From: ferguson@icm1.icp.net (Paul Ferguson)
Date: Sun, 2 Jan 94 07:08:43 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: _The_Hacker_Crackdown_, _Three_Years_Later_
Message-ID: <9401021506.AA14149@icm1.icp.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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I bought Bruce Sterling's book, _The_Hacker_Crackdown_ when it
was first published in November 1992. A lot of us followed along with
the events outlined in the book in real time, so it was genuinely
refreshing to see Bruce author an afterward, "...Three Years Later",
in the electronic freeware release, which made its debut on The Well's
gopher yesterday.
 
 
The remainder of the book is available via gopher:
        gopher.well.sf.ca.us 70
 
follow the menu options to:
        /Publications/authors/Sterling/hc
 
 
Cheers.
 
8<--------------------- cut here --------------------------
 
 
Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.sf.ca.us
 
Literary Freeware:  Not for Commercial Use
 
 
                   THE HACKER CRACKDOWN
 
         Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
 
 
Afterword:  The Hacker Crackdown Three Years Later
 
     Three years in cyberspace is like thirty years anyplace
real.  It feels as 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, cable-phone 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
operating-system 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
computer-network 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 white-collar 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 law-enforcement 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, street-level 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 dicussions 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 popular-science 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  *8-)
 
     Bruce Sterling  bruces@well.sf.ca.us  -- New Years' Day
1994, Austin Texas
 
 
8<----------------- cut here ---------------------------------
 
________________________________________________________________________
Paul Ferguson
Sprint Managed Router Network Engineering           tel: 703.904.2437
Herndon, Virginia  USA                         internet: ferguson@icp.net