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bruces@well.sf.ca.us
Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use
THE HACKER CRACKDOWN
Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier y Bruce Sterling
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Preface to the Electronic Release of *The Hacker Crackdown*
Chronology of the Hacker Crackdown
Introduction
Part 1: CRASHING THE SYSTEM
A Brief History of Telephony / Bell's Golden Vaporware /
Universal Service / Wild Boys and Wire Women / The
Electronic Communities / The Ungentle Giant / The
Breakup / In Defense of the System / The Crash Post-
Mortem / Landslides in Cyberspace
Part 2: THE DIGITAL UNDERGROUND
Steal This Phone / Phreaking and Hacking / The View
From Under the Floorboards / Boards: Core of the
Underground / Phile Phun / The Rake's Progress /
Strongholds of the Elite / Sting Boards / Hot Potatoes /
War on the Legion / Terminus / Phile 9-1-1 / War Games
/ Real Cyberpunk
Part 3: LAW AND ORDER
Crooked Boards / The World's Biggest Hacker Bust /
Teach Them a Lesson / The U.S. Secret Service / The
Secret Service Battles the Boodlers / A Walk Downtown /
FCIC: The Cutting-Edge Mess / Cyberspace Rangers /
FLETC: Training the Hacker-Trackers
Part 4: THE CIVIL LIBERTARIANS
NuPrometheus + FBI = Grateful Dead / Whole Earth +
Computer Revolution = WELL / Phiber Runs
Underground and Acid Spikes the Well / The Trial of
Knight Lightning / Shadowhawk Plummets to Earth /
Kyrie in the Confessional / $79,499 / A Scholar
Investigates / Computers, Freedom, and Privacy
Electronic Afterword to *The Hacker Crackdown,*
New Years' Day 1994
January 1, 1994 -- Austin, Texas
Hi, I'm Bruce Sterling, the author of this
electronic book.
Out in the traditional world of print, *The
Hacker Crackdown* is ISBN 0-553-08058-X, and is
formally catalogued by the Library of Congress as "1.
Computer crimes -- United States. 2. Telephone --
United States -- Corrupt practices. 3. Programming
(Electronic computers) -- United States -- Corrupt
practices." 'Corrupt practices,' I always get a kick out
of that description. Librarians are very ingenious
people.
The paperback is ISBN 0-553-56370-X. If you go
and buy a print version of *The Hacker Crackdown,*
an action I encourage heartily, you may notice that
in the front of the book, beneath the copyright
notice -- "Copyright (C) 1992 by Bruce Sterling" -- it
has this little block of printed legal boilerplate from
the publisher. It says, and I quote:
"No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books."
This is a pretty good disclaimer, as such
disclaimers go. I collect intellectual-property
disclaimers, and I've seen dozens of them, and this
one is at least pretty straightforward. In this narrow
and particular case, however, it isn't quite accurate.
Bantam Books puts that disclaimer on every book
they publish, but Bantam Books does not, in fact,
own the electronic rights to this book. I do, because
of certain extensive contract maneuverings my
agent and I went through before this book was
written. I want to give those electronic publishing
rights away through certain not-for-profit channels,
and I've convinced Bantam that this is a good idea.
Since Bantam has seen fit to peacably agree to
this scheme of mine, Bantam Books is not going to
fuss about this. Provided you don't try to sell the
book, they are not going to bother you for what you
do with the electronic copy of this book. If you want
to check this out personally, you can ask them;
they're at 1540 Broadway NY NY 10036. However, if
you were so foolish as to print this book and start
retailing it for money in violation of my copyright
and the commercial interests of Bantam Books,
then Bantam, a part of the gigantic Bertelsmann
multinational publishing combine, would roust
some of their heavy-duty attorneys out of
hibernation and crush you like a bug. This is only to
be expected. I didn't write this book so that you
could make money out of it. If anybody is gonna
make money out of this book, it's gonna be me and
my publisher.
My publisher deserves to make money out of
this book. Not only did the folks at Bantam Books
commission me to write the book, and pay me a
hefty sum to do so, but they bravely printed, in text,
an electronic document the reproduction of which
was once alleged to be a federal felony. Bantam
Books and their numerous attorneys were very
brave and forthright about this book. Furthermore,
my former editor at Bantam Books, Betsy Mitchell,
genuinely cared about this project, and worked hard
on it, and had a lot of wise things to say about the
manuscript. Betsy deserves genuine credit for this
book, credit that editors too rarely get.
The critics were very kind to *The Hacker
Crackdown,* and commercially the book has done
well. On the other hand, I didn't write this book in
order to squeeze every last nickel and dime out of
the mitts of impoverished sixteen-year-old
cyberpunk high-school-students. Teenagers don't
have any money -- (no, not even enough for the six-
dollar *Hacker Crackdown* paperback, with its
attractive bright-red cover and useful index). That's
a major reason why teenagers sometimes succumb
to the temptation to do things they shouldn't, such
as swiping my books out of libraries. Kids: this one
is all yours, all right? Go give the print version back.
*8-)
Well-meaning, public-spirited civil libertarians
don't have much money, either. And it seems
almost criminal to snatch cash out of the hands of
America's direly underpaid electronic law
enforcement community.
If you're a computer cop, a hacker, or an
electronic civil liberties activist, you are the target
audience for this book. I wrote this book because I
wanted to help you, and help other people
understand you and your unique, uhm, problems. I
wrote this book to aid your activities, and to
contribute to the public discussion of important
political issues. In giving the text away in this
fashion, I am directly contributing to the book's
ultimate aim: to help civilize cyberspace.
Information *wants* to be free. And the
information inside this book longs for freedom with
a peculiar intensity. I genuinely believe that the
natural habitat of this book is inside an electronic
network. That may not be the easiest direct method
to generate revenue for the book's author, but that
doesn't matter; this is where this book belongs by its
nature. I've written other books -- plenty of other
books -- and I'll write more and I am writing more,
but this one is special. I am making *The Hacker
Crackdown* available electronically as widely as I
can conveniently manage, and if you like the book,
and think it is useful, then I urge you to do the same
with it.
You can copy this electronic book. Copy the
heck out of it, be my guest, and give those copies to
anybody who wants them. The nascent world of
cyberspace is full of sysadmins, teachers, trainers,
cybrarians, netgurus, and various species of
cybernetic activist. If you're one of those people, I
know about you, and I know the hassle you go
through to try to help people learn about the
electronic frontier. I hope that possessing this book
in electronic form will lessen your troubles. Granted,
this treatment of our electronic social spectrum is
not the ultimate in academic rigor. And politically, it
has something to offend and trouble almost
everyone. But hey, I'm told it's readable, and at
least the price is right.
You can upload the book onto bulletin board
systems, or Internet nodes, or electronic discussion
groups. Go right ahead and do that, I am giving you
express permission right now. Enjoy yourself.
You can put the book on disks and give the disks
away, as long as you don't take any money for it.
But this book is not public domain. You can't
copyright it in your own name. I own the copyright.
Attempts to pirate this book and make money from
selling it may involve you in a serious litigative snarl.
Believe me, for the pittance you might wring out of
such an action, it's really not worth it. This book
don't "belong" to you. In an odd but very genuine
way, I feel it doesn't "belong" to me, either. It's a
book about the people of cyberspace, and
distributing it in this way is the best way I know to
actually make this information available, freely and
easily, to all the people of cyberspace -- including
people far outside the borders of the United States,
who otherwise may never have a chance to see any
edition of the book, and who may perhaps learn
something useful from this strange story of distant,
obscure, but portentous events in so-called
"American cyberspace."
This electronic book is now literary freeware. It
now belongs to the emergent realm of alternative
information economics. You have no right to make
this electronic book part of the conventional flow of
commerce. Let it be part of the flow of knowledge:
there's a difference. I've divided the book into four
sections, so that it is less ungainly for upload and
download; if there's a section of particular relevance
to you and your colleagues, feel free to reproduce
that one and skip the rest.
Just make more when you need them, and give
them to whoever might want them.
Now have fun.
Bruce Sterling -- bruces@well.sf.ca.us
1865 U.S. Secret Service (USSS) founded.
1876 Alexander Graham Bell invents telephone.
1878 First teenage males flung off phone system by
enraged authorities.
1939 "Futurian" science-fiction group raided by Secret
Service.
1971 Yippie phone phreaks start YIPL/TAP magazine.
1972 *Ramparts* magazine seized in blue-box rip-off
scandal.
1978 Ward Christenson and Randy Suess create first
personal computer bulletin board system.
1982 William Gibson coins term "cyberspace."
1982 "414 Gang" raided.
1983-1983 AT&T dismantled in divestiture.
1984 Congress passes Comprehensive Crime Control Act
giving USSS jurisdiction over credit card fraud and
computer fraud.
1984 "Legion of Doom" formed.
1984. *2600: The Hacker Quarterly* founded.
1984. *Whole Earth Software Catalog* published.
1985. First police "sting" bulletin board systems
established.
1985. Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link computer conference
(WELL) goes on-line.
1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act passed.
1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act passed.
1987 Chicago prosecutors form Computer Fraud and
Abuse Task Force.
1988
July. Secret Service covertly videotapes "SummerCon"
hacker convention.
September. "Prophet" cracks BellSouth AIMSX computer
network and downloads E911 Document to his own
computer and to Jolnet.
September. AT&T Corporate Information Security
informed of Prophet's action.
October. Bellcore Security informed of Prophet's action.
1989
January. Prophet uploads E911 Document to Knight
Lightning.
February 25. Knight Lightning publishes E911Document
in *Phrack* electronic newsletter.
May. Chicago Task Force raids and arrests "Kyrie."
June. "NuPrometheus League" distributes Apple
Computer proprietary software.
June 13. Florida probation office crossed with phone-sex
line in switching-station stunt.
July. "Fry Guy" raided by USSS and Chicago Computer
Fraud and Abuse Task Force.
July. Secret Service raids "Prophet," "Leftist," and
"Urvile"
in Georgia.
1990
January 15. Martin Luther King Day Crash strikes AT&T
long-distance network nationwide.
January 18-19 Chicago Task Force raids Knight Lightning
in St. Louis.
January 24. USSS and New York State Police raid "Phiber
Optik," "Acid Phreak," and "Scorpion" in New York City.
February 1. USSS raids "Terminus" in Maryland.
February 3. Chicago Task Force raids Richard Andrews'
home.
February 6. Chicago Task Force raids Richard Andrews'
business.
February 6. USSS arrests Terminus, Prophet, Leftist, and
Urvile.
February 9. Chicago Task Force arrests Knight Lightning.
February 20. AT&T Security shuts down public-access
"attctc" computer in Dallas.
February 21. Chicago Task Force raids Robert Izenberg in
Austin.
March 1. Chicago Task Force raids Steve Jackson Games,
Inc., "Mentor," and "Erik Bloodaxe" in Austin.
May 7,8,9. USSS and Arizona Organized Crime and
Racketeering Bureau conduct "Operation Sundevil" raids
in Cincinnatti, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark,
Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Tucson, San Diego, San
Jose, and San Francisco.
May. FBI interviews John Perry Barlow re NuPrometheus
case.
June. Mitch Kapor and Barlow found Electronic Frontier
Foundation; Barlow publishes *Crime and Puzzlement*
manifesto.
July 24-27. Trial of Knight Lightning.
1991
February. CPSR Roundtable in Washington, D.C.
March 25-28. Computers, Freedom and Privacy
conference in San Francisco.
May 1. Electronic Frontier Foundation, Steve Jackson, and
others file suit against members of Chicago Task Force.
July 1-2. Switching station phone software crash affects
Washington, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, San Francisco.
September 17. AT&T phone crash affects New York City
and three airports.
This is a book about cops, and wild teenage whiz-
kids, and lawyers, and hairy-eyed anarchists, and
industrial technicians, and hippies, and high-tech
millionaires, and game hobbyists, and computer security
experts, and Secret Service agents, and grifters, and
thieves.
This book is about the electronic frontier of the
1990s.
It concerns activities that take place inside computers and
over telephone lines.
A science fiction writer coined the useful term
"cyberspace" in 1982. But the territory in question, the
electronic frontier, is about a hundred and thirty years
old.
Cyberspace is the "place" where a telephone conversation
appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the
plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person's
phone, in some other city. *The place between* the
phones. The indefinite place *out there,* where the two of
you, two human beings, actually meet and communicate.
Although it is not exactly "real," "cyberspace" is a
genuine place. Things happen there that have very
genuine consequences. This "place" is not "real," but it is
serious, it is earnest. Tens of thousands of people have
dedicated their lives to it, to the public service of public
communication by wire and electronics.
People have worked on this "frontier" for
generations now. Some people became rich and famous
from their efforts there. Some just played in it, as
hobbyists. Others soberly pondered it, and wrote about it,
and regulated it, and negotiated over it in international
forums, and sued one another about it, in gigantic, epic
court battles that lasted for years. And almost since the
beginning, some people have committed crimes in this
place.
But in the past twenty years, this electrical "space,"
which was once thin and dark and one-dimensional -- little
more than a narrow speaking-tube, stretching from phone
to phone -- has flung itself open like a gigantic jack-in-
the-
box. Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of the
glowing computer screen. This dark electric netherworld
has become a vast flowering electronic landscape. Since
the 1960s, the world of the telephone has cross-bred itself
with computers and television, and though there is still no
substance to cyberspace, nothing you can handle, it has a
strange kind of physicality now. It makes good sense
today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own.
Because people live in it now. Not just a few people,
not just a few technicians and eccentrics, but thousands of
people, quite normal people. And not just for a little
while,
either, but for hours straight, over weeks, and months, and
years. Cyberspace today is a "Net," a "Matrix,"
international in scope and growing swiftly and steadily.
It's
growing in size, and wealth, and political importance.
People are making entire careers in modern
cyberspace. Scientists and technicians, of course; they've
been there for twenty years now. But increasingly,
cyberspace is filling with journalists and doctors and
lawyers and artists and clerks. Civil servants make their
careers there now, "on-line" in vast government data-
banks; and so do spies, industrial, political, and just
plain
snoops; and so do police, at least a few of them. And there
are children living there now.
People have met there and been married there.
There are entire living communities in cyberspace today;
chattering, gossipping, planning, conferring and
scheming, leaving one another voice-mail and electronic
mail, giving one another big weightless chunks of valuable
data, both legitimate and illegitimate. They busily pass
one another computer software and the occasional
festering computer virus.
We do not really understand how to live in
cyberspace yet. We are feeling our way into it, blundering
about. That is not surprising. Our lives in the physical
world, the "real" world, are also far from perfect, despite
a
lot more practice. Human lives, real lives, are imperfect
by their nature, and there are human beings in
cyberspace. The way we live in cyberspace is a funhouse
mirror of the way we live in the real world. We take both
our advantages and our troubles with us.
This book is about trouble in cyberspace.
Specifically, this book is about certain strange events in
the year 1990, an unprecedented and startling year for the
the growing world of computerized communications.
In 1990 there came a nationwide crackdown on
illicit
computer hackers, with arrests, criminal charges, one
dramatic show-trial, several guilty pleas, and huge
confiscations of data and equipment all over the USA.
The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was larger, better
organized, more deliberate, and more resolute than any
previous effort in the brave new world of computer crime.
The U.S. Secret Service, private telephone security, and
state and local law enforcement groups across the country
all joined forces in a determined attempt to break the
back of America's electronic underground. It was a
fascinating effort, with very mixed results.
The Hacker Crackdown had another unprecedented
effect; it spurred the creation, within "the computer
community," of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a new
and very odd interest group, fiercely dedicated to the
establishment and preservation of electronic civil
liberties.
The crackdown, remarkable in itself, has created a melee
of debate over electronic crime, punishment, freedom of
the press, and issues of search and seizure. Politics has
entered cyberspace. Where people go, politics follow.
This is the story of the people of cyberspace.
On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance telephone
switching system crashed.
This was a strange, dire, huge event. Sixty thousand
people lost their telephone service completely. During
the nine long hours of frantic effort that it took to
restore
service, some seventy million telephone calls went
uncompleted.
Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco
trade, are a known and accepted hazard of the telephone
business. Hurricanes hit, and phone cables get snapped
by the thousands. Earthquakes wrench through buried
fiber-optic lines. Switching stations catch fire and burn
to
the ground. These things do happen. There are
contingency plans for them, and decades of experience in
dealing with them. But the Crash of January 15 was
unprecedented. It was unbelievably huge, and it occurred
for no apparent physical reason.
The crash started on a Monday afternoon in a single
switching-station in Manhattan. But, unlike any merely
physical damage, it spread and spread. Station after
station across America collapsed in a chain reaction, until
fully half of AT&T's network had gone haywire and the
remaining half was hard-put to handle the overflow.
Within nine hours, AT&T software engineers more or
less understood what had caused the crash. Replicating
the problem exactly, poring over software line by line,
took them a couple of weeks. But because it was hard to
understand technically, the full truth of the matter and its
implications were not widely and thoroughly aired and
explained. The root cause of the crash remained obscure,
surrounded by rumor and fear.
The crash was a grave corporate embarrassment.
The "culprit" was a bug in AT&T's own software -- not the
sort of admission the telecommunications giant wanted to
make, especially in the face of increasing competition.
Still, the truth *was* told, in the baffling technical
terms
necessary to explain it.
Somehow the explanation failed to persuade
American law enforcement officials and even telephone
corporate security personnel. These people were not
technical experts or software wizards, and they had their
own suspicions about the cause of this disaster.
The police and telco security had important sources
of information denied to mere software engineers. They
had informants in the computer underground and years
of experience in dealing with high-tech rascality that
seemed to grow ever more sophisticated. For years they
had been expecting a direct and savage attack against the
American national telephone system. And with the Crash
of January 15 -- the first month of a new, high-tech decade
-- their predictions, fears, and suspicions seemed at last
to
have entered the real world. A world where the telephone
system had not merely crashed, but, quite likely, *been*
crashed -- by "hackers."
The crash created a large dark cloud of suspicion
that would color certain people's assumptions and actions
for months. The fact that it took place in the realm of
software was suspicious on its face. The fact that it
occurred on Martin Luther King Day, still the most
politically touchy of American holidays, made it more
suspicious yet.
The Crash of January 15 gave the Hacker
Crackdown its sense of edge and its sweaty urgency. It
made people, powerful people in positions of public
authority, willing to believe the worst. And, most fatally,
it
helped to give investigators a willingness to take extreme
measures and the determination to preserve almost total
secrecy.
An obscure software fault in an aging switching
system in New York was to lead to a chain reaction of legal
and constitutional trouble all across the country.
#
Like the crash in the telephone system, this chain
reaction was ready and waiting to happen. During the
1980s, the American legal system was extensively patched
to deal with the novel issues of computer crime. There
was, for instance, the Electronic Communications Privacy
Act of 1986 (eloquently described as "a stinking mess" by a
prominent law enforcement official). And there was the
draconian Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, passed
unanimously by the United States Senate, which later
would reveal a large number of flaws. Extensive, well-
meant efforts had been made to keep the legal system up
to date. But in the day-to-day grind of the real world,
even
the most elegant software tends to crumble and suddenly
reveal its hidden bugs.
Like the advancing telephone system, the American
legal system was certainly not ruined by its temporary
crash; but for those caught under the weight of the
collapsing system, life became a series of blackouts and
anomalies.
In order to understand why these weird events
occurred, both in the world of technology and in the world
of law, it's not enough to understand the merely technical
problems. We will get to those; but first and foremost, we
must try to understand the telephone, and the business of
telephones, and the community of human beings that
telephones have created.
#
Technologies have life cycles, like cities do, like
institutions do, like laws and governments do.
The first stage of any technology is the Question
Mark, often known as the "Golden Vaporware" stage. At
this early point, the technology is only a phantom, a mere
gleam in the inventor's eye. One such inventor was a
speech teacher and electrical tinkerer named Alexander
Graham Bell.
Bell's early inventions, while ingenious, failed to
move the world. In 1863, the teenage Bell and his brother
Melville made an artificial talking mechanism out of
wood, rubber, gutta-percha, and tin. This weird device had
a rubber-covered "tongue" made of movable wooden
segments, with vibrating rubber "vocal cords," and rubber
"lips" and "cheeks." While Melville puffed a bellows into a
tin tube, imitating the lungs, young Alec Bell would
manipulate the "lips," "teeth," and "tongue," causing the
thing to emit high-pitched falsetto gibberish.
Another would-be technical breakthrough was the
Bell "phonautograph" of 1874, actually made out of a
human cadaver's ear. Clamped into place on a tripod, this
grisly gadget drew sound-wave images on smoked glass
through a thin straw glued to its vibrating earbones.
By 1875, Bell had learned to produce audible sounds -
- ugly shrieks and squawks -- by using magnets,
diaphragms, and electrical current.
Most "Golden Vaporware" technologies go nowhere.
But the second stage of technology is the Rising Star,
or, the "Goofy Prototype," stage. The telephone, Bell's
most ambitious gadget yet, reached this stage on March
10, 1876. On that great day, Alexander Graham Bell
became the first person to transmit intelligible human
speech electrically. As it happened, young Professor
Bell,
industriously tinkering in his Boston lab, had spattered
his trousers with acid. His assistant, Mr. Watson, heard
his cry for help -- over Bell's experimental audio-
telegraph. This was an event without precedent.
Technologies in their "Goofy Prototype" stage rarely
work very well. They're experimental, and therefore half-
baked and rather frazzled. The prototype may be
attractive and novel, and it does look as if it ought to be
good for something-or-other. But nobody, including the
inventor, is quite sure what. Inventors, and speculators,
and pundits may have very firm ideas about its potential
use, but those ideas are often very wrong.
The natural habitat of the Goofy Prototype is in
trade
shows and in the popular press. Infant technologies need
publicity and investment money like a tottering calf need
milk. This was very true of Bell's machine. To raise
research and development money, Bell toured with his
device as a stage attraction.
Contemporary press reports of the stage debut of
the telephone showed pleased astonishment mixed with
considerable dread. Bell's stage telephone was a large
wooden box with a crude speaker-nozzle, the whole
contraption about the size and shape of an overgrown
Brownie camera. Its buzzing steel soundplate, pumped
up by powerful electromagnets, was loud enough to fill an
auditorium. Bell's assistant Mr. Watson, who could
manage on the keyboards fairly well, kicked in by playing
the organ from distant rooms, and, later, distant cities.
This feat was considered marvellous, but very eerie
indeed.
Bell's original notion for the telephone, an idea
promoted for a couple of years, was that it would become
a mass medium. We might recognize Bell's idea today as
something close to modern "cable radio." Telephones at
a central source would transmit music, Sunday sermons,
and important public speeches to a paying network of
wired-up subscribers.
At the time, most people thought this notion made
good sense. In fact, Bell's idea was workable. In
Hungary, this philosophy of the telephone was
successfully put into everyday practice. In Budapest, for
decades, from 1893 until after World War I, there was a
government-run information service called "Telefon
Hirmondo=." Hirmondo= was a centralized source of news
and entertainment and culture, including stock reports,
plays, concerts, and novels read aloud. At certain hours of
the day, the phone would ring, you would plug in a
loudspeaker for the use of the family, and Telefon
Hirmondo= would be on the air -- or rather, on the phone.
Hirmondo= is dead tech today, but Hirmondo= might
be considered a spiritual ancestor of the modern
telephone-accessed computer data services, such as
CompuServe, GEnie or Prodigy. The principle behind
Hirmondo= is also not too far from computer "bulletin-
board systems" or BBS's, which arrived in the late 1970s,
spread rapidly across America, and will figure largely in
this book.
We are used to using telephones for individual
person-to-person speech, because we are used to the Bell
system. But this was just one possibility among many.
Communication networks are very flexible and protean,
especially when their hardware becomes sufficiently
advanced. They can be put to all kinds of uses. And they
have been -- and they will be.
Bell's telephone was bound for glory, but this was a
combination of political decisions, canny infighting in
court, inspired industrial leadership, receptive local
conditions and outright good luck. Much the same is true
of communications systems today.
As Bell and his backers struggled to install their
newfangled system in the real world of nineteenth-century
New England, they had to fight against skepticism and
industrial rivalry. There was already a strong electrical
communications network present in America: the
telegraph. The head of the Western Union telegraph
system dismissed Bell's prototype as "an electrical toy"
and refused to buy the rights to Bell's patent. The
telephone, it seemed, might be all right as a parlor
entertainment -- but not for serious business.
Telegrams, unlike mere telephones, left a permanent
physical record of their messages. Telegrams, unlike
telephones, could be answered whenever the recipient
had time and convenience. And the telegram had a much
longer distance-range than Bell's early telephone. These
factors made telegraphy seem a much more sound and
businesslike technology -- at least to some.
The telegraph system was huge, and well-entrenched.
In 1876, the United States had 214,000 miles of telegraph
wire, and 8500 telegraph offices. There were specialized
telegraphs for businesses and stock traders, government,
police and fire departments. And Bell's "toy" was best
known as a stage-magic musical device.
The third stage of technology is known as the "Cash
Cow" stage. In the "cash cow" stage, a technology finds
its
place in the world, and matures, and becomes settled and
productive. After a year or so, Alexander Graham Bell
and his capitalist backers concluded that eerie music
piped from nineteenth-century cyberspace was not the
real selling-point of his invention. Instead, the telephone
was about speech -- individual, personal speech, the
human voice, human conversation and human
interaction. The telephone was not to be managed from
any centralized broadcast center. It was to be a personal,
intimate technology.
When you picked up a telephone, you were not
absorbing the cold output of a machine -- you were
speaking to another human being. Once people realized
this, their instinctive dread of the telephone as an eerie,
unnatural device, swiftly vanished. A "telephone call" was
not a "call" from a "telephone" itself, but a call from
another human being, someone you would generally know
and recognize. The real point was not what the machine
could do for you (or to you), but what you yourself, a
person and citizen, could do *through* the machine. This
decision on the part of the young Bell Company was
absolutely vital.
The first telephone networks went up around Boston -
- mostly among the technically curious and the well-to-do
(much the same segment of the American populace that,
a hundred years later, would be buying personal
computers). Entrenched backers of the telegraph
continued to scoff.
But in January 1878, a disaster made the telephone
famous. A train crashed in Tarriffville, Connecticut.
Forward-looking doctors in the nearby city of Hartford had
had Bell's "speaking telephone" installed. An alert local
druggist was able to telephone an entire community of
local doctors, who rushed to the site to give aid. The
disaster, as disasters do, aroused intense press coverage.
The phone had proven its usefulness in the real world.
After Tarriffville, the telephone network spread like
crabgrass. By 1890 it was all over New England. By '93,
out
to Chicago. By '97, into Minnesota, Nebraska and Texas.
By 1904 it was all over the continent.
The telephone had become a mature technology.
Professor Bell (now generally known as "Dr. Bell" despite
his lack of a formal degree) became quite wealthy. He
lost interest in the tedious day-to-day business muddle of
the booming telephone network, and gratefully returned
his attention to creatively hacking-around in his various
laboratories, which were now much larger, better-
ventilated, and gratifyingly better-equipped. Bell was
never to have another great inventive success, though his
speculations and prototypes anticipated fiber-optic
transmission, manned flight, sonar, hydrofoil ships,
tetrahedral construction, and Montessori education. The
"decibel," the standard scientific measure of sound
intensity, was named after Bell.
Not all Bell's vaporware notions were inspired. He
was fascinated by human eugenics. He also spent many
years developing a weird personal system of astrophysics
in which gravity did not exist.
Bell was a definite eccentric. He was something of a
hypochondriac, and throughout his life he habitually
stayed up until four A.M., refusing to rise before noon.
But Bell had accomplished a great feat; he was an idol of
millions and his influence, wealth, and great personal
charm, combined with his eccentricity, made him
something of a loose cannon on deck. Bell maintained a
thriving scientific salon in his winter mansion in
Washington, D.C., which gave him considerable
backstage influence in governmental and scientific
circles. He was a major financial backer of the the
magazines *Science* and *National Geographic,* both
still flourishing today as important organs of the American
scientific establishment.
Bell's companion Thomas Watson, similarly wealthy
and similarly odd, became the ardent political disciple of a
19th-century science-fiction writer and would-be social
reformer, Edward Bellamy. Watson also trod the boards
briefly as a Shakespearian actor.
There would never be another Alexander Graham
Bell, but in years to come there would be surprising
numbers of people like him. Bell was a prototype of the
high-tech entrepreneur. High-tech entrepreneurs will
play a very prominent role in this book: not merely as
technicians and businessmen, but as pioneers of the
technical frontier, who can carry the power and prestige
they derive from high-technology into the political and
social arena.
Like later entrepreneurs, Bell was fierce in defense of
his own technological territory. As the telephone began to
flourish, Bell was soon involved in violent lawsuits in the
defense of his patents. Bell's Boston lawyers were
excellent, however, and Bell himself, as an elecution
teacher and gifted public speaker, was a devastatingly
effective legal witness. In the eighteen years of Bell's
patents, the Bell company was involved in six hundred
separate lawsuits. The legal records printed filled 149
volumes. The Bell Company won every single suit.
After Bell's exclusive patents expired, rival telephone
companies sprang up all over America. Bell's company,
American Bell Telephone, was soon in deep trouble. In
1907, American Bell Telephone fell into the hands of the
rather sinister J.P. Morgan financial cartel, robber-baron
speculators who dominated Wall Street.
At this point, history might have taken a different
turn. American might well have been served forever by a
patchwork of locally owned telephone companies. Many
state politicians and local businessmen considered this an
excellent solution.
But the new Bell holding company, American
Telephone and Telegraph or AT&T, put in a new man at
the helm, a visionary industrialist named Theodore Vail.
Vail, a former Post Office manager, understood large
organizations and had an innate feeling for the nature of
large-scale communications. Vail quickly saw to it that
AT&T seized the technological edge once again. The
Pupin and Campbell "loading coil," and the deForest
"audion," are both extinct technology today, but in 1913
they gave Vail's company the best *long-distance* lines
ever built. By controlling long-distance -- the links
between, and over, and above the smaller local phone
companies -- AT&T swiftly gained the whip-hand over
them, and was soon devouring them right and left.
Vail plowed the profits back into research and
development, starting the Bell tradition of huge-scale and
brilliant industrial research.
Technically and financially, AT&T gradually
steamrollered the opposition. Independent telephone
companies never became entirely extinct, and hundreds
of them flourish today. But Vail's AT&T became the
supreme communications company. At one point, Vail's
AT&T bought Western Union itself, the very company
that had derided Bell's telephone as a "toy." Vail
thoroughly reformed Western Union's hidebound
business along his modern principles; but when the
federal government grew anxious at this centralization of
power, Vail politely gave Western Union back.
This centralizing process was not unique. Very
similar events had happened in American steel, oil, and
railroads. But AT&T, unlike the other companies, was to
remain supreme. The monopoly robber-barons of those
other industries were humbled and shattered by
government trust-busting.
Vail, the former Post Office official, was quite
willing
to accommodate the US government; in fact he would
forge an active alliance with it. AT&T would become
almost a wing of the American government, almost
another Post Office -- though not quite. AT&T would
willingly submit to federal regulation, but in return, it
would use the government's regulators as its own police,
who would keep out competitors and assure the Bell
system's profits and preeminence.
This was the second birth -- the political birth -- of
the
American telephone system. Vail's arrangement was to
persist, with vast success, for many decades, until 1982.
His system was an odd kind of American industrial
socialism. It was born at about the same time as Leninist
Communism, and it lasted almost as long -- and, it must
be admitted, to considerably better effect.
Vail's system worked. Except perhaps for aerospace,
there has been no technology more thoroughly dominated
by Americans than the telephone. The telephone was
seen from the beginning as a quintessentially American
technology. Bell's policy, and the policy of Theodore
Vail,
was a profoundly democratic policy of *universal access.*
Vail's famous corporate slogan, "One Policy, One System,
Universal Service," was a political slogan, with a very
American ring to it.
The American telephone was not to become the
specialized tool of government or business, but a general
public utility. At first, it was true, only the wealthy
could
afford private telephones, and Bell's company pursued
the business markets primarily. The American phone
system was a capitalist effort, meant to make money; it
was not a charity. But from the first, almost all
communities with telephone service had public
telephones. And many stores -- especially drugstores --
offered public use of their phones. You might not own a
telephone -- but you could always get into the system, if
you really needed to.
There was nothing inevitable about this decision to
make telephones "public" and "universal." Vail's system
involved a profound act of trust in the public. This
decision was a political one, informed by the basic values
of the American republic. The situation might have been
very different; and in other countries, under other
systems, it certainly was.
Joseph Stalin, for instance, vetoed plans for a Soviet
phone system soon after the Bolshevik revolution. Stalin
was certain that publicly accessible telephones would
become instruments of anti-Soviet counterrevolution and
conspiracy. (He was probably right.) When telephones
did arrive in the Soviet Union, they would be instruments
of Party authority, and always heavily tapped. (Alexander
Solzhenitsyn's prison-camp novel *The First Circle*
describes efforts to develop a phone system more suited
to Stalinist purposes.)
France, with its tradition of rational centralized
government, had fought bitterly even against the electric
telegraph, which seemed to the French entirely too
anarchical and frivolous. For decades, nineteenth-
century France communicated via the "visual telegraph,"
a nation-spanning, government-owned semaphore
system of huge stone towers that signalled from hilltops,
across vast distances, with big windmill-like arms. In
1846,
one Dr. Barbay, a semaphore enthusiast, memorably
uttered an early version of what might be called "the
security expert's argument" against the open media.
"No, the electric telegraph is not a sound invention.
It will always be at the mercy of the slightest disruption,
wild youths, drunkards, bums, etc.... The electric
telegraph
meets those destructive elements with only a few meters
of wire over which supervision is impossible. A single man
could, without being seen, cut the telegraph wires leading
to Paris, and in twenty-four hours cut in ten different
places the wires of the same line, without being arrested.
The visual telegraph, on the contrary, has its towers, its
high walls, its gates well-guarded from inside by strong
armed men. Yes, I declare, substitution of the electric
telegraph for the visual one is a dreadful measure, a truly
idiotic act."
Dr. Barbay and his high-security stone machines
were eventually unsuccessful, but his argument -- that
communication exists for the safety and convenience of
the state, and must be carefully protected from the wild
boys and the gutter rabble who might want to crash the
system -- would be heard again and again.
When the French telephone system finally did arrive,
its snarled inadequacy was to be notorious. Devotees of
the American Bell System often recommended a trip to
France, for skeptics.
In Edwardian Britain, issues of class and privacy were
a ball-and-chain for telephonic progress. It was
considered outrageous that anyone -- any wild fool off the
street -- could simply barge bellowing into one's office or
home, preceded only by the ringing of a telephone bell.
In Britain, phones were tolerated for the use of business,
but private phones tended be stuffed away into closets,
smoking rooms, or servants' quarters. Telephone
operators were resented in Britain because they did not
seem to "know their place." And no one of breeding
would print a telephone number on a business card; this
seemed a crass attempt to make the acquaintance of
strangers.
But phone access in America was to become a
popular right; something like universal suffrage, only
more so. American women could not yet vote when the
phone system came through; yet from the beginning
American women doted on the telephone. This
"feminization" of the American telephone was often
commented on by foreigners. Phones in America were
not censored or stiff or formalized; they were social,
private, intimate, and domestic. In America, Mother's
Day is by far the busiest day of the year for the phone
network.
The early telephone companies, and especially
AT&T, were among the foremost employers of American
women. They employed the daughters of the American
middle-class in great armies: in 1891, eight thousand
women; by 1946, almost a quarter of a million. Women
seemed to enjoy telephone work; it was respectable, it was
steady, it paid fairly well as women's work went, and -- not
least -- it seemed a genuine contribution to the social good
of the community. Women found Vail's ideal of public
service attractive. This was especially true in rural
areas,
where women operators, running extensive rural party-
lines, enjoyed considerable social power. The operator
knew everyone on the party-line, and everyone knew her.
Although Bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the
telephone company did not employ women for the sake of
advancing female liberation. AT&T did this for sound
commercial reasons. The first telephone operators of the
Bell system were not women, but teenage American boys.
They were telegraphic messenger boys (a group about to
be rendered technically obsolescent), who swept up
around the phone office, dunned customers for bills, and
made phone connections on the switchboard, all on the
cheap.
Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell's
company learned a sharp lesson about combining
teenage boys and telephone switchboards. Putting
teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift
and consistent disaster. Bell's chief engineer described
bruces@well.sf.ca.us
Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use
THE HACKER CRACKDOWN
Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier y Bruce Sterling
---------------------------------------------------------------
Preface to the Electronic Release of *The Hacker Crackdown*
Chronology of the Hacker Crackdown
Introduction
Part 1: CRASHING THE SYSTEM
A Brief History of Telephony / Bell's Golden Vaporware /
Universal Service / Wild Boys and Wire Women / The
Electronic Communities / The Ungentle Giant / The
Breakup / In Defense of the System / The Crash Post-
Mortem / Landslides in Cyberspace
Part 2: THE DIGITAL UNDERGROUND
Steal This Phone / Phreaking and Hacking / The View
From Under the Floorboards / Boards: Core of the
Underground / Phile Phun / The Rake's Progress /
Strongholds of the Elite / Sting Boards / Hot Potatoes /
War on the Legion / Terminus / Phile 9-1-1 / War Games
/ Real Cyberpunk
Part 3: LAW AND ORDER
Crooked Boards / The World's Biggest Hacker Bust /
Teach Them a Lesson / The U.S. Secret Service / The
Secret Service Battles the Boodlers / A Walk Downtown /
FCIC: The Cutting-Edge Mess / Cyberspace Rangers /
FLETC: Training the Hacker-Trackers
Part 4: THE CIVIL LIBERTARIANS
NuPrometheus + FBI = Grateful Dead / Whole Earth +
Computer Revolution = WELL / Phiber Runs
Underground and Acid Spikes the Well / The Trial of
Knight Lightning / Shadowhawk Plummets to Earth /
Kyrie in the Confessional / $79,499 / A Scholar
Investigates / Computers, Freedom, and Privacy
Electronic Afterword to *The Hacker Crackdown,*
New Years' Day 1994
January 1, 1994 -- Austin, Texas
Hi, I'm Bruce Sterling, the author of this
electronic book.
Out in the traditional world of print, *The
Hacker Crackdown* is ISBN 0-553-08058-X, and is
formally catalogued by the Library of Congress as "1.
Computer crimes -- United States. 2. Telephone --
United States -- Corrupt practices. 3. Programming
(Electronic computers) -- United States -- Corrupt
practices." 'Corrupt practices,' I always get a kick out
of that description. Librarians are very ingenious
people.
The paperback is ISBN 0-553-56370-X. If you go
and buy a print version of *The Hacker Crackdown,*
an action I encourage heartily, you may notice that
in the front of the book, beneath the copyright
notice -- "Copyright (C) 1992 by Bruce Sterling" -- it
has this little block of printed legal boilerplate from
the publisher. It says, and I quote:
"No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books."
This is a pretty good disclaimer, as such
disclaimers go. I collect intellectual-property
disclaimers, and I've seen dozens of them, and this
one is at least pretty straightforward. In this narrow
and particular case, however, it isn't quite accurate.
Bantam Books puts that disclaimer on every book
they publish, but Bantam Books does not, in fact,
own the electronic rights to this book. I do, because
of certain extensive contract maneuverings my
agent and I went through before this book was
written. I want to give those electronic publishing
rights away through certain not-for-profit channels,
and I've convinced Bantam that this is a good idea.
Since Bantam has seen fit to peacably agree to
this scheme of mine, Bantam Books is not going to
fuss about this. Provided you don't try to sell the
book, they are not going to bother you for what you
do with the electronic copy of this book. If you want
to check this out personally, you can ask them;
they're at 1540 Broadway NY NY 10036. However, if
you were so foolish as to print this book and start
retailing it for money in violation of my copyright
and the commercial interests of Bantam Books,
then Bantam, a part of the gigantic Bertelsmann
multinational publishing combine, would roust
some of their heavy-duty attorneys out of
hibernation and crush you like a bug. This is only to
be expected. I didn't write this book so that you
could make money out of it. If anybody is gonna
make money out of this book, it's gonna be me and
my publisher.
My publisher deserves to make money out of
this book. Not only did the folks at Bantam Books
commission me to write the book, and pay me a
hefty sum to do so, but they bravely printed, in text,
an electronic document the reproduction of which
was once alleged to be a federal felony. Bantam
Books and their numerous attorneys were very
brave and forthright about this book. Furthermore,
my former editor at Bantam Books, Betsy Mitchell,
genuinely cared about this project, and worked hard
on it, and had a lot of wise things to say about the
manuscript. Betsy deserves genuine credit for this
book, credit that editors too rarely get.
The critics were very kind to *The Hacker
Crackdown,* and commercially the book has done
well. On the other hand, I didn't write this book in
order to squeeze every last nickel and dime out of
the mitts of impoverished sixteen-year-old
cyberpunk high-school-students. Teenagers don't
have any money -- (no, not even enough for the six-
dollar *Hacker Crackdown* paperback, with its
attractive bright-red cover and useful index). That's
a major reason why teenagers sometimes succumb
to the temptation to do things they shouldn't, such
as swiping my books out of libraries. Kids: this one
is all yours, all right? Go give the print version back.
*8-)
Well-meaning, public-spirited civil libertarians
don't have much money, either. And it seems
almost criminal to snatch cash out of the hands of
America's direly underpaid electronic law
enforcement community.
If you're a computer cop, a hacker, or an
electronic civil liberties activist, you are the target
audience for this book. I wrote this book because I
wanted to help you, and help other people
understand you and your unique, uhm, problems. I
wrote this book to aid your activities, and to
contribute to the public discussion of important
political issues. In giving the text away in this
fashion, I am directly contributing to the book's
ultimate aim: to help civilize cyberspace.
Information *wants* to be free. And the
information inside this book longs for freedom with
a peculiar intensity. I genuinely believe that the
natural habitat of this book is inside an electronic
network. That may not be the easiest direct method
to generate revenue for the book's author, but that
doesn't matter; this is where this book belongs by its
nature. I've written other books -- plenty of other
books -- and I'll write more and I am writing more,
but this one is special. I am making *The Hacker
Crackdown* available electronically as widely as I
can conveniently manage, and if you like the book,
and think it is useful, then I urge you to do the same
with it.
You can copy this electronic book. Copy the
heck out of it, be my guest, and give those copies to
anybody who wants them. The nascent world of
cyberspace is full of sysadmins, teachers, trainers,
cybrarians, netgurus, and various species of
cybernetic activist. If you're one of those people, I
know about you, and I know the hassle you go
through to try to help people learn about the
electronic frontier. I hope that possessing this book
in electronic form will lessen your troubles. Granted,
this treatment of our electronic social spectrum is
not the ultimate in academic rigor. And politically, it
has something to offend and trouble almost
everyone. But hey, I'm told it's readable, and at
least the price is right.
You can upload the book onto bulletin board
systems, or Internet nodes, or electronic discussion
groups. Go right ahead and do that, I am giving you
express permission right now. Enjoy yourself.
You can put the book on disks and give the disks
away, as long as you don't take any money for it.
But this book is not public domain. You can't
copyright it in your own name. I own the copyright.
Attempts to pirate this book and make money from
selling it may involve you in a serious litigative snarl.
Believe me, for the pittance you might wring out of
such an action, it's really not worth it. This book
don't "belong" to you. In an odd but very genuine
way, I feel it doesn't "belong" to me, either. It's a
book about the people of cyberspace, and
distributing it in this way is the best way I know to
actually make this information available, freely and
easily, to all the people of cyberspace -- including
people far outside the borders of the United States,
who otherwise may never have a chance to see any
edition of the book, and who may perhaps learn
something useful from this strange story of distant,
obscure, but portentous events in so-called
"American cyberspace."
This electronic book is now literary freeware. It
now belongs to the emergent realm of alternative
information economics. You have no right to make
this electronic book part of the conventional flow of
commerce. Let it be part of the flow of knowledge:
there's a difference. I've divided the book into four
sections, so that it is less ungainly for upload and
download; if there's a section of particular relevance
to you and your colleagues, feel free to reproduce
that one and skip the rest.
Just make more when you need them, and give
them to whoever might want them.
Now have fun.
Bruce Sterling -- bruces@well.sf.ca.us
1865 U.S. Secret Service (USSS) founded.
1876 Alexander Graham Bell invents telephone.
1878 First teenage males flung off phone system by
enraged authorities.
1939 "Futurian" science-fiction group raided by Secret
Service.
1971 Yippie phone phreaks start YIPL/TAP magazine.
1972 *Ramparts* magazine seized in blue-box rip-off
scandal.
1978 Ward Christenson and Randy Suess create first
personal computer bulletin board system.
1982 William Gibson coins term "cyberspace."
1982 "414 Gang" raided.
1983-1983 AT&T dismantled in divestiture.
1984 Congress passes Comprehensive Crime Control Act
giving USSS jurisdiction over credit card fraud and
computer fraud.
1984 "Legion of Doom" formed.
1984. *2600: The Hacker Quarterly* founded.
1984. *Whole Earth Software Catalog* published.
1985. First police "sting" bulletin board systems
established.
1985. Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link computer conference
(WELL) goes on-line.
1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act passed.
1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act passed.
1987 Chicago prosecutors form Computer Fraud and
Abuse Task Force.
1988
July. Secret Service covertly videotapes "SummerCon"
hacker convention.
September. "Prophet" cracks BellSouth AIMSX computer
network and downloads E911 Document to his own
computer and to Jolnet.
September. AT&T Corporate Information Security
informed of Prophet's action.
October. Bellcore Security informed of Prophet's action.
1989
January. Prophet uploads E911 Document to Knight
Lightning.
February 25. Knight Lightning publishes E911Document
in *Phrack* electronic newsletter.
May. Chicago Task Force raids and arrests "Kyrie."
June. "NuPrometheus League" distributes Apple
Computer proprietary software.
June 13. Florida probation office crossed with phone-sex
line in switching-station stunt.
July. "Fry Guy" raided by USSS and Chicago Computer
Fraud and Abuse Task Force.
July. Secret Service raids "Prophet," "Leftist," and
"Urvile"
in Georgia.
1990
January 15. Martin Luther King Day Crash strikes AT&T
long-distance network nationwide.
January 18-19 Chicago Task Force raids Knight Lightning
in St. Louis.
January 24. USSS and New York State Police raid "Phiber
Optik," "Acid Phreak," and "Scorpion" in New York City.
February 1. USSS raids "Terminus" in Maryland.
February 3. Chicago Task Force raids Richard Andrews'
home.
February 6. Chicago Task Force raids Richard Andrews'
business.
February 6. USSS arrests Terminus, Prophet, Leftist, and
Urvile.
February 9. Chicago Task Force arrests Knight Lightning.
February 20. AT&T Security shuts down public-access
"attctc" computer in Dallas.
February 21. Chicago Task Force raids Robert Izenberg in
Austin.
March 1. Chicago Task Force raids Steve Jackson Games,
Inc., "Mentor," and "Erik Bloodaxe" in Austin.
May 7,8,9. USSS and Arizona Organized Crime and
Racketeering Bureau conduct "Operation Sundevil" raids
in Cincinnatti, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark,
Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Tucson, San Diego, San
Jose, and San Francisco.
May. FBI interviews John Perry Barlow re NuPrometheus
case.
June. Mitch Kapor and Barlow found Electronic Frontier
Foundation; Barlow publishes *Crime and Puzzlement*
manifesto.
July 24-27. Trial of Knight Lightning.
1991
February. CPSR Roundtable in Washington, D.C.
March 25-28. Computers, Freedom and Privacy
conference in San Francisco.
May 1. Electronic Frontier Foundation, Steve Jackson, and
others file suit against members of Chicago Task Force.
July 1-2. Switching station phone software crash affects
Washington, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, San Francisco.
September 17. AT&T phone crash affects New York City
and three airports.
This is a book about cops, and wild teenage whiz-
kids, and lawyers, and hairy-eyed anarchists, and
industrial technicians, and hippies, and high-tech
millionaires, and game hobbyists, and computer security
experts, and Secret Service agents, and grifters, and
thieves.
This book is about the electronic frontier of the
1990s.
It concerns activities that take place inside computers and
over telephone lines.
A science fiction writer coined the useful term
"cyberspace" in 1982. But the territory in question, the
electronic frontier, is about a hundred and thirty years
old.
Cyberspace is the "place" where a telephone conversation
appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the
plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person's
phone, in some other city. *The place between* the
phones. The indefinite place *out there,* where the two of
you, two human beings, actually meet and communicate.
Although it is not exactly "real," "cyberspace" is a
genuine place. Things happen there that have very
genuine consequences. This "place" is not "real," but it is
serious, it is earnest. Tens of thousands of people have
dedicated their lives to it, to the public service of public
communication by wire and electronics.
People have worked on this "frontier" for
generations now. Some people became rich and famous
from their efforts there. Some just played in it, as
hobbyists. Others soberly pondered it, and wrote about it,
and regulated it, and negotiated over it in international
forums, and sued one another about it, in gigantic, epic
court battles that lasted for years. And almost since the
beginning, some people have committed crimes in this
place.
But in the past twenty years, this electrical "space,"
which was once thin and dark and one-dimensional -- little
more than a narrow speaking-tube, stretching from phone
to phone -- has flung itself open like a gigantic jack-in-
the-
box. Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of the
glowing computer screen. This dark electric netherworld
has become a vast flowering electronic landscape. Since
the 1960s, the world of the telephone has cross-bred itself
with computers and television, and though there is still no
substance to cyberspace, nothing you can handle, it has a
strange kind of physicality now. It makes good sense
today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own.
Because people live in it now. Not just a few people,
not just a few technicians and eccentrics, but thousands of
people, quite normal people. And not just for a little
while,
either, but for hours straight, over weeks, and months, and
years. Cyberspace today is a "Net," a "Matrix,"
international in scope and growing swiftly and steadily.
It's
growing in size, and wealth, and political importance.
People are making entire careers in modern
cyberspace. Scientists and technicians, of course; they've
been there for twenty years now. But increasingly,
cyberspace is filling with journalists and doctors and
lawyers and artists and clerks. Civil servants make their
careers there now, "on-line" in vast government data-
banks; and so do spies, industrial, political, and just
plain
snoops; and so do police, at least a few of them. And there
are children living there now.
People have met there and been married there.
There are entire living communities in cyberspace today;
chattering, gossipping, planning, conferring and
scheming, leaving one another voice-mail and electronic
mail, giving one another big weightless chunks of valuable
data, both legitimate and illegitimate. They busily pass
one another computer software and the occasional
festering computer virus.
We do not really understand how to live in
cyberspace yet. We are feeling our way into it, blundering
about. That is not surprising. Our lives in the physical
world, the "real" world, are also far from perfect, despite
a
lot more practice. Human lives, real lives, are imperfect
by their nature, and there are human beings in
cyberspace. The way we live in cyberspace is a funhouse
mirror of the way we live in the real world. We take both
our advantages and our troubles with us.
This book is about trouble in cyberspace.
Specifically, this book is about certain strange events in
the year 1990, an unprecedented and startling year for the
the growing world of computerized communications.
In 1990 there came a nationwide crackdown on
illicit
computer hackers, with arrests, criminal charges, one
dramatic show-trial, several guilty pleas, and huge
confiscations of data and equipment all over the USA.
The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was larger, better
organized, more deliberate, and more resolute than any
previous effort in the brave new world of computer crime.
The U.S. Secret Service, private telephone security, and
state and local law enforcement groups across the country
all joined forces in a determined attempt to break the
back of America's electronic underground. It was a
fascinating effort, with very mixed results.
The Hacker Crackdown had another unprecedented
effect; it spurred the creation, within "the computer
community," of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a new
and very odd interest group, fiercely dedicated to the
establishment and preservation of electronic civil
liberties.
The crackdown, remarkable in itself, has created a melee
of debate over electronic crime, punishment, freedom of
the press, and issues of search and seizure. Politics has
entered cyberspace. Where people go, politics follow.
This is the story of the people of cyberspace.
On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance telephone
switching system crashed.
This was a strange, dire, huge event. Sixty thousand
people lost their telephone service completely. During
the nine long hours of frantic effort that it took to
restore
service, some seventy million telephone calls went
uncompleted.
Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco
trade, are a known and accepted hazard of the telephone
business. Hurricanes hit, and phone cables get snapped
by the thousands. Earthquakes wrench through buried
fiber-optic lines. Switching stations catch fire and burn
to
the ground. These things do happen. There are
contingency plans for them, and decades of experience in
dealing with them. But the Crash of January 15 was
unprecedented. It was unbelievably huge, and it occurred
for no apparent physical reason.
The crash started on a Monday afternoon in a single
switching-station in Manhattan. But, unlike any merely
physical damage, it spread and spread. Station after
station across America collapsed in a chain reaction, until
fully half of AT&T's network had gone haywire and the
remaining half was hard-put to handle the overflow.
Within nine hours, AT&T software engineers more or
less understood what had caused the crash. Replicating
the problem exactly, poring over software line by line,
took them a couple of weeks. But because it was hard to
understand technically, the full truth of the matter and its
implications were not widely and thoroughly aired and
explained. The root cause of the crash remained obscure,
surrounded by rumor and fear.
The crash was a grave corporate embarrassment.
The "culprit" was a bug in AT&T's own software -- not the
sort of admission the telecommunications giant wanted to
make, especially in the face of increasing competition.
Still, the truth *was* told, in the baffling technical
terms
necessary to explain it.
Somehow the explanation failed to persuade
American law enforcement officials and even telephone
corporate security personnel. These people were not
technical experts or software wizards, and they had their
own suspicions about the cause of this disaster.
The police and telco security had important sources
of information denied to mere software engineers. They
had informants in the computer underground and years
of experience in dealing with high-tech rascality that
seemed to grow ever more sophisticated. For years they
had been expecting a direct and savage attack against the
American national telephone system. And with the Crash
of January 15 -- the first month of a new, high-tech decade
-- their predictions, fears, and suspicions seemed at last
to
have entered the real world. A world where the telephone
system had not merely crashed, but, quite likely, *been*
crashed -- by "hackers."
The crash created a large dark cloud of suspicion
that would color certain people's assumptions and actions
for months. The fact that it took place in the realm of
software was suspicious on its face. The fact that it
occurred on Martin Luther King Day, still the most
politically touchy of American holidays, made it more
suspicious yet.
The Crash of January 15 gave the Hacker
Crackdown its sense of edge and its sweaty urgency. It
made people, powerful people in positions of public
authority, willing to believe the worst. And, most fatally,
it
helped to give investigators a willingness to take extreme
measures and the determination to preserve almost total
secrecy.
An obscure software fault in an aging switching
system in New York was to lead to a chain reaction of legal
and constitutional trouble all across the country.
#
Like the crash in the telephone system, this chain
reaction was ready and waiting to happen. During the
1980s, the American legal system was extensively patched
to deal with the novel issues of computer crime. There
was, for instance, the Electronic Communications Privacy
Act of 1986 (eloquently described as "a stinking mess" by a
prominent law enforcement official). And there was the
draconian Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, passed
unanimously by the United States Senate, which later
would reveal a large number of flaws. Extensive, well-
meant efforts had been made to keep the legal system up
to date. But in the day-to-day grind of the real world,
even
the most elegant software tends to crumble and suddenly
reveal its hidden bugs.
Like the advancing telephone system, the American
legal system was certainly not ruined by its temporary
crash; but for those caught under the weight of the
collapsing system, life became a series of blackouts and
anomalies.
In order to understand why these weird events
occurred, both in the world of technology and in the world
of law, it's not enough to understand the merely technical
problems. We will get to those; but first and foremost, we
must try to understand the telephone, and the business of
telephones, and the community of human beings that
telephones have created.
#
Technologies have life cycles, like cities do, like
institutions do, like laws and governments do.
The first stage of any technology is the Question
Mark, often known as the "Golden Vaporware" stage. At
this early point, the technology is only a phantom, a mere
gleam in the inventor's eye. One such inventor was a
speech teacher and electrical tinkerer named Alexander
Graham Bell.
Bell's early inventions, while ingenious, failed to
move the world. In 1863, the teenage Bell and his brother
Melville made an artificial talking mechanism out of
wood, rubber, gutta-percha, and tin. This weird device had
a rubber-covered "tongue" made of movable wooden
segments, with vibrating rubber "vocal cords," and rubber
"lips" and "cheeks." While Melville puffed a bellows into a
tin tube, imitating the lungs, young Alec Bell would
manipulate the "lips," "teeth," and "tongue," causing the
thing to emit high-pitched falsetto gibberish.
Another would-be technical breakthrough was the
Bell "phonautograph" of 1874, actually made out of a
human cadaver's ear. Clamped into place on a tripod, this
grisly gadget drew sound-wave images on smoked glass
through a thin straw glued to its vibrating earbones.
By 1875, Bell had learned to produce audible sounds -
- ugly shrieks and squawks -- by using magnets,
diaphragms, and electrical current.
Most "Golden Vaporware" technologies go nowhere.
But the second stage of technology is the Rising Star,
or, the "Goofy Prototype," stage. The telephone, Bell's
most ambitious gadget yet, reached this stage on March
10, 1876. On that great day, Alexander Graham Bell
became the first person to transmit intelligible human
speech electrically. As it happened, young Professor
Bell,
industriously tinkering in his Boston lab, had spattered
his trousers with acid. His assistant, Mr. Watson, heard
his cry for help -- over Bell's experimental audio-
telegraph. This was an event without precedent.
Technologies in their "Goofy Prototype" stage rarely
work very well. They're experimental, and therefore half-
baked and rather frazzled. The prototype may be
attractive and novel, and it does look as if it ought to be
good for something-or-other. But nobody, including the
inventor, is quite sure what. Inventors, and speculators,
and pundits may have very firm ideas about its potential
use, but those ideas are often very wrong.
The natural habitat of the Goofy Prototype is in
trade
shows and in the popular press. Infant technologies need
publicity and investment money like a tottering calf need
milk. This was very true of Bell's machine. To raise
research and development money, Bell toured with his
device as a stage attraction.
Contemporary press reports of the stage debut of
the telephone showed pleased astonishment mixed with
considerable dread. Bell's stage telephone was a large
wooden box with a crude speaker-nozzle, the whole
contraption about the size and shape of an overgrown
Brownie camera. Its buzzing steel soundplate, pumped
up by powerful electromagnets, was loud enough to fill an
auditorium. Bell's assistant Mr. Watson, who could
manage on the keyboards fairly well, kicked in by playing
the organ from distant rooms, and, later, distant cities.
This feat was considered marvellous, but very eerie
indeed.
Bell's original notion for the telephone, an idea
promoted for a couple of years, was that it would become
a mass medium. We might recognize Bell's idea today as
something close to modern "cable radio." Telephones at
a central source would transmit music, Sunday sermons,
and important public speeches to a paying network of
wired-up subscribers.
At the time, most people thought this notion made
good sense. In fact, Bell's idea was workable. In
Hungary, this philosophy of the telephone was
successfully put into everyday practice. In Budapest, for
decades, from 1893 until after World War I, there was a
government-run information service called "Telefon
Hirmondo=." Hirmondo= was a centralized source of news
and entertainment and culture, including stock reports,
plays, concerts, and novels read aloud. At certain hours of
the day, the phone would ring, you would plug in a
loudspeaker for the use of the family, and Telefon
Hirmondo= would be on the air -- or rather, on the phone.
Hirmondo= is dead tech today, but Hirmondo= might
be considered a spiritual ancestor of the modern
telephone-accessed computer data services, such as
CompuServe, GEnie or Prodigy. The principle behind
Hirmondo= is also not too far from computer "bulletin-
board systems" or BBS's, which arrived in the late 1970s,
spread rapidly across America, and will figure largely in
this book.
We are used to using telephones for individual
person-to-person speech, because we are used to the Bell
system. But this was just one possibility among many.
Communication networks are very flexible and protean,
especially when their hardware becomes sufficiently
advanced. They can be put to all kinds of uses. And they
have been -- and they will be.
Bell's telephone was bound for glory, but this was a
combination of political decisions, canny infighting in
court, inspired industrial leadership, receptive local
conditions and outright good luck. Much the same is true
of communications systems today.
As Bell and his backers struggled to install their
newfangled system in the real world of nineteenth-century
New England, they had to fight against skepticism and
industrial rivalry. There was already a strong electrical
communications network present in America: the
telegraph. The head of the Western Union telegraph
system dismissed Bell's prototype as "an electrical toy"
and refused to buy the rights to Bell's patent. The
telephone, it seemed, might be all right as a parlor
entertainment -- but not for serious business.
Telegrams, unlike mere telephones, left a permanent
physical record of their messages. Telegrams, unlike
telephones, could be answered whenever the recipient
had time and convenience. And the telegram had a much
longer distance-range than Bell's early telephone. These
factors made telegraphy seem a much more sound and
businesslike technology -- at least to some.
The telegraph system was huge, and well-entrenched.
In 1876, the United States had 214,000 miles of telegraph
wire, and 8500 telegraph offices. There were specialized
telegraphs for businesses and stock traders, government,
police and fire departments. And Bell's "toy" was best
known as a stage-magic musical device.
The third stage of technology is known as the "Cash
Cow" stage. In the "cash cow" stage, a technology finds
its
place in the world, and matures, and becomes settled and
productive. After a year or so, Alexander Graham Bell
and his capitalist backers concluded that eerie music
piped from nineteenth-century cyberspace was not the
real selling-point of his invention. Instead, the telephone
was about speech -- individual, personal speech, the
human voice, human conversation and human
interaction. The telephone was not to be managed from
any centralized broadcast center. It was to be a personal,
intimate technology.
When you picked up a telephone, you were not
absorbing the cold output of a machine -- you were
speaking to another human being. Once people realized
this, their instinctive dread of the telephone as an eerie,
unnatural device, swiftly vanished. A "telephone call" was
not a "call" from a "telephone" itself, but a call from
another human being, someone you would generally know
and recognize. The real point was not what the machine
could do for you (or to you), but what you yourself, a
person and citizen, could do *through* the machine. This
decision on the part of the young Bell Company was
absolutely vital.
The first telephone networks went up around Boston -
- mostly among the technically curious and the well-to-do
(much the same segment of the American populace that,
a hundred years later, would be buying personal
computers). Entrenched backers of the telegraph
continued to scoff.
But in January 1878, a disaster made the telephone
famous. A train crashed in Tarriffville, Connecticut.
Forward-looking doctors in the nearby city of Hartford had
had Bell's "speaking telephone" installed. An alert local
druggist was able to telephone an entire community of
local doctors, who rushed to the site to give aid. The
disaster, as disasters do, aroused intense press coverage.
The phone had proven its usefulness in the real world.
After Tarriffville, the telephone network spread like
crabgrass. By 1890 it was all over New England. By '93,
out
to Chicago. By '97, into Minnesota, Nebraska and Texas.
By 1904 it was all over the continent.
The telephone had become a mature technology.
Professor Bell (now generally known as "Dr. Bell" despite
his lack of a formal degree) became quite wealthy. He
lost interest in the tedious day-to-day business muddle of
the booming telephone network, and gratefully returned
his attention to creatively hacking-around in his various
laboratories, which were now much larger, better-
ventilated, and gratifyingly better-equipped. Bell was
never to have another great inventive success, though his
speculations and prototypes anticipated fiber-optic
transmission, manned flight, sonar, hydrofoil ships,
tetrahedral construction, and Montessori education. The
"decibel," the standard scientific measure of sound
intensity, was named after Bell.
Not all Bell's vaporware notions were inspired. He
was fascinated by human eugenics. He also spent many
years developing a weird personal system of astrophysics
in which gravity did not exist.
Bell was a definite eccentric. He was something of a
hypochondriac, and throughout his life he habitually
stayed up until four A.M., refusing to rise before noon.
But Bell had accomplished a great feat; he was an idol of
millions and his influence, wealth, and great personal
charm, combined with his eccentricity, made him
something of a loose cannon on deck. Bell maintained a
thriving scientific salon in his winter mansion in
Washington, D.C., which gave him considerable
backstage influence in governmental and scientific
circles. He was a major financial backer of the the
magazines *Science* and *National Geographic,* both
still flourishing today as important organs of the American
scientific establishment.
Bell's companion Thomas Watson, similarly wealthy
and similarly odd, became the ardent political disciple of a
19th-century science-fiction writer and would-be social
reformer, Edward Bellamy. Watson also trod the boards
briefly as a Shakespearian actor.
There would never be another Alexander Graham
Bell, but in years to come there would be surprising
numbers of people like him. Bell was a prototype of the
high-tech entrepreneur. High-tech entrepreneurs will
play a very prominent role in this book: not merely as
technicians and businessmen, but as pioneers of the
technical frontier, who can carry the power and prestige
they derive from high-technology into the political and
social arena.
Like later entrepreneurs, Bell was fierce in defense of
his own technological territory. As the telephone began to
flourish, Bell was soon involved in violent lawsuits in the
defense of his patents. Bell's Boston lawyers were
excellent, however, and Bell himself, as an elecution
teacher and gifted public speaker, was a devastatingly
effective legal witness. In the eighteen years of Bell's
patents, the Bell company was involved in six hundred
separate lawsuits. The legal records printed filled 149
volumes. The Bell Company won every single suit.
After Bell's exclusive patents expired, rival telephone
companies sprang up all over America. Bell's company,
American Bell Telephone, was soon in deep trouble. In
1907, American Bell Telephone fell into the hands of the
rather sinister J.P. Morgan financial cartel, robber-baron
speculators who dominated Wall Street.
At this point, history might have taken a different
turn. American might well have been served forever by a
patchwork of locally owned telephone companies. Many
state politicians and local businessmen considered this an
excellent solution.
But the new Bell holding company, American
Telephone and Telegraph or AT&T, put in a new man at
the helm, a visionary industrialist named Theodore Vail.
Vail, a former Post Office manager, understood large
organizations and had an innate feeling for the nature of
large-scale communications. Vail quickly saw to it that
AT&T seized the technological edge once again. The
Pupin and Campbell "loading coil," and the deForest
"audion," are both extinct technology today, but in 1913
they gave Vail's company the best *long-distance* lines
ever built. By controlling long-distance -- the links
between, and over, and above the smaller local phone
companies -- AT&T swiftly gained the whip-hand over
them, and was soon devouring them right and left.
Vail plowed the profits back into research and
development, starting the Bell tradition of huge-scale and
brilliant industrial research.
Technically and financially, AT&T gradually
steamrollered the opposition. Independent telephone
companies never became entirely extinct, and hundreds
of them flourish today. But Vail's AT&T became the
supreme communications company. At one point, Vail's
AT&T bought Western Union itself, the very company
that had derided Bell's telephone as a "toy." Vail
thoroughly reformed Western Union's hidebound
business along his modern principles; but when the
federal government grew anxious at this centralization of
power, Vail politely gave Western Union back.
This centralizing process was not unique. Very
similar events had happened in American steel, oil, and
railroads. But AT&T, unlike the other companies, was to
remain supreme. The monopoly robber-barons of those
other industries were humbled and shattered by
government trust-busting.
Vail, the former Post Office official, was quite
willing
to accommodate the US government; in fact he would
forge an active alliance with it. AT&T would become
almost a wing of the American government, almost
another Post Office -- though not quite. AT&T would
willingly submit to federal regulation, but in return, it
would use the government's regulators as its own police,
who would keep out competitors and assure the Bell
system's profits and preeminence.
This was the second birth -- the political birth -- of
the
American telephone system. Vail's arrangement was to
persist, with vast success, for many decades, until 1982.
His system was an odd kind of American industrial
socialism. It was born at about the same time as Leninist
Communism, and it lasted almost as long -- and, it must
be admitted, to considerably better effect.
Vail's system worked. Except perhaps for aerospace,
there has been no technology more thoroughly dominated
by Americans than the telephone. The telephone was
seen from the beginning as a quintessentially American
technology. Bell's policy, and the policy of Theodore
Vail,
was a profoundly democratic policy of *universal access.*
Vail's famous corporate slogan, "One Policy, One System,
Universal Service," was a political slogan, with a very
American ring to it.
The American telephone was not to become the
specialized tool of government or business, but a general
public utility. At first, it was true, only the wealthy
could
afford private telephones, and Bell's company pursued
the business markets primarily. The American phone
system was a capitalist effort, meant to make money; it
was not a charity. But from the first, almost all
communities with telephone service had public
telephones. And many stores -- especially drugstores --
offered public use of their phones. You might not own a
telephone -- but you could always get into the system, if
you really needed to.
There was nothing inevitable about this decision to
make telephones "public" and "universal." Vail's system
involved a profound act of trust in the public. This
decision was a political one, informed by the basic values
of the American republic. The situation might have been
very different; and in other countries, under other
systems, it certainly was.
Joseph Stalin, for instance, vetoed plans for a Soviet
phone system soon after the Bolshevik revolution. Stalin
was certain that publicly accessible telephones would
become instruments of anti-Soviet counterrevolution and
conspiracy. (He was probably right.) When telephones
did arrive in the Soviet Union, they would be instruments
of Party authority, and always heavily tapped. (Alexander
Solzhenitsyn's prison-camp novel *The First Circle*
describes efforts to develop a phone system more suited
to Stalinist purposes.)
France, with its tradition of rational centralized
government, had fought bitterly even against the electric
telegraph, which seemed to the French entirely too
anarchical and frivolous. For decades, nineteenth-
century France communicated via the "visual telegraph,"
a nation-spanning, government-owned semaphore
system of huge stone towers that signalled from hilltops,
across vast distances, with big windmill-like arms. In
1846,
one Dr. Barbay, a semaphore enthusiast, memorably
uttered an early version of what might be called "the
security expert's argument" against the open media.
"No, the electric telegraph is not a sound invention.
It will always be at the mercy of the slightest disruption,
wild youths, drunkards, bums, etc.... The electric
telegraph
meets those destructive elements with only a few meters
of wire over which supervision is impossible. A single man
could, without being seen, cut the telegraph wires leading
to Paris, and in twenty-four hours cut in ten different
places the wires of the same line, without being arrested.
The visual telegraph, on the contrary, has its towers, its
high walls, its gates well-guarded from inside by strong
armed men. Yes, I declare, substitution of the electric
telegraph for the visual one is a dreadful measure, a truly
idiotic act."
Dr. Barbay and his high-security stone machines
were eventually unsuccessful, but his argument -- that
communication exists for the safety and convenience of
the state, and must be carefully protected from the wild
boys and the gutter rabble who might want to crash the
system -- would be heard again and again.
When the French telephone system finally did arrive,
its snarled inadequacy was to be notorious. Devotees of
the American Bell System often recommended a trip to
France, for skeptics.
In Edwardian Britain, issues of class and privacy were
a ball-and-chain for telephonic progress. It was
considered outrageous that anyone -- any wild fool off the
street -- could simply barge bellowing into one's office or
home, preceded only by the ringing of a telephone bell.
In Britain, phones were tolerated for the use of business,
but private phones tended be stuffed away into closets,
smoking rooms, or servants' quarters. Telephone
operators were resented in Britain because they did not
seem to "know their place." And no one of breeding
would print a telephone number on a business card; this
seemed a crass attempt to make the acquaintance of
strangers.
But phone access in America was to become a
popular right; something like universal suffrage, only
more so. American women could not yet vote when the
phone system came through; yet from the beginning
American women doted on the telephone. This
"feminization" of the American telephone was often
commented on by foreigners. Phones in America were
not censored or stiff or formalized; they were social,
private, intimate, and domestic. In America, Mother's
Day is by far the busiest day of the year for the phone
network.
The early telephone companies, and especially
AT&T, were among the foremost employers of American
women. They employed the daughters of the American
middle-class in great armies: in 1891, eight thousand
women; by 1946, almost a quarter of a million. Women
seemed to enjoy telephone work; it was respectable, it was
steady, it paid fairly well as women's work went, and -- not
least -- it seemed a genuine contribution to the social good
of the community. Women found Vail's ideal of public
service attractive. This was especially true in rural
areas,
where women operators, running extensive rural party-
lines, enjoyed considerable social power. The operator
knew everyone on the party-line, and everyone knew her.
Although Bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the
telephone company did not employ women for the sake of
advancing female liberation. AT&T did this for sound
commercial reasons. The first telephone operators of the
Bell system were not women, but teenage American boys.
They were telegraphic messenger boys (a group about to
be rendered technically obsolescent), who swept up
around the phone office, dunned customers for bills, and
made phone connections on the switchboard, all on the
cheap.
Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell's
company learned a sharp lesson about combining
teenage boys and telephone switchboards. Putting
teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift
and consistent disaster. Bell's chief engineer described