Godwin admitted quietly that the doctrine of seizing the instrumentality
of a crime was pretty well established in the American legal system.
The meeting broke up. Godwin and Kapor had to leave. Kapor was testifying
next morning before the Massachusetts Department Of Public Utility,
about ISDN narrowband wide-area networking.
As soon as they were gone, Thackeray seemed elated.
She had taken a great risk with this. Her colleagues had not,
in fact, torn Kapor and Godwin's heads off. She was very proud of them,
and told them so.
"Did you hear what Godwin said about INSTRUMENTALITY OF A CRIME?"
she exulted, to nobody in particular. "Wow, that means
MITCH ISN'T GOING TO SUE ME."
#
America's computer police are an interesting group.
As a social phenomenon they are far more interesting,
and far more important, than teenage phone phreaks
and computer hackers. First, they're older and wiser;
not dizzy hobbyists with leaky morals, but seasoned adult
professionals with all the responsibilities of public service.
And, unlike hackers, they possess not merely TECHNICAL
power alone, but heavy-duty legal and social authority.
And, very interestingly, they are just as much at
sea in cyberspace as everyone else. They are not
happy about this. Police are authoritarian by nature,
and prefer to obey rules and precedents. (Even those police
who secretly enjoy a fast ride in rough territory will soberly
disclaim any "cowboy" attitude.) But in cyberspace there ARE
no rules and precedents. They are groundbreaking pioneers,
Cyberspace Rangers, whether they like it or not.
In my opinion, any teenager enthralled by computers,
fascinated by the ins and outs of computer security,
and attracted by the lure of specialized forms of knowledge and power,
would do well to forget all about "hacking" and set his (or her)
sights on becoming a fed. Feds can trump hackers at almost every
single thing hackers do, including gathering intelligence,
undercover disguise, trashing, phone-tapping, building dossiers,
networking, and infiltrating computer systems--CRIMINAL computer systems.
Secret Service agents know more about phreaking, coding and carding
than most phreaks can find out in years, and when it comes to viruses,
break-ins, software bombs and trojan horses, Feds have direct access to red-hot
confidential information that is only vague rumor in the underground.
And if it's an impressive public rep you're after, there are few people
in the world who can be so chillingly impressive as a well-trained,
well-armed United States Secret Service agent.
Of course, a few personal sacrifices are necessary in order to obtain
that power and knowledge. First, you'll have the galling discipline
of belonging to a large organization; but the world of computer crime
is still so small, and so amazingly fast-moving, that it will remain
spectacularly fluid for years to come. The second sacrifice is that
you'll have to give up ripping people off. This is not a great loss.
Abstaining from the use of illegal drugs, also necessary, will be a boon
to your health.
A career in computer security is not a bad choice for a young man
or woman today. The field will almost certainly expand drastically
in years to come. If you are a teenager today, by the time you
become a professional, the pioneers you have read about in this book
will be the grand old men and women of the field, swamped by their many
disciples and successors. Of course, some of them, like William P. Wood
of the 1865 Secret Service, may well be mangled in the whirring machinery
of legal controversy; but by the time you enter the computer-crime field,
it may have stabilized somewhat, while remaining entertainingly challenging.
But you can't just have a badge. You have to win it. First, there's the
federal law enforcement training. And it's hard--it's a challenge.
A real challenge--not for wimps and rodents.
Every Secret Service agent must complete gruelling courses at the
Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. (In fact, Secret Service
agents are periodically re-trained during their entire careers.)
In order to get a glimpse of what this might be like,
I myself travelled to FLETC.
#
The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center is a 1500-acre facility
on Georgia's Atlantic coast. It's a milieu of marshgrass, seabirds,
damp, clinging sea-breezes, palmettos, mosquitos, and bats.
Until 1974, it was a Navy Air Base, and still features a working runway,
and some WWII vintage blockhouses and officers' quarters.
The Center has since benefitted by a forty-million-dollar retrofit,
but there's still enough forest and swamp on the facility for the
Border Patrol to put in tracking practice.
As a town, "Glynco" scarcely exists. The nearest real town is Brunswick,
a few miles down Highway 17, where I stayed at the aptly named Marshview
Holiday Inn. I had Sunday dinner at a seafood restaurant called "Jinright's,"
where I feasted on deep-fried alligator tail. This local favorite was
a heaped basket of bite-sized chunks of white, tender, almost fluffy
reptile meat, steaming in a peppered batter crust. Alligator makes
a culinary experience that's hard to forget, especially when liberally
basted with homemade cocktail sauce from a Jinright squeeze-bottle.
The crowded clientele were tourists, fishermen, local black folks
in their Sunday best, and white Georgian locals who all seemed
to bear an uncanny resemblance to Georgia humorist Lewis Grizzard.
The 2,400 students from 75 federal agencies who make up the FLETC
population scarcely seem to make a dent in the low-key local scene.
The students look like tourists, and the teachers seem to have taken
on much of the relaxed air of the Deep South. My host was Mr. Carlton
Fitzpatrick, the Program Coordinator of the Financial Fraud Institute.
Carlton Fitzpatrick is a mustached, sinewy, well-tanned Alabama native
somewhere near his late forties, with a fondness for chewing tobacco,
powerful computers, and salty, down-home homilies. We'd met before,
at FCIC in Arizona.
The Financial Fraud Institute is one of the nine divisions at FLETC.
Besides Financial Fraud, there's Driver & Marine, Firearms,
and Physical Training. These are specialized pursuits.
There are also five general training divisions: Basic Training,
Operations, Enforcement Techniques, Legal Division, and Behavioral Science.
Somewhere in this curriculum is everything necessary to turn green college
graduates into federal agents. First they're given ID cards. Then they get
the rather miserable-looking blue coveralls known as "smurf suits."
The trainees are assigned a barracks and a cafeteria, and immediately
set on FLETC's bone-grinding physical training routine. Besides the
obligatory daily jogging--(the trainers run up danger flags beside
the track when the humidity rises high enough to threaten heat stroke)--
here's the Nautilus machines, the martial arts, the survival skills. . . .
The eighteen federal agencies who maintain on-site academies at FLETC
employ a wide variety of specialized law enforcement units, some of them
rather arcane. There's Border Patrol, IRS Criminal Investigation Division,
Park Service, Fish and Wildlife, Customs, Immigration, Secret Service and
the Treasury's uniformed subdivisions. . . . If you're a federal cop
and you don't work for the FBI, you train at FLETC. This includes people
as apparently obscure as the agents of the Railroad Retirement Board
Inspector General. Or the Tennessee Valley Authority Police,
who are in fact federal police officers, and can and do arrest criminals
on the federal property of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
And then there are the computer-crime people. All sorts, all backgrounds.
Mr. Fitzpatrick is not jealous of his specialized knowledge. Cops all over,
in every branch of service, may feel a need to learn what he can teach.
Backgrounds don't matter much. Fitzpatrick himself was originally a
Border Patrol veteran, then became a Border Patrol instructor at FLETC.
His Spanish is still fluent--but he found himself strangely fascinated
when the first computers showed up at the Training Center. Fitzpatrick
did have a background in electrical engineering, and though he never
considered himself a computer hacker, he somehow found himself writing
useful little programs for this new and promising gizmo.
He began looking into the general subject of computers and crime,
reading Donn Parker's books and articles, keeping an ear cocked
for war stories, useful insights from the field, the up-and-coming
people of the local computer-crime and high-technology units. . . .
Soon he got a reputation around FLETC as the resident "computer expert,"
and that reputation alone brought him more exposure, more experience--
until one day he looked around, and sure enough he WAS a federal
computer-crime expert.
In fact, this unassuming, genial man may be THE federal computer-crime expert.
There are plenty of very good computer people, and plenty of very good
federal investigators, but the area where these worlds of expertise overlap
is very slim. And Carlton Fitzpatrick has been right at the center of that
since 1985, the first year of the Colluquy, a group which owes much to
his influence.
He seems quite at home in his modest, acoustic-tiled office,
with its Ansel Adams-style Western photographic art, a gold-framed
Senior Instructor Certificate, and a towering bookcase crammed with
three-ring binders with ominous titles such as Datapro Reports on
Information Security and CFCA Telecom Security '90.
The phone rings every ten minutes; colleagues show up at the door
to chat about new developments in locksmithing or to shake their heads
over the latest dismal developments in the BCCI global banking scandal.
Carlton Fitzpatrick is a fount of computer-crime war-stories,
related in an acerbic drawl. He tells me the colorful tale
of a hacker caught in California some years back. He'd been
raiding systems, typing code without a detectable break,
for twenty, twenty-four, thirty-six hours straight. Not just
logged on--TYPING. Investigators were baffled. Nobody
could do that. Didn't he have to go to the bathroom?
Was it some kind of automatic keyboard-whacking device
that could actually type code?
A raid on the suspect's home revealed a situation of astonishing squalor.
The hacker turned out to be a Pakistani computer-science student who had
flunked out of a California university. He'd gone completely underground
as an illegal electronic immigrant, and was selling stolen phone-service
to stay alive. The place was not merely messy and dirty, but in a state
of psychotic disorder. Powered by some weird mix of culture shock,
computer addiction, and amphetamines, the suspect had in fact been sitting
in front of his computer for a day and a half straight, with snacks and
drugs at hand on the edge of his desk and a chamber-pot under his chair.
Word about stuff like this gets around in the hacker-tracker community.
Carlton Fitzpatrick takes me for a guided tour by car around the
FLETC grounds. One of our first sights is the biggest indoor
firing range in the world. There are federal trainees in there,
Fitzpatrick assures me politely, blasting away with a wide variety
of automatic weapons: Uzis, Glocks, AK-47s. . . . He's willing to
take me inside. I tell him I'm sure that's really interesting,
but I'd rather see his computers. Carlton Fitzpatrick seems quite
surprised and pleased. I'm apparently the first journalist he's ever
seen who has turned down the shooting gallery in favor of microchips.
Our next stop is a favorite with touring Congressmen: the three-mile
long FLETC driving range. Here trainees of the Driver & Marine Division
are taught high-speed pursuit skills, setting and breaking road-blocks,
diplomatic security driving for VIP limousines. . . . A favorite FLETC
pastime is to strap a passing Senator into the passenger seat beside a
Driver & Marine trainer, hit a hundred miles an hour, then take it right into
"the skid-pan," a section of greased track where two tons of Detroit iron
can whip and spin like a hockey puck.
Cars don't fare well at FLETC. First they're rifled again and again
for search practice. Then they do 25,000 miles of high-speed
pursuit training; they get about seventy miles per set
of steel-belted radials. Then it's off to the skid pan,
where sometimes they roll and tumble headlong in the grease.
When they're sufficiently grease-stained, dented, and creaky,
they're sent to the roadblock unit, where they're battered without pity.
And finally then they're sacrificed to the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms, whose trainees learn the ins and outs
of car-bomb work by blowing them into smoking wreckage.
There's a railroad box-car on the FLETC grounds, and a large
grounded boat, and a propless plane; all training-grounds for searches.
The plane sits forlornly on a patch of weedy tarmac next to an eerie
blockhouse known as the "ninja compound," where anti-terrorism specialists
practice hostage rescues. As I gaze on this creepy paragon of modern
low-intensity warfare, my nerves are jangled by a sudden staccato outburst
of automatic weapons fire, somewhere in the woods to my right.
"Nine-millimeter," Fitzpatrick judges calmly.
Even the eldritch ninja compound pales somewhat compared
to the truly surreal area known as "the raid-houses."
This is a street lined on both sides with nondescript
concrete-block houses with flat pebbled roofs.
They were once officers' quarters. Now they are training grounds.
The first one to our left, Fitzpatrick tells me, has been specially
adapted for computer search-and-seizure practice. Inside it has been
wired for video from top to bottom, with eighteen pan-and-tilt
remotely controlled videocams mounted on walls and in corners.
Every movement of the trainee agent is recorded live by teachers,
for later taped analysis. Wasted movements, hesitations, possibly lethal
tactical mistakes--all are gone over in detail.
Perhaps the weirdest single aspect of this building is its front door,
scarred and scuffed all along the bottom, from the repeated impact,
day after day, of federal shoe-leather.
Down at the far end of the row of raid-houses some people are practicing
a murder. We drive by slowly as some very young and rather nervous-looking
federal trainees interview a heavyset bald man on the raid-house lawn.
Dealing with murder takes a lot of practice; first you have to learn
to control your own instinctive disgust and panic, then you have to learn
to control the reactions of a nerve-shredded crowd of civilians,
some of whom may have just lost a loved one, some of whom may be murderers--
quite possibly both at once.
A dummy plays the corpse. The roles of the bereaved, the morbidly curious,
and the homicidal are played, for pay, by local Georgians: waitresses,
musicians, most anybody who needs to moonlight and can learn a script.
These people, some of whom are FLETC regulars year after year,
must surely have one of the strangest jobs in the world.
Something about the scene: "normal" people in a weird situation,
standing around talking in bright Georgia sunshine, unsuccessfully
pretending that something dreadful has gone on, while a dummy lies
inside on faked bloodstains. . . . While behind this weird masquerade,
like a nested set of Russian dolls, are grim future realities of real death,
real violence, real murders of real people, that these young agents
will really investigate, many times during their careers. . . .
Over and over. . . . Will those anticipated murders look like this,
feel like this--not as "real" as these amateur actors are trying to
make it seem, but both as "real," and as numbingly unreal, as watching
fake people standing around on a fake lawn? Something about this scene
unhinges me. It seems nightmarish to me, Kafkaesque. I simply don't
know how to take it; my head is turned around; I don't know whether to laugh,
cry, or just shudder.
When the tour is over, Carlton Fitzpatrick and I talk about computers.
For the first time cyberspace seems like quite a comfortable place.
It seems very real to me suddenly, a place where I know what I'm talking about,
a place I'm used to. It's real. "Real." Whatever.
Carlton Fitzpatrick is the only person I've met in cyberspace circles
who is happy with his present equipment. He's got a 5 Meg RAM PC with
a 112 meg hard disk; a 660 meg's on the way. He's got a Compaq 386 desktop,
and a Zenith 386 laptop with 120 meg. Down the hall is a NEC Multi-Sync 2A
with a CD-ROM drive and a 9600 baud modem with four com-lines.
There's a training minicomputer, and a 10-meg local mini just for the Center,
and a lab-full of student PC clones and half-a-dozen Macs or so.
There's a Data General MV 2500 with 8 meg on board and a 370 meg disk.
Fitzpatrick plans to run a UNIX board on the Data General when he's
finished beta-testing the software for it, which he wrote himself.
It'll have E-mail features, massive files on all manner of computer-crime
and investigation procedures, and will follow the computer-security
specifics of the Department of Defense "Orange Book." He thinks
it will be the biggest BBS in the federal government.
Will it have Phrack on it? I ask wryly.
Sure, he tells me. Phrack, TAP, Computer Underground Digest,
all that stuff. With proper disclaimers, of course.
I ask him if he plans to be the sysop. Running a system that size is very
time-consuming, and Fitzpatrick teaches two three-hour courses every day.
No, he says seriously, FLETC has to get its money worth out of the instructors.
He thinks he can get a local volunteer to do it, a high-school student.
He says a bit more, something I think about an Eagle Scout law-enforcement
liaison program, but my mind has rocketed off in disbelief.
"You're going to put a TEENAGER in charge of a federal security BBS?"
I'm speechless. It hasn't escaped my notice that the FLETC Financial
Fraud Institute is the ULTIMATE hacker-trashing target; there is stuff in here,
stuff of such utter and consummate cool by every standard of the
digital underground. . . .
I imagine the hackers of my acquaintance, fainting dead-away from
forbidden-knowledge greed-fits, at the mere prospect of cracking
the superultra top-secret computers used to train the Secret Service
in computer-crime. . . .
"Uhm, Carlton," I babble, "I'm sure he's a really nice kid and all,
but that's a terrible temptation to set in front of somebody who's,
you know, into computers and just starting out. . . ."
"Yeah," he says, "that did occur to me." For the first time I begin
to suspect that he's pulling my leg.
He seems proudest when he shows me an ongoing project called JICC,
Joint Intelligence Control Council. It's based on the services provided
by EPIC, the El Paso Intelligence Center, which supplies data and intelligence
to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Customs Service, the Coast Guard,
and the state police of the four southern border states. Certain EPIC files
can now be accessed by drug-enforcement police of Central America,
South America and the Caribbean, who can also trade information
among themselves. Using a telecom program called "White Hat,"
written by two brothers named Lopez from the Dominican Republic,
police can now network internationally on inexpensive PCs.
Carlton Fitzpatrick is teaching a class of drug-war agents
from the Third World, and he's very proud of their progress.
Perhaps soon the sophisticated smuggling networks of the
Medellin Cartel will be matched by a sophisticated computer
network of the Medellin Cartel's sworn enemies. They'll track boats,
track contraband, track the international drug-lords who now leap over
borders with great ease, defeating the police through the clever use
of fragmented national jurisdictions.
JICC and EPIC must remain beyond the scope of this book.
They seem to me to be very large topics fraught with complications
that I am not fit to judge. I do know, however, that the international,
computer-assisted networking of police, across national boundaries,
is something that Carlton Fitzpatrick considers very important,
a harbinger of a desirable future. I also know that networks
by their nature ignore physical boundaries. And I also know
that where you put communications you put a community,
and that when those communities become self-aware
they will fight to preserve themselves and to expand their influence.
I make no judgements whether this is good or bad.
It's just cyberspace; it's just the way things are.
I asked Carlton Fitzpatrick what advice he would have for
a twenty-year-old who wanted to shine someday in the world
of electronic law enforcement.
He told me that the number one rule was simply not to be
scared of computers. You don't need to be an obsessive
"computer weenie," but you mustn't be buffaloed just because
some machine looks fancy. The advantages computers give
smart crooks are matched by the advantages they give smart cops.
Cops in the future will have to enforce the law "with their heads,
not their holsters." Today you can make good cases without ever
leaving your office. In the future, cops who resist the computer
revolution will never get far beyond walking a beat.
I asked Carlton Fitzpatrick if he had some single message for the public;
some single thing that he would most like the American public to know
about his work.
He thought about it while. "Yes," he said finally. "TELL me the rules,
and I'll TEACH those rules!" He looked me straight in the eye.
"I do the best that I can."
PART FOUR: THE CIVIL LIBERTARIANS
The story of the Hacker Crackdown, as we have followed it thus far,
has been technological, subcultural, criminal and legal.
The story of the Civil Libertarians, though it partakes
of all those other aspects, is profoundly and thoroughly POLITICAL.
In 1990, the obscure, long-simmering struggle over the ownership
and nature of cyberspace became loudly and irretrievably public.
People from some of the oddest corners of American society suddenly
found themselves public figures. Some of these people found this
situation much more than they had ever bargained for. They backpedalled,
and tried to retreat back to the mandarin obscurity of their cozy
subcultural niches. This was generally to prove a mistake.
But the civil libertarians seized the day in 1990. They found themselves
organizing, propagandizing, podium-pounding, persuading, touring,
negotiating, posing for publicity photos, submitting to interviews,
squinting in the limelight as they tried a tentative, but growingly
sophisticated, buck-and-wing upon the public stage.
It's not hard to see why the civil libertarians should have
this competitive advantage.
The hackers of the digital underground are an hermetic elite.
They find it hard to make any remotely convincing case for
their actions in front of the general public. Actually,
hackers roundly despise the "ignorant" public, and have never
trusted the judgement of "the system." Hackers do propagandize,
but only among themselves, mostly in giddy, badly spelled manifestos
of class warfare, youth rebellion or naive techie utopianism.
Hackers must strut and boast in order to establish and preserve
their underground reputations. But if they speak out too loudly
and publicly, they will break the fragile surface-tension of the underground,
and they will be harrassed or arrested. Over the longer term,
most hackers stumble, get busted, get betrayed, or simply give up.
As a political force, the digital underground is hamstrung.
The telcos, for their part, are an ivory tower under protracted seige.
They have plenty of money with which to push their calculated public image,
but they waste much energy and goodwill attacking one another with
slanderous and demeaning ad campaigns. The telcos have suffered
at the hands of politicians, and, like hackers, they don't trust
the public's judgement. And this distrust may be well-founded.
Should the general public of the high-tech 1990s come to understand
its own best interests in telecommunications, that might well pose
a grave threat to the specialized technical power and authority
that the telcos have relished for over a century. The telcos do
have strong advantages: loyal employees, specialized expertise,
influence in the halls of power, tactical allies in law enforcement,
and unbelievably vast amounts of money. But politically speaking, they lack
genuine grassroots support; they simply don't seem to have many friends.
Cops know a lot of things other people don't know.
But cops willingly reveal only those aspects of their
knowledge that they feel will meet their institutional
purposes and further public order. Cops have respect,
they have responsibilities, they have power in the streets
and even power in the home, but cops don't do particularly
well in limelight. When pressed, they will step out in the
public gaze to threaten bad-guys, or to cajole prominent citizens,
or perhaps to sternly lecture the naive and misguided.
But then they go back within their time-honored fortress
of the station-house, the courtroom and the rule-book.
The electronic civil libertarians, however, have proven to be
born political animals. They seemed to grasp very early on
the postmodern truism that communication is power. Publicity is power.
Soundbites are power. The ability to shove one's issue onto the public
agenda--and KEEP IT THERE--is power. Fame is power. Simple personal
fluency and eloquence can be power, if you can somehow catch the
public's eye and ear.
The civil libertarians had no monopoly on "technical power"--
though they all owned computers, most were not particularly
advanced computer experts. They had a good deal of money,
but nowhere near the earthshaking wealth and the galaxy
of resources possessed by telcos or federal agencies.
They had no ability to arrest people. They carried
out no phreak and hacker covert dirty-tricks.
But they really knew how to network.
Unlike the other groups in this book, the civil libertarians
have operated very much in the open, more or less right
in the public hurly-burly. They have lectured audiences galore
and talked to countless journalists, and have learned to
refine their spiels. They've kept the cameras clicking,
kept those faxes humming, swapped that email,
run those photocopiers on overtime, licked envelopes
and spent small fortunes on airfare and long-distance.
In an information society, this open, overt, obvious activity
has proven to be a profound advantage.
In 1990, the civil libertarians of cyberspace assembled
out of nowhere in particular, at warp speed. This "group"
(actually, a networking gaggle of interested parties
which scarcely deserves even that loose term) has almost nothing
in the way of formal organization. Those formal civil libertarian
organizations which did take an interest in cyberspace issues,
mainly the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
and the American Civil Liberties Union, were carried along
by events in 1990, and acted mostly as adjuncts,
underwriters or launching-pads.
The civil libertarians nevertheless enjoyed the greatest success
of any of the groups in the Crackdown of 1990. At this writing,
their future looks rosy and the political initiative is firmly in their hands.
This should be kept in mind as we study the highly unlikely lives
and lifestyles of the people who actually made this happen.
#
In June 1989, Apple Computer, Inc., of Cupertino,
California, had a problem. Someone had illicitly copied
a small piece of Apple's proprietary software, software
which controlled an internal chip driving the Macintosh
screen display. This Color QuickDraw source code was
a closely guarded piece of Apple's intellectual property.
Only trusted Apple insiders were supposed to possess it.
But the "NuPrometheus League" wanted things otherwise.
This person (or persons) made several illicit copies
of this source code, perhaps as many as two dozen.
He (or she, or they) then put those illicit floppy disks
into envelopes and mailed them to people all over America:
people in the computer industry who were associated with,
but not directly employed by, Apple Computer.
The NuPrometheus caper was a complex, highly ideological,
and very hacker-like crime. Prometheus, it will be recalled,
stole the fire of the Gods and gave this potent gift to the
general ranks of downtrodden mankind. A similar god-in-the-manger
attitude was implied for the corporate elite of Apple Computer,
while the "Nu" Prometheus had himself cast in the role of rebel demigod.
The illicitly copied data was given away for free.
The new Prometheus, whoever he was, escaped the
fate of the ancient Greek Prometheus, who was chained
to a rock for centuries by the vengeful gods while an eagle
tore and ate his liver. On the other hand, NuPrometheus
chickened out somewhat by comparison with his role model.
The small chunk of Color QuickDraw code he had filched
and replicated was more or less useless to Apple's
industrial rivals (or, in fact, to anyone else).
Instead of giving fire to mankind, it was more as if
NuPrometheus had photocopied the schematics for part of a Bic lighter.
The act was not a genuine work of industrial espionage.
It was best interpreted as a symbolic, deliberate slap
in the face for the Apple corporate heirarchy.
Apple's internal struggles were well-known in the industry. Apple's founders,
Jobs and Wozniak, had both taken their leave long since. Their raucous core
of senior employees had been a barnstorming crew of 1960s Californians,
many of them markedly less than happy with the new button-down multimillion
dollar regime at Apple. Many of the programmers and developers who had
invented the Macintosh model in the early 1980s had also taken their leave of
the company. It was they, not the current masters of Apple's corporate fate,
who had invented the stolen Color QuickDraw code. The NuPrometheus stunt
was well-calculated to wound company morale.
Apple called the FBI. The Bureau takes an interest in high-profile
intellectual-property theft cases, industrial espionage and theft
of trade secrets. These were likely the right people to call,
and rumor has it that the entities responsible were in fact discovered
by the FBI, and then quietly squelched by Apple management. NuPrometheus
was never publicly charged with a crime, or prosecuted, or jailed.
But there were no further illicit releases of Macintosh internal software.
Eventually the painful issue of NuPrometheus was allowed to fade.
In the meantime, however, a large number of puzzled bystanders
found themselves entertaining surprise guests from the FBI.
One of these people was John Perry Barlow. Barlow is a most unusual man,
difficult to describe in conventional terms. He is perhaps best known as
a songwriter for the Grateful Dead, for he composed lyrics for
"Hell in a Bucket," "Picasso Moon," "Mexicali Blues," "I Need a Miracle,"
and many more; he has been writing for the band since 1970.
Before we tackle the vexing question as to why a rock lyricist
should be interviewed by the FBI in a computer-crime case,
it might be well to say a word or two about the Grateful Dead.
The Grateful Dead are perhaps the most successful and long-lasting
of the numerous cultural emanations from the Haight-Ashbury district
of San Francisco, in the glory days of Movement politics and
lysergic transcendance. The Grateful Dead are a nexus, a veritable
whirlwind, of applique decals, psychedelic vans, tie-dyed T-shirts,
earth-color denim, frenzied dancing and open and unashamed drug use.
The symbols, and the realities, of Californian freak power surround
the Grateful Dead like knotted macrame.
The Grateful Dead and their thousands of Deadhead devotees
are radical Bohemians. This much is widely understood.
Exactly what this implies in the 1990s is rather more problematic.
The Grateful Dead are among the world's most popular
and wealthy entertainers: number 20, according to Forbes magazine,
right between M.C. Hammer and Sean Connery. In 1990, this jeans-clad
group of purported raffish outcasts earned seventeen million dollars.
They have been earning sums much along this line for quite some time now.
And while the Dead are not investment bankers or three-piece-suit
tax specialists--they are, in point of fact, hippie musicians--
this money has not been squandered in senseless Bohemian excess.
The Dead have been quietly active for many years, funding various
worthy activities in their extensive and widespread cultural community.
The Grateful Dead are not conventional players in the American
power establishment. They nevertheless are something of a force
to be reckoned with. They have a lot of money and a lot of friends
in many places, both likely and unlikely.
The Dead may be known for back-to-the-earth environmentalist rhetoric,
but this hardly makes them anti-technological Luddites. On the contrary,
like most rock musicians, the Grateful Dead have spent their entire adult
lives in the company of complex electronic equipment. They have funds to burn
on any sophisticated tool and toy that might happen to catch their fancy.
And their fancy is quite extensive.
The Deadhead community boasts any number of recording engineers,
lighting experts, rock video mavens, electronic technicians
of all descriptions. And the drift goes both ways. Steve Wozniak,
Apple's co-founder, used to throw rock festivals. Silicon Valley rocks out.
These are the 1990s, not the 1960s. Today, for a surprising number of people
all over America, the supposed dividing line between Bohemian and technician
simply no longer exists. People of this sort may have a set of windchimes
and a dog with a knotted kerchief 'round its neck, but they're also quite
likely to own a multimegabyte Macintosh running MIDI synthesizer software
and trippy fractal simulations. These days, even Timothy Leary himself,
prophet of LSD, does virtual-reality computer-graphics demos in
his lecture tours.
John Perry Barlow is not a member of the Grateful Dead. He is, however,
a ranking Deadhead.
Barlow describes himself as a "techno-crank." A vague term like
"social activist" might not be far from the mark, either.
But Barlow might be better described as a "poet"--if one keeps in mind
Percy Shelley's archaic definition of poets as "unacknowledged legislators
of the world."
Barlow once made a stab at acknowledged legislator status. In 1987,
he narrowly missed the Republican nomination for a seat in the
Wyoming State Senate. Barlow is a Wyoming native, the third-generation
scion of a well-to-do cattle-ranching family. He is in his early forties,
married and the father of three daughters.
Barlow is not much troubled by other people's narrow notions of consistency.
In the late 1980s, this Republican rock lyricist cattle rancher sold his ranch
and became a computer telecommunications devotee.
The free-spirited Barlow made this transition with ease. He genuinely
enjoyed computers. With a beep of his modem, he leapt from small-town
Pinedale, Wyoming, into electronic contact with a large and lively crowd
of bright, inventive, technological sophisticates from all over the world.
Barlow found the social milieu of computing attractive: its fast-lane pace,
its blue-sky rhetoric, its open-endedness. Barlow began dabbling in
computer journalism, with marked success, as he was a quick study,
and both shrewd and eloquent. He frequently travelled to San Francisco
to network with Deadhead friends. There Barlow made extensive contacts
throughout the Californian computer community, including friendships
among the wilder spirits at Apple.
In May 1990, Barlow received a visit from a local Wyoming agent of the FBI.
The NuPrometheus case had reached Wyoming.
Barlow was troubled to find himself under investigation in an
area of his interests once quite free of federal attention.
He had to struggle to explain the very nature of computer-crime
to a headscratching local FBI man who specialized in cattle-rustling.
Barlow, chatting helpfully and demonstrating the wonders of his modem
to the puzzled fed, was alarmed to find all "hackers" generally under
FBI suspicion as an evil influence in the electronic community.
The FBI, in pursuit of a hacker called "NuPrometheus," were tracing
attendees of a suspect group called the Hackers Conference.
The Hackers Conference, which had been started in 1984, was a
yearly Californian meeting of digital pioneers and enthusiasts.
The hackers of the Hackers Conference had little if anything to do
with the hackers of the digital underground. On the contrary,
the hackers of this conference were mostly well-to-do Californian
high-tech CEOs, consultants, journalists and entrepreneurs.
(This group of hackers were the exact sort of "hackers"
most likely to react with militant fury at any criminal
degradation of the term "hacker.")
Barlow, though he was not arrested or accused of a crime,
and though his computer had certainly not gone out the door,
was very troubled by this anomaly. He carried the word to the Well.
Like the Hackers Conference, "the Well" was an emanation of the
Point Foundation. Point Foundation, the inspiration of a wealthy
Californian 60s radical named Stewart Brand, was to be a major
launch-pad of the civil libertarian effort.
Point Foundation's cultural efforts, like those of their fellow Bay Area
Californians the Grateful Dead, were multifaceted and multitudinous.
Rigid ideological consistency had never been a strong suit of the
Whole Earth Catalog. This Point publication had enjoyed a strong
vogue during the late 60s and early 70s, when it offered hundreds
of practical (and not so practical) tips on communitarian living,
environmentalism, and getting back-to-the-land. The Whole Earth Catalog,
and its sequels, sold two and half million copies and won a
National Book Award.
With the slow collapse of American radical dissent, the Whole Earth Catalog
had slipped to a more modest corner of the cultural radar; but in its
magazine incarnation, CoEvolution Quarterly, the Point Foundation
continued to offer a magpie potpourri of "access to tools and ideas."
CoEvolution Quarterly, which started in 1974, was never a widely
popular magazine. Despite periodic outbreaks of millenarian fervor,
CoEvolution Quarterly failed to revolutionize Western civilization
and replace leaden centuries of history with bright new Californian paradigms.
Instead, this propaganda arm of Point Foundation cakewalked a fine line between
impressive brilliance and New Age flakiness. CoEvolution Quarterly carried
no advertising, cost a lot, and came out on cheap newsprint with modest
black-and-white graphics. It was poorly distributed, and spread mostly
by subscription and word of mouth.
It could not seem to grow beyond 30,000 subscribers.
And yet--it never seemed to shrink much, either.
Year in, year out, decade in, decade out, some strange
demographic minority accreted to support the magazine.
The enthusiastic readership did not seem to have much
in the way of coherent politics or ideals. It was sometimes
hard to understand what held them together (if the often bitter
debate in the letter-columns could be described as "togetherness").
But if the magazine did not flourish, it was resilient; it got by.
Then, in 1984, the birth-year of the Macintosh computer,
CoEvolution Quarterly suddenly hit the rapids. Point Foundation
had discovered the computer revolution. Out came the Whole Earth
Software Catalog of 1984, arousing headscratching doubts among
the tie-dyed faithful, and rabid enthusiasm among the nascent
"cyberpunk" milieu, present company included. Point Foundation
started its yearly Hackers Conference, and began to take an
extensive interest in the strange new possibilities of
digital counterculture. CoEvolution Quarterlyfolded its teepee,
replaced by Whole Earth Software Review and eventually by Whole Earth
Review (the magazine's present incarnation, currently under
the editorship of virtual-reality maven Howard Rheingold).
1985 saw the birth of the "WELL"--the "Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link."
The Well was Point Foundation's bulletin board system.
As boards went, the Well was an anomaly from the beginning,
and remained one. It was local to San Francisco.
It was huge, with multiple phonelines and enormous files
of commentary. Its complex UNIX-based software might be
most charitably described as "user-opaque." It was run on
a mainframe out of the rambling offices of a non-profit
cultural foundation in Sausalito. And it was crammed with
fans of the Grateful Dead.
Though the Well was peopled by chattering hipsters of the Bay Area
counterculture, it was by no means a "digital underground" board.
Teenagers were fairly scarce; most Well users (known as "Wellbeings")
were thirty- and forty-something Baby Boomers. They tended to work
in the information industry: hardware, software, telecommunications,
media, entertainment. Librarians, academics, and journalists were
especially common on the Well, attracted by Point Foundation's
open-handed distribution of "tools and ideas."
There were no anarchy files on the Well, scarcely a
dropped hint about access codes or credit-card theft.
No one used handles. Vicious "flame-wars" were held to
a comparatively civilized rumble. Debates were sometimes sharp,
but no Wellbeing ever claimed that a rival had disconnected his phone,
trashed his house, or posted his credit card numbers.
The Well grew slowly as the 1980s advanced. It charged a modest sum
for access and storage, and lost money for years--but not enough to hamper
the Point Foundation, which was nonprofit anyway. By 1990, the Well
had about five thousand users. These users wandered about a gigantic
cyberspace smorgasbord of "Conferences", each conference itself consisting
of a welter of "topics," each topic containing dozens, sometimes hundreds
of comments, in a tumbling, multiperson debate that could last for months
or years on end.
In 1991, the Well's list of conferences looked like this:
CONFERENCES ON THE WELL
WELL "Screenzine" Digest (g zine)
Best of the WELL - vintage material - (g best)
Index listing of new topics in all conferences - (g newtops)
Business - Education
----------------------
Apple Library Users Group(g alug) Agriculture (g agri)
Brainstorming (g brain) Classifieds (g cla)
Computer Journalism (g cj) Consultants (g consult)
Consumers (g cons) Design (g design)
Desktop Publishing (g desk) Disability (g disability)
Education (g ed) Energy (g energy91)
Entrepreneurs (g entre) Homeowners (g home)
Indexing (g indexing) Investments (g invest)
Kids91 (g kids) Legal (g legal)
One Person Business (g one)
Periodical/newsletter (g per)
Telecomm Law (g tcl) The Future (g fut)
Translators (g trans) Travel (g tra)
Work (g work)
Electronic Frontier Foundation (g eff)
Computers, Freedom & Privacy (g cfp)
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (g cpsr)
Social - Political - Humanities
---------------------------------
Aging (g gray) AIDS (g aids)
Amnesty International (g amnesty) Archives (g arc)
Berkeley (g berk) Buddhist (g wonderland)
Christian (g cross) Couples (g couples)
Current Events (g curr) Dreams (g dream)
Drugs (g dru) East Coast (g east)
Emotional Health@@@@ (g private) Erotica (g eros)
Environment (g env) Firearms (g firearms)
First Amendment (g first) Fringes of Reason (g fringes)
Gay (g gay) Gay (Private)# (g gaypriv)
Geography (g geo) German (g german)
Gulf War (g gulf) Hawaii (g aloha)
Health (g heal) History (g hist)
Holistic (g holi) Interview (g inter)
Italian (g ital) Jewish (g jew)
Liberty (g liberty) Mind (g mind)
Miscellaneous (g misc) Men on the WELL@@ (g mow)
Network Integration (g origin) Nonprofits (g non)
North Bay (g north) Northwest (g nw)
Pacific Rim (g pacrim) Parenting (g par)
Peace (g pea) Peninsula (g pen)
Poetry (g poetry) Philosophy (g phi)
Politics (g pol) Psychology (g psy)
Psychotherapy (g therapy) Recovery## (g recovery)
San Francisco (g sanfran) Scams (g scam)
Sexuality (g sex) Singles (g singles)
Southern (g south) Spanish (g spanish)
Spirituality (g spirit) Tibet (g tibet)
Transportation (g transport) True Confessions (g tru)
Unclear (g unclear) WELL Writer's Workshop@@@(g www)
Whole Earth (g we) Women on the WELL@(g wow)
Words (g words) Writers (g wri)
@@@@Private Conference - mail wooly for entry
@@@Private conference - mail sonia for entry
@@Private conference - mail flash for entry
@ Private conference - mail reva for entry
# Private Conference - mail hudu for entry
## Private Conference - mail dhawk for entry
Arts - Recreation - Entertainment
-----------------------------------
ArtCom Electronic Net (g acen)
Audio-Videophilia (g aud)
Bicycles (g bike) Bay Area Tonight@@(g bat)
Boating (g wet) Books (g books)
CD's (g cd) Comics (g comics)
Cooking (g cook) Flying (g flying)
Fun (g fun) Games (g games)
Gardening (g gard) Kids (g kids)
Nightowls@ (g owl) Jokes (g jokes)
MIDI (g midi) Movies (g movies)
Motorcycling (g ride) Motoring (g car)
Music (g mus) On Stage (g onstage)
Pets (g pets) Radio (g rad)
Restaurant (g rest) Science Fiction (g sf)
Sports (g spo) Star Trek (g trek)
Television (g tv) Theater (g theater)
Weird (g weird) Zines/Factsheet Five(g f5)
@Open from midnight to 6am
@@Updated daily
Grateful Dead
-------------
Grateful Dead (g gd) Deadplan@ (g dp)
Deadlit (g deadlit) Feedback (g feedback)
GD Hour (g gdh) Tapes (g tapes)
Tickets (g tix) Tours (g tours)
@Private conference - mail tnf for entry
Computers
-----------
AI/Forth/Realtime (g realtime) Amiga (g amiga)
Apple (g app) Computer Books (g cbook)
Art & Graphics (g gra) Hacking (g hack)
HyperCard (g hype) IBM PC (g ibm)
LANs (g lan) Laptop (g lap)
Macintosh (g mac) Mactech (g mactech)
Microtimes (g microx) Muchomedia (g mucho)
NeXt (g next) OS/2 (g os2)
Printers (g print) Programmer's Net (g net)
Siggraph (g siggraph) Software Design (g sdc)
Software/Programming (g software)
Software Support (g ssc)
Unix (g unix) Windows (g windows)
Word Processing (g word)
Technical - Communications
----------------------------
Bioinfo (g bioinfo) Info (g boing)
Media (g media) NAPLPS (g naplps)
Netweaver (g netweaver) Networld (g networld)
Packet Radio (g packet) Photography (g pho)
Radio (g rad) Science (g science)
Technical Writers (g tec) Telecommunications(g tele)
Usenet (g usenet) Video (g vid)
Virtual Reality (g vr)
The WELL Itself
---------------
Deeper (g deeper) Entry (g ent)
General (g gentech) Help (g help)
Hosts (g hosts) Policy (g policy)
System News (g news) Test (g test)
The list itself is dazzling, bringing to the untutored eye
a dizzying impression of a bizarre milieu of mountain-climbing
Hawaiian holistic photographers trading true-life confessions
with bisexual word-processing Tibetans.
But this confusion is more apparent than real. Each of these conferences
was a little cyberspace world in itself, comprising dozens and perhaps
hundreds of sub-topics. Each conference was commonly frequented by
a fairly small, fairly like-minded community of perhaps a few dozen people.
It was humanly impossible to encompass the entire Well (especially since
access to the Well's mainframe computer was billed by the hour).
Most long-time users contented themselves with a few favorite
topical neighborhoods, with the occasional foray elsewhere
for a taste of exotica. But especially important news items,
and hot topical debates, could catch the attention of the entire
Well community.
Like any community, the Well had its celebrities, and John Perry Barlow,
the silver-tongued and silver-modemed lyricist of the Grateful Dead,
ranked prominently among them. It was here on the Well that Barlow
posted his true-life tale of computer-crime encounter with the FBI.
The story, as might be expected, created a great stir. The Well was
already primed for hacker controversy. In December 1989, Harper's magazine
had hosted a debate on the Well about the ethics of illicit computer intrusion.
While over forty various computer-mavens took part, Barlow proved a star
in the debate. So did "Acid Phreak" and "Phiber Optik," a pair of young
New York hacker-phreaks whose skills at telco switching-station intrusion
were matched only by their apparently limitless hunger for fame.
The advent of these two boldly swaggering outlaws in the precincts
of the Well created a sensation akin to that of Black Panthers
at a cocktail party for the radically chic.
Phiber Optik in particular was to seize the day in 1990.
A devotee of the 2600 circle and stalwart of the New York
hackers' group "Masters of Deception," Phiber Optik was
a splendid exemplar of the computer intruder as committed dissident.
The eighteen-year-old Optik, a high-school dropout and part-time
computer repairman, was young, smart, and ruthlessly obsessive,
a sharp-dressing, sharp-talking digital dude who was utterly
and airily contemptuous of anyone's rules but his own.
By late 1991, Phiber Optik had appeared in Harper's,
Esquire, The New York Times, in countless public debates
and conventions, even on a television show hosted by Geraldo Rivera.
Treated with gingerly respect by Barlow and other Well mavens,
Phiber Optik swiftly became a Well celebrity. Strangely, despite
his thorny attitude and utter single-mindedness, Phiber Optik seemed
to arouse strong protective instincts in most of the people who met him.
He was great copy for journalists, always fearlessly ready to swagger,
and, better yet, to actually DEMONSTRATE some off-the-wall digital stunt.
He was a born media darling.
Even cops seemed to recognize that there was something peculiarly unworldly
and uncriminal about this particular troublemaker. He was so bold,
so flagrant, so young, and so obviously doomed, that even those
who strongly disapproved of his actions grew anxious for his welfare,
and began to flutter about him as if he were an endangered seal pup.
In January 24, 1990 (nine days after the Martin Luther King Day Crash),
Phiber Optik, Acid Phreak, and a third NYC scofflaw named Scorpion were
raided by the Secret Service. Their computers went out the door,
along with the usual blizzard of papers, notebooks, compact disks,
answering machines, Sony Walkmans, etc. Both Acid Phreak and
Phiber Optik were accused of having caused the Crash.
The mills of justice ground slowly. The case eventually fell into
the hands of the New York State Police. Phiber had lost his machinery
in the raid, but there were no charges filed against him for over a year.
His predicament was extensively publicized on the Well, where it caused
much resentment for police tactics. It's one thing to merely hear about
a hacker raided or busted; it's another to see the police attacking someone
you've come to know personally, and who has explained his motives at length.
Through the Harper's debate on the Well, it had become clear to the
Wellbeings that Phiber Optik was not in fact going to "hurt anything."
In their own salad days, many Wellbeings had tasted tear-gas in pitched
street-battles with police. They were inclined to indulgence for
acts of civil disobedience.
Wellbeings were also startled to learn of the draconian thoroughness
of a typical hacker search-and-seizure. It took no great stretch of
imagination for them to envision themselves suffering much the same treatment.
As early as January 1990, sentiment on the Well had already begun to sour,
and people had begun to grumble that "hackers" were getting a raw deal
from the ham-handed powers-that-be. The resultant issue of Harper's
magazine posed the question as to whether computer-intrusion was a "crime"
at all. As Barlow put it later: "I've begun to wonder if we wouldn't
also regard spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves."
In February 1991, more than a year after the raid on his home,
Phiber Optik was finally arrested, and was charged with first-degree
Computer Tampering and Computer Trespass, New York state offenses.
He was also charged with a theft-of-service misdemeanor, involving a complex
free-call scam to a 900 number. Phiber Optik pled guilty to the misdemeanor
charge, and was sentenced to 35 hours of community service.
This passing harassment from the unfathomable world of straight people
seemed to bother Optik himself little if at all. Deprived of his computer
by the January search-and-seizure, he simply bought himself a portable
computer so the cops could no longer monitor the phone where he lived
with his Mom, and he went right on with his depredations, sometimes on
live radio or in front of television cameras.
The crackdown raid may have done little to dissuade Phiber Optik,
but its galling affect on the Wellbeings was profound. As 1990 rolled on,
the slings and arrows mounted: the Knight Lightning raid,
the Steve Jackson raid, the nation-spanning Operation Sundevil.
The rhetoric of law enforcement made it clear that there was,
in fact, a concerted crackdown on hackers in progress.
The hackers of the Hackers Conference, the Wellbeings, and their ilk,
did not really mind the occasional public misapprehension of "hacking;"
if anything, this membrane of differentiation from straight society
made the "computer community" feel different, smarter, better.
They had never before been confronted, however, by a concerted
vilification campaign.
Barlow's central role in the counter-struggle was one of the major
anomalies of 1990. Journalists investigating the controversy
often stumbled over the truth about Barlow, but they commonly
dusted themselves off and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
It was as if it were TOO MUCH TO BELIEVE that a 1960s freak
from the Grateful Dead had taken on a federal law enforcement operation
head-to-head and ACTUALLY SEEMED TO BE WINNING!
Barlow had no easily detectable power-base for a political struggle
of this kind. He had no formal legal or technical credentials.
Barlow was, however, a computer networker of truly stellar brilliance.
He had a poet's gift of concise, colorful phrasing. He also had a
journalist's shrewdness, an off-the-wall, self-deprecating wit,
and a phenomenal wealth of simple personal charm.
The kind of influence Barlow possessed is fairly common currency
in literary, artistic, or musical circles. A gifted critic can
wield great artistic influence simply through defining
the temper of the times, by coining the catch-phrases
and the terms of debate that become the common currency of the period.
(And as it happened, Barlow WAS a part-time art critic,
with a special fondness for the Western art of Frederic Remington.)
Barlow was the first commentator to adopt William Gibson's
striking science-fictional term "cyberspace" as a synonym
for the present-day nexus of computer and telecommunications networks.
Barlow was insistent that cyberspace should be regarded as
a qualitatively new world, a "frontier." According to Barlow,
the world of electronic communications, now made visible through
the computer screen, could no longer be usefully regarded
as just a tangle of high-tech wiring. Instead, it had become
a PLACE, cyberspace, which demanded a new set of metaphors,
a new set of rules and behaviors. The term, as Barlow employed it,
struck a useful chord, and this concept of cyberspace was picked up
by Time, Scientific American, computer police, hackers, and even
Constitutional scholars. "Cyberspace" now seems likely to become
a permanent fixture of the language.
Barlow was very striking in person: a tall, craggy-faced, bearded,
deep-voiced Wyomingan in a dashing Western ensemble of jeans, jacket,
cowboy boots, a knotted throat-kerchief and an ever-present Grateful Dead
cloisonne lapel pin.
Armed with a modem, however, Barlow was truly in his element.
Formal hierarchies were not Barlow's strong suit; he rarely missed
a chance to belittle the "large organizations and their drones,"
with their uptight, institutional mindset. Barlow was very much
of the free-spirit persuasion, deeply unimpressed by brass-hats
and jacks-in-office. But when it came to the digital grapevine,
Barlow was a cyberspace ad-hocrat par excellence.
There was not a mighty army of Barlows. There was only one Barlow,
and he was a fairly anomolous individual. However, the situation only
seemed to REQUIRE a single Barlow. In fact, after 1990, many people
must have concluded that a single Barlow was far more than
they'd ever bargained for.
Barlow's querulous mini-essay about his encounter with the FBI
struck a strong chord on the Well. A number of other free spirits
on the fringes of Apple Computing had come under suspicion,
and they liked it not one whit better than he did.
One of these was Mitchell Kapor, the co-inventor of the spreadsheet
program "Lotus 1-2-3" and the founder of Lotus Development Corporation.
Kapor had written-off the passing indignity of being fingerprinted
down at his own local Boston FBI headquarters, but Barlow's post
made the full national scope of the FBI's dragnet clear to Kapor.
The issue now had Kapor's full attention. As the Secret Service
swung into anti-hacker operation nationwide in 1990, Kapor watched
every move with deep skepticism and growing alarm.
As it happened, Kapor had already met Barlow, who had interviewed Kapor
for a California computer journal. Like most people who met Barlow,
Kapor had been very taken with him. Now Kapor took it upon himself
to drop in on Barlow for a heart-to-heart talk about the situation.
Kapor was a regular on the Well. Kapor had been a devotee of the
Whole Earth Catalogsince the beginning, and treasured a complete run
of the magazine. And Kapor not only had a modem, but a private jet.
In pursuit of the scattered high-tech investments of Kapor Enterprises Inc.,
his personal, multi-million dollar holding company, Kapor commonly crossed
state lines with about as much thought as one might give to faxing a letter.
The Kapor-Barlow council of June 1990, in Pinedale, Wyoming, was the start
of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Barlow swiftly wrote a manifesto,
"Crime and Puzzlement," which announced his, and Kapor's, intention
to form a political organization to "raise and disburse funds for education,
lobbying, and litigation in the areas relating to digital speech and the
extension of the Constitution into Cyberspace."
Furthermore, proclaimed the manifesto, the foundation would
"fund, conduct, and support legal efforts to demonstrate
that the Secret Service has exercised prior restraint on publications,
limited free speech, conducted improper seizure of equipment and data,
used undue force, and generally conducted itself in a fashion which
is arbitrary, oppressive, and unconstitutional."
"Crime and Puzzlement" was distributed far and wide through computer
networking channels, and also printed in the Whole Earth Review.
The sudden declaration of a coherent, politicized counter-strike
from the ranks of hackerdom electrified the community. Steve Wozniak
(perhaps a bit stung by the NuPrometheus scandal) swiftly offered
to match any funds Kapor offered the Foundation.
John Gilmore, one of the pioneers of Sun Microsystems, immediately offered
his own extensive financial and personal support. Gilmore, an ardent
libertarian, was to prove an eloquent advocate of electronic privacy issues,
especially freedom from governmental and corporate computer-assisted
surveillance of private citizens.
A second meeting in San Francisco rounded up further allies:
Stewart Brand of the Point Foundation, virtual-reality pioneers
Jaron Lanier and Chuck Blanchard, network entrepreneur and venture
capitalist Nat Goldhaber. At this dinner meeting, the activists settled on
a formal title: the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Incorporated.
Kapor became its president. A new EFF Conference was opened on
the Point Foundation's Well, and the Well was declared
"the home of the Electronic Frontier Foundation."
Press coverage was immediate and intense. Like their
nineteenth-century spiritual ancestors, Alexander Graham Bell
and Thomas Watson, the high-tech computer entrepreneurs
of the 1970s and 1980s--people such as Wozniak, Jobs, Kapor,
Gates, and H. Ross Perot, who had raised themselves by their bootstraps
to dominate a glittering new industry--had always made very good copy.
But while the Wellbeings rejoiced, the press in general seemed
nonplussed by the self-declared "civilizers of cyberspace."
EFF's insistence that the war against "hackers" involved grave
Constitutional civil liberties issues seemed somewhat farfetched,
especially since none of EFF's organizers were lawyers
or established politicians. The business press in particular
found it easier to seize on the apparent core of the story--
that high-tech entrepreneur Mitchell Kapor had established
a "defense fund for hackers." Was EFF a genuinely important
political development--or merely a clique of wealthy eccentrics,
dabbling in matters better left to the proper authorities?
The jury was still out.
But the stage was now set for open confrontation.
And the first and the most critical battle was the
hacker show-trial of "Knight Lightning."
#
It has been my practice throughout this book to refer to hackers
only by their "handles." There is little to gain by giving
the real names of these people, many of whom are juveniles,
many of whom have never been convicted of any crime, and many
of whom had unsuspecting parents who have already suffered enough.
But the trial of Knight Lightning on July 24-27, 1990,
made this particular "hacker" a nationally known public figure.
It can do no particular harm to himself or his family if I repeat
the long-established fact that his name is Craig Neidorf (pronounced NYE-dorf).
Neidorf's jury trial took place in the United States District Court,
Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, with the
Honorable Nicholas J. Bua presiding. The United States of America
was the plaintiff, the defendant Mr. Neidorf. The defendant's attorney
was Sheldon T. Zenner of the Chicago firm of Katten, Muchin and Zavis.
The prosecution was led by the stalwarts of the Chicago Computer Fraud
and Abuse Task Force: William J. Cook, Colleen D. Coughlin, and
David A. Glockner, all Assistant United States Attorneys.
The Secret Service Case Agent was Timothy M. Foley.
It will be recalled that Neidorf was the co-editor of an underground hacker
"magazine" called Phrack. Phrack was an entirely electronic publication,
distributed through bulletin boards and over electronic networks.
It was amateur publication given away for free. Neidorf had never made
any money for his work in Phrack. Neither had his unindicted co-editor
"Taran King" or any of the numerous Phrack contributors.
The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force, however,
had decided to prosecute Neidorf as a fraudster.
To formally admit that Phrack was a "magazine"
and Neidorf a "publisher" was to open a prosecutorial
Pandora's Box of First Amendment issues. To do this
was to play into the hands of Zenner and his EFF advisers,
which now included a phalanx of prominent New York civil rights
lawyers as well as the formidable legal staff of Katten, Muchin and Zavis.
Instead, the prosecution relied heavily on the issue of access device fraud:
Section 1029 of Title 18, the section from which the Secret Service drew
its most direct jurisdiction over computer crime.
Neidorf's alleged crimes centered around the E911 Document.
He was accused of having entered into a fraudulent scheme with the Prophet,
who, it will be recalled, was the Atlanta LoD member who had illicitly
copied the E911 Document from the BellSouth AIMSX system.
The Prophet himself was also a co-defendant in the Neidorf case,
part-and-parcel of the alleged "fraud scheme" to "steal" BellSouth's
E911 Document (and to pass the Document across state lines,
which helped establish the Neidorf trial as a federal case).
The Prophet, in the spirit of full co-operation, had agreed
to testify against Neidorf.
In fact, all three of the Atlanta crew stood ready to testify against Neidorf.
Their own federal prosecutors in Atlanta had charged the Atlanta Three with:
(a) conspiracy, (b) computer fraud, (c) wire fraud, (d) access device fraud,
and (e) interstate transportation of stolen property (Title 18, Sections 371,
1030, 1343, 1029, and 2314).
Faced with this blizzard of trouble, Prophet and Leftist had ducked
any public trial and had pled guilty to reduced charges--one conspiracy
count apiece. Urvile had pled guilty to that odd bit of Section 1029
which makes it illegal to possess "fifteen or more" illegal access devices
(in his case, computer passwords). And their sentences were scheduled
for September 14, 1990--well after the Neidorf trial. As witnesses,
they could presumably be relied upon to behave.
Neidorf, however, was pleading innocent. Most everyone else caught up
in the crackdown had "cooperated fully" and pled guilty in hope
of reduced sentences. (Steve Jackson was a notable exception,
of course, and had strongly protested his innocence from the
very beginning. But Steve Jackson could not get a day in court--
Steve Jackson had never been charged with any crime in the first place.)
Neidorf had been urged to plead guilty. But Neidorf was a political science
major and was disinclined to go to jail for "fraud" when he had not made
any money, had not broken into any computer, and had been publishing
a magazine that he considered protected under the First Amendment.
Neidorf's trial was the ONLY legal action of the entire Crackdown
that actually involved bringing the issues at hand out for a public test
in front of a jury of American citizens.
Neidorf, too, had cooperated with investigators. He had voluntarily
handed over much of the evidence that had led to his own indictment.
He had already admitted in writing that he knew that the E911 Document
had been stolen before he had "published" it in Phrack--or, from the
prosecution's point of view, illegally transported stolen property by wire
in something purporting to be a "publication."
But even if the "publication" of the E911 Document was not held to be a crime,
that wouldn't let Neidorf off the hook. Neidorf had still received
the E911 Document when Prophet had transferred it to him from Rich Andrews'
Jolnet node. On that occasion, it certainly hadn't been "published"--
it was hacker booty, pure and simple, transported across state lines.
The Chicago Task Force led a Chicago grand jury to indict Neidorf
on a set of charges that could have put him in jail for thirty years.
When some of these charges were successfully challenged before Neidorf
actually went to trial, the Chicago Task Force rearranged his
indictment so that he faced a possible jail term of over sixty years!
As a first offender, it was very unlikely that Neidorf would in fact
receive a sentence so drastic; but the Chicago Task Force clearly
intended to see Neidorf put in prison, and his conspiratorial "magazine"
put permanently out of commission. This was a federal case, and Neidorf
was charged with the fraudulent theft of property worth almost
eighty thousand dollars.
William Cook was a strong believer in high-profile prosecutions
with symbolic overtones. He often published articles on his work
in the security trade press, arguing that "a clear message had
to be sent to the public at large and the computer community
in particular that unauthorized attacks on computers and the theft
of computerized information would not be tolerated by the courts."
The issues were complex, the prosecution's tactics somewhat unorthodox,
but the Chicago Task Force had proved sure-footed to date. "Shadowhawk"
had been bagged on the wing in 1989 by the Task Force, and sentenced
to nine months in prison, and a $10,000 fine. The Shadowhawk case involved
charges under Section 1030, the "federal interest computer" section.
Shadowhawk had not in fact been a devotee of "federal-interest" computers
per se. On the contrary, Shadowhawk, who owned an AT&T home computer,
seemed to cherish a special aggression toward AT&T. He had bragged on
the underground boards "Phreak Klass 2600" and "Dr. Ripco" of his skills
at raiding AT&T, and of his intention to crash AT&T's national phone system.
Shadowhawk's brags were noticed by Henry Kluepfel of Bellcore Security,
scourge of the outlaw boards, whose relations with the Chicago Task Force
were long and intimate.
The Task Force successfully established that Section 1030 applied to
the teenage Shadowhawk, despite the objections of his defense attorney.
Shadowhawk had entered a computer "owned" by U.S. Missile Command
and merely "managed" by AT&T. He had also entered an AT&T computer
located at Robbins Air Force Base in Georgia. Attacking AT&T was
of "federal interest" whether Shadowhawk had intended it or not.
The Task Force also convinced the court that a piece of AT&T
software that Shadowhawk had illicitly copied from Bell Labs,
the "Artificial Intelligence C5 Expert System," was worth a cool
one million dollars. Shadowhawk's attorney had argued that
Shadowhawk had not sold the program and had made no profit from
the illicit copying. And in point of fact, the C5 Expert System
was experimental software, and had no established market value
because it had never been on the market in the first place.
AT&T's own assessment of a "one million dollar" figure for its
own intangible property was accepted without challenge
by the court, however. And the court concurred with
the government prosecutors that Shadowhawk showed clear
"intent to defraud" whether he'd gotten any money or not.
Shadowhawk went to jail.
The Task Force's other best-known triumph had been the conviction
and jailing of "Kyrie." Kyrie, a true denizen of the digital
criminal underground, was a 36-year-old Canadian woman,
convicted and jailed for telecommunications fraud in Canada.
After her release from prison, she had fled the wrath of Canada Bell
and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and eventually settled,
very unwisely, in Chicago.
"Kyrie," who also called herself "Long Distance Information,"
specialized in voice-mail abuse. She assembled large numbers
of hot long-distance codes, then read them aloud into a series
of corporate voice-mail systems. Kyrie and her friends were
electronic squatters in corporate voice-mail systems,
using them much as if they were pirate bulletin boards,
then moving on when their vocal chatter clogged the system
and the owners necessarily wised up. Kyrie's camp followers
were a loose tribe of some hundred and fifty phone-phreaks,
who followed her trail of piracy from machine to machine,
ardently begging for her services and expertise.
Kyrie's disciples passed her stolen credit-card numbers,
in exchange for her stolen "long distance information."
Some of Kyrie's clients paid her off in cash, by scamming
credit-card cash advances from Western Union.
Kyrie travelled incessantly, mostly through airline tickets
and hotel rooms that she scammed through stolen credit cards.
Tiring of this, she found refuge with a fellow female phone
phreak in Chicago. Kyrie's hostess, like a surprising number
of phone phreaks, was blind. She was also physically disabled.
Kyrie allegedly made the best of her new situation by applying for,
and receiving, state welfare funds under a false identity as
a qualified caretaker for the handicapped.
Sadly, Kyrie's two children by a former marriage had also vanished
underground with her; these pre-teen digital refugees had no legal
American identity, and had never spent a day in school.
Kyrie was addicted to technical mastery and enthralled by her own
cleverness and the ardent worship of her teenage followers.
This foolishly led her to phone up Gail Thackeray in Arizona,
to boast, brag, strut, and offer to play informant.
Thackeray, however, had already learned far more
than enough about Kyrie, whom she roundly despised
as an adult criminal corrupting minors, a "female Fagin."
Thackeray passed her tapes of Kyrie's boasts to the Secret Service.
Kyrie was raided and arrested in Chicago in May 1989.
She confessed at great length and pled guilty.
In August 1990, Cook and his Task Force colleague Colleen Coughlin
sent Kyrie to jail for 27 months, for computer and telecommunications fraud.
This was a markedly severe sentence by the usual wrist-slapping standards
of "hacker" busts. Seven of Kyrie's foremost teenage disciples were also
indicted and convicted. The Kyrie "high-tech street gang," as Cook
described it, had been crushed. Cook and his colleagues had been
the first ever to put someone in prison for voice-mail abuse.
Their pioneering efforts had won them attention and kudos.
In his article on Kyrie, Cook drove the message home to the readers
of Security Management magazine, a trade journal for corporate
security professionals. The case, Cook said, and Kyrie's stiff sentence,
"reflect a new reality for hackers and computer crime victims in the
'90s. . . . Individuals and corporations who report computer
and telecommunications crimes can now expect that their cooperation
with federal law enforcement will result in meaningful punishment.
Companies and the public at large must report computer-enhanced
crimes if they want prosecutors and the course to protect their rights
to the tangible and intangible property developed and stored on computers."
Cook had made it his business to construct this "new reality for hackers."
He'd also made it his business to police corporate property rights
to the intangible.
Had the Electronic Frontier Foundation been a "hacker defense fund"
as that term was generally understood, they presumably would have stood up
for Kyrie. Her 1990 sentence did indeed send a "message" that federal heat
was coming down on "hackers." But Kyrie found no defenders at EFF,
or anywhere else, for that matter. EFF was not a bail-out fund
for electronic crooks.
The Neidorf case paralleled the Shadowhawk case in certain ways.
The victim once again was allowed to set the value of the "stolen" property.
Once again Kluepfel was both investigator and technical advisor.
Once again no money had changed hands, but the "intent to defraud" was central.
The prosecution's case showed signs of weakness early on. The Task Force
had originally hoped to prove Neidorf the center of a nationwide
Legion of Doom criminal conspiracy. The Phrack editors threw physical
get-togethers every summer, which attracted hackers from across the country;
generally two dozen or so of the magazine's favorite contributors and readers.
(Such conventions were common in the hacker community; 2600 Magazine,
for instance, held public meetings of hackers in New York, every month.)
LoD heavy-dudes were always a strong presence at these Phrack-sponsored
"Summercons."
In July 1988, an Arizona hacker named "Dictator" attended Summercon
in Neidorf's home town of St. Louis. Dictator was one of Gail Thackeray's
underground informants; Dictator's underground board in Phoenix was
a sting operation for the Secret Service. Dictator brought an undercover
crew of Secret Service agents to Summercon. The agents bored spyholes
through the wall of Dictator's hotel room in St Louis, and videotaped
the frolicking hackers through a one-way mirror. As it happened,
however, nothing illegal had occurred on videotape, other than the
guzzling of beer by a couple of minors. Summercons were social events,
not sinister cabals. The tapes showed fifteen hours of raucous laughter,
pizza-gobbling, in-jokes and back-slapping.
Neidorf's lawyer, Sheldon Zenner, saw the Secret Service tapes
before the trial. Zenner was shocked by the complete harmlessness
of this meeting, which Cook had earlier characterized as a sinister
interstate conspiracy to commit fraud. Zenner wanted to show the
Summercon tapes to the jury. It took protracted maneuverings
by the Task Force to keep the tapes from the jury as "irrelevant."
The E911 Document was also proving a weak reed. It had originally
been valued at $79,449. Unlike Shadowhawk's arcane Artificial Intelligence
booty, the E911 Document was not software--it was written in English.
Computer-knowledgeable people found this value--for a twelve-page
bureaucratic document--frankly incredible. In his "Crime and Puzzlement"
manifesto for EFF, Barlow commented: "We will probably never know how
this figure was reached or by whom, though I like to imagine an appraisal
team consisting of Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon."
As it happened, Barlow was unduly pessimistic. The EFF did, in fact,
eventually discover exactly how this figure was reached, and by whom--
but only in 1991, long after the Neidorf trial was over.
Kim Megahee, a Southern Bell security manager,
had arrived at the document's value by simply adding up
the "costs associated with the production" of the E911 Document.
Those "costs" were as follows:
1. A technical writer had been hired to research and write the E911 Document.
200 hours of work, at $35 an hour, cost : $7,000. A Project Manager had
overseen the technical writer. 200 hours, at $31 an hour, made: $6,200.
2. A week of typing had cost $721 dollars. A week of formatting had
cost $721. A week of graphics formatting had cost $742.
3. Two days of editing cost $367.
4. A box of order labels cost five dollars.
5. Preparing a purchase order for the Document, including typing
and the obtaining of an authorizing signature from within the
BellSouth bureaucracy, cost $129.
6. Printing cost $313. Mailing the Document to fifty people
took fifty hours by a clerk, and cost $858.
7. Placing the Document in an index took two clerks an hour each,
totalling $43.
Bureaucratic overhead alone, therefore, was alleged to have cost
a whopping $17,099. According to Mr. Megahee, the typing
of a twelve-page document had taken a full week. Writing it
had taken five weeks, including an overseer who apparently
did nothing else but watch the author for five weeks.
Editing twelve pages had taken two days. Printing and mailing
an electronic document (which was already available on the
Southern Bell Data Network to any telco employee who needed it),
had cost over a thousand dollars.
But this was just the beginning. There were also the HARDWARE EXPENSES.
Eight hundred fifty dollars for a VT220 computer monitor.
THIRTY-ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS for a sophisticated VAXstation II computer.
Six thousand dollars for a computer printer. TWENTY-TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS
for a copy of "Interleaf" software. Two thousand five hundred dollars
for VMS software. All this to create the twelve-page Document.
Plus ten percent of the cost of the software and the hardware, for maintenance.
(Actually, the ten percent maintenance costs, though mentioned, had been left
off the final $79,449 total, apparently through a merciful oversight).
Mr. Megahee's letter had been mailed directly to William Cook himself,
at the office of the Chicago federal attorneys. The United States Government
accepted these telco figures without question.
As incredulity mounted, the value of the E911 Document was officially
revised downward. This time, Robert Kibler of BellSouth Security
estimated the value of the twelve pages as a mere $24,639.05--based,
purportedly, on "R&D costs." But this specific estimate,
right down to the nickel, did not move the skeptics at all;
in fact it provoked open scorn and a torrent of sarcasm.
The financial issues concerning theft of proprietary information
have always been peculiar. It could be argued that BellSouth
had not "lost" its E911 Document at all in the first place,
and therefore had not suffered any monetary damage from this "theft."
And Sheldon Zenner did in fact argue this at Neidorf's trial--
that Prophet's raid had not been "theft," but was better understood
as illicit copying.
The money, however, was not central to anyone's true purposes in this trial.
It was not Cook's strategy to convince the jury that the E911 Document
was a major act of theft and should be punished for that reason alone.
His strategy was to argue that the E911 Document was DANGEROUS.
It was his intention to establish that the E911 Document was "a road-map"
to the Enhanced 911 System. Neidorf had deliberately and recklessly
distributed a dangerous weapon. Neidorf and the Prophet did not care
(or perhaps even gloated at the sinister idea) that the E911 Document
could be used by hackers to disrupt 911 service, "a life line for every
person certainly in the Southern Bell region of the United States,
and indeed, in many communities throughout the United States,"
in Cook's own words. Neidorf had put people's lives in danger.
In pre-trial maneuverings, Cook had established that the E911 Document
was too hot to appear in the public proceedings of the Neidorf trial.
The JURY ITSELF would not be allowed to ever see this Document,
lest it slip into the official court records, and thus into the hands
of the general public, and, thus, somehow, to malicious hackers
who might lethally abuse it.
Hiding the E911 Document from the jury may have been a
clever legal maneuver, but it had a severe flaw. There were,
in point of fact, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people,
already in possession of the E911 Document, just as Phrack
had published it. Its true nature was already obvious
to a wide section of the interested public (all of whom,
by the way, were, at least theoretically, party to
a gigantic wire-fraud conspiracy). Most everyone
in the electronic community who had a modem and any
interest in the Neidorf case already had a copy of the Document.
It had already been available in Phrack for over a year.
People, even quite normal people without any particular
prurient interest in forbidden knowledge, did not shut their eyes
in terror at the thought of beholding a "dangerous" document
from a telephone company. On the contrary, they tended to trust
their own judgement and simply read the Document for themselves.
And they were not impressed.
One such person was John Nagle. Nagle was a forty-one-year-old
professional programmer with a masters' degree in computer science
from Stanford. He had worked for Ford Aerospace, where he had invented
a computer-networking technique known as the "Nagle Algorithm,"
and for the prominent Californian computer-graphics firm "Autodesk,"
where he was a major stockholder.
Nagle was also a prominent figure on the Well, much respected
for his technical knowledgeability.
Nagle had followed the civil-liberties debate closely,
for he was an ardent telecommunicator. He was no particular friend
of computer intruders, but he believed electronic publishing
had a great deal to offer society at large, and attempts
to restrain its growth, or to censor free electronic expression,
strongly roused his ire.
The Neidorf case, and the E911 Document, were both being discussed
in detail on the Internet, in an electronic publication called Telecom Digest.
Nagle, a longtime Internet maven, was a regular reader of Telecom Digest.
Nagle had never seen a copy of Phrack, but the implications of the case
disturbed him.
While in a Stanford bookstore hunting books on robotics,
Nagle happened across a book called The Intelligent Network.
Thumbing through it at random, Nagle came across an entire chapter
meticulously detailing the workings of E911 police emergency systems.
This extensive text was being sold openly, and yet in Illinois
a young man was in danger of going to prison for publishing
a thin six-page document about 911 service.
Nagle made an ironic comment to this effect in Telecom Digest.
From there, Nagle was put in touch with Mitch Kapor,
and then with Neidorf's lawyers.
Sheldon Zenner was delighted to find a computer telecommunications expert
willing to speak up for Neidorf, one who was not a wacky teenage "hacker."
Nagle was fluent, mature, and respectable; he'd once had a federal
security clearance.
Nagle was asked to fly to Illinois to join the defense team.
Having joined the defense as an expert witness, Nagle read the entire
E911 Document for himself. He made his own judgement about its potential
for menace.
The time has now come for you yourself, the reader, to have a look
at the E911 Document. This six-page piece of work was the pretext
for a federal prosecution that could have sent an electronic publisher
to prison for thirty, or even sixty, years. It was the pretext
for the search and seizure of Steve Jackson Games, a legitimate publisher
of printed books. It was also the formal pretext for the search
and seizure of the Mentor's bulletin board, "Phoenix Project,"
and for the raid on the home of Erik Bloodaxe. It also had much
to do with the seizure of Richard Andrews' Jolnet node
and the shutdown of Charles Boykin's AT&T node.
The E911 Document was the single most important piece
of evidence in the Hacker Crackdown. There can be no real
and legitimate substitute for the Document itself.
==Phrack Inc.==
Volume Two, Issue 24, File 5 of 13
Control Office Administration
Of Enhanced 911 Services For
Special Services and Account Centers
by the Eavesdropper
March, 1988
Description of Service
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The control office for Emergency 911 service is assigned in
accordance with the existing standard guidelines to one of
the following centers:
o Special Services Center (SSC)
o Major Accounts Center (MAC)
o Serving Test Center (STC)
o Toll Control Center (TCC)
The SSC/MAC designation is used in this document interchangeably
for any of these four centers. The Special Services Centers (SSCs)
or Major Account Centers (MACs) have been designated as the trouble
reporting contact for all E911 customer (PSAP) reported troubles.
Subscribers who have trouble on an E911 call will continue
to contact local repair service (CRSAB) who will refer the
trouble to the SSC/MAC, when appropriate.
Due to the critical nature of E911 service, the control
and timely repair of troubles is demanded. As the primary
E911 customer contact, the SSC/MAC is in the unique position
to monitor the status of the trouble and insure its resolution.
System Overview
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The number 911 is intended as a nationwide universal
telephone number which provides the public with direct
access to a Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP). A PSAP
is also referred to as an Emergency Service Bureau (ESB).
A PSAP is an agency or facility which is authorized by a
municipality to receive and respond to police, fire and/or
ambulance services. One or more attendants are located
at the PSAP facilities to receive and handle calls of an
emergency nature in accordance with the local municipal
requirements.
An important advantage of E911 emergency service is
improved (reduced) response times for emergency
services. Also close coordination among agencies
providing various emergency services is a valuable
capability provided by E911 service.
1A ESS is used as the tandem office for the E911 network to
route all 911 calls to the correct (primary) PSAP designated
to serve the calling station. The E911 feature was
developed primarily to provide routing to the correct PSAP
for all 911 calls. Selective routing allows a 911 call
originated from a particular station located in a particular
district, zone, or town, to be routed to the primary PSAP
designated to serve that customer station regardless of
wire center boundaries. Thus, selective routing eliminates
the problem of wire center boundaries not coinciding with
district or other political boundaries.
The services available with the E911 feature include:
Forced Disconnect Default Routing
Alternative Routing Night Service
Selective Routing Automatic Number
Identification (ANI)
Selective Transfer Automatic Location
Identification (ALI)
Preservice/Installation Guidelines
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When a contract for an E911 system has been signed, it is
the responsibility of Network Marketing to establish an
implementation/cutover committee which should include
a representative from the SSC/MAC. Duties of the E911
Implementation Team include coordination of all phases
of the E911 system deployment and the formation of an
on-going E911 maintenance subcommittee.
Marketing is responsible for providing the following
customer specific information to the SSC/MAC prior to
the start of call through testing:
o All PSAP's (name, address, local contact)
o All PSAP circuit ID's
o 1004 911 service request including PSAP details on each PSAP
(1004 Section K, L, M)
o Network configuration
o Any vendor information (name, telephone number, equipment)
The SSC/MAC needs to know if the equipment and sets
at the PSAP are maintained by the BOCs, an independent
company, or an outside vendor, or any combination.
This information is then entered on the PSAP profile sheets
and reviewed quarterly for changes, additions and deletions.
Marketing will secure the Major Account Number (MAN)
and provide this number to Corporate Communications
so that the initial issue of the service orders carry
the MAN and can be tracked by the SSC/MAC via CORDNET.
PSAP circuits are official services by definition.
All service orders required for the installation of the E911
system should include the MAN assigned to the city/county
which has purchased the system.
In accordance with the basic SSC/MAC strategy for provisioning,
the SSC/MAC will be Overall Control Office (OCO) for all Node
to PSAP circuits (official services) and any other services
for this customer. Training must be scheduled for all SSC/MAC
involved personnel during the pre-service stage of the project.
The E911 Implementation Team will form the on-going
maintenance subcommittee prior to the initial
implementation of the E911 system. This sub-committee
will establish post implementation quality assurance
procedures to ensure that the E911 system continues to
provide quality service to the customer.
Customer/Company training, trouble reporting interfaces
for the customer, telephone company and any involved
independent telephone companies needs to be addressed
and implemented prior to E911 cutover. These functions
can be best addressed by the formation of a sub-
committee of the E911 Implementation Team to set up
guidelines for and to secure service commitments of
interfacing organizations. A SSC/MAC supervisor should
chair this subcommittee and include the following
organizations:
1) Switching Control Center
- E911 translations
- Trunking
- End office and Tandem office hardware/software
2) Recent Change Memory Administration Center
- Daily RC update activity for TN/ESN translations
- Processes validity errors and rejects
3) Line and Number Administration
- Verification of TN/ESN translations
4) Special Service Center/Major Account Center
- Single point of contact for all PSAP and Node to host troubles
- Logs, tracks & statusing of all trouble reports
- Trouble referral, follow up, and escalation
- Customer notification of status and restoration
- Analyzation of "chronic" troubles
- Testing, installation and maintenance of E911 circuits
5) Installation and Maintenance (SSIM/I&M)
- Repair and maintenance of PSAP equipment and Telco owned sets
6) Minicomputer Maintenance Operations Center
- E911 circuit maintenance (where applicable)
7) Area Maintenance Engineer
- Technical assistance on voice (CO-PSAP) network related E911 troubles
Maintenance Guidelines
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The CCNC will test the Node circuit from the 202T at the
Host site to the 202T at the Node site. Since Host to Node
(CCNC to MMOC) circuits are official company services,
the CCNC will refer all Node circuit troubles to the
SSC/MAC. The SSC/MAC is responsible for the testing
and follow up to restoration of these circuit troubles.
Although Node to PSAP circuit are official services, the
MMOC will refer PSAP circuit troubles to the appropriate
SSC/MAC. The SSC/MAC is responsible for testing and
follow up to restoration of PSAP circuit troubles.
The SSC/MAC will also receive reports from
CRSAB/IMC(s) on subscriber 911 troubles when they are
not line troubles. The SSC/MAC is responsible for testing
and restoration of these troubles.
Maintenance responsibilities are as follows:
SCC@ Voice Network (ANI to PSAP)
@SCC responsible for tandem switch
SSIM/I&M PSAP Equipment (Modems, CIU's, sets)
Vendor PSAP Equipment (when CPE)
SSC/MAC PSAP to Node circuits, and tandem to
PSAP voice circuits (EMNT)
MMOC Node site (Modems, cables, etc)
Note: All above work groups are required to resolve troubles
by interfacing with appropriate work groups for resolution.
The Switching Control Center (SCC) is responsible for
E911/1AESS translations in tandem central offices.
These translations route E911 calls, selective transfer,
default routing, speed calling, etc., for each PSAP.
The SCC is also responsible for troubleshooting on
the voice network (call originating to end office tandem equipment).
For example, ANI failures in the originating offices would
be a responsibility of the SCC.
Recent Change Memory Administration Center (RCMAC) performs
the daily tandem translation updates (recent change)
for routing of individual telephone numbers.
Recent changes are generated from service order activity
(new service, address changes, etc.) and compiled into
a daily file by the E911 Center (ALI/DMS E911 Computer).
SSIM/I&M is responsible for the installation and repair of
PSAP equipment. PSAP equipment includes ANI Controller,
ALI Controller, data sets, cables, sets, and other peripheral
equipment that is not vendor owned. SSIM/I&M is responsible
for establishing maintenance test kits, complete with spare parts
for PSAP maintenance. This includes test gear, data sets,
and ANI/ALI Controller parts.