Bruce Sterling - The Hacker Crackdown

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.