Approaching Zero, Paul Mungo [good summer reads TXT] 📗

>other switches.” The effect was not dissimilar to the endless loop, which

causes all incoming calls to circle idly around the switch.

 

Software problems are not uncommon, but few have such spectacular effects. And

coming so soon after the computer bomb threat, rumors flourished that AT&T had

been hit by hackers. In the course of researching this book, the authors were

told more than once that the AT&T failure had been caused by a computer bomb.

One source even claimed he could identify the culprit. The rumors continue to

circulate, as they do about everything in the computer underworld.

 

However, there is absolutely no proof that it was a computer bomb, and AT&T’s

final, official explanation remains that the shutdown was caused by an errant

piece of software.

 

The attack did not affect the emergency 911 numbers, which are handled by local

carriers. Nor, even if it was a bomb, was it likely to have been linked to the

previous incident. But it had taken place on a national holiday—Martin Luther

King Day—and the coincidence bothered the authorities.

 

On January 18th, three days after the AT&T system collapsed the Secret Service

began a nationwide sweep, targeting hacker gangs—in particular the Legion of

Doom—and anyone who appeared to be a threat to the phone system.

 

Their first call was on Knight Lightning. The handle belonged to Craig Neidorf,

a twenty-year-old prelaw student at the University of Missouri in Columbia, and

one of the coeditors of the underground newsletter PHRACK. He was found in his

room on the third floor of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity house. Special Agent

Tim Foley, who had been investigating the attacks on the telephone computer

switches for seven months, and Reed Nolan, a security representative from

Southwestern Bell Telephone, questioned Neidorf about an article in PHRACK on

the electronic switching systems. They also brought up the E911 document. They

knew that Neidorf had received a copy of the file from the Prophet, and had

published it in PHRACK in February 1989. According to Foley, Neidorf admitted

knowing that the E911 tutorial had been stolen from BellSouth.

 

The next day Foley returned with a search warrant and the local police. The ESS

article had been forgotten; Neidorf was instead charged with ten felony counts

centering on the publication of the E911 file in PHRACK. If found guilty, he

faced a sentence of up to sixty-five years in prison.

 

On January 24, 1990, the Secret Service operation moved to Queens, New York, to

the homes of several known hackers. The first target was a twenty-year-old

known among the underground as Acid Phreak. When the Secret Service arrived,

they told him that he was suspected of causing the AT&T crash nine days

earlier. One of the agents pointed to his answering machine. “What’s that for?”

 

he asked. “Answering the phone,” Acid Phreak said. He wasn’t arrested, but

instead was asked to accompany the agents to their headquarters in the World

Trade Center, where he was questioned until the early hours of the morning.

 

Phiber Optik, who also lives in Queens, was raided next. According to hacker

lore, he was awakened in the middle of the night and confronted with nine

loaded guns, which seems unlikely, as most other raids were conducted by one or

two agents, usually accompanied by a telephone security man. Another New York

hacker, the Scorpion, a friend of both Phiber Optik and Acid Phreak, was also

raided on that day.

 

On March 1st the action moved to Texas, with an almost comically aggressive

bust of a games publishing company.

 

The day started early, in Austin, with a dawn raid on the home of Loyd

Blankenship. Loyd, known as the Mentor to colleagues in the Legion of Doom, was

also sysop of an underground bulletin board, the Phoenix Project, and the

author of a series of “hacker tutorials” in PHRACK. He and his wife were roused

from their bed by a team of six Secret Service agents, a local cop, and a

representative from Bellcore.

 

While his own computer and equipment were being seized, Loyd was driven to his

office at Steve Jackson Games. The company specialized in publishing computer

games, most of them involving role-playing of one sort or another. At the time

it employed fifteen people and had a turnover of $500,000. Founded

by Steve Jackson, the company also ran its own, completely legitimate bulletin

board, which functioned as an information service for its customers. The only

remarkable thing about the bulletin board was its name—Illuminati, after the

secret, world-dominant sect that had so exercised the Soviet hacker gang.

Computer enthusiasts the world over clearly read the same books.

 

Steve Jackson himself arrived at the office just as the Secret Service agents

were attempting to kick down the door. The agents were offered a key instead.

They spared the door but did prefer to force open a locker and to cut the locks

off of the outside storage sheds, despite being offered the appropriate keys.

 

The agents seized all the computer equipment they could find. They also tore

open cartons in the warehouse, looking for a handbook on computer crime that

was in preparation: they intended to seize all copies before it could be

distributed.

 

The “handbook on computer crime” later turned out to be an innocent game about

computers called GURPS Cyberpunk, published by Steve Jackson Games.s The mere

fact that Loyd had chosen the name Cyberpunk had led the authorities to

conclude that the program was part of a conspiracy to spread hacking techniques

nationwide. The Secret Service seized all copies of the game at the company’s

premises and made doubly certain that they collected the data for Loyd’s manual

as well.

 

Two months later Operation Sundevil struck again. On May 8th coordinated raids

on hackers in fourteen cities were carried out. Over 150 Secret Service agents

were deployed, teamed with numerous local and state law enforcement agencies.

The agents served twentyseven search warrants in Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit,

Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, New York, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Plano (Texas),

Richmond, San Diego, San Jose, and Tucson. Forty computers and 23,000 diskettes

were seized.

 

The official reason for the busts was telecommunications fraud. The raids were

synchronized in order to completely surprise the hacker community and prevent

important evidence from being destroyed.

 

But that nearly happened anyway. As reports of the Atlanta and New York raids

circulated, a number of hacker boards carried warnings that another “major

bust” was imminent. (Captain Zap, the Philadelphia hacker arrested years before

for theft, takes credit for the messages.) One of those who took the warnings

seriously was Erik Bloodaxe, the LoD member who was so keen on selling U.S.

military secrets to the Soviets. All his equipment, as well as any documents

that could incriminate him, was hidden away before the raids. When the Secret

Service and local cops burst in on him, he was the picture of innocence. With

little to choose from, the agents considered taking away his PacMan game—then

decided to take his phone instead. It was the only piece of hacker equipment

they could find.

 

Others were less lucky. As the Secret Service raided homes of known hackers,

carrying away boxes of diskettes and computer equipment, they were invariably

asked, “When do I get my system back?” The authorities were well aware that

confiscating equipment for use as evidence later—should there ever be a case—

was punishment in itself.

 

During the raids half the members of the Legion of Doom were busted. MoD and

DPAC were less affected than the Legion by the busts, but the aftershock would

cause DPAC to split up, and MoD would come to grief the next year.

 

The spluttering, intermittent hacker wars had ended in default. The Secret

Service had broken the hacker gangs and brought law and order to Cyberspace. Or

so it seemed.

 

But support for hackers was building—unwittingly aided by the FBI, the Secret

Service’s rival in the bureaucratic battle for responsibility for computer

crime. On May 1, 1990, an FBI agent named Richard Baxter, Jr., drove to

Pinedale, Wyoming, for a meeting with John Perry Barlow. The two men came from

different worlds. Barlow was a bundle of idiosyncrasies and contradictions, the

sort of man who seems to survive only in the American West: aged forty-two, a

former rancher, the Lyricist for the Grate—

ful Dead, and also the local Republican party county chairman he believed in

the frontier, both the real one around Pinedale and the electronic one

accessible through his computer. Barlow wasn’t a hacker, but he was part of

something called WELL—the Whole Earth Electronic Link, the embodiment of the

sixties counterculture surviving in the 1990s on an electronic bulletin board

based in Sausalito, California. His philosophy was a mix of sixties liberalism

leavened by a rancher’s rugged individualism; he was a Republican hippie with a

computer.

 

Agent Baxter was a country boy who “didn’t know a ROM chip from a vise grip,”

according to Barlow. He wanted to talk to Barlow about high-tech crime,

although hackers were not his usual beat.

 

Baxter was investigating the theft of the operating system source code for the

Macintosh computer. According to Baxter, it had been stolen by a group that was

threatening to destroy the American company by releasing the code to East Asian

manufacturers of Apple clones.

 

Briefed at length by his San Francisco office, Agent Baxter told Barlow that

the FBI wanted to interview John Draper, the legendary Captain Crunch. Draper,

the FBI believed, was a known member of the Hackers’ Conference, an underground

association with likely ties to those responsible for the theft. The FBI also

believed that Draper was the chief executive of Autodesk, a software company

with many top-secret government Star Wars contracts.

 

Jurisdiction for this particular investigation had fallen to the FBI, not the

Secret Service. It was one of the oddities of U.S. Iaw enforcement that even

when the responsibilities of the two agencies overlapped, their intelligence

and resources were almost never pooled. And in this case, Barlow knew that the

FBI agent’s information was almost completely wrong.

 

Draper wasn’t the chief executive of Autodesk, though he had worked there as a

programmer at one time, and Autodesk was not a major Star Wars contractor, but

a software developer. Also, the Hackers’ Conference was not an underground

association, but an annual gathering of the nation’s brightest and most

respected computer experts. As for the group that had supposedly stolen the

Macintosh source code, Barlow presumed that the agent was referring to the

self-styled nuPrometheus League, which had been circulating filched copies of

the Macintosh code to annoy Apple. Opinion in the computer underground was that

the code was probably picked up by kids who’d been dumpster diving. (The ethos

at Apple had changed since 1979. Then it was a small company with roots in the

hacker community; now a major corporation, it called in the FBI to chase down

kids for dumpster diving.)

The only thing that the FBI had gotten right, Barlow reckoned, was the address

of Autodesk. So Barlow explained to Baxter what was really going on, spending

most of the two-hour interview educating him about source codes. THINGS HAVE

RATHER JUMPED

THE GROOVE WHEN POTENTIAL SUSPECTS MUST EXPLAIN TO LAW

 

ENFORCERS THE NATURE OF THEIR ALLEGED PERPETRATIONS, he said

in his posting to the WELL about the incident.

 

Barlow’s message produced an unexpected response. A number of other

WELL-beings—the users’ excruciatingly cute name for themselves—had also been

interviewed by the FBI. They had all heard pretty much the same garbled story.

Baxter had only been repeating the information contained in the agency’s files.

 

The entire Bureau seemed to be working on erroneous data. It was enough to

tweak the ideological hackles of any Republican hippie, particularly one who

believed in the new