of investigators, it was impossible to prove that the Legion had crashed
the phone system on January 15, because they, in fact, hadn't done so.
The investigations of 1989 did show that certain members of
the Legion of Doom had achieved unprecedented power over the telco
switching stations, and that they were in active conspiracy
to obtain more power yet. Investigators were privately convinced
that the Legion of Doom intended to do awful things with this knowledge,
but mere evil intent was not enough to put them in jail.
And although the Atlanta Three--Prophet, Leftist, and especially Urvile--
had taught Fry Guy plenty, they were not themselves credit-card fraudsters.
The only thing they'd "stolen" was long-distance service--and since they'd
done much of that through phone-switch manipulation, there was no easy way
to judge how much they'd "stolen," or whether this practice was even "theft"
of any easily recognizable kind.
Fry Guy's theft of long-distance codes had cost the phone companies plenty.
The theft of long-distance service may be a fairly theoretical "loss,"
but it costs genuine money and genuine time to delete all those stolen codes,
and to re-issue new codes to the innocent owners of those corrupted codes.
The owners of the codes themselves are victimized, and lose time and money
and peace of mind in the hassle. And then there were the credit-card victims
to deal with, too, and Western Union. When it came to rip-off, Fry Guy was
far more of a thief than LoD. It was only when it came to actual computer
expertise that Fry Guy was small potatoes.
The Atlanta Legion thought most "rules" of cyberspace were for rodents
and losers, but they DID have rules. THEY NEVER CRASHED ANYTHING,
AND THEY NEVER TOOK MONEY. These were rough rules-of-thumb, and
rather dubious principles when it comes to the ethical subtleties
of cyberspace, but they enabled the Atlanta Three to operate with
a relatively clear conscience (though never with peace of mind).
If you didn't hack for money, if you weren't robbing people of actual funds
--money in the bank, that is-- then nobody REALLY got hurt, in LoD's opinion.
"Theft of service" was a bogus issue, and "intellectual property" was
a bad joke. But LoD had only elitist contempt for rip-off artists,
"leechers," thieves. They considered themselves clean. In their opinion,
if you didn't smash-up or crash any systems --(well, not on purpose, anyhow--
accidents can happen, just ask Robert Morris) then it was very unfair
to call you a "vandal" or a "cracker." When you were hanging out on-line
with your "pals" in telco security, you could face them down from the higher
plane of hacker morality. And you could mock the police from the supercilious
heights of your hacker's quest for pure knowledge.
But from the point of view of law enforcement and telco security, however,
Fry Guy was not really dangerous. The Atlanta Three WERE dangerous.
It wasn't the crimes they were committing, but the DANGER,
the potential hazard, the sheer TECHNICAL POWER LoD had accumulated,
that had made the situation untenable. Fry Guy was not LoD.
He'd never laid eyes on anyone in LoD; his only contacts with them
had been electronic. Core members of the Legion of Doom tended to meet
physically for conventions every year or so, to get drunk, give each other
the hacker high-sign, send out for pizza and ravage hotel suites.
Fry Guy had never done any of this. Deborah Daniels assessed Fry Guy
accurately as "an LoD wannabe."
Nevertheless Fry Guy's crimes would be directly attributed to LoD
in much future police propaganda. LoD would be described as
"a closely knit group" involved in "numerous illegal activities"
including "stealing and modifying individual credit histories,"
and "fraudulently obtaining money and property." Fry Guy did this,
but the Atlanta Three didn't; they simply weren't into theft,
but rather intrusion. This caused a strange kink in
the prosecution's strategy. LoD were accused of
"disseminating information about attacking computers
to other computer hackers in an effort to shift the focus
of law enforcement to those other hackers and away from the Legion of Doom."
This last accusation (taken directly from a press release by the Chicago
Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force) sounds particularly far-fetched.
One might conclude at this point that investigators would have been
well-advised to go ahead and "shift their focus" from the "Legion of Doom."
Maybe they SHOULD concentrate on "those other hackers"--the ones who were
actually stealing money and physical objects.
But the Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was not a simple policing action.
It wasn't meant just to walk the beat in cyberspace--it was a CRACKDOWN,
a deliberate attempt to nail the core of the operation, to send a dire
and potent message that would settle the hash of the digital underground
for good.
By this reasoning, Fry Guy wasn't much more than the electronic equivalent
of a cheap streetcorner dope dealer. As long as the masterminds of LoD were
still flagrantly operating, pushing their mountains of illicit knowledge
right and left, and whipping up enthusiasm for blatant lawbreaking,
then there would be an INFINITE SUPPLY of Fry Guys.
Because LoD were flagrant, they had left trails everywhere,
to be picked up by law enforcement in New York, Indiana,
Florida, Texas, Arizona, Missouri, even Australia.
But 1990's war on the Legion of Doom was led out of Illinois,
by the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force.
#
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force, led by federal prosecutor
William J. Cook, had started in 1987 and had swiftly become one
of the most aggressive local "dedicated computer-crime units."
Chicago was a natural home for such a group. The world's first
computer bulletin-board system had been invented in Illinois.
The state of Illinois had some of the nation's first and sternest
computer crime laws. Illinois State Police were markedly alert
to the possibilities of white-collar crime and electronic fraud.
And William J. Cook in particular was a rising star in
electronic crime-busting. He and his fellow federal prosecutors
at the U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago had a tight relation
with the Secret Service, especially go-getting Chicago-based agent
Timothy Foley. While Cook and his Department of Justice colleagues
plotted strategy, Foley was their man on the street.
Throughout the 1980s, the federal government had given prosecutors
an armory of new, untried legal tools against computer crime.
Cook and his colleagues were pioneers in the use of these new statutes
in the real-life cut-and-thrust of the federal courtroom.
On October 2, 1986, the US Senate had passed the
"Computer Fraud and Abuse Act" unanimously, but there
were pitifully few convictions under this statute.
Cook's group took their name from this statute,
since they were determined to transform this powerful but
rather theoretical Act of Congress into a real-life engine
of legal destruction against computer fraudsters and scofflaws.
It was not a question of merely discovering crimes,
investigating them, and then trying and punishing their
perpetrators. The Chicago unit, like most everyone else
in the business, already KNEW who the bad guys were:
the Legion of Doom and the writers and editors of Phrack.
The task at hand was to find some legal means of putting
these characters away.
This approach might seem a bit dubious, to someone not
acquainted with the gritty realities of prosecutorial work.
But prosecutors don't put people in jail for crimes
they have committed; they put people in jail for crimes
they have committed THAT CAN BE PROVED IN COURT.
Chicago federal police put Al Capone in prison
for income-tax fraud. Chicago is a big town,
with a rough-and-ready bare-knuckle tradition
on both sides of the law.
Fry Guy had broken the case wide open and alerted telco security
to the scope of the problem. But Fry Guy's crimes would not
put the Atlanta Three behind bars--much less the wacko underground
journalists of Phrack. So on July 22, 1989, the same day that
Fry Guy was raided in Indiana, the Secret Service descended upon
the Atlanta Three.
This was likely inevitable. By the summer of 1989, law enforcement
were closing in on the Atlanta Three from at least six directions at once.
First, there were the leads from Fry Guy, which had led to the DNR registers
being installed on the lines of the Atlanta Three. The DNR evidence alone
would have finished them off, sooner or later.
But second, the Atlanta lads were already well-known to Control-C
and his telco security sponsors. LoD's contacts with telco security
had made them overconfident and even more boastful than usual;
they felt that they had powerful friends in high places,
and that they were being openly tolerated by telco security.
But BellSouth's Intrusion Task Force were hot on the trail of LoD
and sparing no effort or expense.
The Atlanta Three had also been identified by name and listed
on the extensive anti-hacker files maintained, and retailed for pay,
by private security operative John Maxfield of Detroit.
Maxfield, who had extensive ties to telco security
and many informants in the underground, was a bete noire
of the Phrack crowd, and the dislike was mutual.
The Atlanta Three themselves had written articles for Phrack.
This boastful act could not possibly escape telco and law enforcement
attention.
"Knightmare," a high-school age hacker from Arizona,
was a close friend and disciple of Atlanta LoD,
but he had been nabbed by the formidable Arizona
Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit. Knightmare was
on some of LoD's favorite boards--"Black Ice" in particular--
and was privy to their secrets. And to have Gail Thackeray,
the Assistant Attorney General of Arizona, on one's trail
was a dreadful peril for any hacker.
And perhaps worst of all, Prophet had committed a major blunder
by passing an illicitly copied BellSouth computer-file to Knight Lightning,
who had published it in Phrack. This, as we will see, was an act of dire
consequence for almost everyone concerned.
On July 22, 1989, the Secret Service showed up at the Leftist's house,
where he lived with his parents. A massive squad of some twenty officers
surrounded the building: Secret Service, federal marshals, local police,
possibly BellSouth telco security; it was hard to tell in the crush.
Leftist's dad, at work in his basement office, first noticed
a muscular stranger in plain clothes crashing through the
back yard with a drawn pistol. As more strangers poured
into the house, Leftist's dad naturally assumed there was
an armed robbery in progress.
Like most hacker parents, Leftist's mom and dad had only the vaguest
notions of what their son had been up to all this time. Leftist had
a day-job repairing computer hardware. His obsession with computers
seemed a bit odd, but harmless enough, and likely to produce a well-
paying career. The sudden, overwhelming raid left Leftist's
parents traumatized.
The Leftist himself had been out after work with his co-workers,
surrounding a couple of pitchers of margaritas. As he came trucking
on tequila-numbed feet up the pavement, toting a bag full of floppy-disks,
he noticed a large number of unmarked cars parked in his driveway.
All the cars sported tiny microwave antennas.
The Secret Service had knocked the front door off its hinges,
almost flattening his mom.
Inside, Leftist was greeted by Special Agent James Cool
of the US Secret Service, Atlanta office. Leftist was flabbergasted.
He'd never met a Secret Service agent before. He could not imagine
that he'd ever done anything worthy of federal attention.
He'd always figured that if his activities became intolerable,
one of his contacts in telco security would give him a private
phone-call and tell him to knock it off.
But now Leftist was pat-searched for weapons by grim professionals,
and his bag of floppies was quickly seized. He and his parents were
all shepherded into separate rooms and grilled at length as a score
of officers scoured their home for anything electronic.
Leftist was horrified as his treasured IBM AT personal computer
with its forty-meg hard disk, and his recently purchased 80386 IBM-clone
with a whopping hundred-meg hard disk, both went swiftly out the door
in Secret Service custody. They also seized all his disks, all his notebooks,
and a tremendous booty in dogeared telco documents that Leftist had snitched
out of trash dumpsters.
Leftist figured the whole thing for a big misunderstanding.
He'd never been into MILITARY computers. He wasn't a SPY or a COMMUNIST.
He was just a good ol' Georgia hacker, and now he just wanted all these
people out of the house. But it seemed they wouldn't go until he made
some kind of statement.
And so, he levelled with them.
And that, Leftist said later from his federal prison camp in Talladega,
Alabama, was a big mistake. The Atlanta area was unique,
in that it had three members of the Legion of Doom who actually
occupied more or less the same physical locality. Unlike the rest
of LoD, who tended to associate by phone and computer,
Atlanta LoD actually WERE "tightly knit." It was no real
surprise that the Secret Service agents apprehending Urvile
at the computer-labs at Georgia Tech, would discover Prophet
with him as well.
Urvile, a 21-year-old Georgia Tech student in polymer chemistry,
posed quite a puzzling case for law enforcement. Urvile--also known
as "Necron 99," as well as other handles, for he tended to change his
cover-alias about once a month--was both an accomplished hacker
and a fanatic simulation-gamer.
Simulation games are an unusual hobby; but then hackers are unusual people,
and their favorite pastimes tend to be somewhat out of the ordinary.
The best-known American simulation game is probably "Dungeons & Dragons,"
a multi-player parlor entertainment played with paper, maps, pencils,
statistical tables and a variety of oddly-shaped dice. Players pretend
to be heroic characters exploring a wholly-invented fantasy world.
The fantasy worlds of simulation gaming are commonly pseudo-medieval,
involving swords and sorcery--spell-casting wizards, knights in armor,
unicorns and dragons, demons and goblins.
Urvile and his fellow gamers preferred their fantasies highly technological.
They made use of a game known as "G.U.R.P.S.," the "Generic Universal Role
Playing System," published by a company called Steve Jackson Games (SJG).
"G.U.R.P.S." served as a framework for creating a wide variety of artificial
fantasy worlds. Steve Jackson Games published a smorgasboard of books,
full of detailed information and gaming hints, which were used to flesh-out
many different fantastic backgrounds for the basic GURPS framework.
Urvile made extensive use of two SJG books called GURPS High-Tech
and GURPS Special Ops.
In the artificial fantasy-world of GURPS Special Ops,
players entered a modern fantasy of intrigue and international espionage.
On beginning the game, players started small and powerless,
perhaps as minor-league CIA agents or penny-ante arms dealers.
But as players persisted through a series of game sessions
(game sessions generally lasted for hours, over long,
elaborate campaigns that might be pursued for months on end)
then they would achieve new skills, new knowledge, new power.
They would acquire and hone new abilities, such as marksmanship,
karate, wiretapping, or Watergate burglary. They could also win
various kinds of imaginary booty, like Berettas, or martini shakers,
or fast cars with ejection seats and machine-guns under the headlights.
As might be imagined from the complexity of these games,
Urvile's gaming notes were very detailed and extensive.
Urvile was a "dungeon-master," inventing scenarios
for his fellow gamers, giant simulated adventure-puzzles
for his friends to unravel. Urvile's game notes covered
dozens of pages with all sorts of exotic lunacy, all about
ninja raids on Libya and break-ins on encrypted Red Chinese supercomputers.
His notes were written on scrap-paper and kept in loose-leaf binders.
The handiest scrap paper around Urvile's college digs were the many pounds of
BellSouth printouts and documents that he had snitched out of telco dumpsters.
His notes were written on the back of misappropriated telco property.
Worse yet, the gaming notes were chaotically interspersed with Urvile's
hand-scrawled records involving ACTUAL COMPUTER INTRUSIONS that he
had committed.
Not only was it next to impossible to tell Urvile's fantasy game-notes
from cyberspace "reality," but Urvile himself barely made this distinction.
It's no exaggeration to say that to Urvile it was ALL a game. Urvile was
very bright, highly imaginative, and quite careless of other people's notions
of propriety. His connection to "reality" was not something to which he paid
a great deal of attention.
Hacking was a game for Urvile. It was an amusement he was carrying out,
it was something he was doing for fun. And Urvile was an obsessive young man.
He could no more stop hacking than he could stop in the middle of
a jigsaw puzzle, or stop in the middle of reading a Stephen Donaldson
fantasy trilogy. (The name "Urvile" came from a best-selling Donaldson novel.)
Urvile's airy, bulletproof attitude seriously annoyed his interrogators.
First of all, he didn't consider that he'd done anything wrong.
There was scarcely a shred of honest remorse in him. On the contrary,
he seemed privately convinced that his police interrogators were operating
in a demented fantasy-world all their own. Urvile was too polite
and well-behaved to say this straight-out, but his reactions were askew
and disquieting.
For instance, there was the business about LoD's ability
to monitor phone-calls to the police and Secret Service.
Urvile agreed that this was quite possible, and posed
no big problem for LoD. In fact, he and his friends
had kicked the idea around on the "Black Ice" board,
much as they had discussed many other nifty notions,
such as building personal flame-throwers and jury-rigging
fistfulls of blasting-caps. They had hundreds of dial-up numbers
for government agencies that they'd gotten through scanning Atlanta phones,
or had pulled from raided VAX/VMS mainframe computers.
Basically, they'd never gotten around to listening in on the cops
because the idea wasn't interesting enough to bother with.
Besides, if they'd been monitoring Secret Service phone calls,
obviously they'd never have been caught in the first place. Right?
The Secret Service was less than satisfied with this rapier-like hacker logic.
Then there was the issue of crashing the phone system. No problem,
Urvile admitted sunnily. Atlanta LoD could have shut down phone service
all over Atlanta any time they liked. EVEN THE 911 SERVICE?
Nothing special about that, Urvile explained patiently.
Bring the switch to its knees, with say the UNIX "makedir" bug,
and 911 goes down too as a matter of course. The 911 system
wasn't very interesting, frankly. It might be tremendously
interesting to cops (for odd reasons of their own), but as
technical challenges went, the 911 service was yawnsville.
So of course the Atlanta Three could crash service.
They probably could have crashed service all over
BellSouth territory, if they'd worked at it for a while.
But Atlanta LoD weren't crashers. Only losers and rodents
were crashers. LoD were ELITE.
Urvile was privately convinced that sheer technical
expertise could win him free of any kind of problem.
As far as he was concerned, elite status in the digital
underground had placed him permanently beyond the intellectual
grasp of cops and straights. Urvile had a lot to learn.
Of the three LoD stalwarts, Prophet was in the most direct trouble.
Prophet was a UNIX programming expert who burrowed in and out
of the Internet as a matter of course. He'd started his hacking
career at around age 14, meddling with a UNIX mainframe system
at the University of North Carolina.
Prophet himself had written the handy Legion of Doom
file "UNIX Use and Security From the Ground Up."
UNIX (pronounced "you-nicks") is a powerful,
flexible computer operating-system, for multi-user,
multi-tasking computers. In 1969, when UNIX was created
in Bell Labs, such computers were exclusive to large
corporations and universities, but today UNIX is run
on thousands of powerful home machines. UNIX was
particularly well-suited to telecommunications programming,
and had become a standard in the field. Naturally, UNIX
also became a standard for the elite hacker and phone phreak.
Lately, Prophet had not been so active as Leftist and Urvile,
but Prophet was a recidivist. In 1986, when he was eighteen,
Prophet had been convicted of "unauthorized access
to a computer network" in North Carolina. He'd been
discovered breaking into the Southern Bell Data Network,
a UNIX-based internal telco network supposedly closed to the public.
He'd gotten a typical hacker sentence: six months suspended,
120 hours community service, and three years' probation.
After that humiliating bust, Prophet had gotten rid of most of his
tonnage of illicit phreak and hacker data, and had tried to go straight.
He was, after all, still on probation. But by the autumn of 1988,
the temptations of cyberspace had proved too much for young Prophet,
and he was shoulder-to-shoulder with Urvile and Leftist into some
of the hairiest systems around.
In early September 1988, he'd broken into BellSouth's centralized
automation system, AIMSX or "Advanced Information Management System."
AIMSX was an internal business network for BellSouth, where telco
employees stored electronic mail, databases, memos, and calendars,
and did text processing. Since AIMSX did not have public dial-ups,
it was considered utterly invisible to the public, and was not well-secured
--it didn't even require passwords. Prophet abused an account known
as "waa1," the personal account of an unsuspecting telco employee.
Disguised as the owner of waa1, Prophet made about ten visits to AIMSX.
Prophet did not damage or delete anything in the system.
His presence in AIMSX was harmless and almost invisible.
But he could not rest content with that.
One particular piece of processed text on AIMSX was a telco document
known as "Bell South Standard Practice 660-225-104SV Control Office
Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special Services
and Major Account Centers dated March 1988."
Prophet had not been looking for this document. It was merely one
among hundreds of similar documents with impenetrable titles.
However, having blundered over it in the course of his illicit
wanderings through AIMSX, he decided to take it with him as a trophy.
It might prove very useful in some future boasting, bragging,
and strutting session. So, some time in September 1988,
Prophet ordered the AIMSX mainframe computer to copy this document
(henceforth called simply called "the E911 Document") and to transfer
this copy to his home computer.
No one noticed that Prophet had done this. He had "stolen"
the E911 Document in some sense, but notions of property
in cyberspace can be tricky. BellSouth noticed nothing wrong,
because BellSouth still had their original copy. They had not
been "robbed" of the document itself. Many people were supposed
to copy this document--specifically, people who worked for the
nineteen BellSouth "special services and major account centers,"
scattered throughout the Southeastern United States. That was
what it was for, why it was present on a computer network
in the first place: so that it could be copied and read--
by telco employees. But now the data had been copied
by someone who wasn't supposed to look at it.
Prophet now had his trophy. But he further decided to store
yet another copy of the E911 Document on another person's computer.
This unwitting person was a computer enthusiast named Richard Andrews
who lived near Joliet, Illinois. Richard Andrews was a UNIX programmer
by trade, and ran a powerful UNIX board called "Jolnet," in the basement
of his house.
Prophet, using the handle "Robert Johnson," had obtained an account
on Richard Andrews' computer. And there he stashed the E911 Document,
by storing it in his own private section of Andrews' computer.
Why did Prophet do this? If Prophet had eliminated the E911 Document
from his own computer, and kept it hundreds of miles away, on another machine, under an
alias, then he might have been fairly safe from discovery and prosecution--
although his sneaky action had certainly put the unsuspecting Richard Andrews
at risk.
But, like most hackers, Prophet was a pack-rat for illicit data.
When it came to the crunch, he could not bear to part from his trophy.
When Prophet's place in Decatur, Georgia was raided in July 1989,
there was the E911 Document, a smoking gun. And there was Prophet
in the hands of the Secret Service, doing his best to "explain."
Our story now takes us away from the Atlanta Three and their raids
of the Summer of 1989. We must leave Atlanta Three "cooperating fully"
with their numerous investigators. And all three of them did cooperate,
as their Sentencing Memorandum from the US District Court of the
Northern Division of Georgia explained--just before all three of them
were sentenced to various federal prisons in November 1990.
We must now catch up on the other aspects of the war on the Legion of Doom.
The war on the Legion was a war on a network--in fact, a network of three
networks, which intertwined and interrelated in a complex fashion.
The Legion itself, with Atlanta LoD, and their hanger-on Fry Guy,
were the first network. The second network was Phrack magazine,
with its editors and contributors.
The third network involved the electronic circle around a hacker
known as "Terminus."
The war against these hacker networks was carried out by
a law enforcement network. Atlanta LoD and Fry Guy
were pursued by USSS agents and federal prosecutors in Atlanta,
Indiana, and Chicago. "Terminus" found himself pursued by USSS
and federal prosecutors from Baltimore and Chicago. And the war
against Phrack was almost entirely a Chicago operation.
The investigation of Terminus involved a great deal of energy,
mostly from the Chicago Task Force, but it was to be the least-known
and least-publicized of the Crackdown operations. Terminus, who lived
in Maryland, was a UNIX programmer and consultant, fairly well-known
(under his given name) in the UNIX community, as an acknowledged expert
on AT&T minicomputers. Terminus idolized AT&T, especially Bellcore,
and longed for public recognition as a UNIX expert; his highest ambition
was to work for Bell Labs.
But Terminus had odd friends and a spotted history.
Terminus had once been the subject of an admiring interview
in Phrack (Volume II, Issue 14, Phile 2--dated May 1987).
In this article, Phrack co-editor Taran King described
"Terminus" as an electronics engineer, 5'9", brown-haired,
born in 1959--at 28 years old, quite mature for a hacker.
Terminus had once been sysop of a phreak/hack underground board
called "MetroNet," which ran on an Apple II. Later he'd replaced
"MetroNet" with an underground board called "MegaNet,"
specializing in IBMs. In his younger days, Terminus had written
one of the very first and most elegant code-scanning programs
for the IBM-PC. This program had been widely distributed
in the underground. Uncounted legions of PC-owning phreaks and
hackers had used Terminus's scanner program to rip-off telco codes.
This feat had not escaped the attention of telco security;
it hardly could, since Terminus's earlier handle, "Terminal Technician,"
was proudly written right on the program.
When he became a full-time computer professional
(specializing in telecommunications programming),
he adopted the handle Terminus, meant to indicate that he
had "reached the final point of being a proficient hacker."
He'd moved up to the UNIX-based "Netsys" board on an AT&T computer,
with four phone lines and an impressive 240 megs of storage.
"Netsys" carried complete issues of Phrack, and Terminus was
quite friendly with its publishers, Taran King and Knight Lightning.
In the early 1980s, Terminus had been a regular on Plovernet,
Pirate-80, Sherwood Forest and Shadowland, all well-known pirate boards,
all heavily frequented by the Legion of Doom. As it happened, Terminus
was never officially "in LoD," because he'd never been given the official
LoD high-sign and back-slap by Legion maven Lex Luthor. Terminus had
never physically met anyone from LoD. But that scarcely mattered much--
the Atlanta Three themselves had never been officially vetted by Lex, either.
As far as law enforcement was concerned, the issues were clear.
Terminus was a full-time, adult computer professional
with particular skills at AT&T software and hardware--
but Terminus reeked of the Legion of Doom and the underground.
On February 1, 1990--half a month after the Martin Luther King Day Crash--
USSS agents Tim Foley from Chicago, and Jack Lewis from the Baltimore office,
accompanied by AT&T security officer Jerry Dalton, travelled to Middle Town,
Maryland. There they grilled Terminus in his home (to the stark terror of
his wife and small children), and, in their customary fashion, hauled his
computers out the door.
The Netsys machine proved to contain a plethora of arcane UNIX software--
proprietary source code formally owned by AT&T. Software such as:
UNIX System Five Release 3.2; UNIX SV Release 3.1; UUCP communications
software; KORN SHELL; RFS; IWB; WWB; DWB; the C++ programming language;
PMON; TOOL CHEST; QUEST; DACT, and S FIND.
In the long-established piratical tradition of the underground,
Terminus had been trading this illicitly-copied software with
a small circle of fellow UNIX programmers. Very unwisely,
he had stored seven years of his electronic mail on his Netsys machine,
which documented all the friendly arrangements he had made with
his various colleagues.
Terminus had not crashed the AT&T phone system on January 15.
He was, however, blithely running a not-for-profit AT&T
software-piracy ring. This was not an activity AT&T found amusing.
AT&T security officer Jerry Dalton valued this "stolen" property
at over three hundred thousand dollars.
AT&T's entry into the tussle of free enterprise had been complicated
by the new, vague groundrules of the information economy.
Until the break-up of Ma Bell, AT&T was forbidden to sell
computer hardware or software. Ma Bell was the phone company;
Ma Bell was not allowed to use the enormous revenue from
telephone utilities, in order to finance any entry into
the computer market.
AT&T nevertheless invented the UNIX operating system.
And somehow AT&T managed to make UNIX a minor source of income.
Weirdly, UNIX was not sold as computer software,
but actually retailed under an obscure regulatory
exemption allowing sales of surplus equipment and scrap.
Any bolder attempt to promote or retail UNIX would have
aroused angry legal opposition from computer companies.
Instead, UNIX was licensed to universities, at modest rates,
where the acids of academic freedom ate away steadily at AT&T's
proprietary rights.
Come the breakup, AT&T recognized that UNIX was a potential gold-mine.
By now, large chunks of UNIX code had been created that were not AT&T's,
and were being sold by others. An entire rival UNIX-based operating system
had arisen in Berkeley, California (one of the world's great founts of
ideological hackerdom). Today, "hackers" commonly consider "Berkeley UNIX"
to be technically superior to AT&T's "System V UNIX," but AT&T has not
allowed mere technical elegance to intrude on the real-world business
of marketing proprietary software. AT&T has made its own code deliberately
incompatible with other folks' UNIX, and has written code that it can prove
is copyrightable, even if that code happens to be somewhat awkward--"kludgey."
AT&T UNIX user licenses are serious business agreements, replete with very
clear copyright statements and non-disclosure clauses.
AT&T has not exactly kept the UNIX cat in the bag,
but it kept a grip on its scruff with some success.
By the rampant, explosive standards of software piracy,
AT&T UNIX source code is heavily copyrighted, well-guarded,
well-licensed. UNIX was traditionally run only on
mainframe machines, owned by large groups of suit-and-tie
professionals, rather than on bedroom machines where
people can get up to easy mischief.
And AT&T UNIX source code is serious high-level programming.
The number of skilled UNIX programmers with any actual motive
to swipe UNIX source code is small. It's tiny, compared to
the tens of thousands prepared to rip-off, say, entertaining
PC games like "Leisure Suit Larry."
But by 1989, the warez-d00d underground, in the persons of Terminus
and his friends, was gnawing at AT&T UNIX. And the property in question
was not sold for twenty bucks over the counter at the local branch of
Babbage's or Egghead's; this was massive, sophisticated, multi-line,
multi-author corporate code worth tens of thousands of dollars.
It must be recognized at this point that Terminus's purported ring of UNIX
software pirates had not actually made any money from their suspected crimes.
The $300,000 dollar figure bandied about for the contents of Terminus's
computer did not mean that Terminus was in actual illicit possession
of three hundred thousand of AT&T's dollars. Terminus was shipping
software back and forth, privately, person to person, for free.
He was not making a commercial business of piracy. He hadn't
asked for money; he didn't take money. He lived quite modestly.
AT&T employees--as well as freelance UNIX consultants, like Terminus--
commonly worked with "proprietary" AT&T software, both in the office
and at home on their private machines. AT&T rarely sent security officers
out to comb the hard disks of its consultants. Cheap freelance UNIX
contractors were quite useful to AT&T; they didn't have health insurance
or retirement programs, much less union membership in the Communication
Workers of America. They were humble digital drudges, wandering with mop
and bucket through the Great Technological Temple of AT&T; but when the
Secret Service arrived at their homes, it seemed they were eating with
company silverware and sleeping on company sheets! Outrageously, they
behaved as if the things they worked with every day belonged to them!
And these were no mere hacker teenagers with their hands full
of trash-paper and their noses pressed to the corporate windowpane.
These guys were UNIX wizards, not only carrying AT&T data in their
machines and their heads, but eagerly networking about it,
over machines that were far more powerful than anything previously
imagined in private hands. How do you keep people disposable,
yet assure their awestruck respect for your property? It was a dilemma.
Much UNIX code was public-domain, available for free. Much "proprietary"
UNIX code had been extensively re-written, perhaps altered so much that it
became an entirely new product--or perhaps not. Intellectual property rights
for software developers were, and are, extraordinarily complex and confused.
And software "piracy," like the private copying of videos, is one of the most
widely practiced "crimes" in the world today.
The USSS were not experts in UNIX or familiar with the customs of its use.
The United States Secret Service, considered as a body, did not have one single
person in it who could program in a UNIX environment--no, not even one.
The Secret Service WERE making extensive use of expert help, but the "experts"
they had chosen were AT&T and Bellcore security officials, the very victims of
the purported crimes under investigation, the very people whose interest in
AT&T's "proprietary" software was most pronounced.
On February 6, 1990, Terminus was arrested by Agent Lewis.
Eventually, Terminus would be sent to prison for his illicit
use of a piece of AT&T software.
The issue of pirated AT&T software would bubble along in the background
during the war on the Legion of Doom. Some half-dozen of Terminus's on-line
acquaintances, including people in Illinois, Texas and California,
were grilled by the Secret Service in connection with the illicit
copying of software. Except for Terminus, however, none were charged
with a crime. None of them shared his peculiar prominence in the
hacker underground.
But that did not mean that these people would, or could,
stay out of trouble. The transferral of illicit data in
cyberspace is hazy and ill-defined business, with paradoxical
dangers for everyone concerned: hackers, signal carriers,
board owners, cops, prosecutors, even random passers-by.
Sometimes, well-meant attempts to avert trouble
or punish wrongdoing bring more trouble than
would simple ignorance, indifference or impropriety.
Terminus's "Netsys" board was not a common-or-garden
bulletin board system, though it had most of the usual
functions of a board. Netsys was not a stand-alone machine,
but part of the globe-spanning "UUCP" cooperative network.
The UUCP network uses a set of Unix software programs called
"Unix-to-Unix Copy," which allows Unix systems to throw data to
one another at high speed through the public telephone network.
UUCP is a radically decentralized, not-for-profit network of UNIX computers.
There are tens of thousands of these UNIX machines. Some are small,
but many are powerful and also link to other networks. UUCP has
certain arcane links to major networks such as JANET, EasyNet, BITNET,
JUNET, VNET, DASnet, PeaceNet and FidoNet, as well as the gigantic Internet.
(The so-called "Internet" is not actually a network itself, but rather an
"internetwork" connections standard that allows several globe-spanning
computer networks to communicate with one another. Readers fascinated
by the weird and intricate tangles of modern computer networks may enjoy
John S. Quarterman's authoritative 719-page explication, The Matrix,
Digital Press, 1990.)
A skilled user of Terminus' UNIX machine could send and receive
electronic mail from almost any major computer network in the world.
Netsys was not called a "board" per se, but rather a "node."
"Nodes" were larger, faster, and more sophisticated than mere "boards,"
and for hackers, to hang out on internationally-connected "nodes"
was quite the step up from merely hanging out on local "boards."
Terminus's Netsys node in Maryland had a number of direct
links to other, similar UUCP nodes, run by people who shared his
interests and at least something of his free-wheeling attitude.
One of these nodes was Jolnet, owned by Richard Andrews, who,
like Terminus, was an independent UNIX consultant.
Jolnet also ran UNIX, and could be contacted at high speed
by mainframe machines from all over the world. Jolnet was
quite a sophisticated piece of work, technically speaking,
but it was still run by an individual, as a private,
not-for-profit hobby. Jolnet was mostly used by other
UNIX programmers--for mail, storage, and access to networks.
Jolnet supplied access network access to about two hundred people,
as well as a local junior college.
Among its various features and services, Jolnet also carried
Phrack magazine.
For reasons of his own, Richard Andrews had become suspicious
of a new user called "Robert Johnson." Richard Andrews
took it upon himself to have a look at what "Robert Johnson"
was storing in Jolnet. And Andrews found the E911 Document.
"Robert Johnson" was the Prophet from the Legion of Doom,
and the E911 Document was illicitly copied data from Prophet's
raid on the BellSouth computers.
The E911 Document, a particularly illicit piece of digital property,
was about to resume its long, complex, and disastrous career.
It struck Andrews as fishy that someone not a telephone employee
should have a document referring to the "Enhanced 911 System."
Besides, the document itself bore an obvious warning.
"WARNING: NOT FOR USE OR DISCLOSURE OUTSIDE BELLSOUTH
OR ANY OF ITS SUBSIDIARIES EXCEPT UNDER WRITTEN AGREEMENT."
These standard nondisclosure tags are often appended to all sorts
of corporate material. Telcos as a species are particularly notorious
for stamping most everything in sight as "not for use or disclosure."
Still, this particular piece of data was about the 911 System.
That sounded bad to Rich Andrews.
Andrews was not prepared to ignore this sort of trouble.
He thought it would be wise to pass the document along
to a friend and acquaintance on the UNIX network, for consultation.
So, around September 1988, Andrews sent yet another copy of the
E911 Document electronically to an AT&T employee, one Charles Boykin,
who ran a UNIX-based node called "attctc" in Dallas, Texas.
"Attctc" was the property of AT&T, and was run from AT&T's
Customer Technology Center in Dallas, hence the name "attctc."
"Attctc" was better-known as "Killer," the name of the machine
that the system was running on. "Killer" was a hefty, powerful,
AT&T 3B2 500 model, a multi-user, multi-tasking UNIX platform
with 32 meg of memory and a mind-boggling 3.2 Gigabytes of storage.
When Killer had first arrived in Texas, in 1985, the 3B2 had been
one of AT&T's great white hopes for going head-to-head with IBM
for the corporate computer-hardware market. "Killer" had been shipped
to the Customer Technology Center in the Dallas Infomart, essentially
a high-technology mall, and there it sat, a demonstration model.
Charles Boykin, a veteran AT&T hardware and digital communications expert,
was a local technical backup man for the AT&T 3B2 system. As a display model
in the Infomart mall, "Killer" had little to do, and it seemed a shame
to waste the system's capacity. So Boykin ingeniously wrote some UNIX
bulletin-board software for "Killer," and plugged the machine in to the
local phone network. "Killer's" debut in late 1985 made it the first
publicly available UNIX site in the state of Texas. Anyone who wanted to
play was welcome.
The machine immediately attracted an electronic community.
It joined the UUCP network, and offered network links
to over eighty other computer sites, all of which became dependent
on Killer for their links to the greater world of cyberspace.
And it wasn't just for the big guys; personal computer users
also stored freeware programs for the Amiga, the Apple,
the IBM and the Macintosh on Killer's vast 3,200 meg archives.
At one time, Killer had the largest library of public-domain
Macintosh software in Texas.
Eventually, Killer attracted about 1,500 users,
all busily communicating, uploading and downloading,
getting mail, gossipping, and linking to arcane
and distant networks.
Boykin received no pay for running Killer. He considered
it good publicity for the AT&T 3B2 system (whose sales were
somewhat less than stellar), but he also simply enjoyed
the vibrant community his skill had created. He gave away
the bulletin-board UNIX software he had written, free of charge.
In the UNIX programming community, Charlie Boykin had the
reputation of a warm, open-hearted, level-headed kind of guy.
In 1989, a group of Texan UNIX professionals voted Boykin
"System Administrator of the Year." He was considered
a fellow you could trust for good advice.
In September 1988, without warning, the E911 Document
came plunging into Boykin's life, forwarded by Richard Andrews.
Boykin immediately recognized that the Document was hot property.
He was not a voice-communications man, and knew little about
the ins and outs of the Baby Bells, but he certainly knew what
the 911 System was, and he was angry to see confidential data
about it in the hands of a nogoodnik. This was clearly a
matter for telco security. So, on September 21, 1988, Boykin
made yet ANOTHER copy of the E911 Document and passed this
one along to a professional acquaintance of his, one Jerome Dalton,
from AT&T Corporate Information Security. Jerry Dalton was the
very fellow who would later raid Terminus's house.
From AT&T's security division, the E911 Document went to Bellcore.
Bellcore (or BELL COmmunications REsearch) had once been the central
laboratory of the Bell System. Bell Labs employees had invented
the UNIX operating system. Now Bellcore was a quasi-independent,
jointly owned company that acted as the research arm for all seven
of the Baby Bell RBOCs. Bellcore was in a good position to co-ordinate
security technology and consultation for the RBOCs, and the gentleman in
charge of this effort was Henry M. Kluepfel, a veteran of the Bell System
who had worked there for twenty-four years.
On October 13, 1988, Dalton passed the E911 Document to Henry Kluepfel.
Kluepfel, a veteran expert witness in telecommunications fraud and
computer-fraud cases, had certainly seen worse trouble than this.
He recognized the document for what it was: a trophy from a hacker break-in.
However, whatever harm had been done in the intrusion was presumably old news.
At this point there seemed little to be done. Kluepfel made a careful note
of the circumstances and shelved the problem for the time being.
Whole months passed.
February 1989 arrived. The Atlanta Three were living it up
in Bell South's switches, and had not yet met their comeuppance.
The Legion was thriving. So was Phrack magazine.
A good six months had passed since Prophet's AIMSX break-in.
Prophet, as hackers will, grew weary of sitting on his laurels.
"Knight Lightning" and "Taran King," the editors of Phrack,
were always begging Prophet for material they could publish.
Prophet decided that the heat must be off by this time,
and that he could safely brag, boast, and strut.
So he sent a copy of the E911 Document--yet another one--
from Rich Andrews' Jolnet machine to Knight Lightning's
BITnet account at the University of Missouri.
Let's review the fate of the document so far.
0. The original E911 Document. This in the AIMSX system
on a mainframe computer in Atlanta, available to hundreds of people,
but all of them, presumably, BellSouth employees. An unknown number
of them may have their own copies of this document, but they are all
professionals and all trusted by the phone company.
1. Prophet's illicit copy, at home on his own computer in Decatur, Georgia.
2. Prophet's back-up copy, stored on Rich Andrew's Jolnet machine
in the basement of Rich Andrews' house near Joliet Illinois.
3. Charles Boykin's copy on "Killer" in Dallas, Texas,
sent by Rich Andrews from Joliet.
4. Jerry Dalton's copy at AT&T Corporate Information Security in New Jersey,
sent from Charles Boykin in Dallas.
5. Henry Kluepfel's copy at Bellcore security headquarters in New Jersey,
sent by Dalton.
6. Knight Lightning's copy, sent by Prophet from Rich Andrews' machine,
and now in Columbia, Missouri.
We can see that the "security" situation of this proprietary document,
once dug out of AIMSX, swiftly became bizarre. Without any money
changing hands, without any particular special effort, this data
had been reproduced at least six times and had spread itself all over
the continent. By far the worst, however, was yet to come.
In February 1989, Prophet and Knight Lightning bargained electronically
over the fate of this trophy. Prophet wanted to boast, but, at the same time,
scarcely wanted to be caught.
For his part, Knight Lightning was eager to publish as much of the document
as he could manage. Knight Lightning was a fledgling political-science major
with a particular interest in freedom-of-information issues. He would gladly
publish most anything that would reflect glory on the prowess of the
underground and embarrass the telcos. However, Knight Lightning himself
had contacts in telco security, and sometimes consulted them on material
he'd received that might be too dicey for publication.
Prophet and Knight Lightning decided to edit the E911 Document
so as to delete most of its identifying traits. First of all,
its large "NOT FOR USE OR DISCLOSURE" warning had to go.
Then there were other matters. For instance, it listed
the office telephone numbers of several BellSouth 911
specialists in Florida. If these phone numbers were
published in Phrack, the BellSouth employees involved
would very likely be hassled by phone phreaks,
which would anger BellSouth no end, and pose a
definite operational hazard for both Prophet and Phrack.
So Knight Lightning cut the Document almost in half,
removing the phone numbers and some of the touchier
and more specific information. He passed it back
electronically to Prophet; Prophet was still nervous,
so Knight Lightning cut a bit more. They finally agreed
that it was ready to go, and that it would be published
in Phrack under the pseudonym, "The Eavesdropper."
And this was done on February 25, 1989.
The twenty-fourth issue of Phrack featured a chatty interview
with co-ed phone-phreak "Chanda Leir," three articles on BITNET
and its links to other computer networks, an article on 800 and 900
numbers by "Unknown User," "VaxCat's" article on telco basics
(slyly entitled "Lifting Ma Bell's Veil of Secrecy,)" and
the usual "Phrack World News."
The News section, with painful irony, featured an extended account
of the sentencing of "Shadowhawk," an eighteen-year-old Chicago hacker
who had just been put in federal prison by William J. Cook himself.
And then there were the two articles by "The Eavesdropper."
The first was the edited E911 Document, now titled
"Control Office Administration Of Enhanced 911 Services
for Special Services and Major Account Centers."
Eavesdropper's second article was a glossary of terms
explaining the blizzard of telco acronyms and buzzwords
in the E911 Document.
The hapless document was now distributed, in the usual Phrack routine,
to a good one hundred and fifty sites. Not a hundred and fifty PEOPLE,
mind you--a hundred and fifty SITES, some of these sites linked to UNIX
nodes or bulletin board systems, which themselves had readerships of tens,
dozens, even hundreds of people.
This was February 1989. Nothing happened immediately.
Summer came, and the Atlanta crew were raided by the Secret Service.
Fry Guy was apprehended. Still nothing whatever happened to Phrack.
Six more issues of Phrack came out, 30 in all, more or less on
a monthly schedule. Knight Lightning and co-editor Taran King
went untouched.
Phrack tended to duck and cover whenever the heat came down.
During the summer busts of 1987--(hacker busts tended to cluster in summer,
perhaps because hackers were easier to find at home than in college)--
Phrack had ceased publication for several months, and laid low.
Several LoD hangers-on had been arrested, but nothing had happened
to the Phrack crew, the premiere gossips of the underground.
In 1988, Phrack had been taken over by a new editor,
"Crimson Death," a raucous youngster with a taste for anarchy files.
1989, however, looked like a bounty year for the underground.
Knight Lightning and his co-editor Taran King took up the reins again,
and Phrack flourished throughout 1989. Atlanta LoD went down hard in
the summer of 1989, but Phrack rolled merrily on. Prophet's E911 Document
seemed unlikely to cause Phrack any trouble. By January 1990,
it had been available in Phrack for almost a year. Kluepfel and Dalton,
officers of Bellcore and AT&T security, had possessed the document
for sixteen months--in fact, they'd had it even before Knight Lightning
himself, and had done nothing in particular to stop its distribution.
They hadn't even told Rich Andrews or Charles Boykin to erase the copies
from their UNIX nodes, Jolnet and Killer.
But then came the monster Martin Luther King Day Crash of January 15, 1990.
A flat three days later, on January 18, four agents showed up
at Knight Lightning's fraternity house. One was Timothy Foley,
the second Barbara Golden, both of them Secret Service agents
from the Chicago office. Also along was a University of Missouri
security officer, and Reed Newlin, a security man from Southwestern Bell,
the RBOC having jurisdiction over Missouri.
Foley accused Knight Lightning of causing the nationwide crash
of the phone system.
Knight Lightning was aghast at this allegation. On the face of it,
the suspicion was not entirely implausible--though Knight Lightning
knew that he himself hadn't done it. Plenty of hot-dog hackers
had bragged that they could crash the phone system, however.
"Shadowhawk," for instance, the Chicago hacker whom William Cook
had recently put in jail, had several times boasted on boards
that he could "shut down AT&T's public switched network."
And now this event, or something that looked just like it,
had actually taken place. The Crash had lit a fire under
the Chicago Task Force. And the former fence-sitters at
Bellcore and AT&T were now ready to roll. The consensus
among telco security--already horrified by the skill of
the BellSouth intruders --was that the digital underground
was out of hand. LoD and Phrack must go. And in publishing
Prophet's E911 Document, Phrack had provided law enforcement
with what appeared to be a powerful legal weapon.
Foley confronted Knight Lightning about the E911 Document.
Knight Lightning was cowed. He immediately began "cooperating fully"
in the usual tradition of the digital underground.
He gave Foley a complete run of Phrack, printed out in a set
of three-ring binders. He handed over his electronic mailing list
of Phrack subscribers. Knight Lightning was grilled for four hours
by Foley and his cohorts. Knight Lightning admitted that Prophet
had passed him the E911 Document, and he admitted that he had known
it was stolen booty from a hacker raid on a telephone company.
Knight Lightning signed a statement to this effect, and agreed,
in writing, to cooperate with investigators.
Next day--January 19, 1990, a Friday --the Secret Service returned
with a search warrant, and thoroughly searched Knight Lightning's
upstairs room in the fraternity house. They took all his floppy disks,
though, interestingly, they left Knight Lightning in possession
of both his computer and his modem. (The computer had no hard disk,
and in Foley's judgement was not a store of evidence.) But this was a
very minor bright spot among Knight Lightning's rapidly multiplying troubles.
By this time, Knight Lightning was in plenty of hot water, not only with
federal police, prosecutors, telco investigators, and university security,
but with the elders of his own campus fraternity, who were outraged
to think that they had been unwittingly harboring a federal computer-criminal.
On Monday, Knight Lightning was summoned to Chicago, where he was
further grilled by Foley and USSS veteran agent Barbara Golden, this time
with an attorney present. And on Tuesday, he was formally indicted
by a federal grand jury.
The trial of Knight Lightning, which occurred on July 24-27, 1990,
was the crucial show-trial of the Hacker Crackdown. We will examine
the trial at some length in Part Four of this book.
In the meantime, we must continue our dogged pursuit of the E911 Document.
It must have been clear by January 1990 that the E911 Document,
in the form Phrack had published it back in February 1989,
had gone off at the speed of light in at least a hundred
and fifty different directions. To attempt to put this
electronic genie back in the bottle was flatly impossible.
And yet, the E911 Document was STILL stolen property,
formally and legally speaking. Any electronic transference
of this document, by anyone unauthorized to have it,
could be interpreted as an act of wire fraud. Interstate
transfer of stolen property, including electronic property,
was a federal crime.
The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force had been assured
that the E911 Document was worth a hefty sum of money. In fact,
they had a precise estimate of its worth from BellSouth security personnel:
$79,449. A sum of this scale seemed to warrant vigorous prosecution.
Even if the damage could not be undone, at least this large sum
offered a good legal pretext for stern punishment of the thieves.
It seemed likely to impress judges and juries. And it could be used
in court to mop up the Legion of Doom.
The Atlanta crowd was already in the bag, by the time
the Chicago Task Force had gotten around to Phrack.
But the Legion was a hydra-headed thing. In late 89,
a brand-new Legion of Doom board, "Phoenix Project,"
had gone up in Austin, Texas. Phoenix Project was sysoped
by no less a man than the Mentor himself, ably assisted by
University of Texas student and hardened Doomster "Erik Bloodaxe."
As we have seen from his Phrack manifesto, the Mentor was a hacker
zealot who regarded computer intrusion as something close to a moral duty.
Phoenix Project was an ambitious effort, intended to revive the digital
underground to what Mentor considered the full flower of the early 80s.
The Phoenix board would also boldly bring elite hackers face-to-face
with the telco "opposition." On "Phoenix," America's cleverest hackers
would supposedly shame the telco squareheads out of their stick-in-the-mud
attitudes, and perhaps convince them that the Legion of Doom elite were really
an all-right crew. The premiere of "Phoenix Project" was heavily trumpeted
by Phrack,and "Phoenix Project" carried a complete run of Phrack issues,
including the E911 Document as Phrack had published it.
Phoenix Project was only one of many--possibly hundreds--of nodes and boards
all over America that were in guilty possession of the E911 Document.
But Phoenix was an outright, unashamed Legion of Doom board.
Under Mentor's guidance, it was flaunting itself in the face
of telco security personnel. Worse yet, it was actively trying
to WIN THEM OVER as sympathizers for the digital underground elite.
"Phoenix" had no cards or codes on it. Its hacker elite considered
Phoenix at least technically legal. But Phoenix was a corrupting influence,
where hacker anarchy was eating away like digital acid at the underbelly
of corporate propriety.
The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force now prepared
to descend upon Austin, Texas.
Oddly, not one but TWO trails of the Task Force's investigation led
toward Austin. The city of Austin, like Atlanta, had made itself
a bulwark of the Sunbelt's Information Age, with a strong university
research presence, and a number of cutting-edge electronics companies,
including Motorola, Dell, CompuAdd, IBM, Sematech and MCC.
Where computing machinery went, hackers generally followed.
Austin boasted not only "Phoenix Project," currently LoD's
most flagrant underground board, but a number of UNIX nodes.
One of these nodes was "Elephant," run by a UNIX consultant
named Robert Izenberg. Izenberg, in search of a relaxed Southern
lifestyle and a lowered cost-of-living, had recently migrated
to Austin from New Jersey. In New Jersey, Izenberg had worked
for an independent contracting company, programming UNIX code for
AT&T itself. "Terminus" had been a frequent user on Izenberg's
privately owned Elephant node.
Having interviewed Terminus and examined the records on Netsys,
the Chicago Task Force were now convinced that they had discovered
an underground gang of UNIX software pirates, who were demonstrably
guilty of interstate trafficking in illicitly copied AT&T source code.
Izenberg was swept into the dragnet around Terminus, the self-proclaimed
ultimate UNIX hacker.
Izenberg, in Austin, had settled down into a UNIX job
with a Texan branch of IBM. Izenberg was no longer
working as a contractor for AT&T, but he had friends
in New Jersey, and he still logged on to AT&T UNIX
computers back in New Jersey, more or less whenever
it pleased him. Izenberg's activities appeared highly
suspicious to the Task Force. Izenberg might well be
breaking into AT&T computers, swiping AT&T software,
and passing it to Terminus and other possible confederates,
through the UNIX node network. And this data was worth,
not merely $79,499, but hundreds of thousands of dollars!
On February 21, 1990, Robert Izenberg arrived home
from work at IBM to find that all the computers
had mysteriously vanished from his Austin apartment.
Naturally he assumed that he had been robbed.
His "Elephant" node, his other machines, his notebooks,
his disks, his tapes, all gone! However, nothing much
else seemed disturbed--the place had not been ransacked.
The puzzle becaming much stranger some five minutes later.
Austin U. S. Secret Service Agent Al Soliz, accompanied by
University of Texas campus-security officer Larry Coutorie
and the ubiquitous Tim Foley, made their appearance at Izenberg's door.
They were in plain clothes: slacks, polo shirts. They came in,
and Tim Foley accused Izenberg of belonging to the Legion of Doom.
Izenberg told them that he had never heard of the "Legion of Doom."
And what about a certain stolen E911 Document, that posed a direct
threat to the police emergency lines? Izenberg claimed that he'd
never heard of that, either.
His interrogators found this difficult to believe.
Didn't he know Terminus?
Who?
They gave him Terminus's real name. Oh yes, said Izenberg.
He knew THAT guy all right--he was leading discussions
on the Internet about AT&T computers, especially the AT&T 3B2.
AT&T had thrust this machine into the marketplace,
but, like many of AT&T's ambitious attempts to enter
the computing arena, the 3B2 project had something less
than a glittering success. Izenberg himself had been
a contractor for the division of AT&T that supported the 3B2.
The entire division had been shut down.
Nowadays, the cheapest and quickest way to get help with this
fractious piece of machinery was to join one of Terminus's
discussion groups on the Internet, where friendly and knowledgeable
hackers would help you for free. Naturally the remarks within this
group were less than flattering about the Death Star. . .was
THAT the problem?
Foley told Izenberg that Terminus had been acquiring hot software
through his, Izenberg's, machine.
Izenberg shrugged this off. A good eight megabytes of data flowed
through his UUCP site every day. UUCP nodes spewed data like fire hoses.
Elephant had been directly linked to Netsys--not surprising, since Terminus
was a 3B2 expert and Izenberg had been a 3B2 contractor.
Izenberg was also linked to "attctc" and the University of Texas.
Terminus was a well-known UNIX expert, and might have been up to
all manner of hijinks on Elephant. Nothing Izenberg could do about that.
That was physically impossible. Needle in a haystack.
In a four-hour grilling, Foley urged Izenberg to come clean
and admit that he was in conspiracy with Terminus,
and a member of the Legion of Doom.
Izenberg denied this. He was no weirdo teenage hacker--
he was thirty-two years old, and didn't even have a "handle."
Izenberg was a former TV technician and electronics specialist
who had drifted into UNIX consulting as a full-grown adult.
Izenberg had never met Terminus, physically. He'd once bought
a cheap high-speed modem from him, though.
Foley told him that this modem (a Telenet T2500 which ran at 19.2 kilobaud,
and which had just gone out Izenberg's door in Secret Service custody)
was likely hot property. Izenberg was taken aback to hear this; but then
again, most of Izenberg's equipment, like that of most freelance professionals
in the industry, was discounted, passed hand-to-hand through various kinds
of barter and gray-market. There was no proof that the modem was stolen,
and even if it were, Izenberg hardly saw how that gave them the right
to take every electronic item in his house.
Still, if the United States Secret Service figured they needed
his computer for national security reasons--or whatever--
then Izenberg would not kick. He figured he would somehow
make the sacrifice of his twenty thousand dollars' worth
of professional equipment, in the spirit of full cooperation
and good citizenship.
Robert Izenberg was not arrested. Izenberg was not charged with any crime.
His UUCP node--full of some 140 megabytes of the files, mail, and data
of himself and his dozen or so entirely innocent users--went out the door
as "evidence." Along with the disks and tapes, Izenberg had lost about
800 megabytes of data.
Six months would pass before Izenberg decided to phone the Secret Service
and ask how the case was going. That was the first time that Robert Izenberg
would ever hear the name of William Cook. As of January 1992, a full
two years after the seizure, Izenberg, still not charged with any crime,
would be struggling through the morass of the courts, in hope of recovering
his thousands of dollars' worth of seized equipment.
In the meantime, the Izenberg case received absolutely no press coverage.
The Secret Service had walked into an Austin home, removed a UNIX bulletin-
board system, and met with no operational difficulties whatsoever.
Except that word of a crackdown had percolated through the Legion of Doom.
"The Mentor" voluntarily shut down "The Phoenix Project." It seemed a pity,
especially as telco security employees had, in fact, shown up on Phoenix,
just as he had hoped--along with the usual motley crowd of LoD heavies,
hangers-on, phreaks, hackers and wannabes. There was "Sandy" Sandquist from
US SPRINT security, and some guy named Henry Kluepfel, from Bellcore itself!
Kluepfel had been trading friendly banter with hackers on Phoenix since
January 30th (two weeks after the Martin Luther King Day Crash).
The presence of such a stellar telco official seemed quite the coup
for Phoenix Project.
Still, Mentor could judge the climate. Atlanta in ruins,
Phrack in deep trouble, something weird going on with UNIX nodes--
discretion was advisable. Phoenix Project went off-line.
Kluepfel, of course, had been monitoring this LoD bulletin
board for his own purposes--and those of the Chicago unit.
As far back as June 1987, Kluepfel had logged on to a Texas
underground board called "Phreak Klass 2600." There he'd
discovered an Chicago youngster named "Shadowhawk,"
strutting and boasting about rifling AT&T computer files,
and bragging of his ambitions to riddle AT&T's Bellcore
computers with trojan horse programs. Kluepfel had passed
the news to Cook in Chicago, Shadowhawk's computers
had gone out the door in Secret Service custody,
and Shadowhawk himself had gone to jail.
Now it was Phoenix Project's turn. Phoenix Project postured
about "legality" and "merely intellectual interest," but it reeked
of the underground. It had Phrack on it. It had the E911 Document.
It had a lot of dicey talk about breaking into systems, including some
bold and reckless stuff about a supposed "decryption service" that Mentor
and friends were planning to run, to help crack encrypted passwords off
of hacked systems.
Mentor was an adult. There was a bulletin board at his place of work,
as well. Kleupfel logged onto this board, too, and discovered it to be
called "Illuminati." It was run by some company called Steve Jackson Games.
On March 1, 1990, the Austin crackdown went into high gear.
On the morning of March 1--a Thursday--21-year-old University of Texas
student "Erik Bloodaxe," co-sysop of Phoenix Project and an avowed member
of the Legion of Doom, was wakened by a police revolver levelled at his head.
Bloodaxe watched, jittery, as Secret Service agents
appropriated his 300 baud terminal and, rifling his files,
discovered his treasured source-code for Robert Morris's
notorious Internet Worm. But Bloodaxe, a wily operator,
had suspected that something of the like might be coming.
All his best equipment had been hidden away elsewhere.
The raiders took everything electronic, however,
including his telephone. They were stymied by his
hefty arcade-style Pac-Man game, and left it in place,
as it was simply too heavy to move.
Bloodaxe was not arrested. He was not charged with any crime.
A good two years later, the police still had what they had
taken from him, however.
The Mentor was less wary. The dawn raid rousted him and his wife
from bed in their underwear, and six Secret Service agents,
accompanied by an Austin policeman and Henry Kluepfel himself,
made a rich haul. Off went the works, into the agents' white
Chevrolet minivan: an IBM PC-AT clone with 4 meg of RAM and
a 120-meg hard disk; a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet II printer;
a completely legitimate and highly expensive SCO-Xenix 286
operating system; Pagemaker disks and documentation;
and the Microsoft Word word-processing program. Mentor's wife
had her incomplete academic thesis stored on the hard-disk;
that went, too, and so did the couple's telephone. As of two years later,
all this property remained in police custody.
Mentor remained under guard in his apartment as agents prepared
to raid Steve Jackson Games. The fact that this was a business
headquarters and not a private residence did not deter the agents.
It was still very early; no one was at work yet. The agents prepared
to break down the door, but Mentor, eavesdropping on the Secret Service
walkie-talkie traffic, begged them not to do it, and offered his key
to the building.
The exact details of the next events are unclear. The agents
would not let anyone else into the building. Their search warrant,
when produced, was unsigned. Apparently they breakfasted from the local
"Whataburger," as the litter from hamburgers was later found inside.
They also extensively sampled a bag of jellybeans kept by an SJG employee.
Someone tore a "Dukakis for President" sticker from the wall.
SJG employees, diligently showing up for the day's work, were met
at the door and briefly questioned by U.S. Secret Service agents.
The employees watched in astonishment as agents wielding crowbars
and screwdrivers emerged with captive machines. They attacked
outdoor storage units with boltcutters. The agents wore
blue nylon windbreakers with "SECRET SERVICE" stencilled
across the back, with running-shoes and jeans.
Jackson's company lost three computers, several hard-disks,
hundred of floppy disks, two monitors, three modems,
a laser printer, various powercords, cables, and adapters
(and, oddly, a small bag of screws, bolts and nuts).
The seizure of Illuminati BBS deprived SJG of all the programs,
text files, and private e-mail on the board. The loss of two other
SJG computers was a severe blow as well, since it caused the loss
of electronically stored contracts, financial projections,
address directories, mailing lists, personnel files,
business correspondence, and, not least, the drafts
of forthcoming games and gaming books.
No one at Steve Jackson Games was arrested. No one was accused
of any crime. No charges were filed. Everything appropriated
was officially kept as "evidence" of crimes never specified.
After the Phrack show-trial, the Steve Jackson Games scandal
was the most bizarre and aggravating incident of the Hacker
Crackdown of 1990. This raid by the Chicago Task Force
on a science-fiction gaming publisher was to rouse a
swarming host of civil liberties issues, and gave rise
to an enduring controversy that was still re-complicating itself,
and growing in the scope of its implications, a full two years later.
The pursuit of the E911 Document stopped with the Steve Jackson Games raid.
As we have seen, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of computer users
in America with the E911 Document in their possession. Theoretically,
Chicago had a perfect legal right to raid any of these people,
and could have legally seized the machines of anybody who subscribed to Phrack.
However, there was no copy of the E911 Document on Jackson's Illuminati board.
And there the Chicago raiders stopped dead; they have not raided anyone since.
It might be assumed that Rich Andrews and Charlie Boykin, who had brought
the E911 Document to the attention of telco security, might be spared
any official suspicion. But as we have seen, the willingness to
"cooperate fully" offers little, if any, assurance against federal
anti-hacker prosecution.
Richard Andrews found himself in deep trouble, thanks to the E911 Document.
Andrews lived in Illinois, the native stomping grounds of the Chicago
Task Force. On February 3 and 6, both his home and his place of work
were raided by USSS. His machines went out the door, too, and he was
grilled at length (though not arrested). Andrews proved to be in
purportedly guilty possession of: UNIX SVR 3.2; UNIX SVR 3.1; UUCP;
PMON; WWB; IWB; DWB; NROFF; KORN SHELL '88; C++; and QUEST,
among other items. Andrews had received this proprietary code--
which AT&T officially valued at well over $250,000--through the
UNIX network, much of it supplied to him as a personal favor by Terminus.
Perhaps worse yet, Andrews admitted to returning the favor, by passing
Terminus a copy of AT&T proprietary STARLAN source code.
Even Charles Boykin, himself an AT&T employee, entered some very hot water.
By 1990, he'd almost forgotten about the E911 problem he'd reported in
September 88; in fact, since that date, he'd passed two more security alerts
to Jerry Dalton, concerning matters that Boykin considered far worse than
the E911 Document.
But by 1990, year of the crackdown, AT&T Corporate Information Security
was fed up with "Killer." This machine offered no direct income to AT&T,
and was providing aid and comfort to a cloud of suspicious yokels
from outside the company, some of them actively malicious toward AT&T,
its property, and its corporate interests. Whatever goodwill and publicity
had been won among Killer's 1,500 devoted users was considered no longer
worth the security risk. On February 20, 1990, Jerry Dalton arrived in
Dallas and simply unplugged the phone jacks, to the puzzled alarm
of Killer's many Texan users. Killer went permanently off-line,
with the loss of vast archives of programs and huge quantities
of electronic mail; it was never restored to service. AT&T showed
no particular regard for the "property" of these 1,500 people.
Whatever "property" the users had been storing on AT&T's computer
simply vanished completely.
Boykin, who had himself reported the E911 problem,
now found himself under a cloud of suspicion. In a weird
private-security replay of the Secret Service seizures,
Boykin's own home was visited by AT&T Security and his
own machines were carried out the door.
However, there were marked special features in the Boykin case.
Boykin's disks and his personal computers were swiftly examined
by his corporate employers and returned politely in just two days--
(unlike Secret Service seizures, which commonly take months or years).
Boykin was not charged with any crime or wrongdoing, and he kept his job
with AT&T (though he did retire from AT&T in September 1991,
at the age of 52).
It's interesting to note that the US Secret Service somehow failed
to seize Boykin's "Killer" node and carry AT&T's own computer out the door.
Nor did they raid Boykin's home. They seemed perfectly willing to take the
word of AT&T Security that AT&T's employee, and AT&T's "Killer" node,
were free of hacker contraband and on the up-and-up.
It's digital water-under-the-bridge at this point, as Killer's
3,200 megabytes of Texan electronic community were erased in 1990,
and "Killer" itself was shipped out of the state.
But the experiences of Andrews and Boykin, and the users of their systems,
remained side issues. They did not begin to assume the social, political,
and legal importance that gathered, slowly but inexorably, around the issue
of the raid on Steve Jackson Games.
#
We must now turn our attention to Steve Jackson Games itself,
and explain what SJG was, what it really did, and how it had
managed to attract this particularly odd and virulent kind of trouble.
The reader may recall that this is not the first but the second time
that the company has appeared in this narrative; a Steve Jackson game
called GURPS was a favorite pastime of Atlanta hacker Urvile,
and Urvile's science-fictional gaming notes had been mixed up
promiscuously with notes about his actual computer intrusions.
First, Steve Jackson Games, Inc., was NOT a publisher of "computer games."
SJG published "simulation games," parlor games that were played on paper,
with pencils, and dice, and printed guidebooks full of rules and
statistics tables. There were no computers involved in the games themselves.
When you bought a Steve Jackson Game, you did not receive any software disks.
What you got was a plastic bag with some cardboard game tokens,
maybe a few maps or a deck of cards. Most of their products were books.
However, computers WERE deeply involved in the Steve Jackson Games business.
Like almost all modern publishers, Steve Jackson and his fifteen employees
used computers to write text, to keep accounts, and to run the business
generally. They also used a computer to run their official bulletin board
system for Steve Jackson Games, a board called Illuminati. On Illuminati,
simulation gamers who happened to own computers and modems could associate,
trade mail, debate the theory and practice of gaming, and keep up with the
company's news and its product announcements.
Illuminati was a modestly popular board, run on a small computer
with limited storage, only one phone-line, and no ties to large-scale
computer networks. It did, however, have hundreds of users,
many of them dedicated gamers willing to call from out-of-state.
Illuminati was NOT an "underground" board. It did not feature hints
on computer intrusion, or "anarchy files," or illicitly posted
credit card numbers, or long-distance access codes.
Some of Illuminati's users, however, were members of the Legion of Doom.
And so was one of Steve Jackson's senior employees--the Mentor.
The Mentor wrote for Phrack, and also ran an underground board,
Phoenix Project--but the Mentor was not a computer professional.
The Mentor was the managing editor of Steve Jackson Games and
a professional game designer by trade. These LoD members did not
use Illuminati to help their HACKING activities. They used it to
help their GAME-PLAYING activities--and they were even more dedicated
to simulation gaming than they were to hacking.
"Illuminati" got its name from a card-game that Steve Jackson himself,
the company's founder and sole owner, had invented. This multi-player
card-game was one of Mr Jackson's best-known, most successful,
most technically innovative products. "Illuminati" was a game
of paranoiac conspiracy in which various antisocial cults warred
covertly to dominate the world. "Illuminati" was hilarious,
and great fun to play, involving flying saucers, the CIA, the KGB,
the phone companies, the Ku Klux Klan, the South American Nazis,
the cocaine cartels, the Boy Scouts, and dozens of other splinter groups
from the twisted depths of Mr. Jackson's professionally fervid imagination.
For the uninitiated, any public discussion of the "Illuminati" card-game
sounded, by turns, utterly menacing or completely insane.
And then there was SJG's "Car Wars," in which souped-up armored hot-rods
with rocket-launchers and heavy machine-guns did battle on the American
highways of the future. The lively Car Wars discussion on the Illuminati
board featured many meticulous, painstaking discussions of the effects
of grenades, land-mines, flamethrowers and napalm. It sounded like
hacker anarchy files run amuck.
Mr Jackson and his co-workers earned their daily bread by supplying people
with make-believe adventures and weird ideas. The more far-out, the better.
Simulation gaming is an unusual pastime, but gamers have not
generally had to beg the permission of the Secret Service to exist.
Wargames and role-playing adventures are an old and honored pastime,
much favored by professional military strategists. Once little-known,
these games are now played by hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts
throughout North America, Europe and Japan. Gaming-books, once restricted
to hobby outlets, now commonly appear in chain-stores like B. Dalton's
and Waldenbooks, and sell vigorously.
Steve Jackson Games, Inc., of Austin, Texas, was a games company
of the middle rank. In 1989, SJG grossed about a million dollars.
Jackson himself had a good reputation in his industry as a talented
and innovative designer of rather unconventional games, but his company
was something less than a titan of the field--certainly not like the
multimillion-dollar TSR Inc., or Britain's gigantic "Games Workshop."
SJG's Austin headquarters was a modest two-story brick office-suite,
cluttered with phones, photocopiers, fax machines and computers.
It bustled with semi-organized activity and was littered with
glossy promotional brochures and dog-eared science-fiction novels.
Attached to the offices was a large tin-roofed warehouse piled twenty feet
high with cardboard boxes of games and books. Despite the weird imaginings
that went on within it, the SJG headquarters was quite a quotidian,
everyday sort of place. It looked like what it was: a publishers' digs.
Both "Car Wars" and "Illuminati" were well-known, popular games.
But the mainstay of the Jackson organization was their Generic Universal
Role-Playing System, "G.U.R.P.S." The GURPS system was considered solid
and well-designed, an asset for players. But perhaps the most popular
feature of the GURPS system was that it allowed gaming-masters to design
scenarios that closely resembled well-known books, movies, and other works
of fantasy. Jackson had licensed and adapted works from many science fiction
and fantasy authors. There was GURPS Conan, GURPS Riverworld,
GURPS Horseclans, GURPS Witch World, names eminently familiar
to science-fiction readers. And there was GURPS Special Ops,
from the world of espionage fantasy and unconventional warfare.
And then there was GURPS Cyberpunk.
"Cyberpunk" was a term given to certain science fiction writers
who had entered the genre in the 1980s. "Cyberpunk," as the label implies,
had two general distinguishing features. First, its writers had a compelling
interest in information technology, an interest closely akin
to science fiction's earlier fascination with space travel.
And second, these writers were "punks," with all the
distinguishing features that that implies: Bohemian artiness,
youth run wild, an air of deliberate rebellion, funny clothes and hair,
odd politics, a fondness for abrasive rock and roll; in a word, trouble.
The "cyberpunk" SF writers were a small group of mostly college-educated
white middle-class litterateurs, scattered through the US and Canada.
Only one, Rudy Rucker, a professor of computer science in Silicon Valley,
could rank with even the humblest computer hacker. But, except for
Professor Rucker, the "cyberpunk" authors were not programmers
or hardware experts; they considered themselves artists
(as, indeed, did Professor Rucker). However, these writers
all owned computers, and took an intense and public interest
in the social ramifications of the information industry.
The cyberpunks had a strong following among the global generation
that had grown up in a world of computers, multinational networks,
and cable television. Their outlook was considered somewhat morbid,
cynical, and dark, but then again, so was the outlook of their
generational peers. As that generation matured and increased
in strength and influence, so did the cyberpunks.
As science-fiction writers went, they were doing
fairly well for themselves. By the late 1980s,
their work had attracted attention from gaming companies,
including Steve Jackson Games, which was planning a cyberpunk
simulation for the flourishing GURPS gaming-system.
The time seemed ripe for such a product, which had already been proven
in the marketplace. The first games- company out of the gate,
with a product boldly called "Cyberpunk" in defiance of possible
infringement-of-copyright suits, had been an upstart group called
R. Talsorian. Talsorian's Cyberpunk was a fairly decent game,
but the mechanics of the simulation system left a lot to be desired.
Commercially, however, the game did very well.
The next cyberpunk game had been the even more successful Shadowrun
by FASA Corporation. The mechanics of this game were fine, but the
scenario was rendered moronic by sappy fantasy elements like elves,
trolls, wizards, and dragons--all highly ideologically-incorrect,
according to the hard-edged, high-tech standards of cyberpunk science fiction.
Other game designers were champing at the bit. Prominent among them
was the Mentor, a gentleman who, like most of his friends in the
Legion of Doom, was quite the cyberpunk devotee. Mentor reasoned
that the time had come for a REAL cyberpunk gaming-book--one that the
princes of computer-mischief in the Legion of Doom could play without
laughing themselves sick. This book, GURPS Cyberpunk, would reek
of culturally on-line authenticity.
Mentor was particularly well-qualified for this task.
Naturally, he knew far more about computer-intrusion
and digital skullduggery than any previously published
cyberpunk author. Not only that, but he was good at his work.
A vivid imagination, combined with an instinctive feeling
for the working of systems and, especially, the loopholes
within them, are excellent qualities for a professional game designer.
By March 1st, GURPS Cyberpunk was almost complete, ready to print and ship.
Steve Jackson expected vigorous sales for this item, which, he hoped,
would keep the company financially afloat for several months.
GURPS Cyberpunk, like the other GURPS "modules," was not a "game"
like a Monopoly set, but a BOOK: a bound paperback book the size
of a glossy magazine, with a slick color cover, and pages full of text,
illustrations, tables and footnotes. It was advertised as a game,
and was used as an aid to game-playing, but it was a book,
with an ISBN number, published in Texas, copyrighted,
and sold in bookstores.
And now, that book, stored on a computer, had gone out the door
in the custody of the Secret Service.
The day after the raid, Steve Jackson visited the local Secret Service
headquarters with a lawyer in tow. There he confronted Tim Foley
(still in Austin at that time) and demanded his book back. But there
was trouble. GURPS Cyberpunk, alleged a Secret Service agent to astonished
businessman Steve Jackson, was "a manual for computer crime."
"It's science fiction," Jackson said.
"No, this is real."
This statement was repeated several times, by several agents.
Jackson's ominously accurate game had passed from pure,
obscure, small-scale fantasy into the impure, highly publicized,
large-scale fantasy of the Hacker Crackdown.
No mention was made of the real reason for the search.
According to their search warrant, the raiders had expected
to find the E911 Document stored on Jackson's bulletin board system.
But that warrant was sealed; a procedure that most law enforcement agencies
will use only when lives are demonstrably in danger. The raiders'
true motives were not discovered until the Jackson search-warrant
was unsealed by his lawyers, many months later. The Secret Service,
and the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force,
said absolutely nothing to Steve Jackson about any threat
to the police 911 System. They said nothing about the Atlanta Three,
nothing about Phrack or Knight Lightning, nothing about Terminus.
Jackson was left to believe that his computers had been seized because
he intended to publish a science fiction book that law enforcement
considered too dangerous to see print.
This misconception was repeated again and again, for months,
to an ever-widening public audience. It was not the truth of the case;
but as months passed, and this misconception was publicly printed again
and again, it became one of the few publicly known "facts" about
the mysterious Hacker Crackdown. The Secret Service had seized a computer
to stop the publication of a cyberpunk science fiction book.
The second section of this book, "The Digital Underground,"
is almost finished now. We have become acquainted with all
the major figures of this case who actually belong to the
underground milieu of computer intrusion. We have some idea
of their history, their motives, their general modus operandi.
We now know, I hope, who they are, where they came from,
and more or less what they want. In the next section of this book,
"Law and Order," we will leave this milieu and directly enter the
world of America's computer-crime police.
At this point, however, I have another figure to introduce: myself.
My name is Bruce Sterling. I live in Austin, Texas, where I am
a science fiction writer by trade: specifically, a CYBERPUNK
science fiction writer.
Like my "cyberpunk" colleagues in the U.S. and Canada,
I've never been entirely happy with this literary label--
especially after it became a synonym for computer criminal.
But I did once edit a book of stories by my colleagues,
called Mirrorshades: the Cyberpunk Anthology, and I've
long been a writer of literary-critical cyberpunk manifestos.
I am not a "hacker" of any description, though I do have readers
in the digital underground.
When the Steve Jackson Games seizure occurred, I naturally took
an intense interest. If "cyberpunk" books were being banned
by federal police in my own home town, I reasonably wondered
whether I myself might be next. Would my computer be seized
by the Secret Service? At the time, I was in possession
of an aging Apple IIe without so much as a hard disk.
If I were to be raided as an author of computer-crime manuals,
the loss of my feeble word-processor would likely provoke more
snickers than sympathy.
I'd known Steve Jackson for many years. We knew
one another as colleagues, for we frequented
the same local science-fiction conventions.
I'd played Jackson games, and recognized his cleverness;
but he certainly had never struck me as a potential mastermind
of computer crime.
I also knew a little about computer bulletin-board systems.
In the mid-1980s I had taken an active role in an Austin board
called "SMOF-BBS," one of the first boards dedicated to science fiction.
I had a modem, and on occasion I'd logged on to Illuminati,
which always looked entertainly wacky, but certainly harmless enough.
At the time of the Jackson seizure, I had no experience
whatsoever with underground boards. But I knew that no one
on Illuminati talked about breaking into systems illegally,
or about robbing phone companies. Illuminati didn't even
offer pirated computer games. Steve Jackson, like many creative artists,
was markedly touchy about theft of intellectual property.
It seemed to me that Jackson was either seriously suspected
of some crime--in which case, he would be charged soon,
and would have his day in court--or else he was innocent,
in which case the Secret Service would quickly return his equipment,
and everyone would have a good laugh. I rather expected the good laugh.
The situation was not without its comic side. The raid, known
as the "Cyberpunk Bust" in the science fiction community,
was winning a great deal of free national publicity both
for Jackson himself and the "cyberpunk" science fiction
writers generally.
Besides, science fiction people are used to being misinterpreted.
Science fiction is a colorful, disreputable, slipshod occupation,
full of unlikely oddballs, which, of course, is why we like it.
Weirdness can be an occupational hazard in our field. People who
wear Halloween costumes are sometimes mistaken for monsters.
Once upon a time--back in 1939, in New York City--
science fiction and the U.S. Secret Service collided in
a comic case of mistaken identity. This weird incident
involved a literary group quite famous in science fiction,
known as "the Futurians," whose membership included
such future genre greats as Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl,
and Damon Knight. The Futurians were every bit as
offbeat and wacky as any of their spiritual descendants,
including the cyberpunks, and were given to communal living,
spontaneous group renditions of light opera, and midnight fencing
exhibitions on the lawn. The Futurians didn't have bulletin
board systems, but they did have the technological equivalent
in 1939--mimeographs and a private printing press. These were
in steady use, producing a stream of science-fiction fan magazines,
literary manifestos, and weird articles, which were picked up
in ink-sticky bundles by a succession of strange, gangly,
spotty young men in fedoras and overcoats.
The neighbors grew alarmed at the antics of the Futurians
and reported them to the Secret Service as suspected counterfeiters.
In the winter of 1939, a squad of USSS agents with drawn guns burst into
"Futurian House," prepared to confiscate the forged currency and illicit
printing presses. There they discovered a slumbering science fiction fan
named George Hahn, a guest of the Futurian commune who had just arrived
in New York. George Hahn managed to explain himself and his group,
and the Secret Service agents left the Futurians in peace henceforth.
(Alas, Hahn died in 1991, just before I had discovered this astonishing
historical parallel, and just before I could interview him for this book.)
But the Jackson case did not come to a swift and comic end.
No quick answers came his way, or mine; no swift reassurances
that all was right in the digital world, that matters were well
in hand after all. Quite the opposite. In my alternate role
as a sometime pop-science journalist, I interviewed Jackson
and his staff for an article in a British magazine.
The strange details of the raid left me more concerned than ever.
Without its computers, the company had been financially
and operationally crippled. Half the SJG workforce,
a group of entirely innocent people, had been sorrowfully fired,
deprived of their livelihoods by the seizure. It began to dawn on me
that authors--American writers--might well have their computers seized,
under sealed warrants, without any criminal charge; and that,
as Steve Jackson had discovered, there was no immediate recourse for this.
This was no joke; this wasn't science fiction; this was real.
I determined to put science fiction aside until I had discovered
what had happened and where this trouble had come from.
It was time to enter the purportedly real world of electronic
free expression and computer crime. Hence, this book.
Hence, the world of the telcos; and the world of the digital underground;
and next, the world of the police.
PART THREE: LAW AND ORDER
Of the various anti-hacker activities of 1990, "Operation Sundevil"
had by far the highest public profile. The sweeping, nationwide
computer seizures of May 8, 1990 were unprecedented in scope and highly,
if rather selectively, publicized.
Unlike the efforts of the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force,
"Operation Sundevil" was not intended to combat "hacking" in the sense
of computer intrusion or sophisticated raids on telco switching stations.
Nor did it have anything to do with hacker misdeeds with AT&T's software,
or with Southern Bell's proprietary documents.
Instead, "Operation Sundevil" was a crackdown on those traditional scourges
of the digital underground: credit-card theft and telephone code abuse.
The ambitious activities out of Chicago, and the somewhat lesser-known
but vigorous anti-hacker actions of the New York State Police in 1990,
were never a part of "Operation Sundevil" per se, which was based in Arizona.
Nevertheless, after the spectacular May 8 raids, the public, misled by
police secrecy, hacker panic, and a puzzled national press-corps,
conflated all aspects of the nationwide crackdown in 1990 under
the blanket term "Operation Sundevil." "Sundevil" is still the best-known
synonym for the crackdown of 1990. But the Arizona organizers of "Sundevil"
did not really deserve this reputation--any more, for instance, than all
hackers deserve a reputation as "hackers."
There was some justice in this confused perception, though.
For one thing, the confusion was abetted by the Washington office
of the Secret Service, who responded to Freedom of Information Act
requests on "Operation Sundevil" by referring investigators
to the publicly known cases of Knight Lightning and the Atlanta Three.
And "Sundevil" was certainly the largest aspect of the Crackdown,
the most deliberate and the best-organized. As a crackdown on electronic
fraud, "Sundevil" lacked the frantic pace of the war on the Legion of Doom;
on the contrary, Sundevil's targets were picked out with cool deliberation
over an elaborate investigation lasting two full years.
And once again the targets were bulletin board systems.
Boards can be powerful aids to organized fraud. Underground boards carry
lively, extensive, detailed, and often quite flagrant "discussions" of
lawbreaking techniques and lawbreaking activities. "Discussing" crime
in the abstract, or "discussing" the particulars of criminal cases,
is not illegal--but there are stern state and federal laws against
coldbloodedly conspiring in groups in order to commit crimes.
In the eyes of police, people who actively conspire to break the law
are not regarded as "clubs," "debating salons," "users' groups," or
"free speech advocates." Rather, such people tend to find themselves
formally indicted by prosecutors as "gangs," "racketeers," "corrupt
organizations" and "organized crime figures."
What's more, the illicit data contained on outlaw boards goes well beyond
mere acts of speech and/or possible criminal conspiracy. As we have seen,
it was common practice in the digital underground to post purloined telephone
codes on boards, for any phreak or hacker who cared to abuse them. Is posting
digital booty of this sort supposed to be protected by the First Amendment?
Hardly--though the issue, like most issues in cyberspace, is not entirely
resolved. Some theorists argue that to merely RECITE a number publicly
is not illegal--only its USE is illegal. But anti-hacker police point out
that magazines and newspapers (more traditional forms of free expression)
never publish stolen telephone codes (even though this might well
raise their circulation).
Stolen credit card numbers, being riskier and more valuable,
were less often publicly posted on boards--but there is no question
that some underground boards carried "carding" traffic,
generally exchanged through private mail.
Underground boards also carried handy programs for "scanning" telephone
codes and raiding credit card companies, as well as the usual obnoxious
galaxy of pirated software, cracked passwords, blue-box schematics,
intrusion manuals, anarchy files, porn files, and so forth.
But besides their nuisance potential for the spread of illicit knowledge,
bulletin boards have another vitally interesting aspect for the
professional investigator. Bulletin boards are cram-full of EVIDENCE.
All that busy trading of electronic mail, all those hacker boasts,
brags and struts, even the stolen codes and cards, can be neat,
electronic, real-time recordings of criminal activity.
As an investigator, when you seize a pirate board, you have
scored a coup as effective as tapping phones or intercepting mail.
However, you have not actually tapped a phone or intercepted a letter.
The rules of evidence regarding phone-taps and mail interceptions are old,
stern and well-understood by police, prosecutors and defense attorneys alike.
The rules of evidence regarding boards are new, waffling, and understood
by nobody at all.
Sundevil was the largest crackdown on boards in world history.
On May 7, 8, and 9, 1990, about forty-two computer systems were seized.
Of those forty-two computers, about twenty-five actually were running boards.
(The vagueness of this estimate is attributable to the vagueness of
(a) what a "computer system" is, and (b) what it actually means to
"run a board" with one--or with two computers, or with three.)
About twenty-five boards vanished into police custody in May 1990.
As we have seen, there are an estimated 30,000 boards in America today.
If we assume that one board in a hundred is up to no good with codes
and cards (which rather flatters the honesty of the board-using community),
then that would leave 2,975 outlaw boards untouched by Sundevil.
Sundevil seized about one tenth of one percent of all computer
bulletin boards in America. Seen objectively, this is something less
than a comprehensive assault. In 1990, Sundevil's organizers--
the team at the Phoenix Secret Service office, and the Arizona
Attorney General's office-- had a list of at least THREE HUNDRED
boards that they considered fully deserving of search and seizure warrants.
The twenty-five boards actually seized were merely among the most obvious
and egregious of this much larger list of candidates. All these boards
had been examined beforehand--either by informants, who had passed printouts
to the Secret Service, or by Secret Service agents themselves, who not only
come equipped with modems but know how to use them.
There were a number of motives for Sundevil. First, it offered
a chance to get ahead of the curve on wire-fraud crimes.
Tracking back credit-card ripoffs to their perpetrators
can be appallingly difficult. If these miscreants
have any kind of electronic sophistication, they can snarl
their tracks through the phone network into a mind-boggling,
untraceable mess, while still managing to "reach out and rob someone."
Boards, however, full of brags and boasts, codes and cards,
offer evidence in the handy congealed form.
Seizures themselves--the mere physical removal of machines--
tends to take the pressure off. During Sundevil, a large number
of code kids, warez d00dz, and credit card thieves would be deprived
of those boards--their means of community and conspiracy--in one swift blow.
As for the sysops themselves (commonly among the boldest offenders)
they would be directly stripped of their computer equipment,
and rendered digitally mute and blind.
And this aspect of Sundevil was carried out with great success.
Sundevil seems to have been a complete tactical surprise--
unlike the fragmentary and continuing seizures of the war on the
Legion of Doom, Sundevil was precisely timed and utterly overwhelming.
At least forty "computers" were seized during May 7, 8 and 9, 1990,
in Cincinnati, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Phoenix, Tucson,
Richmond, San Diego, San Jose, Pittsburgh and San Francisco.
Some cities saw multiple raids, such as the five separate raids
in the New York City environs. Plano, Texas (essentially a suburb of
the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, and a hub of the telecommunications industry)
saw four computer seizures. Chicago, ever in the forefront, saw its own
local Sundevil raid, briskly carried out by Secret Service agents
Timothy Foley and Barbara Golden.
Many of these raids occurred, not in the cities proper,
but in associated white-middle class suburbs--places like
Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania and Clark Lake, Michigan.
There were a few raids on offices; most took place in people's homes,
the classic hacker basements and bedrooms.
The Sundevil raids were searches and seizures, not a group of mass arrests.
There were only four arrests during Sundevil. "Tony the Trashman,"
a longtime teenage bete noire of the Arizona Racketeering unit,
was arrested in Tucson on May 9. "Dr. Ripco," sysop of an outlaw board
with the misfortune to exist in Chicago itself, was also arrested--
on illegal weapons charges. Local units also arrested a 19-year-old
female phone phreak named "Electra" in Pennsylvania, and a male juvenile
in California. Federal agents however were not seeking arrests, but computers.
Hackers are generally not indicted (if at all) until the evidence
in their seized computers is evaluated--a process that can take weeks,
months--even years. When hackers are arrested on the spot, it's generally
an arrest for other reasons. Drugs and/or illegal weapons show up in a good
third of anti-hacker computer seizures (though not during Sundevil).
That scofflaw teenage hackers (or their parents) should have marijuana
in their homes is probably not a shocking revelation, but the surprisingly
common presence of illegal firearms in hacker dens is a bit disquieting.
A Personal Computer can be a great equalizer for the techno-cowboy--
much like that more traditional American "Great Equalizer,"
the Personal Sixgun. Maybe it's not all that surprising
that some guy obsessed with power through illicit technology
would also have a few illicit high-velocity-impact devices around.
An element of the digital underground particularly dotes on those
"anarchy philes," and this element tends to shade into the crackpot milieu
of survivalists, gun-nuts, anarcho-leftists and the ultra-libertarian
right-wing.
This is not to say that hacker raids to date have uncovered any
major crack-dens or illegal arsenals; but Secret Service agents
do not regard "hackers" as "just kids." They regard hackers as
unpredictable people, bright and slippery. It doesn't help matters
that the hacker himself has been "hiding behind his keyboard"
all this time. Commonly, police have no idea what he looks like.
This makes him an unknown quantity, someone best treated with
proper caution.
To date, no hacker has come out shooting, though they do sometimes brag on
boards that they will do just that. Threats of this sort are taken seriously.
Secret Service hacker raids tend to be swift, comprehensive, well-manned
(even over-manned); and agents generally burst through every door
in the home at once, sometimes with drawn guns. Any potential resistance
is swiftly quelled. Hacker raids are usually raids on people's homes.
It can be a very dangerous business to raid an American home;
people can panic when strangers invade their sanctum. Statistically speaking,
the most dangerous thing a policeman can do is to enter someone's home.
(The second most dangerous thing is to stop a car in traffic.)
People have guns in their homes. More cops are hurt in homes
than are ever hurt in biker bars or massage parlors.
But in any case, no one was hurt during Sundevil,
or indeed during any part of the Hacker Crackdown.
Nor were there any allegations of any physical mistreatment of a suspect.
Guns were pointed, interrogations were sharp and prolonged; but no one
in 1990 claimed any act of brutality by any crackdown raider.
In addition to the forty or so computers, Sundevil reaped floppy disks
in particularly great abundance--an estimated 23,000 of them, which
naturally included every manner of illegitimate data: pirated games,
stolen codes, hot credit card numbers, the complete text and software
of entire pirate bulletin-boards. These floppy disks, which remain
in police custody today, offer a gigantic, almost embarrassingly
rich source of possible criminal indictments. These 23,000 floppy disks
also include a thus-far unknown quantity of legitimate computer games,
legitimate software, purportedly "private" mail from boards,
business records, and personal correspondence of all kinds.
Standard computer-crime search warrants lay great emphasis on seizing
written documents as well as computers--specifically including photocopies,
computer printouts, telephone bills, address books, logs, notes,
memoranda and correspondence. In practice, this has meant that diaries,
gaming magazines, software documentation, nonfiction books on hacking
and computer security, sometimes even science fiction novels, have all
vanished out the door in police custody. A wide variety of electronic items
have been known to vanish as well, including telephones, televisions, answering
machines, Sony Walkmans, desktop printers, compact disks, and audiotapes.
No fewer than 150 members of the Secret Service were sent into
the field during Sundevil. They were commonly accompanied by
squads of local and/or state police. Most of these officers--
especially the locals--had never been on an anti-hacker raid before.
(This was one good reason, in fact, why so many of them were invited along
in the first place.) Also, the presence of a uniformed police officer
assures the raidees that the people entering their homes are, in fact, police.
Secret Service agents wear plain clothes. So do the telco security experts
who commonly accompany the Secret Service on raids (and who make no particular
effort to identify themselves as mere employees of telephone companies).
A typical hacker raid goes something like this. First, police storm in
rapidly, through every entrance, with overwhelming force,
in the assumption that this tactic will keep casualties to a minimum.
Second, possible suspects are immediately removed from the vicinity
of any and all computer systems, so that they will have no chance
to purge or destroy computer evidence. Suspects are herded into a room
without computers, commonly the living room, and kept under guard--
not ARMED guard, for the guns are swiftly holstered, but under guard
nevertheless. They are presented with the search warrant and warned
that anything they say may be held against them. Commonly they have
a great deal to say, especially if they are unsuspecting parents.
Somewhere in the house is the "hot spot"--a computer tied to a phone
line (possibly several computers and several phones). Commonly it's
a teenager's bedroom, but it can be anywhere in the house;
there may be several such rooms. This "hot spot" is put in charge
of a two-agent team, the "finder" and the "recorder." The "finder"
is computer-trained, commonly the case agent who has actually obtained
the search warrant from a judge. He or she understands what is being sought,
and actually carries out the seizures: unplugs machines, opens drawers,
desks, files, floppy-disk containers, etc. The "recorder" photographs
all the equipment, just as it stands--especially the tangle of
wired connections in the back, which can otherwise be a real nightmare
to restore. The recorder will also commonly photograph every room
in the house, lest some wily criminal claim that the police had robbed him
during the search. Some recorders carry videocams or tape recorders;
however, it's more common for the recorder to simply take written notes.
Objects are described and numbered as the finder seizes them, generally
on standard preprinted police inventory forms.
Even Secret Service agents were not, and are not, expert computer users.
They have not made, and do not make, judgements on the fly about potential
threats posed by various forms of equipment. They may exercise discretion;
they may leave Dad his computer, for instance, but they don't HAVE to.
Standard computer-crime search warrants, which date back to the early 80s,
use a sweeping language that targets computers, most anything attached
to a computer, most anything used to operate a computer--most anything
that remotely resembles a computer--plus most any and all written documents
surrounding it. Computer-crime investigators have strongly urged agents
to seize the works.
In this sense, Operation Sundevil appears to have been a complete success.
Boards went down all over America, and were shipped en masse to the computer
investigation lab of the Secret Service, in Washington DC, along with the
23,000 floppy disks and unknown quantities of printed material.
But the seizure of twenty-five boards, and the multi-megabyte mountains
of possibly useful evidence contained in these boards (and in their owners'
other computers, also out the door), were far from the only motives for
Operation Sundevil. An unprecedented action of great ambition and size,
Sundevil's motives can only be described as political. It was a
public-relations effort, meant to pass certain messages, meant to make
certain situations clear: both in the mind of the general public,
and in the minds of various constituencies of the electronic community.
First --and this motivation was vital--a "message" would be sent from
law enforcement to the digital underground. This very message was recited
in so many words by Garry M. Jenkins, the Assistant Director of the
US Secret Service, at the Sundevil press conference in Phoenix on
May 9, 1990, immediately after the raids. In brief, hackers were
mistaken in their foolish belief that they could hide behind the
"relative anonymity of their computer terminals." On the contrary,
they should fully understand that state and federal cops were
actively patrolling the beat in cyberspace--that they were
on the watch everywhere, even in those sleazy and secretive
dens of cybernetic vice, the underground boards.
This is not an unusual message for police to publicly convey to crooks.
The message is a standard message; only the context is new.
In this respect, the Sundevil raids were the digital equivalent
of the standard vice-squad crackdown on massage parlors, porno bookstores,
head-shops, or floating crap-games. There may be few or no arrests in a raid
of this sort; no convictions, no trials, no interrogations. In cases of this
sort, police may well walk out the door with many pounds of sleazy magazines,
X-rated videotapes, sex toys, gambling equipment, baggies of marijuana. . . .
Of course, if something truly horrendous is discovered by the raiders,
there will be arrests and prosecutions. Far more likely, however,
there will simply be a brief but sharp disruption of the closed
and secretive world of the nogoodniks. There will be "street hassle."
"Heat." "Deterrence." And, of course, the immediate loss of the seized goods.
It is very unlikely that any of this seized material will ever be returned.
Whether charged or not, whether convicted or not, the perpetrators will
almost surely lack the nerve ever to ask for this stuff to be given back.
Arrests and trials--putting people in jail--may involve all kinds of
formal legalities; but dealing with the justice system is far from the only
task of police. Police do not simply arrest people. They don't simply
put people in jail. That is not how the police perceive their jobs.
Police "protect and serve." Police "keep the peace," they "keep public order."
Like other forms of public relations, keeping public order is not an
exact science. Keeping public order is something of an art-form.
If a group of tough-looking teenage hoodlums was loitering on a street-corner,
no one would be surprised to see a street-cop arrive and sternly order
them to "break it up." On the contrary, the surprise would come if one
of these ne'er-do-wells stepped briskly into a phone-booth,
called a civil rights lawyer, and instituted a civil suit
in defense of his Constitutional rights of free speech
and free assembly. But something much along this line
was one of the many anomolous outcomes of the Hacker Crackdown.
Sundevil also carried useful "messages" for other constituents of
the electronic community. These messages may not have been read
aloud from the Phoenix podium in front of the press corps,
but there was little mistaking their meaning. There was a message
of reassurance for the primary victims of coding and carding:
the telcos, and the credit companies. Sundevil was greeted with joy
by the security officers of the electronic business community.
After years of high-tech harassment and spiralling revenue losses,
their complaints of rampant outlawry were being taken seriously by
law enforcement. No more head-scratching or dismissive shrugs;
no more feeble excuses about "lack of computer-trained officers" or
the low priority of "victimless" white-collar telecommunication crimes.
Computer-crime experts have long believed that computer-related offenses
are drastically under-reported. They regard this as a major open scandal
of their field. Some victims are reluctant to come forth, because they
believe that police and prosecutors are not computer-literate,
and can and will do nothing. Others are embarrassed by
their vulnerabilities, and will take strong measures
to avoid any publicity; this is especially true of banks,
who fear a loss of investor confidence should an embezzlement-case
or wire-fraud surface. And some victims are so helplessly confused
by their own high technology that they never even realize that
a crime has occurred--even when they have been fleeced to the bone.
The results of this situation can be dire.
Criminals escape apprehension and punishment.
The computer-crime units that do exist, can't get work.
The true scope of computer-crime: its size, its real nature,
the scope of its threats, and the legal remedies for it--
all remain obscured.
Another problem is very little publicized, but it is a cause
of genuine concern. Where there is persistent crime,
but no effective police protection, then vigilantism can result.
Telcos, banks, credit companies, the major corporations who
maintain extensive computer networks vulnerable to hacking
--these organizations are powerful, wealthy, and
politically influential. They are disinclined to be
pushed around by crooks (or by most anyone else,
for that matter). They often maintain well-organized
private security forces, commonly run by
experienced veterans of military and police units,
who have left public service for the greener pastures
of the private sector. For police, the corporate
security manager can be a powerful ally; but if this
gentleman finds no allies in the police, and the
pressure is on from his board-of-directors,
he may quietly take certain matters into his own hands.
Nor is there any lack of disposable hired-help in the
corporate security business. Private security agencies--
the `security business' generally--grew explosively in the 1980s.
Today there are spooky gumshoed armies of "security consultants,"
"rent-a- cops," "private eyes," "outside experts"--every manner
of shady operator who retails in "results" and discretion.
Or course, many of these gentlemen and ladies may be paragons
of professional and moral rectitude. But as anyone
who has read a hard-boiled detective novel knows,
police tend to be less than fond of this sort
of private-sector competition.
Companies in search of computer-security have even been
known to hire hackers. Police shudder at this prospect.
Police treasure good relations with the business community.
Rarely will you see a policeman so indiscreet as to allege
publicly that some major employer in his state or city has succumbed
to paranoia and gone off the rails. Nevertheless,
police --and computer police in particular--are aware
of this possibility. Computer-crime police can and do
spend up to half of their business hours just doing
public relations: seminars, "dog and pony shows,"
sometimes with parents' groups or computer users,
but generally with their core audience: the likely
victims of hacking crimes. These, of course, are telcos,
credit card companies and large computer-equipped corporations.
The police strongly urge these people, as good citizens,
to report offenses and press criminal charges;
they pass the message that there is someone in authority who cares,
understands, and, best of all, will take useful action
should a computer-crime occur.
But reassuring talk is cheap. Sundevil offered action.
The final message of Sundevil was intended for internal consumption
by law enforcement. Sundevil was offered as proof that the community
of American computer-crime police had come of age. Sundevil was
proof that enormous things like Sundevil itself could now be accomplished.
Sundevil was proof that the Secret Service and its local law-enforcement
allies could act like a well-oiled machine--(despite the hampering use
of those scrambled phones). It was also proof that the Arizona Organized
Crime and Racketeering Unit--the sparkplug of Sundevil--ranked with the best
in the world in ambition, organization, and sheer conceptual daring.
And, as a final fillip, Sundevil was a message from the Secret Service
to their longtime rivals in the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
By Congressional fiat, both USSS and FBI formally share jurisdiction
over federal computer-crimebusting activities. Neither of these groups
has ever been remotely happy with this muddled situation. It seems to
suggest that Congress cannot make up its mind as to which of these groups
is better qualified. And there is scarcely a G-man or a Special Agent
anywhere without a very firm opinion on that topic.
#
For the neophyte, one of the most puzzling aspects of the crackdown
on hackers is why the United States Secret Service has anything at all
to do with this matter.
The Secret Service is best known for its primary public role:
its agents protect the President of the United States.
They also guard the President's family, the Vice President and his family,
former Presidents, and Presidential candidates. They sometimes guard
foreign dignitaries who are visiting the United States, especially foreign
heads of state, and have been known to accompany American officials
on diplomatic missions overseas.
Special Agents of the Secret Service don't wear uniforms, but the
Secret Service also has two uniformed police agencies. There's the
former White House Police (now known as the Secret Service Uniformed Division,
since they currently guard foreign embassies in Washington, as well as the
White House itself). And there's the uniformed Treasury Police Force.
The Secret Service has been charged by Congress with a number
of little-known duties. They guard the precious metals in Treasury vaults.
They guard the most valuable historical documents of the United States:
originals of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence,
Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, an American-owned copy of
the Magna Carta, and so forth. Once they were assigned to guard
the Mona Lisa, on her American tour in the 1960s.
The entire Secret Service is a division of the Treasury Department.
Secret Service Special Agents (there are about 1,900 of them)
are bodyguards for the President et al, but they all work for the Treasury.
And the Treasury (through its divisions of the U.S. Mint and the
Bureau of Engraving and Printing) prints the nation's money.
As Treasury police, the Secret Service guards the nation's currency;
it is the only federal law enforcement agency with direct jurisdiction
over counterfeiting and forgery. It analyzes documents for authenticity,
and its fight against fake cash is still quite lively (especially since
the skilled counterfeiters of Medellin, Columbia have gotten into the act).
Government checks, bonds, and other obligations, which exist in untold
millions and are worth untold billions, are common targets for forgery,
which the Secret Service also battles. It even handles forgery
of postage stamps.
But cash is fading in importance today as money has become electronic.
As necessity beckoned, the Secret Service moved from fighting the
counterfeiting of paper currency and the forging of checks,
to the protection of funds transferred by wire.
From wire-fraud, it was a simple skip-and-jump to what is formally
known as "access device fraud." Congress granted the Secret Service
the authority to investigate "access device fraud" under Title 18
of the United States Code (U.S.C. Section 1029).
The term "access device" seems intuitively simple. It's some kind
of high-tech gizmo you use to get money with. It makes good sense
to put this sort of thing in the charge of counterfeiting and
wire-fraud experts.
However, in Section 1029, the term "access device" is very
generously defined. An access device is: "any card, plate,
code, account number, or other means of account access
that can be used, alone or in conjunction with another access device,
to obtain money, goods, services, or any other thing of value,
or that can be used to initiate a transfer of funds."
"Access device" can therefore be construed to include credit cards
themselves (a popular forgery item nowadays). It also includes credit card
account NUMBERS, those standards of the digital underground. The same goes
for telephone charge cards (an increasingly popular item with telcos,
who are tired of being robbed of pocket change by phone-booth thieves).
And also telephone access CODES, those OTHER standards of the digital
underground. (Stolen telephone codes may not "obtain money," but they
certainly do obtain valuable "services," which is specifically forbidden
by Section 1029.)
We can now see that Section 1029 already pits the United States Secret Service
directly against the digital underground, without any mention at all of
the word "computer."
Standard phreaking devices, like "blue boxes," used to steal phone service
from old-fashioned mechanical switches, are unquestionably "counterfeit
access devices." Thanks to Sec.1029, it is not only illegal to USE
counterfeit access devices, but it is even illegal to BUILD them.
"Producing," "designing" "duplicating" or "assembling" blue boxes
are all federal crimes today, and if you do this, the Secret Service
has been charged by Congress to come after you.
Automatic Teller Machines, which replicated all over America during the 1980s,
are definitely "access devices," too, and an attempt to tamper with their
punch-in codes and plastic bank cards falls directly under Sec. 1029.