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

up by TIME, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, computer police, hackers, and even Constitutional scholars. “Cyberspace” now seems likely to become a permanent fixture of the language.

Barlow was very striking in person: a tall, craggy-faced, bearded, deep-voiced Wyomingan in a dashing Western ensemble of jeans, jacket, cowboy boots, a knotted throat-kerchief and an ever-present Grateful Dead cloisonne lapel pin.

Armed with a modem, however, Barlow was truly in his element. Formal hierarchies were not Barlow’s strong suit; he rarely missed a chance to belittle the “large organizations and their drones,” with their uptight, institutional mindset. Barlow was very much of the free-spirit persuasion, deeply unimpressed by brass-hats and jacks-in-office. But when it came to the digital grapevine, Barlow was a cyberspace ad-hocrat par excellence.

There was not a mighty army of Barlows. There was only one Barlow, and he was a fairly anomolous individual. However, the situation only seemed to REQUIRE a single Barlow. In fact, after 1990, many people must have concluded that a single Barlow was far more than they’d ever bargained for.

Barlow’s querulous mini-essay about his encounter with the FBI struck a strong chord on the Well. A number of other free spirits on the fringes of Apple Computing had come under suspicion, and they liked it not one whit better than he did.

One of these was Mitchell Kapor, the co-inventor of the spreadsheet program “Lotus 1-2-3” and the founder of Lotus Development Corporation. Kapor had written-off the passing indignity of being fingerprinted down at his own local Boston FBI headquarters, but Barlow’s post made the full national scope of the FBI’s dragnet clear to Kapor. The issue now had Kapor’s full attention. As the Secret Service swung into anti-hacker operation nationwide in 1990, Kapor watched every move with deep skepticism and growing alarm.

As it happened, Kapor had already met Barlow, who had interviewed Kapor for a California computer journal. Like most people who met Barlow, Kapor had been very taken with him. Now Kapor took it upon himself to drop in on Barlow for a heart-to- heart talk about the situation.

Kapor was a regular on the Well. Kapor had been a devotee of the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG since the beginning, and treasured a complete run of the magazine. And Kapor not only had a modem, but a private jet. In pursuit of the scattered high-tech investments of Kapor Enterprises Inc., his personal, multimillion dollar holding company, Kapor commonly crossed state lines with about as much thought as one might give to faxing a letter.

The Kapor-Barlow council of June 1990, in Pinedale, Wyoming, was the start of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Barlow swiftly wrote a manifesto, “Crime and Puzzlement,” which announced his, and Kapor’s, intention to form a political organization to “raise and disburse funds for education, lobbying, and litigation in the areas relating to digital speech and the extension of the Constitution into Cyberspace.”

Furthermore, proclaimed the manifesto, the foundation would “fund, conduct, and support legal efforts to demonstrate that the Secret Service has exercised prior restraint on publications, limited free speech, conducted improper seizure of equipment and data, used undue force, and generally conducted itself in a fashion which is arbitrary, oppressive, and unconstitutional.”

“Crime and Puzzlement” was distributed far and wide through computer networking channels, and also printed in the WHOLE EARTH REVIEW. The sudden declaration of a coherent, politicized counter-strike from the ranks of hackerdom electrified the community. Steve Wozniak (perhaps a bit stung by the NuPrometheus scandal) swiftly offered to match any funds Kapor offered the Foundation.

John Gilmore, one of the pioneers of Sun Microsystems, immediately offered his own extensive financial and personal support. Gilmore, an ardent libertarian, was to prove an eloquent advocate of electronic privacy issues, especially freedom from governmental and corporate computer-assisted surveillance of private citizens.

A second meeting in San Francisco rounded up further allies: Stewart Brand of the Point Foundation, virtual-reality pioneers Jaron Lanier and Chuck Blanchard, network entrepreneur and venture capitalist Nat Goldhaber. At this dinner meeting, the activists settled on a formal title: the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Incorporated. Kapor became its president. A new EFF Conference was opened on the Point Foundation’s Well, and the Well was declared “the home of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.”

Press coverage was immediate and intense. Like their nineteenth-century spiritual ancestors, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson, the high-tech computer entrepreneurs of the 1970s and 1980s—people such as Wozniak, Jobs, Kapor, Gates, and H. Ross Perot, who had raised themselves by their bootstraps to dominate a glittering new industry—had always made very good copy.

But while the Wellbeings rejoiced, the press in general seemed nonplussed by the self-declared “civilizers of cyberspace.” EFF’s insistence that the war against “hackers” involved grave Constitutional civil liberties issues seemed somewhat farfetched, especially since none of EFF’s organizers were lawyers or established politicians. The business press in particular found it easier to seize on the apparent core of the story—that high-tech entrepreneur Mitchell Kapor had established a “defense fund for hackers.” Was EFF a genuinely important political development—or merely a clique of wealthy eccentrics, dabbling in matters better left to the proper authorities? The jury was still out.

But the stage was now set for open confrontation. And the first and the most critical battle was the hacker show-trial of “Knight Lightning.”

 

It has been my practice throughout this book to refer to hackers only by their “handles.” There is little to gain by giving the real names of these people, many of whom are juveniles, many of whom have never been convicted of any crime, and many of whom had unsuspecting parents who have already suffered enough.

But the trial of Knight Lightning on July 24-27, 1990, made this particular “hacker” a nationally known public figure. It can do no particular harm to himself or his family if I repeat the long-established fact that his name is Craig Neidorf (pronounced NYE-dorf).

Neidorf’s jury trial took place in the United States District Court, Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, with the Honorable Nicholas J. Bua presiding. The United States of America was the plaintiff, the defendant Mr. Neidorf. The defendant’s attorney was Sheldon T. Zenner of the Chicago firm of Katten, Muchin and Zavis.

The prosecution was led by the stalwarts of the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force: William J. Cook, Colleen D. Coughlin, and David A. Glockner, all Assistant United States Attorneys. The Secret Service Case Agent was Timothy M. Foley.

It will be recalled that Neidorf was the co-editor of an underground hacker “magazine” called PHRACK. PHRACK was an entirely electronic publication, distributed through bulletin boards and over electronic networks. It was amateur publication given away for free. Neidorf had never made any money for his work in PHRACK. Neither had his unindicted co-editor “Taran King” or any of the numerous PHRACK contributors.

The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force, however, had decided to prosecute Neidorf as a fraudster. To formally admit that PHRACK was a “magazine” and Neidorf a “publisher” was to open a prosecutorial Pandora’s Box of First Amendment issues. To do this was to play into the hands of Zenner and his EFF advisers, which now included a phalanx of prominent New York civil rights lawyers as well as the formidable legal staff of Katten, Muchin and Zavis. Instead, the prosecution relied heavily on the issue of access device fraud: Section 1029 of Title 18, the section from which the Secret Service drew its most direct jurisdiction over computer crime.

Neidorf’s alleged crimes centered around the E911 Document. He was accused of having entered into a fraudulent scheme with the Prophet, who, it will be recalled, was the Atlanta LoD member who had illicitly copied the E911 Document from the BellSouth AIMSX system.

The Prophet himself was also a co-defendant in the Neidorf case, part-and-parcel of the alleged “fraud scheme” to “steal” BellSouth’s E911 Document (and to pass the Document across state lines, which helped establish the Neidorf trial as a federal case). The Prophet, in the spirit of full cooperation, had agreed to testify against Neidorf.

In fact, all three of the Atlanta crew stood ready to testify against Neidorf. Their own federal prosecutors in Atlanta had charged the Atlanta Three with: (a) conspiracy, (b) computer fraud, (c) wire fraud, (d) access device fraud, and (e) interstate transportation of stolen property (Title 18, Sections 371, 1030, 1343, 1029, and 2314).

Faced with this blizzard of trouble, Prophet and Leftist had ducked any public trial and had pled guilty to reduced charges—one conspiracy count apiece. Urvile had pled guilty to that odd bit of Section 1029 which makes it illegal to possess “fifteen or more” illegal access devices (in his case, computer passwords). And their sentences were scheduled for September 14, 1990—well after the Neidorf trial. As witnesses, they could presumably be relied upon to behave.

Neidorf, however, was pleading innocent. Most everyone else caught up in the crackdown had “cooperated fully” and pled guilty in hope of reduced sentences. (Steve Jackson was a notable exception, of course, and had strongly protested his innocence from the very beginning. But Steve Jackson could not get a day in court—Steve Jackson had never been charged with any crime in the first place.)

Neidorf had been urged to plead guilty. But Neidorf was a political science major and was disinclined to go to jail for “fraud” when he had not made any money, had not broken into any computer, and had been publishing a magazine that he considered protected under the First Amendment.

Neidorf’s trial was the ONLY legal action of the entire Crackdown that actually involved bringing the issues at hand out for a public test in front of a jury of American citizens.

Neidorf, too, had cooperated with investigators. He had voluntarily handed over much of the evidence that had led to his own indictment. He had already admitted in writing that he knew that the E911 Document had been stolen before he had “published” it in PHRACK—or, from the prosecution’s point of view, illegally transported stolen property by wire in something purporting to be a “publication.”

But even if the “publication” of the E911 Document was not held to be a crime, that wouldn’t let Neidorf off the hook. Neidorf had still received the E911 Document when Prophet had transferred it to him from Rich Andrews’ Jolnet node. On that occasion, it certainly hadn’t been “published”—it was hacker booty, pure and simple, transported across state lines.

The Chicago Task Force led a Chicago grand jury to indict Neidorf on a set of charges that could have put him in jail for thirty years. When some of these charges were successfully challenged before Neidorf actually went to trial, the Chicago Task Force rearranged his indictment so that he faced a possible jail term of over sixty years! As a first offender, it was very unlikely that Neidorf would in fact receive a sentence so drastic; but the Chicago Task Force clearly intended to see Neidorf put in prison, and his conspiratorial “magazine” put permanently out of commission. This was a federal case, and Neidorf was charged with the fraudulent theft of property worth almost eighty thousand dollars.

William Cook was a strong believer in high-profile prosecutions with symbolic overtones. He often published articles on his work in the security trade press, arguing that “a clear message had to be sent to the public at large and the computer community in particular that unauthorized attacks on computers and the theft of computerized information would not be tolerated by the courts.”

The issues were complex, the prosecution’s tactics somewhat unorthodox, but the Chicago Task Force had proved sure-footed to date. “Shadowhawk” had been bagged on the wing in 1989 by the Task Force, and sentenced to nine months in prison, and a $10,000 fine. The Shadowhawk case involved charges under Section 1030, the “federal interest computer” section.

Shadowhawk had not in fact been a devotee of “federal-interest” computers per se. On the contrary, Shadowhawk, who