The Hacker Crackdown

[Solana Axton]

"No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form orby any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, withoutpermission in writing from the publisher. For information address:Bantam Books."

This is a pretty good disclaimer, as such disclaimers go. I collectintellectual-property disclaimers, and I've seen dozens of them, andthis one is at least pretty straightforward. In this narrow andparticular case, however, it isn't quite accurate. Bantam Books putsthat disclaimer on every book they publish, but Bantam Books does not,in fact, own the electronic rights to this book. I do, because ofcertain extensive contract maneuverings my agent and I went throughbefore this book was written. I want to give those electronicpublishing rights away through certain not-for-profit channels, andI've convinced Bantam that this is a good idea.

Since Bantam has seen fit to peacably agree to this scheme of mine,Bantam Books is not going to fuss about this. Provided you don't tryto sell the book, they are not going to bother you for what you do withthe electronic copy of this book. If you want to check this outpersonally, you can ask them; they're at 1540 Broadway NY NY 10036.However, if you were so foolish as to print this book and startretailing it for money in violation of my copyright and the commercialinterests of Bantam Books, then Bantam, a part of the giganticBertelsmann multinational publishing combine, would roust some of theirheavy-duty attorneys out of hibernation and crush you like a bug. Thisis only to be expected. I didn't write this book so that you couldmake money out of it. If anybody is gonna make money out of this book,it's gonna be me and my publisher.

My publisher deserves to make money out of this book. Not only did thefolks at Bantam Books commission me to write the book, and pay me ahefty sum to do so, but they bravely printed, in text, an electronicdocument the reproduction of which was once alleged to be a federalfelony. Bantam Books and their numerous attorneys were very brave andforthright about this book. Furthermore, my former editor at BantamBooks, Betsy Mitchell, genuinely cared about this project, and workedhard on it, and had a lot of wise things to say about the manuscript.Betsy deserves genuine credit for this book, credit that editors toorarely get.

Well-meaning, public-spirited civil libertarians don't have much money,either. And it seems almost criminal to snatch cash out of the handsof America's direly underpaid electronic law enforcement community.

If you're a computer cop, a hacker, or an electronic civil libertiesactivist, you are the target audience for this book. I wrote this bookbecause I wanted to help you, and help other people understand you andyour unique, uhm, problems. I wrote this book to aid your activities,and to contribute to the public discussion of important politicalissues. In giving the text away in this fashion, I am directlycontributing to the book's ultimate aim: to help civilize cyberspace.

You can copy this electronic book. Copy the heck out of it, be myguest, and give those copies to anybody who wants them. The nascentworld of cyberspace is full of sysadmins, teachers, trainers,cybrarians, netgurus, and various species of cybernetic activist. Ifyou're one of those people, I know about you, and I know the hassle yougo through to try to help people learn about the electronic frontier.I hope that possessing this book in electronic form will lessen yourtroubles. Granted, this treatment of our electronic social spectrum isnot the ultimate in academic rigor. And politically, it has somethingto offend and trouble almost everyone. But hey, I'm told it'sreadable, and at least the price is right.

This electronic book is now literary freeware. It now belongs to theemergent realm of alternative information economics. You have no rightto make this electronic book part of the conventional flow of commerce.Let it be part of the flow of knowledge: there's a difference. I'vedivided the book into four sections, so that it is less ungainly forupload and download; if there's a section of particular relevance toyou and your colleagues, feel free to reproduce that one and skip therest.

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, andSan Francisco.

This is a book about cops, and wild teenage whiz-kids, and lawyers,and hairy-eyed anarchists, and industrial technicians, and hippies, andhigh-tech millionaires, and game hobbyists, and computer securityexperts, and Secret Service agents, and grifters, and thieves.

A science fiction writer coined the useful term "cyberspace" in 1982,but the territory in question, the electronic frontier, is about ahundred and thirty years old. Cyberspace is the "place" where atelephone 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 indefiniteplace OUT THERE, where the two of you, two human beings, actually meetand 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 ofpeople have dedicated their lives to it, to the public service ofpublic communication by wire and electronics.

People have worked on this "frontier" for generations now. Some peoplebecame rich and famous from their efforts there. Some just played init, as hobbyists. Others soberly pondered it, and wrote about it, andregulated it, and negotiated over it in international forums, and suedone another about it, in gigantic, epic court battles that lasted foryears. And almost since the beginning, some people have committedcrimes in this place.

Because people live in it now. Not just a few people, not just a fewtechnicians and eccentrics, but thousands of people, quite normalpeople. And not just for a little while, either, but for hoursstraight, over weeks, and months, and years. Cyberspace today is a"Net," a "Matrix," international in scope and growing swiftly andsteadily. It's growing in size, and wealth, and political importance.

People are making entire careers in modern cyberspace. Scientists andtechnicians, of course; they've been there for twenty years now. Butincreasingly, cyberspace is filling with journalists and doctors andlawyers and artists and clerks. Civil servants make their careersthere now, "on-line" in vast government data-banks; and so do spies,industrial, political, and just plain snoops; and so do police, atleast a few of them. And there are children living there now.

People have met there and been married there. There are entire livingcommunities in cyberspace today; chattering, gossiping, planning,conferring and scheming, leaving one another voice-mail and electronicmail, giving one another big weightless chunks of valuable data, bothlegitimate and illegitimate. They busily pass one another computersoftware and the occasional festering computer virus.

We do not really understand how to live in cyberspace yet. We arefeeling our way into it, blundering about. That is not surprising.Our lives in the physical world, the "real" world, are also far fromperfect, despite a lot more practice. Human lives, real lives, areimperfect by their nature, and there are human beings in cyberspace.The way we live in cyberspace is a funhouse mirror of the way we livein the real world. We take both our advantages and our troubles withus.

This book is about trouble in cyberspace. Specifically, this book isabout certain strange events in the year 1990, an unprecedented andstartling 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 guiltypleas, and huge confiscations of data and equipment all over the USA.

The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was larger, better organized, moredeliberate, and more resolute than any previous effort in the brave newworld of computer crime. The U.S. Secret Service, private telephonesecurity, and state and local law enforcement groups across the countryall joined forces in a determined attempt to break the back ofAmerica's electronic underground. It was a fascinating effort, withvery mixed results.

The Hacker Crackdown had another unprecedented effect; it spurred thecreation, within "the computer community," of the Electronic FrontierFoundation, a new and very odd interest group, fiercely dedicated tothe establishment and preservation of electronic civil liberties. Thecrackdown, remarkable in itself, has created a melee of debate overelectronic crime, punishment, freedom of the press, and issues ofsearch and seizure. Politics has entered cyberspace. Where people go,politics follow.

This was a strange, dire, huge event. Sixty thousand people lost theirtelephone service completely. During the nine long hours of franticeffort that it took to restore service, some seventy million telephonecalls went uncompleted.

Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco trade, are a knownand accepted hazard of the telephone business. Hurricanes hit, andphone cables get snapped by the thousands. Earthquakes wrench throughburied fiber-optic lines. Switching stations catch fire and burn tothe ground. These things do happen. There are contingency plans forthem, and decades of experience in dealing with them. But the Crash ofJanuary 15 was unprecedented. It was unbelievably huge, and itoccurred for no apparent physical reason.

The crash started on a Monday afternoon in a single switching-stationin Manhattan. But, unlike any merely physical damage, it spread andspread. Station after station across America collapsed in a chainreaction, until fully half of AT&T's network had gone haywire and theremaining half was hard-put to handle the overflow.

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