The Hacker Crackdown Part 21

Prophet now had his trophy. But he further decided to store yet another copy of the E911 Doc.u.ment on another person's computer.

This unwitting person was a computer enthusiast named Richard Andrews who lived near Joliet, Illinois. Richard Andrews was a UNIX programmer by trade, and ran a powerful UNIX board called "Jolnet," in the bas.e.m.e.nt of his house.

Prophet, using the handle "Robert Johnson," had obtained an account on Richard Andrews' computer. And there he stashed the E911 Doc.u.ment, by storing it in his own private section of Andrews' computer.

Why did Prophet do this? If Prophet had eliminated the E911 Doc.u.ment from his own computer, and kept it hundreds of miles away, on another machine, under an alias, then he might have been fairly safe from discovery and prosecution-- although his sneaky action had certainly put the unsuspecting Richard Andrews at risk.

But, like most hackers, Prophet was a pack-rat for illicit data.

When it came to the crunch, he could not bear to part from his trophy.

When Prophet's place in Decatur, Georgia was raided in July 1989, there was the E911 Doc.u.ment, a smoking gun. And there was Prophet in the hands of the Secret Service, doing his best to "explain."

Our story now takes us away from the Atlanta Three and their raids of the Summer of 1989. We must leave Atlanta Three "cooperating fully"

with their numerous investigators. And all three of them did cooperate, as their Sentencing Memorandum from the US District Court of the Northern Division of Georgia explained--just before all three of them were sentenced to various federal prisons in November 1990.

We must now catch up on the other aspects of the war on the Legion of Doom.

The war on the Legion was a war on a network--in fact, a network of three networks, which intertwined and interrelated in a complex fas.h.i.+on.

The Legion itself, with Atlanta LoD, and their hanger-on Fry Guy, were the first network. The second network was Phrack magazine, with its editors and contributors.

The third network involved the electronic circle around a hacker known as "Terminus."

The war against these hacker networks was carried out by a law enforcement network. Atlanta LoD and Fry Guy were pursued by USSS agents and federal prosecutors in Atlanta, Indiana, and Chicago. "Terminus" found himself pursued by USSS and federal prosecutors from Baltimore and Chicago. And the war against Phrack was almost entirely a Chicago operation.

The investigation of Terminus involved a great deal of energy, mostly from the Chicago Task Force, but it was to be the least-known and least-publicized of the Crackdown operations. Terminus, who lived in Maryland, was a UNIX programmer and consultant, fairly well-known (under his given name) in the UNIX community, as an acknowledged expert on AT&T minicomputers. Terminus idolized AT&T, especially Bellcore, and longed for public recognition as a UNIX expert; his highest ambition was to work for Bell Labs.

But Terminus had odd friends and a spotted history.

Terminus had once been the subject of an admiring interview in Phrack (Volume II, Issue 14, Phile 2--dated May 1987).

In this article, Phrack co-editor Taran King described "Terminus" as an electronics engineer, 5'9", brown-haired, born in 1959--at 28 years old, quite mature for a hacker.

Terminus had once been sysop of a phreak/hack underground board called "MetroNet," which ran on an Apple II. Later he'd replaced "MetroNet" with an underground board called "MegaNet,"

specializing in IBMs. In his younger days, Terminus had written one of the very first and most elegant code-scanning programs for the IBM-PC. This program had been widely distributed in the underground. Uncounted legions of PC-owning phreaks and hackers had used Terminus's scanner program to rip-off telco codes.

This feat had not escaped the attention of telco security; it hardly could, since Terminus's earlier handle, "Terminal Technician,"

was proudly written right on the program.

When he became a full-time computer professional (specializing in telecommunications programming), he adopted the handle Terminus, meant to indicate that he had "reached the final point of being a proficient hacker."

He'd moved up to the UNIX-based "Netsys" board on an AT&T computer, with four phone lines and an impressive 240 megs of storage.

"Netsys" carried complete issues of Phrack, and Terminus was quite friendly with its publishers, Taran King and Knight Lightning.

In the early 1980s, Terminus had been a regular on Plovernet, Pirate-80, Sherwood Forest and Shadowland, all well-known pirate boards, all heavily frequented by the Legion of Doom. As it happened, Terminus was never officially "in LoD," because he'd never been given the official LoD high-sign and back-slap by Legion maven Lex Luthor. Terminus had never physically met anyone from LoD. But that scarcely mattered much-- the Atlanta Three themselves had never been officially vetted by Lex, either.

As far as law enforcement was concerned, the issues were clear.

Terminus was a full-time, adult computer professional with particular skills at AT&T software and hardware-- but Terminus reeked of the Legion of Doom and the underground.

On February 1, 1990--half a month after the Martin Luther King Day Crash-- USSS agents Tim Foley from Chicago, and Jack Lewis from the Baltimore office, accompanied by AT&T security officer Jerry Dalton, travelled to Middle Town, Maryland. There they grilled Terminus in his home (to the stark terror of his wife and small children), and, in their customary fas.h.i.+on, hauled his computers out the door.

The Netsys machine proved to contain a plethora of arcane UNIX software-- proprietary source code formally owned by AT&T. Software such as: UNIX System Five Release 3.2; UNIX SV Release 3.1; UUCP communications software; KORN Sh.e.l.l; RFS; IWB; WWB; DWB; the C++ programming language; PMON; TOOL CHEST; QUEST; DACT, and S FIND.

In the long-established piratical tradition of the underground, Terminus had been trading this illicitly-copied software with a small circle of fellow UNIX programmers. Very unwisely, he had stored seven years of his electronic mail on his Netsys machine, which doc.u.mented all the friendly arrangements he had made with his various colleagues.

Terminus had not crashed the AT&T phone system on January 15.

He was, however, blithely running a not-for-profit AT&T software-piracy ring. This was not an activity AT&T found amusing.

AT&T security officer Jerry Dalton valued this "stolen" property at over three hundred thousand dollars.

AT&T's entry into the tussle of free enterprise had been complicated by the new, vague groundrules of the information economy.

Until the break-up of Ma Bell, AT&T was forbidden to sell computer hardware or software. Ma Bell was the phone company; Ma Bell was not allowed to use the enormous revenue from telephone utilities, in order to finance any entry into the computer market.

AT&T nevertheless invented the UNIX operating system.

And somehow AT&T managed to make UNIX a minor source of income.

Weirdly, UNIX was not sold as computer software, but actually retailed under an obscure regulatory exemption allowing sales of surplus equipment and sc.r.a.p.

Any bolder attempt to promote or retail UNIX would have aroused angry legal opposition from computer companies.

Instead, UNIX was licensed to universities, at modest rates, where the acids of academic freedom ate away steadily at AT&T's proprietary rights.

Come the breakup, AT&T recognized that UNIX was a potential gold-mine.

By now, large chunks of UNIX code had been created that were not AT&T's, and were being sold by others. An entire rival UNIX-based operating system had arisen in Berkeley, California (one of the world's great founts of ideological hackerdom). Today, "hackers" commonly consider "Berkeley UNIX"

to be technically superior to AT&T's "System V UNIX," but AT&T has not allowed mere technical elegance to intrude on the real-world business of marketing proprietary software. AT&T has made its own code deliberately incompatible with other folks' UNIX, and has written code that it can prove is copyrightable, even if that code happens to be somewhat awkward--"kludgey."

AT&T UNIX user licenses are serious business agreements, replete with very clear copyright statements and non-disclosure clauses.

AT&T has not exactly kept the UNIX cat in the bag, but it kept a grip on its scruff with some success.

By the rampant, explosive standards of software piracy, AT&T UNIX source code is heavily copyrighted, well-guarded, well-licensed. UNIX was traditionally run only on mainframe machines, owned by large groups of suit-and-tie professionals, rather than on bedroom machines where people can get up to easy mischief.

And AT&T UNIX source code is serious high-level programming.

The number of skilled UNIX programmers with any actual motive to swipe UNIX source code is small. It's tiny, compared to the tens of thousands prepared to rip-off, say, entertaining PC games like "Leisure Suit Larry."

But by 1989, the warez-d00d underground, in the persons of Terminus and his friends, was gnawing at AT&T UNIX. And the property in question was not sold for twenty bucks over the counter at the local branch of Babbage's or Egghead's; this was ma.s.sive, sophisticated, multi-line, multi-author corporate code worth tens of thousands of dollars.

It must be recognized at this point that Terminus's purported ring of UNIX software pirates had not actually made any money from their suspected crimes.

The $300,000 dollar figure bandied about for the contents of Terminus's computer did not mean that Terminus was in actual illicit possession of three hundred thousand of AT&T's dollars. Terminus was s.h.i.+pping software back and forth, privately, person to person, for free.

He was not making a commercial business of piracy. He hadn't asked for money; he didn't take money. He lived quite modestly.

AT&T employees--as well as freelance UNIX consultants, like Terminus-- commonly worked with "proprietary" AT&T software, both in the office and at home on their private machines. AT&T rarely sent security officers out to comb the hard disks of its consultants. Cheap freelance UNIX contractors were quite useful to AT&T; they didn't have health insurance or retirement programs, much less union members.h.i.+p in the Communication Workers of America. They were humble digital drudges, wandering with mop and bucket through the Great Technological Temple of AT&T; but when the Secret Service arrived at their homes, it seemed they were eating with company silverware and sleeping on company sheets! Outrageously, they behaved as if the things they worked with every day belonged to them!

And these were no mere hacker teenagers with their hands full of trash-paper and their noses pressed to the corporate windowpane.

These guys were UNIX wizards, not only carrying AT&T data in their machines and their heads, but eagerly networking about it, over machines that were far more powerful than anything previously imagined in private hands. How do you keep people disposable, yet a.s.sure their awestruck respect for your property? It was a dilemma.

Much UNIX code was public-domain, available for free. Much "proprietary"

UNIX code had been extensively re-written, perhaps altered so much that it became an entirely new product--or perhaps not. Intellectual property rights for software developers were, and are, extraordinarily complex and confused.

And software "piracy," like the private copying of videos, is one of the most widely practiced "crimes" in the world today.

The USSS were not experts in UNIX or familiar with the customs of its use.

The United States Secret Service, considered as a body, did not have one single person in it who could program in a UNIX environment--no, not even one.

The Secret Service WERE making extensive use of expert help, but the "experts"

they had chosen were AT&T and Bellcore security officials, the very victims of the purported crimes under investigation, the very people whose interest in AT&T's "proprietary" software was most p.r.o.nounced.

On February 6, 1990, Terminus was arrested by Agent Lewis.

Eventually, Terminus would be sent to prison for his illicit use of a piece of AT&T software.

The issue of pirated AT&T software would bubble along in the background during the war on the Legion of Doom. Some half-dozen of Terminus's on-line acquaintances, including people in Illinois, Texas and California, were grilled by the Secret Service in connection with the illicit copying of software. Except for Terminus, however, none were charged with a crime. None of them shared his peculiar prominence in the hacker underground.

But that did not mean that these people would, or could, stay out of trouble. The transferral of illicit data in cybers.p.a.ce is hazy and ill-defined business, with paradoxical dangers for everyone concerned: hackers, signal carriers, board owners, cops, prosecutors, even random pa.s.sers-by.

Sometimes, well-meant attempts to avert trouble or punish wrongdoing bring more trouble than would simple ignorance, indifference or impropriety.