The Hacker Crackdown Part 23

In February 1989, Prophet and Knight Lightning bargained electronically over the fate of this trophy. Prophet wanted to boast, but, at the same time, scarcely wanted to be caught.

For his part, Knight Lightning was eager to publish as much of the doc.u.ment as he could manage. Knight Lightning was a fledgling political-science major with a particular interest in freedom-of-information issues. He would gladly publish most anything that would reflect glory on the prowess of the underground and embarra.s.s the telcos. However, Knight Lightning himself had contacts in telco security, and sometimes consulted them on material he'd received that might be too dicey for publication.

Prophet and Knight Lightning decided to edit the E911 Doc.u.ment so as to delete most of its identifying traits. First of all, its large "NOT FOR USE OR DISCLOSURE" warning had to go.

Then there were other matters. For instance, it listed the office telephone numbers of several BellSouth 911 specialists in Florida. If these phone numbers were published in Phrack, the BellSouth employees involved would very likely be ha.s.sled by phone phreaks, which would anger BellSouth no end, and pose a definite operational hazard for both Prophet and Phrack.

So Knight Lightning cut the Doc.u.ment almost in half, removing the phone numbers and some of the touchier and more specific information. He pa.s.sed it back electronically to Prophet; Prophet was still nervous, so Knight Lightning cut a bit more. They finally agreed that it was ready to go, and that it would be published in Phrack under the pseudonym, "The Eavesdropper."

And this was done on February 25, 1989.

The twenty-fourth issue of Phrack featured a chatty interview with co-ed phone-phreak "Chanda Leir," three articles on BITNET and its links to other computer networks, an article on 800 and 900 numbers by "Unknown User," "VaxCat's" article on telco basics (slyly ent.i.tled "Lifting Ma Bell's Veil of Secrecy,)" and the usual "Phrack World News."

The News section, with painful irony, featured an extended account of the sentencing of "Shadowhawk," an eighteen-year-old Chicago hacker who had just been put in federal prison by William J. Cook himself.

And then there were the two articles by "The Eavesdropper."

The first was the edited E911 Doc.u.ment, now t.i.tled "Control Office Administration Of Enhanced 911 Services for Special Services and Major Account Centers."

Eavesdropper's second article was a glossary of terms explaining the blizzard of telco acronyms and buzzwords in the E911 Doc.u.ment.

The hapless doc.u.ment was now distributed, in the usual Phrack routine, to a good one hundred and fifty sites. Not a hundred and fifty PEOPLE, mind you--a hundred and fifty SITES, some of these sites linked to UNIX nodes or bulletin board systems, which themselves had readers.h.i.+ps of tens, dozens, even hundreds of people.

This was February 1989. Nothing happened immediately.

Summer came, and the Atlanta crew were raided by the Secret Service.

Fry Guy was apprehended. Still nothing whatever happened to Phrack.

Six more issues of Phrack came out, 30 in all, more or less on a monthly schedule. Knight Lightning and co-editor Taran King went untouched.

Phrack tended to duck and cover whenever the heat came down.

During the summer busts of 1987--(hacker busts tended to cl.u.s.ter in summer, perhaps because hackers were easier to find at home than in college)-- Phrack had ceased publication for several months, and laid low.

Several LoD hangers-on had been arrested, but nothing had happened to the Phrack crew, the premiere gossips of the underground.

In 1988, Phrack had been taken over by a new editor, "Crimson Death," a raucous youngster with a taste for anarchy files.

1989, however, looked like a bounty year for the underground.

Knight Lightning and his co-editor Taran King took up the reins again, and Phrack flourished throughout 1989. Atlanta LoD went down hard in the summer of 1989, but Phrack rolled merrily on. Prophet's E911 Doc.u.ment seemed unlikely to cause Phrack any trouble. By January 1990, it had been available in Phrack for almost a year. Kluepfel and Dalton, officers of Bellcore and AT&T security, had possessed the doc.u.ment for sixteen months--in fact, they'd had it even before Knight Lightning himself, and had done nothing in particular to stop its distribution.

They hadn't even told Rich Andrews or Charles Boykin to erase the copies from their UNIX nodes, Jolnet and Killer.

But then came the monster Martin Luther King Day Crash of January 15, 1990.

A flat three days later, on January 18, four agents showed up at Knight Lightning's fraternity house. One was Timothy Foley, the second Barbara Golden, both of them Secret Service agents from the Chicago office. Also along was a University of Missouri security officer, and Reed Newlin, a security man from Southwestern Bell, the RBOC having jurisdiction over Missouri.

Foley accused Knight Lightning of causing the nationwide crash of the phone system.

Knight Lightning was aghast at this allegation. On the face of it, the suspicion was not entirely implausible--though Knight Lightning knew that he himself hadn't done it. Plenty of hot-dog hackers had bragged that they could crash the phone system, however.

"Shadowhawk," for instance, the Chicago hacker whom William Cook had recently put in jail, had several times boasted on boards that he could "shut down AT&T's public switched network."

And now this event, or something that looked just like it, had actually taken place. The Crash had lit a fire under the Chicago Task Force. And the former fence-sitters at Bellcore and AT&T were now ready to roll. The consensus among telco security--already horrified by the skill of the BellSouth intruders --was that the digital underground was out of hand. LoD and Phrack must go. And in publis.h.i.+ng Prophet's E911 Doc.u.ment, Phrack had provided law enforcement with what appeared to be a powerful legal weapon.

Foley confronted Knight Lightning about the E911 Doc.u.ment.

Knight Lightning was cowed. He immediately began "cooperating fully"

in the usual tradition of the digital underground.

He gave Foley a complete run of Phrack, printed out in a set of three-ring binders. He handed over his electronic mailing list of Phrack subscribers. Knight Lightning was grilled for four hours by Foley and his cohorts. Knight Lightning admitted that Prophet had pa.s.sed him the E911 Doc.u.ment, and he admitted that he had known it was stolen booty from a hacker raid on a telephone company.

Knight Lightning signed a statement to this effect, and agreed, in writing, to cooperate with investigators.

Next day--January 19, 1990, a Friday --the Secret Service returned with a search warrant, and thoroughly searched Knight Lightning's upstairs room in the fraternity house. They took all his floppy disks, though, interestingly, they left Knight Lightning in possession of both his computer and his modem. (The computer had no hard disk, and in Foley's judgement was not a store of evidence.) But this was a very minor bright spot among Knight Lightning's rapidly multiplying troubles.

By this time, Knight Lightning was in plenty of hot water, not only with federal police, prosecutors, telco investigators, and university security, but with the elders of his own campus fraternity, who were outraged to think that they had been unwittingly harboring a federal computer-criminal.

On Monday, Knight Lightning was summoned to Chicago, where he was further grilled by Foley and USSS veteran agent Barbara Golden, this time with an attorney present. And on Tuesday, he was formally indicted by a federal grand jury.

The trial of Knight Lightning, which occurred on July 24-27, 1990, was the crucial show-trial of the Hacker Crackdown. We will examine the trial at some length in Part Four of this book.

In the meantime, we must continue our dogged pursuit of the E911 Doc.u.ment.

It must have been clear by January 1990 that the E911 Doc.u.ment, in the form Phrack had published it back in February 1989, had gone off at the speed of light in at least a hundred and fifty different directions. To attempt to put this electronic genie back in the bottle was flatly impossible.

And yet, the E911 Doc.u.ment was STILL stolen property, formally and legally speaking. Any electronic transference of this doc.u.ment, by anyone unauthorized to have it, could be interpreted as an act of wire fraud. Interstate transfer of stolen property, including electronic property, was a federal crime.

The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force had been a.s.sured that the E911 Doc.u.ment was worth a hefty sum of money. In fact, they had a precise estimate of its worth from BellSouth security personnel: $79,449. A sum of this scale seemed to warrant vigorous prosecution.

Even if the damage could not be undone, at least this large sum offered a good legal pretext for stern punishment of the thieves.

It seemed likely to impress judges and juries. And it could be used in court to mop up the Legion of Doom.

The Atlanta crowd was already in the bag, by the time the Chicago Task Force had gotten around to Phrack.

But the Legion was a hydra-headed thing. In late 89, a brand-new Legion of Doom board, "Phoenix Project,"

had gone up in Austin, Texas. Phoenix Project was sysoped by no less a man than the Mentor himself, ably a.s.sisted by University of Texas student and hardened Doomster "Erik Bloodaxe."

As we have seen from his Phrack manifesto, the Mentor was a hacker zealot who regarded computer intrusion as something close to a moral duty.

Phoenix Project was an ambitious effort, intended to revive the digital underground to what Mentor considered the full flower of the early 80s.

The Phoenix board would also boldly bring elite hackers face-to-face with the telco "opposition." On "Phoenix," America's cleverest hackers would supposedly shame the telco squareheads out of their stick-in-the-mud att.i.tudes, and perhaps convince them that the Legion of Doom elite were really an all-right crew. The premiere of "Phoenix Project" was heavily trumpeted by Phrack,and "Phoenix Project" carried a complete run of Phrack issues, including the E911 Doc.u.ment as Phrack had published it.

Phoenix Project was only one of many--possibly hundreds--of nodes and boards all over America that were in guilty possession of the E911 Doc.u.ment.

But Phoenix was an outright, unashamed Legion of Doom board.

Under Mentor's guidance, it was flaunting itself in the face of telco security personnel. Worse yet, it was actively trying to WIN THEM OVER as sympathizers for the digital underground elite.

"Phoenix" had no cards or codes on it. Its hacker elite considered Phoenix at least technically legal. But Phoenix was a corrupting influence, where hacker anarchy was eating away like digital acid at the underbelly of corporate propriety.

The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force now prepared to descend upon Austin, Texas.

Oddly, not one but TWO trails of the Task Force's investigation led toward Austin. The city of Austin, like Atlanta, had made itself a bulwark of the Sunbelt's Information Age, with a strong university research presence, and a number of cutting-edge electronics companies, including Motorola, Dell, CompuAdd, IBM, Sematech and MCC.

Where computing machinery went, hackers generally followed.

Austin boasted not only "Phoenix Project," currently LoD's most flagrant underground board, but a number of UNIX nodes.

One of these nodes was "Elephant," run by a UNIX consultant named Robert Izenberg. Izenberg, in search of a relaxed Southern lifestyle and a lowered cost-of-living, had recently migrated to Austin from New Jersey. In New Jersey, Izenberg had worked for an independent contracting company, programming UNIX code for AT&T itself. "Terminus" had been a frequent user on Izenberg's privately owned Elephant node.

Having interviewed Terminus and examined the records on Netsys, the Chicago Task Force were now convinced that they had discovered an underground gang of UNIX software pirates, who were demonstrably guilty of interstate trafficking in illicitly copied AT&T source code.

Izenberg was swept into the dragnet around Terminus, the self-proclaimed ultimate UNIX hacker.

Izenberg, in Austin, had settled down into a UNIX job with a Texan branch of IBM. Izenberg was no longer working as a contractor for AT&T, but he had friends in New Jersey, and he still logged on to AT&T UNIX computers back in New Jersey, more or less whenever it pleased him. Izenberg's activities appeared highly suspicious to the Task Force. Izenberg might well be breaking into AT&T computers, swiping AT&T software, and pa.s.sing it to Terminus and other possible confederates, through the UNIX node network. And this data was worth, not merely $79,499, but hundreds of thousands of dollars!

On February 21, 1990, Robert Izenberg arrived home from work at IBM to find that all the computers had mysteriously vanished from his Austin apartment.

Naturally he a.s.sumed that he had been robbed.

His "Elephant" node, his other machines, his notebooks, his disks, his tapes, all gone! However, nothing much else seemed disturbed--the place had not been ransacked.