I brought this to their attention, and although nothing happened until President Bill Clinton finally got around to issuing an executive order about it in 1993, the Government Printing Office began using only recycled paper. Which was a fuck of a lot of paper. So in the final analysis, a few good things came of this meeting. Not the least of which is my own indelibly inscribed memory of Jerry Garcia interacting in a none-too-positive manner with all the Lords of the Public Domain.
THIRTY
PHIBER OPTIK AND ACID PHREAK
I was still working on the book for Viking Press and determined to deliver it to them when I suddenly became part of the story. One of the first things that happened was that I attended a hackers’ conference meeting in San Francisco. This was not the dread thing that people think when someone now uses the word hacker. At that time, the hackers’ conference was a pretty crusty boys’ camp of aging graybeards who had done an awful lot to produce the original Internet and personal computer technology and they were very free and open about what they were doing without much skulking around. At that meeting, I met John Gilmore, who had been the fifth person to go to work at Sun Microsystems. John had then founded Cygnus Solutions, a company that made free software available for commercial use, and so had more than enough money to do just about anything he wanted.
By then, I had become deeply immersed in trying to wrap my head around how to make the book less about new corporate forms and more about society and how it was going to be altered as we entered into what came to be known as cyberspace. Because I could see that incredibly profound changes were already taking place.
At the online forum that Harper’s Magazine had put together in December 1989, the participants included two skate punks whose adopted screen names were entirely ironic—Acid Phreak and Phiber Optik. As I later learned, their real names were Elias Ladopoulos and Mark Abene, and throughout the discussion they were all over everybody with an in-your-face attitude about hacking that I found to be really offensive.
At one point, I said, “I am becoming increasingly irritated at the idea that you guys are exacting vengeance for the sin of openness. You seem to argue that if a system is dumb enough to be open, it’s your moral duty to violate it. Does the fact that I’ve never locked my house—even when I was away for months—mean that someone should come and teach me a good lesson?”
Acid Phreak then asked me where I lived. I gave him exact directions to my house and then said, “Do you really mean to imply what you did with that question? Are you merely a sneak looking for places to violate? You disappoint me, pal. For all your James Dean–on–Silicon rhetoric, you’re not a cyberpunk. You’re just a punk.” He responded by saying that what I had just posted would allow him to get all my credit information as well as a whole lot more.
I then told Phiber Optik that they didn’t scare me at all. I was being a standard old poop and they were being standard young poops. If someone took away their modems, I told them, it wouldn’t be that different from taking away their skateboards.
As this was somewhat true, Optik immediately took vengeance on me by downloading my entire credit history into the conference. He had hacked into the core of TRW, an institution that had made my business their business, extracting from it an abbreviated and incorrect version of my personal financial life. With this came the implication that he and Acid could and would then revise it to my disadvantage if I didn’t back off.
Now, I had been in redneck bars with shoulder-length curls, in police custody while tripping on acid, and in Harlem long after midnight, but no one had ever put the spook in me quite the way Phiber Optik did at that moment. I was dealing with someone who had both the means and desire to leave me trapped in a life of wrinkled bills and money order queues. Never again would I be able to call The Sharper Image on a whim.
If someone was about to paralyze me with a digital spell, I wanted a more visceral sense of who he really was than could ever fit through a modem. So I wrote Optik a personal email in which I said, “We have obviously exceeded the bandwidth of this medium. Please give me a call and I won’t insult your intelligence by giving you my number.” It was listed, but I figured he wouldn’t think that and would hack it out of the system and be on the phone with me right away. Which, of course, was exactly what happened.
In that conversation, as well as all the others that followed, I encountered an intelligent, civilized, and surprisingly principled eighteen-year-old kid who sounded as though he meant little harm to either man or data. Phiber Optik’s hacking impulses seemed purely exploratory. I began to wonder if we wouldn’t also have regarded spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves.
The terrifying poses that Phiber Optik and Acid Phreak had been striking on screen were actually just a media-amplified example of a universal form of human adaptation I had seen before: One becomes as he is beheld. They were both simply living up to what they thought we, and more particularly the editors of Harper’s Magazine, expected of them.
As I became less their adversary and more their scoutmaster, I began getting “conference calls” in which six or eight members of the so-called Legion of Doom—by then an already legendary group of hackers—would crack pay phones all over New York and simultaneously land on my line in Wyoming. Most of them were so young that their voices hadn’t yet changed. And I said, “Oh, I get it. You guys are kids! I see how it is. You want to violate the forbidden.”
Months later, the editors of Harper’s took Phiber Optik, Acid Phreak, and me to dinner at a fancy Chinese restaurant in Manhattan. Acid and Optik were both well scrubbed and fashionably clad. They looked to be about as dangerous as ducks. But as Harper’s and the rest of the media had discovered to their great delight, the boys had developed distinctly showier personae for their rambles through the howling wilderness of what was not yet known as cyberspace.
There was no question that they were still making unauthorized use of data channels. On the night I finally met them in person for the first time, they left our restaurant table and disappeared into a phone booth for a long time. I didn’t see them marshal any quarters to pay for the call before they left.
Around this time I also ingratiated myself with Emmanuel Goldstein, who was the guy behind 2600, the semi-legal magazine of the hackers. His real name was Eric Corley; he took the name Emmanuel Goldstein from George Orwell’s 1984. You could not have chosen a better face to go with a guy who had a bomb in his hand. He was the guy with the bomb in his hand. Once he realized I was a friendly advocate in what you might call the straight world, he started feeding me stories about what had happened to Craig Neidorf and Steve Jackson.
In December 1988, a twenty-one-year-old Legion of Doomster in Atlanta named the Prophet had cracked a BellSouth computer and downloaded a three-page text file that outlined the marketing, servicing, upgrading, and billing administrative procedures and responsibilities for BellSouth’s 911 system.
At some risk, I obtained a copy of this document. To read the whole thing straight through without immediately going into a coma would have required either a machine or a human being who’d had far too much practice thinking like one. Quite simply, it was the worst writing I had ever encountered in my entire life.
Since the document contained little that would have been of interest to anyone who was not a student of advanced organizational sclerosis, I assumed that the Prophet had copied the file only as a kind of hunting trophy. Having gone to the heart of the forest, he had returned with this coonskin to nail to the barn door.
The Prophet was so proud of his accomplishment that he copied the file onto a UNIX bulletin board in Lockport, Illinois. From there, it was downloaded by Craig Neidorf, also known as Knight Lightning, a pre-law student and one of the founding editors of Phrack magazine, an online publication that pretty much defined the hacker mentality of that time. When he got hold of the BellSouth document, he thought it would amuse his readers and r
eproduced it in the next issue of Phrack. He had little reason to think that he was doing something illegal because there was nothing in it to indicate that it contained proprietary or even sensitive information. Indeed, it closely resembled other BellSouth reference documents that had long been publicly available.
Rich Andrews, the systems operator who oversaw the operation of that UNIX bulletin board, thought there might be something funny about the document when he first ran across it in his system. To be on the safe side, he forwarded a copy of it to AT&T officials. He was then contacted by the authorities, with whom he fully cooperated, an act he would come to later regret.
On the basis of the foregoing events, a grand jury in Lockport was persuaded by the Secret Service in early February to hand down a seven-count indictment against the Prophet and Knight Lightning, charging them, among other things, with interstate transfer of stolen property worth more than $5,000. When the Prophet and two of his Georgia colleagues were arrested on February 7, 1990, the Atlanta newspapers reported they faced forty years in prison and a $2 million fine. Knight Lightning was arrested eight days later.
According to the indictment and BellSouth, the document was worth precisely $79,449. This astonishing figure turned out to be the value of the workstation on which the document had been typed. Far more detailed information could be ordered from BellSouth for thirteen bucks. Nonetheless, Craig faced a draconian jail sentence and a fine of $122,000. The authorities also seized his publication, Phrack, along with all related equipment, software, and data, including his list of subscribers, many of whom would soon lose their computers and data for the crime of having just appeared on this list.
When Emmanuel Goldstein told me about this, I said, “If they could shut down Phrack, couldn’t they as easily shut down 2600?” And he said, “I’ve got one advantage. I come out on paper and the Constitution knows how to deal with paper.”
On January 24, 1990, a platoon of Secret Service agents entered the apartment Acid Phreak shared with his mother and twelve-year-old sister. The sister was the only person home when they burst through the door with guns drawn, but they somehow managed to hold her at bay for about half an hour until their quarry arrived.
By then, they were nearly done packing up all of Acid’s worldly goods, including his computer, his notes, his books, and such dubiously dangerous tools as a telephone answering machine, a clock radio, and his complete collection of audiotapes.
One agent actually asked him to define the real purpose of the answering machine and was frankly skeptical when told that it answered the phone. Although the audiotapes seemed to contain nothing but music, who knew what kind of dark data Acid might have encoded between the notes of some James Hetfield solo on one of his Metallica albums?
When Acid Phreak’s mother returned from work, she asked the agents exactly what her son had done to deserve all this attention and was told that, among other things, he had caused the AT&T system to crash several days earlier. The agent then explained that her darling boy was thought to have caused more than $1 billion in damage to the U.S. economy.
This accusation was never turned into a formal charge. Although the Secret Service maintained resolute possession of all of Acid Phreak’s hardware, software, and data, no charge of any kind was ever filed against him. Across town, similar scenes were being played out at the homes of Phiber Optik and a Legion of Doom member named Scorpion. Again, equipment, notes, disks both hard and soft, and personal effects were confiscated. Again, no charges were ever filed.
On March 1, 1990, the Secret Service showed up at the offices of Steve Jackson Games, a company in Austin, Texas, that created and marketed all sorts of role-playing games. The agents ransacked the premises, broke into several locked filing cabinets, and eventually left carrying three computers, two laser printers, several hard disks, and several boxes of paper and floppy disks.
What had Steve Jackson Games done to deserve this nightmare? Although their role-playing games, of which Dungeons and Dragons was the most well known, had been accused of creating obsessive involvement in their nerdy young players, no one had ever before found it necessary to prevent their publication. The problem was that Steve Jackson had hired the wrong writer.
It turned out that the managing editor of Steve Jackson Games was a former hacker who was known to his fellow members in the Legion of Doom as the Mentor. At the time of the raid, he and the rest of the Jackson staff had been working for more than a year on a game called GURPS Cyberpunk: High-Tech Low-Life Role-Playing. The game resided entirely on the hard disks that the agents confiscated; indeed, this was their target. They told Jackson that, based on its author’s background, they had reason to believe it was a “handbook for computer crime.” It was therefore inappropriate for publication, First Amendment or no First Amendment.
I obtained a copy of the game from the trunk of the Mentor’s car in an Austin parking lot. Like the BellSouth document, it seemed pretty innocuous to me, if a little inscrutable. Borrowing its flavor from the works of William Gibson and Austin sci-fi author Bruce Sterling, it was filled with silicon brain implants, holodecks, and Gauss guns. The cover copy described it as “a fusion of the dystopian visions of George Orwell and Timothy Leary.” Actually, it portrayed a future like what Steve Jackson Games was just now experiencing at the hands of the Secret Service.
Over the course of the next three months, Steve Jackson estimated that his company lost about $125,000 in revenue because they had been unable to do business. Faced with that kind of fiscal hemorrhage, he couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer to go after the Secret Service, who were no longer even returning his calls.
By then, he had asked both the state and national offices of the American Civil Liberties Union for help, and both had told him to run along. He also tried to go to the press. As in most other cases, they were unwilling to raise the alarm. As Jackson said at the time, “The conservative press is taking the attitude that the suppression of evil hackers is a good thing and that anyone who happens to be put out of business in the meantime…well, that’s just their tough luck.”
After a good deal of negotiation, Jackson was finally able to get the Secret Service to let him have some of his data back. But they told him he would be limited to an hour and a half on only one of his three computers to copy his data. Also, according to Jackson, “They insisted that all the copies be made by a Secret Service agent who was a two-finger typist. So we didn’t get much.”
In the end, Jackson and his staff had to reconstruct most of the game from neural rather than magnetic memory. Fortunately, they had a few old backups and had retrieved some scraps that had been passed around to game testers. They also had the determination of the enraged.
Taken together, these raids marked the beginning of the visible phase of Operation Sun Devil, a two-year Secret Service investigation that involved 150 federal agents, numerous local and state law enforcement agencies, and the combined security resources of PacBell, AT&T, Bellcore, BellSouth, MCI, U.S. Sprint, Southwestern Bell, NYNEX, U.S. West, and American Express.
The focus of this impressive institutional array was none other than the Legion of Doom, which then numbered less than twenty hackers, nearly all of them in their teens or early twenties. When I asked Acid Phreak why they had chosen such a threatening name for themselves, he said, “We didn’t want to call ourselves something like the Legion of Flower Pickers. But the media ate it right up, probing the Legion of Doom like it was a gang or something, when really it was just a bunch of geeks behind computer terminals.”
On May 8, 1990, Operation Sun Devil swept over the Legion of Doom and its ilk like a bureaucratic tsunami. The U.S. Secret Service served twenty-seven search warrants in fourteen cities ranging from Plano, Texas, to New York. In what they no doubt thought was an incredibly clever stroke of the imagination, they had named the operation after the football stadium at Arizona State University in Phoenix, which was not far
from the Secret Service headquarters where all the raids had been planned.
In a press release issued the day after the nationwide sweep, the Secret Service boasted that they had shut down numerous computer bulletin boards, confiscated forty computers, and seized 23,000 disks. They also noted that “the conceivable criminal violations of this operation have serious implications for the health and welfare of all individuals, corporations, and United States Government agencies relying on computers and telephones to communicate.”
It was unclear from their statement whether “this operation” referred to the Legion of Doom or Operation Sun Devil. But there was definitely room to interpret it either way. Aside from the three-page BellSouth document, the hackers had neither removed nor damaged anyone’s data. Operation Sun Devil, on the other hand, had “serious implications” for a number of folks who relied on “computers and telephones to communicate.”
All told, the people who were raided that day lost the equivalent of about 5.4 million pages of information—not to mention more than a few computers and telephones. Once Operation Sun Devil was over, transit through the wide-open spaces of the virtual world was a lot trickier than it had ever been before. The law had come to what was still not yet known as cyberspace.
The welfare of many of those associated with these people was also put in jeopardy. Like the single mother and computer consultant in Baltimore whose sole means of supporting herself and her eighteen-year-old son was taken away early one morning after Secret Service agents broke down her door with sledge hammers, entered with guns drawn, and seized all her computer equipment. Apparently, this was because her son had also been using it.
Or the father in New York City who opened his door at six A.M. one day only to find a shotgun pointed at his nose. A dozen agents entered, and while one of them kept the man’s wife in a choke hold, the rest made ready to shoot as they entered the bedroom of their sleeping fourteen-year-old child. Before leaving, the agents confiscated every piece of electronic equipment in the house, including all the telephones.
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