The Hacker Crackdown

The Atlanta Legion thought most "rules" of cyberspace were for rodents and losers, but they *did* have rules. *They never crashed anything, and they never took money.* These were rough rules-of-thumb, and rather dubious principles when it comes to the ethical subtleties of cyberspace, but they enabled the Atlanta Three to operate with a relatively clear conscience (though never with peace of mind). If you didn't hack for money, if you weren't robbing people of actual funds -- money in the bank, that is -- then nobody *really* got hurt, in LoD's opinion. "Theft of service" was a bogus issue, and "intellectual property" was a bad joke. But LoD had only elitist contempt for rip-off artists, "leechers," thieves. They considered themselves clean. In their opinion, if you didn't smash-up or crash any systems -- (well, not on purpose, anyhow -- accidents can happen, just ask Robert Morris) then it was very unfair to call you a "vandal" or a "cracker." When you were hanging out on-line with your "pals" in telco security, you could face them down from the higher plane of hacker morality. And you could mock the police from the supercilious heights of your hacker's quest for pure knowledge.

But from the point of view of law enforcement and telco security, however, Fry Guy was not really dangerous. The Atlanta Three *were* dangerous. It wasn't the crimes they were committing, but the *danger,* the potential hazard, the sheer *technical power* LoD had accumulated, that had made the situation untenable.

Fry Guy was not LoD. He'd never laid eyes on anyone in LoD; his only contacts with them had been electronic. Core members of the Legion of Doom tended to meet physically for conventions every year or so, to get drunk, give each other the hacker high-sign, send out for pizza and ravage hotel suites. Fry Guy had never done any of this. Deborah Daniels assessed Fry Guy accurately as "an LoD wa

This last accusation (taken directly from a press release by the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force) sounds particularly far-fetched. One might conclude at this point that investigators would have been well-advised to go ahead and "shift their focus" from the "Legion of Doom." Maybe they *should* concentrate on "those other hackers" -- the ones who were actually stealing money and physical objects.

But the Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was not a simple policing action. It wasn't meant just to walk the beat in cyberspace -- it was a *crackdown,* a deliberate attempt to nail the core of the operation, to send a dire and potent message that would settle the hash of the digital underground for good. By this reasoning, Fry Guy wasn't much more than the electronic equivalent of a cheap streetcorner dope dealer. As long as the masterminds of LoD were still flagrantly operating, pushing their mountains of illicit knowledge right and left, and whipping up enthusiasm for blatant lawbreaking, then there would be an *infinite supply* of Fry Guys.

Because LoD were flagrant, they had left trails everywhere, to be picked up by law enforcement in New York, Indiana, Florida, Texas, Arizona, Missouri, even Australia. But 1990's war on the Legion of Doom was led out of Illinois, by the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force.

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The Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force, led by federal prosecutor William J. Cook, had started in 1987 and had swiftly become one of the most aggressive local "dedicated computer-crime units." Chicago was a natural home for such a group. The world's first computer bulletin-board system had been invented in Illinois. The state of Illinois had some of the nation's first and sternest computer crime laws. Illinois State Police were markedly alert to the possibilities of white-collar crime and electronic fraud. And William J. Cook in particular was a rising star in electronic crime-busting. He and his fellow federal prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago had a tight relation with the Secret Service, especially go-getting Chicago-based agent Timothy Foley. While Cook and his Department of Justice colleagues plotted strategy, Foley was their man on the street.

Throughout the 1980s, the federal government had given prosecutors an armory of new, untried legal tools against computer crime. Cook and his colleagues were pioneers in the use of these new statutes in the real-life cut-and-thrust of the federal courtroom. On October 2, 1986, the US Senate had passed the "Computer Fraud and Abuse Act" unanimously, but there were pitifully few convictions under this statute. Cook's group took their name from this statute, since they were determined to transform this powerful but rather theoretical Act of Congress into a real-life engine of legal destruction against computer fraudsters and scofflaws.

It was not a question of merely discovering crimes, investigating them, and then trying and punishing their perpetrators. The Chicago unit, like most everyone else in the business, already *knew* who the bad guys were: the Legion of Doom and the writers and editors of *Phrack.* The task at hand was to find some legal means of putting these characters away.

This approach might seem a bit dubious, to someone not acquainted with the gritty realities of prosecutorial work. But prosecutors don't put people in jail for crimes they have committed; they put people in jail for crimes they have committed *that can be proved in court.* Chicago federal police put Al Capone in prison for income-tax fraud. Chicago is a big town, with a rough- and-ready bare-knuckle tradition on both sides of the law. Fry Guy had broken the case wide open and alerted telco security to the scope of the problem. But Fry Guy's crimes would not put the Atlanta Three behind bars -- much less the wacko underground journalists of *Phrack.* So on July 22, 1989, the same day that Fry Guy was raided in Indiana, the Secret Service descended upon the Atlanta Three. This was likely inevitable. By the summer of 1989, law enforcement were closing in on the Atlanta Three from at least six directions at once. First, there were the leads from Fry Guy, which had led to the DNR registers being installed on the lines of the Atlanta Three. The DNR evidence alone would have finished them off, sooner or later.

But second, the Atlanta lads were already well-known to Control-C and his telco security sponsors. LoD's contacts with telco security had made them overconfident and even more boastful than usual; they felt that they had powerful friends in high places, and that they were being openly tolerated by telco security. But BellSouth's Intrusion Task Force were hot on the trail of LoD and sparing no effort or expense.

The Atlanta Three had also been identified by name and listed on the extensive anti-hacker files maintained, and retailed for pay, by private security operative John Maxfield of Detroit. Maxfield, who had extensive ties to telco security and many informants in the underground, was a bete noire of the *Phrack* crowd, and the dislike was mutual.

The Atlanta Three themselves had written articles for *Phrack.* This boastful act could not possibly escape telco and law enforcement attention.