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On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance telephone switching system
crashed.
This was a strange, dire, huge event. Sixty thousand people lost
their telephone service completely. During the nine long hours of
frantic effort that it took to restore service, some seventy million
telephone calls went uncompleted.
Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco trade, are a
known and accepted hazard of the telephone business. Hurricanes hit,
and phone cables get snapped by the thousands. Earthquakes wrench
through buried fiber-optic lines. Switching stations catch fire and
burn to the ground. These things do happen. There are contingency
plans for them, and decades of experience in dealing with them. But
the Crash of January 15 was unprecedented. It was unbelievably huge,
and it occurred for no apparent physical reason.
The crash started on a Monday afternoon in a single switching-
station in Manhattan. But, unlike any merely physical damage, it
spread and spread. Station after station across America collapsed in
a chain reaction, until fully half of AT&T's network had gone
haywire and the remaining half was hard-put to handle the overflow.
Within nine hours, AT&T software engineers more or less understood
what had caused the crash. Replicating the problem exactly, poring
over software line by line, took them a couple of weeks. But because
it was hard to understand technically, the full truth of the matter
and its implications were not widely and thoroughly aired and
explained. The root cause of the crash remained obscure, surrounded
by rumor and fear. The crash was a grave corporate embarrassment.
The "culprit" was a bug in AT&T's own software -- not the sort of
admission the telecommunications giant wanted to make, especially in
the face of increasing competition. Still, the truth was told, in
the baffling technical terms necessary to explain it.
Somehow the explanation failed to persuade American law enforcement
officials and even telephone corporate security personnel. These
people were not technical experts or software wizards, and they had
their own suspicions about the cause of this disaster.
The police and telco security had important sources of information
denied to mere software engineers. They had informants in the
computer underground and years of experience in dealing with high-
tech rascality that seemed to grow ever more sophisticated. For
years they had been expecting a direct and savage attack against the
American national telephone system. And with the Crash of January 15
-- the first month of a new, high-tech decade -- their predictions,
fears, and suspicions seemed at last to have entered the real world.
A world where the telephone system had not merely crashed, but,
quite likely, been crashed -- by "hackers."
The crash created a large dark cloud of suspicion that would color
certain people's assumptions and actions for months. The fact that
it took place in the realm of software was suspicious on its face.
The fact that it occurred on Martin Luther King Day, still the most
politically touchy of American holidays, made it more suspicious
yet.
The Crash of January 15 gave the Hacker Crackdown its sense of edge
and its sweaty urgency. It made people, powerful people in positions
of public authority, willing to believe the worst. And, most
fatally, it helped to give investigators a willingness to take
extreme measures and the determination to preserve almost total
secrecy. An obscure software fault in an aging switching system in
New York was to lead to a chain reaction of legal and constitutional
trouble all across the country.
Like the crash in the telephone system, this chain reaction was
ready and waiting to happen. During the 1980s, the American legal
system was extensively patched to deal with the novel issues of
computer crime. There was, for instance, the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (eloquently described as "a
stinking mess" by a prominent law enforcement official). And there
was the draconian Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, passed
unanimously by the United States Senate, which later would reveal a
large number of flaws. Extensive, wellmeant efforts had been made to
keep the legal system up to date. But in the day- to-day grind of
the real world, even the most elegant software tends to crumble and
suddenly reveal its hidden bugs.
Like the advancing telephone system, the American legal system was
certainly not ruined by its temporary crash; but for those caught
under the weight of the collapsing system, life became a series of
blackouts and anomalies.
In order to understand why these weird events occurred, both in the
world of technology and in the world of law, it's not enough to
understand the merely technical problems. We will get to those; but
first and foremost, we must try to understand the telephone, and the
business of telephones, and the community of human beings that
telephones have created.
1.
Technologies have life cycles, like cities do, like institutions do,
like laws and governments do.
The first stage of any technology is the Question Mark, often known
as the "Golden Vaporware" stage. At this early point, the technology
is only a phantom, a mere gleam in the inventor's eye. One such
inventor was a speech teacher and electrical tinkerer named
Alexander Graham Bell.
Bell's early inventions, while ingenious, failed to move the world.
In 1863, the teenage Bell and his brother Melville made an
artificial talking mechanism out of wood, rubber, gutta-percha, and
tin. This weird device had a rubber-covered "tongue" made of movable
wooden segments, with vibrating rubber "vocal cords," and rubber
"lips" and "cheeks." While Melville puffed a bellows into a tin
tube, imitating the lungs, young Alec Bell would manipulate the
"lips," "teeth," and "tongue," causing the thing to emit high-
pitched falsetto gibberish.
Another would-be technical breakthrough was the Bell "phonautograph"
of 1874, actually made out of a human cadaver's ear. Clamped into
place on a tripod, this grisly gadget drew sound-wave images on
smoked glass through a thin straw glued to its vibrating earbones.
By 1875, Bell had learned to produce audible sounds - ugly shrieks
and squawks -- by using magnets, diaphragms, and electrical current.
Most "Golden Vaporware" technologies go nowhere.
But the second stage of technology is the Rising Star, or, the
"Goofy Prototype," stage. The telephone, Bell's most ambitious
gadget yet, reached this stage on March 10, 1876. On that great day,
Alexander Graham Bell became the first person to transmit
intelligible human speech electrically. As it happened, young
Professor Bell, industriously tinkering in his Boston lab, had
spattered his trousers with acid. His assistant, Mr. Watson, heard
his cry for help -- over Bell's experimental audiotelegraph. This
was an event without precedent.
Technologies in their "Goofy Prototype" stage rarely work very well.
They're experimental, and therefore halfbaked and rather frazzled.
The prototype may be attractive and novel, and it does look as if it
ought to be good for something-or-other. But nobody, including the
inventor, is quite sure what. Inventors, and speculators, and
pundits may have very firm ideas about its potential use, but those
ideas are often very wrong.
The natural habitat of the Goofy Prototype is in trade shows and in
the popular press. Infant technologies need publicity and investment
money like a tottering calf need milk. This was very true of Bell's
machine. To raise research and development money, Bell toured with
his device as a stage attraction.
Contemporary press reports of the stage debut of the telephone
showed pleased astonishment mixed with considerable dread. Bell's
stage telephone was a large wooden box with a crude speaker-nozzle,
the whole contraption about the size and shape of an overgrown
Brownie camera. Its buzzing steel soundplate, pumped up by powerful
electromagnets, was loud enough to fill an auditorium. Bell's
assistant Mr. Watson, who could manage on the keyboards fairly well,
kicked in by playing the organ from distant rooms, and, later,
distant cities. This feat was considered marvellous, but very eerie
indeed.
Bell's original notion for the telephone, an idea promoted for a
couple of years, was that it would become a mass medium. We might
recognize Bell's idea today as something close to modern "cable
radio." Telephones at a central source would transmit music, Sunday
sermons, and important public speeches to a paying network of wired-
up subscribers.
At the time, most people thought this notion made good sense. In
fact, Bell's idea was workable. In Hungary, this philosophy of the
telephone was successfully put into everyday practice. In Budapest,
for decades, from 1893 until after World War I, there was a
government-run information service called "Telefon Hirmondo�."
Hirmondo� was a centralized source of news and entertainment and
culture, including stock reports, plays, concerts, and novels read
aloud. At certain hours of the day, the phone would ring, you would
plug in a loudspeaker for the use of the family, and Telefon
Hirmondo� would be on the air -- or rather, on the phone.
Hirmondo� is dead tech today, but Hirmondo� might be considered a
spiritual ancestor of the modern telephone-accessed computer data
services, such as CompuServe, GEnie or Prodigy. The principle behind
Hirmondo� is also not too far from computer "bulletinboard systems"
or BBS's, which arrived in the late 1970s, spread rapidly across
America, and will figure largely in this book.
We are used to using telephones for individual person-to-person
speech, because we are used to the Bell system. But this was just
one possibility among many. Communication networks are very flexible
and protean, especially when their hardware becomes sufficiently
advanced. They can be put to all kinds of uses. And they have been -
- and they will be.
Bell's telephone was bound for glory, but this was a combination of
political decisions, canny infighting in court, inspired industrial
leadership, receptive local conditions and outright good luck. Much
the same is true of communications systems today.
As Bell and his backers struggled to install their newfangled system
in the real world of nineteenth-century New England, they had to
fight against skepticism and industrial rivalry. There was already a
strong electrical communications network present in America: the
telegraph. The head of the Western Union telegraph system dismissed
Bell's prototype as "an electrical toy" and refused to buy the
rights to Bell's patent. The telephone, it seemed, might be all
right as a parlor entertainment -- but not for serious business.
Telegrams, unlike mere telephones, left a permanent physical record
of their messages. Telegrams, unlike telephones, could be answered
whenever the recipient had time and convenience. And the telegram
had a much longer distance-range than Bell's early telephone. These
factors made telegraphy seem a much more sound and businesslike
technology -- at least to some.
The telegraph system was huge, and well-entrenched. In 1876, the
United States had 214,000 miles of telegraph wire, and 8500
telegraph offices. There were specialized telegraphs for businesses
and stock traders, government, police and fire departments. And
Bell's "toy" was best known as a stage-magic musical device.
The third stage of technology is known as the "Cash Cow" stage. In
the "cash cow" stage, a technology finds its place in the world, and
matures, and becomes settled and productive. After a year or so,
Alexander Graham Bell and his capitalist backers concluded that
eerie music piped from nineteenth-century cyberspace was not the
real selling- point of his invention. Instead, the telephone was
about speech -- individual, personal speech, the human voice, human
conversation and human interaction. The telephone was not to be
managed from any centralized broadcast center. It was to be a
personal, intimate technology.
When you picked up a telephone, you were not absorbing the cold
output of a machine -- you were speaking to another human being.
Once people realized this, their instinctive dread of the telephone
as an eerie, unnatural device, swiftly vanished. A "telephone call"
was not a "call" from a "telephone" itself, but a call from another
human being, someone you would generally know and recognize. The
real point was not what the machine could do for you (or to you),
but what you yourself, a person and citizen, could do through the
machine. This decision on the part of the young Bell Company was
absolutely vital.
The first telephone networks went up around Boston - mostly among
the technically curious and the well-to-do (much the same segment of
the American populace that, a hundred years later, would be buying
personal computers). Entrenched backers of the telegraph continued
to scoff.
But in January 1878, a disaster made the telephone famous. A train
crashed in Tarriffville, Connecticut. Forward-looking doctors in the
nearby city of Hartford had had Bell's "speaking telephone"
installed. An alert local druggist was able to telephone an entire
community of local doctors, who rushed to the site to give aid. The
disaster, as disasters do, aroused intense press coverage. The phone
had proven its usefulness in the real world.
After Tarriffville, the telephone network spread like crabgrass. By
1890 it was all over New England. By '93, out to Chicago. By '97,
into Minnesota, Nebraska and Texas. By 1904 it was all over the
continent.
The telephone had become a mature technology. Professor Bell (now
generally known as "Dr. Bell" despite his lack of a formal degree)
became quite wealthy. He lost interest in the tedious day-to-day
business muddle of the booming telephone network, and gratefully
returned his attention to creatively hacking-around in his various
laboratories, which were now much larger, betterventilated, and
gratifyingly better-equipped. Bell was never to have another great
inventive success, though his speculations and prototypes
anticipated fiber-optic transmission, manned flight, sonar,
hydrofoil ships, tetrahedral construction, and Montessori education.
The "decibel," the standard scientific measure of sound intensity,
was named after Bell.
Not all Bell's vaporware notions were inspired. He was fascinated by
human eugenics. He also spent many years developing a weird personal
system of astrophysics in which gravity did not exist.
Bell was a definite eccentric. He was something of a hypochondriac,
and throughout his life he habitually stayed up until four A.M.,
refusing to rise before noon. But Bell had accomplished a great
feat; he was an idol of millions and his influence, wealth, and
great personal charm, combined with his eccentricity, made him
something of a loose cannon on deck. Bell maintained a thriving
scientific salon in his winter mansion in Washington, D.C., which
gave him considerable backstage influence in governmental and
scientific circles. He was a major financial backer of the the
magazines Science and National Geographic, both still flourishing
today as important organs of the American scientific establishment.
Bell's companion Thomas Watson, similarly wealthy and similarly odd,
became the ardent political disciple of a 19th-century science-
fiction writer and would-be social reformer, Edward Bellamy. Watson
also trod the boards briefly as a Shakespearian actor.
There would never be another Alexander Graham Bell, but in years to
come there would be surprising numbers of people like him. Bell was
a prototype of the high-tech entrepreneur. High-tech entrepreneurs
will play a very prominent role in this book: not merely as
technicians and businessmen, but as pioneers of the technical
frontier, who can carry the power and prestige they derive from
high-technology into the political and social arena.
Like later entrepreneurs, Bell was fierce in defense of his own
technological territory. As the telephone began to flourish, Bell
was soon involved in violent lawsuits in the defense of his patents.
Bell's Boston lawyers were excellent, however, and Bell himself, as
an elecution teacher and gifted public speaker, was a devastatingly
effective legal witness. In the eighteen years of Bell's patents,
the Bell company was involved in six hundred separate lawsuits. The
legal records printed filled 149 volumes. The Bell Company won every
single suit.
After Bell's exclusive patents expired, rival telephone companies
sprang up all over America. Bell's company, American Bell Telephone,
was soon in deep trouble. In 1907, American Bell Telephone fell into
the hands of the rather sinister J.P. Morgan financial cartel,
robber-baron speculators who dominated Wall Street.
At this point, history might have taken a different turn. American
might well have been served forever by a patchwork of locally owned
telephone companies. Many state politicians and local businessmen
considered this an excellent solution.
But the new Bell holding company, American Telephone and Telegraph
or AT&T, put in a new man at the helm, a visionary industrialist
named Theodore Vail. Vail, a former Post Office manager, understood
large organizations and had an innate feeling for the nature of
large-scale communications. Vail quickly saw to it that AT&T seized
the technological edge once again. The Pupin and Campbell "loading
coil," and the deForest "audion," are both extinct technology today,
but in 1913 they gave Vail's company the best long-distance lines
ever built. By controlling long-distance -- the links between, and
over, and above the smaller local phone companies -- AT&T swiftly
gained the whip-hand over them, and was soon devouring them right
and left.
Vail plowed the profits back into research and development, starting
the Bell tradition of huge-scale and brilliant industrial research.
Technically and financially, AT&T gradually steamrollered the
opposition. Independent telephone companies never became entirely
extinct, and hundreds of them flourish today. But Vail's AT&T became
the supreme communications company. At one point, Vail's AT&T bought
Western Union itself, the very company that had derided Bell's
telephone as a "toy." Vail thoroughly reformed Western Union's
hidebound business along his modern principles; but when the federal
government grew anxious at this centralization of power, Vail
politely gave Western Union back.
This centralizing process was not unique. Very similar events had
happened in American steel, oil, and railroads. But AT&T, unlike the
other companies, was to remain supreme. The monopoly robber-barons
of those other industries were humbled and shattered by government
trust- busting. Vail, the former Post Office official, was quite
willing to accommodate the US government; in fact he would forge an
active alliance with it. AT&T would become almost a wing of the
American government, almost another Post Office -- though not quite.
AT&T would willingly submit to federal regulation, but in return, it
would use the government's regulators as its own police, who would
keep out competitors and assure the Bell system's profits and
preeminence.
This was the second birth -- the political birth -- of the American
telephone system. Vail's arrangement was to persist, with vast
success, for many decades, until 1982. His system was an odd kind of
American industrial socialism. It was born at about the same time as
Leninist Communism, and it lasted almost as long -- and, it must be
admitted, to considerably better effect.
Vail's system worked. Except perhaps for aerospace, there has been
no technology more thoroughly dominated by Americans than the
telephone. The telephone was seen from the beginning as a
quintessentially American technology. Bell's policy, and the policy
of Theodore Vail, was a profoundly democratic policy of universal
access. Vail's famous corporate slogan, "One Policy, One System,
Universal Service," was a political slogan, with a very American
ring to it. The American telephone was not to become the specialized
tool of government or business, but a general public utility. At
first, it was true, only the wealthy could afford private
telephones, and Bell's company pursued the business markets
primarily. The American phone system was a capitalist effort, meant
to make money; it was not a charity. But from the first, almost all
communities with telephone service had public telephones. And many
stores -- especially drugstores -offered public use of their phones.
You might not own a telephone -- but you could always get into the
system, if you really needed to.
There was nothing inevitable about this decision to make telephones
"public" and "universal." Vail's system involved a profound act of
trust in the public. This decision was a political one, informed by
the basic values of the American republic. The situation might have
been very different; and in other countries, under other systems, it
certainly was.
Joseph Stalin, for instance, vetoed plans for a Soviet phone system
soon after the Bolshevik revolution. Stalin was certain that
publicly accessible telephones would become instruments of anti-
Soviet counterrevolution and conspiracy. (He was probably right.)
When telephones did arrive in the Soviet Union, they would be
instruments of Party authority, and always heavily tapped.
(Alexander Solzhenitsyn's prison-camp novel The First Circle
describes efforts to develop a phone system more suited to Stalinist
purposes.)
France, with its tradition of rational centralized government, had
fought bitterly even against the electric telegraph, which seemed to
the French entirely too anarchical and frivolous. For decades,
nineteenth- century France communicated via the "visual telegraph,"
a nation- spanning, government-owned semaphore system of huge stone
towers that signalled from hilltops, across vast distances, with big
windmill-like arms. In 1846, one Dr. Barbay, a semaphore enthusiast,
memorably uttered an early version of what might be called "the
security expert's argument" against the open media.
"No, the electric telegraph is not a sound invention. It will always
be at the mercy of the slightest disruption, wild youths, drunkards,
bums, etc.... The electric telegraph meets those destructive
elements with only a few meters of wire over which supervision is
impossible. A single man could, without being seen, cut the
telegraph wires leading to Paris, and in twenty-four hours cut in
ten different places the wires of the same line, without being
arrested. The visual telegraph, on the contrary, has its towers, its
high walls, its gates well-guarded from inside by strong armed men.
Yes, I declare, substitution of the electric telegraph for the
visual one is a dreadful measure, a truly idiotic act."
Dr. Barbay and his high-security stone machines were eventually
unsuccessful, but his argument -- that communication exists for the
safety and convenience of the state, and must be carefully protected
from the wild boys and the gutter rabble who might want to crash the
system -- would be heard again and again.
When the French telephone system finally did arrive, its snarled
inadequacy was to be notorious. Devotees of the American Bell System
often recommended a trip to France, for skeptics.
In Edwardian Britain, issues of class and privacy were a ball-and-
chain for telephonic progress. It was considered outrageous that
anyone -- any wild fool off the street -- could simply barge
bellowing into one's office or home, preceded only by the ringing of
a telephone bell. In Britain, phones were tolerated for the use of
business, but private phones tended be stuffed away into closets,
smoking rooms, or servants' quarters. Telephone operators were
resented in Britain because they did not seem to "know their place."
And no one of breeding would print a telephone number on a business
card; this seemed a crass attempt to make the acquaintance of
strangers.
But phone access in America was to become a popular right; something
like universal suffrage, only more so. American women could not yet
vote when the phone system came through; yet from the beginning
American women doted on the telephone. This "feminization" of the
American telephone was often commented on by foreigners. Phones in
America were not censored or stiff or formalized; they were social,
private, intimate, and domestic. In America, Mother's Day is by far
the busiest day of the year for the phone network.
The early telephone companies, and especially AT&T, were among the
foremost employers of American women. They employed the daughters of
the American middle-class in great armies: in 1891, eight thousand
women; by 1946, almost a quarter of a million. Women seemed to enjoy
telephone work; it was respectable, it was steady, it paid fairly
well as women's work went, and -- not least -- it seemed a genuine
contribution to the social good of the community. Women found Vail's
ideal of public service attractive. This was especially true in
rural areas, where women operators, running extensive rural
partylines, enjoyed considerable social power. The operator knew
everyone on the party-line, and everyone knew her.
Although Bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the telephone
company did not employ women for the sake of advancing female
liberation. AT&T did this for sound commercial reasons. The first
telephone operators of the Bell system were not women, but teenage
American boys. They were telegraphic messenger boys (a group about
to be rendered technically obsolescent), who swept up around the
phone office, dunned customers for bills, and made phone connections
on the switchboard, all on the cheap.
Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell's company
learned a sharp lesson about combining teenage boys and telephone
switchboards. Putting teenage boys in charge of the phone system
brought swift and consistent disaster. Bell's chief engineer
described them as "Wild Indians." The boys were openly rude to
customers. They talked back to subscribers, saucing off, uttering
facetious remarks, and generally giving lip. The rascals took Saint
Patrick's Day off without permission. And worst of all they played
clever tricks with the switchboard plugs: disconnecting calls,
crossing lines so that customers found themselves talking to
strangers, and so forth.
This combination of power, technical mastery, and effective
anonymity seemed to act like catnip on teenage boys.
This wild-kid-on-the-wires phenomenon was not confined to the USA;
from the beginning, the same was true of the British phone system.
An early British commentator kindly remarked: "No doubt boys in
their teens found the work not a little irksome, and it is also
highly probable that under the early conditions of employment the
adventurous and inquisitive spirits of which the average healthy boy
of that age is possessed, were not always conducive to the best
attention being given to the wants of the telephone subscribers."
So the boys were flung off the system -- or at least, deprived of
control of the switchboard. But the "adventurous and inquisitive
spirits" of the teenage boys would be heard from in the world of
telephony, again and again.
The fourth stage in the technological life-cycle is death: "the
Dog," dead tech. The telephone has so far avoided this fate. On the
contrary, it is thriving, still spreading, still evolving, and at
increasing speed.
The telephone has achieved a rare and exalted state for a
technological artifact: it has become a household object. The
telephone, like the clock, like pen and paper, like kitchen utensils
and running water, has become a technology that is visible only by
its absence. The telephone is technologically transparent. The
global telephone system is the largest and most complex machine in
the world, yet it is easy to use. More remarkable yet, the telephone
is almost entirely physically safe for the user.
For the average citizen in the 1870s, the telephone was weirder,
more shocking, more "high-tech" and harder to comprehend, than the
most outrageous stunts of advanced computing for us Americans in the
1990s. In trying to understand what is happening to us today, with
our bulletin- board systems, direct overseas dialling, fiberoptic
transmissions, computer viruses, hacking stunts, and a vivid tangle
of new laws and new crimes, it is important to realize that our
society has been through a similar challenge before -- and that, all
in all, we did rather well by it.
Bell's stage telephone seemed bizarre at first. But the sensations
of weirdness vanished quickly, once people began to hear the
familiar voices of relatives and friends, in their own homes on
their own telephones. The telephone changed from a fearsome high-
tech totem to an everyday pillar of human community.
This has also happened, and is still happening, to computer
networks. Computer networks such as NSFnet, BITnet, USENET, JANET,
are technically advanced, intimidating, and much harder to use than
telephones. Even the popular, commercial computer networks, such as
GEnie, Prodigy, and CompuServe, cause much head-scratching and have
been described as "user-hateful." Nevertheless they too are changing
from fancy high-tech items into everyday sources of human community.
The words "community" and "communication" have the same root.
Wherever you put a communications network, you put a community as
well. And whenever you take away that network -- confiscate it,
outlaw it, crash it, raise its price beyond affordability -- then
you hurt that community.
Communities will fight to defend themselves. People will fight
harder and more bitterly to defend their communities, than they will
fight to defend their own individual selves. And this is very true
of the "electronic community" that arose around computer networks in
the 1980s -- or rather, the various electronic communities, in
telephony, law enforcement, computing, and the digital underground
that, by the year 1990, were raiding, rallying, arresting, suing,
jailing, fining and issuing angry manifestos.
None of the events of 1990 were entirely new. Nothing happened in
1990 that did not have some kind of earlier and more understandable
precedent. What gave the Hacker Crackdown its new sense of gravity
and importance was the feeling -- the community feeling - that the
political stakes had been raised; that trouble in cyberspace was no
longer mere mischief or inconclusive skirmishing, but a genuine
fight over genuine issues, a fight for community survival and the
shape of the future. These electronic communities, having flourished
throughout the 1980s, were becoming aware of themselves, and
increasingly, becoming aware of other, rival communities. Worries
were sprouting up right and left, with complaints, rumors, uneasy
speculations. But it would take a catalyst, a shock, to make the new
world evident. Like Bell's great publicity break, the Tarriffville
Rail Disaster of January 1878, it would take a cause celebre.
That cause was the AT&T Crash of January 15, 1990. After the Crash,
the wounded and anxious telephone community would come out fighting
hard.
2.
The community of telephone technicians, engineers, operators and
researchers is the oldest community in cyberspace. These are the
veterans, the most developed group, the richest, the most
respectable, in most ways the most powerful. Whole generations have
come and gone since Alexander Graham Bell's day, but the community
he founded survives; people work for the phone system today whose
great- grandparents worked for the phone system. Its specialty
magazines, such as Telephony, AT&T Technical Journal, Telephone
Engineer and Management, are decades old; they make computer
publications like Macworld and PC Week look like amateur johnny-
come-latelies.
And the phone companies take no back seat in hightechnology, either.
Other companies' industrial researchers may have won new markets;
but the researchers of Bell Labs have won seven Nobel Prizes. One
potent device that Bell Labs originated, the transistor, has created
entire groups of industries. Bell Labs are world-famous for
generating "a patent a day," and have even made vital discoveries in
astronomy, physics and cosmology.
Throughout its seventy-year history, "Ma Bell" was not so much a
company as a way of life. Until the cataclysmic divestiture of the
1980s, Ma Bell was perhaps the ultimate maternalist mega-employer.
The AT&T corporate image was the "gentle giant," "the voice with a
smile," a vaguely socialist-realist world of cleanshaven linemen in
shiny helmets and blandly pretty phone-girls in headsets and nylons.
Bell System employees were famous as rock-ribbed Kiwanis and Rotary
members, Little-League enthusiasts, school-board people.
During the long heyday of Ma Bell, the Bell employee corps were
nurtured top-to-botton on a corporate ethos of public service. There
was good money in Bell, but Bell was not about money; Bell used
public relations, but never mere marketeering. People went into the
Bell System for a good life, and they had a good life. But it was
not mere money that led Bell people out in the midst of storms and
earthquakes to fight with toppled phone-poles, to wade in flooded
manholes, to pull the redeyed graveyard-shift over collapsing
switching-systems. The Bell ethic was the electrical equivalent of
the postman's: neither rain, nor snow, nor gloom of night would stop
these couriers.
It is easy to be cynical about this, as it is easy to be cynical
about any political or social system; but cynicism does not change
the fact that thousands of people took these ideals very seriously.
And some still do.
The Bell ethos was about public service; and that was gratifying;
but it was also about private power, and that was gratifying too. As
a corporation, Bell was very special. Bell was privileged. Bell had
snuggled up close to the state. In fact, Bell was as close to
government as you could get in America and still make a whole lot of
legitimate money.
But unlike other companies, Bell was above and beyond the vulgar
commercial fray. Through its regional operating companies, Bell was
omnipresent, local, and intimate, all over America; but the central
ivory towers at its corporate heart were the tallest and the
ivoriest around.
There were other phone companies in America, to be sure; the so-
called independents. Rural cooperatives, mostly; small fry, mostly
tolerated, sometimes warred upon.
For many decades, "independent" American phone companies lived in
fear and loathing of the official Bell monopoly (or the "Bell
Octopus," as Ma Bell's nineteenthcentury enemies described her in
many angry newspaper manifestos). Some few of these independent
entrepreneurs, while legally in the wrong, fought so bitterly
against the Octopus that their illegal phone networks were cast into
the street by Bell agents and publicly burned.
The pure technical sweetness of the Bell System gave its operators,
inventors and engineers a deeply satisfying sense of power and
mastery. They had devoted their lives to improving this vast nation-
spanning machine; over years, whole human lives, they had watched it
improve and grow. It was like a great technological temple. They
were an elite, and they knew it -- even if others did not; in fact,
they felt even more powerful because others did not understand. The
deep attraction of this sensation of elite technical power should
never be underestimated. "Technical power" is not for everybody; for
many people it simply has no charm at all. But for some people, it
becomes the core of their lives. For a few, it is overwhelming,
obsessive; it becomes something close to an addiction. People -
- especially clever teenage boys whose lives are otherwise mostly
powerless and put-upon - love this sensation of secret power, and
are willing to do all sorts of amazing things to achieve it. The
technical power of electronics has motivated many strange acts
detailed in this book, which would otherwise be inexplicable.
So Bell had power beyond mere capitalism. The Bell service ethos
worked, and was often propagandized, in a rather saccharine fashion.
Over the decades, people slowly grew tired of this. And then, openly
impatient with it. By the early 1980s, Ma Bell was to find herself
with scarcely a real friend in the world. Vail's industrial
socialism had become hopelessly out-of-fashion politically. Bell
would be punished for that. And that punishment would fall harshly
upon the people of the telephone community.
3.
In 1983, Ma Bell was dismantled by federal court action. The pieces
of Bell are now separate corporate entities. The core of the company
became AT&T Communications, and also AT&T Industries (formerly
Western Electric, Bell's manufacturing arm). AT&T Bell Labs become
Bell Communications Research, Bellcore. Then there are the Regional
Bell Operating Companies, or RBOCs, pronounced "arbocks."
Bell was a titan and even these regional chunks are gigantic
enterprises: Fortune 50 companies with plenty of wealth and power
behind them. But the clean lines of "One Policy, One System,
Universal Service" have been shattered, apparently forever.
The "One Policy" of the early Reagan Administration was to shatter a
system that smacked of noncompetitive socialism. Since that time,
there has been no real telephone "policy" on the federal level.
Despite the breakup, the remnants of Bell have never been set free
to compete in the open marketplace.
The RBOCs are still very heavily regulated, but not from the top.
Instead, they struggle politically, economically and legally, in
what seems an endless turmoil, in a patchwork of overlapping federal
and state jurisdictions. Increasingly, like other major American
corporations, the RBOCs are becoming multinational, acquiring
important commercial interests in Europe, Latin America, and the
Pacific Rim. But this, too, adds to their legal and political
predicament.
The people of what used to be Ma Bell are not happy about their
fate. They feel ill-used. They might have been grudgingly willing to
make a full transition to the free market; to become just companies
amid other companies. But this never happened. Instead, AT&T and the
RBOCS ("the Baby Bells") feel themselves wrenched from side to side
by state regulators, by Congress, by the FCC, and especially by the
federal court of Judge Harold Greene, the magistrate who ordered the
Bell breakup and who has been the de facto czar of American
telecommunications ever since 1983.
Bell people feel that they exist in a kind of paralegal limbo today.
They don't understand what's demanded of them. If it's "service,"
why aren't they treated like a public service? And if it's money,
then why aren't they free to compete for it? No one seems to know,
really. Those who claim to know keep changing their minds. Nobody in
authority seems willing to grasp the nettle for once and all.
Telephone people from other countries are amazed by the American
telephone system today. Not that it works so well; for nowadays even
the French telephone system works, more or less. They are amazed
that the American telephone system still works at all, under these
strange conditions.
Bell's "One System" of long-distance service is now only about
eighty percent of a system, with the remainder held by Sprint, MCI,
and the midget long-distance companies. Ugly wars over dubious
corporate practices such as "slamming" (an underhanded method of
snitching clients from rivals) break out with some regularity in the
realm of long-distance service. The battle to break Bell's long-
distance monopoly was long and ugly, and since the breakup the
battlefield has not become much prettier. AT&T's famous shame-and-
blame advertisements, which emphasized the shoddy work and purported
ethical shadiness of their competitors, were much remarked on for
their studied psychological cruelty. There is much bad blood in this
industry, and much long-treasured resentment. AT&T's post-breakup
corporate logo, a striped sphere, is known in the industry as the
"Death Star" (a reference from the movie Star Wars, in which the
"Death Star" was the spherical hightech fortress of the harsh-
breathing imperial ultra-baddie, Darth Vader.) Even AT&T employees
are less than thrilled by the Death Star. A popular (though banned)
Tshirt among AT&T employees bears the old-fashioned Bell logo of the
Bell System, plus the newfangled striped sphere, with the before-
and-after comments: "This is your brain -- This is your brain on
drugs!" AT&T made a very well-financed and determined effort to
break into the personal computer market; it was disastrous, and
telco computer experts are derisively known by their competitors as
"the pole-climbers." AT&T and the Baby Bell arbocks still seem to
have few friends. Under conditions of sharp commercial competition,
a crash like that of January 15, 1990 was a major embarrassment to
AT&T. It was a direct blow against their much- treasured reputation
for reliability. Within days of the crash AT&T's Chief Executive
Officer, Bob Allen, officially apologized, in terms of deeply pained
humility: "AT&T had a major service disruption last Monday. We
didn't live up to our own standards of quality, and we didn't live
up to yours. It's as simple as that. And that's not acceptable to
us. Or to you.... We understand how much people have come to depend
upon AT&T service, so our AT&T Bell Laboratories scientists and our
network engineers are doing everything possible to guard against a
recurrence.... We know there's no way to make up for the
inconvenience this problem may have caused you."
Mr Allen's "open letter to customers" was printed in lavish ads all
over the country: in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York
Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer,
San Francisco Chronicle Examiner, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News,
Detroit Free Press, Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, Cleveland
Plain Dealer, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Minneapolis Star
Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch, Seattle Times/Post
Intelligencer, Tacoma News Tribune, Miami Herald, Pittsburgh Press,
St. Louis Post Dispatch, Denver Post, Phoenix Republic Gazette and
Tampa Tribune.
In another press release, AT&T went to some pains to suggest that
this "software glitch" might have happened just as easily to MCI,
although, in fact, it hadn't. (MCI's switching software was quite
different from AT&T's -though not necessarily any safer.) AT&T also
announced their plans to offer a rebate of service on Valentine's
Day to make up for the loss during the Crash.
"Every technical resource available, including Bell Labs scientists
and engineers, has been devoted to assuring it will not occur
again," the public was told. They were further assured that "The
chances of a recurrence are small--a problem of this magnitude never
occurred before."
In the meantime, however, police and corporate security maintained
their own suspicions about "the chances of recurrence" and the real
reason why a "problem of this magnitude" had appeared, seemingly out
of nowhere. Police and security knew for a fact that hackers of
unprecedented sophistication were illegally entering, and
reprogramming, certain digital switching stations. Rumors of hidden
"viruses" and secret "logic bombs" in the switches ran rampant in
the underground, with much chortling over AT&T's predicament, and
idle speculation over what unsung hacker genius was responsible for
it. Some hackers, including police informants, were trying hard to
finger one another as the true culprits of the Crash.
Telco people found little comfort in objectivity when they
contemplated these possibilities. It was just too close to the bone
for them; it was embarrassing; it hurt so much, it was hard even to
talk about.
There has always been thieving and misbehavior in the phone system.
There has always been trouble with the rival independents, and in
the local loops. But to have such trouble in the core of the system,
the long-distance switching stations, is a horrifying affair. To
telco people, this is all the difference between finding roaches in
your kitchen and big horrid sewer-rats in your bedroom.
From the outside, to the average citizen, the telcos still seem
gigantic and impersonal. The American public seems to regard them as
something akin to Soviet apparats. Even when the telcos do their
best corporatecitizen routine, subsidizing magnet high-schools and
sponsoring news-shows on public television, they seem to win little
except public suspicion.
But from the inside, all this looks very different. There's harsh
competition. A legal and political system that seems baffled and
bored, when not actively hostile to telco interests. There's a loss
of morale, a deep sensation of having somehow lost the upper hand.
Technological change has caused a loss of data and revenue to other,
newer forms of transmission. There's theft, and new forms of theft,
of growing scale and boldness and sophistication. With all these
factors, it was no surprise to see the telcos, large and small,
break out in a litany of bitter complaint.
In late '88 and throughout 1989, telco representatives grew shrill
in their complaints to those few American law enforcement officials
who make it their business to try to understand what telephone
people are talking about. Telco security officials had discovered
the computerhacker underground, infiltrated it thoroughly, and
become deeply alarmed at its growing expertise. Here they had found
a target that was not only loathsome on its face, but clearly ripe
for counterattack.
Those bitter rivals: AT&T, MCI and Sprint -- and a crowd of Baby
Bells: PacBell, Bell South, Southwestern Bell, NYNEX, USWest, as
well as the Bell research consortium Bellcore, and the independent
long- distance carrier Mid-American -- all were to have their role
in the great hacker dragnet of 1990. After years of being battered
and pushed around, the telcos had, at least in a small way, seized
the initiative again. After years of turmoil, telcos and government
officials were once again to work smoothly in concert in defense of
the System. Optimism blossomed; enthusiasm grew on all sides; the
prospective taste of vengeance was sweet.
4.
From the beginning -- even before the crackdown had a name -
- secrecy was a big problem. There were many good reasons for
secrecy in the hacker crackdown. Hackers and code-thieves were wily
prey, slinking back to their bedrooms and basements and destroying
vital incriminating evidence at the first hint of trouble.
Furthermore, the crimes themselves were heavily technical and
difficult to describe, even to police -- much less to the general
public.
When such crimes had been described intelligibly to the public, in
the past, that very publicity had tended to increase the crimes
enormously. Telco officials, while painfully aware of the
vulnerabilities of their systems, were anxious not to publicize
those weaknesses. Experience showed them that those weaknesses, once
discovered, would be pitilessly exploited by tens of thousands of
people -- not only by professional grifters and by underground
hackers and phone phreaks, but by many otherwise more-or-less honest
everyday folks, who regarded stealing service from the faceless,
soulless "Phone Company" as a kind of harmless indoor sport. When it
came to protecting their interests, telcos had long since given up
on general public sympathy for "the Voice with a Smile." Nowadays
the telco's "Voice" was very likely to be a computer's; and the
American public showed much less of the proper respect and gratitude
due the fine public service bequeathed them by Dr. Bell and Mr.
Vail. The more efficient, high-tech, computerized, and impersonal
the telcos became, it seemed, the more they were met by sullen
public resentment and amoral greed.
Telco officials wanted to punish the phone-phreak underground, in as
public and exemplary a manner as possible. They wanted to make dire
examples of the worst offenders, to seize the ringleaders and
intimidate the small fry, to discourage and frighten the wacky
hobbyists, and send the professional grifters to jail. To do all
this, publicity was vital.
Yet operational secrecy was even more so. If word got out that a
nationwide crackdown was coming, the hackers might simply vanish;
destroy the evidence, hide their computers, go to earth, and wait
for the campaign to blow over. Even the young hackers were crafty
and suspicious, and as for the professional grifters, they tended to
split for the nearest state-line at the first sign of trouble. For
the crackdown to work well, they would all have to be caught red-
handed, swept upon suddenly, out of the blue, from every corner of
the compass. And there was another strong motive for secrecy. In the
worst-case scenario, a blown campaign might leave the telcos open to
a devastating hacker counter-attack. If there were indeed hackers
loose in America who had caused the January 15 Crash -- if there
were truly gifted hackers, loose in the nation's long- distance
switching systems, and enraged or frightened by the crackdown -
- then they might react unpredictably to an attempt to collar them.
Even if caught, they might have talented and vengeful friends still
running around loose. Conceivably, it could turn ugly. Very ugly. In
fact, it was hard to imagine just how ugly things might turn, given
that possibility. Counter- attack from hackers was a genuine concern
for the telcos. In point of fact, they would never suffer any such
counter-attack. But in months to come, they would be at some pains
to publicize this notion and to utter grim warnings about it.
Still, that risk seemed well worth running. Better to run the risk
of vengeful attacks, than to live at the mercy of potential
crashers. Any cop would tell you that a protection racket had no
real future.
And publicity was such a useful thing. Corporate security officers,
including telco security, generally work under conditions of great
discretion. And corporate security officials do not make money for
their companies. Their job is to prevent the loss of money, which is
much less glamorous than actually winning profits. If you are a
corporate security official, and you do your job brilliantly, then
nothing bad happens to your company at all. Because of this, you
appear completely superfluous. This is one of the many unattractive
aspects of security work. It's rare that these folks have the chance
to draw some healthy attention to their own efforts.
Publicity also served the interest of their friends in law
enforcement. Public officials, including law enforcement officials,
thrive by attracting favorable public interest. A brilliant
prosecution in a matter of vital public interest can make the career
of a prosecuting attorney. And for a police officer, good publicity
opens the purses of the legislature; it may bring a citation, or a
promotion, or at least a rise in status and the respect of one's
peers.
But to have both publicity and secrecy is to have one's cake and eat
it too. In months to come, as we will show, this impossible act was
to cause great pain to the agents of the crackdown. But early on, it
seemed possible -- maybe even likely -- that the crackdown could
successfully combine the best of both worlds. The arrest of hackers
would be heavily publicized. The actual deeds of the hackers, which
were technically hard to explain and also a security risk, would be
left decently obscured. The threat hackers posed would be heavily
trumpeted; the likelihood of their actually committing such fearsome
crimes would be left to the public's imagination. The spread of the
computer underground, and its growing technical sophistication,
would be heavily promoted; the actual hackers themselves, mostly
bespectacled middle-class white suburban teenagers, would be denied
any personal publicity.
It does not seem to have occurred to any telco official that the
hackers accused would demand a day in court; that journalists would
smile upon the hackers as "good copy;" that wealthy high-tech
entrepreneurs would offer moral and financial support to crackdown
victims; that constitutional lawyers would show up with briefcases,
frowning mightily. This possibility does not seem to have ever
entered the game-plan.
And even if it had, it probably would not have slowed the ferocious
pursuit of a stolen phone-company document, mellifluously known as
"Control Office Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special
Services and Major Account Centers."
In the chapters to follow, we will explore the worlds of police and
the computer underground, and the large shadowy area where they
overlap. But first, we must explore the battleground. Before we
leave the world of the telcos, we must understand what a switching
system actually is and how your telephone actually works.
5.
To the average citizen, the idea of the telephone is represented by,
well, a telephone: a device that you talk into.
To a telco professional, however, the telephone itself is known, in
lordly fashion, as a "subset." The "subset" in your house is a mere
adjunct, a distant nerve ending, of the central switching stations,
which are ranked in levels of heirarchy, up to the long-distance
electronic switching stations, which are some of the largest
computers on earth.
Let us imagine that it is, say, 1925, before the introduction of
computers, when the phone system was simpler and somewhat easier to
grasp. Let's further imagine that you are Miss Leticia Luthor, a
fictional operator for Ma Bell in New York City of the 20s.
Basically, you, Miss Luthor, are the "switching system." You are
sitting in front of a large vertical switchboard, known as a
"cordboard," made of shiny wooden panels, with ten thousand metal-
rimmed holes punched in them, known as jacks. The engineers would
have put more holes into your switchboard, but ten thousand is as
many as you can reach without actually having to get up out of your
chair.
Each of these ten thousand holes has its own little electric
lightbulb, known as a "lamp," and its own neatly printed number
code.
With the ease of long habit, you are scanning your board for lit-up
bulbs. This is what you do most of the time, so you are used to it.
A lamp lights up. This means that the phone at the end of that line
has been taken off the hook. Whenever a handset is taken off the
hook, that closes a circuit inside the phone which then signals the
local office, i.e. you, automatically. There might be somebody
calling, or then again the phone might be simply off the hook, but
this does not matter to you yet. The first thing you do, is record
that number in your logbook, in your fine American public-school
handwriting. This comes first, naturally, since it is done for
billing purposes.
You now take the plug of your answering cord, which goes directly to
your headset, and plug it into the lit-up hole. "Operator," you
announce.
In operator's classes, before taking this job, you have been issued
a large pamphlet full of canned operator's responses for all kinds
of contingencies, which you had to memorize. You have also been
trained in a proper nonregional, non-ethnic pronunciation and tone
of voice. You rarely have the occasion to make any spontaneous
remark to a customer, and in fact this is frowned upon (except out
on the rural lines where people have time on their hands and get up
to all kinds of mischief).
A tough-sounding user's voice at the end of the line gives you a
number. Immediately, you write that number down in your logbook,
next to the caller's number, which you just wrote earlier. You then
look and see if the number this guy wants is in fact on your
switchboard, which it generally is, since it's generally a local
call. Long distance costs so much that people use it sparingly.
Only then do you pick up a calling-cord from a shelf at the base of
the switchboard. This is a long elastic cord mounted on a kind of
reel so that it will zip back in when you unplug it. There are a lot
of cords down there, and when a bunch of them are out at once they
look like a nest of snakes. Some of the girls think there are bugs
living in those cable-holes. They're called "cable mites" and are
supposed to bite your hands and give you rashes. You don't believe
this, yourself.
Gripping the head of your calling-cord, you slip the tip of it
deftly into the sleeve of the jack for the called person. Not all
the way in, though. You just touch it. If you hear a clicking sound,
that means the line is busy and you can't put the call through. If
the line is busy, you have to stick the calling-cord into a "busy-
tone jack," which will give the guy a busy-tone. This way you don't
have to talk to him yourself and absorb his natural human
frustration.
But the line isn't busy. So you pop the cord all the way in. Relay
circuits in your board make the distant phone ring, and if somebody
picks it up off the hook, then a phone conversation starts. You can
hear this conversation on your answering cord, until you unplug it.
In fact you could listen to the whole conversation if you wanted,
but this is sternly frowned upon by management, and frankly, when
you've overheard one, you've pretty much heard 'em all.
You can tell how long the conversation lasts by the glow of the
calling-cord's lamp, down on the calling-cord's shelf. When it's
over, you unplug and the calling-cord zips back into place.
Having done this stuff a few hundred thousand times, you become
quite good at it. In fact you're plugging, and connecting, and
disconnecting, ten, twenty, forty cords at a time. It's a manual
handicraft, really, quite satisfying in a way, rather like weaving
on an upright loom.
Should a long-distance call come up, it would be different, but not
all that different. Instead of connecting the call through your own
local switchboard, you have to go up the hierarchy, onto the long-
distance lines, known as "trunklines." Depending on how far the call
goes, it may have to work its way through a whole series of
operators, which can take quite a while. The caller doesn't wait on
the line while this complex process is negotiated across the country
by the gaggle of operators. Instead, the caller hangs up, and you
call him back yourself when the call has finally worked its way
through.
After four or five years of this work, you get married, and you have
to quit your job, this being the natural order of womanhood in the
American 1920s. The phone company has to train somebody else -
- maybe two people, since the phone system has grown somewhat in the
meantime. And this costs money.
In fact, to use any kind of human being as a switching system is a
very expensive proposition. Eight thousand Leticia Luthors would be
bad enough, but a quarter of a million of them is a military-scale
proposition and makes drastic measures in automation financially
worthwhile.
Although the phone system continues to grow today, the number of
human beings employed by telcos has been dropping steadily for
years. Phone "operators" now deal with nothing but unusual
contingencies, all routine operations having been shrugged off onto
machines. Consequently, telephone operators are considerably less
machine-like nowadays, and have been known to have accents and
actual character in their voices. When you reach a human operator
today, the operators are rather more "human" than they were in
Leticia's day -- but on the other hand, human beings in the phone
system are much harder to reach in the first place.
Over the first half of the twentieth century, "electromechanical"
switching systems of growing complexity were cautiously introduced
into the phone system. In certain backwaters, some of these hybrid
systems are still in use. But after 1965, the phone system began to
go completely electronic, and this is by far the dominant mode
today. Electromechanical systems have "crossbars," and "brushes,"
and other large moving mechanical parts, which, while faster and
cheaper than Leticia, are still slow, and tend to wear out fairly
quickly.
But fully electronic systems are inscribed on silicon chips, and are
lightning-fast, very cheap, and quite durable. They are much cheaper
to maintain than even the best electromechanical systems, and they
fit into half the space. And with every year, the silicon chip grows
smaller, faster, and cheaper yet. Best of all, automated electronics
work around the clock and don't have salaries or health insurance.
There are, however, quite serious drawbacks to the use of computer-
chips. When they do break down, it is a daunting challenge to figure
out what the heck has gone wrong with them. A broken cordboard
generally had a problem in it big enough to see. A broken chip has
invisible, microscopic faults. And the faults in bad software can be
so subtle as to be practically theological. If you want a mechanical
system to do something new, then you must travel to where it is, and
pull pieces out of it, and wire in new pieces. This costs money.
However, if you want a chip to do something new, all you have to do
is change its software, which is easy, fast and dirt-cheap. You
don't even have to see the chip to change its program. Even if you
did see the chip, it wouldn't look like much. A chip with program X
doesn't look one whit different from a chip with program Y. With the
proper codes and sequences, and access to specialized phone-lines,
you can change electronic switching systems all over America from
anywhere you please.
And so can other people. If they know how, and if they want to, they
can sneak into a microchip via the special phonelines and diddle
with it, leaving no physical trace at all. If they broke into the
operator's station and held Leticia at gunpoint, that would be very
obvious. If they broke into a telco building and went after an
electromechanical switch with a toolbelt, that would at least leave
many traces. But people can do all manner of amazing things to
computer switches just by typing on a keyboard, and keyboards are
everywhere today. The extent of this vulnerability is deep, dark,
broad, almost mind-boggling, and yet this is a basic, primal fact of
life about any computer on a network.
Security experts over the past twenty years have insisted, with
growing urgency, that this basic vulnerability of computers
represents an entirely new level of risk, of unknown but obviously
dire potential to society. And they are right.
An electronic switching station does pretty much everything Letitia
did, except in nanoseconds and on a much larger scale. Compared to
Miss Luthor's ten thousand jacks, even a primitive 1ESS switching
computer, 60s vintage, has a 128,000 lines. And the current AT&T
system of choice is the monstrous fifth-generation 5ESS.
An Electronic Switching Station can scan every line on its "board"
in a tenth of a second, and it does this over and over, tirelessly,
around the clock. Instead of eyes, it uses "ferrod scanners" to
check the condition of local lines and trunks. Instead of hands, it
has "signal distributors," "central pulse distributors," "magnetic
latching relays," and "reed switches," which complete and break the
calls. Instead of a brain, it has a "central processor." Instead of
an instruction manual, it has a program. Instead of a handwritten
logbook for recording and billing calls, it has magnetic tapes. And
it never has to talk to anybody. Everything a customer might say to
it is done by punching the direct-dial tone buttons on your subset.
Although an Electronic Switching Station can't talk, it does need an
interface, some way to relate to its, er, employers. This interface
is known as the "master control center." (This interface might be
better known simply as "the interface," since it doesn't actually
"control" phone calls directly. However, a term like "Master Control
Center" is just the kind of rhetoric that telco maintenance
engineers -- and hackers -- find particularly satisfying.) Using the
master control center, a phone engineer can test local and trunk
lines for malfunctions. He (rarely she) can check various alarm
displays, measure traffic on the lines, examine the records of
telephone usage and the charges for those calls, and change the
programming.
And, of course, anybody else who gets into the master control center
by remote control can also do these things, if he (rarely she) has
managed to figure them out, or, more likely, has somehow swiped the
knowledge from people who already know.
In 1989 and 1990, one particular RBOC, BellSouth, which felt
particularly troubled, spent a purported $1.2 million on computer
security. Some think it spent as much as two million, if you count
all the associated costs. Two million dollars is still very little
compared to the great cost- saving utility of telephonic computer
systems.
Unfortunately, computers are also stupid. Unlike human beings,
computers possess the truly profound stupidity of the inanimate.
In the 1960s, in the first shocks of spreading computerization,
there was much easy talk about the stupidity of computers -- how
they could "only follow the program" and were rigidly required to do
"only what they were told." There has been rather less talk about
the stupidity of computers since they began to achieve grandmaster
status in chess tournaments, and to manifest many other impressive
forms of apparent cleverness.
Nevertheless, computers still are profoundly brittle and stupid;
they are simply vastly more subtle in their stupidity and
brittleness. The computers of the 1990s are much more reliable in
their components than earlier computer systems, but they are also
called upon to do far more complex things, under far more
challenging conditions.
On a basic mathematical level, every single line of a software
program offers a chance for some possible screwup. Software does not
sit still when it works; it "runs," it interacts with itself and
with its own inputs and outputs. By analogy, it stretches like putty
into millions of possible shapes and conditions, so many shapes that
they can never all be successfully tested, not even in the lifespan
of the universe. Sometimes the putty snaps.
The stuff we call "software" is not like anything that human society
is used to thinking about. Software is something like a machine, and
something like mathematics, and something like language, and
something like thought, and art, and information.... but software is
not in fact any of those other things. The protean quality of
software is one of the great sources of its fascination. It also
makes software very powerful, very subtle, very unpredictable, and
very risky.
Some software is bad and buggy. Some is "robust," even
"bulletproof." The best software is that which has been tested by
thousands of users under thousands of different conditions, over
years. It is then known as "stable." This does not mean that the
software is now flawless, free of bugs. It generally means that
there are plenty of bugs in it, but the bugs are well-identified and
fairly well understood.
There is simply no way to assure that software is free of flaws.
Though software is mathematical in nature, it cannot by "proven"
like a mathematical theorem; software is more like language, with
inherent ambiguities, with different definitions, different
assumptions, different levels of meaning that can conflict.
Human beings can manage, more or less, with human language because
we can catch the gist of it.
Computers, despite years of effort in "artificial intelligence,"
have proven spectacularly bad in "catching the gist" of anything at
all. The tiniest bit of semantic grit may still bring the mightiest
computer tumbling down. One of the most hazardous things you can do
to a computer program is try to improve it -- to try to make it
safer. Software "patches" represent new, untried un"stable"
software, which is by definition riskier.
The modern telephone system has come to depend, utterly and
irretrievably, upon software. And the System Crash of January 15,
1990, was caused by an improvement in software. Or rather, an
attempted improvement.
As it happened, the problem itself -- the problem per se -- took
this form. A piece of telco software had been written in C language,
a standard language of the telco field. Within the C software was a
long "do... while" construct. The "do... while" construct contained
a "switch" statement. The "switch" statement contained an "if"
clause. The "if" clause contained a "break." The "break" was
supposed to "break" the "if clause." Instead, the "break" broke the
"switch" statement.
That was the problem, the actual reason why people picking up phones
on January 15, 1990, could not talk to one another.
Or at least, that was the subtle, abstract, cyberspatial seed of the
problem. This is how the problem manifested itself from the realm of
programming into the realm of real life.
The System 7 software for AT&T's 4ESS switching station, the
"Generic 44E14 Central Office Switch Software," had been extensively
tested, and was considered very stable. By the end of 1989, eighty
of AT&T's switching systems nationwide had been programmed with the
new software. Cautiously, thirty four stations were left to run the
slower, less-capable System 6, because AT&T suspected there might be
shakedown problems with the new and unprecedently sophisticated
System 7 network.
The stations with System 7 were programmed to switch over to a
backup net in case of any problems. In mid-December 1989, however, a
new high-velocity, high security software patch was distributed to
each of the 4ESS switches that would enable them to switch over even
more quickly, making the System 7 network that much more secure.
Unfortunately, every one of these 4ESS switches was now in
possession of a small but deadly flaw.
In order to maintain the network, switches must monitor the
condition of other switches -- whether they are up and running,
whether they have temporarily shut down, whether they are overloaded
and in need of assistance, and so forth. The new software helped
control this bookkeeping function by monitoring the status calls
from other switches.
It only takes four to six seconds for a troubled 4ESS switch to rid
itself of all its calls, drop everything temporarily, and re-boot
its software from scratch. Starting over from scratch will generally
rid the switch of any software problems that may have developed in
the course of running the system. Bugs that arise will be simply
wiped out by this process. It is a clever idea. This process of
automatically re-booting from scratch is known as the "normal fault
recovery routine." Since AT&T's software is in fact exceptionally
stable, systems rarely have to go into "fault recovery" in the first
place; but AT&T has always boasted of its "real world" reliability,
and this tactic is a belt-and-suspenders routine.
The 4ESS switch used its new software to monitor its fellow switches
as they recovered from faults. As other switches came back on line
after recovery, they would send their "OK" signals to the switch.
The switch would make a little note to that effect in its "status
map," recognizing that the fellow switch was back and ready to go,
and should be sent some calls and put back to regular work.
Unfortunately, while it was busy bookkeeping with the status map,
the tiny flaw in the brand-new software came into play. The flaw
caused the 4ESS switch to interacted, subtly but drastically, with
incoming telephone calls from human users. If -- and only if -- two
incoming phone- calls happened to hit the switch within a hundredth
of a second, then a small patch of data would be garbled by the
flaw.
But the switch had been programmed to monitor itself constantly for
any possible damage to its data. When the switch perceived that its
data had been somehow garbled, then it too would go down, for swift
repairs to its software. It would signal its fellow switches not to
send any more work. It would go into the fault recovery mode for
four to six seconds. And then the switch would be fine again, and
would send out its "OK, ready for work" signal.
However, the "OK, ready for work" signal was the very thing that had
caused the switch to go down in the first place. And all the System
7 switches had the same flaw in their status-map software. As soon
as they stopped to make the bookkeeping note that their fellow
switch was "OK," then they too would become vulnerable to the slight
chance that two phone-calls would hit them within a hundredth of a
second.
At approximately 2:25 p.m. EST on Monday, January 15, one of AT&T's
4ESS toll switching systems in New York City had an actual,
legitimate, minor problem. It went into fault recovery routines,
announced "I'm going down," then announced, "I'm back, I'm OK." And
this cheery message then blasted throughout the network to many of
its fellow 4ESS switches. Many of the switches, at first, completely
escaped trouble. These lucky switches were not hit by the
coincidence of two phone calls within a hundredth of a second. Their
software did not fail -- at first. But three switches -- in Atlanta,
St. Louis, and Detroit -- were unlucky, and were caught with their
hands full. And they went down. And they came back up, almost
immediately. And they too began to broadcast the lethal message that
they, too, were "OK" again, activating the lurking software bug in
yet other switches.
As more and more switches did have that bit of bad luck and
collapsed, the call-traffic became more and more densely packed in
the remaining switches, which were groaning to keep up with the
load. And of course, as the calls became more densely packed, the
switches were much more likely to be hit twice within a hundredth of
a second. It only took four seconds for a switch to get well. There
was no physical damage of any kind to the switches, after all.
Physically, they were working perfectly. This situation was "only" a
software problem. But the 4ESS switches were leaping up and down
every four to six seconds, in a virulent spreading wave all over
America, in utter, manic, mechanical stupidity. They kept knocking
one another down with their contagious "OK" messages. It took about
ten minutes for the chain reaction to cripple the network. Even
then, switches would periodically luck-out and manage to resume
their normal work. Many calls -- millions of them -- were managing
to get through. But millions weren't.
The switching stations that used System 6 were not directly
affected. Thanks to these old-fashioned switches, AT&T's national
system avoided complete collapse. This fact also made it clear to
engineers that System 7 was at fault.
Bell Labs engineers, working feverishly in New Jersey, Illinois, and
Ohio, first tried their entire repertoire of standard network
remedies on the malfunctioning System 7. None of the remedies
worked, of course, because nothing like this had ever happened to
any phone system before.
By cutting out the backup safety network entirely, they were able to
reduce the frenzy of "OK" messages by about half. The system then
began to recover, as the chain reaction slowed. By 11:30 pm on
Monday January 15, sweating engineers on the midnight shift breathed
a sigh of relief as the last switch cleared-up.
By Tuesday they were pulling all the brand-new 4ESS software and
replacing it with an earlier version of System 7. If these had been
human operators, rather than computers at work, someone would simply
have eventually stopped screaming. It would have been obvious that
the situation was not "OK," and common sense would have kicked in.
Humans possess common sense -- at least to some extent. Computers
simply don't. On the other hand, computers can handle hundreds of
calls per second. Humans simply can't. If every single human being
in America worked for the phone company, we couldn't match the
performance of digital switches: direct-dialling, three-way calling,
speed- calling, callwaiting, Caller ID, all the rest of the
cornucopia of digital bounty. Replacing computers with operators is
simply not an option any more.
And yet we still, anachronistically, expect humans to be running our
phone system. It is hard for us to understand that we have
sacrificed huge amounts of initiative and control to senseless yet
powerful machines. When the phones fail, we want somebody to be
responsible. We want somebody to blame.
When the Crash of January 15 happened, the American populace was
simply not prepared to understand that enormous landslides in
cyberspace, like the Crash itself, can happen, and can be nobody's
fault in particular. It was easier to believe, maybe even in some
odd way more reassuring to believe, that some evil person, or evil
group, had done this to us. "Hackers" had done it. With a virus. A
trojan horse. A software bomb. A dirty plot of some kind. People
believed this, responsible people. In 1990, they were looking hard
for evidence to confirm their heartfelt suspicions.
And they would look in a lot of places. Come 1991, however, the
outlines of an apparent new reality would begin to emerge from the
fog.
On July 1 and 2, 1991, computer-software collapses in telephone
switching stations disrupted service in Washington DC, Pittsburgh,
Los Angeles and San Francisco. Once again, seemingly minor
maintenance problems had crippled the digital System 7. About twelve
million people were affected in the Crash of July 1, 1991.
Said the New York Times Service: "Telephone company executives and
federal regulators said they were not ruling out the possibility of
sabotage by computer hackers, but most seemed to think the problems
stemmed from some unknown defect in the software running the
networks."
And sure enough, within the week, a red-faced software company, DSC
Communications Corporation of Plano, Texas, owned up to "glitches"
in the "signal transfer point" software that DSC had designed for
Bell Atlantic and Pacific Bell. The immediate cause of the July 1
Crash was a single mistyped character: one tiny typographical flaw
in one single line of the software. One mistyped letter, in one
single line, had deprived the nation's capital of phone service. It
was not particularly surprising that this tiny flaw had escaped
attention: a typical System 7 station requires ten million lines of
code.
On Tuesday, September 17, 1991, came the most spectacular outage
yet. This case had nothing to do with software failures -- at least,
not directly. Instead, a group of AT&T's switching stations in New
York City had simply run out of electrical power and shut down cold.
Their back-up batteries had failed. Automatic warning systems were
supposed to warn of the loss of battery power, but those automatic
systems had failed as well.
This time, Kennedy, La Guardia, and Newark airports all had their
voice and data communications cut. This horrifying event was
particularly ironic, as attacks on airport computers by hackers had
long been a standard nightmare scenario, much trumpeted by computer-
security experts who feared the computer underground. There had even
been a Hollywood thriller about sinister hackers ruining airport
computers -- Die Hard II.
Now AT&T itself had crippled airports with computer malfunctions -
- not just one airport, but three at once, some of the busiest in
the world.
Air traffic came to a standstill throughout the Greater New York
area, causing more than 500 flights to be cancelled, in a spreading
wave all over America and even into Europe. Another 500 or so
flights were delayed, affecting, all in all, about 85,000
passengers. (One of these passengers was the chairman of the Federal
Communications Commission.)
Stranded passengers in New York and New Jersey were further
infuriated to discover that they could not even manage to make a
long distance phone call, to explain their delay to loved ones or
business associates. Thanks to the crash, about four and a half
million domestic calls, and half a million international calls,
failed to get through. The September 17 NYC Crash, unlike the
previous ones, involved not a whisper of "hacker" misdeeds. On the
contrary, by 1991, AT&T itself was suffering much of the
vilification that had formerly been directed at hackers. Congressmen
were grumbling. So were state and federal regulators. And so was the
press.
For their part, ancient rival MCI took out snide fullpage newspaper
ads in New York, offering their own longdistance services for the
"next time that AT&T goes down." "You wouldn't find a classy company
like AT&T using such advertising," protested AT&T Chairman Robert
Allen, unconvincingly. Once again, out came the full-page AT&T
apologies in newspapers, apologies for "an inexcusable culmination
of both human and mechanical failure." (This time, however, AT&T
offered no discount on later calls. Unkind critics suggested that
AT&T were worried about setting any precedent for refunding the
financial losses caused by telephone crashes.)
Industry journals asked publicly if AT&T was "asleep at the switch."
The telephone network, America's purported marvel of high-tech
reliability, had gone down three times in 18 months. Fortune
magazine listed the Crash of September 17 among the "Biggest
Business Goofs of 1991," cruelly parodying AT&T's ad campaign in an
article entitled "AT&T Wants You Back (Safely On the Ground, God
Willing)."
Why had those New York switching systems simply run out of power?
Because no human being had attended to the alarm system. Why did the
alarm systems blare automatically, without any human being noticing?
Because the three telco technicians who should have been listening
were absent from their stations in the power-room, on another floor
of the building -- attending a training class. A training class
about the alarm systems for the power room!
"Crashing the System" was no longer "unprecedented" by late 1991. On
the contrary, it no longer even seemed an oddity. By 1991, it was
clear that all the policemen in the world could no longer "protect"
the phone system from crashes. By far the worst crashes the system
had ever had, had been inflicted, by the system, upon itself. And
this time nobody was making cocksure statements that this was an
anomaly, something that would never happen again. By 1991 the
System's defenders had met their nebulous Enemy, and the Enemy was -
- the System.
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