The Hacker Crackdown Part 36

Hackers know, for instance, how to sneak into your computer through the phone-lines. But cops can show up RIGHT ON YOUR DOORSTEP and carry off YOU and your computer in separate steel boxes.

A cop interested in hackers can grab them and grill them.

A hacker interested in cops has to depend on hearsay, underground legends, and what cops are willing to publicly reveal.

And the Secret Service didn't get named "the SECRET Service"

because they blab a lot.

Some people, our lecturer informed us, were under the mistaken impression that it was "impossible" to tap a fiber-optic line.

Well, he announced, he and his son had just whipped up a fiber-optic tap in his workshop at home. He pa.s.sed it around the audience, along with a circuit-covered LAN plug-in card so we'd all recognize one if we saw it on a case. We all had a look.

The tap was a cla.s.sic "Goofy Prototype"--a thumb-length rounded metal cylinder with a pair of plastic brackets on it.

From one end dangled three thin black cables, each of which ended in a tiny black plastic cap. When you plucked the safety-cap off the end of a cable, you could see the gla.s.s fiber-- no thicker than a pinhole.

Our lecturer informed us that the metal cylinder was a "wavelength division multiplexer." Apparently, what one did was to cut the fiber-optic cable, insert two of the legs into the cut to complete the network again, and then read any pa.s.sing data on the line by hooking up the third leg to some kind of monitor.

Sounded simple enough. I wondered why n.o.body had thought of it before.

I also wondered whether this guy's son back at the workshop had any teenage friends.

We had a break. The guy sitting next to me was wearing a giveaway baseball cap advertising the Uzi submachine gun. We had a desultory chat about the merits of Uzis. Long a favorite of the Secret Service, it seems Uzis went out of fashion with the advent of the Persian Gulf War, our Arab allies taking some offense at Americans toting Israeli weapons.

Besides, I was informed by another expert, Uzis jam. The equivalent weapon of choice today is the Heckler & Koch, manufactured in Germany.

The guy with the Uzi cap was a forensic photographer. He also did a lot of photographic surveillance work in computer crime cases. He used to, that is, until the firings in Phoenix. He was now a private investigator and, with his wife, ran a photography salon specializing in weddings and portrait photos. At--one must repeat--a considerable rise in income.

He was still FCIC. If you were FCIC, and you needed to talk to an expert about forensic photography, well, there he was, willing and able. If he hadn't shown up, people would have missed him.

Our lecturer had raised the point that preliminary investigation of a computer system is vital before any seizure is undertaken.

It's vital to understand how many machines are in there, what kinds there are, what kind of operating system they use, how many people use them, where the actual data itself is stored. To simply barge into an office demanding "all the computers" is a recipe for swift disaster.

This entails some discreet inquiries beforehand. In fact, what it entails is basically undercover work. An intelligence operation.

SPYING, not to put too fine a point on it.

In a chat after the lecture, I asked an attendee whether "trashing" might work.

I received a swift briefing on the theory and practice of "trash covers."

Police "trash covers," like "mail covers" or like wiretaps, require the agreement of a judge. This obtained, the "trashing" work of cops is just like that of hackers, only more so and much better organized. So much so, I was informed, that mobsters in Phoenix make extensive use of locked garbage cans picked up by a specialty high-security trash company.

In one case, a tiger team of Arizona cops had trashed a local residence for four months. Every week they showed up on the munic.i.p.al garbage truck, disguised as garbagemen, and carried the contents of the suspect cans off to a shade tree, where they combed through the garbage--a messy task, especially considering that one of the occupants was undergoing kidney dialysis. All useful doc.u.ments were cleaned, dried and examined.

A discarded typewriter-ribbon was an especially valuable source of data, as its long one-strike ribbon of film contained the contents of every letter mailed out of the house. The letters were neatly retyped by a police secretary equipped with a large desk-mounted magnifying gla.s.s.

There is something weirdly disquieting about the whole subject of "trashing"-- an unsuspected and indeed rather disgusting mode of deep personal vulnerability. Things that we pa.s.s by every day, that we take utterly for granted, can be exploited with so little work.

Once discovered, the knowledge of these vulnerabilities tend to spread.

Take the lowly subject of MANHOLE COVERS. The humble manhole cover reproduces many of the dilemmas of computer-security in miniature.

Manhole covers are, of course, technological artifacts, access-points to our buried urban infrastructure. To the vast majority of us, manhole covers are invisible. They are also vulnerable. For many years now, the Secret Service has made a point of caulking manhole covers along all routes of the Presidential motorcade. This is, of course, to deter terrorists from leaping out of underground ambush or, more likely, planting remote-control car-smashing bombs beneath the street.

Lately, manhole covers have seen more and more criminal exploitation, especially in New York City. Recently, a telco in New York City discovered that a cable television service had been sneaking into telco manholes and installing cable service alongside the phone-lines-- WITHOUT PAYING ROYALTIES. New York companies have also suffered a general plague of (a) underground copper cable theft; (b) dumping of garbage, including toxic waste, and (c) hasty dumping of murder victims.

Industry complaints reached the ears of an innovative New England industrial-security company, and the result was a new product known as "the Intimidator," a thick t.i.tanium-steel bolt with a precisely machined head that requires a special device to unscrew. All these "keys" have registered serial numbers kept on file with the manufacturer. There are now some thousands of these "Intimidator" bolts being sunk into American pavements wherever our President pa.s.ses, like some macabre parody of strewn roses.

They are also spreading as fast as steel dandelions around US military bases and many centers of private industry.

Quite likely it has never occurred to you to peer under a manhole cover, perhaps climb down and walk around down there with a flashlight, just to see what it's like. Formally speaking, this might be trespa.s.sing, but if you didn't hurt anything, and didn't make an absolute habit of it, n.o.body would really care. The freedom to sneak under manholes was likely a freedom you never intended to exercise.

You now are rather less likely to have that freedom at all.

You may never even have missed it until you read about it here, but if you're in New York City it's gone, and elsewhere it's likely going.

This is one of the things that crime, and the reaction to crime, does to us.

The tenor of the meeting now changed as the Electronic Frontier Foundation arrived. The EFF, whose personnel and history will be examined in detail in the next chapter, are a pioneering civil liberties group who arose in direct response to the Hacker Crackdown of 1990.

Now Mitch.e.l.l Kapor, the Foundation's president, and Michael G.o.dwin, its chief attorney, were confronting federal law enforcement MANO A MANO for the first time ever. Ever alert to the manifold uses of publicity, Mitch Kapor and Mike G.o.dwin had brought their own journalist in tow: Robert Draper, from Austin, whose recent well-received book about ROLLING STONE magazine was still on the stands. Draper was on a.s.signment for TEXAS MONTHLY.

The Steve Jackson/EFF civil lawsuit against the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force was a matter of considerable regional interest in Texas.

There were now two Austinite journalists here on the case. In fact, counting G.o.dwin (a former Austinite and former journalist) there were three of us. Lunch was like Old Home Week.

Later, I took Draper up to my hotel room. We had a long frank talk about the case, networking earnestly like a miniature freelance-journo version of the FCIC: privately confessing the numerous blunders of journalists covering the story, and trying hard to figure out who was who and what the h.e.l.l was really going on out there.

I showed Draper everything I had dug out of the Hilton trashcan.

We pondered the ethics of "trashing" for a while, and agreed that they were dismal. We also agreed that finding a SPRINT bill on your first time out was a heck of a coincidence.

First I'd "trashed"--and now, mere hours later, I'd bragged to someone else.

Having entered the lifestyle of hackerdom, I was now, unsurprisingly, following its logic. Having discovered something remarkable through a surrept.i.tious action, I of course HAD to "brag," and to drag the pa.s.sing Draper into my iniquities. I felt I needed a witness. Otherwise n.o.body would have believed what I'd discovered. . . .

Back at the meeting, Thackeray cordially, if rather tentatively, introduced Kapor and G.o.dwin to her colleagues. Papers were distributed.

Kapor took center stage. The brilliant Bostonian high-tech entrepreneur, normally the hawk in his own administration and quite an effective public speaker, seemed visibly nervous, and frankly admitted as much.

He began by saying he consided computer-intrusion to be morally wrong, and that the EFF was not a "hacker defense fund," despite what had appeared in print. Kapor chatted a bit about the basic motivations of his group, emphasizing their good faith and willingness to listen and seek common ground with law enforcement--when, er, possible.

Then, at G.o.dwin's urging, Kapor suddenly remarked that EFF's own Internet machine had been "hacked" recently, and that EFF did not consider this incident amusing.

After this surprising confession, things began to loosen up quite rapidly. Soon Kapor was fielding questions, parrying objections, challenging definitions, and juggling paradigms with something akin to his usual gusto.

Kapor seemed to score quite an effect with his shrewd and skeptical a.n.a.lysis of the merits of telco "Caller-ID" services. (On this topic, FCIC and EFF have never been at loggerheads, and have no particular established earthworks to defend.) Caller-ID has generally been promoted as a privacy service for consumers, a presentation Kapor described as a "smokescreen,"

the real point of Caller-ID being to ALLOW CORPORATE CUSTOMERS TO BUILD EXTENSIVE COMMERCIAL DATABASES ON EVERYBODY WHO PHONES OR FAXES THEM.

Clearly, few people in the room had considered this possibility, except perhaps for two late-arrivals from US WEST RBOC security, who chuckled nervously.

Mike G.o.dwin then made an extensive presentation on "Civil Liberties Implications of Computer Searches and Seizures."

Now, at last, we were getting to the real nitty-gritty here, real political horse-trading. The audience listened with close attention, angry mutters rising occasionally: "He's trying to teach us our jobs!" "We've been thinking about this for years!

We think about these issues every day!" "If I didn't seize the works, I'd be sued by the guy's victims!" "I'm violating the law if I leave ten thousand disks full of illegal PIRATED SOFTWARE and STOLEN CODES!"

"It's our job to make sure people don't trash the Const.i.tution-- we're the DEFENDERS of the Const.i.tution!" "We seize stuff when we know it will be forfeited anyway as rest.i.tution for the victim!"

"If it's forfeitable, then don't get a search warrant, get a forfeiture warrant," G.o.dwin suggested coolly. He further remarked that most suspects in computer crime don't WANT to see their computers vanish out the door, headed G.o.d knew where, for who knows how long.

They might not mind a search, even an extensive search, but they want their machines searched on-site.

"Are they gonna feed us?" somebody asked sourly.

"How about if you take copies of the data?" G.o.dwin parried.

"That'll never stand up in court."

"Okay, you make copies, give THEM the copies, and take the originals."

Hmmm.

G.o.dwin championed bulletin-board systems as repositories of First Amendment protected free speech. He complained that federal computer-crime training manuals gave boards a bad press, suggesting that they are hotbeds of crime haunted by pedophiles and crooks, whereas the vast majority of the nation's thousands of boards are completely innocuous, and nowhere near so romantically suspicious.