💾 Archived View for clemat.is › saccophore › library › ebooks › hacker_crackdown › part2.txt captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38.
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The date was May 9, 1990. The Pope was touring Mexico City. Hustlers
from the Medellin Cartel were trying to buy black-market Stinger
missiles in Florida. On the comics page, Doonesbury character Andy
was dying of AIDS.
And then.... a highly unusual item whose novelty and calculated
rhetoric won it headscratching attention in newspapers all over
America. The US Attorney's office in Phoenix, Arizona, had issued a
press release announcing a nationwide law enforcement crackdown
against "illegal computer hacking activities." The sweep was
officially known as "Operation Sundevil."
Eight paragraphs in the press release gave the bare facts: twenty-
seven search warrants carried out on May 8, with three arrests, and
a hundred and fifty agents on the prowl in "twelve" cities across
America. (Different counts in local press reports yielded
"thirteen," "fourteen," and "sixteen" cities.) Officials estimated
that criminal losses of revenue to telephone companies "may run into
millions of dollars." Credit for the Sundevil investigations was
taken by the US Secret Service, Assistant US Attorney Tim Holtzen of
Phoenix, and the Assistant Attorney General of Arizona, Gail
Thackeray.
The prepared remarks of Garry M. Jenkins, appearing in a U.S.
Department of Justice press release, were of particular interest.
Mr. Jenkins was the Assistant Director of the US Secret Service, and
the highest-ranking federal official to take any direct public role
in the hacker crackdown of 1990.
"Today, the Secret Service is sending a clear message to those
computer hackers who have decided to violate the laws of this nation
in the mistaken belief that they can successfully avoid detection by
hiding behind the relative anonymity of their computer terminals.
(...) "Underground groups have been formed for the purpose of
exchanging information relevant to their criminal activities. These
groups often communicate with each other through message systems
between computers called 'bulletin boards.' "Our experience shows
that many computer hacker suspects are no longer misguided
teenagers, mischievously playing games with their computers in their
bedrooms. Some are now high tech computer operators using computers
to engage in unlawful conduct."
Who were these "underground groups" and "hightech operators?" Where
had they come from? What did they want? Who were they? Were they
"mischievous?" Were they dangerous? How had "misguided teenagers"
managed to alarm the United States Secret Service? And just how
widespread was this sort of thing? Of all the major players in the
Hacker Crackdown: the phone companies, law enforcement, the civil
libertarians, and the "hackers" themselves -- the "hackers" are by
far the most mysterious, by far the hardest to understand, by far
the weirdest.
Not only are "hackers" novel in their activities, but they come in a
variety of odd subcultures, with a variety of languages, motives and
values.
The earliest proto-hackers were probably those unsung mischievous
telegraph boys who were summarily fired by the Bell Company in 1878.
Legitimate "hackers," those computer enthusiasts who are
independent-minded but law-abiding, generally trace their spiritual
ancestry to elite technical universities, especially M.I.T. and
Stanford, in the 1960s.
But the genuine roots of the modern hacker underground can probably
be traced most successfully to a now much-obscured hippie anarchist
movement known as the Yippies. The Yippies, who took their name from
the largely fictional "Youth International Party," carried out a
loud and lively policy of surrealistic subversion and outrageous
political mischief. Their basic tenets were flagrant sexual
promiscuity, open and copious drug use, the political overthrow of
any powermonger over thirty years of age, and an immediate end to
the war in Vietnam, by any means necessary, including the psychic
levitation of the Pentagon. The two most visible Yippies were Abbie
Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Rubin eventually became a Wall Street
broker. Hoffman, ardently sought by federal authorities, went into
hiding for seven years, in Mexico, France, and the United States.
While on the lam, Hoffman continued to write and publish, with help
from sympathizers in the American anarcho-leftist underground.
Mostly, Hoffman survived through false ID and odd jobs. Eventually
he underwent facial plastic surgery and adopted an entirely new
identity as one "Barry Freed." After surrendering himself to
authorities in 1980, Hoffman spent a year in prison on a cocaine
conviction.
Hoffman's worldview grew much darker as the glory days of the 1960s
faded. In 1989, he purportedly committed suicide, under odd and, to
some, rather suspicious circumstances.
Abbie Hoffman is said to have caused the Federal Bureau of
Investigation to amass the single largest investigation file ever
opened on an individual American citizen. (If this is true, it is
still questionable whether the FBI regarded Abbie Hoffman a serious
public threat -quite possibly, his file was enormous simply because
Hoffman left colorful legendry wherever he went). He was a gifted
publicist, who regarded electronic media as both playground and
weapon. He actively enjoyed manipulating network TV and other
gullible, imagehungry media, with various weird lies, mindboggling
rumors, impersonation scams, and other sinister distortions, all
absolutely guaranteed to upset cops, Presidential candidates, and
federal judges. Hoffman's most famous work was a book self-
reflexively known as Steal This Book, which publicized a number of
methods by which young, penniless hippie agitators might live off
the fat of a system supported by humorless drones. Steal This Book,
whose title urged readers to damage the very means of distribution
which had put it into their hands, might be described as a spiritual
ancestor of a computer virus.
Hoffman, like many a later conspirator, made extensive use of pay-
phones for his agitation work -- in his case, generally through the
use of cheap brass washers as coin-slugs.
During the Vietnam War, there was a federal surtax imposed on
telephone service; Hoffman and his cohorts could, and did, argue
that in systematically stealing phone service they were engaging in
civil disobedience: virtuously denying tax funds to an illegal and
immoral war. But this thin veil of decency was soon dropped
entirely. Ripping-off the System found its own justification in deep
alienation and a basic outlaw contempt for conventional bourgeois
values. Ingenious, vaguely politicized varieties of rip-off, which
might be described as "anarchy by convenience," became very popular
in Yippie circles, and because rip-off was so useful, it was to
survive the Yippie movement itself. In the early 1970s, it required
fairly limited expertise and ingenuity to cheat payphones, to divert
"free" electricity and gas service, or to rob vending machines and
parking meters for handy pocket change. It also required a
conspiracy to spread this knowledge, and the gall and nerve actually
to commit petty theft, but the Yippies had these qualifications in
plenty. In June 1971, Abbie Hoffman and a telephone enthusiast
sarcastically known as "Al Bell" began publishing a newsletter
called Youth International Party Line. This newsletter was dedicated
to collating and spreading Yippie rip-off techniques, especially of
phones, to the joy of the freewheeling underground and the insensate
rage of all straight people.
As a political tactic, phone-service theft ensured that Yippie
advocates would always have ready access to the long-distance
telephone as a medium, despite the Yippies' chronic lack of
organization, discipline, money, or even a steady home address.
Party Line was run out of Greenwich Village for a couple of years,
then "Al Bell" more or less defected from the faltering ranks of
Yippiedom, changing the newsletter's name to TAP or Technical
Assistance Program. After the Vietnam War ended, the steam began
leaking rapidly out of American radical dissent. But by this time,
"Bell" and his dozen or so core contributors had the bit between
their teeth, and had begun to derive tremendous gut-level
satisfaction from the sensation of pure technical power.
TAP articles, once highly politicized, became pitilessly jargonized
and technical, in homage or parody to the Bell System's own
technical documents, which TAP studied closely, gutted, and
reproduced without permission. The TAP elite revelled in gloating
possession of the specialized knowledge necessary to beat the
system.
"Al Bell" dropped out of the game by the late 70s, and "Tom Edison"
took over; TAP readers (some 1400 of them, all told) now began to
show more interest in telex switches and the growing phenomenon of
computer systems. In 1983, "Tom Edison" had his computer stolen and
his house set on fire by an arsonist. This was an eventually mortal
blow to TAP (though the legendary name was to be resurrected in 1990
by a young Kentuckian computeroutlaw named "Predat0r.")
1.
Ever since telephones began to make money, there have been people
willing to rob and defraud phone companies. The legions of petty
phone thieves vastly outnumber those "phone phreaks" who "explore
the system" for the sake of the intellectual challenge. The New York
metropolitan area (long in the vanguard of American crime) claims
over 150,000 physical attacks on pay telephones every year! Studied
carefully, a modern payphone reveals itself as a little fortress,
carefully designed and redesigned over generations, to resist
coinslugs, zaps of electricity, chunks of coin-shaped ice, prybars,
magnets, lockpicks, blasting caps. Public pay- phones must survive
in a world of unfriendly, greedy people, and a modern payphone is as
exquisitely evolved as a cactus.
Because the phone network pre-dates the computer network, the
scofflaws known as "phone phreaks" pre-date the scofflaws known as
"computer hackers." In practice, today, the line between "phreaking"
and "hacking" is very blurred, just as the distinction between
telephones and computers has blurred. The phone system has been
digitized, and computers have learned to "talk" over phone-lines.
What's worse -- and this was the point of the Mr. Jenkins of the
Secret Service -- some hackers have learned to steal, and some
thieves have learned to hack.
Despite the blurring, one can still draw a few useful behavioral
distinctions between "phreaks" and "hackers." Hackers are intensely
interested in the "system" per se, and enjoy relating to machines.
"Phreaks" are more social, manipulating the system in a rough-and-
ready fashion in order to get through to other human beings, fast,
cheap and under the table.
Phone phreaks love nothing so much as "bridges," illegal conference
calls of ten or twelve chatting conspirators, seaboard to seaboard,
lasting for many hours -- and running, of course, on somebody else's
tab, preferably a large corporation's. As phone-phreak conferences
wear on, people drop out (or simply leave the phone off the hook,
while they sashay off to work or school or babysitting), and new
people are phoned up and invited to join in, from some other
continent, if possible. Technical trivia, boasts, brags, lies, head-
trip deceptions, weird rumors, and cruel gossip are all freely
exchanged. The lowest rung of phone- phreaking is the theft of
telephone access codes. Charging a phone call to somebody else's
stolen number is, of course, a pig-easy way of stealing phone
service, requiring practically no technical expertise. This practice
has been very widespread, especially among lonely people without
much money who are far from home. Code theft has flourished
especially in college dorms, military bases, and, notoriously, among
roadies for rock bands. Of late, code theft has spread very rapidly
among Third Worlders in the US, who pile up enormous unpaid long-
distance bills to the Caribbean, South America, and Pakistan.
The simplest way to steal phone-codes is simply to look over a
victim's shoulder as he punches-in his own code-number on a public
payphone. This technique is known as "shoulder-surfing," and is
especially common in airports, bus terminals, and train stations.
The code is then sold by the thief for a few dollars. The buyer
abusing the code has no computer expertise, but calls his Mom in New
York, Kingston or Caracas and runs up a huge bill with impunity. The
losses from this primitive phreaking activity are far, far greater
than the monetary losses caused by computer-intruding hackers. In
the mid-to-late 1980s, until the introduction of sterner telco
security measures, computerized code theft worked like a charm, and
was virtually omnipresent throughout the digital underground, among
phreaks and hackers alike. This was accomplished through programming
one's computer to try random code numbers over the telephone until
one of them worked. Simple programs to do this were widely available
in the underground; a computer running all night was likely to come
up with a dozen or so useful hits. This could be repeated week after
week until one had a large library of stolen codes.
Nowadays, the computerized dialling of hundreds of numbers can be
detected within hours and swiftly traced. If a stolen code is
repeatedly abused, this too can be detected within a few hours. But
for years in the 1980s, the publication of stolen codes was a kind
of elementary etiquette for fledgling hackers. The simplest way to
establish your bona-fides as a raider was to steal a code through
repeated random dialling and offer it to the "community" for use.
Codes could be both stolen, and used, simply and easily from the
safety of one's own bedroom, with very little fear of detection or
punishment.
Before computers and their phone-line modems entered American homes
in gigantic numbers, phone phreaks had their own special
telecommunications hardware gadget, the famous "blue box." This
fraud device (now rendered increasingly useless by the digital
evolution of the phone system) could trick switching systems into
granting free access to long-distance lines. It did this by
mimicking the system's own signal, a tone of 2600 hertz.
Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple Computer, Inc.,
once dabbled in selling blue-boxes in college dorms in California.
For many, in the early days of phreaking, blue-boxing was scarcely
perceived as "theft," but rather as a fun (if sneaky) way to use
excess phone capacity harmlessly. After all, the long-distance lines
were just sitting there.... Whom did it hurt, really? If you're not
damaging the system, and you're not using up any tangible resource,
and if nobody finds out what you did, then what real harm have you
done? What exactly have you "stolen," anyway? If a tree falls in the
forest and nobody hears it, how much is the noise worth? Even now
this remains a rather dicey question.
Blue-boxing was no joke to the phone companies, however. Indeed,
when Ramparts magazine, a radical publication in California, printed
the wiring schematics necessary to create a mute box in June 1972,
the magazine was seized by police and Pacific Bell phonecompany
officials. The mute box, a blue-box variant, allowed its user to
receive long-distance calls free of charge to the caller. This
device was closely described in a Ramparts article wryly titled
"Regulating the Phone Company In Your Home." Publication of this
article was held to be in violation of Californian State Penal Code
section 502.7, which outlaws ownership of wire-fraud devices and the
selling of "plans or instructions for any instrument, apparatus, or
device intended to avoid telephone toll charges."
Issues of Ramparts were recalled or seized on the newsstands, and
the resultant loss of income helped put the magazine out of
business. This was an ominous precedent for free-expression issues,
but the telco's crushing of a radical-fringe magazine passed without
serious challenge at the time. Even in the freewheeling California
1970s, it was widely felt that there was something sacrosanct about
what the phone company knew; that the telco had a legal and moral
right to protect itself by shutting off the flow of such illicit
information. Most telco information was so "specialized" that it
would scarcely be understood by any honest member of the public. If
not published, it would not be missed. To print such material did
not seem part of the legitimate role of a free press.
In 1990 there would be a similar telco-inspired attack on the
electronic phreak/hacking "magazine" Phrack. The Phrack legal case
became a central issue in the Hacker Crackdown, and gave rise to
great controversy. Phrack would also be shut down, for a time, at
least, but this time both the telcos and their law-enforcement
allies would pay a much larger price for their actions. The Phrack
case will be examined in detail, later.
Phone-phreaking as a social practice is still very much alive at
this moment. Today, phone-phreaking is thriving much more vigorously
than the better-known and worse-feared practice of "computer
hacking." New forms of phreaking are spreading rapidly, following
new vulnerabilities in sophisticated phone services.
Cellular phones are especially vulnerable; their chips can be re-
programmed to present a false caller ID and avoid billing. Doing so
also avoids police tapping, making cellular-phone abuse a favorite
among drug- dealers. "Call-sell operations" using pirate cellular
phones can, and have, been run right out of the backs of cars, which
move from "cell" to "cell" in the local phone system, retailing
stolen long-distance service, like some kind of demented electronic
version of the neighborhood ice-cream truck.
Private branch-exchange phone systems in large corporations can be
penetrated; phreaks dial-up a local company, enter its internal
phone- system, hack it, then use the company's own PBX system to
dial back out over the public network, causing the company to be
stuck with the resulting long-distance bill. This technique is known
as "diverting." "Diverting" can be very costly, especially because
phreaks tend to travel in packs and never stop talking. Perhaps the
worst by-product of this "PBX fraud" is that victim companies and
telcos have sued one another over the financial responsibility for
the stolen calls, thus enriching not only shabby phreaks but well-
paid lawyers.
"Voice-mail systems" can also be abused; phreaks can seize their own
sections of these sophisticated electronic answering machines, and
use them for trading codes or knowledge of illegal techniques.
Voice- mail abuse does not hurt the company directly, but finding
supposedly empty slots in your company's answering machine all
crammed with phreaks eagerly chattering and hey-duding one another
in impenetrable jargon can cause sensations of almost mystical
repulsion and dread.
Worse yet, phreaks have sometimes been known to react truculently to
attempts to "clean up" the voice-mail system. Rather than humbly
acquiescing to being thrown out of their playground, they may very
well call up the company officials at work (or at home) and loudly
demand free voice-mail addresses of their very own. Such bullying is
taken very seriously by spooked victims.
Acts of phreak revenge against straight people are rare, but voice-
mail systems are especially tempting and vulnerable, and an
infestation of angry phreaks in one's voice-mail system is no joke.
They can erase legitimate messages; or spy on private messages; or
harass users with recorded taunts and obscenities. They've even been
known to seize control of voice-mail security, and lock out
legitimate users, or even shut down the system entirely.
Cellular phone-calls, cordless phones, and ship-toshore telephony
can all be monitored by various forms of radio; this kind of
"passive monitoring" is spreading explosively today. Technically
eavesdropping on other people's cordless and cellular phone-calls is
the fastestgrowing area in phreaking today. This practice strongly
appeals to the lust for power and conveys gratifying sensations of
technical superiority over the eavesdropping victim. Monitoring is
rife with all manner of tempting evil mischief. Simple prurient
snooping is by far the most common activity. But credit-card numbers
unwarily spoken over the phone can be recorded, stolen and used. And
tapping people's phone-calls (whether through active telephone taps
or passive radio monitors) does lend itself conveniently to
activities like blackmail, industrial espionage, and political dirty
tricks. It should be repeated that telecommunications fraud, the
theft of phone service, causes vastly greater monetary losses than
the practice of entering into computers by stealth. Hackers are
mostly young suburban American white males, and exist in their
hundreds -- but "phreaks" come from both sexes and from many
nationalities, ages and ethnic backgrounds, and are flourishing in
the thousands.
2.
The term "hacker" has had an unfortunate history. This book, The
Hacker Crackdown, has little to say about "hacking" in its finer,
original sense. The term can signify the free-wheeling intellectual
exploration of the highest and deepest potential of computer
systems. Hacking can describe the determination to make access to
computers and information as free and open as possible. Hacking can
involve the heartfelt conviction that beauty can be found in
computers, that the fine aesthetic in a perfect program can liberate
the mind and spirit. This is "hacking" as it was defined in Steven
Levy's much-praised history of the pioneer computer milieu, Hackers,
published in 1984.
Hackers of all kinds are absolutely soaked through with heroic anti-
bureaucratic sentiment. Hackers long for recognition as a
praiseworthy cultural archetype, the postmodern electronic
equivalent of the cowboy and mountain man. Whether they deserve such
a reputation is something for history to decide. But many hackers -
including those outlaw hackers who are computer intruders, and whose
activities are defined as criminal -actually attempt to live up to
this techno-cowboy reputation. And given that electronics and
telecommunications are still largely unexplored territories, there
is simply no telling what hackers might uncover.
For some people, this freedom is the very breath of oxygen, the
inventive spontaneity that makes life worth living and that flings
open doors to marvellous possibility and individual empowerment. But
for many people -- and increasingly so -- the hacker is an ominous
figure, a smartaleck sociopath ready to burst out of his basement
wilderness and savage other people's lives for his own anarchical
convenience.
Any form of power without responsibility, without direct and formal
checks and balances, is frightening to people -- and reasonably so.
It should be frankly admitted that hackers are frightening, and that
the basis of this fear is not irrational. Fear of hackers goes well
beyond the fear of merely criminal activity.
Subversion and manipulation of the phone system is an act with
disturbing political overtones. In America, computers and telephones
are potent symbols of organized authority and the technocratic
business elite.
But there is an element in American culture that has always strongly
rebelled against these symbols; rebelled against all large
industrial computers and all phone companies. A certain anarchical
tinge deep in the American soul delights in causing confusion and
pain to all bureaucracies, including technological ones.
There is sometimes malice and vandalism in this attitude, but it is
a deep and cherished part of the American national character. The
outlaw, the rebel, the rugged individual, the pioneer, the sturdy
Jeffersonian yeoman, the private citizen resisting interference in
his pursuit of happiness -- these are figures that all Americans
recognize, and that many will strongly applaud and defend.
Many scrupulously law-abiding citizens today do cutting-edge work
with electronics -- work that has already had tremendous social
influence and will have much more in years to come. In all truth,
these talented, hardworking, law-abiding, mature, adult people are
far more disturbing to the peace and order of the current status quo
than any scofflaw group of romantic teenage punk kids. These law-
abiding hackers have the power, ability, and willingness to
influence other people's lives quite unpredictably. They have means,
motive, and opportunity to meddle drastically with the American
social order. When corralled into governments, universities, or
large multinational companies, and forced to follow rulebooks and
wear suits and ties, they at least have some conventional halters on
their freedom of action. But when loosed alone, or in small groups,
and fired by imagination and the entrepreneurial spirit, they can
move mountains - causing landslides that will likely crash directly
into your office and living room.
These people, as a class, instinctively recognize that a public,
politicized attack on hackers will eventually spread to them -- that
the term "hacker," once demonized, might be used to knock their
hands off the levers of power and choke them out of existence. There
are hackers today who fiercely and publicly resist any besmirching
of the noble title of hacker. Naturally and understandably, they
deeply resent the attack on their values implicit in using the word
"hacker" as a synonym for computer-criminal.
This book, sadly but in my opinion unavoidably, rather adds to the
degradation of the term. It concerns itself mostly with "hacking" in
its commonest latter-day definition, i.e., intruding into computer
systems by stealth and without permission. The term "hacking" is
used routinely today by almost all law enforcement officials with
any professional interest in computer fraud and abuse. American
police describe almost any crime committed with, by, through, or
against a computer as hacking.
Most importantly, "hacker" is what computerintruders choose to call
themselves. Nobody who "hacks" into systems willingly describes
himself (rarely, herself) as a "computer intruder," "computer
trespasser," "cracker," "wormer," "darkside hacker" or "high tech
street gangster." Several other demeaning terms have been invented
in the hope that the press and public will leave the original sense
of the word alone. But few people actually use these terms. (I
exempt the term "cyberpunk," which a few hackers and law enforcement
people actually do use. The term "cyberpunk" is drawn from literary
criticism and has some odd and unlikely resonances, but, like
hacker, cyberpunk too has become a criminal pejorative today.)
In any case, breaking into computer systems was hardly alien to the
original hacker tradition. The first tottering systems of the 1960s
required fairly extensive internal surgery merely to function day-
by-day. Their users "invaded" the deepest, most arcane recesses of
their operating software almost as a matter of routine. "Computer
security" in these early, primitive systems was at best an
afterthought. What security there was, was entirely physical, for it
was assumed that anyone allowed near this expensive, arcane hardware
would be a fully qualified professional expert.
In a campus environment, though, this meant that grad students,
teaching assistants, undergraduates, and eventually, all manner of
dropouts and hangers-on ended up accessing and often running the
works.
Universities, even modern universities, are not in the business of
maintaining security over information. On the contrary,
universities, as institutions, pre-date the "information economy" by
many centuries and are notfor-profit cultural entities, whose reason
for existence (purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through
techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities are meant
to pass the torch of civilization, not just download data into
student skulls, and the values of the academic community are
strongly at odds with those of all would-be information empires.
Teachers at all levels, from kindergarten up, have proven to be
shameless and persistent software and data pirates. Universities do
not merely "leak information" but vigorously broadcast free thought.
This clash of values has been fraught with controversy. Many hackers
of the 1960s remember their professional apprenticeship as a long
guerilla war against the uptight mainframe-computer "information
priesthood." These computer-hungry youngsters had to struggle hard
for access to computing power, and many of them were not above
certain, er, shortcuts. But, over the years, this practice freed
computing from the sterile reserve of lab-coated technocrats and was
largely responsible for the explosive growth of computing in general
society -- especially personal computing.
Access to technical power acted like catnip on certain of these
youngsters. Most of the basic techniques of computer intrusion:
password cracking, trapdoors, backdoors, trojan horses -- were
invented in college environments in the 1960s, in the early days of
network computing. Some off-the-cuff experience at computer
intrusion was to be in the informal resume of most "hackers" and
many future industry giants. Outside of the tiny cult of computer
enthusiasts, few people thought much about the implications of
"breaking into" computers. This sort of activity had not yet been
publicized, much less criminalized.
In the 1960s, definitions of "property" and "privacy" had not yet
been extended to cyberspace. Computers were not yet indispensable to
society. There were no vast databanks of vulnerable, proprietary
information stored in computers, which might be accessed, copied
without permission, erased, altered, or sabotaged. The stakes were
low in the early days -- but they grew every year, exponentially, as
computers themselves grew.
By the 1990s, commercial and political pressures had become
overwhelming, and they broke the social boundaries of the hacking
subculture. Hacking had become too important to be left to the
hackers. Society was now forced to tackle the intangible nature of
cyberspace-as- property, cyberspace as privately-owned unreal-
estate. In the new, severe, responsible, highstakes context of the
"Information Society" of the 1990s, "hacking" was called into
question.
What did it mean to break into a computer without permission and use
its computational power, or look around inside its files without
hurting anything? What were computer-intruding hackers, anyway -
- how should society, and the law, best define their actions? Were
they just browsers, harmless intellectual explorers? Were they
voyeurs, snoops, invaders of privacy? Should they be sternly treated
as potential agents of espionage, or perhaps as industrial spies? Or
were they best defined as trespassers, a very common teenage
misdemeanor? Was hacking theft of service? (After all, intruders
were getting someone else's computer to carry out their orders,
without permission and without paying). Was hacking fraud? Maybe it
was best described as impersonation. The commonest mode of computer
intrusion was (and is) to swipe or snoop somebody else's password,
and then enter the computer in the guise of another person -- who is
commonly stuck with the blame and the bills.
Perhaps a medical metaphor was better -- hackers should be defined
as "sick," as computer addicts unable to control their
irresponsible, compulsive behavior.
But these weighty assessments meant little to the people who were
actually being judged. From inside the underground world of hacking
itself, all these perceptions seem quaint, wrongheaded, stupid, or
meaningless. The most important self-perception of underground
hackers - from the 1960s, right through to the present day -- is
that they are an elite. The day-to-day struggle in the underground
is not over sociological definitions -- who cares? -- but for power,
knowledge, and status among one's peers.
When you are a hacker, it is your own inner conviction of your elite
status that enables you to break, or let us say "transcend," the
rules. It is not that all rules go by the board. The rules
habitually broken by hackers are unimportant rules -- the rules of
dopey greedhead telco bureaucrats and pig-ignorant government pests.
Hackers have their own rules, which separate behavior which is cool
and elite, from behavior which is rodentlike, stupid and losing.
These "rules," however, are mostly unwritten and enforced by peer
pressure and tribal feeling. Like all rules that depend on the
unspoken conviction that everybody else is a good old boy, these
rules are ripe for abuse. The mechanisms of hacker peer- pressure,
"teletrials" and ostracism, are rarely used and rarely work. Back-
stabbing slander, threats, and electronic harassment are also freely
employed in downand-dirty intrahacker feuds, but this rarely forces
a rival out of the scene entirely. The only real solution for the
problem of an utterly losing, treacherous and rodentlike hacker is
to turn him in to the police. Unlike the Mafia or Medellin Cartel,
the hacker elite cannot simply execute the bigmouths, creeps and
troublemakers among their ranks, so they turn one another in with
astonishing frequency.
There is no tradition of silence or omerta in the hacker underworld.
Hackers can be shy, even reclusive, but when they do talk, hackers
tend to brag, boast and strut. Almost everything hackers do is
invisible; if they don't brag, boast, and strut about it, then
nobody will ever know. If you don't have something to brag, boast,
and strut about, then nobody in the underground will recognize you
and favor you with vital cooperation and respect.
The way to win a solid reputation in the underground is by telling
other hackers things that could only have been learned by
exceptional cunning and stealth. Forbidden knowledge, therefore, is
the basic currency of the digital underground, like seashells among
Trobriand Islanders. Hackers hoard this knowledge, and dwell upon it
obsessively, and refine it, and bargain with it, and talk and talk
about it. Many hackers even suffer from a strange obsession to teach
-- to spread the ethos and the knowledge of the digital underground.
They'll do this even when it gains them no particular advantage and
presents a grave personal risk.
And when that risk catches up with them, they will go right on
teaching and preaching -- to a new audience this time, their
interrogators from law enforcement. Almost every hacker arrested
tells everything he knows -- all about his friends, his mentors, his
disciples -- legends, threats, horror stories, dire rumors, gossip,
hallucinations. This is, of course, convenient for law enforcement -
- except when law enforcement begins to believe hacker legendry.
Phone phreaks are unique among criminals in their willingness to
call up law enforcement officials -- in the office, at their homes -
- and give them an extended piece of their mind. It is hard not to
interpret this as begging for arrest, and in fact it is an act of
incredible foolhardiness. Police are naturally nettled by these acts
of chutzpah and will go well out of their way to bust these
flaunting idiots. But it can also be interpreted as a product of a
world-view so elitist, so closed and hermetic, that electronic
police are simply not perceived as "police," but rather as enemy
phone phreaks who should be scolded into behaving "decently."
Hackers at their most grandiloquent perceive themselves as the elite
pioneers of a new electronic world. Attempts to make them obey the
democratically established laws of contemporary American society are
seen as repression and persecution. After all, they argue, if
Alexander Graham Bell had gone along with the rules of the Western
Union telegraph company, there would have been no telephones. If
Jobs and Wozniak had believed that IBM was the be-all and end-all,
there would have been no personal computers. If Benjamin Franklin
and Thomas Jefferson had tried to "work within the system" there
would have been no United States.
Not only do hackers privately believe this as an article of faith,
but they have been known to write ardent manifestos about it. Here
are some revealing excerpts from an especially vivid hacker
manifesto: "The TechnoRevolution" by "Dr. Crash," which appeared in
electronic form in Phrack Volume 1, Issue 6, Phile 3.
"To fully explain the true motives behind hacking, we must first
take a quick look into the past. In the 1960s, a group of MIT
students built the first modern computer system. This wild,
rebellious group of young men were the first to bear the name
'hackers.' The systems that they developed were intended to be used
to solve world problems and to benefit all of mankind.
"As we can see, this has not been the case. The computer system has
been solely in the hands of big businesses and the government. The
wonderful device meant to enrich life has become a weapon which
dehumanizes people. To the government and large businesses, people
are no more than disk space, and the government doesn't use
computers to arrange aid for the poor, but to control nuclear death
weapons. The average American can only have access to a small
microcomputer which is worth only a fraction of what they pay for
it. The businesses keep the true state-of-the-art equipment away
from the people behind a steel wall of incredibly high prices and
bureaucracy. It is because of this state of affairs that hacking was
born.(...)
"Of course, the government doesn't want the monopoly of technology
broken, so they have outlawed hacking and arrest anyone who is
caught.(...) The phone company is another example of technology
abused and kept from people with high prices.(...)
"Hackers often find that their existing equipment, due to the
monopoly tactics of computer companies, is inefficient for their
purposes. Due to the exorbitantly high prices, it is impossible to
legally purchase the necessary equipment. This need has given still
another segment of the fight: Credit Carding. Carding is a way of
obtaining the necessary goods without paying for them. It is again
due to the companies' stupidity that Carding is so easy, and shows
that the world's businesses are in the hands of those with
considerably less technical know-how than we, the hackers. (...)
"Hacking must continue. We must train newcomers to the art of
hacking.(....) And whatever you do, continue the fight. Whether you
know it or not, if you are a hacker, you are a revolutionary. Don't
worry, you're on the right side."
The defense of "carding" is rare. Most hackers regard credit-card
theft as "poison" to the underground, a sleazy and immoral effort
that, worse yet, is hard to get away with. Nevertheless, manifestos
advocating creditcard theft, the deliberate crashing of computer
systems, and even acts of violent physical destruction such as
vandalism and arson do exist in the underground. These boasts and
threats are taken quite seriously by the police. And not every
hacker is an abstract, Platonic computernerd. Some few are quite
experienced at picking locks, robbing phone-trucks, and breaking and
entering buildings.
Hackers vary in their degree of hatred for authority and the
violence of their rhetoric. But, at a bottom line, they are
scofflaws. They don't regard the current rules of electronic
behavior as respectable efforts to preserve law and order and
protect public safety. They regard these laws as immoral efforts by
soulless corporations to protect their profit margins and to crush
dissidents. "Stupid" people, including police, businessmen,
politicians, and journalists, simply have no right to judge the
actions of those possessed of genius, techno-revolutionary
intentions, and technical expertise.
3.
Hackers are generally teenagers and college kids not engaged in
earning a living. They often come from fairly well-to-do middle-
class backgrounds, and are markedly anti-materialistic (except, that
is, when it comes to computer equipment). Anyone motivated by greed
for mere money (as opposed to the greed for power, knowledge and
status) is swiftly written-off as a narrowminded breadhead whose
interests can only be corrupt and contemptible.
Having grown up in the 1970s and 1980s, the young Bohemians of the
digital underground regard straight society as awash in plutocratic
corruption, where everyone from the President down is for sale and
whoever has the gold makes the rules.
Interestingly, there's a funhouse-mirror image of this attitude on
the other side of the conflict. The police are also one of the most
markedly anti-materialistic groups in American society, motivated
not by mere money but by ideals of service, justice, esprit-de-
corps, and, of course, their own brand of specialized knowledge and
power. Remarkably, the propaganda war between cops and hackers has
always involved angry allegations that the other side is trying to
make a sleazy buck. Hackers consistently sneer that anti-phreak
prosecutors are angling for cushy jobs as telco lawyers and that
computercrime police are aiming to cash in later as well-paid
computer-security consultants in the private sector.
For their part, police publicly conflate all hacking crimes with
robbing payphones with crowbars. Allegations of "monetary losses"
from computer intrusion are notoriously inflated. The act of
illicitly copying a document from a computer is morally equated with
directly robbing a company of, say, half a million dollars. The
teenage computer intruder in possession of this "proprietary"
document has certainly not sold it for such a sum, would likely have
little idea how to sell it at all, and quite probably doesn't even
understand what he has. He has not made a cent in profit from his
felony but is still morally equated with a thief who has robbed the
church poorbox and lit out for Brazil.
Police want to believe that all hackers are thieves. It is a
tortuous and almost unbearable act for the American justice system
to put people in jail because they want to learn things which are
forbidden for them to know. In an American context, almost any
pretext for punishment is better than jailing people to protect
certain restricted kinds of information. Nevertheless, policing
information is part and parcel of the struggle against hackers.
This dilemma is well exemplified by the remarkable activities of
"Emmanuel Goldstein," editor and publisher of a print magazine known
as 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. Goldstein was an English major at
Long Island's State University of New York in the '70s, when he
became involved with the local college radio station. His growing
interest in electronics caused him to drift into Yippie TAP circles
and thus into the digital underground, where he became a self-
described technorat. His magazine publishes techniques of computer
intrusion and telephone "exploration" as well as gloating exposes of
telco misdeeds and governmental failings.
Goldstein lives quietly and very privately in a large, crumbling
Victorian mansion in Setauket, New York. The seaside house is
decorated with telco decals, chunks of driftwood, and the basic
bric-a-brac of a hippie crash-pad. He is unmarried, mildly unkempt,
and survives mostly on TV dinners and turkey-stuffing eaten straight
out of the bag. Goldstein is a man of considerable charm and
fluency, with a brief, disarming smile and the kind of pitiless,
stubborn, thoroughly recidivist integrity that America's electronic
police find genuinely alarming.
Goldstein took his nom-de-plume, or "handle," from a character in
Orwell's 1984, which may be taken, correctly, as a symptom of the
gravity of his sociopolitical worldview. He is not himself a
practicing computer intruder, though he vigorously abets these
actions, especially when they are pursued against large corporations
or governmental agencies. Nor is he a thief, for he loudly scorns
mere theft of phone service, in favor of 'exploring and manipulating
the system.' He is probably best described and understood as a
dissident.
Weirdly, Goldstein is living in modern America under conditions very
similar to those of former East European intellectual dissidents. In
other words, he flagrantly espouses a value-system that is deeply
and irrevocably opposed to the system of those in power and the
police. The values in 2600 are generally expressed in terms that are
ironic, sarcastic, paradoxical, or just downright confused. But
there's no mistaking their radically anti-authoritarian tenor. 2600
holds that technical power and specialized knowledge, of any kind
obtainable, belong by right in the hands of those individuals brave
and bold enough to discover them -- by whatever means necessary.
Devices, laws, or systems that forbid access, and the free spread of
knowledge, are provocations that any free and self- respecting
hacker should relentlessly attack. The "privacy" of governments,
corporations and other soulless technocratic organizations should
never be protected at the expense of the liberty and free initiative
of the individual techno-rat.
However, in our contemporary workaday world, both governments and
corporations are very anxious indeed to police information which is
secret, proprietary, restricted, confidential, copyrighted,
patented, hazardous, illegal, unethical, embarrassing, or otherwise
sensitive. This makes Goldstein persona non grata, and his
philosophy a threat.
Very little about the conditions of Goldstein's daily life would
astonish, say, Vaclav Havel. (We may note in passing that President
Havel once had his word-processor confiscated by the Czechoslovak
police.) Goldstein lives by samizdat, acting semi-openly as a data-
center for the underground, while challenging the powers-that-be to
abide by their own stated rules: freedom of speech and the First
Amendment.
Goldstein thoroughly looks and acts the part of techno-rat, with
shoulder-length ringlets and a piratical black fisherman's-cap set
at a rakish angle. He often shows up like Banquo's ghost at meetings
of computer professionals, where he listens quietly, half-smiling
and taking thorough notes.
Computer professionals generally meet publicly, and find it very
difficult to rid themselves of Goldstein and his ilk without
extralegal and unconstitutional actions. Sympathizers, many of them
quite respectable people with responsible jobs, admire Goldstein's
attitude and surreptitiously pass him information. An unknown but
presumably large proportion of Goldstein's 2,000-plus readership are
telco security personnel and police, who are forced to subscribe to
2600 to stay abreast of new developments in hacking. They thus find
themselves paying this guy's rent while grinding their teeth in
anguish, a situation that would have delighted Abbie Hoffman (one of
Goldstein's few idols).
Goldstein is probably the best-known public representative of the
hacker underground today, and certainly the best-hated. Police
regard him as a Fagin, a corrupter of youth, and speak of him with
untempered loathing. He is quite an accomplished gadfly.
After the Martin Luther King Day Crash of 1990, Goldstein, for
instance, adeptly rubbed salt into the wound in the pages of 2600.
"Yeah, it was fun for the phone phreaks as we watched the network
crumble," he admitted cheerfully. "But it was also an ominous sign
of what's to come... Some AT&T people, aided by well-meaning but
ignorant media, were spreading the notion that many companies had
the same software and therefore could face the same problem someday.
Wrong. This was entirely an AT&T software deficiency. Of course,
other companies could face entirely different software problems. But
then, so too could AT&T."
After a technical discussion of the system's failings, the Long
Island techno-rat went on to offer thoughtful criticism to the
gigantic multinational's hundreds of professionally qualified
engineers. "What we don't know is how a major force in
communications like AT&T could be so sloppy. What happened to
backups? Sure, computer systems go down all the time, but people
making phone calls are not the same as people logging on to
computers. We must make that distinction. It's not acceptable for
the phone system or any other essential service to 'go down.' If we
continue to trust technology without understanding it, we can look
forward to many variations on this theme.
"AT&T owes it to its customers to be prepared to instantly switch to
another network if something strange and unpredictable starts
occurring. The news here isn't so much the failure of a computer
program, but the failure of AT&T's entire structure."
The very idea of this.... this person.... offering "advice" about
"AT&T's entire structure" is more than some people can easily bear.
How dare this near-criminal dictate what is or isn't "acceptable"
behavior from AT&T? Especially when he's publishing, in the very
same issue, detailed schematic diagrams for creating various
switching-network signalling tones unavailable to the public.
"See what happens when you drop a 'silver box' tone or two down your
local exchange or through different long distance service carriers,"
advises 2600 contributor "Mr. Upsetter" in "How To Build a Signal
Box." "If you experiment systematically and keep good records, you
will surely discover something interesting."
This is, of course, the scientific method, generally regarded as a
praiseworthy activity and one of the flowers of modern civilization.
One can indeed learn a great deal with this sort of structured
intellectual activity. Telco employees regard this mode of
"exploration" as akin to flinging sticks of dynamite into their pond
to see what lives on the bottom.
2600 has been published consistently since 1984. It has also run a
bulletin board computer system, printed 2600 T-shirts, taken fax
calls... The Spring 1991 issue has an interesting announcement on
page 45: "We just discovered an extra set of wires attached to our
fax line and heading up the pole. (They've since been clipped.) Your
faxes to us and to anyone else could be monitored."
In the worldview of 2600, the tiny band of technorat brothers
(rarely, sisters) are a beseiged vanguard of the truly free and
honest. The rest of the world is a maelstrom of corporate crime and
high-level governmental corruption, occasionally tempered with well-
meaning ignorance. To read a few issues in a row is to enter a
nightmare akin to Solzhenitsyn's, somewhat tempered by the fact that
2600 is often extremely funny.
Goldstein did not become a target of the Hacker Crackdown, though he
protested loudly, eloquently, and publicly about it, and it added
considerably to his fame. It was not that he is not regarded as
dangerous, because he is so regarded. Goldstein has had brushes with
the law in the past: in 1985, a 2600 bulletin board computer was
seized by the FBI, and some software on it was formally declared "a
burglary tool in the form of a computer program." But Goldstein
escaped direct repression in 1990, because his magazine is printed
on paper, and recognized as subject to Constitutional freedom of the
press protection. As was seen in the Ramparts case, this is far from
an absolute guarantee. Still, as a practical matter, shutting down
2600 by court-order would create so much legal hassle that it is
simply unfeasible, at least for the present. Throughout 1990, both
Goldstein and his magazine were peevishly thriving.
Instead, the Crackdown of 1990 would concern itself with the
computerized version of forbidden data. The crackdown itself, first
and foremost, was about bulletin board systems. Bulletin Board
Systems, most often known by the ugly and un-pluralizable acronym
"BBS," are the life-blood of the digital underground. Boards were
also central to law enforcement's tactics and strategy in the Hacker
Crackdown.
A "bulletin board system" can be formally defined as a computer
which serves as an information and messagepassing center for users
dialing-up over the phone-lines through the use of modems. A
"modem," or modulatordemodulator, is a device which translates the
digital impulses of computers into audible analog telephone signals,
and vice versa. Modems connect computers to phones and thus to each
other.
Large-scale mainframe computers have been connected since the 1960s,
but personal computers, run by individuals out of their homes, were
first networked in the late 1970s. The "board" created by Ward
Christensen and Randy Suess in February 1978, in Chicago, Illinois,
is generally regarded as the first personal-computer bulletin board
system worthy of the name. Boards run on many different machines,
employing many different kinds of software. Early boards were crude
and buggy, and their managers, known as "system operators" or
"sysops," were hard- working technical experts who wrote their own
software. But like most everything else in the world of electronics,
boards became faster, cheaper, better-designed, and generally far
more sophisticated throughout the 1980s. They also moved swiftly out
of the hands of pioneers and into those of the general public. By
1985 there were something in the neighborhood of 4,000 boards in
America. By 1990 it was calculated, vaguely, that there were about
30,000 boards in the US, with uncounted thousands overseas.
Computer bulletin boards are unregulated enterprises. Running a
board is a rough-and-ready, catchas-catch-can proposition.
Basically, anybody with a computer, modem, software and a phone-line
can start a board. With second-hand equipment and public-domain free
software, the price of a board might be quite small -less than it
would take to publish a magazine or even a decent pamphlet.
Entrepreneurs eagerly sell bulletin- board software, and will coach
nontechnical amateur sysops in its use.
Boards are not "presses." They are not magazines, or libraries, or
phones, or CB radios, or traditional cork bulletin boards down at
the local laundry, though they have some passing resemblance to
those earlier media. Boards are a new medium -- they may even be a
large number of new media.
Consider these unique characteristics: boards are cheap, yet they
can have a national, even global reach. Boards can be contacted from
anywhere in the global telephone network, at no cost to the person
running the board -- the caller pays the phone bill, and if the
caller is local, the call is free. Boards do not involve an
editorial elite addressing a mass audience. The "sysop" of a board
is not an exclusive publisher or writer -- he is managing an
electronic salon, where individuals can address the general public,
play the part of the general public, and also exchange private mail
with other individuals. And the "conversation" on boards, though
fluid, rapid, and highly interactive, is not spoken, but written. It
is also relatively anonymous, sometimes completely so.
And because boards are cheap and ubiquitous, regulations and
licensing requirements would likely be practically unenforceable. It
would almost be easier to "regulate" "inspect" and "license" the
content of private mail -- probably more so, since the mail system
is operated by the federal government. Boards are run by
individuals, independently, entirely at their own whim.
For the sysop, the cost of operation is not the primary limiting
factor. Once the investment in a computer and modem has been made,
the only steady cost is the charge for maintaining a phone line (or
several phone lines). The primary limits for sysops are time and
energy. Boards require upkeep. New users are generally "validated" -
they must be issued individual passwords, and called at home by
voice-phone, so that their identity can be verified. Obnoxious
users, who exist in plenty, must be chided or purged. Proliferating
messages must be deleted when they grow old, so that the capacity of
the system is not overwhelmed. And software programs (if such things
are kept on the board) must be examined for possible computer
viruses. If there is a financial charge to use the board
(increasingly common, especially in larger and fancier systems) then
accounts must be kept, and users must be billed. And if the board
crashes -- a very common occurrence -- then repairs must be made.
Boards can be distinguished by the amount of effort spent in
regulating them. First, we have the completely open board, whose
sysop is off chugging brews and watching re-runs while his users
generally degenerate over time into peevish anarchy and eventual
silence. Second comes the supervised board, where the sysop breaks
in every once in a while to tidy up, calm brawls, issue
announcements, and rid the community of dolts and troublemakers.
Third is the heavily supervised board, which sternly urges adult and
responsible behavior and swiftly edits any message considered
offensive, impertinent, illegal or irrelevant. And last comes the
completely edited "electronic publication," which is presented to a
silent audience which is not allowed to respond directly in any way.
Boards can also be grouped by their degree of anonymity. There is
the completely anonymous board, where everyone uses pseudonyms -
- "handles" -- and even the sysop is unaware of the user's true
identity. The sysop himself is likely pseudonymous on a board of
this type. Second, and rather more common, is the board where the
sysop knows (or thinks he knows) the true names and addresses of all
users, but the users don't know one another's names and may not know
his. Third is the board where everyone has to use real names, and
roleplaying and pseudonymous posturing are forbidden.
Boards can be grouped by their immediacy. "Chatlines" are boards
linking several users together over several different phone-lines
simultaneously, so that people exchange messages at the very moment
that they type. (Many large boards feature "chat" capabilities along
with other services.) Less immediate boards, perhaps with a single
phoneline, store messages serially, one at a time. And some boards
are only open for business in daylight hours or on weekends, which
greatly slows response. A network of boards, such as "FidoNet," can
carry electronic mail from board to board, continent to continent,
across huge distances -- but at a relative snail's pace, so that a
message can take several days to reach its target audience and
elicit a reply.
Boards can be grouped by their degree of community. Some boards
emphasize the exchange of private, person-to-person electronic mail.
Others emphasize public postings and may even purge people who
"lurk," merely reading posts but refusing to openly participate.
Some boards are intimate and neighborly. Others are frosty and
highly technical. Some are little more than storage dumps for
software, where users "download" and "upload" programs, but interact
among themselves little if at all.
Boards can be grouped by their ease of access. Some boards are
entirely public. Others are private and restricted only to personal
friends of the sysop. Some boards divide users by status. On these
boards, some users, especially beginners, strangers or children,
will be restricted to general topics, and perhaps forbidden to post.
Favored users, though, are granted the ability to post as they
please, and to stay "on-line" as long as they like, even to the
disadvantage of other people trying to call in. High- status users
can be given access to hidden areas in the board, such as off- color
topics, private discussions, and/or valuable software. Favored users
may even become "remote sysops" with the power to take remote
control of the board through their own home computers. Quite often
"remote sysops" end up doing all the work and taking formal control
of the enterprise, despite the fact that it's physically located in
someone else's house. Sometimes several "co-sysops" share power.
And boards can also be grouped by size. Massive, nationwide
commercial networks, such as CompuServe, Delphi, GEnie and Prodigy,
are run on mainframe computers and are generally not considered
"boards," though they share many of their characteristics, such as
electronic mail, discussion topics, libraries of software, and
persistent and growing problems with civil-liberties issues. Some
private boards have as many as thirty phone-lines and quite
sophisticated hardware. And then there are tiny boards.
Boards vary in popularity. Some boards are huge and crowded, where
users must claw their way in against a constant busy-signal. Others
are huge and empty -- there are few things sadder than a formerly
flourishing board where no one posts any longer, and the dead
conversations of vanished users lie about gathering digital dust.
Some boards are tiny and intimate, their telephone numbers
intentionally kept confidential so that only a small number can log
on.
And some boards are underground.
Boards can be mysterious entities. The activities of their users can
be hard to differentiate from conspiracy. Sometimes they are
conspiracies. Boards have harbored, or have been accused of
harboring, all manner of fringe groups, and have abetted, or been
accused of abetting, every manner of frowned-upon, sleazy, radical,
and criminal activity. There are Satanist boards. Nazi boards.
Pornographic boards. Pedophile boards. Drugdealing boards. Anarchist
boards. Communist boards. Gay and Lesbian boards (these exist in
great profusion, many of them quite lively with well-established
histories). Religious cult boards. Evangelical boards. Witchcraft
boards, hippie boards, punk boards, skateboarder boards. Boards for
UFO believers. There may well be boards for serial killers, airline
terrorists and professional assassins. There is simply no way to
tell. Boards spring up, flourish, and disappear in large numbers, in
most every corner of the developed world. Even apparently innocuous
public boards can, and sometimes do, harbor secret areas known only
to a few. And even on the vast, public, commercial services, private
mail is very private -- and quite possibly criminal.
Boards cover most every topic imaginable and some that are hard to
imagine. They cover a vast spectrum of social activity. However, all
board users do have something in common: their possession of
computers and phones. Naturally, computers and phones are primary
topics of conversation on almost every board.
And hackers and phone phreaks, those utter devotees of computers and
phones, live by boards. They swarm by boards. They are bred by
boards. By the late 1980s, phone-phreak groups and hacker groups,
united by boards, had proliferated fantastically.
As evidence, here is a list of hacker groups compiled by the editors
of Phrack on August 8, 1988.
The Administration. Advanced Telecommunications, Inc. ALIAS.
American Tone Travelers. Anarchy Inc. Apple Mafia. The
Association. Atlantic Pirates Guild.
Bad Ass Mother Fuckers. Bellcore. Bell Shock Force. Black Bag.
Camorra. C&M Productions. Catholics Anonymous. Chaos Computer
Club. Chief Executive Officers. Circle Of Death. Circle Of
Deneb. Club X. Coalition of Hi-Tech Pirates. Coast-To-Coast.
Corrupt Computing. Cult Of The Dead Cow. Custom Retaliations.
Damage Inc. D&B Communications. The Dange Gang. Dec Hunters.
Digital Gang. DPAK.
Eastern Alliance. The Elite Hackers Guild. Elite Phreakers and
Hackers Club. The Elite Society Of America. EPG. Executives Of
Crime. Extasyy Elite.
Fargo 4A. Farmers Of Doom. The Federation. Feds R Us. First
Class. Five O. Five Star. Force Hackers. The 414s.
Hack-A-Trip. Hackers Of America. High Mountain Hackers. High
Society. The Hitchhikers.
IBM Syndicate. The Ice Pirates. Imperial Warlords. Inner
Circle. Inner Circle II. Insanity Inc. International Computer
Underground Bandits.
Justice League of America. Kaos Inc. Knights Of Shadow.
Knights Of The Round Table.
League Of Adepts. Legion Of Doom. Legion Of Hackers. Lords Of
Chaos. Lunatic Labs, Unlimited.
Master Hackers. MAD! The Marauders. MD/PhD. Metal
Communications, Inc. MetalliBashers, Inc. MBI. Metro
Communications. Midwest Pirates Guild.
NASA Elite. The NATO Association. Neon Knights. Nihilist
Order. Order Of The Rose. OSS.
Pacific Pirates Guild. Phantom Access Associates. PHido
PHreaks. The Phirm. Phlash. PhoneLine Phantoms. Phone
Phreakers Of America. Phortune 500. Phreak Hack Delinquents.
Phreak Hack Destroyers. Phreakers, Hackers, And Laundromat
Employees Gang (PHALSE Gang). Phreaks Against Geeks. Phreaks
Against Phreaks Against Geeks. Phreaks and Hackers of America.
Phreaks Anonymous World Wide. Project Genesis. The Punk Mafia.
The Racketeers. Red Dawn Text Files. Roscoe Gang.
SABRE. Secret Circle of Pirates. Secret Service. 707 Club.
Shadow Brotherhood. Sharp Inc. 65C02 Elite. Spectral Force.
Star League. Stowaways. Strata-Crackers.
Team Hackers '86. Team Hackers '87. TeleComputist Newsletter
Staff. Tribunal Of Knowledge. Triple Entente. Turn Over And
Die Syndrome (TOADS). 300 Club. 1200 Club. 2300 Club. 2600
Club. 2601 Club. 2AF. The United Soft WareZ Force. United
Technical Underground.
Ware Brigade. The Warelords. WASP.
Contemplating this list is an impressive, almost humbling business.
As a cultural artifact, the thing approaches poetry.
Underground groups -- subcultures -- can be distinguished from
independent cultures by their habit of referring constantly to the
parent society. Undergrounds by their nature constantly must
maintain a membrane of differentiation. Funny/distinctive clothes
and hair, specialized jargon, specialized ghettoized areas in
cities, different hours of rising, working, sleeping.... The digital
underground, which specializes in information, relies very heavily
on language to distinguish itself. As can be seen from this list,
they make heavy use of parody and mockery. It's revealing to see who
they choose to mock.
First, large corporations. We have the Phortune 500, The Chief
Executive Officers, Bellcore, IBM Syndicate, SABRE (a computerized
reservation service maintained by airlines). The common use of
"Inc." is telling -- none of these groups are actual corporations,
but take clear delight in mimicking them.
Second, governments and police. NASA Elite, NATO Association. "Feds
R Us" and "Secret Service" are fine bits of fleering boldness. OSS -
- the Office of Strategic Services was the forerunner of the CIA.
Third, criminals. Using stigmatizing pejoratives as a perverse badge
of honor is a time-honored tactic for subcultures: punks, gangs,
delinquents, mafias, pirates, bandits, racketeers.
Specialized orthography, especially the use of "ph" for "f" and "z"
for the plural "s," are instant recognition symbols. So is the use
of the numeral "0" for the letter "O" -- computer-software
orthography generally features a slash through the zero, making the
distinction obvious.
Some terms are poetically descriptive of computer intrusion: the
Stowaways, the Hitchhikers, the PhoneLine Phantoms, Coast-to-Coast.
Others are simple bravado and vainglorious puffery. (Note the
insistent use of the terms "elite" and "master.") Some terms are
blasphemous, some obscene, others merely cryptic - anything to
puzzle, offend, confuse, and keep the straights at bay.
Many hacker groups further re-encrypt their names by the use of
acronyms: United Technical Underground becomes UTU, Farmers of Doom
become FoD, the United SoftWareZ Force becomes, at its own
insistence, "TuSwF," and woe to the ignorant rodent who capitalizes
the wrong letters.
It should be further recognized that the members of these groups are
themselves pseudonymous. If you did, in fact, run across the
"PhoneLine Phantoms," you would find them to consist of "Carrier
Culprit," "The Executioner," "Black Majik," "Egyptian Lover," "Solid
State," and "Mr Icom." "Carrier Culprit" will likely be referred to
by his friends as "CC," as in, "I got these dialups from CC of PLP."
It's quite possible that this entire list refers to as few as a
thousand people. It is not a complete list of underground groups -
- there has never been such a list, and there never will be. Groups
rise, flourish, decline, share membership, maintain a cloud of
wannabes and casual hangers-on. People pass in and out, are
ostracized, get bored, are busted by police, or are cornered by
telco security and presented with huge bills. Many "underground
groups" are software pirates, "warez d00dz," who might break copy
protection and pirate programs, but likely wouldn't dare to intrude
on a computer-system. It is hard to estimate the true population of
the digital underground. There is constant turnover. Most hackers
start young, come and go, then drop out at age 22 -- the age of
college graduation. And a large majority of "hackers" access pirate
boards, adopt a handle, swipe software and perhaps abuse a phone-
code or two, while never actually joining the elite.
Some professional informants, who make it their business to retail
knowledge of the underground to paymasters in private corporate
security, have estimated the hacker population at as high as fifty
thousand. This is likely highly inflated, unless one counts every
single teenage software pirate and petty phone-booth thief. My best
guess is about 5,000 people. Of these, I would guess that as few as
a hundred are truly "elite" -- active computer intruders, skilled
enough to penetrate sophisticated systems and truly to worry
corporate security and law enforcement.
Another interesting speculation is whether this group is growing or
not. Young teenage hackers are often convinced that hackers exist in
vast swarms and will soon dominate the cybernetic universe. Older
and wiser veterans, perhaps as wizened as 24 or 25 years old, are
convinced that the glory days are long gone, that the cops have the
underground's number now, and that kids these days are dirt-stupid
and just want to play Nintendo.
My own assessment is that computer intrusion, as a non-profit act of
intellectual exploration and mastery, is in slow decline, at least
in the United States; but that electronic fraud, especially
telecommunication crime, is growing by leaps and bounds.
One might find a useful parallel to the digital underground in the
drug underground. There was a time, now much-obscured by historical
revisionism, when Bohemians freely shared joints at concerts, and
hip, smallscale marijuana dealers might turn people on just for the
sake of enjoying a long stoned conversation about the Doors and
Allen Ginsberg. Now drugs are increasingly verboten, except in a
high-stakes, highly- criminal world of highly addictive drugs. Over
years of disenchantment and police harassment, a vaguely
ideological, free-wheeling drug underground has relinquished the
business of drugdealing to a far more savage criminal hard-core.
This is not a pleasant prospect to contemplate, but the analogy is
fairly compelling.
What does an underground board look like? What distinguishes it from
a standard board? It isn't necessarily the conversation -- hackers
often talk about common board topics, such as hardware, software,
sex, science fiction, current events, politics, movies, personal
gossip. Underground boards can best be distinguished by their files,
or "philes," pre-composed texts which teach the techniques and ethos
of the underground. These are prized reservoirs of forbidden
knowledge. Some are anonymous, but most proudly bear the handle of
the "hacker" who has created them, and his group affiliation, if he
has one. Here is a partial table-of-contents of philes from an
underground board, somewhere in the heart of middle America, circa
1991. The descriptions are mostly self- explanatory.
5406 06-11-91 Hacking Bank America CHHACK.ZIP
4481 06-11-91 Chilton Hacking CITIBANK.ZIP
4118 06-11-91 Hacking Citibank CREDIMTC.ZIP
3241 06-11-91 Hacking Mtc Credit Company DIGEST.ZIP
5159 06-11-91 Hackers Digest HACK.ZIP
14031 06-11-91 How To Hack HACKBAS.ZIP
5073 06-11-91 Basics Of Hacking HACKDICT.ZIP
42774 06-11-91 Hackers Dictionary HACKER.ZIP
57938 06-11-91 Hacker Info HACKERME.ZIP
3148 06-11-91 Hackers Manual HACKHAND.ZIP
4814 06-11-91 Hackers Handbook HACKTHES.ZIP 48290 06-
11-91 Hackers Thesis HACKVMS.ZIP
4696 06-11-91 Hacking Vms Systems MCDON.ZIP
3830 06-11-91 Hacking Macdonalds (Home Of The Archs) P500UNIX.ZIP
15525 06-11-91 Phortune 500 Guide To Unix RADHACK.ZIP
8411 06-11-91 Radio Hacking TAOTRASH.DOC
4096 12-25-89 Suggestions For Trashing TECHHACK.ZIP
5063 06-11-91 Technical Hacking
The files above are do-it- yourself manuals about computer
intrusion. The above is only a small section of a much larger
library of hacking and phreaking techniques and history. We now move
into a different and perhaps surprising area.
3641 06-11-91 Anarchy Files ANARCHST.ZIP
63703 06-11-91 Anarchist Book ANARCHY.ZIP
2076 06-11-91 Anarchy At Home ANARCHY3.ZIP
6982 06-11-91 Anarchy No 3 ANARCTOY.ZIP
2361 06-11-91 Anarchy Toys ANTIMODM.ZIP
2877 06-11-91 Anti-modem Weapons ATOM.ZIP
4494 06-11-91 How To Make An Atom Bomb BARBITUA.ZIP
3982 06-11-91 Barbiturate Formula BLCKPWDR.ZIP
2810 06-11-91 Black Powder Formulas BOMB.ZIP
3765 06-11-91 How To Make Bombs BOOM.ZIP
2036 06-11-91 Things That Go Boom CHLORINE.ZIP
1926 06-11-91 Chlorine Bomb COOKBOOK.ZIP
1500 06-11-91 Anarchy Cook Book DESTROY.ZIP
3947 06-11-91 Destroy Stuff DUSTBOMB.ZIP
2576 06-11-91 Dust Bomb ELECTERR.ZIP
3230 06-11-91 Electronic Terror EXPLOS1.ZIP
2598 06-11-91 Explosives 1 EXPLOSIV.ZIP
18051 06-11-91 More Explosives EZSTEAL.ZIP
4521 06-11-91 Ez-stealing FLAME.ZIP
2240 06-11-91 Flame Thrower FLASHLT.ZIP
2533 06-11-91 Flashlight Bomb FMBUG.ZIP
2906 06-11-91 How To Make An Fm Bug OMEEXPL.ZIP
2139 06-11-91 Home Explosives HOW2BRK.ZIP
3332 06-11-91 How To Break In LETTER.ZIP
2990 06-11-91 Letter Bomb LOCK.ZIP
2199 06-11-91 How To Pick Locks MRSHIN.ZIP
3991 06-11-91 Briefcase Locks NAPALM.ZIP
3563 06-11-91 Napalm At Home NITRO.ZIP
3158 06-11-91 Fun With Nitro PARAMIL.ZIP
2962 06-11-91 Paramilitary Info PICKING.ZIP
3398 06-11-91 Picking Locks PIPEBOMB.ZIP
2137 06-11-91 Pipe Bomb POTASS.ZIP
3987 06-11-91 Formulas With Potassium PRANK.TXT
11074 08-03-90 More Pranks To Pull On Idiots! REVENGE.ZIP
4447 06-11-91 Revenge Tactics ROCKET.ZIP
2590 06-11-91 Rockets For Fun SMUGGLE.ZIP
3385 06-11-91 How To Smuggle
Holy Cow! The damned thing is full of stuff about bombs!
What are we to make of this?
First, it should be acknowledged that spreading knowledge about
demolitions to teenagers is a highly and deliberately antisocial
act.
It is not, however, illegal.
Second, it should be recognized that most of these philes were in
fact written by teenagers. Most adult American males who can
remember their teenage years will recognize that the notion of
building a flamethrower in your garage is an incredibly neat-o idea.
Actually building a flamethrower in your garage, however, is fraught
with discouraging difficulty. Stuffing gunpowder into a booby-
trapped flashlight, so as to blow the arm off your high-school vice-
principal, can be a thing of dark beauty to contemplate. Actually
committing assault by explosives will earn you the sustained
attention of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Some people, however, will actually try these plans. A determinedly
murderous American teenager can probably buy or steal a handgun far
more easily than he can brew fake "napalm" in the kitchen sink.
Nevertheless, if temptation is spread before people a certain number
will succumb, and a small minority will actually attempt these
stunts. A large minority of that small minority will either fail or,
quite likely, maim themselves, since these "philes" have not been
checked for accuracy, are not the product of professional
experience, and are often highly fanciful. But the gloating menace
of these philes is not to be entirely dismissed.
Hackers may not be "serious" about bombing; if they were, we would
hear far more about exploding flashlights, homemade bazookas, and
gym teachers poisoned by chlorine and potassium. However, hackers
are very serious about forbidden knowledge. They are possessed not
merely by curiosity, but by a positive lust to know. The desire to
know what others don't is scarcely new. But the intensity of this
desire, as manifested by these young technophilic denizens of the
Information Age, may in fact be new, and may represent some basic
shift in social values -- a harbinger of what the world may come to,
as society lays more and more value on the possession, assimilation
and retailing of information as a basic commodity of daily life.
There have always been young men with obsessive interests in these
topics. Never before, however, have they been able to network so
extensively and easily, and to propagandize their interests with
impunity to random passers-by. High-school teachers will recognize
that there's always one in a crowd, but when the one in a crowd
escapes control by jumping into the phone-lines, and becomes a
hundred such kids all together on a board, then trouble is brewing
visibly. The urge of authority to do something, even something
drastic, is hard to resist. And in 1990, authority did something. In
fact authority did a great deal.
4.
The process by which boards create hackers goes something like this.
A youngster becomes interested in computers -- usually, computer
games. He hears from friends that "bulletin boards" exist where
games can be obtained for free. (Many computer games are "freeware,"
not copyrighted -- invented simply for the love of it and given away
to the public; some of these games are quite good.) He bugs his
parents for a modem, or quite often, uses his parents' modem.
The world of boards suddenly opens up. Computer games can be quite
expensive, real budget-breakers for a kid, but pirated games,
stripped of copy protection, are cheap or free. They are also
illegal, but it is very rare, almost unheard of, for a small-scale
software pirate to be prosecuted. Once "cracked" of its copy
protection, the program, being digital data, becomes infinitely
reproducible. Even the instructions to the game, any manuals that
accompany it, can be reproduced as text files, or photocopied from
legitimate sets. Other users on boards can give many useful hints in
game-playing tactics. And a youngster with an infinite supply of
free computer games can certainly cut quite a swath among his
modemless friends. And boards are pseudonymous. No one need know
that you're fourteen years old -- with a little practice at
subterfuge, you can talk to adults about adult things, and be
accepted and taken seriously! You can even pretend to be a girl, or
an old man, or anybody you can imagine. If you find this kind of
deception gratifying, there is ample opportunity to hone your
ability on boards. But local boards can grow stale. And almost every
board maintains a list of phone-numbers to other boards, some in
distant, tempting, exotic locales. Who knows what they're up to, in
Oregon or Alaska or Florida or California? It's very easy to find
out -- just order the modem to call through its software -- nothing
to this, just typing on a keyboard, the same thing you would do for
most any computer game. The machine reacts swiftly and in a few
seconds you are talking to a bunch of interesting people on another
seaboard.
And yet the bills for this trivial action can be staggering! Just by
going tippety-tap with your fingers, you may have saddled your
parents with four hundred bucks in long-distance charges, and gotten
chewed out but good. That hardly seems fair.
How horrifying to have made friends in another state and to be
deprived of their company -- and their software - just because
telephone companies demand absurd amounts of money! How painful, to
be restricted to boards in one's own area code -- what the heck is
an "area code" anyway, and what makes it so special? A few grumbles,
complaints, and innocent questions of this sort will often elicit a
sympathetic reply from another board user -- someone with some
stolen codes to hand. You dither a while, knowing this isn't quite
right, then you make up your mind to try them anyhow -- and they
work! Suddenly you're doing something even your parents can't do.
Six months ago you were just some kid -- now, you're the Crimson
Flash of Area Code 512! You're bad -- you're nationwide! Maybe
you'll stop at a few abused codes. Maybe you'll decide that boards
aren't all that interesting after all, that it's wrong, not worth
the risk -- but maybe you won't. The next step is to pick up your
own repeat-dialling program -- to learn to generate your own stolen
codes. (This was dead easy five years ago, much harder to get away
with nowadays, but not yet impossible.) And these dialling programs
are not complex or intimidating -- some are as small as twenty lines
of software. Now, you too can share codes. You can trade codes to
learn other techniques. If you're smart enough to catch on, and
obsessive enough to want to bother, and ruthless enough to start
seriously bending rules, then you'll get better, fast. You start to
develop a rep. You move up to a heavier class of board -- a board
with a bad attitude, the kind of board that naive dopes like your
classmates and your former self have never even heard of! You pick
up the jargon of phreaking and hacking from the board. You read a
few of those anarchy philes -- and man, you never realized you could
be a real outlaw without ever leaving your bedroom.
You still play other computer games, but now you have a new and
bigger game. This one will bring you a different kind of status than
destroying even eight zillion lousy space invaders.
Hacking is perceived by hackers as a "game." This is not an entirely
unreasonable or sociopathic perception. You can win or lose at
hacking, succeed or fail, but it never feels "real." It's not simply
that imaginative youngsters sometimes have a hard time telling
"make-believe" from "real life." Cyberspace is not real! "Real"
things are physical objects like trees and shoes and cars. Hacking
takes place on a screen. Words aren't physical, numbers (even
telephone numbers and credit card numbers) aren't physical. Sticks
and stones may break my bones, but data will never hurt me.
Computers simulate reality, like computer games that simulate tank
battles or dogfights or spaceships. Simulations are just
makebelieve, and the stuff in computers is not real.
Consider this: if "hacking" is supposed to be so serious and real-
life and dangerous, then how come nine-year-old kids have computers
and modems? You wouldn't give a nine year old his own car, or his
own rifle, or his own chainsaw -- those things are "real."
People underground are perfectly aware that the "game" is frowned
upon by the powers that be. Word gets around about busts in the
underground. Publicizing busts is one of the primary functions of
pirate boards, but they also promulgate an attitude about them, and
their own idiosyncratic ideas of justice. The users of underground
boards won't complain if some guy is busted for crashing systems,
spreading viruses, or stealing money by wirefraud. They may shake
their heads with a sneaky grin, but they won't openly defend these
practices. But when a kid is charged with some theoretical amount of
theft: $233,846.14, for instance, because he sneaked into a computer
and copied something, and kept it in his house on a floppy disk -
- this is regarded as a sign of near insanity from prosecutors, a
sign that they've drastically mistaken the immaterial game of
computing for their real and boring everyday world of fatcat
corporate money.
It's as if big companies and their suck-up lawyers think that
computing belongs to them, and they can retail it with price
stickers, as if it were boxes of laundry soap! But pricing
"information" is like trying to price air or price dreams. Well,
anybody on a pirate board knows that computing can be, and ought to
be, free. Pirate boards are little independent worlds in cyberspace,
and they don't belong to anybody but the underground. Underground
boards aren't "brought to you by Procter & Gamble."
To log on to an underground board can mean to experience liberation,
to enter a world where, for once, money isn't everything and adults
don't have all the answers.
Let's sample another vivid hacker manifesto. Here are some excerpts
from "The Conscience of a Hacker," by "The Mentor," from Phrack
Volume One, Issue 7, Phile 3.
"I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this
is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's
because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me.(...)
"And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through
the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic
pulse is sent out, a refuge from day-to-day incompetencies is
sought... a board is found. 'This is it... this is where I
belong...' "I know everyone here... even if I've never met them,
never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you
all...(...) "This is our world now.... the world of the electron and
the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already
existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't
run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We
explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and
you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without
nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat and lie to
us and try to make us believe that it's for our own good, yet we're
the criminals.
"Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they
look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you
will never forgive me for."
5.
There have been underground boards almost as long as there have been
boards. One of the first was 8BBS, which became a stronghold of the
West Coast phonephreak elite. After going on-line in March 1980,
8BBS sponsored "Susan Thunder," and "Tuc," and, most notoriously,
"the Condor." "The Condor" bore the singular distinction of becoming
the most vilified American phreak and hacker ever. Angry underground
associates, fed up with Condor's peevish behavior, turned him in to
police, along with a heaping double-helping of outrageous hacker
legendry. As a result, Condor was kept in solitary confinement for
seven months, for fear that he might start World War Three by
triggering missile silos from the prison payphone. (Having served
his time, Condor is now walking around loose; WWIII has thus far
conspicuously failed to occur.)
The sysop of 8BBS was an ardent free-speech enthusiast who simply
felt that any attempt to restrict the expression of his users was
unconstitutional and immoral. Swarms of the technically curious
entered 8BBS and emerged as phreaks and hackers, until, in 1982, a
friendly 8BBS alumnus passed the sysop a new modem which had been
purchased by credit-card fraud. Police took this opportunity to
seize the entire board and remove what they considered an attractive
nuisance.
Plovernet was a powerful East Coast pirate board that operated in
both New York and Florida. Owned and operated by teenage hacker
"Quasi Moto," Plovernet attracted five hundred eager users in 1983.
"Emmanuel Goldstein" was one-time co-sysop of Plovernet, along with
"Lex Luthor," founder of the "Legion of Doom" group. Plovernet bore
the signal honor of being the original home of the "Legion of Doom,"
about which the reader will be hearing a great deal, soon.
"Pirate-80," or "P-80," run by a sysop known as "Scan- Man," got
into the game very early in Charleston, and continued steadily for
years. P-80 flourished so flagrantly that even its most hardened
users became nervous, and some slanderously speculated that "Scan
Man" must have ties to corporate security, a charge he vigorously
denied.
"414 Private" was the home board for the first group to attract
conspicuous trouble, the teenage "414 Gang," whose intrusions into
Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center and Los Alamos military computers
were to be a nine-dayswonder in 1982.
At about this time, the first software piracy boards began to open
up, trading cracked games for the Atari 800 and the Commodore C64.
Naturally these boards were heavily frequented by teenagers. And
with the 1983 release of the hacker-thriller movie War Games, the
scene exploded. It seemed that every kid in America had demanded and
gotten a modem for Christmas. Most of these dabbler wannabes put
their modems in the attic after a few weeks, and most of the
remainder minded their P's and Q's and stayed well out of hot water.
But some stubborn and talented diehards had this hacker kid in War
Games figured for a happening dude. They simply could not rest until
they had contacted the underground -or, failing that, created their
own.
In the mid-80s, underground boards sprang up like digital fungi.
ShadowSpawn Elite. Sherwood Forest I, II, and III. Digital Logic
Data Service in Florida, sysoped by no less a man than "Digital
Logic" himself; Lex Luthor of the Legion of Doom was prominent on
this board, since it was in his area code. Lex's own board, "Legion
of Doom," started in 1984. The Neon Knights ran a network of
Applehacker boards: Neon Knights North, South, East and West. Free
World II was run by "Major Havoc." Lunatic Labs is still in
operation as of this writing. Dr. Ripco in Chicago, an anything-goes
anarchist board with an extensive and raucous history, was seized by
Secret Service agents in 1990 on Sundevil day, but up again almost
immediately, with new machines and scarcely diminished vigor.
The St. Louis scene was not to rank with major centers of American
hacking such as New York and L.A. But St. Louis did rejoice in
possession of "Knight Lightning" and "Taran King," two of the
foremost journalists native to the underground. Missouri boards like
Metal Shop, Metal Shop Private, Metal Shop Brewery, may not have
been the heaviest boards around in terms of illicit expertise. But
they became boards where hackers could exchange social gossip and
try to figure out what the heck was going on nationally -- and
internationally. Gossip from Metal Shop was put into the form of
news files, then assembled into a general electronic publication,
Phrack, a portmanteau title coined from "phreak" and "hack." The
Phrack editors were as obsessively curious about other hackers as
hackers were about machines.
Phrack, being free of charge and lively reading, began to circulate
throughout the underground. As Taran King and Knight Lightning left
high school for college, Phrack began to appear on mainframe
machines linked to BITNET, and, through BITNET to the "Internet,"
that loose but extremely potent not-for-profit network where
academic, governmental and corporate machines trade data through the
UNIX TCP/IP protocol. (The "Internet Worm" of November 2-3,1988,
created by Cornell grad student Robert Morris, was to be the largest
and bestpublicized computer-intrusion scandal to date. Morris
claimed that his ingenious "worm" program was meant to harmlessly
explore the Internet, but due to bad programming, the Worm
replicated out of control and crashed some six thousand Internet
computers. Smallerscale and less ambitious Internet hacking was a
standard for the underground elite.) Most any underground board not
hopelessly lame and out-of-it would feature a complete run of Phrack
-and, possibly, the lesser-known standards of the underground: the
Legion of Doom Technical Journal, the obscene and raucous Cult of
the Dead Cow files, P/HUN magazine, Pirate, the Syndicate Reports,
and perhaps the highly anarcho- political Activist Times
Incorporated.
Possession of Phrack on one's board was prima facie evidence of a
bad attitude. Phrack was seemingly everywhere, aiding, abetting, and
spreading the underground ethos. And this did not escape the
attention of corporate security or the police.
We now come to the touchy subject of police and boards. Police, do,
in fact, own boards. In 1989, there were police-sponsored boards in
California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Michigan, Missouri,
Texas, and Virginia: boards such as "Crime Bytes," "Crimestoppers,"
"All Points" and "Bullet-N-Board." Police officers, as private
computer enthusiasts, ran their own boards in Arizona, California,
Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Missouri, Maryland, New Mexico,
North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas. Police boards have often
proved helpful in community relations. Sometimes crimes are reported
on police boards.
Sometimes crimes are committed on police boards. This has sometimes
happened by accident, as naive hackers blunder onto police boards
and blithely begin offering telephone codes. Far more often,
however, it occurs through the now almost-traditional use of "sting
boards." The first police sting-boards were established in 1985:
"Underground Tunnel" in Austin, Texas, whose sysop Sgt. Robert
Ansley called himself "Pluto" -- "The Phone Company" in Phoenix,
Arizona, run by Ken MacLeod of the Maricopa County Sheriff's office
-- and Sgt. Dan Pasquale's board in Fremont, California. Sysops
posed as hackers, and swiftly garnered coteries of ardent users, who
posted codes and loaded pirate software with abandon, and came to a
sticky end.
Sting boards, like other boards, are cheap to operate, very cheap by
the standards of undercover police operations. Once accepted by the
local underground, sysops will likely be invited into other pirate
boards, where they can compile more dossiers. And when the sting is
announced and the worst offenders arrested, the publicity is
generally gratifying. The resultant paranoia in the underground -
- perhaps more justly described as a "deterrence effect" -- tends to
quell local lawbreaking for quite a while.
Obviously police do not have to beat the underbrush for hackers. On
the contrary, they can go trolling for them. Those caught can be
grilled. Some become useful informants. They can lead the way to
pirate boards all across the country.
And boards all across the country showed the sticky fingerprints of
Phrack, and of that loudest and most flagrant of all underground
groups, the "Legion of Doom."
The term "Legion of Doom" came from comic books. The Legion of Doom,
a conspiracy of costumed supervillains headed by the chrome- domed
criminal ultramastermind Lex Luthor, gave Superman a lot of four-
color graphic trouble for a number of decades. Of course, Superman,
that exemplar of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, always won in
the long run. This didn't matter to the hacker Doomsters -- "Legion
of Doom" was not some thunderous and evil Satanic reference, it was
not meant to be taken seriously. "Legion of Doom" came from funny-
books and was supposed to be funny. "Legion of Doom" did have a good
mouthfilling ring to it, though. It sounded really cool. Other
groups, such as the "Farmers of Doom," closely allied to LoD,
recognized this grandiloquent quality, and made fun of it. There was
even a hacker group called "Justice League of America," named after
Superman's club of true-blue crimefighting superheros.
But they didn't last; the Legion did. The original Legion of Doom,
hanging out on Quasi Moto's Plovernet board, were phone phreaks.
They weren't much into computers. "Lex Luthor" himself (who was
under eighteen when he formed the Legion) was a COSMOS expert,
COSMOS being the "Central System for Mainframe Operations," a telco
internal computer network. Lex would eventually become quite a dab
hand at breaking into IBM mainframes, but although everyone liked
Lex and admired his attitude, he was not considered a truly
accomplished computer intruder. Nor was he the "mastermind" of the
Legion of Doom -- LoD were never big on formal leadership. As a
regular on Plovernet and sysop of his "Legion of Doom BBS," Lex was
the Legion's cheerleader and recruiting officer.
Legion of Doom began on the ruins of an earlier phreak group, The
Knights of Shadow. Later, LoD was to subsume the personnel of the
hacker group "Tribunal of Knowledge." People came and went
constantly in LoD; groups split up or formed offshoots.
Early on, the LoD phreaks befriended a few computer-intrusion
enthusiasts, who became the associated "Legion of Hackers." Then the
two groups conflated into the "Legion of Doom/Hackers," or LoD/H.
When the original "hacker" wing, Messrs. "CompuPhreak" and "Phucked
Agent 04," found other matters to occupy their time, the extra "/H"
slowly atrophied out of the name; but by this time the phreak wing,
Messrs. Lex Luthor, "Blue Archer," "Gary Seven," "Kerrang Khan,"
"Master of Impact," "Silver Spy," "The Marauder," and "The
Videosmith," had picked up a plethora of intrusion expertise and had
become a force to be reckoned with.
LoD members seemed to have an instinctive understanding that the way
to real power in the underground lay through covert publicity. LoD
were flagrant. Not only was it one of the earliest groups, but the
members took pains to widely distribute their illicit knowledge.
Some LoD members, like "The Mentor," were close to evangelical about
it. Legion of Doom Technical Journal began to show up on boards
throughout the underground.
LoD Technical Journal was named in cruel parody of the ancient and
honored AT&T Technical Journal. The material in these two
publications was quite similar -much of it, adopted from public
journals and discussions in the telco community. And yet, the
predatory attitude of LoD made even its most innocuous data seem
deeply sinister; an outrage; a clear and present danger.
To see why this should be, let's consider the following (invented)
paragraphs, as a kind of thought experiment.
(A) "W. Fred Brown, AT&T Vice President for Advanced Technical
Development, testified May 8 at a Washington hearing of the National
Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), regarding
Bellcore's GARDEN project. GARDEN (Generalized Automatic Remote
Distributed Electronic Network) is a telephone-switch programming
tool that makes it possible to develop new telecom services,
including hold-on-hold and customized message transfers, from any
keypad terminal, within seconds. The GARDEN prototype combines
centrex lines with a minicomputer using UNIX operating system
software."
(B) "Crimson Flash 512 of the Centrex Mobsters reports: D00dz, you
wouldn't believe this GARDEN bullshit Bellcore's just come up with!
Now you don't even need a lousy Commodore to reprogram a switch -
- just log on to GARDEN as a technician, and you can reprogram
switches right off the keypad in any public phone booth! You can
give yourself hold-on-hold and customized message transfers, and
best of all, the thing is run off (notoriously insecure) centrex
lines using -- get this -standard UNIX software! Ha ha ha ha!"
Message (A), couched in typical technobureaucratese, appears tedious
and almost unreadable. (A) scarcely seems threatening or menacing.
Message (B), on the other hand, is a dreadful thing, prima facie
evidence of a dire conspiracy, definitely not the kind of thing you
want your teenager reading. The information, however, is identical.
It is public information, presented before the federal government in
an open hearing. It is not "secret." It is not "proprietary." It is
not even "confidential." On the contrary, the development of
advanced software systems is a matter of great public pride to
Bellcore. However, when Bellcore publicly announces a project of
this kind, it expects a certain attitude from the public -
- something along the lines of gosh wow, you guys are great, keep
that up, whatever it is -- certainly not cruel mimickry, one-
upmanship and outrageous speculations about possible security holes.
Now put yourself in the place of a policeman confronted by an
outraged parent, or telco official, with a copy of Version (B). This
well- meaning citizen, to his horror, has discovered a local
bulletin-board carrying outrageous stuff like (B), which his son is
examining with a deep and unhealthy interest. If (B) were printed in
a book or magazine, you, as an American law enforcement officer,
would know that it would take a hell of a lot of trouble to do
anything about it; but it doesn't take technical genius to recognize
that if there's a computer in your area harboring stuff like (B),
there's going to be trouble.
In fact, if you ask around, any computer-literate cop will tell you
straight out that boards with stuff like (B) are the source of
trouble. And the worst source of trouble on boards are the
ringleaders inventing and spreading stuff like (B). If it weren't
for these jokers, there wouldn't be any trouble.
And Legion of Doom were on boards like nobody else. Plovernet. The
Legion of Doom Board. The Farmers of Doom Board. Metal Shop. OSUNY.
Blottoland. Private Sector. Atlantis. Digital Logic. Hell Phrozen
Over.
LoD members also ran their own boards. "Silver Spy" started his own
board, "Catch-22," considered one of the heaviest around. So did
"Mentor," with his "Phoenix Project." When they didn't run boards
themselves, they showed up on other people's boards, to brag, boast,
and strut. And where they themselves didn't go, their philes went,
carrying evil knowledge and an even more evil attitude. As early as
1986, the police were under the vague impression that everyone in
the underground was Legion of Doom. LoD was never that large -
considerably smaller than either "Metal Communications" or "The
Administration," for instance -- but LoD got tremendous press.
Especially in Phrack, which at times read like an LoD fan magazine;
and Phrack was everywhere, especially in the offices of telco
security. You couldn't get busted as a phone phreak, a hacker, or
even a lousy codes kid or warez dood, without the cops asking if you
were LoD.
This was a difficult charge to deny, as LoD never distributed
membership badges or laminated ID cards. If they had, they would
likely have died out quickly, for turnover in their membership was
considerable. LoD was less a high-tech street-gang than an ongoing
state-ofmind. LoD was the Gang That Refused to Die. By 1990, LoD had
ruled for ten years, and it seemed weird to police that they were
continually busting people who were only sixteen years old. All
these teenage small-timers were pleading the tiresome hacker litany
of "just curious, no criminal intent." Somewhere at the center of
this conspiracy there had to be some serious adult masterminds, not
this seemingly endless supply of myopic suburban white kids with
high SATs and funny haircuts.
There was no question that most any American hacker arrested would
"know" LoD. They knew the handles of contributors to LoD Tech
Journal, and were likely to have learned their craft through LoD
boards and LoD activism. But they'd never met anyone from LoD. Even
some of the rotating cadre who were actually and formally "in LoD"
knew one another only by board-mail and pseudonyms. This was a
highly unconventional profile for a criminal conspiracy. Computer
networking, and the rapid evolution of the digital underground, made
the situation very diffuse and confusing.
Furthermore, a big reputation in the digital underground did not
coincide with one's willingness to commit "crimes." Instead,
reputation was based on cleverness and technical mastery. As a
result, it often seemed that the heavier the hackers were, the less
likely they were to have committed any kind of common, easily
prosecutable crime. There were some hackers who could really steal.
And there were hackers who could really hack. But the two groups
didn't seem to overlap much, if at all. For instance, most people in
the underground looked up to "Emmanuel Goldstein" of 2600 as a
hacker demigod. But Goldstein's publishing activities were entirely
legal -- Goldstein just printed dodgy stuff and talked about
politics, he didn't even hack. When you came right down to it,
Goldstein spent half his time complaining that computer security
wasn't strong enough and ought to be drastically improved across the
board!
Truly heavy-duty hackers, those with serious technical skills who
had earned the respect of the underground, never stole money or
abused credit cards. Sometimes they might abuse phone-codes -- but
often, they seemed to get all the free phone-time they wanted
without leaving a trace of any kind.
The best hackers, the most powerful and technically accomplished,
were not professional fraudsters. They raided computers habitually,
but wouldn't alter anything, or damage anything. They didn't even
steal computer equipment -- most had day-jobs messing with hardware,
and could get all the cheap secondhand equipment they wanted. The
hottest hackers, unlike the teenage wannabes, weren't snobs about
fancy or expensive hardware. Their machines tended to be raw second-
hand digital hot-rods full of custom add-ons that they'd cobbled
together out of chickenwire, memory chips and spit. Some were
adults, computer software writers and consultants by trade, and
making quite good livings at it. Some of them actually worked for
the phone company -- and for those, the "hackers" actually found
under the skirts of Ma Bell, there would be little mercy in 1990.
It has long been an article of faith in the underground that the
"best" hackers never get caught. They're far too smart, supposedly.
They never get caught because they never boast, brag, or strut.
These demigods may read underground boards (with a condescending
smile), but they never say anything there. The "best" hackers,
according to legend, are adult computer professionals, such as
mainframe system administrators, who already know the ins and outs
of their particular brand of security. Even the "best" hacker can't
break in to just any computer at random: the knowledge of security
holes is too specialized, varying widely with different software and
hardware. But if people are employed to run, say, a UNIX mainframe
or a VAX/VMS machine, then they tend to learn security from the
inside out. Armed with this knowledge, they can look into most
anybody else's UNIX or VMS without much trouble or risk, if they
want to. And, according to hacker legend, of course they want to, so
of course they do. They just don't make a big deal of what they've
done. So nobody ever finds out.
It is also an article of faith in the underground that professional
telco people "phreak" like crazed weasels. Of course they spy on
Madonna's phone calls -- I mean, wouldn't you? Of course they give
themselves free longdistance -- why the hell should they pay,
they're running the whole shebang! It has, as a third matter, long
been an article of faith that any hacker caught can escape serious
punishment if he confesses how he did it. Hackers seem to believe
that governmental agencies and large corporations are blundering
about in cyberspace like eyeless jellyfish or cave salamanders. They
feel that these large but pathetically stupid organizations will
proffer up genuine gratitude, and perhaps even a security post and a
big salary, to the hot-shot intruder who will deign to reveal to
them the supreme genius of his modus operandi. In the case of
longtime LoD member "Control-C," this actually happened, more or
less. Control-C had led Michigan Bell a merry chase, and when
captured in 1987, he turned out to be a bright and apparently
physically harmless young fanatic, fascinated by phones. There was
no chance in hell that Control-C would actually repay the enormous
and largely theoretical sums in long-distance service that he had
accumulated from Michigan Bell. He could always be indicted for
fraud or computer-intrusion, but there seemed little real point in
this -- he hadn't physically damaged any computer. He'd just plead
guilty, and he'd likely get the usual slap-on-the-wrist, and in the
meantime it would be a big hassle for Michigan Bell just to bring up
the case. But if kept on the payroll, he might at least keep his
fellow hackers at bay.
There were uses for him. For instance, a contrite Control-C was
featured on Michigan Bell internal posters, sternly warning
employees to shred their trash. He'd always gotten most of his best
inside info from "trashing" - raiding telco dumpsters, for useful
data indiscreetly thrown away. He signed these posters, too.
Control-C had become something like a Michigan Bell mascot. And in
fact, Control-C did keep other hackers at bay. Little hackers were
quite scared of Control-C and his heavy-duty Legion of Doom friends.
And big hackers were his friends and didn't want to screw up his
cushy situation.
No matter what one might say of LoD, they did stick together. When
"Wasp," an apparently genuinely malicious New York hacker, began
crashing Bellcore machines, Control-C received swift volunteer help
from "the Mentor" and the Georgia LoD wing made up of "The Prophet,"
"Urvile," and "Leftist." Using Mentor's Phoenix Project board to
coordinate, the Doomsters helped telco security to trap Wasp, by
luring him into a machine with a tap and line-trace installed. Wasp
lost. LoD won! And my, did they brag.
Urvile, Prophet and Leftist were well-qualified for this activity,
probably more so even than the quite accomplished Control-C. The
Georgia boys knew all about phone switching-stations. Though
relative johnny-comelatelies in the Legion of Doom, they were
considered some of LoD's heaviest guys, into the hairiest systems
around. They had the good fortune to live in or near Atlanta, home
of the sleepy and apparently tolerant BellSouth RBOC.
As RBOC security went, BellSouth were "cake." US West (of Arizona,
the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest) were tough and aggressive,
probably the heaviest RBOC around. Pacific Bell, California's
PacBell, were sleek, high- tech, and longtime veterans of the LA
phone- phreak wars. NYNEX had the misfortune to run the New York
City area, and were warily prepared for most anything. Even Michigan
Bell, a division of the Ameritech RBOC, at least had the elementary
sense to hire their own hacker as a useful scarecrow. But BellSouth,
even though their corporate P.R. proclaimed them to have "Everything
You Expect From a Leader," were pathetic.
When rumor about LoD's mastery of Georgia's switching network got
around to BellSouth through Bellcore and telco security scuttlebutt,
they at first refused to believe it. If you paid serious attention
to every rumor out and about these hacker kids, you would hear all
kinds of wacko saucer-nut nonsense: that the National Security
Agency monitored all American phone calls, that the CIA and DEA
tracked traffic on bulletin- boards with wordanalysis programs, that
the Condor could start World War III from a payphone.
If there were hackers into BellSouth switchingstations, then how
come nothing had happened? Nothing had been hurt. BellSouth's
machines weren't crashing. BellSouth wasn't suffering especially
badly from fraud. BellSouth's customers weren't complaining.
BellSouth was headquartered in Atlanta, ambitious metropolis of the
new high-tech Sunbelt; and BellSouth was upgrading its network by
leaps and bounds, digitizing the works left right and center. They
could hardly be considered sluggish or naive. BellSouth's technical
expertise was second to none, thank you kindly.
But then came the Florida business.
On June 13, 1989, callers to the Palm Beach County Probation
Department, in Delray Beach, Florida, found themselves involved in a
remarkable discussion with a phone-sex worker named "Tina" in New
York State. Somehow, any call to this probation office near Miami
was instantly and magically transported across state lines, at no
extra charge to the user, to a pornographic phonesex hotline
hundreds of miles away!
This practical joke may seem utterly hilarious at first hearing, and
indeed there was a good deal of chuckling about it in phone phreak
circles, including the Autumn 1989 issue of 2600. But for Southern
Bell (the division of the BellSouth RBOC supplying local service for
Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina), this was a
smoking gun. For the first time ever, a computer intruder had broken
into a BellSouth central office switching station and re-programmed
it!
Or so BellSouth thought in June 1989. Actually, LoD members had been
frolicking harmlessly in BellSouth switches since September 1987.
The stunt of June 13 -call-forwarding a number through manipulation
of a switching station -- was child's play for hackers as
accomplished as the Georgia wing of LoD. Switching calls interstate
sounded like a big deal, but it took only four lines of code to
accomplish this. An easy, yet more discreet, stunt, would be to
call-forward another number to your own house. If you were careful
and considerate, and changed the software back later, then not a
soul would know.
Except you. And whoever you had bragged to about it.
As for BellSouth, what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them. Except
now somebody had blown the whole thing wide open, and BellSouth
knew. A now alerted and considerably paranoid BellSouth began
searching switches right and left for signs of impropriety, in that
hot summer of 1989. No fewer than forty-two BellSouth employees were
put on 12-hour shifts, twenty-four hours a day, for two solid
months, poring over records and monitoring computers for any sign of
phony access. These forty-two overworked experts were known as
BellSouth's "Intrusion Task Force."
6.
What the investigators found astounded them. Proprietary telco
databases had been manipulated: phone numbers had been created out
of thin air, with no users' names and no addresses. And perhaps
worst of all, no charges and no records of use. The new digital
ReMOB
(Remote Observation) diagnostic feature had been extensively
tampered with -- hackers had learned to reprogram ReMOB software, so
that they could listen in on any switch-routed call at their
leisure! They were using telco property to spy!
The electrifying news went out throughout law enforcement in 1989.
It had never really occurred to anyone at BellSouth that their
prized and brand-new digital switching-stations could be re-
programmed. People seemed utterly amazed that anyone could have the
nerve. Of course these switching stations were "computers," and
everybody knew hackers liked to "break into computers:" but
telephone people's computers were different from normal people's
computers.
The exact reason why these computers were "different" was rather
ill-defined. It certainly wasn't the extent of their security. The
security on these BellSouth computers was lousy; the AIMSX
computers, for instance, didn't even have passwords. But there was
no question that BellSouth strongly felt that their computers were
very different indeed. And if there were some criminals out there
who had not gotten that message, BellSouth was determined to see
that message taught.
After all, a 5ESS switching station was no mere bookkeeping system
for some local chain of florists. Public service depended on these
stations. Public safety depended on these stations.
And hackers, lurking in there call-forwarding or ReMobbing, could
spy on anybody in the local area! They could spy on telco officials!
They could spy on police stations! They could spy on local offices
of the Secret Service....
In 1989, electronic cops and hacker-trackers began using scrambler-
phones and secured lines. It only made sense. There was no telling
who was into those systems. Whoever they were, they sounded scary.
This was some new level of antisocial daring. Could be West German
hackers, in the pay of the KGB. That too had seemed a weird and
farfetched notion, until Clifford Stoll had poked and prodded a
sluggish Washington law-enforcement bureaucracy into investigating a
computer intrusion that turned out to be exactly that -- hackers, in
the pay of the KGB! Stoll, the systems manager for an Internet lab
in Berkeley California, had ended up on the front page of the New
York Times, proclaimed a national hero in the first true story of
international computer espionage. Stoll's counterspy efforts, which
he related in a bestselling book, The Cuckoo's Egg, in 1989, had
established the credibility of 'hacking' as a possible threat to
national security. The United States Secret Service doesn't mess
around when it suspects a possible action by a foreign intelligence
apparat. The Secret Service scrambler-phones and secured lines put a
tremendous kink in law enforcement's ability to operate freely; to
get the word out, cooperate, prevent misunderstandings.
Nevertheless, 1989 scarcely seemed the time for half-measures. If
the police and Secret Service themselves were not operationally
secure, then how could they reasonably demand measures of security
from private enterprise? At least, the inconvenience made people
aware of the seriousness of the threat.
If there was a final spur needed to get the police off the dime, it
came in the realization that the emergency 911 system was
vulnerable. The 911 system has its own specialized software, but it
is run on the same digital switching systems as the rest of the
telephone network. 911 is not physically different from normal
telephony. But it is certainly culturally different, because this is
the area of telephonic cyberspace reserved for the police and
emergency services. Your average policeman may not know much about
hackers or phone-phreaks. Computer people are weird; even computer
cops are rather weird; the stuff they do is hard to figure out. But
a threat to the 911 system is anything but an abstract threat. If
the 911 system goes, people can die.
Imagine being in a car-wreck, staggering to a phonebooth, punching
911 and hearing "Tina" pick up the phone-sex line somewhere in New
York! The situation's no longer comical, somehow.
And was it possible? No question. Hackers had attacked 911 systems
before. Phreaks can max-out 911 systems just by siccing a bunch of
computer-modems on them in tandem, dialling them over and over until
they clog. That's very crude and low-tech, but it's still a serious
business.
The time had come for action. It was time to take stern measures
with the underground. It was time to start picking up the dropped
threads, the loose edges, the bits of braggadocio here and there; it
was time to get on the stick and start putting serious casework
together. Hackers weren't "invisible." They thought they were
invisible; but the truth was, they had just been tolerated too long.
Under sustained police attention in the summer of '89, the digital
underground began to unravel as never before.
The first big break in the case came very early on: July 1989, the
following month. The perpetrator of the "Tina" switch was caught,
and confessed. His name was "Fry Guy," a 16-year-old in Indiana. Fry
Guy had been a very wicked young man.
Fry Guy had earned his handle from a stunt involving French fries.
Fry Guy had filched the log-in of a local MacDonald's manager and
had logged-on to the MacDonald's mainframe on the Sprint Telenet
system. Posing as the manager, Fry Guy had altered MacDonald's
records, and given some teenage hamburger-flipping friends of his,
generous raises. He had not been caught.
Emboldened by success, Fry Guy moved on to creditcard abuse. Fry Guy
was quite an accomplished talker; with a gift for "social
engineering." If you can do "social engineering" -- fast-talk, fake-
outs, impersonation, conning, scamming -- then card abuse comes
easy. (Getting away with it in the long run is another question).
Fry Guy had run across "Urvile" of the Legion of Doom on the ALTOS
Chat board in Bonn, Germany. ALTOS Chat was a sophisticated board,
accessible through globe-spanning computer networks like BITnet,
Tymnet, and Telenet. ALTOS was much frequented by members of
Germany's Chaos Computer Club. Two Chaos hackers who hung out on
ALTOS, "Jaeger" and "Pengo," had been the central villains of
Clifford Stoll's CUCKOO'S EGG case: consorting in East Berlin with a
spymaster from the KGB, and breaking into American computers for
hire, through the Internet. When LoD members learned the story of
Jaeger's depredations from Stoll's book, they were rather less than
impressed, technically speaking. On LoD's own favorite board of the
moment, "Black Ice," LoD members bragged that they themselves could
have done all the Chaos breakins in a week flat! Nevertheless, LoD
were grudgingly impressed by the Chaos rep, the sheer hairy-eyed
daring of hash-smoking anarchist hackers who had rubbed shoulders
with the fearsome big-boys of international Communist espionage. LoD
members sometimes traded bits of knowledge with friendly German
hackers on ALTOS -- phone numbers for vulnerable VAX/VMS computers
in Georgia, for instance. Dutch and British phone phreaks, and the
Australian clique of "Phoenix," "Nom," and "Electron," were ALTOS
regulars, too. In underground circles, to hang out on ALTOS was
considered the sign of an elite dude, a sophisticated hacker of the
international digital jet-set.
Fry Guy quickly learned how to raid information from credit-card
consumer-reporting agencies. He had over a hundred stolen credit-
card numbers in his notebooks, and upwards of a thousand swiped
long- distance access codes. He knew how to get onto Altos, and how
to talk the talk of the underground convincingly. He now wheedled
knowledge of switching-station tricks from Urvile on the ALTOS
system.
Combining these two forms of knowledge enabled Fry Guy to bootstrap
his way up to a new form of wirefraud. First, he'd snitched credit
card numbers from credit-company computers. The data he copied
included names, addresses and phone numbers of the random card-
holders.
Then Fry Guy, impersonating a card-holder, called up Western Union
and asked for a cash advance on "his" credit card. Western Union, as
a security guarantee, would call the customer back, at home, to
verify the transaction.
But, just as he had switched the Florida probation office to "Tina"
in New York, Fry Guy switched the cardholder's number to a local
pay- phone. There he would lurk in wait, muddying his trail by
routing and re- routing the call, through switches as far away as
Canada. When the call came through, he would boldly "social-
engineer," or con, the Western Union people, pretending to be the
legitimate card-holder. Since he'd answered the proper phone number,
the deception was not very hard. Western Union's money was then
shipped to a confederate of Fry Guy's in his home town in Indiana.
Fry Guy and his cohort, using LoD techniques, stole six thousand
dollars from Western Union between December 1988 and July 1989. They
also dabbled in ordering delivery of stolen goods through card-
fraud. Fry Guy was intoxicated with success. The sixteen-year-old
fantasized wildly to hacker rivals, boasting that he'd used rip-off
money to hire himself a big limousine, and had driven out-of-state
with a groupie from his favorite heavymetal band, Motley Crue. Armed
with knowledge, power, and a gratifying stream of free money, Fry
Guy now took it upon himself to call local representatives of
Indiana Bell security, to brag, boast, strut, and utter tormenting
warnings that his powerful friends in the notorious Legion of Doom
could crash the national telephone network. Fry Guy even named a
date for the scheme: the Fourth of July, a national holiday.
This egregious example of the begging-for-arrest syndrome was
shortly followed by Fry Guy's arrest. After the Indiana telephone
company figured out who he was, the Secret Service had DNRs -
- Dialed Number Recorders -- installed on his home phone lines.
These devices are not taps, and can't record the substance of phone
calls, but they do record the phone numbers of all calls going in
and out. Tracing these numbers showed Fry Guy's long-distance code
fraud, his extensive ties to pirate bulletin boards, and numerous
personal calls to his LoD friends in Atlanta. By July 11, 1989,
Prophet, Urvile and Leftist also had Secret Service DNR "pen
registers" installed on their own lines.
The Secret Service showed up in force at Fry Guy's house on July 22,
1989, to the horror of his unsuspecting parents. The raiders were
led by a special agent from the Secret Service's Indianapolis
office. However, the raiders were accompanied and advised by Timothy
M. Foley of the Secret Service's Chicago office (a gentleman about
whom we will soon be hearing a great deal).
Following federal computer-crime techniques that had been standard
since the early 1980s, the Secret Service searched the house
thoroughly, and seized all of Fry Guy's electronic equipment and
notebooks. All Fry Guy's equipment went out the door in the custody
of the Secret Service, which put a swift end to his depredations.
The USSS interrogated Fry Guy at length. His case was put in the
charge of Deborah Daniels, the federal US Attorney for the Southern
District of Indiana. Fry Guy was charged with eleven counts of
computer fraud, unauthorized computer access, and wire fraud. The
evidence was thorough and irrefutable. For his part, Fry Guy blamed
his corruption on the Legion of Doom and offered to testify against
them.
Fry Guy insisted that the Legion intended to crash the phone system
on a national holiday. And when AT&T crashed on Martin Luther King
Day, 1990, this lent a credence to his claim that genuinely alarmed
telco security and the Secret Service. Fry Guy eventually pled
guilty on May 31, 1990. On September 14, he was sentenced to forty-
four months' probation and four hundred hours' community service. He
could have had it much worse; but it made sense to prosecutors to
take it easy on this teenage minor, while zeroing in on the
notorious kingpins of the Legion of Doom. But the case against LoD
had nagging flaws. Despite the best effort of investigators, it was
impossible to prove that the Legion had crashed the phone system on
January 15, because they, in fact, hadn't done so. The
investigations of 1989 did show that certain members of the Legion
of Doom had achieved unprecedented power over the telco switching
stations, and that they were in active conspiracy to obtain more
power yet. Investigators were privately convinced that the Legion of
Doom intended to do awful things with this knowledge, but mere evil
intent was not enough to put them in jail.
And although the Atlanta Three -- Prophet, Leftist, and especially
Urvile -- had taught Fry Guy plenty, they were not themselves
credit-card fraudsters. The only thing they'd "stolen" was long-
distance service -- and since they'd done much of that through
phone-switch manipulation, there was no easy way to judge how much
they'd "stolen," or whether this practice was even "theft" of any
easily recognizable kind.
Fry Guy's theft of long-distance codes had cost the phone companies
plenty. The theft of long-distance service may be a fairly
theoretical "loss," but it costs genuine money and genuine time to
delete all those stolen codes, and to re-issue new codes to the
innocent owners of those corrupted codes. The owners of the codes
themselves are victimized, and lose time and money and peace of mind
in the hassle. And then there were the credit-card victims to deal
with, too, and Western Union. When it came to rip-off, Fry Guy was
far more of a thief than LoD. It was only when it came to actual
computer expertise that Fry Guy was small potatoes.
The Atlanta Legion thought most "rules" of cyberspace were for
rodents and losers, but they did have rules. They never crashed
anything, and they never took money. These were rough rules-of-
thumb, and rather dubious principles when it comes to the ethical
subtleties of cyberspace, but they enabled the Atlanta Three to
operate with a relatively clear conscience (though never with peace
of mind).
If you didn't hack for money, if you weren't robbing people of
actual funds -- money in the bank, that is -then nobody really got
hurt, in LoD's opinion. "Theft of service" was a bogus issue, and
"intellectual property" was a bad joke. But LoD had only elitist
contempt for rip-off artists, "leechers," thieves. They considered
themselves clean.
In their opinion, if you didn't smash-up or crash any systems --
(well, not on purpose, anyhow -- accidents can happen, just ask
Robert Morris) then it was very unfair to call you a "vandal" or a
"cracker." When you were hanging out on-line with your "pals" in
telco security, you could face them down from the higher plane of
hacker morality. And you could mock the police from the supercilious
heights of your hacker's quest for pure knowledge.
But from the point of view of law enforcement and telco security,
however, Fry Guy was not really dangerous. The Atlanta Three were
dangerous. It wasn't the crimes they were committing, but the
danger, the potential hazard, the sheer technical power LoD had
accumulated, that had made the situation untenable.
Fry Guy was not LoD. He'd never laid eyes on anyone in LoD; his only
contacts with them had been electronic. Core members of the Legion
of Doom tended to meet physically for conventions every year or so,
to get drunk, give each other the hacker high-sign, send out for
pizza and ravage hotel suites. Fry Guy had never done any of this.
Deborah Daniels assessed Fry Guy accurately as "an LoD wannabe."
Nevertheless Fry Guy's crimes would be directly attributed to LoD in
much future police propaganda. LoD would be described as "a closely
knit group" involved in "numerous illegal activities" including
"stealing and modifying individual credit histories," and
"fraudulently obtaining money and property." Fry Guy did this, but
the Atlanta Three didn't; they simply weren't into theft, but rather
intrusion. This caused a strange kink in the prosecution's strategy.
LoD were accused of "disseminating information about attacking
computers to other computer hackers in an effort to shift the focus
of law enforcement to those other hackers and away from the Legion
of Doom."
This last accusation (taken directly from a press release by the
Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force) sounds particularly
far- fetched. One might conclude at this point that investigators
would have been well-advised to go ahead and "shift their focus"
from the "Legion of Doom." Maybe they should concentrate on "those
other hackers" -- the ones who were actually stealing money and
physical objects.
But the Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was not a simple policing action.
It wasn't meant just to walk the beat in cyberspace -- it was a
crackdown, a deliberate attempt to nail the core of the operation,
to send a dire and potent message that would settle the hash of the
digital underground for good.
By this reasoning, Fry Guy wasn't much more than the electronic
equivalent of a cheap streetcorner dope dealer. As long as the
masterminds of LoD were still flagrantly operating, pushing their
mountains of illicit knowledge right and left, and whipping up
enthusiasm for blatant lawbreaking, then there would be an infinite
supply of Fry Guys.
Because LoD were flagrant, they had left trails everywhere, to be
picked up by law enforcement in New York, Indiana, Florida, Texas,
Arizona, Missouri, even Australia. But 1990's war on the Legion of
Doom was led out of Illinois, by the Chicago Computer Fraud and
Abuse Task Force.
7.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force, led by federal prosecutor
William J. Cook, had started in 1987 and had swiftly become one of
the most aggressive local "dedicated computer-crime units." Chicago
was a natural home for such a group. The world's first computer
bulletin-board system had been invented in Illinois. The state of
Illinois had some of the nation's first and sternest computer crime
laws. Illinois State Police were markedly alert to the possibilities
of white-collar crime and electronic fraud.
And William J. Cook in particular was a rising star in electronic
crime-busting. He and his fellow federal prosecutors at the U.S.
Attorney's office in Chicago had a tight relation with the Secret
Service, especially gogetting Chicago-based agent Timothy Foley.
While Cook and his Department of Justice colleagues plotted
strategy, Foley was their man on the street.
Throughout the 1980s, the federal government had given prosecutors
an armory of new, untried legal tools against computer crime. Cook
and his colleagues were pioneers in the use of these new statutes in
the real-life cut-and-thrust of the federal courtroom.
On October 2, 1986, the US Senate had passed the "Computer Fraud and
Abuse Act" unanimously, but there were pitifully few convictions
under this statute. Cook's group took their name from this statute,
since they were determined to transform this powerful but rather
theoretical Act of Congress into a real-life engine of legal
destruction against computer fraudsters and scofflaws.
It was not a question of merely discovering crimes, investigating
them, and then trying and punishing their perpetrators. The Chicago
unit, like most everyone else in the business, already knew who the
bad guys were: the Legion of Doom and the writers and editors of
Phrack. The task at hand was to find some legal means of putting
these characters away.
This approach might seem a bit dubious, to someone not acquainted
with the gritty realities of prosecutorial work. But prosecutors
don't put people in jail for crimes they have committed; they put
people in jail for crimes they have committed that can be proved in
court. Chicago federal police put Al Capone in prison for income-tax
fraud. Chicago is a big town, with a roughand-ready bare-knuckle
tradition on both sides of the law.
Fry Guy had broken the case wide open and alerted telco security to
the scope of the problem. But Fry Guy's crimes would not put the
Atlanta Three behind bars -much less the wacko underground
journalists of Phrack. So on July 22, 1989, the same day that Fry
Guy was raided in Indiana, the Secret Service descended upon the
Atlanta Three.
This was likely inevitable. By the summer of 1989, law enforcement
were closing in on the Atlanta Three from at least six directions at
once. First, there were the leads from Fry Guy, which had led to the
DNR registers being installed on the lines of the Atlanta Three. The
DNR evidence alone would have finished them off, sooner or later.
But second, the Atlanta lads were already well-known to Control-
C and his telco security sponsors. LoD's contacts with telco
security had made them overconfident and even more boastful than
usual; they felt that they had powerful friends in high places, and
that they were being openly tolerated by telco security. But
BellSouth's Intrusion Task Force were hot on the trail of LoD and
sparing no effort or expense.
The Atlanta Three had also been identified by name and listed on the
extensive anti-hacker files maintained, and retailed for pay, by
private security operative John Maxfield of Detroit. Maxfield, who
had extensive ties to telco security and many informants in the
underground, was a bete noire of the Phrack crowd, and the dislike
was mutual.
The Atlanta Three themselves had written articles for Phrack. This
boastful act could not possibly escape telco and law enforcement
attention.
"Knightmare," a high-school age hacker from Arizona, was a close
friend and disciple of Atlanta LoD, but he had been nabbed by the
formidable Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit. Knightmare
was on some of LoD's favorite boards -- "Black Ice" in particular -
- and was privy to their secrets. And to have Gail Thackeray, the
Assistant Attorney General of Arizona, on one's trail was a dreadful
peril for any hacker.
And perhaps worst of all, Prophet had committed a major blunder by
passing an illicitly copied BellSouth computer-file to Knight
Lightning, who had published it in Phrack. This, as we will see, was
an act of dire consequence for almost everyone concerned.
On July 22, 1989, the Secret Service showed up at the Leftist's
house, where he lived with his parents. A massive squad of some
twenty officers surrounded the building: Secret Service, federal
marshals, local police, possibly BellSouth telco security; it was
hard to tell in the crush. Leftist's dad, at work in his basement
office, first noticed a muscular stranger in plain clothes crashing
through the back yard with a drawn pistol. As more strangers poured
into the house, Leftist's dad naturally assumed there was an armed
robbery in progress.
Like most hacker parents, Leftist's mom and dad had only the vaguest
notions of what their son had been up to all this time. Leftist had
a day-job repairing computer hardware. His obsession with computers
seemed a bit odd, but harmless enough, and likely to produce a
wellpaying career. The sudden, overwhelming raid left Leftist's
parents traumatized.
The Leftist himself had been out after work with his co-workers,
surrounding a couple of pitchers of margaritas. As he came trucking
on tequila-numbed feet up the pavement, toting a bag full of floppy-
disks, he noticed a large number of unmarked cars parked in his
driveway. All the cars sported tiny microwave antennas.
The Secret Service had knocked the front door off its hinges, almost
flattening his Mom.
Inside, Leftist was greeted by Special Agent James Cool of the US
Secret Service, Atlanta office. Leftist was flabbergasted. He'd
never met a Secret Service agent before. He could not imagine that
he'd ever done anything worthy of federal attention. He'd always
figured that if his activities became intolerable, one of his
contacts in telco security would give him a private phone-call and
tell him to knock it off.
But now Leftist was pat-searched for weapons by grim professionals,
and his bag of floppies was quickly seized. He and his parents were
all shepherded into separate rooms and grilled at length as a score
of officers scoured their home for anything electronic.
Leftist was horrified as his treasured IBM AT personal computer with
its forty-meg hard disk, and his recently purchased 80386 IBM-clone
with a whopping hundred-meg hard disk, both went swiftly out the
door in Secret Service custody. They also seized all his disks, all
his notebooks, and a tremendous booty in dogeared telco documents
that Leftist had snitched out of trash dumpsters.
Leftist figured the whole thing for a big misunderstanding. He'd
never been into military computers. He wasn't a spy or a Communist.
He was just a good ol' Georgia hacker, and now he just wanted all
these people out of the house. But it seemed they wouldn't go until
he made some kind of statement.
And so, he levelled with them. And that, Leftist said later from his
federal prison camp in Talladega, Alabama, was a big mistake.
The Atlanta area was unique, in that it had three members of the
Legion of Doom who actually occupied more or less the same physical
locality. Unlike the rest of LoD, who tended to associate by phone
and computer, Atlanta LoD actually were "tightly knit." It was no
real surprise that the Secret Service agents apprehending Urvile at
the computer-labs at Georgia Tech, would discover Prophet with him
as well.
Urvile, a 21-year-old Georgia Tech student in polymer chemistry,
posed quite a puzzling case for law enforcement. Urvile -- also
known as "Necron 99," as well as other handles, for he tended to
change his cover- alias about once a month -- was both an
accomplished hacker and a fanatic simulation-gamer.
Simulation games are an unusual hobby; but then hackers are unusual
people, and their favorite pastimes tend to be somewhat out of the
ordinary. The best-known American simulation game is probably
"Dungeons & Dragons," a multi-player parlor entertainment played
with paper, maps, pencils, statistical tables and a variety of
oddly-shaped dice. Players pretend to be heroic characters exploring
a wholly-invented fantasy world. The fantasy worlds of simulation
gaming are commonly pseudo-medieval, involving swords and sorcery -
- spellcasting wizards, knights in armor, unicorns and dragons,
demons and goblins.
Urvile and his fellow gamers preferred their fantasies highly
technological. They made use of a game known as "G.U.R.P.S.," the
"Generic Universal Role Playing System," published by a company
called Steve Jackson Games (SJG).
"G.U.R.P.S." served as a framework for creating a wide variety of
artificial fantasy worlds. Steve Jackson Games published a
smorgasboard of books, full of detailed information and gaming
hints, which were used to flesh-out many different fantastic
backgrounds for the basic GURPS framework. Urvile made extensive use
of two SJG books called GURPS High-Tech and GURPS Special Ops.
In the artificial fantasy-world of GURPS Special Ops, players
entered a modern fantasy of intrigue and international espionage. On
beginning the game, players started small and powerless, perhaps as
minor-league CIA agents or penny-ante arms dealers. But as players
persisted through a series of game sessions (game sessions generally
lasted for hours, over long, elaborate campaigns that might be
pursued for months on end) then they would achieve new skills, new
knowledge, new power. They would acquire and hone new abilities,
such as marksmanship, karate, wiretapping, or Watergate burglary.
They could also win various kinds of imaginary booty, like Berettas,
or martini shakers, or fast cars with ejection seats and machine-
guns under the headlights. As might be imagined from the complexity
of these games, Urvile's gaming notes were very detailed and
extensive. Urvile was a "dungeon-master," inventing scenarios for
his fellow gamers, giant simulated adventure-puzzles for his friends
to unravel. Urvile's game notes covered dozens of pages with all
sorts of exotic lunacy, all about ninja raids on Libya and break-ins
on encrypted Red Chinese supercomputers. His notes were written on
scrap-paper and kept in loose- leaf binders.
The handiest scrap paper around Urvile's college digs were the many
pounds of BellSouth printouts and documents that he had snitched out
of telco dumpsters. His notes were written on the back of
misappropriated telco property. Worse yet, the gaming notes were
chaotically interspersed with Urvile's hand-scrawled records
involving actual computer intrusions that he had committed.
Not only was it next to impossible to tell Urvile's fantasy game-
notes from cyberspace "reality," but Urvile himself barely made this
distinction. It's no exaggeration to say that to Urvile it was all a
game. Urvile was very bright, highly imaginative, and quite careless
of other people's notions of propriety. His connection to "reality"
was not something to which he paid a great deal of attention.
Hacking was a game for Urvile. It was an amusement he was carrying
out, it was something he was doing for fun. And Urvile was an
obsessive young man. He could no more stop hacking than he could
stop in the middle of a jigsaw puzzle, or stop in the middle of
reading a Stephen Donaldson fantasy trilogy. (The name "Urvile" came
from a best-selling Donaldson novel.)
Urvile's airy, bulletproof attitude seriously annoyed his
interrogators. First of all, he didn't consider that he'd done
anything wrong. There was scarcely a shred of honest remorse in him.
On the contrary, he seemed privately convinced that his police
interrogators were operating in a demented fantasy-world all their
own. Urvile was too polite and well-behaved to say this straightout,
but his reactions were askew and disquieting. For instance, there
was the business about LoD's ability to monitor phone-calls to the
police and Secret Service. Urvile agreed that this was quite
possible, and posed no big problem for LoD. In fact, he and his
friends had kicked the idea around on the "Black Ice" board, much as
they had discussed many other nifty notions, such as building
personal flame-throwers and jury-rigging fistfulls of blasting-caps.
They had hundreds of dial-up numbers for government agencies that
they'd gotten through scanning Atlanta phones, or had pulled from
raided VAX/VMS mainframe computers.
Basically, they'd never gotten around to listening in on the cops
because the idea wasn't interesting enough to bother with. Besides,
if they'd been monitoring Secret Service phone calls, obviously
they'd never have been caught in the first place. Right?
The Secret Service was less than satisfied with this rapier-like
hacker logic.
Then there was the issue of crashing the phone system. No problem,
Urvile admitted sunnily. Atlanta LoD could have shut down phone
service all over Atlanta any time they liked. Even the 911 service?
Nothing special about that, Urvile explained patiently. Bring the
switch to its knees, with say the UNIX "makedir" bug, and 911 goes
down too as a matter of course. The 911 system wasn't very
interesting, frankly. It might be tremendously interesting to cops
(for odd reasons of their own), but as technical challenges went,
the 911 service was yawnsville. So of course the Atlanta Three could
crash service. They probably could have crashed service all over
BellSouth territory, if they'd worked at it for a while. But Atlanta
LoD weren't crashers. Only losers and rodents were crashers. LoD
were elite.
Urvile was privately convinced that sheer technical expertise could
win him free of any kind of problem. As far as he was concerned,
elite status in the digital underground had placed him permanently
beyond the intellectual grasp of cops and straights. Urvile had a
lot to learn.
Of the three LoD stalwarts, Prophet was in the most direct trouble.
Prophet was a UNIX programming expert who burrowed in and out of the
Internet as a matter of course. He'd started his hacking career at
around age 14, meddling with a UNIX mainframe system at the
University of North Carolina.
Prophet himself had written the handy Legion of Doom file "UNIX Use
and Security From the Ground Up." UNIX (pronounced "you-nicks") is a
powerful, flexible computer operating-system, for multi-user, multi-
tasking computers. In 1969, when UNIX was created in Bell Labs, such
computers were exclusive to large corporations and universities, but
today UNIX is run on thousands of powerful home machines. UNIX was
particularly wellsuited to telecommunications programming, and had
become a standard in the field. Naturally, UNIX also became a
standard for the elite hacker and phone phreak.
Lately, Prophet had not been so active as Leftist and Urvile, but
Prophet was a recidivist. In 1986, when he was eighteen, Prophet had
been convicted of "unauthorized access to a computer network" in
North Carolina. He'd been discovered breaking into the Southern Bell
Data Network, a UNIX-based internal telco network supposedly closed
to the public. He'd gotten a typical hacker sentence: six months
suspended, 120 hours community service, and three years' probation.
After that humiliating bust, Prophet had gotten rid of most of his
tonnage of illicit phreak and hacker data, and had tried to go
straight. He was, after all, still on probation. But by the autumn
of 1988, the temptations of cyberspace had proved too much for young
Prophet, and he was shoulder-to-shoulder with Urvile and Leftist
into some of the hairiest systems around.
In early September 1988, he'd broken into BellSouth's centralized
automation system, AIMSX or "Advanced Information Management
System." AIMSX was an internal business network for BellSouth, where
telco employees stored electronic mail, databases, memos, and
calendars, and did text processing. Since AIMSX did not have public
dial-ups, it was considered utterly invisible to the public, and was
not well- secured -- it didn't even require passwords. Prophet
abused an account known as "waa1," the personal account of an
unsuspecting telco employee. Disguised as the owner of waa1, Prophet
made about ten visits to AIMSX.
Prophet did not damage or delete anything in the system. His
presence in AIMSX was harmless and almost invisible. But he could
not rest content with that.
One particular piece of processed text on AIMSX was a telco document
known as "Bell South Standard Practice 660-225-104SV Control Office
Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special Services and
Major Account Centers dated March 1988."
Prophet had not been looking for this document. It was merely one
among hundreds of similar documents with impenetrable titles.
However, having blundered over it in the course of his illicit
wanderings through AIMSX, he decided to take it with him as a
trophy. It might prove very useful in some future boasting,
bragging, and strutting session. So, some time in September 1988,
Prophet ordered the AIMSX mainframe computer to copy this document
(henceforth called simply called "the E911 Document") and to
transfer this copy to his home computer.
No one noticed that Prophet had done this. He had "stolen" the E911
Document in some sense, but notions of property in cyberspace can be
tricky. BellSouth noticed nothing wrong, because BellSouth still had
their original copy. They had not been "robbed" of the document
itself. Many people were supposed to copy this document -
specifically, people who worked for the nineteen BellSouth "special
services and major account centers," scattered throughout the
Southeastern United States. That was what it was for, why it was
present on a computer network in the first place: so that it could
be copied and read -by telco employees. But now the data had been
copied by someone who wasn't supposed to look at it.
Prophet now had his trophy. But he further decided to store yet
another copy of the E911 Document on another person's computer. This
unwitting person was a computer enthusiast named Richard Andrews who
lived near Joliet, Illinois. Richard Andrews was a UNIX programmer
by trade, and ran a powerful UNIX board called "Jolnet," in the
basement of his house.
Prophet, using the handle "Robert Johnson," had obtained an account
on Richard Andrews' computer. And there he stashed the E911
Document, by storing it in his own private section of Andrews'
computer.
Why did Prophet do this? If Prophet had eliminated the E911 Document
from his own computer, and kept it hundreds of miles away, on
another machine, under an alias, then he might have been fairly safe
from discovery and prosecution -- although his sneaky action had
certainly put the unsuspecting Richard Andrews at risk.
But, like most hackers, Prophet was a pack-rat for illicit data.
When it came to the crunch, he could not bear to part from his
trophy. When Prophet's place in Decatur, Georgia was raided in July
1989, there was the E911 Document, a smoking gun. And there was
Prophet in the hands of the Secret Service, doing his best to
"explain."
Our story now takes us away from the Atlanta Three and their raids
of the Summer of 1989. We must leave Atlanta Three "cooperating
fully" with their numerous investigators. And all three of them did
cooperate, as their Sentencing Memorandum from the US District Court
of the Northern Division of Georgia explained -just before all three
of them were sentenced to various federal prisons in November 1990.
We must now catch up on the other aspects of the war on the Legion
of Doom. The war on the Legion was a war on a network -- in fact, a
network of three networks, which intertwined and interrelated in a
complex fashion. The Legion itself, with Atlanta LoD, and their
hanger-on Fry Guy, were the first network. The second network was
Phrack magazine, with its editors and contributors. The third
network involved the electronic circle around a hacker known as
"Terminus."
The war against these hacker networks was carried out by a law
enforcement network. Atlanta LoD and Fry Guy were pursued by USSS
agents and federal prosecutors in Atlanta, Indiana, and Chicago.
"Terminus" found himself pursued by USSS and federal prosecutors
from Baltimore and Chicago. And the war against Phrack was almost
entirely a Chicago operation.
The investigation of Terminus involved a great deal of energy,
mostly from the Chicago Task Force, but it was to be the least-known
and least-publicized of the Crackdown operations. Terminus, who
lived in Maryland, was a UNIX programmer and consultant, fairly
wellknown (under his given name) in the UNIX community, as an
acknowledged expert on AT&T minicomputers. Terminus idolized AT&T,
especially Bellcore, and longed for public recognition as a UNIX
expert; his highest ambition was to work for Bell Labs.
But Terminus had odd friends and a spotted history. Terminus had
once been the subject of an admiring interview in Phrack (Volume II,
Issue 14, Phile 2 -dated May 1987). In this article, Phrack co-
editor Taran King described "Terminus" as an electronics engineer,
5'9", brown- haired, born in 1959 -- at 28 years old, quite mature
for a hacker.
Terminus had once been sysop of a phreak/hack underground board
called "MetroNet," which ran on an Apple II. Later he'd replaced
"MetroNet" with an underground board called "MegaNet," specializing
in IBMs. In his younger days, Terminus had written one of the very
first and most elegant code-scanning programs for the IBM-PC. This
program had been widely distributed in the underground. Uncounted
legions of PC- owning phreaks and hackers had used Terminus's
scanner program to rip- off telco codes. This feat had not escaped
the attention of telco security; it hardly could, since Terminus's
earlier handle, "Terminal Technician," was proudly written right on
the program.
When he became a full-time computer professional (specializing in
telecommunications programming), he adopted the handle Terminus,
meant to indicate that he had "reached the final point of being a
proficient hacker." He'd moved up to the UNIX-based "Netsys" board
on an AT&T computer, with four phone lines and an impressive 240
megs of storage. "Netsys" carried complete issues of Phrack, and
Terminus was quite friendly with its publishers, Taran King and
Knight Lightning.
In the early 1980s, Terminus had been a regular on Plovernet,
Pirate-80, Sherwood Forest and Shadowland, all well-known pirate
boards, all heavily frequented by the Legion of Doom. As it
happened, Terminus was never officially "in LoD," because he'd never
been given the official LoD high-sign and back-slap by Legion maven
Lex Luthor. Terminus had never physically met anyone from LoD. But
that scarcely mattered much -- the Atlanta Three themselves had
never been officially vetted by Lex, either. As far as law
enforcement was concerned, the issues were clear. Terminus was a
full-time, adult computer professional with particular skills at
AT&T software and hardware -- but Terminus reeked of the Legion of
Doom and the underground.
On February 1, 1990 -- half a month after the Martin Luther King Day
Crash -- USSS agents Tim Foley from Chicago, and Jack Lewis from the
Baltimore office, accompanied by AT&T security officer Jerry Dalton,
travelled to Middle Town, Maryland. There they grilled Terminus in
his home (to the stark terror of his wife and small children), and,
in their customary fashion, hauled his computers out the door.
The Netsys machine proved to contain a plethora of arcane UNIX
software -- proprietary source code formally owned by AT&T. Software
such as: UNIX System Five Release 3.2; UNIX SV Release 3.1; UUCP
communications software; KORN SHELL; RFS; IWB; WWB; DWB; the C++
programming language; PMON; TOOL CHEST; QUEST; DACT, and S FIND.
In the long-established piratical tradition of the underground,
Terminus had been trading this illicitlycopied software with a small
circle of fellow UNIX programmers. Very unwisely, he had stored
seven years of his electronic mail on his Netsys machine, which
documented all the friendly arrangements he had made with his
various colleagues. Terminus had not crashed the AT&T phone system
on January 15. He was, however, blithely running a notfor-profit
AT&T software-piracy ring. This was not an activity AT&T found
amusing. AT&T security officer Jerry Dalton valued this "stolen"
property at over three hundred thousand dollars.
AT&T's entry into the tussle of free enterprise had been complicated
by the new, vague groundrules of the information economy. Until the
break-up of Ma Bell, AT&T was forbidden to sell computer hardware or
software. Ma Bell was the phone company; Ma Bell was not allowed to
use the enormous revenue from telephone utilities, in order to
finance any entry into the computer market.
AT&T nevertheless invented the UNIX operating system. And somehow
AT&T managed to make UNIX a minor source of income. Weirdly, UNIX
was not sold as computer software, but actually retailed under an
obscure regulatory exemption allowing sales of surplus equipment and
scrap. Any bolder attempt to promote or retail UNIX would have
aroused angry legal opposition from computer companies. Instead,
UNIX was licensed to universities, at modest rates, where the acids
of academic freedom ate away steadily at AT&T's proprietary rights.
Come the breakup, AT&T recognized that UNIX was a potential gold-
mine. By now, large chunks of UNIX code had been created that were
not AT&T's, and were being sold by others. An entire rival UNIX-
based operating system had arisen in Berkeley, California (one of
the world's great founts of ideological hackerdom). Today, "hackers"
commonly consider "Berkeley UNIX" to be technically superior to
AT&T's "System V UNIX," but AT&T has not allowed mere technical
elegance to intrude on the real-world business of marketing
proprietary software. AT&T has made its own code deliberately
incompatible with other folks' UNIX, and has written code that it
can prove is copyrightable, even if that code happens to be somewhat
awkward -- "kludgey." AT&T UNIX user licenses are serious business
agreements, replete with very clear copyright statements and
nondisclosure clauses.
AT&T has not exactly kept the UNIX cat in the bag, but it kept a
grip on its scruff with some success. By the rampant, explosive
standards of software piracy, AT&T UNIX source code is heavily
copyrighted, well- guarded, well-licensed. UNIX was traditionally
run only on mainframe machines, owned by large groups of suit-andtie
professionals, rather than on bedroom machines where people can get
up to easy mischief.
And AT&T UNIX source code is serious high-level programming. The
number of skilled UNIX programmers with any actual motive to swipe
UNIX source code is small. It's tiny, compared to the tens of
thousands prepared to rip-off, say, entertaining PC games like
"Leisure Suit Larry."
But by 1989, the warez-d00d underground, in the persons of Terminus
and his friends, was gnawing at AT&T UNIX. And the property in
question was not sold for twenty bucks over the counter at the local
branch of Babbage's or Egghead's; this was massive, sophisticated,
multi-line, multi-author corporate code worth tens of thousands of
dollars.
It must be recognized at this point that Terminus's purported ring
of UNIX software pirates had not actually made any money from their
suspected crimes. The $300,000 dollar figure bandied about for the
contents of Terminus's computer did not mean that Terminus was in
actual illicit possession of three hundred thousand of AT&T's
dollars. Terminus was shipping software back and forth, privately,
person to person, for free. He was not making a commercial business
of piracy. He hadn't asked for money; he didn't take money. He lived
quite modestly.
AT&T employees -- as well as freelance UNIX consultants, like
Terminus -- commonly worked with "proprietary" AT&T software, both
in the office and at home on their private machines. AT&T rarely
sent security officers out to comb the hard disks of its
consultants. Cheap freelance UNIX contractors were quite useful to
AT&T; they didn't have health insurance or retirement programs, much
less union membership in the Communication Workers of America. They
were humble digital drudges, wandering with mop and bucket through
the Great Technological Temple of AT&T; but when the Secret Service
arrived at their homes, it seemed they were eating with company
silverware and sleeping on company sheets! Outrageously, they
behaved as if the things they worked with every day belonged to
them!
And these were no mere hacker teenagers with their hands full of
trash-paper and their noses pressed to the corporate windowpane.
These guys were UNIX wizards, not only carrying AT&T data in their
machines and their heads, but eagerly networking about it, over
machines that were far more powerful than anything previously
imagined in private hands. How do you keep people disposable, yet
assure their awestruck respect for your property? It was a dilemma.
Much UNIX code was public-domain, available for free. Much
"proprietary" UNIX code had been extensively re-written, perhaps
altered so much that it became an entirely new product -- or perhaps
not. Intellectual property rights for software developers were, and
are, extraordinarily complex and confused. And software "piracy,"
like the private copying of videos, is one of the most widely
practiced "crimes" in the world today. The USSS were not experts in
UNIX or familiar with the customs of its use. The United States
Secret Service, considered as a body, did not have one single person
in it who could program in a UNIX environment -- no, not even one.
The Secret Service were making extensive use of expert help, but the
"experts" they had chosen were AT&T and Bellcore security officials,
the very victims of the purported crimes under investigation, the
very people whose interest in AT&T's "proprietary" software was most
pronounced.
On February 6, 1990, Terminus was arrested by Agent Lewis.
Eventually, Terminus would be sent to prison for his illicit use of
a piece of AT&T software.
The issue of pirated AT&T software would bubble along in the
background during the war on the Legion of Doom. Some half-dozen of
Terminus's on-line acquaintances, including people in Illinois,
Texas and California, were grilled by the Secret Service in
connection with the illicit copying of software. Except for
Terminus, however, none were charged with a crime. None of them
shared his peculiar prominence in the hacker underground.
But that did not meant that these people would, or could, stay out
of trouble. The transferral of illicit data in cyberspace is hazy
and ill- defined business, with paradoxical dangers for everyone
concerned: hackers, signal carriers, board owners, cops,
prosecutors, even random passers-by. Sometimes, well-meant attempts
to avert trouble or punish wrongdoing bring more trouble than would
simple ignorance, indifference or impropriety.
Terminus's "Netsys" board was not a common-or- garden bulletin board
system, though it had most of the usual functions of a board. Netsys
was not a stand-alone machine, but part of the globe-spanning "UUCP"
cooperative network. The UUCP network uses a set of Unix software
programs called "Unix-to-Unix Copy," which allows Unix systems to
throw data to one another at high speed through the public telephone
network. UUCP is a radically decentralized, not-for-profit network
of UNIX computers. There are tens of thousands of these UNIX
machines. Some are small, but many are powerful and also link to
other networks. UUCP has certain arcane links to major networks such
as JANET, EasyNet, BITNET, JUNET, VNET, DASnet, PeaceNet and
FidoNet, as well as the gigantic Internet. (The so-called "Internet"
is not actually a network itself, but rather an "internetwork"
connections standard that allows several globe-spanning computer
networks to communicate with one another. Readers fascinated by the
weird and intricate tangles of modern computer networks may enjoy
John S. Quarterman's authoritative 719-page explication, The Matrix,
Digital Press, 1990.)
A skilled user of Terminus' UNIX machine could send and receive
electronic mail from almost any major computer network in the world.
Netsys was not called a "board" per se, but rather a "node." "Nodes"
were larger, faster, and more sophisticated than mere "boards," and
for hackers, to hang out on internationally-connected "nodes" was
quite the step up from merely hanging out on local "boards."
Terminus's Netsys node in Maryland had a number of direct links to
other, similar UUCP nodes, run by people who shared his interests
and at least something of his free- wheeling attitude. One of these
nodes was Jolnet, owned by Richard Andrews, who, like Terminus, was
an independent UNIX consultant. Jolnet also ran UNIX, and could be
contacted at high speed by mainframe machines from all over the
world. Jolnet was quite a sophisticated piece of work, technically
speaking, but it was still run by an individual, as a private, not-
for-profit hobby. Jolnet was mostly used by other UNIX programmers -
- for mail, storage, and access to networks. Jolnet supplied access
network access to about two hundred people, as well as a local
junior college. Among its various features and services, Jolnet also
carried Phrack magazine.
For reasons of his own, Richard Andrews had become suspicious of a
new user called "Robert Johnson." Richard Andrews took it upon
himself to have a look at what "Robert Johnson" was storing in
Jolnet. And Andrews found the E911 Document.
"Robert Johnson" was the Prophet from the Legion of Doom, and the
E911 Document was illicitly copied data from Prophet's raid on the
BellSouth computers.
The E911 Document, a particularly illicit piece of digital property,
was about to resume its long, complex, and disastrous career.
It struck Andrews as fishy that someone not a telephone employee
should have a document referring to the "Enhanced 911 System."
Besides, the document itself bore an obvious warning.
"WARNING: NOT FOR USE OR DISCLOSURE OUTSIDE BELLSOUTH OR ANY OF ITS
SUBSIDIARIES EXCEPT UNDER WRITTEN AGREEMENT."
These standard nondisclosure tags are often appended to all sorts of
corporate material. Telcos as a species are particularly notorious
for stamping most everything in sight as "not for use or
disclosure." Still, this particular piece of data was about the 911
System. That sounded bad to Rich Andrews.
Andrews was not prepared to ignore this sort of trouble. He thought
it would be wise to pass the document along to a friend and
acquaintance on the UNIX network, for consultation. So, around
September 1988, Andrews sent yet another copy of the E911 Document
electronically to an AT&T employee, one Charles Boykin, who ran a
UNIX-based node called "attctc" in Dallas, Texas.
"Attctc" was the property of AT&T, and was run from AT&T's Customer
Technology Center in Dallas, hence the name "attctc." "Attctc" was
better-known as "Killer," the name of the machine that the system
was running on. "Killer" was a hefty, powerful, AT&T 3B2 500 model,
a multi-user, multi-tasking UNIX platform with 32 meg of memory and
a mind-boggling 3.2 Gigabytes of storage. When Killer had first
arrived in Texas, in 1985, the 3B2 had been one of AT&T's great
white hopes for going head- to-head with IBM for the corporate
computer- hardware market. "Killer" had been shipped to the Customer
Technology Center in the Dallas Infomart, essentially a high-
technology mall, and there it sat, a demonstration model.
Charles Boykin, a veteran AT&T hardware and digital communications
expert, was a local technical backup man for the AT&T 3B2 system. As
a display model in the Infomart mall, "Killer" had little to do, and
it seemed a shame to waste the system's capacity. So Boykin
ingeniously wrote some UNIX bulletin-board software for "Killer,"
and plugged the machine in to the local phone network. "Killer's"
debut in late 1985 made it the first publicly available UNIX site in
the state of Texas. Anyone who wanted to play was welcome.
The machine immediately attracted an electronic community. It joined
the UUCP network, and offered network links to over eighty other
computer sites, all of which became dependent on Killer for their
links to the greater world of cyberspace. And it wasn't just for the
big guys; personal computer users also stored freeware programs for
the Amiga, the Apple, the IBM and the Macintosh on Killer's vast
3,200 meg archives. At one time, Killer had the largest library of
public-domain Macintosh software in Texas.
Eventually, Killer attracted about 1,500 users, all busily
communicating, uploading and downloading, getting mail, gossipping,
and linking to arcane and distant networks.
Boykin received no pay for running Killer. He considered it good
publicity for the AT&T 3B2 system (whose sales were somewhat less
than stellar), but he also simply enjoyed the vibrant community his
skill had created. He gave away the bulletin-board UNIX software he
had written, free of charge.
In the UNIX programming community, Charlie Boykin had the reputation
of a warm, open-hearted, levelheaded kind of guy. In 1989, a group
of Texan UNIX professionals voted Boykin "System Administrator of
the Year." He was considered a fellow you could trust for good
advice.
In September 1988, without warning, the E911 Document came plunging
into Boykin's life, forwarded by Richard Andrews. Boykin immediately
recognized that the Document was hot property. He was not a
voicecommunications man, and knew little about the ins and outs of
the Baby Bells, but he certainly knew what the 911 System was, and
he was angry to see confidential data about it in the hands of a
nogoodnik. This was clearly a matter for telco security. So, on
September 21, 1988, Boykin made yet another copy of the E911
Document and passed this one along to a professional acquaintance of
his, one Jerome Dalton, from AT&T Corporate Information Security.
Jerry Dalton was the very fellow who would later raid Terminus's
house. From AT&T's security division, the E911 Document went to
Bellcore. Bellcore (or BELL COmmunications REsearch) had once been
the central laboratory of the Bell System. Bell Labs employees had
invented the UNIX operating system. Now Bellcore was a quasi-
independent, jointly owned company that acted as the research arm
for all seven of the Baby Bell RBOCs. Bellcore was in a good
position to co-ordinate security technology and consultation for the
RBOCs, and the gentleman in charge of this effort was Henry M.
Kluepfel, a veteran of the Bell System who had worked there for
twenty-four years.
On October 13, 1988, Dalton passed the E911 Document to Henry
Kluepfel. Kluepfel, a veteran expert witness in telecommunications
fraud and computer-fraud cases, had certainly seen worse trouble
than this. He recognized the document for what it was: a trophy from
a hacker break-in.
However, whatever harm had been done in the intrusion was presumably
old news. At this point there seemed little to be done. Kluepfel
made a careful note of the circumstances and shelved the problem for
the time being.
Whole months passed.
February 1989 arrived. The Atlanta Three were living it up in Bell
South's switches, and had not yet met their comeuppance. The Legion
was thriving. So was Phrack magazine. A good six months had passed
since Prophet's AIMSX break-in. Prophet, as hackers will, grew weary
of sitting on his laurels. "Knight Lightning" and "Taran King," the
editors of Phrack, were always begging Prophet for material they
could publish. Prophet decided that the heat must be off by this
time, and that he could safely brag, boast, and strut.
So he sent a copy of the E911 Document -- yet another one -- from
Rich Andrews' Jolnet machine to Knight Lightning's BITnet account at
the University of Missouri. Let's review the fate of the document so
far.
0. The original E911 Document. This in the AIMSX system on a
mainframe computer in Atlanta, available to hundreds of people, but
all of them, presumably, BellSouth employees. An unknown number of
them may have their own copies of this document, but they are all
professionals and all trusted by the phone company.
1. Prophet's illicit copy, at home on his own computer in Decatur,
Georgia.
2. Prophet's back-up copy, stored on Rich Andrew's Jolnet machine in
the basement of Rich Andrews' house near Joliet Illinois.
3. Charles Boykin's copy on "Killer" in Dallas, Texas, sent by Rich
Andrews from Joliet.
4. Jerry Dalton's copy at AT&T Corporate Information Security in New
Jersey, sent from Charles Boykin in Dallas.
5. Henry Kluepfel's copy at Bellcore security headquarters in New
Jersey, sent by Dalton.
6. Knight Lightning's copy, sent by Prophet from Rich Andrews'
machine, and now in Columbia, Missouri.
We can see that the "security" situation of this proprietary
document, once dug out of AIMSX, swiftly became bizarre. Without any
money changing hands, without any particular special effort, this
data had been reproduced at least six times and had spread itself
all over the continent. By far the worst, however, was yet to come.
In February 1989, Prophet and Knight Lightning bargained
electronically over the fate of this trophy. Prophet wanted to
boast, but, at the same time, scarcely wanted to be caught.
For his part, Knight Lightning was eager to publish as much of the
document as he could manage. Knight Lightning was a fledgling
political-science major with a particular interest in freedom-of-
information issues. He would gladly publish most anything that would
reflect glory on the prowess of the underground and embarrass the
telcos. However, Knight Lightning himself had contacts in telco
security, and sometimes consulted them on material he'd received
that might be too dicey for publication.
Prophet and Knight Lightning decided to edit the E911 Document so as
to delete most of its identifying traits. First of all, its large
"NOT FOR USE OR DISCLOSURE" warning had to go. Then there were other
matters. For instance, it listed the office telephone numbers of
several BellSouth 911 specialists in Florida. If these phone numbers
were published in Phrack, the BellSouth employees involved would
very likely be hassled by phone phreaks, which would anger BellSouth
no end, and pose a definite operational hazard for both Prophet and
Phrack.
So Knight Lightning cut the Document almost in half, removing the
phone numbers and some of the touchier and more specific
information. He passed it back electronically to Prophet; Prophet
was still nervous, so Knight Lightning cut a bit more. They finally
agreed that it was ready to go, and that it would be published in
Phrack under the pseudonym, "The Eavesdropper."
And this was done on February 25, 1989.
The twenty-fourth issue of Phrack featured a chatty interview with
co-ed phone-phreak "Chanda Leir," three articles on BITNET and its
links to other computer networks, an article on 800 and 900 numbers
by "Unknown User," "VaxCat's" article on telco basics (slyly
entitled "Lifting Ma Bell's Veil of Secrecy,)" and the usual "Phrack
World News."
The News section, with painful irony, featured an extended account
of the sentencing of "Shadowhawk," an eighteen-year-old Chicago
hacker who had just been put in federal prison by William J. Cook
himself.
And then there were the two articles by "The Eavesdropper." The
first was the edited E911 Document, now titled "Control Office
Administration Of Enhanced 911 Services for Special Services and
Major Account Centers." Eavesdropper's second article was a glossary
of terms explaining the blizzard of telco acronyms and buzzwords in
the E911 Document.
The hapless document was now distributed, in the usual Phrack
routine, to a good one hundred and fifty sites. Not a hundred and
fifty people, mind you -- a hundred and fifty sites, some of these
sites linked to UNIX nodes or bulletin board systems, which
themselves had readerships of tens, dozens, even hundreds of people.
This was February 1989. Nothing happened immediately. Summer came,
and the Atlanta crew were raided by the Secret Service. Fry Guy was
apprehended. Still nothing whatever happened to Phrack. Six more
issues of Phrack came out, 30 in all, more or less on a monthly
schedule. Knight Lightning and co-editor Taran King went untouched.
Phrack tended to duck and cover whenever the heat came down. During
the summer busts of 1987 -(hacker busts tended to cluster in summer,
perhaps because hackers were easier to find at home than in college)
-- Phrack had ceased publication for several months, and laid low.
Several LoD hangers-on had been arrested, but nothing had happened
to the Phrack crew, the premiere gossips of the underground. In
1988, Phrack had been taken over by a new editor, "Crimson Death," a
raucous youngster with a taste for anarchy files.
1989, however, looked like a bounty year for the underground. Knight
Lightning and his co-editor Taran King took up the reins again, and
Phrack flourished throughout 1989. Atlanta LoD went down hard in the
summer of 1989, but Phrack rolled merrily on. Prophet's E911
Document seemed unlikely to cause Phrack any trouble. By January
1990, it had been available in Phrack for almost a year. Kluepfel
and Dalton, officers of Bellcore and AT&T security, had possessed
the document for sixteen months -- in fact, they'd had it even
before Knight Lightning himself, and had done nothing in particular
to stop its distribution. They hadn't even told Rich Andrews or
Charles Boykin to erase the copies from their UNIX nodes, Jolnet and
Killer. But then came the monster Martin Luther King Day Crash of
January 15, 1990.
A flat three days later, on January 18, four agents showed up at
Knight Lightning's fraternity house. One was Timothy Foley, the
second Barbara Golden, both of them Secret Service agents from the
Chicago office. Also along was a University of Missouri security
officer, and Reed Newlin, a security man from Southwestern Bell, the
RBOC having jurisdiction over Missouri. Foley accused Knight
Lightning of causing the nationwide crash of the phone system.
Knight Lightning was aghast at this allegation. On the face of it,
the suspicion was not entirely implausible - though Knight Lightning
knew that he himself hadn't done it. Plenty of hot-dog hackers had
bragged that they could crash the phone system, however.
"Shadowhawk," for instance, the Chicago hacker whom William Cook had
recently put in jail, had several times boasted on boards that he
could "shut down AT&T's public switched network." And now this
event, or something that looked just like it, had actually taken
place. The Crash had lit a fire under the Chicago Task Force. And
the former fencesitters at Bellcore and AT&T were now ready to roll.
The consensus among telco security -- already horrified by the skill
of the BellSouth intruders -- was that the digital underground was
out of hand. LoD and Phrack must go.
And in publishing Prophet's E911 Document, Phrack had provided law
enforcement with what appeared to be a powerful legal weapon. Foley
confronted Knight Lightning about the E911 Document.
Knight Lightning was cowed. He immediately began "cooperating fully"
in the usual tradition of the digital underground.
He gave Foley a complete run of Phrack,printed out in a set of
three-ring binders. He handed over his electronic mailing list of
Phrack subscribers. Knight Lightning was grilled for four hours by
Foley and his cohorts. Knight Lightning admitted that Prophet had
passed him the E911 Document, and he admitted that he had known it
was stolen booty from a hacker raid on a telephone company. Knight
Lightning signed a statement to this effect, and agreed, in writing,
to cooperate with investigators.
Next day -- January 19, 1990, a Friday -- the Secret Service
returned with a search warrant, and thoroughly searched Knight
Lightning's upstairs room in the fraternity house. They took all his
floppy disks, though, interestingly, they left Knight Lightning in
possession of both his computer and his modem. (The computer had no
hard disk, and in Foley's judgement was not a store of evidence.)
But this was a very minor bright spot among Knight Lightning's
rapidly multiplying troubles. By this time, Knight Lightning was in
plenty of hot water, not only with federal police, prosecutors,
telco investigators, and university security, but with the elders of
his own campus fraternity, who were outraged to think that they had
been unwittingly harboring a federal computer-criminal.
On Monday, Knight Lightning was summoned to Chicago, where he was
further grilled by Foley and USSS veteran agent Barbara Golden, this
time with an attorney present. And on Tuesday, he was formally
indicted by a federal grand jury.
The trial of Knight Lightning, which occurred on July 24-27, 1990,
was the crucial show-trial of the Hacker Crackdown. We will examine
the trial at some length in Part Four of this book. In the meantime,
we must continue our dogged pursuit of the E911 Document.
It must have been clear by January 1990 that the E911 Document, in
the form Phrack had published it back in February 1989, had gone off
at the speed of light in at least a hundred and fifty different
directions. To attempt to put this electronic genie back in the
bottle was flatly impossible.
And yet, the E911 Document was still stolen property, formally and
legally speaking. Any electronic transference of this document, by
anyone unauthorized to have it, could be interpreted as an act of
wire fraud. Interstate transfer of stolen property, including
electronic property, was a federal crime.
The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force had been assured
that the E911 Document was worth a hefty sum of money. In fact, they
had a precise estimate of its worth from BellSouth security
personnel: $79,449. A sum of this scale seemed to warrant vigorous
prosecution. Even if the damage could not be undone, at least this
large sum offered a good legal pretext for stern punishment of the
thieves. It seemed likely to impress judges and juries. And it could
be used in court to mop up the Legion of Doom.
The Atlanta crowd was already in the bag, by the time the Chicago
Task Force had gotten around to Phrack. But the Legion was a hydra-
headed thing. In late 89, a brand-new Legion of Doom board, "Phoenix
Project," had gone up in Austin, Texas. Phoenix Project was sysoped
by no less a man than the Mentor himself, ably assisted by
University of Texas student and hardened Doomster "Erik Bloodaxe."
As we have seen from his Phrack manifesto, the Mentor was a hacker
zealot who regarded computer intrusion as something close to a moral
duty. Phoenix Project was an ambitious effort, intended to revive
the digital underground to what Mentor considered the full flower of
the early 80s. The Phoenix board would also boldly bring elite
hackers face-to-face with the telco "opposition." On "Phoenix,"
America's cleverest hackers would supposedly shame the telco
squareheads out of their stick-in-the-mud attitudes, and perhaps
convince them that the Legion of Doom elite were really an all-right
crew. The premiere of "Phoenix Project" was heavily trumpeted by
Phrack, and "Phoenix Project" carried a complete run of Phrack
issues, including the E911 Document as Phrack had published it.
Phoenix Project was only one of many -- possibly hundreds -- of
nodes and boards all over America that were in guilty possession of
the E911 Document. But Phoenix was an outright, unashamed Legion of
Doom board. Under Mentor's guidance, it was flaunting itself in the
face of telco security personnel. Worse yet, it was actively trying
to win them over as sympathizers for the digital underground elite.
"Phoenix" had no cards or codes on it. Its hacker elite considered
Phoenix at least technically legal. But Phoenix was a corrupting
influence, where hacker anarchy was eating away like digital acid at
the underbelly of corporate propriety. The Chicago Computer Fraud
and Abuse Task Force now prepared to descend upon Austin, Texas.
Oddly, not one but two trails of the Task Force's investigation led
toward Austin. The city of Austin, like Atlanta, had made itself a
bulwark of the Sunbelt's Information Age, with a strong university
research presence, and a number of cutting-edge electronics
companies, including Motorola, Dell, CompuAdd, IBM, Sematech and
MCC.
Where computing machinery went, hackers generally followed. Austin
boasted not only "Phoenix Project," currently LoD's most flagrant
underground board, but a number of UNIX nodes.
One of these nodes was "Elephant," run by a UNIX consultant named
Robert Izenberg. Izenberg, in search of a relaxed Southern lifestyle
and a lowered cost-of-living, had recently migrated to Austin from
New Jersey. In New Jersey, Izenberg had worked for an independent
contracting company, programming UNIX code for AT&T itself.
"Terminus" had been a frequent user on Izenberg's privately owned
Elephant node.
Having interviewed Terminus and examined the records on Netsys, the
Chicago Task Force were now convinced that they had discovered an
underground gang of UNIX software pirates, who were demonstrably
guilty of interstate trafficking in illicitly copied AT&T source
code. Izenberg was swept into the dragnet around Terminus, the self-
proclaimed ultimate UNIX hacker.
Izenberg, in Austin, had settled down into a UNIX job with a Texan
branch of IBM. Izenberg was no longer working as a contractor for
AT&T, but he had friends in New Jersey, and he still logged on to
AT&T UNIX computers back in New Jersey, more or less whenever it
pleased him. Izenberg's activities appeared highly suspicious to the
Task Force. Izenberg might well be breaking into AT&T computers,
swiping AT&T software, and passing it to Terminus and other possible
confederates, through the UNIX node network. And this data was
worth, not merely $79,499, but hundreds of thousands of dollars!
On February 21, 1990, Robert Izenberg arrived home from work at IBM
to find that all the computers had mysteriously vanished from his
Austin apartment. Naturally he assumed that he had been robbed. His
"Elephant" node, his other machines, his notebooks, his disks, his
tapes, all gone! However, nothing much else seemed disturbed -- the
place had not been ransacked. The puzzle becaming much stranger some
five minutes later. Austin U. S. Secret Service Agent Al Soliz,
accompanied by University of Texas campus-security officer Larry
Coutorie and the ubiquitous Tim Foley, made their appearance at
Izenberg's door. They were in plain clothes: slacks, polo shirts.
They came in, and Tim Foley accused Izenberg of belonging to the
Legion of Doom.
Izenberg told them that he had never heard of the "Legion of Doom."
And what about a certain stolen E911 Document, that posed a direct
threat to the police emergency lines? Izenberg claimed that he'd
never heard of that, either.
His interrogators found this difficult to believe. Didn't he know
Terminus?
Who?
They gave him Terminus's real name. Oh yes, said Izenberg. He knew
that guy all right -- he was leading discussions on the Internet
about AT&T computers, especially the AT&T 3B2.
AT&T had thrust this machine into the marketplace, but, like many of
AT&T's ambitious attempts to enter the computing arena, the 3B2
project had something less than a glittering success. Izenberg
himself had been a contractor for the division of AT&T that
supported the 3B2. The entire division had been shut down. Nowadays,
the cheapest and quickest way to get help with this fractious piece
of machinery was to join one of Terminus's discussion groups on the
Internet, where friendly and knowledgeable hackers would help you
for free.
Naturally the remarks within this group were less than flattering
about the Death Star.... was that the problem?
Foley told Izenberg that Terminus had been acquiring hot software
through his, Izenberg's, machine.
Izenberg shrugged this off. A good eight megabytes of data flowed
through his UUCP site every day. UUCP nodes spewed data like fire
hoses. Elephant had been directly linked to Netsys -- not
surprising, since Terminus was a 3B2 expert and Izenberg had been a
3B2 contractor. Izenberg was also linked to "attctc" and the
University of Texas. Terminus was a well-known UNIX expert, and
might have been up to all manner of hijinks on Elephant. Nothing
Izenberg could do about that. That was physically impossible. Needle
in a haystack.
In a four-hour grilling, Foley urged Izenberg to come clean and
admit that he was in conspiracy with Terminus, and a member of the
Legion of Doom. Izenberg denied this. He was no weirdo teenage
hacker - - he was thirty-two years old, and didn't even have a
"handle." Izenberg was a former TV technician and electronics
specialist who had drifted into UNIX consulting as a full-grown
adult. Izenberg had never met Terminus, physically. He'd once bought
a cheap highspeed modem from him, though.
Foley told him that this modem (a Telenet T2500 which ran at 19.2
kilobaud, and which had just gone out Izenberg's door in Secret
Service custody) was likely hot property. Izenberg was taken aback
to hear this; but then again, most of Izenberg's equipment, like
that of most freelance professionals in the industry, was
discounted, passed hand-to-hand through various kinds of barter and
gray-market. There was no proof that the modem was stolen, and even
if it was, Izenberg hardly saw how that gave them the right to take
every electronic item in his house.
Still, if the United States Secret Service figured they needed his
computer for national security reasons -- or whatever -- then
Izenberg would not kick. He figured he would somehow make the
sacrifice of his twenty thousand dollars' worth of professional
equipment, in the spirit of full cooperation and good citizenship.
Robert Izenberg was not arrested. Izenberg was not charged with any
crime. His UUCP node -- full of some 140 megabytes of the files,
mail, and data of himself and his dozen or so entirely innocent
users -- went out the door as "evidence." Along with the disks and
tapes, Izenberg had lost about 800 megabytes of data.
Six months would pass before Izenberg decided to phone the Secret
Service and ask how the case was going. That was the first time that
Robert Izenberg would ever hear the name of William Cook. As of
January 1992, a full two years after the seizure, Izenberg, still
not charged with any crime, would be struggling through the morass
of the courts, in hope of recovering his thousands of dollars' worth
of seized equipment.
In the meantime, the Izenberg case received absolutely no press
coverage. The Secret Service had walked into an Austin home, removed
a UNIX bulletinboard system, and met with no operational
difficulties whatsoever.
Except that word of a crackdown had percolated through the Legion of
Doom. "The Mentor" voluntarily shut down "The Phoenix Project." It
seemed a pity, especially as telco security employees had, in fact,
shown up on Phoenix, just as he had hoped -- along with the usual
motley crowd of LoD heavies, hangers-on, phreaks, hackers and
wannabes. There was "Sandy" Sandquist from US SPRINT security, and
some guy named Henry Kluepfel, from Bellcore itself! Kluepfel had
been trading friendly banter with hackers on Phoenix since January
30th (two weeks after the Martin Luther King Day Crash). The
presence of such a stellar telco official seemed quite the coup for
Phoenix Project.
Still, Mentor could judge the climate. Atlanta in ruins, Phrack in
deep trouble, something weird going on with UNIX nodes -- discretion
was advisable. Phoenix Project went off-line.
Kluepfel, of course, had been monitoring this LoD bulletin board for
his own purposes -- and those of the Chicago unit. As far back as
June 1987, Kluepfel had logged on to a Texas underground board
called "Phreak Klass 2600." There he'd discovered an Chicago
youngster named "Shadowhawk," strutting and boasting about rifling
AT&T computer files, and bragging of his ambitions to riddle AT&T's
Bellcore computers with trojan horse programs. Kluepfel had passed
the news to Cook in Chicago, Shadowhawk's computers had gone out the
door in Secret Service custody, and Shadowhawk himself had gone to
jail.
Now it was Phoenix Project's turn. Phoenix Project postured about
"legality" and "merely intellectual interest," but it reeked of the
underground. It had Phrack on it. It had the E911 Document. It had a
lot of dicey talk about breaking into systems, including some bold
and reckless stuff about a supposed "decryption service" that Mentor
and friends were planning to run, to help crack encrypted passwords
off of hacked systems.
Mentor was an adult. There was a bulletin board at his place of
work, as well. Kleupfel logged onto this board, too, and discovered
it to be called "Illuminati." It was run by some company called
Steve Jackson Games. On March 1, 1990, the Austin crackdown went
into high gear.
On the morning of March 1 -- a Thursday -- 21-yearold University of
Texas student "Erik Bloodaxe," co-sysop of Phoenix Project and an
avowed member of the Legion of Doom, was wakened by a police
revolver levelled at his head.
Bloodaxe watched, jittery, as Secret Service agents appropriated his
300 baud terminal and, rifling his files, discovered his treasured
source-code for Robert Morris's notorious Internet Worm. But
Bloodaxe, a wily operator, had suspected that something of the like
might be coming. All his best equipment had been hidden away
elsewhere. The raiders took everything electronic, however,
including his telephone. They were stymied by his hefty arcade-style
Pac-Man game, and left it in place, as it was simply too heavy to
move.
Bloodaxe was not arrested. He was not charged with any crime. A good
two years later, the police still had what they had taken from him,
however.
The Mentor was less wary. The dawn raid rousted him and his wife
from bed in their underwear, and six Secret Service agents,
accompanied by an Austin policeman and Henry Kluepfel himself, made
a rich haul. Off went the works, into the agents' white Chevrolet
minivan: an IBM PC-AT clone with 4 meg of RAM and a 120-meg hard
disk; a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet II printer; a completely legitimate
and highly expensive SCO-Xenix 286 operating system; Pagemaker disks
and documentation; and the Microsoft Word word-processing program.
Mentor's wife had her incomplete academic thesis stored on the hard-
disk; that went, too, and so did the couple's telephone. As of two
years later, all this property remained in police custody.
Mentor remained under guard in his apartment as agents prepared to
raid Steve Jackson Games. The fact that this was a business
headquarters and not a private residence did not deter the agents.
It was still very early; no one was at work yet. The agents prepared
to break down the door, but Mentor, eavesdropping on the Secret
Service walkie- talkie traffic, begged them not to do it, and
offered his key to the building.
The exact details of the next events are unclear. The agents would
not let anyone else into the building. Their search warrant, when
produced, was unsigned. Apparently they breakfasted from the local
"Whataburger," as the litter from hamburgers was later found inside.
They also extensively sampled a bag of jellybeans kept by an SJG
employee. Someone tore a "Dukakis for President" sticker from the
wall.
SJG employees, diligently showing up for the day's work, were met at
the door and briefly questioned by U.S. Secret Service agents. The
employees watched in astonishment as agents wielding crowbars and
screwdrivers emerged with captive machines. They attacked outdoor
storage units with boltcutters. The agents wore blue nylon
windbreakers with "SECRET SERVICE" stencilled across the back, with
running-shoes and jeans.
Jackson's company lost three computers, several hard-disks, hundred
of floppy disks, two monitors, three modems, a laser printer,
various powercords, cables, and adapters (and, oddly, a small bag of
screws, bolts and nuts). The seizure of Illuminati BBS deprived SJG
of all the programs, text files, and private e-mail on the board.
The loss of two other SJG computers was a severe blow as well, since
it caused the loss of electronically stored contracts, financial
projections, address directories, mailing lists, personnel files,
business correspondence, and, not least, the drafts of forthcoming
games and gaming books.
No one at Steve Jackson Games was arrested. No one was accused of
any crime. No charges were filed. Everything appropriated was
officially kept as "evidence" of crimes never specified.
After the Phrack show-trial, the Steve Jackson Games scandal was the
most bizarre and aggravating incident of the Hacker Crackdown of
1990. This raid by the Chicago Task Force on a science-fiction
gaming publisher was to rouse a swarming host of civil liberties
issues, and gave rise to an enduring controversy that was still re-
complicating itself, and growing in the scope of its implications, a
full two years later.
The pursuit of the E911 Document stopped with the Steve Jackson
Games raid. As we have seen, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands
of computer users in America with the E911 Document in their
possession. Theoretically, Chicago had a perfect legal right to raid
any of these people, and could have legally seized the machines of
anybody who subscribed to Phrack. However, there was no copy of the
E911 Document on Jackson's Illuminati board. And there the Chicago
raiders stopped dead; they have not raided anyone since. It might be
assumed that Rich Andrews and Charlie Boykin, who had brought the
E911 Document to the attention of telco security, might be spared
any official suspicion. But as we have seen, the willingness to
"cooperate fully" offers little, if any, assurance against federal
anti-hacker prosecution.
Richard Andrews found himself in deep trouble, thanks to the E911
Document. Andrews lived in Illinois, the native stomping grounds of
the Chicago Task Force. On February 3 and 6, both his home and his
place of work were raided by USSS. His machines went out the door,
too, and he was grilled at length (though not arrested). Andrews
proved to be in purportedly guilty possession of: UNIX SVR 3.2; UNIX
SVR 3.1; UUCP; PMON; WWB; IWB; DWB; NROFF; KORN SHELL '88; C++; and
QUEST, among other items. Andrews had received this proprietary code
-- which AT&T officially valued at well over $250,000 -- through the
UNIX network, much of it supplied to him as a personal favor by
Terminus. Perhaps worse yet, Andrews admitted to returning the
favor, by passing Terminus a copy of AT&T proprietary STARLAN source
code.
Even Charles Boykin, himself an AT&T employee, entered some very hot
water. By 1990, he'd almost forgotten about the E911 problem he'd
reported in September 88; in fact, since that date, he'd passed two
more security alerts to Jerry Dalton, concerning matters that Boykin
considered far worse than the E911 Document.
But by 1990, year of the crackdown, AT&T Corporate Information
Security was fed up with "Killer." This machine offered no direct
income to AT&T, and was providing aid and comfort to a cloud of
suspicious yokels from outside the company, some of them actively
malicious toward AT&T, its property, and its corporate interests.
Whatever goodwill and publicity had been won among Killer's 1,500
devoted users was considered no longer worth the security risk. On
February 20, 1990, Jerry Dalton arrived in Dallas and simply
unplugged the phone jacks, to the puzzled alarm of Killer's many
Texan users. Killer went permanently off-line, with the loss of vast
archives of programs and huge quantities of electronic mail; it was
never restored to service. AT&T showed no particular regard for the
"property" of these 1,500 people. Whatever "property" the users had
been storing on AT&T's computer simply vanished completely.
Boykin, who had himself reported the E911 problem, now found himself
under a cloud of suspicion. In a weird private-security replay of
the Secret Service seizures, Boykin's own home was visited by AT&T
Security and his own machines were carried out the door.
However, there were marked special features in the Boykin case.
Boykin's disks and his personal computers were swiftly examined by
his corporate employers and returned politely in just two days --
(unlike Secret Service seizures, which commonly take months or
years). Boykin was not charged with any crime or wrongdoing, and he
kept his job with AT&T (though he did retire from AT&T in September
1991, at the age of 52).
It's interesting to note that the US Secret Service somehow failed
to seize Boykin's "Killer" node and carry AT&T's own computer out
the door. Nor did they raid Boykin's home. They seemed perfectly
willing to take the word of AT&T Security that AT&T's employee, and
AT&T's "Killer" node, were free of hacker contraband and on the up-
and-up.
It's digital water-under-the-bridge at this point, as Killer's 3,200
megabytes of Texan electronic community were erased in 1990, and
"Killer" itself was shipped out of the state.
But the experiences of Andrews and Boykin, and the users of their
systems, remained side issues. They did not begin to assume the
social, political, and legal importance that gathered, slowly but
inexorably, around the issue of the raid on Steve Jackson Games.
8.
We must now turn our attention to Steve Jackson Games itself, and
explain what SJG was, what it really did, and how it had managed to
attract this particularly odd and virulent kind of trouble. The
reader may recall that this is not the first but the second time
that the company has appeared in this narrative; a Steve Jackson
game called GURPS was a favorite pastime of Atlanta hacker Urvile,
and Urvile's science-fictional gaming notes had been mixed up
promiscuously with notes about his actual computer intrusions.
First, Steve Jackson Games, Inc., was not a publisher of "computer
games." SJG published "simulation games," parlor games that were
played on paper, with pencils, and dice, and printed guidebooks full
of rules and statistics tables. There were no computers involved in
the games themselves. When you bought a Steve Jackson Game, you did
not receive any software disks. What you got was a plastic bag with
some cardboard game tokens, maybe a few maps or a deck of cards.
Most of their products were books.
However, computers were deeply involved in the Steve Jackson Games
business. Like almost all modern publishers, Steve Jackson and his
fifteen employees used computers to write text, to keep accounts,
and to run the business generally. They also used a computer to run
their official bulletin board system for Steve Jackson Games, a
board called Illuminati. On Illuminati, simulation gamers who
happened to own computers and modems could associate, trade mail,
debate the theory and practice of gaming, and keep up with the
company's news and its product announcements.
Illuminati was a modestly popular board, run on a small computer
with limited storage, only one phone-line, and no ties to large-
scale computer networks. It did, however, have hundreds of users,
many of them dedicated gamers willing to call from out-of-state.
Illuminati was not an "underground" board. It did not feature hints
on computer intrusion, or "anarchy files," or illicitly posted
credit card numbers, or long-distance access codes. Some of
Illuminati's users, however, were members of the Legion of Doom. And
so was one of Steve Jackson's senior employees -- the Mentor. The
Mentor wrote for Phrack, and also ran an underground board, Phoenix
Project -- but the Mentor was not a computer professional. The
Mentor was the managing editor of Steve Jackson Games and a
professional game designer by trade. These LoD members did not use
Illuminati to help their hacking activities. They used it to help
their game-playing activities -- and they were even more dedicated
to simulation gaming than they were to hacking.
"Illuminati" got its name from a card-game that Steve Jackson
himself, the company's founder and sole owner, had invented. This
multi- player card-game was one of Mr Jackson's best-known, most
successful, most technically innovative products. "Illuminati" was a
game of paranoiac conspiracy in which various antisocial cults
warred covertly to dominate the world. "Illuminati" was hilarious,
and great fun to play, involving flying saucers, the CIA, the KGB,
the phone companies, the Ku Klux Klan, the South American Nazis, the
cocaine cartels, the Boy Scouts, and dozens of other splinter groups
from the twisted depths of Mr. Jackson's professionally fervid
imagination. For the uninitiated, any public discussion of the
"Illuminati" card-game sounded, by turns, utterly menacing or
completely insane.
And then there was SJG's "Car Wars," in which souped-up armored hot-
rods with rocket-launchers and heavy machine-guns did battle on the
American highways of the future. The lively Car Wars discussion on
the Illuminati board featured many meticulous, painstaking
discussions of the effects of grenades, land-mines, flamethrowers
and napalm. It sounded like hacker anarchy files run amuck.
Mr Jackson and his co-workers earned their daily bread by supplying
people with make-believe adventures and weird ideas. The more far-
out, the better.
Simulation gaming is an unusual pastime, but gamers have not
generally had to beg the permission of the Secret Service to exist.
Wargames and role-playing adventures are an old and honored pastime,
much favored by professional military strategists. Once littleknown,
these games are now played by hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts
throughout North America, Europe and Japan. Gaming-books, once
restricted to hobby outlets, now commonly appear in chain-stores
like B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks, and sell vigorously.
Steve Jackson Games, Inc., of Austin, Texas, was a games company of
the middle rank. In 1989, SJG grossed about a million dollars.
Jackson himself had a good reputation in his industry as a talented
and innovative designer of rather unconventional games, but his
company was something less than a titan of the field -certainly not
like the multimillion-dollar TSR Inc., or Britain's gigantic "Games
Workshop."
SJG's Austin headquarters was a modest two-story brick office-
suite, cluttered with phones, photocopiers, fax machines and
computers. It bustled with semi-organized activity and was littered
with glossy promotional brochures and dog-eared science-fiction
novels. Attached to the offices was a large tin-roofed warehouse
piled twenty feet high with cardboard boxes of games and books.
Despite the weird imaginings that went on within it, the SJG
headquarters was quite a quotidian, everyday sort of place. It
looked like what it was: a publishers' digs. Both "Car Wars" and
"Illuminati" were well-known, popular games. But the mainstay of the
Jackson organization was their Generic Universal Role- Playing
System, "G.U.R.P.S." The GURPS system was considered solid and well-
designed, an asset for players. But perhaps the most popular feature
of the GURPS system was that it allowed gaming-masters to design
scenarios that closely resembled well-known books, movies, and other
works of fantasy. Jackson had licensed and adapted works from many
science fiction and fantasy authors. There was GURPS Conan, GURPS
Riverworld, GURPS Horseclans, GURPS Witch World, names eminently
familiar to science-fiction readers. And there was GURPS Special
Ops, from the world of espionage fantasy and unconventional warfare.
And then there was GURPS Cyberpunk.
"Cyberpunk" was a term given to certain science fiction writers who
had entered the genre in the 1980s. "Cyberpunk," as the label
implies, had two general distinguishing features. First, its writers
had a compelling interest in information technology, an interest
closely akin to science fiction's earlier fascination with space
travel. And second, these writers were "punks," with all the
distinguishing features that that implies: Bohemian artiness, youth
run wild, an air of deliberate rebellion, funny clothes and hair,
odd politics, a fondness for abrasive rock and roll; in a word,
trouble.
The "cyberpunk" SF writers were a small group of mostly college-
educated white middle-class litterateurs, scattered through the US
and Canada. Only one, Rudy Rucker, a professor of computer science
in Silicon Valley, could rank with even the humblest computer
hacker. But, except for Professor Rucker, the "cyberpunk" authors
were not programmers or hardware experts; they considered themselves
artists (as, indeed, did Professor Rucker). However, these writers
all owned computers, and took an intense and public interest in the
social ramifications of the information industry.
The cyberpunks had a strong following among the global generation
that had grown up in a world of computers, multinational networks,
and cable television. Their outlook was considered somewhat morbid,
cynical, and dark, but then again, so was the outlook of their
generational peers. As that generation matured and increased in
strength and influence, so did the cyberpunks. As science-fiction
writers went, they were doing fairly well for themselves. By the
late 1980s, their work had attracted attention from gaming
companies, including Steve Jackson Games, which was planning a
cyberpunk simulation for the flourishing GURPS gamingsystem.
The time seemed ripe for such a product, which had already been
proven in the marketplace. The first gamescompany out of the gate,
with a product boldly called "Cyberpunk" in defiance of possible
infringement- ofcopyright suits, had been an upstart group called R.
Talsorian. Talsorian's Cyberpunk was a fairly decent game, but the
mechanics of the simulation system left a lot to be desired.
Commercially, however, the game did very well.
The next cyberpunk game had been the even more successful Shadowrun
by FASA Corporation. The mechanics of this game were fine, but the
scenario was rendered moronic by sappy fantasy elements like elves,
trolls, wizards, and dragons -- all highly ideologically- incorrect,
according to the hard-edged, high-tech standards of cyberpunk
science fiction.
Other game designers were champing at the bit. Prominent among them
was the Mentor, a gentleman who, like most of his friends in the
Legion of Doom, was quite the cyberpunk devotee. Mentor reasoned
that the time had come for a real cyberpunk gaming-book -- one that
the princes of computer-mischief in the Legion of Doom could play
without laughing themselves sick. This book, GURPS Cyberpunk, would
reek of culturally online authenticity.
Mentor was particularly well-qualified for this task. Naturally, he
knew far more about computer-intrusion and digital skullduggery than
any previously published cyberpunk author. Not only that, but he was
good at his work. A vivid imagination, combined with an instinctive
feeling for the working of systems and, especially, the loopholes
within them, are excellent qualities for a professional game
designer.
By March 1st, GURPS Cyberpunk was almost complete, ready to print
and ship. Steve Jackson expected vigorous sales for this item,
which, he hoped, would keep the company financially afloat for
several months. GURPS Cyberpunk, like the other GURPS "modules," was
not a "game" like a Monopoly set, but a book: a bound paperback book
the size of a glossy magazine, with a slick color cover, and pages
full of text, illustrations, tables and footnotes. It was advertised
as a game, and was used as an aid to game-playing, but it was a
book, with an ISBN number, published in Texas, copyrighted, and sold
in bookstores. And now, that book, stored on a computer, had gone
out the door in the custody of the Secret Service.
The day after the raid, Steve Jackson visited the local Secret
Service headquarters with a lawyer in tow. There he confronted Tim
Foley (still in Austin at that time) and demanded his book back. But
there was trouble. GURPS Cyberpunk, alleged a Secret Service agent
to astonished businessman Steve Jackson, was "a manual for computer
crime."
"It's science fiction," Jackson said.
"No, this is real." This statement was repeated several times, by
several agents. Jackson's ominously accurate game had passed from
pure, obscure, smallscale fantasy into the impure, highly
publicized, largescale fantasy of the Hacker Crackdown. No mention
was made of the real reason for the search. According to their
search warrant, the raiders had expected to find the E911 Document
stored on Jackson's bulletin board system. But that warrant was
sealed; a procedure that most law enforcement agencies will use only
when lives are demonstrably in danger. The raiders' true motives
were not discovered until the Jackson searchwarrant was unsealed by
his lawyers, many months later. The Secret Service, and the Chicago
Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force, said absolutely nothing to
Steve Jackson about any threat to the police 911 System. They said
nothing about the Atlanta Three, nothing about Phrack or Knight
Lightning, nothing about Terminus.
Jackson was left to believe that his computers had been seized
because he intended to publish a science fiction book that law
enforcement considered too dangerous to see print.
This misconception was repeated again and again, for months, to an
ever-widening public audience. It was not the truth of the case; but
as months passed, and this misconception was publicly printed again
and again, it became one of the few publicly known "facts" about the
mysterious Hacker Crackdown. The Secret Service had seized a
computer to stop the publication of a cyberpunk science fiction
book.
The second section of this book, "The Digital Underground," is
almost finished now. We have become acquainted with all the major
figures of this case who actually belong to the underground milieu
of computer intrusion. We have some idea of their history, their
motives, their general modus operandi. We now know, I hope, who they
are, where they came from, and more or less what they want. In the
next section of this book, "Law and Order," we will leave this
milieu and directly enter the world of America's computer-crime
police. At this point, however, I have another figure to introduce:
myself.
My name is Bruce Sterling. I live in Austin, Texas, where I am a
science fiction writer by trade: specifically, a cyberpunk science
fiction writer.
Like my "cyberpunk" colleagues in the U.S. and Canada, I've never
been entirely happy with this literary label -- especially after it
became a synonym for computer criminal. But I did once edit a book
of stories by my colleagues, called MIRRORSHADES: the Cyberpunk
Anthology, and I've long been a writer of literarycritical cyberpunk
manifestos. I am not a "hacker" of any description, though I do have
readers in the digital underground.
When the Steve Jackson Games seizure occurred, I naturally took an
intense interest. If "cyberpunk" books were being banned by federal
police in my own home town, I reasonably wondered whether I myself
might be next. Would my computer be seized by the Secret Service? At
the time, I was in possession of an aging Apple IIe without so much
as a hard disk. If I were to be raided as an author of computer-
crime manuals, the loss of my feeble word-processor would likely
provoke more snickers than sympathy.
I'd known Steve Jackson for many years. We knew one another as
colleagues, for we frequented the same local science-fiction
conventions. I'd played Jackson games, and recognized his
cleverness; but he certainly had never struck me as a potential
mastermind of computer crime.
I also knew a little about computer bulletin-board systems. In the
mid-1980s I had taken an active role in an Austin board called
"SMOF- BBS," one of the first boards dedicated to science fiction. I
had a modem, and on occasion I'd logged on to Illuminati, which
always looked entertainly wacky, but certainly harmless enough.
At the time of the Jackson seizure, I had no experience whatsoever
with underground boards. But I knew that no one on Illuminati talked
about breaking into systems illegally, or about robbing phone
companies. Illuminati didn't even offer pirated computer games.
Steve Jackson, like many creative artists, was markedly touchy about
theft of intellectual property.
It seemed to me that Jackson was either seriously suspected of some
crime -- in which case, he would be charged soon, and would have his
day in court -- or else he was innocent, in which case the Secret
Service would quickly return his equipment, and everyone would have
a good laugh. I rather expected the good laugh. The situation was
not without its comic side. The raid, known as the "Cyberpunk Bust"
in the science fiction community, was winning a great deal of free
national publicity both for Jackson himself and the "cyberpunk"
science fiction writers generally.
Besides, science fiction people are used to being misinterpreted.
Science fiction is a colorful, disreputable, slipshod occupation,
full of unlikely oddballs, which, of course, is why we like it.
Weirdness can be an occupational hazard in our field. People who
wear Halloween costumes are sometimes mistaken for monsters.
Once upon a time -- back in 1939, in New York City -science fiction
and the U.S. Secret Service collided in a comic case of mistaken
identity. This weird incident involved a literary group quite famous
in science fiction, known as "the Futurians," whose membership
included such future genre greats as Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl,
and Damon Knight. The Futurians were every bit as offbeat and wacky
as any of their spiritual descendants, including the cyberpunks, and
were given to communal living, spontaneous group renditions of light
opera, and midnight fencing exhibitions on the lawn. The Futurians
didn't have bulletin board systems, but they did have the
technological equivalent in 1939 -- mimeographs and a private
printing press. These were in steady use, producing a stream of
science-fiction fan magazines, literary manifestos, and weird
articles, which were picked up in ink-sticky bundles by a succession
of strange, gangly, spotty young men in fedoras and overcoats.
The neighbors grew alarmed at the antics of the Futurians and
reported them to the Secret Service as suspected counterfeiters. In
the winter of 1939, a squad of USSS agents with drawn guns burst
into "Futurian House," prepared to confiscate the forged currency
and illicit printing presses. There they discovered a slumbering
science fiction fan named George Hahn, a guest of the Futurian
commune who had just arrived in New York. George Hahn managed to
explain himself and his group, and the Secret Service agents left
the Futurians in peace henceforth. (Alas, Hahn died in 1991, just
before I had discovered this astonishing historical parallel, and
just before I could interview him for this book.)
But the Jackson case did not come to a swift and comic end. No quick
answers came his way, or mine; no swift reassurances that all was
right in the digital world, that matters were well in hand after
all. Quite the opposite. In my alternate role as a sometime pop-
science journalist, I interviewed Jackson and his staff for an
article in a British magazine. The strange details of the raid left
me more concerned than ever. Without its computers, the company had
been financially and operationally crippled. Half the SJG workforce,
a group of entirely innocent people, had been sorrowfully fired,
deprived of their livelihoods by the seizure. It began to dawn on me
that authors -- American writers -- might well have their computers
seized, under sealed warrants, without any criminal charge; and
that, as Steve Jackson had discovered, there was no immediate
recourse for this. This was no joke; this wasn't science fiction;
this was real.
I determined to put science fiction aside until I had discovered
what had happened and where this trouble had come from. It was time
to enter the purportedly real world of electronic free expression
and computer crime. Hence, this book. Hence, the world of the
telcos; and the world of the digital underground; and next, the
world of the police.
Brought to you
by
_T_h_e_ _C_y_b_e_r_p_u_n_k_ _P_r_o_j_e_c_t