The Hacker Crackdown Part 19

The Secret Service showed up in force at Fry Guy's house on July 22, 1989, to the horror of his unsuspecting parents. The raiders were led by a special agent from the Secret Service's Indianapolis office.

However, the raiders were accompanied and advised by Timothy M. Foley of the Secret Service's Chicago office (a gentleman about whom we will soon be hearing a great deal).

Following federal computer-crime techniques that had been standard since the early 1980s, the Secret Service searched the house thoroughly, and seized all of Fry Guy's electronic equipment and notebooks.

All Fry Guy's equipment went out the door in the custody of the Secret Service, which put a swift end to his depredations.

The USSS interrogated Fry Guy at length. His case was put in the charge of Deborah Daniels, the federal US Attorney for the Southern District of Indiana. Fry Guy was charged with eleven counts of computer fraud, unauthorized computer access, and wire fraud. The evidence was thorough and irrefutable. For his part, Fry Guy blamed his corruption on the Legion of Doom and offered to testify against them.

Fry Guy insisted that the Legion intended to crash the phone system on a national holiday. And when AT&T crashed on Martin Luther King Day, 1990, this lent a credence to his claim that genuinely alarmed telco security and the Secret Service.

Fry Guy eventually pled guilty on May 31, 1990. On September 14, he was sentenced to forty-four months' probation and four hundred hours'

community service. He could have had it much worse; but it made sense to prosecutors to take it easy on this teenage minor, while zeroing in on the notorious kingpins of the Legion of Doom.

But the case against LoD had nagging flaws. Despite the best effort of investigators, it was impossible to prove that the Legion had crashed the phone system on January 15, because they, in fact, hadn't done so.

The investigations of 1989 did show that certain members of the Legion of Doom had achieved unprecedented power over the telco switching stations, and that they were in active conspiracy to obtain more power yet. Investigators were privately convinced that the Legion of Doom intended to do awful things with this knowledge, but mere evil intent was not enough to put them in jail.

And although the Atlanta Three--Prophet, Leftist, and especially Urvile-- had taught Fry Guy plenty, they were not themselves credit-card fraudsters.

The only thing they'd "stolen" was long-distance service--and since they'd done much of that through phone-switch manipulation, there was no easy way to judge how much they'd "stolen," or whether this practice was even "theft"

of any easily recognizable kind.

Fry Guy's theft of long-distance codes had cost the phone companies plenty.

The theft of long-distance service may be a fairly theoretical "loss,"

but it costs genuine money and genuine time to delete all those stolen codes, and to re-issue new codes to the innocent owners of those corrupted codes.

The owners of the codes themselves are victimized, and lose time and money and peace of mind in the ha.s.sle. And then there were the credit-card victims to deal with, too, and Western Union. When it came to rip-off, Fry Guy was far more of a thief than LoD. It was only when it came to actual computer expertise that Fry Guy was small potatoes.

The Atlanta Legion thought most "rules" of cybers.p.a.ce were for rodents and losers, but they DID have rules. THEY NEVER CRASHED ANYTHING, AND THEY NEVER TOOK MONEY. These were rough rules-of-thumb, and rather dubious principles when it comes to the ethical subtleties of cybers.p.a.ce, but they enabled the Atlanta Three to operate with a relatively clear conscience (though never with peace of mind).

If you didn't hack for money, if you weren't robbing people of actual funds --money in the bank, that is-- then n.o.body REALLY got hurt, in LoD's opinion.

"Theft of service" was a bogus issue, and "intellectual property" was a bad joke. But LoD had only elitist contempt for rip-off artists, "leechers," thieves. They considered themselves clean. In their opinion, if you didn't smash-up or crash any systems --(well, not on purpose, anyhow-- accidents can happen, just ask Robert Morris) then it was very unfair to call you a "vandal" or a "cracker." When you were hanging out on-line with your "pals" in telco security, you could face them down from the higher plane of hacker morality. And you could mock the police from the supercilious heights of your hacker's quest for pure knowledge.

But from the point of view of law enforcement and telco security, however, Fry Guy was not really dangerous. The Atlanta Three WERE dangerous.

It wasn't the crimes they were committing, but the DANGER, the potential hazard, the sheer TECHNICAL POWER LoD had acc.u.mulated, that had made the situation untenable. Fry Guy was not LoD.

He'd never laid eyes on anyone in LoD; his only contacts with them had been electronic. Core members of the Legion of Doom tended to meet physically for conventions every year or so, to get drunk, give each other the hacker high-sign, send out for pizza and ravage hotel suites.

Fry Guy had never done any of this. Deborah Daniels a.s.sessed Fry Guy accurately as "an LoD wannabe."

Nevertheless Fry Guy's crimes would be directly attributed to LoD in much future police propaganda. LoD would be described as "a closely knit group" involved in "numerous illegal activities"

including "stealing and modifying individual credit histories,"

and "fraudulently obtaining money and property." Fry Guy did this, but the Atlanta Three didn't; they simply weren't into theft, but rather intrusion. This caused a strange kink in the prosecution's strategy. LoD were accused of "disseminating information about attacking computers to other computer hackers in an effort to s.h.i.+ft the focus of law enforcement to those other hackers and away from the Legion of Doom."

This last accusation (taken directly from a press release by the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force) sounds particularly far-fetched.

One might conclude at this point that investigators would have been well-advised to go ahead and "s.h.i.+ft their focus" from the "Legion of Doom."

Maybe they SHOULD concentrate on "those other hackers"--the ones who were actually stealing money and physical objects.

But the Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was not a simple policing action.

It wasn't meant just to walk the beat in cybers.p.a.ce--it was a CRACKDOWN, a deliberate attempt to nail the core of the operation, to send a dire and potent message that would settle the hash of the digital underground for good.

By this reasoning, Fry Guy wasn't much more than the electronic equivalent of a cheap streetcorner dope dealer. As long as the masterminds of LoD were still flagrantly operating, pus.h.i.+ng their mountains of illicit knowledge right and left, and whipping up enthusiasm for blatant lawbreaking, then there would be an INFINITE SUPPLY of Fry Guys.

Because LoD were flagrant, they had left trails everywhere, to be picked up by law enforcement in New York, Indiana, Florida, Texas, Arizona, Missouri, even Australia.

But 1990's war on the Legion of Doom was led out of Illinois, by the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force.

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force, led by federal prosecutor William J. Cook, had started in 1987 and had swiftly become one of the most aggressive local "dedicated computer-crime units."

Chicago was a natural home for such a group. The world's first computer bulletin-board system had been invented in Illinois.

The state of Illinois had some of the nation's first and sternest computer crime laws. Illinois State Police were markedly alert to the possibilities of white-collar crime and electronic fraud.

And William J. Cook in particular was a rising star in electronic crime-busting. He and his fellow federal prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago had a tight relation with the Secret Service, especially go-getting Chicago-based agent Timothy Foley. While Cook and his Department of Justice colleagues plotted strategy, Foley was their man on the street.

Throughout the 1980s, the federal government had given prosecutors an armory of new, untried legal tools against computer crime.

Cook and his colleagues were pioneers in the use of these new statutes in the real-life cut-and-thrust of the federal courtroom.

On October 2, 1986, the US Senate had pa.s.sed the "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act" unanimously, but there were pitifully few convictions under this statute.

Cook's group took their name from this statute, since they were determined to transform this powerful but rather theoretical Act of Congress into a real-life engine of legal destruction against computer fraudsters and scofflaws.

It was not a question of merely discovering crimes, investigating them, and then trying and punis.h.i.+ng their perpetrators. The Chicago unit, like most everyone else in the business, already KNEW who the bad guys were: the Legion of Doom and the writers and editors of Phrack.

The task at hand was to find some legal means of putting these characters away.

This approach might seem a bit dubious, to someone not acquainted with the gritty realities of prosecutorial work.

But prosecutors don't put people in jail for crimes they have committed; they put people in jail for crimes they have committed THAT CAN BE PROVED IN COURT.

Chicago federal police put Al Capone in prison for income-tax fraud. Chicago is a big town, with a rough-and-ready bare-knuckle tradition on both sides of the law.

Fry Guy had broken the case wide open and alerted telco security to the scope of the problem. But Fry Guy's crimes would not put the Atlanta Three behind bars--much less the wacko underground journalists of Phrack. So on July 22, 1989, the same day that Fry Guy was raided in Indiana, the Secret Service descended upon the Atlanta Three.

This was likely inevitable. By the summer of 1989, law enforcement were closing in on the Atlanta Three from at least six directions at once.

First, there were the leads from Fry Guy, which had led to the DNR registers being installed on the lines of the Atlanta Three. The DNR evidence alone would have finished them off, sooner or later.

But second, the Atlanta lads were already well-known to Control-C and his telco security sponsors. LoD's contacts with telco security had made them overconfident and even more boastful than usual; they felt that they had powerful friends in high places, and that they were being openly tolerated by telco security.

But BellSouth's Intrusion Task Force were hot on the trail of LoD and sparing no effort or expense.

The Atlanta Three had also been identified by name and listed on the extensive anti-hacker files maintained, and retailed for pay, by private security operative John Maxfield of Detroit.

Maxfield, who had extensive ties to telco security and many informants in the underground, was a bete noire of the Phrack crowd, and the dislike was mutual.

The Atlanta Three themselves had written articles for Phrack.

This boastful act could not possibly escape telco and law enforcement attention.

"Knightmare," a high-school age hacker from Arizona, was a close friend and disciple of Atlanta LoD, but he had been nabbed by the formidable Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit. Knightmare was on some of LoD's favorite boards--"Black Ice" in particular-- and was privy to their secrets. And to have Gail Thackeray, the a.s.sistant Attorney General of Arizona, on one's trail was a dreadful peril for any hacker.

And perhaps worst of all, Prophet had committed a major blunder by pa.s.sing an illicitly copied BellSouth computer-file to Knight Lightning, who had published it in Phrack. This, as we will see, was an act of dire consequence for almost everyone concerned.

On July 22, 1989, the Secret Service showed up at the Leftist's house, where he lived with his parents. A ma.s.sive squad of some twenty officers surrounded the building: Secret Service, federal marshals, local police, possibly BellSouth telco security; it was hard to tell in the crush.

Leftist's dad, at work in his bas.e.m.e.nt office, first noticed a muscular stranger in plain clothes cras.h.i.+ng through the back yard with a drawn pistol. As more strangers poured into the house, Leftist's dad naturally a.s.sumed there was an armed robbery in progress.

Like most hacker parents, Leftist's mom and dad had only the vaguest notions of what their son had been up to all this time. Leftist had a day-job repairing computer hardware. His obsession with computers seemed a bit odd, but harmless enough, and likely to produce a well- paying career. The sudden, overwhelming raid left Leftist's parents traumatized.

The Leftist himself had been out after work with his co-workers, surrounding a couple of pitchers of margaritas. As he came trucking on tequila-numbed feet up the pavement, toting a bag full of floppy-disks, he noticed a large number of unmarked cars parked in his driveway.

All the cars sported tiny microwave antennas.

The Secret Service had knocked the front door off its hinges, almost flattening his mom.