GURPS' LABOUR LOST

The princes of hackerdom skate the phone-lines, and computer networks, as a lifestyle. They hang out in loose, modem-co

PLAYER FOUR: The Simulation Gamers.

Wargames and role-playing adventures are an old and honored pastime, much favored by professional military strategists and H.G. Wells, and now played by hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts throughout North America, Europe and Japan. In today's market, many simulation games are computerized, making simulation gaming a favorite pastime of hackers, who dote on arcane intellectual challenges and the thrill of doing simulated mischief.

Modern simulation games frequently have a heavily science-fictional cast. Over the past decade or so, fueled by very respectable royalties, the world of simulation gaming has increasingly permeated the world of science-fiction publishing. TSR, Inc., proprietors of the best-known role-playing game, "Dungeons and Dragons," own the venerable science-fiction magazine "Amazing." Gaming-books, once restricted to hobby outlets, now commonly appear in chain-stores like B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks, and sell vigorously.

Steve Jackson Games, Inc., of Austin, Texas, is a games company of the middle rank. In early 1990, it employed fifteen people. In 1989, SJG grossed about half a million dollars. SJG's Austin headquarters is a modest two-story brick office-suite, cluttered with phones, photocopiers, fax machines and computers. A publisher's digs, it bustles with semi-organized activity and is littered with glossy promotional brochures and dog-eared SF novels. Attached to the offices is a large tin-roofed warehouse piled twenty feet high with cardboard boxes of games and books. This building was the site of the "Cyberpunk Bust."

A look at the company's wares, neatly stacked on endless rows of cheap shelving, quickly shows SJG's long involvement with the Science Fiction community. SJG's main product, the Generic Universal Role-Playing System or G.U.R.P.S., features licensed and adapted works from many genre writers. There is GURPS Witch World, GURPS Conan, GURPS Riverworld, GURPS Horseclans, many names eminently familiar to SF fans. (GURPS Difference Engine is currently in the works.) GURPS Cyberpunk, however, was to be another story entirely.

PLAYER FIVE: The Science Fiction Writers.

The "cyberpunk" SF writers are a small group of mostly college-educated white litterateurs, without conspicuous criminal records, scattered through the US and Canada. Only one, Rudy Rucker, a professor of computer science in Silicon Valley, would rank with even the humblest computer hacker. However, these writers all own computers and take an intense, public, and somewhat morbid interest in the social ramifications of the information industry. Despite their small numbers, they all know one another, and are linked by antique print-medium publications with unlikely names like SCIENCE FICTION EYE, ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, OMNI and INTERZONE.

PLAYER SIX: The Civil Libertarians.

This small but rapidly growing group consists of heavily politicized computer enthusiasts and heavily cyberneticized political activists: a mix of wealthy high-tech entrepreneurs, veteran West Coast troublemaking hippies, touchy journalists, and toney East Coast civil rights lawyers. They are all getting to know one another.

We now return to our story. By 1988, law enforcement officials, led by contrite teenage informants, had thoroughly permeated the world of underground bulletin boards, and were alertly prowling the nets compiling dossiers on wrongdoers. While most bulletin board systems are utterly harmless, some few had matured into alarming reservoirs of forbidden knowledge. One such was BLACK ICE -- PRIVATE, located "somewhere in the 607 area code," frequented by members of the "Legion of Doom" and notorious even among hackers for the violence of its rhetoric, which discussed sabotage of phone-lines, drug-manufacturing techniques, and the assembly of home-made bombs, as well as a plethora of rules-of-thumb for penetrating computer security.

Of course, the mere discussion of these notions is not illegal -- many cyberpunk SF stories positively dote on such ideas, as do hundreds of spy epics, techno-thrillers and adventure novels. It was no coincidence that "ICE," or "Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics," was a term invented by cyberpunk writer Tom Maddox, and "BLACK ICE," or a computer-defense that fries the brain of the unwary trespasser, was a coinage of William Gibson.

A reference manual from the US National Institute of Justice, "Dedicated Computer Crime Units" by J. Thomas McEwen, suggests that federal attitudes toward bulletin-board systems are ambivalent at best:

"There are several examples of how bulletin boards have been used in support of criminal activities.... (B)ulletin boards were used to relay illegally obtained access codes into computer service companies. Pedophiles have been known to leave suggestive messages on bulletin boards, and other sexually oriented messages have been found on bulletin boards. Members of cults and sects have also communicated through bulletin boards. While the storing of information on bulletin boards may not be illegal, the use of bulletin boards has certainly advanced many illegal activities."

Here is a troubling concept indeed: invisible electronic pornography, to be printed out at home and read by sects and cults. It makes a mockery of the traditional law-enforcement techniques concerning the publication and prosecution of smut. In fact, the prospect of large numbers of antisocial conspirators, congregating in the limbo of cyberspace without official oversight of any kind, is enough to trouble the sleep of anyone charged with maintaining public order.

Even the sternest free-speech advocate will likely do some headscratching at the prospect of digitized "anarchy files" teaching lock-picking, pipe-bombing, martial arts techniques, and highly unorthodox uses for shotgun shells, especially when these neat-o temptations are distributed freely to any teen (or pre-teen) with a modem.

These may be largely conjectural problems at present, but the use of bulletin boards to foment hacker mischief is real. Worse yet, the bulletin boards themselves are linked, sharing their audience and spreading the wicked knowledge of security flaws in the phone network, and in a wide variety of academic, corporate and governmental computer systems.

This strength of the hackers is also a weakness, however. If the boards are monitored by alert informants and/or officers, the whole wicked tangle can be seized all along its extended electronic vine, rather like harvesting pumpkins.

The war against hackers, including the "Cyberpunk Bust," was primarily a war against hacker bulletin boards. It was, first and foremost, an attack against the enemy's means of information.

This basic strategic insight supplied the tactics for the crackdown of 1990. The variant groups in the national subculture of cyber-law would be kept apprised, persuaded to action, and diplomatically martialled into effective strike position. Then, in a burst of energy and a glorious blaze of publicity, the whole nest of scofflaws would be wrenched up root and branch. Hopefully, the damage would be permanent; if not, the swarming wretches would at least keep their heads down.