The Hacker Crackdown Part 47

The interesting fact also surfaced that Prophet had never physically met Craig Neidorf. He didn't even know Neidorf's last name--at least, not until the trial.

Prophet confirmed the basic facts of his hacker career.

He was a member of the Legion of Doom. He had abused codes, he had broken into switching stations and re-routed calls, he had hung out on pirate bulletin boards. He had raided the BellSouth AIMSX computer, copied the E911 Doc.u.ment, stored it on Jolnet, mailed it to Neidorf. He and Neidorf had edited it, and Neidorf had known where it came from.

Zenner, however, had Prophet confirm that Neidorf was not a member of the Legion of Doom, and had not urged Prophet to break into BellSouth computers. Neidorf had never urged Prophet to defraud anyone, or to steal anything. Prophet also admitted that he had never known Neidorf to break in to any computer. Prophet said that no one in the Legion of Doom considered Craig Neidorf a "hacker" at all. Neidorf was not a UNIX maven, and simply lacked the necessary skill and ability to break into computers.

Neidorf just published a magazine.

On Friday, July 27, 1990, the case against Neidorf collapsed.

Cook moved to dismiss the indictment, citing "information currently available to us that was not available to us at the inception of the trial."

Judge Bua praised the prosecution for this action, which he described as "very responsible," then dismissed a juror and declared a mistrial.

Neidorf was a free man. His defense, however, had cost himself and his family dearly. Months of his life had been consumed in anguish; he had seen his closest friends shun him as a federal criminal.

He owed his lawyers over a hundred thousand dollars, despite a generous payment to the defense by Mitch Kapor.

Neidorf was not found innocent. The trial was simply dropped.

Nevertheless, on September 9, 1991, Judge Bua granted Neidorf's motion for the "expungement and sealing" of his indictment record.

The United States Secret Service was ordered to delete and destroy all fingerprints, photographs, and other records of arrest or processing relating to Neidorf's indictment, including their paper doc.u.ments and their computer records.

Neidorf went back to school, blazingly determined to become a lawyer.

Having seen the justice system at work, Neidorf lost much of his enthusiasm for merely technical power. At this writing, Craig Neidorf is working in Was.h.i.+ngton as a salaried researcher for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The outcome of the Neidorf trial changed the EFF from voices-in-the-wilderness to the media darlings of the new frontier.

Legally speaking, the Neidorf case was not a sweeping triumph for anyone concerned. No const.i.tutional principles had been established.

The issues of "freedom of the press" for electronic publishers remained in legal limbo. There were public misconceptions about the case.

Many people thought Neidorf had been found innocent and relieved of all his legal debts by Kapor. The truth was that the government had simply dropped the case, and Neidorf's family had gone deeply into hock to support him.

But the Neidorf case did provide a single, devastating, public sound-bite: THE FEDS SAID IT WAS WORTH EIGHTY GRAND, AND IT WAS ONLY WORTH THIRTEEN BUCKS.

This is the Neidorf case's single most memorable element. No serious report of the case missed this particular element. Even cops could not read this without a wince and a shake of the head. It left the public credibility of the crackdown agents in tatters.

The crackdown, in fact, continued, however. Those two charges against Prophet, which had been based on the E911 Doc.u.ment, were quietly forgotten at his sentencing--even though Prophet had already pled guilty to them. Georgia federal prosecutors strongly argued for jail time for the Atlanta Three, insisting on "the need to send a message to the community," "the message that hackers around the country need to hear."

There was a great deal in their sentencing memorandum about the awful things that various other hackers had done (though the Atlanta Three themselves had not, in fact, actually committed these crimes). There was also much speculation about the awful things that the Atlanta Three MIGHT have done and WERE CAPABLE of doing (even though they had not, in fact, actually done them).

The prosecution's argument carried the day.

The Atlanta Three were sent to prison: Urvile and Leftist both got 14 months each, while Prophet (a second offender) got 21 months.

The Atlanta Three were also a.s.sessed staggering fines as "rest.i.tution": $233,000 each. BellSouth claimed that the defendants had "stolen"

"approximately $233,880 worth" of "proprietary computer access information"-- specifically, $233,880 worth of computer pa.s.swords and connect addresses.

BellSouth's astonis.h.i.+ng claim of the extreme value of its own computer pa.s.swords and addresses was accepted at face value by the Georgia court.

Furthermore (as if to emphasize its theoretical nature) this enormous sum was not divvied up among the Atlanta Three, but each of them had to pay all of it.

A striking aspect of the sentence was that the Atlanta Three were specifically forbidden to use computers, except for work or under supervision.

Depriving hackers of home computers and modems makes some sense if one considers hackers as "computer addicts," but EFF, filing an amicus brief in the case, protested that this punishment was unconst.i.tutional-- it deprived the Atlanta Three of their rights of free a.s.sociation and free expression through electronic media.

Terminus, the "ultimate hacker," was finally sent to prison for a year through the dogged efforts of the Chicago Task Force. His crime, to which he pled guilty, was the transfer of the UNIX pa.s.sword trapper, which was officially valued by AT&T at $77,000, a figure which aroused intense skepticism among those familiar with UNIX "login.c" programs.

The jailing of Terminus and the Atlanta Legionnaires of Doom, however, did not cause the EFF any sense of embarra.s.sment or defeat.

On the contrary, the civil libertarians were rapidly gathering strength.

An early and potent supporter was Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat from Vermont, who had been a Senate sponsor of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Even before the Neidorf trial, Leahy had spoken out in defense of hacker-power and freedom of the keyboard: "We cannot unduly inhibit the inquisitive 13-year-old who, if left to experiment today, may tomorrow develop the telecommunications or computer technology to lead the United States into the 21st century. He represents our future and our best hope to remain a technologically compet.i.tive nation."

It was a handsome statement, rendered perhaps rather more effective by the fact that the crackdown raiders DID NOT HAVE any Senators speaking out for THEM. On the contrary, their highly secretive actions and tactics, all "sealed search warrants" here and "confidential ongoing investigations" there, might have won them a burst of glamorous publicity at first, but were crippling them in the on-going propaganda war. Gail Thackeray was reduced to unsupported bl.u.s.ter: "Some of these people who are loudest on the bandwagon may just slink into the background,"

she predicted in Newsweek--when all the facts came out, and the cops were vindicated.

But all the facts did not come out. Those facts that did, were not very flattering. And the cops were not vindicated.

And Gail Thackeray lost her job. By the end of 1991, William Cook had also left public employment.

1990 had belonged to the crackdown, but by '91 its agents were in severe disarray, and the libertarians were on a roll.

People were flocking to the cause.

A particularly interesting ally had been Mike G.o.dwin of Austin, Texas.

G.o.dwin was an individual almost as difficult to describe as Barlow; he had been editor of the student newspaper of the University of Texas, and a computer salesman, and a programmer, and in 1990 was back in law school, looking for a law degree.

G.o.dwin was also a bulletin board maven. He was very well-known in the Austin board community under his handle "Johnny Mnemonic,"

which he adopted from a cyberpunk science fiction story by William Gibson.

G.o.dwin was an ardent cyberpunk science fiction fan. As a fellow Austinite of similar age and similar interests, I myself had known G.o.dwin socially for many years. When William Gibson and myself had been writing our collaborative SF novel, The Difference Engine, G.o.dwin had been our technical advisor in our effort to link our Apple word-processors from Austin to Vancouver. Gibson and I were so pleased by his generous expert help that we named a character in the novel "Michael G.o.dwin"

in his honor.

The handle "Mnemonic" suited G.o.dwin very well. His erudition and his mastery of trivia were impressive to the point of stupor; his ardent curiosity seemed insatiable, and his desire to debate and argue seemed the central drive of his life. G.o.dwin had even started his own Austin debating society, wryly known as the "Dull Men's Club." In person, G.o.dwin could be overwhelming; a flypaper-brained polymath who could not seem to let any idea go.

On bulletin boards, however, G.o.dwin's closely reasoned, highly grammatical, erudite posts suited the medium well, and he became a local board celebrity.

Mike G.o.dwin was the man most responsible for the public national exposure of the Steve Jackson case. The Izenberg seizure in Austin had received no press coverage at all. The March 1 raids on Mentor, Bloodaxe, and Steve Jackson Games had received a brief front-page splash in the front page of the Austin American-Statesman, but it was confused and ill-informed: the warrants were sealed, and the Secret Service wasn't talking. Steve Jackson seemed doomed to obscurity.

Jackson had not been arrested; he was not charged with any crime; he was not on trial. He had lost some computers in an ongoing investigation--so what? Jackson tried hard to attract attention to the true extent of his plight, but he was drawing a blank; no one in a position to help him seemed able to get a mental grip on the issues.

G.o.dwin, however, was uniquely, almost magically, qualified to carry Jackson's case to the outside world. G.o.dwin was a board enthusiast, a science fiction fan, a former journalist, a computer salesman, a lawyer-to-be, and an Austinite.

Through a coincidence yet more amazing, in his last year of law school G.o.dwin had specialized in federal prosecutions and criminal procedure. Acting entirely on his own, G.o.dwin made up a press packet which summarized the issues and provided useful contacts for reporters. G.o.dwin's behind-the-scenes effort (which he carried out mostly to prove a point in a local board debate) broke the story again in the Austin American-Statesman and then in Newsweek.

Life was never the same for Mike G.o.dwin after that. As he joined the growing civil liberties debate on the Internet, it was obvious to all parties involved that here was one guy who, in the midst of complete murk and confusion, GENUINELY UNDERSTOOD EVERYTHING HE WAS TALKING ABOUT. The disparate elements of G.o.dwin's dilettantish existence suddenly fell together as neatly as the facets of a Rubik's cube.

When the time came to hire a full-time EFF staff attorney, G.o.dwin was the obvious choice. He took the Texas bar exam, left Austin, moved to Cambridge, became a full-time, professional, computer civil libertarian, and was soon touring the nation on behalf of EFF, delivering well-received addresses on the issues to crowds as disparate as academics, industrialists, science fiction fans, and federal cops.

Michael G.o.dwin is currently the chief legal counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts.

Another early and influential partic.i.p.ant in the controversy was Dorothy Denning. Dr. Denning was unique among investigators of the computer underground in that she did not enter the debate with any set of politicized motives. She was a professional cryptographer and computer security expert whose primary interest in hackers was SCHOLARLY. She had a B.A. and M.A. in mathematics, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Purdue. She had worked for SRI International, the California think-tank that was also the home of computer-security maven Donn Parker, and had auth.o.r.ed an influential text called Cryptography and Data Security. In 1990, Dr. Denning was working for Digital Equipment Corporation in their Systems Reseach Center. Her husband, Peter Denning, was also a computer security expert, working for NASA's Research Inst.i.tute for Advanced Computer Science. He had edited the well-received Computers Under Attack: Intruders, Worms and Viruses.

Dr. Denning took it upon herself to contact the digital underground, more or less with an anthropological interest. There she discovered that these computer-intruding hackers, who had been characterized as unethical, irresponsible, and a serious danger to society, did in fact have their own subculture and their own rules.

They were not particularly well-considered rules, but they were, in fact, rules. Basically, they didn't take money and they didn't break anything.

Her dispa.s.sionate reports on her researches did a great deal to influence serious-minded computer professionals--the sort of people who merely rolled their eyes at the cybers.p.a.ce rhapsodies of a John Perry Barlow.

For young hackers of the digital underground, meeting Dorothy Denning was a genuinely mind-boggling experience. Here was this neatly coiffed, conservatively dressed, dainty little personage, who reminded most hackers of their moms or their aunts. And yet she was an IBM systems programmer with profound expertise in computer architectures and high-security information flow, who had personal friends in the FBI and the National Security Agency.

Dorothy Denning was a s.h.i.+ning example of the American mathematical intelligentsia, a genuinely brilliant person from the central ranks of the computer-science elite. And here she was, gently questioning twenty-year-old hairy-eyed phone-phreaks over the deeper ethical implications of their behavior.