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Three years in cyberspace is like thirty years anyplace real. It
feels as if a generation has passed since I wrote this book. In
terms of the generations of computing machinery involved, that's
pretty much the case.
The basic shape of cyberspace has changed drastically since 1990. A
new U.S. Administration is in power whose personnel are, if
anything, only too aware of the nature and potential of electronic
networks. It's now clear to all players concerned that the status
quo is dead-and-gone in American media and telecommunications, and
almost any territory on the electronic frontier is up for grabs.
Interactive multimedia, cable-phone alliances, the Information
Superhighway, fiber-to-the-curb, laptops and palmtops, the explosive
growth of cellular and the Internet -- the earth trembles visibly.
The year 1990 was not a pleasant one for AT&T. By 1993, however,
AT&T had successfully devoured the computer company NCR in an
unfriendly takeover, finally giving the pole-climbers a major piece
of the digital action. AT&T managed to rid itself of ownership of
the troublesome UNIX operating system, selling it to Novell, a
netware company, which was itself preparing for a savage market
dust-up with operating-system titan Microsoft. Furthermore, AT&T
acquired McCaw Cellular in a gigantic merger, giving AT&T a
potential wireless whip-hand over its former progeny, the RBOCs. The
RBOCs themselves were now AT&T's clearest potential rivals, as the
Chinese firewalls between regulated monopoly and frenzied digital
entrepreneurism began to melt and collapse headlong.
AT&T, mocked by industry analysts in 1990, was reaping awestruck
praise by commentators in 1993. AT&T had managed to avoid any more
major software crashes in its switching stations. AT&T's newfound
reputation as "the nimble giant" was all the sweeter, since AT&T's
traditional rival giant in the world of multinational computing,
IBM, was almost prostrate by 1993. IBM's vision of the commercial
computer-network of the future, "Prodigy," had managed to spend $900
million without a whole heck of a lot to show for it, while AT&T, by
contrast, was boldly speculating on the possibilities of personal
communicators and hedging its bets with investments in handwritten
interfaces. In 1990 AT&T had looked bad; but in 1993 AT&T looked
like the future.
At least, AT&T's *advertising* looked like the future. Similar
public attention was riveted on the massive $22 billion megamerger
between RBOC Bell Atlantic and cable-TV giant Tele-Communications
Inc. Nynex was buying into cable company Viacom International.
BellSouth was buying stock in Prime Management, Southwestern Bell
acquiring a cable company in Washington DC, and so forth. By stark
contrast, the Internet, a noncommercial entity which officially did
not even exist, had no advertising budget at all. And yet, almost
below the level of governmental and corporate awareness, the
Internet was stealthily devouring everything in its path, growing at
a rate that defied comprehension. Kids who might have been eager
computer-intruders a mere five years earlier were now surfing the
Internet, where their natural urge to explore led them into
cyberspace landscapes of such mindboggling vastness that the very
idea of hacking passwords seemed rather a waste of time.
By 1993, there had not been a solid, knock 'em down, panic-striking,
teenage-hacker computer-intrusion scandal in many long months. There
had, of course, been some striking and well-publicized acts of
illicit computer access, but they had been committed by adult white-
collar industry insiders in clear pursuit of personal or commercial
advantage. The kids, by contrast, all seemed to be on IRC, Internet
Relay Chat.
Or, perhaps, frolicking out in the endless glass-roots network of
personal bulletin board systems. In 1993, there were an estimated
60,000 boards in America; the population of boards had fully doubled
since Operation Sundevil in 1990. The hobby was transmuting fitfully
into a genuine industry. The board community were no longer obscure
hobbyists; many were still hobbyists and proud of it, but board
sysops and advanced board users had become a far more cohesive and
politically aware community, no longer allowing themselves to be
obscure.
The specter of cyberspace in the late 1980s, of outwitted
authorities trembling in fear before teenage hacker whiz-kids,
seemed downright antiquated by 1993. Law enforcement emphasis had
changed, and the favorite electronic villain of 1993 was not the
vandal child, but the victimizer of children, the digital child
pornographer. "Operation Longarm," a child-pornography computer raid
carried out by the previously little-known cyberspace rangers of the
U.S. Customs Service, was almost the size of Operation Sundevil, but
received very little notice by comparison.
The huge and well-organized "Operation Disconnect," an FBI strike
against telephone rip-off con-artists, was actually larger than
Sundevil. "Operation Disconnect" had its brief moment in the sun of
publicity, and then vanished utterly. It was unfortunate that a law-
enforcement affair as apparently well-conducted as Operation
Disconnect, which pursued telecom adult career criminals a hundred
times more morally repugnant than teenage hackers, should have
received so little attention and fanfare, especially compared to the
abortive Sundevil and the basically disastrous efforts of the
Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force. But the life of an
electronic policeman is seldom easy.
If any law enforcement event truly deserved full-scale press
coverage (while somehow managing to escape it), it was the amazing
saga of New York State Police Senior Investigator Don Delaney Versus
the Orchard Street Finger-Hackers. This story probably represents
the real future of professional telecommunications crime in America.
The finger-hackers sold, and still sell, stolen long-distance phone
service to a captive clientele of illegal aliens in New York City.
This clientele is desperate to call home, yet as a group, illegal
aliens have few legal means of obtaining standard phone service,
since their very presence in the United States is against the law.
The finger-hackers of Orchard Street were very unusual "hackers,"
with an astonishing lack of any kind of genuine technological
knowledge. And yet these New York call-sell thieves showed a street-
level ingenuity appalling in its single-minded sense of larceny.
There was no dissident-hacker rhetoric about freedom-of-information
among the finger-hackers. Most of them came out of the cocaine-
dealing fraternity, and they retailed stolen calls with the same
street-crime techniques of lookouts and bagholders that a crack gang
would employ. This was down-and-dirty, urban, ethnic, organized
crime, carried out by crime families every day, for cash on the
barrelhead, in the harsh world of the streets. The finger-hackers
dominated certain payphones in certain strikingly unsavory
neighborhoods. They provided a service no one else would give to a
clientele with little to lose.
With such a vast supply of electronic crime at hand, Don Delaney
rocketed from a background in homicide to teaching telecom crime at
FLETC in less than three years. Few can rival Delaney's hands-on,
street-level experience in phone fraud. Anyone in 1993 who still
believes telecommunications crime to be something rare and arcane
should have a few words with Mr Delaney. Don Delaney has also
written two fine essays, on telecom fraud and computer crime, in
Joseph Grau's *Criminal and Civil Investigations Handbook* (McGraw
Hill 1993).
*Phrack* was still publishing in 1993, now under the able editorship
of Erik Bloodaxe. Bloodaxe made a determined attempt to get law
enforcement and corporate security to pay real money for their
electronic copies of *Phrack,* but, as usual, these stalwart
defenders of intellectual property preferred to pirate the magazine.
Bloodaxe has still not gotten back any of his property from the
seizure raids of March 1, 1990. Neither has the Mentor, who is still
the managing editor of Steve Jackson Games.
Nor has Robert Izenberg, who has suspended his court struggle to get
his machinery back. Mr Izenberg has calculated that his $20,000 of
equipment seized in 1990 is, in 1993, worth $4,000 at most. The
missing software, also gone out his door, was long ago replaced. He
might, he says, sue for the sake of principle, but he feels that the
people who seized his machinery have already been discredited, and
won't be doing any more seizures. And even if his machinery were
returned -- and in good repair, which is doubtful -- it will be
essentially worthless by 1995. Robert Izenberg no longer works for
IBM, but has a job programming for a major telecommunications
company in Austin.
Steve Jackson won his case against the Secret Service on March 12,
1993, just over three years after the federal raid on his
enterprise. Thanks to the delaying tactics available through the
legal doctrine of "qualified immunity," Jackson was tactically
forced to drop his suit against the individuals William Cook, Tim
Foley, Barbara Golden and Henry Kluepfel. (Cook, Foley, Golden and
Kluepfel did, however, testify during the trial.)
The Secret Service fought vigorously in the case, battling Jackson's
lawyers right down the line, on the (mostly previously untried)
legal turf of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the
Privacy Protection Act of 1980. The Secret Service denied they were
legally or morally responsible for seizing the work of a publisher.
They claimed that (1) Jackson's gaming "books" weren't real books
anyhow, and (2) the Secret Service didn't realize SJG Inc was a
"publisher" when they raided his offices, and (3) the books only
vanished by accident because they merely happened to be inside the
computers the agents were appropriating.
The Secret Service also denied any wrongdoing in reading and erasing
all the supposedly "private" e-mail inside Jackson's seized board,
Illuminati. The USSS attorneys claimed the seizure did not violate
the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, because they weren't
actually "intercepting" electronic mail that was moving on a wire,
but only electronic mail that was quietly sitting on a disk inside
Jackson's computer. They also claimed that USSS agents hadn't read
any of the private mail on Illuminati; and anyway, even supposing
that they had, they were allowed to do that by the subpoena.
The Jackson case became even more peculiar when the Secret Service
attorneys went so far as to allege that the federal raid against the
gaming company had actually *improved Jackson's business* thanks to
the ensuing nationwide publicity.
It was a long and rather involved trial. The judge seemed most
perturbed, not by the arcane matters of electronic law, but by the
fact that the Secret Service could have avoided almost all the
consequent trouble simply by giving Jackson his computers back in
short order. The Secret Service easily could have looked at
everything in Jackson's computers, recorded everything, and given
the machinery back, and there would have been no major scandal or
federal court suit. On the contrary, everybody simply would have had
a good laugh. Unfortunately, it appeared that this idea had never
entered the heads of the Chicago-based investigators. They seemed to
have concluded unilaterally, and without due course of law, that the
world would be better off if Steve Jackson didn't have computers.
Golden and Foley claimed that they had both never even heard of the
Privacy Protection Act. Cook had heard of the Act, but he'd decided
on his own that the Privacy Protection Act had nothing to do with
Steve Jackson.
The Jackson case was also a very politicized trial, both sides
deliberately angling for a long-term legal precedent that would
stake-out big claims for their interests in cyberspace. Jackson and
his EFF advisors tried hard to establish that the least e-mail
remark of the lonely electronic pamphleteer deserves the same somber
civil-rights protection as that afforded *The New York Times.* By
stark contrast, the Secret Service's attorneys argued boldly that
the contents of an electronic bulletin board have no more
expectation of privacy than a heap of postcards. In the final
analysis, very little was firmly nailed down. Formally, the legal
rulings in the Jackson case apply only in the federal Western
District of Texas. It was, however, established that these were real
civil-liberties issues that powerful people were prepared to go to
the courthouse over; the seizure of bulletin board systems, though
it still goes on, can be a perilous act for the seizer. The Secret
Service owes Steve Jackson $50,000 in damages, and a thousand
dollars each to three of Jackson's angry and offended board users.
And Steve Jackson, rather than owning the single-line bulletin board
system "Illuminati" seized in 1990, now rejoices in possession of a
huge privately-owned Internet node, "io.com," with dozens of phone-
lines on its own T-1 trunk.
Jackson has made the entire blow-by-blow narrative of his case
available electronically, for interested parties. And yet, the
Jackson case may still not be over; a Secret Service appeal seems
likely and the EFF is also gravely dissatisfied with the ruling on
electronic interception.
The WELL, home of the American electronic civil libertarian
movement, added two thousand more users and dropped its aging
Sequent computer in favor of a snappy new Sun Sparcstation. Search-
and-seizure dicussions on the WELL are now taking a decided back-
seat to the current hot topic in digital civil liberties,
unbreakable public-key encryption for private citizens.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation left its modest home in Boston to
move inside the Washington Beltway of the Clinton Administration.
Its new executive director, ECPA pioneer and longtime ACLU activist
Jerry Berman, gained a reputation of a man adept as dining with
tigers, as the EFF devoted its attention to networking at the
highest levels of the computer and telecommunications industry.
EFF's pro-encryption lobby and anti-wiretapping initiative were
especially impressive, successfully assembling a herd of highly
variegated industry camels under the same EFF tent, in open and
powerful opposition to the electronic ambitions of the FBI and the
NSA.
EFF had transmuted at light-speed from an insurrection to an
institution. EFF Co-Founder Mitch Kapor once again sidestepped the
bureaucratic consequences of his own success, by remaining in Boston
and adapting the role of EFF guru and gray eminence. John Perry
Barlow, for his part, left Wyoming, quit the Republican Party, and
moved to New York City, accompanied by his swarm of cellular phones.
Mike Godwin left Boston for Washington as EFF's official legal
adviser to the electronically afflicted.
After the Neidorf trial, Dorothy Denning further proved her firm
scholastic independence-of-mind by speaking up boldly on the
usefulness and social value of federal wiretapping. Many civil
libertarians, who regarded the practice of wiretapping with deep
occult horror, were crestfallen to the point of comedy when
nationally known "hacker sympathizer" Dorothy Denning sternly
defended police and public interests in official eavesdropping.
However, no amount of public uproar seemed to swerve the "quaint"
Dr. Denning in the slightest. She not only made up her own mind, she
made it up in public and then stuck to her guns.
In 1993, the stalwarts of the Masters of Deception, Phiber Optik,
Acid Phreak and Scorpion, finally fell afoul of the machineries of
legal prosecution. Acid Phreak and Scorpion were sent to prison for
six months, six months of home detention, 750 hours of community
service, and, oddly, a $50 fine for conspiracy to commit computer
crime. Phiber Optik, the computer intruder with perhaps the highest
public profile in the entire world, took the longest to plead
guilty, but, facing the possibility of ten years in jail, he finally
did so. He was sentenced to a year and a day in prison.
As for the Atlanta wing of the Legion of Doom, Prophet, Leftist and
Urvile... Urvile now works for a software company in Atlanta. He is
still on probation and still repaying his enormous fine. In fifteen
months, he will once again be allowed to own a personal computer. He
is still a convicted federal felon, but has not had any legal
difficulties since leaving prison. He has lost contact with Prophet
and Leftist. Unfortunately, so have I, though not through lack of
honest effort.
Knight Lightning, now 24, is a technical writer for the federal
government in Washington DC. He has still not been accepted into law
school, but having spent more than his share of time in the company
of attorneys, he's come to think that maybe an MBA would be more to
the point. He still owes his attorneys $30,000, but the sum is
dwindling steadily since he is manfully working two jobs. Knight
Lightning customarily wears a suit and tie and carries a valise. He
has a federal security clearance.
Unindicted *Phrack* co-editor Taran King is also a technical writer
in Washington DC, and recently got married.
Terminus did his time, got out of prison, and currently lives in
Silicon Valley where he is running a full-scale Internet node,
"netsys.com." He programs professionally for a company specializing
in satellite links for the Internet.
Carlton Fitzpatrick still teaches at the Federal Law Enforcement
Training Center, but FLETC found that the issues involved in
sponsoring and running a bulletin board system are rather more
complex than they at first appear to be.
Gail Thackeray briefly considered going into private security, but
then changed tack, and joined the Maricopa County District
Attorney's Office (with a salary). She is still vigorously
prosecuting electronic racketeering in Phoenix, Arizona.
The fourth consecutive Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference
will take place in March 1994 in Chicago.
As for Bruce Sterling... well *8-). I thankfully abandoned my brief
career as a true-crime journalist and wrote a new science fiction
novel, *Heavy Weather,* and assembled a new collection of short
stories, *Globalhead.* I also write nonfiction regularly, for the
popular-science column in *The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction.*
I like life better on the far side of the boundary between fantasy
and reality; but I've come to recognize that reality has an
unfortunate way of annexing fantasy for its own purposes. That's why
I'm on the Police Liaison Committee for EFF-Austin, a local
electronic civil liberties group (eff-austin@tic.com). I don't think
I will ever get over my experience of the Hacker Crackdown, and I
expect to be involved in electronic civil liberties activism for the
rest of my life.
It wouldn't be hard to find material for another book on computer
crime and civil liberties issues. I truly believe that I could write
another book much like this one, every year. Cyberspace is very big.
There's a lot going on out there, far more than can be adequately
covered by the tiny, though growing, cadre of network-literate
reporters. I do wish I could do more work on this topic, because the
various people of cyberspace are an element of our society that
definitely requires sustained study and attention.
But there's only one of me, and I have a lot on my mind, and, like
most science fiction writers, I have a lot more imagination than
discipline. Having done my stint as an electronic-frontier reporter,
my hat is off to those stalwart few who do it every day. I may
return to this topic some day, but I have no real plans to do so.
However, I didn't have any real plans to write "Hacker Crackdown,"
either. Things happen, nowadays. There are landslides in cyberspace.
I'll just have to try and stay alert and on my feet.
The electronic landscape changes with astounding speed. We are
living through the fastest technological transformation in human
history. I was glad to have a chance to document cyberspace during
one moment in its long mutation; a kind of strobe-flash of the
maelstrom. This book is already out-of-date, though, and it will be
quite obsolete in another five years. It seems a pity.
However, in about fifty years, I think this book might seem quite
interesting. And in a hundred years, this book should seem mind-
bogglingly archaic and bizarre, and will probably seem far weirder
to an audience in 2092 than it ever seemed to the contemporary
readership.
Keeping up in cyberspace requires a great deal of sustained
attention. Personally, I keep tabs with the milieu by reading the
invaluable electronic magazine Computer underground Digest
(tk0jut2@mvs.cso.niu.edu with the subject header: SUB CuD and a
message that says: SUB CuD your name your.full.internet@address). I
also read Jack Rickard's bracingly iconoclastic *Boardwatch
Magazine* for print news of the BBS and online community. And,
needless to say, I read *Wired,* the first magazine of the 1990s
that actually looks and acts like it really belongs in this decade.
There are other ways to learn, of course, but these three outlets
will guide your efforts very well.
When I myself want to publish something electronically, which I'm
doing with increasing frequency, I generally put it on the gopher at
Texas Internet Consulting, who are my, well, Texan Internet
consultants (tic.com). This book can be found there. I think it is a
worthwhile act to let this work go free.
From thence, one's bread floats out onto the dark waters of
cyberspace, only to return someday, tenfold. And of course,
thoroughly soggy, and riddled with an entire amazing ecosystem of
bizarre and gnawingly hungry cybermarine life-forms. For this author
at least, that's all that really counts.
Thanks for your attention *8-)
Bruce Sterling
_b_r_u_c_e_s_@_w_e_l_l_._s_f_._c_a_._u_s
New Years' Day 1994, Austin Texas
Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use
Copyright (c) 1992, 1994 Bruce Sterling - _b_r_u_c_e_s_@_w_e_l_l_._s_f_._c_a_._u_s.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this
publication provided the copyright notice and this permission notice
are preserved on all copies.
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