network. "Killer's" debut in late 1985 made it the first
publicly available UNIX site in the state of Texas. Anyone
who wanted to play was welcome.
The machine immediately attracted an electronic
community. It joined the UUCP network, and offered
network links to over eighty other computer sites, all of
which became dependent on Killer for their links to the
greater world of cyberspace. And it wasn't just for the
big
guys; personal computer users also stored freeware
programs for the Amiga, the Apple, the IBM and the
Macintosh on Killer's vast 3,200 meg archives. At one
time, Killer had the largest library of public-domain
Macintosh software in Texas.
Eventually, Killer attracted about 1,500 users, all
busily communicating, uploading and downloading,
getting mail, gossipping, and linking to arcane and distant
networks.
Boykin received no pay for running Killer. He
considered it good publicity for the AT&T 3B2 system
(whose sales were somewhat less than stellar), but he also
simply enjoyed the vibrant community his skill had
created. He gave away the bulletin-board UNIX software
he had written, free of charge.
In the UNIX programming community, Charlie
Boykin had the reputation of a warm, open-hearted, level-
headed kind of guy. In 1989, a group of Texan UNIX
professionals voted Boykin "System Administrator of the
Year." He was considered a fellow you could trust for
good advice.
In September 1988, without warning, the E911
Document came plunging into Boykin's life, forwarded by
Richard Andrews. Boykin immediately recognized that
the Document was hot property. He was not a voice-
communications man, and knew little about the ins and
outs of the Baby Bells, but he certainly knew what the 911
System was, and he was angry to see confidential data
about it in the hands of a nogoodnik. This was clearly a
matter for telco security. So, on September 21, 1988,
Boykin made yet *another* copy of the E911 Document
and passed this one along to a professional acquaintance
of his, one Jerome Dalton, from AT&T Corporate
Information Security. Jerry Dalton was the very fellow
who would later raid Terminus's house.
From AT&T's security division, the E911 Document
went to Bellcore.
Bellcore (or BELL COmmunications REsearch) had
once been the central laboratory of the Bell System. Bell
Labs employees had invented the UNIX operating
system. Now Bellcore was a quasi-independent, jointly
owned company that acted as the research arm for all
seven of the Baby Bell RBOCs. Bellcore was in a good
position to co-ordinate security technology and
consultation for the RBOCs, and the gentleman in charge
of this effort was Henry M. Kluepfel, a veteran of the Bell
System who had worked there for twenty-four years.
On October 13, 1988, Dalton passed the E911
Document to Henry Kluepfel. Kluepfel, a veteran expert
witness in telecommunications fraud and computer-fraud
cases, had certainly seen worse trouble than this. He
recognized the document for what it was: a trophy from a
hacker break-in.
However, whatever harm had been done in the
intrusion was presumably old news. At this point there
seemed little to be done. Kluepfel made a careful note of
the circumstances and shelved the problem for the time
being.
Whole months passed.
February 1989 arrived. The Atlanta Three were living
it up in Bell South's switches, and had not yet met their
comeuppance. The Legion was thriving. So was *Phrack*
magazine. A good six months had passed since Prophet's
AIMSX break-in. Prophet, as hackers will, grew weary of
sitting on his laurels. "Knight Lightning" and "Taran
King," the editors of *Phrack,* were always begging
Prophet for material they could publish. Prophet decided
that the heat must be off by this time, and that he could
safely brag, boast, and strut.
So he sent a copy of the E911 Document -- yet
another one -- from Rich Andrews' Jolnet machine to
Knight Lightning's BITnet account at the University of
Missouri.
Let's review the fate of the document so far.
0. The original E911 Document. This in the AIMSX
system on a mainframe computer in Atlanta, available to
hundreds of people, but all of them, presumably,
BellSouth employees. An unknown number of them may
have their own copies of this document, but they are all
professionals and all trusted by the phone company.
1. Prophet's illicit copy, at home on his own computer
in Decatur, Georgia.
2. Prophet's back-up copy, stored on Rich Andrew's
Jolnet machine in the basement of Rich Andrews' house
near Joliet Illinois.
3. Charles Boykin's copy on "Killer" in Dallas, Texas,
sent by Rich Andrews from Joliet.
4. Jerry Dalton's copy at AT&T Corporate
Information Security in New Jersey, sent from Charles
Boykin in Dallas.
5. Henry Kluepfel's copy at Bellcore security
headquarters in New Jersey, sent by Dalton.
6. Knight Lightning's copy, sent by Prophet from
Rich Andrews' machine, and now in Columbia, Missouri.
We can see that the "security" situation of this
proprietary document, once dug out of AIMSX, swiftly
became bizarre. Without any money changing hands,
without any particular special effort, this data had been
reproduced at least six times and had spread itself all over
the continent. By far the worst, however, was yet to come.
In February 1989, Prophet and Knight Lightning
bargained electronically over the fate of this trophy.
Prophet wanted to boast, but, at the same time, scarcely
wanted to be caught.
For his part, Knight Lightning was eager to publish as
much of the document as he could manage. Knight
Lightning was a fledgling political-science major with a
particular interest in freedom-of-information issues. He
would gladly publish most anything that would reflect
glory on the prowess of the underground and embarrass
the telcos. However, Knight Lightning himself had
contacts in telco security, and sometimes consulted them
on material he'd received that might be too dicey for
publication.
Prophet and Knight Lightning decided to edit the
E911 Document so as to delete most of its identifying
traits. First of all, its large "NOT FOR USE OR
DISCLOSURE" warning had to go. Then there were other
matters. For instance, it listed the office telephone
numbers of several BellSouth 911 specialists in Florida. If
these phone numbers were published in *Phrack,* the
BellSouth employees involved would very likely be
hassled by phone phreaks, which would anger BellSouth
no end, and pose a definite operational hazard for both
Prophet and *Phrack.*
So Knight Lightning cut the Document almost in half,
removing the phone numbers and some of the touchier
and more specific information. He passed it back
electronically to Prophet; Prophet was still nervous, so
Knight Lightning cut a bit more. They finally agreed that
it was ready to go, and that it would be published in
*Phrack* under the pseudonym, "The Eavesdropper."
And this was done on February 25, 1989.
The twenty-fourth issue of *Phrack* featured a chatty
interview with co-ed phone-phreak "Chanda Leir," three
articles on BITNET and its links to other computer
networks, an article on 800 and 900 numbers by "Unknown
User," "VaxCat's" article on telco basics (slyly entitled
"Lifting Ma Bell's Veil of Secrecy,)" and the usual "Phrack
World News."
The News section, with painful irony, featured an
extended account of the sentencing of "Shadowhawk," an
eighteen-year-old Chicago hacker who had just been put
in federal prison by William J. Cook himself.
And then there were the two articles by "The
Eavesdropper." The first was the edited E911 Document,
now titled "Control Office Administration Of Enhanced
911 Services for Special Services and Major Account
Centers." Eavesdropper's second article was a glossary of
terms explaining the blizzard of telco acronyms and
buzzwords in the E911 Document.
The hapless document was now distributed, in the
usual *Phrack* routine, to a good one hundred and fifty
sites. Not a hundred and fifty *people,* mind you -- a
hundred and fifty *sites,* some of these sites linked to
UNIX nodes or bulletin board systems, which themselves
had readerships of tens, dozens, even hundreds of people.
This was February 1989. Nothing happened
immediately. Summer came, and the Atlanta crew were
raided by the Secret Service. Fry Guy was apprehended.
Still nothing whatever happened to *Phrack.* Six more
issues of *Phrack* came out, 30 in all, more or less on a
monthly schedule. Knight Lightning and co-editor Taran
King went untouched.
*Phrack* tended to duck and cover whenever the
heat came down. During the summer busts of 1987 --
(hacker busts tended to cluster in summer, perhaps
because hackers were easier to find at home than in
college) -- *Phrack* had ceased publication for several
months, and laid low. Several LoD hangers-on had been
arrested, but nothing had happened to the *Phrack* crew,
the premiere gossips of the underground. In 1988,
*Phrack* had been taken over by a new editor, "Crimson
Death," a raucous youngster with a taste for anarchy files.
1989, however, looked like a bounty year for the
underground. Knight Lightning and his co-editor Taran
King took up the reins again, and *Phrack* flourished
throughout 1989. Atlanta LoD went down hard in the
summer of 1989, but *Phrack* rolled merrily on. Prophet's
E911 Document seemed unlikely to cause *Phrack* any
trouble. By January 1990, it had been available in
*Phrack* for almost a year. Kluepfel and Dalton, officers
of Bellcore and AT&T security, had possessed the
document for sixteen months -- in fact, they'd had it even
before Knight Lightning himself, and had done nothing in
particular to stop its distribution. They hadn't even told
Rich Andrews or Charles Boykin to erase the copies from
their UNIX nodes, Jolnet and Killer.
But then came the monster Martin Luther King Day
Crash of January 15, 1990.
A flat three days later, on January 18, four agents
showed up at Knight Lightning's fraternity house. One
was Timothy Foley, the second Barbara Golden, both of
them Secret Service agents from the Chicago office. Also
along was a University of Missouri security officer, and
Reed Newlin, a security man from Southwestern Bell, the
RBOC having jurisdiction over Missouri.
Foley accused Knight Lightning of causing the
nationwide crash of the phone system.
Knight Lightning was aghast at this allegation. On
the face of it, the suspicion was not entirely implausible -
-
though Knight Lightning knew that he himself hadn't
done it. Plenty of hot-dog hackers had bragged that they
could crash the phone system, however. "Shadowhawk,"
for instance, the Chicago hacker whom William Cook had
recently put in jail, had several times boasted on boards
that he could "shut down AT&T's public switched
network."
And now this event, or something that looked just
like it, had actually taken place. The Crash had lit a fire
under the Chicago Task Force. And the former fence-
sitters at Bellcore and AT&T were now ready to roll. The
consensus among telco security -- already horrified by the
skill of the BellSouth intruders -- was that the digital
underground was out of hand. LoD and *Phrack* must go.
And in publishing Prophet's E911 Document,
*Phrack* had provided law enforcement with what
appeared to be a powerful legal weapon.
Foley confronted Knight Lightning about the E911
Document.
Knight Lightning was cowed. He immediately began
"cooperating fully" in the usual tradition of the digital
underground.
He gave Foley a complete run of *Phrack,*printed
out in a set of three-ring binders. He handed over his
electronic mailing list of *Phrack* subscribers. Knight
Lightning was grilled for four hours by Foley and his
cohorts. Knight Lightning admitted that Prophet had
passed him the E911 Document, and he admitted that he
had known it was stolen booty from a hacker raid on a
telephone company. Knight Lightning signed a statement
to this effect, and agreed, in writing, to cooperate with
investigators.
Next day -- January 19, 1990, a Friday -- the Secret
Service returned with a search warrant, and thoroughly
searched Knight Lightning's upstairs room in the
fraternity house. They took all his floppy disks, though,
interestingly, they left Knight Lightning in possession of
both his computer and his modem. (The computer had no
hard disk, and in Foley's judgement was not a store of
evidence.) But this was a very minor bright spot among
Knight Lightning's rapidly multiplying troubles. By this
time, Knight Lightning was in plenty of hot water, not only
with federal police, prosecutors, telco investigators, and
university security, but with the elders of his own campus
fraternity, who were outraged to think that they had been
unwittingly harboring a federal computer-criminal.
On Monday, Knight Lightning was summoned to
Chicago, where he was further grilled by Foley and USSS
veteran agent Barbara Golden, this time with an attorney
present. And on Tuesday, he was formally indicted by a
federal grand jury.
The trial of Knight Lightning, which occurred on July
24-27, 1990, was the crucial show-trial of the Hacker
Crackdown. We will examine the trial at some length in
Part Four of this book.
In the meantime, we must continue our dogged
pursuit of the E911 Document.
It must have been clear by January 1990 that the E911
Document, in the form *Phrack* had published it back in
February 1989, had gone off at the speed of light in at
least
a hundred and fifty different directions. To attempt to
put
this electronic genie back in the bottle was flatly
impossible.
And yet, the E911 Document was *still* stolen
property, formally and legally speaking. Any electronic
transference of this document, by anyone unauthorized to
have it, could be interpreted as an act of wire fraud.
Interstate transfer of stolen property, including electronic
property, was a federal crime.
The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force
had been assured that the E911 Document was worth a
hefty sum of money. In fact, they had a precise estimate
of its worth from BellSouth security personnel: $79,449.
A
sum of this scale seemed to warrant vigorous prosecution.
Even if the damage could not be undone, at least this large
sum offered a good legal pretext for stern punishment of
the thieves. It seemed likely to impress judges and
juries.
And it could be used in court to mop up the Legion of
Doom.
The Atlanta crowd was already in the bag, by the time
the Chicago Task Force had gotten around to *Phrack.*
But the Legion was a hydra-headed thing. In late 89, a
brand-new Legion of Doom board, "Phoenix Project," had
gone up in Austin, Texas. Phoenix Project was sysoped by
no less a man than the Mentor himself, ably assisted by
University of Texas student and hardened Doomster "Erik
Bloodaxe."
As we have seen from his *Phrack* manifesto, the
Mentor was a hacker zealot who regarded computer
intrusion as something close to a moral duty. Phoenix
Project was an ambitious effort, intended to revive the
digital underground to what Mentor considered the full
flower of the early 80s. The Phoenix board would also
boldly bring elite hackers face-to-face with the telco
"opposition." On "Phoenix," America's cleverest hackers
would supposedly shame the telco squareheads out of
their stick-in-the-mud attitudes, and perhaps convince
them that the Legion of Doom elite were really an all-right
crew. The premiere of "Phoenix Project" was heavily
trumpeted by *Phrack,* and "Phoenix Project" carried a
complete run of *Phrack* issues, including the E911
Document as *Phrack* had published it.
Phoenix Project was only one of many -- possibly
hundreds -- of nodes and boards all over America that
were in guilty possession of the E911 Document. But
Phoenix was an outright, unashamed Legion of Doom
board. Under Mentor's guidance, it was flaunting itself in
the face of telco security personnel. Worse yet, it was
actively trying to *win them over* as sympathizers for the
digital underground elite. "Phoenix" had no cards or
codes on it. Its hacker elite considered Phoenix at least
technically legal. But Phoenix was a corrupting influence,
where hacker anarchy was eating away like digital acid at
the underbelly of corporate propriety.
The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force
now prepared to descend upon Austin, Texas.
Oddly, not one but *two* trails of the Task Force's
investigation led toward Austin. The city of Austin, like
Atlanta, had made itself a bulwark of the Sunbelt's
Information Age, with a strong university research
presence, and a number of cutting-edge electronics
companies, including Motorola, Dell, CompuAdd, IBM,
Sematech and MCC.
Where computing machinery went, hackers
generally followed. Austin boasted not only "Phoenix
Project," currently LoD's most flagrant underground
board, but a number of UNIX nodes.
One of these nodes was "Elephant," run by a UNIX
consultant named Robert Izenberg. Izenberg, in search of
a relaxed Southern lifestyle and a lowered cost-of-living,
had recently migrated to Austin from New Jersey. In New
Jersey, Izenberg had worked for an independent
contracting company, programming UNIX code for AT&T
itself. "Terminus" had been a frequent user on Izenberg's
privately owned Elephant node.
Having interviewed Terminus and examined the
records on Netsys, the Chicago Task Force were now
convinced that they had discovered an underground gang
of UNIX software pirates, who were demonstrably guilty of
interstate trafficking in illicitly copied AT&T source
code.
Izenberg was swept into the dragnet around Terminus, the
self-proclaimed ultimate UNIX hacker.
Izenberg, in Austin, had settled down into a UNIX job
with a Texan branch of IBM. Izenberg was no longer
working as a contractor for AT&T, but he had friends in
New Jersey, and he still logged on to AT&T UNIX
computers back in New Jersey, more or less whenever it
pleased him. Izenberg's activities appeared highly
suspicious to the Task Force. Izenberg might well be
breaking into AT&T computers, swiping AT&T software,
and passing it to Terminus and other possible
confederates, through the UNIX node network. And this
data was worth, not merely $79,499, but hundreds of
thousands of dollars!
On February 21, 1990, Robert Izenberg arrived home
from work at IBM to find that all the computers had
mysteriously vanished from his Austin apartment.
Naturally he assumed that he had been robbed. His
"Elephant" node, his other machines, his notebooks, his
disks, his tapes, all gone! However, nothing much else
seemed disturbed -- the place had not been ransacked.
The puzzle becaming much stranger some five
minutes later. Austin U. S. Secret Service Agent Al Soliz,
accompanied by University of Texas campus-security
officer Larry Coutorie and the ubiquitous Tim Foley, made
their appearance at Izenberg's door. They were in plain
clothes: slacks, polo shirts. They came in, and Tim Foley
accused Izenberg of belonging to the Legion of Doom.
Izenberg told them that he had never heard of the
"Legion of Doom." And what about a certain stolen E911
Document, that posed a direct threat to the police
emergency lines? Izenberg claimed that he'd never
heard of that, either.
His interrogators found this difficult to believe.
Didn't he know Terminus?
Who?
They gave him Terminus's real name. Oh yes, said
Izenberg. He knew *that* guy all right -- he was leading
discussions on the Internet about AT&T computers,
especially the AT&T 3B2.
AT&T had thrust this machine into the marketplace,
but, like many of AT&T's ambitious attempts to enter the
computing arena, the 3B2 project had something less than
a glittering success. Izenberg himself had been a
contractor for the division of AT&T that supported the 3B2.
The entire division had been shut down.
Nowadays, the cheapest and quickest way to get
help with this fractious piece of machinery was to join one
of Terminus's discussion groups on the Internet, where
friendly and knowledgeable hackers would help you for
free. Naturally the remarks within this group were less
than flattering about the Death Star.... was *that* the
problem?
Foley told Izenberg that Terminus had been
acquiring hot software through his, Izenberg's, machine.
Izenberg shrugged this off. A good eight megabytes
of data flowed through his UUCP site every day. UUCP
nodes spewed data like fire hoses. Elephant had been
directly linked to Netsys -- not surprising, since Terminus
was a 3B2 expert and Izenberg had been a 3B2 contractor.
Izenberg was also linked to "attctc" and the University of
Texas. Terminus was a well-known UNIX expert, and
might have been up to all manner of hijinks on Elephant.
Nothing Izenberg could do about that. That was
physically impossible. Needle in a haystack.
In a four-hour grilling, Foley urged Izenberg to come
clean and admit that he was in conspiracy with Terminus,
and a member of the Legion of Doom.
Izenberg denied this. He was no weirdo teenage
hacker -- he was thirty-two years old, and didn't even have
a "handle." Izenberg was a former TV technician and
electronics specialist who had drifted into UNIX
consulting as a full-grown adult. Izenberg had never met
Terminus, physically. He'd once bought a cheap high-
speed modem from him, though.
Foley told him that this modem (a Telenet T2500
which ran at 19.2 kilobaud, and which had just gone out
Izenberg's door in Secret Service custody) was likely hot
property. Izenberg was taken aback to hear this; but then
again, most of Izenberg's equipment, like that of most
freelance professionals in the industry, was discounted,
passed hand-to-hand through various kinds of barter and
gray-market. There was no proof that the modem was
stolen, and even if it was, Izenberg hardly saw how that
gave them the right to take every electronic item in his
house.
Still, if the United States Secret Service figured
they
needed his computer for national security reasons -- or
whatever -- then Izenberg would not kick. He figured he
would somehow make the sacrifice of his twenty thousand
dollars' worth of professional equipment, in the spirit of
full cooperation and good citizenship.
Robert Izenberg was not arrested. Izenberg was not
charged with any crime. His UUCP node -- full of some
140 megabytes of the files, mail, and data of himself and
his dozen or so entirely innocent users -- went out the
door
as "evidence." Along with the disks and tapes, Izenberg
had lost about 800 megabytes of data.
Six months would pass before Izenberg decided to
phone the Secret Service and ask how the case was going.
That was the first time that Robert Izenberg would ever
hear the name of William Cook. As of January 1992, a full
two years after the seizure, Izenberg, still not charged
with
any crime, would be struggling through the morass of the
courts, in hope of recovering his thousands of dollars'
worth of seized equipment.
In the meantime, the Izenberg case received
absolutely no press coverage. The Secret Service had
walked into an Austin home, removed a UNIX bulletin-
board system, and met with no operational difficulties
whatsoever.
Except that word of a crackdown had percolated
through the Legion of Doom. "The Mentor" voluntarily
shut down "The Phoenix Project." It seemed a pity,
especially as telco security employees had, in fact, shown
up on Phoenix, just as he had hoped -- along with the usual
motley crowd of LoD heavies, hangers-on, phreaks,
hackers and wannabes. There was "Sandy" Sandquist
from US SPRINT security, and some guy named Henry
Kluepfel, from Bellcore itself! Kluepfel had been trading
friendly banter with hackers on Phoenix since January
30th (two weeks after the Martin Luther King Day Crash).
The presence of such a stellar telco official seemed quite
the coup for Phoenix Project.
Still, Mentor could judge the climate. Atlanta in
ruins, *Phrack* in deep trouble, something weird going on
with UNIX nodes -- discretion was advisable. Phoenix
Project went off-line.
Kluepfel, of course, had been monitoring this LoD
bulletin board for his own purposes -- and those of the
Chicago unit. As far back as June 1987, Kluepfel had
logged on to a Texas underground board called "Phreak
Klass 2600." There he'd discovered an Chicago youngster
named "Shadowhawk," strutting and boasting about rifling
AT&T computer files, and bragging of his ambitions to
riddle AT&T's Bellcore computers with trojan horse
programs. Kluepfel had passed the news to Cook in
Chicago, Shadowhawk's computers had gone out the door
in Secret Service custody, and Shadowhawk himself had
gone to jail.
Now it was Phoenix Project's turn. Phoenix Project
postured about "legality" and "merely intellectual
interest," but it reeked of the underground. It had
*Phrack* on it. It had the E911 Document. It had a lot of
dicey talk about breaking into systems, including some
bold and reckless stuff about a supposed "decryption
service" that Mentor and friends were planning to run, to
help crack encrypted passwords off of hacked systems.
Mentor was an adult. There was a bulletin board at
his place of work, as well. Kleupfel logged onto this
board,
too, and discovered it to be called "Illuminati." It was
run
by some company called Steve Jackson Games.
On March 1, 1990, the Austin crackdown went into
high gear.
On the morning of March 1 -- a Thursday -- 21-year-
old University of Texas student "Erik Bloodaxe," co-sysop
of Phoenix Project and an avowed member of the Legion
of Doom, was wakened by a police revolver levelled at his
head.
Bloodaxe watched, jittery, as Secret Service agents
appropriated his 300 baud terminal and, rifling his files,
discovered his treasured source-code for Robert Morris's
notorious Internet Worm. But Bloodaxe, a wily operator,
had suspected that something of the like might be
coming. All his best equipment had been hidden away
elsewhere. The raiders took everything electronic,
however, including his telephone. They were stymied by
his hefty arcade-style Pac-Man game, and left it in place,
as it was simply too heavy to move.
Bloodaxe was not arrested. He was not charged with
any crime. A good two years later, the police still had
what
they had taken from him, however.
The Mentor was less wary. The dawn raid rousted
him and his wife from bed in their underwear, and six
Secret Service agents, accompanied by an Austin
policeman and Henry Kluepfel himself, made a rich haul.
Off went the works, into the agents' white Chevrolet
minivan: an IBM PC-AT clone with 4 meg of RAM and a
120-meg hard disk; a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet II printer;
a completely legitimate and highly expensive SCO-Xenix
286 operating system; Pagemaker disks and
documentation; and the Microsoft Word word-processing
program. Mentor's wife had her incomplete academic
thesis stored on the hard-disk; that went, too, and so did
the couple's telephone. As of two years later, all this
property remained in police custody.
Mentor remained under guard in his apartment as
agents prepared to raid Steve Jackson Games. The fact
that this was a business headquarters and not a private
residence did not deter the agents. It was still very
early;
no one was at work yet. The agents prepared to break
down the door, but Mentor, eavesdropping on the Secret
Service walkie-talkie traffic, begged them not to do it, and
offered his key to the building.
The exact details of the next events are unclear. The
agents would not let anyone else into the building. Their
search warrant, when produced, was unsigned.
Apparently they breakfasted from the local
"Whataburger," as the litter from hamburgers was later
found inside. They also extensively sampled a bag of
jellybeans kept by an SJG employee. Someone tore a
"Dukakis for President" sticker from the wall.
SJG employees, diligently showing up for the day's
work, were met at the door and briefly questioned by U.S.
Secret Service agents. The employees watched in
astonishment as agents wielding crowbars and
screwdrivers emerged with captive machines. They
attacked outdoor storage units with boltcutters. The
agents wore blue nylon windbreakers with "SECRET
SERVICE" stencilled across the back, with running-shoes
and jeans.
Jackson's company lost three computers, several
hard-disks, hundred of floppy disks, two monitors, three
modems, a laser printer, various powercords, cables, and
adapters (and, oddly, a small bag of screws, bolts and
nuts). The seizure of Illuminati BBS deprived SJG of all
the programs, text files, and private e-mail on the board.
The loss of two other SJG computers was a severe blow as
well, since it caused the loss of electronically stored
contracts, financial projections, address directories,
mailing lists, personnel files, business correspondence,
and, not least, the drafts of forthcoming games and
gaming books.
No one at Steve Jackson Games was arrested. No
one was accused of any crime. No charges were filed.
Everything appropriated was officially kept as "evidence"
of crimes never specified.
After the *Phrack* show-trial, the Steve Jackson
Games scandal was the most bizarre and aggravating
incident of the Hacker Crackdown of 1990. This raid by
the Chicago Task Force on a science-fiction gaming
publisher was to rouse a swarming host of civil liberties
issues, and gave rise to an enduring controversy that was
still re-complicating itself, and growing in the scope of
its
implications, a full two years later.
The pursuit of the E911 Document stopped with the
Steve Jackson Games raid. As we have seen, there were
hundreds, perhaps thousands of computer users in
America with the E911 Document in their possession.
Theoretically, Chicago had a perfect legal right to raid any
of these people, and could have legally seized the
machines of anybody who subscribed to *Phrack.*
However, there was no copy of the E911 Document on
Jackson's Illuminati board. And there the Chicago raiders
stopped dead; they have not raided anyone since.
It might be assumed that Rich Andrews and Charlie
Boykin, who had brought the E911 Document to the
attention of telco security, might be spared any official
suspicion. But as we have seen, the willingness to
"cooperate fully" offers little, if any, assurance against
federal anti-hacker prosecution.
Richard Andrews found himself in deep trouble,
thanks to the E911 Document. Andrews lived in Illinois,
the native stomping grounds of the Chicago Task Force.
On February 3 and 6, both his home and his place of work
were raided by USSS. His machines went out the door,
too, and he was grilled at length (though not arrested).
Andrews proved to be in purportedly guilty possession of:
UNIX SVR 3.2; UNIX SVR 3.1; UUCP; PMON; WWB;
IWB; DWB; NROFF; KORN SHELL '88; C++; and
QUEST, among other items. Andrews had received this
proprietary code -- which AT&T officially valued at well
over $250,000 -- through the UNIX network, much of it
supplied to him as a personal favor by Terminus. Perhaps
worse yet, Andrews admitted to returning the favor, by
passing Terminus a copy of AT&T proprietary STARLAN
source code.
Even Charles Boykin, himself an AT&T employee,
entered some very hot water. By 1990, he'd almost
forgotten about the E911 problem he'd reported in
September 88; in fact, since that date, he'd passed two
more security alerts to Jerry Dalton, concerning matters
that Boykin considered far worse than the E911
Document.
But by 1990, year of the crackdown, AT&T Corporate
Information Security was fed up with "Killer." This
machine offered no direct income to AT&T, and was
providing aid and comfort to a cloud of suspicious yokels
from outside the company, some of them actively
malicious toward AT&T, its property, and its corporate
interests. Whatever goodwill and publicity had been won
among Killer's 1,500 devoted users was considered no
longer worth the security risk. On February 20, 1990,
Jerry
Dalton arrived in Dallas and simply unplugged the phone
jacks, to the puzzled alarm of Killer's many Texan users.
Killer went permanently off-line, with the loss of vast
archives of programs and huge quantities of electronic
mail; it was never restored to service. AT&T showed no
particular regard for the "property" of these 1,500 people.
Whatever "property" the users had been storing on
AT&T's computer simply vanished completely.
Boykin, who had himself reported the E911 problem,
now found himself under a cloud of suspicion. In a weird
private-security replay of the Secret Service seizures,
Boykin's own home was visited by AT&T Security and his
own machines were carried out the door.
However, there were marked special features in the
Boykin case. Boykin's disks and his personal computers
were swiftly examined by his corporate employers and
returned politely in just two days -- (unlike Secret Service
seizures, which commonly take months or years). Boykin
was not charged with any crime or wrongdoing, and he
kept his job with AT&T (though he did retire from AT&T in
September 1991, at the age of 52).
It's interesting to note that the US Secret Service
somehow failed to seize Boykin's "Killer" node and carry
AT&T's own computer out the door. Nor did they raid
Boykin's home. They seemed perfectly willing to take the
word of AT&T Security that AT&T's employee, and AT&T's
"Killer" node, were free of hacker contraband and on the
up-and-up.
It's digital water-under-the-bridge at this point, as
Killer's 3,200 megabytes of Texan electronic community
were erased in 1990, and "Killer" itself was shipped out of
the state.
But the experiences of Andrews and Boykin, and the
users of their systems, remained side issues. They did not
begin to assume the social, political, and legal importance
that gathered, slowly but inexorably, around the issue of
the raid on Steve Jackson Games.
#
We must now turn our attention to Steve Jackson
Games itself, and explain what SJG was, what it really did,
and how it had managed to attract this particularly odd
and virulent kind of trouble. The reader may recall that
this is not the first but the second time that the company
has appeared in this narrative; a Steve Jackson game
called GURPS was a favorite pastime of Atlanta hacker
Urvile, and Urvile's science-fictional gaming notes had
been mixed up promiscuously with notes about his actual
computer intrusions.
First, Steve Jackson Games, Inc., was *not* a
publisher of "computer games." SJG published
"simulation games," parlor games that were played on
paper, with pencils, and dice, and printed guidebooks full
of rules and statistics tables. There were no computers
involved in the games themselves. When you bought a
Steve Jackson Game, you did not receive any software
disks. What you got was a plastic bag with some
cardboard game tokens, maybe a few maps or a deck of
cards. Most of their products were books.
However, computers *were* deeply involved in the
Steve Jackson Games business. Like almost all modern
publishers, Steve Jackson and his fifteen employees used
computers to write text, to keep accounts, and to run the
business generally. They also used a computer to run
their official bulletin board system for Steve Jackson
Games, a board called Illuminati. On Illuminati,
simulation gamers who happened to own computers and
modems could associate, trade mail, debate the theory
and practice of gaming, and keep up with the company's
news and its product announcements.
Illuminati was a modestly popular board, run on a
small computer with limited storage, only one phone-line,
and no ties to large-scale computer networks. It did,
however, have hundreds of users, many of them dedicated
gamers willing to call from out-of-state.
Illuminati was *not* an "underground" board. It did
not feature hints on computer intrusion, or "anarchy files,"
or illicitly posted credit card numbers, or long-distance
access codes. Some of Illuminati's users, however, were
members of the Legion of Doom. And so was one of
Steve Jackson's senior employees -- the Mentor. The
Mentor wrote for *Phrack,* and also ran an underground
board, Phoenix Project -- but the Mentor was not a
computer professional. The Mentor was the managing
editor of Steve Jackson Games and a professional game
designer by trade. These LoD members did not use
Illuminati to help their *hacking* activities. They used it
to help their *game-playing* activities -- and they were
even more dedicated to simulation gaming than they were
to hacking.
"Illuminati" got its name from a card-game that Steve
Jackson himself, the company's founder and sole owner,
had invented. This multi-player card-game was one of Mr
Jackson's best-known, most successful, most technically
innovative products. "Illuminati" was a game of
paranoiac conspiracy in which various antisocial cults
warred covertly to dominate the world. "Illuminati" was
hilarious, and great fun to play, involving flying saucers,
the CIA, the KGB, the phone companies, the Ku Klux
Klan, the South American Nazis, the cocaine cartels, the
Boy Scouts, and dozens of other splinter groups from the
twisted depths of Mr. Jackson's professionally fervid
imagination. For the uninitiated, any public discussion of
the "Illuminati" card-game sounded, by turns, utterly
menacing or completely insane.
And then there was SJG's "Car Wars," in which
souped-up armored hot-rods with rocket-launchers and
heavy machine-guns did battle on the American highways
of the future. The lively Car Wars discussion on the
Illuminati board featured many meticulous, painstaking
discussions of the effects of grenades, land-mines,
flamethrowers and napalm. It sounded like hacker
anarchy files run amuck.
Mr Jackson and his co-workers earned their daily
bread by supplying people with make-believe adventures
and weird ideas. The more far-out, the better.
Simulation gaming is an unusual pastime, but
gamers have not generally had to beg the permission of
the Secret Service to exist. Wargames and role-playing
adventures are an old and honored pastime, much
favored by professional military strategists. Once little-
known, these games are now played by hundreds of
thousands of enthusiasts throughout North America,
Europe and Japan. Gaming-books, once restricted to
hobby outlets, now commonly appear in chain-stores like
B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks, and sell vigorously.
Steve Jackson Games, Inc., of Austin, Texas, was a
games company of the middle rank. In 1989, SJG grossed
about a million dollars. Jackson himself had a good
reputation in his industry as a talented and innovative
designer of rather unconventional games, but his
company was something less than a titan of the field --
certainly not like the multimillion-dollar TSR Inc., or
Britain's gigantic "Games Workshop."
SJG's Austin headquarters was a modest two-story
brick office-suite, cluttered with phones, photocopiers, fax
machines and computers. It bustled with semi-organized
activity and was littered with glossy promotional brochures
and dog-eared science-fiction novels. Attached to the
offices was a large tin-roofed warehouse piled twenty feet
high with cardboard boxes of games and books. Despite
the weird imaginings that went on within it, the SJG
headquarters was quite a quotidian, everyday sort of place.
It looked like what it was: a publishers' digs.
Both "Car Wars" and "Illuminati" were well-known,
popular games. But the mainstay of the Jackson
organization was their Generic Universal Role-Playing
System, "G.U.R.P.S." The GURPS system was considered
solid and well-designed, an asset for players. But perhaps
the most popular feature of the GURPS system was that it
allowed gaming-masters to design scenarios that closely
resembled well-known books, movies, and other works of
fantasy. Jackson had licensed and adapted works from
many science fiction and fantasy authors. There was
*GURPS Conan,* *GURPS Riverworld,* *GURPS
Horseclans,* *GURPS Witch World,* names eminently
familiar to science-fiction readers. And there was *GURPS
Special Ops,* from the world of espionage fantasy and
unconventional warfare.
And then there was *GURPS Cyberpunk.*
"Cyberpunk" was a term given to certain science
fiction writers who had entered the genre in the 1980s.
"Cyberpunk," as the label implies, had two general
distinguishing features. First, its writers had a
compelling
interest in information technology, an interest closely akin
to science fiction's earlier fascination with space travel.
And second, these writers were "punks," with all the
distinguishing features that that implies: Bohemian
artiness, youth run wild, an air of deliberate rebellion,
funny clothes and hair, odd politics, a fondness for
abrasive rock and roll; in a word, trouble.
The "cyberpunk" SF writers were a small group of
mostly college-educated white middle-class litterateurs,
scattered through the US and Canada. Only one, Rudy
Rucker, a professor of computer science in Silicon Valley,
could rank with even the humblest computer hacker. But,
except for Professor Rucker, the "cyberpunk" authors were
not programmers or hardware experts; they considered
themselves artists (as, indeed, did Professor Rucker).
However, these writers all owned computers, and took an
intense and public interest in the social ramifications of
the information industry.
The cyberpunks had a strong following among the
global generation that had grown up in a world of
computers, multinational networks, and cable television.
Their outlook was considered somewhat morbid, cynical,
and dark, but then again, so was the outlook of their
generational peers. As that generation matured and
increased in strength and influence, so did the
cyberpunks. As science-fiction writers went, they were
doing fairly well for themselves. By the late 1980s, their
work had attracted attention from gaming companies,
including Steve Jackson Games, which was planning a
cyberpunk simulation for the flourishing GURPS gaming-
system.
The time seemed ripe for such a product, which had
already been proven in the marketplace. The first games-
company out of the gate, with a product boldly called
"Cyberpunk" in defiance of possible infringement-of-
copyright suits, had been an upstart group called R.
Talsorian. Talsorian's Cyberpunk was a fairly decent
game, but the mechanics of the simulation system left a
lot to be desired. Commercially, however, the game did
very well.
The next cyberpunk game had been the even more
successful *Shadowrun* by FASA Corporation. The
mechanics of this game were fine, but the scenario was
rendered moronic by sappy fantasy elements like elves,
trolls, wizards, and dragons -- all highly ideologically-
incorrect, according to the hard-edged, high-tech
standards of cyberpunk science fiction.
Other game designers were champing at the bit.
Prominent among them was the Mentor, a gentleman
who, like most of his friends in the Legion of Doom, was
quite the cyberpunk devotee. Mentor reasoned that the
time had come for a *real* cyberpunk gaming-book -- one
that the princes of computer-mischief in the Legion of
Doom could play without laughing themselves sick. This
book, *GURPS Cyberpunk,* would reek of culturally on-
line authenticity.
Mentor was particularly well-qualified for this task.
Naturally, he knew far more about computer-intrusion
and digital skullduggery than any previously published
cyberpunk author. Not only that, but he was good at his
work. A vivid imagination, combined with an instinctive
feeling for the working of systems and, especially, the
loopholes within them, are excellent qualities for a
professional game designer.
By March 1st, *GURPS Cyberpunk* was almost
complete, ready to print and ship. Steve Jackson expected
vigorous sales for this item, which, he hoped, would keep
the company financially afloat for several months.
*GURPS Cyberpunk,* like the other GURPS "modules,"
was not a "game" like a Monopoly set, but a *book:* a
bound paperback book the size of a glossy magazine, with
a slick color cover, and pages full of text, illustrations,
tables and footnotes. It was advertised as a game, and
was used as an aid to game-playing, but it was a book, with
an ISBN number, published in Texas, copyrighted, and
sold in bookstores.
And now, that book, stored on a computer, had gone
out the door in the custody of the Secret Service.
The day after the raid, Steve Jackson visited the local
Secret Service headquarters with a lawyer in tow. There he
confronted Tim Foley (still in Austin at that time) and
demanded his book back. But there was trouble.
*GURPS Cyberpunk,* alleged a Secret Service agent to
astonished businessman Steve Jackson, was "a manual for
computer crime."
"It's science fiction," Jackson said.
"No, this is real." This statement was repeated
several times, by several agents. Jackson's ominously
accurate game had passed from pure, obscure, small-
scale fantasy into the impure, highly publicized, large-
scale fantasy of the Hacker Crackdown.
No mention was made of the real reason for the
search. According to their search warrant, the raiders had
expected to find the E911 Document stored on Jackson's
bulletin board system. But that warrant was sealed; a
publicly available UNIX site in the state of Texas. Anyone
who wanted to play was welcome.
The machine immediately attracted an electronic
community. It joined the UUCP network, and offered
network links to over eighty other computer sites, all of
which became dependent on Killer for their links to the
greater world of cyberspace. And it wasn't just for the
big
guys; personal computer users also stored freeware
programs for the Amiga, the Apple, the IBM and the
Macintosh on Killer's vast 3,200 meg archives. At one
time, Killer had the largest library of public-domain
Macintosh software in Texas.
Eventually, Killer attracted about 1,500 users, all
busily communicating, uploading and downloading,
getting mail, gossipping, and linking to arcane and distant
networks.
Boykin received no pay for running Killer. He
considered it good publicity for the AT&T 3B2 system
(whose sales were somewhat less than stellar), but he also
simply enjoyed the vibrant community his skill had
created. He gave away the bulletin-board UNIX software
he had written, free of charge.
In the UNIX programming community, Charlie
Boykin had the reputation of a warm, open-hearted, level-
headed kind of guy. In 1989, a group of Texan UNIX
professionals voted Boykin "System Administrator of the
Year." He was considered a fellow you could trust for
good advice.
In September 1988, without warning, the E911
Document came plunging into Boykin's life, forwarded by
Richard Andrews. Boykin immediately recognized that
the Document was hot property. He was not a voice-
communications man, and knew little about the ins and
outs of the Baby Bells, but he certainly knew what the 911
System was, and he was angry to see confidential data
about it in the hands of a nogoodnik. This was clearly a
matter for telco security. So, on September 21, 1988,
Boykin made yet *another* copy of the E911 Document
and passed this one along to a professional acquaintance
of his, one Jerome Dalton, from AT&T Corporate
Information Security. Jerry Dalton was the very fellow
who would later raid Terminus's house.
From AT&T's security division, the E911 Document
went to Bellcore.
Bellcore (or BELL COmmunications REsearch) had
once been the central laboratory of the Bell System. Bell
Labs employees had invented the UNIX operating
system. Now Bellcore was a quasi-independent, jointly
owned company that acted as the research arm for all
seven of the Baby Bell RBOCs. Bellcore was in a good
position to co-ordinate security technology and
consultation for the RBOCs, and the gentleman in charge
of this effort was Henry M. Kluepfel, a veteran of the Bell
System who had worked there for twenty-four years.
On October 13, 1988, Dalton passed the E911
Document to Henry Kluepfel. Kluepfel, a veteran expert
witness in telecommunications fraud and computer-fraud
cases, had certainly seen worse trouble than this. He
recognized the document for what it was: a trophy from a
hacker break-in.
However, whatever harm had been done in the
intrusion was presumably old news. At this point there
seemed little to be done. Kluepfel made a careful note of
the circumstances and shelved the problem for the time
being.
Whole months passed.
February 1989 arrived. The Atlanta Three were living
it up in Bell South's switches, and had not yet met their
comeuppance. The Legion was thriving. So was *Phrack*
magazine. A good six months had passed since Prophet's
AIMSX break-in. Prophet, as hackers will, grew weary of
sitting on his laurels. "Knight Lightning" and "Taran
King," the editors of *Phrack,* were always begging
Prophet for material they could publish. Prophet decided
that the heat must be off by this time, and that he could
safely brag, boast, and strut.
So he sent a copy of the E911 Document -- yet
another one -- from Rich Andrews' Jolnet machine to
Knight Lightning's BITnet account at the University of
Missouri.
Let's review the fate of the document so far.
0. The original E911 Document. This in the AIMSX
system on a mainframe computer in Atlanta, available to
hundreds of people, but all of them, presumably,
BellSouth employees. An unknown number of them may
have their own copies of this document, but they are all
professionals and all trusted by the phone company.
1. Prophet's illicit copy, at home on his own computer
in Decatur, Georgia.
2. Prophet's back-up copy, stored on Rich Andrew's
Jolnet machine in the basement of Rich Andrews' house
near Joliet Illinois.
3. Charles Boykin's copy on "Killer" in Dallas, Texas,
sent by Rich Andrews from Joliet.
4. Jerry Dalton's copy at AT&T Corporate
Information Security in New Jersey, sent from Charles
Boykin in Dallas.
5. Henry Kluepfel's copy at Bellcore security
headquarters in New Jersey, sent by Dalton.
6. Knight Lightning's copy, sent by Prophet from
Rich Andrews' machine, and now in Columbia, Missouri.
We can see that the "security" situation of this
proprietary document, once dug out of AIMSX, swiftly
became bizarre. Without any money changing hands,
without any particular special effort, this data had been
reproduced at least six times and had spread itself all over
the continent. By far the worst, however, was yet to come.
In February 1989, Prophet and Knight Lightning
bargained electronically over the fate of this trophy.
Prophet wanted to boast, but, at the same time, scarcely
wanted to be caught.
For his part, Knight Lightning was eager to publish as
much of the document as he could manage. Knight
Lightning was a fledgling political-science major with a
particular interest in freedom-of-information issues. He
would gladly publish most anything that would reflect
glory on the prowess of the underground and embarrass
the telcos. However, Knight Lightning himself had
contacts in telco security, and sometimes consulted them
on material he'd received that might be too dicey for
publication.
Prophet and Knight Lightning decided to edit the
E911 Document so as to delete most of its identifying
traits. First of all, its large "NOT FOR USE OR
DISCLOSURE" warning had to go. Then there were other
matters. For instance, it listed the office telephone
numbers of several BellSouth 911 specialists in Florida. If
these phone numbers were published in *Phrack,* the
BellSouth employees involved would very likely be
hassled by phone phreaks, which would anger BellSouth
no end, and pose a definite operational hazard for both
Prophet and *Phrack.*
So Knight Lightning cut the Document almost in half,
removing the phone numbers and some of the touchier
and more specific information. He passed it back
electronically to Prophet; Prophet was still nervous, so
Knight Lightning cut a bit more. They finally agreed that
it was ready to go, and that it would be published in
*Phrack* under the pseudonym, "The Eavesdropper."
And this was done on February 25, 1989.
The twenty-fourth issue of *Phrack* featured a chatty
interview with co-ed phone-phreak "Chanda Leir," three
articles on BITNET and its links to other computer
networks, an article on 800 and 900 numbers by "Unknown
User," "VaxCat's" article on telco basics (slyly entitled
"Lifting Ma Bell's Veil of Secrecy,)" and the usual "Phrack
World News."
The News section, with painful irony, featured an
extended account of the sentencing of "Shadowhawk," an
eighteen-year-old Chicago hacker who had just been put
in federal prison by William J. Cook himself.
And then there were the two articles by "The
Eavesdropper." The first was the edited E911 Document,
now titled "Control Office Administration Of Enhanced
911 Services for Special Services and Major Account
Centers." Eavesdropper's second article was a glossary of
terms explaining the blizzard of telco acronyms and
buzzwords in the E911 Document.
The hapless document was now distributed, in the
usual *Phrack* routine, to a good one hundred and fifty
sites. Not a hundred and fifty *people,* mind you -- a
hundred and fifty *sites,* some of these sites linked to
UNIX nodes or bulletin board systems, which themselves
had readerships of tens, dozens, even hundreds of people.
This was February 1989. Nothing happened
immediately. Summer came, and the Atlanta crew were
raided by the Secret Service. Fry Guy was apprehended.
Still nothing whatever happened to *Phrack.* Six more
issues of *Phrack* came out, 30 in all, more or less on a
monthly schedule. Knight Lightning and co-editor Taran
King went untouched.
*Phrack* tended to duck and cover whenever the
heat came down. During the summer busts of 1987 --
(hacker busts tended to cluster in summer, perhaps
because hackers were easier to find at home than in
college) -- *Phrack* had ceased publication for several
months, and laid low. Several LoD hangers-on had been
arrested, but nothing had happened to the *Phrack* crew,
the premiere gossips of the underground. In 1988,
*Phrack* had been taken over by a new editor, "Crimson
Death," a raucous youngster with a taste for anarchy files.
1989, however, looked like a bounty year for the
underground. Knight Lightning and his co-editor Taran
King took up the reins again, and *Phrack* flourished
throughout 1989. Atlanta LoD went down hard in the
summer of 1989, but *Phrack* rolled merrily on. Prophet's
E911 Document seemed unlikely to cause *Phrack* any
trouble. By January 1990, it had been available in
*Phrack* for almost a year. Kluepfel and Dalton, officers
of Bellcore and AT&T security, had possessed the
document for sixteen months -- in fact, they'd had it even
before Knight Lightning himself, and had done nothing in
particular to stop its distribution. They hadn't even told
Rich Andrews or Charles Boykin to erase the copies from
their UNIX nodes, Jolnet and Killer.
But then came the monster Martin Luther King Day
Crash of January 15, 1990.
A flat three days later, on January 18, four agents
showed up at Knight Lightning's fraternity house. One
was Timothy Foley, the second Barbara Golden, both of
them Secret Service agents from the Chicago office. Also
along was a University of Missouri security officer, and
Reed Newlin, a security man from Southwestern Bell, the
RBOC having jurisdiction over Missouri.
Foley accused Knight Lightning of causing the
nationwide crash of the phone system.
Knight Lightning was aghast at this allegation. On
the face of it, the suspicion was not entirely implausible -
-
though Knight Lightning knew that he himself hadn't
done it. Plenty of hot-dog hackers had bragged that they
could crash the phone system, however. "Shadowhawk,"
for instance, the Chicago hacker whom William Cook had
recently put in jail, had several times boasted on boards
that he could "shut down AT&T's public switched
network."
And now this event, or something that looked just
like it, had actually taken place. The Crash had lit a fire
under the Chicago Task Force. And the former fence-
sitters at Bellcore and AT&T were now ready to roll. The
consensus among telco security -- already horrified by the
skill of the BellSouth intruders -- was that the digital
underground was out of hand. LoD and *Phrack* must go.
And in publishing Prophet's E911 Document,
*Phrack* had provided law enforcement with what
appeared to be a powerful legal weapon.
Foley confronted Knight Lightning about the E911
Document.
Knight Lightning was cowed. He immediately began
"cooperating fully" in the usual tradition of the digital
underground.
He gave Foley a complete run of *Phrack,*printed
out in a set of three-ring binders. He handed over his
electronic mailing list of *Phrack* subscribers. Knight
Lightning was grilled for four hours by Foley and his
cohorts. Knight Lightning admitted that Prophet had
passed him the E911 Document, and he admitted that he
had known it was stolen booty from a hacker raid on a
telephone company. Knight Lightning signed a statement
to this effect, and agreed, in writing, to cooperate with
investigators.
Next day -- January 19, 1990, a Friday -- the Secret
Service returned with a search warrant, and thoroughly
searched Knight Lightning's upstairs room in the
fraternity house. They took all his floppy disks, though,
interestingly, they left Knight Lightning in possession of
both his computer and his modem. (The computer had no
hard disk, and in Foley's judgement was not a store of
evidence.) But this was a very minor bright spot among
Knight Lightning's rapidly multiplying troubles. By this
time, Knight Lightning was in plenty of hot water, not only
with federal police, prosecutors, telco investigators, and
university security, but with the elders of his own campus
fraternity, who were outraged to think that they had been
unwittingly harboring a federal computer-criminal.
On Monday, Knight Lightning was summoned to
Chicago, where he was further grilled by Foley and USSS
veteran agent Barbara Golden, this time with an attorney
present. And on Tuesday, he was formally indicted by a
federal grand jury.
The trial of Knight Lightning, which occurred on July
24-27, 1990, was the crucial show-trial of the Hacker
Crackdown. We will examine the trial at some length in
Part Four of this book.
In the meantime, we must continue our dogged
pursuit of the E911 Document.
It must have been clear by January 1990 that the E911
Document, in the form *Phrack* had published it back in
February 1989, had gone off at the speed of light in at
least
a hundred and fifty different directions. To attempt to
put
this electronic genie back in the bottle was flatly
impossible.
And yet, the E911 Document was *still* stolen
property, formally and legally speaking. Any electronic
transference of this document, by anyone unauthorized to
have it, could be interpreted as an act of wire fraud.
Interstate transfer of stolen property, including electronic
property, was a federal crime.
The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force
had been assured that the E911 Document was worth a
hefty sum of money. In fact, they had a precise estimate
of its worth from BellSouth security personnel: $79,449.
A
sum of this scale seemed to warrant vigorous prosecution.
Even if the damage could not be undone, at least this large
sum offered a good legal pretext for stern punishment of
the thieves. It seemed likely to impress judges and
juries.
And it could be used in court to mop up the Legion of
Doom.
The Atlanta crowd was already in the bag, by the time
the Chicago Task Force had gotten around to *Phrack.*
But the Legion was a hydra-headed thing. In late 89, a
brand-new Legion of Doom board, "Phoenix Project," had
gone up in Austin, Texas. Phoenix Project was sysoped by
no less a man than the Mentor himself, ably assisted by
University of Texas student and hardened Doomster "Erik
Bloodaxe."
As we have seen from his *Phrack* manifesto, the
Mentor was a hacker zealot who regarded computer
intrusion as something close to a moral duty. Phoenix
Project was an ambitious effort, intended to revive the
digital underground to what Mentor considered the full
flower of the early 80s. The Phoenix board would also
boldly bring elite hackers face-to-face with the telco
"opposition." On "Phoenix," America's cleverest hackers
would supposedly shame the telco squareheads out of
their stick-in-the-mud attitudes, and perhaps convince
them that the Legion of Doom elite were really an all-right
crew. The premiere of "Phoenix Project" was heavily
trumpeted by *Phrack,* and "Phoenix Project" carried a
complete run of *Phrack* issues, including the E911
Document as *Phrack* had published it.
Phoenix Project was only one of many -- possibly
hundreds -- of nodes and boards all over America that
were in guilty possession of the E911 Document. But
Phoenix was an outright, unashamed Legion of Doom
board. Under Mentor's guidance, it was flaunting itself in
the face of telco security personnel. Worse yet, it was
actively trying to *win them over* as sympathizers for the
digital underground elite. "Phoenix" had no cards or
codes on it. Its hacker elite considered Phoenix at least
technically legal. But Phoenix was a corrupting influence,
where hacker anarchy was eating away like digital acid at
the underbelly of corporate propriety.
The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force
now prepared to descend upon Austin, Texas.
Oddly, not one but *two* trails of the Task Force's
investigation led toward Austin. The city of Austin, like
Atlanta, had made itself a bulwark of the Sunbelt's
Information Age, with a strong university research
presence, and a number of cutting-edge electronics
companies, including Motorola, Dell, CompuAdd, IBM,
Sematech and MCC.
Where computing machinery went, hackers
generally followed. Austin boasted not only "Phoenix
Project," currently LoD's most flagrant underground
board, but a number of UNIX nodes.
One of these nodes was "Elephant," run by a UNIX
consultant named Robert Izenberg. Izenberg, in search of
a relaxed Southern lifestyle and a lowered cost-of-living,
had recently migrated to Austin from New Jersey. In New
Jersey, Izenberg had worked for an independent
contracting company, programming UNIX code for AT&T
itself. "Terminus" had been a frequent user on Izenberg's
privately owned Elephant node.
Having interviewed Terminus and examined the
records on Netsys, the Chicago Task Force were now
convinced that they had discovered an underground gang
of UNIX software pirates, who were demonstrably guilty of
interstate trafficking in illicitly copied AT&T source
code.
Izenberg was swept into the dragnet around Terminus, the
self-proclaimed ultimate UNIX hacker.
Izenberg, in Austin, had settled down into a UNIX job
with a Texan branch of IBM. Izenberg was no longer
working as a contractor for AT&T, but he had friends in
New Jersey, and he still logged on to AT&T UNIX
computers back in New Jersey, more or less whenever it
pleased him. Izenberg's activities appeared highly
suspicious to the Task Force. Izenberg might well be
breaking into AT&T computers, swiping AT&T software,
and passing it to Terminus and other possible
confederates, through the UNIX node network. And this
data was worth, not merely $79,499, but hundreds of
thousands of dollars!
On February 21, 1990, Robert Izenberg arrived home
from work at IBM to find that all the computers had
mysteriously vanished from his Austin apartment.
Naturally he assumed that he had been robbed. His
"Elephant" node, his other machines, his notebooks, his
disks, his tapes, all gone! However, nothing much else
seemed disturbed -- the place had not been ransacked.
The puzzle becaming much stranger some five
minutes later. Austin U. S. Secret Service Agent Al Soliz,
accompanied by University of Texas campus-security
officer Larry Coutorie and the ubiquitous Tim Foley, made
their appearance at Izenberg's door. They were in plain
clothes: slacks, polo shirts. They came in, and Tim Foley
accused Izenberg of belonging to the Legion of Doom.
Izenberg told them that he had never heard of the
"Legion of Doom." And what about a certain stolen E911
Document, that posed a direct threat to the police
emergency lines? Izenberg claimed that he'd never
heard of that, either.
His interrogators found this difficult to believe.
Didn't he know Terminus?
Who?
They gave him Terminus's real name. Oh yes, said
Izenberg. He knew *that* guy all right -- he was leading
discussions on the Internet about AT&T computers,
especially the AT&T 3B2.
AT&T had thrust this machine into the marketplace,
but, like many of AT&T's ambitious attempts to enter the
computing arena, the 3B2 project had something less than
a glittering success. Izenberg himself had been a
contractor for the division of AT&T that supported the 3B2.
The entire division had been shut down.
Nowadays, the cheapest and quickest way to get
help with this fractious piece of machinery was to join one
of Terminus's discussion groups on the Internet, where
friendly and knowledgeable hackers would help you for
free. Naturally the remarks within this group were less
than flattering about the Death Star.... was *that* the
problem?
Foley told Izenberg that Terminus had been
acquiring hot software through his, Izenberg's, machine.
Izenberg shrugged this off. A good eight megabytes
of data flowed through his UUCP site every day. UUCP
nodes spewed data like fire hoses. Elephant had been
directly linked to Netsys -- not surprising, since Terminus
was a 3B2 expert and Izenberg had been a 3B2 contractor.
Izenberg was also linked to "attctc" and the University of
Texas. Terminus was a well-known UNIX expert, and
might have been up to all manner of hijinks on Elephant.
Nothing Izenberg could do about that. That was
physically impossible. Needle in a haystack.
In a four-hour grilling, Foley urged Izenberg to come
clean and admit that he was in conspiracy with Terminus,
and a member of the Legion of Doom.
Izenberg denied this. He was no weirdo teenage
hacker -- he was thirty-two years old, and didn't even have
a "handle." Izenberg was a former TV technician and
electronics specialist who had drifted into UNIX
consulting as a full-grown adult. Izenberg had never met
Terminus, physically. He'd once bought a cheap high-
speed modem from him, though.
Foley told him that this modem (a Telenet T2500
which ran at 19.2 kilobaud, and which had just gone out
Izenberg's door in Secret Service custody) was likely hot
property. Izenberg was taken aback to hear this; but then
again, most of Izenberg's equipment, like that of most
freelance professionals in the industry, was discounted,
passed hand-to-hand through various kinds of barter and
gray-market. There was no proof that the modem was
stolen, and even if it was, Izenberg hardly saw how that
gave them the right to take every electronic item in his
house.
Still, if the United States Secret Service figured
they
needed his computer for national security reasons -- or
whatever -- then Izenberg would not kick. He figured he
would somehow make the sacrifice of his twenty thousand
dollars' worth of professional equipment, in the spirit of
full cooperation and good citizenship.
Robert Izenberg was not arrested. Izenberg was not
charged with any crime. His UUCP node -- full of some
140 megabytes of the files, mail, and data of himself and
his dozen or so entirely innocent users -- went out the
door
as "evidence." Along with the disks and tapes, Izenberg
had lost about 800 megabytes of data.
Six months would pass before Izenberg decided to
phone the Secret Service and ask how the case was going.
That was the first time that Robert Izenberg would ever
hear the name of William Cook. As of January 1992, a full
two years after the seizure, Izenberg, still not charged
with
any crime, would be struggling through the morass of the
courts, in hope of recovering his thousands of dollars'
worth of seized equipment.
In the meantime, the Izenberg case received
absolutely no press coverage. The Secret Service had
walked into an Austin home, removed a UNIX bulletin-
board system, and met with no operational difficulties
whatsoever.
Except that word of a crackdown had percolated
through the Legion of Doom. "The Mentor" voluntarily
shut down "The Phoenix Project." It seemed a pity,
especially as telco security employees had, in fact, shown
up on Phoenix, just as he had hoped -- along with the usual
motley crowd of LoD heavies, hangers-on, phreaks,
hackers and wannabes. There was "Sandy" Sandquist
from US SPRINT security, and some guy named Henry
Kluepfel, from Bellcore itself! Kluepfel had been trading
friendly banter with hackers on Phoenix since January
30th (two weeks after the Martin Luther King Day Crash).
The presence of such a stellar telco official seemed quite
the coup for Phoenix Project.
Still, Mentor could judge the climate. Atlanta in
ruins, *Phrack* in deep trouble, something weird going on
with UNIX nodes -- discretion was advisable. Phoenix
Project went off-line.
Kluepfel, of course, had been monitoring this LoD
bulletin board for his own purposes -- and those of the
Chicago unit. As far back as June 1987, Kluepfel had
logged on to a Texas underground board called "Phreak
Klass 2600." There he'd discovered an Chicago youngster
named "Shadowhawk," strutting and boasting about rifling
AT&T computer files, and bragging of his ambitions to
riddle AT&T's Bellcore computers with trojan horse
programs. Kluepfel had passed the news to Cook in
Chicago, Shadowhawk's computers had gone out the door
in Secret Service custody, and Shadowhawk himself had
gone to jail.
Now it was Phoenix Project's turn. Phoenix Project
postured about "legality" and "merely intellectual
interest," but it reeked of the underground. It had
*Phrack* on it. It had the E911 Document. It had a lot of
dicey talk about breaking into systems, including some
bold and reckless stuff about a supposed "decryption
service" that Mentor and friends were planning to run, to
help crack encrypted passwords off of hacked systems.
Mentor was an adult. There was a bulletin board at
his place of work, as well. Kleupfel logged onto this
board,
too, and discovered it to be called "Illuminati." It was
run
by some company called Steve Jackson Games.
On March 1, 1990, the Austin crackdown went into
high gear.
On the morning of March 1 -- a Thursday -- 21-year-
old University of Texas student "Erik Bloodaxe," co-sysop
of Phoenix Project and an avowed member of the Legion
of Doom, was wakened by a police revolver levelled at his
head.
Bloodaxe watched, jittery, as Secret Service agents
appropriated his 300 baud terminal and, rifling his files,
discovered his treasured source-code for Robert Morris's
notorious Internet Worm. But Bloodaxe, a wily operator,
had suspected that something of the like might be
coming. All his best equipment had been hidden away
elsewhere. The raiders took everything electronic,
however, including his telephone. They were stymied by
his hefty arcade-style Pac-Man game, and left it in place,
as it was simply too heavy to move.
Bloodaxe was not arrested. He was not charged with
any crime. A good two years later, the police still had
what
they had taken from him, however.
The Mentor was less wary. The dawn raid rousted
him and his wife from bed in their underwear, and six
Secret Service agents, accompanied by an Austin
policeman and Henry Kluepfel himself, made a rich haul.
Off went the works, into the agents' white Chevrolet
minivan: an IBM PC-AT clone with 4 meg of RAM and a
120-meg hard disk; a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet II printer;
a completely legitimate and highly expensive SCO-Xenix
286 operating system; Pagemaker disks and
documentation; and the Microsoft Word word-processing
program. Mentor's wife had her incomplete academic
thesis stored on the hard-disk; that went, too, and so did
the couple's telephone. As of two years later, all this
property remained in police custody.
Mentor remained under guard in his apartment as
agents prepared to raid Steve Jackson Games. The fact
that this was a business headquarters and not a private
residence did not deter the agents. It was still very
early;
no one was at work yet. The agents prepared to break
down the door, but Mentor, eavesdropping on the Secret
Service walkie-talkie traffic, begged them not to do it, and
offered his key to the building.
The exact details of the next events are unclear. The
agents would not let anyone else into the building. Their
search warrant, when produced, was unsigned.
Apparently they breakfasted from the local
"Whataburger," as the litter from hamburgers was later
found inside. They also extensively sampled a bag of
jellybeans kept by an SJG employee. Someone tore a
"Dukakis for President" sticker from the wall.
SJG employees, diligently showing up for the day's
work, were met at the door and briefly questioned by U.S.
Secret Service agents. The employees watched in
astonishment as agents wielding crowbars and
screwdrivers emerged with captive machines. They
attacked outdoor storage units with boltcutters. The
agents wore blue nylon windbreakers with "SECRET
SERVICE" stencilled across the back, with running-shoes
and jeans.
Jackson's company lost three computers, several
hard-disks, hundred of floppy disks, two monitors, three
modems, a laser printer, various powercords, cables, and
adapters (and, oddly, a small bag of screws, bolts and
nuts). The seizure of Illuminati BBS deprived SJG of all
the programs, text files, and private e-mail on the board.
The loss of two other SJG computers was a severe blow as
well, since it caused the loss of electronically stored
contracts, financial projections, address directories,
mailing lists, personnel files, business correspondence,
and, not least, the drafts of forthcoming games and
gaming books.
No one at Steve Jackson Games was arrested. No
one was accused of any crime. No charges were filed.
Everything appropriated was officially kept as "evidence"
of crimes never specified.
After the *Phrack* show-trial, the Steve Jackson
Games scandal was the most bizarre and aggravating
incident of the Hacker Crackdown of 1990. This raid by
the Chicago Task Force on a science-fiction gaming
publisher was to rouse a swarming host of civil liberties
issues, and gave rise to an enduring controversy that was
still re-complicating itself, and growing in the scope of
its
implications, a full two years later.
The pursuit of the E911 Document stopped with the
Steve Jackson Games raid. As we have seen, there were
hundreds, perhaps thousands of computer users in
America with the E911 Document in their possession.
Theoretically, Chicago had a perfect legal right to raid any
of these people, and could have legally seized the
machines of anybody who subscribed to *Phrack.*
However, there was no copy of the E911 Document on
Jackson's Illuminati board. And there the Chicago raiders
stopped dead; they have not raided anyone since.
It might be assumed that Rich Andrews and Charlie
Boykin, who had brought the E911 Document to the
attention of telco security, might be spared any official
suspicion. But as we have seen, the willingness to
"cooperate fully" offers little, if any, assurance against
federal anti-hacker prosecution.
Richard Andrews found himself in deep trouble,
thanks to the E911 Document. Andrews lived in Illinois,
the native stomping grounds of the Chicago Task Force.
On February 3 and 6, both his home and his place of work
were raided by USSS. His machines went out the door,
too, and he was grilled at length (though not arrested).
Andrews proved to be in purportedly guilty possession of:
UNIX SVR 3.2; UNIX SVR 3.1; UUCP; PMON; WWB;
IWB; DWB; NROFF; KORN SHELL '88; C++; and
QUEST, among other items. Andrews had received this
proprietary code -- which AT&T officially valued at well
over $250,000 -- through the UNIX network, much of it
supplied to him as a personal favor by Terminus. Perhaps
worse yet, Andrews admitted to returning the favor, by
passing Terminus a copy of AT&T proprietary STARLAN
source code.
Even Charles Boykin, himself an AT&T employee,
entered some very hot water. By 1990, he'd almost
forgotten about the E911 problem he'd reported in
September 88; in fact, since that date, he'd passed two
more security alerts to Jerry Dalton, concerning matters
that Boykin considered far worse than the E911
Document.
But by 1990, year of the crackdown, AT&T Corporate
Information Security was fed up with "Killer." This
machine offered no direct income to AT&T, and was
providing aid and comfort to a cloud of suspicious yokels
from outside the company, some of them actively
malicious toward AT&T, its property, and its corporate
interests. Whatever goodwill and publicity had been won
among Killer's 1,500 devoted users was considered no
longer worth the security risk. On February 20, 1990,
Jerry
Dalton arrived in Dallas and simply unplugged the phone
jacks, to the puzzled alarm of Killer's many Texan users.
Killer went permanently off-line, with the loss of vast
archives of programs and huge quantities of electronic
mail; it was never restored to service. AT&T showed no
particular regard for the "property" of these 1,500 people.
Whatever "property" the users had been storing on
AT&T's computer simply vanished completely.
Boykin, who had himself reported the E911 problem,
now found himself under a cloud of suspicion. In a weird
private-security replay of the Secret Service seizures,
Boykin's own home was visited by AT&T Security and his
own machines were carried out the door.
However, there were marked special features in the
Boykin case. Boykin's disks and his personal computers
were swiftly examined by his corporate employers and
returned politely in just two days -- (unlike Secret Service
seizures, which commonly take months or years). Boykin
was not charged with any crime or wrongdoing, and he
kept his job with AT&T (though he did retire from AT&T in
September 1991, at the age of 52).
It's interesting to note that the US Secret Service
somehow failed to seize Boykin's "Killer" node and carry
AT&T's own computer out the door. Nor did they raid
Boykin's home. They seemed perfectly willing to take the
word of AT&T Security that AT&T's employee, and AT&T's
"Killer" node, were free of hacker contraband and on the
up-and-up.
It's digital water-under-the-bridge at this point, as
Killer's 3,200 megabytes of Texan electronic community
were erased in 1990, and "Killer" itself was shipped out of
the state.
But the experiences of Andrews and Boykin, and the
users of their systems, remained side issues. They did not
begin to assume the social, political, and legal importance
that gathered, slowly but inexorably, around the issue of
the raid on Steve Jackson Games.
#
We must now turn our attention to Steve Jackson
Games itself, and explain what SJG was, what it really did,
and how it had managed to attract this particularly odd
and virulent kind of trouble. The reader may recall that
this is not the first but the second time that the company
has appeared in this narrative; a Steve Jackson game
called GURPS was a favorite pastime of Atlanta hacker
Urvile, and Urvile's science-fictional gaming notes had
been mixed up promiscuously with notes about his actual
computer intrusions.
First, Steve Jackson Games, Inc., was *not* a
publisher of "computer games." SJG published
"simulation games," parlor games that were played on
paper, with pencils, and dice, and printed guidebooks full
of rules and statistics tables. There were no computers
involved in the games themselves. When you bought a
Steve Jackson Game, you did not receive any software
disks. What you got was a plastic bag with some
cardboard game tokens, maybe a few maps or a deck of
cards. Most of their products were books.
However, computers *were* deeply involved in the
Steve Jackson Games business. Like almost all modern
publishers, Steve Jackson and his fifteen employees used
computers to write text, to keep accounts, and to run the
business generally. They also used a computer to run
their official bulletin board system for Steve Jackson
Games, a board called Illuminati. On Illuminati,
simulation gamers who happened to own computers and
modems could associate, trade mail, debate the theory
and practice of gaming, and keep up with the company's
news and its product announcements.
Illuminati was a modestly popular board, run on a
small computer with limited storage, only one phone-line,
and no ties to large-scale computer networks. It did,
however, have hundreds of users, many of them dedicated
gamers willing to call from out-of-state.
Illuminati was *not* an "underground" board. It did
not feature hints on computer intrusion, or "anarchy files,"
or illicitly posted credit card numbers, or long-distance
access codes. Some of Illuminati's users, however, were
members of the Legion of Doom. And so was one of
Steve Jackson's senior employees -- the Mentor. The
Mentor wrote for *Phrack,* and also ran an underground
board, Phoenix Project -- but the Mentor was not a
computer professional. The Mentor was the managing
editor of Steve Jackson Games and a professional game
designer by trade. These LoD members did not use
Illuminati to help their *hacking* activities. They used it
to help their *game-playing* activities -- and they were
even more dedicated to simulation gaming than they were
to hacking.
"Illuminati" got its name from a card-game that Steve
Jackson himself, the company's founder and sole owner,
had invented. This multi-player card-game was one of Mr
Jackson's best-known, most successful, most technically
innovative products. "Illuminati" was a game of
paranoiac conspiracy in which various antisocial cults
warred covertly to dominate the world. "Illuminati" was
hilarious, and great fun to play, involving flying saucers,
the CIA, the KGB, the phone companies, the Ku Klux
Klan, the South American Nazis, the cocaine cartels, the
Boy Scouts, and dozens of other splinter groups from the
twisted depths of Mr. Jackson's professionally fervid
imagination. For the uninitiated, any public discussion of
the "Illuminati" card-game sounded, by turns, utterly
menacing or completely insane.
And then there was SJG's "Car Wars," in which
souped-up armored hot-rods with rocket-launchers and
heavy machine-guns did battle on the American highways
of the future. The lively Car Wars discussion on the
Illuminati board featured many meticulous, painstaking
discussions of the effects of grenades, land-mines,
flamethrowers and napalm. It sounded like hacker
anarchy files run amuck.
Mr Jackson and his co-workers earned their daily
bread by supplying people with make-believe adventures
and weird ideas. The more far-out, the better.
Simulation gaming is an unusual pastime, but
gamers have not generally had to beg the permission of
the Secret Service to exist. Wargames and role-playing
adventures are an old and honored pastime, much
favored by professional military strategists. Once little-
known, these games are now played by hundreds of
thousands of enthusiasts throughout North America,
Europe and Japan. Gaming-books, once restricted to
hobby outlets, now commonly appear in chain-stores like
B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks, and sell vigorously.
Steve Jackson Games, Inc., of Austin, Texas, was a
games company of the middle rank. In 1989, SJG grossed
about a million dollars. Jackson himself had a good
reputation in his industry as a talented and innovative
designer of rather unconventional games, but his
company was something less than a titan of the field --
certainly not like the multimillion-dollar TSR Inc., or
Britain's gigantic "Games Workshop."
SJG's Austin headquarters was a modest two-story
brick office-suite, cluttered with phones, photocopiers, fax
machines and computers. It bustled with semi-organized
activity and was littered with glossy promotional brochures
and dog-eared science-fiction novels. Attached to the
offices was a large tin-roofed warehouse piled twenty feet
high with cardboard boxes of games and books. Despite
the weird imaginings that went on within it, the SJG
headquarters was quite a quotidian, everyday sort of place.
It looked like what it was: a publishers' digs.
Both "Car Wars" and "Illuminati" were well-known,
popular games. But the mainstay of the Jackson
organization was their Generic Universal Role-Playing
System, "G.U.R.P.S." The GURPS system was considered
solid and well-designed, an asset for players. But perhaps
the most popular feature of the GURPS system was that it
allowed gaming-masters to design scenarios that closely
resembled well-known books, movies, and other works of
fantasy. Jackson had licensed and adapted works from
many science fiction and fantasy authors. There was
*GURPS Conan,* *GURPS Riverworld,* *GURPS
Horseclans,* *GURPS Witch World,* names eminently
familiar to science-fiction readers. And there was *GURPS
Special Ops,* from the world of espionage fantasy and
unconventional warfare.
And then there was *GURPS Cyberpunk.*
"Cyberpunk" was a term given to certain science
fiction writers who had entered the genre in the 1980s.
"Cyberpunk," as the label implies, had two general
distinguishing features. First, its writers had a
compelling
interest in information technology, an interest closely akin
to science fiction's earlier fascination with space travel.
And second, these writers were "punks," with all the
distinguishing features that that implies: Bohemian
artiness, youth run wild, an air of deliberate rebellion,
funny clothes and hair, odd politics, a fondness for
abrasive rock and roll; in a word, trouble.
The "cyberpunk" SF writers were a small group of
mostly college-educated white middle-class litterateurs,
scattered through the US and Canada. Only one, Rudy
Rucker, a professor of computer science in Silicon Valley,
could rank with even the humblest computer hacker. But,
except for Professor Rucker, the "cyberpunk" authors were
not programmers or hardware experts; they considered
themselves artists (as, indeed, did Professor Rucker).
However, these writers all owned computers, and took an
intense and public interest in the social ramifications of
the information industry.
The cyberpunks had a strong following among the
global generation that had grown up in a world of
computers, multinational networks, and cable television.
Their outlook was considered somewhat morbid, cynical,
and dark, but then again, so was the outlook of their
generational peers. As that generation matured and
increased in strength and influence, so did the
cyberpunks. As science-fiction writers went, they were
doing fairly well for themselves. By the late 1980s, their
work had attracted attention from gaming companies,
including Steve Jackson Games, which was planning a
cyberpunk simulation for the flourishing GURPS gaming-
system.
The time seemed ripe for such a product, which had
already been proven in the marketplace. The first games-
company out of the gate, with a product boldly called
"Cyberpunk" in defiance of possible infringement-of-
copyright suits, had been an upstart group called R.
Talsorian. Talsorian's Cyberpunk was a fairly decent
game, but the mechanics of the simulation system left a
lot to be desired. Commercially, however, the game did
very well.
The next cyberpunk game had been the even more
successful *Shadowrun* by FASA Corporation. The
mechanics of this game were fine, but the scenario was
rendered moronic by sappy fantasy elements like elves,
trolls, wizards, and dragons -- all highly ideologically-
incorrect, according to the hard-edged, high-tech
standards of cyberpunk science fiction.
Other game designers were champing at the bit.
Prominent among them was the Mentor, a gentleman
who, like most of his friends in the Legion of Doom, was
quite the cyberpunk devotee. Mentor reasoned that the
time had come for a *real* cyberpunk gaming-book -- one
that the princes of computer-mischief in the Legion of
Doom could play without laughing themselves sick. This
book, *GURPS Cyberpunk,* would reek of culturally on-
line authenticity.
Mentor was particularly well-qualified for this task.
Naturally, he knew far more about computer-intrusion
and digital skullduggery than any previously published
cyberpunk author. Not only that, but he was good at his
work. A vivid imagination, combined with an instinctive
feeling for the working of systems and, especially, the
loopholes within them, are excellent qualities for a
professional game designer.
By March 1st, *GURPS Cyberpunk* was almost
complete, ready to print and ship. Steve Jackson expected
vigorous sales for this item, which, he hoped, would keep
the company financially afloat for several months.
*GURPS Cyberpunk,* like the other GURPS "modules,"
was not a "game" like a Monopoly set, but a *book:* a
bound paperback book the size of a glossy magazine, with
a slick color cover, and pages full of text, illustrations,
tables and footnotes. It was advertised as a game, and
was used as an aid to game-playing, but it was a book, with
an ISBN number, published in Texas, copyrighted, and
sold in bookstores.
And now, that book, stored on a computer, had gone
out the door in the custody of the Secret Service.
The day after the raid, Steve Jackson visited the local
Secret Service headquarters with a lawyer in tow. There he
confronted Tim Foley (still in Austin at that time) and
demanded his book back. But there was trouble.
*GURPS Cyberpunk,* alleged a Secret Service agent to
astonished businessman Steve Jackson, was "a manual for
computer crime."
"It's science fiction," Jackson said.
"No, this is real." This statement was repeated
several times, by several agents. Jackson's ominously
accurate game had passed from pure, obscure, small-
scale fantasy into the impure, highly publicized, large-
scale fantasy of the Hacker Crackdown.
No mention was made of the real reason for the
search. According to their search warrant, the raiders had
expected to find the E911 Document stored on Jackson's
bulletin board system. But that warrant was sealed; a