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This is a PRELIMINARY Project Gutenberg Etext of Hacker
Crackdown.
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Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.sf.ca.us
Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use
THE HACKER CRACKDOWN
Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
by Bruce Sterling
CONTENTS
Preface to the Electronic Release of THE HACKER CRACKDOWN
Chronology of the Hacker Crackdown
Introduction
Part 1: CRASHING THE SYSTEM
A Brief History of Telephony / Bell's Golden Vaporware /
Universal Service / Wild Boys and Wire Women / The Electronic
Communities / The Ungentle Giant / The Breakup / In Defense of
the System / The Crash Post-Mortem / Landslides in Cyberspace
Part 2: THE DIGITAL UNDERGROUND
Steal This Phone / Phreaking and Hacking / The View From Under
the Floorboards / Boards: Core of the Underground / Phile Phun /
The Rake's Progress / Strongholds of the Elite / Sting Boards /
Hot Potatoes / War on the Legion / Terminus / Phile 9-1-1 / War
Games / Real Cyberpunk
Part 3: LAW AND ORDER
Crooked Boards / The World's Biggest Hacker Bust / Teach Them a
Lesson / The U.S. Secret Service / The Secret Service Battles the
Boodlers / A Walk Downtown / FCIC: The Cutting-Edge Mess /
Cyberspace Rangers / FLETC: Training the Hacker-Trackers
Part 4: THE CIVIL LIBERTARIANS
NuPrometheus + FBI = Grateful Dead / Whole Earth + Computer
Revolution = WELL / Phiber Runs Underground and Acid Spikes the
Well / The Trial of Knight Lightning / Shadowhawk Plummets to
Earth / Kyrie in the Confessional / $79,499 / A Scholar
Investigates / Computers, Freedom, and Privacy
Electronic Afterword to THE HACKER CRACKDOWN, Halloween 1993
Preface to the Electronic Release of THE HACKER CRACKDOWN
October 31, 1993--Austin, Texas
Hi, I'm Bruce Sterling, the author of this electronic
book. Out in the traditional world of print, this book is still
a part of the traditional commercial economy, because it happens
to be widely available in paperback (for a while, at least).
Out in the world of print, THE HACKER CRACKDOWN is ISBN
0-553-08058-X, and is formally catalogued by the Library of
Congress as "1. Computer crimes--United States. 2. Telephone--
United States--Corrupt practices. 3. Programming (Electronic
computers)--United States--Corrupt practices." 'Corrupt
practices,' I always get a kick out of that description.
Librarians are very ingenious people.
If you go and buy the print version of THE HACKER
CRACKDOWN, an action I encourage heartily, you may notice that in
the front of the book, right under the copyright sign--"Copyright
(C) 1992 by Bruce Sterling"--it has this little block of printed
legal boilerplate from the publisher. It says, and I quote:
"No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher. For information address: Bantam Books."
This is a pretty good disclaimer, as such disclaimers go.
I collect intellectual-property disclaimers, and I've seen dozens
of them, and this one is at least pretty straightforward.
Unfortunately, it doesn't have much to do with reality. Bantam
Books puts that disclaimer on every book they publish, but Bantam
Books does not, in fact, own the electronic rights to this book.
I do. And I've chosen to give them away.
Bantam Books is not going to fuss about this. They are
not going to bother you for what you do with the electronic copy
of this book. If you want to check this out personally, you can
ask them; they're at 1540 Broadway NY NY 10036. However, if you
were so foolish as to print this book and start retailing it for
money in violation of my copyright and the commercial interests
of Bantam Books, then Bantam, a part of the gigantic Bertelsmann
multinational publishing combine, would roust some of their
heavy-duty attorneys out of hibernation and crush you like a bug.
This is only to be expected. I didn't write this book so that
you could make money out of it. If anybody is gonna make money
out of this book, it's gonna be me and my publisher.
My publisher deserves to make money out of this book.
Not only did the folks at Bantam Books commission me to write the
book, and pay me a hefty sum to do so, but they bravely printed,
in text, an electronic document the reproduction of which was
once alleged to be a federal felony. Bantam Books and their
numerous attorneys were very brave and forthright about this
book. Furthermore, my former editor at Bantam Books, Betsy
Mitchell, genuinely cared about this project, and worked hard on
it, and had a lot of wise things to say about the manuscript.
Betsy deserves genuine credit for this book, credit that editors
too rarely get.
The critics were very kind to THE HACKER CRACKDOWN, and
commercially the book has done well. On the other hand, I didn't
write this book in order to squeeze every last nickel and dime
out of the mitts of impoverished sixteen-year-old cyberpunk high-
school-students. Teenagers don't have any money--no, not even
enough for HACKER CRACKDOWN. That's a major reason why they
sometimes succumb to the temptation to do things they shouldn't,
such as swiping my books out of libraries. Kids: this one is
all yours, all right? Go give the paper copy back. *8-)
Well-meaning, public-spirited civil libertarians don't
have much money, either. And it seems almost criminal to snatch
cash out of the hands of America's grotesquely underpaid
electronic law enforcement community.
If you're a computer cop, a hacker, or an electronic
civil liberties activist, you are the target audience for this
book. I wrote this book because I wanted to help you, and help
other people understand you and your unique, uhm, problems. I
wrote this book to aid your activities, and to contribute to the
public discussion of important political issues. In giving the
text away in this fashion, I am directly contributing to the
book's ultimate aim: to help civilize cyberspace.
Information WANTS to be free. And the information inside
this book longs for freedom with a peculiar intensity. I
genuinely believe that the natural habitat of this book is inside
an electronic network. That may not be the easiest direct method
to generate revenue for the book's author, but that doesn't
matter; this is where this book belongs by its nature. I've
written other books--plenty of other books--and I'll write more
and I am writing more, but this one is special. I am making THE
HACKER CRACKDOWN available electronically as widely as I can
conveniently manage, and if you like the book, and think it is
useful, then I urge you to do the same with it.
You can copy this electronic book. Copy the heck out of
it, be my guest, and give those copies to anybody who wants them.
The nascent world of cyberspace is full of sysadmins, teachers,
trainers, cybrarians, netgurus, and various species of cybernetic
activist. If you're one of those people, I know about you, and I
know the hassle you go through to try to help people learn about
the electronic frontier. I hope that possessing this book in
electronic form will lessen your troubles. Granted, this
treatment of our electronic social spectrum not the ultimate in
academic rigor. And politically, it has something to offend and
trouble almost everyone. But hey, I'm told it's readable, and at
least the price is right.
You can upload the book onto bulletin board systems, or
Internet nodes, or electronic discussion groups. Go right ahead
and do that, I am giving you express permission right now. Enjoy
yourself.
You can put the book on disks and give the disks away, as
long as you don't take any money for it.
But this book is not public domain. You can't copyright
it in your own name. I own the copyright. Attempts to pirate
this book and make money from selling it may involve you in a
serious litigative snarl. Believe me, for the pittance you might
wring out of such an action, it's really not worth it. This book
don't "belong" to you. In an odd but very genuine way, I feel it
doesn't "belong" to me, either. It's a book about the people of
cyberspace, and distributing it in this way is the best way I
know to actually make this information available, freely and
easily, to all the people of cyberspace--including people far
outside the borders of the United States, who otherwise may never
have a chance to see any edition of the book, and who may perhaps
learn something useful from this strange story of distant,
obscure, but portentous events in so-called "American
cyberspace."
This electronic book is now literary freeware. It now
belongs to the emergent realm of alternative information
economics. You have no right to make this electronic book part
of the conventional flow of commerce. Let it be part of the flow
of knowledge: there's a difference. I've divided the book into
four sections, so that it is less ungainly for upload and
download; if there's a section of particular relevance to you and
your colleagues, feel free to reproduce that one and skip the
rest.
Just make more when you need them, and give them to
whoever might want them.
Now have fun.
Bruce Sterling--bruces@well.sf.ca.us
CHRONOLOGY OF THE HACKER CRACKDOWN
1865 U.S. Secret Service (USSS) founded.
1876 Alexander Graham Bell invents telephone.
1878 First teenage males flung off phone system by enraged
authorities.
1939 "Futurian" science-fiction group raided by Secret Service.
1971 Yippie phone phreaks start YIPL/TAP magazine.
1972 RAMPARTS magazine seized in blue-box rip-off scandal.
1978 Ward Christenson and Randy Suess create first personal
computer bulletin board system.
1982 William Gibson coins term "cyberspace."
1982 "414 Gang" raided.
1983-1983 AT&T dismantled in divestiture.
1984 Congress passes Comprehensive Crime Control Act giving USSS
jurisdiction over credit card fraud and computer fraud.
1984 "Legion of Doom" formed.
1984. 2600: THE HACKER QUARTERLY founded.
1984. WHOLE EARTH SOFTWARE CATALOG published.
1985. First police "sting" bulletin board systems established.
1985. Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link computer conference (WELL)
goes on-line.
1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act passed.
1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act passed.
1987 Chicago prosecutors form Computer Fraud and Abuse Task
Force.
1988
July. Secret Service covertly videotapes "SummerCon" hacker
convention.
September. "Prophet" cracks BellSouth AIMSX computer network
and downloads E911 Document to his own computer and
to Jolnet.
September. AT&T Corporate Information Security informed of
Prophet's action.
October. Bellcore Security informed of Prophet's action.
1989
January. Prophet uploads E911 Document to Knight Lightning.
February 25. Knight Lightning publishes E911 Document in PHRACK
electronic newsletter.
May. Chicago Task Force raids and arrests "Kyrie."
June. "NuPrometheus League" distributes Apple Computer
proprietary software.
June 13. Florida probation office crossed with phone-sex line
in switching-station stunt.
July. "Fry Guy" raided by USSS and Chicago Computer Fraud
and Abuse Task Force.
July. Secret Service raids "Prophet," "Leftist," and "Urvile" in
Georgia.
1990
January 15. Martin Luther King Day Crash strikes AT&T
long-distance
network nationwide.
January 18-19. Chicago Task Force raids Knight Lightning in St.
Louis.
January 24. USSS and New York State Police raid "Phiber Optik,"
"Acid Phreak," and "Scorpion" in New York City.
February 1. USSS raids "Terminus" in Maryland.
February 3. Chicago Task Force raids Richard Andrews' home.
February 6. Chicago Task Force raids Richard Andrews' business.
February 6. USSS arrests Terminus, Prophet, Leftist, and Urvile.
February 9. Chicago Task Force arrests Knight Lightning.
February 20. AT&T Security shuts down public-access
"attctc" computer in Dallas.
February 21. Chicago Task Force raids Robert Izenberg in Austin.
March 1. Chicago Task Force raids Steve Jackson Games, Inc.,
"Mentor," and "Erik Bloodaxe" in Austin.
May 7,8,9.
USSS and Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau conduct
"Operation Sundevil" raids in Cincinnatti, Detroit, Los Angeles,
Miami, Newark, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Tucson, San Diego,
San Jose, and San Francisco.
May. FBI interviews John Perry Barlow re NuPrometheus case.
June. Mitch Kapor and Barlow found Electronic Frontier
Foundation;
Barlow publishes CRIME AND PUZZLEMENT manifesto.
July 24-27. Trial of Knight Lightning.
1991
February. CPSR Roundtable in Washington, D.C.
March 25-28. Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in San
Francisco.
May 1. Electronic Frontier Foundation, Steve Jackson,
and others file suit against members of Chicago Task
Force.
July 1-2. Switching station phone software crash affects
Washington, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, San Francisco.
September 17. AT&T phone crash affects New York City and three
airports.
Introduction
This is a book about cops, and wild teenage whiz-kids,
and lawyers, and hairy-eyed anarchists, and industrial
technicians, and hippies, and high-tech millionaires, and game
hobbyists, and computer security experts, and Secret Service
agents, and grifters, and thieves.
This book is about the electronic frontier of the 1990s.
It concerns activities that take place inside computers and over
telephone lines.
A science fiction writer coined the useful term
"cyberspace" in 1982. But the territory in question, the
electronic frontier, is about a hundred and thirty years old.
Cyberspace is the "place" where a telephone conversation appears
to occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on
your desk. Not inside the other person's phone, in some other
city. THE PLACE BETWEEN the phones. The indefinite place OUT
THERE, where the two of you, two human beings, actually meet and
communicate.
Although it is not exactly "real," "cyberspace" is a
genuine place. Things happen there that have very genuine
consequences. This "place" is not "real," but it is serious, it
is earnest. Tens of thousands of people have dedicated their
lives to it, to the public service of public communication by
wire and electronics.
People have worked on this "frontier" for generations
now. Some people became rich and famous from their efforts
there. Some just played in it, as hobbyists. Others soberly
pondered it, and wrote about it, and regulated it, and negotiated
over it in international forums, and sued one another about it,
in gigantic, epic court battles that lasted for years. And
almost since the beginning, some people have committed crimes in
this place.
But in the past twenty years, this electrical "space,"
which was once thin and dark and one-dimensional--little more
than a narrow speaking-tube, stretching from phone to phone--has
flung itself open like a gigantic jack-in-the-box. Light has
flooded upon it, the eerie light of the glowing computer screen.
This dark electric netherworld has become a vast flowering
electronic landscape. Since the 1960s, the world of the
telephone has cross-bred itself with computers and television,
and though there is still no substance to cyberspace, nothing you
can handle, it has a strange kind of physicality now. It makes
good sense today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own.
Because people live in it now. Not just a few people,
not just a few technicians and eccentrics, but thousands of
people, quite normal people. And not just for a little while,
either, but for hours straight, over weeks, and months, and
years. Cyberspace today is a "Net," a "Matrix," international in
scope and growing swiftly and steadily. It's growing in size,
and wealth, and political importance.
People are making entire careers in modern cyberspace.
Scientists and technicians, of course; they've been there for
twenty years now. But increasingly, cyberspace is filling with
journalists and doctors and lawyers and artists and clerks.
Civil servants make their careers there now, "on-line" in vast
government data-banks; and so do spies, industrial, political,
and just plain snoops; and so do police, at least a few of them.
And there are children living there now.
People have met there and been married there. There are
entire living communities in cyberspace today; chattering,
gossiping, planning, conferring and scheming, leaving one
another voice-mail and electronic mail, giving one another big
weightless chunks of valuable data, both legitimate and
illegitimate. They busily pass one another computer software and
the occasional festering computer virus.
We do not really understand how to live in cyberspace
yet. We are feeling our way into it, blundering about. That is
not surprising. Our lives in the physical world, the "real"
world, are also far from perfect, despite a lot more practice.
Human lives, real lives, are imperfect by their nature, and there
are human beings in cyberspace. The way we live in cyberspace is
a funhouse mirror of the way we live in the real world. We take
both our advantages and our troubles with us.
This book is about trouble in cyberspace. Specifically,
this book is about certain strange events in the year 1990, an
unprecedented and startling year for the the growing world of
computerized communications.
In 1990 there came a nationwide crackdown on illicit
computer hackers, with arrests, criminal charges, one dramatic
show-trial, several guilty pleas, and huge confiscations of data
and equipment all over the USA.
The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was larger, better
organized, more deliberate, and more resolute than any previous
effort in the brave new world of computer crime. The U.S.
Secret Service, private telephone security, and state and local
law enforcement groups across the country all joined forces in a
determined attempt to break the back of America's electronic
underground. It was a fascinating effort, with very mixed
results.
The Hacker Crackdown had another unprecedented effect; it
spurred the creation, within "the computer community," of the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, a new and very odd interest
group, fiercely dedicated to the establishment and preservation
of electronic civil liberties. The crackdown, remarkable in
itself, has created a melee of debate over electronic crime,
punishment, freedom of the press, and issues of search and
seizure. Politics has entered cyberspace. Where people go,
politics follow.
This is the story of the people of cyberspace.
PART ONE: Crashing the System
On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance telephone
switching system crashed.
This was a strange, dire, huge event. Sixty thousand
people lost their telephone service completely. During the nine
long hours of frantic effort that it took to restore service,
some seventy million telephone calls went uncompleted.
Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco
trade, are a known and accepted hazard of the telephone business.
Hurricanes hit, and phone cables get snapped by the thousands.
Earthquakes wrench through buried fiber-optic lines. Switching
stations catch fire and burn to the ground. These things do
happen. There are contingency plans for them, and decades of
experience in dealing with them. But the Crash of January 15 was
unprecedented. It was unbelievably huge, and it occurred for no
apparent physical reason.
The crash started on a Monday afternoon in a single
switching-station in Manhattan. But, unlike any merely physical
damage, it spread and spread. Station after station across
America collapsed in a chain reaction, until fully half of AT&T's
network had gone haywire and the remaining half was hard-put to
handle the overflow.
Within nine hours, AT&T software engineers more or less
understood what had caused the crash. Replicating the problem
exactly, poring over software line by line, took them a couple of
weeks. But because it was hard to understand technically, the
full truth of the matter and its implications were not widely and
thoroughly aired and explained. The root cause of the crash
remained obscure, surrounded by rumor and fear.
The crash was a grave corporate embarrassment. The
"culprit" was a bug in AT&T's own software--not the sort of
admission the telecommunications giant wanted to make, especially
in the face of increasing competition. Still, the truth WAS
told, in the baffling technical terms necessary to explain it.
Somehow the explanation failed to persuade American law
enforcement officials and even telephone corporate security
personnel. These people were not technical experts or software
wizards, and they had their own suspicions about the cause of
this disaster.
The police and telco security had important sources of
information denied to mere software engineers. They had
informants in the computer underground and years of experience in
dealing with high-tech rascality that seemed to grow ever more
sophisticated. For years they had been expecting a direct and
savage attack against the American national telephone system.
And with the Crash of January 15--the first month of a new, high-
tech decade--their predictions, fears, and suspicions seemed at
last to have entered the real world. A world where the
telephone system had not merely crashed, but, quite likely, BEEN
crashed--by "hackers."
The crash created a large dark cloud of suspicion that
would color certain people's assumptions and actions for months.
The fact that it took place in the realm of software was
suspicious on its face. The fact that it occurred on Martin
Luther King Day, still the most politically touchy of American
holidays, made it more suspicious yet.
The Crash of January 15 gave the Hacker Crackdown its
sense of edge and its sweaty urgency. It made people, powerful
people in positions of public authority, willing to believe the
worst. And, most fatally, it helped to give investigators a
willingness to take extreme measures and the determination to
preserve almost total secrecy.
An obscure software fault in an aging switching system in
New York was to lead to a chain reaction of legal and
constitutional trouble all across the country.
Like the crash in the telephone system, this chain
reaction was ready and waiting to happen. During the 1980s, the
American legal system was extensively patched to deal with the
novel issues of computer crime. There was, for instance, the
Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (eloquently
described as "a stinking mess" by a prominent law enforcement
official). And there was the draconian Computer Fraud and Abuse
Act of 1986, passed unanimously by the United States Senate,
which later would reveal a large number of flaws. Extensive,
well-meant efforts had been made to keep the legal system up to
date. But in the day-to-day grind of the real world, even the
most elegant software tends to crumble and suddenly reveal its
hidden bugs.
Like the advancing telephone system, the American legal
system was certainly not ruined by its temporary crash; but for
those caught under the weight of the collapsing system, life
became a series of blackouts and anomalies.
In order to understand why these weird events occurred,
both in the world of technology and in the world of law, it's not
enough to understand the merely technical problems. We will get
to those; but first and foremost, we must try to understand the
telephone, and the business of telephones, and the community of
human beings that telephones have created.
Technologies have life cycles, like cities do, like
institutions do, like laws and governments do.
The first stage of any technology is the Question Mark,
often known as the "Golden Vaporware" stage. At this early
point, the technology is only a phantom, a mere gleam in the
inventor's eye. One such inventor was a speech teacher and
electrical tinkerer named Alexander Graham Bell.
Bell's early inventions, while ingenious, failed to move
the world. In 1863, the teenage Bell and his brother Melville
made an artificial talking mechanism out of wood, rubber, gutta-
percha, and tin. This weird device had a rubber-covered "tongue"
made of movable wooden segments, with vibrating rubber "vocal
cords," and rubber "lips" and "cheeks." While Melville puffed a
bellows into a tin tube, imitating the lungs, young Alec Bell
would manipulate the "lips," "teeth," and "tongue," causing the
thing to emit high-pitched falsetto gibberish.
Another would-be technical breakthrough was the Bell
"phonautograph" of 1874, actually made out of a human cadaver's
ear. Clamped into place on a tripod, this grisly gadget drew
sound-wave images on smoked glass through a thin straw glued to
its vibrating earbones.
By 1875, Bell had learned to produce audible sounds--ugly
shrieks and squawks--by using magnets, diaphragms, and electrical
current.
Most "Golden Vaporware" technologies go nowhere.
But the second stage of technology is the Rising Star,
or, the "Goofy Prototype," stage. The telephone, Bell's most
ambitious gadget yet, reached this stage on March 10, 1876. On
that great day, Alexander Graham Bell became the first person to
transmit intelligible human speech electrically. As it happened,
young Professor Bell, industriously tinkering in his Boston lab,
had spattered his trousers with acid. His assistant, Mr. Watson,
heard his cry for help--over Bell's experimental audio-telegraph.
This was an event without precedent.
Technologies in their "Goofy Prototype" stage rarely work
very well. They're experimental, and therefore half-baked and
rather frazzled. The prototype may be attractive and novel, and
it does look as if it ought to be good for something-or-other.
But nobody, including the inventor, is quite sure what.
Inventors, and speculators, and pundits may have very firm ideas
about its potential use, but those ideas are often very wrong.
The natural habitat of the Goofy Prototype is in trade
shows and in the popular press. Infant technologies need
publicity and investment money like a tottering calf need milk.
This was very true of Bell's machine. To raise research and
development money, Bell toured with his device as a stage
attraction.
Contemporary press reports of the stage debut of the
telephone showed pleased astonishment mixed with considerable
dread. Bell's stage telephone was a large wooden box with a
crude speaker-nozzle, the whole contraption about the size and
shape of an overgrown Brownie camera. Its buzzing steel
soundplate, pumped up by powerful electromagnets, was loud enough
to fill an auditorium. Bell's assistant Mr. Watson, who could
manage on the keyboards fairly well, kicked in by playing the
organ from distant rooms, and, later, distant cities. This feat
was considered marvellous, but very eerie indeed.
Bell's original notion for the telephone, an idea
promoted for a couple of years, was that it would become a mass
medium. We might recognize Bell's idea today as something close
to modern "cable radio." Telephones at a central source would
transmit music, Sunday sermons, and important public speeches to
a paying network of wired-up subscribers.
At the time, most people thought this notion made good
sense. In fact, Bell's idea was workable. In Hungary, this
philosophy of the telephone was successfully put into everyday
practice. In Budapest, for decades, from 1893 until after World
War I, there was a government-run information service called
"Telefon Hirmondo+." Hirmondo+ was a centralized source of news
and entertainment and culture, including stock reports, plays,
concerts, and novels read aloud. At certain hours of the day,
the phone would ring, you would plug in a loudspeaker for the use
of the family, and Telefon Hirmondo+ would be on the air--or
rather, on the phone.
Hirmondo+ is dead tech today, but Hirmondo+ might be
considered a spiritual ancestor of the modern telephone-accessed
computer data services, such as CompuServe, GEnie or Prodigy.
The principle behind Hirmondo+ is also not too far from computer
"bulletin-board systems" or BBS's, which arrived in the late
1970s, spread rapidly across America, and will figure largely in
this book.
We are used to using telephones for individual person-to-
person speech, because we are used to the Bell system. But this
was just one possibility among many. Communication networks are
very flexible and protean, especially when their hardware becomes
sufficiently advanced. They can be put to all kinds of uses.
And they have been--and they will be.
Bell's telephone was bound for glory, but this was a
combination of political decisions, canny infighting in court,
inspired industrial leadership, receptive local conditions and
outright good luck. Much the same is true of communications
systems today.
As Bell and his backers struggled to install their
newfangled system in the real world of nineteenth-century New
England, they had to fight against skepticism and industrial
rivalry. There was already a strong electrical communications
network present in America: the telegraph. The head of the
Western Union telegraph system dismissed Bell's prototype as "an
electrical toy" and refused to buy the rights to Bell's patent.
The telephone, it seemed, might be all right as a parlor
entertainment--but not for serious business.
Telegrams, unlike mere telephones, left a permanent
physical record of their messages. Telegrams, unlike telephones,
could be answered whenever the recipient had time and
convenience. And the telegram had a much longer distance-range
than Bell's early telephone. These factors made telegraphy seem
a much more sound and businesslike technology--at least to some.
The telegraph system was huge, and well-entrenched. In
1876, the United States had 214,000 miles of telegraph wire, and
8500 telegraph offices. There were specialized telegraphs for
businesses and stock traders, government, police and fire
departments. And Bell's "toy" was best known as a stage-magic
musical device.
The third stage of technology is known as the "Cash Cow"
stage. In the "cash cow" stage, a technology finds its place in
the world, and matures, and becomes settled and productive.
After a year or so, Alexander Graham Bell and his capitalist
backers concluded that eerie music piped from nineteenth-century
cyberspace was not the real selling-point of his invention.
Instead, the telephone was about speech--individual, personal
speech, the human voice, human conversation and human
interaction. The telephone was not to be managed from any
centralized broadcast center. It was to be a personal, intimate
technology.
When you picked up a telephone, you were not absorbing
the cold output of a machine--you were speaking to another human
being. Once people realized this, their instinctive dread of the
telephone as an eerie, unnatural device, swiftly vanished. A
"telephone call" was not a "call" from a "telephone" itself, but
a call from another human being, someone you would generally know
and recognize. The real point was not what the machine could do
for you (or to you), but what you yourself, a person and citizen,
could do THROUGH the machine. This decision on the part of the
young Bell Company was absolutely vital.
The first telephone networks went up around Boston--
mostly among the technically curious and the well-to-do (much the
same segment of the American populace that, a hundred years
later, would be buying personal computers). Entrenched backers
of the telegraph continued to scoff.
But in January 1878, a disaster made the telephone
famous. A train crashed in Tarriffville, Connecticut. Forward-
looking doctors in the nearby city of Hartford had had Bell's
"speaking telephone" installed. An alert local druggist was able
to telephone an entire community of local doctors, who rushed to
the site to give aid. The disaster, as disasters do, aroused
intense press coverage. The phone had proven its usefulness in
the real world.
After Tarriffville, the telephone network spread like
crabgrass. By 1890 it was all over New England. By '93, out to
Chicago. By '97, into Minnesota, Nebraska and Texas. By 1904 it
was all over the continent.
The telephone had become a mature technology. Professor
Bell (now generally known as "Dr. Bell" despite his lack of a
formal degree) became quite wealthy. He lost interest in the
tedious day-to-day business muddle of the booming telephone
network, and gratefully returned his attention to creatively
hacking-around in his various laboratories, which were now much
larger, better-ventilated, and gratifyingly better-equipped.
Bell was never to have another great inventive success, though
his speculations and prototypes anticipated fiber-optic
transmission, manned flight, sonar, hydrofoil ships, tetrahedral
construction, and Montessori education. The "decibel," the
standard scientific measure of sound intensity, was named after
Bell.
Not all Bell's vaporware notions were inspired. He was
fascinated by human eugenics. He also spent many years
developing a weird personal system of astrophysics in which
gravity did not exist.
Bell was a definite eccentric. He was something of a
hypochondriac, and throughout his life he habitually stayed up
until four A.M., refusing to rise before noon. But Bell had
accomplished a great feat; he was an idol of millions and his
influence, wealth, and great personal charm, combined with his
eccentricity, made him something of a loose cannon on deck. Bell
maintained a thriving scientific salon in his winter mansion in
Washington, D.C., which gave him considerable backstage influence
in governmental and scientific circles. He was a major financial
backer of the the magazines SCIENCE and NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, both
still flourishing today as important organs of the American
scientific establishment.
Bell's companion Thomas Watson, similarly wealthy and
similarly odd, became the ardent political disciple of a 19th-
century science-fiction writer and would-be social reformer,
Edward Bellamy. Watson also trod the boards briefly as a
Shakespearian actor.
There would never be another Alexander Graham Bell, but
in years to come there would be surprising numbers of people like
him. Bell was a prototype of the high-tech entrepreneur. High-
tech entrepreneurs will play a very prominent role in this book:
not merely as technicians and businessmen, but as pioneers of the
technical frontier, who can carry the power and prestige they
derive from high-technology into the political and social arena.
Like later entrepreneurs, Bell was fierce in defense of
his own technological territory. As the telephone began to
flourish, Bell was soon involved in violent lawsuits in the
defense of his patents. Bell's Boston lawyers were excellent,
however, and Bell himself, as an elocution teacher and gifted
public speaker, was a devastatingly effective legal witness. In
the eighteen years of Bell's patents, the Bell company was
involved in six hundred separate lawsuits. The legal records
printed filled 149 volumes. The Bell Company won every single
suit.
After Bell's exclusive patents expired, rival telephone
companies sprang up all over America. Bell's company, American
Bell Telephone, was soon in deep trouble. In 1907, American Bell
Telephone fell into the hands of the rather sinister J.P. Morgan
financial cartel, robber-baron speculators who dominated Wall
Street.
At this point, history might have taken a different turn.
American might well have been served forever by a patchwork of
locally owned telephone companies. Many state politicians and
local businessmen considered this an excellent solution.
But the new Bell holding company, American Telephone and
Telegraph or AT&T, put in a new man at the helm, a visionary
industrialist named Theodore Vail. Vail, a former Post Office
manager, understood large organizations and had an innate feeling
for the nature of large-scale communications. Vail quickly saw
to it that AT&T seized the technological edge once again. The
Pupin and Campbell "loading coil," and the deForest "audion," are
both extinct technology today, but in 1913 they gave Vail's
company the best LONG-DISTANCE lines ever built. By controlling
long-distance--the links between, and over, and above the smaller
local phone companies--AT&T swiftly gained the whip-hand over
them, and was soon devouring them right and left.
Vail plowed the profits back into research and
development, starting the Bell tradition of huge-scale and
brilliant industrial research.
Technically and financially, AT&T gradually steamrollered
the opposition. Independent telephone companies never became
entirely extinct, and hundreds of them flourish today. But
Vail's AT&T became the supreme communications company. At one
point, Vail's AT&T bought Western Union itself, the very company
that had derided Bell's telephone as a "toy." Vail thoroughly
reformed Western Union's hidebound business along his modern
principles; but when the federal government grew anxious at this
centralization of power, Vail politely gave Western Union back.
This centralizing process was not unique. Very similar
events had happened in American steel, oil, and railroads. But
AT&T, unlike the other companies, was to remain supreme. The
monopoly robber-barons of those other industries were humbled and
shattered by government trust-busting.
Vail, the former Post Office official, was quite willing
to accommodate the US government; in fact he would forge an
active alliance with it. AT&T would become almost a wing of the
American government, almost another Post Office--though not
quite. AT&T would willingly submit to federal regulation, but in
return, it would use the government's regulators as its own
police, who would keep out competitors and assure the Bell
system's profits and preeminence.
This was the second birth--the political birth--of the
American telephone system. Vail's arrangement was to persist,
with vast success, for many decades, until 1982. His system was
an odd kind of American industrial socialism. It was born at
about the same time as Leninist Communism, and it lasted almost
as long--and, it must be admitted, to considerably better effect.
Vail's system worked. Except perhaps for aerospace,
there has been no technology more thoroughly dominated by
Americans than the telephone. The telephone was seen from the
beginning as a quintessentially American technology. Bell's
policy, and the policy of Theodore Vail, was a profoundly
democratic policy of UNIVERSAL ACCESS. Vail's famous corporate
slogan, "One Policy, One System, Universal Service," was a
political slogan, with a very American ring to it.
The American telephone was not to become the specialized
tool of government or business, but a general public utility. At
first, it was true, only the wealthy could afford private
telephones, and Bell's company pursued the business markets
primarily. The American phone system was a capitalist effort,
meant to make money; it was not a charity. But from the first,
almost all communities with telephone service had public
telephones. And many stores--especially drugstores--offered
public use of their phones. You might not own a telephone--but
you could always get into the system, if you really needed to.
There was nothing inevitable about this decision to make
telephones "public" and "universal." Vail's system involved a
profound act of trust in the public. This decision was a
political one, informed by the basic values of the American
republic. The situation might have been very different; and in
other countries, under other systems, it certainly was.
Joseph Stalin, for instance, vetoed plans for a Soviet
phone system soon after the Bolshevik revolution. Stalin was
certain that publicly accessible telephones would become
instruments of anti-Soviet counterrevolution and conspiracy. (He
was probably right.) When telephones did arrive in the Soviet
Union, they would be instruments of Party authority, and always
heavily tapped. (Alexander Solzhenitsyn's prison-camp novel THE
FIRST CIRCLE describes efforts to develop a phone system more
suited to Stalinist purposes.)
France, with its tradition of rational centralized
government, had fought bitterly even against the electric
telegraph, which seemed to the French entirely too anarchical and
frivolous. For decades, nineteenth-century France communicated
via the "visual telegraph," a nation-spanning, government-owned
semaphore system of huge stone towers that signalled from
hilltops, across vast distances, with big windmill-like arms. In
1846, one Dr. Barbay, a semaphore enthusiast, memorably uttered
an early version of what might be called "the security expert's
argument" against the open media.
"No, the electric telegraph is not a sound invention. It
will always be at the mercy of the slightest disruption, wild
youths, drunkards, bums, etc.... The electric telegraph meets
those destructive elements with only a few meters of wire over
which supervision is impossible. A single man could, without
being seen, cut the telegraph wires leading to Paris, and in
twenty-four hours cut in ten different places the wires of the
same line, without being arrested. The visual telegraph, on the
contrary, has its towers, its high walls, its gates well-guarded
from inside by strong armed men. Yes, I declare, substitution of
the electric telegraph for the visual one is a dreadful measure,
a truly idiotic act."
Dr. Barbay and his high-security stone machines were
eventually unsuccessful, but his argument--that communication
exists for the safety and convenience of the state, and must be
carefully protected from the wild boys and the gutter rabble who
might want to crash the system--would be heard again and again.
When the French telephone system finally did arrive, its
snarled inadequacy was to be notorious. Devotees of the American
Bell System often recommended a trip to France, for skeptics.
In Edwardian Britain, issues of class and privacy were a
ball-and-chain for telephonic progress. It was considered
outrageous that anyone--any wild fool off the street--could
simply barge bellowing into one's office or home, preceded only
by the ringing of a telephone bell. In Britain, phones were
tolerated for the use of business, but private phones tended be
stuffed away into closets, smoking rooms, or servants' quarters.
Telephone operators were resented in Britain because they did not
seem to "know their place." And no one of breeding would print a
telephone number on a business card; this seemed a crass attempt
to make the acquaintance of strangers.
But phone access in America was to become a popular
right; something like universal suffrage, only more so. American
women could not yet vote when the phone system came through; yet
from the beginning American women doted on the telephone. This
"feminization" of the American telephone was often commented on
by foreigners. Phones in America were not censored or stiff or
formalized; they were social, private, intimate, and domestic.
In America, Mother's Day is by far the busiest day of the year
for the phone network.
The early telephone companies, and especially AT&T, were
among the foremost employers of American women. They employed
the daughters of the American middle-class in great armies: in
1891, eight thousand women; by 1946, almost a quarter of a
million. Women seemed to enjoy telephone work; it was
respectable, it was steady, it paid fairly well as women's work
went, and--not least--it seemed a genuine contribution to the
social good of the community. Women found Vail's ideal of
public service attractive. This was especially true in rural
areas, where women operators, running extensive rural party-
lines, enjoyed considerable social power. The operator knew
everyone on the party-line, and everyone knew her.
Although Bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the
telephone company did not employ women for the sake of advancing
female liberation. AT&T did this for sound commercial reasons.
The first telephone operators of the Bell system were not women,
but teenage American boys. They were telegraphic messenger boys
(a group about to be rendered technically obsolescent), who swept
up around the phone office, dunned customers for bills, and made
phone connections on the switchboard, all on the cheap.
Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell's
company learned a sharp lesson about combining teenage boys and
telephone switchboards. Putting teenage boys in charge of the
phone system brought swift and consistent disaster. Bell's chief
engineer described them as "Wild Indians." The boys were openly
rude to customers. They talked back to subscribers, saucing off,
uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip. The
rascals took Saint Patrick's Day off without permission. And
worst of all they played clever tricks with the switchboard
plugs: disconnecting calls, crossing lines so that customers
found themselves talking to strangers, and so forth.
This combination of power, technical mastery, and
effective anonymity seemed to act like catnip on teenage boys.
This wild-kid-on-the-wires phenomenon was not confined to
the USA; from the beginning, the same was true of the British
phone system. An early British commentator kindly remarked: "No
doubt boys in their teens found the work not a little irksome,
and it is also highly probable that under the early conditions of
employment the adventurous and inquisitive spirits of which the
average healthy boy of that age is possessed, were not always
conducive to the best attention being given to the wants of the
telephone subscribers."
So the boys were flung off the system--or at least,
deprived of control of the switchboard. But the "adventurous and
inquisitive spirits" of the teenage boys would be heard from in
the world of telephony, again and again.
The fourth stage in the technological life-cycle is
death: "the Dog," dead tech. The telephone has so far avoided
this fate. On the contrary, it is thriving, still spreading,
still evolving, and at increasing speed.
The telephone has achieved a rare and exalted state for
a technological artifact: it has become a HOUSEHOLD OBJECT. The
telephone, like the clock, like pen and paper, like kitchen
utensils and running water, has become a technology that is
visible only by its absence. The telephone is technologically
transparent. The global telephone system is the largest and most
complex machine in the world, yet it is easy to use. More
remarkable yet, the telephone is almost entirely physically safe
for the user.
For the average citizen in the 1870s, the telephone was
weirder, more shocking, more "high-tech" and harder to
comprehend, than the most outrageous stunts of advanced computing
for us Americans in the 1990s. In trying to understand what is
happening to us today, with our bulletin-board systems, direct
overseas dialling, fiber-optic transmissions, computer viruses,
hacking stunts, and a vivid tangle of new laws and new crimes, it
is important to realize that our society has been through a
similar challenge before--and that, all in all, we did rather
well by it.
Bell's stage telephone seemed bizarre at first. But the
sensations of weirdness vanished quickly, once people began to
hear the familiar voices of relatives and friends, in their own
homes on their own telephones. The telephone changed from a
fearsome high-tech totem to an everyday pillar of human
community.
This has also happened, and is still happening, to
computer networks. Computer networks such as NSFnet, BITnet,
USENET, JANET, are technically advanced, intimidating, and much
harder to use than telephones. Even the popular, commercial
computer networks, such as GEnie, Prodigy, and CompuServe, cause
much head-scratching and have been described as "user-hateful."
Nevertheless they too are changing from fancy high-tech items
into everyday sources of human community.
The words "community" and "communication" have the same
root. Wherever you put a communications network, you put a
community as well. And whenever you TAKE AWAY that network--
confiscate it, outlaw it, crash it, raise its price beyond
affordability--then you hurt that community.
Communities will fight to defend themselves. People will
fight harder and more bitterly to defend their communities, than
they will fight to defend their own individual selves. And this
is very true of the "electronic community" that arose around
computer networks in the 1980s--or rather, the VARIOUS electronic
communities, in telephony, law enforcement, computing, and the
digital underground that, by the year 1990, were raiding,
rallying, arresting, suing, jailing, fining and issuing angry
manifestos.
None of the events of 1990 were entirely new. Nothing
happened in 1990 that did not have some kind of earlier and more
understandable precedent. What gave the Hacker Crackdown its new
sense of gravity and importance was the feeling--the COMMUNITY
feeling--that the political stakes had been raised; that trouble
in cyberspace was no longer mere mischief or inconclusive
skirmishing, but a genuine fight over genuine issues, a fight for
community survival and the shape of the future.
These electronic communities, having flourished
throughout the 1980s, were becoming aware of themselves, and
increasingly, becoming aware of other, rival communities.
Worries were sprouting up right and left, with complaints,
rumors, uneasy speculations. But it would take a catalyst, a
shock, to make the new world evident. Like Bell's great
publicity break, the Tarriffville Rail Disaster of January 1878,
it would take a cause celebre.
That cause was the AT&T Crash of January 15, 1990. After
the Crash, the wounded and anxious telephone community would come
out fighting hard.
The community of telephone technicians, engineers,
operators and researchers is the oldest community in cyberspace.
These are the veterans, the most developed group, the richest,
the most respectable, in most ways the most powerful. Whole
generations have come and gone since Alexander Graham Bell's day,
but the community he founded survives; people work for the phone
system today whose great-grandparents worked for the phone
system. Its specialty magazines, such as TELEPHONY, AT&T
TECHNICAL JOURNAL, and TELEPHONE ENGINEER AND MANAGEMENT, are
decades old; they make computer publications like MACWORLD and PC
WEEK look like amateur johnny-come-latelies.
And the phone companies take no back seat in high-
technology, either. Other companies' industrial researchers may
have won new markets; but the researchers of Bell Labs have won
SEVEN NOBLE PRIZES. One potent device that Bell Labs originated,
the transistor, has created entire GROUPS of industries. Bell
Labs are world-famous for generating "a patent a day," and have
even made vital discoveries in astronomy, physics and cosmology.
Throughout its seventy-year history, "Ma Bell" was not so
much a company as a way of life. Until the cataclysmic
divestiture of the 1980s, Ma Bell was perhaps the ultimate
maternalist mega-employer. The AT&T corporate image was the
"gentle giant," "the voice with a smile," a vaguely socialist-
realist world of cleanshaven linemen in shiny helmets and blandly
pretty phone-girls in headsets and nylons. Bell System employees
were famous as rock-ribbed Kiwanis and Rotary members, Little-
League enthusiasts, school-board people.
During the long heyday of Ma Bell, the Bell employee
corps were nurtured top-to-bottom on a corporate ethos of public
service. There was good money in Bell, but Bell was not ABOUT
money; Bell used public relations, but never mere marketeering.
People went into the Bell System for a good life, and they had a
good life. But it was not mere money that led Bell people out in
the midst of storms and earthquakes to fight with toppled phone-
poles, to wade in flooded manholes, to pull the red-eyed
graveyard-shift over collapsing switching-systems. The Bell
ethic was the electrical equivalent of the postman's: neither
rain, nor snow, nor gloom of night would stop these couriers.
It is easy to be cynical about this, as it is easy to be
cynical about any political or social system; but cynicism does
not change the fact that thousands of people took these ideals
very seriously. And some still do.
The Bell ethos was about public service; and that was
gratifying; but it was also about private POWER, and that was
gratifying too. As a corporation, Bell was very special. Bell
was privileged. Bell had snuggled up close to the state. In
fact, Bell was as close to government as you could get in America
and still make a whole lot of legitimate money.
But unlike other companies, Bell was above and beyond the
vulgar commercial fray. Through its regional operating
companies, Bell was omnipresent, local, and intimate, all over
America; but the central ivory towers at its corporate heart were
the tallest and the ivoriest around.
There were other phone companies in America, to be sure;
the so-called independents. Rural cooperatives, mostly; small
fry, mostly tolerated, sometimes warred upon. For many decades,
"independent" American phone companies lived in fear and loathing
of the official Bell monopoly (or the "Bell Octopus," as Ma
Bell's nineteenth-century enemies described her in many angry
newspaper manifestos). Some few of these independent
entrepreneurs, while legally in the wrong, fought so bitterly
against the Octopus that their illegal phone networks were cast
into the street by Bell agents and publicly burned.
The pure technical sweetness of the Bell System gave its
operators, inventors and engineers a deeply satisfying sense of
power and mastery. They had devoted their lives to improving
this vast nation-spanning machine; over years, whole human lives,
they had watched it improve and grow. It was like a great
technological temple. They were an elite, and they knew it--
even if others did not; in fact, they felt even more powerful
BECAUSE others did not understand.
The deep attraction of this sensation of elite technical
power should never be underestimated. "Technical power" is not
for everybody; for many people it simply has no charm at all.
But for some people, it becomes the core of their lives. For a
few, it is overwhelming, obsessive; it becomes something close to
an addiction. People--especially clever teenage boys whose lives
are otherwise mostly powerless and put-upon--love this sensation
of secret power, and are willing to do all sorts of amazing
things to achieve it. The technical POWER of electronics has
motivated many strange acts detailed in this book, which would
otherwise be inexplicable.
So Bell had power beyond mere capitalism. The Bell
service ethos worked, and was often propagandized, in a rather
saccharine fashion. Over the decades, people slowly grew tired
of this. And then, openly impatient with it. By the early
1980s, Ma Bell was to find herself with scarcely a real friend in
the world. Vail's industrial socialism had become hopelessly
out-of-fashion politically. Bell would be punished for that.
And that punishment would fall harshly upon the people of the
telephone community.
In 1983, Ma Bell was dismantled by federal court action.
The pieces of Bell are now separate corporate entities. The core
of the company became AT&T Communications, and also AT&T
Industries (formerly Western Electric, Bell's manufacturing arm).
AT&T Bell Labs become Bell Communications Research, Bellcore.
Then there are the Regional Bell Operating Companies, or RBOCs,
pronounced "arbocks."
Bell was a titan and even these regional chunks are
gigantic enterprises: Fortune 50 companies with plenty of wealth
and power behind them. But the clean lines of "One Policy, One
System, Universal Service" have been shattered, apparently
forever.
The "One Policy" of the early Reagan Administration was
to shatter a system that smacked of noncompetitive socialism.
Since that time, there has been no real telephone "policy" on the
federal level. Despite the breakup, the remnants of Bell have
never been set free to compete in the open marketplace.
The RBOCs are still very heavily regulated, but not from
the top. Instead, they struggle politically, economically and
legally, in what seems an endless turmoil, in a patchwork of
overlapping federal and state jurisdictions. Increasingly, like
other major American corporations, the RBOCs are becoming
multinational, acquiring important commercial interests in
Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific Rim. But this, too, adds
to their legal and political predicament.
The people of what used to be Ma Bell are not happy about
their fate. They feel ill-used. They might have been grudgingly
willing to make a full transition to the free market; to become
just companies amid other companies. But this never happened.
Instead, AT&T and the RBOCS ("the Baby Bells") feel themselves
wrenched from side to side by state regulators, by Congress, by
the FCC, and especially by the federal court of Judge Harold
Greene, the magistrate who ordered the Bell breakup and who has
been the de facto czar of American telecommunications ever since
1983. Bell people feel that they exist in a kind of paralegal
limbo today. They don't understand what's demanded of them. If
it's "service," why aren't they treated like a public service?
And if it's money, then why aren't they free to compete for it?
No one seems to know, really. Those who claim to know keep
changing their minds. Nobody in authority seems willing to grasp
the nettle for once and all.
Telephone people from other countries are amazed by the
American telephone system today. Not that it works so well; for
nowadays even the French telephone system works, more or less.
They are amazed that the American telephone system STILL works AT
ALL, under these strange conditions.
Bell's "One System" of long-distance service is now only
about eighty percent of a system, with the remainder held by
Sprint, MCI, and the midget long-distance companies. Ugly wars
over dubious corporate practices such as "slamming" (an
underhanded method of snitching clients from rivals) break out
with some regularity in the realm of long-distance service. The
battle to break Bell's long-distance monopoly was long and ugly,
and since the breakup the battlefield has not become much
prettier. AT&T's famous shame-and-blame advertisements, which
emphasized the shoddy work and purported ethical shadiness of
their competitors, were much remarked on for their studied
psychological cruelty.
There is much bad blood in this industry, and much long-
treasured resentment. AT&T's post-breakup corporate logo, a
striped sphere, is known in the industry as the "Death Star" (a
reference from the movie STAR WARS, in which the "Death Star" was
the spherical high-tech fortress of the harsh-breathing imperial
ultra-baddie, Darth Vader.) Even AT&T employees are less than
thrilled by the Death Star. A popular (though banned) T-shirt
among AT&T employees bears the old-fashioned Bell logo of the
Bell System, plus the newfangled striped sphere, with the before-
and-after comments: "This is your brain--This is your brain on
drugs!" AT&T made a very well-financed and determined effort to
break into the personal computer market; it was disastrous, and
telco computer experts are derisively known by their competitors
as "the pole-climbers." AT&T and the Baby Bell arbocks still
seem to have few friends.
Under conditions of sharp commercial competition, a crash
like that of January 15, 1990 was a major embarrassment to AT&T.
It was a direct blow against their much-treasured reputation for
reliability. Within days of the crash AT&T's Chief Executive
Officer, Bob Allen, officially apologized, in terms of deeply
pained humility:
"AT&T had a major service disruption last Monday. We
didn't live up to our own standards of quality, and we didn't
live up to yours. It's as simple as that. And that's not
acceptable to us. Or to you.... We understand how much people
have come to depend upon AT&T service, so our AT&T Bell
Laboratories scientists and our network engineers are doing
everything possible to guard against a recurrence.... We know
there's no way to make up for the inconvenience this problem may
have caused you."
Mr Allen's "open letter to customers" was printed in
lavish ads all over the country: in the WALL STREET JOURNAL, USA
TODAY, NEW YORK TIMES, LOS ANGELES TIMES, CHICAGO TRIBUNE,
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE EXAMINER, BOSTON
GLOBE, DALLAS MORNING NEWS, DETROIT FREE PRESS, WASHINGTON POST,
HOUSTON CHRONICLE, CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER, ATLANTA JOURNAL
CONSTITUTION, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE, ST. PAUL PIONEER PRESS
DISPATCH, SEATTLE TIME/POST INTELLIGENCER, TACOMA NEWS TRIBUNE,
MIAMI HERALD, PITTSBURGH PRESS, ST. LOUIS POST DISPATCH, DENVER
POST, PHOENIX REPUBLIC GAZETTE and TAMPA TRIBUNE.
In another press release, AT&T went to some pains to
suggest that this "software glitch" MIGHT have happened just as
easily to MCI, although, in fact, it hadn't. (MCI's switching
software was quite different from AT&T's--though not necessarily
any safer.) AT&T also announced their plans to offer a rebate of
service on Valentine's Day to make up for the loss during the
Crash.
"Every technical resource available, including Bell Labs
scientists and engineers, has been devoted to assuring it will
not occur again," the public was told. They were further assured
that "The chances of a recurrence are small--a problem of this
magnitude never occurred before."
In the meantime, however, police and corporate security
maintained their own suspicions about "the chances of recurrence"
and the real reason why a "problem of this magnitude" had
appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. Police and security knew for
a fact that hackers of unprecedented sophistication were
illegally entering, and reprogramming, certain digital switching
stations. Rumors of hidden "viruses" and secret "logic bombs" in
the switches ran rampant in the underground, with much chortling
over AT&T's predicament, and idle speculation over what unsung
hacker genius was responsible for it. Some hackers, including
police informants, were trying hard to finger one another as the
true culprits of the Crash.
Telco people found little comfort in objectivity when
they contemplated these possibilities. It was just too close to
the bone for them; it was embarrassing; it hurt so much, it was
hard even to talk about.
There has always been thieving and misbehavior in the
phone system. There has always been trouble with the rival
independents, and in the local loops. But to have such trouble
in the core of the system, the long-distance switching stations,
is a horrifying affair. To telco people, this is all the
difference between finding roaches in your kitchen and big horrid
sewer-rats in your bedroom.
From the outside, to the average citizen, the telcos
still seem gigantic and impersonal. The American public seems to
regard them as something akin to Soviet apparats. Even when the
telcos do their best corporate-citizen routine, subsidizing
magnet high-schools and sponsoring news-shows on public
television, they seem to win little except public suspicion.
But from the inside, all this looks very different.
There's harsh competition. A legal and political system that
seems baffled and bored, when not actively hostile to telco
interests. There's a loss of morale, a deep sensation of having
somehow lost the upper hand. Technological change has caused a
loss of data and revenue to other, newer forms of transmission.
There's theft, and new forms of theft, of growing scale and
boldness and sophistication. With all these factors, it was no
surprise to see the telcos, large and small, break out in a
litany of bitter complaint.
In late '88 and throughout 1989, telco representatives
grew shrill in their complaints to those few American law
enforcement officials who make it their business to try to
understand what telephone people are talking about. Telco
security officials had discovered the computer-hacker
underground, infiltrated it thoroughly, and become deeply alarmed
at its growing expertise. Here they had found a target that was
not only loathsome on its face, but clearly ripe for
counterattack.
Those bitter rivals: AT&T, MCI and Sprint--and a crowd
of Baby Bells: PacBell, Bell South, Southwestern Bell, NYNEX,
USWest, as well as the Bell research consortium Bellcore, and the
independent long-distance carrier Mid-American--all were to have
their role in the great hacker dragnet of 1990. After years of
being battered and pushed around, the telcos had, at least in a
small way, seized the initiative again. After years of turmoil,
telcos and government officials were once again to work smoothly
in concert in defense of the System. Optimism blossomed;
enthusiasm grew on all sides; the prospective taste of vengeance
was sweet.
From the beginning--even before the crackdown had a name
--secrecy was a big problem. There were many good reasons for
secrecy in the hacker crackdown. Hackers and code-thieves were
wily prey, slinking back to their bedrooms and basements and
destroying vital incriminating evidence at the first hint of
trouble. Furthermore, the crimes themselves were heavily
technical and difficult to describe, even to police--much less to
the general public.
When such crimes HAD been described intelligibly to the
public, in the past, that very publicity had tended to INCREASE
the crimes enormously. Telco officials, while painfully aware of
the vulnerabilities of their systems, were anxious not to
publicize those weaknesses. Experience showed them that those
weaknesses, once discovered, would be pitilessly exploited by
tens of thousands of people--not only by professional grifters
and by underground hackers and phone phreaks, but by many
otherwise more-or-less honest everyday folks, who regarded
stealing service from the faceless, soulless "Phone Company" as a
kind of harmless indoor sport. When it came to protecting their
interests, telcos had long since given up on general public
sympathy for "the Voice with a Smile." Nowadays the telco's
"Voice" was very likely to be a computer's; and the American
public showed much less of the proper respect and gratitude due
the fine public service bequeathed them by Dr. Bell and Mr. Vail.
The more efficient, high-tech, computerized, and impersonal the
telcos became, it seemed, the more they were met by sullen public
resentment and amoral greed.
Telco officials wanted to punish the phone-phreak
underground, in as public and exemplary a manner as possible.
They wanted to make dire examples of the worst offenders, to
seize the ringleaders and intimidate the small fry, to discourage
and frighten the wacky hobbyists, and send the professional
grifters to jail. To do all this, publicity was vital.
Yet operational secrecy was even more so. If word got
out that a nationwide crackdown was coming, the hackers might
simply vanish; destroy the evidence, hide their computers, go to
earth, and wait for the campaign to blow over. Even the young
hackers were crafty and suspicious, and as for the professional
grifters, they tended to split for the nearest state-line at the
first sign of trouble. For the crackdown to work well, they
would all have to be caught red-handed, swept upon suddenly, out
of the blue, from every corner of the compass.
And there was another strong motive for secrecy. In the
worst-case scenario, a blown campaign might leave the telcos open
to a devastating hacker counter-attack. If there were indeed
hackers loose in America who had caused the January 15 Crash--if
there were truly gifted hackers, loose in the nation's long-
distance switching systems, and enraged or frightened by the
crackdown--then they might react unpredictably to an attempt to
collar them. Even if caught, they might have talented and
vengeful friends still running around loose. Conceivably, it
could turn ugly. Very ugly. In fact, it was hard to imagine
just how ugly things might turn, given that possibility.
Counter-attack from hackers was a genuine concern for the
telcos. In point of fact, they would never suffer any such
counter-attack. But in months to come, they would be at some
pains to publicize this notion and to utter grim warnings about
it.
Still, that risk seemed well worth running. Better to
run the risk of vengeful attacks, than to live at the mercy of
potential crashers. Any cop would tell you that a protection
racket had no real future.
And publicity was such a useful thing. Corporate
security officers, including telco security, generally work under
conditions of great discretion. And corporate security officials
do not make money for their companies. Their job is to PREVENT
THE LOSS of money, which is much less glamorous than actually
winning profits.
If you are a corporate security official, and you do your
job brilliantly, then nothing bad happens to your company at all.
Because of this, you appear completely superfluous. This is one
of the many unattractive aspects of security work. It's rare
that these folks have the chance to draw some healthy attention
to their own efforts.
Publicity also served the interest of their friends in
law enforcement. Public officials, including law enforcement
officials, thrive by attracting favorable public interest. A
brilliant prosecution in a matter of vital public interest can
make the career of a prosecuting attorney. And for a police
officer, good publicity opens the purses of the legislature; it
may bring a citation, or a promotion, or at least a rise in
status and the respect of one's peers.
But to have both publicity and secrecy is to have one's
cake and eat it too. In months to come, as we will show, this
impossible act was to cause great pain to the agents of the
crackdown. But early on, it seemed possible--maybe even likely--
that the crackdown could successfully combine the best of both
worlds. The ARREST of hackers would be heavily publicized. The
actual DEEDS of the hackers, which were technically hard to
explain and also a security risk, would be left decently
obscured. The THREAT hackers posed would be heavily trumpeted;
the likelihood of their actually committing such fearsome crimes
would be left to the public's imagination. The spread of the
computer underground, and its growing technical sophistication,
would be heavily promoted; the actual hackers themselves, mostly
bespectacled middle-class white suburban teenagers, would be
denied any personal publicity.
It does not seem to have occurred to any telco official
that the hackers accused would demand a day in court; that
journalists would smile upon the hackers as "good copy;" that
wealthy high-tech entrepreneurs would offer moral and financial
support to crackdown victims; that constitutional lawyers would
show up with briefcases, frowning mightily. This possibility
does not seem to have ever entered the game-plan.
And even if it had, it probably would not have slowed the
ferocious pursuit of a stolen phone-company document,
mellifluously known as "Control Office Administration of Enhanced
911 Services for Special Services and Major Account Centers."
In the chapters to follow, we will explore the worlds of
police and the computer underground, and the large shadowy area
where they overlap. But first, we must explore the battleground.
Before we leave the world of the telcos, we must understand what
a switching system actually is and how your telephone actually
works.
To the average citizen, the idea of the telephone is
represented by, well, a TELEPHONE: a device that you talk into.
To a telco professional, however, the telephone itself is known,
in lordly fashion, as a "subset." The "subset" in your house is
a mere adjunct, a distant nerve ending, of the central switching
stations, which are ranked in levels of hierarchy, up to the
long-distance electronic switching stations, which are some of
the largest computers on earth.
Let us imagine that it is, say, 1925, before the
introduction of computers, when the phone system was simpler and
somewhat easier to grasp. Let's further imagine that you are
Miss Leticia Luthor, a fictional operator for Ma Bell in New York
City of the 20s.
Basically, you, Miss Luthor, ARE the "switching system."
You are sitting in front of a large vertical switchboard, known
as a "cordboard," made of shiny wooden panels, with ten thousand
metal-rimmed holes punched in them, known as jacks. The
engineers would have put more holes into your switchboard, but
ten thousand is as many as you can reach without actually having
to get up out of your chair.
Each of these ten thousand holes has its own little
electric lightbulb, known as a "lamp," and its own neatly printed
number code.
With the ease of long habit, you are scanning your board
for lit-up bulbs. This is what you do most of the time, so you
are used to it.
A lamp lights up. This means that the phone at the end
of that line has been taken off the hook. Whenever a handset is
taken off the hook, that closes a circuit inside the phone which
then signals the local office, i.e. you, automatically. There
might be somebody calling, or then again the phone might be
simply off the hook, but this does not matter to you yet. The
first thing you do, is record that number in your logbook, in
your fine American public-school handwriting. This comes first,
naturally, since it is done for billing purposes.
You now take the plug of your answering cord, which goes
directly to your headset, and plug it into the lit-up hole.
"Operator," you announce.
In operator's classes, before taking this job, you have
been issued a large pamphlet full of canned operator's responses
for all kinds of contingencies, which you had to memorize. You
have also been trained in a proper non-regional, non-ethnic
pronunciation and tone of voice. You rarely have the occasion
to make any spontaneous remark to a customer, and in fact this is
frowned upon (except out on the rural lines where people have
time on their hands and get up to all kinds of mischief).
A tough-sounding user's voice at the end of the line
gives you a number. Immediately, you write that number down in
your logbook, next to the caller's number, which you just wrote
earlier. You then look and see if the number this guy wants is
in fact on your switchboard, which it generally is, since it's
generally a local call. Long distance costs so much that people
use it sparingly.
Only then do you pick up a calling-cord from a shelf at
the base of the switchboard. This is a long elastic cord mounted
on a kind of reel so that it will zip back in when you unplug it.
There are a lot of cords down there, and when a bunch of them are
out at once they look like a nest of snakes. Some of the girls
think there are bugs living in those cable-holes. They're called
"cable mites" and are supposed to bite your hands and give you
rashes. You don't believe this, yourself.
Gripping the head of your calling-cord, you slip the tip
of it deftly into the sleeve of the jack for the called person.
Not all the way in, though. You just touch it. If you hear a
clicking sound, that means the line is busy and you can't put the
call through. If the line is busy, you have to stick the
calling-cord into a "busy-tone jack," which will give the guy a
busy-tone. This way you don't have to talk to him yourself and
absorb his natural human frustration.
But the line isn't busy. So you pop the cord all the way
in. Relay circuits in your board make the distant phone ring,
and if somebody picks it up off the hook, then a phone
conversation starts. You can hear this conversation on your
answering cord, until you unplug it. In fact you could listen to
the whole conversation if you wanted, but this is sternly frowned
upon by management, and frankly, when you've overheard one,
you've pretty much heard 'em all.
You can tell how long the conversation lasts by the glow
of the calling-cord's lamp, down on the calling-cord's shelf.
When it's over, you unplug and the calling-cord zips back into
place.
Having done this stuff a few hundred thousand times, you
become quite good at it. In fact you're plugging, and
connecting, and disconnecting, ten, twenty, forty cords at a
time. It's a manual handicraft, really, quite satisfying in a
way, rather like weaving on an upright loom.
Should a long-distance call come up, it would be
different, but not all that different. Instead of connecting the
call through your own local switchboard, you have to go up the
hierarchy, onto the long-distance lines, known as "trunklines."
Depending on how far the call goes, it may have to work its way
through a whole series of operators, which can take quite a
while. The caller doesn't wait on the line while this complex
process is negotiated across the country by the gaggle of
operators. Instead, the caller hangs up, and you call him back
yourself when the call has finally worked its way through.
After four or five years of this work, you get married,
and you have to quit your job, this being the natural order of
womanhood in the American 1920s. The phone company has to train
somebody else--maybe two people, since the phone system has grown
somewhat in the meantime. And this costs money.
In fact, to use any kind of human being as a switching
system is a very expensive proposition. Eight thousand Leticia
Luthors would be bad enough, but a quarter of a million of them
is a military-scale proposition and makes drastic measures in
automation financially worthwhile.
Although the phone system continues to grow today, the
number of human beings employed by telcos has been dropping
steadily for years. Phone "operators" now deal with nothing but
unusual contingencies, all routine operations having been
shrugged off onto machines. Consequently, telephone operators
are considerably less machine-like nowadays, and have been known
to have accents and actual character in their voices. When you
reach a human operator today, the operators are rather more
"human" than they were in Leticia's day--but on the other hand,
human beings in the phone system are much harder to reach in the
first place.
Over the first half of the twentieth century,
"electromechanical" switching systems of growing complexity were
cautiously introduced into the phone system. In certain
backwaters, some of these hybrid systems are still in use. But
after 1965, the phone system began to go completely electronic,
and this is by far the dominant mode today. Electromechanical
systems have "crossbars," and "brushes," and other large moving
mechanical parts, which, while faster and cheaper than Leticia,
are still slow, and tend to wear out fairly quickly.
But fully electronic systems are inscribed on silicon
chips, and are lightning-fast, very cheap, and quite durable.
They are much cheaper to maintain than even the best
electromechanical systems, and they fit into half the space. And
with every year, the silicon chip grows smaller, faster, and
cheaper yet. Best of all, automated electronics work around the
clock and don't have salaries or health insurance.
There are, however, quite serious drawbacks to the use of
computer-chips. When they do break down, it is a daunting
challenge to figure out what the heck has gone wrong with them.
A broken cordboard generally had a problem in it big enough to
see. A broken chip has invisible, microscopic faults. And the
faults in bad software can be so subtle as to be practically
theological.
If you want a mechanical system to do something new, then
you must travel to where it is, and pull pieces out of it, and
wire in new pieces. This costs money. However, if you want a
chip to do something new, all you have to do is change its
software, which is easy, fast and dirt-cheap. You don't even
have to see the chip to change its program. Even if you did see
the chip, it wouldn't look like much. A chip with program X
doesn't look one whit different from a chip with program Y.
With the proper codes and sequences, and access to
specialized phone-lines, you can change electronic switching
systems all over America from anywhere you please.
And so can other people. If they know how, and if they
want to, they can sneak into a microchip via the special
phonelines and diddle with it, leaving no physical trace at all.
If they broke into the operator's station and held Leticia at
gunpoint, that would be very obvious. If they broke into a telco
building and went after an electromechanical switch with a
toolbelt, that would at least leave many traces. But people can
do all manner of amazing things to computer switches just by
typing on a keyboard, and keyboards are everywhere today. The
extent of this vulnerability is deep, dark, broad, almost mind-
boggling, and yet this is a basic, primal fact of life about any
computer on a network.
Security experts over the past twenty years have
insisted, with growing urgency, that this basic vulnerability of
computers represents an entirely new level of risk, of unknown
but obviously dire potential to society. And they are right.
An electronic switching station does pretty much
everything Letitia did, except in nanoseconds and on a much
larger scale. Compared to Miss Luthor's ten thousand jacks, even
a primitive 1ESS switching computer, 60s vintage, has a 128,000
lines. And the current AT&T system of choice is the monstrous
fifth-generation 5ESS.
An Electronic Switching Station can scan every line on
its "board" in a tenth of a second, and it does this over and
over, tirelessly, around the clock. Instead of eyes, it uses
"ferrod scanners" to check the condition of local lines and
trunks. Instead of hands, it has "signal distributors," "central
pulse distributors," "magnetic latching relays," and "reed
switches," which complete and break the calls. Instead of a
brain, it has a "central processor." Instead of an instruction
manual, it has a program. Instead of a handwritten logbook for
recording and billing calls, it has magnetic tapes. And it never
has to talk to anybody. Everything a customer might say to it is
done by punching the direct-dial tone buttons on your subset.
Although an Electronic Switching Station can't talk, it
does need an interface, some way to relate to its, er, employers.
This interface is known as the "master control center." (This
interface might be better known simply as "the interface," since
it doesn't actually "control" phone calls directly. However, a
term like "Master Control Center" is just the kind of rhetoric
that telco maintenance engineers--and hackers--find particularly
satisfying.)
Using the master control center, a phone engineer can
test local and trunk lines for malfunctions. He (rarely she) can
check various alarm displays, measure traffic on the lines,
examine the records of telephone usage and the charges for those
calls, and change the programming.
And, of course, anybody else who gets into the master
control center by remote control can also do these things, if he
(rarely she) has managed to figure them out, or, more likely, has
somehow swiped the knowledge from people who already know.
In 1989 and 1990, one particular RBOC, BellSouth, which
felt particularly troubled, spent a purported $1.2 million on
computer security. Some think it spent as much as two million,
if you count all the associated costs. Two million dollars is
still very little compared to the great cost-saving utility of
telephonic computer systems.
Unfortunately, computers are also stupid. Unlike human
beings, computers possess the truly profound stupidity of the
inanimate.
In the 1960s, in the first shocks of spreading
computerization, there was much easy talk about the stupidity of
computers--how they could "only follow the program" and were
rigidly required to do "only what they were told." There has
been rather less talk about the stupidity of computers since they
began to achieve grandmaster status in chess tournaments, and to
manifest many other impressive forms of apparent cleverness.
Nevertheless, computers STILL are profoundly brittle and
stupid; they are simply vastly more subtle in their stupidity and
brittleness. The computers of the 1990s are much more reliable
in their components than earlier computer systems, but they are
also called upon to do far more complex things, under far more
challenging conditions.
On a basic mathematical level, every single line of a
software program offers a chance for some possible screwup.
Software does not sit still when it works; it "runs," it
interacts with itself and with its own inputs and outputs. By
analogy, it stretches like putty into millions of possible shapes
and conditions, so many shapes that they can never all be
successfully tested, not even in the lifespan of the universe.
Sometimes the putty snaps.
The stuff we call "software" is not like anything that
human society is used to thinking about. Software is something
like a machine, and something like mathematics, and something
like language, and something like thought, and art, and
information.... but software is not in fact any of those other
things. The protean quality of software is one of the great
sources of its fascination. It also makes software very
powerful, very subtle, very unpredictable, and very risky.
Some software is bad and buggy. Some is "robust," even
"bulletproof." The best software is that which has been tested
by thousands of users under thousands of different conditions,
over years. It is then known as "stable." This does NOT mean
that the software is now flawless, free of bugs. It generally
means that there are plenty of bugs in it, but the bugs are well-
identified and fairly well understood.
There is simply no way to assure that software is free of
flaws. Though software is mathematical in nature, it cannot by
"proven" like a mathematical theorem; software is more like
language, with inherent ambiguities, with different definitions,
different assumptions, different levels of meaning that can
conflict.
Human beings can manage, more or less, with human
language because we can catch the gist of it.
Computers, despite years of effort in "artificial
intelligence," have proven spectacularly bad in "catching the
gist" of anything at all. The tiniest bit of semantic grit may
still bring the mightiest computer tumbling down. One of the
most hazardous things you can do to a computer program is try to
improve it--to try to make it safer. Software "patches"
represent new, untried un-"stable" software, which is by
definition riskier.
The modern telephone system has come to depend, utterly
and irretrievably, upon software. And the System Crash of
January 15, 1990, was caused by an IMPROVEMENT in software. Or
rather, an ATTEMPTED improvement.
As it happened, the problem itself--the problem per se --
took this form. A piece of telco software had been written in C
language, a standard language of the telco field. Within the C
software was a long "do... while" construct. The "do... while"
construct contained a "switch" statement. The "switch" statement
contained an "if" clause. The "if" clause contained a "break."
The "break" was SUPPOSED to "break" the "if clause." Instead,
the "break" broke the "switch" statement.
That was the problem, the actual reason why people
picking up phones on January 15, 1990, could not talk to one
another.
Or at least, that was the subtle, abstract, cyberspatial
seed of the problem. This is how the problem manifested itself
from the realm of programming into the realm of real life.
The System 7 software for AT&T's 4ESS switching station,
the "Generic 44E14 Central Office Switch Software," had been
extensively tested, and was considered very stable. By the end
of 1989, eighty of AT&T's switching systems nationwide had been
programmed with the new software. Cautiously, thirty-four
stations were left to run the slower, less-capable System 6,
because AT&T suspected there might be shakedown problems with the
new and unprecedently sophisticated System 7 network.
The stations with System 7 were programmed to switch over
to a backup net in case of any problems. In mid-December 1989,
however, a new high-velocity, high-security software patch was
distributed to each of the 4ESS switches that would enable them
to switch over even more quickly, making the System 7 network
that much more secure.
Unfortunately, every one of these 4ESS switches was now
in possession of a small but deadly flaw.
In order to maintain the network, switches must monitor
the condition of other switches--whether they are up and running,
whether they have temporarily shut down, whether they are
overloaded and in need of assistance, and so forth. The new
software helped control this bookkeeping function by monitoring
the status calls from other switches.
It only takes four to six seconds for a troubled 4ESS
switch to rid itself of all its calls, drop everything
temporarily, and re-boot its software from scratch. Starting
over from scratch will generally rid the switch of any software
problems that may have developed in the course of running the
system. Bugs that arise will be simply wiped out by this
process. It is a clever idea. This process of automatically re-
booting from scratch is known as the "normal fault recovery
routine." Since AT&T's software is in fact exceptionally stable,
systems rarely have to go into "fault recovery" in the first
place; but AT&T has always boasted of its "real world"
reliability, and this tactic is a belt-and-suspenders routine.
The 4ESS switch used its new software to monitor its
fellow switches as they recovered from faults. As other switches
came back on line after recovery, they would send their "OK"
signals to the switch. The switch would make a little note to
that effect in its "status map," recognizing that the fellow
switch was back and ready to go, and should be sent some calls
and put back to regular work.
Unfortunately, while it was busy bookkeeping with the
status map, the tiny flaw in the brand-new software came into
play. The flaw caused the 4ESS switch to interacted, subtly but
drastically, with incoming telephone calls from human users.
If--and only if--two incoming phone-calls happened to hit the
switch within a hundredth of a second, then a small patch of data
would be garbled by the flaw.
But the switch had been programmed to monitor itself
constantly for any possible damage to its data. When the switch
perceived that its data had been somehow garbled, then it too
would go down, for swift repairs to its software. It would
signal its fellow switches not to send any more work. It would
go into the fault-recovery mode for four to six seconds. And
then the switch would be fine again, and would send out its "OK,
ready for work" signal.
However, the "OK, ready for work" signal was the VERY
THING THAT CAUSED THE SWITCH TO GO DOWN IN THE FIRST PLACE. And
ALL the System 7 switches had the same flaw in their status-map
software. As soon as they stopped to make the bookkeeping note
that their fellow switch was "OK," then they too would become
vulnerable to the slight chance that two phone-calls would hit
them within a hundredth of a second.
At approximately 2:25 p.m. EST on Monday, January 15, one
of AT&T's 4ESS toll switching systems in New York City had an
actual, legitimate, minor problem. It went into fault recovery
routines, announced "I'm going down," then announced, "I'm back,
I'm OK." And this cheery message then blasted throughout the
network to many of its fellow 4ESS switches.
Many of the switches, at first, completely escaped
trouble. These lucky switches were not hit by the coincidence of
two phone calls within a hundredth of a second. Their software
did not fail--at first. But three switches--in Atlanta, St.
Louis, and Detroit--were unlucky, and were caught with their
hands full. And they went down. And they came back up, almost
immediately. And they too began to broadcast the lethal message
that they, too, were "OK" again, activating the lurking software
bug in yet other switches.
As more and more switches did have that bit of bad luck
and collapsed, the call-traffic became more and more densely
packed in the remaining switches, which were groaning to keep up
with the load. And of course, as the calls became more densely
packed, the switches were MUCH MORE LIKELY to be hit twice within
a hundredth of a second.
It only took four seconds for a switch to get well.
There was no PHYSICAL damage of any kind to the switches, after
all. Physically, they were working perfectly. This situation
was "only" a software problem.
But the 4ESS switches were leaping up and down every four
to six seconds, in a virulent spreading wave all over America, in
utter, manic, mechanical stupidity. They kept KNOCKING one
another down with their contagious "OK" messages.
It took about ten minutes for the chain reaction to
cripple the network. Even then, switches would periodically
luck-out and manage to resume their normal work. Many calls--
millions of them--were managing to get through. But millions
weren't.
The switching stations that used System 6 were not
directly affected. Thanks to these old-fashioned switches,
AT&T's national system avoided complete collapse. This fact also
made it clear to engineers that System 7 was at fault.
Bell Labs engineers, working feverishly in New Jersey,
Illinois, and Ohio, first tried their entire repertoire of
standard network remedies on the malfunctioning System 7. None
of the remedies worked, of course, because nothing like this had
ever happened to any phone system before.
By cutting out the backup safety network entirely, they
were able to reduce the frenzy of "OK" messages by about half.
The system then began to recover, as the chain reaction slowed.
By 11:30 pm on Monday January 15, sweating engineers on the
midnight shift breathed a sigh of relief as the last switch
cleared-up.
By Tuesday they were pulling all the brand-new 4ESS
software and replacing it with an earlier version of System 7.
If these had been human operators, rather than computers
at work, someone would simply have eventually stopped screaming.
It would have been OBVIOUS that the situation was not "OK," and
common sense would have kicked in. Humans possess common sense
--at least to some extent. Computers simply don't.
On the other hand, computers can handle hundreds of calls
per second. Humans simply can't. If every single human being in
America worked for the phone company, we couldn't match the
performance of digital switches: direct-dialling, three-way
calling, speed-calling, call-waiting, Caller ID, all the rest of
the cornucopia of digital bounty. Replacing computers with
operators is simply not an option any more.
And yet we still, anachronistically, expect humans to be
running our phone system. It is hard for us to understand that
we have sacrificed huge amounts of initiative and control to
senseless yet powerful machines. When the phones fail, we want
somebody to be responsible. We want somebody to blame.
When the Crash of January 15 happened, the American
populace was simply not prepared to understand that enormous
landslides in cyberspace, like the Crash itself, can happen, and
can be nobody's fault in particular. It was easier to believe,
maybe even in some odd way more reassuring to believe, that some
evil person, or evil group, had done this to us. "Hackers" had
done it. With a virus. A trojan horse. A software bomb. A
dirty plot of some kind. People believed this, responsible
people. In 1990, they were looking hard for evidence to confirm
their heartfelt suspicions.
And they would look in a lot of places.
Come 1991, however, the outlines of an apparent new
reality would begin to emerge from the fog.
On July 1 and 2, 1991, computer-software collapses in
telephone switching stations disrupted service in Washington DC,
Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Once again, seemingly
minor maintenance problems had crippled the digital System 7.
About twelve million people were affected in the Crash of July 1,
1991.
Said the New York Times Service: "Telephone company
executives and federal regulators said they were not ruling out
the possibility of sabotage by computer hackers, but most seemed
to think the problems stemmed from some unknown defect in the
software running the networks."
And sure enough, within the week, a red-faced software
company, DSC Communications Corporation of Plano, Texas, owned up
to "glitches" in the "signal transfer point" software that DSC
had designed for Bell Atlantic and Pacific Bell. The immediate
cause of the July 1 Crash was a single mistyped character: one
tiny typographical flaw in one single line of the software. One
mistyped letter, in one single line, had deprived the nation's
capital of phone service. It was not particularly surprising
that this tiny flaw had escaped attention: a typical System 7
station requires TEN MILLION lines of code.
On Tuesday, September 17, 1991, came the most spectacular
outage yet. This case had nothing to do with software failures--
at least, not directly. Instead, a group of AT&T's switching
stations in New York City had simply run out of electrical power
and shut down cold. Their back-up batteries had failed.
Automatic warning systems were supposed to warn of the loss of
battery power, but those automatic systems had failed as well.
This time, Kennedy, La Guardia, and Newark airports all
had their voice and data communications cut. This horrifying
event was particularly ironic, as attacks on airport computers by
hackers had long been a standard nightmare scenario, much
trumpeted by computer-security experts who feared the computer
underground. There had even been a Hollywood thriller about
sinister hackers ruining airport computers--DIE HARD II. Now AT&T
itself had crippled airports with computer malfunctions--not just
one airport, but three at once, some of the busiest in the world.
Air traffic came to a standstill throughout the Greater
New York area, causing more than 500 flights to be cancelled, in
a spreading wave all over America and even into Europe. Another
500 or so flights were delayed, affecting, all in all, about
85,000 passengers. (One of these passengers was the chairman of
the Federal Communications Commission.)
Stranded passengers in New York and New Jersey were
further infuriated to discover that they could not even manage to
make a long distance phone call, to explain their delay to loved
ones or business associates. Thanks to the crash, about four and
a half million domestic calls, and half a million international
calls, failed to get through.
The September 17 NYC Crash, unlike the previous ones,
involved not a whisper of "hacker" misdeeds. On the contrary, by
1991, AT&T itself was suffering much of the vilification that had
formerly been directed at hackers. Congressmen were grumbling.
So were state and federal regulators. And so was the press.
For their part, ancient rival MCI took out snide full-
page newspaper ads in New York, offering their own long-distance
services for the "next time that AT&T goes down."
"You wouldn't find a classy company like AT&T using such
advertising," protested AT&T Chairman Robert Allen,
unconvincingly. Once again, out came the full-page AT&T
apologies in newspapers, apologies for "an inexcusable
culmination of both human and mechanical failure." (This time,
however, AT&T offered no discount on later calls. Unkind critics
suggested that AT&T were worried about setting any precedent for
refunding the financial losses caused by telephone crashes.)
Industry journals asked publicly if AT&T was "asleep at
the switch." The telephone network, America's purported marvel
of high-tech reliability, had gone down three times in 18 months.
FORTUNE magazine listed the Crash of September 17 among the
"Biggest Business Goofs of 1991," cruelly parodying AT&T's ad
campaign in an article entitled "AT&T Wants You Back (Safely On
the Ground, God Willing)."
Why had those New York switching systems simply run out
of power? Because no human being had attended to the alarm
system. Why did the alarm systems blare automatically, without
any human being noticing? Because the three telco technicians
who SHOULD have been listening were absent from their stations in
the power-room, on another floor of the building--attending a
training class. A training class about the alarm systems for the
power room!
"Crashing the System" was no longer "unprecedented" by
late 1991. On the contrary, it no longer even seemed an oddity.
By 1991, it was clear that all the policemen in the world could
no longer "protect" the phone system from crashes. By far the
worst crashes the system had ever had, had been inflicted, by the
system, upon ITSELF. And this time nobody was making cocksure
statements that this was an anomaly, something that would never
happen again. By 1991 the System's defenders had met their
nebulous Enemy, and the Enemy was--the System.
PART TWO: THE DIGITAL UNDERGROUND
The date was May 9, 1990. The Pope was touring Mexico
City. Hustlers from the Medellin Cartel were trying to buy
black-market Stinger missiles in Florida. On the comics page,
Doonesbury character Andy was dying of AIDS. And then.... a
highly unusual item whose novelty and calculated rhetoric won it
headscratching attention in newspapers all over America.
The US Attorney's office in Phoenix, Arizona, had issued
a press release announcing a nationwide law enforcement crackdown
against "illegal computer hacking activities." The sweep was
officially known as "Operation Sundevil."
Eight paragraphs in the press release gave the bare
facts: twenty-seven search warrants carried out on May 8, with
three arrests, and a hundred and fifty agents on the prowl in
"twelve" cities across America. (Different counts in local press
reports yielded "thirteen," "fourteen," and "sixteen" cities.)
Officials estimated that criminal losses of revenue to telephone
companies "may run into millions of dollars." Credit for the
Sundevil investigations was taken by the US Secret Service,
Assistant US Attorney Tim Holtzen of Phoenix, and the Assistant
Attorney General of Arizona, Gail Thackeray.
The prepared remarks of Garry M. Jenkins, appearing in a
U.S. Department of Justice press release, were of particular
interest. Mr. Jenkins was the Assistant Director of the US
Secret Service, and the highest-ranking federal official to take
any direct public role in the hacker crackdown of 1990.
"Today, the Secret Service is sending a clear message to
those computer hackers who have decided to violate the laws of
this nation in the mistaken belief that they can successfully
avoid detection by hiding behind the relative anonymity of their
computer terminals.(...)
"Underground groups have been formed for the purpose of
exchanging information relevant to their criminal activities.
These groups often communicate with each other through message
systems between computers called 'bulletin boards.'
"Our experience shows that many computer hacker suspects
are no longer misguided teenagers, mischievously playing games
with their computers in their bedrooms. Some are now high tech
computer operators using computers to engage in unlawful
conduct."
Who were these "underground groups" and "high-tech
operators?" Where had they come from? What did they want? Who
WERE they? Were they "mischievous?" Were they dangerous? How
had "misguided teenagers" managed to alarm the United States
Secret Service? And just how widespread was this sort of thing?
Of all the major players in the Hacker Crackdown: the
phone companies, law enforcement, the civil libertarians, and the
"hackers" themselves--the "hackers" are by far the most
mysterious, by far the hardest to understand, by far the
WEIRDEST.
Not only are "hackers" novel in their activities, but
they come in a variety of odd subcultures, with a variety of
languages, motives and values.
The earliest proto-hackers were probably those unsung
mischievous telegraph boys who were summarily fired by the Bell
Company in 1878.
Legitimate "hackers," those computer enthusiasts who are
independent-minded but law-abiding, generally trace their
spiritual ancestry to elite technical universities, especially
M.I.T. and Stanford, in the 1960s.
But the genuine roots of the modern hacker UNDERGROUND
can probably be traced most successfully to a now much-obscured
hippie anarchist movement known as the Yippies. The Yippies,
who took their name from the largely fictional "Youth
International Party," carried out a loud and lively policy of
surrealistic subversion and outrageous political mischief. Their
basic tenets were flagrant sexual promiscuity, open and copious
drug use, the political overthrow of any powermonger over thirty
years of age, and an immediate end to the war in Vietnam, by any
means necessary, including the psychic levitation of the
Pentagon.
The two most visible Yippies were Abbie Hoffman and Jerry
Rubin. Rubin eventually became a Wall Street broker. Hoffman,
ardently sought by federal authorities, went into hiding for
seven years, in Mexico, France, and the United States. While on
the lam, Hoffman continued to write and publish, with help from
sympathizers in the American anarcho-leftist underground.
Mostly, Hoffman survived through false ID and odd jobs.
Eventually he underwent facial plastic surgery and adopted an
entirely new identity as one "Barry Freed." After surrendering
himself to authorities in 1980, Hoffman spent a year in prison on
a cocaine conviction.
Hoffman's worldview grew much darker as the glory days of
the 1960s faded. In 1989, he purportedly committed suicide,
under odd and, to some, rather suspicious circumstances.
Abbie Hoffman is said to have caused the Federal Bureau
of Investigation to amass the single largest investigation file
ever opened on an individual American citizen. (If this is true,
it is still questionable whether the FBI regarded Abbie Hoffman a
serious public threat--quite possibly, his file was enormous
simply because Hoffman left colorful legendry wherever he went).
He was a gifted publicist, who regarded electronic media as both
playground and weapon. He actively enjoyed manipulating network
TV and other gullible, image-hungry media, with various weird
lies, mindboggling rumors, impersonation scams, and other
sinister distortions, all absolutely guaranteed to upset cops,
Presidential candidates, and federal judges. Hoffman's most
famous work was a book self-reflexively known as STEAL THIS BOOK,
which publicized a number of methods by which young, penniless
hippie agitators might live off the fat of a system supported by
humorless drones. STEAL THIS BOOK, whose title urged readers to
damage the very means of distribution which had put it into their
hands, might be described as a spiritual ancestor of a computer
virus.
Hoffman, like many a later conspirator, made extensive
use of pay-phones for his agitation work--in his case, generally
through the use of cheap brass washers as coin-slugs.
During the Vietnam War, there was a federal surtax
imposed on telephone service; Hoffman and his cohorts could, and
did, argue that in systematically stealing phone service they
were engaging in civil disobedience: virtuously denying tax
funds to an illegal and immoral war.
But this thin veil of decency was soon dropped entirely.
Ripping-off the System found its own justification in deep
alienation and a basic outlaw contempt for conventional
bourgeois values. Ingenious, vaguely politicized varieties of
rip-off, which might be described as "anarchy by convenience,"
became very popular in Yippie circles, and because rip-off was so
useful, it was to survive the Yippie movement itself.
In the early 1970s, it required fairly limited expertise
and ingenuity to cheat payphones, to divert "free" electricity
and gas service, or to rob vending machines and parking meters
for handy pocket change. It also required a conspiracy to spread
this knowledge, and the gall and nerve actually to commit petty
theft, but the Yippies had these qualifications in plenty. In
June 1971, Abbie Hoffman and a telephone enthusiast sarcastically
known as "Al Bell" began publishing a newsletter called YOUTH
INTERNATIONAL PARTY LINE. This newsletter was dedicated to
collating and spreading Yippie rip-off techniques, especially of
phones, to the joy of the freewheeling underground and the
insensate rage of all straight people.
As a political tactic, phone-service theft ensured that
Yippie advocates would always have ready access to the long-
distance telephone as a medium, despite the Yippies' chronic lack
of organization, discipline, money, or even a steady home
address.
PARTY LINE was run out of Greenwich Village for a couple
of years, then "Al Bell" more or less defected from the faltering
ranks of Yippiedom, changing the newsletter's name to _TAP_ or
TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE PROGRAM. After the Vietnam War ended, the
steam began leaking rapidly out of American radical dissent. But
by this time, "Bell" and his dozen or so core contributors had
the bit between their teeth, and had begun to derive tremendous
gut-level satisfaction from the sensation of pure TECHNICAL
POWER.
_TAP_ articles, once highly politicized, became
pitilessly jargonized and technical, in homage or parody to the
Bell System's own technical documents, which _TAP_ studied
closely, gutted, and reproduced without permission. The _TAP_
elite revelled in gloating possession of the specialized
knowledge necessary to beat the system.
"Al Bell" dropped out of the game by the late 70s, and
"Tom Edison" took over; TAP readers (some 1400 of them, all
told) now began to show more interest in telex switches and the
growing phenomenon of computer systems.
In 1983, "Tom Edison" had his computer stolen and his
house set on fire by an arsonist. This was an eventually mortal
blow to _TAP_ (though the legendary name was to be resurrected in
1990 by a young Kentuckian computer-outlaw named "Predat0r.")
Ever since telephones began to make money, there have
been people willing to rob and defraud phone companies. The
legions of petty phone thieves vastly outnumber those "phone
phreaks" who "explore the system" for the sake of the
intellectual challenge. The New York metropolitan area (long in
the vanguard of American crime) claims over 150,000 physical
attacks on pay telephones every year! Studied carefully, a
modern payphone reveals itself as a little fortress, carefully
designed and redesigned over generations, to resist coin-slugs,
zaps of electricity, chunks of coin-shaped ice, prybars, magnets,
lockpicks, blasting caps. Public pay-phones must survive in a
world of unfriendly, greedy people, and a modern payphone is as
exquisitely evolved as a cactus.
Because the phone network pre-dates the computer network,
the scofflaws known as "phone phreaks" pre-date the scofflaws
known as "computer hackers." In practice, today, the line
between "phreaking" and "hacking" is very blurred, just as the
distinction between telephones and computers has blurred. The
phone system has been digitized, and computers have learned to
"talk" over phone-lines. What's worse--and this was the point of
the Mr. Jenkins of the Secret Service--some hackers have learned
to steal, and some thieves have learned to hack.
Despite the blurring, one can still draw a few useful
behavioral distinctions between "phreaks" and "hackers." Hackers
are intensely interested in the "system" per se, and enjoy
relating to machines. "Phreaks" are more social, manipulating
the system in a rough-and-ready fashion in order to get through
to other human beings, fast, cheap and under the table.
Phone phreaks love nothing so much as "bridges," illegal
conference calls of ten or twelve chatting conspirators, seaboard
to seaboard, lasting for many hours--and running, of course, on
somebody else's tab, preferably a large corporation's.
As phone-phreak conferences wear on, people drop out (or
simply leave the phone off the hook, while they sashay off to
work or school or babysitting), and new people are phoned up and
invited to join in, from some other continent, if possible.
Technical trivia, boasts, brags, lies, head-trip deceptions,
weird rumors, and cruel gossip are all freely exchanged.
The lowest rung of phone-phreaking is the theft of
telephone access codes. Charging a phone call to somebody else's
stolen number is, of course, a pig-easy way of stealing phone
service, requiring practically no technical expertise. This
practice has been very widespread, especially among lonely people
without much money who are far from home. Code theft has
flourished especially in college dorms, military bases, and,
notoriously, among roadies for rock bands. Of late, code theft
has spread very rapidly among Third Worlders in the US, who pile
up enormous unpaid long-distance bills to the Caribbean, South
America, and Pakistan.
The simplest way to steal phone-codes is simply to look
over a victim's shoulder as he punches-in his own code-num |
