Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.sf.ca.us

Literary Freeware:  Not for Commercial Use

THE HACKER CRACKDOWN:  Law and Disorder 
on the Electronic Frontier

PART THREE:  LAW AND ORDER


	Of the various anti-hacker activities of 1990, 
"Operation Sundevil" had by far the highest public 
profile.   The sweeping, nationwide computer 
seizures of May 8, 1990 were unprecedented in 
scope and highly, if rather selectively, publicized.

	Unlike the efforts of the Chicago Computer 
Fraud and Abuse Task Force,  "Operation Sundevil" 
was not intended to combat "hacking" in the sense 
of computer intrusion or sophisticated raids on telco 
switching stations.  Nor did it have anything to do 
with hacker misdeeds with AT&T's software, or with 
Southern Bell's proprietary documents.

	Instead, "Operation Sundevil" was a crackdown 
on those traditional scourges of the digital 
underground:  credit-card theft and telephone code 
abuse.   The ambitious activities out of Chicago, and 
the somewhat lesser-known but  vigorous anti-
hacker actions of the New York State Police in 1990, 
were never a part of "Operation Sundevil" per se, 
which was based in Arizona.
  
	Nevertheless, after the spectacular May 8 raids, 
the public, misled by  police secrecy, hacker panic, 
and a puzzled national press-corps, conflated all 
aspects of the nationwide crackdown in 1990 under 
the blanket term "Operation Sundevil."  "Sundevil" is 
still the best-known synonym for the crackdown of 
1990.  But the Arizona organizers of "Sundevil" did 
not really deserve this reputation -- any more, for 
instance, than all hackers deserve a reputation as 
"hackers."

	There was some justice in this confused 
perception, though.  For one thing, the confusion 
was abetted by the Washington office of the Secret 
Service, who responded to Freedom of Information 
Act requests on "Operation Sundevil" by referring 
investigators to the publicly known cases of Knight 
Lightning and the Atlanta Three.  And "Sundevil" 
was certainly the largest aspect of the Crackdown, 
the most deliberate and the best-organized.  As a 
crackdown on electronic fraud, "Sundevil" lacked 
the frantic pace of the war on the Legion of Doom; 
on the contrary, Sundevil's targets were picked out 
with cool deliberation over an elaborate 
investigation lasting two full years. 
     
	And once again the targets were bulletin board 
systems. 
 	
	Boards can be powerful aids to organized fraud.  
Underground boards carry lively, extensive, 
detailed, and often quite flagrant "discussions" of 
lawbreaking techniques and lawbreaking activities.   
"Discussing" crime in the abstract, or "discussing" 
the particulars of criminal cases, is not illegal -- but 
there are stern state and federal laws against 
coldbloodedly conspiring in groups in order to 
commit crimes.
  
	In the eyes of police, people who actively 
conspire to break the law are not regarded as  
"clubs," "debating salons," "users' groups," or "free 
speech advocates."   Rather, such people tend to 
find themselves formally indicted by prosecutors as 
"gangs," "racketeers," "corrupt organizations" and 
"organized crime figures."
  
	What's more, the illicit data contained on 
outlaw boards goes well beyond mere acts of speech 
and/or possible criminal conspiracy.  As we have 
seen, it was common practice in the digital 
underground to post purloined telephone codes on 
boards, for any phreak or hacker who cared to abuse 
them.  Is posting digital booty of this sort supposed 
to be protected by the First Amendment?  Hardly -- 
though the issue, like most issues in cyberspace, is 
not entirely resolved.   Some theorists argue that to 
merely *recite* a number publicly is not illegal -- 
only its *use* is illegal.   But anti-hacker police point 
out that magazines and newspapers (more 
traditional forms of free expression) never publish 
stolen telephone codes (even though this might well 
raise their circulation).
  
	Stolen credit card numbers, being riskier and 
more valuable, were less often publicly posted on  
boards -- but there is no question that some 
underground boards carried "carding" traffic, 
generally exchanged through private mail.
   
	Underground boards also carried handy 
programs for "scanning" telephone codes and 
raiding credit card companies, as well as the usual 
obnoxious galaxy of pirated software, cracked 
passwords, blue-box schematics, intrusion manuals, 
anarchy files, porn files, and so forth.
 
	But besides their nuisance potential for the 
spread of illicit knowledge, bulletin boards have 
another vitally interesting aspect for the professional 
investigator.  Bulletin boards are cram-full of 
*evidence.*  All that busy trading of electronic mail, 
all those hacker boasts, brags and struts,  even the 
stolen codes and cards, can be neat, electronic, real-
time recordings of criminal activity.
  
	As an investigator, when you seize a pirate 
board, you have scored a coup as effective as 
tapping phones or intercepting mail.  However, you 
have not actually tapped a phone or intercepted a 
letter.   The rules of evidence regarding phone-taps 
and mail interceptions are old, stern and well-
understood by police, prosecutors and defense 
attorneys alike.  The rules of evidence regarding 
boards are new, waffling, and understood by nobody 
at all.

	Sundevil was the largest crackdown on boards in 
world history.  On May 7, 8, and 9, 1990, about forty-
two computer systems were seized.  Of those forty-
two computers, about twenty-five actually were 
running boards.  (The vagueness of this estimate is 
attributable to the vagueness of (a) what a 
"computer system" is, and (b) what it actually means 
to "run a board" with one -- or with two computers, or 
with three.) 
  
	About twenty-five boards vanished into police 
custody in May 1990.   As we have seen, there are an 
estimated 30,000 boards in America today.  If we 
assume that one board in a hundred is up to no good 
with codes and cards (which rather flatters the 
honesty of the board-using community), then that  
would leave 2,975 outlaw boards untouched by 
Sundevil.  Sundevil seized about one tenth of one 
percent of all computer bulletin boards in America.   
Seen objectively, this is something less than a 
comprehensive assault.   In 1990, Sundevil's 
organizers -- the team at the Phoenix Secret Service 
office, and the Arizona Attorney General's office -- 
had a list of at least *three hundred* boards that 
they considered fully deserving of search and 
seizure warrants.   The twenty-five boards actually 
seized were merely among the most obvious and 
egregious of this much larger list of candidates.   All 
these boards had been examined beforehand -- 
either by informants, who had passed printouts to 
the Secret Service, or by Secret Service agents 
themselves, who not only come equipped with 
modems but know how to use them.

	There were a number of motives for Sundevil.  
First, it offered a chance to get ahead of the curve on 
wire-fraud crimes.  Tracking back credit-card ripoffs 
to their perpetrators can be appallingly difficult.  If 
these miscreants have any kind of electronic 
sophistication, they can snarl their tracks through 
the phone network into a mind-boggling, 
untraceable mess, while still managing to "reach out 
and rob someone."  Boards, however, full of brags 
and boasts, codes and cards, offer evidence in the 
handy congealed form. 
 	
	Seizures themselves -- the mere physical 
removal of machines -- tends to take the pressure 
off.  During Sundevil, a large number of code kids, 
warez d00dz, and credit card thieves would be 
deprived of those boards -- their  means of 
community and conspiracy -- in one swift blow.  As 
for the sysops themselves (commonly among the 
boldest offenders) they would be directly stripped of 
their computer equipment, and rendered digitally 
mute and blind. 
  
	And this aspect of Sundevil was carried out with 
great success.   Sundevil seems to have been a 
complete tactical surprise -- unlike the fragmentary 
and continuing seizures of the war on the Legion of 
Doom, Sundevil was precisely timed and utterly 
overwhelming.    At least forty "computers" were 
seized during May 7, 8 and 9, 1990, in Cincinnati, 
Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Phoenix, 
Tucson, Richmond, San Diego, San Jose, Pittsburgh 
and San Francisco.   Some cities saw multiple raids, 
such as the five separate raids in the New York City 
environs.  Plano, Texas (essentially a suburb of the 
Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, and a hub of the 
telecommunications industry)  saw four computer 
seizures.  Chicago, ever in the forefront, saw its own 
local Sundevil raid, briskly carried out by Secret 
Service agents Timothy Foley and Barbara Golden.
  
	Many of these raids occurred, not in the cities 
proper, but in associated white-middle class suburbs 
-- places like Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania and 
Clark Lake, Michigan.   There were a few raids on 
offices; most took place in people's homes, the 
classic hacker basements and bedrooms.
  
	The Sundevil raids were searches and seizures, 
not a group of mass arrests.  There were only four 
arrests during Sundevil.  "Tony the Trashman," a 
longtime teenage bete noire of the Arizona 
Racketeering unit, was arrested in Tucson on May 9.  
"Dr. Ripco," sysop of an outlaw board with the 
misfortune to exist in Chicago itself, was also 
arrested  -- on illegal weapons charges.   Local units 
also arrested a 19-year-old female phone phreak 
named "Electra" in Pennsylvania,  and a male 
juvenile in California.  Federal agents however were 
not seeking arrests, but computers.

	Hackers are generally not indicted (if at all) 
until the evidence in their seized computers is 
evaluated -- a process that can take weeks, months -- 
even years.    When hackers are arrested on the 
spot, it's generally an arrest for other reasons.  Drugs 
and/or illegal weapons show up in a good third of 
anti-hacker computer seizures (though not during 
Sundevil).

	That scofflaw teenage hackers (or their parents) 
should have marijuana in their homes is probably 
not a shocking revelation, but the surprisingly 
common presence of illegal firearms in hacker dens 
is a bit disquieting.   A Personal Computer can be a 
great equalizer for the techno-cowboy -- much like 
that more traditional American "Great Equalizer," 
the Personal Sixgun.   Maybe it's not all that 
surprising that some guy obsessed with power 
through illicit technology would also have a few illicit 
high-velocity-impact devices around.  An element of 
the digital underground particularly dotes on those 
"anarchy philes,"  and this element tends to shade 
into the crackpot milieu of survivalists, gun-nuts, 
anarcho-leftists and the ultra-libertarian right-wing.
   
	This is not to say that hacker raids to date have 
uncovered any major crack-dens or illegal arsenals; 
but Secret Service agents do not regard "hackers" as 
"just kids."   They regard hackers as unpredictable 
people, bright and slippery.   It doesn't help matters  
that the hacker himself has been "hiding behind his 
keyboard" all this time.   Commonly, police have no 
idea what he looks like.  This makes him an 
unknown quantity, someone best treated with 
proper caution.

	To date, no hacker has come out shooting, 
though they do sometimes brag on boards that they 
will do just that.  Threats of this sort are taken 
seriously.   Secret Service hacker raids tend to be 
swift, comprehensive, well-manned (even over-
manned);  and agents generally burst through every 
door in the home at once, sometimes with drawn 
guns.  Any potential resistance is swiftly quelled.   
Hacker raids are usually raids on people's homes.   
It can be a very dangerous business to raid an 
American home; people can panic when strangers 
invade their sanctum.   Statistically speaking, the 
most dangerous thing a policeman can do is to enter 
someone's home.  (The second most dangerous 
thing is to stop a car in traffic.)  People have guns in 
their homes.   More cops are hurt in homes than are 
ever hurt in biker bars or massage parlors.

	But in any case, no one was hurt during 
Sundevil, or indeed during any part of the Hacker 
Crackdown.
   
	Nor were there any allegations of any physical 
mistreatment of a suspect.   Guns were pointed, 
interrogations were sharp and prolonged; but no one 
in 1990 claimed any act of brutality by any 
crackdown raider.

	In addition to the forty or so computers, 
Sundevil reaped floppy disks in particularly great 
abundance -- an estimated 23,000 of them, which 
naturally included every manner of illegitimate 
data:  pirated games, stolen codes, hot credit card 
numbers, the complete text and software of entire 
pirate bulletin-boards.  These floppy disks, which 
remain in police custody today, offer a gigantic, 
almost embarrassingly rich source of possible 
criminal indictments.  These 23,000 floppy disks also 
include a thus-far unknown quantity of legitimate 
computer games, legitimate software,  purportedly 
"private" mail from boards, business records, and 
personal correspondence of all kinds.

  	Standard computer-crime search warrants lay 
great emphasis on seizing written documents as well 
as computers -- specifically including photocopies, 
computer printouts, telephone bills, address books, 
logs, notes, memoranda and correspondence.  In 
practice, this has meant that diaries, gaming 
magazines, software documentation, nonfiction 
books on hacking and computer security, 
sometimes even science fiction novels, have all 
vanished out the door in police custody.   A wide 
variety of electronic items have been known to 
vanish as well, including telephones, televisions, 
answering machines, Sony Walkmans, desktop 
printers, compact disks, and audiotapes.
 
	No fewer than 150 members of the Secret 
Service were sent into the field during Sundevil.   
They were commonly accompanied by squads of 
local and/or state police.   Most of these officers -- 
especially  the locals -- had never been on an anti-
hacker raid before.  (This was one good reason, in 
fact, why so many of them were invited along in the 
first place.)   Also, the presence of a uniformed 
police officer assures the raidees that the people 
entering their homes are, in fact, police.   Secret 
Service agents wear plain clothes.  So do the telco 
security experts who commonly accompany the 
Secret Service on raids (and who make no particular 
effort to identify themselves as mere employees of 
telephone companies).

	A typical hacker raid goes something like this.  
First, police storm in rapidly, through every 
entrance, with overwhelming force, in the 
assumption that this tactic will keep casualties to a 
minimum.  Second, possible suspects are 
immediately removed from the vicinity of any and 
all computer systems, so that they will have no 
chance to purge or destroy computer evidence.  
Suspects are herded into a room without computers, 
commonly the living room,  and kept under guard -- 
not *armed* guard, for the guns are swiftly 
holstered, but under guard nevertheless.   They are 
presented with the search warrant and warned that 
anything they say may be held against them.  
Commonly they have a great deal to say, especially 
if they are unsuspecting parents.

	Somewhere in the house is the "hot spot" -- a 
computer tied to a phone line (possibly several 
computers and several phones).   Commonly it's a 
teenager's bedroom, but it can be anywhere in the 
house; there may be several such rooms.   This "hot 
spot" is put in charge of a two-agent team, the 
"finder" and the "recorder."   The "finder" is 
computer-trained, commonly the case agent who 
has actually obtained the search warrant from a 
judge.   He or she understands what is being sought, 
and actually carries out the seizures: unplugs 
machines, opens drawers, desks, files, floppy-disk 
containers, etc.   The "recorder" photographs all the 
equipment, just as it stands -- especially the tangle 
of wired connections in the back, which can 
otherwise be a real nightmare to restore.  The 
recorder will also commonly photograph every room 
in the house, lest some wily criminal claim that the 
police had robbed him during the search.   Some 
recorders carry videocams or tape recorders; 
however, it's more common for the recorder to 
simply take written notes.  Objects are described 
and numbered as the finder seizes them, generally 
on standard preprinted police inventory forms.

	Even Secret Service agents were not, and are 
not, expert computer users.  They have not made, 
and do not make, judgements on the fly about 
potential threats posed by various forms of 
equipment.   They may exercise discretion; they may 
leave Dad his computer, for instance, but they don't 
*have* to.   Standard computer-crime search 
warrants, which date back to the early 80s, use a 
sweeping language that targets computers,  most 
anything attached to a computer, most anything 
used to operate a computer -- most anything that 
remotely resembles a computer -- plus most any 
and all written documents surrounding it.   
Computer-crime investigators have strongly urged 
agents to seize the works.

	In this sense, Operation Sundevil appears to 
have been a complete success.  Boards went down 
all over America, and were shipped en masse to the 
computer investigation lab of the Secret Service, in 
Washington DC, along with the 23,000 floppy disks 
and unknown quantities of printed material.

	But the seizure of twenty-five boards, and the 
multi-megabyte mountains of possibly useful 
evidence contained in these boards (and in their 
owners' other computers, also out the door), were far 
from the only motives for Operation Sundevil.   An 
unprecedented action of great ambition and size, 
Sundevil's motives can only be described as 
political.   It was a public-relations effort, meant to 
pass certain messages, meant to make certain 
situations clear:  both in the mind of the general 
public, and in the minds of various constituencies of 
the electronic community.

	 First  -- and this motivation was vital -- a 
"message" would be sent from law enforcement to 
the digital underground.   This very message was 
recited in so many words by Garry M. Jenkins, the 
Assistant Director of the US Secret Service, at the 
Sundevil press conference in Phoenix on May 9, 
1990, immediately after the raids.   In brief, hackers 
were mistaken in their foolish belief that they could 
hide behind the "relative anonymity of their 
computer terminals."  On the contrary, they should 
fully understand that state and federal cops were 
actively patrolling the beat in cyberspace -- that they 
were on the watch everywhere, even in those sleazy 
and secretive dens of cybernetic vice, the 
underground boards.

	This is not an unusual message for police to 
publicly convey to crooks.   The message is a 
standard message; only the context is new. 

	In this respect,  the Sundevil raids were the 
digital equivalent of the standard vice-squad 
crackdown on massage parlors, porno bookstores, 
head-shops,  or floating crap-games.  There may be 
few or no arrests in a raid of this sort; no convictions, 
no trials, no interrogations.   In cases of this sort, 
police may well walk out the door with many pounds 
of sleazy magazines, X-rated videotapes, sex toys, 
gambling equipment, baggies of marijuana....
  
	Of course, if something truly horrendous is 
discovered by the raiders, there will be arrests and 
prosecutions.   Far more likely, however, there will 
simply be a brief but sharp disruption of the closed 
and secretive world of the nogoodniks.  There will be 
"street hassle."  "Heat."  "Deterrence."  And, of 
course, the immediate loss of the seized goods.  It is 
very unlikely that any of this seized material will ever 
be returned.   Whether charged or not, whether 
convicted or not, the perpetrators will almost surely 
lack the nerve ever to ask for this stuff to be given 
back. 
 
	Arrests and trials -- putting people in jail -- may 
involve all kinds of formal legalities; but dealing with 
the justice system is far from the only task of police.   
Police do not simply arrest people.  They don't 
simply put people in jail.   That is not how the police 
perceive their jobs.  Police "protect and serve."  
Police "keep the peace," they "keep public order."   
Like other forms of public relations, keeping public 
order is not an exact science.  Keeping public order 
is something of an art-form.

	If a group of tough-looking teenage hoodlums 
was loitering on a street-corner, no one would be 
surprised to see a street-cop arrive and sternly order 
them to "break it up."   On the contrary, the surprise 
would come if one of these ne'er-do-wells stepped 
briskly into a phone-booth, called a civil rights 
lawyer, and instituted a civil suit in defense of his 
Constitutional rights of free speech and free 
assembly.  But  something much  along this line was 
one of the many anomolous outcomes of the Hacker 
Crackdown.

	Sundevil also carried useful "messages" for 
other constituents of the electronic community.   
These messages may not have been read aloud 
from the Phoenix podium in front of the press corps, 
but there was little mistaking their meaning.  There 
was a message of reassurance for the primary 
victims of coding and carding:  the telcos, and the 
credit companies.  Sundevil was greeted with joy by 
the security officers of the electronic business 
community.   After years of high-tech harassment 
and spiralling revenue losses, their complaints of 
rampant outlawry were being taken seriously by law 
enforcement.  No more head-scratching or 
dismissive shrugs; no more feeble excuses about 
"lack of computer-trained officers" or the low priority 
of "victimless" white-collar telecommunication 
crimes.

	Computer-crime experts have long believed 
that computer-related offenses are drastically 
under-reported.   They regard this as a major open 
scandal of their field.  Some victims are reluctant to 
come forth, because they believe that police and 
prosecutors are not computer-literate, and can and 
will do nothing.  Others are embarrassed by their 
vulnerabilities, and will take strong measures to 
avoid any publicity; this is especially true of banks, 
who fear a loss of investor confidence should an 
embezzlement-case or wire-fraud surface.   And 
some victims are so helplessly confused by their own 
high technology that they never even realize that a 
crime has occurred -- even when they have been 
fleeced to the bone.
 
	The results of this situation can be dire.  
Criminals escape apprehension and punishment.  
The computer-crime units that do exist, can't get 
work.   The true scope of computer-crime:  its size, its 
real nature, the scope of its threats, and the legal 
remedies for it -- all remain obscured.

	Another problem is very little publicized, but it 
is a cause of genuine concern.  Where there is 
persistent crime, but no effective police protection, 
then vigilantism can result.   Telcos, banks, credit 
companies, the major corporations who maintain 
extensive computer networks vulnerable to hacking 
-- these organizations are powerful, wealthy, and 
politically influential.   They are disinclined to be 
pushed around by crooks (or by most anyone else, 
for that matter).  They often maintain well-organized 
private security forces, commonly run by 
experienced veterans of military and police units, 
who have left public service for the greener pastures 
of the private sector.   For police, the corporate 
security manager can be a powerful ally; but if this 
gentleman finds no allies in the police, and the 
pressure is on from his board-of-directors, he may 
quietly take certain matters into his own hands.

	Nor is there any lack of disposable hired-help in 
the corporate security business.  Private security 
agencies -- the 'security business' generally -- grew 
explosively in the 1980s.  Today there are spooky 
gumshoed armies of "security consultants," "rent-a-
cops," "private eyes,"  "outside experts" --  every 
manner of shady operator who retails in "results" 
and discretion.   Or course, many of these 
gentlemen and ladies may be  paragons of 
professional and moral rectitude.  But as anyone 
who has read a hard-boiled detective novel knows, 
police tend to be less than fond of this sort of 
private-sector competition.

	Companies in search of computer-security have 
even been known to hire hackers.   Police shudder at 
this prospect.

	Police treasure good relations with the business 
community.   Rarely will you see a policeman so 
indiscreet as to  allege publicly that some major 
employer in his state or city has succumbed to 
paranoia and gone off the rails.  Nevertheless, police 
-- and computer police in particular -- are aware of 
this possibility.   Computer-crime police can and do 
spend up to half of their business hours just doing 
public relations:  seminars, "dog and pony shows," 
sometimes with parents' groups or computer users, 
but generally with their core audience: the likely 
victims of hacking crimes.  These, of course, are 
telcos, credit card companies and large computer-
equipped corporations.   The police strongly urge 
these people, as good citizens, to report offenses and 
press criminal charges; they pass the message that 
there is someone in authority who cares, 
understands, and, best of all, will take useful action 
should a computer-crime occur.

	But reassuring talk is cheap.  Sundevil offered 
action.

	The final message of Sundevil was intended for 
internal consumption by law enforcement.  Sundevil 
was offered as proof that the community of 
American computer-crime police  had come of age.   
Sundevil was proof that enormous things like 
Sundevil itself could now be accomplished.   
Sundevil was proof that the Secret Service and its 
local law-enforcement allies could act like a well-
oiled machine -- (despite the hampering use of 
those scrambled phones).   It was also proof that the 
Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit  -- 
the sparkplug of Sundevil -- ranked with the best in 
the world in ambition, organization, and sheer 
conceptual daring.

	And, as a final fillip, Sundevil was a message 
from the Secret Service to their longtime rivals in the 
Federal Bureau of Investigation.  By Congressional 
fiat, both USSS and FBI formally share jurisdiction 
over federal computer-crimebusting activities.  
Neither of these groups has ever been remotely 
happy with this muddled situation.  It seems to 
suggest that Congress cannot make up its mind as to 
which of these groups is better qualified.   And there 
is scarcely a G-man or a Special Agent anywhere 
without a very firm opinion on that topic.

					#

           For the neophyte, one of the most puzzling 
aspects of the crackdown on hackers is why the 
United States Secret Service has anything at all to do 
with this matter.

	The Secret Service is best known for its primary 
public role:  its agents protect the President of the 
United States.  They also guard the President's 
family, the Vice President and his family, former 
Presidents, and Presidential candidates.   They 
sometimes guard foreign dignitaries who are visiting 
the United States, especially foreign heads of state, 
and have been known to accompany American 
officials on diplomatic missions overseas. 

	Special Agents of the Secret Service don't wear 
uniforms, but the Secret Service also has two 
uniformed police agencies.  There's the former 
White House Police  (now known as the Secret 
Service Uniformed Division, since they currently 
guard foreign embassies in Washington, as well as 
the White House itself).  And there's the uniformed 
Treasury Police Force.

	The Secret Service has been charged by 
Congress with a number of little-known duties.   
They guard the precious metals in Treasury vaults.  
They guard the most valuable historical documents 
of the United States:  originals of the Constitution, 
the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln's Second 
Inaugural Address, an American-owned copy of the 
Magna Carta, and so forth.   Once they were 
assigned to guard the Mona Lisa, on her American 
tour in the 1960s.

	The entire Secret Service is a division of the 
Treasury Department.   Secret Service Special 
Agents (there are about 1,900 of them)  are 
bodyguards for the President et al, but they all work 
for the Treasury.  And the Treasury (through its 
divisions of the U.S. Mint and the Bureau of 
Engraving and Printing) prints the nation's money.

	As Treasury police, the Secret Service guards 
the nation's currency; it is the only federal law 
enforcement agency with direct jurisdiction over 
counterfeiting and forgery.  It analyzes documents 
for authenticity, and its fight against  fake cash is still 
quite lively (especially since the skilled 
counterfeiters of Medellin, Columbia have gotten 
into the act).   Government checks, bonds, and other 
obligations, which exist in untold millions and are 
worth untold billions, are common targets for 
forgery, which the Secret Service also battles.   It 
even handles forgery of postage stamps.

	But cash is fading in importance today as 
money has become electronic.  As necessity 
beckoned, the Secret Service moved from fighting 
the counterfeiting of paper currency and the forging 
of checks, to the protection of funds transferred by 
wire.

	From wire-fraud, it was a simple skip-and-jump 
to what is formally known as "access device fraud."   
Congress granted the Secret Service the authority to 
investigate "access device fraud"  under Title 18 of 
the United States Code (U.S.C.  Section 1029).

	The term "access device" seems intuitively 
simple.  It's some kind of high-tech gizmo you use to 
get money with.  It makes good sense to put this sort 
of thing in the charge of counterfeiting and wire-
fraud experts.

	However, in Section 1029, the term "access 
device" is very generously defined.  An access device 
is: "any card, plate, code, account number, or other 
means of account access that can be used, alone or 
in conjunction with another access device, to obtain 
money, goods, services, or any other thing of value, 
or that can be used to initiate a transfer of funds."

	"Access device" can therefore be construed to 
include credit cards themselves (a popular forgery 
item nowadays).  It also includes credit card account 
*numbers,* those standards of the digital 
underground.   The same goes for telephone charge 
cards (an increasingly popular item with telcos, who 
are tired of being robbed of pocket change by 
phone-booth thieves).   And also telephone access 
*codes,* those *other* standards of the digital 
underground.  (Stolen telephone codes may not 
"obtain money," but they certainly do obtain 
valuable "services," which is specifically forbidden 
by Section 1029.)

	We can now see that Section 1029 already pits 
the United States Secret Service directly against the 
digital underground, without any mention at all of 
the word "computer."

	Standard phreaking devices, like "blue boxes," 
used to steal phone service from old-fashioned 
mechanical switches, are unquestionably 
"counterfeit access devices."   Thanks to Sec.1029, it 
is not only illegal to *use* counterfeit access devices, 
but it is even illegal to *build* them.   "Producing," 
"designing" "duplicating" or "assembling" blue 
boxes are all federal crimes today, and if you do this, 
the Secret Service has been charged by Congress to 
come after you.

	Automatic Teller Machines, which replicated all 
over America during the 1980s, are definitely "access 
devices," too, and an attempt to tamper with their 
punch-in codes and plastic bank cards falls directly 
under Sec. 1029.

	Section 1029 is remarkably elastic.  Suppose you 
find a computer password in somebody's trash.  That 
password might be a "code" -- it's certainly a "means 
of account access."  Now suppose you log on to a 
computer and copy some software for yourself.  
You've certainly obtained "service" (computer 
service)  and a "thing of value" (the software).   
Suppose you tell a dozen friends about your swiped 
password, and let them use it, too.  Now you're 
"trafficking in unauthorized access devices."  And 
when the Prophet, a member of the Legion of Doom, 
passed a stolen telephone company document to 
Knight Lightning at *Phrack* magazine, they were 
both charged under Sec. 1029!

	There are two limitations on Section 1029.  First, 
the offense must "affect interstate or foreign 
commerce" in order to become a matter of federal 
jurisdiction.  The term "affecting commerce" is not 
well defined; but you may take it as a given that the 
Secret Service can take an interest if you've done 
most anything that happens to cross a state line.   
State and local police can be touchy about their 
jurisdictions, and can sometimes be mulish when 
the feds show up.   But when it comes to computer-
crime, the local police are pathetically grateful for 
federal help -- in fact they complain that they can't 
get enough of it.   If you're stealing long-distance 
service, you're almost certainly crossing state lines, 
and you're definitely "affecting the interstate 
commerce" of the telcos.  And if you're abusing 
credit cards by ordering stuff out of glossy catalogs 
from, say, Vermont, you're in for it.

	The second limitation is money.  As a rule, the 
feds don't pursue penny-ante offenders.  Federal 
judges will dismiss cases that appear to waste their 
time.  Federal crimes must be serious;  Section 1029 
specifies a minimum loss of a thousand dollars.

	We now come to the very next section of Title 
18, which is Section 1030, "Fraud and related activity 
in connection with computers."  This statute gives 
the Secret Service direct jurisdiction over acts of 
computer intrusion.  On the face of it, the Secret 
Service would now seem to command the field.  
Section 1030, however, is nowhere near so ductile as 
Section 1029.

	The first annoyance is Section 1030(d), which 
reads:

	"(d) The United States Secret Service shall, *in 
addition to any other agency having such authority,* 
have the authority to investigate offenses under this 
section.  Such authority of the United States Secret 
Service shall be exercised in accordance with an 
agreement which shall be entered into by the 
Secretary  of the Treasury *and the Attorney 
General.*"   (Author's  italics.)

	The Secretary of the Treasury is the titular head 
of the Secret Service, while the Attorney General is 
in charge of the FBI.  In Section (d), Congress 
shrugged off responsibility for the computer-crime 
turf-battle between the Service and the Bureau, and 
made them fight it out all by themselves.  The result 
was a rather dire one for the Secret Service, for the 
FBI ended up with exclusive jurisdiction over 
computer break-ins having to do with national 
security, foreign espionage, federally insured banks, 
and U.S. military bases, while retaining joint 
jurisdiction over all the other computer intrusions.  
Essentially, when it comes to Section 1030, the FBI 
not only gets the real glamor stuff for itself, but can 
peer over the shoulder of the Secret Service and 
barge in to meddle whenever it suits them.

	The second problem has to do with the dicey 
term "Federal interest computer."  Section 1030(a)(2) 
makes it illegal to "access a computer without 
authorization" if that computer belongs to a 
financial institution or an issuer of credit cards 
(fraud cases, in other words).   Congress was quite 
willing to give the Secret Service jurisdiction over 
money-transferring computers, but Congress balked 
at letting them investigate any and all computer 
intrusions.   Instead, the USSS had to settle for the 
money machines and the "Federal interest 
computers."   A "Federal interest computer" is a 
computer which the government itself owns, or is 
using.  Large networks of interstate computers, 
linked over state lines, are also considered to be of 
"Federal interest."   (This notion of "Federal interest" 
is legally rather foggy and has never been clearly 
defined in the courts.  The Secret Service has never 
yet had its hand slapped for investigating computer 
break-ins that were *not* of "Federal interest," but 
conceivably someday this might happen.)

	So the Secret Service's authority over 
"unauthorized access" to computers covers a lot of 
territory, but by no means the whole ball of 
cyberspatial wax.   If you are, for instance, a *local* 
computer retailer, or the owner of a *local* bulletin 
board system, then a malicious *local* intruder can 
break in, crash your system, trash your files and 
scatter viruses, and the U.S.  Secret Service cannot 
do a single thing about it.

	At least, it can't do anything *directly.*   But the 
Secret Service will do plenty to help the local people 
who can.

	The FBI may have dealt itself an ace off the 
bottom of the deck when it comes to Section 1030; 
but that's not the whole story; that's not the street.   
What's Congress thinks is one thing, and Congress 
has been known to change its mind.  The *real* turf-
struggle is out there in the streets where it's 
happening.    If you're a local street-cop with a 
computer problem, the Secret Service wants you to 
know where you can find the real expertise.  While 
the Bureau crowd are off having their favorite shoes 
polished -- (wing-tips) -- and making derisive fun of 
the Service's favorite shoes -- ("pansy-ass tassels") -- 
the tassel-toting Secret Service has a crew of ready-
and-able  hacker-trackers installed in the capital of 
every state in the Union.   Need advice?  They'll give 
you advice, or at least point you in the right 
direction.  Need training?  They can see to that, too.

	If you're a local cop and you call in the FBI, the 
FBI (as is widely and slanderously rumored)  will 
order you around like a coolie, take all the credit for 
your busts, and mop up every possible scrap of 
reflected glory.  The Secret Service, on the other 
hand, doesn't brag a lot.  They're the quiet types.  
*Very* quiet.  Very cool.  Efficient.  High-tech.  
Mirrorshades, icy stares, radio ear-plugs, an Uzi 
machine-pistol tucked somewhere in that well-cut 
jacket.  American samurai, sworn to give their lives 
to protect our President.  "The granite agents."  
Trained in martial arts, absolutely fearless.  Every 
single one of 'em has a top-secret security clearance.   
Something goes a little wrong, you're not gonna hear 
any whining and moaning and political buck-
passing out of these guys.

	The facade of the granite agent is not, of course, 
the reality.  Secret Service agents are human beings.  
And the real glory in Service work is not in battling 
computer crime -- not yet, anyway -- but in 
protecting the President.  The real glamour of Secret 
Service work is in the White House Detail.   If you're 
at the President's side, then the kids and the wife see 
you on television; you rub shoulders with the most 
powerful people in the world.   That's the real heart 
of Service work, the number one priority.  More than 
one computer investigation has stopped dead in the 
water when Service agents vanished at the 
President's need.

	There's romance in the work of the Service.  The 
intimate access to circles of great power;  the esprit-
de-corps of a highly trained and disciplined elite; the 
high responsibility of defending the Chief Executive;  
the fulfillment of a patriotic duty.   And as police 
work goes, the pay's not bad.  But there's squalor in 
Service work, too.  You may get spat upon by 
protesters howling abuse -- and if they get violent, if 
they get too close, sometimes you have to knock one 
of them down -- discreetly.

	The real squalor in Service work is drudgery 
such as "the quarterlies," traipsing out four times a 
year, year in, year out, to interview the various 
pathetic wretches, many of them in prisons and  
asylums, who have seen fit to threaten the 
President's life.   And then there's the grinding stress 
of searching  all those faces in the endless bustling 
crowds, looking for hatred, looking for psychosis, 
looking for the tight, nervous face of an Arthur 
Bremer, a Squeaky Fromme, a Lee Harvey Oswald.  
It's watching all those grasping, waving hands for 
sudden movements, while your ears strain at your 
radio headphone for the long-rehearsed cry of 
"Gun!"

	It's poring, in grinding detail, over the 
biographies of every rotten loser who ever shot at a 
President.  It's the unsung work of the Protective 
Research Section, who study scrawled, anonymous 
death threats with all the meticulous tools of anti-
forgery techniques.

	And it's maintaining the hefty computerized 
files on anyone who ever threatened the President's 
life.  Civil libertarians have become increasingly 
concerned at the Government's use of computer 
files to track American citizens -- but the Secret 
Service file of potential Presidential assassins, which 
has upward of twenty thousand names, rarely  
causes a peep of protest.  If you *ever* state that you 
intend to kill the President, the Secret Service will 
want to know and record who you are, where you are, 
what you are, and what you're up to.   If you're a 
serious threat -- if you're officially considered "of 
protective interest" -- then the Secret Service may 
well keep tabs on you for the rest of your natural life.

	Protecting the President has first call on all the 
Service's resources.  But there's a lot more to the 
Service's traditions and history than standing guard 
outside the Oval Office.

	The Secret Service is the nation's oldest general 
federal law-enforcement agency.   Compared to the 
Secret Service, the FBI are new-hires and the CIA 
are temps.  The Secret Service was founded 'way 
back in 1865, at the suggestion of Hugh McCulloch, 
Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury.   
McCulloch wanted a specialized Treasury police to 
combat counterfeiting.  Abraham Lincoln agreed 
that this seemed a good idea, and, with a terrible 
irony, Abraham Lincoln was shot that very night by 
John Wilkes Booth.

	The Secret Service originally had nothing to do 
with protecting Presidents.  They didn't take this on 
as a regular assignment until after the Garfield 
assassination in 1881.   And they didn't get any 
Congressional money for it until President McKinley 
was shot in 1901.   The Service was originally 
designed for one purpose: destroying counterfeiters.

					#

	There are interesting parallels between the 
Service's nineteenth-century entry into 
counterfeiting, and America's twentieth-century 
entry into computer-crime.

	In 1865, America's paper currency was a terrible 
muddle.  Security was drastically bad.  Currency was 
printed on the spot by local banks in literally 
hundreds of different designs.  No one really knew 
what the heck a dollar bill was supposed to look like.  
Bogus bills passed easily.  If some joker told you that 
a one-dollar bill from the Railroad Bank of Lowell, 
Massachusetts had a woman leaning on a shield, 
with a locomotive, a cornucopia, a compass, various 
agricultural implements, a railroad bridge, and 
some factories, then you pretty much had to take his 
word for it.  (And in fact he was telling the truth!)

	  *Sixteen hundred* local American banks 
designed and printed their own paper currency, and 
there were no general standards for security.  Like a 
badly guarded node in a computer network, badly 
designed bills were easy to fake, and  posed a 
security hazard for the entire monetary system.

	No one knew the exact extent of the threat to 
the currency.  There were panicked estimates that as 
much as a third of the entire national currency was 
faked.  Counterfeiters -- known as "boodlers" in the 
underground slang of the time -- were  mostly 
technically skilled printers who had gone to the bad.  
Many had once worked printing legitimate currency. 
Boodlers operated in rings and gangs.   Technical 
experts engraved the bogus plates -- commonly in 
basements in New York City.  Smooth confidence 
men passed large wads of high-quality, high-
denomination fakes, including the really 
sophisticated stuff --  government bonds, stock 
certificates, and railway shares.  Cheaper, botched 
fakes were sold or sharewared to low-level gangs of 
boodler wannabes.  (The really cheesy lowlife 
boodlers merely upgraded real bills by altering face 
values, changing ones to fives, tens to hundreds, and 
so on.)

	The techniques of boodling were little-known 
and regarded with a certain awe by the mid-
nineteenth-century  public.  The ability to 
manipulate the system for rip-off seemed 
diabolically clever.  As the skill and daring of the 
boodlers increased, the situation became 
intolerable.  The federal government stepped in, 
and began offering its own federal currency, which 
was printed in fancy green ink, but only on the back -
- the original "greenbacks."  And at first, the 
improved security of the well-designed, well-printed 
federal greenbacks seemed to solve the problem; 
but then the counterfeiters caught on.  Within a few 
years things were worse than ever:  a *centralized* 
system where *all* security was bad!

	The local police were helpless.  The 
Government tried offering blood money to potential 
informants, but this met with little success.  Banks, 
plagued by boodling, gave up hope of police help 
and hired private security men instead.  Merchants 
and bankers queued up by the thousands to buy 
privately-printed manuals on currency security, slim 
little books like Laban Heath's  *Infallible 
Government Counterfeit Detector.*  The back of the 
book offered Laban Heath's patent microscope for 
five bucks.

	Then the Secret Service entered the picture.  
The first agents were a rough and ready crew.   Their 
chief was one William P. Wood, a former guerilla in 
the Mexican War who'd won a reputation busting 
contractor fraudsters for the War Department 
during the Civil War.   Wood, who was also Keeper 
of the Capital Prison, had a sideline as a 
counterfeiting expert, bagging boodlers for the 
federal bounty money.

	Wood was named Chief of the new Secret 
Service in July 1865.  There were only ten  Secret 
Service agents in all:  Wood himself, a handful 
who'd worked for him in the War Department, and a 
few former private investigators -- counterfeiting 
experts -- whom Wood had won over to public 
service.   (The Secret Service of 1865 was much the 
size of the Chicago Computer Fraud Task Force or 
the Arizona Racketeering Unit of 1990.)  These ten 
"Operatives" had an additional twenty or so 
"Assistant Operatives" and "Informants."   Besides 
salary and per diem, each Secret Service employee 
received a whopping twenty-five dollars for each 
boodler he captured.

	Wood himself publicly estimated that at least 
*half* of America's currency was counterfeit, a 
perhaps pardonable perception.   Within a year the 
Secret Service had arrested over 200 counterfeiters.  
They busted about two hundred boodlers a year for 
four years straight.

	Wood attributed his success to travelling fast 
and light, hitting the bad-guys hard, and avoiding 
bureaucratic baggage.  "Because my raids were 
made without military escort and I did not ask the 
assistance of state officers, I surprised the 
professional counterfeiter."

	Wood's social message to the once-impudent 
boodlers bore an eerie ring of Sundevil:  "It was also 
my purpose to convince such characters that it 
would no longer be healthy for them to ply their 
vocation without being handled roughly, a fact they 
soon discovered."

	William P. Wood, the Secret Service's guerilla 
pioneer, did not end well.  He succumbed to the lure 
of aiming for the really big score.  The notorious 
Brockway Gang of New York City,  headed by 
William E. Brockway, the "King of the 
Counterfeiters," had forged a number of 
government bonds.  They'd passed these brilliant 
fakes on the prestigious Wall Street investment firm 
of Jay Cooke and Company.  The Cooke firm were 
frantic and offered a huge reward for the forgers' 
plates.

	Laboring diligently, Wood confiscated the 
plates (though not Mr. Brockway) and claimed the 
reward.  But the Cooke company treacherously 
reneged.   Wood got involved in a down-and-dirty 
lawsuit with the Cooke capitalists.   Wood's boss, 
Secretary of the Treasury McCulloch, felt that 
Wood's demands for money and glory were 
unseemly, and even when the reward money finally 
came through, McCulloch refused to pay Wood 
anything.   Wood found himself mired in a 
seemingly endless round of federal suits and 
Congressional lobbying.

	Wood never got his money.  And he lost his job 
to boot.  He resigned in 1869.

	Wood's agents suffered, too.  On May 12, 1869, 
the second Chief of the Secret Service took over, and 
almost immediately fired most of Wood's pioneer 
Secret Service agents:   Operatives, Assistants and 
Informants alike.  The practice of receiving $25 per 
crook was abolished.   And the Secret Service began 
the long, uncertain process of thorough 
professionalization.

	Wood ended badly.  He must have felt stabbed 
in the back.  In fact his entire organization was 
mangled.

	On the other hand, William P. Wood *was* the 
first head of the Secret Service.  William Wood was 
the pioneer.  People still honor his name.  Who 
remembers the name of the *second* head of the 
Secret Service?

	As for William Brockway (also known as 
"Colonel Spencer"), he was finally arrested by the 
Secret Service in 1880.  He did five years in prison, 
got out, and was still boodling at the age of seventy-
four.
	
				#

	Anyone with an interest in  Operation Sundevil -
- or in American computer-crime generally -- could 
scarcely miss the presence of Gail Thackeray, 
Assistant Attorney General of the State of Arizona.   
Computer-crime training manuals often cited 
Thackeray's group and her work;  she was the 
highest-ranking state official to specialize in 
computer-related offenses.   Her name had been on 
the Sundevil press release (though modestly ranked 
well after the local federal prosecuting attorney and 
the head of the Phoenix Secret Service office).

	As public commentary, and controversy, began 
to mount about the Hacker Crackdown, this 
Arizonan state official began to take a higher and 
higher public profile.  Though uttering almost 
nothing specific about the Sundevil operation itself,  
she coined some of the most striking soundbites of 
the growing propaganda war:  "Agents are operating 
in good faith, and I don't think you can say that for 
the hacker community," was one.  Another was the 
memorable "I am not a mad dog prosecutor"  
(*Houston Chronicle,*  Sept 2, 1990.)  In the 
meantime, the Secret Service maintained its usual 
extreme discretion; the Chicago Unit, smarting from 
the backlash of the Steve Jackson scandal, had gone 
completely to earth.

	As I collated my growing pile of newspaper 
clippings, Gail Thackeray ranked as a comparative 
fount of public knowledge on police operations.

	I decided that I  had to get to know Gail 
Thackeray.   I wrote to her at the Arizona Attorney 
General's Office.   Not only did she kindly reply to 
me, but, to my astonishment, she knew very well 
what "cyberpunk" science fiction was.

	Shortly after this, Gail Thackeray lost her job.   
And I temporarily misplaced my own career as a 
science-fiction writer, to become a full-time 
computer-crime journalist.   In early March, 1991, I 
flew to Phoenix, Arizona, to interview Gail Thackeray 
for my book on the hacker crackdown.  
		
					#

	"Credit cards didn't used to cost anything to 
get," says Gail Thackeray.  "Now they cost forty 
bucks -- and that's all just to cover the costs from 
*rip-off artists.*"

	Electronic nuisance criminals are parasites.  
One by one they're not much harm, no big deal.  But 
they never come just one by one. They come in 
swarms, heaps, legions, sometimes whole 
subcultures.  And they bite.  Every time we buy a 
credit card today, we lose a little financial vitality to a 
particular species of bloodsucker.

	What, in her expert opinion, are the worst forms 
of electronic crime, I ask, consulting my notes.  Is it -- 
credit card fraud?  Breaking into ATM bank 
machines?  Phone-phreaking?  Computer 
intrusions?  Software viruses?  Access-code theft? 
Records tampering?  Software piracy?  Pornographic 
bulletin boards? Satellite TV piracy?  Theft of cable 
service?   It's a long list.  By the time I reach the end 
of it I feel rather depressed.

	"Oh no," says Gail Thackeray, leaning forward 
over the table, her whole body gone stiff with 
energetic indignation, "the biggest damage is 
telephone fraud.  Fake sweepstakes, fake charities.  
Boiler-room con operations.  You could pay off the 
national debt with what these guys steal....  They 
target old people, they get hold of credit ratings and 
demographics, they rip off the old and the weak."   
The words come tumbling out of her.

	It's low-tech stuff, your everyday boiler-room 
fraud.  Grifters, conning people out of money over 
the phone, have been around for decades.  This is 
where the word "phony" came from!

	It's just that it's so much *easier* now, horribly 
facilitated by advances in technology and the 
byzantine structure of the modern phone system.  
The same professional fraudsters do it over and 
over, Thackeray tells me, they hide behind dense 
onion-shells of fake companies.... fake holding 
corporations nine or ten layers deep, registered all 
over the map.  They get a phone installed under a 
false name in an empty safe-house.  And then they 
call-forward everything out of that phone to yet 
another phone,  a phone that may even be in 
another *state.*  And they don't even pay the 
charges on their phones; after a month or so, they 
just split.  Set up somewhere else in another  
Podunkville with the same seedy crew of veteran 
phone-crooks.  They buy or steal commercial credit 
card reports, slap them on the PC, have a program 
pick out people over sixty-five  who pay a lot to 
charities.  A whole subculture living off this, 
merciless folks on the con.

	"The 'light-bulbs for the blind' people," 
Thackeray muses, with a special loathing.  "There's 
just no end to them."

	We're sitting in a downtown diner in Phoenix, 
Arizona.  It's a tough town, Phoenix.  A state capital 
seeing some hard times.  Even to a Texan like 
myself, Arizona state politics seem rather baroque.  
There was, and remains, endless trouble over the 
Martin Luther King holiday, the sort of stiff-necked, 
foot-shooting incident for which Arizona politics 
seem famous.  There was Evan Mecham, the 
eccentric Republican millionaire governor who was 
impeached, after reducing state government to a 
ludicrous shambles.  Then there was the national 
Keating scandal, involving Arizona savings and 
loans, in which both  of Arizona's  U.S. senators, 
DeConcini and McCain, played sadly prominent 
roles.

	And the very latest is the bizarre AzScam case, 
in which state legislators were videotaped, eagerly 
taking cash from an informant of the Phoenix city 
police department, who was posing as a Vegas 
mobster.

	"Oh," says Thackeray cheerfully.  "These people 
are amateurs here, they thought they were finally 
getting to play with the big boys.  They don't have the 
least idea how to take a bribe!  It's not institutional 
corruption.  It's not  like back in Philly."

	Gail Thackeray was a former prosecutor in 
Philadelphia.  Now she's a former assistant attorney 
general of the State of Arizona.  Since  moving to 
Arizona in 1986, she had worked under the aegis of 
Steve Twist,  her boss in the Attorney General's 
office.  Steve Twist wrote Arizona's pioneering 
computer crime laws and naturally took an interest 
in seeing them enforced. It was a snug niche, and 
Thackeray's Organized Crime and Racketeering 
Unit won a national reputation for ambition and 
technical knowledgeability....  Until the latest 
election in Arizona.  Thackeray's boss ran for the top 
job, and lost.  The victor, the new Attorney General, 
apparently went to some pains to eliminate the 
bureaucratic traces of his rival, including his pet 
group -- Thackeray's group.   Twelve people got their 
walking papers.

	Now Thackeray's painstakingly assembled 
computer lab sits gathering dust somewhere in the 
glass-and-concrete Attorney General's HQ on 1275 
Washington Street.  Her computer-crime books, her 
painstakingly garnered back issues of phreak and 
hacker zines, all bought at her own expense -- are 
piled in boxes somewhere.  The State of Arizona is 
simply not particularly interested in electronic 
racketeering at the moment.

	At the moment of our interview, Gail Thackeray, 
officially unemployed, is working out of the county 
sheriff's office, living on her savings, and prosecuting 
several cases -- working 60-hour weeks, just as always 
-- for no pay at all.  "I'm trying to train people," she 
mutters.

	Half her life seems to be spent training people -
- merely pointing out, to the naive and incredulous 
(such as myself) that this stuff is *actually going on 
out there.*  It's a small world, computer crime.  A 
young world.   Gail Thackeray, a trim blonde Baby-
Boomer who favors Grand Canyon white-water 
rafting to kill some slow time, is one of the world's 
most senior, most veteran "hacker-trackers."   Her 
mentor was Donn Parker,  the California think-tank 
theorist who got it all started 'way back in the mid-
70s, the "grandfather of the field,"  "the great bald 
eagle of computer crime."

	And what she has learned, Gail Thackeray 
teaches.  Endlessly. Tirelessly.  To anybody.  To 
Secret Service agents and state police, at the Glynco, 
Georgia federal training center.  To local police, on 
"roadshows" with her slide projector and notebook.  
To corporate security personnel.  To journalists.  To 
parents.

	 Even *crooks* look to Gail Thackeray for advice.  
Phone-phreaks call her at the office.  They know very 
well who she is.  They pump her for information on 
what the cops are up to, how much they know.  
Sometimes whole *crowds* of phone phreaks, 
hanging out on illegal conference calls, will call Gail 
Thackeray up.  They taunt her.  And, as always, they 
boast.  Phone-phreaks, real stone phone-phreaks, 
simply *cannot shut up.*  They natter on for hours.

	Left to themselves, they mostly talk about the 
intricacies of ripping-off phones; it's about as 
interesting as listening to hot-rodders talk about 
suspension and distributor-caps.  They also gossip 
cruelly about each other.  And when talking to Gail 
Thackeray, they incriminate themselves.   "I have 
tapes," Thackeray says coolly.

	Phone phreaks just talk like crazy.  "Dial-Tone" 
out in Alabama has been known to spend half-an-
hour simply reading stolen phone-codes aloud into 
voice-mail answering machines.  Hundreds, 
thousands of numbers, recited in a monotone, 
without a break -- an eerie phenomenon.  When 
arrested, it's a rare phone phreak who doesn't 
inform at endless length on everybody he knows.

	Hackers are no better.  What other group of 
criminals, she asks rhetorically, publishes 
newsletters and holds conventions?   She seems 
deeply nettled by the sheer brazenness of this 
behavior, though to an outsider, this activity might 
make one wonder whether hackers should be 
considered "criminals" at all.  Skateboarders have 
magazines, and they trespass a lot.  Hot rod people 
have magazines and they break speed limits and 
sometimes kill people....

	I ask her whether it would be any loss to society 
if phone phreaking and computer hacking, as 
hobbies, simply dried up and blew away, so that 
nobody ever did it again.

	She seems surprised.  "No," she says swiftly.  
"Maybe a little... in the old days... the MIT stuff...  But 
there's a lot of wonderful, legal stuff you can do with 
computers now, you don't have to break into 
somebody else's just to learn.  You don't have that 
excuse. You can learn all you like."

	Did you ever hack into a system? I ask.

	The trainees do it at Glynco.  Just to 
demonstrate system vulnerabilities.  She's cool to 
the notion.  Genuinely indifferent.

	"What kind of computer do you have?"

	"A Compaq 286LE," she mutters.

	"What kind do you *wish* you had?"

	At this question, the unmistakable light of true 
hackerdom flares in Gail Thackeray's eyes.  She 
becomes tense, animated, the words pour out:  "An 
Amiga 2000 with an IBM card and Mac emulation!  
The most common hacker machines are Amigas 
and Commodores.  And Apples."  If she had the 
Amiga, she enthuses, she could run a whole galaxy 
of seized computer-evidence disks on one 
convenient multifunctional machine.  A cheap one, 
too.  Not like the old Attorney General lab, where 
they had an ancient CP/M machine, assorted 
Amiga flavors and Apple flavors, a couple IBMS, all 
the utility software... but no Commodores.  The 
workstations down at the Attorney General's are 
Wang dedicated word-processors.  Lame machines 
tied in to an office net --  though at least they get on-
line to the Lexis and Westlaw legal data services.

	I don't say anything.  I recognize the syndrome, 
though.  This computer-fever has been running 
through segments of our society for years now.  It's a 
strange kind of lust: K-hunger, Meg-hunger; but it's 
a shared disease; it can kill parties dead, as 
conversation spirals into the deepest and most 
deviant recesses of software releases and expensive 
peripherals....  The mark of the hacker beast.  I have 
it too.  The whole "electronic community," whatever 
the hell that is, has it.  Gail Thackeray has it.  Gail 
Thackeray is a hacker cop.   My immediate reaction 
is a strong rush of indignant pity:  *why doesn't 
somebody buy this woman her Amiga?!*   It's not 
like she's asking for a Cray X-MP supercomputer 
mainframe; an Amiga's a sweet little  cookie-box 
thing.  We're losing zillions in organized fraud; 
prosecuting and defending a single hacker case in 
court can cost a hundred grand easy.  How come 
nobody can come up with four lousy grand so this 
woman can do her job?  For a hundred grand we 
could buy every computer cop in America an Amiga.  
There aren't that many of 'em.

	Computers.  The lust, the hunger, for 
computers.  The loyalty they inspire, the intense 
sense of possessiveness.   The culture they have 
bred.  I myself am sitting in  downtown Phoenix, 
Arizona because it suddenly occurred to me that the 
police might -- just *might* -- come and take away 
my computer.  The prospect of this, the mere 
*implied threat,*  was unbearable.  It literally 
changed my life.  It was changing the lives of many 
others.  Eventually it would change everybody's life.

	Gail Thackeray was one of the top computer-
crime people in America.  And I was just some 
novelist, and yet I had a better computer than hers.  
*Practically everybody I knew*  had a better 
computer than Gail Thackeray and her feeble 
laptop 286.  It was like sending the sheriff in to clean 
up Dodge City and arming her with a slingshot cut 
from an old rubber tire.

	But then again, you don't need a howitzer to 
enforce the law.  You can do a lot just with a badge.  
With a badge alone, you can basically wreak havoc, 
take a terrible vengeance on wrongdoers.  Ninety 
percent of "computer crime investigation" is just 
"crime investigation:" names, places, dossiers, 
modus operandi, search warrants, victims, 
complainants, informants...

	What will computer crime look like in ten 
years?  Will it get better?  Did "Sundevil" send 'em 
reeling back in confusion?

	It'll be like it is now,  only worse, she tells me 
with perfect conviction.  Still there in the 
background, ticking along, changing with the times: 
the criminal underworld.  It'll be like drugs are.  Like 
our problems with alcohol.  All the cops and laws in 
the world never solved our problems with alcohol.  If 
there's something people want, a certain percentage 
of them are just going to take it.  Fifteen percent of 
the populace will never steal.  Fifteen percent will 
steal most anything not nailed down.  The battle is 
for the hearts and minds of the remaining seventy 
percent.

	And criminals catch on fast.  If there's not "too 
steep a learning curve" -- if it doesn't require a 
baffling amount of expertise and practice -- then 
criminals are often some of the first through the gate 
of a new technology.  Especially if it helps them to 
hide.  They have tons of cash, criminals.  The new  
communications tech -- like pagers, cellular phones, 
faxes, Federal Express -- were pioneered by rich 
corporate people, and by criminals.  In the early 
years of pagers and beepers, dope dealers were so 
enthralled this technology that owing a beeper was 
practically prima facie evidence of cocaine dealing.  
CB radio exploded when the speed limit hit 55 and 
breaking the highway law became a national 
pastime.  Dope dealers send cash by  Federal 
Express, despite, or perhaps *because of,* the 
warnings in FedEx offices that tell you never to try 
this.  Fed Ex uses X-rays and dogs on their mail, to 
stop drug shipments.  That doesn't work very well.

	Drug dealers went wild over cellular phones.  
There are simple methods of faking ID on cellular 
phones, making the location of the call mobile, free 
of charge, and effectively untraceable.  Now 
victimized cellular companies routinely bring in vast 
toll-lists of calls to Colombia and Pakistan.

	Judge Greene's fragmentation of the phone 
company is driving law enforcement nuts.  Four 
thousand telecommunications companies.  Fraud 
skyrocketing.  Every temptation in the world 
available with a phone and a credit card number.  
Criminals untraceable.  A galaxy of "new neat rotten 
things to do."

	 If there were one thing Thackeray would like to 
have, it would be an effective legal end-run through 
this new fragmentation minefield.

	  It would be a new form of electronic search 
warrant, an "electronic letter of marque" to be issued 
by a judge.  It would create a new category of 
"electronic emergency."   Like a wiretap, its use 
would be rare, but it would cut across state lines and 
force swift cooperation from all concerned.  Cellular, 
phone, laser, computer network, PBXes, AT&T, Baby 
Bells, long-distance entrepreneurs, packet radio.  
Some document, some mighty court-order, that 
could slice through four thousand separate forms of 
corporate red-tape, and get her at once to the source 
of calls, the source of email threats and viruses, the 
sources of bomb threats, kidnapping threats.  "From 
now on," she says, "the Lindberg baby will always 
die."

	Something that would make the Net sit still, if 
only for a moment.  Something that would get her up 
to speed.  Seven league boots.  That's what she really 
needs.  "Those guys move in nanoseconds and I'm 
on the Pony Express."

	And then, too, there's the  coming international 
angle.  Electronic crime has never been easy to 
localize, to tie to a physical jurisdiction.  And phone-
phreaks and hackers loathe boundaries, they jump 
them whenever they can.  The English.  The Dutch.  
And the Germans, especially the ubiquitous Chaos 
Computer Club.  The Australians.  They've all 
learned phone-phreaking from America.  It's a 
growth mischief industry.  The multinational 
networks are global, but governments and the police 
simply aren't.  Neither are the laws.  Or the legal 
frameworks for citizen protection.

 	One language is global, though -- English.  
Phone phreaks speak English; it's their native 
tongue even if they're Germans.  English may have 
started in England but now it's the Net language; it 
might as well be called "CNNese."

	Asians just aren't much into phone phreaking.  
They're the world masters at organized software 
piracy.  The French aren't into phone-phreaking 
either.  The French are into computerized industrial 
espionage.

	In the old days of the MIT righteous 
hackerdom, crashing systems didn't hurt anybody.  
Not all that much, anyway.  Not permanently.  Now 
the players are more venal.  Now the consequences 
are worse.  Hacking will begin killing people soon.  
Already there are methods of stacking calls onto 911 
systems, annoying the police, and possibly causing 
the death of some poor soul calling in with a genuine 
emergency.  Hackers in Amtrak computers, or air-
traffic control computers, will kill somebody 
someday.  Maybe a lot of people.  Gail Thackeray 
expects it.

	And the viruses are getting nastier.  The "Scud" 
virus is the latest one out.  It wipes hard-disks.

	According to Thackeray, the idea that phone-
phreaks are Robin Hoods is a fraud.  They don't 
deserve this repute.   Basically, they pick on the 
weak.  AT&T now protects itself with the fearsome 
ANI (Automatic Number Identification) trace 
capability.  When AT&T wised up and tightened 
security generally, the phreaks drifted into the Baby 
Bells.  The Baby Bells lashed out in 1989 and 1990, so 
the phreaks switched to smaller long-distance 
entrepreneurs.  Today, they are moving into locally 
owned PBXes and voice-mail systems, which are full 
of security holes, dreadfully easy to hack.  These 
victims aren't the moneybags Sheriff of Nottingham 
or Bad King John, but small groups of innocent 
people who find it hard to protect themselves, and 
who really suffer from these depredations.  Phone 
phreaks pick on the weak.  They do it for power.  If it 
were legal, they wouldn't do it.  They don't want 
service, or knowledge, they want the thrill of power-
tripping.   There's plenty of knowledge or service 
around, if you're willing to pay.  Phone phreaks don't 
pay, they steal.  It's because it is illegal that it feels 
like power, that it gratifies their vanity.

	I leave Gail Thackeray with a handshake at the 
door of her office building -- a vast International-
Style office building downtown.  The Sheriff's office is 
renting part of it.  I get the vague impression that 
quite a lot of the building is empty -- real estate 
crash.

	In a Phoenix sports apparel store, in a downtown 
mall, I meet the "Sun Devil" himself.  He is the 
cartoon mascot of Arizona State University, whose 
football stadium, "Sundevil," is near the local Secret 
Service HQ -- hence the name Operation Sundevil.  
The Sun Devil himself is named "Sparky."  Sparky 
the Sun Devil is maroon and bright yellow, the 
school colors.  Sparky brandishes a three-tined 
yellow pitchfork.  He has a small mustache, pointed 
ears, a barbed tail, and is dashing forward jabbing 
the air with the pitchfork, with an expression of 
devilish glee.

	Phoenix was the home of Operation Sundevil.  
The Legion of Doom ran a hacker bulletin board 
called "The Phoenix Project."  An Australian hacker 
named "Phoenix"  once burrowed through the 
Internet to attack Cliff Stoll, then bragged and 
boasted about it to *The New York Times.*  This net 
of coincidence is both odd and meaningless.

	The headquarters of the Arizona Attorney 
General, Gail Thackeray's former workplace, is on 
1275 Washington Avenue.  Many of the downtown 
streets in Phoenix are named after prominent 
American presidents:  Washington, Jefferson, 
Madison....

	After dark, all the employees go home to their 
suburbs.  Washington, Jefferson and Madison -- 
what would be the Phoenix inner city, if there were 
an inner city in this sprawling automobile-bred town 
--  become the haunts of transients and derelicts.  
The homeless. The sidewalks along Washington are 
lined with orange trees.  Ripe fallen fruit lies 
scattered like croquet balls on the sidewalks and 
gutters.  No one seems to be eating them.  I try a 
fresh one.  It tastes unbearably bitter.

          The Attorney General's office, built in 1981 
during the Babbitt administration,  is a long low two-
story building of white cement and wall-sized sheets 
of curtain-glass.  Behind each glass wall is a lawyer's 
office, quite open and visible to anyone strolling by.  
Across the street is a dour government building 
labelled simply ECONOMIC SECURITY, something 
that has not been in great supply in the American 
Southwest lately.

 	The offices  are about twelve feet square.  They 
feature tall wooden cases full of red-spined 
lawbooks; Wang computer monitors; telephones; 
Post-it notes galore.  Also framed law diplomas and a 
general excess of bad Western landscape art.  Ansel 
Adams photos are a big favorite, perhaps to 
compensate for the dismal specter of the parking-
lot, two acres of striped black asphalt, which features 
gravel landscaping and some sickly-looking barrel 
cacti.

	It has grown dark.  Gail Thackeray has told me 
that the people who work late here, are afraid of 
muggings in the parking lot.  It seems cruelly ironic 
that a woman tracing electronic racketeers across 
the interstate labyrinth of Cyberspace should fear 
an assault by a homeless derelict in the parking lot 
of her own workplace.

	Perhaps this is less than coincidence.  Perhaps 
these two seemingly disparate worlds are somehow 
generating one another.  The poor and 
disenfranchised take to the streets, while the rich 
and computer-equipped, safe in their bedrooms, 
chatter over their modems.  Quite often the derelicts 
kick the glass out and break in to the lawyers' offices, 
if they see something they need or want badly 
enough.

	I cross  the parking lot to the street behind the 
Attorney General's office.  A pair of young tramps 
are bedding down on flattened sheets of cardboard, 
under an alcove stretching over the sidewalk.  One 
tramp wears a glitter-covered T-shirt reading 
"CALIFORNIA" in Coca-Cola cursive.  His nose and 
cheeks look chafed and swollen; they glisten with 
what seems to be Vaseline.  The other tramp has a 
ragged long-sleeved shirt and lank brown hair 
parted in the middle. They both wear blue jeans 
coated in grime.  They are both drunk.

	"You guys crash here a lot?" I ask them.

	They look at me warily.  I am wearing black 
jeans, a black pinstriped suit jacket and a black silk 
tie.  I have odd shoes and a funny haircut.

	"It's our first time here," says the red-nosed 
tramp unconvincingly. There is a lot of cardboard 
stacked here.  More than any two people could use.

	"We usually stay at the Vinnie's down the 
street," says the brown-haired tramp, puffing a 
Marlboro with a meditative air, as he sprawls with his 
head on a blue nylon backpack.  "The Saint 
Vincent's."

	"You know who works in that building over 
there?"  I ask, pointing.

	The brown-haired tramp shrugs.  "Some kind of 
attorneys, it says."

`	We urge one another to take it easy.  I give 
them five bucks.

	A block down the street I meet a vigorous 
workman who is wheeling along some kind of 
industrial trolley; it has what appears to be a tank of 
propane on it.

	 We make eye contact.  We nod politely.  I walk 
past him.  "Hey!  Excuse me sir!" he says.

	"Yes?" I say, stopping and turning.

	"Have you seen," the guy says rapidly, "a black 
guy, about 6'7", scars on both his cheeks like this --" 
he gestures --  "wears a black baseball cap on 
backwards, wandering around here anyplace?"

	"Sounds like I don't much *want* to meet him," I 
say.

	"He took my wallet," says my new acquaintance.  
"Took it this morning.  Y'know, some people would 
be *scared* of a guy like that.  But I'm not scared.  
I'm from Chicago.  I'm gonna hunt him down.  We 
do things like that in Chicago."

	"Yeah?"

	"I went to the cops and now he's got an APB out 
on his ass," he says with satisfaction.  "You run into 
him, you let me know."

	"Okay," I say.  "What is your name, sir?"

	"Stanley...."

	"And how can I reach you?"

	"Oh," Stanley says, in the same rapid voice, "you 
don't have to reach, uh, me.  You can just call the 
cops.  Go straight to the cops." He reaches into a 
pocket and pulls out a greasy piece of pasteboard.  
"See, here's my report on him."

	I look.  The "report," the size of an index card, is 
labelled PRO-ACT:  Phoenix Residents Opposing 
Active Crime Threat.... or is it  Organized Against 
Crime Threat?  In the darkening street it's hard to 
read.  Some kind of vigilante group?  Neighborhood 
watch?  I feel very puzzled.

	"Are you a police officer, sir?"

	He smiles, seems very pleased by the question.

	"No," he says.

`	"But you are a 'Phoenix Resident?'"

	"Would you believe a homeless person," 
Stanley says.

	"Really?  But what's with the..."   For the first 
time I take a close look at Stanley's trolley.  It's a 
rubber-wheeled thing of industrial metal, but the 
device I had mistaken for a tank of propane is in fact 
a water-cooler.  Stanley also has an Army duffel-bag, 
stuffed tight as a sausage with clothing or perhaps a 
tent, and, at the base of his trolley, a cardboard box 
and a battered leather briefcase.

	"I see," I say, quite at a loss.  For the first time I 
notice that Stanley has a wallet.  He has not lost his 
wallet at all.  It is in his back pocket and chained to 
his belt.  It's not a new wallet.  It seems to have seen 
a lot of wear.

	"Well, you know how it is, brother," says Stanley.  
Now that I know that he is homeless -- *a possible 
threat* --  my entire perception of him has changed 
in an instant.   His speech, which once seemed just 
bright and enthusiastic, now seems to have a 
dangerous tang of mania.  "I have to do this!" he 
assures me.  "Track this guy down... It's a thing I do... 
you know... to keep myself together!"  He smiles, 
nods, lifts his trolley by its decaying rubber 
handgrips.

	"Gotta work together, y'know, "  Stanley booms, 
his face alight with cheerfulness, "the police can't do 
everything!"

	The gentlemen I met in my stroll in downtown 
Phoenix are the only computer illiterates in this 
book.  To regard them as irrelevant, however, would 
be a grave mistake.

	As computerization spreads across society, the 
populace at large is subjected to wave after wave of 
future shock.  But, as a necessary converse, the 
"computer community" itself is subjected to wave 
after wave of incoming computer illiterates.   How 
will those currently enjoying America's digital 
bounty regard, and treat, all this teeming refuse 
yearning to breathe free?  Will the electronic 
frontier be another Land of Opportunity -- or an 
armed and monitored enclave, where the 
disenfranchised snuggle on their cardboard at the 
locked doors of our houses of justice?

	Some people just don't get along with 
computers.  They can't read.  They can't type.  They 
just don't have it in their heads to master arcane 
instructions in wirebound manuals.   Somewhere, 
the process of computerization of the populace will 
reach a limit.  Some people -- quite decent people 
maybe, who might have thrived in any other 
situation -- will be left irretrievably outside the 
bounds.   What's to be done with these people, in 
the bright new shiny electroworld?  How will they be 
regarded, by the mouse-whizzing masters of 
cyberspace?  With contempt?  Indifference?  Fear?

	In retrospect, it astonishes me to realize how 
quickly poor Stanley became a  perceived threat.  
Surprise and fear are closely allied feelings.  And the 
world of computing is full of surprises.

	I met one character in the streets of Phoenix 
whose role in those book is supremely and directly 
relevant.  That personage was Stanley's giant 
thieving scarred phantom.  This phantasm is 
everywhere in this book.  He is the specter haunting 
cyberspace.

	Sometimes he's a maniac vandal ready to 
smash the phone system for no sane reason at all.  
Sometimes he's a fascist fed, coldly programming 
his mighty mainframes to destroy our Bill of Rights.  
Sometimes he's a telco bureaucrat, covertly 
conspiring to register all modems in the service of 
an Orwellian surveillance regime.   Mostly, though, 
this fearsome phantom is a "hacker."   He's strange, 
he doesn't belong, he's not authorized, he doesn't 
smell right, he's not keeping his proper place, he's 
not one of us.  The focus of fear is the hacker, for 
much the same reasons that Stanley's fancied 
assailant is black.

	Stanley's demon can't go away, because he 
doesn't exist.  Despite singleminded and 
tremendous effort, he can't be arrested, sued, jailed, 
or fired.  The only constructive way to do *anything* 
about him is to learn more about Stanley himself.  
This learning process may be repellent, it may be 
ugly, it may involve grave elements of paranoiac 
confusion, but it's necessary.  Knowing Stanley 
requires something more than class-crossing 
condescension.  It requires more than steely legal 
objectivity.  It requires  human compassion and 
sympathy.

	To know Stanley is to know his demon.  If you 
know the other guy's demon, then maybe you'll 
come to know some of your own.   You'll be able to 
separate reality from illusion.   And then you won't 
do your cause, and yourself, more harm than good.   
Like poor damned Stanley from Chicago did. 

					#

	The Federal Computer Investigations 
Committee (FCIC) is the most important and 
influential organization in the realm of American 
computer-crime.  Since the police of other countries 
have largely taken their computer-crime cues from 
American methods, the FCIC might well be called 
the most important computer crime group in the 
world.

	It is also, by federal standards, an organization 
of great unorthodoxy.  State and local investigators 
mix with federal agents.   Lawyers, financial auditors 
and computer-security programmers trade notes 
with street cops.  Industry vendors and telco security 
people show up to explain their gadgetry and plead 
for protection and justice.   Private investigators, 
think-tank experts and industry pundits throw in 
their two cents' worth.   The FCIC is the antithesis of 
a formal bureaucracy.

	Members of the FCIC are obscurely proud of 
this fact; they recognize their group as aberrant,  but 
are entirely convinced that this, for them, outright 
*weird* behavior is nevertheless *absolutely 
necessary* to get their jobs done.

	FCIC regulars  -- from the Secret Service, the 
FBI, the IRS, the Department of Labor, the offices of 
federal attorneys, state police, the Air Force, from 
military intelligence --  often attend meetings, held 
hither and thither across the country,  at their own 
expense.  The FCIC doesn't get grants.  It doesn't 
charge membership fees.  It doesn't have a boss.  It 
has no headquarters -- just a mail drop in 
Washington DC, at the Fraud Division of the Secret 
Service.  It doesn't have a budget.  It doesn't have 
schedules.  It meets three times a year -- sort of.   
Sometimes it issues publications, but the FCIC has 
no regular publisher,  no treasurer, not even a 
secretary.   There are no minutes of FCIC  meetings.   
Non-federal people are considered "non-voting 
members,"  but there's not much in the way of 
elections.  There are no badges, lapel pins or 
certificates of membership.   Everyone is on a first-
name basis.   There are about forty of them.  Nobody 
knows how many, exactly.  People come, people go -- 
sometimes people "go" formally but still hang 
around anyway.  Nobody has ever exactly figured 
out what "membership" of this "Committee"  
actually entails.

	Strange as this may seem to some, to anyone 
familiar with the social world of computing, the 
"organization" of the FCIC is very recognizable.

	 For years now, economists and management 
theorists have speculated that the tidal wave of the 
information revolution would destroy rigid, 
pyramidal bureaucracies, where everything is top-
down and centrally controlled.   Highly trained 
"employees" would take on much greater autonomy,  
being self-starting, and self-motivating,  moving 
from place to place, task to task, with great speed 
and fluidity.  "Ad-hocracy" would rule, with groups of 
people spontaneously knitting together across 
organizational lines, tackling the problem at hand, 
applying intense computer-aided expertise to it, and 
then vanishing whence they came.

	This is more or less what has actually happened 
in the world of federal computer investigation.  With 
the conspicuous exception of the phone companies, 
which are after all over a hundred years old,  
practically *every* organization that plays any 
important role in this book functions just like the 
FCIC.    The Chicago Task Force, the Arizona 
Racketeering Unit, the Legion of Doom, the Phrack 
crowd, the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- they 
*all* look and act like "tiger teams" or "user's 
groups."  They are all electronic ad-hocracies 
leaping up spontaneously to attempt to meet a 
need.

	 Some are police.  Some are, by strict definition, 
criminals.  Some are political interest-groups.   But 
every single group has that same quality of apparent 
spontaneity -- "Hey, gang!  My uncle's got a barn -- 
let's put on a show!"

	Every one of these groups is embarrassed by 
this "amateurism," and, for the sake of their public 
image in a world of non-computer people,  they all 
attempt to look as stern and formal and impressive 
as possible.    These electronic frontier-dwellers 
resemble groups of nineteenth-century pioneers 
hankering after the respectability of statehood.  
There are however,  two crucial differences in the 
historical experience of these "pioneers" of the 
nineteeth and twenty-first centuries.

	  First, powerful information technology *does* 
play into the hands of small, fluid, loosely organized 
groups.  There have always been "pioneers," 
"hobbyists," "amateurs," "dilettantes," "volunteers," 
"movements," "users' groups" and "blue-ribbon 
panels of experts" around.   But a group of this kind -
- when technically equipped to ship huge amounts 
of specialized information, at lightning speed, to its 
members, to government, and to the press -- is 
simply a different kind of animal.   It's like the 
difference between an eel and an electric eel.

	The second crucial change is that American 
society is currently in a state  approaching 
permanent technological revolution.  In the world of 
computers particularly,  it is practically impossible to 
*ever* stop being a  "pioneer," unless you either 
drop dead or deliberately jump off the bus.  The 
scene has never slowed down enough to become 
well-institutionalized.  And after twenty, thirty, forty 
years the "computer revolution" continues to spread, 
to permeate new corners of society.   Anything that 
really works is already obsolete.

	If you spend your entire working life as a 
"pioneer," the word "pioneer" begins to lose its 
meaning.  Your way of life looks less and less like an 
introduction to something else" more stable and 
organized,  and more and more like *just the way 
things are.*   A "permanent revolution" is really a 
contradiction in terms.  If "turmoil"  lasts long 
enough, it simply becomes *a new kind of society*  -- 
still the same game of history, but new players, new 
rules.

	Apply this to the world of late twentieth-century 
law enforcement, and the implications are  novel 
and puzzling indeed.  Any bureaucratic rulebook 
you write about computer-crime will be flawed when 
you write it, and almost an antique by the time it 
sees print.   The fluidity and fast reactions of the 
FCIC give them a great advantage in this regard, 
which explains their success.  Even with the best will 
in the world (which it does not, in fact, possess) it is 
impossible for an organization the size of the U.S. 
Federal Bureau of Investigation to get up to speed 
on the theory and practice of computer crime.   If 
they tried to train all their agents to do this, it would 
be *suicidal,*  as they would *never be able to do 
anything else.*
 
	 The FBI does try to train its agents in the basics 
of electronic crime, at their base in Quantico, 
Virginia.   And the Secret Service, along with many 
other law enforcement groups, runs quite successful 
and well-attended training courses on wire fraud, 
business crime, and computer intrusion  at the 
Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC, 
pronounced "fletsy") in Glynco, Georgia.   But the 
best efforts of these bureaucracies does not remove 
the absolute need for a "cutting-edge mess" like the 
FCIC.

	For you see -- the members of FCIC *are* the 
trainers of the rest of law enforcement.  Practically 
and literally speaking, they are the Glynco  
computer-crime faculty by another name.  If the 
FCIC went over a cliff on a bus, the U.S. law 
enforcement community would be rendered deaf 
dumb and blind in the world of computer crime, and 
would swiftly feel a desperate need to reinvent them.  
And this is no time to go starting from scratch.

	On June 11, 1991, I once again arrived in 
Phoenix, Arizona, for the latest meeting of the 
Federal Computer Investigations Committee.  This 
was more or less the twentieth meeting of this stellar 
group.   The count was uncertain, since nobody  
could figure out whether to include the meetings of 
"the Colluquy," which is what the FCIC was called in 
the mid-1980s before it had even managed to obtain 
the dignity of its own acronym.

	Since my last visit to Arizona, in May, the local 
AzScam bribery scandal had resolved itself in a 
general muddle of humiliation.  The Phoenix chief of 
police, whose agents had videotaped nine state 
legislators up to no good, had resigned his office in a 
tussle with the Phoenix city council over the 
propriety of his undercover operations.

	The Phoenix Chief could now join Gail 
Thackeray and eleven of her closest associates in 
the shared experience of politically motivated 
unemployment.   As of June, resignations were still 
continuing at the Arizona Attorney General's office, 
which could be interpreted as either a New Broom 
Sweeping Clean or a Night of the Long Knives Part 
II, depending on your point of view.

	The meeting of FCIC was held at the Scottsdale 
Hilton Resort. Scottsdale is a wealthy suburb of  
Phoenix, known as "Scottsdull" to scoffing local 
trendies, but well-equipped with posh shopping-
malls and manicured lawns, while conspicuously 
undersupplied with homeless derelicts.   The 
Scottsdale Hilton Resort was a sprawling hotel in 
postmodern  crypto-Southwestern style.  It featured 
a "mission bell tower" plated in turquoise tile and 
vaguely resembling a Saudi minaret.

	Inside it was all barbarically striped Santa Fe 
Style decor.   There was a health spa downstairs and 
a large oddly-shaped pool in the patio.  A poolside 
umbrella-stand offered Ben and Jerry's politically 
correct Peace Pops.

	I registered as a member of FCIC, attaining a 
handy discount rate, then went in search of the Feds.  
Sure enough, at the back of the hotel grounds came 
the unmistakable sound of Gail Thackeray holding 
forth.

	Since I had also attended the Computers 
Freedom and Privacy conference (about which more 
later), this was the second time I had seen 
Thackeray in a group of her law enforcement 
colleagues.   Once again I was struck by how simply 
pleased they seemed to see her.   It was natural that 
she'd get *some* attention, as Gail was one of two 
women in a group of some thirty men; but there was 
a lot more to it than that.

	Gail Thackeray personifies the social glue of the 
FCIC.  They could give a damn about her losing her 
job with the Attorney General.  They were sorry 
about it, of course, but hell, they'd all lost jobs.   If 
they were the kind of guys who liked steady  boring 
jobs, they would never have gotten into computer 
work in the first place. 

	I wandered into her circle and was immediately 
introduced to five strangers.  The conditions of my 
visit at FCIC were reviewed.  I would not quote 
anyone directly.  I would not tie opinions expressed 
to the agencies of the attendees.  I would not (a 
purely hypothetical example) report the 
conversation of a guy from the Secret Service talking 
quite civilly to  a guy from the FBI, as these two 
agencies *never*  talk to each other, and the IRS 
(also present, also hypothetical) *never talks to 
anybody.*

	Worse yet, I was forbidden to attend the first 
conference.  And I didn't.  I have no idea what the 
FCIC was up to behind closed doors that afternoon.  
I rather suspect that they were engaging in a frank 
and thorough confession of their errors, goof-ups 
and blunders, as this has been a feature of every 
FCIC meeting since their legendary Memphis beer-
bust of 1986.  Perhaps the single greatest attraction 
of FCIC is that it is a place where you can go, let your 
hair down, and completely level with people who 
actually comprehend what you are talking about.  
Not only do they understand you, but they *really 
pay attention,*  they are *grateful for your insights,* 
and they *forgive you,*  which in nine cases out of 
ten is something even your boss can't do, because as 
soon as you start talking "ROM," "BBS," or "T-1 
trunk," his eyes glaze over.

	I had nothing much to do that afternoon.  The 
FCIC were beavering away in their  conference 
room.  Doors were firmly closed, windows too dark to 
peer through.  I wondered what a real hacker, a 
computer intruder, would do at a meeting like this.

	The answer came at once.  He would "trash" the 
place.  Not reduce the place to trash  in some orgy of 
vandalism; that's not the use of the term in the 
hacker milieu.  No, he would quietly *empty the 
trash baskets* and silently raid any valuable data 
indiscreetly thrown away.

	Journalists have been known to do this.  
(Journalists hunting information have been known 
to do almost every single unethical thing that 
hackers have ever done.  They also throw in a few 
awful techniques all their own.)  The legality of 
'trashing' is somewhat dubious but it is not in fact 
flagrantly illegal.   It was, however, absurd to 
contemplate trashing the FCIC.  These people knew 
all about trashing.   I wouldn't last fifteen seconds.

	The idea sounded interesting, though.   I'd been 
hearing a lot about the practice lately.  On the spur 
of the moment, I decided I would try trashing the 
office *across the hall*  from the FCIC, an area 
which had nothing to do with the investigators.

	The office was tiny; six chairs, a table....  
Nevertheless, it was open, so I dug around in its 
plastic trash can.

	To my utter astonishment, I came up with the 
torn scraps of a SPRINT long-distance phone bill.  
More digging produced a bank statement and the 
scraps of a hand-written letter, along with gum, 
cigarette ashes, candy wrappers and a day-old-issue 
of USA TODAY.

	The trash went back in its receptacle while the 
scraps of data went into  my travel bag.  I detoured 
through the hotel souvenir shop for some Scotch 
tape and went up to my room.

	Coincidence or not, it was quite true.  Some poor 
soul had, in fact, thrown a SPRINT bill into the 
hotel's trash.   Date May 1991, total amount due: 
$252.36.  Not a business phone, either, but a 
residential bill, in the name of someone called 
Evelyn (not her real name).  Evelyn's records showed 
a ## PAST DUE BILL ##!   Here was her nine-digit 
account ID.    Here was a stern computer-printed 
warning:

 "TREAT YOUR FONCARD AS YOU WOULD ANY 
CREDIT CARD.  TO SECURE AGAINST FRAUD, 
NEVER GIVE YOUR FONCARD NUMBER OVER 
THE PHONE UNLESS YOU INITIATED THE 
CALL.  IF YOU RECEIVE SUSPICIOUS CALLS 
PLEASE NOTIFY CUSTOMER SERVICE 
IMMEDIATELY!"

	I examined my watch.  Still plenty of time left for 
the FCIC to carry on.  I sorted out the scraps of 
Evelyn's SPRINT bill and re-assembled them with 
fresh Scotch tape.  Here was her ten-digit 
FONCARD number.   Didn't seem to have the ID 
number necessary to cause real fraud trouble.

	I did, however, have Evelyn's home phone 
number.  And the phone numbers for a whole crowd 
of Evelyn's long-distance friends and acquaintances.  
In San Diego, Folsom, Redondo, Las Vegas, La Jolla, 
Topeka, and Northampton Massachusetts.  Even 
somebody in Australia!

	I examined other documents.  Here was a bank 
statement.  It was Evelyn's IRA account down at a 
bank in San Mateo California (total balance 
$1877.20).  Here was a charge-card bill for $382.64.    
She was paying it off bit by bit.

	Driven by motives that were completely 
unethical and prurient, I now examined the 
handwritten notes.  They had been torn fairly 
thoroughly, so much so that it took me almost an 
entire five minutes to reassemble them.

	They were drafts of a love letter.  They had been 
written on the lined stationery of Evelyn's employer, 
a biomedical company.  Probably written at work 
when she should have been doing something else.

	"Dear Bob," (not his real name)  "I guess in 
everyone's life there comes a time when hard 
decisions have to be made, and this is a difficult one 
for me -- very upsetting.  Since you haven't called 
me, and I don't understand why, I can only surmise 
it's because you don't want to.  I thought I would 
have heard from you Friday.  I did have a few 
unusual problems with my phone and possibly you 
tried, I hope so.
	"Robert, you asked me to 'let go'..."

	The first note ended.  *Unusual problems with 
her phone?*  I looked swiftly at the next note.

	"Bob, not hearing from you for the whole 
weekend has left me very perplexed..."

	 Next draft. 

	"Dear Bob, there is so much I don't understand 
right now, and I wish I did.  I wish I could talk to you, 
but for some unknown reason you have elected not 
to call -- this is so difficult for me to understand..."

	She tried again.

	"Bob, Since I have always held you in such high 
esteem, I had every hope that we could remain good 
friends, but now one essential ingredient is missing -
- respect.  Your ability to discard people when their 
purpose is served is appalling to me.  The kindest 
thing you could do for me now is to leave me alone.  
You are no longer welcome in my heart or home..."

	Try again.

	"Bob, I wrote a very factual note to you to say 
how much respect I had lost for you, by the way you 
treat people, me in particular, so uncaring and cold.  
The kindest thing you can do for me is to leave me 
alone entirely, as you are no longer welcome in my 
heart or home. I would appreciate it if you could 
retire your debt to me as soon as possible -- I wish no 
link to you in any way.  Sincerely, Evelyn."

	Good heavens, I thought, the bastard actually 
owes her money!  I turned to the next page.

	"Bob:  very simple.  GOODBYE!  No more mind 
games -- no more fascination -- no more coldness -- 
no more respect for you!  It's over -- Finis.  Evie"

	There were two versions of the final brushoff 
letter, but they read about the same.  Maybe she 
hadn't sent it.  The final item in my illicit and 
shameful booty was an envelope addressed to "Bob" 
at his home address, but it had no stamp on it and it 
hadn't been mailed.

	Maybe she'd just been blowing off steam 
because her rascal boyfriend had neglected to call 
her one weekend.   Big deal.  Maybe they'd kissed 
and made up, maybe she and Bob were down at 
Pop's Chocolate Shop now, sharing a malted.  Sure.

	Easy to find out.  All I had to do was call Evelyn 
up.  With a half-clever story and enough brass-
plated gall I could probably trick the truth out of her.  
Phone-phreaks and hackers deceive people over the 
phone all the time.  It's called "social engineering."   
Social engineering is a very common practice in the 
underground, and almost magically effective.  
Human beings are almost always the weakest link in 
computer security.  The simplest way to learn Things 
You Are Not Meant To Know is simply to call up  
and exploit the knowledgeable people.   With social 
engineering, you use the bits of specialized  
knowledge you already have as a key, to manipulate 
people into believing that you are legitimate.  You 
can then coax, flatter, or frighten them into revealing 
almost anything you want to know.  Deceiving 
people (especially over the phone) is easy and fun.  
Exploiting their gullibility is very gratifying; it makes 
you feel very superior to them.

	If I'd been a  malicious hacker on a trashing 
raid, I would now have Evelyn very much in my 
power.  Given all this inside  data, it wouldn't take 
much effort at all to invent a convincing lie.  If I were 
ruthless enough, and jaded enough, and clever 
enough, this momentary indiscretion of hers -- 
maybe committed in tears, who knows -- could cause 
her a whole world of confusion and grief.

	I didn't even have to have a *malicious*  motive.   
Maybe I'd be "on her side," and call up Bob instead, 
and anonymously threaten to break both his 
kneecaps if he didn't take Evelyn out for a steak 
dinner pronto.   It was still profoundly *none of my 
business.*   To have gotten this knowledge at all was 
a sordid act and to use it would be to inflict a sordid 
injury.

	To do all these awful things would require 
exactly zero high-tech expertise.  All it would take 
was the willingness to do it and a certain amount of 
bent imagination.

	I went back downstairs. The hard-working FCIC, 
who had labored forty-five minutes over their 
schedule, were through for the day, and adjourned 
to the hotel bar.  We all had a beer.

	 I had a chat with a guy about "Isis," or rather 
IACIS, the International Association of Computer 
Investigation Specialists.  They're into "computer 
forensics,"  the techniques of picking computer-
systems apart without destroying vital evidence.  
IACIS, currently run out of Oregon, is comprised of 
investigators in the U.S., Canada, Taiwan and 
Ireland.  "Taiwan and Ireland?"  I said.  Are *Taiwan* 
and *Ireland*  really in the forefront of this stuff?  
Well not exactly, my informant admitted.  They just 
happen to have been the first ones to have caught 
on by word of mouth.  Still, the international angle 
counts, because this is obviously an international 
problem.  Phone-lines go everywhere.

	There was a Mountie here from the Royal 
Canadian Mounted Police.  He seemed to be having 
quite a good time.   Nobody had flung this Canadian 
out because he might pose a foreign security risk.  
These are cyberspace cops.  They still worry a lot 
about "jurisdictions," but mere geography is the 
least of their troubles.

	NASA had failed to show.  NASA suffers a lot 
from computer intrusions, in particular from 
Australian raiders and a well-trumpeted Chaos 
Computer Club case,  and in 1990 there was a brief 
press flurry when it was revealed that one of NASA's 
Houston branch-exchanges had been systematically 
ripped off by a gang of phone-phreaks.   But the 
NASA guys had had their funding cut.  They were 
stripping everything.

	Air Force OSI, its Office of Special 
Investigations, is the *only*  federal entity dedicated 
full-time to computer security.  They'd been 
expected to show up in force, but some of them had 
cancelled -- a Pentagon budget pinch.

	As the empties piled up, the guys began joshing 
around and telling war-stories.  "These are cops," 
Thackeray said tolerantly.  "If they're not talking 
shop they talk about women and beer."

	I heard the story about the guy who, asked for "a 
copy" of a computer disk, *photocopied the label on 
it.*  He put the floppy disk onto the glass plate of a 
photocopier.  The blast of static when the copier 
worked  completely erased all the real information 
on the disk.

	Some other poor souls threw a whole bag of 
confiscated diskettes into the squad-car trunk next 
to the police radio.  The powerful radio signal 
blasted them, too.

	 We heard a bit about Dave Geneson, the first 
computer prosecutor, a mainframe-runner in Dade 
County, turned lawyer.   Dave Geneson was one guy 
who had hit the ground running, a signal virtue in 
making the transition to computer-crime.  It was 
generally agreed that it was easier to learn the world 
of computers first, then police or prosecutorial work.    
You could take certain computer people and train 
'em to successful police work -- but of course they 
had to have the *cop mentality.*  They had to have 
street smarts.  Patience.  Persistence.  And 
discretion.   You've got to make sure they're not hot-
shots, show-offs,  "cowboys."

	Most of the folks in the bar had backgrounds in 
military intelligence, or drugs, or homicide.  It was 
rudely opined that "military intelligence" was a 
contradiction in terms, while even the grisly world of 
homicide was considered cleaner than drug 
enforcement.  One guy had been 'way undercover 
doing dope-work in Europe for four years straight.  
"I'm almost recovered now," he said deadpan, with 
the acid black humor that is pure cop.  "Hey, now I 
can say *fucker*  without putting *mother*  in front 
of it."

	"In the cop world," another guy said earnestly, 
"everything is good and bad, black and white.  In the 
computer world everything is gray."

	One guy -- a founder of the FCIC, who'd been 
with the group since it was just the Colluquy -- 
described his own introduction to the field.  He'd 
been a Washington DC homicide guy called in on a 
"hacker" case.  From the word "hacker," he naturally 
assumed he was on the trail of a knife-wielding 
marauder, and went to the computer center 
expecting blood and a body.  When he finally 
figured out what was happening there (after loudly 
demanding, in vain, that the programmers "speak 
English"),  he called headquarters and told them he 
was clueless about computers.  They told him 
nobody else knew diddly either, and to get the hell 
back to work.

	So, he said, he had proceeded by comparisons.  
By analogy.  By metaphor.  "Somebody broke in to 
your computer, huh?"  Breaking and entering; I can 
understand that.  How'd he get in?  "Over the phone-
lines."  Harassing phone-calls, I can understand 
that!  What we need here is a tap and a trace!

	It worked.  It was better than nothing.   And it 
worked a lot faster when he got hold of another cop 
who'd done something similar.  And then the two of 
them got another, and another, and pretty soon the 
Colluquy was a happening thing.  It helped a lot that 
everybody seemed to know Carlton Fitzpatrick, the 
data-processing trainer in Glynco.

	The ice broke big-time in Memphis in '86.  The 
Colluquy had attracted a bunch of new guys -- Secret 
Service, FBI, military, other feds, heavy guys.  
Nobody wanted to tell anybody anything.  They 
suspected that if word got back to the home office 
they'd all be fired.  They passed an uncomfortably 
guarded afternoon.

	The formalities got them nowhere.  But after the 
formal session was over, the organizers brought in a 
case of beer.  As soon as the participants knocked it 
off with the bureaucratic ranks and turf-fighting,  
everything changed.  "I bared my soul," one veteran 
reminisced proudly.  By nightfall they were building 
pyramids of empty beer-cans and doing everything 
but composing a team fight song.

	FCIC were not the only computer-crime people 
around.  There was DATTA (District Attorneys' 
Technology Theft Association),  though they mostly 
specialized in chip theft, intellectual property, and 
black-market cases.  There was HTCIA  (High Tech 
Computer Investigators Association), also out in 
Silicon Valley, a year older than FCIC and featuring 
brilliant people like Donald Ingraham.  There was 
LEETAC (Law Enforcement Electronic Technology 
Assistance Committee)  in Florida, and computer-
crime units in Illinois and Maryland and Texas and 
Ohio and Colorado and Pennsylvania.   But these 
were local groups.  FCIC were the first to really 
network nationally and on a federal level.

	FCIC people live on the phone lines.  Not on 
bulletin board systems -- they know very well what 
boards are, and they know that  boards aren't secure.   
Everyone in the FCIC has a voice-phone bill like you 
wouldn't believe.  FCIC people have been tight with 
the telco people for a long time.  Telephone 
cyberspace is their native habitat.

	FCIC has three basic sub-tribes:  the trainers, 
the security people, and the investigators.  That's 
why it's called an "Investigations Committee" with 
no mention of the term "computer-crime" -- the 
dreaded "C-word."   FCIC, officially, is "an 
association of agencies rather than individuals;" 
unofficially, this field is small enough that the 
influence of individuals and individual expertise is 
paramount.  Attendance is by invitation only, and 
most everyone in FCIC considers himself a prophet 
without honor in his own house.

	Again and again I heard this,  with different 
terms but identical sentiments.  "I'd been sitting in 
the wilderness talking to myself."  "I was totally 
isolated."  "I was desperate."  "FCIC is the best thing 
there is about computer crime in America."   "FCIC 
is what really works."  "This is where you hear real 
people telling you what's really happening out there, 
not just lawyers picking nits."  "We taught each 
other everything we knew."

	The sincerity of these statements convinces me 
that this is true.  FCIC is the real thing and it is 
invaluable.  It's also very sharply at odds with the 
rest of the traditions and power structure in 
American law enforcement.   There probably  hasn't 
been anything around as loose and go-getting as the 
FCIC since the start of the U.S. Secret Service in the 
1860s.   FCIC people are living like twenty-first-
century people in a twentieth-century environment, 
and while there's a great deal to be said for that, 
there's also a great deal to be said against it, and 
those against it happen to control the budgets.

	I listened to two FCIC guys from Jersey compare 
life histories.  One of them had been a biker in a 
fairly heavy-duty gang in the 1960s.  "Oh, did you 
know so-and-so?" said the other guy from Jersey.   
"Big guy, heavyset?"

	"Yeah, I knew him."

	"Yeah, he was one of ours.  He was our plant in 
the gang."

	"Really?  Wow!  Yeah, I knew him.  Helluva guy."

	Thackeray reminisced at length about being 
tear-gassed blind in the November 1969  antiwar 
protests in Washington Circle, covering them for 
her college paper.  "Oh yeah, I was there," said 
another cop.  "Glad to hear that tear gas hit 
somethin'.  Haw haw haw."  He'd been so blind 
himself, he confessed, that later that day he'd 
arrested a small tree.

	FCIC are an odd group, sifted out by 
coincidence and necessity, and turned into a new 
kind of cop.   There are a lot of specialized cops in 
the world -- your bunco guys, your drug guys, your 
tax guys, but the only group that matches FCIC for 
sheer isolation are probably the child-pornography 
people.  Because they both deal with conspirators 
who are desperate to exchange forbidden data and 
also desperate to hide; and because nobody else in 
law enforcement even wants to hear about it.

	FCIC people tend to change jobs a lot.  They 
tend not to get the equipment and training they 
want and need.  And they tend to get sued quite 
often.

	As the night wore on and a band set up in the 
bar, the talk grew darker.  Nothing ever gets done in 
government, someone opined, until there's a 
*disaster.*  Computing disasters are awful, but 
there's no denying that they greatly  help the 
credibility of FCIC people.  The Internet Worm, for 
instance.  "For years we'd been warning about that -- 
but it's nothing compared to what's coming."  They 
expect horrors, these people.  They know that 
nothing will really get done until there is a horror.

					#

	Next day we heard an extensive briefing from a 
guy who'd been a computer cop, gotten into hot 
water with an Arizona city council, and now installed 
computer networks for a living (at a considerable 
rise in pay).  He talked about pulling fiber-optic 
networks apart.

	Even a single computer, with enough 
peripherals, is a literal "network" -- a bunch of 
machines all cabled together, generally with a 
complexity that puts stereo units to shame.   FCIC 
people invent and publicize  methods of seizing 
computers and maintaining their evidence.   Simple 
things, sometimes, but vital rules of thumb for street 
cops, who nowadays often stumble across a busy 
computer in the midst of a drug investigation or a 
white-collar bust.  For instance:  Photograph the 
system before you touch it.  Label the ends of all the 
cables before you detach anything.  "Park" the heads 
on the disk drives before you move them.  Get the 
diskettes.  Don't put the diskettes in magnetic fields.  
Don't write on diskettes with ballpoint pens.  Get the 
manuals.  Get the printouts.  Get the handwritten 
notes.  Copy data before you look at it, and then 
examine the copy instead of the original.

	Now our lecturer distributed copied diagrams of 
a typical LAN or "Local Area Network", which 
happened to be out of Connecticut.  *One hundred 
and fifty-nine*  desktop computers, each with its own 
peripherals.  Three "file servers."  Five "star 
couplers" each with thirty-two ports.  One sixteen-
port coupler off in the corner office.   All these 
machines talking to each other, distributing 
electronic mail, distributing software, distributing, 
quite possibly, criminal evidence.  All linked by high-
capacity fiber-optic cable.  A bad guy -- cops talk a 
lot about "bad guys"  -- might be lurking on PC #47 
or #123 and distributing his ill doings onto some 
dupe's "personal"  machine in another office -- or 
another floor -- or, quite possibly, two or three miles 
away!   Or,  conceivably, the evidence might be 
"data-striped" -- split up into meaningless slivers 
stored, one by one, on a whole crowd of different disk 
drives.

	The lecturer challenged us for solutions.  I for 
one was utterly clueless.  As far as I could figure, the 
Cossacks were at the gate; there were probably more 
disks in this single building than were seized during 
the entirety of Operation Sundevil.

	"Inside informant," somebody said.  Right.  
There's always the human angle, something easy to 
forget when contemplating the arcane recesses of 
high technology.  Cops are skilled at getting people 
to talk, and computer people, given a chair and 
some sustained attention, will talk about their 
computers till their throats go raw.  There's a case on 
record of a single question -- "How'd you do it?" -- 
eliciting a forty-five-minute videotaped confession 
from a computer criminal who not only completely 
incriminated himself but drew helpful diagrams.

	Computer people talk.  Hackers *brag.*   Phone-
phreaks talk *pathologically*  -- why else are they 
stealing phone-codes, if not to natter for ten hours 
straight to their friends on an opposite seaboard?  
Computer-literate people do in fact possess an 
arsenal of nifty gadgets and techniques that would 
allow them to conceal all kinds of exotic 
skullduggery, and if they could only *shut up*  about 
it, they could probably get away with all manner of 
amazing information-crimes.   But that's just not how 
it works -- or at least, that's not how it's worked *so 
far.*

	Most every phone-phreak ever busted has 
swiftly implicated his mentors, his disciples, and his 
friends.  Most every white-collar computer-criminal, 
smugly convinced that his clever scheme is 
bulletproof,  swiftly learns otherwise when, for the 
first time in his life, an actual no-kidding policeman 
leans over, grabs the front of his shirt, looks him 
right in the eye and says:  "All right, *asshole* --  you 
and me are going downtown!"   All the hardware in 
the world will not insulate your nerves from these 
actual real-life sensations of terror and guilt.

	Cops know ways to get from point A to point Z 
without thumbing through every letter in some 
smart-ass bad-guy's  alphabet.  Cops know how to 
cut to the chase.  Cops know a lot of things other 
people don't know.

	Hackers know a lot of things other people don't 
know, too.  Hackers know, for instance, how to sneak 
into your computer through the phone-lines.  But 
cops  can show up *right on your doorstep*  and 
carry off *you*  and your computer in separate steel 
boxes.   A cop interested in hackers can grab them 
and grill them.  A hacker interested in cops has to 
depend on hearsay, underground legends, and what 
cops are willing to publicly reveal.  And the Secret 
Service didn't get named "the *Secret*  Service" 
because they blab a lot.

	Some people, our lecturer informed us, were 
under the mistaken impression that it was 
"impossible" to tap a fiber-optic line.  Well, he 
announced, he and his son had just whipped up a 
fiber-optic tap in his workshop at home.  He passed 
it around the audience, along with a circuit-covered 
LAN plug-in card so we'd all recognize one if we saw 
it on a case.  We all had a look.

	The tap was a classic "Goofy Prototype" -- a 
thumb-length rounded metal cylinder with a pair of 
plastic brackets on it.  From one end dangled three 
thin black cables, each of which ended in a tiny 
black plastic cap.   When you plucked the safety-cap 
off the end of a cable,  you could see the glass fiber  -
- no thicker than a pinhole.

	  Our lecturer informed us that the metal 
cylinder was a "wavelength division multiplexer."  
Apparently, what one did was to cut the fiber-optic 
cable, insert two of the legs into the cut to complete 
the network again, and then read any passing data 
on the line by hooking up the third leg to some kind 
of monitor.  Sounded simple enough.  I wondered 
why nobody had thought of it before.  I also 
wondered whether this guy's son back at the 
workshop had any teenage friends.

	We had a break.  The guy sitting next to me was 
wearing a giveaway baseball cap advertising the Uzi 
submachine gun.  We had a desultory chat about 
the merits of Uzis.  Long a favorite of the Secret 
Service, it seems Uzis went out of fashion with the 
advent of the Persian Gulf War, our Arab allies 
taking some offense at Americans toting Israeli 
weapons.  Besides, I was informed by another 
expert, Uzis jam.  The equivalent weapon of choice 
today is the Heckler & Koch, manufactured in 
Germany.

	  The guy with the Uzi cap was a forensic 
photographer.  He also did a lot of photographic 
surveillance work in computer crime cases.   He 
used to, that is, until the firings in Phoenix.  He was 
now a private investigator and, with his wife, ran a 
photography salon specializing in weddings and 
portrait photos.  At -- one must repeat -- a 
considerable rise in income.

	He was still FCIC.  If you were FCIC, and you 
needed to talk to an expert about forensic 
photography, well, there he was, willing and able.  If 
he hadn't shown up, people would have missed him.

	Our lecturer had raised the point that 
preliminary investigation of a computer system is 
vital before any seizure is undertaken.  It's vital to 
understand how many machines are in there, what 
kinds there are, what kind of operating system they 
use,  how many people use them, where the actual 
data itself is stored.  To simply barge into an office 
demanding "all the computers" is a recipe for swift 
disaster.

	This entails some discreet inquiries beforehand.  
In fact, what it entails is basically undercover work.  
An intelligence operation.   *Spying,*  not to put too 
fine a point on it.

	In a chat after the lecture, I asked an attendee 
whether "trashing" might work.

	I received a swift briefing on the theory and 
practice of "trash covers."  Police "trash covers," like 
"mail covers" or like wiretaps, require the agreement 
of a judge.  This obtained, the "trashing" work of cops 
is just like that of hackers, only more so and much 
better organized.  So much so, I was informed, that 
mobsters in Phoenix make extensive use of locked 
garbage cans picked up by a specialty high-security 
trash company.

	In one case, a tiger team of Arizona cops had 
trashed a local residence for four months.  Every 
week they showed up on the municipal garbage 
truck, disguised as garbagemen, and carried the 
contents of the suspect cans off to a shade tree, 
where they combed through the garbage -- a messy 
task, especially considering that one of the 
occupants was undergoing kidney dialysis.  All 
useful documents were cleaned, dried and 
examined.  A discarded typewriter-ribbon was an 
especially valuable source of data, as its long one-
strike ribbon of film contained the contents of every 
letter mailed out of the house.  The letters were 
neatly retyped by a police secretary equipped with a 
large desk-mounted magnifying glass.

	There is something weirdly disquieting about 
the whole subject of "trashing" -- an unsuspected 
and indeed rather disgusting mode of deep personal 
vulnerability.  Things that we pass by every day, that 
we take utterly for granted, can be exploited with so 
little work.   Once discovered, the knowledge of these 
vulnerabilities tend to spread.

	Take the lowly subject of *manhole covers.*  The 
humble manhole cover reproduces many of the 
dilemmas of computer-security in miniature.  
Manhole covers are, of course, technological 
artifacts, access-points to our buried urban 
infrastructure.  To the vast majority of us, manhole 
covers are invisible.  They are also vulnerable.  For 
many years now, the Secret Service has made a 
point of caulking manhole covers along all routes of 
the Presidential motorcade.   This is, of course, to 
deter terrorists from leaping out of underground 
ambush or, more likely, planting remote-control car-
smashing bombs beneath the street.

	Lately, manhole covers have seen more and 
more criminal exploitation, especially in New York 
City.  Recently, a telco in New York City discovered 
that a cable television service had been sneaking 
into telco manholes and installing cable service 
alongside the phone-lines -- *without paying 
royalties.*   New York companies have also suffered 
a general plague of (a) underground copper cable 
theft; (b) dumping of garbage, including toxic waste, 
and (c) hasty dumping of murder victims.

	Industry complaints reached the ears of an 
innovative New England industrial-security 
company, and the result was a new product known 
as "the Intimidator," a thick titanium-steel bolt with 
a precisely machined head that requires a special 
device to unscrew.  All these "keys" have registered 
serial numbers kept on file with the manufacturer.  
There are now some thousands of these 
"Intimidator" bolts being sunk into American 
pavements wherever our President passes, like 
some macabre parody of strewn roses.   They are 
also spreading as fast as steel dandelions around US 
military bases and many centers of private industry.

	Quite likely it has never occurred to you to  peer 
under a manhole cover, perhaps climb down and 
walk around down there with a flashlight, just to see 
what it's like.  Formally speaking, this might be 
trespassing, but if you didn't hurt anything, and 
didn't make an absolute habit of it, nobody would 
really care.  The freedom to sneak under manholes 
was likely a freedom you never intended to exercise.

	You now are rather less likely to have that 
freedom at all.  You may never even have missed it 
until you read about it here, but if you're in New 
York City it's gone, and elsewhere it's likely going.  
This is one of the things that crime, and the reaction 
to crime,  does to us.

	The tenor of the meeting now changed as the 
Electronic Frontier Foundation arrived.  The EFF, 
whose personnel and history will be examined in 
detail in the next chapter, are a pioneering civil 
liberties group who arose in direct response to the 
Hacker Crackdown of 1990.

	Now Mitchell Kapor, the Foundation's 
president, and Michael Godwin, its chief attorney, 
were confronting federal law enforcement *mano a 
mano* for the first time ever.  Ever alert to the 
manifold uses of publicity, Mitch Kapor and Mike 
Godwin had brought their own journalist in tow:  
Robert Draper, from Austin, whose recent well-
received book about ROLLING STONE magazine 
was still on the stands.  Draper was on assignment 
for TEXAS MONTHLY.

	The Steve Jackson/EFF civil lawsuit against the 
Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force was 
a matter of considerable regional interest in Texas.   
There were now two Austinite journalists here on the 
case.  In fact, counting Godwin (a former Austinite 
and former journalist) there were three of us.  Lunch 
was like Old Home Week.

	Later, I took Draper up to my hotel room.  We 
had a long frank talk about the case, networking 
earnestly like a miniature freelance-journo version 
of the FCIC:  privately confessing the numerous 
blunders of journalists covering the story, and trying 
hard to figure out who was who and what the hell was 
really going on out there.  I showed Draper 
everything I had dug out of the Hilton trashcan.  We 
pondered the ethics of "trashing" for a while, and 
agreed that they were dismal.  We also agreed that 
finding a SPRINT bill on your first time out was a 
heck of a coincidence.

	First I'd "trashed" -- and now, mere hours later,  
I'd bragged to someone else.   Having entered the 
lifestyle of hackerdom, I was now, unsurprisingly, 
following  its logic.  Having discovered something 
remarkable through a surreptitious action, I of 
course *had*  to "brag," and to drag the passing 
Draper into my iniquities.  I felt I needed a witness.  
Otherwise nobody would have believed what I'd 
discovered....

	Back at the meeting, Thackeray cordially, if 
rather tentatively, introduced Kapor and Godwin to 
her colleagues.  Papers were distributed.  Kapor took 
center stage.  The brilliant Bostonian high-tech 
entrepreneur, normally the hawk in his own 
administration and quite an effective public 
speaker, seemed visibly nervous, and frankly 
admitted as much.   He began by saying he 
consided computer-intrusion to be morally wrong, 
and that the EFF was not a "hacker defense fund," 
despite what had appeared in print.    Kapor chatted 
a bit about the basic motivations of his group, 
emphasizing their good faith and willingness to 
listen and seek common ground with law 
enforcement -- when, er,  possible.

	 Then, at Godwin's urging, Kapor suddenly 
remarked that EFF's own Internet machine had 
been "hacked" recently, and that EFF did not 
consider this incident amusing.

	After this surprising confession, things began to 
loosen up quite rapidly.  Soon Kapor was fielding 
questions, parrying objections, challenging 
definitions, and juggling paradigms with something 
akin to his usual gusto.

	Kapor seemed to score quite an effect with his 
shrewd and skeptical analysis of the merits of telco 
"Caller-ID" services.  (On this topic, FCIC and EFF 
have never been at loggerheads, and have no 
particular established earthworks to defend.)   
Caller-ID has generally been promoted as a privacy 
service for consumers, a presentation Kapor 
described as a "smokescreen,"  the real point of 
Caller-ID being to *allow corporate customers to 
build extensive commercial databases  on 
everybody who phones or faxes them.*  Clearly, few 
people in the room had considered this possibility, 
except perhaps for two late-arrivals from  US WEST 
RBOC security, who chuckled nervously.

	Mike Godwin then made an extensive 
presentation on "Civil Liberties Implications of 
Computer Searches and Seizures."  Now, at last, we 
were getting to the real nitty-gritty here, real political 
horse-trading.  The audience listened with close 
attention, angry mutters rising occasionally:  "He's 
trying to teach us our jobs!"  "We've been thinking 
about this for years!  We think about these issues 
every day!"  "If I didn't seize the works, I'd be sued by 
the guy's victims!"   "I'm violating the law if I leave 
ten thousand disks full of illegal *pirated software*  
and *stolen codes!*"   "It's our job to make sure 
people don't trash the Constitution -- we're the 
*defenders*  of the Constitution!"  "We seize stuff 
when we know it will be forfeited anyway as 
restitution for the victim!"

	"If it's forfeitable, then don't get a search 
warrant, get a forfeiture warrant,"  Godwin suggested 
coolly.  He further remarked that most suspects in 
computer crime don't *want*  to see their computers 
vanish out the door, headed God knew where, for 
who knows how long.  They might not mind a search, 
even an extensive search, but they want their 
machines searched on-site.

	"Are they gonna feed us?"  somebody asked 
sourly.

	"How about if you take copies of the data?"  
Godwin parried.

	"That'll never stand up in court."

	"Okay, you make copies, give *them*  the 
copies, and take the originals."

	Hmmm.

	Godwin championed bulletin-board systems as 
repositories of First Amendment protected free 
speech.  He complained that federal computer-
crime training manuals gave boards a bad press, 
suggesting that they are hotbeds of crime haunted 
by pedophiles and crooks, whereas the vast majority 
of the nation's thousands of boards are completely 
innocuous, and nowhere near so romantically 
suspicious.

	  People who run boards violently resent it when 
their systems are seized, and their dozens (or 
hundreds) of users look on in abject horror.   Their 
rights of free expression are cut short.  Their right to 
associate with other people is infringed.  And their 
privacy is violated as their private electronic mail 
becomes police property.

	Not a soul spoke up to defend the practice of 
seizing boards.   The issue passed in chastened 
silence.   Legal principles aside -- (and those 
principles cannot be settled without laws passed or 
court precedents) -- seizing bulletin boards has 
become public-relations poison for American 
computer police.

	And anyway, it's not entirely necessary.  If you're 
a cop, you can get 'most everything you need from a 
pirate board, just by using an inside informant.   
Plenty of vigilantes -- well, *concerned citizens* --  
will inform police the moment they see a pirate 
board hit their area  (and will tell the police all about 
it, in such technical detail, actually, that you kinda 
wish they'd shut up).   They will happily supply police 
with extensive downloads or printouts.  It's 
*impossible* to keep this fluid electronic 
information out of the hands of police.

	Some people in the electronic community 
become enraged at the prospect of cops 
"monitoring" bulletin boards.   This does have 
touchy aspects, as Secret Service people in 
particular examine bulletin boards with some 
regularity.    But to expect electronic police to be 
deaf dumb and blind in regard to this particular 
medium rather flies in the face of common sense.  
Police watch television, listen to radio, read 
newspapers and magazines; why should the new 
medium of boards be different?   Cops can exercise 
the same access to electronic information as 
everybody else.   As we have seen, quite a few 
computer police maintain *their own*  bulletin 
boards, including anti-hacker "sting" boards, which 
have generally proven quite effective.

	As a final clincher, their Mountie friends in 
Canada (and colleagues in Ireland and Taiwan) 
don't have First Amendment or American 
constitutional restrictions, but they do have phone 
lines, and can call any bulletin board in America 
whenever they please.  The same technological 
determinants that play into the hands of hackers, 
phone phreaks and software pirates can play into 
the hands of police.  "Technological determinants" 
don't have *any*  human allegiances.  They're not 
black or white, or Establishment or Underground, or 
pro-or-anti anything.

	Godwin  complained at length about what he 
called "the Clever Hobbyist hypothesis"  -- the 
assumption that the "hacker" you're busting is 
clearly a technical genius, and must therefore by 
searched with extreme thoroughness.  So:  from the 
law's point of view, why risk missing anything?  Take 
the works.  Take the guy's computer.  Take his books.   
Take his notebooks.  Take the electronic drafts of his 
love letters. Take his Walkman.  Take his wife's 
computer.  Take his dad's computer.  Take his kid 
sister's computer.   Take his employer's computer.  
Take his compact disks -- they *might* be CD-ROM 
disks, cunningly disguised as pop music.  Take his 
laser printer -- he might have hidden something 
vital in the printer's 5meg of memory.  Take his 
software manuals and hardware documentation.  
Take his science-fiction novels and his simulation-
gaming books.  Take his Nintendo Game-Boy and 
his Pac-Man arcade game.  Take his answering 
machine, take his telephone out of the wall.  Take 
anything remotely suspicious.

	Godwin pointed out that most "hackers" are not, 
in fact, clever genius hobbyists.  Quite a few are 
crooks and grifters who don't have much in the way 
of technical sophistication; just some rule-of-thumb 
rip-off techniques.  The same goes for most fifteen-
year-olds who've downloaded a code-scanning 
program from a pirate board.   There's no real need 
to seize everything in sight.  It doesn't require an 
entire computer system and ten thousand disks to 
prove a case in court.

	What if the computer is the instrumentality of a 
crime? someone demanded.

	Godwin admitted quietly that the doctrine of 
seizing the instrumentality of a crime was pretty well 
established in the American legal system.

	The meeting broke up.  Godwin and Kapor had 
to leave.  Kapor was testifying next morning before 
the Massachusetts Department Of Public Utility, 
about ISDN narrowband wide-area networking.

	As soon as they were gone, Thackeray seemed 
elated.   She had taken a great risk with this.  Her 
colleagues had not, in fact, torn Kapor and Godwin's 
heads off.  She was very proud of them, and told 
them so.

	"Did you hear what Godwin said about 
*instrumentality of a crime?*"  she exulted, to 
nobody in particular.  "Wow, that means *Mitch isn't 
going to sue me.*" 

					#

	America's computer police are an interesting 
group.  As a social phenomenon they are far more 
interesting, and far more important, than teenage 
phone phreaks and computer hackers.  First, they're 
older and wiser; not dizzy hobbyists with leaky 
morals, but  seasoned adult professionals with all the 
responsibilities of public service.  And, unlike 
hackers, they possess not merely *technical* power 
alone, but heavy-duty legal and social authority.

	And, very interestingly, they are just as much at 
sea in cyberspace as everyone else.  They are not 
happy about this.  Police are authoritarian by nature, 
and prefer to obey rules and precedents.   (Even 
those police who secretly enjoy a fast ride in rough 
territory will soberly disclaim any "cowboy" attitude.)  
But in cyberspace there *are*  no rules and 
precedents.  They are groundbreaking pioneers, 
Cyberspace Rangers, whether they like it or not.

  	In my opinion, any teenager enthralled by 
computers, fascinated by the ins and outs of 
computer security, and attracted by the lure of 
specialized forms of knowledge and power, would do 
well to forget all about "hacking" and set his (or her)  
sights on becoming a fed.   Feds can trump hackers 
at almost every single thing hackers do, including 
gathering intelligence, undercover disguise, 
trashing, phone-tapping,  building dossiers, 
networking, and infiltrating computer systems -- 
*criminal* computer systems.   Secret Service agents 
know more about phreaking, coding and carding 
than most phreaks can find out in years, and when it 
comes to viruses, break-ins, software bombs and 
trojan horses, Feds have direct access to red-hot 
confidential information that is only vague rumor in 
the underground.

	And if it's an impressive public rep you're after, 
there are few people in the world who can be so 
chillingly impressive as a well-trained, well-armed 
United States Secret Service agent.

	 Of course, a few personal sacrifices are 
necessary in order to obtain that power and 
knowledge.  First, you'll have the galling discipline of 
belonging to a large organization;  but the world of 
computer crime is still so small, and so amazingly 
fast-moving, that it will remain spectacularly fluid for 
years to come.   The second sacrifice is that you'll 
have to give up ripping people off.  This is not a great 
loss.  Abstaining from the use of illegal drugs, also 
necessary, will be a boon to your health.

	A career in computer security is not a bad 
choice for a young man or woman today.  The field 
will almost certainly expand drastically in years to 
come.  If you are a teenager today, by the time you 
become a professional, the pioneers you have read 
about in this book will be the grand old men and 
women of the field, swamped by their many 
disciples and successors.   Of course, some of them, 
like William P. Wood of the 1865 Secret Service, 
may well be mangled in the whirring machinery of 
legal controversy; but by the time you enter the 
computer-crime field, it may have stabilized 
somewhat, while remaining entertainingly 
challenging.

	But you can't just have a badge.  You have to win 
it.  First, there's the federal law enforcement 
training.  And it's hard -- it's a challenge.  A real 
challenge -- not for wimps and rodents.

	Every Secret Service agent must complete 
gruelling courses at the Federal Law Enforcement 
Training Center.  (In fact, Secret Service agents are 
periodically re-trained during their entire careers.)

	In order to get a glimpse of what this might be 
like, I myself travelled to FLETC.

					#

	The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center 
is a 1500-acre facility on Georgia's Atlantic coast.   It's 
a milieu of marshgrass, seabirds,  damp, clinging 
sea-breezes, palmettos, mosquitos, and bats.   Until 
1974, it was a  Navy Air Base, and still features a 
working runway, and some WWII vintage 
blockhouses and officers' quarters.  The Center has 
since benefitted by a forty-million-dollar retrofit, but 
there's still enough forest and swamp on the facility 
for the Border Patrol to put in tracking practice.

	As a town, "Glynco" scarcely exists.  The nearest 
real town is Brunswick, a few miles down Highway 17, 
where I stayed at the aptly named Marshview 
Holiday Inn.   I had Sunday dinner at a seafood 
restaurant called "Jinright's," where I feasted on  
deep-fried alligator tail.  This local favorite was a 
heaped basket of bite-sized chunks of white, tender, 
almost fluffy reptile meat, steaming in a peppered 
batter crust.  Alligator makes a culinary experience 
that's hard to forget, especially when liberally basted 
with homemade cocktail sauce from a Jinright 
squeeze-bottle. 

	The crowded clientele were tourists, fishermen, 
local black folks in their Sunday best, and white 
Georgian locals who all seemed to bear an uncanny 
resemblance to Georgia humorist Lewis Grizzard.

	The 2,400 students from 75 federal agencies who 
make up the FLETC population scarcely seem to 
make a dent in the low-key local scene.   The 
students look like tourists, and the teachers seem to 
have taken on much of the relaxed air of the Deep 
South.   My host was Mr. Carlton Fitzpatrick, the 
Program Coordinator of the Financial Fraud 
Institute.  Carlton Fitzpatrick is a mustached, sinewy, 
well-tanned Alabama native somewhere near his 
late forties, with a fondness for chewing tobacco, 
powerful computers, and salty, down-home homilies.  
We'd met before, at FCIC in Arizona.

	The Financial Fraud Institute is one of the nine 
divisions at FLETC. Besides Financial Fraud, there's 
Driver & Marine, Firearms, and Physical Training.   
These are specialized pursuits.  There are also five 
general training divisions:  Basic Training, 
Operations, Enforcement Techniques, Legal 
Division, and Behavioral Science.

	Somewhere in this curriculum is everything 
necessary to turn green college graduates into 
federal agents.  First they're given ID cards. Then 
they get the rather miserable-looking blue coveralls 
known as "smurf suits."  The trainees are assigned a 
barracks and a cafeteria, and immediately set on 
FLETC's bone-grinding physical training routine.  
Besides the obligatory  daily jogging -- (the trainers 
run up danger flags beside the track when the 
humidity rises high enough to threaten heat stroke) -
- there's the Nautilus machines, the martial arts, the 
survival skills.... 

	The eighteen federal agencies who maintain on-
site academies at FLETC employ a wide variety of 
specialized law enforcement units, some of them 
rather arcane.   There's Border Patrol, IRS Criminal 
Investigation Division, Park Service, Fish and 
Wildlife, Customs, Immigration, Secret Service and 
the Treasury's uniformed subdivisions....  If you're a 
federal cop and you don't work for the FBI, you train 
at FLETC.   This includes people as apparently 
obscure as the agents of the Railroad Retirement 
Board Inspector General.  Or the Tennessee Valley 
Authority Police, who are in fact federal police 
officers, and can and do arrest criminals on the 
federal property of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

	And then there are the computer-crime people.   
All sorts, all backgrounds.  Mr. Fitzpatrick  is not 
jealous of his specialized knowledge.   Cops all over, 
in every branch of service, may feel a need to learn 
what he can teach.   Backgrounds don't matter 
much.  Fitzpatrick himself  was originally a Border 
Patrol veteran, then became a Border Patrol 
instructor at FLETC.  His Spanish is still fluent -- but 
he found himself strangely fascinated when the first 
computers showed up at the Training Center.   
Fitzpatrick did have a background in electrical 
engineering, and though he never considered 
himself a computer hacker, he somehow found 
himself writing useful little programs for this new 
and promising gizmo.

	He began looking into the general subject of 
computers and crime, reading Donn Parker's books 
and articles, keeping an ear cocked for war stories, 
useful insights from the field, the up-and-coming 
people of the local computer-crime and high-
technology units....  Soon he got a reputation around 
FLETC as the resident "computer expert," and that 
reputation alone brought him more exposure, more 
experience -- until one day he looked around, and 
sure enough he *was*  a federal computer-crime 
expert.

	In fact, this unassuming, genial man may be 
*the*  federal computer-crime expert.   There are 
plenty of very good computer people, and plenty of 
very good federal investigators, but the area where 
these worlds of expertise overlap is very slim.  And 
Carlton Fitzpatrick has been right at the center of 
that since 1985, the first year of the Colluquy, a group 
which owes much to his influence.

	He seems quite at home in his modest, 
acoustic-tiled office, with its Ansel Adams-style 
Western photographic art, a gold-framed Senior 
Instructor Certificate, and a towering bookcase 
crammed with three-ring binders with ominous titles 
such as *Datapro Reports on Information Security*  
and *CFCA Telecom Security '90.*

	 The phone rings every ten minutes; colleagues 
show up at the door to chat about new developments 
in locksmithing or to shake their heads over the 
latest dismal developments in the BCCI global 
banking scandal.

	Carlton Fitzpatrick is a fount of computer-crime 
war-stories, related in an acerbic drawl.  He tells me 
the colorful tale of a hacker caught in California 
some years back.   He'd been raiding systems, 
typing code without a detectable break, for twenty, 
twenty-four, thirty-six hours straight.  Not just logged 
on -- *typing.*   Investigators were baffled.  Nobody 
could do that.  Didn't he have to go to the bathroom?   
Was it some kind of automatic keyboard-whacking 
device that could actually type code?

	A raid on the suspect's home revealed a 
situation of astonishing squalor.  The hacker turned 
out to be a Pakistani computer-science student who 
had flunked out of a California university.  He'd 
gone completely underground as an illegal 
electronic immigrant,  and was selling stolen phone-
service to stay alive.  The place was not merely 
messy and dirty, but in a state of psychotic disorder.   
Powered by some weird mix of culture shock, 
computer addiction, and amphetamines, the 
suspect had in fact been sitting in front of his 
computer for a day and a half straight, with snacks 
and drugs at hand on the edge of his desk and a 
chamber-pot under his chair.

	Word about stuff like this gets around in the 
hacker-tracker community.

	Carlton Fitzpatrick takes me for a guided tour 
by car around the FLETC grounds.   One of our first 
sights is the biggest indoor firing range in the world.   
There are federal trainees in there, Fitzpatrick 
assures me politely, blasting away with a wide variety 
of automatic weapons: Uzis, Glocks, AK-47s....   He's 
willing to take me inside.   I tell him I'm sure that's 
really interesting, but I'd rather see his computers.   
Carlton Fitzpatrick seems quite surprised and 
pleased.  I'm apparently the first journalist he's ever 
seen who has turned down the shooting gallery in 
favor of microchips.

	Our next stop is a favorite with touring 
Congressmen:  the three-mile long FLETC driving 
range.  Here trainees of the Driver & Marine 
Division are taught high-speed pursuit skills, setting 
and breaking road-blocks, diplomatic security 
driving for VIP limousines....  A favorite FLETC 
pastime is to strap a passing Senator into the 
passenger seat beside a Driver & Marine trainer, hit 
a hundred miles an hour, then take it right into "the 
skid-pan," a section of greased track  where two tons 
of Detroit iron can whip and spin like a hockey puck.

	Cars don't fare well at FLETC.   First they're 
rifled again and again for search practice.  Then they 
do  25,000 miles of high-speed pursuit training; they 
get about seventy miles per set of steel-belted 
radials.   Then it's off to the skid pan, where 
sometimes they roll and tumble headlong in the 
grease.   When they're sufficiently grease-stained, 
dented, and creaky, they're sent to the roadblock 
unit, where they're battered without pity.  And finally 
then they're sacrificed to the Bureau of Alcohol, 
Tobacco and Firearms, whose trainees learn the ins 
and outs of car-bomb work by blowing them into 
smoking wreckage.

	There's a railroad box-car on the FLETC 
grounds, and a large grounded boat, and a propless 
plane; all training-grounds for searches.   The plane 
sits forlornly on a patch of weedy tarmac next to an 
eerie blockhouse known as the "ninja compound," 
where anti-terrorism specialists practice hostage 
rescues.  As I gaze on this creepy paragon of modern 
low-intensity warfare, my nerves are jangled by a 
sudden staccato outburst of automatic weapons fire, 
somewhere in the woods to my right.  "Nine-
millimeter," Fitzpatrick judges calmly.

	Even the eldritch ninja compound pales 
somewhat compared to the truly surreal area known 
as "the raid-houses."   This is a street lined on both 
sides with nondescript concrete-block houses with 
flat pebbled roofs.  They were once officers' quarters.  
Now they are training grounds.   The first one to our 
left, Fitzpatrick tells me, has been specially adapted 
for computer search-and-seizure practice.  Inside it 
has been wired for video from top to bottom, with 
eighteen pan-and-tilt remotely controlled 
videocams mounted on walls and in corners.  Every 
movement of the trainee agent is recorded live by 
teachers, for later taped analysis.  Wasted 
movements, hesitations, possibly lethal tactical 
mistakes -- all are gone over in detail.

	Perhaps the weirdest single aspect of this 
building is its front door, scarred and scuffed all 
along the bottom, from the repeated impact, day 
after day, of federal shoe-leather.

	Down at the far end of the row of raid-houses 
some people are practicing a murder.   We drive by 
slowly as some very young and rather nervous-
looking federal trainees interview a heavyset bald 
man on the raid-house lawn.  Dealing with murder 
takes a lot of practice; first you have to learn to 
control your own instinctive disgust and panic,  then 
you have to learn to control the reactions of a nerve-
shredded crowd of civilians, some of whom may 
have just lost a loved one, some of whom may be 
murderers -- quite possibly both at once.

	A dummy plays the corpse.  The roles of the 
bereaved, the morbidly curious, and the homicidal 
are played, for pay, by local Georgians:  waitresses, 
musicians, most anybody who needs to moonlight 
and can learn a script.   These people, some of whom 
are FLETC regulars year after year, must surely have 
one of the strangest jobs in the world.

	Something about the scene:  "normal" people in 
a weird situation, standing around talking in bright 
Georgia sunshine, unsuccessfully pretending that 
something dreadful has gone on, while a dummy lies 
inside on faked bloodstains....  While behind this 
weird masquerade, like a nested set of Russian dolls,  
are grim future realities of real death, real violence, 
real murders of real people, that these young agents 
will really investigate, many times during their 
careers....  Over and over....  Will those anticipated 
murders look like this, feel like this -- not as "real" as 
these amateur actors are trying to make it seem, but 
both as "real," and as numbingly unreal, as watching 
fake people standing around on a fake lawn?   
Something about this scene unhinges me.  It seems 
nightmarish to me,  Kafkaesque.   I simply don't 
know how to take it; my head is turned around; I 
don't know whether to laugh, cry, or just shudder.

	When the tour is over, Carlton Fitzpatrick and I 
talk about computers.  For the first time cyberspace 
seems like quite a comfortable place.  It seems very 
real to me suddenly, a place where I know what I'm 
talking about, a place I'm used to.   It's real.  "Real."  
Whatever.

	Carlton Fitzpatrick is the only person I've met in 
cyberspace circles who is happy with his present 
equipment.  He's got a 5 Meg RAM PC with a 112 
meg hard disk; a 660 meg's on the way.  He's got a 
Compaq 386 desktop, and a Zenith 386 laptop with 
120 meg.  Down the hall is a NEC Multi-Sync 2A with 
a CD-ROM drive and a 9600 baud modem with four 
com-lines.  There's a training minicomputer, and a 
10-meg local mini just for the Center, and a lab-full 
of student PC clones and half-a-dozen Macs or so.  
There's a Data General MV 2500 with 8 meg on 
board and a 370 meg disk.

	Fitzpatrick plans to run a UNIX board on the 
Data General when he's finished beta-testing the 
software for it, which he wrote himself.  It'll have E-
mail features, massive files on all manner of 
computer-crime and investigation procedures, and 
will follow the computer-security specifics of the 
Department of Defense "Orange Book."  He thinks 
it will be the biggest BBS in the federal government.

	 Will it have *Phrack* on it?  I ask wryly.

	Sure, he tells me.  *Phrack,* *TAP,*  *Computer 
Underground Digest,* all that stuff.  With  proper 
disclaimers, of course.

	I ask him if he plans to be the sysop.  Running a 
system that size is very time-consuming, and 
Fitzpatrick teaches two three-hour courses every 
day.

	No, he says seriously,  FLETC has to get its 
money worth out of the instructors.  He thinks he 
can get a local volunteer to do it, a high-school 
student.

	He says a bit more, something I think about an 
Eagle Scout law-enforcement liaison program, but 
my mind has rocketed off in disbelief.

	"You're going to put a *teenager* in charge of a 
federal security BBS?"  I'm speechless.  It hasn't 
escaped my notice that the FLETC Financial Fraud 
Institute is the *ultimate* hacker-trashing target; 
there is stuff in here, stuff of such utter and 
consummate cool by every standard of the digital 
underground.... I imagine the hackers of my 
acquaintance, fainting dead-away from forbidden-
knowledge greed-fits, at the mere prospect of 
cracking the superultra top-secret computers used 
to train the Secret Service in computer-crime....

	"Uhm, Carlton," I babble, "I'm sure he's a really 
nice kid and all, but that's a terrible temptation to 
set in front of somebody who's, you know, into 
computers and just starting out..."

	"Yeah," he says, "that did occur to me."  For the 
first time I begin to suspect that he's pulling my leg.

	He seems proudest when he shows me an 
ongoing project called JICC, Joint Intelligence 
Control Council.  It's based on the services provided 
by EPIC, the El Paso Intelligence Center, which 
supplies data and intelligence to the Drug 
Enforcement Administration, the Customs Service, 
the Coast Guard, and the state police of the four 
southern border states.  Certain EPIC files can now 
be accessed by drug-enforcement police of Central 
America, South America and the Caribbean, who 
can also trade information among themselves.   
Using a telecom program called "White Hat," 
written by two brothers named Lopez from the 
Dominican Republic, police can now network 
internationally on inexpensive PCs.   Carlton 
Fitzpatrick is teaching a class of drug-war agents 
from the Third World, and he's very proud of their 
progress.   Perhaps soon the sophisticated 
smuggling networks of the Medellin Cartel will be 
matched by a sophisticated computer network of the 
Medellin Cartel's sworn enemies.   They'll track 
boats, track contraband, track the international 
drug-lords who now leap over borders with great 
ease, defeating the police through the clever use of 
fragmented national jurisdictions.

	JICC and EPIC must remain beyond the scope 
of this book.   They seem to me to be very large 
topics fraught with complications that I am not fit to 
judge.   I do know, however, that the international, 
computer-assisted networking of police, across 
national boundaries, is something that Carlton 
Fitzpatrick considers very important, a harbinger of 
a desirable future.  I also know that networks by their 
nature ignore physical boundaries.  And I also know 
that where you put communications you put a 
community, and that when those communities 
become self-aware they will fight to preserve 
themselves and to expand their influence.   I make 
no judgements whether this is good or bad.  It's just 
cyberspace; it's just the way things are.

	I asked Carlton Fitzpatrick what advice he 
would have for a twenty-year-old who wanted to 
shine someday in the world of electronic law 
enforcement.

	He told me that the number one rule was 
simply not to be scared of computers.   You don't 
need to be an obsessive "computer weenie," but you 
mustn't be buffaloed just because some machine 
looks fancy.  The advantages computers give smart 
crooks are matched by the advantages they give 
smart cops.  Cops in the future will have to enforce 
the law "with their heads, not their holsters."   Today 
you can make good cases without ever leaving your 
office.  In the future, cops who resist the computer 
revolution will never get far beyond walking a beat.

	I asked Carlton Fitzpatrick if he had some single 
message for the public; some single thing that he 
would most like the American public to know about 
his work.

	He thought about it while.  "Yes," he said finally.  
"*Tell* me the rules, and I'll *teach* those rules!"  He 
looked me straight in the eye.  "I do the best that I 
can." 
	   	   
