The Hacker Crackdown Part 35

Some other poor souls threw a whole bag of confiscated diskettes into the squad-car trunk next to the police radio. The powerful radio signal blasted them, too.

We heard a bit about Dave Geneson, the first computer prosecutor, a mainframe-runner in Dade County, turned lawyer. Dave Geneson was one guy who had hit the ground running, a signal virtue in making the transition to computer-crime. It was generally agreed that it was easier to learn the world of computers first, then police or prosecutorial work. You could take certain computer people and train 'em to successful police work--but of course they had to have the COP MENTALITY. They had to have street smarts.

Patience. Persistence. And discretion. You've got to make sure they're not hot-shots, show-offs, "cowboys."

Most of the folks in the bar had backgrounds in military intelligence, or drugs, or homicide. It was rudely opined that "military intelligence"

was a contradiction in terms, while even the grisly world of homicide was considered cleaner than drug enforcement. One guy had been 'way undercover doing dope-work in Europe for four years straight.

"I'm almost recovered now," he said deadpan, with the acid black humor that is pure cop. "Hey, now I can say f.u.c.kER without putting MOTHER in front of it."

"In the cop world," another guy said earnestly, "everything is good and bad, black and white. In the computer world everything is gray."

One guy--a founder of the FCIC, who'd been with the group since it was just the Colluquy--described his own introduction to the field. He'd been a Was.h.i.+ngton DC homicide guy called in on a "hacker" case. From the word "hacker," he naturally a.s.sumed he was on the trail of a knife-wielding marauder, and went to the computer center expecting blood and a body. When he finally figured out what was happening there (after loudly demanding, in vain, that the programmers "speak English"), he called headquarters and told them he was clueless about computers. They told him n.o.body else knew diddly either, and to get the h.e.l.l back to work.

So, he said, he had proceeded by comparisons. By a.n.a.logy. By metaphor.

"Somebody broke in to your computer, huh?" Breaking and entering; I can understand that. How'd he get in? "Over the phone-lines."

Hara.s.sing phone-calls, I can understand that! What we need here is a tap and a trace!

It worked. It was better than nothing. And it worked a lot faster when he got hold of another cop who'd done something similar.

And then the two of them got another, and another, and pretty soon the Colluquy was a happening thing. It helped a lot that everybody seemed to know Carlton Fitzpatrick, the data-processing trainer in Glynco.

The ice broke big-time in Memphis in '86. The Colluquy had attracted a bunch of new guys--Secret Service, FBI, military, other feds, heavy guys.

n.o.body wanted to tell anybody anything. They suspected that if word got back to the home office they'd all be fired. They pa.s.sed an uncomfortably guarded afternoon.

The formalities got them nowhere. But after the formal session was over, the organizers brought in a case of beer. As soon as the partic.i.p.ants knocked it off with the bureaucratic ranks and turf-fighting, everything changed. "I bared my soul," one veteran reminisced proudly. By nightfall they were building pyramids of empty beer-cans and doing everything but composing a team fight song.

FCIC were not the only computer-crime people around. There was DATTA (District Attorneys' Technology Theft a.s.sociation), though they mostly specialized in chip theft, intellectual property, and black-market cases.

There was HTCIA (High Tech Computer Investigators a.s.sociation), also out in Silicon Valley, a year older than FCIC and featuring brilliant people like Donald Ingraham. There was LEETAC (Law Enforcement Electronic Technology a.s.sistance Committee) in Florida, and computer-crime units in Illinois and Maryland and Texas and Ohio and Colorado and Pennsylvania. But these were local groups. FCIC were the first to really network nationally and on a federal level.

FCIC people live on the phone lines. Not on bulletin board systems-- they know very well what boards are, and they know that boards aren't secure.

Everyone in the FCIC has a voice-phone bill like you wouldn't believe.

FCIC people have been tight with the telco people for a long time.

Telephone cybers.p.a.ce is their native habitat.

FCIC has three basic sub-tribes: the trainers, the security people, and the investigators. That's why it's called an "Investigations Committee" with no mention of the term "computer-crime"--the dreaded "C-word." FCIC, officially, is "an a.s.sociation of agencies rather than individuals;" unofficially, this field is small enough that the influence of individuals and individual expertise is paramount.

Attendance is by invitation only, and most everyone in FCIC considers himself a prophet without honor in his own house.

Again and again I heard this, with different terms but identical sentiments. "I'd been sitting in the wilderness talking to myself."

"I was totally isolated." "I was desperate." "FCIC is the best thing there is about computer crime in America." "FCIC is what really works." "This is where you hear real people telling you what's really happening out there, not just lawyers picking nits."

"We taught each other everything we knew."

The sincerity of these statements convinces me that this is true.

FCIC is the real thing and it is invaluable. It's also very sharply at odds with the rest of the traditions and power structure in American law enforcement. There probably hasn't been anything around as loose and go-getting as the FCIC since the start of the U.S. Secret Service in the 1860s. FCIC people are living like twenty-first-century people in a twentieth-century environment, and while there's a great deal to be said for that, there's also a great deal to be said against it, and those against it happen to control the budgets.

I listened to two FCIC guys from Jersey compare life histories.

One of them had been a biker in a fairly heavy-duty gang in the 1960s.

"Oh, did you know so-and-so?" said the other guy from Jersey.

"Big guy, heavyset?"

"Yeah, I knew him."

"Yeah, he was one of ours. He was our plant in the gang."

"Really? Wow! Yeah, I knew him. h.e.l.luva guy."

Thackeray reminisced at length about being tear-ga.s.sed blind in the November 1969 antiwar protests in Was.h.i.+ngton Circle, covering them for her college paper. "Oh yeah, I was there,"

said another cop. "Glad to hear that tear gas. .h.i.t somethin'.

Haw haw haw." He'd been so blind himself, he confessed, that later that day he'd arrested a small tree.

FCIC are an odd group, sifted out by coincidence and necessity, and turned into a new kind of cop. There are a lot of specialized cops in the world--your bunco guys, your drug guys, your tax guys, but the only group that matches FCIC for sheer isolation are probably the child-p.o.r.nography people. Because they both deal with conspirators who are desperate to exchange forbidden data and also desperate to hide; and because n.o.body else in law enforcement even wants to hear about it.

FCIC people tend to change jobs a lot. They tend not to get the equipment and training they want and need. And they tend to get sued quite often.

As the night wore on and a band set up in the bar, the talk grew darker.

Nothing ever gets done in government, someone opined, until there's a DISASTER. Computing disasters are awful, but there's no denying that they greatly help the credibility of FCIC people. The Internet Worm, for instance. "For years we'd been warning about that--but it's nothing compared to what's coming." They expect horrors, these people.

They know that nothing will really get done until there is a horror.

Next day we heard an extensive briefing from a guy who'd been a computer cop, gotten into hot water with an Arizona city council, and now installed computer networks for a living (at a considerable rise in pay).

He talked about pulling fiber-optic networks apart.

Even a single computer, with enough peripherals, is a literal "network"--a bunch of machines all cabled together, generally with a complexity that puts stereo units to shame. FCIC people invent and publicize methods of seizing computers and maintaining their evidence. Simple things, sometimes, but vital rules of thumb for street cops, who nowadays often stumble across a busy computer in the midst of a drug investigation or a white-collar bust.

For instance: Photograph the system before you touch it.

Label the ends of all the cables before you detach anything.

"Park" the heads on the disk drives before you move them.

Get the diskettes. Don't put the diskettes in magnetic fields.

Don't write on diskettes with ballpoint pens. Get the manuals.

Get the printouts. Get the handwritten notes. Copy data before you look at it, and then examine the copy instead of the original.

Now our lecturer distributed copied diagrams of a typical LAN or "Local Area Network", which happened to be out of Connecticut.

ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-NINE desktop computers, each with its own peripherals. Three "file servers." Five "star couplers"

each with thirty-two ports. One sixteen-port coupler off in the corner office. All these machines talking to each other, distributing electronic mail, distributing software, distributing, quite possibly, criminal evidence. All linked by high-capacity fiber-optic cable. A bad guy--cops talk a about "bad guys"

--might be lurking on PC #47 lot or #123 and distributing his ill doings onto some dupe's "personal" machine in another office--or another floor--or, quite possibly, two or three miles away! Or, conceivably, the evidence might be "data-striped"--split up into meaningless slivers stored, one by one, on a whole crowd of different disk drives.

The lecturer challenged us for solutions. I for one was utterly clueless.

As far as I could figure, the Cossacks were at the gate; there were probably more disks in this single building than were seized during the entirety of Operation Sundevil.

"Inside informant," somebody said. Right. There's always the human angle, something easy to forget when contemplating the arcane recesses of high technology. Cops are skilled at getting people to talk, and computer people, given a chair and some sustained attention, will talk about their computers till their throats go raw. There's a case on record of a single question-- "How'd you do it?"--eliciting a forty-five-minute videotaped confession from a computer criminal who not only completely incriminated himself but drew helpful diagrams.

Computer people talk. Hackers BRAG. Phone-phreaks talk PATHOLOGICALLY--why else are they stealing phone-codes, if not to natter for ten hours straight to their friends on an opposite seaboard? Computer-literate people do in fact possess an a.r.s.enal of nifty gadgets and techniques that would allow them to conceal all kinds of exotic skullduggery, and if they could only SHUT UP about it, they could probably get away with all manner of amazing information-crimes.

But that's just not how it works--or at least, that's not how it's worked SO FAR.

Most every phone-phreak ever busted has swiftly implicated his mentors, his disciples, and his friends. Most every white-collar computer-criminal, smugly convinced that his clever scheme is bulletproof, swiftly learns otherwise when, for the first time in his life, an actual no-kidding policeman leans over, grabs the front of his s.h.i.+rt, looks him right in the eye and says: "All right, a.s.sHOLE--you and me are going downtown!"

All the hardware in the world will not insulate your nerves from these actual real-life sensations of terror and guilt.

Cops know ways to get from point A to point Z without thumbing through every letter in some smart-a.s.s bad-guy's alphabet.

Cops know how to cut to the chase. Cops know a lot of things other people don't know.

Hackers know a lot of things other people don't know, too.