The Hacker Crackdown Part 37

People who run boards violently resent it when their systems are seized, and their dozens (or hundreds) of users look on in abject horror.

Their rights of free expression are cut short. Their right to a.s.sociate with other people is infringed. And their privacy is violated as their private electronic mail becomes police property.

Not a soul spoke up to defend the practice of seizing boards.

The issue pa.s.sed in chastened silence. Legal principles aside-- (and those principles cannot be settled without laws pa.s.sed or court precedents)--seizing bulletin boards has become public-relations poison for American computer police.

And anyway, it's not entirely necessary. If you're a cop, you can get 'most everything you need from a pirate board, just by using an inside informant.

Plenty of vigilantes--well, CONCERNED CITIZENS--will inform police the moment they see a pirate board hit their area (and will tell the police all about it, in such technical detail, actually, that you kinda wish they'd shut up).

They will happily supply police with extensive downloads or printouts.

It's IMPOSSIBLE to keep this fluid electronic information out of the hands of police.

Some people in the electronic community become enraged at the prospect of cops "monitoring" bulletin boards. This does have touchy aspects, as Secret Service people in particular examine bulletin boards with some regularity. But to expect electronic police to be deaf dumb and blind in regard to this particular medium rather flies in the face of common sense. Police watch television, listen to radio, read newspapers and magazines; why should the new medium of boards be different?

Cops can exercise the same access to electronic information as everybody else. As we have seen, quite a few computer police maintain THEIR OWN bulletin boards, including anti-hacker "sting" boards, which have generally proven quite effective.

As a final clincher, their Mountie friends in Canada (and colleagues in Ireland and Taiwan) don't have First Amendment or American const.i.tutional restrictions, but they do have phone lines, and can call any bulletin board in America whenever they please.

The same technological determinants that play into the hands of hackers, phone phreaks and software pirates can play into the hands of police.

"Technological determinants" don't have ANY human allegiances.

They're not black or white, or Establishment or Underground, or pro-or-anti anything.

G.o.dwin complained at length about what he called "the Clever Hobbyist hypothesis" --the a.s.sumption that the "hacker" you're busting is clearly a technical genius, and must therefore by searched with extreme thoroughness.

So: from the law's point of view, why risk missing anything? Take the works.

Take the guy's computer. Take his books. Take his notebooks.

Take the electronic drafts of his love letters. Take his Walkman.

Take his wife's computer. Take his dad's computer. Take his kid sister's computer. Take his employer's computer. Take his compact disks-- they MIGHT be CD-ROM disks, cunningly disguised as pop music.

Take his laser printer--he might have hidden something vital in the printer's 5meg of memory. Take his software manuals and hardware doc.u.mentation. Take his science-fiction novels and his simulation- gaming books. Take his Nintendo Game-Boy and his Pac-Man arcade game.

Take his answering machine, take his telephone out of the wall.

Take anything remotely suspicious.

G.o.dwin pointed out that most "hackers" are not, in fact, clever genius hobbyists. Quite a few are crooks and grifters who don't have much in the way of technical sophistication; just some rule-of-thumb rip-off techniques. The same goes for most fifteen-year-olds who've downloaded a code-scanning program from a pirate board. There's no real need to seize everything in sight. It doesn't require an entire computer system and ten thousand disks to prove a case in court.

What if the computer is the instrumentality of a crime? someone demanded.

G.o.dwin admitted quietly that the doctrine of seizing the instrumentality of a crime was pretty well established in the American legal system.

The meeting broke up. G.o.dwin and Kapor had to leave. Kapor was testifying next morning before the Ma.s.sachusetts Department Of Public Utility, about ISDN narrowband wide-area networking.

As soon as they were gone, Thackeray seemed elated.

She had taken a great risk with this. Her colleagues had not, in fact, torn Kapor and G.o.dwin's heads off. She was very proud of them, and told them so.

"Did you hear what G.o.dwin said about INSTRUMENTALITY OF A CRIME?"

she exulted, to n.o.body in particular. "Wow, that means MITCH ISN'T GOING TO SUE ME."

America's computer police are an interesting group.

As a social phenomenon they are far more interesting, and far more important, than teenage phone phreaks and computer hackers. First, they're older and wiser; not dizzy hobbyists with leaky morals, but seasoned adult professionals with all the responsibilities of public service.

And, unlike hackers, they possess not merely TECHNICAL power alone, but heavy-duty legal and social authority.

And, very interestingly, they are just as much at sea in cybers.p.a.ce as everyone else. They are not happy about this. Police are authoritarian by nature, and prefer to obey rules and precedents. (Even those police who secretly enjoy a fast ride in rough territory will soberly disclaim any "cowboy" att.i.tude.) But in cybers.p.a.ce there ARE no rules and precedents. They are groundbreaking pioneers, Cybers.p.a.ce Rangers, whether they like it or not.

In my opinion, any teenager enthralled by computers, fascinated by the ins and outs of computer security, and attracted by the lure of specialized forms of knowledge and power, would do well to forget all about "hacking" and set his (or her) sights on becoming a fed. Feds can trump hackers at almost every single thing hackers do, including gathering intelligence, undercover disguise, trashing, phone-tapping, building dossiers, networking, and infiltrating computer systems--CRIMINAL computer systems.

Secret Service agents know more about phreaking, coding and carding than most phreaks can find out in years, and when it comes to viruses, break-ins, software bombs and trojan horses, Feds have direct access to red-hot confidential information that is only vague rumor in the underground.

And if it's an impressive public rep you're after, there are few people in the world who can be so chillingly impressive as a well-trained, well-armed United States Secret Service agent.

Of course, a few personal sacrifices are necessary in order to obtain that power and knowledge. First, you'll have the galling discipline of belonging to a large organization; but the world of computer crime is still so small, and so amazingly fast-moving, that it will remain spectacularly fluid for years to come. The second sacrifice is that you'll have to give up ripping people off. This is not a great loss.

Abstaining from the use of illegal drugs, also necessary, will be a boon to your health.

A career in computer security is not a bad choice for a young man or woman today. The field will almost certainly expand drastically in years to come. If you are a teenager today, by the time you become a professional, the pioneers you have read about in this book will be the grand old men and women of the field, swamped by their many disciples and successors. Of course, some of them, like William P. Wood of the 1865 Secret Service, may well be mangled in the whirring machinery of legal controversy; but by the time you enter the computer-crime field, it may have stabilized somewhat, while remaining entertainingly challenging.

But you can't just have a badge. You have to win it. First, there's the federal law enforcement training. And it's hard--it's a challenge.

A real challenge--not for wimps and rodents.

Every Secret Service agent must complete gruelling courses at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. (In fact, Secret Service agents are periodically re-trained during their entire careers.)

In order to get a glimpse of what this might be like, I myself travelled to FLETC.

The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center is a 1500-acre facility on Georgia's Atlantic coast. It's a milieu of marshgra.s.s, seabirds, damp, clinging sea-breezes, palmettos, mosquitos, and bats.

Until 1974, it was a Navy Air Base, and still features a working runway, and some WWII vintage blockhouses and officers' quarters.

The Center has since benefitted by a forty-million-dollar retrofit, but there's still enough forest and swamp on the facility for the Border Patrol to put in tracking practice.

As a town, "Glynco" scarcely exists. The nearest real town is Brunswick, a few miles down Highway 17, where I stayed at the aptly named Marshview Holiday Inn. I had Sunday dinner at a seafood restaurant called "Jinright's,"

where I feasted on deep-fried alligator tail. This local favorite was a heaped basket of bite-sized chunks of white, tender, almost fluffy reptile meat, steaming in a peppered batter crust. Alligator makes a culinary experience that's hard to forget, especially when liberally basted with homemade c.o.c.ktail sauce from a Jinright squeeze-bottle.

The crowded clientele were tourists, fishermen, local black folks in their Sunday best, and white Georgian locals who all seemed to bear an uncanny resemblance to Georgia humorist Lewis Grizzard.

The 2,400 students from 75 federal agencies who make up the FLETC population scarcely seem to make a dent in the low-key local scene.

The students look like tourists, and the teachers seem to have taken on much of the relaxed air of the Deep South. My host was Mr. Carlton Fitzpatrick, the Program Coordinator of the Financial Fraud Inst.i.tute.

Carlton Fitzpatrick is a mustached, sinewy, well-tanned Alabama native somewhere near his late forties, with a fondness for chewing tobacco, powerful computers, and salty, down-home homilies. We'd met before, at FCIC in Arizona.

The Financial Fraud Inst.i.tute is one of the nine divisions at FLETC.

Besides Financial Fraud, there's Driver & Marine, Firearms, and Physical Training. These are specialized pursuits.

There are also five general training divisions: Basic Training, Operations, Enforcement Techniques, Legal Division, and Behavioral Science.

Somewhere in this curriculum is everything necessary to turn green college graduates into federal agents. First they're given ID cards. Then they get the rather miserable-looking blue coveralls known as "smurf suits."

The trainees are a.s.signed a barracks and a cafeteria, and immediately set on FLETC's bone-grinding physical training routine. Besides the obligatory daily jogging--(the trainers run up danger flags beside the track when the humidity rises high enough to threaten heat stroke)-- here's the Nautilus machines, the martial arts, the survival skills. . . .

The eighteen federal agencies who maintain on-site academies at FLETC employ a wide variety of specialized law enforcement units, some of them rather arcane. There's Border Patrol, IRS Criminal Investigation Division, Park Service, Fish and Wildlife, Customs, Immigration, Secret Service and the Treasury's uniformed subdivisions. . . . If you're a federal cop and you don't work for the FBI, you train at FLETC. This includes people as apparently obscure as the agents of the Railroad Retirement Board Inspector General. Or the Tennessee Valley Authority Police, who are in fact federal police officers, and can and do arrest criminals on the federal property of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

And then there are the computer-crime people. All sorts, all backgrounds.

Mr. Fitzpatrick is not jealous of his specialized knowledge. Cops all over, in every branch of service, may feel a need to learn what he can teach.

Backgrounds don't matter much. Fitzpatrick himself was originally a Border Patrol veteran, then became a Border Patrol instructor at FLETC.

His Spanish is still fluent--but he found himself strangely fascinated when the first computers showed up at the Training Center. Fitzpatrick did have a background in electrical engineering, and though he never considered himself a computer hacker, he somehow found himself writing useful little programs for this new and promising gizmo.

He began looking into the general subject of computers and crime, reading Donn Parker's books and articles, keeping an ear c.o.c.ked for war stories, useful insights from the field, the up-and-coming people of the local computer-crime and high-technology units. . . .

Soon he got a reputation around FLETC as the resident "computer expert,"

and that reputation alone brought him more exposure, more experience-- until one day he looked around, and sure enough he WAS a federal computer-crime expert.