crime and puzzlement.txt

黑客培训教程

Cyberspace and took no physical form.  

When Knight Lightning got hold of the Bell South document, he 
thought it would amuse his readers and reproduced it in the next 
issue of Phrack.  He had little reason to think that he was doing 
something illegal.  There is nothing in it to indicate that it contains 
proprietary or even sensitive information.  Indeed, it closely 
resembles telco reference documents which have long been publicly 
available.

However, Rich Andrews, the systems operator who oversaw the 
operation of Jolnet, 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 
subsequently contacted by the authorities, and he cooperated with 
them fully.  He would regret that later. 

On the basis of the forgoing, 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 papers 
reported they faced 40 years in prison and a $2 million fine.  Knight 
Lightning was arrested on February 15.   

The property in question was the affore-mentioned blot on the 
history of prose whose full title was A Bell South Standard Practice 
(BSP) 660-225-104SV-Control Office Administration of Enhanced 911 
Services for Special Services and Major Account Centers, March, 1988.

And not only was this item worth more than $5,000.00, it was worth, 
according to the indictment and Bell South, precisely $79,449.00.  And 
not a penny less.  We will probably never know how this figure was 
reached or by whom, though I like to imagine an appraisal team 
consisting of Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon...

In addition to charging Knight Lightning with crimes for which he 
could go to jail 30 years and be fined $122,000.00, they 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 appearing on it.   

I talked to Emmanuel Goldstein, the editor of 2600, another hacker 
publication which has been known to publish purloined documents.  
If they could shut down Phrack, couldn't they as easily shut down 
2600?  

He said, "I've got one advantage.  I come out on paper and the 
Constitution knows   how to deal with paper."  

In fact, nearly all publications are now electronic at some point in 
their creation.  In a modern newspaper, stories written at the scene 
are typed to screens and then sent by modem to a central computer.  
This computer composes the layout in electronic type and the entire 
product transmitted electronically to the presses.  There, finally, the 
bytes become ink.  

Phrack merely omitted the last step in a long line of virtual events.  
However, that omission, and its insignificant circulation, left it 
vulnerable to seizure based on content.  If the 911 document had been 
the Pentagon Papers (another proprietary document) and Phrack the 
New York Times, a completion of the analogy would have seen the 
government stopping publication of the Times and seizing its every 
material possession, from notepads to presses.  

Not that anyone in the newspaper business seemed particularly 
worried about such implications.  They, and the rest of the media 
who bothered to report Knight Lightning's arrest were too obsessed 
by what they portrayed as actual disruptions of emergency service 
and with marvelling at the sociopathy of it.  One report expressed 
relief that no one appeared to have died as a result of the 
"intrusions."

Meanwhile, in Baltimore, the 911 dragnet snared Leonard Rose, aka 
Terminus.  A professional computer consultant who specialized in 
UNIX, Rose got a visit from the government early in February.  The 
G-men forcibly detained his wife and children for six hours while 
they interrogated Rose about the 911 document and ransacked his 
system.  

Rose had no knowledge of the 911 matter.  Indeed, his only 
connection had been occasional contact with Knight Lightning over 
several years...and admitted membership in the Legion of Doom.  
However, when searching his hard disk for 911 evidence, they found 
something else.  Like many UNIX consultants, Rose did have some 
UNIX source code in his possession.   Furthermore, there was 
evidence that he had transmitted some of it to Jolnet and left it there 
for another consultant.  

UNIX is a ubiquitous operating system, and though its main virtue is 
its openness to amendment at the source level, it is nevertheless the 
property of AT&T.  What had been widely d  istributed within 
businesses and universities for years was suddenly, in Rose's hands, 
a felonious possession.       

Finally, the Secret Service rewarded the good citizenship of Rich 
Andrews by confiscating the computer where Jolnet had dwelt, along 
with all the e-mail, read and un-read, which his subscribers had left 
there.  Like the many others whose equipment and data were taken 
by the Secret Service subsequently, he wasn't charged with anything.  
Nor is he likely to be.  They have already inflicted on him the worst 
punishment a nerd can suffer: data death.

Andrews was baffled.  "I'm the one that found it, I'm the one that 
turned it in...And I'm the one that's suffering," he said.  

One wonders what will happen when they find such documents on 
the hard disks of CompuServe.  Maybe I'll just upload my copy of  
Bell South Standard Practice (BSP) 660-225-104SV and see...

In any case, association with stolen data is all the guilt you need.  It's 
quite as if the government could seize your house simply because a 
guest left a stolen VCR in an upstairs bedroom closet.  Or confiscate 
all the mail in a post office upon finding a stolen package there. The 
first concept of modern jurisprudence to have arrived in Cyberspace 
seems to have been Zero Tolerance. 

******


Rich Andrews was not the last to learn about the Secret Service's 
debonair new attitude toward the 4th Amendment's protection 
against unreasonable seizure.   

Early on March 1, 1990, the offices of a role-playing game publisher in 
Austin, Texas called Steve Jackson Games were visited by agents of 
the United States Secret Service.  They ransacked the premises, broke 
into several locked filing cabinets (damaging them irreparably in the 
process) and eventually left carrying 3 computers, 2 laser printers, 
several hard disks, and many boxes of paper and floppy disks.

Later in the day, callers to the Illuminati BBS (which Steve Jackson 
Games operated to keep in touch with roll-players around the 
country) encountered the following message:  

"So far we have not received a clear explanation of what the Secret Service  
was looking  for, what they expected to find, or much of anything else. We are 
fairly certain  that Steve  Jackson Games is not the target of whatever 
investigation is being conducted;  in any case,  we have done nothing illegal 
and have nothing whatsoever to hide.  However, the  equipment that was 
seized is apparently considered to be evidence in  whatever they're  
investigating, so we aren't likely to get it back any time soon. It could be a  
month, it could  be never." 

It's been three months as I write this and, not only has nothing been 
returned to them, but, according to Steve Jackson, the Secret Service 
will no longer take his calls.  He figures that, in the months since the 
raid, his little company has lost an estimated $125,000.  With such a 
fiscal hemorrhage, he can't afford a lawyer to take after the Secret 
Service.  Both the state and national offices of the ACLU told him to 
"run along" when he solicited their help. 

He tried to go to the press.  As in most other cases, they were 
unwilling to raise the alarm.  Jackson theorized, "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."

In fact, Newsweek did run a story about the event, portraying it from 
Jackson's perspective, but they were almost alone in dealing with it.

What had he done to deserve this nightmare?  Role-playing games, of 
which Dungeons and Dragons is the most famous, have been accused 
of creating obsessive involvement in their nerdy young players, but 
no one before had found it necessary to prevent their publication. 
 
It seems that Steve Jackson had hired the wrong writer.  The 
managing editor of Steve Jackson Games is a former cracker,  known 
by his fellows in the Legion of Doom as The Mentor.  At the time of 
the raid, he and the rest of Jackson staff had been working for over a 
year on a game called GURPS Cyberpunk, High-Tech Low-Life Role-
Playing. 

At the time of the Secret Service raids, the game resided entirely on 
the hard disks they confiscated.  Indeed, it was their target.  They told 
Jackson that, based on its author's background, they had reason to 
believe it was a "handbook on computer crime."  It was therefore 
inappropriate for publication, 1st Amendment or no 1st Amendment. 

I got a copy of the game from the trunk of The Mentor's car in an 
Austin parking lot.  Like the Bell South 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 is 
filled with silicon brain implants, holodecks, and gauss guns.  

It is, as the cover copy puts it, "a fusion of the dystopian visions of 
George Orwell and Timothy Leary." Actually, without the gizmos, it 
describes a future kind of like the present its publisher is 
experiencing at the hands of the Secret Service.    

An unbelievably Byzantine world resides within its 120 large pages 
of small print.  (These roll-players must be some kind of idiots 
savants...)  Indeed, it's a thing of such complexity that I can't swear 
there's no criminal information in there, but then I can't swear that 
Grateful Dead records don't have satanic messages if played 
backwards.  Anything's possible, especially inside something as 
remarkable as Cyberpunk.  

The most remarkable thing about Cyberpunk is the fact that it was 
printed at all.  After much negotiation, Jackson was able to get the 
Secret Service to let him have some of his data back.  However, they 
told him that he would be limited to an hour and a half with only one 
of his three computers.  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.  They did have a few very 
old backups, and they retrieved some scraps which had been passed 
around to game testers.  They also had the determination of the 
enraged.   

Despite government efforts to impose censorship by prior restraint, 
Cyberpunk is now on the market.  Presumably, advertising it as "The 
book that was seized by the U.S. Secret Service" will invigorate sales.  
But Steve Jackson Games, the heretofore prosperous publisher of 
more than a hundred role-playing games, has been forced to lay off 
more than half of its employees and may well be mortally wounded.  

Any employer who has heard this tale will think hard before he hires 
a computer cracker.  Which may be, of course, among the effects the 
Secret Service desires.

******


On May 8, 1990, Operation Sun Devil, heretofore an apparently 
random and nameless trickle of Secret Service actions, swept down 
on the Legion of Doom and its ilk like a bureaucratic tsunami.  On 
that day, the Secret Service served 27 search warrants in 14 cities from 
Plano, Texas to New York, New York.

The law had come to Cyberspace.  When the day was over, transit 
through the wide open spaces of the Virtual World would be a lot 
trickier. 

In a press release following the sweep, the Secret Service boasted 
having shut down numerous computer bulletin boards, confiscated 
40 computers, and seized 23,000 disks.  They noted in their statement 
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" meant 
the Legion of Doom or Operation Sun Devil.  There was room to 
interpret it either way.

Because the deliciously ironic truth is that, aside from the 3 page Bell 
South 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." They lost the equivalent of about 5.4 
million pages of information.  Not to mention a few computers and 
telephones.

And the welfare of the individuals behind those figures was surely in 
jeopardy.  Like the story of the single mother and computer