Hacker Crackdown | Page 6

light of the glowing computer screen. This dark electric netherworld has become a
vast flowering electronic landscape. Since the 1960s, the world of the telephone has
cross-bred itself with computers and television, and though there is still no substance to
cyberspace, nothing you can handle, it has a strange kind of physicality now. It makes
good sense today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own.
Because people live in it now. Not just a few people, not just a few technicians and
eccentrics, but thousands of people, quite normal people. And not just for a little while,
either, but for hours straight, over weeks, and months, and years. Cyberspace today is a
"Net," a "Matrix," international in scope and growing swiftly and steadily. It's growing in
size, and wealth, and political importance.
People are making entire careers in modern cyberspace. Scientists and technicians, of
course; they've been there for twenty years now. But increasingly, cyberspace is filling
with journalists and doctors and lawyers and artists and clerks. Civil servants make their
careers there now, "on-line" in vast government data-banks; and so do spies, industrial,
political, and just plain snoops; and so do police, at least a few of them. And there are
children living there now.
People have met there and been married there. There are entire living communities in
cyberspace today; chattering, gossiping, planning, conferring and scheming, leaving one
another voice-mail and electronic mail, giving one another big weightless chunks of
valuable data, both legitimate and illegitimate. They busily pass one another computer
software and the occasional festering computer virus.
We do not really understand how to live in cyberspace yet. We are feeling our way into it,
blundering about. That is not surprising. Our lives in the physical world, the "real" world,
are also far from perfect, despite a lot more practice. Human lives, real lives, are
imperfect by their nature, and there are human beings in cyberspace. The way we live in

cyberspace is a funhouse mirror of the way we live in the real world. We take both our
advantages and our troubles with us.
This book is about trouble in cyberspace. Specifically, this book is about certain strange
events in the year 1990, an unprecedented and startling year for the the growing world of
computerized communications.
In 1990 there came a nationwide crackdown on illicit computer hackers, with arrests,
criminal charges, one dramatic show-trial, several guilty pleas, and huge confiscations of
data and equipment all over the USA.
The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was larger, better organized, more deliberate, and more
resolute than any previous effort in the brave new world of computer crime. The U.S.
Secret Service, private telephone security, and state and local law enforcement groups
across the country all joined forces in a determined attempt to break the back of
America's electronic underground. It was a fascinating effort, with very mixed results.
The Hacker Crackdown had another unprecedented effect; it spurred the creation, within
"the computer community," of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a new and very odd
interest group, fiercely dedicated to the establishment and preservation of electronic civil
liberties. The crackdown, remarkable in itself, has created a melee of debate over
electronic crime, punishment, freedom of the press, and issues of search and seizure.
Politics has entered cyberspace. Where people go, politics follow.
This is the story of the people of cyberspace.

PART ONE: Crashing the System
On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance telephone switching system crashed.
This was a strange, dire, huge event. Sixty thousand people lost their telephone service
completely. During the nine long hours of frantic effort that it took to restore service,
some seventy million telephone calls went uncompleted.
Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco trade, are a known and accepted hazard
of the telephone business. Hurricanes hit, and phone cables get snapped by the thousands.
Earthquakes wrench through buried fiber-optic lines. Switching stations catch fire and
burn to the ground. These things do happen. There are contingency plans for them, and
decades of experience in dealing with them. But the Crash of January 15 was
unprecedented. It was unbelievably huge, and it occurred for no apparent physical reason.
The crash started on a Monday afternoon in a single switching-station in Manhattan. But,
unlike any merely physical damage, it spread and spread. Station after station across
America collapsed in a chain reaction, until fully half of AT&T's network had gone
haywire and the remaining half was hard-put to handle the overflow.

Within nine hours, AT&T software engineers more or less understood what had caused
the crash. Replicating the problem exactly, poring over software line by line, took them a
couple of weeks. But because it was hard to understand technically, the full truth of the
matter and its implications were not widely