The Hacker Crackdown Part 30

Though uttering almost nothing specific about the Sundevil operation itself, she coined some of the most striking soundbites of the growing propaganda war: "Agents are operating in good faith, and I don't think you can say that for the hacker community," was one.

Another was the memorable "I am not a mad dog prosecutor"

(Houston Chronicle, Sept 2, 1990.) In the meantime, the Secret Service maintained its usual extreme discretion; the Chicago Unit, smarting from the backlash of the Steve Jackson scandal, had gone completely to earth.

As I collated my growing pile of newspaper clippings, Gail Thackeray ranked as a comparative fount of public knowledge on police operations.

I decided that I had to get to know Gail Thackeray.

I wrote to her at the Arizona Attorney General's Office.

Not only did she kindly reply to me, but, to my astonishment, she knew very well what "cyberpunk" science fiction was.

Shortly after this, Gail Thackeray lost her job.

And I temporarily misplaced my own career as a science-fiction writer, to become a full-time computer-crime journalist. In early March, 1991, I flew to Phoenix, Arizona, to interview Gail Thackeray for my book on the hacker crackdown.

"Credit cards didn't used to cost anything to get,"

says Gail Thackeray. "Now they cost forty bucks-- and that's all just to cover the costs from RIP-OFF ARTISTS."

Electronic nuisance criminals are parasites.

One by one they're not much harm, no big deal.

But they never come just one by one. They come in swarms, heaps, legions, sometimes whole subcultures. And they bite.

Every time we buy a credit card today, we lose a little financial vitality to a particular species of bloodsucker.

What, in her expert opinion, are the worst forms of electronic crime, I ask, consulting my notes. Is it--credit card fraud? Breaking into ATM bank machines? Phone-phreaking? Computer intrusions?

Software viruses? Access-code theft? Records tampering?

Software piracy? p.o.r.nographic bulletin boards?

Satellite TV piracy? Theft of cable service?

It's a long list. By the time I reach the end of it I feel rather depressed.

"Oh no," says Gail Thackeray, leaning forward over the table, her whole body gone stiff with energetic indignation, "the biggest damage is telephone fraud. Fake sweepstakes, fake charities. Boiler-room con operations. You could pay off the national debt with what these guys steal. . . .

They target old people, they get hold of credit ratings and demographics, they rip off the old and the weak."

The words come tumbling out of her.

It's low-tech stuff, your everyday boiler-room fraud.

Grifters, conning people out of money over the phone, have been around for decades. This is where the word "phony" came from!

It's just that it's so much EASIER now, horribly facilitated by advances in technology and the byzantine structure of the modern phone system.

The same professional fraudsters do it over and over, Thackeray tells me, they hide behind dense onion-sh.e.l.ls of fake companies. . . fake holding corporations nine or ten layers deep, registered all over the map.

They get a phone installed under a false name in an empty safe-house.

And then they call-forward everything out of that phone to yet another phone, a phone that may even be in another STATE.

And they don't even pay the charges on their phones; after a month or so, they just split; set up somewhere else in another Podunkville with the same seedy crew of veteran phone-crooks.

They buy or steal commercial credit card reports, slap them on the PC, have a program pick out people over sixty-five who pay a lot to charities.

A whole subculture living off this, merciless folks on the con.

"The 'light-bulbs for the blind' people," Thackeray muses, with a special loathing. "There's just no end to them."

We're sitting in a downtown diner in Phoenix, Arizona.

It's a tough town, Phoenix. A state capital seeing some hard times.

Even to a Texan like myself, Arizona state politics seem rather baroque.

There was, and remains, endless trouble over the Martin Luther King holiday, the sort of stiff-necked, foot-shooting incident for which Arizona politics seem famous. There was Evan Mecham, the eccentric Republican millionaire governor who was impeached, after reducing state government to a ludicrous shambles. Then there was the national Keating scandal, involving Arizona savings and loans, in which both of Arizona's U.S. senators, DeConcini and McCain, played sadly prominent roles.

And the very latest is the bizarre AzScam case, in which state legislators were videotaped, eagerly taking cash from an informant of the Phoenix city police department, who was posing as a Vegas mobster.

"Oh," says Thackeray cheerfully. "These people are amateurs here, they thought they were finally getting to play with the big boys.

They don't have the least idea how to take a bribe!

It's not inst.i.tutional corruption. It's not like back in Philly."

Gail Thackeray was a former prosecutor in Philadelphia.

Now she's a former a.s.sistant attorney general of the State of Arizona.

Since moving to Arizona in 1986, she had worked under the aegis of Steve Twist, her boss in the Attorney General's office.

Steve Twist wrote Arizona's pioneering computer crime laws and naturally took an interest in seeing them enforced.

It was a snug niche, and Thackeray's Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit won a national reputation for ambition and technical knowledgeability. . . . Until the latest election in Arizona. Thackeray's boss ran for the top job, and lost. The victor, the new Attorney General, apparently went to some pains to eliminate the bureaucratic traces of his rival, including his pet group--Thackeray's group.

Twelve people got their walking papers.

Now Thackeray's painstakingly a.s.sembled computer lab sits gathering dust somewhere in the gla.s.s-and-concrete Attorney General's HQ on 1275 Was.h.i.+ngton Street.

Her computer-crime books, her painstakingly garnered back issues of phreak and hacker zines, all bought at her own expense--are piled in boxes somewhere.

The State of Arizona is simply not particularly interested in electronic racketeering at the moment.

At the moment of our interview, Gail Thackeray, officially unemployed, is working out of the county sheriff's office, living on her savings, and prosecuting several cases--working 60-hour weeks, just as always-- for no pay at all. "I'm trying to train people,"

she mutters.

Half her life seems to be spent training people--merely pointing out, to the naive and incredulous (such as myself) that this stuff is ACTUALLY GOING ON OUT THERE. It's a small world, computer crime.

A young world. Gail Thackeray, a trim blonde Baby-Boomer who favors Grand Canyon white-water rafting to kill some slow time, is one of the world's most senior, most veteran "hacker-trackers."

Her mentor was Donn Parker, the California think-tank theorist who got it all started 'way back in the mid-70s, the "grandfather of the field," "the great bald eagle of computer crime."

And what she has learned, Gail Thackeray teaches. Endlessly.

Tirelessly. To anybody. To Secret Service agents and state police, at the Glynco, Georgia federal training center. To local police, on "roadshows" with her slide projector and notebook.

To corporate security personnel. To journalists. To parents.

Even CROOKS look to Gail Thackeray for advice.

Phone-phreaks call her at the office. They know very well who she is. They pump her for information on what the cops are up to, how much they know.

Sometimes whole CROWDS of phone phreaks, hanging out on illegal conference calls, will call Gail Thackeray up. They taunt her. And, as always, they boast. Phone-phreaks, real stone phone-phreaks, simply CANNOT SHUT UP. They natter on for hours.

Left to themselves, they mostly talk about the intricacies of ripping-off phones; it's about as interesting as listening to hot-rodders talk about suspension and distributor-caps.

They also gossip cruelly about each other. And when talking to Gail Thackeray, they incriminate themselves. "I have tapes,"

Thackeray says coolly.

Phone phreaks just talk like crazy. "Dial-Tone" out in Alabama has been known to spend half-an-hour simply reading stolen phone-codes aloud into voice-mail answering machines.

Hundreds, thousands of numbers, recited in a monotone, without a break--an eerie phenomenon. When arrested, it's a rare phone phreak who doesn't inform at endless length on everybody he knows.

Hackers are no better. What other group of criminals, she asks rhetorically, publishes newsletters and holds conventions?

She seems deeply nettled by the sheer brazenness of this behavior, though to an outsider, this activity might make one wonder whether hackers should be considered "criminals" at all.

Skateboarders have magazines, and they trespa.s.s a lot.

Hot rod people have magazines and they break speed limits and sometimes kill people. . . .

I ask her whether it would be any loss to society if phone phreaking and computer hacking, as hobbies, simply dried up and blew away, so that n.o.body ever did it again.

She seems surprised. "No," she says swiftly. "Maybe a little. . .

in the old days. . .the MIT stuff. . . . But there's a lot of wonderful, legal stuff you can do with computers now, you don't have to break into somebody else's just to learn. You don't have that excuse.

You can learn all you like."