them as "Wild Indians." The boys were openly rude to
customers. They talked back to subscribers, saucing off,
uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip. The
rascals took Saint Patrick's Day off without permission.
And worst of all they played clever tricks with the
switchboard plugs: disconnecting calls, crossing lines so
that customers found themselves talking to strangers, and
so forth.
This combination of power, technical mastery, and
effective anonymity seemed to act like catnip on teenage
boys.
This wild-kid-on-the-wires phenomenon was not
confined to the USA; from the beginning, the same was
true of the British phone system. An early British
commentator kindly remarked: "No doubt boys in their
teens found the work not a little irksome, and it is also
highly probable that under the early conditions of
employment the adventurous and inquisitive spirits of
which the average healthy boy of that age is possessed,
were not always conducive to the best attention being
given to the wants of the telephone subscribers."
So the boys were flung off the system -- or at least,
deprived of control of the switchboard. But the
"adventurous and inquisitive spirits" of the teenage boys
would be heard from in the world of telephony, again and
again.
The fourth stage in the technological life-cycle is
death: "the Dog," dead tech. The telephone has so far
avoided this fate. On the contrary, it is thriving, still
spreading, still evolving, and at increasing speed.
The telephone has achieved a rare and exalted state
for a technological artifact: it has become a *household
object.* The telephone, like the clock, like pen and
paper, like kitchen utensils and running water, has
become a technology that is visible only by its absence.
The telephone is technologically transparent. The global
telephone system is the largest and most complex
machine in the world, yet it is easy to use. More
remarkable yet, the telephone is almost entirely
physically safe for the user.
For the average citizen in the 1870s, the telephone
was weirder, more shocking, more "high-tech" and harder
to comprehend, than the most outrageous stunts of
advanced computing for us Americans in the 1990s. In
trying to understand what is happening to us today, with
our bulletin-board systems, direct overseas dialling, fiber-
optic transmissions, computer viruses, hacking stunts, and
a vivid tangle of new laws and new crimes, it is important
to realize that our society has been through a similar
challenge before -- and that, all in all, we did rather well
by
it.
Bell's stage telephone seemed bizarre at first. But
the sensations of weirdness vanished quickly, once people
began to hear the familiar voices of relatives and friends,
in their own homes on their own telephones. The
telephone changed from a fearsome high-tech totem to
an everyday pillar of human community.
This has also happened, and is still happening, to
computer networks. Computer networks such as
NSFnet, BITnet, USENET, JANET, are technically
advanced, intimidating, and much harder to use than
telephones. Even the popular, commercial computer
networks, such as GEnie, Prodigy, and CompuServe,
cause much head-scratching and have been described as
"user-hateful." Nevertheless they too are changing from
fancy high-tech items into everyday sources of human
community.
The words "community" and "communication" have
the same root. Wherever you put a communications
network, you put a community as well. And whenever you
*take away* that network -- confiscate it, outlaw it,
crash it,
raise its price beyond affordability -- then you hurt that
community.
Communities will fight to defend themselves. People
will fight harder and more bitterly to defend their
communities, than they will fight to defend their own
individual selves. And this is very true of the
"electronic
community" that arose around computer networks in the
1980s -- or rather, the *various* electronic communities,
in
telephony, law enforcement, computing, and the digital
underground that, by the year 1990, were raiding, rallying,
arresting, suing, jailing, fining and issuing angry
manifestos.
None of the events of 1990 were entirely new.
Nothing happened in 1990 that did not have some kind of
earlier and more understandable precedent. What gave
the Hacker Crackdown its new sense of gravity and
importance was the feeling -- the *community* feeling --
that the political stakes had been raised; that trouble in
cyberspace was no longer mere mischief or inconclusive
skirmishing, but a genuine fight over genuine issues, a
fight for community survival and the shape of the future.
These electronic communities, having flourished
throughout the 1980s, were becoming aware of
themselves, and increasingly, becoming aware of other,
rival communities. Worries were sprouting up right and
left, with complaints, rumors, uneasy speculations. But it
would take a catalyst, a shock, to make the new world
evident. Like Bell's great publicity break, the
Tarriffville
Rail Disaster of January 1878, it would take a cause
celebre.
That cause was the AT&T Crash of January 15, 1990.
After the Crash, the wounded and anxious telephone
community would come out fighting hard.
#
The community of telephone technicians, engineers,
operators and researchers is the oldest community in
cyberspace. These are the veterans, the most developed
group, the richest, the most respectable, in most ways the
most powerful. Whole generations have come and gone
since Alexander Graham Bell's day, but the community he
founded survives; people work for the phone system today
whose great-grandparents worked for the phone system.
Its specialty magazines, such as *Telephony,* *AT&T
Technical Journal,* *Telephone Engineer and
Management,* are decades old; they make computer
publications like *Macworld* and *PC Week* look like
amateur johnny-come-latelies.
And the phone companies take no back seat in high-
technology, either. Other companies' industrial
researchers may have won new markets; but the
researchers of Bell Labs have won *seven Nobel Prizes.*
One potent device that Bell Labs originated, the transistor,
has created entire *groups* of industries. Bell Labs are
world-famous for generating "a patent a day," and have
even made vital discoveries in astronomy, physics and
cosmology.
Throughout its seventy-year history, "Ma Bell" was
not so much a company as a way of life. Until the
cataclysmic divestiture of the 1980s, Ma Bell was perhaps
the ultimate maternalist mega-employer. The AT&T
corporate image was the "gentle giant," "the voice with a
smile," a vaguely socialist-realist world of cleanshaven
linemen in shiny helmets and blandly pretty phone-girls
in headsets and nylons. Bell System employees were
famous as rock-ribbed Kiwanis and Rotary members,
Little-League enthusiasts, school-board people.
During the long heyday of Ma Bell, the Bell
employee corps were nurtured top-to-botton on a
corporate ethos of public service. There was good money
in Bell, but Bell was not *about* money; Bell used public
relations, but never mere marketeering. People went into
the Bell System for a good life, and they had a good life.
But it was not mere money that led Bell people out in the
midst of storms and earthquakes to fight with toppled
phone-poles, to wade in flooded manholes, to pull the red-
eyed graveyard-shift over collapsing switching-systems.
The Bell ethic was the electrical equivalent of the
postman's: neither rain, nor snow, nor gloom of night
would stop these couriers.
It is easy to be cynical about this, as it is easy to
be
cynical about any political or social system; but cynicism
does not change the fact that thousands of people took
these ideals very seriously. And some still do.
The Bell ethos was about public service; and that was
gratifying; but it was also about private *power,* and that
was gratifying too. As a corporation, Bell was very
special.
Bell was privileged. Bell had snuggled up close to the
state. In fact, Bell was as close to government as you
could
get in America and still make a whole lot of legitimate
money.
But unlike other companies, Bell was above and
beyond the vulgar commercial fray. Through its regional
operating companies, Bell was omnipresent, local, and
intimate, all over America; but the central ivory towers at
its corporate heart were the tallest and the ivoriest
around.
There were other phone companies in America, to be
sure; the so-called independents. Rural cooperatives,
mostly; small fry, mostly tolerated, sometimes warred
upon. For many decades, "independent" American phone
companies lived in fear and loathing of the official Bell
monopoly (or the "Bell Octopus," as Ma Bell's nineteenth-
century enemies described her in many angry newspaper
manifestos). Some few of these independent
entrepreneurs, while legally in the wrong, fought so
bitterly against the Octopus that their illegal phone
networks were cast into the street by Bell agents and
publicly burned.
The pure technical sweetness of the Bell System gave
its operators, inventors and engineers a deeply satisfying
sense of power and mastery. They had devoted their lives
to improving this vast nation-spanning machine; over
years, whole human lives, they had watched it improve
and grow. It was like a great technological temple. They
were an elite, and they knew it -- even if others did not;
in
fact, they felt even more powerful *because* others did
not understand.
The deep attraction of this sensation of elite
technical power should never be underestimated.
"Technical power" is not for everybody; for many people it
simply has no charm at all. But for some people, it
becomes the core of their lives. For a few, it is
overwhelming, obsessive; it becomes something close to
an addiction. People -- especially clever teenage boys
whose lives are otherwise mostly powerless and put-upon -
- love this sensation of secret power, and are willing to
do
all sorts of amazing things to achieve it. The technical
*power* of electronics has motivated many strange acts
detailed in this book, which would otherwise be
inexplicable.
So Bell had power beyond mere capitalism. The Bell
service ethos worked, and was often propagandized, in a
rather saccharine fashion. Over the decades, people
slowly grew tired of this. And then, openly impatient with
it. By the early 1980s, Ma Bell was to find herself with
scarcely a real friend in the world. Vail's industrial
socialism had become hopelessly out-of-fashion
politically. Bell would be punished for that. And that
punishment would fall harshly upon the people of the
telephone community.
#
In 1983, Ma Bell was dismantled by federal court
action. The pieces of Bell are now separate corporate
entities. The core of the company became AT&T
Communications, and also AT&T Industries (formerly
Western Electric, Bell's manufacturing arm). AT&T Bell
Labs become Bell Communications Research, Bellcore.
Then there are the Regional Bell Operating Companies,
or RBOCs, pronounced "arbocks."
Bell was a titan and even these regional chunks are
gigantic enterprises: Fortune 50 companies with plenty of
wealth and power behind them. But the clean lines of
"One Policy, One System, Universal Service" have been
shattered, apparently forever.
The "One Policy" of the early Reagan Administration
was to shatter a system that smacked of noncompetitive
socialism. Since that time, there has been no real
telephone "policy" on the federal level. Despite the
breakup, the remnants of Bell have never been set free to
compete in the open marketplace.
The RBOCs are still very heavily regulated, but not
from the top. Instead, they struggle politically,
economically and legally, in what seems an endless
turmoil, in a patchwork of overlapping federal and state
jurisdictions. Increasingly, like other major American
corporations, the RBOCs are becoming multinational,
acquiring important commercial interests in Europe, Latin
America, and the Pacific Rim. But this, too, adds to their
legal and political predicament.
The people of what used to be Ma Bell are not happy
about their fate. They feel ill-used. They might have been
grudgingly willing to make a full transition to the free
market; to become just companies amid other companies.
But this never happened. Instead, AT&T and the RBOCS
("the Baby Bells") feel themselves wrenched from side to
side by state regulators, by Congress, by the FCC, and
especially by the federal court of Judge Harold Greene,
the magistrate who ordered the Bell breakup and who has
been the de facto czar of American telecommunications
ever since 1983.
Bell people feel that they exist in a kind of paralegal
limbo today. They don't understand what's demanded of
them. If it's "service," why aren't they treated like a
public
service? And if it's money, then why aren't they free to
compete for it? No one seems to know, really. Those who
claim to know keep changing their minds. Nobody in
authority seems willing to grasp the nettle for once and
all.
Telephone people from other countries are amazed
by the American telephone system today. Not that it
works so well; for nowadays even the French telephone
system works, more or less. They are amazed that the
American telephone system *still* works *at all,* under
these strange conditions.
Bell's "One System" of long-distance service is now
only about eighty percent of a system, with the remainder
held by Sprint, MCI, and the midget long-distance
companies. Ugly wars over dubious corporate practices
such as "slamming" (an underhanded method of snitching
clients from rivals) break out with some regularity in the
realm of long-distance service. The battle to break Bell's
long-distance monopoly was long and ugly, and since the
breakup the battlefield has not become much prettier.
AT&T's famous shame-and-blame advertisements, which
emphasized the shoddy work and purported ethical
shadiness of their competitors, were much remarked on
for their studied psychological cruelty.
There is much bad blood in this industry, and much
long-treasured resentment. AT&T's post-breakup
corporate logo, a striped sphere, is known in the industry
as the "Death Star" (a reference from the movie *Star
Wars,* in which the "Death Star" was the spherical high-
tech fortress of the harsh-breathing imperial ultra-baddie,
Darth Vader.) Even AT&T employees are less than
thrilled by the Death Star. A popular (though banned) T-
shirt among AT&T employees bears the old-fashioned
Bell logo of the Bell System, plus the newfangled striped
sphere, with the before-and-after comments: "This is your
brain -- This is your brain on drugs!" AT&T made a very
well-financed and determined effort to break into the
personal computer market; it was disastrous, and telco
computer experts are derisively known by their
competitors as "the pole-climbers." AT&T and the Baby
Bell arbocks still seem to have few friends.
Under conditions of sharp commercial competition, a
crash like that of January 15, 1990 was a major
embarrassment to AT&T. It was a direct blow against their
much-treasured reputation for reliability. Within days of
the crash AT&T's Chief Executive Officer, Bob Allen,
officially apologized, in terms of deeply pained humility:
"AT&T had a major service disruption last Monday.
We didn't live up to our own standards of quality, and we
didn't live up to yours. It's as simple as that. And that's
not
acceptable to us. Or to you.... We understand how much
people have come to depend upon AT&T service, so our
AT&T Bell Laboratories scientists and our network
engineers are doing everything possible to guard against a
recurrence.... We know there's no way to make up for the
inconvenience this problem may have caused you."
Mr Allen's "open letter to customers" was printed in
lavish ads all over the country: in the *Wall Street
Journal,* *USA Today,* *New York Times,*
*Los Angeles Times,* *Chicago Tribune,* *Philadelphia
Inquirer,* *San Francisco Chronicle Examiner,* *Boston
Globe,* *Dallas Morning News,* *Detroit Free Press,*
*Washington Post,* *Houston Chronicle,* *Cleveland
Plain Dealer,* *Atlanta Journal Constitution,*
*Minneapolis Star Tribune,* *St. Paul Pioneer Press
Dispatch,* *Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer,*
*Tacoma News Tribune,* *Miami Herald,* *Pittsburgh
Press,* *St. Louis Post Dispatch,* *Denver Post,* *Phoenix
Republic Gazette* and *Tampa Tribune.*
In another press release, AT&T went to some pains to
suggest that this "software glitch" *might* have happened
just as easily to MCI, although, in fact, it hadn't. (MCI's
switching software was quite different from AT&T's --
though not necessarily any safer.) AT&T also announced
their plans to offer a rebate of service on Valentine's Day
to make up for the loss during the Crash.
"Every technical resource available, including Bell
Labs scientists and engineers, has been devoted to
assuring it will not occur again," the public was told.
They
were further assured that "The chances of a recurrence
are small--a problem of this magnitude never occurred
before."
In the meantime, however, police and corporate
security maintained their own suspicions about "the
chances of recurrence" and the real reason why a
"problem of this magnitude" had appeared, seemingly out
of nowhere. Police and security knew for a fact that
hackers of unprecedented sophistication were illegally
entering, and reprogramming, certain digital switching
stations. Rumors of hidden "viruses" and secret "logic
bombs" in the switches ran rampant in the underground,
with much chortling over AT&T's predicament, and idle
speculation over what unsung hacker genius was
responsible for it. Some hackers, including police
informants, were trying hard to finger one another as the
true culprits of the Crash.
Telco people found little comfort in objectivity when
they contemplated these possibilities. It was just too
close
to the bone for them; it was embarrassing; it hurt so much,
it was hard even to talk about.
There has always been thieving and misbehavior in
the phone system. There has always been trouble with the
rival independents, and in the local loops. But to have
such trouble in the core of the system, the long-distance
switching stations, is a horrifying affair. To telco
people,
this is all the difference between finding roaches in your
kitchen and big horrid sewer-rats in your bedroom.
From the outside, to the average citizen, the telcos
still seem gigantic and impersonal. The American public
seems to regard them as something akin to Soviet
apparats. Even when the telcos do their best corporate-
citizen routine, subsidizing magnet high-schools and
sponsoring news-shows on public television, they seem to
win little except public suspicion.
But from the inside, all this looks very different.
There's harsh competition. A legal and political system
that seems baffled and bored, when not actively hostile to
telco interests. There's a loss of morale, a deep sensation
of having somehow lost the upper hand. Technological
change has caused a loss of data and revenue to other,
newer forms of transmission. There's theft, and new
forms of theft, of growing scale and boldness and
sophistication. With all these factors, it was no surprise
to
see the telcos, large and small, break out in a litany of
bitter complaint.
In late '88 and throughout 1989, telco representatives
grew shrill in their complaints to those few American law
enforcement officials who make it their business to try to
understand what telephone people are talking about.
Telco security officials had discovered the computer-
hacker underground, infiltrated it thoroughly, and
become deeply alarmed at its growing expertise. Here
they had found a target that was not only loathsome on its
face, but clearly ripe for counterattack.
Those bitter rivals: AT&T, MCI and Sprint -- and a
crowd of Baby Bells: PacBell, Bell South, Southwestern
Bell, NYNEX, USWest, as well as the Bell research
consortium Bellcore, and the independent long-distance
carrier Mid-American -- all were to have their role in the
great hacker dragnet of 1990. After years of being
battered and pushed around, the telcos had, at least in a
small way, seized the initiative again. After years of
turmoil, telcos and government officials were once again
to work smoothly in concert in defense of the System.
Optimism blossomed; enthusiasm grew on all sides; the
prospective taste of vengeance was sweet.
#
From the beginning -- even before the crackdown
had a name -- secrecy was a big problem. There were
many good reasons for secrecy in the hacker crackdown.
Hackers and code-thieves were wily prey, slinking back to
their bedrooms and basements and destroying vital
incriminating evidence at the first hint of trouble.
Furthermore, the crimes themselves were heavily
technical and difficult to describe, even to police -- much
less to the general public.
When such crimes *had* been described intelligibly
to the public, in the past, that very publicity had tended
to
*increase* the crimes enormously. Telco officials, while
painfully aware of the vulnerabilities of their systems,
were
anxious not to publicize those weaknesses. Experience
showed them that those weaknesses, once discovered,
would be pitilessly exploited by tens of thousands of
people -- not only by professional grifters and by
underground hackers and phone phreaks, but by many
otherwise more-or-less honest everyday folks, who
regarded stealing service from the faceless, soulless
"Phone Company" as a kind of harmless indoor sport.
When it came to protecting their interests, telcos had long
since given up on general public sympathy for "the Voice
with a Smile." Nowadays the telco's "Voice" was very likely
to be a computer's; and the American public showed
much less of the proper respect and gratitude due the fine
public service bequeathed them by Dr. Bell and Mr. Vail.
The more efficient, high-tech, computerized, and
impersonal the telcos became, it seemed, the more they
were met by sullen public resentment and amoral greed.
Telco officials wanted to punish the phone-phreak
underground, in as public and exemplary a manner as
possible. They wanted to make dire examples of the worst
offenders, to seize the ringleaders and intimidate the
small fry, to discourage and frighten the wacky hobbyists,
and send the professional grifters to jail. To do all this,
publicity was vital.
Yet operational secrecy was even more so. If word got
out that a nationwide crackdown was coming, the hackers
might simply vanish; destroy the evidence, hide their
computers, go to earth, and wait for the campaign to blow
over. Even the young hackers were crafty and suspicious,
and as for the professional grifters, they tended to split
for
the nearest state-line at the first sign of trouble. For
the
crackdown to work well, they would all have to be caught
red-handed, swept upon suddenly, out of the blue, from
every corner of the compass.
And there was another strong motive for secrecy. In
the worst-case scenario, a blown campaign might leave
the telcos open to a devastating hacker counter-attack. If
there were indeed hackers loose in America who had
caused the January 15 Crash -- if there were truly gifted
hackers, loose in the nation's long-distance switching
systems, and enraged or frightened by the crackdown --
then they might react unpredictably to an attempt to
collar them. Even if caught, they might have talented and
vengeful friends still running around loose. Conceivably,
it could turn ugly. Very ugly. In fact, it was hard to
imagine just how ugly things might turn, given that
possibility.
Counter-attack from hackers was a genuine concern
for the telcos. In point of fact, they would never suffer
any
such counter-attack. But in months to come, they would
be at some pains to publicize this notion and to utter grim
warnings about it.
Still, that risk seemed well worth running. Better to
run the risk of vengeful attacks, than to live at the mercy
of
potential crashers. Any cop would tell you that a
protection racket had no real future.
And publicity was such a useful thing. Corporate
security officers, including telco security, generally work
under conditions of great discretion. And corporate
security officials do not make money for their companies.
Their job is to *prevent the loss* of money, which is much
less glamorous than actually winning profits.
If you are a corporate security official, and you do
your job brilliantly, then nothing bad happens to your
company at all. Because of this, you appear completely
superfluous. This is one of the many unattractive aspects
of security work. It's rare that these folks have the
chance
to draw some healthy attention to their own efforts.
Publicity also served the interest of their friends in
law enforcement. Public officials, including law
enforcement officials, thrive by attracting favorable
public interest. A brilliant prosecution in a matter of
vital
public interest can make the career of a prosecuting
attorney. And for a police officer, good publicity opens
the
purses of the legislature; it may bring a citation, or a
promotion, or at least a rise in status and the respect of
one's peers.
But to have both publicity and secrecy is to have
one's cake and eat it too. In months to come, as we will
show, this impossible act was to cause great pain to the
agents of the crackdown. But early on, it seemed possible
-- maybe even likely -- that the crackdown could
successfully combine the best of both worlds. The
*arrest* of hackers would be heavily publicized. The
actual *deeds* of the hackers, which were technically hard
to explain and also a security risk, would be left decently
obscured. The *threat* hackers posed would be heavily
trumpeted; the likelihood of their actually committing
such fearsome crimes would be left to the public's
imagination. The spread of the computer underground,
and its growing technical sophistication, would be heavily
promoted; the actual hackers themselves, mostly
bespectacled middle-class white suburban teenagers,
would be denied any personal publicity.
It does not seem to have occurred to any telco official
that the hackers accused would demand a day in court;
that journalists would smile upon the hackers as "good
copy;" that wealthy high-tech entrepreneurs would offer
moral and financial support to crackdown victims; that
constitutional lawyers would show up with briefcases,
frowning mightily. This possibility does not seem to have
ever entered the game-plan.
And even if it had, it probably would not have slowed
the ferocious pursuit of a stolen phone-company
document, mellifluously known as "Control Office
Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special
Services and Major Account Centers."
In the chapters to follow, we will explore the worlds
of
police and the computer underground, and the large
shadowy area where they overlap. But first, we must
explore the battleground. Before we leave the world of the
telcos, we must understand what a switching system
actually is and how your telephone actually works.
#
To the average citizen, the idea of the telephone is
represented by, well, a *telephone:* a device that you
talk
into. To a telco professional, however, the telephone
itself
is known, in lordly fashion, as a "subset." The "subset"
in
your house is a mere adjunct, a distant nerve ending, of
the central switching stations, which are ranked in levels
of
heirarchy, up to the long-distance electronic switching
stations, which are some of the largest computers on
earth.
Let us imagine that it is, say, 1925, before the
introduction of computers, when the phone system was
simpler and somewhat easier to grasp. Let's further
imagine that you are Miss Leticia Luthor, a fictional
operator for Ma Bell in New York City of the 20s.
Basically, you, Miss Luthor, *are* the "switching
system." You are sitting in front of a large vertical
switchboard, known as a "cordboard," made of shiny
wooden panels, with ten thousand metal-rimmed holes
punched in them, known as jacks. The engineers would
have put more holes into your switchboard, but ten
thousand is as many as you can reach without actually
having to get up out of your chair.
Each of these ten thousand holes has its own little
electric lightbulb, known as a "lamp," and its own neatly
printed number code.
With the ease of long habit, you are scanning your
board for lit-up bulbs. This is what you do most of the
time, so you are used to it.
A lamp lights up. This means that the phone at the
end of that line has been taken off the hook. Whenever a
handset is taken off the hook, that closes a circuit inside
the phone which then signals the local office, i.e. you,
automatically. There might be somebody calling, or then
again the phone might be simply off the hook, but this
does not matter to you yet. The first thing you do, is
record
that number in your logbook, in your fine American
public-school handwriting. This comes first, naturally,
since it is done for billing purposes.
You now take the plug of your answering cord, which
goes directly to your headset, and plug it into the lit-up
hole. "Operator," you announce.
In operator's classes, before taking this job, you have
been issued a large pamphlet full of canned operator's
responses for all kinds of contingencies, which you had to
memorize. You have also been trained in a proper non-
regional, non-ethnic pronunciation and tone of voice. You
rarely have the occasion to make any spontaneous
remark to a customer, and in fact this is frowned upon
(except out on the rural lines where people have time on
their hands and get up to all kinds of mischief).
A tough-sounding user's voice at the end of the line
gives you a number. Immediately, you write that number
down in your logbook, next to the caller's number, which
you just wrote earlier. You then look and see if the
number this guy wants is in fact on your switchboard,
which it generally is, since it's generally a local call.
Long
distance costs so much that people use it sparingly.
Only then do you pick up a calling-cord from a shelf
at the base of the switchboard. This is a long elastic cord
mounted on a kind of reel so that it will zip back in when
you unplug it. There are a lot of cords down there, and
when a bunch of them are out at once they look like a nest
of snakes. Some of the girls think there are bugs living in
those cable-holes. They're called "cable mites" and are
supposed to bite your hands and give you rashes. You
don't believe this, yourself.
Gripping the head of your calling-cord, you slip the
tip of it deftly into the sleeve of the jack for the called
person. Not all the way in, though. You just touch it. If
you hear a clicking sound, that means the line is busy and
you can't put the call through. If the line is busy, you
have
to stick the calling-cord into a "busy-tone jack," which
will
give the guy a busy-tone. This way you don't have to talk
to
him yourself and absorb his natural human frustration.
But the line isn't busy. So you pop the cord all the
way in. Relay circuits in your board make the distant
phone ring, and if somebody picks it up off the hook, then
a phone conversation starts. You can hear this
conversation on your answering cord, until you unplug it.
In fact you could listen to the whole conversation if you
wanted, but this is sternly frowned upon by management,
and frankly, when you've overheard one, you've pretty
much heard 'em all.
You can tell how long the conversation lasts by the
glow of the calling-cord's lamp, down on the calling-cord's
shelf. When it's over, you unplug and the calling-cord
zips back into place.
Having done this stuff a few hundred thousand times,
you become quite good at it. In fact you're plugging, and
connecting, and disconnecting, ten, twenty, forty cords at a
time. It's a manual handicraft, really, quite satisfying in
a
way, rather like weaving on an upright loom.
Should a long-distance call come up, it would be
different, but not all that different. Instead of
connecting
the call through your own local switchboard, you have to
go up the hierarchy, onto the long-distance lines, known as
"trunklines." Depending on how far the call goes, it may
have to work its way through a whole series of operators,
which can take quite a while. The caller doesn't wait on
the line while this complex process is negotiated across
the country by the gaggle of operators. Instead, the
caller
hangs up, and you call him back yourself when the call has
finally worked its way through.
After four or five years of this work, you get married,
and you have to quit your job, this being the natural order
of womanhood in the American 1920s. The phone
company has to train somebody else -- maybe two people,
since the phone system has grown somewhat in the
meantime. And this costs money.
In fact, to use any kind of human being as a switching
system is a very expensive proposition. Eight thousand
Leticia Luthors would be bad enough, but a quarter of a
million of them is a military-scale proposition and makes
drastic measures in automation financially worthwhile.
Although the phone system continues to grow today,
the number of human beings employed by telcos has
been dropping steadily for years. Phone "operators" now
deal with nothing but unusual contingencies, all routine
operations having been shrugged off onto machines.
Consequently, telephone operators are considerably less
machine-like nowadays, and have been known to have
accents and actual character in their voices. When you
reach a human operator today, the operators are rather
more "human" than they were in Leticia's day -- but on the
other hand, human beings in the phone system are much
harder to reach in the first place.
Over the first half of the twentieth century,
"electromechanical" switching systems of growing
complexity were cautiously introduced into the phone
system. In certain backwaters, some of these hybrid
systems are still in use. But after 1965, the phone system
began to go completely electronic, and this is by far the
dominant mode today. Electromechanical systems have
"crossbars," and "brushes," and other large moving
mechanical parts, which, while faster and cheaper than
Leticia, are still slow, and tend to wear out fairly
quickly.
But fully electronic systems are inscribed on silicon
chips, and are lightning-fast, very cheap, and quite
durable. They are much cheaper to maintain than even
the best electromechanical systems, and they fit into half
the space. And with every year, the silicon chip grows
smaller, faster, and cheaper yet. Best of all, automated
electronics work around the clock and don't have salaries
or health insurance.
There are, however, quite serious drawbacks to the
use of computer-chips. When they do break down, it is a
daunting challenge to figure out what the heck has gone
wrong with them. A broken cordboard generally had a
problem in it big enough to see. A broken chip has
invisible, microscopic faults. And the faults in bad
software can be so subtle as to be practically theological.
If you want a mechanical system to do something
new, then you must travel to where it is, and pull pieces
out
of it, and wire in new pieces. This costs money. However,
if you want a chip to do something new, all you have to do
is change its software, which is easy, fast and dirt-cheap.
You don't even have to see the chip to change its program.
Even if you did see the chip, it wouldn't look like much. A
chip with program X doesn't look one whit different from a
chip with program Y.
With the proper codes and sequences, and access to
specialized phone-lines, you can change electronic
switching systems all over America from anywhere you
please.
And so can other people. If they know how, and if
they want to, they can sneak into a microchip via the
special phonelines and diddle with it, leaving no physical
trace at all. If they broke into the operator's station and
held Leticia at gunpoint, that would be very obvious. If
they broke into a telco building and went after an
electromechanical switch with a toolbelt, that would at
least leave many traces. But people can do all manner of
amazing things to computer switches just by typing on a
keyboard, and keyboards are everywhere today. The
extent of this vulnerability is deep, dark, broad, almost
mind-boggling, and yet this is a basic, primal fact of life
about any computer on a network.
Security experts over the past twenty years have
insisted, with growing urgency, that this basic
vulnerability
of computers represents an entirely new level of risk, of
unknown but obviously dire potential to society. And they
are right.
An electronic switching station does pretty much
everything Letitia did, except in nanoseconds and on a
much larger scale. Compared to Miss Luthor's ten
thousand jacks, even a primitive 1ESS switching computer,
60s vintage, has a 128,000 lines. And the current AT&T
system of choice is the monstrous fifth-generation 5ESS.
An Electronic Switching Station can scan every line
on its "board" in a tenth of a second, and it does this over
and over, tirelessly, around the clock. Instead of eyes, it
uses "ferrod scanners" to check the condition of local lines
and trunks. Instead of hands, it has "signal distributors,"
"central pulse distributors," "magnetic latching relays,"
and "reed switches," which complete and break the calls.
Instead of a brain, it has a "central processor." Instead
of
an instruction manual, it has a program. Instead of a
handwritten logbook for recording and billing calls, it has
magnetic tapes. And it never has to talk to anybody.
Everything a customer might say to it is done by punching
the direct-dial tone buttons on your subset.
Although an Electronic Switching Station can't talk, it
does need an interface, some way to relate to its, er,
employers. This interface is known as the "master control
center." (This interface might be better known simply as
"the interface," since it doesn't actually "control" phone
calls directly. However, a term like "Master Control
Center" is just the kind of rhetoric that telco maintenance
engineers -- and hackers -- find particularly satisfying.)
Using the master control center, a phone engineer
can test local and trunk lines for malfunctions. He (rarely
she) can check various alarm displays, measure traffic on
the lines, examine the records of telephone usage and the
charges for those calls, and change the programming.
And, of course, anybody else who gets into the master
control center by remote control can also do these things,
if he (rarely she) has managed to figure them out, or, more
likely, has somehow swiped the knowledge from people
who already know.
In 1989 and 1990, one particular RBOC, BellSouth,
which felt particularly troubled, spent a purported $1.2
million on computer security. Some think it spent as
much as two million, if you count all the associated costs.
Two million dollars is still very little compared to the
great
cost-saving utility of telephonic computer systems.
Unfortunately, computers are also stupid. Unlike
human beings, computers possess the truly profound
stupidity of the inanimate.
In the 1960s, in the first shocks of spreading
computerization, there was much easy talk about the
stupidity of computers -- how they could "only follow the
program" and were rigidly required to do "only what they
were told." There has been rather less talk about the
stupidity of computers since they began to achieve
grandmaster status in chess tournaments, and to manifest
many other impressive forms of apparent cleverness.
Nevertheless, computers *still* are profoundly
brittle and stupid; they are simply vastly more subtle in
their stupidity and brittleness. The computers of the
1990s are much more reliable in their components than
earlier computer systems, but they are also called upon to
do far more complex things, under far more challenging
conditions.
On a basic mathematical level, every single line of a
software program offers a chance for some possible
screwup. Software does not sit still when it works; it
"runs,"
it interacts with itself and with its own inputs and
outputs.
By analogy, it stretches like putty into millions of
possible
shapes and conditions, so many shapes that they can
never all be successfully tested, not even in the lifespan
of
the universe. Sometimes the putty snaps.
The stuff we call "software" is not like anything that
human society is used to thinking about. Software is
something like a machine, and something like
mathematics, and something like language, and
something like thought, and art, and information.... but
software is not in fact any of those other things. The
protean quality of software is one of the great sources of
its
fascination. It also makes software very powerful, very
subtle, very unpredictable, and very risky.
Some software is bad and buggy. Some is "robust,"
even "bulletproof." The best software is that which has
been tested by thousands of users under thousands of
different conditions, over years. It is then known as
"stable." This does *not* mean that the software is now
flawless, free of bugs. It generally means that there are
plenty of bugs in it, but the bugs are well-identified and
fairly well understood.
There is simply no way to assure that software is free
of flaws. Though software is mathematical in nature, it
cannot by "proven" like a mathematical theorem; software
is more like language, with inherent ambiguities, with
different definitions, different assumptions, different
levels of meaning that can conflict.
Human beings can manage, more or less, with
human language because we can catch the gist of it.
Computers, despite years of effort in "artificial
intelligence," have proven spectacularly bad in "catching
the gist" of anything at all. The tiniest bit of semantic
grit
may still bring the mightiest computer tumbling down.
One of the most hazardous things you can do to a
computer program is try to improve it -- to try to make it
safer. Software "patches" represent new, untried un-
"stable" software, which is by definition riskier.
The modern telephone system has come to depend,
utterly and irretrievably, upon software. And the System
Crash of January 15, 1990, was caused by an
*improvement* in software. Or rather, an *attempted*
improvement.
As it happened, the problem itself -- the problem per
se -- took this form. A piece of telco software had been
written in C language, a standard language of the telco
field. Within the C software was a long "do... while"
construct. The "do... while" construct contained a "switch"
statement. The "switch" statement contained an "if"
clause. The "if" clause contained a "break." The "break"
was *supposed* to "break" the "if clause." Instead, the
"break" broke the "switch" statement.
That was the problem, the actual reason why people
picking up phones on January 15, 1990, could not talk to
one another.
Or at least, that was the subtle, abstract,
cyberspatial
seed of the problem. This is how the problem manifested
itself from the realm of programming into the realm of
real life.
The System 7 software for AT&T's 4ESS switching
station, the "Generic 44E14 Central Office Switch
Software," had been extensively tested, and was
considered very stable. By the end of 1989, eighty of
AT&T's switching systems nationwide had been
programmed with the new software. Cautiously, thirty-
four stations were left to run the slower, less-capable
System 6, because AT&T suspected there might be
shakedown problems with the new and unprecedently
sophisticated System 7 network.
The stations with System 7 were programmed to
switch over to a backup net in case of any problems. In
mid-December 1989, however, a new high-velocity, high-
security software patch was distributed to each of the 4ESS
switches that would enable them to switch over even more
quickly, making the System 7 network that much more
secure.
Unfortunately, every one of these 4ESS switches was
now in possession of a small but deadly flaw.
In order to maintain the network, switches must
monitor the condition of other switches -- whether they are
up and running, whether they have temporarily shut down,
whether they are overloaded and in need of assistance,
and so forth. The new software helped control this
bookkeeping function by monitoring the status calls from
other switches.
It only takes four to six seconds for a troubled 4ESS
switch to rid itself of all its calls, drop everything
temporarily, and re-boot its software from scratch.
Starting over from scratch will generally rid the switch of
any software problems that may have developed in the
course of running the system. Bugs that arise will be
simply wiped out by this process. It is a clever idea.
This
process of automatically re-booting from scratch is known
as the "normal fault recovery routine." Since AT&T's
software is in fact exceptionally stable, systems rarely
customers. They talked back to subscribers, saucing off,
uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip. The
rascals took Saint Patrick's Day off without permission.
And worst of all they played clever tricks with the
switchboard plugs: disconnecting calls, crossing lines so
that customers found themselves talking to strangers, and
so forth.
This combination of power, technical mastery, and
effective anonymity seemed to act like catnip on teenage
boys.
This wild-kid-on-the-wires phenomenon was not
confined to the USA; from the beginning, the same was
true of the British phone system. An early British
commentator kindly remarked: "No doubt boys in their
teens found the work not a little irksome, and it is also
highly probable that under the early conditions of
employment the adventurous and inquisitive spirits of
which the average healthy boy of that age is possessed,
were not always conducive to the best attention being
given to the wants of the telephone subscribers."
So the boys were flung off the system -- or at least,
deprived of control of the switchboard. But the
"adventurous and inquisitive spirits" of the teenage boys
would be heard from in the world of telephony, again and
again.
The fourth stage in the technological life-cycle is
death: "the Dog," dead tech. The telephone has so far
avoided this fate. On the contrary, it is thriving, still
spreading, still evolving, and at increasing speed.
The telephone has achieved a rare and exalted state
for a technological artifact: it has become a *household
object.* The telephone, like the clock, like pen and
paper, like kitchen utensils and running water, has
become a technology that is visible only by its absence.
The telephone is technologically transparent. The global
telephone system is the largest and most complex
machine in the world, yet it is easy to use. More
remarkable yet, the telephone is almost entirely
physically safe for the user.
For the average citizen in the 1870s, the telephone
was weirder, more shocking, more "high-tech" and harder
to comprehend, than the most outrageous stunts of
advanced computing for us Americans in the 1990s. In
trying to understand what is happening to us today, with
our bulletin-board systems, direct overseas dialling, fiber-
optic transmissions, computer viruses, hacking stunts, and
a vivid tangle of new laws and new crimes, it is important
to realize that our society has been through a similar
challenge before -- and that, all in all, we did rather well
by
it.
Bell's stage telephone seemed bizarre at first. But
the sensations of weirdness vanished quickly, once people
began to hear the familiar voices of relatives and friends,
in their own homes on their own telephones. The
telephone changed from a fearsome high-tech totem to
an everyday pillar of human community.
This has also happened, and is still happening, to
computer networks. Computer networks such as
NSFnet, BITnet, USENET, JANET, are technically
advanced, intimidating, and much harder to use than
telephones. Even the popular, commercial computer
networks, such as GEnie, Prodigy, and CompuServe,
cause much head-scratching and have been described as
"user-hateful." Nevertheless they too are changing from
fancy high-tech items into everyday sources of human
community.
The words "community" and "communication" have
the same root. Wherever you put a communications
network, you put a community as well. And whenever you
*take away* that network -- confiscate it, outlaw it,
crash it,
raise its price beyond affordability -- then you hurt that
community.
Communities will fight to defend themselves. People
will fight harder and more bitterly to defend their
communities, than they will fight to defend their own
individual selves. And this is very true of the
"electronic
community" that arose around computer networks in the
1980s -- or rather, the *various* electronic communities,
in
telephony, law enforcement, computing, and the digital
underground that, by the year 1990, were raiding, rallying,
arresting, suing, jailing, fining and issuing angry
manifestos.
None of the events of 1990 were entirely new.
Nothing happened in 1990 that did not have some kind of
earlier and more understandable precedent. What gave
the Hacker Crackdown its new sense of gravity and
importance was the feeling -- the *community* feeling --
that the political stakes had been raised; that trouble in
cyberspace was no longer mere mischief or inconclusive
skirmishing, but a genuine fight over genuine issues, a
fight for community survival and the shape of the future.
These electronic communities, having flourished
throughout the 1980s, were becoming aware of
themselves, and increasingly, becoming aware of other,
rival communities. Worries were sprouting up right and
left, with complaints, rumors, uneasy speculations. But it
would take a catalyst, a shock, to make the new world
evident. Like Bell's great publicity break, the
Tarriffville
Rail Disaster of January 1878, it would take a cause
celebre.
That cause was the AT&T Crash of January 15, 1990.
After the Crash, the wounded and anxious telephone
community would come out fighting hard.
#
The community of telephone technicians, engineers,
operators and researchers is the oldest community in
cyberspace. These are the veterans, the most developed
group, the richest, the most respectable, in most ways the
most powerful. Whole generations have come and gone
since Alexander Graham Bell's day, but the community he
founded survives; people work for the phone system today
whose great-grandparents worked for the phone system.
Its specialty magazines, such as *Telephony,* *AT&T
Technical Journal,* *Telephone Engineer and
Management,* are decades old; they make computer
publications like *Macworld* and *PC Week* look like
amateur johnny-come-latelies.
And the phone companies take no back seat in high-
technology, either. Other companies' industrial
researchers may have won new markets; but the
researchers of Bell Labs have won *seven Nobel Prizes.*
One potent device that Bell Labs originated, the transistor,
has created entire *groups* of industries. Bell Labs are
world-famous for generating "a patent a day," and have
even made vital discoveries in astronomy, physics and
cosmology.
Throughout its seventy-year history, "Ma Bell" was
not so much a company as a way of life. Until the
cataclysmic divestiture of the 1980s, Ma Bell was perhaps
the ultimate maternalist mega-employer. The AT&T
corporate image was the "gentle giant," "the voice with a
smile," a vaguely socialist-realist world of cleanshaven
linemen in shiny helmets and blandly pretty phone-girls
in headsets and nylons. Bell System employees were
famous as rock-ribbed Kiwanis and Rotary members,
Little-League enthusiasts, school-board people.
During the long heyday of Ma Bell, the Bell
employee corps were nurtured top-to-botton on a
corporate ethos of public service. There was good money
in Bell, but Bell was not *about* money; Bell used public
relations, but never mere marketeering. People went into
the Bell System for a good life, and they had a good life.
But it was not mere money that led Bell people out in the
midst of storms and earthquakes to fight with toppled
phone-poles, to wade in flooded manholes, to pull the red-
eyed graveyard-shift over collapsing switching-systems.
The Bell ethic was the electrical equivalent of the
postman's: neither rain, nor snow, nor gloom of night
would stop these couriers.
It is easy to be cynical about this, as it is easy to
be
cynical about any political or social system; but cynicism
does not change the fact that thousands of people took
these ideals very seriously. And some still do.
The Bell ethos was about public service; and that was
gratifying; but it was also about private *power,* and that
was gratifying too. As a corporation, Bell was very
special.
Bell was privileged. Bell had snuggled up close to the
state. In fact, Bell was as close to government as you
could
get in America and still make a whole lot of legitimate
money.
But unlike other companies, Bell was above and
beyond the vulgar commercial fray. Through its regional
operating companies, Bell was omnipresent, local, and
intimate, all over America; but the central ivory towers at
its corporate heart were the tallest and the ivoriest
around.
There were other phone companies in America, to be
sure; the so-called independents. Rural cooperatives,
mostly; small fry, mostly tolerated, sometimes warred
upon. For many decades, "independent" American phone
companies lived in fear and loathing of the official Bell
monopoly (or the "Bell Octopus," as Ma Bell's nineteenth-
century enemies described her in many angry newspaper
manifestos). Some few of these independent
entrepreneurs, while legally in the wrong, fought so
bitterly against the Octopus that their illegal phone
networks were cast into the street by Bell agents and
publicly burned.
The pure technical sweetness of the Bell System gave
its operators, inventors and engineers a deeply satisfying
sense of power and mastery. They had devoted their lives
to improving this vast nation-spanning machine; over
years, whole human lives, they had watched it improve
and grow. It was like a great technological temple. They
were an elite, and they knew it -- even if others did not;
in
fact, they felt even more powerful *because* others did
not understand.
The deep attraction of this sensation of elite
technical power should never be underestimated.
"Technical power" is not for everybody; for many people it
simply has no charm at all. But for some people, it
becomes the core of their lives. For a few, it is
overwhelming, obsessive; it becomes something close to
an addiction. People -- especially clever teenage boys
whose lives are otherwise mostly powerless and put-upon -
- love this sensation of secret power, and are willing to
do
all sorts of amazing things to achieve it. The technical
*power* of electronics has motivated many strange acts
detailed in this book, which would otherwise be
inexplicable.
So Bell had power beyond mere capitalism. The Bell
service ethos worked, and was often propagandized, in a
rather saccharine fashion. Over the decades, people
slowly grew tired of this. And then, openly impatient with
it. By the early 1980s, Ma Bell was to find herself with
scarcely a real friend in the world. Vail's industrial
socialism had become hopelessly out-of-fashion
politically. Bell would be punished for that. And that
punishment would fall harshly upon the people of the
telephone community.
#
In 1983, Ma Bell was dismantled by federal court
action. The pieces of Bell are now separate corporate
entities. The core of the company became AT&T
Communications, and also AT&T Industries (formerly
Western Electric, Bell's manufacturing arm). AT&T Bell
Labs become Bell Communications Research, Bellcore.
Then there are the Regional Bell Operating Companies,
or RBOCs, pronounced "arbocks."
Bell was a titan and even these regional chunks are
gigantic enterprises: Fortune 50 companies with plenty of
wealth and power behind them. But the clean lines of
"One Policy, One System, Universal Service" have been
shattered, apparently forever.
The "One Policy" of the early Reagan Administration
was to shatter a system that smacked of noncompetitive
socialism. Since that time, there has been no real
telephone "policy" on the federal level. Despite the
breakup, the remnants of Bell have never been set free to
compete in the open marketplace.
The RBOCs are still very heavily regulated, but not
from the top. Instead, they struggle politically,
economically and legally, in what seems an endless
turmoil, in a patchwork of overlapping federal and state
jurisdictions. Increasingly, like other major American
corporations, the RBOCs are becoming multinational,
acquiring important commercial interests in Europe, Latin
America, and the Pacific Rim. But this, too, adds to their
legal and political predicament.
The people of what used to be Ma Bell are not happy
about their fate. They feel ill-used. They might have been
grudgingly willing to make a full transition to the free
market; to become just companies amid other companies.
But this never happened. Instead, AT&T and the RBOCS
("the Baby Bells") feel themselves wrenched from side to
side by state regulators, by Congress, by the FCC, and
especially by the federal court of Judge Harold Greene,
the magistrate who ordered the Bell breakup and who has
been the de facto czar of American telecommunications
ever since 1983.
Bell people feel that they exist in a kind of paralegal
limbo today. They don't understand what's demanded of
them. If it's "service," why aren't they treated like a
public
service? And if it's money, then why aren't they free to
compete for it? No one seems to know, really. Those who
claim to know keep changing their minds. Nobody in
authority seems willing to grasp the nettle for once and
all.
Telephone people from other countries are amazed
by the American telephone system today. Not that it
works so well; for nowadays even the French telephone
system works, more or less. They are amazed that the
American telephone system *still* works *at all,* under
these strange conditions.
Bell's "One System" of long-distance service is now
only about eighty percent of a system, with the remainder
held by Sprint, MCI, and the midget long-distance
companies. Ugly wars over dubious corporate practices
such as "slamming" (an underhanded method of snitching
clients from rivals) break out with some regularity in the
realm of long-distance service. The battle to break Bell's
long-distance monopoly was long and ugly, and since the
breakup the battlefield has not become much prettier.
AT&T's famous shame-and-blame advertisements, which
emphasized the shoddy work and purported ethical
shadiness of their competitors, were much remarked on
for their studied psychological cruelty.
There is much bad blood in this industry, and much
long-treasured resentment. AT&T's post-breakup
corporate logo, a striped sphere, is known in the industry
as the "Death Star" (a reference from the movie *Star
Wars,* in which the "Death Star" was the spherical high-
tech fortress of the harsh-breathing imperial ultra-baddie,
Darth Vader.) Even AT&T employees are less than
thrilled by the Death Star. A popular (though banned) T-
shirt among AT&T employees bears the old-fashioned
Bell logo of the Bell System, plus the newfangled striped
sphere, with the before-and-after comments: "This is your
brain -- This is your brain on drugs!" AT&T made a very
well-financed and determined effort to break into the
personal computer market; it was disastrous, and telco
computer experts are derisively known by their
competitors as "the pole-climbers." AT&T and the Baby
Bell arbocks still seem to have few friends.
Under conditions of sharp commercial competition, a
crash like that of January 15, 1990 was a major
embarrassment to AT&T. It was a direct blow against their
much-treasured reputation for reliability. Within days of
the crash AT&T's Chief Executive Officer, Bob Allen,
officially apologized, in terms of deeply pained humility:
"AT&T had a major service disruption last Monday.
We didn't live up to our own standards of quality, and we
didn't live up to yours. It's as simple as that. And that's
not
acceptable to us. Or to you.... We understand how much
people have come to depend upon AT&T service, so our
AT&T Bell Laboratories scientists and our network
engineers are doing everything possible to guard against a
recurrence.... We know there's no way to make up for the
inconvenience this problem may have caused you."
Mr Allen's "open letter to customers" was printed in
lavish ads all over the country: in the *Wall Street
Journal,* *USA Today,* *New York Times,*
*Los Angeles Times,* *Chicago Tribune,* *Philadelphia
Inquirer,* *San Francisco Chronicle Examiner,* *Boston
Globe,* *Dallas Morning News,* *Detroit Free Press,*
*Washington Post,* *Houston Chronicle,* *Cleveland
Plain Dealer,* *Atlanta Journal Constitution,*
*Minneapolis Star Tribune,* *St. Paul Pioneer Press
Dispatch,* *Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer,*
*Tacoma News Tribune,* *Miami Herald,* *Pittsburgh
Press,* *St. Louis Post Dispatch,* *Denver Post,* *Phoenix
Republic Gazette* and *Tampa Tribune.*
In another press release, AT&T went to some pains to
suggest that this "software glitch" *might* have happened
just as easily to MCI, although, in fact, it hadn't. (MCI's
switching software was quite different from AT&T's --
though not necessarily any safer.) AT&T also announced
their plans to offer a rebate of service on Valentine's Day
to make up for the loss during the Crash.
"Every technical resource available, including Bell
Labs scientists and engineers, has been devoted to
assuring it will not occur again," the public was told.
They
were further assured that "The chances of a recurrence
are small--a problem of this magnitude never occurred
before."
In the meantime, however, police and corporate
security maintained their own suspicions about "the
chances of recurrence" and the real reason why a
"problem of this magnitude" had appeared, seemingly out
of nowhere. Police and security knew for a fact that
hackers of unprecedented sophistication were illegally
entering, and reprogramming, certain digital switching
stations. Rumors of hidden "viruses" and secret "logic
bombs" in the switches ran rampant in the underground,
with much chortling over AT&T's predicament, and idle
speculation over what unsung hacker genius was
responsible for it. Some hackers, including police
informants, were trying hard to finger one another as the
true culprits of the Crash.
Telco people found little comfort in objectivity when
they contemplated these possibilities. It was just too
close
to the bone for them; it was embarrassing; it hurt so much,
it was hard even to talk about.
There has always been thieving and misbehavior in
the phone system. There has always been trouble with the
rival independents, and in the local loops. But to have
such trouble in the core of the system, the long-distance
switching stations, is a horrifying affair. To telco
people,
this is all the difference between finding roaches in your
kitchen and big horrid sewer-rats in your bedroom.
From the outside, to the average citizen, the telcos
still seem gigantic and impersonal. The American public
seems to regard them as something akin to Soviet
apparats. Even when the telcos do their best corporate-
citizen routine, subsidizing magnet high-schools and
sponsoring news-shows on public television, they seem to
win little except public suspicion.
But from the inside, all this looks very different.
There's harsh competition. A legal and political system
that seems baffled and bored, when not actively hostile to
telco interests. There's a loss of morale, a deep sensation
of having somehow lost the upper hand. Technological
change has caused a loss of data and revenue to other,
newer forms of transmission. There's theft, and new
forms of theft, of growing scale and boldness and
sophistication. With all these factors, it was no surprise
to
see the telcos, large and small, break out in a litany of
bitter complaint.
In late '88 and throughout 1989, telco representatives
grew shrill in their complaints to those few American law
enforcement officials who make it their business to try to
understand what telephone people are talking about.
Telco security officials had discovered the computer-
hacker underground, infiltrated it thoroughly, and
become deeply alarmed at its growing expertise. Here
they had found a target that was not only loathsome on its
face, but clearly ripe for counterattack.
Those bitter rivals: AT&T, MCI and Sprint -- and a
crowd of Baby Bells: PacBell, Bell South, Southwestern
Bell, NYNEX, USWest, as well as the Bell research
consortium Bellcore, and the independent long-distance
carrier Mid-American -- all were to have their role in the
great hacker dragnet of 1990. After years of being
battered and pushed around, the telcos had, at least in a
small way, seized the initiative again. After years of
turmoil, telcos and government officials were once again
to work smoothly in concert in defense of the System.
Optimism blossomed; enthusiasm grew on all sides; the
prospective taste of vengeance was sweet.
#
From the beginning -- even before the crackdown
had a name -- secrecy was a big problem. There were
many good reasons for secrecy in the hacker crackdown.
Hackers and code-thieves were wily prey, slinking back to
their bedrooms and basements and destroying vital
incriminating evidence at the first hint of trouble.
Furthermore, the crimes themselves were heavily
technical and difficult to describe, even to police -- much
less to the general public.
When such crimes *had* been described intelligibly
to the public, in the past, that very publicity had tended
to
*increase* the crimes enormously. Telco officials, while
painfully aware of the vulnerabilities of their systems,
were
anxious not to publicize those weaknesses. Experience
showed them that those weaknesses, once discovered,
would be pitilessly exploited by tens of thousands of
people -- not only by professional grifters and by
underground hackers and phone phreaks, but by many
otherwise more-or-less honest everyday folks, who
regarded stealing service from the faceless, soulless
"Phone Company" as a kind of harmless indoor sport.
When it came to protecting their interests, telcos had long
since given up on general public sympathy for "the Voice
with a Smile." Nowadays the telco's "Voice" was very likely
to be a computer's; and the American public showed
much less of the proper respect and gratitude due the fine
public service bequeathed them by Dr. Bell and Mr. Vail.
The more efficient, high-tech, computerized, and
impersonal the telcos became, it seemed, the more they
were met by sullen public resentment and amoral greed.
Telco officials wanted to punish the phone-phreak
underground, in as public and exemplary a manner as
possible. They wanted to make dire examples of the worst
offenders, to seize the ringleaders and intimidate the
small fry, to discourage and frighten the wacky hobbyists,
and send the professional grifters to jail. To do all this,
publicity was vital.
Yet operational secrecy was even more so. If word got
out that a nationwide crackdown was coming, the hackers
might simply vanish; destroy the evidence, hide their
computers, go to earth, and wait for the campaign to blow
over. Even the young hackers were crafty and suspicious,
and as for the professional grifters, they tended to split
for
the nearest state-line at the first sign of trouble. For
the
crackdown to work well, they would all have to be caught
red-handed, swept upon suddenly, out of the blue, from
every corner of the compass.
And there was another strong motive for secrecy. In
the worst-case scenario, a blown campaign might leave
the telcos open to a devastating hacker counter-attack. If
there were indeed hackers loose in America who had
caused the January 15 Crash -- if there were truly gifted
hackers, loose in the nation's long-distance switching
systems, and enraged or frightened by the crackdown --
then they might react unpredictably to an attempt to
collar them. Even if caught, they might have talented and
vengeful friends still running around loose. Conceivably,
it could turn ugly. Very ugly. In fact, it was hard to
imagine just how ugly things might turn, given that
possibility.
Counter-attack from hackers was a genuine concern
for the telcos. In point of fact, they would never suffer
any
such counter-attack. But in months to come, they would
be at some pains to publicize this notion and to utter grim
warnings about it.
Still, that risk seemed well worth running. Better to
run the risk of vengeful attacks, than to live at the mercy
of
potential crashers. Any cop would tell you that a
protection racket had no real future.
And publicity was such a useful thing. Corporate
security officers, including telco security, generally work
under conditions of great discretion. And corporate
security officials do not make money for their companies.
Their job is to *prevent the loss* of money, which is much
less glamorous than actually winning profits.
If you are a corporate security official, and you do
your job brilliantly, then nothing bad happens to your
company at all. Because of this, you appear completely
superfluous. This is one of the many unattractive aspects
of security work. It's rare that these folks have the
chance
to draw some healthy attention to their own efforts.
Publicity also served the interest of their friends in
law enforcement. Public officials, including law
enforcement officials, thrive by attracting favorable
public interest. A brilliant prosecution in a matter of
vital
public interest can make the career of a prosecuting
attorney. And for a police officer, good publicity opens
the
purses of the legislature; it may bring a citation, or a
promotion, or at least a rise in status and the respect of
one's peers.
But to have both publicity and secrecy is to have
one's cake and eat it too. In months to come, as we will
show, this impossible act was to cause great pain to the
agents of the crackdown. But early on, it seemed possible
-- maybe even likely -- that the crackdown could
successfully combine the best of both worlds. The
*arrest* of hackers would be heavily publicized. The
actual *deeds* of the hackers, which were technically hard
to explain and also a security risk, would be left decently
obscured. The *threat* hackers posed would be heavily
trumpeted; the likelihood of their actually committing
such fearsome crimes would be left to the public's
imagination. The spread of the computer underground,
and its growing technical sophistication, would be heavily
promoted; the actual hackers themselves, mostly
bespectacled middle-class white suburban teenagers,
would be denied any personal publicity.
It does not seem to have occurred to any telco official
that the hackers accused would demand a day in court;
that journalists would smile upon the hackers as "good
copy;" that wealthy high-tech entrepreneurs would offer
moral and financial support to crackdown victims; that
constitutional lawyers would show up with briefcases,
frowning mightily. This possibility does not seem to have
ever entered the game-plan.
And even if it had, it probably would not have slowed
the ferocious pursuit of a stolen phone-company
document, mellifluously known as "Control Office
Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special
Services and Major Account Centers."
In the chapters to follow, we will explore the worlds
of
police and the computer underground, and the large
shadowy area where they overlap. But first, we must
explore the battleground. Before we leave the world of the
telcos, we must understand what a switching system
actually is and how your telephone actually works.
#
To the average citizen, the idea of the telephone is
represented by, well, a *telephone:* a device that you
talk
into. To a telco professional, however, the telephone
itself
is known, in lordly fashion, as a "subset." The "subset"
in
your house is a mere adjunct, a distant nerve ending, of
the central switching stations, which are ranked in levels
of
heirarchy, up to the long-distance electronic switching
stations, which are some of the largest computers on
earth.
Let us imagine that it is, say, 1925, before the
introduction of computers, when the phone system was
simpler and somewhat easier to grasp. Let's further
imagine that you are Miss Leticia Luthor, a fictional
operator for Ma Bell in New York City of the 20s.
Basically, you, Miss Luthor, *are* the "switching
system." You are sitting in front of a large vertical
switchboard, known as a "cordboard," made of shiny
wooden panels, with ten thousand metal-rimmed holes
punched in them, known as jacks. The engineers would
have put more holes into your switchboard, but ten
thousand is as many as you can reach without actually
having to get up out of your chair.
Each of these ten thousand holes has its own little
electric lightbulb, known as a "lamp," and its own neatly
printed number code.
With the ease of long habit, you are scanning your
board for lit-up bulbs. This is what you do most of the
time, so you are used to it.
A lamp lights up. This means that the phone at the
end of that line has been taken off the hook. Whenever a
handset is taken off the hook, that closes a circuit inside
the phone which then signals the local office, i.e. you,
automatically. There might be somebody calling, or then
again the phone might be simply off the hook, but this
does not matter to you yet. The first thing you do, is
record
that number in your logbook, in your fine American
public-school handwriting. This comes first, naturally,
since it is done for billing purposes.
You now take the plug of your answering cord, which
goes directly to your headset, and plug it into the lit-up
hole. "Operator," you announce.
In operator's classes, before taking this job, you have
been issued a large pamphlet full of canned operator's
responses for all kinds of contingencies, which you had to
memorize. You have also been trained in a proper non-
regional, non-ethnic pronunciation and tone of voice. You
rarely have the occasion to make any spontaneous
remark to a customer, and in fact this is frowned upon
(except out on the rural lines where people have time on
their hands and get up to all kinds of mischief).
A tough-sounding user's voice at the end of the line
gives you a number. Immediately, you write that number
down in your logbook, next to the caller's number, which
you just wrote earlier. You then look and see if the
number this guy wants is in fact on your switchboard,
which it generally is, since it's generally a local call.
Long
distance costs so much that people use it sparingly.
Only then do you pick up a calling-cord from a shelf
at the base of the switchboard. This is a long elastic cord
mounted on a kind of reel so that it will zip back in when
you unplug it. There are a lot of cords down there, and
when a bunch of them are out at once they look like a nest
of snakes. Some of the girls think there are bugs living in
those cable-holes. They're called "cable mites" and are
supposed to bite your hands and give you rashes. You
don't believe this, yourself.
Gripping the head of your calling-cord, you slip the
tip of it deftly into the sleeve of the jack for the called
person. Not all the way in, though. You just touch it. If
you hear a clicking sound, that means the line is busy and
you can't put the call through. If the line is busy, you
have
to stick the calling-cord into a "busy-tone jack," which
will
give the guy a busy-tone. This way you don't have to talk
to
him yourself and absorb his natural human frustration.
But the line isn't busy. So you pop the cord all the
way in. Relay circuits in your board make the distant
phone ring, and if somebody picks it up off the hook, then
a phone conversation starts. You can hear this
conversation on your answering cord, until you unplug it.
In fact you could listen to the whole conversation if you
wanted, but this is sternly frowned upon by management,
and frankly, when you've overheard one, you've pretty
much heard 'em all.
You can tell how long the conversation lasts by the
glow of the calling-cord's lamp, down on the calling-cord's
shelf. When it's over, you unplug and the calling-cord
zips back into place.
Having done this stuff a few hundred thousand times,
you become quite good at it. In fact you're plugging, and
connecting, and disconnecting, ten, twenty, forty cords at a
time. It's a manual handicraft, really, quite satisfying in
a
way, rather like weaving on an upright loom.
Should a long-distance call come up, it would be
different, but not all that different. Instead of
connecting
the call through your own local switchboard, you have to
go up the hierarchy, onto the long-distance lines, known as
"trunklines." Depending on how far the call goes, it may
have to work its way through a whole series of operators,
which can take quite a while. The caller doesn't wait on
the line while this complex process is negotiated across
the country by the gaggle of operators. Instead, the
caller
hangs up, and you call him back yourself when the call has
finally worked its way through.
After four or five years of this work, you get married,
and you have to quit your job, this being the natural order
of womanhood in the American 1920s. The phone
company has to train somebody else -- maybe two people,
since the phone system has grown somewhat in the
meantime. And this costs money.
In fact, to use any kind of human being as a switching
system is a very expensive proposition. Eight thousand
Leticia Luthors would be bad enough, but a quarter of a
million of them is a military-scale proposition and makes
drastic measures in automation financially worthwhile.
Although the phone system continues to grow today,
the number of human beings employed by telcos has
been dropping steadily for years. Phone "operators" now
deal with nothing but unusual contingencies, all routine
operations having been shrugged off onto machines.
Consequently, telephone operators are considerably less
machine-like nowadays, and have been known to have
accents and actual character in their voices. When you
reach a human operator today, the operators are rather
more "human" than they were in Leticia's day -- but on the
other hand, human beings in the phone system are much
harder to reach in the first place.
Over the first half of the twentieth century,
"electromechanical" switching systems of growing
complexity were cautiously introduced into the phone
system. In certain backwaters, some of these hybrid
systems are still in use. But after 1965, the phone system
began to go completely electronic, and this is by far the
dominant mode today. Electromechanical systems have
"crossbars," and "brushes," and other large moving
mechanical parts, which, while faster and cheaper than
Leticia, are still slow, and tend to wear out fairly
quickly.
But fully electronic systems are inscribed on silicon
chips, and are lightning-fast, very cheap, and quite
durable. They are much cheaper to maintain than even
the best electromechanical systems, and they fit into half
the space. And with every year, the silicon chip grows
smaller, faster, and cheaper yet. Best of all, automated
electronics work around the clock and don't have salaries
or health insurance.
There are, however, quite serious drawbacks to the
use of computer-chips. When they do break down, it is a
daunting challenge to figure out what the heck has gone
wrong with them. A broken cordboard generally had a
problem in it big enough to see. A broken chip has
invisible, microscopic faults. And the faults in bad
software can be so subtle as to be practically theological.
If you want a mechanical system to do something
new, then you must travel to where it is, and pull pieces
out
of it, and wire in new pieces. This costs money. However,
if you want a chip to do something new, all you have to do
is change its software, which is easy, fast and dirt-cheap.
You don't even have to see the chip to change its program.
Even if you did see the chip, it wouldn't look like much. A
chip with program X doesn't look one whit different from a
chip with program Y.
With the proper codes and sequences, and access to
specialized phone-lines, you can change electronic
switching systems all over America from anywhere you
please.
And so can other people. If they know how, and if
they want to, they can sneak into a microchip via the
special phonelines and diddle with it, leaving no physical
trace at all. If they broke into the operator's station and
held Leticia at gunpoint, that would be very obvious. If
they broke into a telco building and went after an
electromechanical switch with a toolbelt, that would at
least leave many traces. But people can do all manner of
amazing things to computer switches just by typing on a
keyboard, and keyboards are everywhere today. The
extent of this vulnerability is deep, dark, broad, almost
mind-boggling, and yet this is a basic, primal fact of life
about any computer on a network.
Security experts over the past twenty years have
insisted, with growing urgency, that this basic
vulnerability
of computers represents an entirely new level of risk, of
unknown but obviously dire potential to society. And they
are right.
An electronic switching station does pretty much
everything Letitia did, except in nanoseconds and on a
much larger scale. Compared to Miss Luthor's ten
thousand jacks, even a primitive 1ESS switching computer,
60s vintage, has a 128,000 lines. And the current AT&T
system of choice is the monstrous fifth-generation 5ESS.
An Electronic Switching Station can scan every line
on its "board" in a tenth of a second, and it does this over
and over, tirelessly, around the clock. Instead of eyes, it
uses "ferrod scanners" to check the condition of local lines
and trunks. Instead of hands, it has "signal distributors,"
"central pulse distributors," "magnetic latching relays,"
and "reed switches," which complete and break the calls.
Instead of a brain, it has a "central processor." Instead
of
an instruction manual, it has a program. Instead of a
handwritten logbook for recording and billing calls, it has
magnetic tapes. And it never has to talk to anybody.
Everything a customer might say to it is done by punching
the direct-dial tone buttons on your subset.
Although an Electronic Switching Station can't talk, it
does need an interface, some way to relate to its, er,
employers. This interface is known as the "master control
center." (This interface might be better known simply as
"the interface," since it doesn't actually "control" phone
calls directly. However, a term like "Master Control
Center" is just the kind of rhetoric that telco maintenance
engineers -- and hackers -- find particularly satisfying.)
Using the master control center, a phone engineer
can test local and trunk lines for malfunctions. He (rarely
she) can check various alarm displays, measure traffic on
the lines, examine the records of telephone usage and the
charges for those calls, and change the programming.
And, of course, anybody else who gets into the master
control center by remote control can also do these things,
if he (rarely she) has managed to figure them out, or, more
likely, has somehow swiped the knowledge from people
who already know.
In 1989 and 1990, one particular RBOC, BellSouth,
which felt particularly troubled, spent a purported $1.2
million on computer security. Some think it spent as
much as two million, if you count all the associated costs.
Two million dollars is still very little compared to the
great
cost-saving utility of telephonic computer systems.
Unfortunately, computers are also stupid. Unlike
human beings, computers possess the truly profound
stupidity of the inanimate.
In the 1960s, in the first shocks of spreading
computerization, there was much easy talk about the
stupidity of computers -- how they could "only follow the
program" and were rigidly required to do "only what they
were told." There has been rather less talk about the
stupidity of computers since they began to achieve
grandmaster status in chess tournaments, and to manifest
many other impressive forms of apparent cleverness.
Nevertheless, computers *still* are profoundly
brittle and stupid; they are simply vastly more subtle in
their stupidity and brittleness. The computers of the
1990s are much more reliable in their components than
earlier computer systems, but they are also called upon to
do far more complex things, under far more challenging
conditions.
On a basic mathematical level, every single line of a
software program offers a chance for some possible
screwup. Software does not sit still when it works; it
"runs,"
it interacts with itself and with its own inputs and
outputs.
By analogy, it stretches like putty into millions of
possible
shapes and conditions, so many shapes that they can
never all be successfully tested, not even in the lifespan
of
the universe. Sometimes the putty snaps.
The stuff we call "software" is not like anything that
human society is used to thinking about. Software is
something like a machine, and something like
mathematics, and something like language, and
something like thought, and art, and information.... but
software is not in fact any of those other things. The
protean quality of software is one of the great sources of
its
fascination. It also makes software very powerful, very
subtle, very unpredictable, and very risky.
Some software is bad and buggy. Some is "robust,"
even "bulletproof." The best software is that which has
been tested by thousands of users under thousands of
different conditions, over years. It is then known as
"stable." This does *not* mean that the software is now
flawless, free of bugs. It generally means that there are
plenty of bugs in it, but the bugs are well-identified and
fairly well understood.
There is simply no way to assure that software is free
of flaws. Though software is mathematical in nature, it
cannot by "proven" like a mathematical theorem; software
is more like language, with inherent ambiguities, with
different definitions, different assumptions, different
levels of meaning that can conflict.
Human beings can manage, more or less, with
human language because we can catch the gist of it.
Computers, despite years of effort in "artificial
intelligence," have proven spectacularly bad in "catching
the gist" of anything at all. The tiniest bit of semantic
grit
may still bring the mightiest computer tumbling down.
One of the most hazardous things you can do to a
computer program is try to improve it -- to try to make it
safer. Software "patches" represent new, untried un-
"stable" software, which is by definition riskier.
The modern telephone system has come to depend,
utterly and irretrievably, upon software. And the System
Crash of January 15, 1990, was caused by an
*improvement* in software. Or rather, an *attempted*
improvement.
As it happened, the problem itself -- the problem per
se -- took this form. A piece of telco software had been
written in C language, a standard language of the telco
field. Within the C software was a long "do... while"
construct. The "do... while" construct contained a "switch"
statement. The "switch" statement contained an "if"
clause. The "if" clause contained a "break." The "break"
was *supposed* to "break" the "if clause." Instead, the
"break" broke the "switch" statement.
That was the problem, the actual reason why people
picking up phones on January 15, 1990, could not talk to
one another.
Or at least, that was the subtle, abstract,
cyberspatial
seed of the problem. This is how the problem manifested
itself from the realm of programming into the realm of
real life.
The System 7 software for AT&T's 4ESS switching
station, the "Generic 44E14 Central Office Switch
Software," had been extensively tested, and was
considered very stable. By the end of 1989, eighty of
AT&T's switching systems nationwide had been
programmed with the new software. Cautiously, thirty-
four stations were left to run the slower, less-capable
System 6, because AT&T suspected there might be
shakedown problems with the new and unprecedently
sophisticated System 7 network.
The stations with System 7 were programmed to
switch over to a backup net in case of any problems. In
mid-December 1989, however, a new high-velocity, high-
security software patch was distributed to each of the 4ESS
switches that would enable them to switch over even more
quickly, making the System 7 network that much more
secure.
Unfortunately, every one of these 4ESS switches was
now in possession of a small but deadly flaw.
In order to maintain the network, switches must
monitor the condition of other switches -- whether they are
up and running, whether they have temporarily shut down,
whether they are overloaded and in need of assistance,
and so forth. The new software helped control this
bookkeeping function by monitoring the status calls from
other switches.
It only takes four to six seconds for a troubled 4ESS
switch to rid itself of all its calls, drop everything
temporarily, and re-boot its software from scratch.
Starting over from scratch will generally rid the switch of
any software problems that may have developed in the
course of running the system. Bugs that arise will be
simply wiped out by this process. It is a clever idea.
This
process of automatically re-booting from scratch is known
as the "normal fault recovery routine." Since AT&T's
software is in fact exceptionally stable, systems rarely