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