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

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 surreptitious action, I of course HAD to “brag,” and to drag the passing Draper into my iniquities. I felt I needed a witness. Otherwise nobody would have believed what I’d discovered….

Back at the meeting, Thackeray cordially, if rather tentatively, introduced Kapor and Godwin 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 Godwin’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 analysis 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 Godwin 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 Constitution—we’re the DEFENDERS of the Constitution!” “We seize stuff when we know it will be forfeited anyway as restitution for the victim!”

“If it’s forfeitable, then don’t get a search warrant, get a forfeiture warrant,” Godwin suggested coolly. He further remarked that most suspects in computer crime don’t WANT to see their computers vanish out the door, headed God 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?” Godwin parried.

“That’ll never stand up in court.”

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

Hmmm.

Godwin 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.

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 associate 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 passed in chastened silence. Legal principles aside—(and those principles cannot be settled without laws passed 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 constitutional 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.

Godwin complained at length about what he called “the Clever Hobbyist hypothesis”—the assumption 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 5 meg of memory. Take his software manuals and hardware documentation. 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.

Godwin 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.

Godwin 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. Godwin and Kapor had to leave. Kapor was testifying next morning before the Massachusetts 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 Godwin’s heads off. She was very proud of them, and told them so.

“Did you hear what Godwin said about INSTRUMENTALITY OF A CRIME?” she exulted, to nobody 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 cyberspace 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” attitude.) But in cyberspace there ARE no rules and precedents. They are groundbreaking pioneers, Cyberspace 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, breakins, 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 marshgrass, 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