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  ************ PPaarrtt OOnnee:: CCrraasshhiinngg tthhee SSyysstteemm ************

  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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