Social - Political - Humanities
---------------------------------
Aging (g gray) AIDS
(g aids)
Amnesty International (g amnesty) Archives (g
arc)
Berkeley (g berk) Buddhist (g
wonderland)
Christian (g cross) Couples
(g couples)
Current Events (g curr) Dreams (g
dream)
Drugs (g dru) East
Coast (g east)
Emotional Health**** (g private) Erotica (g
eros)
Environment (g env) Firearms (g
firearms)
First Amendment (g first) Fringes of Reason (g fringes)
Gay (g gay) Gay (Private)#
(g gaypriv)
Geography (g geo) German
(g german)
Gulf War (g gulf) Hawaii
(g aloha)
Health (g heal) History
(g hist)
Holistic (g holi)
Interview (g inter)
Italian (g ital) Jewish
(g jew)
Liberty (g liberty) Mind
(g mind)
Miscellaneous (g misc) Men on the WELL** (g mow)
Network Integration (g origin) Nonprofits
(g non)
North Bay (g north) Northwest
(g nw)
Pacific Rim (g pacrim) Parenting
(g par)
Peace (g pea) Peninsula
(g pen)
Poetry (g poetry) Philosophy
(g phi)
Politics (g pol)
Psychology (g psy)
Psychotherapy (g therapy) Recovery## (g recovery)
San Francisco (g sanfran) Scams
(g scam)
Sexuality (g sex) Singles
(g singles)
Southern (g south) Spanish
(g spanish)
Spirituality (g spirit) Tibet
(g tibet)
Transportation (g transport) True Confessions (g tru)
Unclear (g unclear) WELL Writer's Workshop***(g www)
Whole Earth (g we) Women on the WELL*(g wow)
Words (g words) Writers
(g wri)
**** Private Conference - mail wooly for entry
***Private conference - mail sonia for entry
** Private conference - mail flash for entry
* Private conference - mail reva for entry
# Private Conference - mail hudu for entry
## Private Conference - mail dhawk for entry
Arts - Recreation - Entertainment
-----------------------------------
ArtCom Electronic Net (g acen)
Audio-Videophilia (g aud)
Bicycles (g bike) Bay Area
Tonight**(g bat)
Boating (g wet) Books
(g books)
CD's (g cd) Comics
(g comics)
Cooking (g cook) Flying
(g flying)
Fun (g fun) Games
(g games)
Gardening (g gard) Kids
(g kids)
Nightowls* (g owl) Jokes
(g jokes)
MIDI (g midi) Movies
(g movies)
Motorcycling (g ride) Motoring
(g car)
Music (g mus) On Stage
(g onstage)
Pets (g pets) Radio
(g rad)
Restaurant (g rest) Science Fiction
(g sf)
Sports (g spo) Star Trek
(g trek)
Television (g tv) Theater
(g theater)
Weird (g weird)
Zines/Factsheet Five(g f5)
* Open from midnight to 6am
** Updated daily
Grateful Dead
-------------
Grateful Dead (g gd) Deadplan* (g
dp)
Deadlit (g deadlit) Feedback
(g feedback)
GD Hour (g gdh) Tapes
(g tapes)
Tickets (g tix) Tours
(g tours)
* Private conference - mail tnf for entry
Computers
-----------
AI/Forth/Realtime (g realtime) Amiga (g
amiga)
Apple (g app) Computer Books (g
cbook)
Art & Graphics (g gra) Hacking
(g hack)
HyperCard (g hype) IBM PC
(g ibm)
LANs (g lan) Laptop
(g lap)
Macintosh (g mac) Mactech (g
mactech)
Microtimes (g microx) Muchomedia (g
mucho)
NeXt (g next) OS/2
(g os2)
Printers (g print)
Programmer's Net (g net)
Siggraph (g siggraph) Software
Design (g sdc)
Software/Programming (software)
Software Support (g ssc)
Unix (g unix) Windows
(g windows)
Word Processing (g word)
Technical - Communications
----------------------------
Bioinfo (g bioinfo) Info
(g boing)
Media (g media) NAPLPS
(g naplps)
Netweaver (g netweaver) Networld (g networld)
Packet Radio (g packet) Photography
(g pho)
Radio (g rad) Science
(g science)
Technical Writers (g tec) Telecommunications(g tele)
Usenet (g usenet) Video
(g vid)
Virtual Reality (g vr)
The WELL Itself
---------------
Deeper (g deeper) Entry
(g ent)
General (g gentech) Help
(g help)
Hosts (g hosts) Policy
(g policy)
System News (g news) Test
(g test)
The list itself is dazzling, bringing to the
untutored
eye a dizzying impression of a bizarre milieu of mountain-
climbing Hawaiian holistic photographers trading true-life
confessions with bisexual word-processing Tibetans.
But this confusion is more apparent than real. Each
of these conferences was a little cyberspace world in
itself,
comprising dozens and perhaps hundreds of sub-topics.
Each conference was commonly frequented by a fairly
small, fairly like-minded community of perhaps a few
dozen people. It was humanly impossible to encompass
the entire Well (especially since access to the Well's
mainframe computer was billed by the hour). Most long-
time users contented themselves with a few favorite
topical neighborhoods, with the occasional foray
elsewhere for a taste of exotica. But especially important
news items, and hot topical debates, could catch the
attention of the entire Well community.
Like any community, the Well had its celebrities, and
John Perry Barlow, the silver-tongued and silver-
modemed lyricist of the Grateful Dead, ranked
prominently among them. It was here on the Well that
Barlow posted his true-life tale of computer-crime
encounter with the FBI.
The story, as might be expected, created a great stir.
The Well was already primed for hacker controversy. In
December 1989, *Harper's* magazine had hosted a
debate on the Well about the ethics of illicit computer
intrusion. While over forty various computer-mavens
took part, Barlow proved a star in the debate. So did
"Acid Phreak" and "Phiber Optik," a pair of young New
York hacker-phreaks whose skills at telco switching-station
intrusion were matched only by their apparently limitless
hunger for fame. The advent of these two boldly
swaggering outlaws in the precincts of the Well created a
sensation akin to that of Black Panthers at a cocktail party
for the radically chic.
Phiber Optik in particular was to seize the day in
1990.
A devotee of the *2600* circle and stalwart of the New York
hackers' group "Masters of Deception," Phiber Optik was
a splendid exemplar of the computer intruder as
committed dissident. The eighteen-year-old Optik, a
high-school dropout and part-time computer repairman,
was young, smart, and ruthlessly obsessive, a sharp-
dressing, sharp-talking digital dude who was utterly and
airily contemptuous of anyone's rules but his own. By
late 1991, Phiber Optik had appeared in *Harper's,*
*Esquire,* *The New York Times,* in countless public
debates and conventions, even on a television show
hosted by Geraldo Rivera.
Treated with gingerly respect by Barlow and other
Well mavens, Phiber Optik swiftly became a Well
celebrity. Strangely, despite his thorny attitude and
utter
single-mindedness, Phiber Optik seemed to arouse strong
protective instincts in most of the people who met him.
He was great copy for journalists, always fearlessly ready
to swagger, and, better yet, to actually *demonstrate*
some off-the-wall digital stunt. He was a born media
darling.
Even cops seemed to recognize that there was
something peculiarly unworldly and uncriminal about this
particular troublemaker. He was so bold, so flagrant, so
young, and so obviously doomed, that even those who
strongly disapproved of his actions grew anxious for his
welfare, and began to flutter about him as if he were an
endangered seal pup.
In January 24, 1990 (nine days after the Martin Luther
King Day Crash), Phiber Optik, Acid Phreak, and a third
NYC scofflaw named Scorpion were raided by the Secret
Service. Their computers went out the door, along with
the usual blizzard of papers, notebooks, compact disks,
answering machines, Sony Walkmans, etc. Both Acid
Phreak and Phiber Optik were accused of having caused
the Crash.
The mills of justice ground slowly. The case
eventually fell into the hands of the New York State Police.
Phiber had lost his machinery in the raid, but there were
no charges filed against him for over a year. His
predicament was extensively publicized on the Well,
where it caused much resentment for police tactics. It's
one thing to merely hear about a hacker raided or busted;
it's another to see the police attacking someone you've
come to know personally, and who has explained his
motives at length. Through the *Harper's* debate on the
Well, it had become clear to the Wellbeings that Phiber
Optik was not in fact going to "hurt anything." In their
own salad days, many Wellbeings had tasted tear-gas in
pitched street-battles with police. They were inclined to
indulgence for acts of civil disobedience.
Wellbeings were also startled to learn of the
draconian thoroughness of a typical hacker search-and-
seizure. It took no great stretch of imagination for them
to
envision themselves suffering much the same treatment.
As early as January 1990, sentiment on the Well had
already begun to sour, and people had begun to grumble
that "hackers" were getting a raw deal from the ham-
handed powers-that-be. The resultant issue of *Harper's*
magazine posed the question as to whether computer-
intrusion was a "crime" at all. As Barlow put it later:
"I've
begun to wonder if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as
desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves."
In February 1991, more than a year after the raid on
his home, Phiber Optik was finally arrested, and was
charged with first-degree Computer Tampering and
Computer Trespass, New York state offenses. He was also
charged with a theft-of-service misdemeanor, involving a
complex free-call scam to a 900 number. Phiber Optik
pled guilty to the misdemeanor charge, and was
sentenced to 35 hours of community service.
This passing harassment from the unfathomable
world of straight people seemed to bother Optik himself
little if at all. Deprived of his computer by the January
search-and-seizure, he simply bought himself a portable
computer so the cops could no longer monitor the phone
where he lived with his Mom, and he went right on with his
depredations, sometimes on live radio or in front of
television cameras.
The crackdown raid may have done little to dissuade
Phiber Optik, but its galling affect on the Wellbeings was
profound. As 1990 rolled on, the slings and arrows
mounted: the Knight Lightning raid, the Steve Jackson
raid, the nation-spanning Operation Sundevil. The
rhetoric of law enforcement made it clear that there was,
in fact, a concerted crackdown on hackers in progress.
The hackers of the Hackers Conference, the
Wellbeings, and their ilk, did not really mind the
occasional public misapprehension of "hacking"; if
anything, this membrane of differentiation from straight
society made the "computer community" feel different,
smarter, better. They had never before been confronted,
however, by a concerted vilification campaign.
Barlow's central role in the counter-struggle was one
of the major anomalies of 1990. Journalists investigating
the controversy often stumbled over the truth about
Barlow, but they commonly dusted themselves off and
hurried on as if nothing had happened. It was as if it
were
*too much to believe* that a 1960s freak from the Grateful
Dead had taken on a federal law enforcement operation
head-to-head and *actually seemed to be winning!*
Barlow had no easily detectable power-base for a
political struggle of this kind. He had no formal legal or
technical credentials. Barlow was, however, a computer
networker of truly stellar brilliance. He had a poet's
gift of
concise, colorful phrasing. He also had a journalist's
shrewdness, an off-the-wall, self-deprecating wit, and a
phenomenal wealth of simple personal charm.
The kind of influence Barlow possessed is fairly
common currency in literary, artistic, or musical circles.
A
gifted critic can wield great artistic influence simply
through defining the temper of the times, by coining the
catch-phrases and the terms of debate that become the
common currency of the period. (And as it happened,
Barlow *was* a part-time art critic, with a special
fondness
for the Western art of Frederic Remington.)
Barlow was the first commentator to adopt William
Gibson's striking science-fictional term "cyberspace" as a
synonym for the present-day nexus of computer and
telecommunications networks. Barlow was insistent that
cyberspace should be regarded as a qualitatively new
world, a "frontier." According to Barlow, the world of
electronic communications, now made visible through the
computer screen, could no longer be usefully regarded as
just a tangle of high-tech wiring. Instead, it had become a
*place,* cyberspace, which demanded a new set of
metaphors, a new set of rules and behaviors. The term, as
Barlow employed it, struck a useful chord, and this
concept of cyberspace was picked up by *Time,*
*Scientific American,* computer police, hackers, and
even Constitutional scholars. "Cyberspace" now seems
likely to become a permanent fixture of the language.
Barlow was very striking in person: a tall, craggy-
faced, bearded, deep-voiced Wyomingan in a dashing
Western ensemble of jeans, jacket, cowboy boots, a
knotted throat-kerchief and an ever-present Grateful
Dead cloisonne lapel pin.
Armed with a modem, however, Barlow was truly in
his element. Formal hierarchies were not Barlow's strong
suit; he rarely missed a chance to belittle the "large
organizations and their drones," with their uptight,
institutional mindset. Barlow was very much of the free-
spirit persuasion, deeply unimpressed by brass-hats and
jacks-in-office. But when it came to the digital grapevine,
Barlow was a cyberspace ad-hocrat par excellence.
There was not a mighty army of Barlows. There was
only one Barlow, and he was a fairly anomolous individual.
However, the situation only seemed to *require* a single
Barlow. In fact, after 1990, many people must have
concluded that a single Barlow was far more than they'd
ever bargained for.
Barlow's querulous mini-essay about his encounter
with the FBI struck a strong chord on the Well. A number
of other free spirits on the fringes of Apple Computing had
come under suspicion, and they liked it not one whit better
than he did.
One of these was Mitchell Kapor, the co-inventor of
the spreadsheet program "Lotus 1-2-3" and the founder of
Lotus Development Corporation. Kapor had written-off
the passing indignity of being fingerprinted down at his
own local Boston FBI headquarters, but Barlow's post
made the full national scope of the FBI's dragnet clear to
Kapor. The issue now had Kapor's full attention. As the
Secret Service swung into anti-hacker operation
nationwide in 1990, Kapor watched every move with deep
skepticism and growing alarm.
As it happened, Kapor had already met Barlow, who
had interviewed Kapor for a California computer journal.
Like most people who met Barlow, Kapor had been very
taken with him. Now Kapor took it upon himself to drop
in on Barlow for a heart-to-heart talk about the situation.
Kapor was a regular on the Well. Kapor had been a
devotee of the *Whole Earth Catalog* since the
beginning, and treasured a complete run of the magazine.
And Kapor not only had a modem, but a private jet. In
pursuit of the scattered high-tech investments of Kapor
Enterprises Inc., his personal, multi-million dollar holding
company, Kapor commonly crossed state lines with about
as much thought as one might give to faxing a letter.
The Kapor-Barlow council of June 1990, in Pinedale,
Wyoming, was the start of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation. Barlow swiftly wrote a manifesto, "Crime and
Puzzlement," which announced his, and Kapor's,
intention to form a political organization to "raise and
disburse funds for education, lobbying, and litigation in
the areas relating to digital speech and the extension of
the Constitution into Cyberspace."
Furthermore, proclaimed the manifesto, the
foundation would "fund, conduct, and support legal efforts
to demonstrate that the Secret Service has exercised prior
restraint on publications, limited free speech, conducted
improper seizure of equipment and data, used undue
force, and generally conducted itself in a fashion which is
arbitrary, oppressive, and unconstitutional."
"Crime and Puzzlement" was distributed far and wide
through computer networking channels, and also printed
in the *Whole Earth Review.* The sudden declaration of a
coherent, politicized counter-strike from the ranks of
hackerdom electrified the community. Steve Wozniak
(perhaps a bit stung by the NuPrometheus scandal)
swiftly offered to match any funds Kapor offered the
Foundation.
John Gilmore, one of the pioneers of Sun
Microsystems, immediately offered his own extensive
financial and personal support. Gilmore, an ardent
libertarian, was to prove an eloquent advocate of
electronic privacy issues, especially freedom from
governmental and corporate computer-assisted
surveillance of private citizens.
A second meeting in San Francisco rounded up
further allies: Stewart Brand of the Point Foundation,
virtual-reality pioneers Jaron Lanier and Chuck
Blanchard, network entrepreneur and venture capitalist
Nat Goldhaber. At this dinner meeting, the activists
settled on a formal title: the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, Incorporated. Kapor became its president.
A new EFF Conference was opened on the Point
Foundation's Well, and the Well was declared "the home
of the Electronic Frontier Foundation."
Press coverage was immediate and intense. Like
their nineteenth-century spiritual ancestors, Alexander
Graham Bell and Thomas Watson, the high-tech
computer entrepreneurs of the 1970s and 1980s -- people
such as Wozniak, Jobs, Kapor, Gates, and H. Ross Perot,
who had raised themselves by their bootstraps to
dominate a glittering new industry -- had always made
very good copy.
But while the Wellbeings rejoiced, the press in
general seemed nonplussed by the self-declared
"civilizers of cyberspace." EFF's insistence that the war
against "hackers" involved grave Constitutional civil
liberties issues seemed somewhat farfetched, especially
since none of EFF's organizers were lawyers or established
politicians. The business press in particular found it
easier to seize on the apparent core of the story -- that
high-tech entrepreneur Mitchell Kapor had established a
"defense fund for hackers." Was EFF a genuinely
important political development -- or merely a clique of
wealthy eccentrics, dabbling in matters better left to the
proper authorities? The jury was still out.
But the stage was now set for open confrontation.
And the first and the most critical battle was the hacker
show-trial of "Knight Lightning."
#
It has been my practice throughout this book to refer
to hackers only by their "handles." There is little to
gain
by giving the real names of these people, many of whom
are juveniles, many of whom have never been convicted of
any crime, and many of whom had unsuspecting parents
who have already suffered enough.
But the trial of Knight Lightning on July 24-27, 1990,
made this particular "hacker" a nationally known public
figure. It can do no particular harm to himself or his
family if I repeat the long-established fact that his name
is
Craig Neidorf (pronounced NYE-dorf).
Neidorf's jury trial took place in the United States
District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Eastern
Division, with the Honorable Nicholas J. Bua presiding.
The United States of America was the plaintiff, the
defendant Mr. Neidorf. The defendant's attorney was
Sheldon T. Zenner of the Chicago firm of Katten, Muchin
and Zavis.
The prosecution was led by the stalwarts of the
Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force: William
J. Cook, Colleen D. Coughlin, and David A. Glockner, all
Assistant United States Attorneys. The Secret Service
Case Agent was Timothy M. Foley.
It will be recalled that Neidorf was the co-editor of
an
underground hacker "magazine" called *Phrack*.
*Phrack* was an entirely electronic publication,
distributed through bulletin boards and over electronic
networks. It was amateur publication given away for free.
Neidorf had never made any money for his work in
*Phrack.* Neither had his unindicted co-editor "Taran
King" or any of the numerous *Phrack* contributors.
The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force,
however, had decided to prosecute Neidorf as a fraudster.
To formally admit that *Phrack* was a "magazine" and
Neidorf a "publisher" was to open a prosecutorial
Pandora's Box of First Amendment issues. To do this was
to play into the hands of Zenner and his EFF advisers,
which now included a phalanx of prominent New York civil
rights lawyers as well as the formidable legal staff of
Katten, Muchin and Zavis. Instead, the prosecution relied
heavily on the issue of access device fraud: Section 1029
of
Title 18, the section from which the Secret Service drew its
most direct jurisdiction over computer crime.
Neidorf's alleged crimes centered around the E911
Document. He was accused of having entered into a
fraudulent scheme with the Prophet, who, it will be
recalled, was the Atlanta LoD member who had illicitly
copied the E911 Document from the BellSouth AIMSX
system.
The Prophet himself was also a co-defendant in the
Neidorf case, part-and-parcel of the alleged "fraud
scheme" to "steal" BellSouth's E911 Document (and to
pass the Document across state lines, which helped
establish the Neidorf trial as a federal case). The
Prophet,
in the spirit of full co-operation, had agreed to testify
against Neidorf.
In fact, all three of the Atlanta crew stood ready to
testify against Neidorf. Their own federal prosecutors in
Atlanta had charged the Atlanta Three with: (a)
conspiracy, (b) computer fraud, (c) wire fraud, (d) access
device fraud, and (e) interstate transportation of stolen
property (Title 18, Sections 371, 1030, 1343, 1029, and
2314).
Faced with this blizzard of trouble, Prophet and
Leftist had ducked any public trial and had pled guilty to
reduced charges -- one conspiracy count apiece. Urvile
had pled guilty to that odd bit of Section 1029 which makes
it illegal to possess "fifteen or more" illegal access
devices
(in his case, computer passwords). And their sentences
were scheduled for September 14, 1990 -- well after the
Neidorf trial. As witnesses, they could presumably be
relied upon to behave.
Neidorf, however, was pleading innocent. Most
everyone else caught up in the crackdown had
"cooperated fully" and pled guilty in hope of reduced
sentences. (Steve Jackson was a notable exception, of
course, and had strongly protested his innocence from the
very beginning. But Steve Jackson could not get a day in
court -- Steve Jackson had never been charged with any
crime in the first place.)
Neidorf had been urged to plead guilty. But Neidorf
was a political science major and was disinclined to go to
jail for "fraud" when he had not made any money, had not
broken into any computer, and had been publishing a
magazine that he considered protected under the First
Amendment.
Neidorf's trial was the *only* legal action of the
entire Crackdown that actually involved bringing the
issues at hand out for a public test in front of a jury of
American citizens.
Neidorf, too, had cooperated with investigators. He
had voluntarily handed over much of the evidence that
had led to his own indictment. He had already admitted
in writing that he knew that the E911 Document had been
stolen before he had "published" it in *Phrack* -- or, from
the prosecution's point of view, illegally transported
stolen
property by wire in something purporting to be a
"publication."
But even if the "publication" of the E911 Document
was not held to be a crime, that wouldn't let Neidorf off
the hook. Neidorf had still received the E911 Document
when Prophet had transferred it to him from Rich
Andrews' Jolnet node. On that occasion, it certainly
hadn't been "published" -- it was hacker booty, pure and
simple, transported across state lines.
The Chicago Task Force led a Chicago grand jury to
indict Neidorf on a set of charges that could have put him
in jail for thirty years. When some of these charges were
successfully challenged before Neidorf actually went to
trial, the Chicago Task Force rearranged his indictment so
that he faced a possible jail term of over sixty years! As
a
first offender, it was very unlikely that Neidorf would in
fact receive a sentence so drastic; but the Chicago Task
Force clearly intended to see Neidorf put in prison, and
his conspiratorial "magazine" put permanently out of
commission. This was a federal case, and Neidorf was
charged with the fraudulent theft of property worth almost
eighty thousand dollars.
William Cook was a strong believer in high-profile
prosecutions with symbolic overtones. He often published
articles on his work in the security trade press, arguing
that "a clear message had to be sent to the public at large
and the computer community in particular that
unauthorized attacks on computers and the theft of
computerized information would not be tolerated by the
courts."
The issues were complex, the prosecution's tactics
somewhat unorthodox, but the Chicago Task Force had
proved sure-footed to date. "Shadowhawk" had been
bagged on the wing in 1989 by the Task Force, and
sentenced to nine months in prison, and a $10,000 fine.
The Shadowhawk case involved charges under Section
1030, the "federal interest computer" section.
Shadowhawk had not in fact been a devotee of
"federal-interest" computers per se. On the contrary,
Shadowhawk, who owned an AT&T home computer,
seemed to cherish a special aggression toward AT&T. He
had bragged on the underground boards "Phreak Klass
2600" and "Dr. Ripco" of his skills at raiding AT&T, and of
his intention to crash AT&T's national phone system.
Shadowhawk's brags were noticed by Henry Kluepfel of
Bellcore Security, scourge of the outlaw boards, whose
relations with the Chicago Task Force were long and
intimate.
The Task Force successfully established that Section
1030 applied to the teenage Shadowhawk, despite the
objections of his defense attorney. Shadowhawk had
entered a computer "owned" by U.S. Missile Command
and merely "managed" by AT&T. He had also entered an
AT&T computer located at Robbins Air Force Base in
Georgia. Attacking AT&T was of "federal interest"
whether Shadowhawk had intended it or not.
The Task Force also convinced the court that a piece
of AT&T software that Shadowhawk had illicitly copied
from Bell Labs, the "Artificial Intelligence C5 Expert
System," was worth a cool one million dollars.
Shadowhawk's attorney had argued that Shadowhawk had
not sold the program and had made no profit from the
illicit copying. And in point of fact, the C5 Expert System
was experimental software, and had no established
market value because it had never been on the market in
the first place. AT&T's own assessment of a "one million
dollar" figure for its own intangible property was accepted
without challenge by the court, however. And the court
concurred with the government prosecutors that
Shadowhawk showed clear "intent to defraud" whether
he'd gotten any money or not. Shadowhawk went to jail.
The Task Force's other best-known triumph had been
the conviction and jailing of "Kyrie." Kyrie, a true
denizen
of the digital criminal underground, was a 36-year-old
Canadian woman, convicted and jailed for
telecommunications fraud in Canada. After her release
from prison, she had fled the wrath of Canada Bell and the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and eventually settled,
very unwisely, in Chicago.
"Kyrie," who also called herself "Long Distance
Information," specialized in voice-mail abuse. She
assembled large numbers of hot long-distance codes, then
read them aloud into a series of corporate voice-mail
systems. Kyrie and her friends were electronic squatters
in corporate voice-mail systems, using them much as if
they were pirate bulletin boards, then moving on when
their vocal chatter clogged the system and the owners
necessarily wised up. Kyrie's camp followers were a loose
tribe of some hundred and fifty phone-phreaks, who
followed her trail of piracy from machine to machine,
ardently begging for her services and expertise.
Kyrie's disciples passed her stolen credit-card
numbers, in exchange for her stolen "long distance
information." Some of Kyrie's clients paid her off in cash,
by scamming credit-card cash advances from Western
Union.
Kyrie travelled incessantly, mostly through airline
tickets and hotel rooms that she scammed through stolen
credit cards. Tiring of this, she found refuge with a
fellow
female phone phreak in Chicago. Kyrie's hostess, like a
surprising number of phone phreaks, was blind. She was
also physically disabled. Kyrie allegedly made the best of
her new situation by applying for, and receiving, state
welfare funds under a false identity as a qualified
caretaker for the handicapped.
Sadly, Kyrie's two children by a former marriage had
also vanished underground with her; these pre-teen digital
refugees had no legal American identity, and had never
spent a day in school.
Kyrie was addicted to technical mastery and
enthralled by her own cleverness and the ardent worship
of her teenage followers. This foolishly led her to phone
up Gail Thackeray in Arizona, to boast, brag, strut, and
offer to play informant. Thackeray, however, had already
learned far more than enough about Kyrie, whom she
roundly despised as an adult criminal corrupting minors, a
"female Fagin." Thackeray passed her tapes of Kyrie's
boasts to the Secret Service.
Kyrie was raided and arrested in Chicago in May
1989. She confessed at great length and pled guilty.
In August 1990, Cook and his Task Force colleague
Colleen Coughlin sent Kyrie to jail for 27 months, for
computer and telecommunications fraud. This was a
markedly severe sentence by the usual wrist-slapping
standards of "hacker" busts. Seven of Kyrie's foremost
teenage disciples were also indicted and convicted. The
Kyrie "high-tech street gang," as Cook described it, had
been crushed. Cook and his colleagues had been the first
ever to put someone in prison for voice-mail abuse. Their
pioneering efforts had won them attention and kudos.
In his article on Kyrie, Cook drove the message home
to the readers of *Security Management* magazine, a
trade journal for corporate security professionals. The
case, Cook said, and Kyrie's stiff sentence, "reflect a new
reality for hackers and computer crime victims in the
'90s.... Individuals and corporations who report computer
and telecommunications crimes can now expect that their
cooperation with federal law enforcement will result in
meaningful punishment. Companies and the public at
large must report computer-enhanced crimes if they want
prosecutors and the course to protect their rights to the
tangible and intangible property developed and stored on
computers."
Cook had made it his business to construct this "new
reality for hackers." He'd also made it his business to
police corporate property rights to the intangible.
Had the Electronic Frontier Foundation been a
"hacker defense fund" as that term was generally
understood, they presumably would have stood up for
Kyrie. Her 1990 sentence did indeed send a "message"
that federal heat was coming down on "hackers." But
Kyrie found no defenders at EFF, or anywhere else, for
that matter. EFF was not a bail-out fund for electronic
crooks.
The Neidorf case paralleled the Shadowhawk case in
certain ways. The victim once again was allowed to set the
value of the "stolen" property. Once again Kluepfel was
both investigator and technical advisor. Once again no
money had changed hands, but the "intent to defraud"
was central.
The prosecution's case showed signs of weakness
early on. The Task Force had originally hoped to prove
Neidorf the center of a nationwide Legion of Doom
criminal conspiracy. The *Phrack* editors threw physical
get-togethers every summer, which attracted hackers
from across the country; generally two dozen or so of the
magazine's favorite contributors and readers. (Such
conventions were common in the hacker community; 2600
Magazine, for instance, held public meetings of hackers in
New York, every month.) LoD heavy-dudes were always a
strong presence at these *Phrack*-sponsored
"Summercons."
In July 1988, an Arizona hacker named "Dictator"
attended Summercon in Neidorf's home town of St. Louis.
Dictator was one of Gail Thackeray's underground
informants; Dictator's underground board in Phoenix was
a sting operation for the Secret Service. Dictator brought
an undercover crew of Secret Service agents to
Summercon. The agents bored spyholes through the wall
of Dictator's hotel room in St Louis, and videotaped the
frolicking hackers through a one-way mirror. As it
happened, however, nothing illegal had occurred on
videotape, other than the guzzling of beer by a couple of
minors. Summercons were social events, not sinister
cabals. The tapes showed fifteen hours of raucous
laughter, pizza-gobbling, in-jokes and back-slapping.
Neidorf's lawyer, Sheldon Zenner, saw the Secret
Service tapes before the trial. Zenner was shocked by the
complete harmlessness of this meeting, which Cook had
earlier characterized as a sinister interstate conspiracy to
commit fraud. Zenner wanted to show the Summercon
tapes to the jury. It took protracted maneuverings by the
Task Force to keep the tapes from the jury as "irrelevant."
The E911 Document was also proving a weak reed. It
had originally been valued at $79,449. Unlike
Shadowhawk's arcane Artificial Intelligence booty, the
E911 Document was not software -- it was written in
English. Computer-knowledgeable people found this
value -- for a twelve-page bureaucratic document --
frankly incredible. In his "Crime and Puzzlement"
manifesto for EFF, Barlow commented: "We will probably
never know how this figure was reached or by whom,
though I like to imagine an appraisal team consisting of
Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon."
As it happened, Barlow was unduly pessimistic. The
EFF did, in fact, eventually discover exactly how this
figure
was reached, and by whom -- but only in 1991, long after
the Neidorf trial was over.
Kim Megahee, a Southern Bell security manager,
had arrived at the document's value by simply adding up
the "costs associated with the production" of the E911
Document. Those "costs" were as follows:
1. A technical writer had been hired to research and
write the E911 Document. 200 hours of work, at $35 an
hour, cost : $7,000. A Project Manager had overseen the
technical writer. 200 hours, at $31 an hour, made: $6,200.
2. A week of typing had cost $721 dollars. A week of
formatting had cost $721. A week of graphics formatting
had cost $742.
3. Two days of editing cost $367.
` 4. A box of order labels cost five dollars.
5. Preparing a purchase order for the Document,
including typing and the obtaining of an authorizing
signature from within the BellSouth bureaucracy, cost
$129.
6. Printing cost $313. Mailing the Document to fifty
people took fifty hours by a clerk, and cost $858.
7. Placing the Document in an index took two clerks
an hour each, totalling $43.
Bureaucratic overhead alone, therefore, was alleged
to have cost a whopping $17,099. According to Mr.
Megahee, the typing of a twelve-page document had
taken a full week. Writing it had taken five weeks,
including an overseer who apparently did nothing else but
watch the author for five weeks. Editing twelve pages had
taken two days. Printing and mailing an electronic
document (which was already available on the Southern
Bell Data Network to any telco employee who needed it),
had cost over a thousand dollars.
But this was just the beginning. There were also the
*hardware expenses.* Eight hundred fifty dollars for a
VT220 computer monitor. *Thirty-one thousand dollars*
for a sophisticated VAXstation II computer. Six thousand
dollars for a computer printer. *Twenty-two thousand
dollars* for a copy of "Interleaf" software. Two thousand
five hundred dollars for VMS software. All this to create
the twelve-page Document.
Plus ten percent of the cost of the software and the
hardware, for maintenance. (Actually, the ten percent
maintenance costs, though mentioned, had been left off
the final $79,449 total, apparently through a merciful
oversight).
Mr. Megahee's letter had been mailed directly to
William Cook himself, at the office of the Chicago federal
attorneys. The United States Government accepted these
telco figures without question.
As incredulity mounted, the value of the E911
Document was officially revised downward. This time,
Robert Kibler of BellSouth Security estimated the value of
the twelve pages as a mere $24,639.05 -- based,
purportedly, on "R&D costs." But this specific estimate,
right down to the nickel, did not move the skeptics at all;
in
fact it provoked open scorn and a torrent of sarcasm.
The financial issues concerning theft of proprietary
information have always been peculiar. It could be
argued that BellSouth had not "lost" its E911 Document at
all in the first place, and therefore had not suffered any
monetary damage from this "theft." And Sheldon Zenner
did in fact argue this at Neidorf's trial -- that Prophet's
raid
had not been "theft," but was better understood as illicit
copying.
The money, however, was not central to anyone's true
purposes in this trial. It was not Cook's strategy to
convince the jury that the E911 Document was a major act
of theft and should be punished for that reason alone.
His strategy was to argue that the E911 Document was
*dangerous.* It was his intention to establish that the
E911 Document was "a road-map" to the Enhanced 911
System. Neidorf had deliberately and recklessly
distributed a dangerous weapon. Neidorf and the
Prophet did not care (or perhaps even gloated at the
sinister idea) that the E911 Document could be used by
hackers to disrupt 911 service, "a life line for every
person
certainly in the Southern Bell region of the United States,
and indeed, in many communities throughout the United
States," in Cook's own words. Neidorf had put people's
lives in danger.
In pre-trial maneuverings, Cook had established that
the E911 Document was too hot to appear in the public
proceedings of the Neidorf trial. The *jury itself* would
not be allowed to ever see this Document, lest it slip into
the official court records, and thus into the hands of the
general public, and, thus, somehow, to malicious hackers
who might lethally abuse it.
Hiding the E911 Document from the jury may have
been a clever legal maneuver, but it had a severe flaw.
There were, in point of fact, hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of people, already in possession of the E911 Document,
just as *Phrack* had published it. Its true nature was
already obvious to a wide section of the interested public
(all of whom, by the way, were, at least theoretically,
party
to a gigantic wire-fraud conspiracy). Most everyone in the
electronic community who had a modem and any interest
in the Neidorf case already had a copy of the Document.
It had already been available in *Phrack* for over a year.
People, even quite normal people without any
particular prurient interest in forbidden knowledge, did
not shut their eyes in terror at the thought of beholding a
"dangerous" document from a telephone company. On
the contrary, they tended to trust their own judgement and
simply read the Document for themselves. And they were
not impressed.
One such person was John Nagle. Nagle was a forty-
one-year-old professional programmer with a masters'
degree in computer science from Stanford. He had
worked for Ford Aerospace, where he had invented a
computer-networking technique known as the "Nagle
Algorithm," and for the prominent Californian computer-
graphics firm "Autodesk," where he was a major
stockholder.
Nagle was also a prominent figure on the Well, much
respected for his technical knowledgeability.
Nagle had followed the civil-liberties debate closely,
for he was an ardent telecommunicator. He was no
particular friend of computer intruders, but he believed
electronic publishing had a great deal to offer society at
large, and attempts to restrain its growth, or to censor
free
electronic expression, strongly roused his ire.
The Neidorf case, and the E911 Document, were both
being discussed in detail on the Internet, in an electronic
publication called *Telecom Digest.* Nagle, a longtime
Internet maven, was a regular reader of *Telecom
Digest.* Nagle had never seen a copy of *Phrack,* but
the implications of the case disturbed him.
While in a Stanford bookstore hunting books on
robotics, Nagle happened across a book called *The
Intelligent Network.* Thumbing through it at random,
Nagle came across an entire chapter meticulously
detailing the workings of E911 police emergency systems.
This extensive text was being sold openly, and yet in
Illinois a young man was in danger of going to prison for
publishing a thin six-page document about 911 service.
Nagle made an ironic comment to this effect in
*Telecom Digest.* From there, Nagle was put in touch
with Mitch Kapor, and then with Neidorf's lawyers.
Sheldon Zenner was delighted to find a computer
telecommunications expert willing to speak up for
Neidorf, one who was not a wacky teenage "hacker."
Nagle was fluent, mature, and respectable; he'd once had
a federal security clearance.
Nagle was asked to fly to Illinois to join the defense
team.
Having joined the defense as an expert witness,
Nagle read the entire E911 Document for himself. He
made his own judgement about its potential for menace.
The time has now come for you yourself, the reader,
to have a look at the E911 Document. This six-page piece
of work was the pretext for a federal prosecution that could
have sent an electronic publisher to prison for thirty, or
even sixty, years. It was the pretext for the search and
seizure of Steve Jackson Games, a legitimate publisher of
printed books. It was also the formal pretext for the
search
and seizure of the Mentor's bulletin board, "Phoenix
Project," and for the raid on the home of Erik Bloodaxe. It
also had much to do with the seizure of Richard Andrews'
Jolnet node and the shutdown of Charles Boykin's AT&T
node. The E911 Document was the single most important
piece of evidence in the Hacker Crackdown. There can
be no real and legitimate substitute for the Document
itself.
==Phrack Inc.==
Volume Two, Issue 24, File 5 of 13
Control Office Administration
Of Enhanced 911 Services For
Special Services and Account Centers
by the Eavesdropper
March, 1988
Description of Service
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The control office for Emergency 911 service is assigned in
accordance with the existing standard guidelines to one of
the following centers:
o Special Services Center (SSC)
o Major Accounts Center (MAC)
o Serving Test Center (STC)
o Toll Control Center (TCC)
The SSC/MAC designation is used in this document
interchangeably for any of these four centers. The Special
Services Centers (SSCs) or Major Account Centers
(MACs) have been designated as the trouble reporting
contact for all E911 customer (PSAP) reported troubles.
Subscribers who have trouble on an E911 call will continue
to contact local repair service (CRSAB) who will refer the
---------------------------------
Aging (g gray) AIDS
(g aids)
Amnesty International (g amnesty) Archives (g
arc)
Berkeley (g berk) Buddhist (g
wonderland)
Christian (g cross) Couples
(g couples)
Current Events (g curr) Dreams (g
dream)
Drugs (g dru) East
Coast (g east)
Emotional Health**** (g private) Erotica (g
eros)
Environment (g env) Firearms (g
firearms)
First Amendment (g first) Fringes of Reason (g fringes)
Gay (g gay) Gay (Private)#
(g gaypriv)
Geography (g geo) German
(g german)
Gulf War (g gulf) Hawaii
(g aloha)
Health (g heal) History
(g hist)
Holistic (g holi)
Interview (g inter)
Italian (g ital) Jewish
(g jew)
Liberty (g liberty) Mind
(g mind)
Miscellaneous (g misc) Men on the WELL** (g mow)
Network Integration (g origin) Nonprofits
(g non)
North Bay (g north) Northwest
(g nw)
Pacific Rim (g pacrim) Parenting
(g par)
Peace (g pea) Peninsula
(g pen)
Poetry (g poetry) Philosophy
(g phi)
Politics (g pol)
Psychology (g psy)
Psychotherapy (g therapy) Recovery## (g recovery)
San Francisco (g sanfran) Scams
(g scam)
Sexuality (g sex) Singles
(g singles)
Southern (g south) Spanish
(g spanish)
Spirituality (g spirit) Tibet
(g tibet)
Transportation (g transport) True Confessions (g tru)
Unclear (g unclear) WELL Writer's Workshop***(g www)
Whole Earth (g we) Women on the WELL*(g wow)
Words (g words) Writers
(g wri)
**** Private Conference - mail wooly for entry
***Private conference - mail sonia for entry
** Private conference - mail flash for entry
* Private conference - mail reva for entry
# Private Conference - mail hudu for entry
## Private Conference - mail dhawk for entry
Arts - Recreation - Entertainment
-----------------------------------
ArtCom Electronic Net (g acen)
Audio-Videophilia (g aud)
Bicycles (g bike) Bay Area
Tonight**(g bat)
Boating (g wet) Books
(g books)
CD's (g cd) Comics
(g comics)
Cooking (g cook) Flying
(g flying)
Fun (g fun) Games
(g games)
Gardening (g gard) Kids
(g kids)
Nightowls* (g owl) Jokes
(g jokes)
MIDI (g midi) Movies
(g movies)
Motorcycling (g ride) Motoring
(g car)
Music (g mus) On Stage
(g onstage)
Pets (g pets) Radio
(g rad)
Restaurant (g rest) Science Fiction
(g sf)
Sports (g spo) Star Trek
(g trek)
Television (g tv) Theater
(g theater)
Weird (g weird)
Zines/Factsheet Five(g f5)
* Open from midnight to 6am
** Updated daily
Grateful Dead
-------------
Grateful Dead (g gd) Deadplan* (g
dp)
Deadlit (g deadlit) Feedback
(g feedback)
GD Hour (g gdh) Tapes
(g tapes)
Tickets (g tix) Tours
(g tours)
* Private conference - mail tnf for entry
Computers
-----------
AI/Forth/Realtime (g realtime) Amiga (g
amiga)
Apple (g app) Computer Books (g
cbook)
Art & Graphics (g gra) Hacking
(g hack)
HyperCard (g hype) IBM PC
(g ibm)
LANs (g lan) Laptop
(g lap)
Macintosh (g mac) Mactech (g
mactech)
Microtimes (g microx) Muchomedia (g
mucho)
NeXt (g next) OS/2
(g os2)
Printers (g print)
Programmer's Net (g net)
Siggraph (g siggraph) Software
Design (g sdc)
Software/Programming (software)
Software Support (g ssc)
Unix (g unix) Windows
(g windows)
Word Processing (g word)
Technical - Communications
----------------------------
Bioinfo (g bioinfo) Info
(g boing)
Media (g media) NAPLPS
(g naplps)
Netweaver (g netweaver) Networld (g networld)
Packet Radio (g packet) Photography
(g pho)
Radio (g rad) Science
(g science)
Technical Writers (g tec) Telecommunications(g tele)
Usenet (g usenet) Video
(g vid)
Virtual Reality (g vr)
The WELL Itself
---------------
Deeper (g deeper) Entry
(g ent)
General (g gentech) Help
(g help)
Hosts (g hosts) Policy
(g policy)
System News (g news) Test
(g test)
The list itself is dazzling, bringing to the
untutored
eye a dizzying impression of a bizarre milieu of mountain-
climbing Hawaiian holistic photographers trading true-life
confessions with bisexual word-processing Tibetans.
But this confusion is more apparent than real. Each
of these conferences was a little cyberspace world in
itself,
comprising dozens and perhaps hundreds of sub-topics.
Each conference was commonly frequented by a fairly
small, fairly like-minded community of perhaps a few
dozen people. It was humanly impossible to encompass
the entire Well (especially since access to the Well's
mainframe computer was billed by the hour). Most long-
time users contented themselves with a few favorite
topical neighborhoods, with the occasional foray
elsewhere for a taste of exotica. But especially important
news items, and hot topical debates, could catch the
attention of the entire Well community.
Like any community, the Well had its celebrities, and
John Perry Barlow, the silver-tongued and silver-
modemed lyricist of the Grateful Dead, ranked
prominently among them. It was here on the Well that
Barlow posted his true-life tale of computer-crime
encounter with the FBI.
The story, as might be expected, created a great stir.
The Well was already primed for hacker controversy. In
December 1989, *Harper's* magazine had hosted a
debate on the Well about the ethics of illicit computer
intrusion. While over forty various computer-mavens
took part, Barlow proved a star in the debate. So did
"Acid Phreak" and "Phiber Optik," a pair of young New
York hacker-phreaks whose skills at telco switching-station
intrusion were matched only by their apparently limitless
hunger for fame. The advent of these two boldly
swaggering outlaws in the precincts of the Well created a
sensation akin to that of Black Panthers at a cocktail party
for the radically chic.
Phiber Optik in particular was to seize the day in
1990.
A devotee of the *2600* circle and stalwart of the New York
hackers' group "Masters of Deception," Phiber Optik was
a splendid exemplar of the computer intruder as
committed dissident. The eighteen-year-old Optik, a
high-school dropout and part-time computer repairman,
was young, smart, and ruthlessly obsessive, a sharp-
dressing, sharp-talking digital dude who was utterly and
airily contemptuous of anyone's rules but his own. By
late 1991, Phiber Optik had appeared in *Harper's,*
*Esquire,* *The New York Times,* in countless public
debates and conventions, even on a television show
hosted by Geraldo Rivera.
Treated with gingerly respect by Barlow and other
Well mavens, Phiber Optik swiftly became a Well
celebrity. Strangely, despite his thorny attitude and
utter
single-mindedness, Phiber Optik seemed to arouse strong
protective instincts in most of the people who met him.
He was great copy for journalists, always fearlessly ready
to swagger, and, better yet, to actually *demonstrate*
some off-the-wall digital stunt. He was a born media
darling.
Even cops seemed to recognize that there was
something peculiarly unworldly and uncriminal about this
particular troublemaker. He was so bold, so flagrant, so
young, and so obviously doomed, that even those who
strongly disapproved of his actions grew anxious for his
welfare, and began to flutter about him as if he were an
endangered seal pup.
In January 24, 1990 (nine days after the Martin Luther
King Day Crash), Phiber Optik, Acid Phreak, and a third
NYC scofflaw named Scorpion were raided by the Secret
Service. Their computers went out the door, along with
the usual blizzard of papers, notebooks, compact disks,
answering machines, Sony Walkmans, etc. Both Acid
Phreak and Phiber Optik were accused of having caused
the Crash.
The mills of justice ground slowly. The case
eventually fell into the hands of the New York State Police.
Phiber had lost his machinery in the raid, but there were
no charges filed against him for over a year. His
predicament was extensively publicized on the Well,
where it caused much resentment for police tactics. It's
one thing to merely hear about a hacker raided or busted;
it's another to see the police attacking someone you've
come to know personally, and who has explained his
motives at length. Through the *Harper's* debate on the
Well, it had become clear to the Wellbeings that Phiber
Optik was not in fact going to "hurt anything." In their
own salad days, many Wellbeings had tasted tear-gas in
pitched street-battles with police. They were inclined to
indulgence for acts of civil disobedience.
Wellbeings were also startled to learn of the
draconian thoroughness of a typical hacker search-and-
seizure. It took no great stretch of imagination for them
to
envision themselves suffering much the same treatment.
As early as January 1990, sentiment on the Well had
already begun to sour, and people had begun to grumble
that "hackers" were getting a raw deal from the ham-
handed powers-that-be. The resultant issue of *Harper's*
magazine posed the question as to whether computer-
intrusion was a "crime" at all. As Barlow put it later:
"I've
begun to wonder if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as
desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves."
In February 1991, more than a year after the raid on
his home, Phiber Optik was finally arrested, and was
charged with first-degree Computer Tampering and
Computer Trespass, New York state offenses. He was also
charged with a theft-of-service misdemeanor, involving a
complex free-call scam to a 900 number. Phiber Optik
pled guilty to the misdemeanor charge, and was
sentenced to 35 hours of community service.
This passing harassment from the unfathomable
world of straight people seemed to bother Optik himself
little if at all. Deprived of his computer by the January
search-and-seizure, he simply bought himself a portable
computer so the cops could no longer monitor the phone
where he lived with his Mom, and he went right on with his
depredations, sometimes on live radio or in front of
television cameras.
The crackdown raid may have done little to dissuade
Phiber Optik, but its galling affect on the Wellbeings was
profound. As 1990 rolled on, the slings and arrows
mounted: the Knight Lightning raid, the Steve Jackson
raid, the nation-spanning Operation Sundevil. The
rhetoric of law enforcement made it clear that there was,
in fact, a concerted crackdown on hackers in progress.
The hackers of the Hackers Conference, the
Wellbeings, and their ilk, did not really mind the
occasional public misapprehension of "hacking"; if
anything, this membrane of differentiation from straight
society made the "computer community" feel different,
smarter, better. They had never before been confronted,
however, by a concerted vilification campaign.
Barlow's central role in the counter-struggle was one
of the major anomalies of 1990. Journalists investigating
the controversy often stumbled over the truth about
Barlow, but they commonly dusted themselves off and
hurried on as if nothing had happened. It was as if it
were
*too much to believe* that a 1960s freak from the Grateful
Dead had taken on a federal law enforcement operation
head-to-head and *actually seemed to be winning!*
Barlow had no easily detectable power-base for a
political struggle of this kind. He had no formal legal or
technical credentials. Barlow was, however, a computer
networker of truly stellar brilliance. He had a poet's
gift of
concise, colorful phrasing. He also had a journalist's
shrewdness, an off-the-wall, self-deprecating wit, and a
phenomenal wealth of simple personal charm.
The kind of influence Barlow possessed is fairly
common currency in literary, artistic, or musical circles.
A
gifted critic can wield great artistic influence simply
through defining the temper of the times, by coining the
catch-phrases and the terms of debate that become the
common currency of the period. (And as it happened,
Barlow *was* a part-time art critic, with a special
fondness
for the Western art of Frederic Remington.)
Barlow was the first commentator to adopt William
Gibson's striking science-fictional term "cyberspace" as a
synonym for the present-day nexus of computer and
telecommunications networks. Barlow was insistent that
cyberspace should be regarded as a qualitatively new
world, a "frontier." According to Barlow, the world of
electronic communications, now made visible through the
computer screen, could no longer be usefully regarded as
just a tangle of high-tech wiring. Instead, it had become a
*place,* cyberspace, which demanded a new set of
metaphors, a new set of rules and behaviors. The term, as
Barlow employed it, struck a useful chord, and this
concept of cyberspace was picked up by *Time,*
*Scientific American,* computer police, hackers, and
even Constitutional scholars. "Cyberspace" now seems
likely to become a permanent fixture of the language.
Barlow was very striking in person: a tall, craggy-
faced, bearded, deep-voiced Wyomingan in a dashing
Western ensemble of jeans, jacket, cowboy boots, a
knotted throat-kerchief and an ever-present Grateful
Dead cloisonne lapel pin.
Armed with a modem, however, Barlow was truly in
his element. Formal hierarchies were not Barlow's strong
suit; he rarely missed a chance to belittle the "large
organizations and their drones," with their uptight,
institutional mindset. Barlow was very much of the free-
spirit persuasion, deeply unimpressed by brass-hats and
jacks-in-office. But when it came to the digital grapevine,
Barlow was a cyberspace ad-hocrat par excellence.
There was not a mighty army of Barlows. There was
only one Barlow, and he was a fairly anomolous individual.
However, the situation only seemed to *require* a single
Barlow. In fact, after 1990, many people must have
concluded that a single Barlow was far more than they'd
ever bargained for.
Barlow's querulous mini-essay about his encounter
with the FBI struck a strong chord on the Well. A number
of other free spirits on the fringes of Apple Computing had
come under suspicion, and they liked it not one whit better
than he did.
One of these was Mitchell Kapor, the co-inventor of
the spreadsheet program "Lotus 1-2-3" and the founder of
Lotus Development Corporation. Kapor had written-off
the passing indignity of being fingerprinted down at his
own local Boston FBI headquarters, but Barlow's post
made the full national scope of the FBI's dragnet clear to
Kapor. The issue now had Kapor's full attention. As the
Secret Service swung into anti-hacker operation
nationwide in 1990, Kapor watched every move with deep
skepticism and growing alarm.
As it happened, Kapor had already met Barlow, who
had interviewed Kapor for a California computer journal.
Like most people who met Barlow, Kapor had been very
taken with him. Now Kapor took it upon himself to drop
in on Barlow for a heart-to-heart talk about the situation.
Kapor was a regular on the Well. Kapor had been a
devotee of the *Whole Earth Catalog* since the
beginning, and treasured a complete run of the magazine.
And Kapor not only had a modem, but a private jet. In
pursuit of the scattered high-tech investments of Kapor
Enterprises Inc., his personal, multi-million dollar holding
company, Kapor commonly crossed state lines with about
as much thought as one might give to faxing a letter.
The Kapor-Barlow council of June 1990, in Pinedale,
Wyoming, was the start of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation. Barlow swiftly wrote a manifesto, "Crime and
Puzzlement," which announced his, and Kapor's,
intention to form a political organization to "raise and
disburse funds for education, lobbying, and litigation in
the areas relating to digital speech and the extension of
the Constitution into Cyberspace."
Furthermore, proclaimed the manifesto, the
foundation would "fund, conduct, and support legal efforts
to demonstrate that the Secret Service has exercised prior
restraint on publications, limited free speech, conducted
improper seizure of equipment and data, used undue
force, and generally conducted itself in a fashion which is
arbitrary, oppressive, and unconstitutional."
"Crime and Puzzlement" was distributed far and wide
through computer networking channels, and also printed
in the *Whole Earth Review.* The sudden declaration of a
coherent, politicized counter-strike from the ranks of
hackerdom electrified the community. Steve Wozniak
(perhaps a bit stung by the NuPrometheus scandal)
swiftly offered to match any funds Kapor offered the
Foundation.
John Gilmore, one of the pioneers of Sun
Microsystems, immediately offered his own extensive
financial and personal support. Gilmore, an ardent
libertarian, was to prove an eloquent advocate of
electronic privacy issues, especially freedom from
governmental and corporate computer-assisted
surveillance of private citizens.
A second meeting in San Francisco rounded up
further allies: Stewart Brand of the Point Foundation,
virtual-reality pioneers Jaron Lanier and Chuck
Blanchard, network entrepreneur and venture capitalist
Nat Goldhaber. At this dinner meeting, the activists
settled on a formal title: the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, Incorporated. Kapor became its president.
A new EFF Conference was opened on the Point
Foundation's Well, and the Well was declared "the home
of the Electronic Frontier Foundation."
Press coverage was immediate and intense. Like
their nineteenth-century spiritual ancestors, Alexander
Graham Bell and Thomas Watson, the high-tech
computer entrepreneurs of the 1970s and 1980s -- people
such as Wozniak, Jobs, Kapor, Gates, and H. Ross Perot,
who had raised themselves by their bootstraps to
dominate a glittering new industry -- had always made
very good copy.
But while the Wellbeings rejoiced, the press in
general seemed nonplussed by the self-declared
"civilizers of cyberspace." EFF's insistence that the war
against "hackers" involved grave Constitutional civil
liberties issues seemed somewhat farfetched, especially
since none of EFF's organizers were lawyers or established
politicians. The business press in particular found it
easier to seize on the apparent core of the story -- that
high-tech entrepreneur Mitchell Kapor had established a
"defense fund for hackers." Was EFF a genuinely
important political development -- or merely a clique of
wealthy eccentrics, dabbling in matters better left to the
proper authorities? The jury was still out.
But the stage was now set for open confrontation.
And the first and the most critical battle was the hacker
show-trial of "Knight Lightning."
#
It has been my practice throughout this book to refer
to hackers only by their "handles." There is little to
gain
by giving the real names of these people, many of whom
are juveniles, many of whom have never been convicted of
any crime, and many of whom had unsuspecting parents
who have already suffered enough.
But the trial of Knight Lightning on July 24-27, 1990,
made this particular "hacker" a nationally known public
figure. It can do no particular harm to himself or his
family if I repeat the long-established fact that his name
is
Craig Neidorf (pronounced NYE-dorf).
Neidorf's jury trial took place in the United States
District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Eastern
Division, with the Honorable Nicholas J. Bua presiding.
The United States of America was the plaintiff, the
defendant Mr. Neidorf. The defendant's attorney was
Sheldon T. Zenner of the Chicago firm of Katten, Muchin
and Zavis.
The prosecution was led by the stalwarts of the
Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force: William
J. Cook, Colleen D. Coughlin, and David A. Glockner, all
Assistant United States Attorneys. The Secret Service
Case Agent was Timothy M. Foley.
It will be recalled that Neidorf was the co-editor of
an
underground hacker "magazine" called *Phrack*.
*Phrack* was an entirely electronic publication,
distributed through bulletin boards and over electronic
networks. It was amateur publication given away for free.
Neidorf had never made any money for his work in
*Phrack.* Neither had his unindicted co-editor "Taran
King" or any of the numerous *Phrack* contributors.
The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force,
however, had decided to prosecute Neidorf as a fraudster.
To formally admit that *Phrack* was a "magazine" and
Neidorf a "publisher" was to open a prosecutorial
Pandora's Box of First Amendment issues. To do this was
to play into the hands of Zenner and his EFF advisers,
which now included a phalanx of prominent New York civil
rights lawyers as well as the formidable legal staff of
Katten, Muchin and Zavis. Instead, the prosecution relied
heavily on the issue of access device fraud: Section 1029
of
Title 18, the section from which the Secret Service drew its
most direct jurisdiction over computer crime.
Neidorf's alleged crimes centered around the E911
Document. He was accused of having entered into a
fraudulent scheme with the Prophet, who, it will be
recalled, was the Atlanta LoD member who had illicitly
copied the E911 Document from the BellSouth AIMSX
system.
The Prophet himself was also a co-defendant in the
Neidorf case, part-and-parcel of the alleged "fraud
scheme" to "steal" BellSouth's E911 Document (and to
pass the Document across state lines, which helped
establish the Neidorf trial as a federal case). The
Prophet,
in the spirit of full co-operation, had agreed to testify
against Neidorf.
In fact, all three of the Atlanta crew stood ready to
testify against Neidorf. Their own federal prosecutors in
Atlanta had charged the Atlanta Three with: (a)
conspiracy, (b) computer fraud, (c) wire fraud, (d) access
device fraud, and (e) interstate transportation of stolen
property (Title 18, Sections 371, 1030, 1343, 1029, and
2314).
Faced with this blizzard of trouble, Prophet and
Leftist had ducked any public trial and had pled guilty to
reduced charges -- one conspiracy count apiece. Urvile
had pled guilty to that odd bit of Section 1029 which makes
it illegal to possess "fifteen or more" illegal access
devices
(in his case, computer passwords). And their sentences
were scheduled for September 14, 1990 -- well after the
Neidorf trial. As witnesses, they could presumably be
relied upon to behave.
Neidorf, however, was pleading innocent. Most
everyone else caught up in the crackdown had
"cooperated fully" and pled guilty in hope of reduced
sentences. (Steve Jackson was a notable exception, of
course, and had strongly protested his innocence from the
very beginning. But Steve Jackson could not get a day in
court -- Steve Jackson had never been charged with any
crime in the first place.)
Neidorf had been urged to plead guilty. But Neidorf
was a political science major and was disinclined to go to
jail for "fraud" when he had not made any money, had not
broken into any computer, and had been publishing a
magazine that he considered protected under the First
Amendment.
Neidorf's trial was the *only* legal action of the
entire Crackdown that actually involved bringing the
issues at hand out for a public test in front of a jury of
American citizens.
Neidorf, too, had cooperated with investigators. He
had voluntarily handed over much of the evidence that
had led to his own indictment. He had already admitted
in writing that he knew that the E911 Document had been
stolen before he had "published" it in *Phrack* -- or, from
the prosecution's point of view, illegally transported
stolen
property by wire in something purporting to be a
"publication."
But even if the "publication" of the E911 Document
was not held to be a crime, that wouldn't let Neidorf off
the hook. Neidorf had still received the E911 Document
when Prophet had transferred it to him from Rich
Andrews' Jolnet node. On that occasion, it certainly
hadn't been "published" -- it was hacker booty, pure and
simple, transported across state lines.
The Chicago Task Force led a Chicago grand jury to
indict Neidorf on a set of charges that could have put him
in jail for thirty years. When some of these charges were
successfully challenged before Neidorf actually went to
trial, the Chicago Task Force rearranged his indictment so
that he faced a possible jail term of over sixty years! As
a
first offender, it was very unlikely that Neidorf would in
fact receive a sentence so drastic; but the Chicago Task
Force clearly intended to see Neidorf put in prison, and
his conspiratorial "magazine" put permanently out of
commission. This was a federal case, and Neidorf was
charged with the fraudulent theft of property worth almost
eighty thousand dollars.
William Cook was a strong believer in high-profile
prosecutions with symbolic overtones. He often published
articles on his work in the security trade press, arguing
that "a clear message had to be sent to the public at large
and the computer community in particular that
unauthorized attacks on computers and the theft of
computerized information would not be tolerated by the
courts."
The issues were complex, the prosecution's tactics
somewhat unorthodox, but the Chicago Task Force had
proved sure-footed to date. "Shadowhawk" had been
bagged on the wing in 1989 by the Task Force, and
sentenced to nine months in prison, and a $10,000 fine.
The Shadowhawk case involved charges under Section
1030, the "federal interest computer" section.
Shadowhawk had not in fact been a devotee of
"federal-interest" computers per se. On the contrary,
Shadowhawk, who owned an AT&T home computer,
seemed to cherish a special aggression toward AT&T. He
had bragged on the underground boards "Phreak Klass
2600" and "Dr. Ripco" of his skills at raiding AT&T, and of
his intention to crash AT&T's national phone system.
Shadowhawk's brags were noticed by Henry Kluepfel of
Bellcore Security, scourge of the outlaw boards, whose
relations with the Chicago Task Force were long and
intimate.
The Task Force successfully established that Section
1030 applied to the teenage Shadowhawk, despite the
objections of his defense attorney. Shadowhawk had
entered a computer "owned" by U.S. Missile Command
and merely "managed" by AT&T. He had also entered an
AT&T computer located at Robbins Air Force Base in
Georgia. Attacking AT&T was of "federal interest"
whether Shadowhawk had intended it or not.
The Task Force also convinced the court that a piece
of AT&T software that Shadowhawk had illicitly copied
from Bell Labs, the "Artificial Intelligence C5 Expert
System," was worth a cool one million dollars.
Shadowhawk's attorney had argued that Shadowhawk had
not sold the program and had made no profit from the
illicit copying. And in point of fact, the C5 Expert System
was experimental software, and had no established
market value because it had never been on the market in
the first place. AT&T's own assessment of a "one million
dollar" figure for its own intangible property was accepted
without challenge by the court, however. And the court
concurred with the government prosecutors that
Shadowhawk showed clear "intent to defraud" whether
he'd gotten any money or not. Shadowhawk went to jail.
The Task Force's other best-known triumph had been
the conviction and jailing of "Kyrie." Kyrie, a true
denizen
of the digital criminal underground, was a 36-year-old
Canadian woman, convicted and jailed for
telecommunications fraud in Canada. After her release
from prison, she had fled the wrath of Canada Bell and the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and eventually settled,
very unwisely, in Chicago.
"Kyrie," who also called herself "Long Distance
Information," specialized in voice-mail abuse. She
assembled large numbers of hot long-distance codes, then
read them aloud into a series of corporate voice-mail
systems. Kyrie and her friends were electronic squatters
in corporate voice-mail systems, using them much as if
they were pirate bulletin boards, then moving on when
their vocal chatter clogged the system and the owners
necessarily wised up. Kyrie's camp followers were a loose
tribe of some hundred and fifty phone-phreaks, who
followed her trail of piracy from machine to machine,
ardently begging for her services and expertise.
Kyrie's disciples passed her stolen credit-card
numbers, in exchange for her stolen "long distance
information." Some of Kyrie's clients paid her off in cash,
by scamming credit-card cash advances from Western
Union.
Kyrie travelled incessantly, mostly through airline
tickets and hotel rooms that she scammed through stolen
credit cards. Tiring of this, she found refuge with a
fellow
female phone phreak in Chicago. Kyrie's hostess, like a
surprising number of phone phreaks, was blind. She was
also physically disabled. Kyrie allegedly made the best of
her new situation by applying for, and receiving, state
welfare funds under a false identity as a qualified
caretaker for the handicapped.
Sadly, Kyrie's two children by a former marriage had
also vanished underground with her; these pre-teen digital
refugees had no legal American identity, and had never
spent a day in school.
Kyrie was addicted to technical mastery and
enthralled by her own cleverness and the ardent worship
of her teenage followers. This foolishly led her to phone
up Gail Thackeray in Arizona, to boast, brag, strut, and
offer to play informant. Thackeray, however, had already
learned far more than enough about Kyrie, whom she
roundly despised as an adult criminal corrupting minors, a
"female Fagin." Thackeray passed her tapes of Kyrie's
boasts to the Secret Service.
Kyrie was raided and arrested in Chicago in May
1989. She confessed at great length and pled guilty.
In August 1990, Cook and his Task Force colleague
Colleen Coughlin sent Kyrie to jail for 27 months, for
computer and telecommunications fraud. This was a
markedly severe sentence by the usual wrist-slapping
standards of "hacker" busts. Seven of Kyrie's foremost
teenage disciples were also indicted and convicted. The
Kyrie "high-tech street gang," as Cook described it, had
been crushed. Cook and his colleagues had been the first
ever to put someone in prison for voice-mail abuse. Their
pioneering efforts had won them attention and kudos.
In his article on Kyrie, Cook drove the message home
to the readers of *Security Management* magazine, a
trade journal for corporate security professionals. The
case, Cook said, and Kyrie's stiff sentence, "reflect a new
reality for hackers and computer crime victims in the
'90s.... Individuals and corporations who report computer
and telecommunications crimes can now expect that their
cooperation with federal law enforcement will result in
meaningful punishment. Companies and the public at
large must report computer-enhanced crimes if they want
prosecutors and the course to protect their rights to the
tangible and intangible property developed and stored on
computers."
Cook had made it his business to construct this "new
reality for hackers." He'd also made it his business to
police corporate property rights to the intangible.
Had the Electronic Frontier Foundation been a
"hacker defense fund" as that term was generally
understood, they presumably would have stood up for
Kyrie. Her 1990 sentence did indeed send a "message"
that federal heat was coming down on "hackers." But
Kyrie found no defenders at EFF, or anywhere else, for
that matter. EFF was not a bail-out fund for electronic
crooks.
The Neidorf case paralleled the Shadowhawk case in
certain ways. The victim once again was allowed to set the
value of the "stolen" property. Once again Kluepfel was
both investigator and technical advisor. Once again no
money had changed hands, but the "intent to defraud"
was central.
The prosecution's case showed signs of weakness
early on. The Task Force had originally hoped to prove
Neidorf the center of a nationwide Legion of Doom
criminal conspiracy. The *Phrack* editors threw physical
get-togethers every summer, which attracted hackers
from across the country; generally two dozen or so of the
magazine's favorite contributors and readers. (Such
conventions were common in the hacker community; 2600
Magazine, for instance, held public meetings of hackers in
New York, every month.) LoD heavy-dudes were always a
strong presence at these *Phrack*-sponsored
"Summercons."
In July 1988, an Arizona hacker named "Dictator"
attended Summercon in Neidorf's home town of St. Louis.
Dictator was one of Gail Thackeray's underground
informants; Dictator's underground board in Phoenix was
a sting operation for the Secret Service. Dictator brought
an undercover crew of Secret Service agents to
Summercon. The agents bored spyholes through the wall
of Dictator's hotel room in St Louis, and videotaped the
frolicking hackers through a one-way mirror. As it
happened, however, nothing illegal had occurred on
videotape, other than the guzzling of beer by a couple of
minors. Summercons were social events, not sinister
cabals. The tapes showed fifteen hours of raucous
laughter, pizza-gobbling, in-jokes and back-slapping.
Neidorf's lawyer, Sheldon Zenner, saw the Secret
Service tapes before the trial. Zenner was shocked by the
complete harmlessness of this meeting, which Cook had
earlier characterized as a sinister interstate conspiracy to
commit fraud. Zenner wanted to show the Summercon
tapes to the jury. It took protracted maneuverings by the
Task Force to keep the tapes from the jury as "irrelevant."
The E911 Document was also proving a weak reed. It
had originally been valued at $79,449. Unlike
Shadowhawk's arcane Artificial Intelligence booty, the
E911 Document was not software -- it was written in
English. Computer-knowledgeable people found this
value -- for a twelve-page bureaucratic document --
frankly incredible. In his "Crime and Puzzlement"
manifesto for EFF, Barlow commented: "We will probably
never know how this figure was reached or by whom,
though I like to imagine an appraisal team consisting of
Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon."
As it happened, Barlow was unduly pessimistic. The
EFF did, in fact, eventually discover exactly how this
figure
was reached, and by whom -- but only in 1991, long after
the Neidorf trial was over.
Kim Megahee, a Southern Bell security manager,
had arrived at the document's value by simply adding up
the "costs associated with the production" of the E911
Document. Those "costs" were as follows:
1. A technical writer had been hired to research and
write the E911 Document. 200 hours of work, at $35 an
hour, cost : $7,000. A Project Manager had overseen the
technical writer. 200 hours, at $31 an hour, made: $6,200.
2. A week of typing had cost $721 dollars. A week of
formatting had cost $721. A week of graphics formatting
had cost $742.
3. Two days of editing cost $367.
` 4. A box of order labels cost five dollars.
5. Preparing a purchase order for the Document,
including typing and the obtaining of an authorizing
signature from within the BellSouth bureaucracy, cost
$129.
6. Printing cost $313. Mailing the Document to fifty
people took fifty hours by a clerk, and cost $858.
7. Placing the Document in an index took two clerks
an hour each, totalling $43.
Bureaucratic overhead alone, therefore, was alleged
to have cost a whopping $17,099. According to Mr.
Megahee, the typing of a twelve-page document had
taken a full week. Writing it had taken five weeks,
including an overseer who apparently did nothing else but
watch the author for five weeks. Editing twelve pages had
taken two days. Printing and mailing an electronic
document (which was already available on the Southern
Bell Data Network to any telco employee who needed it),
had cost over a thousand dollars.
But this was just the beginning. There were also the
*hardware expenses.* Eight hundred fifty dollars for a
VT220 computer monitor. *Thirty-one thousand dollars*
for a sophisticated VAXstation II computer. Six thousand
dollars for a computer printer. *Twenty-two thousand
dollars* for a copy of "Interleaf" software. Two thousand
five hundred dollars for VMS software. All this to create
the twelve-page Document.
Plus ten percent of the cost of the software and the
hardware, for maintenance. (Actually, the ten percent
maintenance costs, though mentioned, had been left off
the final $79,449 total, apparently through a merciful
oversight).
Mr. Megahee's letter had been mailed directly to
William Cook himself, at the office of the Chicago federal
attorneys. The United States Government accepted these
telco figures without question.
As incredulity mounted, the value of the E911
Document was officially revised downward. This time,
Robert Kibler of BellSouth Security estimated the value of
the twelve pages as a mere $24,639.05 -- based,
purportedly, on "R&D costs." But this specific estimate,
right down to the nickel, did not move the skeptics at all;
in
fact it provoked open scorn and a torrent of sarcasm.
The financial issues concerning theft of proprietary
information have always been peculiar. It could be
argued that BellSouth had not "lost" its E911 Document at
all in the first place, and therefore had not suffered any
monetary damage from this "theft." And Sheldon Zenner
did in fact argue this at Neidorf's trial -- that Prophet's
raid
had not been "theft," but was better understood as illicit
copying.
The money, however, was not central to anyone's true
purposes in this trial. It was not Cook's strategy to
convince the jury that the E911 Document was a major act
of theft and should be punished for that reason alone.
His strategy was to argue that the E911 Document was
*dangerous.* It was his intention to establish that the
E911 Document was "a road-map" to the Enhanced 911
System. Neidorf had deliberately and recklessly
distributed a dangerous weapon. Neidorf and the
Prophet did not care (or perhaps even gloated at the
sinister idea) that the E911 Document could be used by
hackers to disrupt 911 service, "a life line for every
person
certainly in the Southern Bell region of the United States,
and indeed, in many communities throughout the United
States," in Cook's own words. Neidorf had put people's
lives in danger.
In pre-trial maneuverings, Cook had established that
the E911 Document was too hot to appear in the public
proceedings of the Neidorf trial. The *jury itself* would
not be allowed to ever see this Document, lest it slip into
the official court records, and thus into the hands of the
general public, and, thus, somehow, to malicious hackers
who might lethally abuse it.
Hiding the E911 Document from the jury may have
been a clever legal maneuver, but it had a severe flaw.
There were, in point of fact, hundreds, perhaps thousands,
of people, already in possession of the E911 Document,
just as *Phrack* had published it. Its true nature was
already obvious to a wide section of the interested public
(all of whom, by the way, were, at least theoretically,
party
to a gigantic wire-fraud conspiracy). Most everyone in the
electronic community who had a modem and any interest
in the Neidorf case already had a copy of the Document.
It had already been available in *Phrack* for over a year.
People, even quite normal people without any
particular prurient interest in forbidden knowledge, did
not shut their eyes in terror at the thought of beholding a
"dangerous" document from a telephone company. On
the contrary, they tended to trust their own judgement and
simply read the Document for themselves. And they were
not impressed.
One such person was John Nagle. Nagle was a forty-
one-year-old professional programmer with a masters'
degree in computer science from Stanford. He had
worked for Ford Aerospace, where he had invented a
computer-networking technique known as the "Nagle
Algorithm," and for the prominent Californian computer-
graphics firm "Autodesk," where he was a major
stockholder.
Nagle was also a prominent figure on the Well, much
respected for his technical knowledgeability.
Nagle had followed the civil-liberties debate closely,
for he was an ardent telecommunicator. He was no
particular friend of computer intruders, but he believed
electronic publishing had a great deal to offer society at
large, and attempts to restrain its growth, or to censor
free
electronic expression, strongly roused his ire.
The Neidorf case, and the E911 Document, were both
being discussed in detail on the Internet, in an electronic
publication called *Telecom Digest.* Nagle, a longtime
Internet maven, was a regular reader of *Telecom
Digest.* Nagle had never seen a copy of *Phrack,* but
the implications of the case disturbed him.
While in a Stanford bookstore hunting books on
robotics, Nagle happened across a book called *The
Intelligent Network.* Thumbing through it at random,
Nagle came across an entire chapter meticulously
detailing the workings of E911 police emergency systems.
This extensive text was being sold openly, and yet in
Illinois a young man was in danger of going to prison for
publishing a thin six-page document about 911 service.
Nagle made an ironic comment to this effect in
*Telecom Digest.* From there, Nagle was put in touch
with Mitch Kapor, and then with Neidorf's lawyers.
Sheldon Zenner was delighted to find a computer
telecommunications expert willing to speak up for
Neidorf, one who was not a wacky teenage "hacker."
Nagle was fluent, mature, and respectable; he'd once had
a federal security clearance.
Nagle was asked to fly to Illinois to join the defense
team.
Having joined the defense as an expert witness,
Nagle read the entire E911 Document for himself. He
made his own judgement about its potential for menace.
The time has now come for you yourself, the reader,
to have a look at the E911 Document. This six-page piece
of work was the pretext for a federal prosecution that could
have sent an electronic publisher to prison for thirty, or
even sixty, years. It was the pretext for the search and
seizure of Steve Jackson Games, a legitimate publisher of
printed books. It was also the formal pretext for the
search
and seizure of the Mentor's bulletin board, "Phoenix
Project," and for the raid on the home of Erik Bloodaxe. It
also had much to do with the seizure of Richard Andrews'
Jolnet node and the shutdown of Charles Boykin's AT&T
node. The E911 Document was the single most important
piece of evidence in the Hacker Crackdown. There can
be no real and legitimate substitute for the Document
itself.
==Phrack Inc.==
Volume Two, Issue 24, File 5 of 13
Control Office Administration
Of Enhanced 911 Services For
Special Services and Account Centers
by the Eavesdropper
March, 1988
Description of Service
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The control office for Emergency 911 service is assigned in
accordance with the existing standard guidelines to one of
the following centers:
o Special Services Center (SSC)
o Major Accounts Center (MAC)
o Serving Test Center (STC)
o Toll Control Center (TCC)
The SSC/MAC designation is used in this document
interchangeably for any of these four centers. The Special
Services Centers (SSCs) or Major Account Centers
(MACs) have been designated as the trouble reporting
contact for all E911 customer (PSAP) reported troubles.
Subscribers who have trouble on an E911 call will continue
to contact local repair service (CRSAB) who will refer the