The Hacker Crackdown Part 33

In retrospect, it astonishes me to realize how quickly poor Stanley became a perceived threat. Surprise and fear are closely allied feelings.

And the world of computing is full of surprises.

I met one character in the streets of Phoenix whose role in this book is supremely and directly relevant. That personage was Stanley's giant thieving scarred phantom. This phantasm is everywhere in this book.

He is the specter haunting cybers.p.a.ce.

Sometimes he's a maniac vandal ready to smash the phone system for no sane reason at all. Sometimes he's a fascist fed, coldly programming his mighty mainframes to destroy our Bill of Rights.

Sometimes he's a telco bureaucrat, covertly conspiring to register all modems in the service of an Orwellian surveillance regime. Mostly, though, this fearsome phantom is a "hacker." He's strange, he doesn't belong, he's not authorized, he doesn't smell right, he's not keeping his proper place, he's not one of us. The focus of fear is the hacker, for much the same reasons that Stanley's fancied a.s.sailant is black.

Stanley's demon can't go away, because he doesn't exist.

Despite singleminded and tremendous effort, he can't be arrested, sued, jailed, or fired. The only constructive way to do ANYTHING about him is to learn more about Stanley himself. This learning process may be repellent, it may be ugly, it may involve grave elements of paranoiac confusion, but it's necessary. Knowing Stanley requires something more than cla.s.s-crossing condescension. It requires more than steely legal objectivity. It requires human compa.s.sion and sympathy.

To know Stanley is to know his demon. If you know the other guy's demon, then maybe you'll come to know some of your own. You'll be able to separate reality from illusion. And then you won't do your cause, and yourself, more harm than good. Like poor d.a.m.ned Stanley from Chicago did.

The Federal Computer Investigations Committee (FCIC) is the most important and influential organization in the realm of American computer-crime.

Since the police of other countries have largely taken their computer-crime cues from American methods, the FCIC might well be called the most important computer crime group in the world.

It is also, by federal standards, an organization of great unorthodoxy.

State and local investigators mix with federal agents. Lawyers, financial auditors and computer-security programmers trade notes with street cops. Industry vendors and telco security people show up to explain their gadgetry and plead for protection and justice.

Private investigators, think-tank experts and industry pundits throw in their two cents' worth. The FCIC is the ant.i.thesis of a formal bureaucracy.

Members of the FCIC are obscurely proud of this fact; they recognize their group as aberrant, but are entirely convinced that this, for them, outright WEIRD behavior is nevertheless ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY to get their jobs done.

FCIC regulars --from the Secret Service, the FBI, the IRS, the Department of Labor, the offices of federal attorneys, state police, the Air Force, from military intelligence-- often attend meetings, held hither and thither across the country, at their own expense. The FCIC doesn't get grants. It doesn't charge members.h.i.+p fees. It doesn't have a boss. It has no headquarters-- just a mail drop in Was.h.i.+ngton DC, at the Fraud Division of the Secret Service.

It doesn't have a budget. It doesn't have schedules. It meets three times a year--sort of. Sometimes it issues publications, but the FCIC has no regular publisher, no treasurer, not even a secretary.

There are no minutes of FCIC meetings. Non-federal people are considered "non-voting members," but there's not much in the way of elections.

There are no badges, lapel pins or certificates of members.h.i.+p.

Everyone is on a first-name basis. There are about forty of them.

n.o.body knows how many, exactly. People come, people go-- sometimes people "go" formally but still hang around anyway.

n.o.body has ever exactly figured out what "members.h.i.+p" of this "Committee" actually entails.

Strange as this may seem to some, to anyone familiar with the social world of computing, the "organization" of the FCIC is very recognizable.

For years now, economists and management theorists have speculated that the tidal wave of the information revolution would destroy rigid, pyramidal bureaucracies, where everything is top-down and centrally controlled. Highly trained "employees" would take on much greater autonomy, being self-starting, and self-motivating, moving from place to place, task to task, with great speed and fluidity.

"Ad-hocracy" would rule, with groups of people spontaneously knitting together across organizational lines, tackling the problem at hand, applying intense computer-aided expertise to it, and then vanis.h.i.+ng whence they came.

This is more or less what has actually happened in the world of federal computer investigation. With the conspicuous exception of the phone companies, which are after all over a hundred years old, practically EVERY organization that plays any important role in this book functions just like the FCIC. The Chicago Task Force, the Arizona Racketeering Unit, the Legion of Doom, the Phrack crowd, the Electronic Frontier Foundation--they ALL look and act like "tiger teams"

or "user's groups." They are all electronic ad-hocracies leaping up spontaneously to attempt to meet a need.

Some are police. Some are, by strict definition, criminals.

Some are political interest-groups. But every single group has that same quality of apparent spontaneity--"Hey, gang!

My uncle's got a barn--let's put on a show!"

Every one of these groups is embarra.s.sed by this "amateurism,"

and, for the sake of their public image in a world of non-computer people, they all attempt to look as stern and formal and impressive as possible.

These electronic frontier-dwellers resemble groups of nineteenth-century pioneers hankering after the respectability of statehood.

There are however, two crucial differences in the historical experience of these "pioneers" of the nineteeth and twenty-first centuries.

First, powerful information technology DOES play into the hands of small, fluid, loosely organized groups. There have always been "pioneers,"

"hobbyists," "amateurs," "dilettantes," "volunteers," "movements,"

"users' groups" and "blue-ribbon panels of experts" around.

But a group of this kind--when technically equipped to s.h.i.+p huge amounts of specialized information, at lightning speed, to its members, to government, and to the press--is simply a different kind of animal. It's like the difference between an eel and an electric eel.

The second crucial change is that American society is currently in a state approaching permanent technological revolution.

In the world of computers particularly, it is practically impossible to EVER stop being a "pioneer," unless you either drop dead or deliberately jump off the bus. The scene has never slowed down enough to become well-inst.i.tutionalized. And after twenty, thirty, forty years the "computer revolution" continues to spread, to permeate new corners of society. Anything that really works is already obsolete.

If you spend your entire working life as a "pioneer," the word "pioneer"

begins to lose its meaning. Your way of life looks less and less like an introduction to something else" more stable and organized, and more and more like JUST THE WAY THINGS ARE. A "permanent revolution"

is really a contradiction in terms. If "turmoil" lasts long enough, it simply becomes A NEW KIND OF SOCIETY--still the same game of history, but new players, new rules.

Apply this to the world of late twentieth-century law enforcement, and the implications are novel and puzzling indeed. Any bureaucratic rulebook you write about computer-crime will be flawed when you write it, and almost an antique by the time it sees print. The fluidity and fast reactions of the FCIC give them a great advantage in this regard, which explains their success. Even with the best will in the world (which it does not, in fact, possess) it is impossible for an organization the size of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to get up to speed on the theory and practice of computer crime. If they tried to train all their agents to do this, it would be SUICIDAL, as they would NEVER BE ABLE TO DO ANYTHING ELSE.

The FBI does try to train its agents in the basics of electronic crime, at their base in Quantico, Virginia. And the Secret Service, along with many other law enforcement groups, runs quite successful and well-attended training courses on wire fraud, business crime, and computer intrusion at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC, p.r.o.nounced "fletsy") in Glynco, Georgia. But the best efforts of these bureaucracies does not remove the absolute need for a "cutting-edge mess" like the FCIC.

For you see--the members of FCIC ARE the trainers of the rest of law enforcement. Practically and literally speaking, they are the Glynco computer-crime faculty by another name.

If the FCIC went over a cliff on a bus, the U.S. law enforcement community would be rendered deaf dumb and blind in the world of computer crime, and would swiftly feel a desperate need to reinvent them. And this is no time to go starting from scratch.

On June 11, 1991, I once again arrived in Phoenix, Arizona, for the latest meeting of the Federal Computer Investigations Committee.

This was more or less the twentieth meeting of this stellar group.

The count was uncertain, since n.o.body could figure out whether to include the meetings of "the Colluquy," which is what the FCIC was called in the mid-1980s before it had even managed to obtain the dignity of its own acronym.

Since my last visit to Arizona, in May, the local AzScam bribery scandal had resolved itself in a general muddle of humiliation. The Phoenix chief of police, whose agents had videotaped nine state legislators up to no good, had resigned his office in a tussle with the Phoenix city council over the propriety of his undercover operations.

The Phoenix Chief could now join Gail Thackeray and eleven of her closest a.s.sociates in the shared experience of politically motivated unemployment.

As of June, resignations were still continuing at the Arizona Attorney General's office, which could be interpreted as either a New Broom Sweeping Clean or a Night of the Long Knives Part II, depending on your point of view.

The meeting of FCIC was held at the Scottsdale Hilton Resort.

Scottsdale is a wealthy suburb of Phoenix, known as "Scottsdull"

to scoffing local trendies, but well-equipped with posh shopping-malls and manicured lawns, while conspicuously undersupplied with homeless derelicts.

The Scottsdale Hilton Resort was a sprawling hotel in postmodern crypto-Southwestern style. It featured a "mission bell tower"

plated in turquoise tile and vaguely resembling a Saudi minaret.

Inside it was all barbarically striped Santa Fe Style decor.

There was a health spa downstairs and a large oddly-shaped pool in the patio. A poolside umbrella-stand offered Ben and Jerry's politically correct Peace Pops.

I registered as a member of FCIC, attaining a handy discount rate, then went in search of the Feds. Sure enough, at the back of the hotel grounds came the unmistakable sound of Gail Thackeray holding forth.

Since I had also attended the Computers Freedom and Privacy conference (about which more later), this was the second time I had seen Thackeray in a group of her law enforcement colleagues. Once again I was struck by how simply pleased they seemed to see her. It was natural that she'd get SOME attention, as Gail was one of two women in a group of some thirty men; but there was a lot more to it than that.

Gail Thackeray personifies the social glue of the FCIC. They could give a d.a.m.n about her losing her job with the Attorney General. They were sorry about it, of course, but h.e.l.l, they'd all lost jobs. If they were the kind of guys who liked steady boring jobs, they would never have gotten into computer work in the first place.

I wandered into her circle and was immediately introduced to five strangers.

The conditions of my visit at FCIC were reviewed. I would not quote anyone directly. I would not tie opinions expressed to the agencies of the attendees. I would not (a purely hypothetical example) report the conversation of a guy from the Secret Service talking quite civilly to a guy from the FBI, as these two agencies NEVER talk to each other, and the IRS (also present, also hypothetical) NEVER TALKS TO ANYBODY.

Worse yet, I was forbidden to attend the first conference. And I didn't.

I have no idea what the FCIC was up to behind closed doors that afternoon.

I rather suspect that they were engaging in a frank and thorough confession of their errors, goof-ups and blunders, as this has been a feature of every FCIC meeting since their legendary Memphis beer-bust of 1986. Perhaps the single greatest attraction of FCIC is that it is a place where you can go, let your hair down, and completely level with people who actually comprehend what you are talking about. Not only do they understand you, but they REALLY PAY ATTENTION, they are GRATEFUL FOR YOUR INSIGHTS, and they FORGIVE YOU, which in nine cases out of ten is something even your boss can't do, because as soon as you start talking "ROM," "BBS,"