The Hacker Crackdown Part 38

In fact, this una.s.suming, genial man may be THE federal computer-crime expert.

There are plenty of very good computer people, and plenty of very good federal investigators, but the area where these worlds of expertise overlap is very slim. And Carlton Fitzpatrick has been right at the center of that since 1985, the first year of the Colluquy, a group which owes much to his influence.

He seems quite at home in his modest, acoustic-tiled office, with its Ansel Adams-style Western photographic art, a gold-framed Senior Instructor Certificate, and a towering bookcase crammed with three-ring binders with ominous t.i.tles such as Datapro Reports on Information Security and CFCA Telecom Security '90.

The phone rings every ten minutes; colleagues show up at the door to chat about new developments in locksmithing or to shake their heads over the latest dismal developments in the BCCI global banking scandal.

Carlton Fitzpatrick is a fount of computer-crime war-stories, related in an acerbic drawl. He tells me the colorful tale of a hacker caught in California some years back. He'd been raiding systems, typing code without a detectable break, for twenty, twenty-four, thirty-six hours straight. Not just logged on--TYPING. Investigators were baffled. n.o.body could do that. Didn't he have to go to the bathroom?

Was it some kind of automatic keyboard-whacking device that could actually type code?

A raid on the suspect's home revealed a situation of astonis.h.i.+ng squalor.

The hacker turned out to be a Pakistani computer-science student who had flunked out of a California university. He'd gone completely underground as an illegal electronic immigrant, and was selling stolen phone-service to stay alive. The place was not merely messy and dirty, but in a state of psychotic disorder. Powered by some weird mix of culture shock, computer addiction, and amphetamines, the suspect had in fact been sitting in front of his computer for a day and a half straight, with snacks and drugs at hand on the edge of his desk and a chamber-pot under his chair.

Word about stuff like this gets around in the hacker-tracker community.

Carlton Fitzpatrick takes me for a guided tour by car around the FLETC grounds. One of our first sights is the biggest indoor firing range in the world. There are federal trainees in there, Fitzpatrick a.s.sures me politely, blasting away with a wide variety of automatic weapons: Uzis, Glocks, AK-47s. . . . He's willing to take me inside. I tell him I'm sure that's really interesting, but I'd rather see his computers. Carlton Fitzpatrick seems quite surprised and pleased. I'm apparently the first journalist he's ever seen who has turned down the shooting gallery in favor of microchips.

Our next stop is a favorite with touring Congressmen: the three-mile long FLETC driving range. Here trainees of the Driver & Marine Division are taught high-speed pursuit skills, setting and breaking road-blocks, diplomatic security driving for VIP limousines. . . . A favorite FLETC pastime is to strap a pa.s.sing Senator into the pa.s.senger seat beside a Driver & Marine trainer, hit a hundred miles an hour, then take it right into "the skid-pan," a section of greased track where two tons of Detroit iron can whip and spin like a hockey puck.

Cars don't fare well at FLETC. First they're rifled again and again for search practice. Then they do 25,000 miles of high-speed pursuit training; they get about seventy miles per set of steel-belted radials. Then it's off to the skid pan, where sometimes they roll and tumble headlong in the grease.

When they're sufficiently grease-stained, dented, and creaky, they're sent to the roadblock unit, where they're battered without pity.

And finally then they're sacrificed to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, whose trainees learn the ins and outs of car-bomb work by blowing them into smoking wreckage.

There's a railroad box-car on the FLETC grounds, and a large grounded boat, and a propless plane; all training-grounds for searches.

The plane sits forlornly on a patch of weedy tarmac next to an eerie blockhouse known as the "ninja compound," where anti-terrorism specialists practice hostage rescues. As I gaze on this creepy paragon of modern low-intensity warfare, my nerves are jangled by a sudden staccato outburst of automatic weapons fire, somewhere in the woods to my right.

"Nine-millimeter," Fitzpatrick judges calmly.

Even the eldritch ninja compound pales somewhat compared to the truly surreal area known as "the raid-houses."

This is a street lined on both sides with nondescript concrete-block houses with flat pebbled roofs.

They were once officers' quarters. Now they are training grounds.

The first one to our left, Fitzpatrick tells me, has been specially adapted for computer search-and-seizure practice. Inside it has been wired for video from top to bottom, with eighteen pan-and-tilt remotely controlled videocams mounted on walls and in corners.

Every movement of the trainee agent is recorded live by teachers, for later taped a.n.a.lysis. Wasted movements, hesitations, possibly lethal tactical mistakes--all are gone over in detail.

Perhaps the weirdest single aspect of this building is its front door, scarred and scuffed all along the bottom, from the repeated impact, day after day, of federal shoe-leather.

Down at the far end of the row of raid-houses some people are practicing a murder. We drive by slowly as some very young and rather nervous-looking federal trainees interview a heavyset bald man on the raid-house lawn.

Dealing with murder takes a lot of practice; first you have to learn to control your own instinctive disgust and panic, then you have to learn to control the reactions of a nerve-shredded crowd of civilians, some of whom may have just lost a loved one, some of whom may be murderers-- quite possibly both at once.

A dummy plays the corpse. The roles of the bereaved, the morbidly curious, and the homicidal are played, for pay, by local Georgians: waitresses, musicians, most anybody who needs to moonlight and can learn a script.

These people, some of whom are FLETC regulars year after year, must surely have one of the strangest jobs in the world.

Something about the scene: "normal" people in a weird situation, standing around talking in bright Georgia suns.h.i.+ne, unsuccessfully pretending that something dreadful has gone on, while a dummy lies inside on faked bloodstains. . . . While behind this weird masquerade, like a nested set of Russian dolls, are grim future realities of real death, real violence, real murders of real people, that these young agents will really investigate, many times during their careers. . . .

Over and over. . . . Will those antic.i.p.ated murders look like this, feel like this--not as "real" as these amateur actors are trying to make it seem, but both as "real," and as numbingly unreal, as watching fake people standing around on a fake lawn? Something about this scene unhinges me. It seems nightmarish to me, Kafkaesque. I simply don't know how to take it; my head is turned around; I don't know whether to laugh, cry, or just shudder.

When the tour is over, Carlton Fitzpatrick and I talk about computers.

For the first time cybers.p.a.ce seems like quite a comfortable place.

It seems very real to me suddenly, a place where I know what I'm talking about, a place I'm used to. It's real. "Real." Whatever.

Carlton Fitzpatrick is the only person I've met in cybers.p.a.ce circles who is happy with his present equipment. He's got a 5 Meg RAM PC with a 112 meg hard disk; a 660 meg's on the way. He's got a Compaq 386 desktop, and a Zenith 386 laptop with 120 meg. Down the hall is a NEC Multi-Sync 2A with a CD-ROM drive and a 9600 baud modem with four com-lines.

There's a training minicomputer, and a 10-meg local mini just for the Center, and a lab-full of student PC clones and half-a-dozen Macs or so.

There's a Data General MV 2500 with 8 meg on board and a 370 meg disk.

Fitzpatrick plans to run a UNIX board on the Data General when he's finished beta-testing the software for it, which he wrote himself.

It'll have E-mail features, ma.s.sive files on all manner of computer-crime and investigation procedures, and will follow the computer-security specifics of the Department of Defense "Orange Book." He thinks it will be the biggest BBS in the federal government.

Will it have Phrack on it? I ask wryly.

Sure, he tells me. Phrack, TAP, Computer Underground Digest, all that stuff. With proper disclaimers, of course.

I ask him if he plans to be the sysop. Running a system that size is very time-consuming, and Fitzpatrick teaches two three-hour courses every day.

No, he says seriously, FLETC has to get its money worth out of the instructors.

He thinks he can get a local volunteer to do it, a high-school student.

He says a bit more, something I think about an Eagle Scout law-enforcement liaison program, but my mind has rocketed off in disbelief.

"You're going to put a TEENAGER in charge of a federal security BBS?"

I'm speechless. It hasn't escaped my notice that the FLETC Financial Fraud Inst.i.tute is the ULTIMATE hacker-tras.h.i.+ng target; there is stuff in here, stuff of such utter and consummate cool by every standard of the digital underground. . . .

I imagine the hackers of my acquaintance, fainting dead-away from forbidden-knowledge greed-fits, at the mere prospect of cracking the superultra top-secret computers used to train the Secret Service in computer-crime. . . .

"Uhm, Carlton," I babble, "I'm sure he's a really nice kid and all, but that's a terrible temptation to set in front of somebody who's, you know, into computers and just starting out. . . ."

"Yeah," he says, "that did occur to me." For the first time I begin to suspect that he's pulling my leg.

He seems proudest when he shows me an ongoing project called JICC, Joint Intelligence Control Council. It's based on the services provided by EPIC, the El Paso Intelligence Center, which supplies data and intelligence to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Customs Service, the Coast Guard, and the state police of the four southern border states. Certain EPIC files can now be accessed by drug-enforcement police of Central America, South America and the Caribbean, who can also trade information among themselves. Using a telecom program called "White Hat,"

written by two brothers named Lopez from the Dominican Republic, police can now network internationally on inexpensive PCs.

Carlton Fitzpatrick is teaching a cla.s.s of drug-war agents from the Third World, and he's very proud of their progress.

Perhaps soon the sophisticated smuggling networks of the Medellin Cartel will be matched by a sophisticated computer network of the Medellin Cartel's sworn enemies. They'll track boats, track contraband, track the international drug-lords who now leap over borders with great ease, defeating the police through the clever use of fragmented national jurisdictions.

JICC and EPIC must remain beyond the scope of this book.

They seem to me to be very large topics fraught with complications that I am not fit to judge. I do know, however, that the international, computer-a.s.sisted networking of police, across national boundaries, is something that Carlton Fitzpatrick considers very important, a harbinger of a desirable future. I also know that networks by their nature ignore physical boundaries. And I also know that where you put communications you put a community, and that when those communities become self-aware they will fight to preserve themselves and to expand their influence.

I make no judgements whether this is good or bad.

It's just cybers.p.a.ce; it's just the way things are.

I asked Carlton Fitzpatrick what advice he would have for a twenty-year-old who wanted to s.h.i.+ne someday in the world of electronic law enforcement.

He told me that the number one rule was simply not to be scared of computers. You don't need to be an obsessive "computer weenie," but you mustn't be buffaloed just because some machine looks fancy. The advantages computers give smart crooks are matched by the advantages they give smart cops.

Cops in the future will have to enforce the law "with their heads, not their holsters." Today you can make good cases without ever leaving your office. In the future, cops who resist the computer revolution will never get far beyond walking a beat.

I asked Carlton Fitzpatrick if he had some single message for the public; some single thing that he would most like the American public to know about his work.

He thought about it while. "Yes," he said finally. "TELL me the rules, and I'll TEACH those rules!" He looked me straight in the eye.

"I do the best that I can."

PART FOUR: THE CIVIL LIBERTARIANS