The Hacker Crackdown Part 12

Goldstein is probably the best-known public representative of the hacker underground today, and certainly the best-hated.

Police regard him as a f.a.gin, a corrupter of youth, and speak of him with untempered loathing. He is quite an accomplished gadfly.

After the Martin Luther King Day Crash of 1990, Goldstein, for instance, adeptly rubbed salt into the wound in the pages of 2600.

"Yeah, it was fun for the phone phreaks as we watched the network crumble,"

he admitted cheerfully. "But it was also an ominous sign of what's to come. . . . Some AT&T people, aided by well-meaning but ignorant media, were spreading the notion that many companies had the same software and therefore could face the same problem someday. Wrong. This was entirely an AT&T software deficiency. Of course, other companies could face entirely DIFFERENT software problems. But then, so too could AT&T."

After a technical discussion of the system's failings, the Long Island techno-rat went on to offer thoughtful criticism to the gigantic multinational's hundreds of professionally qualified engineers. "What we don't know is how a major force in communications like AT&T could be so sloppy. What happened to backups? Sure, computer systems go down all the time, but people making phone calls are not the same as people logging on to computers. We must make that distinction. It's not acceptable for the phone system or any other essential service to 'go down.' If we continue to trust technology without understanding it, we can look forward to many variations on this theme.

"AT&T owes it to its customers to be prepared to INSTANTLY switch to another network if something strange and unpredictable starts occurring. The news here isn't so much the failure of a computer program, but the failure of AT&T's entire structure."

The very idea of this. . . . this PERSON. . . . offering "advice" about "AT&T's entire structure" is more than some people can easily bear. How dare this near-criminal dictate what is or isn't "acceptable" behavior from AT&T?

Especially when he's publishing, in the very same issue, detailed schematic diagrams for creating various switching-network signalling tones unavailable to the public.

"See what happens when you drop a 'silver box' tone or two down your local exchange or through different long distance service carriers," advises 2600 contributor "Mr. Upsetter"

in "How To Build a Signal Box." "If you experiment systematically and keep good records, you will surely discover something interesting."

This is, of course, the scientific method, generally regarded as a praiseworthy activity and one of the flowers of modern civilization.

One can indeed learn a great deal with this sort of structured intellectual activity. Telco employees regard this mode of "exploration"

as akin to flinging sticks of dynamite into their pond to see what lives on the bottom.

2600 has been published consistently since 1984.

It has also run a bulletin board computer system, printed 2600 T-shirts, taken fax calls. . . .

The Spring 1991 issue has an interesting announcement on page 45: "We just discovered an extra set of wires attached to our fax line and heading up the pole. (They've since been clipped.) Your faxes to us and to anyone else could be monitored."

In the worldview of 2600, the tiny band of techno-rat brothers (rarely, sisters) are a beseiged vanguard of the truly free and honest.

The rest of the world is a maelstrom of corporate crime and high-level governmental corruption, occasionally tempered with well-meaning ignorance. To read a few issues in a row is to enter a nightmare akin to Solzhenitsyn's, somewhat tempered by the fact that 2600 is often extremely funny.

Goldstein did not become a target of the Hacker Crackdown, though he protested loudly, eloquently, and publicly about it, and it added considerably to his fame. It was not that he is not regarded as dangerous, because he is so regarded. Goldstein has had brushes with the law in the past: in 1985, a 2600 bulletin board computer was seized by the FBI, and some software on it was formally declared "a burglary tool in the form of a computer program."

But Goldstein escaped direct repression in 1990, because his magazine is printed on paper, and recognized as subject to Const.i.tutional freedom of the press protection.

As was seen in the Ramparts case, this is far from an absolute guarantee. Still, as a practical matter, shutting down 2600 by court-order would create so much legal ha.s.sle that it is simply unfeasible, at least for the present. Throughout 1990, both Goldstein and his magazine were peevishly thriving.

Instead, the Crackdown of 1990 would concern itself with the computerized version of forbidden data.

The crackdown itself, first and foremost, was about BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEMS. Bulletin Board Systems, most often known by the ugly and un-pluralizable acronym "BBS," are the life-blood of the digital underground. Boards were also central to law enforcement's tactics and strategy in the Hacker Crackdown.

A "bulletin board system" can be formally defined as a computer which serves as an information and message- pa.s.sing center for users dialing-up over the phone-lines through the use of modems. A "modem," or modulator- demodulator, is a device which translates the digital impulses of computers into audible a.n.a.log telephone signals, and vice versa. Modems connect computers to phones and thus to each other.

Large-scale mainframe computers have been connected since the 1960s, but PERSONAL computers, run by individuals out of their homes, were first networked in the late 1970s. The "board" created by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess in February 1978, in Chicago, Illinois, is generally regarded as the first personal-computer bulletin board system worthy of the name.

Boards run on many different machines, employing many different kinds of software. Early boards were crude and buggy, and their managers, known as "system operators" or "sysops,"

were hard-working technical experts who wrote their own software.

But like most everything else in the world of electronics, boards became faster, cheaper, better-designed, and generally far more sophisticated throughout the 1980s. They also moved swiftly out of the hands of pioneers and into those of the general public. By 1985 there were something in the neighborhood of 4,000 boards in America. By 1990 it was calculated, vaguely, that there were about 30,000 boards in the US, with uncounted thousands overseas.

Computer bulletin boards are unregulated enterprises.

Running a board is a rough-and-ready, catch-as-catch-can proposition.

Basically, anybody with a computer, modem, software and a phone-line can start a board. With second-hand equipment and public-domain free software, the price of a board might be quite small-- less than it would take to publish a magazine or even a decent pamphlet. Entrepreneurs eagerly sell bulletin-board software, and will coach nontechnical amateur sysops in its use.

Boards are not "presses." They are not magazines, or libraries, or phones, or CB radios, or traditional cork bulletin boards down at the local laundry, though they have some pa.s.sing resemblance to those earlier media.

Boards are a new medium--they may even be a LARGE NUMBER of new media.

Consider these unique characteristics: boards are cheap, yet they can have a national, even global reach.

Boards can be contacted from anywhere in the global telephone network, at NO COST to the person running the board-- the caller pays the phone bill, and if the caller is local, the call is free. Boards do not involve an editorial elite addressing a ma.s.s audience. The "sysop" of a board is not an exclusive publisher or writer--he is managing an electronic salon, where individuals can address the general public, play the part of the general public, and also exchange private mail with other individuals. And the "conversation" on boards, though fluid, rapid, and highly interactive, is not spoken, but written. It is also relatively anonymous, sometimes completely so.

And because boards are cheap and ubiquitous, regulations and licensing requirements would likely be practically unenforceable.

It would almost be easier to "regulate," "inspect," and "license"

the content of private mail--probably more so, since the mail system is operated by the federal government. Boards are run by individuals, independently, entirely at their own whim.

For the sysop, the cost of operation is not the primary limiting factor. Once the investment in a computer and modem has been made, the only steady cost is the charge for maintaining a phone line (or several phone lines).

The primary limits for sysops are time and energy.

Boards require upkeep. New users are generally "validated"-- they must be issued individual pa.s.swords, and called at home by voice-phone, so that their ident.i.ty can be verified. Obnoxious users, who exist in plenty, must be chided or purged. Proliferating messages must be deleted when they grow old, so that the capacity of the system is not overwhelmed. And software programs (if such things are kept on the board) must be examined for possible computer viruses. If there is a financial charge to use the board (increasingly common, especially in larger and fancier systems) then accounts must be kept, and users must be billed. And if the board crashes--a very common occurrence--then repairs must be made.

Boards can be distinguished by the amount of effort spent in regulating them. First, we have the completely open board, whose sysop is off chugging brews and watching re-runs while his users generally degenerate over time into peevish anarchy and eventual silence.

Second comes the supervised board, where the sysop breaks in every once in a while to tidy up, calm brawls, issue announcements, and rid the community of dolts and troublemakers. Third is the heavily supervised board, which sternly urges adult and responsible behavior and swiftly edits any message considered offensive, impertinent, illegal or irrelevant. And last comes the completely edited "electronic publication," which is presented to a silent audience which is not allowed to respond directly in any way.

Boards can also be grouped by their degree of anonymity.

There is the completely anonymous board, where everyone uses pseudonyms--"handles"--and even the sysop is unaware of the user's true ident.i.ty. The sysop himself is likely pseudonymous on a board of this type. Second, and rather more common, is the board where the sysop knows (or thinks he knows) the true names and addresses of all users, but the users don't know one another's names and may not know his.

Third is the board where everyone has to use real names, and roleplaying and pseudonymous posturing are forbidden.

Boards can be grouped by their immediacy. "Chat-lines"

are boards linking several users together over several different phone-lines simultaneously, so that people exchange messages at the very moment that they type.

(Many large boards feature "chat" capabilities along with other services.) Less immediate boards, perhaps with a single phoneline, store messages serially, one at a time. And some boards are only open for business in daylight hours or on weekends, which greatly slows response.

A NETWORK of boards, such as "FidoNet," can carry electronic mail from board to board, continent to continent, across huge distances-- but at a relative snail's pace, so that a message can take several days to reach its target audience and elicit a reply.

Boards can be grouped by their degree of community.

Some boards emphasize the exchange of private, person-to-person electronic mail. Others emphasize public postings and may even purge people who "lurk,"

merely reading posts but refusing to openly partic.i.p.ate.

Some boards are intimate and neighborly. Others are frosty and highly technical. Some are little more than storage dumps for software, where users "download" and "upload" programs, but interact among themselves little if at all.

Boards can be grouped by their ease of access. Some boards are entirely public. Others are private and restricted only to personal friends of the sysop. Some boards divide users by status.

On these boards, some users, especially beginners, strangers or children, will be restricted to general topics, and perhaps forbidden to post.

Favored users, though, are granted the ability to post as they please, and to stay "on-line" as long as they like, even to the disadvantage of other people trying to call in. High-status users can be given access to hidden areas in the board, such as off-color topics, private discussions, and/or valuable software. Favored users may even become "remote sysops"

with the power to take remote control of the board through their own home computers. Quite often "remote sysops" end up doing all the work and taking formal control of the enterprise, despite the fact that it's physically located in someone else's house. Sometimes several "co-sysops"

share power.

And boards can also be grouped by size. Ma.s.sive, nationwide commercial networks, such as CompuServe, Delphi, GEnie and Prodigy, are run on mainframe computers and are generally not considered "boards,"

though they share many of their characteristics, such as electronic mail, discussion topics, libraries of software, and persistent and growing problems with civil-liberties issues. Some private boards have as many as thirty phone-lines and quite sophisticated hardware. And then there are tiny boards.

Boards vary in popularity. Some boards are huge and crowded, where users must claw their way in against a constant busy-signal.

Others are huge and empty--there are few things sadder than a formerly flourishing board where no one posts any longer, and the dead conversations of vanished users lie about gathering digital dust. Some boards are tiny and intimate, their telephone numbers intentionally kept confidential so that only a small number can log on.

And some boards are UNDERGROUND.

Boards can be mysterious ent.i.ties. The activities of their users can be hard to differentiate from conspiracy.

Sometimes they ARE conspiracies. Boards have harbored, or have been accused of harboring, all manner of fringe groups, and have abetted, or been accused of abetting, every manner of frowned-upon, sleazy, radical, and criminal activity.

There are Satanist boards. n.a.z.i boards. p.o.r.nographic boards.

Pedophile boards. Drug- dealing boards. Anarchist boards.

Communist boards. Gay and Lesbian boards (these exist in great profusion, many of them quite lively with well-established histories).

Religious cult boards. Evangelical boards. Witchcraft boards, hippie boards, punk boards, skateboarder boards.

Boards for UFO believers. There may well be boards for serial killers, airline terrorists and professional a.s.sa.s.sins.

There is simply no way to tell. Boards spring up, flourish, and disappear in large numbers, in most every corner of the developed world. Even apparently innocuous public boards can, and sometimes do, harbor secret areas known only to a few. And even on the vast, public, commercial services, private mail is very private--and quite possibly criminal.

Boards cover most every topic imaginable and some that are hard to imagine. They cover a vast spectrum of social activity. However, all board users do have something in common: their possession of computers and phones. Naturally, computers and phones are primary topics of conversation on almost every board.