The Hacker Crackdown

CHRONOLOGY OF THE
HACKER CRACKDOWN
1865 U.S. Secret Service (USSS) founded.
1876 Alexander Graham Bell invents telephone.
1878 First teenage males flung off phone system by enraged authorities.
1939 "Futurian" science-fiction group raided by Secret Service.
1971 Yippie phone phreaks start YIPL/TAP magazine.
1972 *Ramparts* magazine seized in blue-box rip-off scandal.
1978 Ward Christenson and Randy Suess create first personal computer
bulletin board system.
1982 William Gibson coins term "cyberspace."
1982 "414 Gang" raided.
1983-1983 AT&T dismantled in divestiture.
1984 Congress passes Comprehensive Crime Control Act giving USSS
jurisdiction over credit card fraud and computer fraud.
1984 "Legion of Doom" formed.
1984 *2600: The Hacker Quarterly* founded.
1984 *Whole Earth Software Catalog* published.
1985 First police "sting" bulletin board systems established.
1985 Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link computer conference (WELL) goes
on-line.
1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act passed.
1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act passed.
1987 Chicago prosecutors form Computer Fraud and Abuse Task
Force.
1988
July. Secret Service covertly videotapes "SummerCon" hacker convention.
September. "Prophet" cracks BellSouth AIMSX computer network and
downloads E911 Document to his own computer and to Jolnet.
September. AT&T Corporate Information Security informed of
Prophet's action.
October. Bellcore Security informed of Prophet's action.
1989
January. Prophet uploads E911 Document to Knight Lightning.
February 25. Knight Lightning publishes E911Document in *Phrack*
electronic newsletter.
May. Chicago Task Force raids and arrests "Kyrie."
June. "NuPrometheus League" distributes Apple Computer proprietary
software.
June 13. Florida probation office crossed with phone-sex line in
switching-station stunt.

July. "Fry Guy" raided by USSS and Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse
Task Force.
July. Secret Service raids "Prophet," "Leftist," and "Urvile" in
Georgia.
1990
January 15. Martin Luther King Day Crash strikes AT&T long-distance
network nationwide.
January 18-19 Chicago Task Force raids Knight Lightning in St. Louis.
January 24. USSS and New York State Police raid "Phiber Optik,"
"Acid Phreak," and "Scorpion" in New York City.
February 1. USSS raids "Terminus" in Maryland.
February 3. Chicago Task Force raids Richard Andrews' home.
February 6. Chicago Task Force raids Richard Andrews' business.
February 6. USSS arrests Terminus, Prophet, Leftist, and Urvile.
February 9. Chicago Task Force arrests Knight Lightning.
February 20. AT&T Security shuts down public-access "attctc" computer
in Dallas.
February 21. Chicago Task Force raids Robert Izenberg in Austin.
March 1. Chicago Task Force raids Steve Jackson Games, Inc.,
"Mentor," and "Erik Bloodaxe" in Austin.
May 7,8,9. USSS and Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau
conduct "Operation Sundevil" raids in Cincinnatti, Detroit, Los Angeles,
Miami, Newark, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Tucson, San Diego, San
Jose, and San Francisco.
May. FBI interviews John Perry Barlow re NuPrometheus case.
June. Mitch Kapor and Barlow found Electronic Frontier Foundation;
Barlow publishes *Crime and Puzzlement* manifesto.
July 24-27. Trial of Knight Lightning.
1991
February. CPSR Roundtable in Washington, D.C.
March 25-28. Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in San
Francisco.
May 1. Electronic Frontier Foundation, Steve Jackson, and others file
suit against members of Chicago Task Force.
July 1-2. Switching station phone software crash affects Washington,
Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, San Francisco.
September 17. AT&T phone crash affects New York City and three airports.


I N T R O D U C T I O N
This is a book about cops, and wild teenage whiz- kids, and lawyers, and
hairy-eyed anarchists, and industrial technicians, and hippies, and
high-tech millionaires, and game hobbyists, and computer security
experts, and Secret Service agents, and grifters, and thieves.
This book is about the electronic frontier of the 1990s. It concerns
activities that take place inside computers and over telephone lines.
A science fiction writer coined the useful term "cyberspace" in 1982.
But the territory in question, the electronic frontier, is about a hundred
and thirty years old. Cyberspace is the "place" where a telephone conversation
appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic
device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone, in some other
city. *The place between* the phones. The indefinite place *out there,*
where the two of you, two human beings, actually meet and communicate.
Although it is not exactly "real," "cyberspace" is a genuine place.
Things happen there that have very genuine consequences. This "place"
is not "real," but it is serious, it is earnest. Tens of thousands of people
have dedicated their lives to it, to the public service of public communication
by wire and electronics.
People have worked on this "frontier" for generations now. Some people
became rich and famous from their efforts there. Some just played in
it, as hobbyists. Others soberly pondered it, and wrote about it, and
regulated it, and negotiated over it in international forums, and sued one
another about it, in gigantic, epic court battles that lasted for years.
And almost since the beginning, some people have committed crimes in
this place.
But in the past twenty years, this electrical "space," which was once
thin and dark and one-dimensional — little more than a narrow speaking-
tube, stretching from phone to phone — has flung itself open like a
gigantic jack-in- the- box. Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of
the glowing computer screen. This dark electric netherworld has become a vast flowering electronic landscape. Since the 1960s, the
world of the telephone has cross-bred itself with computers and television,
and though there is still no substance to cyberspace, nothing you
can handle, it has a strange kind of physicality now. It makes good sense
today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own.
Because people live in it now. Not just a few people, not just a few
technicians and eccentrics, but thousands of people, quite normal people.
And not just for a little while, either, but for hours straight, over
weeks, and months, and years. Cyberspace today is a "Net," a
"Matrix," international in scope and growing swiftly and steadily. It's
growing in size, and wealth, and political importance.
People are making entire careers in modern cyberspace. Scientists and
technicians, of course; they've been there for twenty years now. But
increasingly, cyberspace is filling with journalists and doctors and
lawyers and artists and clerks. Civil servants make their careers
there now, "on-line" in vast government data- banks; and so do spies,
industrial, political, and just plain snoops; and so do police, at least a
few of them. And there are children living there now.
People have met there and been married there. There are entire living
communities in cyberspace today; chattering, gossipping, planning,
conferring and scheming, leaving one another voice-mail and electronic
mail, giving one another big weightless chunks of valuable data, both
legitimate and illegitimate. They busily pass one another computer
software and the occasional festering computer virus.
We do not really understand how to live in cyberspace yet. We are feeling
our way into it, blundering about. That is not surprising. Our lives
in the physical world, the "real" world, are also far from perfect,
despite a lot more practice. Human lives, real lives, are imperfect by
their nature, and there are human beings in cyberspace. The way we
live in cyberspace is a funhouse mirror of the way we live in the real
world. We take both our advantages and our troubles with us.
This book is about trouble in cyberspace. Specifically, this book is about
certain strange events in the year 1990, an unprecedented and startling year for the the growing world of computerized communications.
In 1990 there came a nationwide crackdown on illicit computer hackers,
with arrests, criminal charges, one dramatic show-trial, several
guilty pleas, and huge confiscations of data and equipment all over the
USA.
The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was larger, better organized, more
deliberate, and more resolute than any previous effort in the brave new
world of computer crime. The U.S. Secret Service, private telephone
security, and state and local law enforcement groups across the country
all joined forces in a determined attempt to break the back of America's
electronic underground. It was a fascinating effort, with very mixed
results.
The Hacker Crackdown had another unprecedented effect; it spurred the
creation, within "the computer community," of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a new and very odd interest group, fiercely dedicated to the
establishment and preservation of electronic civil liberties. The crackdown,
remarkable in itself, has created a melee of debate over electronic
crime, punishment, freedom of the press, and issues of search and
seizure. Politics has entered cyberspace. Where people go, politics
follow.