Crashing the System (part-1)

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 telecommu-nications 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 readyand 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.
_____
Technologies have life cycles, like cities do, like institutions do, like
laws and governments do.
The first stage of any technology is the Question Mark, often known as
the "Golden Vaporware" stage. At this early point, the technology is
only a phantom, a mere gleam in the inventor's eye. One such inventor
was a speech teacher and electrical tinkerer named Alexander Graham
Bell.
Bell's early inventions, while ingenious, failed to move the world. In
1863, the teenage Bell and his brother Melville made an artificial talking
mechanism out of wood, rubber, gutta-percha, and tin. This weird
device had a rubber-covered "tongue" made of movable wooden segments,
with vibrating rubber "vocal cords," and rubber "lips" and "cheeks." While Melville puffed a bellows into a tin tube, imitating the
lungs, young Alec Bell would manipulate the "lips," "teeth," and
"tongue," causing the thing to emit high-pitched falsetto gibberish.
Another would-be technical breakthrough was the Bell "phonautograph"
of 1874, actually made out of a human cadaver's ear. Clamped into place
on a tripod, this grisly gadget drew sound-wave images on smoked glass
through a thin straw glued to its vibrating earbones.
By 1875, Bell had learned to produce audible sounds — ugly shrieks and
squawks — by using magnets, diaphragms, and electrical current.
Most "Golden Vaporware" technologies go nowhere.
But the second stage of technology is the Rising Star, or, the "Goofy
Prototype," stage. The telephone, Bell's most ambitious gadget yet,
reached this stage on March 10, 1876. On that great day, Alexander
Graham Bell became the first person to transmit intelligible human
speech electrically. As it happened, young Professor Bell, industriously
tinkering in his Boston lab, had spattered his trousers with acid.
His assistant, Mr. Watson, heard his cry for help — over Bell's experimental
audio- telegraph. This was an event without precedent.
Technologies in their "Goofy Prototype" stage rarely work very well.
They're experimental, and therefore half- baked and rather frazzled.
The prototype may be attractive and novel, and it does look as if it ought
to be good for something-or-other. But nobody, including the inventor,
is quite sure what. Inventors, and speculators, and pundits may have
very firm ideas about its potential use, but those ideas are often very
wrong.
The natural habitat of the Goofy Prototype is in trade shows and in the
popular press. Infant technologies need publicity and investment
money like a tottering calf need milk. This was very true of Bell's
machine. To raise research and development money, Bell toured with
his device as a stage attraction.
Contemporary press reports of the stage debut of the telephone showed pleased astonishment mixed with considerable dread. Bell's stage telephone
was a large wooden box with a crude speaker-nozzle, the whole
contraption about the size and shape of an overgrown Brownie camera.
Its buzzing steel soundplate, pumped up by powerful electromagnets,
was loud enough to fill an auditorium. Bell's assistant Mr. Watson, who
could manage on the keyboards fairly well, kicked in by playing the
organ from distant rooms, and, later, distant cities. This feat was considered
marvellous, but very eerie indeed.
Bell's original notion for the telephone, an idea promoted for a couple of
years, was that it would become a mass medium. We might recognize
Bell's idea today as something close to modern "cable radio."
Telephones at a central source would transmit music, Sunday sermons,
and important public speeches to a paying network of wired-up subscribers.
At the time, most people thought this notion made good sense. In fact,
Bell's idea was workable. In Hungary, this philosophy of the telephone
was successfully put into everyday practice. In Budapest, for decades,
from 1893 until after World War I, there was a government-run
information service called "Telefon Hirmondo=." Hirmondo= was a
centralized source of news and entertainment and culture, including
stock reports, plays, concerts, and novels read aloud. At certain hours
of the day, the phone would ring, you would plug in a loudspeaker for the
use of the family, and Telefon Hirmondo= would be on the air — or
rather, on the phone.
Hirmondo= is dead tech today, but Hirmondo= might be considered a
spiritual ancestor of the modern telephone-accessed computer data services,
such as CompuServe, GEnie or Prodigy. The principle behind
Hirmondo= is also not too far from computer "bulletin- board systems"
or BBS's, which arrived in the late 1970s, spread rapidly across
America, and will figure largely in this book.
We are used to using telephones for individual person-to-person
speech, because we are used to the Bell system. But this was just one
possibility among many. Communication networks are very flexible and
protean, especially when their hardware becomes sufficiently advanced. They can be put to all kinds of uses. And they have been — and they will
be.
Bell's telephone was bound for glory, but this was a combination of
political decisions, canny infighting in court, inspired industrial leadership,
receptive local conditions and outright good luck. Much the same
is true of communications systems today.
As Bell and his backers struggled to install their newfangled system in
the real world of nineteenth-century New England, they had to fight
against skepticism and industrial rivalry. There was already a strong
electrical communications network present in America: the telegraph.
The head of the Western Union telegraph system dismissed Bell's prototype
as "an electrical toy" and refused to buy the rights to Bell's patent.
The telephone, it seemed, might be all right as a parlor entertainment
— but not for serious business.
Telegrams, unlike mere telephones, left a permanent physical record of
their messages. Telegrams, unlike telephones, could be answered
whenever the recipient had time and convenience. And the telegram had
a much longer distance-range than Bell's early telephone. These factors
made telegraphy seem a much more sound and businesslike technology —
at least to some.
The telegraph system was huge, and well-entrenched. In 1876, the
United States had 214,000 miles of telegraph wire, and 8500 telegraph
offices. There were specialized telegraphs for businesses and stock
traders, government, police and fire departments. And Bell's "toy" was
best known as a stage-magic musical device.
The third stage of technology is known as the "Cash Cow" stage. In the
"cash cow" stage, a technology finds its place in the world, and matures,
and becomes settled and productive. After a year or so, Alexander
Graham Bell and his capitalist backers concluded that eerie music piped
from nineteenth-century cyberspace was not the real selling-point of
his invention. Instead, the telephone was about speech — individual,
personal speech, the human voice, human conversation and human
interaction. The telephone was not to be managed from any centralized broadcast center. It was to be a personal, intimate technology.
When you picked up a telephone, you were not absorbing the cold output
of a machine — you were speaking to another human being. Once people
realized this, their instinctive dread of the telephone as an eerie,
unnatural device, swiftly vanished. A "telephone call" was not a "call"
from a "telephone" itself, but a call from another human being, someone
you would generally know and recognize. The real point was not
what the machine could do for you (or to you), but what you yourself, a
person and citizen, could do *through* the machine. This decision on
the part of the young Bell Company was absolutely vital.
The first telephone networks went up around Boston — mostly among the
technically curious and the well-to-do (much the same segment of the
American populace that, a hundred years later, would be buying personal
computers). Entrenched backers of the telegraph continued to scoff.
But in January 1878, a disaster made the telephone famous. A train
crashed in Tarriffville, Connecticut. Forward-looking doctors in the
nearby city of Hartford had had Bell's "speaking telephone" installed.
An alert local druggist was able to telephone an entire community of
local doctors, who rushed to the site to give aid. The disaster, as disasters
do, aroused intense press coverage. The phone had proven its usefulness
in the real world.
After Tarriffville, the telephone network spread like crabgrass. By
1890 it was all over New England. By '93, out to Chicago. By '97, into
Minnesota, Nebraska and Texas. By 1904 it was all over the continent.
The telephone had become a mature technology. Professor Bell (now
generally known as "Dr. Bell" despite his lack of a formal degree)
became quite wealthy. He lost interest in the tedious day-to-day business
muddle of the booming telephone network, and gratefully returned
his attention to creatively hacking-around in his various laboratories,
which were now much larger, better- ventilated, and gratifyingly better-
equipped. Bell was never to have another great inventive success,
though his speculations and prototypes anticipated fiber-optic transmission,
manned flight, sonar, hydrofoil ships, tetrahedral construction, and Montessori education. The "decibel," the standard scientific
measure of sound intensity, was named after Bell.
Not all Bell's vaporware notions were inspired. He was fascinated by
human eugenics. He also spent many years developing a weird personal
system of astrophysics in which gravity did not exist.
Bell was a definite eccentric. He was something of a hypochondriac, and
throughout his life he habitually stayed up until four A.M., refusing to
rise before noon. But Bell had accomplished a great feat; he was an idol
of millions and his influence, wealth, and great personal charm, combined
with his eccentricity, made him something of a loose cannon on
deck. Bell maintained a thriving scientific salon in his winter mansion
in Washington, D.C., which gave him considerable backstage influence in
governmental and scientific circles. He was a major financial backer of
the the magazines *Science* and *National Geographic,* both still
flourishing today as important organs of the American scientific establishment.
Bell's companion Thomas Watson, similarly wealthy and similarly odd,
became the ardent political disciple of a 19th-century science-fiction
writer and would-be social reformer, Edward Bellamy. Watson also
trod the boards briefly as a Shakespearian actor.
There would never be another Alexander Graham Bell, but in years to
come there would be surprising numbers of people like him. Bell was a
prototype of the high-tech entrepreneur. High-tech entrepreneurs
will play a very prominent role in this book: not merely as technicians
and businessmen, but as pioneers of the technical frontier, who can
carry the power and prestige they derive from high-technology into the
political and social arena.
Like later entrepreneurs, Bell was fierce in defense of his own technological
territory. As the telephone began to flourish, Bell was soon
involved in violent lawsuits in the defense of his patents. Bell's Boston
lawyers were excellent, however, and Bell himself, as an elecution
teacher and gifted public speaker, was a devastatingly effective legal
witness. In the eighteen years of Bell's patents, the Bell company was involved in six hundred separate lawsuits. The legal records printed
filled 149 volumes. The Bell Company won every single suit.
After Bell's exclusive patents expired, rival telephone companies
sprang up all over America. Bell's company, American Bell Telephone,
was soon in deep trouble. In 1907, American Bell Telephone fell into
the hands of the rather sinister J.P. Morgan financial cartel, robberbaron
speculators who dominated Wall Street.
At this point, history might have taken a different turn. American
might well have been served forever by a patchwork of locally owned
telephone companies. Many state politicians and local businessmen
considered this an excellent solution.
But the new Bell holding company, American Telephone and Telegraph or
AT&T, put in a new man at the helm, a visionary industrialist named
Theodore Vail. Vail, a former Post Office manager, understood large
organizations and had an innate feeling for the nature of large-scale
communications. Vail quickly saw to it that AT&T seized the technological
edge once again. The Pupin and Campbell "loading coil," and the
deForest "audion," are both extinct technology today, but in 1913 they
gave Vail's company the best *long-distance* lines ever built. By controlling
long-distance — the links between, and over, and above the
smaller local phone companies — AT&T swiftly gained the whip-hand
over them, and was soon devouring them right and left.
Vail plowed the profits back into research and development, starting the
Bell tradition of huge-scale and brilliant industrial research.
Technically and financially, AT&T gradually steamrollered the opposition.
Independent telephone companies never became entirely extinct,
and hundreds of them flourish today. But Vail's AT&T became the
supreme communications company. At one point, Vail's AT&T bought
Western Union itself, the very company that had derided Bell's telephone
as a "toy." Vail thoroughly reformed Western Union's hidebound
business along his modern principles; but when the federal government
grew anxious at this centralization of power, Vail politely gave Western
Union back. This centralizing process was not unique. Very similar events had happened
in American steel, oil, and railroads. But AT&T, unlike the other
companies, was to remain supreme. The monopoly robber-barons of
those other industries were humbled and shattered by government
trust-busting.
Vail, the former Post Office official, was quite willing to accommodate
the US government; in fact he would forge an active alliance with it.
AT&T would become almost a wing of the American government, almost
another Post Office — though not quite. AT&T would willingly submit to
federal regulation, but in return, it would use the government's regulators
as its own police, who would keep out competitors and assure the
Bell system's profits and preeminence.
This was the second birth — the political birth — of the American telephone
system. Vail's arrangement was to persist, with vast success, for
many decades, until 1982. His system was an odd kind of American
industrial socialism. It was born at about the same time as Leninist
Communism, and it lasted almost as long — and, it must be admitted, to
considerably better effect.
Vail's system worked. Except perhaps for aerospace, there has been no
technology more thoroughly dominated by Americans than the telephone.
The telephone was seen from the beginning as a quintessentially
American technology. Bell's policy, and the policy of Theodore Vail, was
a profoundly democratic policy of *universal access.* Vail's famous
corporate slogan, "One Policy, One System, Universal Service," was a
political slogan, with a very American ring to it.
The American telephone was not to become the specialized tool of government
or business, but a general public utility. At first, it was true,
only the wealthy could afford private telephones, and Bell's company
pursued the business markets primarily. The American phone system
was a capitalist effort, meant to make money; it was not a charity. But
from the first, almost all communities with telephone service had public
telephones. And many stores — especially drugstores — offered public
use of their phones. You might not own a telephone — but you could always get into the system, if you really needed to.
There was nothing inevitable about this decision to make telephones
"public" and "universal." Vail's system involved a profound act of trust
in the public. This decision was a political one, informed by the basic
values of the American republic. The situation might have been very
different; and in other countries, under other systems, it certainly
was.
Joseph Stalin, for instance, vetoed plans for a Soviet phone system soon
after the Bolshevik revolution. Stalin was certain that publicly accessible
telephones would become instruments of anti-Soviet counterrevolution
and conspiracy. (He was probably right.) When telephones did
arrive in the Soviet Union, they would be instruments of Party authority,
and always heavily tapped. (Alexander Solzhenitsyn's prison-camp
novel *The First Circle* describes efforts to develop a phone system
more suited to Stalinist purposes.)
France, with its tradition of rational centralized government, had fought
bitterly even against the electric telegraph, which seemed to the French
entirely too anarchical and frivolous. For decades, nineteenth- century
France communicated via the "visual telegraph," a nation-spanning,
government-owned semaphore system of huge stone towers that signalled
from hilltops, across vast distances, with big windmill-like
arms. In 1846, one Dr. Barbay, a semaphore enthusiast, memorably
uttered an early version of what might be called "the security expert's
argument" against the open media.
"No, the electric telegraph is not a sound invention. It will always be at
the mercy of the slightest disruption, wild youths, drunkards, bums,
etc.... The electric telegraph meets those destructive elements with only
a few meters of wire over which supervision is impossible. A single
man could, without being seen, cut the telegraph wires leading to Paris,
and in twenty-four hours cut in ten different places the wires of the
same line, without being arrested. The visual telegraph, on the contrary,
has its towers, its high walls, its gates well-guarded from inside
by strong armed men. Yes, I declare, substitution of the electric telegraph
for the visual one is a dreadful measure, a truly idiotic act." Dr. Barbay and his high-security stone machines were eventually
unsuccessful, but his argument — that communication exists for the
safety and convenience of the state, and must be carefully protected from
the wild boys and the gutter rabble who might want to crash the system
— would be heard again and again.
When the French telephone system finally did arrive, its snarled inadequacy
was to be notorious. Devotees of the American Bell System often
recommended a trip to France, for skeptics.
In Edwardian Britain, issues of class and privacy were a ball-and-chain
for telephonic progress. It was considered outrageous that anyone —
any wild fool off the street — could simply barge bellowing into one's
office or home, preceded only by the ringing of a telephone bell. In
Britain, phones were tolerated for the use of business, but private
phones tended be stuffed away into closets, smoking rooms, or servants'
quarters. Telephone operators were resented in Britain because they
did not seem to "know their place." And no one of breeding would print a
telephone number on a business card; this seemed a crass attempt to
make the acquaintance of strangers.
But phone access in America was to become a popular right; something
like universal suffrage, only more so. American women could not yet
vote when the phone system came through; yet from the beginning
American women doted on the telephone. This "feminization" of the
American telephone was often commented on by foreigners. Phones in
America were not censored or stiff or formalized; they were social,
private, intimate, and domestic. In America, Mother's Day is by far the
busiest day of the year for the phone network.
The early telephone companies, and especially AT&T, were among the
foremost employers of American women. They employed the daughters
of the American middle-class in great armies: in 1891, eight thousand
women; by 1946, almost a quarter of a million. Women seemed to
enjoy telephone work; it was respectable, it was steady, it paid fairly
well as women's work went, and — not least — it seemed a genuine contribution
to the social good of the community. Women found Vail's ideal of public service attractive. This was especially true in rural areas,
where women operators, running extensive rural party- lines, enjoyed
considerable social power. The operator knew everyone on the partyline,
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, fiber- optic 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.
_____
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 high- technology, 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
red- eyed 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 nineteenth- century 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.
_____
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 high- tech
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) T- shirt among AT&T employees bears the oldfashioned
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 longdistance
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 corporate-
citizen 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.
_____

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.
_____
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 non- regional, 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 cableholes.
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 callingcord'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 computerchips.
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 phonelines,
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 phonecalls
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, call- waiting,
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 full- page newspaper
ads in New York, offering their own long- distance 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.