The Hacker Crackdown Part 5

That cause was the AT&T Crash of January 15, 1990.

After the Crash, the wounded and anxious telephone community would come out fighting hard.

The community of telephone technicians, engineers, operators and researchers is the oldest community in cybers.p.a.ce.

These are the veterans, the most developed group, the richest, the most respectable, in most ways the most powerful.

Whole generations have come and gone since Alexander Graham Bell's day, but the community he founded survives; people work for the phone system today whose great-grandparents worked for the phone system.

Its specialty magazines, such as Telephony, AT&T Technical Journal, Telephone Engineer and Management, are decades old; they make computer publications like Macworld and PC Week look like amateur johnny-come-latelies.

And the phone companies take no back seat in high-technology, either.

Other companies' industrial researchers may have won new markets; but the researchers of Bell Labs have won SEVEN n.o.bEL PRIZES.

One potent device that Bell Labs originated, the transistor, has created entire GROUPS of industries. Bell Labs are world-famous for generating "a patent a day," and have even made vital discoveries in astronomy, physics and cosmology.

Throughout its seventy-year history, "Ma Bell" was not so much a company as a way of life. Until the cataclysmic divest.i.ture of the 1980s, Ma Bell was perhaps the ultimate maternalist mega-employer.

The AT&T corporate image was the "gentle giant," "the voice with a smile,"

a vaguely socialist-realist world of cleanshaven linemen in shiny helmets and blandly pretty phone-girls in headsets and nylons. Bell System employees were famous as rock-ribbed Kiwanis and Rotary members, Little-League enthusiasts, school-board people.

During the long heyday of Ma Bell, the Bell employee corps were nurtured top-to-bottom on a corporate ethos of public service.

There was good money in Bell, but Bell was not ABOUT money; Bell used public relations, but never mere marketeering.

People went into the Bell System for a good life, and they had a good life. But it was not mere money that led Bell people out in the midst of storms and earthquakes to fight with toppled phone-poles, to wade in flooded manholes, to pull the red-eyed graveyard-shift over collapsing switching-systems.

The Bell ethic was the electrical equivalent of the postman's: neither rain, nor snow, nor gloom of night would stop these couriers.

It is easy to be cynical about this, as it is easy to be cynical about any political or social system; but cynicism does not change the fact that thousands of people took these ideals very seriously. And some still do.

The Bell ethos was about public service; and that was gratifying; but it was also about private POWER, and that was gratifying too. As a corporation, Bell was very special.

Bell was privileged. Bell had snuggled up close to the state.

In fact, Bell was as close to government as you could get in America and still make a whole lot of legitimate money.

But unlike other companies, Bell was above and beyond the vulgar commercial fray. Through its regional operating companies, Bell was omnipresent, local, and intimate, all over America; but the central ivory towers at its corporate heart were the tallest and the ivoriest around.

There were other phone companies in America, to be sure; the so-called independents. Rural cooperatives, mostly; small fry, mostly tolerated, sometimes warred upon.

For many decades, "independent" American phone companies lived in fear and loathing of the official Bell monopoly (or the "Bell Octopus," as Ma Bell's nineteenth-century enemies described her in many angry newspaper manifestos).

Some few of these independent entrepreneurs, while legally in the wrong, fought so bitterly against the Octopus that their illegal phone networks were cast into the street by Bell agents and publicly burned.

The pure technical sweetness of the Bell System gave its operators, inventors and engineers a deeply satisfying sense of power and mastery.

They had devoted their lives to improving this vast nation-spanning machine; over years, whole human lives, they had watched it improve and grow.

It was like a great technological temple. They were an elite, and they knew it--even if others did not; in fact, they felt even more powerful BECAUSE others did not understand.

The deep attraction of this sensation of elite technical power should never be underestimated. "Technical power" is not for everybody; for many people it simply has no charm at all. But for some people, it becomes the core of their lives. For a few, it is overwhelming, obsessive; it becomes something close to an addiction. People--especially clever teenage boys whose lives are otherwise mostly powerless and put-upon --love this sensation of secret power, and are willing to do all sorts of amazing things to achieve it. The technical POWER of electronics has motivated many strange acts detailed in this book, which would otherwise be inexplicable.

So Bell had power beyond mere capitalism. The Bell service ethos worked, and was often propagandized, in a rather saccharine fashion. Over the decades, people slowly grew tired of this. And then, openly impatient with it.

By the early 1980s, Ma Bell was to find herself with scarcely a real friend in the world. Vail's industrial socialism had become hopelessly out-of-fashion politically. Bell would be punished for that.

And that punishment would fall harshly upon the people of the telephone community.

In 1983, Ma Bell was dismantled by federal court action.

The pieces of Bell are now separate corporate ent.i.ties.

The core of the company became AT&T Communications, and also AT&T Industries (formerly Western Electric, Bell's manufacturing arm). AT&T Bell Labs became Bell Communications Research, Bellcore. Then there are the Regional Bell Operating Companies, or RBOCs, p.r.o.nounced "arbocks."

Bell was a t.i.tan and even these regional chunks are gigantic enterprises: Fortune 50 companies with plenty of wealth and power behind them.

But the clean lines of "One Policy, One System, Universal Service"

have been shattered, apparently forever.

The "One Policy" of the early Reagan Administration was to shatter a system that smacked of noncompet.i.tive socialism.

Since that time, there has been no real telephone "policy"

on the federal level. Despite the breakup, the remnants of Bell have never been set free to compete in the open marketplace.

The RBOCs are still very heavily regulated, but not from the top.

Instead, they struggle politically, economically and legally, in what seems an endless turmoil, in a patchwork of overlapping federal and state jurisdictions. Increasingly, like other major American corporations, the RBOCs are becoming multinational, acquiring important commercial interests in Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific Rim. But this, too, adds to their legal and political predicament.

The people of what used to be Ma Bell are not happy about their fate.

They feel ill-used. They might have been grudgingly willing to make a full transition to the free market; to become just companies amid other companies. But this never happened. Instead, AT&T and the RBOCS ("the Baby Bells") feel themselves wrenched from side to side by state regulators, by Congress, by the FCC, and especially by the federal court of Judge Harold Greene, the magistrate who ordered the Bell breakup and who has been the de facto czar of American telecommunications ever since 1983.

Bell people feel that they exist in a kind of paralegal limbo today.

They don't understand what's demanded of them. If it's "service,"

why aren't they treated like a public service? And if it's money, then why aren't they free to compete for it? No one seems to know, really. Those who claim to know keep changing their minds.

n.o.body in authority seems willing to grasp the nettle for once and all.

Telephone people from other countries are amazed by the American telephone system today. Not that it works so well; for nowadays even the French telephone system works, more or less.

They are amazed that the American telephone system STILL works AT ALL, under these strange conditions.

Bell's "One System" of long-distance service is now only about eighty percent of a system, with the remainder held by Sprint, MCI, and the midget long-distance companies. Ugly wars over dubious corporate practices such as "slamming" (an underhanded method of snitching clients from rivals) break out with some regularity in the realm of long-distance service. The battle to break Bell's long-distance monopoly was long and ugly, and since the breakup the battlefield has not become much prettier. AT&T's famous shame-and-blame advertis.e.m.e.nts, which emphasized the shoddy work and purported ethical shadiness of their compet.i.tors, were much remarked on for their studied psychological cruelty.

There is much bad blood in this industry, and much long-treasured resentment. AT&T's post-breakup corporate logo, a striped sphere, is known in the industry as the "Death Star" (a reference from the movie Star Wars, in which the "Death Star" was the spherical high- tech fortress of the harsh-breathing imperial ultra-baddie, Darth Vader.) Even AT&T employees are less than thrilled by the Death Star. A popular (though banned) T-shirt among AT&T employees bears the old-fashioned Bell logo of the Bell System, plus the newfangled striped sphere, with the before-and-after comments: "This is your brain--This is your brain on drugs!" AT&T made a very well-financed and determined effort to break into the personal computer market; it was disastrous, and telco computer experts are derisively known by their compet.i.tors as "the pole-climbers."

AT&T and the Baby Bell arbocks still seem to have few friends.

Under conditions of sharp commercial compet.i.tion, a crash like that of January 15, 1990 was a major embarra.s.sment to AT&T.

It was a direct blow against their much-treasured reputation for reliability. Within days of the crash AT&T's Chief Executive Officer, Bob Allen, officially apologized, in terms of deeply pained humility:

"AT&T had a major service disruption last Monday.

We didn't live up to our own standards of quality, and we didn't live up to yours. It's as simple as that.

And that's not acceptable to us. Or to you. . . .

We understand how much people have come to depend upon AT&T service, so our AT&T Bell Laboratories scientists and our network engineers are doing everything possible to guard against a recurrence. . . . We know there's no way to make up for the inconvenience this problem may have caused you."

Mr Allen's "open letter to customers" was printed in lavish ads all over the country: in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle Examiner, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Detroit Free Press, Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Atlanta Journal Const.i.tution, Minneapolis Star Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch, Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer, Tacoma News Tribune, Miami Herald, Pittsburgh Press, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Denver Post, Phoenix Republic Gazette and Tampa Tribune.

In another press release, AT&T went to some pains to suggest that this "software glitch" might have happened just as easily to MCI, although, in fact, it hadn't. (MCI's switching software was quite different from AT&T's--though not necessarily any safer.) AT&T also announced their plans to offer a rebate of service on Valentine's Day to make up for the loss during the Crash.

"Every technical resource available, including Bell Labs scientists and engineers, has been devoted to a.s.suring it will not occur again," the public was told. They were further a.s.sured that "The chances of a recurrence are small-- a problem of this magnitude never occurred before."

In the meantime, however, police and corporate security maintained their own suspicions about "the chances of recurrence" and the real reason why a "problem of this magnitude" had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. Police and security knew for a fact that hackers of unprecedented sophistication were illegally entering, and reprogramming, certain digital switching stations.

Rumors of hidden "viruses" and secret "logic bombs"

in the switches ran rampant in the underground, with much chortling over AT&T's predicament, and idle speculation over what unsung hacker genius was responsible for it. Some hackers, including police informants, were trying hard to finger one another as the true culprits of the Crash.

Telco people found little comfort in objectivity when they contemplated these possibilities. It was just too close to the bone for them; it was embarra.s.sing; it hurt so much, it was hard even to talk about.

There has always been thieving and misbehavior in the phone system.

There has always been trouble with the rival independents, and in the local loops. But to have such trouble in the core of the system, the long-distance switching stations, is a horrifying affair. To telco people, this is all the difference between finding roaches in your kitchen and big horrid sewer-rats in your bedroom.