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Pure Bollocks Issue 22_055
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* C Y B E R S P A C E * A N D * I T ' S *
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L E G A L * I M P L I C A T I O N S *
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GURPS LABOR LOST: The Cyberpunk Bust
by Bruce Sterling
Copyright (c) by Bruce Sterling, 1991.
Reprinted by permission of the author.
Some months ago, I wrote an article about the raid on Steve Jackson Games,
which appeared in my "Comment" column in the British science fiction monthly,
Interzone(#44, February 1991). This updated version, specially re-written for
dissemination by EFF, reflects the somewhat greater knowledge I've gained to
date, in the course of research on an upcoming nonfiction book, The Hacker
Crackdown: The True Story of the Digital Dragnet of 1990 and the Start of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The bizarre events suffered by Mr. Jackson and his co-workers, in my own home
town of Austin, Texas, were directly responsible for my decision to put science
fiction aside and to tackle the purportedly real world of computer crime and
electronic free-expression.
The national crackdown on computer hackers in 1990 was the largest and best-
coordinated attack on computer mischief in American history. There was
Arizona's "Operation Sundevil," the sweeping May 8 nationwide raid against
outlaw bulletin boards. The BellSouth E911 case (of which the Jackson raid was
a small and particularly egregious part) was coordinated out of Chicago. The
New York State Police were also very active in 1990.
All this vigorous law enforcement activity meant very little to the narrow and
intensely clannish world of science fiction. All we knew - and this perception
persisted, uncorrected, for months - was that Mr. Jackson had been raided
because of his intention to publish a gaming book about "cyberpunk" science
fiction. The Jackson raid received extensive coverage in science fiction news
magazines (yes, we have these) and became notorious in the world of SF as "the
Cyberpunk Bust." My INTERZONE article attempted to make the Jackson case
intelligible to the British SF audience.
What possible reason could lead an American federal law enforcement agency to
raid the headquarters of a science-fiction gaming company? Why did armed teams
of city police, corporate security men, and federal agents roust two Texan
computer hackers from their beds at dawn, and then confiscate thousands of
dollars' worth of computer equipment, including the hackers' common household
telephones? Why was an unpublished book called GURPS Cyberpunk seized by the
US Secret Service and declared "a manual for computer crime?" These weird
events were not parodies or fantasies; no, this was real.
The first order of business in untangling this bizarre drama is to know the
players - who come in entire teams.
PLAYER ONE: The Law Enforcement Agencies.
America's defense against the threat of computer crime is a confusing
hodgepodge of state, municipal, and federal agencies. Ranked first, by size
and power, are the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security
Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), large, potent and
secretive organizations who, luckily, play almost no role in the Jackson story.
The second rank of such agencies include the Internal Revenue Service (IRS),
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Justice
Department, the Department of Labor, and various branches of the defense
establishment, especially the Air Force Office of Special Investigations
(AFOSI). Premier among these groups, however, is the highly-motivated US
Secret Service (USSS),the suited, mirrorshades- toting, heavily-armed
bodyguards of the President of the United States.
Guarding high-ranking federal officials and foreign dignitaries is a hazardous,
challenging and eminently necessary task, which has won USSS a high public
profile. But Abraham Lincoln created this oldest of federal law enforcement
agencies in order to foil counterfeiting. Due to the historical tribulations
of the Treasury Department (of which USSS is a part), the Secret Service also
guards historical documents, analyzes forgeries, combats wire fraud, and
battles "computer fraud and abuse." These may seem unrelated assignments, but
the Secret Service is fiercely aware of its duties. It is also jealous of its
bureaucratic turf, especially in computer-crime, where it formally shares
jurisdiction with its traditional rival, the Johnny-come-lately FBI.
As the use of plastic money has spread, and their long-established role as
protectors of the currency has faded in importance, the Secret Service has
moved aggressively into the realm of electronic crime. Unlike the lordly NSA,
CIA, and FBI, which generally can't be bothered with domestic computer
mischief, the Secret Service is noted for its street-level enthusiasm.
The third-rank of law enforcement are the local "dedicated computer crime
units." There are few such groups, pitifully under staffed. They struggle
hard for funding and the vital light of publicity. It's difficult to make
white-collar computer crimes seem pressing, to an American public that lives in
terror of armed and violent street crime.
These local groups are small - often, one or two officers, computer hobbyists,
who have drifted into electronic crimebusting because they alone are game to
devote time and effort to bringing law to the electronic frontier.
California's Silicon Valley has three computer- crime units. There are others
in Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Maryland, Texas, Colorado, and a formerly very
active one in Arizona - all told, though, perhaps only fifty people nationwide.
The locals do have one great advantage, though. They all know one another.
Though scattered across the country, they are linked by both public-sector and
private-sector professional societies, and have a commendable subcultural
esprit-de-corps. And in the well-manned Secret Service, they have willing
national-level assistance.
PLAYER TWO: The Telephone Companies.
In the early 80s, after years of bitter federal court battle, America's
telephone monopoly was pulverized. "Ma Bell," the national phone company,
became AT&T, AT&T Industries, and the regional "Baby Bells," all purportedly
independent companies, who compete with new communications companies and other
long-distance providers. As a class, however, they are all sorely harassed by
fraudsters, phone phreaks, and computer hackers, and they all maintain
computer-security experts. In a lot of cases these "corporate security
divisions" consist of just one or two guys, who drifted into the work from
backgrounds in traditional security or law enforcement. But, linked by
specialized security trade journals and private sector trade groups, they all
know one another.
PLAYER THREE: The Computer Hackers.
The American "hacker" elite consists of about a hundred people, who all know
one another. These are the people who know enough about computer intrusion to
baffle corporate security and alarm police (and who, furthermore, are willing
to put their intrusion skills into actual practice). The somewhat older
subculture of "phone-phreaking," once native only to the phone system, has
blended into hackerdom as phones have become digital and computers have been
netted-together by telephones. "Phone phreaks," always tarred with the stigma
of rip-off artists, are nowadays increasingly hacking PBX systems and cellular
phones. These practices, unlike computer-intrusion, offer easy profit to
fraudsters.
There are legions of minor "hackers," such as the "kodez kidz," who purloin
telephone access codes to make free (i.e., stolen) phone calls. Code theft can
be done with home computers, and almost looks like real "hacking," though
"kodez kidz" are regarded with lordly contempt by the elite. "Warez d00dz," who
copy and pirate computer games and software, are a thriving subspecies of
"hacker," but they played no real role in the crackdown of 1990 or the Jackson
case. As for the dire minority who create computer viruses, the less said the
better.
The princes of hackerdom skate the phone-lines, and computer networks, as a
lifestyle. They hang out in loose, modem-connected gangs like the "Legion of
Doom" and the "Masters of Destruction." The craft of hacking is taught through
"bulletin board systems," personal computers that carry electronic mail and can
be accessed by phone. Hacker bulletin boards generally sport grim, scary, sci-
fi heavy metal names like BLACK ICE - PRIVATE or SPEED DEMON ELITE. Hackers
themselves often adopt romantic and highly suspicious tough-guy monickers like
"Necron 99," "Prime Suspect," "Erik Bloodaxe," "Malefactor" and "Phase Jitter."
This can be seen as a kind of cyberpunk folk-poetry - after all, baseball
players also have colorful nicknames. But so do the Mafia and the Medellin
Cartel.
PLAYER FOUR: The Simulation Gamers.
Wargames and role-playing adventures are an old and honored pastime, much
favored by professional military strategists and H.G. Wells, and now played by
hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts throughout North America, Europe and
Japan. In today's market, many simulation games are computerized, making
simulation gaming a favorite pastime of hackers, who dote on arcane
intellectual challenges and the thrill of doing simulated mischief.
Modern simulation games frequently have a heavily science-fictional cast. Over
the past decade or so, fueled by very respectable royalties, the world of
simulation gaming has increasingly permeated the world of science-fiction
publishing. TSR, Inc., proprietors of the best-known role-playing game,
"Dungeons and Dragons," own the venerable science-fiction magazine "Amazing."
Gaming-books, once restricted to hobby outlets, now commonly appear in chain-
stores like B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks, and sell vigorously.
Steve Jackson Games, Inc., of Austin, Texas, is a games company of the middle
rank. In early 1990, it employed fifteen people. In 1989, SJG grossed about
half a million dollars. SJG's Austin headquarters is a modest two-story brick
office-suite, cluttered with phones, photocopiers, fax machines and computers.
A publisher's digs, it bustles with semi-organized activity and is littered
with glossy promotional brochures and dog-eared SF novels. Attached to the
offices is a large tin-roofed warehouse piled twenty feet high with cardboard
boxes of games and books. This building was the site of the "Cyberpunk Bust."
A look at the company's wares, neatly stacked on endless rows of cheap
shelving, quickly shows SJG's long involvement with the Science Fiction
community. SJG's main product, the Generic Universal Role- Playing System or
GURPS, features licensed and adapted works from many genre writers. There is
GURPS Witch World, GURPS Conan, GURPS Riverworld, GURPS Horseclans, many names
eminently familiar to SF fans. (GURPS Difference Engine is currently in the
works.) GURPS Cyberpunk, however, was to be another story entirely.
PLAYER FIVE: The Science Fiction Writers.
The "cyberpunk" SF writers are a small group of mostly college-educated white
litterateurs, without conspicuous criminal records, scattered throughout the US
and Canada. Only one, Rudy Rucker, a professor of computer science in Silicon
Valley, would rank with even the humblest computer hacker. However, these
writers all own computers and take an intense, public, and somewhat morbid
interest in the social ramifications of the information industry. Despite
their small numbers, the "cyberpunk" writers all know one another, and are
linked by antique print-medium publications with unlikely names like Science
Fiction Eye, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Omni and Interzone.
PLAYER SIX: The Civil Libertarians.
This small but rapidly growing group consists of heavily politicized computer
enthusiasts and heavily cyberneticized political activists: a mix of wealthy
high-tech entrepreneurs, veteran West Coast troublemaking hippies, touchy
journalists, and toney East Coast civil rights lawyers. They are all getting to
know one another.
We now return to our story. By 1988, law enforcement officials, led by
contrite teenage informants, had thoroughly permeated the world of underground
bulletin boards, and were alertly prowling the nets compiling dossiers on
wrongdoers. While most bulletin board systems are utterly harmless, some few
had matured into alarming reservoirs of forbidden knowledge. One such was
BLACK ICE - PRIVATE, located "somewhere in the 607 area code," frequented by
members of the "Legion of Doom" and notorious even among hackers for the
violence of its rhetoric, which discussed sabotage of phone-lines, drug-
manufacturing techniques, and the assembly of home-made bombs, as well as a
plethora of rules-of-thumb for penetrating computer security.
Of course, the mere discussion of these notions is not illegal - many cyberpunk
SF stories positively dote on such ideas, as do hundreds of spy epics, techno-
thrillers and adventure novels. It was no coincidence that "ICE," or
"Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics," was a term invented by cyberpunk
writer Tom Maddox, and "BLACK ICE," or a computer-defense that fries the brain
of the unwary trespasser, was a coinage of William Gibson.
A reference manual from the US National Institute of Justice, Dedicated
Computer Crime Units by J. Thomas McEwen, suggests that federal attitudes
toward bulletin-board systems are ambivalent at best:
"There are several examples of how bulletin boards have been used in support of
criminal activities.... (B)ulletin boards were used to relay illegally obtained
access codes into computer service companies. Pedophiles have been known to
leave suggestive messages on bulletin boards, and other sexually oriented
messages have been found on bulletin boards. Members of cults and sects have
also communicated through bulletin boards. While the storing of information on
bulletin boards may not be illegal, the use of bulletin boards has certainly
advanced many illegal activities."
Here is a troubling concept indeed: invisible electronic pornography, to be
printed out at home and read by sects and cults. It makes a mockery of the
traditional law-enforcement techniques concerning the publication and
prosecution of smut. In fact, the prospect of large numbers of antisocial
conspirators, congregating in cyberspace without official oversight of any
kind, is enough to trouble the sleep of anyone charged with maintaining public
order.
Even the sternest free-speech advocate will likely do some headscratching at
the prospect of digitized "anarchy files" teaching lock-picking, pipe-bombing,
martial arts techniques, and highly unorthodox uses for shotgun shells,
especially when these neat-o temptations are distributed freely to any teen (or
pre-teen) with a modem.
These may be largely conjectural problems at present, but the use of bulletin
boards to foment hacker mischief is real. Worse yet, the bulletin boards
themselves are linked, sharing their audience and spreading the wicked
knowledge of security flaws in the phone network, and in a wide variety of
academic, corporate and governmental computer systems.
This strength of the hackers is also a weakness, however. If the boards are
monitored by alert informants and/or officers, the whole wicked tangle can be
seized all along its extended electronic vine, rather like harvesting pumpkins.
The war against hackers, including the "Cyberpunk Bust," was primarily a war
against hacker bulletin boards. It was, first and foremost, an attack against
the enemy's means of information.
This basic strategic insight supplied the tactics for the crackdown of 1990.
The variant groups in the national subculture of cyber-law would be kept
apprised, persuaded to action, and diplomatically martialled into effective
strike position. Then, in a burst of energy and a glorious blaze of publicity,
the whole nest of scofflaws would be wrenched up root and branch. Hopefully,
the damage would be permanent; if not, the swarming wretches would at least
keep their heads down.
"Operation Sundevil," the Phoenix-inspired crackdown of May 8,1990,
concentrated on telephone code-fraud and credit-card abuse, and followed this
seizure plan with some success. Boards went down all over America, terrifying
the underground and swiftly depriving them of at least some of their criminal
instruments. It also saddled analysts with some 24,000 floppy disks, and
confronted harried Justice Department prosecutors with the daunting challenge
of a gigantic nationwide hacker show-trial involving highly technical issues in
dozens of jurisdictions. As of July 1991, it must be questioned whether the
climate is right for an action of this sort, especially since several of the
most promising prosecutees have already been jailed on other charges.
"Sundevil" aroused many dicey legal and constitutional questions, but at least
its organizers were spared the spectacle of seizure victims loudly proclaiming
their innocence - (if one excepts Bruce Esquibel, sysop of "Dr. Ripco," an
anarchist board in Chicago).
The activities of March 1, 1990, including the Jackson case, were the
inspiration of the Chicago-based Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force. At telco
urging, the Chicago group were pursuing the purportedly vital "E911 document"
with headlong energy. As legal evidence, this Bell South document was to prove
a very weak reed in the Craig Neidorf trial, which ended in a humiliating
dismissal and a triumph for Neidorf. As of March 1990, however, this purloined
data-file seemed a red-hot chunk of contraband, and the decision was made to
track it down wherever it might have gone, and to shut down any board that had
touched it - or even come close to it. [If you don't know about this, it's a
document which was downloaded off one of the computer systems handling the
"911" exchange in the area, and reproduced in Phrack online magazine. Dialling
991 in the US is equivalent to dialling 999 in the UK, so this sort of thing
would be like hacking into an emergency Ambulance service computer system in
Central London and downloading one of the "help" text files! This was widely
publiscised, and a lot of people were shocked- the hacker that did it did
nothing else, but what if he wanted to muck up the system? -EGBSS]
In the meantime, however - early 1990 - Mr. Loyd Blankenship, an employee of
Steve Jackson Games, an accomplished hacker, and a sometime member and file-
writer for the Legion of Doom, was contemplating a "cyberpunk" simulation-
module for the flourishing GURPS gaming-system.
The time seemed ripe for such a product, which had already been proven in the
marketplace. The first games-company out of the gate, with a product boldly
called "Cyberpunk" in defiance of possible infringement-of-copyright suits, had
been an upstart group called R. Talsorian. Talsorian's "Cyberpunk" was a
fairly decent game, but the mechanics of the simulation system sucked. But the
game sold like crazy.
The next "cyberpunk" game had been the even more successful "Shadowrun" by FASA
Corporation. The mechanics of this game were fine, but the scenario was
rendered moronic by lame fantasy elements like orcs, dwarves, trolls,
magicians, and dragons - all highly ideologically incorrect, according to the
hard-edged, high-tech standards of cyberpunk science fiction. No true
cyberpunk fan could play this game without vomiting, despite FASA's nifty T-
shirts and street-samurai lead figurines.
Lured by the scent of money, other game companies were champing at the bit.
Blankenship reasoned that the time had come for a real "Cyberpunk" gaming-book
- one that the princes of computer-mischief in the Legion of Doom could play
without laughing themselves sick. This book, GURPS Cyberpunk, would reek of
on-line authenticity.
Hot discussion soon raged on the Steve Jackson Games electronic bulletin board,
the "Illuminati BBS." This board was named after a bestselling SJG card-game,
involving antisocial sects and cults who war covertly for the domination of the
world. Gamers and hackers alike loved this board, with its meticulously
detailed discussions of pastimes like SJG's "Car Wars," in which souped-up
armored hot-rods with rocket-launchers and heavy machine-guns do battle on the
American highways of the future.
While working, with considerable creative success, for SJG, Blankenship himself
was running his own computer bulletin board, "The Phoenix Project," from his
house. It had been ages - months, anyway - since Blankenship, an increasingly
sedate husband and author, had last entered a public phone-booth without a
supply of pocket-change. However, his intellectual interest in computer-
security remained intense. He was pleased to notice the presence on "Phoenix"
of Henry Kluepfel, a phone-company security professional for Bellcore. Such
contacts were risky for telco employees; at least one such gentleman who
reached out to the hacker underground has been accused of divided loyalties and
summarily fired. Kluepfel, on the other hand, was bravely engaging in friendly
banter with heavy-dude hackers and eager telephone-wannabes. Blankenship did
nothing to spook him away, and Kluepfel, for his part, passed dark warnings
about "Phoenix Project" to the Chicago group. "Phoenix Project" glowed with the
radioactive presence of the E911 document, passed there in a copy of Craig
Neidorf's electronic hacker fan-magazine, Phrack.
"Illuminati" was prominently mentioned on the Phoenix Project. Phoenix users
were urged to visit Illuminati, to discuss the upcoming "cyberpunk" game and
possibly lend their expertise. It was also frankly hoped that they would spend
some money on SJG games.
Illuminati and Phoenix had become two ripe pumpkins on the criminal vine.
Hacker busts were nothing new. They had always been problematic for the
authorities. The offenders were generally high-IQ white juveniles with no
criminal record. Public sympathy for the phone companies was limited at best.
Trials often ended in puzzled dismissals or a slap on the wrist.
Through long experience, law enforcement had come up with an unorthodox but
workable tactic. This was to avoid any trial at all, or even an arrest.
Instead, somber teams of grim police would swoop upon the teenage suspect's
home and box up his computer as "evidence." If he was a good boy, and promised
contritely to stay out of trouble forthwith, the highly expensive equipment
might be returned to him in short order. If he was a hard-case, though, his
toys could stay boxed-up and locked away for a couple of years.
The busts in Austin were an intensification of this tried-and-true technique.
There were adults involved in this case, though, reeking of a hardened bad
attitude. The supposed threat to the 911 system, apparently posed by the E911
document, had nerved law enforcement to extraordinary effort. The 911 system
is the emergency system used by the police themselves. Any threat to it was a
direct, insolent hacker menace to the electronic home turf of American law
enforcement.
Had Steve Jackson been arrested and directly accused of a plot to destroy the
911 system, the resultant embarrassment would likely have been sharp, but
brief. The Chicago group, instead, chose total operational security. They may
have suspected that their search for E911, once publicized, would cause that
"dangerous" document to spread like wildfire throughout the underground.
Instead, they allowed the impression to spread that they had raided Steve
Jackson to stop the publication of a book: GURPS Cyberpunk. This was a grave
public- relations blunder which caused the darkest fears and suspicions to
spread - not in the hacker underground, but among the general public.
On March 1, 1990, 21-year-old hacker Chris Goggans (aka "Erik Bloodaxe") was
wakened by a police revolver levelled at his head. He watched, jittery, as
Secret Service agents appropriated his 300 baud terminal and, rifling his
files, discovered his treasured source-code for the notorious Internet Worm.
Goggans, a co-sysop of "Phoenix Project" and a wily operator, had suspected
that something of the like might be coming. All his best equipment had been
hidden away elsewhere. They took his phone, though, and considered hauling
away his hefty arcade-style Pac-Man game, before deciding that it was simply
too heavy. Goggans was not arrested. To date, he has never been charged with
a crime. The police still have what they took, though.
Blankenship was less wary. He had shut down "Phoenix" as rumors reached him of
a crackdown coming. Still, a dawn raid rousted him and his wife from bed in
their underwear, and six Secret Service agents, accompanied by a bemused Austin
cop and a corporate security agent from Bellcore, made a rich haul. Off went
the works, into the agents' white Chevrolet minivan: an IBM PC-AT clone with
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 documentation; the Microsoft Word word-processing program; Mrs.
Blankenship's incomplete academic thesis stored on disk; and the couple's
telephone. All this property remains in police custody today.
The agents then bundled Blankenship into a car and it was off the Steve Jackson
Games in the bleak light of dawn. The fact that this was a business
headquarters, and not a private residence, did not deter the agents. It was
still early; no one was at work yet. The agents prepared to break down the
door, until Blankenship offered his key.
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 "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.
They watched in astonishment as agents wielding crowbars and screwdrivers
emerged with captive machines. The agents wore blue nylon windbreakers with
"SECRET SERVICE" stencilled across the back, with running-shoes and jeans.
Confiscating computers can be heavy physical work.
No one at Steve Jackson Games was arrested. No one was accused of any crime.
There were no charges filed. Everything appropriated was officially kept as
"evidence" of crimes never specified. Steve Jackson will not face a conspiracy
trial over the contents of his science-fiction gaming book. On the contrary,
the raid's organizers have been accused of grave misdeeds in a civil suit filed
by EFF, and if there is any trial over GURPS Cyberpunk it seems likely to be
theirs.
The day after the raid, Steve Jackson visited the local Secret Service
headquarters with a lawyer in tow. There was trouble over GURPS Cyberpunk,
which had been discovered on the hard-disk of a seized machine. GURPS
Cyberpunk, alleged a Secret Service agent to astonished businessman Steve
Jackson, was "a manual for computer crime."
"It's science fiction," Jackson said.
"No, this is real." This statement was repeated several times, by several
agents. This is not a fantasy, no, this is real. Jackson's ominously
"accurate" game had passed from pure, obscure, small-scale fantasy into the
impure, highly publicized, large-scale fantasy of the hacker crackdown. No
mention was made of the real reason for the search, the E911 document. Indeed,
this fact was not discovered until the Jackson search-warrant was unsealed
months later. Jackson was left to believe that his board had been seized
because he intended to publish a science fiction book that law enforcement
considered too dangerous to see print. This misconception was repeated again
and again, for months, to an ever-widening audience. The effect of this
statement on the science fiction community was, to say the least, striking.
GURPS Cyberpunk, now published and available from Steve Jackson Games (Box
18957, Austin, Texas 78760), does discuss some of the commonplaces of computer-
hacking, such as searching through trash for useful clues, or snitching
passwords by boldly lying to gullible users. Reading it won't make you a
hacker, any more than reading Spycatcher will make you an agent of MI5. Still,
this bold insistence by the Secret Service on its authenticity has made GURPS
Cyberpunk the Satanic Verses of simulation gaming, and has made Steve Jackson
the first martyr-to-the-cause for the computer world's civil libertarians.
From the beginning, Steve Jackson declared that he had committed no crime, and
had nothing to hide. Few believed him, for it seemed incredible that such a
tremendous effort by the government would be spent on someone entirely
innocent.
Surely there were a few stolen long-distance codes in "Illuminati," a swiped
credit-card number or two - something. Those who rallied to the defense of
Jackson were publicly warned that they would be caught with egg on their face
when the real truth came out, "later." But "later" came and went. The fact is
that Jackson was innocent of any crime. There was no case against him; his
activities were entirely legal. He had simply been consorting with the wrong
sort of people.
In fact he was the wrong sort of people. His attitude stank. He showed no
contrition; he scoffed at authority; he gave aid and comfort to the enemy; he
was trouble. Steve Jackson comes from subcultures - gaming, science fiction -
that have always smelled to high heaven of troubling weirdness and deep-dyed
unorthodoxy. He was important enough to attract repression, but not important
enough, apparently, to deserve a straight answer from those who had raided his
property and destroyed his livelihood.
The American law-enforcement community lacks the manpower and resources to
prosecute hackers successfully on the merits of the cases against them. The
cyber-police to date have settled instead for a cheap "hack" of the legal
system: a quasi-legal tactic of seizure and "deterrence." Humiliate and harass
a few ringleaders, the philosophy goes, and the rest will fall into line.
After all, most hackers are just kids. The few grown-ups among them are
sociopathic geeks, not real players in the political and legal game. In the
final analysis, a small company like Jackson's lacks the resources to make any
real trouble for the Secret Service.
But Jackson, with his conspiracy-obsessed bulletin board and his seedy SF-fan
computer-freak employees, is not "just a kid." He is a publisher, and he was
battered by the police in the full light of national publicity, under the
shocked gaze of journalists, gaming fans, libertarian activists and millionaire
computer entrepreneurs, many of whom were not "deterred," but genuinely aghast.
"What," reasons the author, "is to prevent the Secret Service from carting off
my word-processor as 'evidence' of some non-existent crime?"
"What would I do," thinks the small-press owner, "if someone took my laser-
printer?"
Hence the establishment of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Steve Jackson was provided with a high-powered lawyer specializing in
Constitutional freedom-of-the-press issues. Faced with this, a markedly un-
contrite Secret Service returned Jackson's machinery, after months of delay -
some of it broken, with valuable data lost. Jackson sustained many thousands
of dollars in business losses, from failure to meet deadlines and loss of
computer-assisted production.
Half the employees of Steve Jackson Games were sorrowfully laid-off. Some had
been with the company for years - not statistics, these people, not "hackers"
of any stripe, but bystanders, citizens, deprived of their livelihoods by the
zealousness of the March 1 seizure. Some have since been re-hired - perhaps
all will be, if Jackson can pull his company out of its now persistent
financial hole. Devastated by the raid, the company would surely have
collapsed in short order - but SJG's distributors, touched by the company's
plight and feeling some natural subcultural solidarity, advanced him money to
scrape along.
In retrospect, it is hard to see much good for anyone at all in the activities
of March 1. Perhaps the Jackson case has served as a warning light for trouble
in our legal system; but that's not much recompense for Jackson himself. His
own unsought fame may be helpful, but it doesn't do much for his unemployed co-
workers. In the meantime, "hackers" have been demonized as a national threat.
"Cyberpunk," a literary term, has become a synonym for computer criminal. The
cyber-police have leapt where angels fear to tread. And the phone companies
have badly overstated their case and deeply embarrassed their protectors.
Sixteen months later, Steve Jackson suspects he may yet pull through.
Illuminati is still on-line. GURPS Cyberpunk, while it failed to match Satanic
Verses, sold fairly briskly. And Steve Jackson Games headquarters, the site of
the raid, was the site of a Cyberspace Weenie Roast to launch an Austin Chapter
of The Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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