The Hacker Crackdown Part 31

Did you ever hack into a system? I ask.

The trainees do it at Glynco. Just to demonstrate system vulnerabilities.

She's cool to the notion. Genuinely indifferent.

"What kind of computer do you have?"

"A Compaq 286LE," she mutters.

"What kind do you WISH you had?"

At this question, the unmistakable light of true hackerdom flares in Gail Thackeray's eyes. She becomes tense, animated, the words pour out: "An Amiga 2000 with an IBM card and Mac emulation! The most common hacker machines are Amigas and Commodores. And Apples." If she had the Amiga, she enthuses, she could run a whole galaxy of seized computer-evidence disks on one convenient multifunctional machine. A cheap one, too. Not like the old Attorney General lab, where they had an ancient CP/M machine, a.s.sorted Amiga flavors and Apple flavors, a couple IBMS, all the utility software. . .but no Commodores. The workstations down at the Attorney General's are w.a.n.g dedicated word-processors.

Lame machines tied in to an office net--though at least they get on- line to the Lexis and Westlaw legal data services.

I don't say anything. I recognize the syndrome, though.

This computer-fever has been running through segments of our society for years now. It's a strange kind of l.u.s.t: K-hunger, Meg-hunger; but it's a shared disease; it can kill parties dead, as conversation spirals into the deepest and most deviant recesses of software releases and expensive peripherals. . . . The mark of the hacker beast.

I have it too. The whole "electronic community," whatever the h.e.l.l that is, has it. Gail Thackeray has it. Gail Thackeray is a hacker cop.

My immediate reaction is a strong rush of indignant pity: WHY DOESN'T SOMEBODY BUY THIS WOMAN HER AMIGA?!

It's not like she's asking for a Cray X-MP supercomputer mainframe; an Amiga's a sweet little cookie-box thing. We're losing zillions in organized fraud; prosecuting and defending a single hacker case in court can cost a hundred grand easy. How come n.o.body can come up with four lousy grand so this woman can do her job? For a hundred grand we could buy every computer cop in America an Amiga. There aren't that many of 'em.

Computers. The l.u.s.t, the hunger, for computers.

The loyalty they inspire, the intense sense of possessiveness.

The culture they have bred. I myself am sitting in downtown Phoenix, Arizona because it suddenly occurred to me that the police might-- just MIGHT--come and take away my computer. The prospect of this, the mere IMPLIED THREAT, was unbearable. It literally changed my life.

It was changing the lives of many others. Eventually it would change everybody's life.

Gail Thackeray was one of the top computer-crime people in America.

And I was just some novelist, and yet I had a better computer than hers.

PRACTICALLY EVERYBODY I KNEW had a better computer than Gail Thackeray and her feeble laptop 286. It was like sending the sheriff in to clean up Dodge City and arming her with a slingshot cut from an old rubber tire.

But then again, you don't need a howitzer to enforce the law.

You can do a lot just with a badge. With a badge alone, you can basically wreak havoc, take a terrible vengeance on wrongdoers.

Ninety percent of "computer crime investigation" is just "crime investigation:"

names, places, dossiers, modus operandi, search warrants, victims, complainants, informants. . . .

What will computer crime look like in ten years? Will it get better?

Did "Sundevil" send 'em reeling back in confusion?

It'll be like it is now, only worse, she tells me with perfect conviction.

Still there in the background, ticking along, changing with the times: the criminal underworld. It'll be like drugs are. Like our problems with alcohol. All the cops and laws in the world never solved our problems with alcohol. If there's something people want, a certain percentage of them are just going to take it. Fifteen percent of the populace will never steal. Fifteen percent will steal most anything not nailed down.

The battle is for the hearts and minds of the remaining seventy percent.

And criminals catch on fast. If there's not "too steep a learning curve"-- if it doesn't require a baffling amount of expertise and practice-- then criminals are often some of the first through the gate of a new technology. Especially if it helps them to hide.

They have tons of cash, criminals. The new communications tech-- like pagers, cellular phones, faxes, Federal Express--were pioneered by rich corporate people, and by criminals. In the early years of pagers and beepers, dope dealers were so enthralled this technology that owing a beeper was practically prima facie evidence of cocaine dealing.

CB radio exploded when the speed limit hit 55 and breaking the highway law became a national pastime. Dope dealers send cash by Federal Express, despite, or perhaps BECAUSE OF, the warnings in FedEx offices that tell you never to try this. Fed Ex uses X-rays and dogs on their mail, to stop drug s.h.i.+pments. That doesn't work very well.

Drug dealers went wild over cellular phones.

There are simple methods of faking ID on cellular phones, making the location of the call mobile, free of charge, and effectively untraceable. Now victimized cellular companies routinely bring in vast toll-lists of calls to Colombia and Pakistan.

Judge Greene's fragmentation of the phone company is driving law enforcement nuts. Four thousand telecommunications companies. Fraud skyrocketing.

Every temptation in the world available with a phone and a credit card number. Criminals untraceable.

A galaxy of "new neat rotten things to do."

If there were one thing Thackeray would like to have, it would be an effective legal end-run through this new fragmentation minefield.

It would be a new form of electronic search warrant, an "electronic letter of marque" to be issued by a judge.

It would create a new category of "electronic emergency."

Like a wiretap, its use would be rare, but it would cut across state lines and force swift cooperation from all concerned.

Cellular, phone, laser, computer network, PBXes, AT&T, Baby Bells, long-distance entrepreneurs, packet radio. Some doc.u.ment, some mighty court-order, that could slice through four thousand separate forms of corporate red-tape, and get her at once to the source of calls, the source of email threats and viruses, the sources of bomb threats, kidnapping threats. "From now on,"

she says, "the Lindbergh baby will always die."

Something that would make the Net sit still, if only for a moment.

Something that would get her up to speed. Seven league boots.

That's what she really needs. "Those guys move in nanoseconds and I'm on the Pony Express."

And then, too, there's the coming international angle.

Electronic crime has never been easy to localize, to tie to a physical jurisdiction. And phone-phreaks and hackers loathe boundaries, they jump them whenever they can.

The English. The Dutch. And the Germans, especially the ubiquitous Chaos Computer Club. The Australians. They've all learned phone-phreaking from America. It's a growth mischief industry. The multinational networks are global, but governments and the police simply aren't.

Neither are the laws. Or the legal frameworks for citizen protection.

One language is global, though--English. Phone phreaks speak English; it's their native tongue even if they're Germans. English may have started in England but now it's the Net language; it might as well be called "CNNese."

Asians just aren't much into phone phreaking. They're the world masters at organized software piracy. The French aren't into phone-phreaking either.

The French are into computerized industrial espionage.

In the old days of the MIT righteous hackerdom, cras.h.i.+ng systems didn't hurt anybody. Not all that much, anyway. Not permanently.

Now the players are more venal. Now the consequences are worse.

Hacking will begin killing people soon. Already there are methods of stacking calls onto 911 systems, annoying the police, and possibly causing the death of some poor soul calling in with a genuine emergency.

Hackers in Amtrak computers, or air-traffic control computers, will kill somebody someday. Maybe a lot of people. Gail Thackeray expects it.

And the viruses are getting nastier. The "Scud" virus is the latest one out.

It wipes hard-disks.

According to Thackeray, the idea that phone-phreaks are Robin Hoods is a fraud.

They don't deserve this repute. Basically, they pick on the weak. AT&T now protects itself with the fearsome ANI (Automatic Number Identification) trace capability. When AT&T wised up and tightened security generally, the phreaks drifted into the Baby Bells. The Baby Bells lashed out in 1989 and 1990, so the phreaks switched to smaller long-distance entrepreneurs.

Today, they are moving into locally owned PBXes and voice-mail systems, which are full of security holes, dreadfully easy to hack. These victims aren't the moneybags Sheriff of Nottingham or Bad King John, but small groups of innocent people who find it hard to protect themselves, and who really suffer from these depredations. Phone phreaks pick on the weak. They do it for power. If it were legal, they wouldn't do it. They don't want service, or knowledge, they want the thrill of power-tripping. There's plenty of knowledge or service around if you're willing to pay. Phone phreaks don't pay, they steal. It's because it is illegal that it feels like power, that it gratifies their vanity.

I leave Gail Thackeray with a handshake at the door of her office building-- a vast International-Style office building downtown. The Sheriff's office is renting part of it. I get the vague impression that quite a lot of the building is empty--real estate crash.

In a Phoenix sports apparel store, in a downtown mall, I meet the "Sun Devil" himself. He is the cartoon mascot of Arizona State University, whose football stadium, "Sundevil,"

is near the local Secret Service HQ--hence the name Operation Sundevil.

The Sun Devil himself is named "Sparky." Sparky the Sun Devil is maroon and bright yellow, the school colors. Sparky brandishes a three-tined yellow pitchfork. He has a small mustache, pointed ears, a barbed tail, and is das.h.i.+ng forward jabbing the air with the pitchfork, with an expression of devilish glee.

Phoenix was the home of Operation Sundevil. The Legion of Doom ran a hacker bulletin board called "The Phoenix Project."

An Australian hacker named "Phoenix" once burrowed through the Internet to attack Cliff Stoll, then bragged and boasted about it to The New York Times. This net of coincidence is both odd and meaningless.

The headquarters of the Arizona Attorney General, Gail Thackeray's former workplace, is on 1275 Was.h.i.+ngton Avenue. Many of the downtown streets in Phoenix are named after prominent American presidents: Was.h.i.+ngton, Jefferson, Madison. . . .

After dark, all the employees go home to their suburbs.

Was.h.i.+ngton, Jefferson and Madison--what would be the Phoenix inner city, if there were an inner city in this sprawling automobile-bred town--become the haunts of transients and derelicts. The homeless. The sidewalks along Was.h.i.+ngton are lined with orange trees.