The Hacker Crackdown Part 2

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.

Introduction

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 "cybers.p.a.ce" in 1982, but the territory in question, the electronic frontier, is about a hundred and thirty years old. Cybers.p.a.ce 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," "cybers.p.a.ce" 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 "s.p.a.ce,"

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 cybers.p.a.ce, nothing you can handle, it has a strange kind of physicality now. It makes good sense today to talk of cybers.p.a.ce 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. Cybers.p.a.ce 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 cybers.p.a.ce.

Scientists and technicians, of course; they've been there for twenty years now. But increasingly, cybers.p.a.ce 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 cybers.p.a.ce today; chattering, gossiping, 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 pa.s.s one another computer software and the occasional festering computer virus.

We do not really understand how to live in cybers.p.a.ce 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 cybers.p.a.ce. The way we live in cybers.p.a.ce 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 cybers.p.a.ce.

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 cybers.p.a.ce. Where people go, politics follow.

This is the story of the people of cybers.p.a.ce.

PART ONE: Crashing the System

On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance telephone switching system crashed.

This was a strange, dire, huge event. Sixty thousand people lost their telephone service completely. During the nine long hours of frantic effort that it took to restore service, some seventy million telephone calls went uncompleted.

Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco trade, are a known and accepted hazard of the telephone business.

Hurricanes. .h.i.t, and phone cables get snapped by the thousands.

Earthquakes wrench through buried fiber-optic lines.

Switching stations catch fire and burn to the ground.

These things do happen. There are contingency plans for them, and decades of experience in dealing with them.

But the Crash of January 15 was unprecedented.

It was unbelievably huge, and it occurred for no apparent physical reason.

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

Within nine hours, AT&T software engineers more or less understood what had caused the crash. Replicating the problem exactly, poring over software line by line, took them a couple of weeks. But because it was hard to understand technically, the full truth of the matter and its implications were not widely and thoroughly aired and explained. The root cause of the crash remained obscure, surrounded by rumor and fear.

The crash was a grave corporate embarra.s.sment.

The "culprit" was a bug in AT&T's own software--not the sort of admission the telecommunications giant wanted to make, especially in the face of increasing compet.i.tion.

Still, the truth WAS told, in the baffling technical terms necessary to explain it.

Somehow the explanation failed to persuade American law enforcement officials and even telephone corporate security personnel. These people were not technical experts or software wizards, and they had their own suspicions about the cause of this disaster.

The police and telco security had important sources of information denied to mere software engineers.

They had informants in the computer underground and years of experience in dealing with high-tech rascality that seemed to grow ever more sophisticated.

For years they had been expecting a direct and savage attack against the American national telephone system.

And with the Crash of January 15--the first month of a new, high-tech decade--their predictions, fears, and suspicions seemed at last to have entered the real world.

A world where the telephone system had not merely crashed, but, quite likely, BEEN crashed--by "hackers."

The crash created a large dark cloud of suspicion that would color certain people's a.s.sumptions and actions for months. The fact that it took place in the realm of software was suspicious on its face. The fact that it occurred on Martin Luther King Day, still the most politically touchy of American holidays, made it more suspicious yet.

The Crash of January 15 gave the Hacker Crackdown its sense of edge and its sweaty urgency. It made people, powerful people in positions of public authority, willing to believe the worst. And, most fatally, it helped to give investigators a willingness to take extreme measures and the determination to preserve almost total secrecy.

An obscure software fault in an aging switching system in New York was to lead to a chain reaction of legal and const.i.tutional trouble all across the country.