useful one supposes, but nothing like *this.* There has
never been *anything* like this. Without any prodding,
without any preparation, people in the audience simply
begin to ask questions. Longhairs, freaky people,
mathematicians. Bayse is answering, politely, frankly,
fully, like a man walking on air. The ballroom's
atmosphere crackles with surreality. A female lawyer
behind me breaks into a sweat and a hot waft of
surprisingly potent and musky perfume flows off her
pulse-points.
People are giddy with laughter. People are
interested, fascinated, their eyes so wide and dark that
they seem eroticized. Unlikely daisy-chains form in the
halls, around the bar, on the escalators: cops with
hackers,
civil rights with FBI, Secret Service with phone phreaks.
Gail Thackeray is at her crispest in a white wool
sweater with a tiny Secret Service logo. "I found Phiber
Optik at the payphones, and when he saw my sweater, he
turned into a *pillar of salt!*" she chortles.
Phiber discusses his case at much length with his
arresting officer, Don Delaney of the New York State
Police. After an hour's chat, the two of them look ready to
begin singing "Auld Lang Syne." Phiber finally finds the
courage to get his worst complaint off his chest. It isn't
so
much the arrest. It was the *charge.* Pirating service off
900 numbers. I'm a *programmer,* Phiber insists. This
lame charge is going to hurt my reputation. It would have
been cool to be busted for something happening, like
Section 1030 computer intrusion. Maybe some kind of
crime that's scarcely been invented yet. Not lousy phone
fraud. Phooey.
Delaney seems regretful. He had a mountain of
possible criminal charges against Phiber Optik. The kid's
gonna plead guilty anyway. He's a first timer, they always
plead. Coulda charged the kid with most anything, and
gotten the same result in the end. Delaney seems
genuinely sorry not to have gratified Phiber in this
harmless fashion. Too late now. Phiber's pled already.
All
water under the bridge. Whaddya gonna do?
Delaney's got a good grasp on the hacker mentality.
He held a press conference after he busted a bunch of
Masters of Deception kids. Some journo had asked him:
"Would you describe these people as *geniuses?*"
Delaney's deadpan answer, perfect: "No, I would describe
these people as *defendants.*" Delaney busts a kid for
hacking codes with repeated random dialling. Tells the
press that NYNEX can track this stuff in no time flat
nowadays, and a kid has to be *stupid* to do something so
easy to catch. Dead on again: hackers don't mind being
thought of as Genghis Khan by the straights, but if there's
anything that really gets 'em where they live, it's being
called *dumb.*
Won't be as much fun for Phiber next time around.
As a second offender he's gonna see prison. Hackers
break the law. They're not geniuses, either. They're gonna
be defendants. And yet, Delaney muses over a drink in
the hotel bar, he has found it impossible to treat them as
common criminals. Delaney knows criminals. These
kids, by comparison, are clueless -- there is just no crook
vibe off of them, they don't smell right, they're just not
*bad.*
Delaney has seen a lot of action. He did Vietnam.
He's been shot at, he has shot people. He's a homicide
cop from New York. He has the appearance of a man who
has not only seen the shit hit the fan but has seen it
splattered across whole city blocks and left to ferment for
years. This guy has been around.
He listens to Steve Jackson tell his story. The dreamy
game strategist has been dealt a bad hand. He has played
it for all he is worth. Under his nerdish SF-fan exterior
is a
core of iron. Friends of his say Steve Jackson believes in
the rules, believes in fair play. He will never compromise
his principles, never give up. "Steve," Delaney says to
Steve Jackson, "they had some balls, whoever busted you.
You're all right!" Jackson, stunned, falls silent and
actually
blushes with pleasure.
Neidorf has grown up a lot in the past year. The kid
is
a quick study, you gotta give him that. Dressed by his
mom, the fashion manager for a national clothing chain,
Missouri college techie-frat Craig Neidorf out-dappers
everyone at this gig but the toniest East Coast lawyers.
The iron jaws of prison clanged shut without him and now
law school beckons for Neidorf. He looks like a larval
Congressman.
Not a "hacker," our Mr. Neidorf. He's not interested
in computer science. Why should he be? He's not
interested in writing C code the rest of his life, and
besides,
he's seen where the chips fall. To the world of computer
science he and *Phrack* were just a curiosity. But to the
world of law.... The kid has learned where the bodies are
buried. He carries his notebook of press clippings
wherever he goes.
Phiber Optik makes fun of Neidorf for a Midwestern
geek, for believing that "Acid Phreak" does acid and
listens to acid rock. Hell no. Acid's never done *acid!*
Acid's into *acid house music.* Jesus. The very idea of
doing LSD. Our *parents* did LSD, ya clown.
Thackeray suddenly turns upon Craig Neidorf the
full lighthouse glare of her attention and begins a
determined half-hour attempt to *win the boy over.* The
Joan of Arc of Computer Crime is *giving career advice to
Knight Lightning!* "Your experience would be very
valuable -- a real asset," she tells him with unmistakeable
sixty-thousand-watt sincerity. Neidorf is fascinated. He
listens with unfeigned attention. He's nodding and saying
yes ma'am. Yes, Craig, you too can forget all about money
and enter the glamorous and horribly underpaid world of
PROSECUTING COMPUTER CRIME! You can put your
former friends in prison -- ooops....
You cannot go on dueling at modem's length
indefinitely. You cannot beat one another senseless with
rolled-up press-clippings. Sooner or later you have to
come directly to grips. And yet the very act of assembling
here has changed the entire situation drastically. John
Quarterman, author of *The Matrix,* explains the Internet
at his symposium. It is the largest news network in the
world, it is growing by leaps and bounds, and yet you
cannot measure Internet because you cannot stop it in
place. It cannot stop, because there is no one anywhere in
the world with the authority to stop Internet. It changes,
yes, it grows, it embeds itself across the post-industrial,
postmodern world and it generates community wherever
it touches, and it is doing this all by itself.
Phiber is different. A very fin de siecle kid, Phiber
Optik. Barlow says he looks like an Edwardian dandy. He
does rather. Shaven neck, the sides of his skull cropped
hip-hop close, unruly tangle of black hair on top that looks
pomaded, he stays up till four a.m. and misses all the
sessions, then hangs out in payphone booths with his
acoustic coupler gutsily CRACKING SYSTEMS RIGHT IN
THE MIDST OF THE HEAVIEST LAW ENFORCEMENT
DUDES IN THE U.S., or at least *pretending* to.... Unlike
"Frank Drake." Drake, who wrote Dorothy Denning out of
nowhere, and asked for an interview for his cheapo
cyberpunk fanzine, and then started grilling her on her
ethics. She was squirmin', too.... Drake, scarecrow-tall
with his floppy blond mohawk, rotting tennis shoes and
black leather jacket lettered ILLUMINATI in red, gives off
an unmistakeable air of the bohemian literatus. Drake is
the kind of guy who reads British industrial design
magazines and appreciates William Gibson because the
quality of the prose is so tasty. Drake could never touch a
phone or a keyboard again, and he'd still have the nose-
ring and the blurry photocopied fanzines and the sampled
industrial music. He's a radical punk with a desktop-
publishing rig and an Internet address. Standing next to
Drake, the diminutive Phiber looks like he's been
physically coagulated out of phone-lines. Born to phreak.
Dorothy Denning approaches Phiber suddenly. The
two of them are about the same height and body-build.
Denning's blue eyes flash behind the round window-
frames of her glasses. "Why did you say I was 'quaint?'"
she asks Phiber, quaintly.
It's a perfect description but Phiber is nonplussed...
"Well, I uh, you know...."
"I also think you're quaint, Dorothy," I say, novelist
to
the rescue, the journo gift of gab... She is neat and
dapper
and yet there's an arcane quality to her, something like a
Pilgrim Maiden behind leaded glass; if she were six inches
high Dorothy Denning would look great inside a china
cabinet... The Cryptographeress.... The Cryptographrix...
whatever... Weirdly, Peter Denning looks just like his
wife, you could pick this gentleman out of a thousand guys
as the soulmate of Dorothy Denning. Wearing tailored
slacks, a spotless fuzzy varsity sweater, and a neatly
knotted academician's tie.... This fineboned, exquisitely
polite, utterly civilized and hyperintelligent couple seem
to have emerged from some cleaner and finer parallel
universe, where humanity exists to do the Brain Teasers
column in Scientific American. Why does this Nice Lady
hang out with these unsavory characters?
Because the time has come for it, that's why.
Because she's the best there is at what she does.
Donn Parker is here, the Great Bald Eagle of
Computer Crime.... With his bald dome, great height, and
enormous Lincoln-like hands, the great visionary pioneer
of the field plows through the lesser mortals like an
icebreaker.... His eyes are fixed on the future with the
rigidity of a bronze statue.... Eventually, he tells his
audience, all business crime will be computer crime,
because businesses will do everything through computers.
"Computer crime" as a category will vanish.
In the meantime, passing fads will flourish and fail
and evaporate.... Parker's commanding, resonant voice is
sphinxlike, everything is viewed from some eldritch valley
of deep historical abstraction... Yes, they've come and
they've gone, these passing flaps in the world of digital
computation.... The radio-frequency emanation scandal...
KGB and MI5 and CIA do it every day, it's easy, but
nobody else ever has.... The salami-slice fraud, mostly
mythical... "Crimoids," he calls them.... Computer viruses
are the current crimoid champ, a lot less dangerous than
most people let on, but the novelty is fading and there's a
crimoid vacuum at the moment, the press is visibly
hungering for something more outrageous.... The Great
Man shares with us a few speculations on the coming
crimoids.... Desktop Forgery! Wow.... Computers stolen
just for the sake of the information within them -- data-
napping! Happened in Britain a while ago, could be the
coming thing.... Phantom nodes in the Internet!
Parker handles his overhead projector sheets with an
ecclesiastical air... He wears a grey double-breasted suit,
a
light blue shirt, and a very quiet tie of understated maroon
and blue paisley... Aphorisms emerge from him with slow,
leaden emphasis... There is no such thing as an
adequately secure computer when one faces a sufficiently
powerful adversary.... Deterrence is the most socially
useful aspect of security... People are the primary
weakness in all information systems... The entire baseline
of computer security must be shifted upward.... Don't ever
violate your security by publicly describing your security
measures...
People in the audience are beginning to squirm, and
yet there is something about the elemental purity of this
guy's philosophy that compels uneasy respect.... Parker
sounds like the only sane guy left in the lifeboat,
sometimes. The guy who can prove rigorously, from deep
moral principles, that Harvey there, the one with the
broken leg and the checkered past, is the one who has to
be, err.... that is, Mr. Harvey is best placed to make the
necessary sacrifice for the security and indeed the very
survival of the rest of this lifeboat's crew.... Computer
security, Parker informs us mournfully, is a nasty topic,
and we wish we didn't have to have it... The security
expert, armed with method and logic, must think --
imagine -- everything that the adversary might do before
the adversary might actually do it. It is as if the
criminal's
dark brain were an extensive subprogram within the
shining cranium of Donn Parker. He is a Holmes whose
Moriarty does not quite yet exist and so must be perfectly
simulated.
CFP is a stellar gathering, with the giddiness of a
wedding. It is a happy time, a happy ending, they know
their world is changing forever tonight, and they're proud
to have been there to see it happen, to talk, to think, to
help.
And yet as night falls, a certain elegiac quality
manifests itself, as the crowd gathers beneath the
chandeliers with their wineglasses and dessert plates.
Something is ending here, gone forever, and it takes a
while to pinpoint it.
It is the End of the Amateurs.
***********
Afterword: The Hacker Crackdown Three Years Later
Three years in cyberspace is like thirty years anyplace
real. It feels as if a generation has passed since I wrote
this
book. In terms of the generations of computing machinery
involved, that's pretty much the case.
The basic shape of cyberspace has changed drastically
since 1990. A new U.S. Administration is in power whose
personnel are, if anything, only too aware of the nature and
potential of electronic networks. It's now clear to all
players
concerned that the status quo is dead-and-gone in American
media and telecommunications, and almost any territory on
the electronic frontier is up for grabs. Interactive
multimedia,
cable-phone alliances, the Information Superhighway, fiber-
to-the-curb, laptops and palmtops, the explosive growth of
cellular and the Internet -- the earth trembles visibly.
The year 1990 was not a pleasant one for AT&T. By
1993,
however, AT&T had successfully devoured the computer
company NCR in an unfriendly takeover, finally giving the
pole-climbers a major piece of the digital action. AT&T
managed to rid itself of ownership of the troublesome UNIX
operating system, selling it to Novell, a netware company,
which was itself preparing for a savage market dust-up with
operating-system titan Microsoft. Furthermore, AT&T
acquired McCaw Cellular in a gigantic merger, giving AT&T a
potential wireless whip-hand over its former progeny, the
RBOCs. The RBOCs themselves were now AT&T's clearest
potential rivals, as the Chinese firewalls between regulated
monopoly and frenzied digital entrepreneurism began to melt
and collapse headlong.
AT&T, mocked by industry analysts in 1990, was reaping
awestruck praise by commentators in 1993. AT&T had
managed to avoid any more major software crashes in its
switching stations. AT&T's newfound reputation as "the
nimble giant" was all the sweeter, since AT&T's traditional
rival giant in the world of multinational computing, IBM,
was
almost prostrate by 1993. IBM's vision of the commercial
computer-network of the future, "Prodigy," had managed to
spend $900 million without a whole heck of a lot to show for
it,
while AT&T, by contrast, was boldly speculating on the
possibilities of personal communicators and hedging its bets
with investments in handwritten interfaces. In 1990 AT&T
had
looked bad; but in 1993 AT&T looked like the future.
At least, AT&T's *advertising* looked like the future.
Similar public attention was riveted on the massive $22
billion
megamerger between RBOC Bell Atlantic and cable-TV giant
Tele-Communications Inc. Nynex was buying into cable
company Viacom International. BellSouth was buying stock in
Prime Management, Southwestern Bell acquiring a cable
company in Washington DC, and so forth. By stark contrast,
the Internet, a noncommercial entity which officially did
not
even exist, had no advertising budget at all. And yet,
almost
below the level of governmental and corporate awareness,
the
Internet was stealthily devouring everything in its path,
growing at a rate that defied comprehension. Kids who might
have been eager computer-intruders a mere five years earlier
were now surfing the Internet, where their natural urge to
explore led them into cyberspace landscapes of such
mindboggling vastness that the very idea of hacking
passwords
seemed rather a waste of time.
By 1993, there had not been a solid, knock 'em down,
panic-striking, teenage-hacker computer-intrusion scandal
in
many long months. There had, of course, been some striking
and well-publicized acts of illicit computer access, but
they had
been committed by adult white-collar industry insiders in
clear
pursuit of personal or commercial advantage. The kids, by
contrast, all seemed to be on IRC, Internet Relay Chat.
Or, perhaps, frolicking out in the endless glass-roots
network of personal bulletin board systems. In 1993, there
were an estimated 60,000 boards in America; the population
of
boards had fully doubled since Operation Sundevil in 1990.
The
hobby was transmuting fitfully into a genuine industry. The
board community were no longer obscure hobbyists; many
were still hobbyists and proud of it, but board sysops and
advanced board users had become a far more cohesive and
politically aware community, no longer allowing themselves
to
be obscure.
The specter of cyberspace in the late 1980s, of
outwitted
authorities trembling in fear before teenage hacker whiz-
kids,
seemed downright antiquated by 1993. Law enforcement
emphasis had changed, and the favorite electronic villain of
1993 was not the vandal child, but the victimizer of
children,
the digital child pornographer. "Operation Longarm," a
child-
pornography computer raid carried out by the previously
little-
known cyberspace rangers of the U.S. Customs Service, was
almost the size of Operation Sundevil, but received very
little
notice by comparison.
The huge and well-organized "Operation Disconnect,"
an FBI strike against telephone rip-off con-artists, was
actually larger than Sundevil. "Operation Disconnect" had
its
brief moment in the sun of publicity, and then vanished
utterly.
It was unfortunate that a law-enforcement affair as
apparently well-conducted as Operation Disconnect, which
pursued telecom adult career criminals a hundred times more
morally repugnant than teenage hackers, should have received
so little attention and fanfare, especially compared to the
abortive Sundevil and the basically disastrous efforts of
the
Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force. But the life
of
an electronic policeman is seldom easy.
If any law enforcement event truly deserved full-scale
press coverage (while somehow managing to escape it), it was
the amazing saga of New York State Police Senior
Investigator Don Delaney Versus the Orchard Street Finger-
Hackers. This story probably represents the real future of
professional telecommunications crime in America. The
finger-
hackers sold, and still sell, stolen long-distance phone
service
to a captive clientele of illegal aliens in New York City.
This
clientele is desperate to call home, yet as a group, illegal
aliens
have few legal means of obtaining standard phone service,
since their very presence in the United States is against
the
law. The finger-hackers of Orchard Street were very unusual
"hackers," with an astonishing lack of any kind of genuine
technological knowledge. And yet these New York call-sell
thieves showed a street-level ingenuity appalling in its
single-
minded sense of larceny.
There was no dissident-hacker rhetoric about freedom-
of-information among the finger-hackers. Most of them came
out of the cocaine-dealing fraternity, and they retailed
stolen
calls with the same street-crime techniques of lookouts and
bagholders that a crack gang would employ. This was down-
and-dirty, urban, ethnic, organized crime, carried out by
crime
families every day, for cash on the barrelhead, in the harsh
world of the streets. The finger-hackers dominated certain
payphones in certain strikingly unsavory neighborhoods.
They
provided a service no one else would give to a clientele
with
little to lose.
With such a vast supply of electronic crime at hand,
Don
Delaney rocketed from a background in homicide to teaching
telecom crime at FLETC in less than three years. Few can
rival
Delaney's hands-on, street-level experience in phone fraud.
Anyone in 1993 who still believes telecommunications crime
to
be something rare and arcane should have a few words with
Mr Delaney. Don Delaney has also written two fine essays,
on
telecom fraud and computer crime, in Joseph Grau's *Criminal
and Civil Investigations Handbook* (McGraw Hill 1993).
*Phrack* was still publishing in 1993, now under the
able
editorship of Erik Bloodaxe. Bloodaxe made a determined
attempt to get law enforcement and corporate security to pay
real money for their electronic copies of *Phrack,* but, as
usual, these stalwart defenders of intellectual property
preferred to pirate the magazine. Bloodaxe has still not
gotten
back any of his property from the seizure raids of March 1,
1990. Neither has the Mentor, who is still the managing
editor
of Steve Jackson Games.
Nor has Robert Izenberg, who has suspended his court
struggle to get his machinery back. Mr Izenberg has
calculated
that his $20,000 of equipment seized in 1990 is, in 1993,
worth
$4,000 at most. The missing software, also gone out his
door,
was long ago replaced. He might, he says, sue for the sake
of
principle, but he feels that the people who seized his
machinery
have already been discredited, and won't be doing any more
seizures. And even if his machinery were returned -- and in
good repair, which is doubtful -- it will be essentially
worthless
by 1995. Robert Izenberg no longer works for IBM, but has a
job programming for a major telecommunications company in
Austin.
Steve Jackson won his case against the Secret Service
on
March 12, 1993, just over three years after the federal raid
on
his enterprise. Thanks to the delaying tactics available
through the legal doctrine of "qualified immunity," Jackson
was
tactically forced to drop his suit against the individuals
William
Cook, Tim Foley, Barbara Golden and Henry Kluepfel. (Cook,
Foley, Golden and Kluepfel did, however, testify during the
trial.)
The Secret Service fought vigorously in the case,
battling
Jackson's lawyers right down the line, on the (mostly
previously untried) legal turf of the Electronic
Communications
Privacy Act and the Privacy Protection Act of 1980. The
Secret
Service denied they were legally or morally responsible for
seizing the work of a publisher. They claimed that (1)
Jackson's gaming "books" weren't real books anyhow, and (2)
the Secret Service didn't realize SJG Inc was a "publisher"
when they raided his offices, and (3) the books only
vanished by
accident because they merely happened to be inside the
computers the agents were appropriating.
The Secret Service also denied any wrongdoing in
reading and erasing all the supposedly "private" e-mail
inside
Jackson's seized board, Illuminati. The USSS attorneys
claimed the seizure did not violate the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act, because they weren't actually
"intercepting" electronic mail that was moving on a wire,
but
only electronic mail that was quietly sitting on a disk
inside
Jackson's computer. They also claimed that USSS agents
hadn't read any of the private mail on Illuminati; and
anyway,
even supposing that they had, they were allowed to do that
by
the subpoena.
The Jackson case became even more peculiar when the
Secret Service attorneys went so far as to allege that the
federal raid against the gaming company had actually
*improved Jackson's business* thanks to the ensuing
nationwide publicity.
It was a long and rather involved trial. The judge
seemed most perturbed, not by the arcane matters of
electronic
law, but by the fact that the Secret Service could have
avoided
almost all the consequent trouble simply by giving Jackson
his
computers back in short order. The Secret Service easily
could
have looked at everything in Jackson's computers, recorded
everything, and given the machinery back, and there would
have been no major scandal or federal court suit. On the
contrary, everybody simply would have had a good laugh.
Unfortunately, it appeared that this idea had never entered
the
heads of the Chicago-based investigators. They seemed to
have concluded unilaterally, and without due course of law,
that the world would be better off if Steve Jackson didn't
have
computers. Golden and Foley claimed that they had both
never
even heard of the Privacy Protection Act. Cook had heard of
the Act, but he'd decided on his own that the Privacy
Protection
Act had nothing to do with Steve Jackson.
The Jackson case was also a very politicized trial,
both
sides deliberately angling for a long-term legal precedent
that
would stake-out big claims for their interests in
cyberspace.
Jackson and his EFF advisors tried hard to establish that
the
least e-mail remark of the lonely electronic pamphleteer
deserves the same somber civil-rights protection as that
afforded *The New York Times.* By stark contrast, the
Secret
Service's attorneys argued boldly that the contents of an
electronic bulletin board have no more expectation of
privacy
than a heap of postcards. In the final analysis, very
little was
firmly nailed down. Formally, the legal rulings in the
Jackson
case apply only in the federal Western District of Texas.
It
was, however, established that these were real civil-
liberties
issues that powerful people were prepared to go to the
courthouse over; the seizure of bulletin board systems,
though
it still goes on, can be a perilous act for the seizer.
The Secret
Service owes Steve Jackson $50,000 in damages, and a
thousand dollars each to three of Jackson's angry and
offended
board users. And Steve Jackson, rather than owning the
single-line bulletin board system "Illuminati" seized in
1990,
now rejoices in possession of a huge privately-owned
Internet
node, "io.com," with dozens of phone-lines on its own T-1
trunk.
Jackson has made the entire blow-by-blow narrative of
his case available electronically, for interested parties.
And yet, the
Jackson case may still not be over; a Secret Service appeal
seems
likely and the EFF is also gravely dissatisfied with the
ruling on
electronic interception.
The WELL, home of the American electronic civil
libertarian movement, added two thousand more users and
dropped its aging Sequent computer in favor of a snappy new
Sun Sparcstation. Search-and-seizure discussions on the
WELL
are now taking a decided back-seat to the current hot topic
in
digital civil liberties, unbreakable public-key encryption
for
private citizens.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation left its modest home
in Boston to move inside the Washington Beltway of the
Clinton Administration. Its new executive director, ECPA
pioneer and longtime ACLU activist Jerry Berman, gained a
reputation of a man adept as dining with tigers, as the EFF
devoted its attention to networking at the highest levels of
the
computer and telecommunications industry. EFF's pro-
encryption lobby and anti-wiretapping initiative were
especially impressive, successfully assembling a herd of
highly
variegated industry camels under the same EFF tent, in open
and powerful opposition to the electronic ambitions of the
FBI
and the NSA.
EFF had transmuted at light-speed from an insurrection
to an institution. EFF Co-Founder Mitch Kapor once again
sidestepped the bureaucratic consequences of his own
success,
by remaining in Boston and adapting the role of EFF guru and
gray eminence. John Perry Barlow, for his part, left
Wyoming,
quit the Republican Party, and moved to New York City,
accompanied by his swarm of cellular phones. Mike Godwin
left Boston for Washington as EFF's official legal adviser
to the
electronically afflicted.
After the Neidorf trial, Dorothy Denning further proved
her firm scholastic independence-of-mind by speaking up
boldly on the usefulness and social value of federal
wiretapping. Many civil libertarians, who regarded the
practice of wiretapping with deep occult horror, were
crestfallen to the point of comedy when nationally known
"hacker sympathizer" Dorothy Denning sternly defended
police and public interests in official eavesdropping.
However,
no amount of public uproar seemed to swerve the "quaint" Dr.
Denning in the slightest. She not only made up her own
mind,
she made it up in public and then stuck to her guns.
In 1993, the stalwarts of the Masters of Deception,
Phiber
Optik, Acid Phreak and Scorpion, finally fell afoul of the
machineries of legal prosecution. Acid Phreak and Scorpion
were sent to prison for six months, six months of home
detention, 750 hours of community service, and, oddly, a $50
fine for conspiracy to commit computer crime. Phiber Optik,
the computer intruder with perhaps the highest public
profile in
the entire world, took the longest to plead guilty, but,
facing
the possibility of ten years in jail, he finally did so. He
was
sentenced to a year and a day in prison.
As for the Atlanta wing of the Legion of Doom, Prophet,
Leftist and Urvile... Urvile now works for a software
company in Atlanta. He is still on probation and still
repaying
his enormous fine. In fifteen months, he will once again be
allowed to own a personal computer. He is still a convicted
federal felon, but has not had any legal difficulties since
leaving
prison. He has lost contact with Prophet and Leftist.
Unfortunately, so have I, though not through lack of honest
effort.
Knight Lightning, now 24, is a technical writer for
the federal government in Washington DC. He has still not
been accepted into law school, but having spent more than
his
share of time in the company of attorneys, he's come to
think
that maybe an MBA would be more to the point. He still
owes
his attorneys $30,000, but the sum is dwindling steadily
since he
is manfully working two jobs. Knight Lightning customarily
wears a suit and tie and carries a valise. He has a federal
security clearance.
Unindicted *Phrack* co-editor Taran King is also a
technical writer in Washington DC, and recently got
married.
Terminus did his time, got out of prison, and currently
lives in Silicon Valley where he is running a full-scale
Internet
node, "netsys.com." He programs professionally for a
company specializing in satellite links for the Internet.
Carlton Fitzpatrick still teaches at the Federal Law
Enforcement Training Center, but FLETC found that the issues
involved in sponsoring and running a bulletin board system
are
rather more complex than they at first appear to be.
Gail Thackeray briefly considered going into private
security, but then changed tack, and joined the Maricopa
County District Attorney's Office (with a salary). She is
still
vigorously prosecuting electronic racketeering in Phoenix,
Arizona.
The fourth consecutive Computers, Freedom and Privacy
Conference will take place in March 1994 in Chicago.
As for Bruce Sterling... well *8-). I thankfully
abandoned
my brief career as a true-crime journalist and wrote a new
science fiction novel, *Heavy Weather,* and assembled a new
collection of short stories, *Globalhead.* I also write
nonfiction regularly, for the popular-science column in
*The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.*
I like life better on the far side of the boundary
between
fantasy and reality; but I've come to recognize that
reality has
an unfortunate way of annexing fantasy for its own
purposes.
That's why I'm on the Police Liaison Committee for EFF-
Austin, a local electronic civil liberties group (eff-
austin@tic.com). I don't think I will ever get over my
experience of the Hacker Crackdown, and I expect to be
involved in electronic civil liberties activism for the rest
of my
life.
It wouldn't be hard to find material for another book
on
computer crime and civil liberties issues. I truly believe
that I
could write another book much like this one, every year.
Cyberspace is very big. There's a lot going on out there,
far
more than can be adequately covered by the tiny, though
growing, cadre of network-literate reporters. I do wish I
could
do more work on this topic, because the various people of
cyberspace are an element of our society that definitely
requires
sustained study and attention.
But there's only one of me, and I have a lot on my
mind,
and, like most science fiction writers, I have a lot more
imagination than discipline. Having done my stint as an
electronic-frontier reporter, my hat is off to those
stalwart few
who do it every day. I may return to this topic some day,
but I
have no real plans to do so. However, I didn't have any
real
plans to write "Hacker Crackdown," either. Things happen,
nowadays. There are landslides in cyberspace. I'll just
have to
try and stay alert and on my feet.
The electronic landscape changes with astounding speed.
We are living through the fastest technological
transformation
in human history. I was glad to have a chance to document
cyberspace during one moment in its long mutation; a kind of
strobe-flash of the maelstrom. This book is already out-of-
date, though, and it will be quite obsolete in another five
years.
It seems a pity.
However, in about fifty years, I think this book might
seem quite interesting. And in a hundred years, this book
should seem mind-bogglingly archaic and bizarre, and will
probably seem far weirder to an audience in 2092 than it
ever
seemed to the contemporary readership.
Keeping up in cyberspace requires a great deal of
sustained attention. Personally, I keep tabs with the
milieu by
reading the invaluable electronic magazine Computer
underground Digest (tk0jut2@mvs.cso.niu.edu with the
subject
header: SUB CuD and a message that says: SUB CuD your
name your.full.internet@address). I also read Jack
Rickard's
bracingly iconoclastic *Boardwatch Magazine* for print news
of the BBS and online community. And, needless to say, I
read
*Wired,* the first magazine of the 1990s that actually looks
and
acts like it really belongs in this decade. There are other
ways
to learn, of course, but these three outlets will guide your
efforts very well.
When I myself want to publish something electronically,
which I'm doing with increasing frequency, I generally put
it on
the gopher at Texas Internet Consulting, who are my, well,
Texan Internet consultants (tic.com). This book can be
found
there. I think it is a worthwhile act to let this work go
free.
From thence, one's bread floats out onto the dark
waters
of cyberspace, only to return someday, tenfold. And of
course,
thoroughly soggy, and riddled with an entire amazing
ecosystem of bizarre and gnawingly hungry cybermarine life-
forms. For this author at least, that's all that really
counts.
Thanks for your attention *8-)
Bruce Sterling bruces@well.sf.ca.us -- New Years' Day
1994, Austin Texas
never been *anything* like this. Without any prodding,
without any preparation, people in the audience simply
begin to ask questions. Longhairs, freaky people,
mathematicians. Bayse is answering, politely, frankly,
fully, like a man walking on air. The ballroom's
atmosphere crackles with surreality. A female lawyer
behind me breaks into a sweat and a hot waft of
surprisingly potent and musky perfume flows off her
pulse-points.
People are giddy with laughter. People are
interested, fascinated, their eyes so wide and dark that
they seem eroticized. Unlikely daisy-chains form in the
halls, around the bar, on the escalators: cops with
hackers,
civil rights with FBI, Secret Service with phone phreaks.
Gail Thackeray is at her crispest in a white wool
sweater with a tiny Secret Service logo. "I found Phiber
Optik at the payphones, and when he saw my sweater, he
turned into a *pillar of salt!*" she chortles.
Phiber discusses his case at much length with his
arresting officer, Don Delaney of the New York State
Police. After an hour's chat, the two of them look ready to
begin singing "Auld Lang Syne." Phiber finally finds the
courage to get his worst complaint off his chest. It isn't
so
much the arrest. It was the *charge.* Pirating service off
900 numbers. I'm a *programmer,* Phiber insists. This
lame charge is going to hurt my reputation. It would have
been cool to be busted for something happening, like
Section 1030 computer intrusion. Maybe some kind of
crime that's scarcely been invented yet. Not lousy phone
fraud. Phooey.
Delaney seems regretful. He had a mountain of
possible criminal charges against Phiber Optik. The kid's
gonna plead guilty anyway. He's a first timer, they always
plead. Coulda charged the kid with most anything, and
gotten the same result in the end. Delaney seems
genuinely sorry not to have gratified Phiber in this
harmless fashion. Too late now. Phiber's pled already.
All
water under the bridge. Whaddya gonna do?
Delaney's got a good grasp on the hacker mentality.
He held a press conference after he busted a bunch of
Masters of Deception kids. Some journo had asked him:
"Would you describe these people as *geniuses?*"
Delaney's deadpan answer, perfect: "No, I would describe
these people as *defendants.*" Delaney busts a kid for
hacking codes with repeated random dialling. Tells the
press that NYNEX can track this stuff in no time flat
nowadays, and a kid has to be *stupid* to do something so
easy to catch. Dead on again: hackers don't mind being
thought of as Genghis Khan by the straights, but if there's
anything that really gets 'em where they live, it's being
called *dumb.*
Won't be as much fun for Phiber next time around.
As a second offender he's gonna see prison. Hackers
break the law. They're not geniuses, either. They're gonna
be defendants. And yet, Delaney muses over a drink in
the hotel bar, he has found it impossible to treat them as
common criminals. Delaney knows criminals. These
kids, by comparison, are clueless -- there is just no crook
vibe off of them, they don't smell right, they're just not
*bad.*
Delaney has seen a lot of action. He did Vietnam.
He's been shot at, he has shot people. He's a homicide
cop from New York. He has the appearance of a man who
has not only seen the shit hit the fan but has seen it
splattered across whole city blocks and left to ferment for
years. This guy has been around.
He listens to Steve Jackson tell his story. The dreamy
game strategist has been dealt a bad hand. He has played
it for all he is worth. Under his nerdish SF-fan exterior
is a
core of iron. Friends of his say Steve Jackson believes in
the rules, believes in fair play. He will never compromise
his principles, never give up. "Steve," Delaney says to
Steve Jackson, "they had some balls, whoever busted you.
You're all right!" Jackson, stunned, falls silent and
actually
blushes with pleasure.
Neidorf has grown up a lot in the past year. The kid
is
a quick study, you gotta give him that. Dressed by his
mom, the fashion manager for a national clothing chain,
Missouri college techie-frat Craig Neidorf out-dappers
everyone at this gig but the toniest East Coast lawyers.
The iron jaws of prison clanged shut without him and now
law school beckons for Neidorf. He looks like a larval
Congressman.
Not a "hacker," our Mr. Neidorf. He's not interested
in computer science. Why should he be? He's not
interested in writing C code the rest of his life, and
besides,
he's seen where the chips fall. To the world of computer
science he and *Phrack* were just a curiosity. But to the
world of law.... The kid has learned where the bodies are
buried. He carries his notebook of press clippings
wherever he goes.
Phiber Optik makes fun of Neidorf for a Midwestern
geek, for believing that "Acid Phreak" does acid and
listens to acid rock. Hell no. Acid's never done *acid!*
Acid's into *acid house music.* Jesus. The very idea of
doing LSD. Our *parents* did LSD, ya clown.
Thackeray suddenly turns upon Craig Neidorf the
full lighthouse glare of her attention and begins a
determined half-hour attempt to *win the boy over.* The
Joan of Arc of Computer Crime is *giving career advice to
Knight Lightning!* "Your experience would be very
valuable -- a real asset," she tells him with unmistakeable
sixty-thousand-watt sincerity. Neidorf is fascinated. He
listens with unfeigned attention. He's nodding and saying
yes ma'am. Yes, Craig, you too can forget all about money
and enter the glamorous and horribly underpaid world of
PROSECUTING COMPUTER CRIME! You can put your
former friends in prison -- ooops....
You cannot go on dueling at modem's length
indefinitely. You cannot beat one another senseless with
rolled-up press-clippings. Sooner or later you have to
come directly to grips. And yet the very act of assembling
here has changed the entire situation drastically. John
Quarterman, author of *The Matrix,* explains the Internet
at his symposium. It is the largest news network in the
world, it is growing by leaps and bounds, and yet you
cannot measure Internet because you cannot stop it in
place. It cannot stop, because there is no one anywhere in
the world with the authority to stop Internet. It changes,
yes, it grows, it embeds itself across the post-industrial,
postmodern world and it generates community wherever
it touches, and it is doing this all by itself.
Phiber is different. A very fin de siecle kid, Phiber
Optik. Barlow says he looks like an Edwardian dandy. He
does rather. Shaven neck, the sides of his skull cropped
hip-hop close, unruly tangle of black hair on top that looks
pomaded, he stays up till four a.m. and misses all the
sessions, then hangs out in payphone booths with his
acoustic coupler gutsily CRACKING SYSTEMS RIGHT IN
THE MIDST OF THE HEAVIEST LAW ENFORCEMENT
DUDES IN THE U.S., or at least *pretending* to.... Unlike
"Frank Drake." Drake, who wrote Dorothy Denning out of
nowhere, and asked for an interview for his cheapo
cyberpunk fanzine, and then started grilling her on her
ethics. She was squirmin', too.... Drake, scarecrow-tall
with his floppy blond mohawk, rotting tennis shoes and
black leather jacket lettered ILLUMINATI in red, gives off
an unmistakeable air of the bohemian literatus. Drake is
the kind of guy who reads British industrial design
magazines and appreciates William Gibson because the
quality of the prose is so tasty. Drake could never touch a
phone or a keyboard again, and he'd still have the nose-
ring and the blurry photocopied fanzines and the sampled
industrial music. He's a radical punk with a desktop-
publishing rig and an Internet address. Standing next to
Drake, the diminutive Phiber looks like he's been
physically coagulated out of phone-lines. Born to phreak.
Dorothy Denning approaches Phiber suddenly. The
two of them are about the same height and body-build.
Denning's blue eyes flash behind the round window-
frames of her glasses. "Why did you say I was 'quaint?'"
she asks Phiber, quaintly.
It's a perfect description but Phiber is nonplussed...
"Well, I uh, you know...."
"I also think you're quaint, Dorothy," I say, novelist
to
the rescue, the journo gift of gab... She is neat and
dapper
and yet there's an arcane quality to her, something like a
Pilgrim Maiden behind leaded glass; if she were six inches
high Dorothy Denning would look great inside a china
cabinet... The Cryptographeress.... The Cryptographrix...
whatever... Weirdly, Peter Denning looks just like his
wife, you could pick this gentleman out of a thousand guys
as the soulmate of Dorothy Denning. Wearing tailored
slacks, a spotless fuzzy varsity sweater, and a neatly
knotted academician's tie.... This fineboned, exquisitely
polite, utterly civilized and hyperintelligent couple seem
to have emerged from some cleaner and finer parallel
universe, where humanity exists to do the Brain Teasers
column in Scientific American. Why does this Nice Lady
hang out with these unsavory characters?
Because the time has come for it, that's why.
Because she's the best there is at what she does.
Donn Parker is here, the Great Bald Eagle of
Computer Crime.... With his bald dome, great height, and
enormous Lincoln-like hands, the great visionary pioneer
of the field plows through the lesser mortals like an
icebreaker.... His eyes are fixed on the future with the
rigidity of a bronze statue.... Eventually, he tells his
audience, all business crime will be computer crime,
because businesses will do everything through computers.
"Computer crime" as a category will vanish.
In the meantime, passing fads will flourish and fail
and evaporate.... Parker's commanding, resonant voice is
sphinxlike, everything is viewed from some eldritch valley
of deep historical abstraction... Yes, they've come and
they've gone, these passing flaps in the world of digital
computation.... The radio-frequency emanation scandal...
KGB and MI5 and CIA do it every day, it's easy, but
nobody else ever has.... The salami-slice fraud, mostly
mythical... "Crimoids," he calls them.... Computer viruses
are the current crimoid champ, a lot less dangerous than
most people let on, but the novelty is fading and there's a
crimoid vacuum at the moment, the press is visibly
hungering for something more outrageous.... The Great
Man shares with us a few speculations on the coming
crimoids.... Desktop Forgery! Wow.... Computers stolen
just for the sake of the information within them -- data-
napping! Happened in Britain a while ago, could be the
coming thing.... Phantom nodes in the Internet!
Parker handles his overhead projector sheets with an
ecclesiastical air... He wears a grey double-breasted suit,
a
light blue shirt, and a very quiet tie of understated maroon
and blue paisley... Aphorisms emerge from him with slow,
leaden emphasis... There is no such thing as an
adequately secure computer when one faces a sufficiently
powerful adversary.... Deterrence is the most socially
useful aspect of security... People are the primary
weakness in all information systems... The entire baseline
of computer security must be shifted upward.... Don't ever
violate your security by publicly describing your security
measures...
People in the audience are beginning to squirm, and
yet there is something about the elemental purity of this
guy's philosophy that compels uneasy respect.... Parker
sounds like the only sane guy left in the lifeboat,
sometimes. The guy who can prove rigorously, from deep
moral principles, that Harvey there, the one with the
broken leg and the checkered past, is the one who has to
be, err.... that is, Mr. Harvey is best placed to make the
necessary sacrifice for the security and indeed the very
survival of the rest of this lifeboat's crew.... Computer
security, Parker informs us mournfully, is a nasty topic,
and we wish we didn't have to have it... The security
expert, armed with method and logic, must think --
imagine -- everything that the adversary might do before
the adversary might actually do it. It is as if the
criminal's
dark brain were an extensive subprogram within the
shining cranium of Donn Parker. He is a Holmes whose
Moriarty does not quite yet exist and so must be perfectly
simulated.
CFP is a stellar gathering, with the giddiness of a
wedding. It is a happy time, a happy ending, they know
their world is changing forever tonight, and they're proud
to have been there to see it happen, to talk, to think, to
help.
And yet as night falls, a certain elegiac quality
manifests itself, as the crowd gathers beneath the
chandeliers with their wineglasses and dessert plates.
Something is ending here, gone forever, and it takes a
while to pinpoint it.
It is the End of the Amateurs.
***********
Afterword: The Hacker Crackdown Three Years Later
Three years in cyberspace is like thirty years anyplace
real. It feels as if a generation has passed since I wrote
this
book. In terms of the generations of computing machinery
involved, that's pretty much the case.
The basic shape of cyberspace has changed drastically
since 1990. A new U.S. Administration is in power whose
personnel are, if anything, only too aware of the nature and
potential of electronic networks. It's now clear to all
players
concerned that the status quo is dead-and-gone in American
media and telecommunications, and almost any territory on
the electronic frontier is up for grabs. Interactive
multimedia,
cable-phone alliances, the Information Superhighway, fiber-
to-the-curb, laptops and palmtops, the explosive growth of
cellular and the Internet -- the earth trembles visibly.
The year 1990 was not a pleasant one for AT&T. By
1993,
however, AT&T had successfully devoured the computer
company NCR in an unfriendly takeover, finally giving the
pole-climbers a major piece of the digital action. AT&T
managed to rid itself of ownership of the troublesome UNIX
operating system, selling it to Novell, a netware company,
which was itself preparing for a savage market dust-up with
operating-system titan Microsoft. Furthermore, AT&T
acquired McCaw Cellular in a gigantic merger, giving AT&T a
potential wireless whip-hand over its former progeny, the
RBOCs. The RBOCs themselves were now AT&T's clearest
potential rivals, as the Chinese firewalls between regulated
monopoly and frenzied digital entrepreneurism began to melt
and collapse headlong.
AT&T, mocked by industry analysts in 1990, was reaping
awestruck praise by commentators in 1993. AT&T had
managed to avoid any more major software crashes in its
switching stations. AT&T's newfound reputation as "the
nimble giant" was all the sweeter, since AT&T's traditional
rival giant in the world of multinational computing, IBM,
was
almost prostrate by 1993. IBM's vision of the commercial
computer-network of the future, "Prodigy," had managed to
spend $900 million without a whole heck of a lot to show for
it,
while AT&T, by contrast, was boldly speculating on the
possibilities of personal communicators and hedging its bets
with investments in handwritten interfaces. In 1990 AT&T
had
looked bad; but in 1993 AT&T looked like the future.
At least, AT&T's *advertising* looked like the future.
Similar public attention was riveted on the massive $22
billion
megamerger between RBOC Bell Atlantic and cable-TV giant
Tele-Communications Inc. Nynex was buying into cable
company Viacom International. BellSouth was buying stock in
Prime Management, Southwestern Bell acquiring a cable
company in Washington DC, and so forth. By stark contrast,
the Internet, a noncommercial entity which officially did
not
even exist, had no advertising budget at all. And yet,
almost
below the level of governmental and corporate awareness,
the
Internet was stealthily devouring everything in its path,
growing at a rate that defied comprehension. Kids who might
have been eager computer-intruders a mere five years earlier
were now surfing the Internet, where their natural urge to
explore led them into cyberspace landscapes of such
mindboggling vastness that the very idea of hacking
passwords
seemed rather a waste of time.
By 1993, there had not been a solid, knock 'em down,
panic-striking, teenage-hacker computer-intrusion scandal
in
many long months. There had, of course, been some striking
and well-publicized acts of illicit computer access, but
they had
been committed by adult white-collar industry insiders in
clear
pursuit of personal or commercial advantage. The kids, by
contrast, all seemed to be on IRC, Internet Relay Chat.
Or, perhaps, frolicking out in the endless glass-roots
network of personal bulletin board systems. In 1993, there
were an estimated 60,000 boards in America; the population
of
boards had fully doubled since Operation Sundevil in 1990.
The
hobby was transmuting fitfully into a genuine industry. The
board community were no longer obscure hobbyists; many
were still hobbyists and proud of it, but board sysops and
advanced board users had become a far more cohesive and
politically aware community, no longer allowing themselves
to
be obscure.
The specter of cyberspace in the late 1980s, of
outwitted
authorities trembling in fear before teenage hacker whiz-
kids,
seemed downright antiquated by 1993. Law enforcement
emphasis had changed, and the favorite electronic villain of
1993 was not the vandal child, but the victimizer of
children,
the digital child pornographer. "Operation Longarm," a
child-
pornography computer raid carried out by the previously
little-
known cyberspace rangers of the U.S. Customs Service, was
almost the size of Operation Sundevil, but received very
little
notice by comparison.
The huge and well-organized "Operation Disconnect,"
an FBI strike against telephone rip-off con-artists, was
actually larger than Sundevil. "Operation Disconnect" had
its
brief moment in the sun of publicity, and then vanished
utterly.
It was unfortunate that a law-enforcement affair as
apparently well-conducted as Operation Disconnect, which
pursued telecom adult career criminals a hundred times more
morally repugnant than teenage hackers, should have received
so little attention and fanfare, especially compared to the
abortive Sundevil and the basically disastrous efforts of
the
Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force. But the life
of
an electronic policeman is seldom easy.
If any law enforcement event truly deserved full-scale
press coverage (while somehow managing to escape it), it was
the amazing saga of New York State Police Senior
Investigator Don Delaney Versus the Orchard Street Finger-
Hackers. This story probably represents the real future of
professional telecommunications crime in America. The
finger-
hackers sold, and still sell, stolen long-distance phone
service
to a captive clientele of illegal aliens in New York City.
This
clientele is desperate to call home, yet as a group, illegal
aliens
have few legal means of obtaining standard phone service,
since their very presence in the United States is against
the
law. The finger-hackers of Orchard Street were very unusual
"hackers," with an astonishing lack of any kind of genuine
technological knowledge. And yet these New York call-sell
thieves showed a street-level ingenuity appalling in its
single-
minded sense of larceny.
There was no dissident-hacker rhetoric about freedom-
of-information among the finger-hackers. Most of them came
out of the cocaine-dealing fraternity, and they retailed
stolen
calls with the same street-crime techniques of lookouts and
bagholders that a crack gang would employ. This was down-
and-dirty, urban, ethnic, organized crime, carried out by
crime
families every day, for cash on the barrelhead, in the harsh
world of the streets. The finger-hackers dominated certain
payphones in certain strikingly unsavory neighborhoods.
They
provided a service no one else would give to a clientele
with
little to lose.
With such a vast supply of electronic crime at hand,
Don
Delaney rocketed from a background in homicide to teaching
telecom crime at FLETC in less than three years. Few can
rival
Delaney's hands-on, street-level experience in phone fraud.
Anyone in 1993 who still believes telecommunications crime
to
be something rare and arcane should have a few words with
Mr Delaney. Don Delaney has also written two fine essays,
on
telecom fraud and computer crime, in Joseph Grau's *Criminal
and Civil Investigations Handbook* (McGraw Hill 1993).
*Phrack* was still publishing in 1993, now under the
able
editorship of Erik Bloodaxe. Bloodaxe made a determined
attempt to get law enforcement and corporate security to pay
real money for their electronic copies of *Phrack,* but, as
usual, these stalwart defenders of intellectual property
preferred to pirate the magazine. Bloodaxe has still not
gotten
back any of his property from the seizure raids of March 1,
1990. Neither has the Mentor, who is still the managing
editor
of Steve Jackson Games.
Nor has Robert Izenberg, who has suspended his court
struggle to get his machinery back. Mr Izenberg has
calculated
that his $20,000 of equipment seized in 1990 is, in 1993,
worth
$4,000 at most. The missing software, also gone out his
door,
was long ago replaced. He might, he says, sue for the sake
of
principle, but he feels that the people who seized his
machinery
have already been discredited, and won't be doing any more
seizures. And even if his machinery were returned -- and in
good repair, which is doubtful -- it will be essentially
worthless
by 1995. Robert Izenberg no longer works for IBM, but has a
job programming for a major telecommunications company in
Austin.
Steve Jackson won his case against the Secret Service
on
March 12, 1993, just over three years after the federal raid
on
his enterprise. Thanks to the delaying tactics available
through the legal doctrine of "qualified immunity," Jackson
was
tactically forced to drop his suit against the individuals
William
Cook, Tim Foley, Barbara Golden and Henry Kluepfel. (Cook,
Foley, Golden and Kluepfel did, however, testify during the
trial.)
The Secret Service fought vigorously in the case,
battling
Jackson's lawyers right down the line, on the (mostly
previously untried) legal turf of the Electronic
Communications
Privacy Act and the Privacy Protection Act of 1980. The
Secret
Service denied they were legally or morally responsible for
seizing the work of a publisher. They claimed that (1)
Jackson's gaming "books" weren't real books anyhow, and (2)
the Secret Service didn't realize SJG Inc was a "publisher"
when they raided his offices, and (3) the books only
vanished by
accident because they merely happened to be inside the
computers the agents were appropriating.
The Secret Service also denied any wrongdoing in
reading and erasing all the supposedly "private" e-mail
inside
Jackson's seized board, Illuminati. The USSS attorneys
claimed the seizure did not violate the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act, because they weren't actually
"intercepting" electronic mail that was moving on a wire,
but
only electronic mail that was quietly sitting on a disk
inside
Jackson's computer. They also claimed that USSS agents
hadn't read any of the private mail on Illuminati; and
anyway,
even supposing that they had, they were allowed to do that
by
the subpoena.
The Jackson case became even more peculiar when the
Secret Service attorneys went so far as to allege that the
federal raid against the gaming company had actually
*improved Jackson's business* thanks to the ensuing
nationwide publicity.
It was a long and rather involved trial. The judge
seemed most perturbed, not by the arcane matters of
electronic
law, but by the fact that the Secret Service could have
avoided
almost all the consequent trouble simply by giving Jackson
his
computers back in short order. The Secret Service easily
could
have looked at everything in Jackson's computers, recorded
everything, and given the machinery back, and there would
have been no major scandal or federal court suit. On the
contrary, everybody simply would have had a good laugh.
Unfortunately, it appeared that this idea had never entered
the
heads of the Chicago-based investigators. They seemed to
have concluded unilaterally, and without due course of law,
that the world would be better off if Steve Jackson didn't
have
computers. Golden and Foley claimed that they had both
never
even heard of the Privacy Protection Act. Cook had heard of
the Act, but he'd decided on his own that the Privacy
Protection
Act had nothing to do with Steve Jackson.
The Jackson case was also a very politicized trial,
both
sides deliberately angling for a long-term legal precedent
that
would stake-out big claims for their interests in
cyberspace.
Jackson and his EFF advisors tried hard to establish that
the
least e-mail remark of the lonely electronic pamphleteer
deserves the same somber civil-rights protection as that
afforded *The New York Times.* By stark contrast, the
Secret
Service's attorneys argued boldly that the contents of an
electronic bulletin board have no more expectation of
privacy
than a heap of postcards. In the final analysis, very
little was
firmly nailed down. Formally, the legal rulings in the
Jackson
case apply only in the federal Western District of Texas.
It
was, however, established that these were real civil-
liberties
issues that powerful people were prepared to go to the
courthouse over; the seizure of bulletin board systems,
though
it still goes on, can be a perilous act for the seizer.
The Secret
Service owes Steve Jackson $50,000 in damages, and a
thousand dollars each to three of Jackson's angry and
offended
board users. And Steve Jackson, rather than owning the
single-line bulletin board system "Illuminati" seized in
1990,
now rejoices in possession of a huge privately-owned
Internet
node, "io.com," with dozens of phone-lines on its own T-1
trunk.
Jackson has made the entire blow-by-blow narrative of
his case available electronically, for interested parties.
And yet, the
Jackson case may still not be over; a Secret Service appeal
seems
likely and the EFF is also gravely dissatisfied with the
ruling on
electronic interception.
The WELL, home of the American electronic civil
libertarian movement, added two thousand more users and
dropped its aging Sequent computer in favor of a snappy new
Sun Sparcstation. Search-and-seizure discussions on the
WELL
are now taking a decided back-seat to the current hot topic
in
digital civil liberties, unbreakable public-key encryption
for
private citizens.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation left its modest home
in Boston to move inside the Washington Beltway of the
Clinton Administration. Its new executive director, ECPA
pioneer and longtime ACLU activist Jerry Berman, gained a
reputation of a man adept as dining with tigers, as the EFF
devoted its attention to networking at the highest levels of
the
computer and telecommunications industry. EFF's pro-
encryption lobby and anti-wiretapping initiative were
especially impressive, successfully assembling a herd of
highly
variegated industry camels under the same EFF tent, in open
and powerful opposition to the electronic ambitions of the
FBI
and the NSA.
EFF had transmuted at light-speed from an insurrection
to an institution. EFF Co-Founder Mitch Kapor once again
sidestepped the bureaucratic consequences of his own
success,
by remaining in Boston and adapting the role of EFF guru and
gray eminence. John Perry Barlow, for his part, left
Wyoming,
quit the Republican Party, and moved to New York City,
accompanied by his swarm of cellular phones. Mike Godwin
left Boston for Washington as EFF's official legal adviser
to the
electronically afflicted.
After the Neidorf trial, Dorothy Denning further proved
her firm scholastic independence-of-mind by speaking up
boldly on the usefulness and social value of federal
wiretapping. Many civil libertarians, who regarded the
practice of wiretapping with deep occult horror, were
crestfallen to the point of comedy when nationally known
"hacker sympathizer" Dorothy Denning sternly defended
police and public interests in official eavesdropping.
However,
no amount of public uproar seemed to swerve the "quaint" Dr.
Denning in the slightest. She not only made up her own
mind,
she made it up in public and then stuck to her guns.
In 1993, the stalwarts of the Masters of Deception,
Phiber
Optik, Acid Phreak and Scorpion, finally fell afoul of the
machineries of legal prosecution. Acid Phreak and Scorpion
were sent to prison for six months, six months of home
detention, 750 hours of community service, and, oddly, a $50
fine for conspiracy to commit computer crime. Phiber Optik,
the computer intruder with perhaps the highest public
profile in
the entire world, took the longest to plead guilty, but,
facing
the possibility of ten years in jail, he finally did so. He
was
sentenced to a year and a day in prison.
As for the Atlanta wing of the Legion of Doom, Prophet,
Leftist and Urvile... Urvile now works for a software
company in Atlanta. He is still on probation and still
repaying
his enormous fine. In fifteen months, he will once again be
allowed to own a personal computer. He is still a convicted
federal felon, but has not had any legal difficulties since
leaving
prison. He has lost contact with Prophet and Leftist.
Unfortunately, so have I, though not through lack of honest
effort.
Knight Lightning, now 24, is a technical writer for
the federal government in Washington DC. He has still not
been accepted into law school, but having spent more than
his
share of time in the company of attorneys, he's come to
think
that maybe an MBA would be more to the point. He still
owes
his attorneys $30,000, but the sum is dwindling steadily
since he
is manfully working two jobs. Knight Lightning customarily
wears a suit and tie and carries a valise. He has a federal
security clearance.
Unindicted *Phrack* co-editor Taran King is also a
technical writer in Washington DC, and recently got
married.
Terminus did his time, got out of prison, and currently
lives in Silicon Valley where he is running a full-scale
Internet
node, "netsys.com." He programs professionally for a
company specializing in satellite links for the Internet.
Carlton Fitzpatrick still teaches at the Federal Law
Enforcement Training Center, but FLETC found that the issues
involved in sponsoring and running a bulletin board system
are
rather more complex than they at first appear to be.
Gail Thackeray briefly considered going into private
security, but then changed tack, and joined the Maricopa
County District Attorney's Office (with a salary). She is
still
vigorously prosecuting electronic racketeering in Phoenix,
Arizona.
The fourth consecutive Computers, Freedom and Privacy
Conference will take place in March 1994 in Chicago.
As for Bruce Sterling... well *8-). I thankfully
abandoned
my brief career as a true-crime journalist and wrote a new
science fiction novel, *Heavy Weather,* and assembled a new
collection of short stories, *Globalhead.* I also write
nonfiction regularly, for the popular-science column in
*The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.*
I like life better on the far side of the boundary
between
fantasy and reality; but I've come to recognize that
reality has
an unfortunate way of annexing fantasy for its own
purposes.
That's why I'm on the Police Liaison Committee for EFF-
Austin, a local electronic civil liberties group (eff-
austin@tic.com). I don't think I will ever get over my
experience of the Hacker Crackdown, and I expect to be
involved in electronic civil liberties activism for the rest
of my
life.
It wouldn't be hard to find material for another book
on
computer crime and civil liberties issues. I truly believe
that I
could write another book much like this one, every year.
Cyberspace is very big. There's a lot going on out there,
far
more than can be adequately covered by the tiny, though
growing, cadre of network-literate reporters. I do wish I
could
do more work on this topic, because the various people of
cyberspace are an element of our society that definitely
requires
sustained study and attention.
But there's only one of me, and I have a lot on my
mind,
and, like most science fiction writers, I have a lot more
imagination than discipline. Having done my stint as an
electronic-frontier reporter, my hat is off to those
stalwart few
who do it every day. I may return to this topic some day,
but I
have no real plans to do so. However, I didn't have any
real
plans to write "Hacker Crackdown," either. Things happen,
nowadays. There are landslides in cyberspace. I'll just
have to
try and stay alert and on my feet.
The electronic landscape changes with astounding speed.
We are living through the fastest technological
transformation
in human history. I was glad to have a chance to document
cyberspace during one moment in its long mutation; a kind of
strobe-flash of the maelstrom. This book is already out-of-
date, though, and it will be quite obsolete in another five
years.
It seems a pity.
However, in about fifty years, I think this book might
seem quite interesting. And in a hundred years, this book
should seem mind-bogglingly archaic and bizarre, and will
probably seem far weirder to an audience in 2092 than it
ever
seemed to the contemporary readership.
Keeping up in cyberspace requires a great deal of
sustained attention. Personally, I keep tabs with the
milieu by
reading the invaluable electronic magazine Computer
underground Digest (tk0jut2@mvs.cso.niu.edu with the
subject
header: SUB CuD and a message that says: SUB CuD your
name your.full.internet@address). I also read Jack
Rickard's
bracingly iconoclastic *Boardwatch Magazine* for print news
of the BBS and online community. And, needless to say, I
read
*Wired,* the first magazine of the 1990s that actually looks
and
acts like it really belongs in this decade. There are other
ways
to learn, of course, but these three outlets will guide your
efforts very well.
When I myself want to publish something electronically,
which I'm doing with increasing frequency, I generally put
it on
the gopher at Texas Internet Consulting, who are my, well,
Texan Internet consultants (tic.com). This book can be
found
there. I think it is a worthwhile act to let this work go
free.
From thence, one's bread floats out onto the dark
waters
of cyberspace, only to return someday, tenfold. And of
course,
thoroughly soggy, and riddled with an entire amazing
ecosystem of bizarre and gnawingly hungry cybermarine life-
forms. For this author at least, that's all that really
counts.
Thanks for your attention *8-)
Bruce Sterling bruces@well.sf.ca.us -- New Years' Day
1994, Austin Texas