Hacker Crackdown, Bruce Sterling [ebook reader with highlight function .txt] 📗

per crook was abolished. And the Secret Service began the long, uncertain process of thorough professionalization.

Wood ended badly. He must have felt stabbed in the back. In fact his entire organization was mangled.

On the other hand, William P. Wood WAS the first head of the Secret Service. William Wood was the pioneer. People still honor his name. Who remembers the name of the SECOND head of the Secret Service?

As for William Brockway (also known as “Colonel Spencer”), he was finally arrested by the Secret Service in 1880. He did five years in prison, got out, and was still boodling at the age of seventy-four.

 

Anyone with an interest in Operation Sundevil—or in American computer-crime generally—could scarcely miss the presence of Gail Thackeray, Assistant Attorney General of the State of Arizona. Computer-crime training manuals often cited Thackeray’s group and her work; she was the highest-ranking state official to specialize in computer-related offenses. Her name had been on the Sundevil press release (though modestly ranked well after the local federal prosecuting attorney and the head of the Phoenix Secret Service office).

As public commentary, and controversy, began to mount about the Hacker Crackdown, this Arizonan state official began to take a higher and higher public profile. Though uttering almost nothing specific about the Sundevil operation itself, she coined some of the most striking soundbites of the growing propaganda war: “Agents are operating in good faith, and I don’t think you can say that for the hacker community,” was one. Another was the memorable “I am not a mad dog prosecutor” (HOUSTON CHRONICLE, Sept 2, 1990.) In the meantime, the Secret Service maintained its usual extreme discretion; the Chicago Unit, smarting from the backlash of the Steve Jackson scandal, had gone completely to earth.

As I collated my growing pile of newspaper clippings, Gail Thackeray ranked as a comparative fount of public knowledge on police operations.

I decided that I had to get to know Gail Thackeray. I wrote to her at the Arizona Attorney General’s Office. Not only did she kindly reply to me, but, to my astonishment, she knew very well what “cyberpunk” science fiction was.

Shortly after this, Gail Thackeray lost her job. And I temporarily misplaced my own career as a science-fiction writer, to become a full-time computer-crime journalist. In early March, 1991, I flew to Phoenix, Arizona, to interview Gail Thackeray for my book on the hacker crackdown.

 

“Credit cards didn’t used to cost anything to get,” says Gail Thackeray. “Now they cost forty bucks—and that’s all just to cover the costs from RIP-OFF ARTISTS.”

 

Electronic nuisance criminals are parasites. One by one they’re not much harm, no big deal. But they never come just one by one. They come in swarms, heaps, legions, sometimes whole subcultures. And they bite. Every time we buy a credit card today, we lose a little financial vitality to a particular species of bloodsucker.

What, in her expert opinion, are the worst forms of electronic crime, I ask, consulting my notes. Is it—credit card fraud? Breaking into ATM bank machines? Phone-phreaking? Computer intrusions? Software viruses? Access-code theft? Records tampering? Software piracy? Pornographic bulletin boards? Satellite TV piracy? Theft of cable service? It’s a long list. By the time I reach the end of it I feel rather depressed.

“Oh no,” says Gail Thackeray, leaning forward over the table, her whole body gone stiff with energetic indignation, “the biggest damage is telephone fraud. Fake sweepstakes, fake charities. Boiler-room con operations. You could pay off the national debt with what these guys steal…. They target old people, they get hold of credit ratings and demographics, they rip off the old and the weak.” The words come tumbling out of her.

It’s low-tech stuff, your everyday boiler-room fraud. Grifters, conning people out of money over the phone, have been around for decades. This is where the word “phony” came from!

It’s just that it’s so much EASIER now, horribly facilitated by advances in technology and the byzantine structure of the modern phone system. The same professional fraudsters do it over and over, Thackeray tells me, they hide behind dense onion-shells of fake companies…. fake holding corporations nine or ten layers deep, registered all over the map. They get a phone installed under a false name in an empty safe-house. And then they call-forward everything out of that phone to yet another phone, a phone that may even be in another STATE. And they don’t even pay the charges on their phones; after a month or so, they just split; set up somewhere else in another Podunkville with the same seedy crew of veteran phone-crooks. They buy or steal commercial credit card reports, slap them on the PC, have a program pick out people over sixty-five who pay a lot to charities. A whole subculture living off this, merciless folks on the con.

“The ‘lightbulbs for the blind’ people,” Thackeray muses, with a special loathing. “There’s just no end to them.”

We’re sitting in a downtown diner in Phoenix, Arizona. It’s a tough town, Phoenix. A state capital seeing some hard times. Even to a Texan like myself, Arizona state politics seem rather baroque. There was, and remains, endless trouble over the Martin Luther King holiday, the sort of stiff-necked, foot-shooting incident for which Arizona politics seem famous. There was Evan Mecham, the eccentric Republican millionaire governor who was impeached, after reducing state government to a ludicrous shambles. Then there was the national Keating scandal, involving Arizona savings and loans, in which both of Arizona’s U.S. senators, DeConcini and McCain, played sadly prominent roles.

And the very latest is the bizarre AzScam case, in which state legislators were videotaped, eagerly taking cash from an informant of the Phoenix city police department, who was posing as a Vegas mobster.

“Oh,” says Thackeray cheerfully. “These people are amateurs here, they thought they were finally getting to play with the big boys. They don’t have the least idea how to take a bribe! It’s not institutional corruption. It’s not like back in Philly.”

Gail Thackeray was a former prosecutor in Philadelphia. Now she’s a former assistant attorney general of the State of Arizona. Since moving to Arizona in 1986, she had worked under the aegis of Steve Twist, her boss in the Attorney General’s office. Steve Twist wrote Arizona’s pioneering computer crime laws and naturally took an interest in seeing them enforced. It was a snug niche, and Thackeray’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit won a national reputation for ambition and technical knowledgeability…. Until the latest election in Arizona. Thackeray’s boss ran for the top job, and lost. The victor, the new Attorney General, apparently went to some pains to eliminate the bureaucratic traces of his rival, including his pet group—Thackeray’s group. Twelve people got their walking papers.

Now Thackeray’s painstakingly assembled computer lab sits gathering dust somewhere in the glass-and-concrete Attorney General’s HQ on 1275 Washington Street. Her computer-crime books, her painstakingly garnered back issues of phreak and hacker zines, all bought at her own expense—are piled in boxes somewhere. The State of Arizona is simply not particularly interested in electronic racketeering at the moment.

At the moment of our interview, Gail Thackeray, officially unemployed, is working out of the county sheriff’s office, living on her savings, and prosecuting several cases— working 60-hour weeks, just as always—for no pay at all. “I’m trying to train people,” she mutters.

Half her life seems to be spent training people—merely pointing out, to the naive and incredulous (such as myself) that this stuff is ACTUALLY GOING ON OUT THERE. It’s a small world, computer crime. A young world. Gail Thackeray, a trim blonde Baby-Boomer who favors Grand Canyon white-water rafting to kill some slow time, is one of the world’s most senior, most veteran “hacker-trackers.” Her mentor was Donn Parker, the California think-tank theorist who got it all started ‘way back in the mid-70s, the “grandfather of the field,” “the great bald eagle of computer crime.”

And what she has learned, Gail Thackeray teaches. Endlessly. Tirelessly. To anybody. To Secret Service agents and state police, at the Glynco, Georgia federal training center. To local police, on “roadshows” with her slide projector and notebook. To corporate security personnel. To journalists. To parents.

Even CROOKS look to Gail Thackeray for advice. Phone-phreaks call her at the office. They know very well who she is. They pump her for information on what the cops are up to, how much they know. Sometimes whole CROWDS of phone phreaks, hanging out on illegal conference calls, will call Gail Thackeray up. They taunt her. And, as always, they boast. Phone-phreaks, real stone phone-phreaks, simply CANNOT SHUT UP. They natter on for hours.

Left to themselves, they mostly talk about the intricacies of ripping-off phones; it’s about as interesting as listening to hot-rodders talk about suspension and distributor-caps. They also gossip cruelly about each other. And when talking to Gail Thackeray, they incriminate themselves. “I have tapes,” Thackeray says coolly.

Phone phreaks just talk like crazy. “Dial-Tone” out in Alabama has been known to spend half-an-hour simply reading stolen phone-codes aloud into voice-mail answering machines. Hundreds, thousands of numbers, recited in a monotone, without a break—an eerie phenomenon. When arrested, it’s a rare phone phreak who doesn’t inform at endless length on everybody he knows.

Hackers are no better. What other group of criminals, she asks rhetorically, publishes newsletters and holds conventions? She seems deeply nettled by the sheer brazenness of this behavior, though to an outsider, this activity might make one wonder whether hackers should be considered “criminals” at all. Skateboarders have magazines, and they trespass a lot. Hot rod people have magazines and they break speed limits and sometimes kill people….

I ask her whether it would be any loss to society if phone phreaking and computer hacking, as hobbies, simply dried up and blew away, so that nobody ever did it again.

She seems surprised. “No,” she says swiftly. “Maybe a little… in the old days… the MIT stuff… But there’s a lot of wonderful, legal stuff you can do with computers now, you don’t have to break into somebody else’s just to learn. You don’t have that excuse. You can learn all you like.”

Did you ever hack into a system? I ask.

The trainees do it at Glynco. Just to demonstrate system vulnerabilities. She’s cool to the notion. Genuinely indifferent.

“What kind of computer do you have?”

“A Compaq 286LE,” she mutters.

“What kind do you WISH you had?”

At this question, the unmistakable light of true hackerdom flares in Gail Thackeray’s eyes. She becomes tense, animated, the words pour out: “An Amiga 2000 with an IBM card and Mac emulation! The most common hacker machines are Amigas and Commodores. And Apples.” If she had the Amiga, she enthuses, she could run a whole galaxy of seized computer-evidence disks on one convenient multifunctional machine. A cheap one, too. Not like the old Attorney General lab, where they had an ancient CP/M machine, assorted Amiga flavors and Apple flavors, a couple IBMS, all the utility software… but no Commodores. The workstations down at the Attorney General’s are Wang dedicated word-processors. Lame machines tied in to an office net—though at least they get on-line to the Lexis and Westlaw legal data services.

I don’t say anything. I recognize the syndrome, though. This computer-fever has been running through segments of our society for years now. It’s a strange kind of lust: K-hunger, Meg-hunger; but it’s a shared disease; it can kill parties dead, as conversation spirals into the deepest and most deviant recesses of software releases and expensive peripherals…. The mark of the hacker beast. I have it too. The whole “electronic community,” whatever the hell that is, has it. Gail Thackeray has it. Gail Thackeray is a hacker cop. My immediate reaction is a strong rush of indignant pity: WHY DOESN’T SOMEBODY BUY THIS WOMEN HER AMIGA?! It’s not like she’s asking for a Cray X-MP supercomputer mainframe; an