The Hacker Crackdown Part 27

(The vagueness of this estimate is attributable to the vagueness of (a) what a "computer system" is, and (b) what it actually means to "run a board" with one--or with two computers, or with three.)

About twenty-five boards vanished into police custody in May 1990.

As we have seen, there are an estimated 30,000 boards in America today.

If we a.s.sume that one board in a hundred is up to no good with codes and cards (which rather flatters the honesty of the board-using community), then that would leave 2,975 outlaw boards untouched by Sundevil.

Sundevil seized about one tenth of one percent of all computer bulletin boards in America. Seen objectively, this is something less than a comprehensive a.s.sault. In 1990, Sundevil's organizers-- the team at the Phoenix Secret Service office, and the Arizona Attorney General's office-- had a list of at least THREE HUNDRED boards that they considered fully deserving of search and seizure warrants.

The twenty-five boards actually seized were merely among the most obvious and egregious of this much larger list of candidates. All these boards had been examined beforehand--either by informants, who had pa.s.sed printouts to the Secret Service, or by Secret Service agents themselves, who not only come equipped with modems but know how to use them.

There were a number of motives for Sundevil. First, it offered a chance to get ahead of the curve on wire-fraud crimes.

Tracking back credit-card ripoffs to their perpetrators can be appallingly difficult. If these miscreants have any kind of electronic sophistication, they can snarl their tracks through the phone network into a mind-boggling, untraceable mess, while still managing to "reach out and rob someone."

Boards, however, full of brags and boasts, codes and cards, offer evidence in the handy congealed form.

Seizures themselves--the mere physical removal of machines-- tends to take the pressure off. During Sundevil, a large number of code kids, warez d00dz, and credit card thieves would be deprived of those boards--their means of community and conspiracy--in one swift blow.

As for the sysops themselves (commonly among the boldest offenders) they would be directly stripped of their computer equipment, and rendered digitally mute and blind.

And this aspect of Sundevil was carried out with great success.

Sundevil seems to have been a complete tactical surprise-- unlike the fragmentary and continuing seizures of the war on the Legion of Doom, Sundevil was precisely timed and utterly overwhelming.

At least forty "computers" were seized during May 7, 8 and 9, 1990, in Cincinnati, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Phoenix, Tucson, Richmond, San Diego, San Jose, Pittsburgh and San Francisco.

Some cities saw multiple raids, such as the five separate raids in the New York City environs. Plano, Texas (essentially a suburb of the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, and a hub of the telecommunications industry) saw four computer seizures. Chicago, ever in the forefront, saw its own local Sundevil raid, briskly carried out by Secret Service agents Timothy Foley and Barbara Golden.

Many of these raids occurred, not in the cities proper, but in a.s.sociated white-middle cla.s.s suburbs--places like Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania and Clark Lake, Michigan.

There were a few raids on offices; most took place in people's homes, the cla.s.sic hacker bas.e.m.e.nts and bedrooms.

The Sundevil raids were searches and seizures, not a group of ma.s.s arrests.

There were only four arrests during Sundevil. "Tony the Trashman,"

a longtime teenage bete noire of the Arizona Racketeering unit, was arrested in Tucson on May 9. "Dr. Ripco," sysop of an outlaw board with the misfortune to exist in Chicago itself, was also arrested-- on illegal weapons charges. Local units also arrested a 19-year-old female phone phreak named "Electra" in Pennsylvania, and a male juvenile in California. Federal agents however were not seeking arrests, but computers.

Hackers are generally not indicted (if at all) until the evidence in their seized computers is evaluated--a process that can take weeks, months--even years. When hackers are arrested on the spot, it's generally an arrest for other reasons. Drugs and/or illegal weapons show up in a good third of anti-hacker computer seizures (though not during Sundevil).

That scofflaw teenage hackers (or their parents) should have marijuana in their homes is probably not a shocking revelation, but the surprisingly common presence of illegal firearms in hacker dens is a bit disquieting.

A Personal Computer can be a great equalizer for the techno-cowboy-- much like that more traditional American "Great Equalizer,"

the Personal Sixgun. Maybe it's not all that surprising that some guy obsessed with power through illicit technology would also have a few illicit high-velocity-impact devices around.

An element of the digital underground particularly dotes on those "anarchy philes," and this element tends to shade into the crackpot milieu of survivalists, gun-nuts, anarcho-leftists and the ultra-libertarian right-wing.

This is not to say that hacker raids to date have uncovered any major crack-dens or illegal a.r.s.enals; but Secret Service agents do not regard "hackers" as "just kids." They regard hackers as unpredictable people, bright and slippery. It doesn't help matters that the hacker himself has been "hiding behind his keyboard"

all this time. Commonly, police have no idea what he looks like.

This makes him an unknown quant.i.ty, someone best treated with proper caution.

To date, no hacker has come out shooting, though they do sometimes brag on boards that they will do just that. Threats of this sort are taken seriously.

Secret Service hacker raids tend to be swift, comprehensive, well-manned (even over-manned); and agents generally burst through every door in the home at once, sometimes with drawn guns. Any potential resistance is swiftly quelled. Hacker raids are usually raids on people's homes.

It can be a very dangerous business to raid an American home; people can panic when strangers invade their sanctum. Statistically speaking, the most dangerous thing a policeman can do is to enter someone's home.

(The second most dangerous thing is to stop a car in traffic.) People have guns in their homes. More cops are hurt in homes than are ever hurt in biker bars or ma.s.sage parlors.

But in any case, no one was hurt during Sundevil, or indeed during any part of the Hacker Crackdown.

Nor were there any allegations of any physical mistreatment of a suspect.

Guns were pointed, interrogations were sharp and prolonged; but no one in 1990 claimed any act of brutality by any crackdown raider.

In addition to the forty or so computers, Sundevil reaped floppy disks in particularly great abundance--an estimated 23,000 of them, which naturally included every manner of illegitimate data: pirated games, stolen codes, hot credit card numbers, the complete text and software of entire pirate bulletin-boards. These floppy disks, which remain in police custody today, offer a gigantic, almost embarra.s.singly rich source of possible criminal indictments. These 23,000 floppy disks also include a thus-far unknown quant.i.ty of legitimate computer games, legitimate software, purportedly "private" mail from boards, business records, and personal correspondence of all kinds.

Standard computer-crime search warrants lay great emphasis on seizing written doc.u.ments as well as computers--specifically including photocopies, computer printouts, telephone bills, address books, logs, notes, memoranda and correspondence. In practice, this has meant that diaries, gaming magazines, software doc.u.mentation, nonfiction books on hacking and computer security, sometimes even science fiction novels, have all vanished out the door in police custody. A wide variety of electronic items have been known to vanish as well, including telephones, televisions, answering machines, Sony Walkmans, desktop printers, compact disks, and audiotapes.

No fewer than 150 members of the Secret Service were sent into the field during Sundevil. They were commonly accompanied by squads of local and/or state police. Most of these officers-- especially the locals--had never been on an anti-hacker raid before.

(This was one good reason, in fact, why so many of them were invited along in the first place.) Also, the presence of a uniformed police officer a.s.sures the raidees that the people entering their homes are, in fact, police.

Secret Service agents wear plain clothes. So do the telco security experts who commonly accompany the Secret Service on raids (and who make no particular effort to identify themselves as mere employees of telephone companies).

A typical hacker raid goes something like this. First, police storm in rapidly, through every entrance, with overwhelming force, in the a.s.sumption that this tactic will keep casualties to a minimum.

Second, possible suspects are immediately removed from the vicinity of any and all computer systems, so that they will have no chance to purge or destroy computer evidence. Suspects are herded into a room without computers, commonly the living room, and kept under guard-- not ARMED guard, for the guns are swiftly holstered, but under guard nevertheless. They are presented with the search warrant and warned that anything they say may be held against them. Commonly they have a great deal to say, especially if they are unsuspecting parents.

Somewhere in the house is the "hot spot"--a computer tied to a phone line (possibly several computers and several phones). Commonly it's a teenager's bedroom, but it can be anywhere in the house; there may be several such rooms. This "hot spot" is put in charge of a two-agent team, the "finder" and the "recorder." The "finder"

is computer-trained, commonly the case agent who has actually obtained the search warrant from a judge. He or she understands what is being sought, and actually carries out the seizures: unplugs machines, opens drawers, desks, files, floppy-disk containers, etc. The "recorder" photographs all the equipment, just as it stands--especially the tangle of wired connections in the back, which can otherwise be a real nightmare to restore. The recorder will also commonly photograph every room in the house, lest some wily criminal claim that the police had robbed him during the search. Some recorders carry videocams or tape recorders; however, it's more common for the recorder to simply take written notes.

Objects are described and numbered as the finder seizes them, generally on standard preprinted police inventory forms.

Even Secret Service agents were not, and are not, expert computer users.

They have not made, and do not make, judgements on the fly about potential threats posed by various forms of equipment. They may exercise discretion; they may leave Dad his computer, for instance, but they don't HAVE to.

Standard computer-crime search warrants, which date back to the early 80s, use a sweeping language that targets computers, most anything attached to a computer, most anything used to operate a computer--most anything that remotely resembles a computer--plus most any and all written doc.u.ments surrounding it. Computer-crime investigators have strongly urged agents to seize the works.

In this sense, Operation Sundevil appears to have been a complete success.

Boards went down all over America, and were s.h.i.+pped en ma.s.se to the computer investigation lab of the Secret Service, in Was.h.i.+ngton DC, along with the 23,000 floppy disks and unknown quant.i.ties of printed material.

But the seizure of twenty-five boards, and the multi-megabyte mountains of possibly useful evidence contained in these boards (and in their owners'

other computers, also out the door), were far from the only motives for Operation Sundevil. An unprecedented action of great ambition and size, Sundevil's motives can only be described as political. It was a public-relations effort, meant to pa.s.s certain messages, meant to make certain situations clear: both in the mind of the general public, and in the minds of various const.i.tuencies of the electronic community.

First --and this motivation was vital--a "message" would be sent from law enforcement to the digital underground. This very message was recited in so many words by Garry M. Jenkins, the a.s.sistant Director of the US Secret Service, at the Sundevil press conference in Phoenix on May 9, 1990, immediately after the raids. In brief, hackers were mistaken in their foolish belief that they could hide behind the "relative anonymity of their computer terminals." On the contrary, they should fully understand that state and federal cops were actively patrolling the beat in cybers.p.a.ce--that they were on the watch everywhere, even in those sleazy and secretive dens of cybernetic vice, the underground boards.

This is not an unusual message for police to publicly convey to crooks.

The message is a standard message; only the context is new.

In this respect, the Sundevil raids were the digital equivalent of the standard vice-squad crackdown on ma.s.sage parlors, p.o.r.no bookstores, head-shops, or floating c.r.a.p-games. There may be few or no arrests in a raid of this sort; no convictions, no trials, no interrogations. In cases of this sort, police may well walk out the door with many pounds of sleazy magazines, X-rated videotapes, s.e.x toys, gambling equipment, baggies of marijuana. . . .

Of course, if something truly horrendous is discovered by the raiders, there will be arrests and prosecutions. Far more likely, however, there will simply be a brief but sharp disruption of the closed and secretive world of the nogoodniks. There will be "street ha.s.sle."

"Heat." "Deterrence." And, of course, the immediate loss of the seized goods.

It is very unlikely that any of this seized material will ever be returned.

Whether charged or not, whether convicted or not, the perpetrators will almost surely lack the nerve ever to ask for this stuff to be given back.

Arrests and trials--putting people in jail--may involve all kinds of formal legalities; but dealing with the justice system is far from the only task of police. Police do not simply arrest people. They don't simply put people in jail. That is not how the police perceive their jobs.

Police "protect and serve." Police "keep the peace," they "keep public order."

Like other forms of public relations, keeping public order is not an exact science. Keeping public order is something of an art-form.

If a group of tough-looking teenage hoodlums was loitering on a street-corner, no one would be surprised to see a street-cop arrive and sternly order them to "break it up." On the contrary, the surprise would come if one of these ne'er-do-wells stepped briskly into a phone-booth, called a civil rights lawyer, and inst.i.tuted a civil suit in defense of his Const.i.tutional rights of free speech and free a.s.sembly. But something much along this line was one of the many anomolous outcomes of the Hacker Crackdown.

Sundevil also carried useful "messages" for other const.i.tuents of the electronic community. These messages may not have been read aloud from the Phoenix podium in front of the press corps, but there was little mistaking their meaning. There was a message of rea.s.surance for the primary victims of coding and carding: the telcos, and the credit companies. Sundevil was greeted with joy by the security officers of the electronic business community.

After years of high-tech hara.s.sment and spiralling revenue losses, their complaints of rampant outlawry were being taken seriously by law enforcement. No more head-scratching or dismissive shrugs; no more feeble excuses about "lack of computer-trained officers" or the low priority of "victimless" white-collar telecommunication crimes.

Computer-crime experts have long believed that computer-related offenses are drastically under-reported. They regard this as a major open scandal of their field. Some victims are reluctant to come forth, because they believe that police and prosecutors are not computer-literate, and can and will do nothing. Others are embarra.s.sed by their vulnerabilities, and will take strong measures to avoid any publicity; this is especially true of banks, who fear a loss of investor confidence should an embezzlement-case or wire-fraud surface. And some victims are so helplessly confused by their own high technology that they never even realize that a crime has occurred--even when they have been fleeced to the bone.

The results of this situation can be dire.

Criminals escape apprehension and punishment.

The computer-crime units that do exist, can't get work.

The true scope of computer-crime: its size, its real nature, the scope of its threats, and the legal remedies for it-- all remain obscured.