Hacker Crackdown | Page 7

and thoroughly aired and explained. The root
cause of the crash remained obscure, surrounded by rumor and fear.
The crash was a grave corporate embarrassment. The "culprit" was a bug in AT&T's own
software--not the sort of admission the telecommunications giant wanted to make,
especially in the face of increasing competition. Still, the truth WAS told, in the baffling
technical terms necessary to explain it.
Somehow the explanation failed to persuade American law enforcement officials and
even telephone corporate security personnel. These people were not technical experts or
software wizards, and they had their own suspicions about the cause of this disaster.
The police and telco security had important sources of information denied to mere
software engineers. They had informants in the computer underground and years of
experience in dealing with high-tech rascality that seemed to grow ever more
sophisticated. For years they had been expecting a direct and savage attack against the
American national telephone system. And with the Crash of January 15--the first month
of a new, high- tech decade--their predictions, fears, and suspicions seemed at last to
have entered the real world. A world where the telephone system had not merely crashed,
but, quite likely, BEEN crashed--by "hackers."
The crash created a large dark cloud of suspicion that would color certain people's
assumptions and actions for months. The fact that it took place in the realm of software
was suspicious on its face. The fact that it occurred on Martin Luther King Day, still the
most politically touchy of American holidays, made it more suspicious yet.
The Crash of January 15 gave the Hacker Crackdown its sense of edge and its sweaty
urgency. It made people, powerful people in positions of public authority, willing to
believe the worst. And, most fatally, it helped to give investigators a willingness to take
extreme measures and the determination to preserve almost total secrecy.
An obscure software fault in an aging switching system in New York was to lead to a
chain reaction of legal and constitutional trouble all across the country.
Like the crash in the telephone system, this chain reaction was ready and waiting to
happen. During the 1980s, the American legal system was extensively patched to deal
with the novel issues of computer crime. There was, for instance, the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (eloquently described as "a stinking mess" by a
prominent law enforcement official). And there was the draconian Computer Fraud and
Abuse Act of 1986, passed unanimously by the United States Senate, which later would
reveal a large number of flaws. Extensive, well-meant efforts had been made to keep the
legal system up to date. But in the day-to-day grind of the real world, even the most
elegant software tends to crumble and suddenly reveal its hidden bugs.
Like the advancing telephone system, the American legal system was certainly not ruined

by its temporary crash; but for those caught under the weight of the collapsing system,
life became a series of blackouts and anomalies.
In order to understand why these weird events occurred, both in the world of technology
and in the world of law, it's not enough to understand the merely technical problems. We
will get to those; but first and foremost, we must try to understand the telephone, and the
business of telephones, and the community of human beings that telephones have created.
Technologies have life cycles, like cities do, like institutions do, like laws and
governments do.
The first stage of any technology is the Question Mark, often known as the "Golden
Vaporware" stage. At this early point, the technology is only a phantom, a mere gleam in
the inventor's eye. One such inventor was a speech teacher and electrical tinkerer named
Alexander Graham Bell.
Bell's early inventions, while ingenious, failed to move the world. In 1863, the teenage
Bell and his brother Melville made an artificial talking mechanism out of wood, rubber,
gutta- percha, and tin. This weird device had a rubber-covered "tongue" made of movable
wooden segments, with vibrating rubber "vocal cords," and rubber "lips" and "cheeks."
While Melville puffed a bellows into a tin tube, imitating the lungs, young Alec Bell
would manipulate the "lips," "teeth," and "tongue," causing the thing to emit high-pitched
falsetto gibberish.
Another would-be technical breakthrough was the Bell "phonautograph" of 1874,
actually made out of a human cadaver's ear. Clamped into place on a tripod, this grisly
gadget drew sound-wave images on smoked glass through a thin straw glued to its
vibrating earbones.
By 1875, Bell had learned to produce audible sounds--ugly shrieks and squawks--by
using magnets, diaphragms, and electrical current.
Most "Golden Vaporware" technologies go nowhere.
But the second stage of technology is the Rising Star, or, the "Goofy Prototype," stage.
The telephone, Bell's most ambitious gadget yet, reached this stage on March