sunday sermons, and important public speeches to a paying network
of wired-up subscribers.
At the time, most people thought this notion made good sense.
In fact, Bell's idea was workable. In Hungary, this philosophy
of the telephone was successfully put into everyday practice.
In Budapest, for decades, from 1893 until after World War I,
there was a government-run information service called
"Telefon Hirmondo-." Hirmondo- was a centralized source
of news and entertainment and culture, including stock reports,
plays, concerts, and novels read aloud. At certain hours
of the day, the phone would ring, you would plug in
a loudspeaker for the use of the family, and Telefon
Hirmondo- would be on the air--or rather, on the phone.
Hirmondo- is dead tech today, but Hirmondo- might be considered
a spiritual ancestor of the modern telephone-accessed computer
data services, such as CompuServe, GEnie or Prodigy.
The principle behind Hirmondo- is also not too far from computer
"bulletin- board systems" or BBS's, which arrived in the late 1970s,
spread rapidly across America, and will figure largely in this book.
We are used to using telephones for individual person-to-person speech,
because we are used to the Bell system. But this was just one possibility
among many. Communication networks are very flexible and protean,
especially when their hardware becomes sufficiently advanced.
They can be put to all kinds of uses. And they have been--
and they will be.
Bell's telephone was bound for glory, but this was a combination
of political decisions, canny infighting in court, inspired industrial
leadership, receptive local conditions and outright good luck.
Much the same is true of communications systems today.
As Bell and his backers struggled to install their newfangled system
in the real world of nineteenth-century New England, they had to fight
against skepticism and industrial rivalry. There was already a strong
electrical communications network present in America: the telegraph.
The head of the Western Union telegraph system dismissed Bell's prototype
as "an electrical toy" and refused to buy the rights to Bell's patent.
The telephone, it seemed, might be all right as a parlor entertainment--
but not for serious business.
Telegrams, unlike mere telephones, left a permanent physical record
of their messages. Telegrams, unlike telephones, could be answered
whenever the recipient had time and convenience. And the telegram
had a much longer distance-range than Bell's early telephone.
These factors made telegraphy seem a much more sound and businesslike
technology--at least to some.
The telegraph system was huge, and well-entrenched.
In 1876, the United States had 214,000 miles of telegraph wire,
and 8500 telegraph offices. There were specialized telegraphs
for businesses and stock traders, government, police and fire departments.
And Bell's "toy" was best known as a stage-magic musical device.
The third stage of technology is known as the "Cash Cow" stage.
In the "cash cow" stage, a technology finds its place in the world,
and matures, and becomes settled and productive. After a year or so,
Alexander Graham Bell and his capitalist backers concluded that
eerie music piped from nineteenth-century cyberspace was not the real
selling-point of his invention. Instead, the telephone was about speech--
individual, personal speech, the human voice, human conversation and
human interaction. The telephone was not to be managed from any centralized
broadcast center. It was to be a personal, intimate technology.
When you picked up a telephone, you were not absorbing
the cold output of a machine--you were speaking to another human being.
Once people realized this, their instinctive dread of the telephone
as an eerie, unnatural device, swiftly vanished. A "telephone call"
was not a "call" from a "telephone" itself, but a call from another
human being, someone you would generally know and recognize.
The real point was not what the machine could do for you (or to you),
but what you yourself, a person and citizen, could do THROUGH the machine.
This decision on the part of the young Bell Company was absolutely vital.
The first telephone networks went up around Boston--mostly among
the technically curious and the well-to-do (much the same segment
of the American populace that, a hundred years later, would be
buying personal computers). Entrenched backers of the telegraph
continued to scoff.
But in January 1878, a disaster made the telephone famous.
A train crashed in Tarriffville, Connecticut. Forward-looking
doctors in the nearby city of Hartford had had Bell's
"speaking telephone" installed. An alert local druggist
was able to telephone an entire community of local doctors,
who rushed to the site to give aid. The disaster, as disasters do,
aroused intense press coverage. The phone had proven its usefulness
in the real world.
After Tarriffville, the telephone network spread like crabgrass.
By 1890 it was all over New England. By '93, out to Chicago.
By '97, into Minnesota, Nebraska and Texas. By 1904 it was
all over the continent.
The telephone had become a mature technology. Professor Bell
(now generally known as "Dr. Bell" despite his lack of a formal degree)
became quite wealthy. He lost interest in the tedious day-to-day business
muddle of the booming telephone network, and gratefully returned
his attention to creatively hacking-around in his various laboratories,
which were now much larger, better-ventilated, and gratifyingly
better-equipped. Bell was never to have another great inventive success,
though his speculations and prototypes anticipated fiber-optic transmission,
manned flight, sonar, hydrofoil ships, tetrahedral construction, and
Montessori education. The "decibel," the standard scientific measure
of sound intensity, was named after Bell.
Not all Bell's vaporware notions were inspired. He was fascinated
by human eugenics. He also spent many years developing a weird personal
system of astrophysics in which gravity did not exist.
Bell was a definite eccentric. He was something of a hypochondriac,
and throughout his life he habitually stayed up until four A.M.,
refusing to rise before noon. But Bell had accomplished a great feat;
he was an idol of millions and his influence, wealth, and great
personal charm, combined with his eccentricity, made him something
of a loose cannon on deck. Bell maintained a thriving scientific
salon in his winter mansion in Washington, D.C., which gave him
considerable backstage influence in governmental and scientific circles.
He was a major financial backer of the the magazines Science and
National Geographic, both still flourishing today as important organs
of the American scientific establishment.
Bell's companion Thomas Watson, similarly wealthy and similarly odd,
became the ardent political disciple of a 19th-century science-fiction writer
and would-be social reformer, Edward Bellamy. Watson also trod the boards
briefly as a Shakespearian actor.
There would never be another Alexander Graham Bell,
but in years to come there would be surprising numbers
of people like him. Bell was a prototype of the
high-tech entrepreneur. High-tech entrepreneurs will
play a very prominent role in this book: not merely as
technicians and businessmen, but as pioneers of the
technical frontier, who can carry the power and prestige
they derive from high-technology into the political and
social arena.
Like later entrepreneurs, Bell was fierce in defense of
his own technological territory. As the telephone began to
flourish, Bell was soon involved in violent lawsuits in the
defense of his patents. Bell's Boston lawyers were
excellent, however, and Bell himself, as an elocution
teacher and gifted public speaker, was a devastatingly
effective legal witness. In the eighteen years of Bell's patents,
the Bell company was involved in six hundred separate lawsuits.
The legal records printed filled 149 volumes. The Bell Company
won every single suit.
After Bell's exclusive patents expired, rival telephone
companies sprang up all over America. Bell's company,
American Bell Telephone, was soon in deep trouble.
In 1907, American Bell Telephone fell into the hands of the
rather sinister J.P. Morgan financial cartel, robber-baron
speculators who dominated Wall Street.
At this point, history might have taken a different turn.
American might well have been served forever by a patchwork
of locally owned telephone companies. Many state politicians
and local businessmen considered this an excellent solution.
But the new Bell holding company, American Telephone and Telegraph
or AT&T, put in a new man at the helm, a visionary industrialist
named Theodore Vail. Vail, a former Post Office manager,
understood large organizations and had an innate feeling
for the nature of large-scale communications. Vail quickly
saw to it that AT&T seized the technological edge once again.
The Pupin and Campbell "loading coil," and the deForest
"audion," are both extinct technology today, but in 1913
they gave Vail's company the best LONG-DISTANCE lines
ever built. By controlling long-distance--the links
between, and over, and above the smaller local phone
companies--AT&T swiftly gained the whip-hand over them,
and was soon devouring them right and left.
Vail plowed the profits back into research and development,
starting the Bell tradition of huge-scale and brilliant
industrial research.
Technically and financially, AT&T gradually steamrollered
the opposition. Independent telephone companies never
became entirely extinct, and hundreds of them flourish today.
But Vail's AT&T became the supreme communications company.
At one point, Vail's AT&T bought Western Union itself,
the very company that had derided Bell's telephone as a "toy."
Vail thoroughly reformed Western Union's hidebound business
along his modern principles; but when the federal government
grew anxious at this centralization of power, Vail politely
gave Western Union back.
This centralizing process was not unique. Very similar
events had happened in American steel, oil, and railroads.
But AT&T, unlike the other companies, was to remain supreme.
The monopoly robber-barons of those other industries
were humbled and shattered by government trust-busting.
Vail, the former Post Office official, was quite willing
to accommodate the US government; in fact he would
forge an active alliance with it. AT&T would become
almost a wing of the American government, almost
another Post Office--though not quite. AT&T would
willingly submit to federal regulation, but in return,
it would use the government's regulators as its own police,
who would keep out competitors and assure the Bell
system's profits and preeminence.
This was the second birth--the political birth--of the
American telephone system. Vail's arrangement was to
persist, with vast success, for many decades, until 1982.
His system was an odd kind of American industrial socialism.
It was born at about the same time as Leninist Communism,
and it lasted almost as long--and, it must be admitted,
to considerably better effect.
Vail's system worked. Except perhaps for aerospace,
there has been no technology more thoroughly dominated
by Americans than the telephone. The telephone was
seen from the beginning as a quintessentially American
technology. Bell's policy, and the policy of Theodore Vail,
was a profoundly democratic policy of UNIVERSAL ACCESS.
Vail's famous corporate slogan, "One Policy, One System,
Universal Service," was a political slogan, with a very
American ring to it.
The American telephone was not to become the specialized tool
of government or business, but a general public utility.
At first, it was true, only the wealthy could afford
private telephones, and Bell's company pursued the
business markets primarily. The American phone system
was a capitalist effort, meant to make money; it was not a charity.
But from the first, almost all communities with telephone service
had public telephones. And many stores--especially drugstores--
offered public use of their phones. You might not own a telephone--
but you could always get into the system, if you really needed to.
There was nothing inevitable about this decision to make telephones
"public" and "universal." Vail's system involved a profound act
of trust in the public. This decision was a political one,
informed by the basic values of the American republic.
The situation might have been very different;
and in other countries, under other systems,
it certainly was.
Joseph Stalin, for instance, vetoed plans for a Soviet
phone system soon after the Bolshevik revolution.
Stalin was certain that publicly accessible telephones
would become instruments of anti-Soviet counterrevolution
and conspiracy. (He was probably right.) When telephones
did arrive in the Soviet Union, they would be instruments
of Party authority, and always heavily tapped. (Alexander
Solzhenitsyn's prison-camp novel The First Circle
describes efforts to develop a phone system more suited
to Stalinist purposes.)
France, with its tradition of rational centralized government,
had fought bitterly even against the electric telegraph,
which seemed to the French entirely too anarchical and frivolous.
For decades, nineteenth-century France communicated via the
"visual telegraph," a nation-spanning, government-owned semaphore
system of huge stone towers that signalled from hilltops,
across vast distances, with big windmill-like arms.
In 1846, one Dr. Barbay, a semaphore enthusiast,
memorably uttered an early version of what might be called
"the security expert's argument" against the open media.
"No, the electric telegraph is not a sound invention.
It will always be at the mercy of the slightest disruption,
wild youths, drunkards, bums, etc. . . . The electric telegraph
meets those destructive elements with only a few meters of wire
over which supervision is impossible. A single man could,
without being seen, cut the telegraph wires leading to Paris,
and in twenty-four hours cut in ten different places the wires
of the same line, without being arrested. The visual telegraph,
on the contrary, has its towers, its high walls, its gates
well-guarded from inside by strong armed men. Yes, I declare,
substitution of the electric telegraph for the visual one
is a dreadful measure, a truly idiotic act."
Dr. Barbay and his high-security stone machines
were eventually unsuccessful, but his argument--
that communication exists for the safety and convenience
of the state, and must be carefully protected from the wild
boys and the gutter rabble who might want to crash the
system--would be heard again and again.
When the French telephone system finally did arrive,
its snarled inadequacy was to be notorious. Devotees
of the American Bell System often recommended a trip
to France, for skeptics.
In Edwardian Britain, issues of class and privacy
were a ball-and-chain for telephonic progress. It was
considered outrageous that anyone--any wild fool off
the street--could simply barge bellowing into one's office
or home, preceded only by the ringing of a telephone bell.
In Britain, phones were tolerated for the use of business,
but private phones tended be stuffed away into closets,
smoking rooms, or servants' quarters. Telephone operators
were resented in Britain because they did not seem to
"know their place." And no one of breeding would print
a telephone number on a business card; this seemed a crass
attempt to make the acquaintance of strangers.
But phone access in America was to become a popular right;
something like universal suffrage, only more so.
American women could not yet vote when the phone system
came through; yet from the beginning American women
doted on the telephone. This "feminization" of the
American telephone was often commented on by foreigners.
Phones in America were not censored or stiff or formalized;
they were social, private, intimate, and domestic.
In America, Mother's Day is by far the busiest day
of the year for the phone network.
The early telephone companies, and especially AT&T,
were among the foremost employers of American women.
They employed the daughters of the American middle-class
in great armies: in 1891, eight thousand women; by 1946,
almost a quarter of a million. Women seemed to enjoy
telephone work; it was respectable, it was steady,
it paid fairly well as women's work went, and--not least--
it seemed a genuine contribution to the social good
of the community. Women found Vail's ideal of public
service attractive. This was especially true in rural areas,
where women operators, running extensive rural party-lines,
enjoyed considerable social power. The operator knew everyone
on the party-line, and everyone knew her.
Although Bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the
telephone company did not employ women for the sake of
advancing female liberation. AT&T did this for sound
commercial reasons. The first telephone operators of
the Bell system were not women, but teenage American boys.
They were telegraphic messenger boys (a group about to
be rendered technically obsolescent), who swept up
around the phone office, dunned customers for bills,
and made phone connections on the switchboard,
all on the cheap.
Within the very first year of operation, 1878,
Bell's company learned a sharp lesson about combining
teenage boys and telephone switchboards. Putting
teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift
and consistent disaster. Bell's chief engineer described them
as "Wild Indians." The boys were openly rude to customers.
They talked back to subscribers, saucing off,
uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip.
The rascals took Saint Patrick's Day off without permission.
And worst of all they played clever tricks with
the switchboard plugs: disconnecting calls, crossing lines
so that customers found themselves talking to strangers,
and so forth.
This combination of power, technical mastery, and effective
anonymity seemed to act like catnip on teenage boys.
This wild-kid-on-the-wires phenomenon was not confined to
the USA; from the beginning, the same was true of the British
phone system. An early British commentator kindly remarked:
"No doubt boys in their teens found the work not a little irksome,
and it is also highly probable that under the early conditions
of employment the adventurous and inquisitive spirits of which
the average healthy boy of that age is possessed, were not always
conducive to the best attention being given to the wants
of the telephone subscribers."
So the boys were flung off the system--or at least,
deprived of control of the switchboard. But the
"adventurous and inquisitive spirits" of the teenage boys
would be heard from in the world of telephony, again and again.
The fourth stage in the technological life-cycle is death:
"the Dog," dead tech. The telephone has so far avoided this fate.
On the contrary, it is thriving, still spreading, still evolving,
and at increasing speed.
The telephone has achieved a rare and exalted state for a
technological artifact: it has become a HOUSEHOLD OBJECT.
The telephone, like the clock, like pen and paper,
like kitchen utensils and running water, has become
a technology that is visible only by its absence.
The telephone is technologically transparent.
The global telephone system is the largest and most
complex machine in the world, yet it is easy to use.
More remarkable yet, the telephone is almost entirely
physically safe for the user.
For the average citizen in the 1870s, the telephone
was weirder, more shocking, more "high-tech" and
harder to comprehend, than the most outrageous stunts
of advanced computing for us Americans in the 1990s.
In trying to understand what is happening to us today,
with our bulletin-board systems, direct overseas dialling,
fiber-optic transmissions, computer viruses, hacking stunts,
and a vivid tangle of new laws and new crimes, it is important
to realize that our society has been through a similar challenge before--
and that, all in all, we did rather well by it.
Bell's stage telephone seemed bizarre at first. But the
sensations of weirdness vanished quickly, once people began
to hear the familiar voices of relatives and friends,
in their own homes on their own telephones. The telephone
changed from a fearsome high-tech totem to an everyday pillar
of human community.
This has also happened, and is still happening,
to computer networks. Computer networks such as
NSFnet, BITnet, USENET, JANET, are technically
advanced, intimidating, and much harder to use than
telephones. Even the popular, commercial computer
networks, such as GEnie, Prodigy, and CompuServe,
cause much head-scratching and have been described
as "user-hateful." Nevertheless they too are changing
from fancy high-tech items into everyday sources
of human community.
The words "community" and "communication" have
the same root. Wherever you put a communications
network, you put a community as well. And whenever
you TAKE AWAY that network--confiscate it, outlaw it,
crash it, raise its price beyond affordability--
then you hurt that community.
Communities will fight to defend themselves. People will fight harder
and more bitterly to defend their communities, than they will fight
to defend their own individual selves. And this is very true
of the "electronic community" that arose around computer networks
in the 1980s--or rather, the VARIOUS electronic communities,
in telephony, law enforcement, computing, and the digital
underground that, by the year 1990, were raiding, rallying,
arresting, suing, jailing, fining and issuing angry manifestos.
None of the events of 1990 were entirely new.
Nothing happened in 1990 that did not have some kind
of earlier and more understandable precedent. What gave
the Hacker Crackdown its new sense of gravity and
importance was the feeling--the COMMUNITY feeling--
that the political stakes had been raised; that trouble
in cyberspace was no longer mere mischief or inconclusive
skirmishing, but a genuine fight over genuine issues,
a fight for community survival and the shape of the future.
These electronic communities, having flourished throughout
the 1980s, were becoming aware of themselves, and increasingly,
becoming aware of other, rival communities. Worries were
sprouting up right and left, with complaints, rumors,
uneasy speculations. But it would take a catalyst, a shock,
to make the new world evident. Like Bell's great publicity break,
the Tarriffville Rail Disaster of January 1878,
it would take a cause celebre.
That cause was the AT&T Crash of January 15, 1990.
After the Crash, the wounded and anxious telephone
community would come out fighting hard.
#
The community of telephone technicians, engineers, operators
and researchers is the oldest community in cyberspace.
These are the veterans, the most developed group,
the richest, the most respectable, in most ways the most powerful.
Whole generations have come and gone since Alexander Graham Bell's day,
but the community he founded survives; people work for the phone system
today whose great-grandparents worked for the phone system.
Its specialty magazines, such as Telephony, AT&T Technical Journal,
Telephone Engineer and Management, are decades old;
they make computer publications like Macworld and PC Week
look like amateur johnny-come-latelies.
And the phone companies take no back seat in high-technology, either.
Other companies' industrial researchers may have won new markets;
but the researchers of Bell Labs have won SEVEN NOBEL PRIZES.
One potent device that Bell Labs originated, the transistor,
has created entire GROUPS of industries. Bell Labs are
world-famous for generating "a patent a day," and have even
made vital discoveries in astronomy, physics and cosmology.
Throughout its seventy-year history, "Ma Bell" was not so much
a company as a way of life. Until the cataclysmic divestiture
of the 1980s, Ma Bell was perhaps the ultimate maternalist mega-employer.
The AT&T corporate image was the "gentle giant," "the voice with a smile,"
a vaguely socialist-realist world of cleanshaven linemen in shiny helmets
and blandly pretty phone-girls in headsets and nylons. Bell System
employees were famous as rock-ribbed Kiwanis and Rotary members,
Little-League enthusiasts, school-board people.
During the long heyday of Ma Bell, the Bell employee corps
were nurtured top-to-bottom on a corporate ethos of public service.
There was good money in Bell, but Bell was not ABOUT money;
Bell used public relations, but never mere marketeering.
People went into the Bell System for a good life,
and they had a good life. But it was not mere money
that led Bell people out in the midst of storms and earthquakes
to fight with toppled phone-poles, to wade in flooded manholes,
to pull the red-eyed graveyard-shift over collapsing switching-systems.
The Bell ethic was the electrical equivalent of the postman's:
neither rain, nor snow, nor gloom of night would stop these couriers.
It is easy to be cynical about this, as it is easy to be
cynical about any political or social system; but cynicism
does not change the fact that thousands of people took
these ideals very seriously. And some still do.
The Bell ethos was about public service; and that was
gratifying; but it was also about private POWER, and that
was gratifying too. As a corporation, Bell was very special.
Bell was privileged. Bell had snuggled up close to the state.
In fact, Bell was as close to government as you could get in
America and still make a whole lot of legitimate money.
But unlike other companies, Bell was above and beyond
the vulgar commercial fray. Through its regional operating companies,
Bell was omnipresent, local, and intimate, all over America;
but the central ivory towers at its corporate heart were the
tallest and the ivoriest around.
There were other phone companies in America, to be sure;
the so-called independents. Rural cooperatives, mostly;
small fry, mostly tolerated, sometimes warred upon.
For many decades, "independent" American phone companies
lived in fear and loathing of the official Bell monopoly
(or the "Bell Octopus," as Ma Bell's nineteenth-century
enemies described her in many angry newspaper manifestos).
Some few of these independent entrepreneurs, while legally
in the wrong, fought so bitterly against the Octopus
that their illegal phone networks were cast into the street
by Bell agents and publicly burned.
The pure technical sweetness of the Bell System gave its operators,
inventors and engineers a deeply satisfying sense of power and mastery.
They had devoted their lives to improving this vast nation-spanning machine;
over years, whole human lives, they had watched it improve and grow.
It was like a great technological temple. They were an elite,
and they knew it--even if others did not; in fact, they felt
even more powerful BECAUSE others did not understand.
The deep attraction of this sensation of elite technical power
should never be underestimated. "Technical power" is not for everybody;
for many people it simply has no charm at all. But for some people,
it becomes the core of their lives. For a few, it is overwhelming,
obsessive; it becomes something close to an addiction. People--especially
clever teenage boys whose lives are otherwise mostly powerless and put-upon
--love this sensation of secret power, and are willing to do all sorts
of amazing things to achieve it. The technical POWER of electronics
has motivated many strange acts detailed in this book, which would
otherwise be inexplicable.
So Bell had power beyond mere capitalism. The Bell service ethos worked,
and was often propagandized, in a rather saccharine fashion. Over the decades,
people slowly grew tired of this. And then, openly impatient with it.
By the early 1980s, Ma Bell was to find herself with scarcely a real friend
in the world. Vail's industrial socialism had become hopelessly
out-of-fashion politically. Bell would be punished for that.
And that punishment would fall harshly upon the people of the
telephone community.
#
In 1983, Ma Bell was dismantled by federal court action.
The pieces of Bell are now separate corporate entities.
The core of the company became AT&T Communications,
and also AT&T Industries (formerly Western Electric,
Bell's manufacturing arm). AT&T Bell Labs became Bell
Communications Research, Bellcore. Then there are the
Regional Bell Operating Companies, or RBOCs, pronounced "arbocks."
Bell was a titan and even these regional chunks are gigantic enterprises:
Fortune 50 companies with plenty of wealth and power behind them.
But the clean lines of "One Policy, One System, Universal Service"
have been shattered, apparently forever.
The "One Policy" of the early Reagan Administration was to
shatter a system that smacked of noncompetitive socialism.
Since that time, there has been no real telephone "policy"
on the federal level. Despite the breakup, the remnants
of Bell have never been set free to compete in the open marketplace.
The RBOCs are still very heavily regulated, but not from the top.
Instead, they struggle politically, economically and legally,
in what seems an endless turmoil, in a patchwork of overlapping federal
and state jurisdictions. Increasingly, like other major American corporations,
the RBOCs are becoming multinational, acquiring important commercial interests
in Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific Rim. But this, too, adds to their
legal and political predicament.
The people of what used to be Ma Bell are not happy about their fate.
They feel ill-used. They might have been grudgingly willing to make
a full transition to the free market; to become just companies amid
other companies. But this never happened. Instead, AT&T and the RBOCS
("the Baby Bells") feel themselves wrenched from side to side by state
regulators, by Congress, by the FCC, and especially by the federal court
of Judge Harold Greene, the magistrate who ordered the Bell breakup
and who has been the de facto czar of American telecommunications
ever since 1983.
Bell people feel that they exist in a kind of paralegal limbo today.
They don't understand what's demanded of them. If it's "service,"
why aren't they treated like a public service? And if it's money,
then why aren't they free to compete for it? No one seems to know,
really. Those who claim to know keep changing their minds.
Nobody in authority seems willing to grasp the nettle for once and all.
Telephone people from other countries are amazed by the
American telephone system today. Not that it works so well;
for nowadays even the French telephone system works, more or less.
They are amazed that the American telephone system STILL works
AT ALL, under these strange conditions.
Bell's "One System" of long-distance service is now only about
eighty percent of a system, with the remainder held by Sprint, MCI,
and the midget long-distance companies. Ugly wars over dubious
corporate practices such as "slamming" (an underhanded method
of snitching clients from rivals) break out with some regularity
in the realm of long-distance service. The battle to break Bell's
long-distance monopoly was long and ugly, and since the breakup
the battlefield has not become much prettier. AT&T's famous
shame-and-blame advertisements, which emphasized the shoddy work
and purported ethical shadiness of their competitors, were much
remarked on for their studied psychological cruelty.
There is much bad blood in this industry, and much
long-treasured resentment. AT&T's post-breakup
corporate logo, a striped sphere, is known in the
industry as the "Death Star" (a reference from the movie
Star Wars, in which the "Death Star" was the spherical
high- tech fortress of the harsh-breathing imperial ultra-baddie,
Darth Vader.) Even AT&T employees are less than thrilled
by the Death Star. A popular (though banned) T-shirt among
AT&T employees bears the old-fashioned Bell logo of the Bell System,
plus the newfangled striped sphere, with the before-and-after comments:
"This is your brain--This is your brain on drugs!" AT&T made a very
well-financed and determined effort to break into the personal
computer market; it was disastrous, and telco computer experts
are derisively known by their competitors as "the pole-climbers."
AT&T and the Baby Bell arbocks still seem to have few friends.
Under conditions of sharp commercial competition, a crash like
that of January 15, 1990 was a major embarrassment to AT&T.
It was a direct blow against their much-treasured reputation
for reliability. Within days of the crash AT&T's
Chief Executive Officer, Bob Allen, officially apologized,
in terms of deeply pained humility:
"AT&T had a major service disruption last Monday.
We didn't live up to our own standards of quality,
and we didn't live up to yours. It's as simple as that.
And that's not acceptable to us. Or to you. . . .
We understand how much people have come to depend
upon AT&T service, so our AT&T Bell Laboratories scientists
and our network engineers are doing everything possible
to guard against a recurrence. . . . We know there's no way
to make up for the inconvenience this problem may have caused you."
Mr Allen's "open letter to customers" was printed in lavish ads
all over the country: in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today,
New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune,
Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle Examiner,
Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Detroit Free Press,
Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, Cleveland Plain Dealer,
Atlanta Journal Constitution, Minneapolis Star Tribune,
St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch, Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer,
Tacoma News Tribune, Miami Herald, Pittsburgh Press,
St. Louis Post Dispatch, Denver Post, Phoenix Republic Gazette
and Tampa Tribune.
In another press release, AT&T went to some pains to suggest
that this "software glitch" might have happened just as easily to MCI,
although, in fact, it hadn't. (MCI's switching software was quite different
from AT&T's--though not necessarily any safer.) AT&T also announced
their plans to offer a rebate of service on Valentine's Day to make up
for the loss during the Crash.
"Every technical resource available, including Bell Labs
scientists and engineers, has been devoted to assuring
it will not occur again," the public was told. They were
further assured that "The chances of a recurrence are small--
a problem of this magnitude never occurred before."
In the meantime, however, police and corporate
security maintained their own suspicions about
"the chances of recurrence" and the real reason why
a "problem of this magnitude" had appeared, seemingly
out of nowhere. Police and security knew for a fact
that hackers of unprecedented sophistication were illegally
entering, and reprogramming, certain digital switching stations.
Rumors of hidden "viruses" and secret "logic bombs"
in the switches ran rampant in the underground,
with much chortling over AT&T's predicament,
and idle speculation over what unsung hacker genius
was responsible for it. Some hackers, including police
informants, were trying hard to finger one another
as the true culprits of the Crash.
Telco people found little comfort in objectivity when
they contemplated these possibilities. It was just too close
to the bone for them; it was embarrassing; it hurt so much,
it was hard even to talk about.
There has always been thieving and misbehavior in the phone system.
There has always been trouble with the rival independents,
and in the local loops. But to have such trouble in the core
of the system, the long-distance switching stations,
is a horrifying affair. To telco people, this is
all the difference between finding roaches in your kitchen
and big horrid sewer-rats in your bedroom.
From the outside, to the average citizen, the telcos
still seem gigantic and impersonal. The American public
seems to regard them as something akin to Soviet apparats.
Even when the telcos do their best corporate-citizen routine,
subsidizing magnet high-schools and sponsoring news-shows
on public television, they seem to win little except public suspicion.
But from the inside, all this looks very different.
There's harsh competition. A legal and political system
that seems baffled and bored, when not actively hostile
to telco interests. There's a loss of morale, a deep sensation
of having somehow lost the upper hand. Technological change
has caused a loss of data and revenue to other, newer forms
of transmission. There's theft, and new forms of theft,
of growing scale and boldness and sophistication.
With all these factors, it was no surprise to see the telcos,
large and small, break out in a litany of bitter complaint.
In late '88 and throughout 1989, telco representatives
grew shrill in their complaints to those few American law
enforcement officials who make it their business to try to
understand what telephone people are talking about.
Telco security officials had discovered the computer-
hacker underground, infiltrated it thoroughly,
and become deeply alarmed at its growing expertise.
Here they had found a target that was not only loathsome
on its face, but clearly ripe for counterattack.
Those bitter rivals: AT&T, MCI and Sprint--and a crowd
of Baby Bells: PacBell, Bell South, Southwestern Bell,
NYNEX, USWest, as well as the Bell research consortium Bellcore,
and the independent long-distance carrier Mid-American--
all were to have their role in the great hacker dragnet of 1990.
After years of being battered and pushed around, the telcos had,
at least in a small way, seized the initiative again.
After years of turmoil, telcos and government officials were
once again to work smoothly in concert in defense of the System.
Optimism blossomed; enthusiasm grew on all sides;
the prospective taste of vengeance was sweet.
#
From the beginning--even before the crackdown had a name--
secrecy was a big problem. There were many good reasons
for secrecy in the hacker crackdown. Hackers and code-thieves
were wily prey, slinking back to their bedrooms and basements
and destroying vital incriminating evidence at the first hint of trouble.
Furthermore, the crimes themselves were heavily technical and difficult
to describe, even to police--much less to the general public.
When such crimes HAD been described intelligibly to the public,
in the past, that very publicity had tended to INCREASE the crimes
enormously. Telco officials, while painfully aware of the vulnerabilities
of their systems, were anxious not to publicize those weaknesses.
Experience showed them that those weaknesses, once discovered,
would be pitilessly exploited by tens of thousands of people--not only
by professional grifters and by underground hackers and phone phreaks,
but by many otherwise more-or-less honest everyday folks, who regarded
stealing service from the faceless, soulless "Phone Company" as a kind of
harmless indoor sport. When it came to protecting their interests,
telcos had long since given up on general public sympathy for
"the Voice with a Smile." Nowadays the telco's "Voice" was
very likely to be a computer's; and the American public
showed much less of the proper respect and gratitude due
the fine public service bequeathed them by Dr. Bell and Mr. Vail.
The more efficient, high-tech, computerized, and impersonal
the telcos became, it seemed, the more they were met by
sullen public resentment and amoral greed.
Telco officials wanted to punish the phone-phreak underground, in as
public and exemplary a manner as possible. They wanted to make dire
examples of the worst offenders, to seize the ringleaders and intimidate
the small fry, to discourage and frighten the wacky hobbyists, and send
the professional grifters to jail. To do all this, publicity was vital.
Yet operational secrecy was even more so. If word got out that
a nationwide crackdown was coming, the hackers might simply vanish;
destroy the evidence, hide their computers, go to earth,
and wait for the campaign to blow over. Even the young
hackers were crafty and suspicious, and as for the professional grifters,
they tended to split for the nearest state-line at the first sign of trouble.
For the crackdown to work well, they would all have to be caught red-handed,
swept upon suddenly, out of the blue, from every corner of the compass.
And there was another strong motive for secrecy. In the worst-case scenario,
a blown campaign might leave the telcos open to a devastating hacker
counter-attack. If there were indeed hackers loose in America who
had caused the January 15 Crash--if there were truly gifted hackers,
loose in the nation's long-distance switching systems, and enraged
or frightened by the crackdown--then they might react unpredictably
to an attempt to collar them. Even if caught, they might have talented
and vengeful friends still running around loose. Conceivably,
it could turn ugly. Very ugly. In fact, it was hard to imagine
just how ugly things might turn, given that possibility.
Counter-attack from hackers was a genuine concern for the telcos.
In point of fact, they would never suffer any such counter-attack.
But in months to come, they would be at some pains to publicize
this notion and to utter grim warnings about it.
Still, that risk seemed well worth running. Better to run the risk
of vengeful attacks, than to live at the mercy of potential crashers.
Any cop would tell you that a protection racket had no real future.
And publicity was such a useful thing. Corporate security officers,
including telco security, generally work under conditions of great discretion.
And corporate security officials do not make money for their companies.
Their job is to PREVENT THE LOSS of money, which is much less glamorous
than actually winning profits.
If you are a corporate security official, and you do your job brilliantly,
then nothing bad happens to your company at all. Because of this, you appear
completely superfluous. This is one of the many unattractive aspects
of security work. It's rare that these folks have the chance to draw
some healthy attention to their own efforts.
Publicity also served the interest of their friends in law enforcement.
Public officials, including law enforcement officials, thrive by attracting
favorable public interest. A brilliant prosecution in a matter of vital
public interest can make the career of a prosecuting attorney.
And for a police officer, good publicity opens the purses of the legislature;
it may bring a citation, or a promotion, or at least a rise in status
and the respect of one's peers.
But to have both publicity and secrecy is to have one's cake and eat it too.
In months to come, as we will show, this impossible act was to cause great
pain to the agents of the crackdown. But early on, it seemed possible
--maybe even likely--that the crackdown could successfully combine
the best of both worlds. The ARREST of hackers would be heavily publicized.
The actual DEEDS of the hackers, which were technically hard to explain
and also a security risk, would be left decently obscured. The THREAT
hackers posed would be heavily trumpeted; the likelihood of their actually
committing such fearsome crimes would be left to the public's imagination.
The spread of the computer underground, and its growing technical
sophistication, would be heavily promoted; the actual hackers themselves,
mostly bespectacled middle-class white suburban teenagers,
would be denied any personal publicity.
It does not seem to have occurred to any telco official
that the hackers accused would demand a day in court;
that journalists would smile upon the hackers as
"good copy;" that wealthy high-tech entrepreneurs would
offer moral and financial support to crackdown victims;
that constitutional lawyers would show up with briefcases,
frowning mightily. This possibility does not seem to have
ever entered the game-plan.
And even if it had, it probably would not have slowed
the ferocious pursuit of a stolen phone-company document,
mellifluously known as "Control Office Administration of
Enhanced 911 Services for Special Services and Major Account Centers."
In the chapters to follow, we will explore the worlds
of police and the computer underground, and the large
shadowy area where they overlap. But first, we must
explore the battleground. Before we leave the world
of the telcos, we must understand what a switching system
actually is and how your telephone actually works.
#
To the average citizen, the idea of the telephone is represented by,
well, a TELEPHONE: a device that you talk into. To a telco
professional, however, the telephone itself is known, in lordly
fashion, as a "subset." The "subset" in your house is a mere adjunct,
a distant nerve ending, of the central switching stations,
which are ranked in levels of heirarchy, up to the long-distance electronic
switching stations, which are some of the largest computers on earth.
Let us imagine that it is, say, 1925, before the
introduction of computers, when the phone system was
simpler and somewhat easier to grasp. Let's further
imagine that you are Miss Leticia Luthor, a fictional
operator for Ma Bell in New York City of the 20s.
Basically, you, Miss Luthor, ARE the "switching system."
You are sitting in front of a large vertical switchboard,
known as a "cordboard," made of shiny wooden panels,
with ten thousand metal-rimmed holes punched in them,
known as jacks. The engineers would have put more
holes into your switchboard, but ten thousand is
as many as you can reach without actually having
to get up out of your chair.
Each of these ten thousand holes has its own little electric lightbulb,
known as a "lamp," and its own neatly printed number code.
With the ease of long habit, you are scanning your board for lit-up bulbs.
This is what you do most of the time, so you are used to it.
A lamp lights up. This means that the phone
at the end of that line has been taken off the hook.
Whenever a handset is taken off the hook, that closes a circuit
inside the phone which then signals the local office, i.e. you,
automatically. There might be somebody calling, or then
again the phone might be simply off the hook, but this
does not matter to you yet. The first thing you do,
is record that number in your logbook, in your fine American
public-school handwriting. This comes first, naturally,
since it is done for billing purposes.
You now take the plug of your answering cord, which goes
directly to your headset, and plug it into the lit-up hole.
"Operator," you announce.
In operator's classes, before taking this job, you have
been issued a large pamphlet full of canned operator's
responses for all kinds of contingencies, which you had
to memorize. You have also been trained in a proper
non-regional, non-ethnic pronunciation and tone of voice.
You rarely have the occasion to make any spontaneous
remark to a customer, and in fact this is frowned upon
(except out on the rural lines where people have time
on their hands and get up to all kinds of mischief).
A tough-sounding user's voice at the end of the line
gives you a number. Immediately, you write that number
down in your logbook, next to the caller's number,
which you just wrote earlier. You then look and see if
the number this guy wants is in fact on your switchboard,
which it generally is, since it's generally a local call.
Long distance costs so much that people use it sparingly.
Only then do you pick up a calling-cord from a shelf
at the base of the switchboard. This is a long elastic cord
mounted on a kind of reel so that it will zip back in when
you unplug it. There are a lot of cords down there,
and when a bunch of them are out at once they look like
a nest of snakes. Some of the girls think there are bugs
living in those cable-holes. They're called "cable mites"
and are supposed to bite your hands and give you rashes.
You don't believe this, yourself.
Gripping the head of your calling-cord, you slip the tip
of it deftly into the sleeve of the jack for the called person.
Not all the way in, though. You just touch it. If you hear
a clicking sound, that means the line is busy and you can't
put the call through. If the line is busy, you have to stick
the calling-cord into a "busy-tone jack," which will give
the guy a busy-tone. This way you don't have to talk to him
yourself and absorb his natural human frustration.
But the line isn't busy. So you pop the cord all the way in.
Relay circuits in your board make the distant phone ring,
and if somebody picks it up off the hook, then a phone
conversation starts. You can hear this conversation
on your answering cord, until you unplug it. In fact
you could listen to the whole conversation if you wanted,
but this is sternly frowned upon by management, and frankly,
when you've overheard one, you've pretty much heard 'em all.
You can tell how long the conversation lasts by the glow
of the calling-cord's lamp, down on the calling-cord's shelf.
When it's over, you unplug and the calling-cord zips back into place.
Having done this stuff a few hundred thousand times,
you become quite good at it. In fact you're plugging,
and connecting, and disconnecting, ten, twenty, forty cords
at a time. It's a manual handicraft, really, quite satisfying
in a way, rather like weaving on an upright loom.
Should a long-distance call come up, it would be different,
but not all that different. Instead of connecting the call
through your own local switchboard, you have to go up the hierarchy,
onto the long-distance lines, known as "trunklines."
Depending on how far the call goes, it may have to work
its way through a whole series of operators, which can
take quite a while. The caller doesn't wait on the line
while this complex process is negotiated across the country
by the gaggle of operators. Instead, the caller hangs up,
and you call him back yourself when the call has finally
worked its way through.
After four or five years of this work, you get married,
and you have to quit your job, this being the natural order
of womanhood in the American 1920s. The phone company
has to train somebody else--maybe two people, since
the phone system has grown somewhat in the meantime.
And this costs money.
In fact, to use any kind of human being as a switching
system is a very expensive proposition. Eight thousand
Leticia Luthors would be bad enough, but a quarter of a
million of them is a military-scale proposition and makes
drastic measures in automation financially worthwhile.
Although the phone system continues to grow today,
the number of human beings employed by telcos has
been dropping steadily for years. Phone "operators"
now deal with nothing but unusual contingencies,
all routine operations having been shrugged off onto machines.
Consequently, telephone operators are considerably less
machine-like nowadays, and have been known to have accents
and actual character in their voices. When you reach
a human operator today, the operators are rather more
"human" than they were in Leticia's day--but on the other hand,
human beings in the phone system are much harder to reach
in the first place.
Over the first half of the twentieth century,
"electromechanical" switching systems of growing
complexity were cautiously introduced into the phone system.
In certain backwaters, some of these hybrid systems are still
in use. But after 1965, the phone system began to go completely
electronic, and this is by far the dominant mode today.
Electromechanical systems have "crossbars," and "brushes,"
and other large moving mechanical parts, which, while faster
and cheaper than Leticia, are still slow, and tend to wear out
fairly quickly.
But fully electronic systems are inscribed on silicon chips,
and are lightning-fast, very cheap, and quite durable.
They are much cheaper to maintain than even the best
electromechanical systems, and they fit into half the space.
And with every year, the silicon chip grows smaller, faster,
and cheaper yet. Best of all, automated electronics work
around the clock and don't have salaries or health insurance.
There are, however, quite serious drawbacks to the
use of computer-chips. When they do break down, it is
a daunting challenge to figure out what the heck has gone
wrong with them. A broken cordboard generally had
a problem in it big enough to see. A broken chip has
invisible, microscopic faults. And the faults in bad
software can be so subtle as to be practically theological.
If you want a mechanical system to do something new,
then you must travel to where it is, and pull pieces out of it,
and wire in new pieces. This costs money. However, if you want
a chip to do something new, all you have to do is change its software,
which is easy, fast and dirt-cheap. You don't even have to see the chip
to change its program. Even if you did see the chip, it wouldn't look
like much. A chip with program X doesn't look one whit different from
a chip with program Y.
With the proper codes and sequences, and access to specialized phone-lines,
you can change electronic switching systems all over America from anywhere
you please.
And so can other people. If they know how, and if they want to,
they can sneak into a microchip via the special phonelines and diddle with it,
leaving no physical trace at all. If they broke into the operator's station
and held Leticia at gunpoint, that would be very obvious. If they broke into
a telco building and went after an electromechanical switch with a toolbelt,
that would at least leave many traces. But people can do all manner of amazing
things to computer switches just by typing on a keyboard, and keyboards are
everywhere today. The extent of this vulnerability is deep, dark, broad,
almost mind-boggling, and yet this is a basic, primal fact of life about
any computer on a network.
Security experts over the past twenty years have insisted,
with growing urgency, that this basic vulnerability of computers
represents an entirely new level of risk, of unknown but obviously
dire potential to society. And they are right.
An electronic switching station does pretty much
everything Letitia did, except in nanoseconds and
on a much larger scale. Compared to Miss Luthor's
ten thousand jacks, even a primitive 1ESS switching computer,
60s vintage, has a 128,000 lines. And the current AT&T
system of choice is the monstrous fifth-generation 5ESS.
An Electronic Switching Station can scan every line on its "board"
in a tenth of a second, and it does this over and over, tirelessly,
around the clock. Instead of eyes, it uses "ferrod scanners"
to check the condition of local lines and trunks. Instead of hands,
it has "signal distributors," "central pulse distributors,"
"magnetic latching relays," and "reed switches," which complete
and break the calls. Instead of a brain, it has a "central processor."
Instead of an instruction manual, it has a program. Instead of
a handwritten logbook for recording and billing calls,
it has magnetic tapes. And it never has to talk to anybody.
Everything a customer might say to it is done by punching
the direct-dial tone buttons on your subset.
Although an Electronic Switching Station can't talk,
it does need an interface, some way to relate to its, er,
employers. This interface is known as the "master control
center." (This interface might be better known simply as
"the interface," since it doesn't actually "control" phone
calls directly. However, a term like "Master Control
Center" is just the kind of rhetoric that telco maintenance
engineers--and hackers--find particularly satisfying.)
Using the master control center, a phone engineer can test
local and trunk lines for malfunctions. He (rarely she)
can check various alarm displays, measure traffic on the lines,
examine the records of telephone usage and the charges for those calls,
and change the programming.
And, of course, anybody else who gets into the master control center
by remote control can also do these things, if he (rarely she)
has managed to figure them out, or, more likely, has somehow swiped
the knowledge from people who already know.
In 1989 and 1990, one particular RBOC, BellSouth,
which felt particularly troubled, spent a purported $1.2
million on computer security. Some think it spent as
much as two million, if you count all the associated costs.
Two million dollars is still very little compared to the
great cost-saving utility of telephonic computer systems.
Unfortunately, computers are also stupid.
Unlike human beings, computers possess the truly
profound stupidity of the inanimate.
In the 1960s, in the first shocks of spreading computerization,
there was much easy talk about the stupidity of computers--
how they could "only follow the program" and were rigidly required
to do "only what they were told." There has been rather less talk
about the stupidity of computers since they began to achieve
grandmaster status in chess tournaments, and to manifest
many other impressive forms of apparent cleverness.
Nevertheless, computers STILL are profoundly brittle and stupid;
they are simply vastly more subtle in their stupidity and brittleness.
The computers of the 1990s are much more reliable in their components
than earlier computer systems, but they are also called upon to do
far more complex things, under far more challenging conditions.
On a basic mathematical level, every single line of
a software program offers a chance for some possible screwup.
Software does not sit still when it works; it "runs,"
it interacts with itself and with its own inputs and outputs.
By analogy, it stretches like putty into millions of possible
shapes and conditions, so many shapes that they can never
all be successfully tested, not even in the lifespan of the universe.
Sometimes the putty snaps.
The stuff we call "software" is not like anything that human society
is used to thinking about. Software is something like a machine,
and something like mathematics, and something like language, and
something like thought, and art, and information. . . . But software
is not in fact any of those other things. The protean quality
of software is one of the great sources of its fascination.
It also makes software very powerful, very subtle,
very unpredictable, and very risky.
Some software is bad and buggy. Some is "robust,"
even "bulletproof." The best software is that which has
been tested by thousands of users under thousands of
different conditions, over years. It is then known as
"stable." This does NOT mean that the software is
now flawless, free of bugs. It generally means that there
are plenty of bugs in it, but the bugs are well-identified
and fairly well understood.
There is simply no way to assure that software is free
of flaws. Though software is mathematical in nature,
it cannot by "proven" like a mathematical theorem;
software is more like language, with inherent ambiguities,
with different definitions, different assumptions,
different levels of meaning that can conflict.
Human beings can manage, more or less, with
human language because we can catch the gist of it.
Computers, despite years of effort in "artificial intelligence,"
have proven spectacularly bad in "catching the gist" of anything at all.
The tiniest bit of semantic grit may still bring the mightiest computer
tumbling down. One of the most hazardous things you can do to a
computer program is try to improve it--to try to make it safer.
Software "patches" represent new, untried un-"stable" software,
which is by definition riskier.
The modern telephone system has come to depend,
utterly and irretrievably, upon software. And the
System Crash of January 15, 1990, was caused by an
IMPROVEMENT in software. Or rather, an ATTEMPTED
improvement.
As it happened, the problem itself--the problem per se--took this form.
A piece of telco software had been written in C language, a standard
language of the telco field. Within the C software was a
long "do. . .while" construct. The "do. . .while" construct
contained a "switch" statement. The "switch" statement contained
an "if" clause. The "if" clause contained a "break." The "break"
was SUPPOSED to "break" the "if clause." Instead, the "break"
broke the "switch" statement.
That was the problem, the actual reason why people picking up phones
on January 15, 1990, could not talk to one another.
Or at least, that was the subtle, abstract, cyberspatial
seed of the problem. This is how the problem manifested itself
from the realm of programming into the realm of real life.
The System 7 software for AT&T's 4ESS switching station,
the "Generic 44E14 Central Office Switch Software,"
had been extensively tested, and was considered very stable.
By the end of 1989, eighty of AT&T's switching systems
nationwide had been programmed with the new software. Cautiously,
thirty-four stations were left to run the slower, less-capable
System 6, because AT&T suspected there might be shakedown problems
with the new and unprecedently sophisticated System 7 network.
The stations with System 7 were programmed to switch over to a backup net
in case of any problems. In mid-December 1989, however, a new high-velocity,
high-security software patch was distributed to each of the 4ESS switches
that would enable them to switch over even more quickly, making the System 7
network that much more secure.
Unfortunately, every one of these 4ESS switches was now in possession
of a small but deadly flaw.
In order to maintain the network, switches must monitor
the condition of other switches--whether they are up and running,
whether they have temporarily shut down, whether they are overloaded
and in need of assistance, and so forth. The new software helped
control this bookkeeping function by monitoring the status calls
from other switches.
It only takes four to six seconds for a troubled 4ESS switch
to rid itself of all its calls, drop everything temporarily,
and re-boot its software from scratch. Starting over from scratch
will generally rid the switch of any software problems that may have
developed in the course of running the system. Bugs that arise will
be simply wiped out by this process. It is a clever idea. This process
of automatically re-booting from scratch is known as the "normal fault
recovery routine." Since AT&T's software is in fact exceptionally stable,
systems rarely have to go into "fault recovery" in the first place;
but AT&T has always boasted of its "real world" reliability, and this
tactic is a belt-and-suspenders routine.
The 4ESS switch used its new software to monitor its fellow switches
as they recovered from faults. As other switches came back on line
after recovery, they would send their "OK" signals to the switch.
The switch would make a little note to that effect in its "status map,"
recognizing that the fellow switch was back and ready to go,
and should be sent some calls and put back to regular work.
Unfortunately, while it was busy bookkeeping with the status map,
the tiny flaw in the brand-new software came into play.
The flaw caused the 4ESS switch to interact, subtly but drastically,
with incoming telephone calls from human users. If--and only if--
two incoming phone-calls happened to hit the switch within a hundredth
of a second, then a small patch of data would be garbled by the flaw.
But the switch had been programmed to monitor itself
constantly for any possible damage to its data.
When the switch perceived that its data had been somehow garbled,
then it too would go down, for swift repairs to its software.
It would signal its fellow switches not to send any more work.
It would go into the fault-recovery mode for four to six seconds.
And then the switch would be fine again, and would send out its "OK,
ready for work" signal.
However, the "OK, ready for work" signal was the VERY THING THAT
HAD CAUSED THE SWITCH TO GO DOWN IN THE FIRST PLACE. And ALL the
System 7 switches had the same flaw in their status-map software.
As soon as they stopped to make the bookkeeping note that their fellow
switch was "OK," then they too would become vulnerable to the slight
chance that two phone-calls would hit them within a hundredth of a second.
At approximately 2:25 P.M. EST on Monday, January 15,
one of AT&T's 4ESS toll switching systems in New York City
had an actual, legitimate, minor problem. It went into fault
recovery routines, announced "I'm going down," then announced,
"I'm back, I'm OK." And this cheery message then blasted
throughout the network to many of its fellow 4ESS switches.
Many of the switches, at first, completely escaped trouble.
These lucky switches were not hit by the coincidence of
two phone calls within a hundredth of a second.
Their software did not fail--at first. But three switches--
in Atlanta, St. Louis, and Detroit--were unlucky,
and were caught with their hands full. And they went down.
And they came back up, almost immediately. And they too began
to broadcast the lethal message that they, too, were "OK" again,
activating the lurking software bug in yet other switches.
As more and more switches did have that bit of bad luck
and collapsed, the call-traffic became more and more densely
packed in the remaining switches, which were groaning
to keep up with the load. And of course, as the calls
became more densely packed, the switches were MUCH MORE LIKELY
to be hit twice within a hundredth of a second.
It only took four seconds for a switch to get well.
There was no PHYSICAL damage of any kind to the switches,
after all. Physically, they were working perfectly.
This situation was "only" a software problem.
But the 4ESS switches were leaping up and down every
four to six seconds, in a virulent spreading wave all over America,
in utter, manic, mechanical stupidity. They kept KNOCKING
one another down with their contagious "OK" messages.
It took about ten minutes for the chain reaction to cripple the network.
Even then, switches would periodically luck-out and manage to resume
their normal work. Many calls--millions of them--were managing
to get through. But millions weren't.
The switching stations that used System 6 were not directly affected.
Thanks to these old-fashioned switches, AT&T's national system avoided
complete collapse. This fact also made it clear to engineers that
System 7 was at fault.
Bell Labs engineers, working feverishly in New Jersey, Illinois,
and Ohio, first tried their entire repertoire of standard network
remedies on the malfunctioning System 7. None of the remedies worked,
of course, because nothing like this had ever happened to any
phone system before.
By cutting out the backup safety network entirely,
they were able to reduce the frenzy of "OK" messages
by about half. The system then began to recover, as the
chain reaction slowed. By 11:30 P.M. on Monday January
15, sweating engineers on the midnight shift breathed a
sigh of relief as the last switch cleared-up.
By Tuesday they were pulling all the brand-new 4ESS software
and replacing it with an earlier version of System 7.
If these had been human operators, rather than
computers at work, someone would simply have
eventually stopped screaming. It would have been
OBVIOUS that the situation was not "OK," and common
sense would have kicked in. Humans possess common sense--
at least to some extent. Computers simply don't.
On the other hand, computers can handle hundreds
of calls per second. Humans simply can't. If every single
human being in America worked for the phone company,
we couldn't match the performance of digital switches:
direct-dialling, three-way calling, speed-calling, call-
waiting, Caller ID, all the rest of the cornucopia
of digital bounty. Replacing computers with operators
is simply not an option any more.
And yet we still, anachronistically, expect humans to
be running our phone system. It is hard for us
to understand that we have sacrificed huge amounts
of initiative and control to senseless yet powerful machines.
When the phones fail, we want somebody to be responsible.
We want somebody to blame.
When the Crash of January 15 happened, the American populace
was simply not prepared to understand that enormous landslides
in cyberspace, like the Crash itself, can happen,
and can be nobody's fault in particular. It was easier to believe,
maybe even in some odd way more reassuring to believe,
that some evil person, or evil group, had done this to us.
"Hackers" had done it. With a virus. A trojan horse.
A software bomb. A dirty plot of some kind. People believed this,
responsible people. In 1990, they were looking hard for evidence
to confirm their heartfelt suspicions.
And they would look in a lot of places.
Come 1991, however, the outlines of an apparent new reality
would begin to emerge from the fog.
On July 1 and 2, 1991, computer-software collapses
in telephone switching stations disrupted service in
Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Once again, seemingly minor maintenance problems had
crippled the digital System 7. About twelve million
people were affected in the Crash of July 1, 1991.
Said the New York Times Service: "Telephone company executives
and federal regulators said they were not ruling out the possibility
of sabotage by computer hackers, but most seemed to think the problems
stemmed from some unknown defect in the software running the networks."
And sure enough, within the week, a red-faced software company,
DSC Communications Corporation of Plano, Texas, owned up
to "glitches" in the "signal transfer point" software that
DSC had designed for Bell Atlantic and Pacific Bell.
The immediate cause of the July 1 Crash was a single
mistyped character: one tiny typographical flaw
in one single line of the software. One mistyped letter,
in one single line, had deprived the nation's capital of phone service.
It was not particularly surprising that this tiny flaw had escaped attention:
a typical System 7 station requires TEN MILLION lines of code.
On Tuesday, September 17, 1991, came the most spectacular outage yet.
This case had nothing to do with software failures--at least, not directly.
Instead, a group of AT&T's switching stations in New York City had simply
run out of electrical power and shut down cold. Their back-up batteries
had failed. Automatic warning systems were supposed to warn of the loss
of battery power, but those automatic systems had failed as well.
This time, Kennedy, La Guardia, and Newark airports
all had their voice and data communications cut.
This horrifying event was particularly ironic, as attacks
on airport computers by hackers had long been a standard
nightmare scenario, much trumpeted by computer-security
experts who feared the computer underground. There had even
been a Hollywood thriller about sinister hackers ruining
airport computers--DIE HARD II.
Now AT&T itself had crippled airports with computer malfunctions--
not just one airport, but three at once, some of the busiest in the world.
Air traffic came to a standstill throughout the Greater New York area,
causing more than 500 flights to be cancelled, in a spreading wave
all over America and even into Europe. Another 500 or so flights
were delayed, affecting, all in all, about 85,000 passengers.
(One of these passengers was the chairman of the Federal
Communications Commission.)
Stranded passengers in New York and New Jersey were further
infuriated to discover that they could not even manage to
make a long distance phone call, to explain their delay
to loved ones or business associates. Thanks to the crash,
about four and a half million domestic calls, and half a million
international calls, failed to get through.
The September 17 NYC Crash, unlike the previous ones,
involved not a whisper of "hacker" misdeeds. On the contrary,
by 1991, AT&T itself was suffering much of the vilification
that had formerly been directed at hackers. Congressmen were grumbling.
So were state and federal regulators. And so was the press.
For their part, ancient rival MCI took out snide full-page
newspaper ads in New York, offering their own long-distance
services for the "next time that AT&T goes down."
"You wouldn't find a classy company like AT&T using such advertising,"
protested AT&T Chairman Robert Allen, unconvincingly. Once again,
out came the full-page AT&T apologies in newspapers, apologies for
"an inexcusable culmination of both human and mechanical failure."
(This time, however, AT&T offered no discount on later calls.
Unkind critics suggested that AT&T were worried about setting any precedent
for refunding the financial losses caused by telephone crashes.)
Industry journals asked publicly if AT&T was "asleep at the switch."
The telephone network, America's purported marvel of high-tech reliability,
had gone down three times in 18 months. Fortune magazine listed the
Crash of September 17 among the "Biggest Business Goofs of 1991,"
cruelly parodying AT&T's ad campaign in an article entitled
"AT&T Wants You Back (Safely On the Ground, God Willing)."
Why had those New York switching systems simply run out of power?
Because no human being had attended to the alarm system.
Why did the alarm systems blare automatically,
without any human being noticing? Because the three
telco technicians who SHOULD have been listening
were absent from their stations in the power-room,
on another floor of the building--attending a training class.
A training class about the alarm systems for the power room!
"Crashing the System" was no longer "unprecedented" by late 1991.
On the contrary, it no longer even seemed an oddity. By 1991,
it was clear that all the policemen in the world could no longer
"protect" the phone system from crashes. By far the worst crashes
the system had ever had, had been inflicted, by the system,
upon ITSELF. And this time nobody was making cocksure statements
that this was an anomaly, something that would never happen again.
By 1991 the System's defenders had met their nebulous Enemy,
and the Enemy was--the System.
PART TWO: THE DIGITAL UNDERGROUND
The date was May 9, 1990. The Pope was touring Mexico City.
Hustlers from the Medellin Cartel were trying to buy
black-market Stinger missiles in Florida. On the comics page,
Doonesbury character Andy was dying of AIDS. And then. . .a highly
unusual item whose novelty and calculated rhetoric won it
headscratching attention in newspapers all over America.
The US Attorney's office in Phoenix, Arizona, had issued
a press release announcing a nationwide law enforcement crackdown
against "illegal computer hacking activities." The sweep was
officially known as "Operation Sundevil."
Eight paragraphs in the press release gave the bare facts:
twenty-seven search warrants carried out on May 8, with three arrests,
and a hundred and fifty agents on the prowl in "twelve" cities across America.
(Different counts in local press reports yielded "thirteen," "fourteen," and
"sixteen" cities.) Officials estimated that criminal losses of revenue
to telephone companies "may run into millions of dollars." Credit for
the Sundevil investigations was taken by the US Secret Service,
Assistant US Attorney Tim Holtzen of Phoenix, and the Assistant
Attorney General of Arizona, Gail Thackeray.
The prepared remarks of Garry M. Jenkins, appearing in a U.S. Department
of Justice press release, were of particular interest. Mr. Jenkins was the
Assistant Director of the US Secret Service, and the highest-ranking federal
official to take any direct public role in the hacker crackdown of 1990.
"Today, the Secret Service is sending a clear message to those computer hackers
who have decided to violate the laws of this nation in the mistaken belief
that they can successfully avoid detection by hiding behind the relative
anonymity of their computer terminals. (. . .) "Underground groups have been
formed for the purpose of exchanging information relevant to their criminal
activities. These groups often communicate with each other through message
systems between computers called `bulletin boards.' "Our experience shows
that many computer hacker suspects are no longer misguided teenagers,
mischievously playing games with their computers in their bedrooms.
Some are now high tech computer operators using computers to engage
in unlawful conduct."
Who were these "underground groups" and "high-tech operators?"
Where had they come from? What did they want? Who WERE they?
Were they "mischievous?" Were they dangerous? How had "misguided teenagers"
managed to alarm the United States Secret Service? And just how widespread
was this sort of thing?
Of all the major players in the Hacker Crackdown: the phone companies,
law enforcement, the civil libertarians, and the "hackers" themselves--
the "hackers" are by far the most mysterious, by far the hardest to
understand, by far the WEIRDEST.
Not only are "hackers" novel in their activities, but they come
in a variety of odd subcultures, with a variety of languages,
motives and values.
The earliest proto-hackers were probably those unsung mischievous
telegraph boys who were summarily fired by the Bell Company in 1878.
Legitimate "hackers," those computer enthusiasts who are independent-minded
but law-abiding, generally trace their spiritual ancestry to elite technical
universities, especially M.I.T. and Stanford, in the 1960s.
But the genuine roots of the modern hacker UNDERGROUND can probably be traced
most successfully to a now much-obscured hippie anarchist movement known as
the Yippies. The Yippies, who took their name from the largely fictional
"Youth International Party," carried out a loud and lively policy of surrealistic
subversion and outrageous political mischief. Their basic tenets were flagrant
sexual promiscuity, open and copious drug use, the political overthrow of any
powermonger over thirty years of age, and an immediate end to the war
in Vietnam, by any means necessary, including the psychic levitation
of the Pentagon.
The two most visible Yippies were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin.
Rubin eventually became a Wall Street broker. Hoffman, ardently sought
by federal authorities, went into hiding for seven years,
in Mexico, France, and the United States. While on the lam,
Hoffman continued to write and publish, with help from sympathizers
in the American anarcho-leftist underground. Mostly, Hoffman survived
through false ID and odd jobs. Eventually he underwent facial plastic
surgery and adopted an entirely new identity as one "Barry Freed."
After surrendering himself to authorities in 1980, Hoffman spent a year
in prison on a cocaine conviction.
Hoffman's worldview grew much darker as the glory days of the 1960s faded.
In 1989, he purportedly committed suicide, under odd and, to some, rather
suspicious circumstances.
Abbie Hoffman is said to have caused the Federal Bureau of Investigation
to amass the single largest investigation file ever opened on an individual
American citizen. (If this is true, it is still questionable whether the
FBI regarded Abbie Hoffman a serious public threat--quite possibly,
his file was enormous simply because Hoffman left colorful legendry
wherever he went). He was a gifted publicist, who regarded electronic
media as both playground and weapon. He actively enjoyed manipulating
network TV and other gullible, image-hungry media, with various weird lies,
mindboggling rumors, impersonation scams, and other sinister distortions,
all absolutely guaranteed to upset cops, Presidential candidates,
and federal judges. Hoffman's most famous work was a book self-reflexively
known as STEAL THIS BOOK, which publicized a number of methods by which young,
penniless hippie agitators might live off the fat of a system supported by
humorless drones. STEAL THIS BOOK, whose title urged readers to damage
the very means of distribution which had put it into their hands,
might be described as a spiritual ancestor of a computer virus.
Hoffman, like many a later conspirator, made extensive use of
pay-phones for his agitation work--in his case, generally through
the use of cheap brass washers as coin-slugs.
During the Vietnam War, there was a federal surtax imposed on telephone
service; Hoffman and his cohorts could, and did, argue that in systematically
stealing phone service they were engaging in civil disobedience:
virtuously denying tax funds to an illegal and immoral war.
But this thin veil of decency was soon dropped entirely.
Ripping-off the System found its own justification in deep alienation
and a basic outlaw contempt for conventional bourgeois values.
Ingenious, vaguely politicized varieties of rip-off,
which might be described as "anarchy by convenience,"
became very popular in Yippie circles, and because rip-off
was so useful, it was to survive the Yippie movement itself.
In the early 1970s, it required fairly limited expertise
and ingenuity to cheat payphones, to divert "free"
electricity and gas service, or to rob vending machines
and parking meters for handy pocket change. It also required
a conspiracy to spread this knowledge, and the gall
and nerve actually to commit petty theft, but the Yippies
had these qualifications in plenty. In June 1971, Abbie
Hoffman and a telephone enthusiast sarcastically known
as "Al Bell" began publishing a newsletter called Youth
International Party Line. This newsletter was dedicated
to collating and spreading Yippie rip-off techniques,
especially of phones, to the joy of the freewheeling
underground and the insensate rage of all straight people.
As a political tactic, phone-service theft ensured
that Yippie advocates would always have ready access
to the long-distance telephone as a medium, despite
the Yippies' chronic lack of organization, discipline,
money, or even a steady home address.
PARTY LINE was run out of Greenwich Village for a couple of years,
then "Al Bell" more or less defected from the faltering ranks of Yippiedom,
changing the newsletter's name to TAP or Technical Assistance Program.
After the Vietnam War ended, the steam began leaking rapidly out of American
radical dissent. But by this time, "Bell" and his dozen or so
core contributors had the bit between their teeth,
and had begun to derive tremendous gut-level satisfaction
from the sensation of pure TECHNICAL POWER.
TAP articles, once highly politicized, became pitilessly jargonized
and technical, in homage or parody to the Bell System's own technical
documents, which TAP studied closely, gutted, and reproduced without
permission. The TAP elite revelled in gloating possession
of the specialized knowledge necessary to beat the system.
"Al Bell" dropped out of the game by the late 70s,
and "Tom Edison" took over; TAP readers (some 1400 of
them, all told) now began to show more interest in telex
switches and the growing phenomenon of computer systems.
In 1983, "Tom Edison" had his computer stolen and his house
set on fire by an arsonist. This was an eventually mortal blow
to TAP (though the legendary name was to be resurrected
in 1990 by a young Kentuckian computer-outlaw named "Predat0r.")
#
Ever since telephones began to make money, there have been
people willing to rob and defraud phone companies.
The legions of petty phone thieves vastly outnumber those
"phone phreaks" who "explore the system" for the sake
of the intellectual challenge. The New York metropolitan area
(long in the vanguard of American crime) claims over 150,000
physical attacks on pay telephones every year! Studied carefully,
a modern payphone reveals itself as a little fortress, carefully
designed and redesigned over generations, to resist coin-slugs,
zaps of electricity, chunks of coin-shaped ice, prybars, magnets,
lockpicks, blasting caps. Public pay- phones must survive in a world
of unfriendly, greedy people, and a modern payphone is as exquisitely
evolved as a cactus.
Because the phone network pre-dates the computer network,
the scofflaws known as "phone phreaks" pre-date the scofflaws
known as "computer hackers." In practice, today, the line
between "phreaking" and "hacking" is very blurred,
just as the distinction between telephones and computers
has blurred. The phone system has been digitized,
and computers have learned to "talk" over phone-lines.
What's worse--and this was the point of the Mr. Jenkins
of the Secret Service--some hackers have learned to steal,
and some thieves have learned to hack.
Despite the blurring, one can still draw a few useful
behavioral distinctions between "phreaks" and "hackers."
Hackers are intensely interested in the "system" per se,
and enjoy relating to machines. "Phreaks" are more
social, manipulating the system in a rough-and-ready
fashion in order to get through to other human beings,
fast, cheap and under the table.
Phone phreaks love nothing so much as "bridges,"
illegal conference calls of ten or twelve chatting
conspirators, seaboard to seaboard, lasting for many hours
--and running, of course, on somebody else's tab,
preferably a large corporation's.
As phone-phreak conferences wear on, people drop out
(or simply leave the phone off the hook, while they
sashay off to work or school or babysitting),
and new people are phoned up and invited to join in,
from some other continent, if possible. Technical trivia,
boasts, brags, lies, head-trip deceptions, weird rumors,
and cruel gossip are all freely exchanged.
The lowest rung of phone-phreaking is the theft of telephone access codes.
Charging a phone call to somebody else's stolen number is, of course,
a pig-easy way of stealing phone service, requiring practically no
technical expertise. This practice has been very widespread,
especially among lonely people without much money who are far from home.
Code theft has flourished especially in college dorms, military bases,
and, notoriously, among roadies for rock bands. Of late, code theft
has spread very rapidly among Third Worlders in the US, who pile up
enormous unpaid long-distance bills to the Caribbean, South America,
and Pakistan.