The Hacker Crackdown Part 24

The puzzle becaming much stranger some five minutes later.

Austin U. S. Secret Service Agent Al Soliz, accompanied by University of Texas campus-security officer Larry Coutorie and the ubiquitous Tim Foley, made their appearance at Izenberg's door.

They were in plain clothes: slacks, polo s.h.i.+rts. They came in, and Tim Foley accused Izenberg of belonging to the Legion of Doom.

Izenberg told them that he had never heard of the "Legion of Doom."

And what about a certain stolen E911 Doc.u.ment, that posed a direct threat to the police emergency lines? Izenberg claimed that he'd never heard of that, either.

His interrogators found this difficult to believe.

Didn't he know Terminus?

Who?

They gave him Terminus's real name. Oh yes, said Izenberg.

He knew THAT guy all right--he was leading discussions on the Internet about AT&T computers, especially the AT&T 3B2.

AT&T had thrust this machine into the marketplace, but, like many of AT&T's ambitious attempts to enter the computing arena, the 3B2 project had something less than a glittering success. Izenberg himself had been a contractor for the division of AT&T that supported the 3B2.

The entire division had been shut down.

Nowadays, the cheapest and quickest way to get help with this fractious piece of machinery was to join one of Terminus's discussion groups on the Internet, where friendly and knowledgeable hackers would help you for free. Naturally the remarks within this group were less than flattering about the Death Star. . .was THAT the problem?

Foley told Izenberg that Terminus had been acquiring hot software through his, Izenberg's, machine.

Izenberg shrugged this off. A good eight megabytes of data flowed through his UUCP site every day. UUCP nodes spewed data like fire hoses.

Elephant had been directly linked to Netsys--not surprising, since Terminus was a 3B2 expert and Izenberg had been a 3B2 contractor.

Izenberg was also linked to "attctc" and the University of Texas.

Terminus was a well-known UNIX expert, and might have been up to all manner of hijinks on Elephant. Nothing Izenberg could do about that.

That was physically impossible. Needle in a haystack.

In a four-hour grilling, Foley urged Izenberg to come clean and admit that he was in conspiracy with Terminus, and a member of the Legion of Doom.

Izenberg denied this. He was no weirdo teenage hacker-- he was thirty-two years old, and didn't even have a "handle."

Izenberg was a former TV technician and electronics specialist who had drifted into UNIX consulting as a full-grown adult.

Izenberg had never met Terminus, physically. He'd once bought a cheap high-speed modem from him, though.

Foley told him that this modem (a Telenet T2500 which ran at 19.2 kilobaud, and which had just gone out Izenberg's door in Secret Service custody) was likely hot property. Izenberg was taken aback to hear this; but then again, most of Izenberg's equipment, like that of most freelance professionals in the industry, was discounted, pa.s.sed hand-to-hand through various kinds of barter and gray-market. There was no proof that the modem was stolen, and even if it were, Izenberg hardly saw how that gave them the right to take every electronic item in his house.

Still, if the United States Secret Service figured they needed his computer for national security reasons--or whatever-- then Izenberg would not kick. He figured he would somehow make the sacrifice of his twenty thousand dollars' worth of professional equipment, in the spirit of full cooperation and good citizens.h.i.+p.

Robert Izenberg was not arrested. Izenberg was not charged with any crime.

His UUCP node--full of some 140 megabytes of the files, mail, and data of himself and his dozen or so entirely innocent users--went out the door as "evidence." Along with the disks and tapes, Izenberg had lost about 800 megabytes of data.

Six months would pa.s.s before Izenberg decided to phone the Secret Service and ask how the case was going. That was the first time that Robert Izenberg would ever hear the name of William Cook. As of January 1992, a full two years after the seizure, Izenberg, still not charged with any crime, would be struggling through the mora.s.s of the courts, in hope of recovering his thousands of dollars' worth of seized equipment.

In the meantime, the Izenberg case received absolutely no press coverage.

The Secret Service had walked into an Austin home, removed a UNIX bulletin- board system, and met with no operational difficulties whatsoever.

Except that word of a crackdown had percolated through the Legion of Doom.

"The Mentor" voluntarily shut down "The Phoenix Project." It seemed a pity, especially as telco security employees had, in fact, shown up on Phoenix, just as he had hoped--along with the usual motley crowd of LoD heavies, hangers-on, phreaks, hackers and wannabes. There was "Sandy" Sandquist from US SPRINT security, and some guy named Henry Kluepfel, from Bellcore itself!

Kluepfel had been trading friendly banter with hackers on Phoenix since January 30th (two weeks after the Martin Luther King Day Crash).

The presence of such a stellar telco official seemed quite the coup for Phoenix Project.

Still, Mentor could judge the climate. Atlanta in ruins, Phrack in deep trouble, something weird going on with UNIX nodes-- discretion was advisable. Phoenix Project went off-line.

Kluepfel, of course, had been monitoring this LoD bulletin board for his own purposes--and those of the Chicago unit.

As far back as June 1987, Kluepfel had logged on to a Texas underground board called "Phreak Kla.s.s 2600." There he'd discovered an Chicago youngster named "Shadowhawk,"

strutting and boasting about rifling AT&T computer files, and bragging of his ambitions to riddle AT&T's Bellcore computers with trojan horse programs. Kluepfel had pa.s.sed the news to Cook in Chicago, Shadowhawk's computers had gone out the door in Secret Service custody, and Shadowhawk himself had gone to jail.

Now it was Phoenix Project's turn. Phoenix Project postured about "legality" and "merely intellectual interest," but it reeked of the underground. It had Phrack on it. It had the E911 Doc.u.ment.

It had a lot of dicey talk about breaking into systems, including some bold and reckless stuff about a supposed "decryption service" that Mentor and friends were planning to run, to help crack encrypted pa.s.swords off of hacked systems.

Mentor was an adult. There was a bulletin board at his place of work, as well. Kleupfel logged onto this board, too, and discovered it to be called "Illuminati." It was run by some company called Steve Jackson Games.

On March 1, 1990, the Austin crackdown went into high gear.

On the morning of March 1--a Thursday--21-year-old University of Texas student "Erik Bloodaxe," co-sysop of Phoenix Project and an avowed member of the Legion of Doom, was wakened by a police revolver levelled at his head.

Bloodaxe watched, jittery, as Secret Service agents appropriated his 300 baud terminal and, rifling his files, discovered his treasured source-code for Robert Morris's notorious Internet Worm. But Bloodaxe, a wily operator, had suspected that something of the like might be coming.

All his best equipment had been hidden away elsewhere.

The raiders took everything electronic, however, including his telephone. They were stymied by his hefty arcade-style Pac-Man game, and left it in place, as it was simply too heavy to move.

Bloodaxe was not arrested. He was not charged with any crime.

A good two years later, the police still had what they had taken from him, however.

The Mentor was less wary. The dawn raid rousted him and his wife from bed in their underwear, and six Secret Service agents, accompanied by an Austin policeman and Henry Kluepfel himself, made a rich haul. Off went the works, into the agents' white Chevrolet minivan: an IBM PC-AT clone with 4 meg of RAM and a 120-meg hard disk; a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet II printer; a completely legitimate and highly expensive SCO-Xenix 286 operating system; Pagemaker disks and doc.u.mentation; and the Microsoft Word word-processing program. Mentor's wife had her incomplete academic thesis stored on the hard-disk; that went, too, and so did the couple's telephone. As of two years later, all this property remained in police custody.

Mentor remained under guard in his apartment as agents prepared to raid Steve Jackson Games. The fact that this was a business headquarters and not a private residence did not deter the agents.

It was still very early; no one was at work yet. The agents prepared to break down the door, but Mentor, eavesdropping on the Secret Service walkie-talkie traffic, begged them not to do it, and offered his key to the building.

The exact details of the next events are unclear. The agents would not let anyone else into the building. Their search warrant, when produced, was unsigned. Apparently they breakfasted from the local "Whataburger," as the litter from hamburgers was later found inside.

They also extensively sampled a bag of jellybeans kept by an SJG employee.

Someone tore a "Dukakis for President" sticker from the wall.

SJG employees, diligently showing up for the day's work, were met at the door and briefly questioned by U.S. Secret Service agents.

The employees watched in astonishment as agents wielding crowbars and screwdrivers emerged with captive machines. They attacked outdoor storage units with boltcutters. The agents wore blue nylon windbreakers with "SECRET SERVICE" stencilled across the back, with running-shoes and jeans.

Jackson's company lost three computers, several hard-disks, hundred of floppy disks, two monitors, three modems, a laser printer, various powercords, cables, and adapters (and, oddly, a small bag of screws, bolts and nuts).

The seizure of Illuminati BBS deprived SJG of all the programs, text files, and private e-mail on the board. The loss of two other SJG computers was a severe blow as well, since it caused the loss of electronically stored contracts, financial projections, address directories, mailing lists, personnel files, business correspondence, and, not least, the drafts of forthcoming games and gaming books.

No one at Steve Jackson Games was arrested. No one was accused of any crime. No charges were filed. Everything appropriated was officially kept as "evidence" of crimes never specified.

After the Phrack show-trial, the Steve Jackson Games scandal was the most bizarre and aggravating incident of the Hacker Crackdown of 1990. This raid by the Chicago Task Force on a science-fiction gaming publisher was to rouse a swarming host of civil liberties issues, and gave rise to an enduring controversy that was still re-complicating itself, and growing in the scope of its implications, a full two years later.

The pursuit of the E911 Doc.u.ment stopped with the Steve Jackson Games raid.

As we have seen, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of computer users in America with the E911 Doc.u.ment in their possession. Theoretically, Chicago had a perfect legal right to raid any of these people, and could have legally seized the machines of anybody who subscribed to Phrack.

However, there was no copy of the E911 Doc.u.ment on Jackson's Illuminati board.

And there the Chicago raiders stopped dead; they have not raided anyone since.

It might be a.s.sumed that Rich Andrews and Charlie Boykin, who had brought the E911 Doc.u.ment to the attention of telco security, might be spared any official suspicion. But as we have seen, the willingness to "cooperate fully" offers little, if any, a.s.surance against federal anti-hacker prosecution.

Richard Andrews found himself in deep trouble, thanks to the E911 Doc.u.ment.