And the real glory in Service work is not in battling
computer crime -- not yet, anyway -- but in
protecting the President. The real glamour of Secret
Service work is in the White House Detail. If you're
at the President's side, then the kids and the wife see
you on television; you rub shoulders with the most
powerful people in the world. That's the real heart
of Service work, the number one priority. More than
one computer investigation has stopped dead in the
water when Service agents vanished at the
President's need.
There's romance in the work of the Service. The
intimate access to circles of great power; the esprit-
de-corps of a highly trained and disciplined elite; the
high responsibility of defending the Chief Executive;
the fulfillment of a patriotic duty. And as police
work goes, the pay's not bad. But there's squalor in
Service work, too. You may get spat upon by
protesters howling abuse -- and if they get violent, if
they get too close, sometimes you have to knock one
of them down -- discreetly.
The real squalor in Service work is drudgery
such as "the quarterlies," traipsing out four times a
year, year in, year out, to interview the various
pathetic wretches, many of them in prisons and
asylums, who have seen fit to threaten the
President's life. And then there's the grinding stress
of searching all those faces in the endless bustling
crowds, looking for hatred, looking for psychosis,
looking for the tight, nervous face of an Arthur
Bremer, a Squeaky Fromme, a Lee Harvey Oswald.
It's watching all those grasping, waving hands for
sudden movements, while your ears strain at your
radio headphone for the long-rehearsed cry of
"Gun!"
It's poring, in grinding detail, over the
biographies of every rotten loser who ever shot at a
President. It's the unsung work of the Protective
Research Section, who study scrawled, anonymous
death threats with all the meticulous tools of anti-
forgery techniques.
And it's maintaining the hefty computerized
files on anyone who ever threatened the President's
life. Civil libertarians have become increasingly
concerned at the Government's use of computer
files to track American citizens -- but the Secret
Service file of potential Presidential assassins, which
has upward of twenty thousand names, rarely
causes a peep of protest. If you *ever* state that you
intend to kill the President, the Secret Service will
want to know and record who you are, where you are,
what you are, and what you're up to. If you're a
serious threat -- if you're officially considered "of
protective interest" -- then the Secret Service may
well keep tabs on you for the rest of your natural life.
Protecting the President has first call on all the
Service's resources. But there's a lot more to the
Service's traditions and history than standing guard
outside the Oval Office.
The Secret Service is the nation's oldest general
federal law-enforcement agency. Compared to the
Secret Service, the FBI are new-hires and the CIA
are temps. The Secret Service was founded 'way
back in 1865, at the suggestion of Hugh McCulloch,
Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury.
McCulloch wanted a specialized Treasury police to
combat counterfeiting. Abraham Lincoln agreed
that this seemed a good idea, and, with a terrible
irony, Abraham Lincoln was shot that very night by
John Wilkes Booth.
The Secret Service originally had nothing to do
with protecting Presidents. They didn't take this on
as a regular assignment until after the Garfield
assassination in 1881. And they didn't get any
Congressional money for it until President McKinley
was shot in 1901. The Service was originally
designed for one purpose: destroying counterfeiters.
#
There are interesting parallels between the
Service's nineteenth-century entry into
counterfeiting, and America's twentieth-century
entry into computer-crime.
In 1865, America's paper currency was a terrible
muddle. Security was drastically bad. Currency was
printed on the spot by local banks in literally
hundreds of different designs. No one really knew
what the heck a dollar bill was supposed to look like.
Bogus bills passed easily. If some joker told you that
a one-dollar bill from the Railroad Bank of Lowell,
Massachusetts had a woman leaning on a shield,
with a locomotive, a cornucopia, a compass, various
agricultural implements, a railroad bridge, and
some factories, then you pretty much had to take his
word for it. (And in fact he was telling the truth!)
*Sixteen hundred* local American banks
designed and printed their own paper currency, and
there were no general standards for security. Like a
badly guarded node in a computer network, badly
designed bills were easy to fake, and posed a
security hazard for the entire monetary system.
No one knew the exact extent of the threat to
the currency. There were panicked estimates that as
much as a third of the entire national currency was
faked. Counterfeiters -- known as "boodlers" in the
underground slang of the time -- were mostly
technically skilled printers who had gone to the bad.
Many had once worked printing legitimate currency.
Boodlers operated in rings and gangs. Technical
experts engraved the bogus plates -- commonly in
basements in New York City. Smooth confidence
men passed large wads of high-quality, high-
denomination fakes, including the really
sophisticated stuff -- government bonds, stock
certificates, and railway shares. Cheaper, botched
fakes were sold or sharewared to low-level gangs of
boodler wannabes. (The really cheesy lowlife
boodlers merely upgraded real bills by altering face
values, changing ones to fives, tens to hundreds, and
so on.)
The techniques of boodling were little-known
and regarded with a certain awe by the mid-
nineteenth-century public. The ability to
manipulate the system for rip-off seemed
diabolically clever. As the skill and daring of the
boodlers increased, the situation became
intolerable. The federal government stepped in,
and began offering its own federal currency, which
was printed in fancy green ink, but only on the back -
- the original "greenbacks." And at first, the
improved security of the well-designed, well-printed
federal greenbacks seemed to solve the problem;
but then the counterfeiters caught on. Within a few
years things were worse than ever: a *centralized*
system where *all* security was bad!
The local police were helpless. The
Government tried offering blood money to potential
informants, but this met with little success. Banks,
plagued by boodling, gave up hope of police help
and hired private security men instead. Merchants
and bankers queued up by the thousands to buy
privately-printed manuals on currency security, slim
little books like Laban Heath's *Infallible
Government Counterfeit Detector.* The back of the
book offered Laban Heath's patent microscope for
five bucks.
Then the Secret Service entered the picture.
The first agents were a rough and ready crew. Their
chief was one William P. Wood, a former guerilla in
the Mexican War who'd won a reputation busting
contractor fraudsters for the War Department
during the Civil War. Wood, who was also Keeper
of the Capital Prison, had a sideline as a
counterfeiting expert, bagging boodlers for the
federal bounty money.
Wood was named Chief of the new Secret
Service in July 1865. There were only ten Secret
Service agents in all: Wood himself, a handful
who'd worked for him in the War Department, and a
few former private investigators -- counterfeiting
experts -- whom Wood had won over to public
service. (The Secret Service of 1865 was much the
size of the Chicago Computer Fraud Task Force or
the Arizona Racketeering Unit of 1990.) These ten
"Operatives" had an additional twenty or so
"Assistant Operatives" and "Informants." Besides
salary and per diem, each Secret Service employee
received a whopping twenty-five dollars for each
boodler he captured.
Wood himself publicly estimated that at least
*half* of America's currency was counterfeit, a
perhaps pardonable perception. Within a year the
Secret Service had arrested over 200 counterfeiters.
They busted about two hundred boodlers a year for
four years straight.
Wood attributed his success to travelling fast
and light, hitting the bad-guys hard, and avoiding
bureaucratic baggage. "Because my raids were
made without military escort and I did not ask the
assistance of state officers, I surprised the
professional counterfeiter."
Wood's social message to the once-impudent
boodlers bore an eerie ring of Sundevil: "It was also
my purpose to convince such characters that it
would no longer be healthy for them to ply their
vocation without being handled roughly, a fact they
soon discovered."
William P. Wood, the Secret Service's guerilla
pioneer, did not end well. He succumbed to the lure
of aiming for the really big score. The notorious
Brockway Gang of New York City, headed by
William E. Brockway, the "King of the
Counterfeiters," had forged a number of
government bonds. They'd passed these brilliant
fakes on the prestigious Wall Street investment firm
of Jay Cooke and Company. The Cooke firm were
frantic and offered a huge reward for the forgers'
plates.
Laboring diligently, Wood confiscated the
plates (though not Mr. Brockway) and claimed the
reward. But the Cooke company treacherously
reneged. Wood got involved in a down-and-dirty
lawsuit with the Cooke capitalists. Wood's boss,
Secretary of the Treasury McCulloch, felt that
Wood's demands for money and glory were
unseemly, and even when the reward money finally
came through, McCulloch refused to pay Wood
anything. Wood found himself mired in a
seemingly endless round of federal suits and
Congressional lobbying.
Wood never got his money. And he lost his job
to boot. He resigned in 1869.
Wood's agents suffered, too. On May 12, 1869,
the second Chief of the Secret Service took over, and
almost immediately fired most of Wood's pioneer
Secret Service agents: Operatives, Assistants and
Informants alike. The practice of receiving $25 per
crook was abolished. And the Secret Service began
the long, uncertain process of thorough
professionalization.
Wood ended badly. He must have felt stabbed
in the back. In fact his entire organization was
mangled.
On the other hand, William P. Wood *was* the
first head of the Secret Service. William Wood was
the pioneer. People still honor his name. Who
remembers the name of the *second* head of the
Secret Service?
As for William Brockway (also known as
"Colonel Spencer"), he was finally arrested by the
Secret Service in 1880. He did five years in prison,
got out, and was still boodling at the age of seventy-
four.
#
Anyone with an interest in Operation Sundevil -
- or in American computer-crime generally -- could
scarcely miss the presence of Gail Thackeray,
Assistant Attorney General of the State of Arizona.
Computer-crime training manuals often cited
Thackeray's group and her work; she was the
highest-ranking state official to specialize in
computer-related offenses. Her name had been on
the Sundevil press release (though modestly ranked
well after the local federal prosecuting attorney and
the head of the Phoenix Secret Service office).
As public commentary, and controversy, began
to mount about the Hacker Crackdown, this
Arizonan state official began to take a higher and
higher public profile. Though uttering almost
nothing specific about the Sundevil operation itself,
she coined some of the most striking soundbites of
the growing propaganda war: "Agents are operating
in good faith, and I don't think you can say that for
the hacker community," was one. Another was the
memorable "I am not a mad dog prosecutor"
(*Houston Chronicle,* Sept 2, 1990.) In the
meantime, the Secret Service maintained its usual
extreme discretion; the Chicago Unit, smarting from
the backlash of the Steve Jackson scandal, had gone
completely to earth.
As I collated my growing pile of newspaper
clippings, Gail Thackeray ranked as a comparative
fount of public knowledge on police operations.
I decided that I had to get to know Gail
Thackeray. I wrote to her at the Arizona Attorney
General's Office. Not only did she kindly reply to
me, but, to my astonishment, she knew very well
what "cyberpunk" science fiction was.
Shortly after this, Gail Thackeray lost her job.
And I temporarily misplaced my own career as a
science-fiction writer, to become a full-time
computer-crime journalist. In early March, 1991, I
flew to Phoenix, Arizona, to interview Gail Thackeray
for my book on the hacker crackdown.
#
"Credit cards didn't used to cost anything to
get," says Gail Thackeray. "Now they cost forty
bucks -- and that's all just to cover the costs from
*rip-off artists.*"
Electronic nuisance criminals are parasites.
One by one they're not much harm, no big deal. But
they never come just one by one. They come in
swarms, heaps, legions, sometimes whole
subcultures. And they bite. Every time we buy a
credit card today, we lose a little financial vitality to a
particular species of bloodsucker.
What, in her expert opinion, are the worst forms
of electronic crime, I ask, consulting my notes. Is it --
credit card fraud? Breaking into ATM bank
machines? Phone-phreaking? Computer
intrusions? Software viruses? Access-code theft?
Records tampering? Software piracy? Pornographic
bulletin boards? Satellite TV piracy? Theft of cable
service? It's a long list. By the time I reach the end
of it I feel rather depressed.
"Oh no," says Gail Thackeray, leaning forward
over the table, her whole body gone stiff with
energetic indignation, "the biggest damage is
telephone fraud. Fake sweepstakes, fake charities.
Boiler-room con operations. You could pay off the
national debt with what these guys steal.... They
target old people, they get hold of credit ratings and
demographics, they rip off the old and the weak."
The words come tumbling out of her.
It's low-tech stuff, your everyday boiler-room
fraud. Grifters, conning people out of money over
the phone, have been around for decades. This is
where the word "phony" came from!
It's just that it's so much *easier* now, horribly
facilitated by advances in technology and the
byzantine structure of the modern phone system.
The same professional fraudsters do it over and
over, Thackeray tells me, they hide behind dense
onion-shells of fake companies.... fake holding
corporations nine or ten layers deep, registered all
over the map. They get a phone installed under a
false name in an empty safe-house. And then they
call-forward everything out of that phone to yet
another phone, a phone that may even be in
another *state.* And they don't even pay the
charges on their phones; after a month or so, they
just split. Set up somewhere else in another
Podunkville with the same seedy crew of veteran
phone-crooks. They buy or steal commercial credit
card reports, slap them on the PC, have a program
pick out people over sixty-five who pay a lot to
charities. A whole subculture living off this,
merciless folks on the con.
"The 'light-bulbs for the blind' people,"
Thackeray muses, with a special loathing. "There's
just no end to them."
We're sitting in a downtown diner in Phoenix,
Arizona. It's a tough town, Phoenix. A state capital
seeing some hard times. Even to a Texan like
myself, Arizona state politics seem rather baroque.
There was, and remains, endless trouble over the
Martin Luther King holiday, the sort of stiff-necked,
foot-shooting incident for which Arizona politics
seem famous. There was Evan Mecham, the
eccentric Republican millionaire governor who was
impeached, after reducing state government to a
ludicrous shambles. Then there was the national
Keating scandal, involving Arizona savings and
loans, in which both of Arizona's U.S. senators,
DeConcini and McCain, played sadly prominent
roles.
And the very latest is the bizarre AzScam case,
in which state legislators were videotaped, eagerly
taking cash from an informant of the Phoenix city
police department, who was posing as a Vegas
mobster.
"Oh," says Thackeray cheerfully. "These people
are amateurs here, they thought they were finally
getting to play with the big boys. They don't have the
least idea how to take a bribe! It's not institutional
corruption. It's not like back in Philly."
Gail Thackeray was a former prosecutor in
Philadelphia. Now she's a former assistant attorney
general of the State of Arizona. Since moving to
Arizona in 1986, she had worked under the aegis of
Steve Twist, her boss in the Attorney General's
office. Steve Twist wrote Arizona's pioneering
computer crime laws and naturally took an interest
in seeing them enforced. It was a snug niche, and
Thackeray's Organized Crime and Racketeering
Unit won a national reputation for ambition and
technical knowledgeability.... Until the latest
election in Arizona. Thackeray's boss ran for the top
job, and lost. The victor, the new Attorney General,
apparently went to some pains to eliminate the
bureaucratic traces of his rival, including his pet
group -- Thackeray's group. Twelve people got their
walking papers.
Now Thackeray's painstakingly assembled
computer lab sits gathering dust somewhere in the
glass-and-concrete Attorney General's HQ on 1275
Washington Street. Her computer-crime books, her
painstakingly garnered back issues of phreak and
hacker zines, all bought at her own expense -- are
piled in boxes somewhere. The State of Arizona is
simply not particularly interested in electronic
racketeering at the moment.
At the moment of our interview, Gail Thackeray,
officially unemployed, is working out of the county
sheriff's office, living on her savings, and prosecuting
several cases -- working 60-hour weeks, just as always
-- for no pay at all. "I'm trying to train people," she
mutters.
Half her life seems to be spent training people -
- merely pointing out, to the naive and incredulous
(such as myself) that this stuff is *actually going on
out there.* It's a small world, computer crime. A
young world. Gail Thackeray, a trim blonde Baby-
Boomer who favors Grand Canyon white-water
rafting to kill some slow time, is one of the world's
most senior, most veteran "hacker-trackers." Her
mentor was Donn Parker, the California think-tank
theorist who got it all started 'way back in the mid-
70s, the "grandfather of the field," "the great bald
eagle of computer crime."
And what she has learned, Gail Thackeray
teaches. Endlessly. Tirelessly. To anybody. To
Secret Service agents and state police, at the Glynco,
Georgia federal training center. To local police, on
"roadshows" with her slide projector and notebook.
To corporate security personnel. To journalists. To
parents.
Even *crooks* look to Gail Thackeray for advice.
Phone-phreaks call her at the office. They know very
well who she is. They pump her for information on
what the cops are up to, how much they know.
Sometimes whole *crowds* of phone phreaks,
hanging out on illegal conference calls, will call Gail
Thackeray up. They taunt her. And, as always, they
boast. Phone-phreaks, real stone phone-phreaks,
simply *cannot shut up.* They natter on for hours.
Left to themselves, they mostly talk about the
intricacies of ripping-off phones; it's about as
interesting as listening to hot-rodders talk about
suspension and distributor-caps. They also gossip
cruelly about each other. And when talking to Gail
Thackeray, they incriminate themselves. "I have
tapes," Thackeray says coolly.
Phone phreaks just talk like crazy. "Dial-Tone"
out in Alabama has been known to spend half-an-
hour simply reading stolen phone-codes aloud into
voice-mail answering machines. Hundreds,
thousands of numbers, recited in a monotone,
without a break -- an eerie phenomenon. When
arrested, it's a rare phone phreak who doesn't
inform at endless length on everybody he knows.
Hackers are no better. What other group of
criminals, she asks rhetorically, publishes
newsletters and holds conventions? She seems
deeply nettled by the sheer brazenness of this
behavior, though to an outsider, this activity might
make one wonder whether hackers should be
considered "criminals" at all. Skateboarders have
magazines, and they trespass a lot. Hot rod people
have magazines and they break speed limits and
sometimes kill people....
I ask her whether it would be any loss to society
if phone phreaking and computer hacking, as
hobbies, simply dried up and blew away, so that
nobody ever did it again.
She seems surprised. "No," she says swiftly.
"Maybe a little... in the old days... the MIT stuff... But
there's a lot of wonderful, legal stuff you can do with
computers now, you don't have to break into
somebody else's just to learn. You don't have that
excuse. You can learn all you like."
Did you ever hack into a system? I ask.
The trainees do it at Glynco. Just to
demonstrate system vulnerabilities. She's cool to
the notion. Genuinely indifferent.
"What kind of computer do you have?"
"A Compaq 286LE," she mutters.
"What kind do you *wish* you had?"
At this question, the unmistakable light of true
hackerdom flares in Gail Thackeray's eyes. She
becomes tense, animated, the words pour out: "An
Amiga 2000 with an IBM card and Mac emulation!
The most common hacker machines are Amigas
and Commodores. And Apples." If she had the
Amiga, she enthuses, she could run a whole galaxy
of seized computer-evidence disks on one
convenient multifunctional machine. A cheap one,
too. Not like the old Attorney General lab, where
they had an ancient CP/M machine, assorted
Amiga flavors and Apple flavors, a couple IBMS, all
the utility software... but no Commodores. The
workstations down at the Attorney General's are
Wang dedicated word-processors. Lame machines
tied in to an office net -- though at least they get on-
line to the Lexis and Westlaw legal data services.
I don't say anything. I recognize the syndrome,
though. This computer-fever has been running
through segments of our society for years now. It's a
strange kind of lust: K-hunger, Meg-hunger; but it's
a shared disease; it can kill parties dead, as
conversation spirals into the deepest and most
deviant recesses of software releases and expensive
peripherals.... The mark of the hacker beast. I have
it too. The whole "electronic community," whatever
the hell that is, has it. Gail Thackeray has it. Gail
Thackeray is a hacker cop. My immediate reaction
is a strong rush of indignant pity: *why doesn't
somebody buy this woman her Amiga?!* It's not
like she's asking for a Cray X-MP supercomputer
mainframe; an Amiga's a sweet little cookie-box
thing. We're losing zillions in organized fraud;
prosecuting and defending a single hacker case in
court can cost a hundred grand easy. How come
nobody can come up with four lousy grand so this
woman can do her job? For a hundred grand we
could buy every computer cop in America an Amiga.
There aren't that many of 'em.
Computers. The lust, the hunger, for
computers. The loyalty they inspire, the intense
sense of possessiveness. The culture they have
bred. I myself am sitting in downtown Phoenix,
Arizona because it suddenly occurred to me that the
police might -- just *might* -- come and take away
my computer. The prospect of this, the mere
*implied threat,* was unbearable. It literally
changed my life. It was changing the lives of many
others. Eventually it would change everybody's life.
Gail Thackeray was one of the top computer-
crime people in America. And I was just some
novelist, and yet I had a better computer than hers.
*Practically everybody I knew* had a better
computer than Gail Thackeray and her feeble
laptop 286. It was like sending the sheriff in to clean
up Dodge City and arming her with a slingshot cut
from an old rubber tire.
But then again, you don't need a howitzer to
enforce the law. You can do a lot just with a badge.
With a badge alone, you can basically wreak havoc,
take a terrible vengeance on wrongdoers. Ninety
percent of "computer crime investigation" is just
"crime investigation:" names, places, dossiers,
modus operandi, search warrants, victims,
complainants, informants...
What will computer crime look like in ten
years? Will it get better? Did "Sundevil" send 'em
reeling back in confusion?
It'll be like it is now, only worse, she tells me
with perfect conviction. Still there in the
background, ticking along, changing with the times:
the criminal underworld. It'll be like drugs are. Like
our problems with alcohol. All the cops and laws in
the world never solved our problems with alcohol. If
there's something people want, a certain percentage
of them are just going to take it. Fifteen percent of
the populace will never steal. Fifteen percent will
steal most anything not nailed down. The battle is
for the hearts and minds of the remaining seventy
percent.
And criminals catch on fast. If there's not "too
steep a learning curve" -- if it doesn't require a
baffling amount of expertise and practice -- then
criminals are often some of the first through the gate
of a new technology. Especially if it helps them to
hide. They have tons of cash, criminals. The new
communications tech -- like pagers, cellular phones,
faxes, Federal Express -- were pioneered by rich
corporate people, and by criminals. In the early
years of pagers and beepers, dope dealers were so
enthralled this technology that owing a beeper was
practically prima facie evidence of cocaine dealing.
CB radio exploded when the speed limit hit 55 and
breaking the highway law became a national
pastime. Dope dealers send cash by Federal
Express, despite, or perhaps *because of,* the
warnings in FedEx offices that tell you never to try
this. Fed Ex uses X-rays and dogs on their mail, to
stop drug shipments. That doesn't work very well.
Drug dealers went wild over cellular phones.
There are simple methods of faking ID on cellular
phones, making the location of the call mobile, free
of charge, and effectively untraceable. Now
victimized cellular companies routinely bring in vast
toll-lists of calls to Colombia and Pakistan.
Judge Greene's fragmentation of the phone
company is driving law enforcement nuts. Four
thousand telecommunications companies. Fraud
skyrocketing. Every temptation in the world
available with a phone and a credit card number.
Criminals untraceable. A galaxy of "new neat rotten
things to do."
If there were one thing Thackeray would like to
have, it would be an effective legal end-run through
this new fragmentation minefield.
It would be a new form of electronic search
warrant, an "electronic letter of marque" to be issued
by a judge. It would create a new category of
"electronic emergency." Like a wiretap, its use
would be rare, but it would cut across state lines and
force swift cooperation from all concerned. Cellular,
phone, laser, computer network, PBXes, AT&T, Baby
Bells, long-distance entrepreneurs, packet radio.
Some document, some mighty court-order, that
could slice through four thousand separate forms of
corporate red-tape, and get her at once to the source
of calls, the source of email threats and viruses, the
sources of bomb threats, kidnapping threats. "From
now on," she says, "the Lindberg baby will always
die."
Something that would make the Net sit still, if
only for a moment. Something that would get her up
to speed. Seven league boots. That's what she really
needs. "Those guys move in nanoseconds and I'm
on the Pony Express."
And then, too, there's the coming international
angle. Electronic crime has never been easy to
localize, to tie to a physical jurisdiction. And phone-
phreaks and hackers loathe boundaries, they jump
them whenever they can. The English. The Dutch.
And the Germans, especially the ubiquitous Chaos
Computer Club. The Australians. They've all
learned phone-phreaking from America. It's a
growth mischief industry. The multinational
networks are global, but governments and the police
simply aren't. Neither are the laws. Or the legal
frameworks for citizen protection.
One language is global, though -- English.
Phone phreaks speak English; it's their native
tongue even if they're Germans. English may have
started in England but now it's the Net language; it
might as well be called "CNNese."
Asians just aren't much into phone phreaking.
They're the world masters at organized software
piracy. The French aren't into phone-phreaking
either. The French are into computerized industrial
espionage.
In the old days of the MIT righteous
hackerdom, crashing systems didn't hurt anybody.
Not all that much, anyway. Not permanently. Now
the players are more venal. Now the consequences
are worse. Hacking will begin killing people soon.
Already there are methods of stacking calls onto 911
systems, annoying the police, and possibly causing
the death of some poor soul calling in with a genuine
emergency. Hackers in Amtrak computers, or air-
traffic control computers, will kill somebody
someday. Maybe a lot of people. Gail Thackeray
expects it.
And the viruses are getting nastier. The "Scud"
virus is the latest one out. It wipes hard-disks.
According to Thackeray, the idea that phone-
phreaks are Robin Hoods is a fraud. They don't
deserve this repute. Basically, they pick on the
weak. AT&T now protects itself with the fearsome
ANI (Automatic Number Identification) trace
capability. When AT&T wised up and tightened
security generally, the phreaks drifted into the Baby
Bells. The Baby Bells lashed out in 1989 and 1990, so
the phreaks switched to smaller long-distance
entrepreneurs. Today, they are moving into locally
owned PBXes and voice-mail systems, which are full
of security holes, dreadfully easy to hack. These
victims aren't the moneybags Sheriff of Nottingham
or Bad King John, but small groups of innocent
people who find it hard to protect themselves, and
who really suffer from these depredations. Phone
phreaks pick on the weak. They do it for power. If it
were legal, they wouldn't do it. They don't want
service, or knowledge, they want the thrill of power-
tripping. There's plenty of knowledge or service
around, if you're willing to pay. Phone phreaks don't
pay, they steal. It's because it is illegal that it feels
like power, that it gratifies their vanity.
I leave Gail Thackeray with a handshake at the
door of her office building -- a vast International-
Style office building downtown. The Sheriff's office is
renting part of it. I get the vague impression that
quite a lot of the building is empty -- real estate
crash.
In a Phoenix sports apparel store, in a downtown
mall, I meet the "Sun Devil" himself. He is the
cartoon mascot of Arizona State University, whose
football stadium, "Sundevil," is near the local Secret
Service HQ -- hence the name Operation Sundevil.
The Sun Devil himself is named "Sparky." Sparky
the Sun Devil is maroon and bright yellow, the
school colors. Sparky brandishes a three-tined
yellow pitchfork. He has a small mustache, pointed
ears, a barbed tail, and is dashing forward jabbing
the air with the pitchfork, with an expression of
devilish glee.
Phoenix was the home of Operation Sundevil.
The Legion of Doom ran a hacker bulletin board
called "The Phoenix Project." An Australian hacker
named "Phoenix" once burrowed through the
Internet to attack Cliff Stoll, then bragged and
boasted about it to *The New York Times.* This net
of coincidence is both odd and meaningless.
The headquarters of the Arizona Attorney
General, Gail Thackeray's former workplace, is on
1275 Washington Avenue. Many of the downtown
streets in Phoenix are named after prominent
American presidents: Washington, Jefferson,
Madison....
After dark, all the employees go home to their
suburbs. Washington, Jefferson and Madison --
what would be the Phoenix inner city, if there were
an inner city in this sprawling automobile-bred town
-- become the haunts of transients and derelicts.
The homeless. The sidewalks along Washington are
lined with orange trees. Ripe fallen fruit lies
scattered like croquet balls on the sidewalks and
gutters. No one seems to be eating them. I try a
fresh one. It tastes unbearably bitter.
The Attorney General's office, built in 1981
during the Babbitt administration, is a long low two-
story building of white cement and wall-sized sheets
of curtain-glass. Behind each glass wall is a lawyer's
office, quite open and visible to anyone strolling by.
Across the street is a dour government building
labelled simply ECONOMIC SECURITY, something
that has not been in great supply in the American
Southwest lately.
The offices are about twelve feet square. They
feature tall wooden cases full of red-spined
lawbooks; Wang computer monitors; telephones;
Post-it notes galore. Also framed law diplomas and a
general excess of bad Western landscape art. Ansel
Adams photos are a big favorite, perhaps to
compensate for the dismal specter of the parking-
lot, two acres of striped black asphalt, which features
gravel landscaping and some sickly-looking barrel
cacti.
It has grown dark. Gail Thackeray has told me
that the people who work late here, are afraid of
muggings in the parking lot. It seems cruelly ironic
that a woman tracing electronic racketeers across
the interstate labyrinth of Cyberspace should fear
an assault by a homeless derelict in the parking lot
of her own workplace.
Perhaps this is less than coincidence. Perhaps
these two seemingly disparate worlds are somehow
generating one another. The poor and
disenfranchised take to the streets, while the rich
and computer-equipped, safe in their bedrooms,
chatter over their modems. Quite often the derelicts
kick the glass out and break in to the lawyers' offices,
if they see something they need or want badly
enough.
I cross the parking lot to the street behind the
Attorney General's office. A pair of young tramps
are bedding down on flattened sheets of cardboard,
under an alcove stretching over the sidewalk. One
tramp wears a glitter-covered T-shirt reading
"CALIFORNIA" in Coca-Cola cursive. His nose and
cheeks look chafed and swollen; they glisten with
what seems to be Vaseline. The other tramp has a
ragged long-sleeved shirt and lank brown hair
parted in the middle. They both wear blue jeans
coated in grime. They are both drunk.
"You guys crash here a lot?" I ask them.
They look at me warily. I am wearing black
jeans, a black pinstriped suit jacket and a black silk
tie. I have odd shoes and a funny haircut.
"It's our first time here," says the red-nosed
tramp unconvincingly. There is a lot of cardboard
stacked here. More than any two people could use.
"We usually stay at the Vinnie's down the
street," says the brown-haired tramp, puffing a
Marlboro with a meditative air, as he sprawls with his
head on a blue nylon backpack. "The Saint
Vincent's."
"You know who works in that building over
there?" I ask, pointing.
The brown-haired tramp shrugs. "Some kind of
attorneys, it says."
` We urge one another to take it easy. I give
them five bucks.
A block down the street I meet a vigorous
workman who is wheeling along some kind of
industrial trolley; it has what appears to be a tank of
propane on it.
We make eye contact. We nod politely. I walk
past him. "Hey! Excuse me sir!" he says.
"Yes?" I say, stopping and turning.
"Have you seen," the guy says rapidly, "a black
guy, about 6'7", scars on both his cheeks like this --"
he gestures -- "wears a black baseball cap on
backwards, wandering around here anyplace?"
"Sounds like I don't much *want* to meet him," I
say.
"He took my wallet," says my new acquaintance.
"Took it this morning. Y'know, some people would
be *scared* of a guy like that. But I'm not scared.
I'm from Chicago. I'm gonna hunt him down. We
do things like that in Chicago."
"Yeah?"
"I went to the cops and now he's got an APB out
on his ass," he says with satisfaction. "You run into
him, you let me know."
"Okay," I say. "What is your name, sir?"
"Stanley...."
"And how can I reach you?"
"Oh," Stanley says, in the same rapid voice, "you
don't have to reach, uh, me. You can just call the
cops. Go straight to the cops." He reaches into a
pocket and pulls out a greasy piece of pasteboard.
"See, here's my report on him."
I look. The "report," the size of an index card, is
labelled PRO-ACT: Phoenix Residents Opposing
Active Crime Threat.... or is it Organized Against
Crime Threat? In the darkening street it's hard to
read. Some kind of vigilante group? Neighborhood
watch? I feel very puzzled.
"Are you a police officer, sir?"
He smiles, seems very pleased by the question.
"No," he says.
` "But you are a 'Phoenix Resident?'"
"Would you believe a homeless person,"
Stanley says.
"Really? But what's with the..." For the first
time I take a close look at Stanley's trolley. It's a
rubber-wheeled thing of industrial metal, but the
device I had mistaken for a tank of propane is in fact
a water-cooler. Stanley also has an Army duffel-bag,
stuffed tight as a sausage with clothing or perhaps a
tent, and, at the base of his trolley, a cardboard box
and a battered leather briefcase.
"I see," I say, quite at a loss. For the first time I
notice that Stanley has a wallet. He has not lost his
wallet at all. It is in his back pocket and chained to
his belt. It's not a new wallet. It seems to have seen
a lot of wear.
"Well, you know how it is, brother," says Stanley.
Now that I know that he is homeless -- *a possible
threat* -- my entire perception of him has changed
in an instant. His speech, which once seemed just
bright and enthusiastic, now seems to have a
dangerous tang of mania. "I have to do this!" he
assures me. "Track this guy down... It's a thing I do...
you know... to keep myself together!" He smiles,
nods, lifts his trolley by its decaying rubber
handgrips.
"Gotta work together, y'know, " Stanley booms,
his face alight with cheerfulness, "the police can't do
everything!"
The gentlemen I met in my stroll in downtown
Phoenix are the only computer illiterates in this
book. To regard them as irrelevant, however, would
be a grave mistake.
As computerization spreads across society, the
populace at large is subjected to wave after wave of
future shock. But, as a necessary converse, the
"computer community" itself is subjected to wave
after wave of incoming computer illiterates. How
will those currently enjoying America's digital
bounty regard, and treat, all this teeming refuse
yearning to breathe free? Will the electronic
frontier be another Land of Opportunity -- or an
armed and monitored enclave, where the
disenfranchised snuggle on their cardboard at the
locked doors of our houses of justice?
Some people just don't get along with
computers. They can't read. They can't type. They
just don't have it in their heads to master arcane
instructions in wirebound manuals. Somewhere,
the process of computerization of the populace will
reach a limit. Some people -- quite decent people
maybe, who might have thrived in any other
situation -- will be left irretrievably outside the
bounds. What's to be done with these people, in
the bright new shiny electroworld? How will they be
regarded, by the mouse-whizzing masters of
cyberspace? With contempt? Indifference? Fear?
In retrospect, it astonishes me to realize how
quickly poor Stanley became a perceived threat.
Surprise and fear are closely allied feelings. And the
world of computing is full of surprises.
I met one character in the streets of Phoenix
whose role in those book is supremely and directly
relevant. That personage was Stanley's giant
thieving scarred phantom. This phantasm is
everywhere in this book. He is the specter haunting
cyberspace.
Sometimes he's a maniac vandal ready to
smash the phone system for no sane reason at all.
Sometimes he's a fascist fed, coldly programming
his mighty mainframes to destroy our Bill of Rights.
Sometimes he's a telco bureaucrat, covertly
conspiring to register all modems in the service of
an Orwellian surveillance regime. Mostly, though,
this fearsome phantom is a "hacker." He's strange,
he doesn't belong, he's not authorized, he doesn't
smell right, he's not keeping his proper place, he's
not one of us. The focus of fear is the hacker, for
much the same reasons that Stanley's fancied
assailant is black.
Stanley's demon can't go away, because he
doesn't exist. Despite singleminded and
tremendous effort, he can't be arrested, sued, jailed,
or fired. The only constructive way to do *anything*
about him is to learn more about Stanley himself.
This learning process may be repellent, it may be
ugly, it may involve grave elements of paranoiac
confusion, but it's necessary. Knowing Stanley
requires something more than class-crossing
condescension. It requires more than steely legal
objectivity. It requires human compassion and
sympathy.
To know Stanley is to know his demon. If you
know the other guy's demon, then maybe you'll
come to know some of your own. You'll be able to
separate reality from illusion. And then you won't
do your cause, and yourself, more harm than good.
Like poor damned Stanley from Chicago did.
#
The Federal Computer Investigations
Committee (FCIC) is the most important and
influential organization in the realm of American
computer-crime. Since the police of other countries
have largely taken their computer-crime cues from
American methods, the FCIC might well be called
the most important computer crime group in the
world.
It is also, by federal standards, an organization
of great unorthodoxy. State and local investigators
mix with federal agents. Lawyers, financial auditors
and computer-security programmers trade notes
with street cops. Industry vendors and telco security
people show up to explain their gadgetry and plead
for protection and justice. Private investigators,
think-tank experts and industry pundits throw in
their two cents' worth. The FCIC is the antithesis of
a formal bureaucracy.
Members of the FCIC are obscurely proud of
this fact; they recognize their group as aberrant, but
are entirely convinced that this, for them, outright
*weird* behavior is nevertheless *absolutely
necessary* to get their jobs done.
FCIC regulars -- from the Secret Service, the
FBI, the IRS, the Department of Labor, the offices of
federal attorneys, state police, the Air Force, from
military intelligence -- often attend meetings, held
hither and thither across the country, at their own
expense. The FCIC doesn't get grants. It doesn't
charge membership fees. It doesn't have a boss. It
has no headquarters -- just a mail drop in
Washington DC, at the Fraud Division of the Secret
Service. It doesn't have a budget. It doesn't have
schedules. It meets three times a year -- sort of.
Sometimes it issues publications, but the FCIC has
no regular publisher, no treasurer, not even a
secretary. There are no minutes of FCIC meetings.
Non-federal people are considered "non-voting
members," but there's not much in the way of
elections. There are no badges, lapel pins or
certificates of membership. Everyone is on a first-
name basis. There are about forty of them. Nobody
knows how many, exactly. People come, people go --
sometimes people "go" formally but still hang
around anyway. Nobody has ever exactly figured
out what "membership" of this "Committee"
actually entails.
Strange as this may seem to some, to anyone
familiar with the social world of computing, the
"organization" of the FCIC is very recognizable.
For years now, economists and management
theorists have speculated that the tidal wave of the
information revolution would destroy rigid,
pyramidal bureaucracies, where everything is top-
down and centrally controlled. Highly trained
"employees" would take on much greater autonomy,
being self-starting, and self-motivating, moving
from place to place, task to task, with great speed
and fluidity. "Ad-hocracy" would rule, with groups of
people spontaneously knitting together across
organizational lines, tackling the problem at hand,
applying intense computer-aided expertise to it, and
then vanishing whence they came.
This is more or less what has actually happened
in the world of federal computer investigation. With
the conspicuous exception of the phone companies,
which are after all over a hundred years old,
practically *every* organization that plays any
important role in this book functions just like the
FCIC. The Chicago Task Force, the Arizona
Racketeering Unit, the Legion of Doom, the Phrack
crowd, the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- they
*all* look and act like "tiger teams" or "user's
groups." They are all electronic ad-hocracies
leaping up spontaneously to attempt to meet a
need.
Some are police. Some are, by strict definition,
criminals. Some are political interest-groups. But
every single group has that same quality of apparent
spontaneity -- "Hey, gang! My uncle's got a barn --
let's put on a show!"
Every one of these groups is embarrassed by
computer crime -- not yet, anyway -- but in
protecting the President. The real glamour of Secret
Service work is in the White House Detail. If you're
at the President's side, then the kids and the wife see
you on television; you rub shoulders with the most
powerful people in the world. That's the real heart
of Service work, the number one priority. More than
one computer investigation has stopped dead in the
water when Service agents vanished at the
President's need.
There's romance in the work of the Service. The
intimate access to circles of great power; the esprit-
de-corps of a highly trained and disciplined elite; the
high responsibility of defending the Chief Executive;
the fulfillment of a patriotic duty. And as police
work goes, the pay's not bad. But there's squalor in
Service work, too. You may get spat upon by
protesters howling abuse -- and if they get violent, if
they get too close, sometimes you have to knock one
of them down -- discreetly.
The real squalor in Service work is drudgery
such as "the quarterlies," traipsing out four times a
year, year in, year out, to interview the various
pathetic wretches, many of them in prisons and
asylums, who have seen fit to threaten the
President's life. And then there's the grinding stress
of searching all those faces in the endless bustling
crowds, looking for hatred, looking for psychosis,
looking for the tight, nervous face of an Arthur
Bremer, a Squeaky Fromme, a Lee Harvey Oswald.
It's watching all those grasping, waving hands for
sudden movements, while your ears strain at your
radio headphone for the long-rehearsed cry of
"Gun!"
It's poring, in grinding detail, over the
biographies of every rotten loser who ever shot at a
President. It's the unsung work of the Protective
Research Section, who study scrawled, anonymous
death threats with all the meticulous tools of anti-
forgery techniques.
And it's maintaining the hefty computerized
files on anyone who ever threatened the President's
life. Civil libertarians have become increasingly
concerned at the Government's use of computer
files to track American citizens -- but the Secret
Service file of potential Presidential assassins, which
has upward of twenty thousand names, rarely
causes a peep of protest. If you *ever* state that you
intend to kill the President, the Secret Service will
want to know and record who you are, where you are,
what you are, and what you're up to. If you're a
serious threat -- if you're officially considered "of
protective interest" -- then the Secret Service may
well keep tabs on you for the rest of your natural life.
Protecting the President has first call on all the
Service's resources. But there's a lot more to the
Service's traditions and history than standing guard
outside the Oval Office.
The Secret Service is the nation's oldest general
federal law-enforcement agency. Compared to the
Secret Service, the FBI are new-hires and the CIA
are temps. The Secret Service was founded 'way
back in 1865, at the suggestion of Hugh McCulloch,
Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury.
McCulloch wanted a specialized Treasury police to
combat counterfeiting. Abraham Lincoln agreed
that this seemed a good idea, and, with a terrible
irony, Abraham Lincoln was shot that very night by
John Wilkes Booth.
The Secret Service originally had nothing to do
with protecting Presidents. They didn't take this on
as a regular assignment until after the Garfield
assassination in 1881. And they didn't get any
Congressional money for it until President McKinley
was shot in 1901. The Service was originally
designed for one purpose: destroying counterfeiters.
#
There are interesting parallels between the
Service's nineteenth-century entry into
counterfeiting, and America's twentieth-century
entry into computer-crime.
In 1865, America's paper currency was a terrible
muddle. Security was drastically bad. Currency was
printed on the spot by local banks in literally
hundreds of different designs. No one really knew
what the heck a dollar bill was supposed to look like.
Bogus bills passed easily. If some joker told you that
a one-dollar bill from the Railroad Bank of Lowell,
Massachusetts had a woman leaning on a shield,
with a locomotive, a cornucopia, a compass, various
agricultural implements, a railroad bridge, and
some factories, then you pretty much had to take his
word for it. (And in fact he was telling the truth!)
*Sixteen hundred* local American banks
designed and printed their own paper currency, and
there were no general standards for security. Like a
badly guarded node in a computer network, badly
designed bills were easy to fake, and posed a
security hazard for the entire monetary system.
No one knew the exact extent of the threat to
the currency. There were panicked estimates that as
much as a third of the entire national currency was
faked. Counterfeiters -- known as "boodlers" in the
underground slang of the time -- were mostly
technically skilled printers who had gone to the bad.
Many had once worked printing legitimate currency.
Boodlers operated in rings and gangs. Technical
experts engraved the bogus plates -- commonly in
basements in New York City. Smooth confidence
men passed large wads of high-quality, high-
denomination fakes, including the really
sophisticated stuff -- government bonds, stock
certificates, and railway shares. Cheaper, botched
fakes were sold or sharewared to low-level gangs of
boodler wannabes. (The really cheesy lowlife
boodlers merely upgraded real bills by altering face
values, changing ones to fives, tens to hundreds, and
so on.)
The techniques of boodling were little-known
and regarded with a certain awe by the mid-
nineteenth-century public. The ability to
manipulate the system for rip-off seemed
diabolically clever. As the skill and daring of the
boodlers increased, the situation became
intolerable. The federal government stepped in,
and began offering its own federal currency, which
was printed in fancy green ink, but only on the back -
- the original "greenbacks." And at first, the
improved security of the well-designed, well-printed
federal greenbacks seemed to solve the problem;
but then the counterfeiters caught on. Within a few
years things were worse than ever: a *centralized*
system where *all* security was bad!
The local police were helpless. The
Government tried offering blood money to potential
informants, but this met with little success. Banks,
plagued by boodling, gave up hope of police help
and hired private security men instead. Merchants
and bankers queued up by the thousands to buy
privately-printed manuals on currency security, slim
little books like Laban Heath's *Infallible
Government Counterfeit Detector.* The back of the
book offered Laban Heath's patent microscope for
five bucks.
Then the Secret Service entered the picture.
The first agents were a rough and ready crew. Their
chief was one William P. Wood, a former guerilla in
the Mexican War who'd won a reputation busting
contractor fraudsters for the War Department
during the Civil War. Wood, who was also Keeper
of the Capital Prison, had a sideline as a
counterfeiting expert, bagging boodlers for the
federal bounty money.
Wood was named Chief of the new Secret
Service in July 1865. There were only ten Secret
Service agents in all: Wood himself, a handful
who'd worked for him in the War Department, and a
few former private investigators -- counterfeiting
experts -- whom Wood had won over to public
service. (The Secret Service of 1865 was much the
size of the Chicago Computer Fraud Task Force or
the Arizona Racketeering Unit of 1990.) These ten
"Operatives" had an additional twenty or so
"Assistant Operatives" and "Informants." Besides
salary and per diem, each Secret Service employee
received a whopping twenty-five dollars for each
boodler he captured.
Wood himself publicly estimated that at least
*half* of America's currency was counterfeit, a
perhaps pardonable perception. Within a year the
Secret Service had arrested over 200 counterfeiters.
They busted about two hundred boodlers a year for
four years straight.
Wood attributed his success to travelling fast
and light, hitting the bad-guys hard, and avoiding
bureaucratic baggage. "Because my raids were
made without military escort and I did not ask the
assistance of state officers, I surprised the
professional counterfeiter."
Wood's social message to the once-impudent
boodlers bore an eerie ring of Sundevil: "It was also
my purpose to convince such characters that it
would no longer be healthy for them to ply their
vocation without being handled roughly, a fact they
soon discovered."
William P. Wood, the Secret Service's guerilla
pioneer, did not end well. He succumbed to the lure
of aiming for the really big score. The notorious
Brockway Gang of New York City, headed by
William E. Brockway, the "King of the
Counterfeiters," had forged a number of
government bonds. They'd passed these brilliant
fakes on the prestigious Wall Street investment firm
of Jay Cooke and Company. The Cooke firm were
frantic and offered a huge reward for the forgers'
plates.
Laboring diligently, Wood confiscated the
plates (though not Mr. Brockway) and claimed the
reward. But the Cooke company treacherously
reneged. Wood got involved in a down-and-dirty
lawsuit with the Cooke capitalists. Wood's boss,
Secretary of the Treasury McCulloch, felt that
Wood's demands for money and glory were
unseemly, and even when the reward money finally
came through, McCulloch refused to pay Wood
anything. Wood found himself mired in a
seemingly endless round of federal suits and
Congressional lobbying.
Wood never got his money. And he lost his job
to boot. He resigned in 1869.
Wood's agents suffered, too. On May 12, 1869,
the second Chief of the Secret Service took over, and
almost immediately fired most of Wood's pioneer
Secret Service agents: Operatives, Assistants and
Informants alike. The practice of receiving $25 per
crook was abolished. And the Secret Service began
the long, uncertain process of thorough
professionalization.
Wood ended badly. He must have felt stabbed
in the back. In fact his entire organization was
mangled.
On the other hand, William P. Wood *was* the
first head of the Secret Service. William Wood was
the pioneer. People still honor his name. Who
remembers the name of the *second* head of the
Secret Service?
As for William Brockway (also known as
"Colonel Spencer"), he was finally arrested by the
Secret Service in 1880. He did five years in prison,
got out, and was still boodling at the age of seventy-
four.
#
Anyone with an interest in Operation Sundevil -
- or in American computer-crime generally -- could
scarcely miss the presence of Gail Thackeray,
Assistant Attorney General of the State of Arizona.
Computer-crime training manuals often cited
Thackeray's group and her work; she was the
highest-ranking state official to specialize in
computer-related offenses. Her name had been on
the Sundevil press release (though modestly ranked
well after the local federal prosecuting attorney and
the head of the Phoenix Secret Service office).
As public commentary, and controversy, began
to mount about the Hacker Crackdown, this
Arizonan state official began to take a higher and
higher public profile. Though uttering almost
nothing specific about the Sundevil operation itself,
she coined some of the most striking soundbites of
the growing propaganda war: "Agents are operating
in good faith, and I don't think you can say that for
the hacker community," was one. Another was the
memorable "I am not a mad dog prosecutor"
(*Houston Chronicle,* Sept 2, 1990.) In the
meantime, the Secret Service maintained its usual
extreme discretion; the Chicago Unit, smarting from
the backlash of the Steve Jackson scandal, had gone
completely to earth.
As I collated my growing pile of newspaper
clippings, Gail Thackeray ranked as a comparative
fount of public knowledge on police operations.
I decided that I had to get to know Gail
Thackeray. I wrote to her at the Arizona Attorney
General's Office. Not only did she kindly reply to
me, but, to my astonishment, she knew very well
what "cyberpunk" science fiction was.
Shortly after this, Gail Thackeray lost her job.
And I temporarily misplaced my own career as a
science-fiction writer, to become a full-time
computer-crime journalist. In early March, 1991, I
flew to Phoenix, Arizona, to interview Gail Thackeray
for my book on the hacker crackdown.
#
"Credit cards didn't used to cost anything to
get," says Gail Thackeray. "Now they cost forty
bucks -- and that's all just to cover the costs from
*rip-off artists.*"
Electronic nuisance criminals are parasites.
One by one they're not much harm, no big deal. But
they never come just one by one. They come in
swarms, heaps, legions, sometimes whole
subcultures. And they bite. Every time we buy a
credit card today, we lose a little financial vitality to a
particular species of bloodsucker.
What, in her expert opinion, are the worst forms
of electronic crime, I ask, consulting my notes. Is it --
credit card fraud? Breaking into ATM bank
machines? Phone-phreaking? Computer
intrusions? Software viruses? Access-code theft?
Records tampering? Software piracy? Pornographic
bulletin boards? Satellite TV piracy? Theft of cable
service? It's a long list. By the time I reach the end
of it I feel rather depressed.
"Oh no," says Gail Thackeray, leaning forward
over the table, her whole body gone stiff with
energetic indignation, "the biggest damage is
telephone fraud. Fake sweepstakes, fake charities.
Boiler-room con operations. You could pay off the
national debt with what these guys steal.... They
target old people, they get hold of credit ratings and
demographics, they rip off the old and the weak."
The words come tumbling out of her.
It's low-tech stuff, your everyday boiler-room
fraud. Grifters, conning people out of money over
the phone, have been around for decades. This is
where the word "phony" came from!
It's just that it's so much *easier* now, horribly
facilitated by advances in technology and the
byzantine structure of the modern phone system.
The same professional fraudsters do it over and
over, Thackeray tells me, they hide behind dense
onion-shells of fake companies.... fake holding
corporations nine or ten layers deep, registered all
over the map. They get a phone installed under a
false name in an empty safe-house. And then they
call-forward everything out of that phone to yet
another phone, a phone that may even be in
another *state.* And they don't even pay the
charges on their phones; after a month or so, they
just split. Set up somewhere else in another
Podunkville with the same seedy crew of veteran
phone-crooks. They buy or steal commercial credit
card reports, slap them on the PC, have a program
pick out people over sixty-five who pay a lot to
charities. A whole subculture living off this,
merciless folks on the con.
"The 'light-bulbs for the blind' people,"
Thackeray muses, with a special loathing. "There's
just no end to them."
We're sitting in a downtown diner in Phoenix,
Arizona. It's a tough town, Phoenix. A state capital
seeing some hard times. Even to a Texan like
myself, Arizona state politics seem rather baroque.
There was, and remains, endless trouble over the
Martin Luther King holiday, the sort of stiff-necked,
foot-shooting incident for which Arizona politics
seem famous. There was Evan Mecham, the
eccentric Republican millionaire governor who was
impeached, after reducing state government to a
ludicrous shambles. Then there was the national
Keating scandal, involving Arizona savings and
loans, in which both of Arizona's U.S. senators,
DeConcini and McCain, played sadly prominent
roles.
And the very latest is the bizarre AzScam case,
in which state legislators were videotaped, eagerly
taking cash from an informant of the Phoenix city
police department, who was posing as a Vegas
mobster.
"Oh," says Thackeray cheerfully. "These people
are amateurs here, they thought they were finally
getting to play with the big boys. They don't have the
least idea how to take a bribe! It's not institutional
corruption. It's not like back in Philly."
Gail Thackeray was a former prosecutor in
Philadelphia. Now she's a former assistant attorney
general of the State of Arizona. Since moving to
Arizona in 1986, she had worked under the aegis of
Steve Twist, her boss in the Attorney General's
office. Steve Twist wrote Arizona's pioneering
computer crime laws and naturally took an interest
in seeing them enforced. It was a snug niche, and
Thackeray's Organized Crime and Racketeering
Unit won a national reputation for ambition and
technical knowledgeability.... Until the latest
election in Arizona. Thackeray's boss ran for the top
job, and lost. The victor, the new Attorney General,
apparently went to some pains to eliminate the
bureaucratic traces of his rival, including his pet
group -- Thackeray's group. Twelve people got their
walking papers.
Now Thackeray's painstakingly assembled
computer lab sits gathering dust somewhere in the
glass-and-concrete Attorney General's HQ on 1275
Washington Street. Her computer-crime books, her
painstakingly garnered back issues of phreak and
hacker zines, all bought at her own expense -- are
piled in boxes somewhere. The State of Arizona is
simply not particularly interested in electronic
racketeering at the moment.
At the moment of our interview, Gail Thackeray,
officially unemployed, is working out of the county
sheriff's office, living on her savings, and prosecuting
several cases -- working 60-hour weeks, just as always
-- for no pay at all. "I'm trying to train people," she
mutters.
Half her life seems to be spent training people -
- merely pointing out, to the naive and incredulous
(such as myself) that this stuff is *actually going on
out there.* It's a small world, computer crime. A
young world. Gail Thackeray, a trim blonde Baby-
Boomer who favors Grand Canyon white-water
rafting to kill some slow time, is one of the world's
most senior, most veteran "hacker-trackers." Her
mentor was Donn Parker, the California think-tank
theorist who got it all started 'way back in the mid-
70s, the "grandfather of the field," "the great bald
eagle of computer crime."
And what she has learned, Gail Thackeray
teaches. Endlessly. Tirelessly. To anybody. To
Secret Service agents and state police, at the Glynco,
Georgia federal training center. To local police, on
"roadshows" with her slide projector and notebook.
To corporate security personnel. To journalists. To
parents.
Even *crooks* look to Gail Thackeray for advice.
Phone-phreaks call her at the office. They know very
well who she is. They pump her for information on
what the cops are up to, how much they know.
Sometimes whole *crowds* of phone phreaks,
hanging out on illegal conference calls, will call Gail
Thackeray up. They taunt her. And, as always, they
boast. Phone-phreaks, real stone phone-phreaks,
simply *cannot shut up.* They natter on for hours.
Left to themselves, they mostly talk about the
intricacies of ripping-off phones; it's about as
interesting as listening to hot-rodders talk about
suspension and distributor-caps. They also gossip
cruelly about each other. And when talking to Gail
Thackeray, they incriminate themselves. "I have
tapes," Thackeray says coolly.
Phone phreaks just talk like crazy. "Dial-Tone"
out in Alabama has been known to spend half-an-
hour simply reading stolen phone-codes aloud into
voice-mail answering machines. Hundreds,
thousands of numbers, recited in a monotone,
without a break -- an eerie phenomenon. When
arrested, it's a rare phone phreak who doesn't
inform at endless length on everybody he knows.
Hackers are no better. What other group of
criminals, she asks rhetorically, publishes
newsletters and holds conventions? She seems
deeply nettled by the sheer brazenness of this
behavior, though to an outsider, this activity might
make one wonder whether hackers should be
considered "criminals" at all. Skateboarders have
magazines, and they trespass a lot. Hot rod people
have magazines and they break speed limits and
sometimes kill people....
I ask her whether it would be any loss to society
if phone phreaking and computer hacking, as
hobbies, simply dried up and blew away, so that
nobody ever did it again.
She seems surprised. "No," she says swiftly.
"Maybe a little... in the old days... the MIT stuff... But
there's a lot of wonderful, legal stuff you can do with
computers now, you don't have to break into
somebody else's just to learn. You don't have that
excuse. You can learn all you like."
Did you ever hack into a system? I ask.
The trainees do it at Glynco. Just to
demonstrate system vulnerabilities. She's cool to
the notion. Genuinely indifferent.
"What kind of computer do you have?"
"A Compaq 286LE," she mutters.
"What kind do you *wish* you had?"
At this question, the unmistakable light of true
hackerdom flares in Gail Thackeray's eyes. She
becomes tense, animated, the words pour out: "An
Amiga 2000 with an IBM card and Mac emulation!
The most common hacker machines are Amigas
and Commodores. And Apples." If she had the
Amiga, she enthuses, she could run a whole galaxy
of seized computer-evidence disks on one
convenient multifunctional machine. A cheap one,
too. Not like the old Attorney General lab, where
they had an ancient CP/M machine, assorted
Amiga flavors and Apple flavors, a couple IBMS, all
the utility software... but no Commodores. The
workstations down at the Attorney General's are
Wang dedicated word-processors. Lame machines
tied in to an office net -- though at least they get on-
line to the Lexis and Westlaw legal data services.
I don't say anything. I recognize the syndrome,
though. This computer-fever has been running
through segments of our society for years now. It's a
strange kind of lust: K-hunger, Meg-hunger; but it's
a shared disease; it can kill parties dead, as
conversation spirals into the deepest and most
deviant recesses of software releases and expensive
peripherals.... The mark of the hacker beast. I have
it too. The whole "electronic community," whatever
the hell that is, has it. Gail Thackeray has it. Gail
Thackeray is a hacker cop. My immediate reaction
is a strong rush of indignant pity: *why doesn't
somebody buy this woman her Amiga?!* It's not
like she's asking for a Cray X-MP supercomputer
mainframe; an Amiga's a sweet little cookie-box
thing. We're losing zillions in organized fraud;
prosecuting and defending a single hacker case in
court can cost a hundred grand easy. How come
nobody can come up with four lousy grand so this
woman can do her job? For a hundred grand we
could buy every computer cop in America an Amiga.
There aren't that many of 'em.
Computers. The lust, the hunger, for
computers. The loyalty they inspire, the intense
sense of possessiveness. The culture they have
bred. I myself am sitting in downtown Phoenix,
Arizona because it suddenly occurred to me that the
police might -- just *might* -- come and take away
my computer. The prospect of this, the mere
*implied threat,* was unbearable. It literally
changed my life. It was changing the lives of many
others. Eventually it would change everybody's life.
Gail Thackeray was one of the top computer-
crime people in America. And I was just some
novelist, and yet I had a better computer than hers.
*Practically everybody I knew* had a better
computer than Gail Thackeray and her feeble
laptop 286. It was like sending the sheriff in to clean
up Dodge City and arming her with a slingshot cut
from an old rubber tire.
But then again, you don't need a howitzer to
enforce the law. You can do a lot just with a badge.
With a badge alone, you can basically wreak havoc,
take a terrible vengeance on wrongdoers. Ninety
percent of "computer crime investigation" is just
"crime investigation:" names, places, dossiers,
modus operandi, search warrants, victims,
complainants, informants...
What will computer crime look like in ten
years? Will it get better? Did "Sundevil" send 'em
reeling back in confusion?
It'll be like it is now, only worse, she tells me
with perfect conviction. Still there in the
background, ticking along, changing with the times:
the criminal underworld. It'll be like drugs are. Like
our problems with alcohol. All the cops and laws in
the world never solved our problems with alcohol. If
there's something people want, a certain percentage
of them are just going to take it. Fifteen percent of
the populace will never steal. Fifteen percent will
steal most anything not nailed down. The battle is
for the hearts and minds of the remaining seventy
percent.
And criminals catch on fast. If there's not "too
steep a learning curve" -- if it doesn't require a
baffling amount of expertise and practice -- then
criminals are often some of the first through the gate
of a new technology. Especially if it helps them to
hide. They have tons of cash, criminals. The new
communications tech -- like pagers, cellular phones,
faxes, Federal Express -- were pioneered by rich
corporate people, and by criminals. In the early
years of pagers and beepers, dope dealers were so
enthralled this technology that owing a beeper was
practically prima facie evidence of cocaine dealing.
CB radio exploded when the speed limit hit 55 and
breaking the highway law became a national
pastime. Dope dealers send cash by Federal
Express, despite, or perhaps *because of,* the
warnings in FedEx offices that tell you never to try
this. Fed Ex uses X-rays and dogs on their mail, to
stop drug shipments. That doesn't work very well.
Drug dealers went wild over cellular phones.
There are simple methods of faking ID on cellular
phones, making the location of the call mobile, free
of charge, and effectively untraceable. Now
victimized cellular companies routinely bring in vast
toll-lists of calls to Colombia and Pakistan.
Judge Greene's fragmentation of the phone
company is driving law enforcement nuts. Four
thousand telecommunications companies. Fraud
skyrocketing. Every temptation in the world
available with a phone and a credit card number.
Criminals untraceable. A galaxy of "new neat rotten
things to do."
If there were one thing Thackeray would like to
have, it would be an effective legal end-run through
this new fragmentation minefield.
It would be a new form of electronic search
warrant, an "electronic letter of marque" to be issued
by a judge. It would create a new category of
"electronic emergency." Like a wiretap, its use
would be rare, but it would cut across state lines and
force swift cooperation from all concerned. Cellular,
phone, laser, computer network, PBXes, AT&T, Baby
Bells, long-distance entrepreneurs, packet radio.
Some document, some mighty court-order, that
could slice through four thousand separate forms of
corporate red-tape, and get her at once to the source
of calls, the source of email threats and viruses, the
sources of bomb threats, kidnapping threats. "From
now on," she says, "the Lindberg baby will always
die."
Something that would make the Net sit still, if
only for a moment. Something that would get her up
to speed. Seven league boots. That's what she really
needs. "Those guys move in nanoseconds and I'm
on the Pony Express."
And then, too, there's the coming international
angle. Electronic crime has never been easy to
localize, to tie to a physical jurisdiction. And phone-
phreaks and hackers loathe boundaries, they jump
them whenever they can. The English. The Dutch.
And the Germans, especially the ubiquitous Chaos
Computer Club. The Australians. They've all
learned phone-phreaking from America. It's a
growth mischief industry. The multinational
networks are global, but governments and the police
simply aren't. Neither are the laws. Or the legal
frameworks for citizen protection.
One language is global, though -- English.
Phone phreaks speak English; it's their native
tongue even if they're Germans. English may have
started in England but now it's the Net language; it
might as well be called "CNNese."
Asians just aren't much into phone phreaking.
They're the world masters at organized software
piracy. The French aren't into phone-phreaking
either. The French are into computerized industrial
espionage.
In the old days of the MIT righteous
hackerdom, crashing systems didn't hurt anybody.
Not all that much, anyway. Not permanently. Now
the players are more venal. Now the consequences
are worse. Hacking will begin killing people soon.
Already there are methods of stacking calls onto 911
systems, annoying the police, and possibly causing
the death of some poor soul calling in with a genuine
emergency. Hackers in Amtrak computers, or air-
traffic control computers, will kill somebody
someday. Maybe a lot of people. Gail Thackeray
expects it.
And the viruses are getting nastier. The "Scud"
virus is the latest one out. It wipes hard-disks.
According to Thackeray, the idea that phone-
phreaks are Robin Hoods is a fraud. They don't
deserve this repute. Basically, they pick on the
weak. AT&T now protects itself with the fearsome
ANI (Automatic Number Identification) trace
capability. When AT&T wised up and tightened
security generally, the phreaks drifted into the Baby
Bells. The Baby Bells lashed out in 1989 and 1990, so
the phreaks switched to smaller long-distance
entrepreneurs. Today, they are moving into locally
owned PBXes and voice-mail systems, which are full
of security holes, dreadfully easy to hack. These
victims aren't the moneybags Sheriff of Nottingham
or Bad King John, but small groups of innocent
people who find it hard to protect themselves, and
who really suffer from these depredations. Phone
phreaks pick on the weak. They do it for power. If it
were legal, they wouldn't do it. They don't want
service, or knowledge, they want the thrill of power-
tripping. There's plenty of knowledge or service
around, if you're willing to pay. Phone phreaks don't
pay, they steal. It's because it is illegal that it feels
like power, that it gratifies their vanity.
I leave Gail Thackeray with a handshake at the
door of her office building -- a vast International-
Style office building downtown. The Sheriff's office is
renting part of it. I get the vague impression that
quite a lot of the building is empty -- real estate
crash.
In a Phoenix sports apparel store, in a downtown
mall, I meet the "Sun Devil" himself. He is the
cartoon mascot of Arizona State University, whose
football stadium, "Sundevil," is near the local Secret
Service HQ -- hence the name Operation Sundevil.
The Sun Devil himself is named "Sparky." Sparky
the Sun Devil is maroon and bright yellow, the
school colors. Sparky brandishes a three-tined
yellow pitchfork. He has a small mustache, pointed
ears, a barbed tail, and is dashing forward jabbing
the air with the pitchfork, with an expression of
devilish glee.
Phoenix was the home of Operation Sundevil.
The Legion of Doom ran a hacker bulletin board
called "The Phoenix Project." An Australian hacker
named "Phoenix" once burrowed through the
Internet to attack Cliff Stoll, then bragged and
boasted about it to *The New York Times.* This net
of coincidence is both odd and meaningless.
The headquarters of the Arizona Attorney
General, Gail Thackeray's former workplace, is on
1275 Washington Avenue. Many of the downtown
streets in Phoenix are named after prominent
American presidents: Washington, Jefferson,
Madison....
After dark, all the employees go home to their
suburbs. Washington, Jefferson and Madison --
what would be the Phoenix inner city, if there were
an inner city in this sprawling automobile-bred town
-- become the haunts of transients and derelicts.
The homeless. The sidewalks along Washington are
lined with orange trees. Ripe fallen fruit lies
scattered like croquet balls on the sidewalks and
gutters. No one seems to be eating them. I try a
fresh one. It tastes unbearably bitter.
The Attorney General's office, built in 1981
during the Babbitt administration, is a long low two-
story building of white cement and wall-sized sheets
of curtain-glass. Behind each glass wall is a lawyer's
office, quite open and visible to anyone strolling by.
Across the street is a dour government building
labelled simply ECONOMIC SECURITY, something
that has not been in great supply in the American
Southwest lately.
The offices are about twelve feet square. They
feature tall wooden cases full of red-spined
lawbooks; Wang computer monitors; telephones;
Post-it notes galore. Also framed law diplomas and a
general excess of bad Western landscape art. Ansel
Adams photos are a big favorite, perhaps to
compensate for the dismal specter of the parking-
lot, two acres of striped black asphalt, which features
gravel landscaping and some sickly-looking barrel
cacti.
It has grown dark. Gail Thackeray has told me
that the people who work late here, are afraid of
muggings in the parking lot. It seems cruelly ironic
that a woman tracing electronic racketeers across
the interstate labyrinth of Cyberspace should fear
an assault by a homeless derelict in the parking lot
of her own workplace.
Perhaps this is less than coincidence. Perhaps
these two seemingly disparate worlds are somehow
generating one another. The poor and
disenfranchised take to the streets, while the rich
and computer-equipped, safe in their bedrooms,
chatter over their modems. Quite often the derelicts
kick the glass out and break in to the lawyers' offices,
if they see something they need or want badly
enough.
I cross the parking lot to the street behind the
Attorney General's office. A pair of young tramps
are bedding down on flattened sheets of cardboard,
under an alcove stretching over the sidewalk. One
tramp wears a glitter-covered T-shirt reading
"CALIFORNIA" in Coca-Cola cursive. His nose and
cheeks look chafed and swollen; they glisten with
what seems to be Vaseline. The other tramp has a
ragged long-sleeved shirt and lank brown hair
parted in the middle. They both wear blue jeans
coated in grime. They are both drunk.
"You guys crash here a lot?" I ask them.
They look at me warily. I am wearing black
jeans, a black pinstriped suit jacket and a black silk
tie. I have odd shoes and a funny haircut.
"It's our first time here," says the red-nosed
tramp unconvincingly. There is a lot of cardboard
stacked here. More than any two people could use.
"We usually stay at the Vinnie's down the
street," says the brown-haired tramp, puffing a
Marlboro with a meditative air, as he sprawls with his
head on a blue nylon backpack. "The Saint
Vincent's."
"You know who works in that building over
there?" I ask, pointing.
The brown-haired tramp shrugs. "Some kind of
attorneys, it says."
` We urge one another to take it easy. I give
them five bucks.
A block down the street I meet a vigorous
workman who is wheeling along some kind of
industrial trolley; it has what appears to be a tank of
propane on it.
We make eye contact. We nod politely. I walk
past him. "Hey! Excuse me sir!" he says.
"Yes?" I say, stopping and turning.
"Have you seen," the guy says rapidly, "a black
guy, about 6'7", scars on both his cheeks like this --"
he gestures -- "wears a black baseball cap on
backwards, wandering around here anyplace?"
"Sounds like I don't much *want* to meet him," I
say.
"He took my wallet," says my new acquaintance.
"Took it this morning. Y'know, some people would
be *scared* of a guy like that. But I'm not scared.
I'm from Chicago. I'm gonna hunt him down. We
do things like that in Chicago."
"Yeah?"
"I went to the cops and now he's got an APB out
on his ass," he says with satisfaction. "You run into
him, you let me know."
"Okay," I say. "What is your name, sir?"
"Stanley...."
"And how can I reach you?"
"Oh," Stanley says, in the same rapid voice, "you
don't have to reach, uh, me. You can just call the
cops. Go straight to the cops." He reaches into a
pocket and pulls out a greasy piece of pasteboard.
"See, here's my report on him."
I look. The "report," the size of an index card, is
labelled PRO-ACT: Phoenix Residents Opposing
Active Crime Threat.... or is it Organized Against
Crime Threat? In the darkening street it's hard to
read. Some kind of vigilante group? Neighborhood
watch? I feel very puzzled.
"Are you a police officer, sir?"
He smiles, seems very pleased by the question.
"No," he says.
` "But you are a 'Phoenix Resident?'"
"Would you believe a homeless person,"
Stanley says.
"Really? But what's with the..." For the first
time I take a close look at Stanley's trolley. It's a
rubber-wheeled thing of industrial metal, but the
device I had mistaken for a tank of propane is in fact
a water-cooler. Stanley also has an Army duffel-bag,
stuffed tight as a sausage with clothing or perhaps a
tent, and, at the base of his trolley, a cardboard box
and a battered leather briefcase.
"I see," I say, quite at a loss. For the first time I
notice that Stanley has a wallet. He has not lost his
wallet at all. It is in his back pocket and chained to
his belt. It's not a new wallet. It seems to have seen
a lot of wear.
"Well, you know how it is, brother," says Stanley.
Now that I know that he is homeless -- *a possible
threat* -- my entire perception of him has changed
in an instant. His speech, which once seemed just
bright and enthusiastic, now seems to have a
dangerous tang of mania. "I have to do this!" he
assures me. "Track this guy down... It's a thing I do...
you know... to keep myself together!" He smiles,
nods, lifts his trolley by its decaying rubber
handgrips.
"Gotta work together, y'know, " Stanley booms,
his face alight with cheerfulness, "the police can't do
everything!"
The gentlemen I met in my stroll in downtown
Phoenix are the only computer illiterates in this
book. To regard them as irrelevant, however, would
be a grave mistake.
As computerization spreads across society, the
populace at large is subjected to wave after wave of
future shock. But, as a necessary converse, the
"computer community" itself is subjected to wave
after wave of incoming computer illiterates. How
will those currently enjoying America's digital
bounty regard, and treat, all this teeming refuse
yearning to breathe free? Will the electronic
frontier be another Land of Opportunity -- or an
armed and monitored enclave, where the
disenfranchised snuggle on their cardboard at the
locked doors of our houses of justice?
Some people just don't get along with
computers. They can't read. They can't type. They
just don't have it in their heads to master arcane
instructions in wirebound manuals. Somewhere,
the process of computerization of the populace will
reach a limit. Some people -- quite decent people
maybe, who might have thrived in any other
situation -- will be left irretrievably outside the
bounds. What's to be done with these people, in
the bright new shiny electroworld? How will they be
regarded, by the mouse-whizzing masters of
cyberspace? With contempt? Indifference? Fear?
In retrospect, it astonishes me to realize how
quickly poor Stanley became a perceived threat.
Surprise and fear are closely allied feelings. And the
world of computing is full of surprises.
I met one character in the streets of Phoenix
whose role in those book is supremely and directly
relevant. That personage was Stanley's giant
thieving scarred phantom. This phantasm is
everywhere in this book. He is the specter haunting
cyberspace.
Sometimes he's a maniac vandal ready to
smash the phone system for no sane reason at all.
Sometimes he's a fascist fed, coldly programming
his mighty mainframes to destroy our Bill of Rights.
Sometimes he's a telco bureaucrat, covertly
conspiring to register all modems in the service of
an Orwellian surveillance regime. Mostly, though,
this fearsome phantom is a "hacker." He's strange,
he doesn't belong, he's not authorized, he doesn't
smell right, he's not keeping his proper place, he's
not one of us. The focus of fear is the hacker, for
much the same reasons that Stanley's fancied
assailant is black.
Stanley's demon can't go away, because he
doesn't exist. Despite singleminded and
tremendous effort, he can't be arrested, sued, jailed,
or fired. The only constructive way to do *anything*
about him is to learn more about Stanley himself.
This learning process may be repellent, it may be
ugly, it may involve grave elements of paranoiac
confusion, but it's necessary. Knowing Stanley
requires something more than class-crossing
condescension. It requires more than steely legal
objectivity. It requires human compassion and
sympathy.
To know Stanley is to know his demon. If you
know the other guy's demon, then maybe you'll
come to know some of your own. You'll be able to
separate reality from illusion. And then you won't
do your cause, and yourself, more harm than good.
Like poor damned Stanley from Chicago did.
#
The Federal Computer Investigations
Committee (FCIC) is the most important and
influential organization in the realm of American
computer-crime. Since the police of other countries
have largely taken their computer-crime cues from
American methods, the FCIC might well be called
the most important computer crime group in the
world.
It is also, by federal standards, an organization
of great unorthodoxy. State and local investigators
mix with federal agents. Lawyers, financial auditors
and computer-security programmers trade notes
with street cops. Industry vendors and telco security
people show up to explain their gadgetry and plead
for protection and justice. Private investigators,
think-tank experts and industry pundits throw in
their two cents' worth. The FCIC is the antithesis of
a formal bureaucracy.
Members of the FCIC are obscurely proud of
this fact; they recognize their group as aberrant, but
are entirely convinced that this, for them, outright
*weird* behavior is nevertheless *absolutely
necessary* to get their jobs done.
FCIC regulars -- from the Secret Service, the
FBI, the IRS, the Department of Labor, the offices of
federal attorneys, state police, the Air Force, from
military intelligence -- often attend meetings, held
hither and thither across the country, at their own
expense. The FCIC doesn't get grants. It doesn't
charge membership fees. It doesn't have a boss. It
has no headquarters -- just a mail drop in
Washington DC, at the Fraud Division of the Secret
Service. It doesn't have a budget. It doesn't have
schedules. It meets three times a year -- sort of.
Sometimes it issues publications, but the FCIC has
no regular publisher, no treasurer, not even a
secretary. There are no minutes of FCIC meetings.
Non-federal people are considered "non-voting
members," but there's not much in the way of
elections. There are no badges, lapel pins or
certificates of membership. Everyone is on a first-
name basis. There are about forty of them. Nobody
knows how many, exactly. People come, people go --
sometimes people "go" formally but still hang
around anyway. Nobody has ever exactly figured
out what "membership" of this "Committee"
actually entails.
Strange as this may seem to some, to anyone
familiar with the social world of computing, the
"organization" of the FCIC is very recognizable.
For years now, economists and management
theorists have speculated that the tidal wave of the
information revolution would destroy rigid,
pyramidal bureaucracies, where everything is top-
down and centrally controlled. Highly trained
"employees" would take on much greater autonomy,
being self-starting, and self-motivating, moving
from place to place, task to task, with great speed
and fluidity. "Ad-hocracy" would rule, with groups of
people spontaneously knitting together across
organizational lines, tackling the problem at hand,
applying intense computer-aided expertise to it, and
then vanishing whence they came.
This is more or less what has actually happened
in the world of federal computer investigation. With
the conspicuous exception of the phone companies,
which are after all over a hundred years old,
practically *every* organization that plays any
important role in this book functions just like the
FCIC. The Chicago Task Force, the Arizona
Racketeering Unit, the Legion of Doom, the Phrack
crowd, the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- they
*all* look and act like "tiger teams" or "user's
groups." They are all electronic ad-hocracies
leaping up spontaneously to attempt to meet a
need.
Some are police. Some are, by strict definition,
criminals. Some are political interest-groups. But
every single group has that same quality of apparent
spontaneity -- "Hey, gang! My uncle's got a barn --
let's put on a show!"
Every one of these groups is embarrassed by