
Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.sf.ca.us

Literary Freeware:  Not for Commercial Use

THE HACKER CRACKDOWN:  Law and Disorder on the 
Electronic Frontier

PART TWO:  THE DIGITAL UNDERGROUND


	The date was May 9, 1990.  The Pope was touring 
Mexico City.   Hustlers from the Medellin Cartel were 
trying to buy black-market Stinger missiles in Florida.  On 
the comics page, Doonesbury character Andy was dying of 
AIDS.   And then.... a highly unusual item whose novelty 
and calculated rhetoric won it headscratching attention in 
newspapers all over America.

	The US Attorney's office in Phoenix, Arizona, had 
issued a press release announcing a nationwide law 
enforcement crackdown against "illegal computer hacking 
activities."  The sweep was officially known as "Operation 
Sundevil."

	Eight paragraphs in the press release gave the bare 
facts:  twenty-seven search warrants carried out on May 8, 
with three arrests, and a hundred and fifty agents on the 
prowl in "twelve" cities across America.   (Different counts 
in local press reports yielded "thirteen," "fourteen," and 
"sixteen" cities.)   Officials estimated that criminal losses 
of revenue to telephone companies "may run into millions 
of dollars."   Credit for the Sundevil investigations was 
taken by the US Secret Service, Assistant US Attorney Tim 
Holtzen of Phoenix, and the Assistant Attorney General of 
Arizona,  Gail Thackeray.

	  The prepared remarks of Garry M. Jenkins, 
appearing in a U.S. Department of Justice press release, 
were of particular interest.  Mr. Jenkins was the Assistant 
Director of the US Secret Service, and the highest-ranking 
federal official to take any direct public role in  the hacker 
crackdown of 1990.

	 "Today, the Secret Service is sending a clear message 
to those computer hackers who have decided to violate 
the laws of this nation in the mistaken belief that they can 
successfully avoid detection by hiding behind the relative 
anonymity of their computer terminals.(...)
	"Underground groups have been formed for the 
purpose of exchanging information relevant to their 
criminal activities.  These groups often communicate with 
each other through message systems between computers 
called 'bulletin boards.'
	"Our experience shows that many computer hacker 
suspects are no longer misguided teenagers, 
mischievously playing games with their computers in their 
bedrooms.  Some are now high tech computer operators 
using computers to engage in unlawful conduct." 

	Who were these "underground groups" and "high-
tech operators?"  Where had they come from?  What did 
they want?  Who *were*   they?  Were they 
"mischievous?"  Were they dangerous?  How had 
"misguided teenagers" managed to alarm the United 
States Secret Service?  And just how widespread was this 
sort of thing?
 
	Of all the major players in the Hacker Crackdown:  
the phone companies, law enforcement, the civil 
libertarians, and the "hackers" themselves -- the "hackers" 
are by far the most mysterious, by far the hardest to 
understand, by far the *weirdest.*
  
	 Not only are "hackers"  novel in their activities, but 
they come in a variety of odd subcultures, with a variety of 
languages, motives and values. 
 
	The earliest proto-hackers were probably those 
unsung mischievous telegraph boys who were summarily 
fired by the Bell Company in 1878.

	Legitimate "hackers," those computer enthusiasts 
who are independent-minded but law-abiding, generally 
trace their spiritual ancestry to  elite technical universities, 
especially M.I.T. and Stanford, in the 1960s.

	But the genuine roots of the modern hacker 
*underground* can probably be traced most successfully 
to a now much-obscured hippie anarchist movement 
known as the Yippies.   The  Yippies, who took their name 
from the largely fictional "Youth International Party," 
carried out a loud and lively policy of surrealistic 
subversion and outrageous political mischief.  Their basic 
tenets were flagrant sexual promiscuity, open and copious 
drug use, the political overthrow of any powermonger over 
thirty years of age, and an immediate end to the war in 
Vietnam, by any means necessary, including the psychic 
levitation of the Pentagon.

	The two most visible Yippies were Abbie Hoffman 
and Jerry Rubin.  Rubin eventually  became a Wall Street 
broker.  Hoffman, ardently sought by federal authorities, 
went into hiding for seven years, in Mexico, France, and 
the United States.   While on the lam, Hoffman continued 
to write and publish, with help from sympathizers in the 
American anarcho-leftist underground.   Mostly, Hoffman 
survived through false ID and odd jobs.  Eventually he 
underwent facial plastic surgery and adopted an entirely 
new identity as one "Barry Freed."   After surrendering 
himself to authorities in 1980, Hoffman  spent a year in 
prison on a cocaine conviction. 
 
	Hoffman's worldview grew much darker as the glory 
days of the 1960s faded.  In 1989, he purportedly 
committed suicide, under odd and, to some, rather 
suspicious circumstances.

	Abbie Hoffman is said to have caused the Federal 
Bureau of Investigation to amass the single largest 
investigation file ever opened on an individual American 
citizen.  (If this is true, it is still questionable whether the 
FBI regarded Abbie Hoffman a serious public threat  -- 
quite possibly, his file was enormous simply because 
Hoffman left colorful legendry wherever he went).   He 
was a gifted publicist, who regarded electronic media as 
both playground and weapon.  He actively enjoyed 
manipulating network TV and other gullible, image-
hungry media,  with various weird lies, mindboggling 
rumors, impersonation scams, and other sinister 
distortions, all absolutely guaranteed to upset cops, 
Presidential candidates, and federal judges.    Hoffman's 
most famous work was a book self-reflexively known as 
*Steal This Book,* which publicized a number of methods 
by which young, penniless hippie agitators might live off 
the fat of a system supported by humorless drones.  *Steal 
This Book,* whose title urged readers to damage the very 
means of distribution which had put it into their hands, 
might be described as a spiritual ancestor of a computer 
virus.
   
	Hoffman, like many a later conspirator, made 
extensive use of pay-phones for his agitation work -- in his 
case, generally through the use of cheap brass washers as 
coin-slugs.

	During the Vietnam War, there was a federal surtax 
imposed on telephone service; Hoffman and his cohorts 
could, and did,  argue that in systematically stealing 
phone service they were engaging in civil disobedience:  
virtuously denying tax funds to an illegal and immoral war. 

	 But this thin veil of decency was soon dropped 
entirely.  Ripping-off the System  found its own 
justification in deep alienation and a basic outlaw 
contempt for  conventional bourgeois values.  Ingenious, 
vaguely politicized varieties of rip-off, which might be 
described as "anarchy by convenience," became very 
popular in Yippie circles, and because rip-off was so 
useful, it was to survive the Yippie movement itself.
   
	In the early 1970s, it required fairly limited expertise 
and ingenuity to cheat payphones, to divert "free" 
electricity and gas service, or to rob vending machines and 
parking meters for handy pocket change.   It also required 
a conspiracy to spread this knowledge, and the gall and 
nerve actually to commit petty theft, but the Yippies had 
these qualifications in plenty.  In June 1971, Abbie 
Hoffman and a telephone enthusiast sarcastically known 
as "Al Bell"  began publishing a newsletter called *Youth 
International Party Line.*  This newsletter was dedicated 
to collating and spreading Yippie rip-off techniques, 
especially of phones, to the joy of the freewheeling 
underground and the insensate rage of all straight people.
   
	As a political tactic, phone-service theft ensured that 
Yippie advocates would always have ready access to the 
long-distance telephone as a medium, despite the Yippies' 
chronic lack of organization, discipline, money, or even a 
steady home address.
  
	*Party Line* was run out of Greenwich Village for a 
couple of years, then "Al Bell" more or less defected from 
the faltering ranks of Yippiedom, changing the 
newsletter's name to *TAP* or *Technical Assistance 
Program.*  After the Vietnam War ended, the steam 
began leaking rapidly out of American radical dissent.  
But  by this time, "Bell" and his dozen or so core 
contributors  had the bit between their teeth, and had 
begun to derive tremendous gut-level satisfaction from 
the sensation of pure *technical power.*
 
	*TAP* articles, once highly politicized, became 
pitilessly jargonized and technical, in homage or parody to 
the Bell System's own technical documents, which *TAP* 
studied closely, gutted, and reproduced without 
permission.   The *TAP* elite revelled in gloating 
possession of the specialized knowledge necessary to beat 
the system.

	   "Al Bell" dropped out of the game by the late 70s, 
and "Tom Edison" took over; TAP  readers (some 1400 of 
them, all told) now began to show more interest in telex 
switches and the growing phenomenon of computer 
systems. 
 
	In 1983, "Tom Edison" had his computer stolen and 
his house set on fire by an arsonist.  This was an eventually  
mortal blow to *TAP* (though the legendary name was to 
be resurrected in 1990 by a young Kentuckian computer-
outlaw named "Predat0r.")

					#


	Ever since telephones began to make money, there 
have been people willing to rob and defraud phone 
companies.   The legions of petty phone thieves vastly 
outnumber those "phone phreaks" who  "explore the 
system" for the sake of the intellectual challenge.   The 
New York metropolitan area  (long in the vanguard of 
American crime) claims over 150,000 physical attacks on 
pay telephones every year!  Studied carefully, a modern 
payphone reveals itself as a little fortress, carefully 
designed and redesigned over generations,  to resist coin-
slugs, zaps of electricity, chunks of coin-shaped ice, 
prybars, magnets, lockpicks, blasting caps.  Public pay-
phones must survive in a world of unfriendly, greedy 
people,  and a modern payphone is as exquisitely evolved 
as a cactus. 

	Because the phone network pre-dates the computer 
network, the scofflaws known as "phone phreaks" pre-date 
the scofflaws known as "computer hackers."   In practice, 
today, the line between "phreaking" and "hacking" is very 
blurred, just as the distinction between telephones and 
computers has blurred.  The phone system has been 
digitized, and computers have learned to "talk" over 
phone-lines.   What's worse -- and this was the point of the 
Mr. Jenkins of the Secret Service -- some hackers have 
learned to steal, and some thieves have learned to hack.

	Despite the blurring, one can still draw a few useful 
behavioral distinctions between "phreaks" and "hackers."  
Hackers are intensely interested in the "system" per se, 
and enjoy relating to machines.  "Phreaks" are more 
social,  manipulating the system in a rough-and-ready 
fashion in order to get through to other human beings, 
fast, cheap and under the table.

	Phone phreaks love nothing so much as "bridges," 
illegal conference calls of ten or twelve chatting 
conspirators, seaboard to seaboard, lasting for many hours 
-- and running, of course, on somebody else's tab, 
preferably a large corporation's. 
 
	As phone-phreak conferences wear on, people drop 
out (or simply leave the phone off the hook, while they 
sashay off to work or school or babysitting), and new 
people are phoned up and invited to join in, from some 
other continent, if possible.  Technical trivia, boasts, brags, 
lies, head-trip deceptions, weird rumors, and cruel gossip 
are all freely exchanged.

	The lowest rung of phone-phreaking is the theft of 
telephone access codes.   Charging a phone call to 
somebody else's stolen number is, of course, a pig-easy 
way of stealing phone service, requiring practically no 
technical expertise.  This practice has been very 
widespread, especially among lonely people without much 
money who are far from home.  Code theft has flourished 
especially in college dorms, military bases, and, 
notoriously, among roadies for rock bands.   Of late, code 
theft has spread very rapidly among Third Worlders in the 
US, who pile up enormous unpaid long-distance bills to 
the Caribbean, South America, and Pakistan.

	The simplest way to steal phone-codes is simply to 
look over a victim's shoulder as he punches-in his own 
code-number on a public payphone.  This technique is 
known as "shoulder-surfing," and is especially common in 
airports, bus terminals, and train stations.  The code is 
then sold by the thief for a few dollars.  The buyer abusing 
the code has no computer expertise, but calls his Mom in 
New York,  Kingston or Caracas and runs up a huge bill 
with impunity.  The losses from this primitive phreaking 
activity are far, far greater than the monetary losses 
caused by computer-intruding hackers.

	In the mid-to-late 1980s, until the introduction of 
sterner telco security measures, *computerized* code 
theft worked like a charm, and was virtually omnipresent 
throughout the digital underground, among phreaks and 
hackers alike.   This was accomplished through 
programming one's computer to try random code 
numbers over the telephone until one of them worked.   
Simple programs to do this were widely available in the 
underground; a computer running all night was likely to 
come up with a dozen or so useful hits.  This could be 
repeated week after week until one had a large library of 
stolen codes.
  
	Nowadays, the computerized dialling of hundreds of 
numbers can be detected within hours and swiftly traced.   
If a stolen code is repeatedly abused, this too can be 
detected within a few hours.  But for years in the 1980s, the 
publication of stolen codes was a kind of elementary 
etiquette for fledgling hackers.   The simplest way to 
establish your bona-fides as a raider was to steal a code 
through repeated random dialling and offer it to the 
"community" for use.   Codes could be both stolen, and 
used, simply and easily from the safety of one's own 
bedroom, with very little fear of detection or punishment.

	Before computers and their phone-line modems 
entered American homes in gigantic numbers, phone 
phreaks had their own special telecommunications 
hardware gadget, the famous "blue box."  This fraud 
device (now rendered increasingly useless by the digital 
evolution of the phone system) could trick switching 
systems into granting free access to long-distance lines.  It 
did this by mimicking the system's own signal, a tone of 
2600 hertz.
  
	Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of 
Apple Computer, Inc., once dabbled in selling blue-boxes 
in college dorms in California.  For many, in the early days 
of phreaking, blue-boxing was scarcely perceived as 
"theft," but rather as a fun (if sneaky) way to use excess 
phone capacity harmlessly.  After all, the long-distance 
lines were *just sitting there*....   Whom did it hurt, really?   
If you're not *damaging* the system, and  you're not 
*using up any tangible resource,* and if nobody *finds 
out* what you did, then what real harm have you done?  
What exactly *have* you "stolen," anyway?   If a tree falls 
in the forest and nobody hears it, how much is the noise 
worth?  Even now this remains a rather dicey question.

	Blue-boxing was no joke to the phone companies, 
however.  Indeed, when *Ramparts* magazine, a radical 
publication in California, printed the wiring schematics 
necessary to create a  mute box in June 1972, the 
magazine was seized by police and Pacific Bell phone-
company officials.   The mute box, a blue-box variant, 
allowed its user to receive long-distance calls free of 
charge to the caller.  This device was closely described in a 
*Ramparts* article wryly titled "Regulating the Phone 
Company In Your Home."  Publication of this article was 
held to be in violation of Californian State Penal Code 
section 502.7, which outlaws ownership of wire-fraud 
devices and the selling of "plans or instructions for any 
instrument, apparatus, or device intended to avoid 
telephone toll charges."
  
	Issues of *Ramparts* were recalled or seized on the 
newsstands, and the resultant loss of income helped put 
the magazine out of business.  This was an ominous 
precedent for free-expression issues, but the telco's 
crushing of a radical-fringe magazine passed without 
serious challenge at the time.  Even in the freewheeling 
California 1970s, it was widely felt that there was 
something sacrosanct about what the phone company 
knew; that the telco had a legal and moral right to protect 
itself by shutting off the flow of such illicit information.   
Most telco information was so "specialized" that it would 
scarcely be understood by any honest member of the 
public.   If not published, it would not be missed.   To print 
such material did not seem part of the legitimate role of a 
free press.

	In 1990 there would be a similar telco-inspired attack 
on the electronic phreak/hacking "magazine" *Phrack.* 
The *Phrack* legal case became a central issue in the 
Hacker Crackdown, and gave rise to great controversy.  
*Phrack* would also be shut down, for a  time, at least, but 
this time both the telcos and their law-enforcement allies 
would pay a much larger price for their actions.  The 
*Phrack* case will be examined in detail, later.

	Phone-phreaking as a social practice is still very 
much alive at this moment.  Today, phone-phreaking is 
thriving much more vigorously than the better-known and 
worse-feared practice of "computer hacking."  New forms 
of phreaking are spreading rapidly, following new 
vulnerabilities in sophisticated phone services.
   
	Cellular phones are especially vulnerable; their chips 
can be re-programmed to present a false caller ID and 
avoid billing.   Doing so also avoids police tapping, making 
cellular-phone abuse a favorite among drug-dealers.  
"Call-sell operations" using pirate cellular phones can, and 
have, been run right out of the backs of cars, which move 
from "cell" to "cell" in the local phone system, retailing 
stolen long-distance service, like some kind of demented 
electronic version of the neighborhood ice-cream truck.

	 Private branch-exchange phone systems in large 
corporations can be penetrated; phreaks dial-up a local 
company, enter its internal phone-system, hack it, then 
use the company's own PBX system to dial back out over 
the public network, causing the company to be stuck with 
the resulting long-distance bill.  This technique is known 
as "diverting."  "Diverting"  can be very costly, especially 
because phreaks tend to travel in packs and never stop 
talking.   Perhaps the worst by-product of this "PBX fraud" 
is that victim companies and telcos have sued one another 
over the financial responsibility for the stolen calls, thus 
enriching not only shabby phreaks but well-paid lawyers.

	   "Voice-mail systems" can also be abused; phreaks 
can seize their own sections of these sophisticated 
electronic answering machines, and use them for trading 
codes or knowledge of illegal techniques.   Voice-mail 
abuse does not hurt the company directly, but finding 
supposedly empty slots in your company's answering 
machine all crammed with phreaks eagerly chattering 
and hey-duding one another in impenetrable jargon can 
cause sensations of almost mystical repulsion and dread.

	   Worse yet, phreaks have sometimes been known to 
react truculently to attempts to "clean up" the voice-mail 
system.  Rather than humbly acquiescing to being thrown 
out of their playground, they may very well call up the 
company officials at work (or at home) and loudly demand  
free voice-mail addresses of their very own.  Such bullying 
is taken very seriously by spooked victims.

	Acts of phreak revenge against straight people are  
rare, but voice-mail systems are especially tempting and 
vulnerable, and an infestation of angry phreaks in one's 
voice-mail system is no joke.  They can erase legitimate 
messages; or spy on private messages; or harass users with 
recorded taunts and  obscenities.   They've even been 
known to seize control of voice-mail security, and lock out 
legitimate users, or even shut down the system entirely. 

	Cellular phone-calls, cordless phones, and ship-to-
shore telephony can all be monitored by various forms of 
radio; this kind of "passive monitoring" is spreading 
explosively today.  Technically eavesdropping on other 
people's cordless and cellular phone-calls is the fastest-
growing area in phreaking today.   This practice strongly 
appeals to the lust for power and conveys gratifying 
sensations of technical superiority over the eavesdropping 
victim.  Monitoring is rife with all manner of tempting evil 
mischief.  Simple prurient snooping is by far the most 
common activity.   But credit-card numbers unwarily 
spoken over the phone can be recorded, stolen and used.   
And tapping people's phone-calls (whether through active 
telephone taps or passive radio monitors) does lend itself 
conveniently to activities like blackmail, industrial 
espionage, and political dirty tricks.
   
	It should be repeated that telecommunications 
fraud,  the theft of phone service,  causes vastly greater 
monetary losses than the practice of entering into 
computers by stealth.   Hackers are mostly young 
suburban American white males, and exist in their 
hundreds -- but "phreaks" come from both sexes and from 
many nationalities, ages and ethnic backgrounds, and are 
flourishing in the thousands.  

					#

	The term "hacker" has had an unfortunate history.   
This book, *The Hacker Crackdown,* has little to say about 
"hacking" in its finer, original sense.  The term  can signify 
the free-wheeling intellectual exploration of the highest 
and deepest potential of computer systems.   Hacking can 
describe  the determination to make access to computers 
and information as free and open as possible.  Hacking 
can involve the heartfelt conviction that beauty can be 
found in computers, that the fine aesthetic in a perfect 
program can liberate the mind and spirit.  This is 
"hacking" as it was defined in Steven Levy's much-praised 
history of the pioneer computer milieu, *Hackers,* 
published in 1984. 
  
	Hackers of all kinds are absolutely soaked through 
with heroic anti-bureaucratic sentiment.  Hackers long for 
recognition as a praiseworthy cultural archetype, the 
postmodern electronic equivalent of the cowboy and 
mountain man.   Whether  they deserve such a reputation 
is something for history to decide.  But many hackers -- 
including those outlaw hackers who are computer 
intruders, and whose activities are defined as criminal --  
actually attempt to *live up to* this techno-cowboy 
reputation.   And given that electronics and 
telecommunications are still largely unexplored 
territories, there is simply *no telling* what hackers might 
uncover.
    
	For some people, this freedom is the very breath of 
oxygen, the inventive spontaneity that makes life worth 
living  and that flings open doors to marvellous possibility 
and individual empowerment.  But for many people -- and 
increasingly so -- the hacker is an ominous figure, a smart-
aleck sociopath ready to burst out of his basement 
wilderness and savage other people's lives for his own 
anarchical convenience.
  
	Any form of power without responsibility, without 
direct and formal checks and balances, is frightening to 
people -- and reasonably so.  It should be frankly admitted 
that hackers *are* frightening, and that the basis of this 
fear is not irrational.
   
	Fear of hackers goes well beyond the fear of merely 
criminal activity.

	Subversion and manipulation of the phone system is 
an act with disturbing political overtones.  In America,  
computers and telephones are potent symbols of 
organized authority and the technocratic business elite.
  
	But there is an element in American culture that has 
always strongly rebelled  against these symbols; rebelled 
against all large industrial computers and all phone 
companies.    A certain anarchical tinge deep in the 
American soul delights in causing confusion and pain to 
all bureaucracies, including technological ones.

	There is sometimes malice and vandalism in this 
attitude, but it is a deep and cherished part of the 
American national character.  The outlaw, the rebel, the 
rugged individual, the pioneer, the sturdy Jeffersonian 
yeoman, the private citizen resisting interference in his 
pursuit of happiness --  these are figures that all 
Americans recognize, and that many will strongly applaud 
and defend. 

	Many scrupulously law-abiding citizens today do 
cutting-edge work with electronics -- work that has already 
had tremendous social influence and will have much 
more in years to come.    In all truth, these talented, 
hardworking, law-abiding, mature, adult people are far 
more disturbing  to the peace and order of the current 
status quo  than any scofflaw group of romantic teenage 
punk kids.  These law-abiding hackers  have the power, 
ability, and willingness to influence other people's lives 
quite unpredictably.  They have means, motive, and 
opportunity to meddle drastically with the American social 
order.    When corralled into governments, universities, or 
large multinational companies, and forced to follow 
rulebooks and wear suits and ties, they at least have some 
conventional halters on their freedom of action.  But when 
loosed alone, or in small groups, and fired by imagination 
and the entrepreneurial spirit, they can move mountains -
- causing landslides that will likely crash directly into your 
office and living room.
   
	These people, as a class, instinctively recognize that a 
public, politicized attack on hackers will eventually spread 
to them -- that the term "hacker,"  once demonized, might 
be used to knock their hands off the levers of power and 
choke them out of existence.  There are hackers today who 
fiercely and publicly resist any besmirching of the noble 
title of hacker.   Naturally and understandably, they 
deeply resent the attack on their values implicit in using 
the word "hacker" as a synonym for computer-criminal.
  
	This book, sadly but in my opinion unavoidably, 
rather adds to the degradation of the term.  It concerns 
itself mostly with "hacking" in its commonest latter-day 
definition, i.e., intruding into computer systems by stealth 
and without permission. 
   
	The term "hacking" is used routinely today  by  
almost all law enforcement officials with any professional 
interest in computer fraud  and abuse.   American police 
describe almost any crime committed with, by, through, or 
against a computer as hacking.
   
	Most importantly, "hacker" is what computer-
intruders choose to call *themselves.*  Nobody who 
"hacks" into systems willingly describes himself (rarely, 
herself) as a "computer intruder," "computer trespasser,"  
"cracker," "wormer," "darkside hacker" or "high tech street 
gangster."   Several other demeaning terms have been 
invented  in the hope that the press and public will leave 
the original sense of the word alone.   But few people 
actually use these terms.  (I exempt the term "cyberpunk," 
which a few hackers and law enforcement people actually 
do use.  The term "cyberpunk" is drawn from literary 
criticism and has some odd  and unlikely resonances, but, 
like hacker, cyberpunk too has become a criminal 
pejorative today.) 

	In any case, breaking into computer systems was 
hardly alien to the original hacker tradition.   The first 
tottering systems of the 1960s  required fairly extensive 
internal surgery merely to function day-by-day.   Their 
users "invaded" the deepest, most arcane recesses of their 
operating software almost as a matter of routine.  
"Computer security" in these early, primitive systems was 
at best an afterthought.  What security there was, was 
entirely physical, for it was assumed that anyone allowed 
near this expensive, arcane hardware would be a fully 
qualified professional expert. 
  
	In a campus environment, though, this meant that 
grad students, teaching assistants, undergraduates, and 
eventually, all manner of dropouts and hangers-on ended 
up accessing and often running the works.

   	Universities, even modern universities, are not in the 
business of maintaining security over information.  On the 
contrary, universities, as institutions, pre-date the 
"information economy" by many centuries and are not-
for-profit cultural entities, whose reason for existence 
(purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through 
techniques of scholarship, and then teach it.   Universities 
are meant to *pass the torch of civilization,* not just 
download data into student skulls, and the values of the 
academic community are strongly at odds with those of all 
would-be information empires.   Teachers at all levels, 
from kindergarten up, have proven to be shameless and  
persistent software and data pirates.   Universities do not 
merely "leak information" but vigorously broadcast free 
thought. 
  
	This clash of values has been fraught with 
controversy.  Many hackers of the 1960s remember their 
professional apprenticeship as a long guerilla war against 
the uptight mainframe-computer "information 
priesthood."  These computer-hungry youngsters had to 
struggle hard for access to computing power, and many of 
them were not above certain, er, shortcuts.   But, over the 
years,  this practice freed computing from the sterile 
reserve of lab-coated technocrats and was largely 
responsible for the explosive growth of computing in 
general society -- especially *personal* computing.
 
	  Access to technical power acted like catnip on 
certain of these youngsters.  Most of the basic techniques 
of computer intrusion: password cracking, trapdoors, 
backdoors, trojan horses --  were invented in college 
environments in the 1960s, in the early days of network 
computing.   Some off-the-cuff experience at computer 
intrusion was to be in the informal resume of most 
"hackers" and many future industry giants.   Outside of the 
tiny cult of computer enthusiasts, few people thought 
much about  the implications of "breaking into" 
computers.  This sort of activity had not yet been 
publicized, much less criminalized.
   
	In the 1960s, definitions of "property" and "privacy" 
had not yet been extended to cyberspace.  Computers 
were not yet indispensable to society.  There were no vast 
databanks of vulnerable, proprietary information stored in 
computers, which might be accessed, copied without 
permission, erased, altered, or sabotaged.   The stakes 
were low in the early days -- but they grew every year, 
exponentially, as computers themselves grew.
  
	By the 1990s, commercial and political pressures had 
become overwhelming, and they broke the social 
boundaries of the hacking subculture.   Hacking had 
become too important to be left to the  hackers.   Society 
was now forced to tackle the intangible nature of 
cyberspace-as-property, cyberspace as privately-owned 
unreal-estate.   In the  new, severe, responsible, high-
stakes context of the "Information Society" of the 1990s, 
"hacking" was called into question.
  
	What did it mean to break into a computer without 
permission and use its computational power, or look 
around inside its files without hurting anything?  What 
were computer-intruding hackers, anyway -- how should 
society, and the law,  best define their actions?    Were 
they just *browsers,* harmless intellectual explorers?  
Were they *voyeurs,* snoops, invaders of privacy?  Should 
they be sternly treated as potential *agents of espionage,* 
or perhaps as *industrial spies?* Or were they best 
defined as *trespassers,* a very common teenage 
misdemeanor?  Was hacking  *theft of service?*  (After 
all, intruders were getting someone else's computer to 
carry out their orders, without permission and without 
paying).   Was hacking *fraud?*  Maybe it was best 
described as *impersonation.*  The commonest mode of 
computer intrusion was (and is) to swipe or snoop 
somebody else's password, and then enter the computer 
in the guise of another person -- who is commonly stuck 
with the blame and the bills.
  
	Perhaps a medical metaphor was better -- hackers 
should be defined as "sick," as *computer addicts* unable 
to control their irresponsible, compulsive behavior. 
  
	But these weighty assessments meant little to the 
people who were actually being judged.   From inside the 
underground world of hacking itself,  all these perceptions 
seem quaint, wrongheaded, stupid, or meaningless.   The 
most important self-perception of underground hackers -- 
from the 1960s, right through to the present day --  is that 
they are an *elite.*  The day-to-day struggle in the 
underground is not over sociological definitions -- who 
cares? -- but for power, knowledge, and  status among 
one's peers.

	When you are a hacker, it is your own inner 
conviction of your elite status that enables you to break, or 
let us say "transcend," the rules.   It is not that *all* rules go 
by the board.   The rules habitually broken  by hackers are 
*unimportant* rules -- the rules of dopey greedhead telco 
bureaucrats and pig-ignorant government pests.
   
	Hackers have their *own* rules,  which separate 
behavior which is cool and elite, from behavior which is 
rodentlike, stupid and losing.   These "rules," however, are 
mostly unwritten and  enforced by peer pressure and 
tribal feeling.   Like all rules that depend on the unspoken 
conviction that everybody else is a good old boy, these 
rules are ripe for abuse.  The mechanisms of hacker peer-
pressure, "teletrials" and ostracism, are rarely used and 
rarely work.  Back-stabbing slander, threats, and 
electronic harassment are also freely employed in down-
and-dirty intrahacker feuds, but this rarely forces a rival 
out of the scene entirely.  The only real solution for the 
problem of an utterly losing, treacherous and rodentlike 
hacker is to *turn him in to the police.*   Unlike the Mafia 
or Medellin Cartel, the hacker elite cannot simply execute 
the bigmouths, creeps and troublemakers among their 
ranks, so they turn one another in with astonishing 
frequency.

	There is no tradition of silence or *omerta* in the 
hacker underworld.     Hackers can be shy, even reclusive, 
but when they do talk, hackers tend to brag, boast and 
strut.   Almost everything hackers do is *invisible;* if they 
don't brag, boast, and strut about it, then *nobody will ever 
know.*  If you don't have something to brag, boast, and 
strut about, then nobody in the underground will 
recognize you and favor you with vital cooperation and 
respect.
   
	The way to win a solid reputation in the underground 
is by telling other hackers things that could only have 
been learned by exceptional cunning and stealth.   
Forbidden knowledge, therefore, is the basic currency of 
the digital underground, like seashells among Trobriand 
Islanders.   Hackers hoard this knowledge, and dwell upon 
it obsessively, and refine it, and bargain with it, and talk 
and talk about it.
  
	Many hackers even suffer from a strange obsession 
to *teach* -- to spread the ethos and the knowledge of the 
digital underground.  They'll do this even when it gains 
them no particular advantage and presents a grave 
personal risk.

	 And when that risk catches up with them, they will go 
right on teaching and preaching -- to a new audience this 
time, their interrogators from law enforcement.   Almost 
every hacker arrested tells everything he knows --  all 
about his friends, his mentors, his disciples -- legends, 
threats, horror stories, dire rumors, gossip, hallucinations.   
This is, of course, convenient for law enforcement -- except 
when law enforcement begins to believe hacker legendry.

	Phone phreaks are unique among criminals in their 
willingness to call up law enforcement officials -- in the 
office, at their homes -- and give them an extended piece 
of their mind.  It is hard not to interpret this as *begging 
for arrest,* and in fact it is an act of incredible 
foolhardiness.  Police are naturally nettled by these acts of 
chutzpah and will go well out of their way to bust these 
flaunting idiots.   But it can also be interpreted as a 
product of a world-view so elitist, so closed and hermetic, 
that electronic police are simply  not perceived as "police," 
but rather as *enemy phone phreaks* who should be 
scolded into behaving "decently."

	Hackers at their most grandiloquent perceive 
themselves as the elite pioneers of a new electronic world.  
Attempts to make them obey the democratically 
established laws of contemporary American society are 
seen as repression and persecution.   After all, they argue, 
if Alexander Graham Bell had gone along with the rules of 
the Western Union telegraph company, there would have 
been no telephones.  If Jobs and Wozniak had believed 
that IBM was the be-all and end-all, there would have 
been no personal computers.  If Benjamin Franklin and 
Thomas Jefferson had tried to "work within the system" 
there would have been no United States. 

	Not only do hackers privately believe this as an 
article of faith, but they have been known to write ardent 
manifestos about it.  Here are some revealing excerpts 
from an especially vivid hacker manifesto:  "The Techno-
Revolution" by  "Dr. Crash,"  which appeared in electronic 
form in *Phrack* Volume 1, Issue 6, Phile 3.


	"To fully explain the true motives behind hacking, we 
must first take a quick look into the past.  In the 1960s, a 
group of MIT students built the first modern computer 
system.  This wild, rebellious group of young men were the 
first to bear the name 'hackers.'  The systems that they 
developed were intended to be used to solve world 
problems and to benefit all of mankind.
	"As we can see, this has not been the case.  The 
computer system has been solely in the hands of big 
businesses and the government.  The wonderful device 
meant to enrich life has become a weapon which 
dehumanizes people.  To the government and large 
businesses, people are no more than disk space, and the 
government doesn't use computers to arrange aid for the 
poor, but to control nuclear death weapons.  The average 
American can only have access to a small microcomputer 
which is worth only a fraction of what they pay for it.  The 
businesses keep the true state-of-the-art equipment away 
from the people behind a steel wall of incredibly high 
prices and bureaucracy.  It is because of this state of 
affairs that hacking was born.(...)
	"Of course, the government doesn't want the 
monopoly of technology broken, so they have outlawed 
hacking and arrest anyone who is caught.(...) The phone 
company is another example of technology abused and 
kept from people with high prices.(...)
	"Hackers often find that their existing equipment, 
due to the monopoly tactics of computer companies, is 
inefficient for their purposes.  Due to the exorbitantly high 
prices, it is impossible to legally purchase the necessary 
equipment.  This need has given still another segment of 
the fight:  Credit Carding.  Carding is a way of obtaining 
the necessary goods without paying for them.  It is again 
due to the companies' stupidity that Carding is so easy, 
and shows that the world's businesses are in the hands of 
those with considerably less technical know-how than we, 
the hackers. (...)
	"Hacking must continue.  We must train newcomers 
to the art of hacking.(....)  And whatever you do, continue 
the fight.  Whether you know it or not, if you are a hacker, 
you are a revolutionary.  Don't worry, you're on the right 
side."

	The  defense of "carding" is rare.  Most hackers 
regard credit-card theft as "poison" to the underground, a 
sleazy and immoral effort that, worse yet, is hard to get 
away with.   Nevertheless, manifestos advocating credit-
card theft, the deliberate crashing of computer systems, 
and even acts of violent physical destruction such as 
vandalism and arson do exist in the underground.  These 
boasts and threats are taken quite seriously by the police.   
And not every hacker is an abstract, Platonic computer-
nerd.  Some few are quite experienced at picking locks, 
robbing phone-trucks, and breaking and entering 
buildings.

	Hackers  vary in their degree of hatred for authority 
and the violence of their rhetoric.  But, at a bottom line, 
they are scofflaws.  They don't regard the current rules of 
electronic behavior as respectable efforts to preserve law 
and order and protect public safety.  They regard these 
laws as immoral efforts by soulless corporations to protect 
their profit margins and to crush dissidents.   "Stupid" 
people, including police, businessmen, politicians, and 
journalists, simply have no right to judge the actions of 
those possessed of genius, techno-revolutionary 
intentions, and technical expertise.

				#

	Hackers are generally teenagers and college kids not 
engaged in earning a living.   They often come from fairly 
well-to-do middle-class backgrounds, and are markedly 
anti-materialistic (except, that is, when it comes to 
computer equipment).   Anyone motivated by greed for 
mere money (as opposed to the greed for power, 
knowledge and status)  is swiftly written-off as a narrow-
minded breadhead whose interests can only be corrupt 
and contemptible.   Having grown up in the 1970s and 
1980s, the young Bohemians of the digital underground 
regard straight society as awash in plutocratic corruption, 
where everyone from the President down is for sale and 
whoever has the gold makes the rules.

	Interestingly, there's a funhouse-mirror image of this 
attitude on the other side of the conflict.  The police are 
also one of the most markedly anti-materialistic groups in 
American society, motivated not by mere money but by 
ideals of service, justice, esprit-de-corps, and, of course, 
their own brand of specialized knowledge and power.   
Remarkably, the propaganda war between cops and 
hackers has always involved angry allegations that the 
other side is trying to make a sleazy buck.  Hackers 
consistently sneer that anti-phreak prosecutors are 
angling for cushy jobs as telco lawyers and that computer-
crime police are aiming to cash in later as well-paid 
computer-security consultants in the private sector. 
 
	For their part, police publicly conflate all hacking 
crimes with robbing payphones with crowbars.  Allegations 
of "monetary losses" from computer intrusion are 
notoriously inflated.  The act of illicitly copying a 
document from a computer is morally equated with 
directly robbing a company of, say, half a million dollars.   
The teenage computer intruder in possession of this 
"proprietary"  document has certainly not sold it for such a 
sum, would likely have little idea how to sell it at all, and 
quite probably doesn't even understand what he has.  He 
has not made a cent in profit from his felony but is still 
morally equated with a thief who has robbed the church 
poorbox and lit out for Brazil. 
 
	Police want to believe that all hackers are thieves.  It 
is a tortuous and almost unbearable act for the American 
justice system to put people in jail because they want to 
learn things which are forbidden for them to know.   In an 
American context, almost any pretext for punishment is 
better than jailing people to protect certain restricted 
kinds of information.  Nevertheless, *policing 
information* is part and parcel of the struggle against 
hackers.

	This dilemma is well exemplified by the remarkable 
activities of "Emmanuel Goldstein," editor and publisher 
of a print magazine known as *2600: The Hacker 
Quarterly.*  Goldstein was an English major at Long 
Island's State University of New York in the '70s, when he 
became involved with the local college radio station.  His 
growing interest in electronics caused him to drift into 
Yippie *TAP* circles and thus into the digital 
underground, where he became a self-described techno-
rat.  His magazine publishes techniques of computer 
intrusion and telephone "exploration" as well as gloating 
exposes of telco misdeeds and governmental failings.

	Goldstein lives quietly and very privately in a large, 
crumbling Victorian mansion in Setauket, New York.   The 
seaside house is decorated with telco decals, chunks of 
driftwood, and the basic bric-a-brac of a hippie crash-pad.   
He is unmarried, mildly unkempt, and survives mostly on 
TV dinners and turkey-stuffing eaten straight out of the 
bag.   Goldstein is a man of considerable charm and 
fluency, with a brief, disarming smile and the kind of 
pitiless, stubborn, thoroughly recidivist integrity that 
America's electronic police find genuinely alarming.
  
	Goldstein took his nom-de-plume, or "handle," from a 
character in Orwell's *1984,*  which may be taken, 
correctly, as a symptom of the gravity of his sociopolitical 
worldview.   He is not himself a practicing computer 
intruder, though he vigorously abets these actions, 
especially when they are pursued against large 
corporations or governmental agencies.   Nor is he a thief, 
for he loudly scorns mere theft of phone service, in favor of 
'exploring and manipulating the system.'  He is probably 
best described and understood as a *dissident.*

	 Weirdly, Goldstein is living in modern America 
under conditions very similar to those of former East 
European intellectual dissidents.  In other words, he 
flagrantly espouses a value-system that is deeply and 
irrevocably opposed to the system of those in power and 
the police.  The values in *2600* are generally expressed in 
terms that are ironic, sarcastic, paradoxical, or just 
downright confused.  But there's no mistaking their 
radically anti-authoritarian tenor.  *2600* holds that 
technical power and specialized knowledge, of any kind 
obtainable, belong by right in the hands of those 
individuals brave and bold enough to discover them -- by 
whatever means necessary.  Devices, laws, or systems that 
forbid access, and the free spread of knowledge, are 
provocations that any free and self-respecting hacker 
should relentlessly attack.  The "privacy" of governments, 
corporations and other soulless technocratic organizations 
should never be protected at the expense of the liberty 
and free initiative of the individual techno-rat.

	However, in our contemporary workaday world,  both 
governments and corporations are very anxious indeed to 
police information which is secret, proprietary, restricted, 
confidential, copyrighted, patented, hazardous, illegal, 
unethical, embarrassing, or otherwise sensitive.   This 
makes Goldstein persona non grata, and his philosophy a 
threat. 
 
	Very little about the conditions of Goldstein's daily 
life would astonish, say, Vaclav Havel.  (We may note in 
passing that President Havel once had his word-processor 
confiscated by the Czechoslovak police.)   Goldstein lives 
by *samizdat,* acting semi-openly as a data-center for the 
underground, while challenging the powers-that-be to 
abide by their own stated rules:  freedom of speech and 
the First Amendment. 
  
	Goldstein thoroughly looks and acts the part of 
techno-rat, with shoulder-length ringlets and a piratical 
black fisherman's-cap set at a rakish angle.  He often 
shows up like Banquo's ghost at meetings of computer 
professionals, where he listens quietly, half-smiling and 
taking thorough notes.

	Computer professionals generally meet publicly,  and 
find it very difficult to rid themselves of Goldstein and his 
ilk  without extralegal and unconstitutional actions.  
Sympathizers, many of them quite respectable people 
with responsible jobs, admire Goldstein's attitude and 
surreptitiously pass him information.  An unknown but 
presumably large proportion of Goldstein's  2,000-plus 
readership are telco security personnel and police, who 
are forced to subscribe to *2600*  to stay abreast of new 
developments in hacking.  They thus find themselves 
*paying this guy's rent* while grinding their teeth in 
anguish, a situation that would have delighted Abbie 
Hoffman (one of Goldstein's few idols).
 
	Goldstein is probably the best-known public 
representative of the hacker underground today, and 
certainly the best-hated.  Police regard him as a Fagin, a 
corrupter of youth, and speak of him with untempered 
loathing.  He is quite an accomplished gadfly.
  
	After the  Martin Luther King Day Crash of 1990, 
Goldstein, for instance, adeptly rubbed salt into the wound 
in the pages of *2600.*   "Yeah, it was fun for the phone 
phreaks as we watched the network crumble," he admitted 
cheerfully.   "But it was also an ominous sign of what's to 
come...  Some AT&T people, aided by well-meaning but 
ignorant media, were spreading the notion that many 
companies had the same software and therefore could 
face the same problem someday.  Wrong.  This was 
entirely an AT&T software deficiency.  Of course, other 
companies could face entirely *different* software 
problems.  But then, so too could AT&T."

	After a technical discussion of the system's failings,  
the Long Island techno-rat went on to offer thoughtful 
criticism to the gigantic multinational's hundreds of 
professionally qualified engineers.  "What we don't know 
is how a major force in communications like AT&T could 
be so sloppy.  What happened to backups?  Sure, 
computer systems go down all the time, but people 
making phone calls are not the same as people logging on 
to computers.  We must make that distinction.  It's not 
acceptable for the phone system or any other essential 
service to 'go down.'  If we continue to trust technology 
without understanding it, we can look forward to many 
variations on this theme.
	"AT&T owes it to its customers to be prepared to 
*instantly* switch to another network if something strange 
and unpredictable starts occurring.  The news here isn't so 
much the failure of a computer program, but the failure of 
AT&T's entire structure."

	The very idea of this.... this *person*....  offering 
"advice" about "AT&T's entire structure" is more than 
some people can easily bear.   How dare this near-criminal 
dictate what is or isn't "acceptable" behavior from AT&T?  
Especially when he's publishing, in the very same issue, 
detailed schematic diagrams for creating various 
switching-network signalling tones unavailable to the 
public.

	 "See what happens when you drop a 'silver box' tone 
or two down your local exchange or through different long 
distance service carriers," advises *2600* contributor "Mr. 
Upsetter" in "How To Build a Signal Box."  "If you 
experiment systematically and keep good records, you will 
surely discover something interesting." 
 
	This is, of course, the scientific method, generally 
regarded as a praiseworthy activity and one of the flowers 
of modern civilization.   One can indeed learn a great deal 
with this sort of structured intellectual activity.   Telco 
employees regard this mode of "exploration" as akin to 
flinging sticks of dynamite into their pond to see what lives 
on the bottom.

	*2600* has been published consistently since 1984.  It 
has also run a bulletin board computer system, printed 
*2600* T-shirts, taken fax calls...  The Spring 1991 issue has 
an interesting announcement on page 45:  "We just 
discovered an extra set of wires attached to our fax line 
and heading up the pole.  (They've since been clipped.)  
Your faxes to us and to anyone else could be monitored."
   
	 In the worldview of *2600,* the tiny band of techno-
rat brothers (rarely, sisters) are a beseiged vanguard of the 
truly free and honest.   The rest of the world is a maelstrom 
of corporate crime and high-level governmental 
corruption, occasionally tempered with well-meaning 
ignorance.   To read a few issues in a row is to enter a 
nightmare akin to Solzhenitsyn's, somewhat tempered by 
the fact that *2600* is often extremely funny.

	Goldstein did not become a target of the Hacker 
Crackdown, though he protested loudly, eloquently, and 
publicly about it, and it added considerably to his fame.  It 
was not that he is not regarded as dangerous, because he 
is so regarded.  Goldstein has had brushes with the law in 
the past:  in 1985, a *2600* bulletin board computer was 
seized by the FBI, and some software on it was formally 
declared "a burglary tool in the form of a computer 
program."  But Goldstein escaped direct repression in 
1990, because his magazine is printed on paper, and 
recognized as subject to Constitutional freedom of the 
press protection.  As was seen in the *Ramparts* case, this 
is far from an absolute guarantee.  Still, as a practical 
matter, shutting down *2600* by court-order would create 
so much legal hassle that it is simply unfeasible, at least 
for the present.   Throughout 1990, both Goldstein and his 
magazine were peevishly thriving.

	Instead, the Crackdown of 1990 would concern itself 
with the computerized version of forbidden data.  The 
crackdown itself, first and foremost, was about *bulletin 
board systems.*  Bulletin Board Systems, most often 
known by the ugly and un-pluralizable acronym "BBS," are 
the life-blood of the digital underground.  Boards were 
also central to law enforcement's tactics and strategy in 
the Hacker Crackdown.

	A "bulletin board system" can be formally defined as 
a computer which serves as an information and message-
passing center for users dialing-up over the phone-lines 
through the use of  modems.   A "modem," or modulator-
demodulator, is a device which translates the digital 
impulses of computers into audible analog telephone 
signals, and vice versa.   Modems connect computers to 
phones and thus to each other.

	Large-scale mainframe computers have been 
connected since the 1960s, but *personal* computers, run 
by individuals out of their homes, were first networked in 
the late 1970s.   The "board" created by Ward Christensen 
and Randy Suess in February 1978, in Chicago, Illinois, is 
generally regarded as the first personal-computer bulletin 
board system worthy of the name.

	Boards run on many different machines, employing 
many different kinds of software.  Early boards were crude 
and buggy, and their managers, known as "system 
operators" or "sysops," were hard-working technical 
experts who wrote their own software.  But like most 
everything else in the world of electronics, boards became 
faster, cheaper, better-designed, and generally far more 
sophisticated throughout the 1980s.  They also moved 
swiftly out of the hands of pioneers and into those of the 
general public.   By 1985 there were something in the 
neighborhood of 4,000 boards in America.  By 1990 it was 
calculated, vaguely, that there were about 30,000 boards in 
the US, with uncounted thousands overseas. 
  
	Computer bulletin boards are unregulated 
enterprises.  Running a board is a rough-and-ready, catch-
as-catch-can proposition.   Basically,  anybody with a 
computer, modem, software and a phone-line can start a 
board.   With second-hand equipment and public-domain 
free software, the price of a board might be quite small -- 
less than it would take to publish a magazine or even a 
decent pamphlet.   Entrepreneurs eagerly sell bulletin-
board software, and will coach nontechnical amateur 
sysops in its use. 
 
	Boards are not "presses."  They are not magazines, or 
libraries, or phones, or CB radios, or traditional cork 
bulletin boards down at the local laundry, though they 
have some passing resemblance to those earlier media.  
Boards are a new medium -- they may even be a *large 
number* of new media.

  	Consider these unique characteristics:  boards are 
cheap, yet they  can have a national, even global reach.  
Boards can be contacted from anywhere in the global 
telephone network, at *no cost* to the person running the 
board -- the caller pays the phone bill, and if the caller is 
local, the call is free.  Boards do not involve an editorial 
elite addressing a mass audience.   The "sysop" of a board 
is not an exclusive publisher or writer -- he is managing an 
electronic salon, where individuals can address the 
general public,  play the part of the general public, and 
also  exchange private mail with other individuals.  And 
the "conversation" on boards, though fluid, rapid, and 
highly interactive, is not spoken, but written.  It is also 
relatively anonymous, sometimes completely so.
  
	And because boards are cheap and ubiquitous, 
regulations and licensing requirements would likely be 
practically unenforceable.  It would almost be easier to 
"regulate"  "inspect" and "license" the content of private 
mail -- probably more so, since the mail system is 
operated by the federal government.  Boards are run by 
individuals, independently, entirely at their own whim.

	For the sysop, the cost of operation is not the primary 
limiting factor.  Once the investment in a computer and 
modem has been made, the only steady cost is the charge 
for maintaining a phone line (or several phone lines).   The 
primary limits for sysops are time and energy.  Boards 
require upkeep.  New users are generally "validated" -- 
they must be issued individual passwords, and called at 
home by voice-phone, so that their identity can be 
verified.  Obnoxious users, who exist in plenty, must be 
chided or purged.  Proliferating messages must be deleted 
when they grow old, so that the capacity of the system is 
not overwhelmed.  And software programs (if such things 
are kept on the board)  must be examined for possible 
computer viruses.   If there is a financial charge to use the 
board (increasingly common, especially in larger and 
fancier systems) then accounts must be kept, and users 
must be billed.  And if the board crashes -- a very common 
occurrence -- then repairs must be made.

	Boards can be distinguished by the amount of effort 
spent in regulating them.  First, we have the completely 
open board, whose sysop is off chugging brews and 
watching re-runs while his users generally degenerate 
over time into peevish anarchy and eventual silence.  
Second comes the supervised board, where the sysop 
breaks in every once in a while to tidy up, calm brawls, 
issue announcements, and rid the community of  dolts 
and troublemakers.   Third is the heavily supervised 
board,  which sternly urges adult and responsible behavior 
and swiftly edits any message considered offensive, 
impertinent, illegal or irrelevant.  And last comes the 
completely  edited "electronic publication,"  which is 
presented to a silent audience which is not allowed to 
respond directly in any way.

	Boards can also be grouped by their degree of 
anonymity.  There is the completely anonymous board, 
where everyone uses pseudonyms -- "handles" -- and even 
the sysop is unaware of the user's true identity.  The sysop 
himself is likely pseudonymous on a board of this type.  
Second, and rather more common, is the board where the 
sysop knows (or thinks he knows) the true names and 
addresses of all users, but the users don't know one 
another's names and may not know his.  Third is the board 
where everyone has to use real names, and roleplaying 
and pseudonymous posturing are forbidden.

	Boards can be grouped by their immediacy.  "Chat-
lines" are boards linking several users together over 
several different phone-lines simultaneously, so that 
people exchange messages at the very moment that they 
type.  (Many large boards feature "chat" capabilities along 
with other services.)   Less immediate boards, perhaps 
with a single phoneline, store messages serially, one at a 
time.  And some boards are only open for business in 
daylight hours or on weekends, which greatly slows 
response.  A *network* of boards, such as "FidoNet," can 
carry electronic mail from board to board, continent to 
continent, across huge distances -- but at a relative snail's 
pace, so that a message can take several days to reach its 
target audience and elicit a reply.

	Boards can be grouped by their degree of 
community.  Some boards emphasize the exchange of 
private, person-to-person electronic mail.   Others 
emphasize public postings and may even purge people 
who "lurk," merely reading posts but refusing to openly 
participate.  Some boards are intimate and neighborly.  
Others are frosty and highly technical.  Some are little 
more than storage dumps for software, where users 
"download" and "upload" programs, but interact among 
themselves little if at all. 

	Boards can be grouped by their ease of access.  Some 
boards are entirely public.  Others are private and 
restricted only to personal friends of the sysop.   Some 
boards divide users by status.   On these boards, some 
users, especially beginners, strangers or children, will be 
restricted to general topics, and perhaps forbidden to post.  
Favored users, though, are granted the ability to post as 
they please, and to stay "on-line" as long as they like, even 
to the disadvantage of other people trying to call in.  High-
status users can be given access to hidden areas in the 
board, such as off-color topics, private discussions, and/or 
valuable software.  Favored users may even become 
"remote sysops" with the power to take remote control of 
the board through their own home computers.  Quite 
often "remote sysops" end up doing all the work and 
taking formal control of the enterprise, despite the fact 
that it's physically located in someone else's house.  
Sometimes several "co-sysops" share power.

	And boards can also be grouped by size.  Massive, 
nationwide commercial networks, such as CompuServe, 
Delphi, GEnie and Prodigy, are run on mainframe 
computers and are generally not considered "boards," 
though they share many of their characteristics, such as 
electronic mail, discussion topics, libraries of software, and 
persistent and growing problems with civil-liberties issues.   
Some private boards have as many as thirty phone-lines 
and quite sophisticated hardware.   And then there are 
tiny boards.

	Boards vary in popularity.  Some boards are huge and 
crowded, where users must claw their way in against a 
constant busy-signal.  Others are huge and empty -- there 
are few things sadder than a formerly flourishing board 
where no one posts any longer, and the dead 
conversations of vanished users lie about gathering digital 
dust.  Some boards are tiny and intimate, their telephone 
numbers intentionally kept confidential so that only a 
small number can log on.

	And some boards are *underground.*

	Boards can be mysterious entities.  The activities of 
their users can be hard to differentiate from conspiracy.  
Sometimes they *are* conspiracies.  Boards have 
harbored, or have been accused of harboring, all manner 
of fringe groups, and have abetted, or been accused of 
abetting, every manner of frowned-upon, sleazy, radical, 
and criminal activity.   There are Satanist boards.  Nazi 
boards.  Pornographic boards.  Pedophile boards.  Drug-
dealing boards.  Anarchist boards.  Communist boards.  
Gay and Lesbian boards (these exist in great profusion, 
many of them quite lively with well-established histories).  
Religious cult boards.  Evangelical boards.  Witchcraft 
boards, hippie boards, punk boards, skateboarder boards.  
Boards for UFO believers.   There may well be boards for  
serial killers, airline terrorists and professional assassins.  
There is simply no way to tell.   Boards spring up, flourish, 
and disappear in large numbers, in most every corner of 
the developed world.  Even apparently innocuous public 
boards can, and sometimes do, harbor secret areas known 
only to a few.  And even on the vast, public, commercial 
services, private mail is very private -- and quite possibly 
criminal.

	Boards cover most every topic imaginable and some 
that are hard to imagine.  They cover a vast spectrum of 
social activity.   However, all board users do have 
something in common:  their possession of computers and 
phones.  Naturally, computers and phones are primary 
topics of conversation on almost every board.
  
	And hackers and phone phreaks, those utter 
devotees of computers and phones, live by boards.  They 
swarm by boards.  They are bred by boards.  By the late 
1980s, phone-phreak groups and hacker groups, united by 
boards, had proliferated fantastically.

	As evidence, here is a list of hacker groups compiled 
by the editors of *Phrack* on August 8, 1988.

	The Administration.  Advanced Telecommunications, 
Inc.  ALIAS.  American Tone Travelers.  Anarchy Inc.  
Apple Mafia.  The Association. Atlantic Pirates Guild.

	Bad Ass Mother Fuckers.  Bellcore.  Bell Shock Force.  
Black Bag.

	Camorra.  C&M Productions.  Catholics Anonymous.  
Chaos Computer Club.  Chief Executive Officers.  Circle 
Of Death.  Circle Of Deneb.  Club X.  Coalition of Hi-Tech 
Pirates.  Coast-To-Coast.  Corrupt Computing.  Cult Of The 
Dead Cow.  Custom Retaliations.

	Damage Inc.  D&B Communications. The Dange 
Gang.  Dec Hunters.  Digital Gang.  DPAK.

	 Eastern Alliance. The Elite Hackers Guild.  Elite 
Phreakers and Hackers Club.  The Elite Society Of 
America.  EPG.  Executives Of Crime. Extasyy Elite.

	 Fargo 4A.  Farmers Of Doom.  The Federation.  Feds 
R Us.  First Class. Five O.  Five Star.   Force Hackers.  The 
414s.

	 Hack-A-Trip.  Hackers Of America.   High Mountain 
Hackers.  High Society.  The Hitchhikers.
  
	IBM Syndicate.  The Ice Pirates.   Imperial Warlords.  
Inner Circle. Inner Circle II.  Insanity Inc.  International 
Computer Underground Bandits.

	 Justice League of America.

	 Kaos Inc.  Knights Of Shadow.  Knights Of The 
Round Table.

	 League Of Adepts.  Legion Of Doom.  Legion Of 
Hackers.  Lords Of Chaos.  Lunatic Labs, Unlimited. 

	Master Hackers.  MAD!  The Marauders.  MD/PhD.  
Metal Communications, Inc.  MetalliBashers, Inc.  MBI.  
Metro Communications.  Midwest Pirates Guild.

 	NASA Elite.  The NATO Association.  Neon Knights.  
Nihilist Order.  	Order Of The Rose.  OSS. 
 
	Pacific Pirates Guild.  Phantom Access Associates.  
PHido PHreaks. The Phirm.  Phlash.  PhoneLine 
Phantoms.  Phone Phreakers Of America. Phortune 500.  
Phreak Hack Delinquents.  Phreak Hack Destroyers.  
Phreakers, Hackers, And Laundromat Employees Gang 
(PHALSE Gang).  Phreaks Against Geeks.  Phreaks 
Against Phreaks Against Geeks.  Phreaks and Hackers of 
America.  Phreaks Anonymous World Wide.  Project 
Genesis.  The Punk Mafia.
  
	The Racketeers.  Red Dawn Text Files.  Roscoe Gang. 

	SABRE.  Secret Circle of Pirates.  Secret Service.  707 
Club.  Shadow Brotherhood.  Sharp Inc.  65C02 Elite.  
Spectral Force. Star League.  Stowaways.   Strata-Crackers.
   
	Team Hackers '86.  Team Hackers '87.  
TeleComputist Newsletter Staff.  Tribunal Of Knowledge.  
Triple Entente.  Turn Over And Die Syndrome (TOADS).  
300 Club.  1200 Club.  2300 Club.  2600 Club.  2601 Club.  
2AF.

	The United Soft WareZ Force.  United Technical 
Underground.
	
	Ware Brigade.  The Warelords.  WASP.

	Contemplating this list is  an impressive, almost 
humbling business.   As a cultural artifact, the thing 
approaches poetry.  
 
	Underground groups -- subcultures -- can be 
distinguished from independent cultures by their  habit of 
referring constantly to the parent society.  Undergrounds 
by their nature constantly  must maintain a membrane of 
differentiation.   Funny/distinctive clothes and hair, 
specialized jargon, specialized ghettoized areas in cities, 
different hours of rising, working, sleeping....  The digital 
underground, which specializes in information, relies very 
heavily on language to distinguish itself.   As can be seen 
from this list, they make heavy use of parody and 
mockery.   It's revealing to see who they choose to mock.

	First,  large corporations.  We have the Phortune 500,  
The Chief Executive Officers,  Bellcore,  IBM Syndicate, 
SABRE (a computerized reservation service maintained 
by airlines).  The common use of "Inc." is telling -- none of 
these groups are actual corporations, but take clear 
delight in mimicking them.

	Second,  governments and police.  NASA Elite, NATO  
Association.  "Feds R Us" and "Secret Service" are fine bits 
of fleering boldness.  OSS -- the Office of Strategic Services 
was the forerunner of the CIA.

	Third, criminals.  Using stigmatizing pejoratives as a 
perverse badge of honor is a time-honored tactic for 
subcultures:   punks, gangs, delinquents, mafias, pirates, 
bandits, racketeers.

	Specialized orthography, especially the use of "ph" 
for "f" and "z" for the plural "s," are instant recognition 
symbols.  So is the use of the numeral "0" for the letter "O" 
-- computer-software orthography generally features a 
slash through the zero, making the distinction obvious.

	Some terms are poetically descriptive of computer 
intrusion:  the Stowaways,  the Hitchhikers, the PhoneLine 
Phantoms, Coast-to-Coast.  Others are simple bravado 
and vainglorious puffery.  (Note the insistent use of the 
terms "elite" and "master.")  Some terms are 
blasphemous, some obscene, others merely cryptic -- 
anything to puzzle, offend, confuse, and keep the straights 
at bay.
   
	Many hacker groups further re-encrypt their names 
by the use of acronyms:  United Technical Underground 
becomes UTU, Farmers of Doom become FoD,  the 
United SoftWareZ Force becomes, at its own insistence, 
"TuSwF," and woe to the ignorant rodent who capitalizes 
the wrong letters.   	

	It should be further recognized that the members of 
these groups are themselves pseudonymous.  If you did, in 
fact, run across the "PhoneLine Phantoms," you would find 
them to consist of  "Carrier Culprit,"  "The Executioner," 
"Black Majik,"  "Egyptian Lover,"  "Solid State," and  "Mr 
Icom."  "Carrier Culprit" will likely be referred to by his 
friends as "CC," as in, "I got these dialups from CC of PLP."

	It's quite possible that this entire list refers to as few 
as a thousand people.   It is not a complete list of 
underground groups -- there has never been such a list, 
and there never will be.   Groups rise, flourish, decline, 
share membership, maintain a cloud of wannabes and 
casual hangers-on.  People pass in and out, are ostracized, 
get bored, are busted by police, or are cornered by telco 
security and presented with huge bills.  Many 
"underground groups" are software pirates, "warez d00dz,"  
who might break copy protection and pirate programs, but 
likely wouldn't dare to intrude on a computer-system. 
 
	It is hard to estimate the true population of the digital 
underground.  There is constant turnover.  Most hackers 
start young, come and go, then drop out at age 22 -- the 
age of college graduation.  And a large majority of 
"hackers" access pirate boards, adopt a handle,  swipe 
software and perhaps abuse a phone-code or two, while 
never actually joining the elite. 
  
	Some professional informants, who make it their 
business to retail knowledge of the underground to 
paymasters in private corporate security, have estimated 
the hacker population at as high as fifty thousand.   This is 
likely highly inflated, unless one counts every single 
teenage software pirate  and petty phone-booth thief.  My 
best guess is about 5,000 people.   Of these, I would guess 
that as few as a hundred are truly "elite"  -- active 
computer intruders, skilled enough to penetrate 
sophisticated systems and truly to worry corporate security 
and law enforcement.

	Another interesting speculation is whether this group 
is growing or not.  Young teenage hackers are often 
convinced that hackers exist in vast swarms and will soon 
dominate the cybernetic universe.  Older and wiser 
veterans, perhaps as wizened as 24 or 25 years old, are 
convinced that the glory days are long gone, that the cops 
have the underground's number now, and that kids these 
days are dirt-stupid and just want to play Nintendo. 
 
	My own assessment is that computer intrusion, as a 
non-profit act of intellectual exploration and mastery, is in 
slow decline, at least in the United States; but that 
electronic fraud, especially telecommunication crime, is 
growing by leaps and bounds.

	One might find a useful parallel to the digital 
underground in  the drug  underground.   There was a 
time, now much-obscured by historical revisionism, when 
Bohemians freely shared joints at concerts, and hip, small-
scale marijuana dealers might turn people on just for the 
sake of enjoying a long stoned conversation about the 
Doors and Allen Ginsberg.  Now drugs are increasingly 
verboten, except in a high-stakes, highly-criminal world of 
highly addictive drugs.  Over years of disenchantment and 
police harassment, a vaguely ideological, free-wheeling 
drug underground has relinquished the business of drug-
dealing to a  far more savage criminal hard-core.   This is 
not a pleasant prospect to contemplate, but the analogy is 
fairly compelling.

	What does an underground board look like?   What 
distinguishes it from a standard board?  It isn't necessarily 
the conversation -- hackers often talk about common 
board topics, such as hardware, software, sex, science 
fiction, current events, politics, movies, personal gossip.  
Underground boards can best be distinguished by their 
files, or "philes,"  pre-composed texts which teach the 
techniques and ethos of the underground.   These are 
prized reservoirs of forbidden knowledge.  Some are 
anonymous, but most proudly bear the handle of the 
"hacker" who has created them, and his group affiliation, if 
he has one.

	Here is a partial table-of-contents of philes from an 
underground board, somewhere in the heart of middle 
America, circa 1991.  The descriptions are mostly self-
explanatory.  


BANKAMER.ZIP    5406 06-11-91  Hacking Bank America
CHHACK.ZIP      4481 06-11-91  Chilton Hacking
CITIBANK.ZIP    4118 06-11-91  Hacking Citibank
CREDIMTC.ZIP    3241 06-11-91  Hacking Mtc Credit 
Company
DIGEST.ZIP      5159 06-11-91  Hackers Digest
HACK.ZIP       14031 06-11-91  How To Hack
HACKBAS.ZIP     5073 06-11-91  Basics Of Hacking
HACKDICT.ZIP   42774 06-11-91  Hackers Dictionary
HACKER.ZIP     57938 06-11-91  Hacker Info
HACKERME.ZIP    3148 06-11-91  Hackers Manual
HACKHAND.ZIP    4814 06-11-91  Hackers Handbook
HACKTHES.ZIP   48290 06-11-91  Hackers Thesis
HACKVMS.ZIP     4696 06-11-91  Hacking Vms Systems
MCDON.ZIP       3830 06-11-91  Hacking Macdonalds 
(Home Of The Archs)
P500UNIX.ZIP   15525 06-11-91  Phortune 500 Guide To 
Unix
RADHACK.ZIP     8411 06-11-91  Radio Hacking
TAOTRASH.DOC    4096 12-25-89  Suggestions For 
Trashing
TECHHACK.ZIP    5063 06-11-91  Technical Hacking


The files above are do-it-yourself manuals about 
computer intrusion.  The above is only a small section of a 
much larger library of hacking and phreaking techniques 
and history.  We now move into a different and perhaps 
surprising area.

                              +------------+
                              |Anarchy|
                              +------------+

ANARC.ZIP       3641 06-11-91  Anarchy Files
ANARCHST.ZIP   63703 06-11-91  Anarchist Book
ANARCHY.ZIP     2076 06-11-91  Anarchy At Home
ANARCHY3.ZIP    6982 06-11-91  Anarchy No 3
ANARCTOY.ZIP    2361 06-11-91  Anarchy Toys
ANTIMODM.ZIP    2877 06-11-91  Anti-modem Weapons
ATOM.ZIP        4494 06-11-91  How To Make An Atom 
Bomb
BARBITUA.ZIP    3982 06-11-91  Barbiturate Formula
BLCKPWDR.ZIP    2810 06-11-91  Black Powder Formulas
BOMB.ZIP        3765 06-11-91  How To Make Bombs
BOOM.ZIP        2036 06-11-91  Things That Go Boom
CHLORINE.ZIP    1926 06-11-91  Chlorine Bomb 
COOKBOOK.ZIP    1500 06-11-91  Anarchy Cook Book
DESTROY.ZIP     3947 06-11-91  Destroy Stuff
DUSTBOMB.ZIP    2576 06-11-91  Dust Bomb
ELECTERR.ZIP    3230 06-11-91  Electronic Terror
EXPLOS1.ZIP     2598 06-11-91  Explosives 1
EXPLOSIV.ZIP   18051 06-11-91  More Explosives
EZSTEAL.ZIP     4521 06-11-91  Ez-stealing
FLAME.ZIP       2240 06-11-91  Flame Thrower
FLASHLT.ZIP     2533 06-11-91  Flashlight Bomb
FMBUG.ZIP       2906 06-11-91  How To Make An Fm Bug
OMEEXPL.ZIP    2139 06-11-91  Home Explosives
HOW2BRK.ZIP     3332 06-11-91  How To Break In
LETTER.ZIP      2990 06-11-91  Letter Bomb
LOCK.ZIP        2199 06-11-91  How To Pick Locks
MRSHIN.ZIP      3991 06-11-91  Briefcase Locks
NAPALM.ZIP      3563 06-11-91  Napalm At Home
NITRO.ZIP       3158 06-11-91  Fun With Nitro
PARAMIL.ZIP     2962 06-11-91  Paramilitary Info
PICKING.ZIP     3398 06-11-91  Picking Locks
PIPEBOMB.ZIP    2137 06-11-91  Pipe Bomb
POTASS.ZIP      3987 06-11-91  Formulas With Potassium
PRANK.TXT      11074 08-03-90  More Pranks To Pull On 
Idiots!
REVENGE.ZIP     4447 06-11-91  Revenge Tactics
ROCKET.ZIP      2590 06-11-91  Rockets For Fun
SMUGGLE.ZIP     3385 06-11-91  How To Smuggle

	*Holy Cow!*  The damned thing is full of stuff about 
bombs! 

	What are we to make of this?

	First, it should be acknowledged that spreading 
knowledge about demolitions to teenagers is a highly and 
deliberately antisocial act.   It is not, however, illegal. 
 
	Second, it should be recognized that most of these 
philes were in fact *written* by teenagers.  Most adult 
American males who can remember their teenage years 
will recognize that the notion of building a flamethrower in 
your garage is an incredibly neat-o idea.  *Actually* 
building a flamethrower in your garage, however, is 
fraught with discouraging difficulty.  Stuffing gunpowder 
into a booby-trapped flashlight, so as to blow the arm off 
your high-school vice-principal, can be a thing of dark 
beauty to contemplate.   Actually committing assault by 
explosives  will earn you the sustained attention of the 
federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

	Some people, however, will actually try these plans.  A 
determinedly murderous American teenager can 
probably buy or steal a handgun far more easily than he 
can brew fake "napalm" in the kitchen sink.  Nevertheless, 
if temptation is spread before people a certain number 
will succumb, and a small minority will actually attempt 
these stunts.  A large minority of that small minority will 
either fail or, quite likely, maim themselves, since these 
"philes" have not been checked for accuracy, are not the 
product of professional experience, and are often highly 
fanciful.  But the gloating menace of these philes is not to 
be entirely dismissed.

	Hackers may not be "serious" about bombing; if they 
were, we would hear far more about exploding flashlights, 
homemade bazookas, and gym teachers poisoned by 
chlorine and potassium.  However, hackers are *very* 
serious about forbidden knowledge.  They are possessed 
not merely by curiosity, but by a positive *lust to know.*  
The desire to know what others don't is scarcely new.  But 
the *intensity* of this desire, as manifested by these young 
technophilic denizens of the Information Age, may in fact 
*be* new, and may represent some basic shift in social 
values -- a harbinger of what the world may come to, as 
society lays more and more value on the possession, 
assimilation and retailing of *information* as a basic 
commodity of daily life.

	There have always been young men with obsessive 
interests in these topics.  Never before, however, have they 
been able to network so extensively and easily, and to 
propagandize their interests with impunity to random 
passers-by.   High-school teachers will recognize that 
there's always one in a crowd, but when the one in a crowd 
escapes control by jumping into the phone-lines, and 
becomes a hundred such kids all together on a board, 
then trouble is brewing visibly.  The urge of authority to 
*do something,*  even something drastic, is hard to resist.  
And in 1990, authority did something.  In fact authority did 
a great deal.

				#
	
	The process by which boards create hackers goes 
something like this.  A youngster becomes interested in 
computers -- usually, computer games.  He hears from 
friends that "bulletin boards" exist where games can be 
obtained for free.  (Many computer games are "freeware," 
not copyrighted -- invented simply for the love of it and 
given away to the public; some of these games are quite 
good.)  He bugs his parents for a modem, or quite often, 
uses his parents' modem.

	 The world of boards suddenly opens up.  Computer 
games can be quite expensive, real budget-breakers for a 
kid, but pirated games, stripped of copy protection,  are 
cheap or free.  They are also illegal, but it is very rare, 
almost unheard of, for a small-scale software pirate to be 
prosecuted.  Once "cracked" of its copy protection, the 
program, being digital data, becomes infinitely 
reproducible.  Even the instructions to the game, any 
manuals that accompany it, can be reproduced as text 
files, or photocopied from legitimate sets.  Other users  on 
boards can give many useful hints in game-playing tactics.   
And a youngster with an infinite supply of free computer 
games can certainly cut quite a swath among his modem-
less friends.

	And boards are pseudonymous.  No one need know 
that you're fourteen years old -- with a little practice at 
subterfuge, you can talk to adults about adult things, and 
be accepted and taken seriously!  You can even pretend to 
be a girl, or an old man, or anybody you can imagine.  If 
you find this kind of deception gratifying, there is ample 
opportunity to hone your ability on boards.
   
	But local boards can grow stale.  And almost every 
board maintains a list of phone-numbers to other boards, 
some in distant, tempting, exotic locales.   Who knows 
what they're up to, in Oregon or Alaska or Florida or 
California?  It's very easy to find out -- just  order the 
modem to call through its software -- nothing to this, just 
typing on a keyboard, the same thing you would do for 
most any computer game.   The machine reacts swiftly 
and in a few seconds you are talking to a bunch of 
interesting people on another seaboard.

	And yet the *bills* for this trivial action can be 
staggering!  Just by going tippety-tap with your fingers, you 
may have saddled your parents with four hundred bucks 
in long-distance charges, and gotten chewed out but good.  
That hardly seems fair.

	How horrifying to have made friends in another state 
and to be deprived of their company -- and their software -
-  just because telephone companies demand absurd 
amounts of money!   How painful, to be restricted to 
boards in one's own *area code* --   what the heck is an 
"area code" anyway, and what makes it so special?   A few 
grumbles, complaints, and innocent questions of this sort 
will often elicit a sympathetic reply from another board 
user  --  someone with some stolen codes to hand.  You 
dither a while,  knowing this isn't quite right, then you 
make up your mind to try them anyhow -- *and they work!*  
Suddenly you're doing something even your parents can't 
do.  Six months ago you were just some kid -- now, you're 
the Crimson Flash of Area Code 512!   You're bad -- you're 
nationwide! 
 
	Maybe you'll stop at a few abused codes.  Maybe 
you'll decide that boards aren't all that interesting after all, 
that it's wrong, not worth the risk  -- but maybe you won't.  
The next step is to pick up your own repeat-dialling 
program --  to learn to generate your own stolen codes.  
(This was dead easy five years ago, much harder to get 
away with nowadays, but not yet impossible.)   And these 
dialling programs are not complex or intimidating -- some 
are as small as twenty lines of software. 
 
	Now, you too can share codes.   You can trade codes 
to learn other techniques.   If you're smart enough to catch 
on, and obsessive enough to want to bother,  and ruthless 
enough to start seriously bending rules, then you'll get 
better, fast.  You start to develop a rep.  You  move up to a 
heavier class of board -- a board with a bad attitude, the 
kind of board that naive dopes like your classmates and 
your former self have never even heard of!  You pick up 
the jargon of phreaking and hacking from the board.   You 
read a few of those anarchy philes -- and man, you never 
realized you could be a real *outlaw* without ever leaving 
your bedroom.

	You still play other computer games, but now you 
have a new and bigger game.   This one will bring you a 
different kind of status than destroying even eight zillion 
lousy space invaders.

	Hacking is perceived by hackers as a "game."  This is 
not an entirely unreasonable or sociopathic perception.   
You can win or lose at hacking, succeed or fail, but it never 
feels "real."  It's not simply that imaginative youngsters 
sometimes have a hard time telling "make-believe" from 
"real life."  Cyberspace is *not real!*  "Real" things are 
physical objects like trees and  shoes and cars.  Hacking 
takes place on a screen.   Words aren't physical, numbers  
(even telephone numbers and credit card numbers)  
aren't physical.  Sticks and stones may break my bones, 
but data will never hurt me.  Computers *simulate* reality, 
like computer games that simulate tank battles or 
dogfights or spaceships.   Simulations are just make-
believe, and the stuff in computers is *not real.*

	Consider this:  if "hacking" is supposed to be so 
serious and real-life and  dangerous, then how come 
*nine-year-old kids* have computers and modems?  You 
wouldn't give a nine year old his own car, or his own rifle, or 
his own chainsaw -- those things are "real."

	People underground are perfectly aware that the 
"game" is frowned upon by the powers that be.   Word gets 
around about busts in the underground.   Publicizing busts 
is one of the primary functions of pirate boards,  but they 
also promulgate an attitude about them, and their own 
idiosyncratic ideas of justice.   The users of underground 
boards won't complain if some guy is busted for crashing 
systems, spreading viruses, or stealing money by wire-
fraud.   They may shake their heads with a sneaky grin, but 
they won't openly defend these practices.   But when a kid 
is charged with some theoretical amount of theft:  
$233,846.14, for instance, because he sneaked into a 
computer and copied something, and kept it in his house 
on a floppy disk -- this is regarded as a sign of near-
insanity from prosecutors, a sign that they've drastically 
mistaken the immaterial game of computing for their real 
and boring everyday world of fatcat corporate money. 
  
	It's as if big companies and their suck-up lawyers 
think that computing belongs to them, and they can retail 
it with price stickers, as if it were boxes of laundry soap!  
But pricing "information"  is like trying to price air or price 
dreams.  Well, anybody on a pirate board knows that 
computing can be, and ought to be, *free.*  Pirate boards 
are little independent worlds in cyberspace, and they don't 
belong to anybody but the underground.   Underground 
boards aren't "brought to you by Procter & Gamble."

	To log on to an underground board can mean to 
experience liberation, to enter a world where, for once, 
money isn't everything and adults don't have all the 
answers. 
   
	Let's sample another vivid hacker manifesto.  Here 
are some excerpts from "The Conscience of a Hacker," by 
"The Mentor," from *Phrack* Volume One, Issue 7, Phile 
3.

	"I made a discovery today.  I found a computer.  Wait 
a second, this is cool.  It does what I want it to.  If it makes a 
mistake, it's because I screwed it up.  Not because it 
doesn't like me.(...)
	"And then it happened... a door opened to a world... 
rushing through the phone line like heroin through an 
addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge 
from day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is 
found.   'This is it...  this is where I belong...'
	"I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, 
never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I 
know you all...(...)
	"This is our world now....  the world of the electron and 
the switch, the beauty of the baud.  We make use of a 
service already existing without paying for what could be 
dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you 
call us criminals.  We explore... and you call us criminals.  
We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals.  We 
exist without skin color, without nationality, without 
religious bias... and you call us criminals.  You build atomic 
bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat and lie to us and 
try to make us believe that it's for our own good, yet we're 
the criminals.
	"Yes, I am a criminal.  My crime is that of curiosity.  
My crime is that of judging people by what they say and 
think, not what they look like.  My crime is that of 
outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me 
for."

					#

	There have been underground boards almost as long 
as there have been boards.  One of the first was 8BBS, 
which became a stronghold of the West Coast phone-
phreak elite.   After going on-line in March 1980, 8BBS 
sponsored "Susan Thunder," and "Tuc,"  and, most 
notoriously, "the Condor."  "The Condor"  bore the singular 
distinction of becoming the most vilified American phreak 
and hacker ever.   Angry underground associates, fed up 
with Condor's peevish behavior, turned him in to police, 
along with a heaping double-helping of  outrageous 
hacker legendry.  As a result, Condor was kept in solitary 
confinement for seven months,  for fear that he might start 
World War Three by triggering missile silos from the 
prison payphone.  (Having served his time, Condor is now 
walking around loose;  WWIII has thus far conspicuously 
failed to occur.)

	The sysop of 8BBS was an ardent free-speech 
enthusiast who simply felt that *any* attempt to restrict 
the expression of his users was unconstitutional and 
immoral.   Swarms of the technically curious entered 8BBS 
and emerged as phreaks and hackers, until, in 1982, a 
friendly 8BBS alumnus passed the sysop a new modem 
which had been purchased by credit-card fraud.  Police 
took this opportunity to seize the entire board and remove 
what they considered an attractive nuisance.

	Plovernet was a powerful East Coast pirate board that 
operated in both New York and Florida.  Owned and 
operated by teenage hacker "Quasi Moto,"  Plovernet 
attracted five hundred eager users in 1983.  "Emmanuel 
Goldstein" was one-time co-sysop of Plovernet, along with 
"Lex Luthor,"  founder of the "Legion of Doom" group.  
Plovernet  bore the signal honor of being the original 
home of the "Legion of Doom," about which the reader will 
be hearing a great deal, soon.

  	"Pirate-80," or "P-80," run by a sysop known as "Scan-
Man," got into the game very early in Charleston, and 
continued steadily for years.  P-80 flourished so flagrantly 
that even its most hardened users became nervous, and 
some slanderously speculated that "Scan Man" must have 
ties to corporate security, a charge he vigorously denied.

	"414 Private" was the home board for the first *group* 
to attract conspicuous trouble, the teenage "414 Gang," 
whose intrusions into Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and 
Los Alamos military computers were to be a nine-days-
wonder in 1982.

	At about this time, the first software piracy boards 
began to open up, trading cracked games for the Atari 800 
and the Commodore C64.   Naturally these boards were 
heavily frequented by teenagers.  And with the 1983 
release of the hacker-thriller movie *War Games,* the 
scene exploded.   It seemed that every kid in America had 
demanded and  gotten a modem for Christmas.  Most of 
these dabbler wannabes put their modems in the attic 
after a few weeks, and most of the remainder minded their 
P's and Q's and stayed well out of hot water.  But some 
stubborn and talented diehards had this hacker kid in 
*War Games* figured for a happening dude.   They simply 
could not rest until they had contacted the underground -- 
or, failing that, created their own.
  
	In the mid-80s, underground boards sprang up like 
digital fungi.  ShadowSpawn Elite.  Sherwood Forest I, II, 
and III. Digital Logic Data Service in Florida, sysoped by  
no less a man than "Digital Logic" himself; Lex Luthor of 
the Legion of Doom was prominent on this board, since it 
was in his area code.  Lex's own board,  "Legion of Doom," 
started in 1984.  The Neon Knights ran a network of Apple-
hacker boards: Neon Knights North, South, East and 
West.   Free World II was run by "Major Havoc."  Lunatic 
Labs is still in operation as of this writing.   Dr. Ripco in 
Chicago, an anything-goes anarchist board with an 
extensive and raucous history, was seized by Secret 
Service agents in 1990 on Sundevil day, but up again 
almost immediately, with new machines and scarcely 
diminished  vigor.

	The St. Louis scene was not to rank with major centers 
of American hacking such as New York and L.A.  But St. 
Louis did rejoice in possession of "Knight Lightning" and 
"Taran King,"  two of the foremost *journalists* native to 
the underground.   Missouri boards like Metal Shop, 
Metal Shop Private, Metal Shop Brewery, may not have 
been the heaviest boards around in terms of illicit 
expertise.  But they became boards where hackers could 
exchange social gossip and try to figure out what the heck 
was going on nationally -- and internationally.   Gossip 
from Metal Shop was put into the form of news files, then 
assembled into a general electronic publication, *Phrack,* 
a portmanteau title coined from "phreak" and "hack."  The 
*Phrack* editors were as obsessively curious about other 
hackers as hackers were about machines.

	*Phrack,* being free of charge and lively reading, 
began to circulate throughout the underground.   As Taran 
King and Knight Lightning left high school for college, 
*Phrack* began to appear on mainframe machines linked 
to BITNET, and, through BITNET to the "Internet,"  that 
loose but extremely potent not-for-profit network where 
academic, governmental and corporate machines trade 
data through the UNIX TCP/IP protocol.   (The "Internet 
Worm"  of  November 2-3,1988, created by Cornell grad 
student Robert Morris,  was to be the largest and best-
publicized computer-intrusion scandal to date.  Morris 
claimed that his ingenious "worm" program was meant to 
harmlessly explore the Internet, but due to bad 
programming, the Worm replicated out of control and 
crashed some six thousand Internet computers.   Smaller-
scale and less ambitious Internet hacking was a standard 
for the underground elite.)
  
	Most any underground board not hopelessly lame 
and out-of-it would feature a complete run of *Phrack* --
and, possibly, the lesser-known standards of the 
underground:  the *Legion of Doom Technical Journal,*  
the obscene and raucous *Cult of the Dead Cow*  files,  
*P/HUN*  magazine,  *Pirate,*  the *Syndicate Reports,* 
and perhaps the highly anarcho-political *Activist Times 
Incorporated.*

	Possession of *Phrack*  on one's board was prima 
facie evidence of a bad attitude.   *Phrack* was seemingly 
everywhere, aiding, abetting, and spreading the 
underground ethos.  And this did not escape the attention 
of corporate security or the police. 
           
	 We now come to the touchy subject of police and 
boards.  Police, do, in fact, own boards.   In 1989, there were 
police-sponsored boards in California, Colorado, Florida, 
Georgia, Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, Texas, and Virginia:  
boards such as "Crime Bytes,"  "Crimestoppers,"  "All 
Points" and "Bullet-N-Board."   Police officers, as private 
computer enthusiasts, ran their own boards in Arizona, 
California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Missouri, 
Maryland, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee 
and Texas.   Police boards have often proved helpful in 
community relations.  Sometimes crimes are reported on 
police boards.

	Sometimes crimes are *committed*  on police 
boards.  This has sometimes happened by accident, as 
naive hackers blunder onto police boards and blithely 
begin offering telephone codes.  Far more often, however, 
it occurs through the now almost-traditional use of "sting 
boards."  The first police sting-boards were established in 
1985:  "Underground Tunnel" in Austin, Texas, whose 
sysop Sgt. Robert Ansley called himself "Pluto" -- "The 
Phone Company" in Phoenix, Arizona, run by Ken 
MacLeod of the Maricopa County Sheriff's office -- and  
Sgt. Dan Pasquale's board in Fremont, California.   Sysops 
posed as hackers, and swiftly garnered coteries of ardent 
users, who posted codes and loaded pirate software with 
abandon, and came to a sticky end. 

	Sting boards, like other boards, are cheap to operate,  
very cheap by the standards of undercover police 
operations.  Once accepted by the local underground, 
sysops will likely be invited into other pirate boards, where 
they can compile more dossiers.  And when the sting is 
announced and the worst offenders arrested, the publicity 
is generally  gratifying.  The resultant paranoia in the 
underground -- perhaps more justly described as a 
"deterrence effect" -- tends to quell local lawbreaking for 
quite a while.

	Obviously police do not have to beat the underbrush 
for hackers.  On the contrary, they can go trolling for them.  
Those caught can be grilled.  Some become useful 
informants.  They can lead the way to pirate boards all 
across the country.

	And boards all across the country showed the sticky 
fingerprints of *Phrack,* and of that loudest and most 
flagrant of all underground groups, the "Legion of Doom."

	The term "Legion of Doom" came from comic books.  
The Legion of Doom, a conspiracy of costumed super-
villains headed by the chrome-domed criminal ultra-
mastermind Lex Luthor, gave Superman a lot of four-color 
graphic trouble for a number of decades.   Of course, 
Superman, that exemplar of Truth, Justice, and the 
American Way, always won in the long run.   This didn't 
matter to the hacker Doomsters -- "Legion of Doom" was 
not some thunderous and evil Satanic reference, it was not 
meant to be taken seriously.  "Legion of Doom" came 
from funny-books and was supposed to be funny. 
  
	"Legion of Doom" did have a good mouthfilling ring 
to it, though.  It sounded really cool.  Other groups, such as 
the "Farmers of Doom," closely allied to LoD, recognized 
this grandiloquent quality, and made fun of it.  There was 
even a hacker group called "Justice League of America," 
named after Superman's club of true-blue crimefighting 
superheros.
  
	But they didn't last; the Legion did.

	The original Legion of Doom, hanging out on Quasi 
Moto's Plovernet board, were phone phreaks.   They 
weren't much into computers.   "Lex Luthor" himself (who 
was under eighteen when he formed the Legion)  was a 
COSMOS expert, COSMOS being the "Central System for 
Mainframe Operations," a telco internal computer 
network.   Lex would eventually become quite a dab hand 
at breaking into IBM mainframes, but although everyone 
liked Lex and admired his attitude, he was not considered  
a truly accomplished computer intruder.  Nor was he the 
"mastermind" of the Legion of Doom --  LoD were never 
big on formal leadership.  As a regular on Plovernet and 
sysop of his "Legion of Doom BBS,"  Lex was the Legion's 
cheerleader and recruiting officer.

	Legion of Doom began on the ruins of an earlier 
phreak group, The Knights of Shadow.  Later, LoD was to 
subsume the personnel of the hacker group "Tribunal of 
Knowledge."  People came and went constantly in LoD; 
groups split up or formed offshoots.
   
	Early on, the LoD phreaks befriended a few 
computer-intrusion enthusiasts, who became the 
associated "Legion of Hackers."  Then the two groups 
conflated into the "Legion of Doom/Hackers,"  or LoD/H.   
When the original "hacker" wing, Messrs. "Compu-
Phreak" and "Phucked Agent 04," found other matters to 
occupy their time, the extra "/H" slowly atrophied out of 
the name;  but by this time the phreak wing, Messrs.  Lex 
Luthor, "Blue Archer," "Gary Seven," "Kerrang Khan," 
"Master of Impact," "Silver Spy," "The Marauder," and 
"The Videosmith," had picked up a plethora of intrusion 
expertise and had become a force to be reckoned with.

	LoD members seemed to have an instinctive 
understanding that the way to real power in the 
underground lay through covert publicity.   LoD were 
flagrant.  Not only was it one of the earliest groups, but the 
members took pains to widely distribute their illicit 
knowledge.   Some LoD members, like "The Mentor," were 
close to evangelical about it.   *Legion of Doom Technical 
Journal*  began to show up on boards throughout the 
underground.
   
	*LoD Technical Journal* was named in cruel parody 
of the ancient and honored *AT&T Technical Journal.*  
The material in these two publications was quite similar -- 
much of it, adopted from public journals and discussions 
in the telco community.  And yet, the predatory attitude of 
LoD made even its most innocuous data seem deeply 
sinister; an outrage; a clear and present danger.

	To see why this should be, let's consider the following 
(invented) paragraphs, as a kind of thought experiment.

	(A)  "W. Fred Brown, AT&T Vice President for 
Advanced Technical Development, testified May 8  at a 
Washington hearing of the National Telecommunications 
and Information Administration (NTIA), regarding 
Bellcore's GARDEN project.  GARDEN (Generalized 
Automatic Remote Distributed Electronic Network)  is a 
telephone-switch programming tool that makes it possible 
to develop new telecom services, including hold-on-hold 
and customized message transfers,  from any keypad 
terminal, within seconds.   The GARDEN prototype 
combines centrex lines with a minicomputer using UNIX 
operating system software."

	(B)  "Crimson Flash 512 of the Centrex Mobsters 
reports:  D00dz, you wouldn't believe this GARDEN 
bullshit Bellcore's just come up with!   Now you don't even 
need a lousy Commodore to reprogram a switch -- just log 
on to GARDEN as a technician, and you can reprogram 
switches right off the keypad in any public phone booth!  
You can give yourself hold-on-hold and customized 
message transfers, and best of all, the thing is run off 
(notoriously insecure)  centrex lines using -- get this -- 
standard UNIX software!  Ha ha ha ha!"       	

	Message (A), couched in typical techno-
bureaucratese, appears tedious and almost unreadable.  
(A) scarcely seems threatening or menacing.   Message 
(B), on the other hand, is a dreadful thing, prima facie 
evidence of a dire conspiracy, definitely not the kind of 
thing you want your teenager reading. 
  
	The *information,* however, is identical.  It is *public*  
information, presented before the federal government in 
an open hearing.  It is not "secret."  It is not "proprietary."  
It is not even "confidential."  On the contrary, the 
development of advanced software systems is a matter of 
great public pride to Bellcore. 
  
	However, when Bellcore publicly announces a project 
of this kind, it expects a certain attitude from the public -- 
something along the lines of  *gosh wow, you guys are 
great, keep that up, whatever it is*  --  certainly not cruel 
mimickry, one-upmanship and outrageous speculations 
about possible security holes.

	Now put yourself in the place of a policeman 
confronted by an outraged parent, or telco official, with a 
copy of Version (B).  This well-meaning citizen, to his 
horror, has discovered a local bulletin-board carrying 
outrageous stuff like (B), which his son is examining with a 
deep and unhealthy interest.   If (B) were printed in a book 
or magazine, you, as an American law enforcement officer, 
would know that it would take a hell of a lot of trouble to do 
anything about it;  but it doesn't take technical genius to 
recognize that if there's a computer in your area harboring 
stuff like (B), there's going to be trouble. 
   
	In fact, if you ask around, any computer-literate cop 
will tell you straight out that boards with stuff like (B) are 
the *source* of trouble.  And the *worst* source of trouble 
on boards are the ringleaders inventing and spreading 
stuff like (B).  If it weren't for these jokers, there wouldn't 
*be* any trouble. 
 
	And Legion of Doom were on boards like nobody 
else.  Plovernet.  The Legion of Doom Board.  The Farmers 
of Doom Board.  Metal Shop.  OSUNY.  Blottoland.  
Private Sector.  Atlantis.  Digital Logic.  Hell Phrozen Over.

	LoD members also ran their own boards.  "Silver Spy" 
started his own board, "Catch-22,"  considered one of the 
heaviest around.   So did "Mentor," with his "Phoenix 
Project."   When they didn't run boards themselves, they 
showed up on other people's boards, to brag, boast, and 
strut.  And where they themselves didn't go, their philes 
went, carrying evil knowledge and an even more evil 
attitude.
   
   	As early as 1986, the police were under the vague 
impression that *everyone* in the underground was 
Legion of Doom.   LoD was never that large -- 
considerably smaller than either "Metal 
Communications" or "The Administration," for instance -- 
but LoD got tremendous press.  Especially in *Phrack,* 
which at times read like an LoD fan magazine; and 
*Phrack* was everywhere, especially in the offices of telco 
security.   You couldn't *get* busted as a phone phreak, a 
hacker, or even a lousy codes kid or warez dood, without 
the cops asking if you were LoD.

	This was a difficult charge to deny, as LoD never 
distributed membership badges or laminated ID cards.  If 
they had, they would likely have died out quickly, for 
turnover in their membership was considerable.  LoD was 
less a high-tech street-gang than an ongoing state-of-
mind.  LoD was the Gang That Refused to Die.   By 1990, 
LoD had *ruled* for ten years, and it seemed *weird* to 
police that they were continually busting people who were 
only sixteen years old.   All these teenage small-timers 
were pleading the tiresome hacker litany  of "just curious, 
no criminal intent."  Somewhere at the center of this 
conspiracy there had to be some serious adult 
masterminds, not this seemingly endless supply of myopic 
suburban white kids with high SATs and funny haircuts.

	There was no question that most any American 
hacker arrested would "know" LoD.  They knew the 
handles of contributors to *LoD Tech Journal,*  and were 
likely to have learned their craft through LoD boards and 
LoD activism.  But they'd never met anyone from LoD.   
Even some of the rotating cadre who were actually and 
formally "in LoD" knew one another only by board-mail 
and pseudonyms.   This was a highly unconventional 
profile for a criminal conspiracy.  Computer networking, 
and the rapid evolution of the digital underground,  made 
the situation very diffuse and confusing. 

	Furthermore, a big reputation in the digital 
underground did not coincide with one's willingness to 
commit "crimes."   Instead, reputation was based on 
cleverness and technical mastery.  As a result, it often 
seemed that the *heavier* the hackers were, the *less* 
likely they were to have committed any kind of common, 
easily prosecutable crime.   There were some hackers who 
could really steal.  And there were hackers who could 
really hack.  But the two groups didn't seem to overlap 
much, if at all.   For instance, most people in the 
underground looked up to "Emmanuel Goldstein" of 
*2600* as a hacker demigod.  But Goldstein's publishing  
activities were entirely legal -- Goldstein just printed 
dodgy stuff and talked about politics, he didn't even hack.  
When you came right down to it, Goldstein spent half his 
time complaining that computer security *wasn't strong 
enough* and ought to be drastically improved across the 
board! 
 
	Truly heavy-duty hackers, those with serious 
technical skills who had earned the respect of the 
underground,  never stole money or abused credit cards.   
Sometimes they might abuse phone-codes -- but often, 
they seemed to get all the free phone-time they wanted 
without leaving a trace of any kind.

	The best hackers, the most powerful and technically 
accomplished, were not professional fraudsters.   They 
raided computers habitually, but wouldn't alter anything, 
or damage anything.  They didn't even steal computer 
equipment -- most had day-jobs messing with hardware, 
and could get all the cheap secondhand equipment they 
wanted.   The hottest hackers, unlike the teenage 
wannabes,  weren't snobs about fancy or expensive 
hardware.  Their machines tended to be raw second-hand 
digital hot-rods full of custom add-ons that they'd cobbled 
together out of chickenwire, memory chips and spit.  Some 
were adults, computer software writers and consultants by 
trade, and making quite good livings at it.  Some of them 
*actually worked for the phone company* --  and for those, 
the "hackers" actually found under the skirts of Ma Bell, 
there would be little mercy in 1990.

	 It has long been an article of faith in the 
underground that the "best" hackers never get caught.  
They're far too smart, supposedly.  They never get caught 
because they never boast, brag, or strut.   These demigods 
may read underground boards (with a condescending 
smile), but they never say anything there.   The "best" 
hackers, according to legend, are adult computer 
professionals, such as mainframe system administrators, 
who already know the ins and outs of their particular 
brand of security.   Even the "best" hacker can't break in to 
just any computer at random: the knowledge of security 
holes is too specialized, varying widely with different 
software and hardware.  But if people are employed to run, 
say, a UNIX mainframe or a VAX/VMS machine, then 
they tend to learn security from the inside out.  Armed 
with this knowledge, they can look into most anybody 
else's UNIX or VMS without much trouble or risk, if they 
want to.   And, according to hacker legend, of course they 
want to, so of course they do.   They just don't make a big 
deal of what they've done.  So nobody ever finds out.

	It is also an article of faith in the underground that 
professional telco people "phreak" like crazed weasels.  
*Of course* they spy on Madonna's phone calls -- I mean, 
*wouldn't you?*  Of course they give themselves free long-
distance -- why the hell should *they* pay, they're running 
the whole shebang!

	It has, as a third matter, long been an article of faith 
that any hacker caught can escape serious punishment if 
he confesses *how he did it.*  Hackers seem to believe 
that governmental agencies and large corporations are 
blundering about in cyberspace like eyeless jellyfish or 
cave salamanders.  They feel that these large but 
pathetically stupid organizations will proffer up genuine 
gratitude, and perhaps even a security post and a big 
salary, to the hot-shot intruder who will deign to reveal to 
them the supreme genius of his modus operandi.

	In the case of longtime LoD member "Control-C," 
this actually happened, more or less.   Control-C had led 
Michigan Bell a merry chase, and when captured in 1987, 
he turned out to be a bright and apparently physically 
harmless young fanatic, fascinated by phones.   There was 
no chance in hell that Control-C would actually repay the 
enormous and largely theoretical sums in long-distance 
service that he had accumulated from Michigan Bell.   He 
could always be indicted for fraud or computer-intrusion, 
but there seemed little real point in this -- he hadn't 
physically damaged any computer.  He'd just plead guilty, 
and he'd likely get the usual slap-on-the-wrist, and in the 
meantime it would be a big hassle for Michigan Bell just 
to bring up the case.  But if kept on the payroll, he might at 
least keep his fellow hackers at bay.
  
	There were uses for him.  For instance, a contrite 
Control-C was featured on Michigan Bell internal posters, 
sternly warning employees to shred their trash.   He'd 
always gotten most of his best inside info from "trashing" -- 
raiding telco dumpsters, for useful data indiscreetly 
thrown away.   He signed these posters, too.  Control-C had 
become something like a Michigan Bell mascot.  And in 
fact, Control-C *did* keep other hackers at bay.  Little 
hackers were quite scared of Control-C and his heavy-duty 
Legion of Doom friends.   And big hackers *were* his 
friends and didn't want to screw up his cushy situation.

	No matter what one might say of LoD, they did stick 
together.   When "Wasp," an apparently genuinely 
malicious New York hacker, began crashing Bellcore 
machines,  Control-C received swift volunteer help from 
"the Mentor" and the Georgia LoD wing  made up of "The 
Prophet," "Urvile," and "Leftist."   Using Mentor's Phoenix 
Project board to coordinate, the Doomsters helped telco 
security to trap Wasp, by luring him into a machine with a 
tap and line-trace installed.  Wasp lost.  LoD won!  And 
my, did they brag.

	  Urvile, Prophet and Leftist were well-qualified for 
this activity, probably more so even than the quite 
accomplished Control-C.  The Georgia boys knew all about 
phone switching-stations.  Though relative johnny-come-
latelies in the Legion of Doom, they were considered some 
of LoD's heaviest guys, into the hairiest systems around.  
They had the good fortune to live in or near Atlanta, home 
of the sleepy and apparently tolerant BellSouth RBOC.

	As RBOC security went, BellSouth were "cake."   US 
West (of Arizona, the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest) 
were tough and aggressive, probably the heaviest RBOC 
around.  Pacific Bell, California's PacBell, were sleek, high-
tech, and longtime veterans of the LA phone-phreak wars.  
NYNEX had the misfortune to run the New York City area, 
and were warily prepared for most anything.   Even 
Michigan Bell, a division of the Ameritech RBOC, at least 
had the elementary sense to hire their own hacker as a 
useful scarecrow.  But BellSouth, even though their 
corporate P.R.  proclaimed them to have "Everything You 
Expect From a Leader," were pathetic.

	When rumor about LoD's mastery of Georgia's 
switching network got around to BellSouth through 
Bellcore and telco security scuttlebutt, they at first refused 
to believe it.   If you paid serious attention to every rumor 
out and about these hacker kids, you would hear all kinds 
of wacko saucer-nut nonsense:  that the National Security 
Agency monitored all American phone calls, that the CIA 
and DEA tracked traffic on bulletin-boards with word-
analysis programs, that the Condor could start World 
War III from a payphone.
   
	If there were hackers into BellSouth switching-
stations, then how come nothing had happened?  Nothing 
had been hurt.  BellSouth's machines weren't crashing.   
BellSouth wasn't suffering especially badly from fraud.  
BellSouth's customers weren't complaining.  BellSouth 
was headquartered in Atlanta, ambitious metropolis of the 
new high-tech Sunbelt; and BellSouth was upgrading its 
network by leaps and bounds, digitizing the works left right 
and center.   They could hardly be considered sluggish or 
naive.  BellSouth's technical expertise was second to none, 
thank you kindly.

	But then came the Florida business.
  
	On June 13, 1989, callers to the Palm Beach County 
Probation Department, in Delray Beach, Florida,  found 
themselves involved in a remarkable discussion with a 
phone-sex worker named "Tina" in New York State.  
Somehow, *any* call to this probation office near Miami 
was instantly and magically transported across state lines, 
at no extra charge to the user, to a pornographic phone-
sex hotline hundreds of miles away! 

	This practical joke may seem utterly hilarious at first 
hearing, and indeed there was a good deal of chuckling 
about it in phone phreak circles, including the Autumn 
1989 issue of *2600.*  But for Southern Bell  (the division of 
the BellSouth RBOC supplying local service for Florida, 
Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina),  this was a 
smoking gun.  For the first time ever,  a computer intruder 
had broken into a BellSouth central office switching 
station and re-programmed it!

	Or so BellSouth thought in June 1989.  Actually, LoD 
members had been frolicking harmlessly in BellSouth 
switches since September 1987.  The stunt of June 13 -- 
call-forwarding a number through manipulation of a 
switching station -- was child's play for hackers as 
accomplished as the Georgia wing of LoD.  Switching calls 
interstate sounded like a big deal, but it took only four 
lines of code to accomplish this.    An easy, yet more 
discreet, stunt, would be to call-forward another number to 
your own house.  If you were careful and considerate, and 
changed the software back later, then not a soul would 
know.  Except you.  And whoever you had bragged to about 
it.

	As for BellSouth, what they didn't know wouldn't hurt 
them.

	Except now somebody had blown the whole thing 
wide open, and BellSouth knew.

	A now alerted and considerably paranoid BellSouth 
began searching switches right and left for signs of 
impropriety, in that hot summer of 1989.  No fewer than 
forty-two BellSouth employees were put on 12-hour shifts, 
twenty-four hours a day, for two solid months, poring over 
records and monitoring computers for any sign of phony 
access.  These forty-two overworked experts were known as 
BellSouth's  "Intrusion Task Force."

	  What the investigators found astounded them.   
Proprietary telco databases had been manipulated:  
phone numbers had been created out of thin air, with no 
users' names and no addresses.  And perhaps worst of all, 
no charges and no records of use.   The new digital 
ReMOB  (Remote Observation)  diagnostic feature had 
been extensively tampered with -- hackers had learned to 
reprogram ReMOB software, so that they could listen in 
on any switch-routed call at their leisure!   They were using 
telco property to *spy!*

	 The electrifying news went out throughout law 
enforcement in 1989.  It had never really occurred to 
anyone at BellSouth that their prized and brand-new 
digital switching-stations could be *re-programmed.*  
People seemed utterly amazed that anyone could have 
the nerve.   Of course these switching stations were 
"computers," and everybody knew hackers liked to "break 
into computers:"   but telephone people's computers were 
*different* from normal people's computers.

	 The exact reason *why* these computers were 
"different" was rather ill-defined.  It certainly wasn't the 
extent of their security.  The security on these BellSouth 
computers was lousy;  the AIMSX computers, for instance, 
didn't even have passwords.   But there was no question 
that BellSouth strongly *felt* that their computers were 
very different indeed.  And if there were some criminals 
out there who had not gotten that message, BellSouth was 
determined to see that message taught.

	After all, a 5ESS switching station was no mere 
bookkeeping system for some local chain of florists.   
Public service depended on these stations.   Public 
*safety* depended on these stations.

	And hackers, lurking in there call-forwarding or 
ReMobbing,  could spy on anybody in the local area!   
They could spy on telco officials!  They could spy on police 
stations!  They could spy on local offices of the Secret 
Service....

	In 1989, electronic cops and hacker-trackers began 
using scrambler-phones and secured lines.  It only made 
sense.  There was no telling who was into those systems.   
Whoever they were, they sounded scary.   This was some 
new level of antisocial daring.  Could be West German 
hackers, in the pay of the KGB.   That too had seemed a 
weird and farfetched notion, until Clifford Stoll had poked 
and prodded a sluggish Washington law-enforcement 
bureaucracy into investigating a computer intrusion that 
turned out to be exactly that -- *hackers, in the pay of the 
KGB!*    Stoll, the  systems manager for an Internet lab in 
Berkeley California, had ended up on the front page of the 
*New York  Times,*  proclaimed a national  hero in the 
first true story of international computer espionage.   
Stoll's counterspy efforts, which he related in a bestselling 
book, *The Cuckoo's Egg,*  in 1989, had established the 
credibility of 'hacking' as a possible threat to national 
security.  The United States Secret Service doesn't mess 
around when it suspects a possible action by a foreign 
intelligence apparat.

	The Secret Service scrambler-phones and secured 
lines put a tremendous kink in law enforcement's ability to 
operate freely; to get the word out, cooperate, prevent 
misunderstandings.   Nevertheless, 1989 scarcely seemed 
the time for half-measures.  If the police and Secret 
Service themselves were not operationally secure, then 
how could they reasonably demand measures of security 
from private enterprise?  At least, the inconvenience 
made people aware of the seriousness  of the threat.
 
	If there was a final spur needed to get the police off 
the dime, it came in the realization that the emergency 
911 system was vulnerable.   The 911 system has its own 
specialized software, but it is run on the same digital 
switching systems as the rest of the telephone network.  
911 is not physically different from normal telephony.  But 
it is certainly culturally  different, because this is the area 
of telephonic cyberspace reserved for the police and 
emergency services.
   
	Your average policeman may not know much about 
hackers or phone-phreaks.  Computer people are weird; 
even computer *cops*  are rather weird; the stuff they do is 
hard to figure out.   But a threat to the 911 system is 
anything but an abstract threat.  If the 911 system goes, 
people can die.

	Imagine being in a car-wreck, staggering to a phone-
booth, punching 911 and hearing "Tina" pick up the 
phone-sex line somewhere in New York!   The situation's 
no longer comical, somehow.

	 And was it possible?  No question.  Hackers had 
attacked 911 systems before.  Phreaks can max-out 911 
systems just by siccing a bunch of computer-modems on 
them in tandem, dialling them over and over until they 
clog.  That's very crude and low-tech, but it's still a serious 
business.

	The time had come for action.  It was time to take 
stern measures with the underground.  It was time to start 
picking up the dropped threads, the loose edges, the bits 
of braggadocio here and there; it was time to get on the 
stick and start putting serious casework together.  Hackers 
weren't "invisible."  They *thought*  they were invisible; 
but the truth was, they had just been tolerated too long.

	Under sustained police attention in the summer of 
'89, the digital underground began to unravel as never 
before.

	The first big break in the case came very early on:  
July 1989, the following month.  The perpetrator of the 
"Tina" switch was caught, and confessed.  His name was 
"Fry Guy," a 16-year-old in Indiana.  Fry Guy had been a 
very wicked young man.

	Fry Guy had earned his handle from a stunt involving 
French fries.  Fry Guy had filched the log-in of a local 
MacDonald's manager and had logged-on to the 
MacDonald's mainframe on the Sprint Telenet system.  
Posing as the manager, Fry Guy had altered MacDonald's 
records, and given some teenage hamburger-flipping 
friends of his, generous raises.  He had not been caught.

	Emboldened by success, Fry Guy moved on to credit-
card abuse.  Fry Guy was quite an accomplished talker; 
with a gift for "social engineering."   If you can do "social 
engineering"  -- fast-talk, fake-outs, impersonation, 
conning, scamming -- then card abuse comes easy.  
(Getting away with it in the long run is another question).
  
	Fry Guy had run across "Urvile" of the Legion of 
Doom on the ALTOS Chat board in Bonn, Germany.  
ALTOS Chat was a sophisticated board, accessible 
through globe-spanning computer networks like BITnet, 
Tymnet, and Telenet.    ALTOS was much frequented by 
members of Germany's  Chaos Computer Club.  Two 
Chaos hackers who hung out on ALTOS, "Jaeger" and 
"Pengo," had been the central villains of Clifford Stoll's 
CUCKOO'S EGG case:  consorting in East Berlin with a 
spymaster from the KGB, and breaking into American 
computers for hire, through the Internet. 
 
	When LoD members learned the story of Jaeger's 
depredations from Stoll's book, they were rather less than 
impressed, technically speaking.  On LoD's own favorite 
board of the moment, "Black Ice," LoD members bragged 
that they themselves could have done all the Chaos break-
ins in a week flat!  Nevertheless,  LoD were grudgingly 
impressed by the Chaos rep, the sheer hairy-eyed daring 
of hash-smoking anarchist hackers who had rubbed 
shoulders with the fearsome big-boys of international 
Communist espionage.  LoD members sometimes traded 
bits of knowledge with friendly German hackers on ALTOS 
-- phone numbers for vulnerable VAX/VMS computers in 
Georgia, for instance.  Dutch and British phone phreaks, 
and the Australian clique of "Phoenix," "Nom," and 
"Electron," were ALTOS regulars, too.  In underground 
circles, to hang out on ALTOS was considered the sign of 
an elite dude, a sophisticated hacker of the international 
digital jet-set.

	Fry Guy quickly learned how to raid information from 
credit-card consumer-reporting agencies.  He had over a 
hundred stolen credit-card numbers in his notebooks, and 
upwards of a thousand swiped long-distance access codes.  
He knew how to get onto Altos, and how to talk the talk of 
the underground convincingly.  He now wheedled 
knowledge of switching-station tricks from Urvile on the 
ALTOS system. 

	Combining these two forms of knowledge enabled 
Fry Guy to bootstrap his way up to a new form of wire-
fraud.  First, he'd snitched credit card numbers from 
credit-company computers.  The data he copied included 
names, addresses and phone numbers of the random 
card-holders.
   
	Then Fry Guy, impersonating a card-holder, called up 
Western Union and asked for a cash advance on "his" 
credit card.  Western Union, as a security guarantee, 
would call the customer back, at home, to verify the 
transaction.
  
	But, just as he had switched the Florida probation 
office to "Tina" in New York,  Fry Guy switched the card-
holder's number to a local pay-phone.  There he would 
lurk in wait, muddying his trail by routing and re-routing 
the call, through switches as far away as Canada.   When 
the call came through, he would boldly "social-engineer," 
or con, the Western Union people, pretending to be the 
legitimate card-holder.  Since he'd answered the proper 
phone number, the deception was not very hard.   
Western Union's money was then shipped to a 
confederate of Fry Guy's in his home town in Indiana.

	Fry Guy and his cohort, using LoD techniques, stole 
six thousand dollars from Western Union between 
December 1988 and July 1989.  They also dabbled in 
ordering delivery of stolen goods through card-fraud.  Fry 
Guy was intoxicated with success.  The sixteen-year-old 
fantasized wildly to hacker rivals, boasting that he'd used 
rip-off money to hire  himself a big limousine, and had 
driven out-of-state with a groupie from his favorite heavy-
metal band, Motley Crue.

	Armed with knowledge, power, and a gratifying 
stream of free money, Fry Guy now took it upon himself to 
call local representatives of Indiana Bell security, to brag, 
boast, strut, and utter tormenting warnings that his 
powerful friends in the notorious Legion of Doom could 
crash the national telephone network.  Fry Guy even 
named a date for the scheme:  the Fourth of July, a 
national holiday.
 
	This egregious example of the begging-for-arrest 
syndrome was shortly followed by Fry Guy's arrest.  After 
the Indiana telephone company figured out who he was, 
the Secret Service had DNRs -- Dialed Number 
Recorders -- installed on his home phone lines.  These 
devices are not taps, and can't record the substance of 
phone calls, but they do record the phone numbers of all 
calls going in and out.   Tracing these numbers showed Fry 
Guy's long-distance code fraud, his extensive ties to pirate 
bulletin boards, and numerous personal calls to his LoD 
friends in Atlanta.   By July 11, 1989, Prophet, Urvile and 
Leftist also had Secret Service DNR "pen registers" 
installed on their own lines.

	The Secret Service showed up in force at Fry Guy's 
house on July 22, 1989, to the horror of his unsuspecting 
parents.  The raiders were led by a special agent from the 
Secret Service's Indianapolis office.   However, the raiders 
were accompanied and advised by Timothy M. Foley of 
the Secret Service's Chicago office (a gentleman about 
whom we will soon be hearing a great deal).

	Following federal computer-crime techniques that 
had been standard since the early 1980s, the Secret 
Service searched the house thoroughly, and seized all of 
Fry Guy's electronic equipment and notebooks.   All Fry 
Guy's equipment went out the door in the custody of the 
Secret Service, which put a swift end to his depredations.
 
	The USSS interrogated Fry Guy at length.  His case 
was put in the charge of Deborah Daniels, the federal US 
Attorney for the Southern District of Indiana.  Fry Guy was 
charged with eleven counts of computer fraud, 
unauthorized computer access, and wire fraud.   The 
evidence was thorough and irrefutable.  For his part, Fry 
Guy blamed his corruption on the Legion of Doom and 
offered to testify against them.
   
	Fry Guy insisted that the Legion intended to crash 
the phone system on a national holiday.   And when AT&T 
crashed on Martin Luther King Day, 1990, this lent a 
credence to his claim that genuinely alarmed telco 
security and the Secret Service.

	Fry Guy eventually pled guilty on May 31, 1990.  On 
September 14, he was sentenced to forty-four months' 
probation and  four hundred hours' community service.   
He could have had it much worse; but it made sense to 
prosecutors to take it easy on this teenage minor, while 
zeroing in on the notorious kingpins of the Legion of 
Doom.

	But the case against LoD had nagging flaws.   
Despite the best effort of investigators, it was impossible 
to prove that the Legion had crashed the phone system on 
January 15, because they, in fact, hadn't done so.  The 
investigations of 1989 did show that certain members of 
the Legion of Doom had achieved unprecedented power 
over the telco switching stations, and that they were in 
active conspiracy to obtain more power yet.  Investigators 
were privately convinced that the Legion of Doom 
intended to do awful things with this knowledge, but mere 
evil intent was not enough to put them in jail.

	   And although the Atlanta Three -- Prophet, Leftist, 
and especially Urvile -- had taught Fry Guy plenty, they 
were not themselves credit-card fraudsters.  The only 
thing they'd "stolen" was long-distance service -- and since 
they'd done much of that through phone-switch 
manipulation, there was no easy way to judge how much 
they'd "stolen," or whether this practice was even "theft" of 
any easily recognizable kind.

	  Fry Guy's theft of long-distance codes had cost the 
phone companies plenty.  The theft of long-distance 
service may be a fairly theoretical "loss,"  but it costs 
genuine money and genuine time to delete all those 
stolen codes, and to re-issue new codes to the innocent 
owners of those corrupted codes.  The owners of the codes 
themselves are victimized, and lose time and money and 
peace of mind in the hassle.   And then there were the 
credit-card victims to deal with, too, and Western Union.  
When it came to rip-off, Fry Guy was far more of a thief 
than LoD.  It was only when it came to actual computer 
expertise that Fry Guy was small potatoes.

	The Atlanta Legion thought most "rules" of 
cyberspace were for rodents and losers, but they *did* 
have rules.  *They never crashed anything, and they never 
took money.*   These were rough rules-of-thumb, and 
rather dubious principles when it comes to the ethical 
subtleties of cyberspace, but they enabled the Atlanta 
Three to operate with a relatively clear conscience (though 
never with peace of mind). 
 
	If you didn't hack for money, if you weren't robbing 
people of actual funds -- money in the bank, that is --  then 
nobody *really* got hurt, in LoD's opinion.  "Theft of 
service" was a bogus issue, and "intellectual property" was 
a bad joke.   But LoD had only elitist contempt for rip-off 
artists, "leechers," thieves.   They considered themselves 
clean.  In their opinion, if you didn't smash-up or crash any 
systems  -- (well, not on purpose, anyhow -- accidents can 
happen, just ask Robert Morris)  then it was very unfair to 
call you a "vandal" or a "cracker."  When you were 
hanging out on-line with your "pals" in telco security, you 
could face them down from the higher plane of hacker 
morality.  And you could mock the police from the 
supercilious heights of your hacker's quest for pure 
knowledge.

	 But from the point of view of law enforcement and 
telco security, however, Fry Guy was not really dangerous.  
The Atlanta Three *were* dangerous.  It wasn't the crimes 
they were committing, but the *danger,*   the potential 
hazard, the sheer *technical power*  LoD had 
accumulated, that had made the situation untenable.

	Fry Guy was not LoD.  He'd never laid eyes on 
anyone in LoD; his only contacts with them had been 
electronic.  Core members of the Legion of Doom tended 
to meet physically for conventions every year or so, to get 
drunk, give each other the hacker high-sign, send out for 
pizza and ravage hotel suites.  Fry Guy had never done any 
of this.   Deborah Daniels assessed Fry Guy accurately as 
"an LoD wannabe."
  
	Nevertheless Fry Guy's crimes would be directly 
attributed to LoD in much future police propaganda.  LoD 
would be described as "a closely knit group" involved in 
"numerous illegal activities" including "stealing and 
modifying individual credit histories," and "fraudulently 
obtaining money and property."  Fry Guy did this, but the 
Atlanta Three didn't; they simply weren't into theft, but 
rather intrusion.   This caused a strange kink in the 
prosecution's strategy.  LoD were accused of 
"disseminating information about attacking computers to 
other computer hackers in an effort to shift the focus of 
law enforcement to those other hackers and away from the 
Legion of Doom."

	This last accusation (taken directly from a press 
release by the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task 
Force) sounds particularly far-fetched.  One might 
conclude at this point that investigators would have been 
well-advised to go ahead and "shift their focus" from the 
"Legion of Doom."   Maybe they *should* concentrate on 
"those other hackers" -- the ones who were actually 
stealing money and physical objects.

	But the Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was not a simple 
policing action.  It wasn't meant just to walk the beat in 
cyberspace -- it was a *crackdown,* a deliberate attempt to 
nail the core of the operation, to send a dire and potent 
message that would settle the hash of the digital 
underground for good. 
 
	By this reasoning, Fry Guy wasn't much more than 
the electronic equivalent of a cheap streetcorner dope 
dealer.  As long as the masterminds of LoD were still 
flagrantly operating, pushing their mountains of illicit 
knowledge right and left, and whipping up enthusiasm for 
blatant lawbreaking, then there would be an *infinite 
supply*  of Fry Guys.

         Because LoD were flagrant, they had left trails 
everywhere, to be picked up by law enforcement in New 
York, Indiana, Florida, Texas, Arizona, Missouri, even 
Australia.  But 1990's war on the Legion of Doom was led 
out of Illinois, by the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse 
Task Force.  

					#

     
	  The Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force, led by 
federal prosecutor William J. Cook, had started in 1987 
and had swiftly become one of the most aggressive local 
"dedicated computer-crime units."  Chicago was a natural 
home for such a group.  The world's first computer 
bulletin-board system had been invented in Illinois.  The 
state of Illinois had some of the nation's first and sternest 
computer crime laws.   Illinois State Police were markedly 
alert to the possibilities of white-collar crime and 
electronic fraud.
  
	And William J. Cook in particular was a rising star in 
electronic crime-busting.   He and his fellow federal 
prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago had a 
tight relation with the Secret Service, especially go-getting 
Chicago-based agent Timothy  Foley.  While Cook and his 
Department of Justice colleagues plotted strategy, Foley 
was their man on the street.

	Throughout the 1980s, the federal government had 
given prosecutors an armory of new, untried legal tools 
against computer crime.  Cook and his colleagues were 
pioneers in the use of these new statutes in the real-life 
cut-and-thrust of the federal courtroom. 
 
	On October 2, 1986, the US Senate had passed the 
"Computer Fraud and Abuse Act" unanimously, but there 
were pitifully few convictions under this statute.  Cook's 
group took their name from this statute, since they were 
determined to transform this powerful but rather 
theoretical Act of Congress into a real-life engine of legal 
destruction against computer fraudsters and scofflaws.

	It was not a question of merely discovering crimes, 
investigating them, and then trying and punishing their 
perpetrators.   The Chicago unit, like most everyone else in 
the business, already *knew* who the bad guys were:  the 
Legion of Doom and the writers and editors of *Phrack.* 
The task at hand was to find some legal means of putting 
these characters away.

	This approach might seem a bit dubious, to someone 
not acquainted with the gritty realities of prosecutorial 
work.  But prosecutors don't put people in jail for crimes 
they have committed; they put people in jail for crimes 
they have committed *that can be proved in court.*   
Chicago federal police put Al Capone in prison for 
income-tax fraud.   Chicago is a big town, with a rough-
and-ready bare-knuckle tradition on both sides of the law. 
    
	Fry Guy had broken the case wide open and alerted 
telco security to the scope of the problem.   But Fry Guy's 
crimes would not put the Atlanta Three behind bars -- 
much less the wacko underground journalists of *Phrack.*  
So on July 22, 1989, the same day that Fry Guy was raided 
in Indiana, the Secret Service descended upon the Atlanta 
Three. 
    
	This was likely inevitable.  By the summer of 1989, law 
enforcement were closing in on the Atlanta Three from at 
least six directions at once.   First, there were the leads 
from Fry Guy, which had led to the DNR registers being 
installed on the lines of the Atlanta Three.  The DNR 
evidence alone would have finished them off, sooner or 
later. 

	But second, the Atlanta lads were already well-known 
to Control-C and his telco security sponsors.  LoD's 
contacts with telco security had made them overconfident 
and even more boastful than usual; they felt that they had 
powerful friends in high places, and that they were being 
openly tolerated by telco security.  But BellSouth's 
Intrusion Task Force were hot on the trail of LoD and 
sparing no effort or expense.

	The Atlanta Three had also been identified by name 
and listed on the extensive anti-hacker files maintained, 
and retailed for pay, by private security operative John 
Maxfield of Detroit.  Maxfield, who had extensive ties to 
telco security and many informants in the underground, 
was a bete noire of the *Phrack* crowd, and the dislike was 
mutual.

	The Atlanta Three themselves had written articles for 
*Phrack.*  This boastful act could not possibly escape telco 
and law enforcement attention.

	"Knightmare," a high-school age hacker from 
Arizona,  was a close friend and disciple of Atlanta LoD, 
but he had been nabbed by the formidable Arizona 
Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit.   Knightmare 
was on some of LoD's favorite boards -- "Black Ice" in 
particular -- and was privy to their secrets.  And to have 
Gail Thackeray, the Assistant Attorney General of Arizona, 
on one's trail was a dreadful peril for any hacker.
 
 	And perhaps worst of all, Prophet had committed a 
major blunder by passing an illicitly copied BellSouth 
computer-file to Knight Lightning, who had published it in 
*Phrack.*   This, as we will see, was an act of dire 
consequence for almost everyone concerned.

	On July 22, 1989, the Secret Service showed up at the 
Leftist's house, where he lived with his parents.  A massive 
squad of some twenty officers surrounded the building: 
Secret Service, federal marshals, local police, possibly 
BellSouth telco security; it was hard to tell in the crush.  
Leftist's dad, at work in his basement office, first noticed a 
muscular stranger in plain clothes crashing through the 
back yard with a drawn pistol.   As more strangers poured 
into the house, Leftist's dad naturally assumed there was 
an armed robbery in progress.

	Like most hacker parents, Leftist's mom and dad had 
only the vaguest notions of what their son had been up to 
all this time.   Leftist had a day-job repairing computer 
hardware.  His obsession with computers seemed a bit 
odd, but harmless enough, and likely to produce a well-
paying career.  The sudden, overwhelming raid left 
Leftist's parents traumatized.

	The Leftist himself had been out after work with his 
co-workers, surrounding a couple of pitchers of 
margaritas.  As he came trucking on tequila-numbed feet 
up the pavement, toting a bag full of floppy-disks, he 
noticed a large number of unmarked cars parked in his 
driveway.  All the cars sported tiny microwave antennas.

	The Secret Service had knocked the front door off its 
hinges, almost flattening his Mom.
  
	Inside, Leftist was greeted by Special Agent James 
Cool of the US Secret Service, Atlanta office.  Leftist was 
flabbergasted.  He'd never met a Secret Service agent 
before.   He could not imagine that he'd ever done 
anything worthy of federal attention.  He'd always figured 
that if his activities became intolerable, one of his contacts 
in telco security would give him a private phone-call and 
tell him to knock it off.
 
	But now Leftist was pat-searched for weapons by grim 
professionals, and his bag of floppies was quickly seized.  
He and his parents were all shepherded into separate 
rooms and grilled at length as a score of officers scoured 
their home for anything electronic.
 
	Leftist was horrified as his treasured IBM AT 
personal computer with its forty-meg hard disk, and his  
recently purchased 80386 IBM-clone with a  whopping 
hundred-meg hard disk, both went swiftly out the door in 
Secret Service custody.  They also seized all his disks, all 
his notebooks, and a tremendous booty in dogeared telco 
documents that Leftist had snitched out of trash 
dumpsters.

	Leftist figured the whole thing for a big 
misunderstanding.  He'd never been into *military*  
computers.  He wasn't a *spy* or a *Communist.*  He  was 
just a good ol' Georgia hacker, and now he just wanted all 
these people out of the house.  But it seemed they 
wouldn't go until he made some kind of statement. 
 
	And so, he levelled with them.

	And that, Leftist said later from his federal prison 
camp in Talladega, Alabama, was a big mistake.

	The Atlanta area was unique, in that it had three 
members of the Legion of Doom who actually occupied 
more or less the same physical  locality.  Unlike the rest of 
LoD, who tended to associate by phone and computer, 
Atlanta LoD actually *were* "tightly knit."  It was no real 
surprise that the Secret Service agents apprehending 
Urvile at the computer-labs at Georgia Tech, would 
discover Prophet with him as well.

	Urvile, a 21-year-old Georgia Tech student in polymer 
chemistry, posed quite a puzzling case for law 
enforcement.  Urvile --  also known as "Necron 99," as well 
as other handles, for he tended to change his cover-alias 
about once a month -- was both an accomplished hacker 
and a fanatic simulation-gamer. 
 
	Simulation games are an unusual hobby; but then 
hackers are unusual people, and their favorite pastimes 
tend to be somewhat out of the ordinary.  The best-known 
American simulation game is probably "Dungeons & 
Dragons," a multi-player parlor entertainment played with 
paper, maps, pencils, statistical tables and a variety of 
oddly-shaped dice.  Players pretend to be heroic 
characters exploring a wholly-invented fantasy world.  The 
fantasy worlds of simulation gaming are commonly 
pseudo-medieval, involving swords and sorcery -- spell-
casting wizards, knights in armor, unicorns and dragons, 
demons and goblins. 

	Urvile and his fellow gamers  preferred their 
fantasies highly technological.   They made use of a game 
known as "G.U.R.P.S.,"  the "Generic Universal Role 
Playing System," published by a company called Steve 
Jackson Games (SJG).

	"G.U.R.P.S."  served as a framework for creating  a 
wide variety of artificial fantasy worlds.  Steve Jackson 
Games published  a smorgasboard of books, full of 
detailed information and gaming hints, which were used 
to flesh-out many different fantastic backgrounds for  the  
basic GURPS framework.  Urvile made extensive use of 
two SJG books called *GURPS High-Tech*  and *GURPS 
Special Ops.* 
 
	In the artificial fantasy-world of *GURPS Special 
Ops,*  players entered a modern  fantasy of intrigue and 
international espionage.   On beginning the game, players 
started small and powerless, perhaps as minor-league CIA 
agents or penny-ante arms dealers.   But as players 
persisted through a series of game sessions (game 
sessions generally lasted for hours, over long, elaborate 
campaigns that might be pursued for months on end)  
then they would achieve new skills, new knowledge, new 
power.  They would acquire and hone new abilities, such as 
marksmanship, karate, wiretapping, or Watergate 
burglary.  They could also win various kinds of imaginary 
booty, like Berettas, or martini shakers, or fast cars with 
ejection seats and machine-guns under the headlights.

	As might be imagined from the complexity of these 
games, Urvile's gaming notes were very detailed and 
extensive.  Urvile was a "dungeon-master," inventing 
scenarios for his fellow gamers, giant simulated 
adventure-puzzles for his friends to unravel.   Urvile's 
game notes covered dozens of pages with all sorts of exotic 
lunacy, all about ninja raids on Libya and break-ins on 
encrypted Red Chinese supercomputers.   His notes were 
written on scrap-paper and kept in loose-leaf binders.

	The handiest scrap paper around Urvile's college 
digs were the many pounds of BellSouth printouts and 
documents that he had snitched out of telco dumpsters.   
His notes were written on the back of misappropriated 
telco property.   Worse yet, the gaming notes were 
chaotically interspersed with Urvile's hand-scrawled 
records involving  *actual computer intrusions*  that he 
had committed.
  
	Not only was it next to impossible to tell Urvile's 
fantasy game-notes from cyberspace "reality," but Urvile 
himself barely made this distinction.  It's no exaggeration 
to say that to Urvile it was *all* a game.   Urvile was very 
bright, highly imaginative, and quite careless of other 
people's notions of propriety.  His connection to "reality" 
was not something to which he paid a great deal of 
attention.
  
	Hacking was a game for Urvile.  It was an amusement 
he was carrying out, it was something he was doing for fun.  
And  Urvile was an obsessive young man.  He could no 
more stop hacking than he could stop in the middle of a 
jigsaw puzzle, or stop in the middle of reading a Stephen 
Donaldson fantasy trilogy.  (The name "Urvile" came from 
a best-selling Donaldson novel.) 
     
	Urvile's airy, bulletproof attitude seriously annoyed 
his interrogators.   First of all, he didn't consider that he'd 
done anything wrong.  There was scarcely a shred of 
honest remorse in him.   On the contrary, he seemed 
privately convinced that his police interrogators were 
operating in a demented fantasy-world all their own.  
Urvile was too polite and well-behaved to say this straight-
out, but his reactions were askew and disquieting.

	For instance, there was the business about LoD's 
ability to monitor phone-calls to the police and Secret 
Service.  Urvile agreed that this was quite possible, and 
posed no big problem for LoD.  In fact, he and his friends 
had kicked the idea around on the "Black Ice" board, 
much as they had discussed many other nifty notions, 
such as building personal flame-throwers and jury-rigging 
fistfulls of blasting-caps.  They had hundreds of dial-up 
numbers for government agencies that they'd gotten 
through scanning Atlanta phones, or had pulled from 
raided VAX/VMS mainframe computers.
  
	Basically, they'd never gotten around to listening in 
on the cops because the idea wasn't interesting enough to 
bother with.  Besides, if they'd been monitoring Secret 
Service phone calls, obviously they'd never have been 
caught in the first place.  Right?

	The Secret Service was less than satisfied with this 
rapier-like hacker logic.

	Then there was the issue of crashing the phone 
system.  No problem, Urvile admitted sunnily.   Atlanta 
LoD could have shut down phone service all over Atlanta 
any time they liked.   *Even the 911 service?*   Nothing 
special about that, Urvile explained patiently.   Bring the 
switch to its knees, with say the UNIX "makedir" bug, and 
911 goes down too as a matter of course.  The 911 system 
wasn't very interesting, frankly.   It might be tremendously 
interesting to cops (for odd reasons of their own), but as 
technical challenges went, the 911 service was yawnsville.

	So of course the Atlanta Three could crash service.  
They probably could have crashed service all over 
BellSouth territory, if they'd worked at it for a while.   But 
Atlanta LoD weren't crashers.   Only losers and rodents 
were crashers.  LoD were *elite.*

	  Urvile was privately convinced that sheer technical 
expertise could win him free of any kind of problem.  As 
far as he was concerned, elite status in the digital 
underground had placed him permanently beyond the 
intellectual grasp of cops and straights.  Urvile had a lot to 
learn.

	Of the three LoD stalwarts, Prophet was in the most 
direct trouble.  Prophet was a UNIX programming expert 
who burrowed in and out of the Internet as a matter of 
course.   He'd started his hacking career at around age 14,  
meddling with a UNIX mainframe system at the 
University of North Carolina. 
 
	Prophet himself had written the handy Legion of 
Doom file "UNIX Use and Security From the Ground Up."   
UNIX  (pronounced "you-nicks")  is a powerful, flexible 
computer operating-system, for multi-user, multi-tasking 
computers.   In 1969, when UNIX was created in Bell Labs, 
such computers were exclusive to large corporations and 
universities, but today UNIX is run on thousands of 
powerful home machines.  UNIX was particularly well-
suited to telecommunications programming, and had 
become a standard in the field.   Naturally, UNIX also 
became a standard for the elite hacker and phone phreak.

	Lately, Prophet had not been so active as Leftist and 
Urvile, but Prophet was a recidivist.   In 1986, when he was 
eighteen, Prophet had been convicted of "unauthorized 
access to a computer network" in North Carolina.  He'd 
been discovered breaking into the Southern Bell Data 
Network, a UNIX-based internal telco network supposedly 
closed to the public.  He'd gotten a typical hacker 
sentence:  six months suspended, 120 hours community 
service, and three years' probation.

	After that humiliating bust, Prophet had gotten rid of 
most of his tonnage of illicit phreak and hacker data, and 
had tried to go straight.  He was, after all, still on probation.  
But by  the autumn of 1988, the temptations of cyberspace 
had proved too much for young Prophet, and he was 
shoulder-to-shoulder with Urvile and Leftist into some of 
the hairiest systems around. 
  
	In early September 1988, he'd broken into BellSouth's 
centralized automation system, AIMSX or "Advanced 
Information Management System."     AIMSX was an 
internal business network for BellSouth, where telco 
employees stored electronic mail, databases, memos, and 
calendars, and did text processing.   Since AIMSX did not 
have public dial-ups, it was considered utterly invisible to 
the public, and was not well-secured -- it didn't even 
require passwords.   Prophet abused an account known as 
"waa1," the personal account of an unsuspecting telco 
employee.   Disguised as the owner of waa1, Prophet made 
about ten visits to AIMSX.

	Prophet did not damage or delete anything in the 
system.  His presence in AIMSX was harmless and almost 
invisible.  But he could not rest content with that.

	One particular piece of processed text on AIMSX was 
a telco document known as "Bell South Standard Practice 
660-225-104SV Control Office Administration of Enhanced 
911 Services for Special Services and Major Account 
Centers dated March 1988."

	Prophet had not been looking for this document.  It 
was merely one among hundreds of similar documents 
with impenetrable titles.  However, having blundered over 
it in the course of his illicit wanderings through AIMSX, he 
decided to take it with him as a trophy.  It might prove very 
useful in some future boasting, bragging, and strutting 
session.   So,  some time in September 1988, Prophet 
ordered the AIMSX mainframe computer to copy this 
document (henceforth called simply  called "the E911 
Document")  and  to transfer this copy to his home 
computer.

	No one noticed that Prophet had done this.  He had 
"stolen" the E911 Document in some sense, but notions of 
property in cyberspace can be tricky.   BellSouth noticed 
nothing wrong, because BellSouth still had their original 
copy.  They had not been "robbed" of the document itself.   
Many people were supposed to copy this document -- 
specifically, people who worked for the nineteen BellSouth 
"special services and major account centers," scattered 
throughout the Southeastern United States.  That was 
what it was for, why it was present on a computer network 
in the first place: so that it could be copied and read -- by 
telco employees.   But now the data had been copied by 
someone who wasn't supposed to look at it.

	Prophet now had his trophy.  But he further decided 
to store yet another copy of the E911 Document on 
another person's computer.  This unwitting person was a 
computer enthusiast named Richard Andrews who lived 
near Joliet, Illinois.  Richard Andrews was a UNIX 
programmer by trade, and ran a powerful UNIX board 
called "Jolnet," in the basement of his house.

	Prophet, using the handle "Robert Johnson," had 
obtained an account on Richard Andrews' computer.  And 
there he stashed the E911 Document, by storing it in his 
own private section of Andrews' computer. 
 
	Why did Prophet do this?  If Prophet had eliminated 
the E911 Document from his own computer, and kept it 
hundreds of miles away, on another machine, under an 
alias, then he might have been fairly safe from discovery 
and prosecution -- although his sneaky action had 
certainly put the unsuspecting Richard Andrews at risk.

	But, like most hackers, Prophet was a pack-rat for 
illicit data.  When it came to the crunch, he could not bear 
to part from his trophy.   When Prophet's place in 
Decatur, Georgia was raided in July 1989, there was the 
E911 Document, a smoking gun.  And there was Prophet in 
the hands of the Secret Service, doing his best to "explain."

	Our story now takes us away from the Atlanta Three 
and their raids of the Summer of 1989.  We must leave 
Atlanta Three "cooperating fully" with their numerous 
investigators.  And  all three of them did cooperate, as 
their  Sentencing Memorandum from the US District 
Court of the Northern Division of Georgia explained  -- 
just before all three of them were sentenced to various 
federal prisons in November 1990. 

	We must now catch up on the other aspects of the 
war on the Legion of Doom.   The war on the Legion was a 
war on a network -- in fact, a network of three networks, 
which intertwined and interrelated in a complex fashion.  
The Legion itself, with Atlanta LoD, and their hanger-on 
Fry Guy, were the first network.  The second network was 
*Phrack* magazine, with its editors and contributors.
  
	The third  network involved the electronic circle 
around a  hacker known as "Terminus."

	The war against these hacker networks was carried 
out by a law enforcement network.  Atlanta LoD  and Fry 
Guy were pursued by USSS agents and federal 
prosecutors in Atlanta, Indiana, and Chicago.  "Terminus" 
found himself pursued by USSS and  federal prosecutors 
from Baltimore and Chicago.  And the war against Phrack 
was almost entirely a Chicago operation.

	The investigation of Terminus involved a great deal 
of energy, mostly from the Chicago Task Force, but it was 
to be the least-known and least-publicized of the 
Crackdown operations.  Terminus, who lived in Maryland, 
was a UNIX programmer and consultant, fairly well-
known (under his given name)  in the UNIX community, 
as an acknowledged expert on AT&T minicomputers.   
Terminus idolized AT&T, especially Bellcore, and longed 
for public recognition as a UNIX expert; his highest 
ambition was to work for Bell Labs. 

	But Terminus had odd friends and a spotted history.   
Terminus had once been  the subject of an admiring 
interview in *Phrack* (Volume II, Issue 14, Phile 2  -- dated 
May 1987).   In this article, *Phrack* co-editor Taran King 
described "Terminus" as an electronics engineer,  5'9", 
brown-haired, born in 1959 -- at 28 years old, quite mature 
for a hacker.

	Terminus had once been sysop of a phreak/hack 
underground board called "MetroNet," which ran on an 
Apple II.  Later he'd replaced "MetroNet" with an 
underground board called "MegaNet," specializing in 
IBMs.  In his younger days, Terminus had written one of 
the very first and most elegant code-scanning programs 
for the IBM-PC.  This program had been widely 
distributed in the underground.  Uncounted legions of PC-
owning  phreaks and hackers had used Terminus's 
scanner  program to rip-off telco codes.  This  feat had not 
escaped the attention of telco security; it hardly could, 
since Terminus's earlier handle, "Terminal Technician," 
was proudly written right on the program.

	When he became a full-time computer professional 
(specializing in telecommunications programming),  he 
adopted the handle Terminus, meant to indicate that he 
had "reached the final point of being a proficient hacker."  
He'd moved up to the UNIX-based "Netsys" board on an 
AT&T computer, with four phone lines and an impressive 
240 megs of storage.   "Netsys" carried complete issues of 
*Phrack,* and Terminus was quite friendly with its 
publishers, Taran King and Knight Lightning.

	In the early 1980s, Terminus had been a regular on 
Plovernet, Pirate-80, Sherwood Forest and Shadowland, all 
well-known pirate boards, all heavily frequented by the 
Legion of Doom.   As it happened, Terminus was never 
officially "in LoD," because he'd never been given the 
official LoD high-sign and back-slap by Legion maven Lex 
Luthor.   Terminus had never physically met anyone from 
LoD.  But that scarcely mattered much -- the Atlanta 
Three themselves had never been officially vetted by Lex, 
either.

	As far as law enforcement was concerned, the issues 
were clear. Terminus was a full-time, adult computer 
professional with particular skills at AT&T software and 
hardware -- but Terminus reeked of the Legion of Doom 
and the underground.

	On February 1, 1990 -- half a month after the Martin 
Luther King Day Crash --  USSS  agents Tim Foley from 
Chicago, and Jack Lewis from the Baltimore office, 
accompanied by AT&T security officer Jerry Dalton, 
travelled to Middle Town, Maryland.  There they grilled 
Terminus in his home (to the stark terror of his wife and 
small children), and, in their customary fashion, hauled 
his computers out the door.

	The Netsys machine proved to contain a plethora of 
arcane UNIX software -- proprietary source code formally 
owned by AT&T.  Software such as:  UNIX System Five 
Release 3.2; UNIX SV Release 3.1;  UUCP 
communications software; KORN SHELL; RFS; IWB; 
WWB; DWB; the C++ programming language; PMON; 
TOOL CHEST; QUEST; DACT, and S FIND.

	In the long-established piratical tradition of the 
underground,  Terminus had been trading this illicitly-
copied  software with a small circle of fellow UNIX 
programmers.   Very unwisely, he had stored seven years 
of his electronic mail on his Netsys machine, which 
documented all the friendly arrangements he had made 
with his various colleagues.

	Terminus had not crashed the AT&T phone system 
on January 15.  He was, however, blithely running a not-
for-profit AT&T software-piracy ring.  This was not an 
activity AT&T found amusing.   AT&T security officer Jerry 
Dalton valued this "stolen" property at over three hundred 
thousand dollars.

	AT&T's entry into the tussle of free enterprise had 
been complicated by the new, vague groundrules of the 
information economy.   Until the break-up of Ma Bell, 
AT&T was forbidden to sell computer hardware or 
software.  Ma Bell was the phone company; Ma Bell was 
not allowed to use the enormous revenue from telephone 
utilities, in order to finance any entry into the computer 
market.

	AT&T nevertheless invented the UNIX operating 
system.   And somehow AT&T managed to make UNIX a 
minor source of income.  Weirdly, UNIX was not sold as 
computer software, but actually retailed under an obscure 
regulatory exemption allowing sales of surplus equipment 
and scrap.  Any bolder attempt to promote or retail UNIX 
would have aroused angry legal opposition from computer 
companies.  Instead, UNIX was licensed to universities, at 
modest rates, where the acids of academic freedom ate 
away steadily at AT&T's proprietary rights.

	Come the breakup, AT&T recognized that UNIX was 
a potential gold-mine.   By now, large chunks of UNIX 
code had been created that were not AT&T's, and were 
being sold by others.  An entire rival UNIX-based 
operating system had arisen in Berkeley, California  (one 
of the world's great founts of ideological hackerdom).   
Today, "hackers" commonly consider "Berkeley UNIX" to 
be technically superior to AT&T's "System V UNIX," but 
AT&T has not allowed mere technical elegance to intrude 
on the real-world business of marketing proprietary 
software.   AT&T has made its own code deliberately 
incompatible with other folks' UNIX, and has written code 
that it can prove is copyrightable, even if that code 
happens to be somewhat awkward -- "kludgey."   AT&T 
UNIX user licenses are serious business agreements, 
replete with very clear copyright statements and non-
disclosure clauses.

	AT&T has not exactly kept the UNIX cat in the bag, 
but it kept a grip on its scruff with some success.   By the 
rampant, explosive standards of software piracy, AT&T 
UNIX source code is heavily copyrighted, well-guarded, 
well-licensed.   UNIX was traditionally run only on 
mainframe machines, owned by large groups of suit-and-
tie professionals, rather than on bedroom machines where 
people can get up to easy mischief.

	And AT&T UNIX source code is serious high-level 
programming.   The number of skilled UNIX 
programmers with any actual motive to swipe UNIX 
source code is small.  It's tiny, compared to the tens of 
thousands prepared to rip-off, say, entertaining PC games 
like "Leisure Suit Larry."

	But by 1989, the warez-d00d underground, in the 
persons of Terminus and his friends,  was gnawing at 
AT&T UNIX.  And the property in question was not sold 
for twenty bucks over the counter at the local branch of 
Babbage's or Egghead's;  this was massive, sophisticated, 
multi-line, multi-author corporate code worth tens of 
thousands of dollars.

	It must be recognized at this point that Terminus's 
purported ring of UNIX software pirates had not actually 
made any money from their suspected crimes.  The 
$300,000 dollar figure bandied about for the contents of 
Terminus's computer did not mean that Terminus was in 
actual illicit possession of three hundred thousand of 
AT&T's  dollars.   Terminus was shipping software back 
and forth, privately, person to person, for free.  He was not 
making a commercial business of piracy.  He hadn't asked 
for money; he didn't take money.  He lived quite modestly.

	AT&T employees -- as well as freelance UNIX 
consultants, like Terminus -- commonly worked with 
"proprietary" AT&T software, both in the office and at 
home on their private machines.   AT&T rarely sent 
security officers out to comb the hard disks of its 
consultants.   Cheap freelance UNIX  contractors were 
quite useful to AT&T; they didn't have health insurance or 
retirement programs, much less union membership in the 
Communication Workers of America.  They were humble 
digital drudges, wandering with mop and bucket through 
the Great Technological Temple of AT&T; but when the 
Secret Service arrived at their homes, it seemed they were 
eating with company silverware and sleeping on company 
sheets!  Outrageously, they behaved as if the things they 
worked with every day belonged to them!

	And these were no mere hacker teenagers with their 
hands full of trash-paper and their noses pressed to the 
corporate windowpane.  These guys were UNIX wizards, 
not only carrying AT&T data in their machines and their 
heads, but eagerly networking about it, over machines that 
were far more powerful than anything previously 
imagined in private hands.  How do you keep people 
disposable, yet assure their awestruck respect for your 
property?  It was a dilemma.

	  Much UNIX code was public-domain, available for 
free.   Much "proprietary" UNIX code had been 
extensively re-written, perhaps altered so much that it 
became an entirely new product-- or perhaps not.   
Intellectual property rights for software developers were, 
and are, extraordinarily complex and confused.   And 
software "piracy," like the private copying of videos, is one 
of the most widely practiced "crimes" in the world today.

	The USSS were not experts in UNIX or familiar with 
the customs of its use.   The United States Secret Service, 
considered as a body, did not have one single person in it 
who could program in a UNIX environment -- no, not even 
one.   The Secret Service *were* making extensive use of 
expert help, but the "experts" they had chosen were AT&T 
and Bellcore security officials, the very victims of the 
purported crimes under investigation, the very people 
whose interest in AT&T's  "proprietary" software was most 
pronounced.

	On February 6, 1990, Terminus was arrested by Agent 
Lewis.  Eventually, Terminus would be sent to prison for 
his illicit use of a piece of AT&T software.

	The issue of pirated AT&T software would bubble 
along in the background during the war on the Legion of 
Doom.  Some half-dozen of Terminus's on-line 
acquaintances, including people in Illinois, Texas and 
California, were grilled by the Secret Service in connection 
with the illicit copying of software.   Except for Terminus, 
however, none were charged with a crime.  None of them 
shared his peculiar prominence in the hacker 
underground.

	But that did not meant that these people would, or 
could, stay out of trouble.   The transferral of illicit data in 
cyberspace is hazy and ill-defined business, with 
paradoxical dangers for everyone concerned:  hackers, 
signal carriers, board owners,  cops, prosecutors, even 
random passers-by.  Sometimes, well-meant attempts to 
avert trouble  or punish wrongdoing bring more trouble 
than  would simple ignorance, indifference or impropriety.

	Terminus's "Netsys" board was not a common-or-
garden bulletin board system, though it had most of the 
usual functions of a board.  Netsys was not a stand-alone 
machine, but part of the globe-spanning  "UUCP" 
cooperative network.  The UUCP network uses a set of 
Unix software programs called "Unix-to-Unix Copy," which 
allows Unix systems to throw data to one another at high 
speed through the public telephone network.   UUCP is a 
radically decentralized, not-for-profit network of UNIX 
computers.   There are tens of thousands of these UNIX 
machines.  Some are small, but many are powerful and 
also link to other networks.  UUCP has certain arcane links 
to  major networks such as JANET, EasyNet, BITNET, 
JUNET, VNET, DASnet, PeaceNet and FidoNet, as well as 
the gigantic Internet.  (The so-called "Internet" is not 
actually a network itself, but rather an "internetwork" 
connections standard that allows several globe-spanning 
computer networks to communicate with one another.   
Readers fascinated by the weird and intricate tangles of 
modern computer networks may enjoy John S. 
Quarterman's authoritative 719-page explication, *The 
Matrix,* Digital Press, 1990.) 
 
	A skilled user of Terminus' UNIX machine could 
send and receive electronic mail from almost any major 
computer network in the world.  Netsys was not called a 
"board" per se, but rather a "node."   "Nodes" were larger, 
faster, and more sophisticated than mere "boards," and 
for hackers, to hang out on internationally-connected 
"nodes" was quite the step up from merely hanging out on 
local "boards."

	Terminus's Netsys node in Maryland had a number 
of direct links to other, similar UUCP  nodes, run by 
people who shared his interests and at least something of 
his free-wheeling attitude.   One of these nodes was Jolnet, 
owned by Richard Andrews, who, like Terminus, was an 
independent UNIX consultant.   Jolnet also ran UNIX, and 
could be contacted at high speed by mainframe machines 
from all over the world.  Jolnet was quite a sophisticated 
piece of work, technically speaking, but it was still run by 
an individual, as a private, not-for-profit hobby.   Jolnet was 
mostly used by other UNIX programmers -- for mail, 
storage, and access to networks.  Jolnet supplied access 
network access to about two hundred people, as well as a 
local junior college.

	Among its various features and services, Jolnet also 
carried *Phrack* magazine.

	For reasons of his own, Richard Andrews had become 
suspicious of a new user called  "Robert Johnson."  Richard 
Andrews took it upon himself to have a look at what 
"Robert Johnson" was storing in Jolnet.  And Andrews 
found the E911 Document.

	"Robert Johnson" was the Prophet from the Legion of 
Doom, and the E911 Document was illicitly copied data 
from Prophet's raid on the BellSouth computers.

	The E911 Document, a particularly illicit piece of 
digital property, was about to resume its long, complex, 
and disastrous career.

	It struck Andrews as fishy that someone not a 
telephone employee should have a document referring to 
the "Enhanced 911 System."  Besides,  the document itself 
bore an obvious warning.

	"WARNING:  NOT FOR USE OR DISCLOSURE 
OUTSIDE BELLSOUTH OR ANY OF ITS SUBSIDIARIES 
EXCEPT UNDER WRITTEN AGREEMENT."

	These standard nondisclosure tags are often 
appended to all sorts of corporate material.   Telcos as a 
species are particularly notorious for stamping most 
everything in sight as "not for use or disclosure."  Still, this 
particular piece of data was  about the 911 System.  That 
sounded bad to  Rich Andrews.

	Andrews was not prepared to ignore this sort of 
trouble.  He thought it would be wise to pass the document 
along to a friend and acquaintance on the UNIX network, 
for consultation.  So, around September 1988, Andrews 
sent yet another copy of the E911 Document electronically 
to an AT&T employee, one Charles Boykin, who ran a 
UNIX-based node called "attctc" in Dallas, Texas.

	"Attctc" was the property of AT&T, and was run from 
AT&T's Customer Technology Center  in Dallas, hence the 
name "attctc."  "Attctc" was better-known as "Killer," the 
name of the machine that the system was running on.  
"Killer" was a hefty, powerful, AT&T 3B2 500 model, a 
multi-user, multi-tasking UNIX platform with 32 meg of 
memory and a mind-boggling 3.2 Gigabytes of storage.  
When  Killer had first arrived in Texas, in 1985, the 3B2 
had been one of AT&T's great white hopes for going head-
to-head with IBM for the corporate computer-hardware 
market.  "Killer" had been shipped to the Customer 
Technology Center in the Dallas Infomart, essentially a 
high-technology mall, and there it sat, a demonstration 
model.

	Charles Boykin, a veteran AT&T hardware and digital 
communications expert, was a local technical backup man 
for the AT&T 3B2 system.   As a display model in the 
Infomart mall, "Killer" had little to do, and it seemed a 
shame to waste the system's capacity.  So Boykin 
ingeniously wrote some UNIX bulletin-board software for 
"Killer," and plugged the machine in to the local phone 
network.   "Killer's" debut in late 1985 made it the first 
publicly available UNIX site in the state of Texas.  Anyone 
who wanted to play was welcome.

	The machine immediately attracted an electronic 
community.  It joined the UUCP network, and offered 
network links to over eighty other computer sites, all of 
which became dependent on Killer for their links to the 
greater world of cyberspace.   And it wasn't just for the big 
guys; personal computer users also stored freeware 
programs for the Amiga, the Apple, the IBM and the 
Macintosh on Killer's vast 3,200 meg archives.  At one 
time, Killer had the largest library of public-domain 
Macintosh software in Texas.

	Eventually, Killer attracted about 1,500 users, all 
busily communicating, uploading and downloading, 
getting mail, gossipping, and linking to arcane and distant 
networks.

	  Boykin received no pay for running Killer.  He 
considered it good publicity for the AT&T 3B2 system 
(whose sales were somewhat less than stellar), but he also 
simply enjoyed the vibrant community his skill had 
created.   He gave away the bulletin-board UNIX software 
he had written, free of charge.

	In the UNIX programming community, Charlie 
Boykin had the reputation of a warm, open-hearted, level-
headed kind of guy.   In 1989, a group of Texan UNIX 
professionals voted Boykin "System Administrator of the 
Year."   He was considered a fellow you could trust for 
good advice.

	In September 1988, without warning, the E911 
Document came plunging into Boykin's life, forwarded by 
Richard Andrews.  Boykin immediately recognized that 
the Document was hot property.   He was not a voice-
communications man, and knew little about the ins and 
outs of the Baby Bells, but he certainly knew what the 911 
System was, and he was angry to see confidential data 
about it in the hands of a nogoodnik.  This was clearly a 
matter for telco security.  So, on September 21, 1988,  
Boykin made yet *another* copy of the  E911 Document 
and passed this one along to a professional acquaintance 
of his, one Jerome Dalton, from AT&T Corporate 
Information Security.   Jerry Dalton was the very fellow 
who would later raid Terminus's house.

	From AT&T's security division, the E911 Document 
went to Bellcore.

	Bellcore (or BELL COmmunications REsearch)  had 
once been the central laboratory of the Bell System.  Bell 
Labs employees had invented the UNIX operating 
system.  Now Bellcore was a quasi-independent, jointly 
owned company that  acted as the research arm for all 
seven of the Baby Bell RBOCs.   Bellcore was in a good 
position to co-ordinate security technology and 
consultation for the RBOCs, and the gentleman in charge 
of this effort was Henry M. Kluepfel, a veteran of the Bell 
System who had worked there for twenty-four years.

	On October  13, 1988, Dalton passed the E911 
Document to Henry Kluepfel.  Kluepfel, a veteran expert 
witness in telecommunications fraud and computer-fraud 
cases, had certainly seen worse trouble than this.   He 
recognized the document for what it was:  a trophy from a 
hacker break-in.

	However, whatever harm had been done in the 
intrusion was presumably old news.   At this point there 
seemed little to be done.  Kluepfel made a careful note of 
the circumstances and shelved the problem for the time 
being.

	Whole months passed.

	February 1989 arrived.  The Atlanta Three were living 
it up in Bell South's switches, and had not yet met their 
comeuppance.   The Legion was thriving.  So was *Phrack* 
magazine.   A good six months had passed since Prophet's  
AIMSX break-in.  Prophet, as hackers will, grew weary of 
sitting on his laurels.  "Knight Lightning" and "Taran 
King,"  the editors of *Phrack,* were always begging 
Prophet for material they could publish.   Prophet decided 
that the heat must be off by this time, and that he could 
safely brag, boast, and strut.

	So he sent a copy of the E911 Document -- yet 
another one -- from Rich Andrews' Jolnet machine to 
Knight Lightning's  BITnet account at the University of 
Missouri.

	Let's review the fate of the document so far.

	0.  The original E911 Document.  This in the AIMSX 
system on a mainframe computer in Atlanta, available to 
hundreds of people, but all of them, presumably, 
BellSouth employees.   An unknown number of them may 
have their own copies of this document, but they are all 
professionals and all trusted by the phone company.

	1.  Prophet's illicit copy, at home on his own computer 
in Decatur, Georgia.

	2.  Prophet's back-up copy, stored on Rich Andrew's 
Jolnet machine in the basement of Rich Andrews'  house 
near Joliet Illinois.

	3.  Charles Boykin's copy on "Killer" in Dallas, Texas, 
sent by Rich Andrews from Joliet.

	4.  Jerry Dalton's copy at AT&T Corporate 
Information Security in New Jersey, sent from Charles 
Boykin in Dallas.

	5.  Henry Kluepfel's copy at Bellcore security 
headquarters in New Jersey, sent by Dalton.

	6.  Knight Lightning's copy, sent by Prophet from  
Rich Andrews' machine, and now in Columbia, Missouri.

	 We can see that the "security" situation of this 
proprietary document, once dug out of AIMSX,  swiftly 
became bizarre.   Without any money changing hands, 
without any particular special effort, this data had been 
reproduced at least six times and had spread itself all over 
the continent.  By far the worst, however, was yet to come.

	In February 1989, Prophet and Knight Lightning 
bargained electronically over the fate of this trophy.  
Prophet wanted to boast, but, at the same time, scarcely 
wanted to be caught.

	For his part, Knight Lightning was eager to publish as 
much of the document as he could manage.   Knight 
Lightning was a fledgling political-science major with a 
particular interest in freedom-of-information issues.  He 
would gladly publish most anything that would reflect 
glory on the prowess of the underground and embarrass 
the telcos.   However, Knight Lightning himself had 
contacts in telco security, and sometimes consulted them 
on material he'd received that might be too dicey for 
publication.

	Prophet and  Knight Lightning decided to edit the 
E911 Document so as  to delete most of its identifying 
traits.   First of all, its large "NOT FOR USE OR 
DISCLOSURE" warning had to go.  Then there were other 
matters.  For instance, it listed the office telephone 
numbers of several BellSouth 911 specialists in Florida.  If 
these phone numbers were published in *Phrack,* the 
BellSouth employees involved would very likely be 
hassled by phone phreaks, which would anger BellSouth 
no end, and pose a definite operational hazard for both 
Prophet and *Phrack.*

	So Knight Lightning cut the Document almost in half, 
removing the phone numbers and some of the touchier 
and more specific information.  He passed it back 
electronically to Prophet;  Prophet was still nervous, so 
Knight Lightning cut a bit more.  They finally agreed that 
it was ready to go, and that it would be published in 
*Phrack* under the pseudonym, "The Eavesdropper."

	And this was done on February 25, 1989.

	The twenty-fourth issue of *Phrack*  featured a chatty 
interview with co-ed phone-phreak "Chanda Leir," three 
articles on BITNET and its links to other computer 
networks,  an article on 800 and 900 numbers by "Unknown 
User,"  "VaxCat's" article on telco basics (slyly entitled 
"Lifting Ma Bell's Veil of Secrecy,)" and the usual "Phrack 
World News."

	The News section, with painful irony, featured an 
extended account of the sentencing of "Shadowhawk,"  an 
eighteen-year-old Chicago hacker who had just been put 
in federal prison by William J. Cook himself.

	And then there were the two articles by "The 
Eavesdropper."   The first was the  edited E911 Document, 
now titled "Control Office Administration Of Enhanced 
911 Services for Special Services and Major Account 
Centers."  Eavesdropper's second article was a glossary of 
terms explaining the blizzard of telco acronyms and 
buzzwords in the E911 Document.

	The hapless document was now distributed, in the 
usual *Phrack* routine, to a good one hundred and fifty 
sites.  Not a hundred and fifty *people,* mind you -- a 
hundred and fifty *sites,* some of these sites linked to 
UNIX nodes or bulletin board systems, which themselves 
had readerships of tens, dozens, even hundreds of people.

	This was February 1989.  Nothing happened 
immediately.  Summer came, and the Atlanta crew were 
raided by the Secret Service.   Fry Guy was apprehended.  
Still nothing whatever happened to *Phrack.* Six more 
issues of *Phrack* came out, 30 in all, more or less on a 
monthly schedule.  Knight Lightning and co-editor Taran 
King went untouched.

	*Phrack* tended to duck and cover whenever the 
heat came down.  During the summer busts of 1987 -- 
(hacker busts tended to cluster in summer, perhaps 
because hackers were easier to find at home than in 
college) -- *Phrack* had ceased publication for several 
months, and laid low.   Several LoD hangers-on had been 
arrested, but nothing had happened to the *Phrack*  crew, 
the premiere gossips of the underground.  In 1988, 
*Phrack* had been taken over by a new editor, "Crimson 
Death," a raucous youngster with a taste for anarchy files.

	 1989, however, looked like a bounty year for the 
underground.  Knight Lightning and his co-editor Taran 
King took up the reins again, and *Phrack* flourished 
throughout 1989.   Atlanta LoD went down hard in the 
summer of 1989, but *Phrack* rolled merrily on.   Prophet's  
E911 Document seemed unlikely to cause *Phrack* any 
trouble.  By January 1990, it had been available in 
*Phrack* for almost a year.   Kluepfel and Dalton, officers 
of Bellcore and AT&T  security, had possessed the 
document for sixteen months -- in fact, they'd had it even 
before Knight Lightning himself, and had done nothing in 
particular to stop its distribution.  They hadn't even told 
Rich Andrews or Charles Boykin to erase the copies from 
their UNIX nodes, Jolnet and Killer.

	But then came the monster Martin Luther King Day 
Crash of January 15, 1990.

	A flat three days later, on January 18,  four agents 
showed up at Knight Lightning's fraternity house.   One 
was Timothy Foley, the second Barbara Golden, both of 
them Secret Service agents from the Chicago office.   Also 
along was a University of Missouri security officer, and 
Reed Newlin, a security man from Southwestern Bell, the 
RBOC having jurisdiction over Missouri.

	Foley accused Knight Lightning of causing the 
nationwide crash of the phone system.

	Knight Lightning was aghast at this allegation.   On 
the face of it, the suspicion was not entirely implausible -- 
though Knight Lightning knew that he himself hadn't 
done it.   Plenty of hot-dog hackers had bragged that they 
could crash the phone system, however.  "Shadowhawk," 
for instance, the Chicago hacker whom William Cook had 
recently put in jail, had several times  boasted on boards 
that he could "shut down AT&T's public switched 
network."

	 And now this event, or something that looked just 
like it, had actually taken place.  The Crash had lit a fire 
under the Chicago Task Force.  And the former fence-
sitters at Bellcore and AT&T were now ready to roll.  The 
consensus among telco security -- already horrified by the 
skill of the BellSouth intruders  -- was that the digital 
underground was out of hand.  LoD and *Phrack* must go.

	And in publishing Prophet's E911 Document, 
*Phrack* had provided law enforcement with what 
appeared to be a powerful legal weapon.

	Foley confronted Knight Lightning about the  E911 
Document.

	Knight Lightning was cowed.  He immediately began 
"cooperating fully" in the usual tradition of the digital 
underground.

	He gave Foley a complete run of *Phrack,*printed 
out in a set of three-ring binders.   He handed over his 
electronic mailing list of *Phrack* subscribers. Knight 
Lightning was grilled for four hours by Foley and his 
cohorts.  Knight Lightning admitted that Prophet had 
passed him the E911 Document, and he admitted that he 
had known it was stolen booty from a hacker raid on a 
telephone company.  Knight Lightning signed a statement 
to this effect, and agreed, in writing, to cooperate with 
investigators.

	Next day -- January 19, 1990, a Friday  -- the Secret 
Service returned with a search warrant, and thoroughly 
searched Knight Lightning's upstairs room in the 
fraternity house.   They took all his floppy disks, though, 
interestingly, they left Knight Lightning in possession of 
both his computer and his modem.  (The computer had no 
hard disk, and in Foley's judgement was not a store of 
evidence.)   But this was a very minor bright spot among 
Knight Lightning's rapidly multiplying troubles.  By this 
time, Knight Lightning was in plenty of hot water, not only 
with federal police, prosecutors, telco investigators, and 
university security, but with the elders of his own campus 
fraternity, who were outraged to think that they had been 
unwittingly harboring a federal computer-criminal.

	On Monday, Knight Lightning was summoned to 
Chicago, where he was further grilled by Foley and USSS 
veteran agent Barbara Golden, this time with an attorney 
present.  And on Tuesday, he was formally indicted by a 
federal grand jury.

	The trial of Knight Lightning, which occurred on July 
24-27, 1990, was the crucial show-trial of the Hacker 
Crackdown.  We will examine the trial at some length in 
Part Four of this book.

	In the meantime, we must continue our dogged 
pursuit of the E911 Document.

	It must have been clear by January 1990 that the E911 
Document, in the form *Phrack* had published it back in 
February 1989, had gone off at the speed of light in at least 
a hundred and fifty different directions.   To attempt to put 
this electronic genie back in the bottle was flatly 
impossible.

	And yet, the E911 Document was *still* stolen 
property, formally and legally speaking.  Any electronic 
transference of this document, by anyone unauthorized to 
have it, could be interpreted as an act of wire fraud.   
Interstate transfer of stolen property, including electronic 
property, was a federal crime.

	The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force 
had been assured that the E911 Document was worth a 
hefty sum of money.  In fact, they had a precise estimate 
of its worth from BellSouth security personnel:  $79,449.   A 
sum of this scale seemed to warrant vigorous prosecution.  
Even if the damage could not be undone, at least this large 
sum offered a good legal pretext for stern punishment of 
the thieves.   It seemed likely to impress judges and juries.  
And it could be used in court to mop up the Legion of 
Doom.

	The Atlanta crowd was already in the bag, by the time 
the Chicago Task Force had gotten around to *Phrack.* 
But the Legion was a hydra-headed thing.   In late 89, a 
brand-new Legion of Doom board, "Phoenix Project," had 
gone up in Austin, Texas.  Phoenix Project was sysoped by 
no less a man than the Mentor himself, ably assisted by 
University of Texas student and hardened Doomster "Erik 
Bloodaxe."

	As we have seen from his *Phrack* manifesto, the 
Mentor was a hacker zealot who regarded computer 
intrusion as something close to a moral duty.  Phoenix 
Project  was an ambitious effort, intended to revive the 
digital underground to what Mentor considered the full 
flower of the early 80s.  The Phoenix board would also 
boldly bring elite hackers face-to-face with the telco 
"opposition."  On "Phoenix," America's cleverest hackers 
would supposedly shame the telco squareheads out of 
their stick-in-the-mud attitudes, and perhaps convince 
them that the Legion of Doom elite were really an all-right 
crew.  The  premiere of "Phoenix Project" was heavily 
trumpeted by *Phrack,* and "Phoenix Project" carried a 
complete run of *Phrack* issues, including the E911 
Document as *Phrack* had published it.

	Phoenix Project was only one of many -- possibly 
hundreds -- of nodes and boards all over America that 
were in guilty possession of the E911 Document.  But 
Phoenix was an outright, unashamed Legion of Doom 
board.  Under Mentor's guidance, it was flaunting itself in 
the face of telco security personnel. Worse yet, it was 
actively trying to *win them over* as sympathizers for the 
digital underground elite.   "Phoenix" had no cards or 
codes on it.  Its hacker elite considered Phoenix at least 
technically legal.   But Phoenix was a corrupting influence,  
where hacker anarchy was eating away like digital acid at 
the underbelly of corporate propriety.

	The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force 
now prepared to descend upon Austin, Texas.

	Oddly, not one but *two* trails of the Task Force's 
investigation led toward Austin.  The city of Austin, like 
Atlanta, had made itself a bulwark of the Sunbelt's 
Information Age, with a strong university research 
presence, and a number of cutting-edge electronics 
companies, including Motorola, Dell, CompuAdd, IBM, 
Sematech and MCC.

	Where computing machinery went, hackers 
generally followed.  Austin boasted not only "Phoenix 
Project," currently LoD's most flagrant underground 
board, but a number of UNIX  nodes.

	One of these nodes was "Elephant," run by a UNIX 
consultant named Robert Izenberg.  Izenberg, in search of 
a relaxed Southern lifestyle and a lowered cost-of-living, 
had recently migrated to Austin from New Jersey.  In New 
Jersey, Izenberg had worked for an independent 
contracting company, programming UNIX code for AT&T 
itself.  "Terminus" had been a frequent user on Izenberg's 
privately owned Elephant node.

	Having interviewed Terminus and examined the 
records on Netsys, the Chicago Task Force were now 
convinced that they had discovered an underground gang 
of UNIX software pirates, who were demonstrably guilty of 
interstate trafficking in illicitly copied  AT&T source code.  
Izenberg was swept into the dragnet around Terminus, the 
self-proclaimed ultimate UNIX hacker.

	Izenberg, in Austin, had settled down into a UNIX job 
with a Texan branch of IBM.  Izenberg was no longer 
working as a contractor for AT&T, but he had friends in 
New Jersey, and he still logged on to AT&T UNIX 
computers back in New Jersey, more or less whenever it 
pleased him.  Izenberg's activities appeared highly 
suspicious to the Task Force.  Izenberg might well be 
breaking into AT&T computers, swiping AT&T software, 
and passing it to  Terminus and other possible 
confederates, through the UNIX node network.  And this 
data was worth, not merely $79,499, but hundreds of 
thousands of dollars!

	On February 21, 1990, Robert Izenberg arrived home 
from work at IBM to find that all the computers had  
mysteriously vanished from his Austin apartment.  
Naturally he assumed that he had been robbed.  His 
"Elephant" node, his other machines, his notebooks, his 
disks, his tapes, all gone!  However, nothing much else 
seemed disturbed -- the place had not been ransacked.

	The puzzle becaming much stranger some five 
minutes later.   Austin U. S. Secret Service Agent Al Soliz, 
accompanied by University of Texas campus-security 
officer Larry Coutorie and the ubiquitous Tim Foley, made 
their appearance at Izenberg's door.  They were in plain 
clothes: slacks, polo shirts.  They came in, and Tim Foley 
accused Izenberg of belonging to the Legion of Doom.

	Izenberg told them that he had never heard of the 
"Legion of Doom."  And what about a certain stolen E911 
Document, that posed a direct threat to the police 
emergency lines?   Izenberg claimed that he'd never 
heard of that, either.

	His interrogators found this difficult to believe.  
Didn't he know Terminus?

	Who?

	They gave him Terminus's real name.  Oh yes, said 
Izenberg.  He knew *that* guy all right -- he was leading 
discussions on the Internet about AT&T computers, 
especially the AT&T 3B2.

	AT&T had thrust this machine into the marketplace, 
but, like many of AT&T's ambitious attempts to enter the 
computing arena, the 3B2 project had something less than 
a glittering success.   Izenberg himself had been a 
contractor for the division of AT&T that supported the 3B2.   
The entire division had been shut down.

	  Nowadays, the cheapest and quickest way to get 
help with this fractious piece of machinery was to join one 
of Terminus's discussion groups on the Internet, where 
friendly and knowledgeable hackers would help you for 
free.  Naturally the remarks within this group were less 
than flattering about the Death Star....  was *that* the 
problem?

	Foley told Izenberg that Terminus had been 
acquiring hot software through his, Izenberg's, machine.

	Izenberg shrugged this off.   A good eight megabytes 
of data flowed through his UUCP site every day.   UUCP 
nodes spewed data like fire hoses.  Elephant had been 
directly linked to Netsys -- not surprising, since Terminus 
was a 3B2 expert and Izenberg had been a 3B2 contractor.  
Izenberg was also linked to "attctc" and the University of 
Texas.   Terminus was a well-known UNIX expert, and 
might have been up to all manner of hijinks on Elephant.  
Nothing Izenberg could do about that.  That was 
physically impossible.  Needle in a haystack.

	 In a four-hour grilling, Foley urged Izenberg to come 
clean and admit that he was in conspiracy with Terminus, 
and a member of the Legion of Doom.

	Izenberg denied this.  He was no weirdo teenage 
hacker -- he was thirty-two years old, and didn't even have 
a "handle."  Izenberg was a former TV technician and 
electronics specialist who had drifted into UNIX 
consulting as a full-grown adult.   Izenberg had never met 
Terminus, physically.  He'd once bought a cheap high-
speed modem from him, though.

	Foley told him that this modem (a Telenet T2500 
which ran at 19.2 kilobaud, and which had just gone out 
Izenberg's door in Secret Service custody)  was likely hot 
property.  Izenberg was taken aback to hear this; but then 
again, most of Izenberg's equipment, like that of most 
freelance professionals in the industry, was discounted, 
passed hand-to-hand through various kinds of barter and 
gray-market.   There was no proof that the modem was 
stolen, and even if it was, Izenberg hardly saw how that 
gave them the right to take every electronic item in his 
house.

	 Still, if the United States Secret Service figured they 
needed his computer for national security reasons -- or 
whatever -- then Izenberg would not kick.  He figured he 
would somehow make the sacrifice of his twenty thousand 
dollars' worth of professional equipment, in the spirit of 
full cooperation and good citizenship.

	Robert Izenberg was not arrested.  Izenberg was not 
charged with any crime.  His UUCP node -- full of some 
140 megabytes of the files, mail, and data of himself and 
his dozen or so entirely innocent users --  went out the door 
as "evidence."  Along with the disks and tapes, Izenberg 
had lost about 800 megabytes of data.

	Six months would pass before Izenberg decided to 
phone the Secret Service and ask how the case was going.  
That was the first time that Robert Izenberg would ever 
hear the name of William Cook.  As of January 1992, a full 
two years after the seizure, Izenberg, still not charged with 
any crime, would be struggling through the morass of the 
courts, in hope of recovering his thousands of dollars' 
worth of seized equipment.

	In the meantime, the Izenberg case received 
absolutely no press coverage.   The Secret Service had 
walked into an Austin home, removed a UNIX bulletin-
board system, and met with no operational difficulties 
whatsoever.

	Except that word of a crackdown had percolated 
through the Legion of Doom.   "The Mentor" voluntarily 
shut down "The Phoenix Project."  It seemed a pity, 
especially as telco security employees had, in fact, shown 
up on Phoenix, just as he had hoped -- along with the usual 
motley crowd of LoD heavies, hangers-on, phreaks, 
hackers and wannabes.  There was "Sandy" Sandquist 
from US SPRINT security, and some guy named Henry 
Kluepfel, from Bellcore itself!  Kluepfel had been trading 
friendly banter with hackers on Phoenix since January 
30th (two weeks after the Martin Luther King Day Crash).  
The presence of such a stellar telco official seemed quite 
the coup for Phoenix Project.

	Still, Mentor could judge the climate.  Atlanta in 
ruins, *Phrack* in deep trouble, something weird going on 
with UNIX nodes -- discretion was advisable.  Phoenix 
Project went off-line.

	Kluepfel, of course, had been monitoring this LoD 
bulletin board for his own purposes -- and those of the 
Chicago unit.   As far back as June 1987, Kluepfel had 
logged on to a Texas underground board called "Phreak 
Klass 2600."  There he'd discovered an Chicago youngster 
named "Shadowhawk," strutting and boasting about rifling 
AT&T computer files, and bragging of his ambitions to 
riddle AT&T's Bellcore computers with trojan horse 
programs.  Kluepfel had passed the news to Cook in 
Chicago, Shadowhawk's computers had gone out the door 
in Secret Service custody, and Shadowhawk himself had 
gone to jail.

	Now it was Phoenix Project's turn.   Phoenix Project 
postured about "legality" and "merely intellectual 
interest," but it reeked of the underground.  It had 
*Phrack* on it.  It had the E911 Document.  It had a lot of 
dicey talk about breaking into systems, including some 
bold and reckless stuff about a supposed "decryption 
service" that Mentor and friends were planning to run, to 
help crack encrypted passwords off of hacked systems.

	Mentor was an adult.   There was a  bulletin board at 
his place of work, as well.  Kleupfel logged onto this board, 
too, and discovered it to be called "Illuminati."  It was run 
by some company called Steve Jackson Games.

	On  March 1, 1990, the Austin crackdown went into 
high gear.

	On the morning of March 1 -- a Thursday -- 21-year-
old University of Texas student "Erik Bloodaxe," co-sysop 
of Phoenix Project and an avowed member of the Legion 
of Doom, was wakened by a police revolver levelled at his 
head.

	Bloodaxe watched, jittery, as Secret Service agents 
appropriated his 300 baud terminal and, rifling his files, 
discovered his treasured source-code for Robert Morris's 
notorious Internet Worm.  But Bloodaxe, a wily operator, 
had suspected that something of the like might be 
coming.  All his best equipment had been hidden away 
elsewhere.  The raiders took everything electronic, 
however, including his telephone.  They were stymied by 
his hefty arcade-style Pac-Man game, and left it in place, 
as it was simply too heavy to move.

	Bloodaxe was not arrested.   He was not charged with 
any crime.  A good two years later, the police still had what 
they had taken from him, however.

	The Mentor was less wary.  The dawn raid rousted 
him and his wife from bed in their underwear, and six 
Secret Service agents, accompanied by an Austin 
policeman and  Henry Kluepfel himself, made a rich haul.  
Off went the works, into the agents' white Chevrolet 
minivan:  an IBM PC-AT clone with 4 meg of RAM and a 
120-meg hard disk; a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet II printer; 
a completely legitimate and highly expensive SCO-Xenix 
286 operating system; Pagemaker disks and 
documentation; and the Microsoft Word word-processing 
program.  Mentor's wife had her incomplete academic 
thesis stored on the hard-disk; that went, too, and so did 
the couple's telephone.  As of two years later, all this 
property remained in police custody.

	Mentor remained under guard in his apartment as 
agents prepared to raid Steve Jackson Games.  The fact 
that this was a business headquarters and not a private 
residence did not deter the agents.  It was still very early; 
no one was at work yet.  The agents prepared to break 
down the door, but Mentor, eavesdropping on the Secret 
Service walkie-talkie traffic, begged them not to do it, and 
offered his key to the building.

	The exact details of the next events are unclear.  The 
agents would not let anyone else into the building.  Their 
search warrant, when produced, was unsigned.  
Apparently they breakfasted from the local 
"Whataburger," as the litter from hamburgers was later 
found inside.  They also extensively sampled a bag of 
jellybeans kept by an SJG employee.  Someone tore a 
"Dukakis for President" sticker from the wall.

	SJG employees, diligently showing up for the day's 
work, were met at the door and briefly questioned by U.S. 
Secret Service agents.  The employees watched in 
astonishment as agents wielding crowbars and 
screwdrivers emerged with captive machines.  They 
attacked outdoor storage units with boltcutters.  The 
agents wore blue nylon windbreakers with "SECRET 
SERVICE" stencilled across the back, with running-shoes 
and jeans.

	Jackson's company lost three computers, several 
hard-disks, hundred of floppy disks, two monitors, three 
modems, a laser printer, various powercords, cables, and 
adapters (and, oddly, a small bag of screws, bolts and 
nuts).   The seizure of Illuminati BBS deprived SJG of all 
the programs, text files, and private e-mail on the board.   
The loss of two other SJG computers was a severe blow as 
well, since it caused the loss of electronically stored 
contracts, financial projections, address directories, 
mailing lists, personnel files, business correspondence, 
and, not least, the drafts of forthcoming games and 
gaming books.

	No one at Steve Jackson Games was arrested.  No 
one was accused of any crime.   No charges were filed.  
Everything appropriated was officially kept as "evidence" 
of crimes never specified.

	After the *Phrack* show-trial, the Steve Jackson 
Games scandal was the most bizarre and aggravating 
incident of the Hacker Crackdown of 1990.   This raid by 
the Chicago Task Force on a science-fiction gaming 
publisher was to rouse a swarming host of civil liberties 
issues, and gave rise to an enduring controversy that was 
still re-complicating itself, and growing in the scope of its 
implications, a full two years later.

	The pursuit of the E911 Document stopped with the 
Steve Jackson Games raid.   As we have seen, there were 
hundreds, perhaps thousands of computer users in 
America with the E911 Document in their possession.   
Theoretically, Chicago had a perfect legal right to raid any 
of these people, and could have legally seized the 
machines of anybody who subscribed to *Phrack.*  
However, there was no copy of the E911 Document on 
Jackson's Illuminati board.   And there the Chicago raiders 
stopped dead; they have not raided anyone since.

	It might be assumed that Rich Andrews and Charlie 
Boykin, who had brought the E911 Document to the 
attention of telco security, might be spared any official 
suspicion.  But as we have seen, the willingness to 
"cooperate fully" offers little, if any, assurance against 
federal anti-hacker prosecution.

	Richard Andrews found himself in deep trouble, 
thanks to the E911 Document.  Andrews lived in Illinois, 
the native stomping grounds of the Chicago Task Force.  
On February 3 and 6, both his home and his place of work 
were raided by USSS.  His machines went out the door, 
too, and he was grilled at length (though not arrested).  
Andrews proved to be in purportedly guilty possession of:   
UNIX SVR 3.2; UNIX SVR 3.1; UUCP; PMON; WWB; 
IWB; DWB; NROFF; KORN SHELL '88; C++; and 
QUEST, among other items.   Andrews had received this 
proprietary code -- which AT&T officially valued at well 
over $250,000 -- through the UNIX network, much of it 
supplied to him as a personal favor by Terminus.  Perhaps 
worse yet, Andrews admitted to returning the favor, by 
passing Terminus a copy of AT&T proprietary STARLAN 
source code.

	 Even Charles Boykin, himself an AT&T employee, 
entered some very hot water.   By 1990, he'd almost 
forgotten about the E911 problem he'd reported in 
September 88; in fact, since that date, he'd passed two 
more security alerts to Jerry Dalton, concerning matters 
that Boykin considered far worse than the E911 
Document.

	But by 1990, year of the crackdown,  AT&T Corporate 
Information Security was fed up with "Killer."   This 
machine offered no  direct income to AT&T, and was 
providing aid and comfort to a cloud of suspicious yokels 
from outside the company, some of them actively 
malicious toward AT&T, its property, and its corporate 
interests.   Whatever goodwill and publicity had been won 
among Killer's 1,500 devoted users was considered no 
longer worth the security risk.  On February 20, 1990,  Jerry 
Dalton arrived in Dallas and simply unplugged the phone 
jacks, to the puzzled alarm of Killer's many Texan users.  
Killer went permanently off-line, with the loss of vast 
archives of programs and huge quantities of electronic 
mail; it was never restored to service.   AT&T showed no 
particular regard for the "property" of these 1,500 people.   
Whatever "property" the users had been storing on 
AT&T's computer simply vanished completely.

	Boykin, who had himself reported the E911 problem, 
now found himself under a cloud of suspicion.  In a weird 
private-security replay of the Secret Service seizures,  
Boykin's own home was visited by AT&T Security and his 
own machines were carried out the door.

	However, there were marked special features in the 
Boykin case.   Boykin's disks and his personal computers 
were swiftly examined by his corporate employers and 
returned politely in just two days -- (unlike Secret Service 
seizures, which commonly take months or years).   Boykin 
was not charged with any crime or wrongdoing, and he 
kept his job with AT&T (though he did retire from AT&T in 
September 1991, at the age of 52). 

	It's interesting to note that the US Secret Service 
somehow failed to seize Boykin's "Killer" node and carry 
AT&T's own computer out the door.   Nor did they raid 
Boykin's home.  They seemed perfectly willing to take the 
word of AT&T Security that AT&T's employee, and AT&T's 
"Killer" node, were free of hacker contraband and on the 
up-and-up.

	It's digital water-under-the-bridge at this point, as 
Killer's 3,200 megabytes of Texan electronic community 
were erased in 1990, and "Killer" itself was shipped out of 
the state.

	But the experiences of Andrews and Boykin, and the 
users of their systems, remained side issues.   They did not 
begin to assume the social, political, and legal importance 
that gathered, slowly but inexorably, around the issue of 
the raid on Steve Jackson Games.

					#

	We must now turn our attention to Steve Jackson 
Games itself, and explain what SJG was, what it really did, 
and how it had managed to attract this particularly odd 
and virulent kind of trouble.  The reader may recall that 
this is not the first but the second time that the company 
has appeared in this narrative; a Steve Jackson game 
called GURPS was a favorite pastime of Atlanta hacker 
Urvile, and Urvile's science-fictional gaming notes had 
been mixed up promiscuously with notes about his actual 
computer intrusions.

	First, Steve Jackson Games, Inc., was *not* a 
publisher of "computer games."  SJG published 
"simulation games," parlor games that were played on 
paper, with pencils, and dice, and printed guidebooks full 
of rules and statistics tables.  There were no computers 
involved in the games themselves.   When you bought a 
Steve Jackson Game, you did not receive any software 
disks.  What you got was a plastic bag with some 
cardboard game tokens, maybe a few maps or a deck of 
cards.  Most of their products were books.

	However, computers *were* deeply involved in the 
Steve Jackson Games business.  Like almost all modern 
publishers, Steve Jackson and his fifteen employees used 
computers to write text, to keep accounts, and to run the 
business generally.  They also used a computer to run 
their official bulletin board system for Steve Jackson 
Games, a board called Illuminati.  On Illuminati, 
simulation gamers who happened to own computers and 
modems could associate, trade mail, debate the theory 
and practice of gaming, and keep up with the company's 
news and its product announcements.

	Illuminati was a modestly popular board, run on a 
small computer with limited storage,  only one phone-line, 
and no ties to large-scale computer networks.   It did, 
however, have hundreds of users, many of them dedicated 
gamers willing to call from out-of-state.

	Illuminati was *not* an "underground" board.  It did 
not feature hints on computer intrusion, or "anarchy files," 
or illicitly posted credit card numbers, or long-distance 
access codes.  Some of Illuminati's users, however, were 
members of the Legion of Doom.    And so was one of 
Steve Jackson's senior employees -- the Mentor.   The 
Mentor wrote for *Phrack,* and also ran an underground 
board, Phoenix Project -- but the Mentor was not a 
computer professional.  The Mentor was the managing 
editor of Steve Jackson Games and a professional game 
designer by trade.   These LoD members did not use 
Illuminati to help their *hacking* activities.  They used it 
to help their *game-playing* activities -- and they were 
even more dedicated to simulation gaming than they were 
to hacking.

	"Illuminati" got its name from a card-game that Steve 
Jackson himself, the company's founder and sole owner,  
had invented.  This multi-player card-game was one of Mr 
Jackson's best-known, most successful, most technically 
innovative products.   "Illuminati" was a game of 
paranoiac conspiracy in which various antisocial cults 
warred covertly to dominate the world.   "Illuminati" was 
hilarious, and great fun to play, involving flying saucers, 
the CIA, the KGB, the phone companies, the Ku Klux 
Klan, the South American Nazis, the cocaine cartels, the 
Boy Scouts, and dozens of other splinter groups from the 
twisted depths of Mr. Jackson's professionally fervid 
imagination.  For the uninitiated, any public discussion of 
the "Illuminati" card-game sounded, by turns, utterly 
menacing or completely insane.

 	And then there was SJG's "Car Wars," in which 
souped-up armored hot-rods with rocket-launchers and 
heavy machine-guns did battle on the American highways 
of the future.   The lively Car Wars discussion on the 
Illuminati board featured many meticulous, painstaking 
discussions of the effects of grenades, land-mines, 
flamethrowers and napalm.  It sounded like hacker 
anarchy files run amuck.

	Mr Jackson and his co-workers earned their daily 
bread by supplying people with make-believe adventures 
and weird ideas.  The more far-out, the better.

	Simulation gaming is an unusual pastime, but 
gamers have not generally had to beg the permission of 
the Secret Service to exist.  Wargames and role-playing 
adventures are an old and honored pastime, much 
favored by professional military strategists.   Once little-
known, these games are now played by hundreds of 
thousands of enthusiasts throughout North America, 
Europe and Japan.  Gaming-books, once restricted to 
hobby outlets, now commonly appear in chain-stores like 
B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks, and sell vigorously.

	Steve Jackson Games, Inc., of Austin, Texas, was a 
games company of the middle rank.  In 1989, SJG grossed 
about a million dollars.   Jackson himself had a good 
reputation in his industry as a talented and innovative 
designer of rather unconventional games, but his 
company was something less than a titan of the field -- 
certainly not like the multimillion-dollar TSR Inc., or 
Britain's gigantic "Games Workshop."

	SJG's Austin headquarters was a modest two-story 
brick office-suite, cluttered with phones, photocopiers, fax 
machines and computers. It bustled with semi-organized 
activity and was littered with glossy promotional brochures 
and dog-eared science-fiction novels.  Attached to the 
offices was a large tin-roofed warehouse piled twenty feet 
high with cardboard boxes of games and books.   Despite 
the weird imaginings that went on within it, the SJG  
headquarters was quite a quotidian, everyday sort of place.  
It looked like what it was:  a publishers' digs.

	Both "Car Wars" and "Illuminati" were well-known, 
popular games.  But the mainstay of the Jackson 
organization was their Generic Universal Role-Playing 
System, "G.U.R.P.S."   The GURPS system was considered 
solid and well-designed, an asset for players.  But perhaps 
the most popular feature of the GURPS system was that it 
allowed gaming-masters to design scenarios that closely 
resembled well-known books, movies, and other works of 
fantasy.  Jackson had  licensed and adapted works from 
many science fiction and fantasy authors.  There was 
*GURPS Conan,* *GURPS Riverworld,* *GURPS 
Horseclans,* *GURPS Witch World,*  names eminently 
familiar to science-fiction readers.  And there was *GURPS 
Special Ops,*  from the world of espionage fantasy and 
unconventional warfare.

	And then there was *GURPS Cyberpunk.*

	"Cyberpunk" was a term given to certain science 
fiction writers who had entered the genre in the 1980s.  
"Cyberpunk," as the label implies, had two general 
distinguishing features.  First, its writers had a compelling 
interest in information technology, an interest closely akin 
to science fiction's earlier fascination with space travel.  
And second, these writers  were "punks," with all the 
distinguishing features that that implies:  Bohemian 
artiness, youth run wild, an air of deliberate rebellion, 
funny clothes and hair, odd politics, a fondness for 
abrasive rock and roll; in a word, trouble.

	The "cyberpunk" SF writers were a small group of 
mostly college-educated white middle-class litterateurs, 
scattered through the US and Canada.  Only one, Rudy 
Rucker, a professor of computer science in Silicon Valley, 
could rank with even the humblest computer hacker.   But, 
except for Professor Rucker, the "cyberpunk" authors were 
not programmers or hardware experts; they considered 
themselves artists (as, indeed, did Professor Rucker).  
However, these writers all owned computers, and took an 
intense and public interest in the social ramifications of 
the information industry.

	The cyberpunks had a strong following among the 
global generation that had grown up in a world of 
computers, multinational networks, and  cable television.   
Their outlook was considered somewhat morbid, cynical, 
and dark, but then again, so was the outlook of their 
generational peers.  As that generation matured and 
increased in strength and influence, so did the 
cyberpunks.   As science-fiction writers went, they were 
doing fairly well for themselves.  By the late 1980s, their 
work had attracted attention from gaming companies, 
including Steve Jackson Games, which was planning a 
cyberpunk simulation for the flourishing GURPS gaming-
system.

	The time seemed ripe for such a product, which had 
already been proven in the marketplace.  The first games-
company out of the gate, with a product boldly called 
"Cyberpunk" in defiance of possible infringement-of-
copyright suits, had been an upstart group called R. 
Talsorian.  Talsorian's Cyberpunk was a fairly decent 
game, but the mechanics of the simulation system left a 
lot to be desired.  Commercially, however, the game did 
very well.

	The next cyberpunk game had been the even more 
successful *Shadowrun* by FASA Corporation.  The 
mechanics of this game were fine, but the scenario was 
rendered moronic by  sappy fantasy elements like elves, 
trolls, wizards, and  dragons -- all highly ideologically-
incorrect, according to the hard-edged, high-tech 
standards of cyberpunk science fiction.

	Other game designers were champing at the bit.  
Prominent among them was the Mentor, a gentleman 
who, like most of his friends in the Legion of Doom, was 
quite the cyberpunk devotee.  Mentor reasoned that the 
time had come for a *real* cyberpunk gaming-book -- one 
that the princes of computer-mischief in the Legion of 
Doom could play without laughing themselves sick.  This 
book, *GURPS Cyberpunk,*  would reek of culturally on-
line authenticity.

	  Mentor was particularly well-qualified for this task.  
Naturally, he knew far more about computer-intrusion 
and digital skullduggery than any previously published 
cyberpunk author.  Not only that, but he was good at his 
work.   A vivid imagination, combined with an instinctive 
feeling for the working of systems and, especially, the 
loopholes within them, are excellent qualities for a 
professional game designer.

	By March 1st, *GURPS Cyberpunk* was almost 
complete, ready to print and ship.  Steve Jackson expected 
vigorous sales for this item, which, he hoped, would keep 
the company financially afloat for several months.  
*GURPS Cyberpunk,*  like the other GURPS "modules," 
was not a "game" like a Monopoly set, but a *book:*  a 
bound paperback book the size of a glossy magazine, with 
a slick color cover, and pages full of text, illustrations, 
tables and footnotes.   It was advertised as a game, and 
was used as an aid to game-playing,  but it was a book, with 
an ISBN number, published in Texas, copyrighted, and 
sold in bookstores.

	And now, that book, stored on a computer, had gone 
out the door in the custody of the Secret Service.

	The day after the raid, Steve Jackson visited the local 
Secret Service headquarters with a lawyer in tow.  There he 
confronted Tim Foley (still in Austin at that time) and 
demanded his book back.   But there was trouble.  
*GURPS Cyberpunk,*  alleged a Secret Service agent to 
astonished businessman Steve Jackson, was "a manual for 
computer crime."

	"It's science fiction," Jackson said.

	"No, this is real."  This statement was repeated 
several times, by several agents.  Jackson's ominously 
accurate game had passed from pure, obscure, small-
scale fantasy into the impure, highly publicized, large-
scale fantasy of the Hacker Crackdown.

	No mention was made of the real reason for the 
search.  According to their search warrant, the raiders had 
expected to find the E911 Document stored on Jackson's 
bulletin board system.   But that warrant was sealed; a 
procedure that most law enforcement agencies will use 
only when lives are demonstrably in danger.   The raiders' 
true motives were not discovered until the Jackson search-
warrant was unsealed by his lawyers, many months later.   
The Secret Service, and the Chicago Computer Fraud and 
Abuse Task Force, said absolutely nothing to Steve 
Jackson about any threat to the police 911 System.   They 
said nothing about the Atlanta Three, nothing about 
*Phrack* or Knight Lightning, nothing about Terminus.

	Jackson was left to believe that his computers had 
been seized because he intended to publish a science 
fiction book that law enforcement considered too 
dangerous to see print.

	This misconception was repeated again and again, 
for months, to an ever-widening public audience.  It was 
not the truth of the case; but as months passed, and this 
misconception was publicly printed again and again, it 
became one of the few publicly known "facts" about the 
mysterious Hacker Crackdown.   The Secret Service had 
seized a computer to stop the publication of a cyberpunk 
science fiction book.

	The second section of this book, "The Digital 
Underground," is almost finished now.  We have become 
acquainted with all the major figures of this case who 
actually belong to the underground milieu of computer 
intrusion.   We have some idea of their history, their 
motives, their general modus operandi.  We now know, I 
hope, who they are, where they came from, and more or 
less what they want.  In the next section of this book, "Law 
and Order," we will leave this milieu and directly enter the 
world of America's computer-crime police.

	At this point, however, I have another figure to 
introduce:  myself.

	My name is Bruce Sterling.   I live in Austin, Texas, 
where I am a science fiction writer by trade:  specifically, a 
*cyberpunk* science fiction writer.

	Like my "cyberpunk" colleagues in the U.S. and 
Canada, I've never been entirely happy with this literary 
label -- especially after it became a synonym for computer 
criminal.  But I did once edit a book of stories by my 
colleagues, called  *MIRRORSHADES:  the Cyberpunk 
Anthology,*  and I've long been a writer of literary-critical 
cyberpunk manifestos.   I am not a "hacker" of any 
description, though I do have readers in the digital 
underground.

	When the Steve Jackson Games seizure occurred, I 
naturally took an intense interest.  If "cyberpunk" books 
were being banned by federal police in my own home 
town, I reasonably wondered whether I myself might be 
next.  Would my computer be seized by the Secret 
Service?  At the time, I was in possession of an aging Apple 
IIe without so much as a hard disk.  If I were to be raided 
as an author of computer-crime manuals, the loss of my 
feeble word-processor would likely provoke more snickers 
than sympathy.

	I'd known Steve Jackson for many years.   We knew 
one another as colleagues, for we frequented the same 
local science-fiction conventions.  I'd played Jackson 
games, and recognized his cleverness; but he certainly 
had never struck me as a potential mastermind of 
computer crime.

	I also knew a little about computer bulletin-board 
systems.  In the mid-1980s I had taken an active role in an 
Austin board called "SMOF-BBS," one of the first boards 
dedicated to science fiction.  I had a modem, and on 
occasion I'd logged on to Illuminati, which always looked 
entertainly wacky, but certainly harmless enough.

	At the time of the Jackson seizure, I had no 
experience whatsoever with underground boards.   But I 
knew that no one on Illuminati talked about breaking into 
systems illegally, or about robbing phone companies.  
Illuminati didn't even offer pirated computer games.  
Steve Jackson, like many creative artists,  was markedly 
touchy about theft of intellectual property.

	It seemed to me that Jackson was either seriously 
suspected of some crime -- in which case, he would be 
charged soon, and would have his day in court -- or else he 
was innocent, in which case the Secret Service would 
quickly return his equipment, and everyone would have a 
good laugh.  I rather expected the good laugh.  The 
situation was not without its comic side.  The raid, known 
as the "Cyberpunk Bust" in the science fiction community, 
was winning a great deal of free national publicity both for 
Jackson himself and the "cyberpunk" science fiction 
writers generally.

	Besides, science fiction people are used to being 
misinterpreted.  Science fiction is a colorful, disreputable, 
slipshod occupation, full of unlikely oddballs, which, of 
course, is why we like it.   Weirdness can be an 
occupational hazard in our field.  People who wear 
Halloween costumes are sometimes mistaken for 
monsters.

	Once upon a time -- back in 1939, in New York City --  
science fiction and the U.S. Secret Service collided in a 
comic case of mistaken identity.  This weird incident 
involved a literary group quite famous in science fiction, 
known as "the Futurians," whose membership included 
such future genre greats as Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, 
and Damon Knight.  The Futurians were every bit as 
offbeat and wacky as any of their spiritual descendants, 
including the cyberpunks, and were given to communal 
living, spontaneous group renditions of light opera, and 
midnight fencing exhibitions on the lawn.  The Futurians 
didn't have bulletin board systems, but they did have the 
technological equivalent in 1939 -- mimeographs and a 
private printing press.   These were in steady use, 
producing a stream of science-fiction fan magazines, 
literary manifestos, and weird articles, which were picked 
up in ink-sticky bundles by a succession of strange, gangly, 
spotty young men in fedoras and overcoats.

	The neighbors grew alarmed at the antics of the 
Futurians and reported them to the Secret Service as 
suspected counterfeiters.   In the winter of 1939, a squad of 
USSS agents with drawn guns burst into "Futurian House," 
prepared to confiscate the forged currency and illicit 
printing presses.  There they discovered a slumbering 
science fiction fan named George Hahn, a guest of the 
Futurian commune who had just arrived in New York.  
George Hahn managed to explain himself and his group, 
and the Secret Service agents left the Futurians in peace 
henceforth.  (Alas, Hahn died in 1991, just before I had 
discovered this astonishing historical parallel, and just 
before I could interview him for this book.)

	But the Jackson case did not come to a swift and 
comic end.   No quick answers came his way, or mine;  no 
swift reassurances that all was right in the digital world, 
that matters were well in hand after all.   Quite the 
opposite.   In my alternate role as a sometime pop-science 
journalist, I interviewed  Jackson and his staff for an article 
in a British magazine.   The strange details of the raid left 
me more concerned than ever.   Without its computers, 
the company had been financially and operationally 
crippled.   Half the SJG workforce, a group of entirely 
innocent people, had been sorrowfully fired, deprived of 
their livelihoods by the seizure.  It began to dawn on me 
that authors -- American writers -- might well have their 
computers seized, under sealed warrants, without any 
criminal charge; and that, as Steve Jackson had 
discovered, there was no immediate recourse for this.   
This was no joke; this wasn't science fiction; this was real.

	I determined to put science fiction aside until I had 
discovered what had happened and where this trouble 
had come from.  It was time to enter the purportedly real 
world of electronic free expression and computer crime.   
Hence, this book.  Hence, the world of the telcos;  and the 
world of the digital underground; and next, the world of 
the police.

