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B R U C E S T E R L I N G T H E H A C K E R C R A C K D O W N 1 8 6
Computers. The lust, the hunger, for computers. The loyalty they
inspire, the intense sense of possessiveness. The culture they have
bred. I myself am sitting in downtown Phoenix, Arizona because it sud-
denly occurred to me that the police might just *might* come and
take away my computer. The prospect of this, the mere *implied
threat,* was unbearable. It literally changed my life. It was changing
the lives of many others. Eventually it would change everybody's life.
Gail Thackeray was one of the top computer- crime people in America.
And I was just some novelist, and yet I had a better computer than hers.
*Practically everybody I knew* had a better computer than Gail
Thackeray and her feeble laptop 286. It was like sending the sheriff in
to clean up Dodge City and arming her with a slingshot cut from an old
rubber tire.
But then again, you don't need a howitzer to enforce the law. You can do a
lot just with a badge. With a badge alone, you can basically wreak havoc,
take a terrible vengeance on wrongdoers. Ninety percent of "computer
crime investigation" is just "crime investigation:" names, places,
dossiers, modus operandi, search warrants, victims, complainants,
informants...
What will computer crime look like in ten years? Will it get better?
Did "Sundevil" send 'em reeling back in confusion?
It'll be like it is now, only worse, she tells me with perfect conviction.
Still there in the background, ticking along, changing with the times: the
criminal underworld. It'll be like drugs are. Like our problems with
alcohol. All the cops and laws in the world never solved our problems
with alcohol. If there's something people want, a certain percentage of
them are just going to take it. Fifteen percent of the populace will never
steal. Fifteen percent will steal most anything not nailed down. The
battle is for the hearts and minds of the remaining seventy percent.
And criminals catch on fast. If there's not "too steep a learning curve"
if it doesn't require a baffling amount of expertise and practice
then criminals are often some of the first through the gate of a new
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B R U C E S T E R L I N G T H E H A C K E R C R A C K D O W N 1 8 7
technology. Especially if it helps them to hide. They have tons of cash,
criminals. The new communications tech like pagers, cellular
phones, faxes, Federal Express were pioneered by rich corporate
people, and by criminals. In the early years of pagers and beepers, dope
dealers were so enthralled this technology that owing a beeper was
practically prima facie evidence of cocaine dealing. CB radio exploded
when the speed limit hit 55 and breaking the highway law became a
national pastime. Dope dealers send cash by Federal Express, despite,
or perhaps *because of,* the warnings in FedEx offices that tell you
never to try this. Fed Ex uses X-rays and dogs on their mail, to stop
drug shipments. That doesn't work very well.
Drug dealers went wild over cellular phones. There are simple methods
of faking ID on cellular phones, making the location of the call mobile,
free of charge, and effectively untraceable. Now victimized cellular
companies routinely bring in vast toll-lists of calls to Colombia and
Pakistan.
Judge Greene's fragmentation of the phone company is driving law
enforcement nuts. Four thousand telecommunications companies. Fraud
skyrocketing. Every temptation in the world available with a phone and
a credit card number. Criminals untraceable. A galaxy of "new neat
rotten things to do."
If there were one thing Thackeray would like to have, it would be an
effective legal end-run through this new fragmentation minefield.
It would be a new form of electronic search warrant, an "electronic let-
ter of marque" to be issued by a judge. It would create a new category of
"electronic emergency." Like a wiretap, its use would be rare, but it
would cut across state lines and force swift cooperation from all con-
cerned. Cellular, phone, laser, computer network, PBXes, AT&T, Baby
Bells, long-distance entrepreneurs, packet radio. Some document, some
mighty court-order, that could slice through four thousand separate
forms of corporate red-tape, and get her at once to the source of calls,
the source of email threats and viruses, the sources of bomb threats,
kidnapping threats. "From now on," she says, "the Lindberg baby will
always die."
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B R U C E S T E R L I N G T H E H A C K E R C R A C K D O W N 1 8 8
Something that would make the Net sit still, if only for a moment.
Something that would get her up to speed. Seven league boots. That's
what she really needs. "Those guys move in nanoseconds and I'm on the
Pony Express."
And then, too, there's the coming international angle. Electronic crime
has never been easy to localize, to tie to a physical jurisdiction. And
phone- phreaks and hackers loathe boundaries, they jump them when-
ever they can. The English. The Dutch. And the Germans, especially the
ubiquitous Chaos Computer Club. The Australians. They've all learned
phone-phreaking from America. It's a growth mischief industry. The
multinational networks are global, but governments and the police sim-
ply aren't. Neither are the laws. Or the legal frameworks for citizen
protection.
One language is global, though English. Phone phreaks speak English;
it's their native tongue even if they're Germans. English may have
started in England but now it's the Net language; it might as well be
called "CNNese."
Asians just aren't much into phone phreaking. They're the world mas-
ters at organized software piracy. The French aren't into phone-
phreaking either. The French are into computerized industrial espi-
onage.
In the old days of the MIT righteous hackerdom, crashing systems didn't
hurt anybody. Not all that much, anyway. Not permanently. Now the
players are more venal. Now the consequences are worse. Hacking will
begin killing people soon. Already there are methods of stacking calls
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