Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.sf.ca.us

Literary Freeware:  Not for Commercial Use


			    THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

	           Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

				by Bruce Sterling

CONTENTS

Preface to the Electronic Release of *The Hacker 
Crackdown*

Chronology of the Hacker Crackdown

Introduction

Part 1:  CRASHING THE SYSTEM
A Brief History of Telephony / Bell's Golden Vaporware / 
Universal Service / Wild Boys and Wire Women / The 
Electronic Communities / The Ungentle Giant / The 
Breakup / In Defense of the System / The Crash Post-
Mortem / Landslides in Cyberspace

Part 2:  THE DIGITAL UNDERGROUND
Steal This Phone / Phreaking and Hacking / The View 
From Under the Floorboards / Boards: Core of the 
Underground / Phile Phun / The Rake's Progress / 
Strongholds of the Elite / Sting Boards / Hot Potatoes / 
War on the Legion / Terminus / Phile 9-1-1 / War Games 
/ Real Cyberpunk

Part 3:  LAW AND ORDER
Crooked Boards / The World's Biggest Hacker Bust / 
Teach Them a Lesson / The U.S. Secret Service / The 
Secret Service Battles the Boodlers / A Walk Downtown / 
FCIC: The Cutting-Edge Mess / Cyberspace Rangers / 
FLETC:  Training the Hacker-Trackers

Part 4:  THE CIVIL LIBERTARIANS
NuPrometheus + FBI = Grateful Dead / Whole Earth + 
Computer Revolution = WELL / Phiber Runs 
Underground and Acid Spikes the Well / The Trial of 
Knight Lightning / Shadowhawk Plummets to Earth / 
Kyrie in the Confessional / $79,499 / A Scholar 
Investigates / Computers, Freedom, and Privacy 

Electronic Afterword to *The Hacker Crackdown,*
 New Years Day 1994

Preface to the Electronic Release of *The Hacker 
Crackdown*  

January 1, 1994 -- Austin, Texas

	Hi, I'm Bruce Sterling, the author of this 
electronic book.

	Out in the traditional world of print, *The 
Hacker Crackdown* is ISBN 0-553-08058-X, and is  
formally catalogued by the Library of Congress as "1. 
Computer crimes -- United States.  2. Telephone -- 
United States -- Corrupt practices.  3.  Programming 
(Electronic computers) -- United States -- Corrupt 
practices."  'Corrupt practices,' I always get a kick out 
of that description.  Librarians are very ingenious 
people.

	The paperback is ISBN 0-553-56370-X.  If you go 
and buy a print version of *The Hacker Crackdown,* 
an action I encourage heartily, you may notice that 
in the front of the book,  beneath the copyright 
notice  -- "Copyright (C) 1992 by Bruce Sterling" -- it 
has this little block of printed legal boilerplate from 
the publisher.  It says, and I quote:

 	"No part of this book may be reproduced or 
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic 
or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, 
or by any information storage and retrieval system, 
without permission in writing from the publisher.  
For information address:  Bantam Books." 

	This is a pretty good disclaimer, as such 
disclaimers go.  I collect intellectual-property 
disclaimers, and I've seen dozens of them, and this 
one is at least pretty straightforward.  In this narrow 
and particular case, however, it isn't quite accurate.  
Bantam Books puts that disclaimer on every book 
they publish, but Bantam Books does not, in fact, 
own the electronic rights to this book.  I do, because 
of certain extensive contract maneuverings my 
agent and I went through before this book was 
written.  I want to give those electronic publishing 
rights away through certain not-for-profit channels, 
and I've convinced Bantam that this is a good idea.

	Since Bantam has seen fit to peacably agree to 
this scheme of mine, Bantam Books is not going to 
fuss about this.  Provided you don't try to sell the 
book, they are not going to bother you for what you 
do with the electronic copy of this book. If you want 
to check this out personally, you can ask them; 
they're at 1540 Broadway NY NY 10036.  However, if 
you were so foolish as to print this book and start 
retailing it for money in violation of my copyright 
and the commercial interests of Bantam Books, 
then Bantam, a part of the gigantic Bertelsmann 
multinational publishing combine, would roust 
some of their heavy-duty attorneys out of 
hibernation and crush you like a bug.  This is only to 
be expected.  I didn't write this book so that you 
could make money out of it.  If anybody is gonna 
make money out of this book, it's gonna be me and 
my publisher.

	My publisher deserves to make money out of 
this book.  Not only did the folks at Bantam Books 
commission me to write the book, and pay me a 
hefty sum to do so, but they bravely printed, in text, 
an electronic document the reproduction of which 
was once alleged to be a federal felony.  Bantam 
Books and their numerous attorneys were very 
brave and forthright about this book.  Furthermore, 
my former editor at Bantam Books, Betsy Mitchell, 
genuinely cared about this project, and worked hard 
on it, and had a lot of wise things to say about the 
manuscript.  Betsy deserves genuine credit for this 
book, credit that editors too rarely get.

	The critics were very kind to *The Hacker 
Crackdown,* and commercially the book has done 
well.  On the other hand, I didn't write this book in 
order to squeeze every last nickel and dime out of 
the mitts of impoverished sixteen-year-old 
cyberpunk high-school-students.  Teenagers don't 
have any money -- (no, not even enough for the  six-
dollar *Hacker Crackdown* paperback, with its 
attractive bright-red cover and useful index).   That's 
a major reason why teenagers sometimes succumb 
to the temptation to do things they shouldn't, such 
as swiping my books out of libraries.   Kids:  this one 
is all yours, all right?  Go give the print version back.  
*8-)

	Well-meaning, public-spirited civil libertarians 
don't have much money, either.   And it seems 
almost criminal to snatch cash out of the hands of 
America's direly underpaid electronic law 
enforcement community.

	If you're a computer cop, a hacker, or an 
electronic civil liberties activist, you are the target 
audience for this book.  I wrote this book because I 
wanted to help you, and help other people 
understand you and your unique, uhm, problems.  I 
wrote this book to aid your activities, and to 
contribute to the public discussion of important 
political issues.  In giving the text away in this 
fashion, I am directly contributing to the book's 
ultimate aim:  to help civilize cyberspace.

	Information *wants* to be free.  And  the 
information inside this book longs for freedom with 
a peculiar intensity.  I genuinely believe that the 
natural habitat of this book is inside an electronic 
network.  That may not be the easiest direct method 
to generate revenue for the book's author, but that 
doesn't matter; this is where this book belongs by its 
nature.  I've written other books -- plenty of other 
books -- and I'll write more and I am writing more, 
but this one is special.  I am making *The Hacker 
Crackdown* available electronically as widely as I 
can conveniently manage, and if you like the book, 
and think it is useful, then I urge you to do the same 
with it.

	You can copy this electronic book.   Copy the 
heck out of it, be my guest, and give those copies to 
anybody who wants them.  The nascent world of 
cyberspace is full of sysadmins, teachers, trainers, 
cybrarians, netgurus, and various species of 
cybernetic activist.  If you're one of those people,  I 
know about you, and I know the hassle you go 
through to try to help people learn about the 
electronic frontier.  I hope that possessing this book 
in electronic form will lessen your troubles.  Granted, 
this treatment of our electronic social spectrum is 
not the ultimate in academic rigor.  And politically, it 
has something to offend and trouble almost 
everyone.   But hey, I'm told it's readable, and at 
least the price is right.

	You can upload the book onto bulletin board 
systems, or Internet nodes, or electronic discussion 
groups.  Go right ahead and do that, I am giving you 
express permission right now.  Enjoy yourself.

	You can put the book on disks and give the disks 
away, as long as you don't take any money for it.

	But this book is not public domain.  You can't 
copyright it in your own name.   I own the copyright. 
Attempts to pirate this book and make money from 
selling it may involve you in a serious litigative snarl.  
Believe me, for the pittance you might wring out of 
such an action, it's really not worth it.  This book 
don't "belong" to you.  In an odd but very genuine 
way, I feel it doesn't "belong" to me, either.  It's a 
book about the people of cyberspace, and 
distributing it in this way is the best way I know to 
actually make this information available, freely and 
easily, to all the people of cyberspace -- including 
people far outside the borders of the United States, 
who otherwise may never have a chance to see any 
edition of the book, and who may perhaps learn 
something useful from this strange story of distant, 
obscure, but portentous events in so-called 
"American cyberspace."

	 This electronic book is now literary freeware.  It 
now belongs to the emergent realm of alternative 
information economics.  You have no right to make 
this electronic book part of the conventional flow of 
commerce.  Let it be part of the flow of knowledge:  
there's a difference.   I've divided the book into four 
sections, so that it is less ungainly for upload and 
download; if there's a section of particular relevance 
to you and your colleagues, feel free to reproduce 
that one and skip the rest.  

	Just make more when you need them, and give 
them to whoever might want them.

	Now have fun.

	Bruce Sterling -- bruces@well.sf.ca.us



CHRONOLOGY OF THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

1865 U.S. Secret Service (USSS) founded.

1876  Alexander Graham Bell invents telephone.

1878  First teenage males flung off phone system by 
enraged authorities.

1939  "Futurian" science-fiction group raided by Secret 
Service.

1971  Yippie phone phreaks start YIPL/TAP magazine.

1972  *Ramparts* magazine seized in blue-box rip-off 
scandal.

1978  Ward Christenson and Randy Suess create first 
personal computer bulletin board system.

1982  William Gibson coins term "cyberspace."

1982  "414 Gang"  raided.

1983-1983  AT&T dismantled in divestiture.

1984  Congress passes Comprehensive Crime Control Act 
giving USSS jurisdiction over credit card fraud and 
computer fraud.

1984  "Legion of Doom" formed.

1984.  *2600:  The Hacker Quarterly*  founded.

1984.   *Whole Earth Software Catalog* published.

1985.  First police "sting" bulletin board systems 
established.

1985.  Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link computer conference 
(WELL) goes on-line.

1986  Computer Fraud and Abuse Act passed.

1986  Electronic Communications Privacy Act passed.

1987  Chicago prosecutors form Computer Fraud and 
Abuse Task Force.

1988

July.  Secret Service covertly videotapes "SummerCon" 
hacker convention.

September.  "Prophet" cracks BellSouth AIMSX computer 
network and downloads E911 Document to his own 
computer and to Jolnet.

September.  AT&T Corporate Information Security 
informed of Prophet's action.

October.  Bellcore Security informed of Prophet's action.

1989

January.  Prophet uploads E911 Document to Knight 
Lightning.

February 25.  Knight Lightning publishes E911Document 
in *Phrack* electronic newsletter.

May.  Chicago Task Force raids and arrests "Kyrie."

June.  "NuPrometheus League" distributes Apple 
Computer proprietary software.

June 13.  Florida probation office crossed with phone-sex 
line in switching-station stunt.

July.  "Fry Guy" raided by USSS and Chicago Computer 
Fraud and Abuse Task Force.

July.  Secret Service raids "Prophet," "Leftist," and "Urvile" 
in Georgia.

1990

January 15.  Martin Luther King Day Crash strikes AT&T 
long-distance network nationwide.

January 18-19  Chicago Task Force raids Knight Lightning 
in St. Louis.

January 24.  USSS and New York State Police raid "Phiber 
Optik,"  "Acid Phreak," and "Scorpion" in New York City.

February 1. USSS raids "Terminus" in Maryland.

February 3.  Chicago Task Force raids Richard Andrews' 
home.

February 6.  Chicago Task Force raids Richard Andrews' 
business.

February 6.  USSS arrests Terminus, Prophet, Leftist, and 
Urvile.

February 9.  Chicago Task Force arrests Knight Lightning.

February 20.  AT&T Security shuts down public-access 
"attctc" computer in Dallas.

February 21.  Chicago Task Force raids Robert Izenberg in 
Austin.

March 1.  Chicago Task Force raids Steve Jackson Games, 
Inc., "Mentor," and "Erik Bloodaxe" in Austin.

May 7,8,9.  USSS and Arizona Organized Crime and 
Racketeering Bureau conduct "Operation Sundevil" raids 
in Cincinnatti, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, 
Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Tucson, San Diego, San 
Jose, and San Francisco.

May.  FBI interviews John Perry Barlow re NuPrometheus 
case.

June.  Mitch Kapor and Barlow found Electronic Frontier 
Foundation;  Barlow publishes *Crime and Puzzlement* 
manifesto.

July 24-27.  Trial of Knight Lightning.

1991

February.  CPSR Roundtable in Washington, D.C.

March 25-28.  Computers, Freedom and Privacy 
conference in San Francisco.

May 1.  Electronic Frontier Foundation, Steve Jackson, and 
others file suit against members of Chicago Task Force.

July 1-2.  Switching station phone software crash affects 
Washington, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, San Francisco.

September 17.  AT&T phone crash affects New York City 
and three airports.





Introduction

	This is a book about cops, and  wild teenage whiz-
kids, and lawyers, and hairy-eyed anarchists, and  
industrial technicians, and hippies, and high-tech 
millionaires, and game hobbyists, and computer security 
experts, and Secret Service agents, and grifters, and 
thieves.

	This book is about the electronic frontier of the 1990s.  
It concerns activities that take place inside computers and 
over telephone lines. 

	 A science fiction writer coined the useful term 
"cyberspace" in 1982.  But the territory in question, the 
electronic frontier, is about a hundred and thirty years old.  
Cyberspace is the "place" where a telephone conversation 
appears to occur.  Not inside your actual phone, the 
plastic device on your desk.  Not inside the other person's 
phone, in some other city.  *The place between* the 
phones.  The indefinite place *out there,* where the two of 
you, two human beings, actually meet and communicate. 

	 Although it is not exactly  "real," "cyberspace" is a 
genuine place.   Things happen there that have very 
genuine consequences.  This "place" is not "real," but it is 
serious, it is earnest.  Tens of thousands of people have 
dedicated their lives to it, to the public service of public 
communication by wire and electronics.

	  People have worked on this "frontier" for 
generations now.  Some people became rich and famous 
from their efforts there.  Some just played in it, as 
hobbyists.  Others soberly pondered it, and wrote about it, 
and regulated it, and negotiated over it in international 
forums, and sued one another about it, in gigantic, epic 
court battles that lasted for years.  And almost since the 
beginning, some people have committed crimes in this 
place.

	But in the past twenty years, this electrical "space," 
which was once thin and dark and one-dimensional -- little 
more than a narrow speaking-tube, stretching from phone 
to phone -- has flung itself open like a gigantic jack-in-the-
box.  Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of the 
glowing computer screen.   This dark electric netherworld 
has become a vast flowering electronic landscape.   Since 
the 1960s, the world of the telephone has cross-bred itself 
with computers and television, and though there is still no 
substance to cyberspace,  nothing you can handle, it has a 
strange kind of physicality now.   It makes good sense 
today to talk of cyberspace  as a place all its own.

	Because people live in it now.   Not just a few people, 
not just a few technicians and eccentrics, but thousands of 
people, quite normal people.  And not just for a little while,  
either, but for hours straight, over weeks, and  months, and 
years.   Cyberspace today is a "Net," a "Matrix," 
international in scope and growing swiftly and steadily.  It's 
growing in size, and wealth, and  political importance. 
 
	People are making entire careers in modern 
cyberspace.   Scientists and technicians, of course; they've 
been there for twenty years now.  But increasingly, 
cyberspace is filling with journalists and doctors and 
lawyers and artists and clerks.   Civil servants make their 
careers there now, "on-line" in vast government data-
banks; and so do spies, industrial, political, and just plain 
snoops; and so do police, at least a few of them.  And there 
are children living there now.

	People have met there and been married there.  
There are entire living communities in cyberspace today; 
chattering, gossipping, planning, conferring and 
scheming,  leaving one another voice-mail and electronic 
mail, giving one another big weightless chunks of valuable 
data,  both legitimate and illegitimate.  They busily pass 
one another computer software and the occasional 
festering computer virus.

	We do not really understand how to live in 
cyberspace yet.  We are feeling our way into it, blundering 
about.   That is not surprising.  Our lives in the physical 
world, the "real" world, are also far from perfect, despite a 
lot more practice.   Human lives, real lives,  are imperfect 
by their nature, and there are human beings in 
cyberspace.  The way we live in cyberspace is a funhouse 
mirror of the way we live in the real world.   We take both 
our advantages and our troubles with us.  

	  This book is about trouble in cyberspace.   
Specifically, this book is about certain strange events in 
the year 1990, an unprecedented and startling year for the 
the growing world of computerized communications.

            In 1990 there came a nationwide crackdown on illicit 
computer hackers, with arrests, criminal charges,  one 
dramatic show-trial, several guilty pleas,  and huge 
confiscations of data and equipment all over the USA. 

	The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was larger, better 
organized, more deliberate, and more resolute than any 
previous effort in the brave new world of computer crime.   
The U.S.  Secret Service, private telephone security, and 
state and local law enforcement groups across the country 
all joined forces in a determined attempt to break the 
back of America's electronic underground.   It was a 
fascinating effort, with very mixed results.

	The Hacker Crackdown had another unprecedented 
effect; it spurred the creation, within "the computer 
community," of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a new 
and very odd interest group, fiercely  dedicated to the 
establishment and preservation of electronic civil liberties.   
The crackdown, remarkable in itself, has created a melee 
of debate over electronic crime, punishment, freedom of 
the press,  and issues of search and seizure.   Politics has 
entered cyberspace.   Where people go, politics follow.
   
	This is the story of the people of cyberspace.
	
 PART ONE:  Crashing the System

	On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance telephone 
switching system crashed.

	  This was a strange, dire, huge event.  Sixty thousand 
people lost their telephone service completely.   During 
the nine long hours of frantic effort that it took to restore 
service, some seventy million telephone calls went 
uncompleted. 

	 Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco 
trade, are a known and accepted hazard of the telephone 
business.    Hurricanes hit, and phone cables get snapped 
by the thousands.   Earthquakes wrench through buried 
fiber-optic lines.  Switching stations catch fire and burn to 
the ground.  These things do happen.  There are 
contingency plans for them, and decades of experience in 
dealing with them.   But the Crash of January 15 was 
unprecedented.  It was unbelievably huge, and it occurred 
for no apparent physical reason. 

	The crash started  on a Monday afternoon in a single 
switching-station in Manhattan.  But, unlike any merely 
physical damage,  it spread and spread.   Station after 
station across America collapsed in a chain reaction, until 
fully half of AT&T's  network had gone haywire and the 
remaining half was hard-put to handle the overflow. 
 
	Within nine hours, AT&T software engineers more or 
less understood what had caused the crash.  Replicating 
the problem exactly, poring over software line by line,  
took them a couple of weeks.   But because it was hard to 
understand technically, the full truth of the matter and its 
implications were not widely and thoroughly aired and 
explained.  The root cause of the crash remained obscure, 
surrounded by rumor and fear.

	The crash was a grave corporate embarrassment.   
The "culprit" was a bug in AT&T's own software -- not the 
sort of admission the telecommunications giant wanted to 
make, especially in the face of increasing competition.  
Still, the truth *was*  told, in the baffling technical terms 
necessary to explain it.  

	Somehow  the explanation failed to persuade 
American law enforcement officials and even telephone 
corporate security personnel.   These people were not 
technical experts or software wizards, and they had their 
own suspicions about the cause of this disaster.   

	The police and telco security  had important sources 
of information denied to mere software engineers.   They 
had informants in the computer underground and  years 
of experience in dealing with high-tech rascality that 
seemed to grow ever more sophisticated.   For years they 
had been expecting a direct and savage attack against the 
American national telephone system.  And with the Crash 
of January 15 -- the first month of a new, high-tech decade 
-- their predictions, fears, and suspicions seemed at last to 
have  entered the real world.   A world where the telephone 
system had not merely crashed, but, quite likely, *been*  
crashed -- by "hackers."

 	The  crash created a large dark cloud of suspicion 
that would color  certain people's assumptions and actions 
for months.  The fact that it took place in the realm of 
software was suspicious on its face.   The fact that it 
occurred on Martin Luther King Day, still the most 
politically touchy of American holidays, made it more 
suspicious yet.

             The  Crash of January 15  gave the Hacker 
Crackdown its sense of edge and  its sweaty urgency.   It 
made people, powerful people in positions of public 
authority, willing to believe the worst.  And, most fatally, it 
helped to give investigators a willingness to take extreme 
measures and the determination to preserve almost total 
secrecy. 

	 An obscure software fault in an aging switching 
system in New York  was to lead to a chain reaction of legal 
and constitutional trouble all across the country. 

					#
  
	Like the crash in the telephone system, this chain 
reaction was ready and waiting to happen.  During the 
1980s, the American legal system was extensively patched 
to deal with the novel issues of computer crime.  There 
was, for instance, the Electronic  Communications Privacy 
Act of 1986  (eloquently described as "a stinking mess" by a 
prominent law enforcement official).   And there was the 
draconian Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, passed 
unanimously by the United States Senate, which later 
would reveal a large number of flaws.   Extensive, well-
meant efforts had been made to keep the legal system up 
to date.  But in the day-to-day grind of the real world, even 
the most elegant software tends to crumble and suddenly  
reveal its hidden bugs.

	Like the advancing telephone system, the American 
legal system was certainly not ruined by its temporary 
crash; but for those caught under the weight of the 
collapsing system, life became a series of blackouts and 
anomalies.

	In order to understand why these weird events 
occurred, both in the world of technology and in the world 
of law, it's not enough to understand the merely technical 
problems.  We will get to those; but first and foremost, we 
must try to understand the telephone, and the business of 
telephones, and the community of human beings that 
telephones have created.

					#

	Technologies have life cycles, like cities do, like 
institutions do, like laws and governments do.

	The first stage of  any technology is  the Question 
Mark, often known as the "Golden Vaporware" stage.   At 
this early point, the technology is only a phantom, a mere 
gleam in the inventor's eye.   One such inventor was a 
speech teacher and electrical tinkerer named Alexander 
Graham Bell.

	Bell's early inventions, while ingenious, failed to 
move the world.   In 1863, the teenage Bell and his brother 
Melville made an artificial talking mechanism out of 
wood, rubber, gutta-percha, and tin.  This weird device had 
a rubber-covered "tongue" made of movable wooden 
segments, with vibrating rubber "vocal cords," and rubber 
"lips" and "cheeks."  While Melville puffed a bellows into a 
tin tube, imitating the lungs,  young Alec  Bell would 
manipulate the "lips," "teeth," and "tongue," causing the 
thing to emit high-pitched falsetto gibberish.

	Another would-be technical breakthrough was the 
Bell "phonautograph" of 1874, actually made out of a 
human cadaver's ear.  Clamped into place on a tripod, this 
grisly gadget drew sound-wave images on smoked glass 
through a thin straw glued to its vibrating earbones.

	By 1875, Bell had learned to produce audible sounds -
- ugly shrieks and squawks -- by using magnets, 
diaphragms, and electrical current. 

	Most "Golden Vaporware" technologies go nowhere. 

	But the second stage of technology is the Rising Star, 
or, the "Goofy Prototype," stage.   The telephone, Bell's 
most ambitious gadget yet,  reached this stage on March 
10, 1876.  On that great day, Alexander Graham Bell 
became the first person to transmit intelligible human 
speech electrically.   As it happened, young Professor  Bell, 
industriously tinkering in his Boston lab,  had spattered 
his trousers with acid.   His assistant, Mr. Watson, heard 
his cry for help -- over Bell's experimental audio-
telegraph.  This was an event without precedent.

	Technologies in their "Goofy Prototype" stage rarely 
work very well.  They're experimental, and therefore half-
baked and rather frazzled.  The prototype may be 
attractive and novel, and it does look as if it ought to be 
good for something-or-other.  But nobody, including the 
inventor, is quite sure what.  Inventors, and speculators, 
and pundits may have very firm ideas about its potential 
use, but those ideas are often very wrong.

	  The natural habitat of the Goofy Prototype is in trade 
shows and in the popular press.   Infant technologies need 
publicity and investment money like a tottering calf need 
milk.  This was very true of Bell's machine.   To raise 
research and development money,  Bell toured with his 
device as a stage attraction.

	  Contemporary press reports of the stage debut of 
the telephone showed pleased astonishment mixed with 
considerable dread.   Bell's stage telephone was a large 
wooden box with a crude speaker-nozzle, the whole 
contraption about the size and shape of an overgrown  
Brownie camera.   Its buzzing steel soundplate, pumped 
up by powerful electromagnets,  was loud enough to fill an 
auditorium.  Bell's assistant Mr. Watson, who could 
manage on the keyboards fairly well, kicked in by playing 
the organ from distant rooms, and, later, distant cities.  
This feat was considered marvellous, but very eerie  
indeed.

	 Bell's original notion for the telephone, an idea 
promoted for a couple of  years, was that it would become 
a mass medium.  We might recognize Bell's idea today as 
something close to modern "cable radio."    Telephones  at 
a central source would transmit music, Sunday sermons, 
and important public speeches to a paying network of 
wired-up subscribers.

	At the time, most people thought this notion made 
good sense.    In fact, Bell's idea  was workable.  In 
Hungary, this philosophy of the telephone was 
successfully put into everyday practice.  In Budapest, for 
decades, from 1893 until after World War I, there was a 
government-run information  service called "Telefon 
Hirmondo."   Hirmondo was a centralized source of news 
and entertainment and culture, including stock reports, 
plays, concerts, and novels read aloud.  At certain hours of 
the day, the phone would ring, you would plug in a 
loudspeaker for the use of the family, and Telefon 
Hirmondo would be on the air -- or rather, on the phone.

	Hirmondo is dead tech today, but  Hirmondo might 
be considered a spiritual ancestor of the modern 
telephone-accessed computer data services, such as 
CompuServe, GEnie or Prodigy.  The principle behind 
Hirmondo is also not too far from computer "bulletin-
board systems" or BBS's, which arrived in the late 1970s, 
spread rapidly across America, and will figure largely in 
this book.

	We are used to using telephones for individual 
person-to-person speech, because we are used to the Bell 
system.  But this was just one possibility among many.  
Communication networks are very flexible and protean, 
especially when their hardware becomes sufficiently 
advanced.  They can be put to all kinds of uses.   And they 
have been -- and they will be.

	Bell's telephone was bound for glory, but this was a 
combination of political decisions, canny infighting in 
court, inspired industrial leadership, receptive local 
conditions and outright good luck.  Much the same is true 
of communications systems today.

	As Bell and his backers struggled to install their 
newfangled system in the real world of nineteenth-century 
New England, they had to fight against skepticism and 
industrial rivalry.  There was already a strong electrical 
communications network present in America: the 
telegraph.  The head of the Western Union telegraph 
system dismissed Bell's prototype as "an electrical toy" 
and refused to buy the rights to Bell's  patent.    The 
telephone, it seemed,  might be all right as a parlor 
entertainment -- but not for serious business. 

	Telegrams, unlike mere telephones, left a permanent 
physical record of their messages.  Telegrams, unlike 
telephones,  could be answered whenever the recipient 
had time and convenience.  And the telegram had a much 
longer distance-range than Bell's early telephone.  These 
factors made telegraphy seem a much more sound and 
businesslike technology -- at least to some.

	The telegraph system was huge, and well-entrenched.  
In 1876, the United States had 214,000 miles of telegraph 
wire, and 8500 telegraph offices.  There were specialized 
telegraphs for businesses and stock traders, government, 
police and fire departments.  And Bell's "toy" was best 
known as a stage-magic musical device.

	The third stage of technology is known as the "Cash 
Cow" stage.   In the "cash cow" stage, a technology finds its 
place in the world, and matures, and becomes settled and 
productive.   After a year or so,  Alexander Graham Bell 
and his capitalist backers concluded that eerie music 
piped from nineteenth-century cyberspace was not the 
real selling-point of his invention.  Instead, the telephone 
was about speech -- individual, personal speech, the 
human voice, human conversation and  human 
interaction.   The telephone was not to be managed from 
any centralized broadcast center.  It was to be a personal, 
intimate technology.

	When you picked up a telephone, you were not 
absorbing the cold output of a machine -- you were 
speaking to another human being.   Once people realized 
this, their instinctive dread of the telephone as an eerie, 
unnatural device, swiftly vanished.   A "telephone call" was 
not a "call" from a "telephone" itself,  but a call from 
another human being, someone you would generally know 
and recognize.   The real point was not what the machine 
could do for you (or to you), but what you yourself, a 
person and citizen, could do *through* the machine.  This 
decision on the part of the young Bell Company was 
absolutely vital.

	The first telephone networks went up around Boston -
- mostly among the technically curious and the well-to-do 
(much the same segment of the American populace that, 
a hundred years later, would be buying personal 
computers).  Entrenched backers of the telegraph 
continued to scoff.

	But in January 1878, a disaster made the telephone 
famous.   A train crashed in Tarriffville, Connecticut.  
Forward-looking doctors in the nearby city of Hartford had 
had Bell's "speaking telephone" installed.    An alert local 
druggist was able to telephone an entire community of 
local doctors, who rushed to the site to give aid.  The 
disaster, as disasters do, aroused intense press coverage.  
The phone had proven its usefulness in the real world.

	After Tarriffville, the telephone network spread like 
crabgrass.  By 1890 it was all over New England.  By '93, out 
to Chicago.  By '97, into Minnesota, Nebraska and Texas.   
By 1904 it was all over the continent.

	The telephone had become a mature technology.   
Professor Bell  (now generally known as "Dr. Bell" despite 
his lack of a formal degree) became quite wealthy.   He 
lost interest in the tedious day-to-day business muddle of 
the booming telephone network, and gratefully returned 
his attention to creatively hacking-around in his  various 
laboratories, which were now much larger, better-
ventilated,  and gratifyingly better-equipped.   Bell was 
never to have another great inventive success, though his 
speculations and prototypes anticipated fiber-optic 
transmission, manned flight, sonar, hydrofoil ships, 
tetrahedral construction, and Montessori education.   The 
"decibel," the standard scientific measure of sound 
intensity, was named after Bell.

	Not all Bell's vaporware notions were inspired.  He 
was fascinated by human eugenics.   He also spent many 
years developing a weird personal system of astrophysics 
in which gravity did not exist.

	Bell was a definite eccentric.  He was something of a 
hypochondriac, and throughout his life he habitually 
stayed up until four A.M., refusing to rise before noon.   
But Bell had accomplished a great feat; he was an idol of 
millions and his influence, wealth, and great personal 
charm, combined with his eccentricity, made him 
something of a loose cannon on deck.   Bell maintained a 
thriving scientific salon in his winter mansion in 
Washington, D.C., which gave him considerable 
backstage influence in governmental and scientific 
circles.   He was a major financial backer of the the 
magazines *Science* and *National Geographic,* both 
still flourishing today as important organs of the American 
scientific establishment.

	 Bell's companion Thomas Watson, similarly wealthy 
and similarly odd, became the ardent political disciple of a 
19th-century science-fiction writer and would-be social 
reformer, Edward Bellamy.  Watson also trod the boards 
briefly as a Shakespearian actor.

	There would never be another Alexander Graham 
Bell, but in years to come there would be surprising 
numbers of people like him.  Bell was a prototype of the 
high-tech entrepreneur.   High-tech entrepreneurs will 
play a very prominent role in this book: not merely as 
technicians and businessmen, but as pioneers of the 
technical frontier, who can carry the power and prestige 
they derive from high-technology into the political and 
social arena.

	Like later entrepreneurs, Bell was fierce in defense of 
his own technological territory.  As the telephone began to 
flourish, Bell was soon involved in violent lawsuits in the 
defense of his patents.  Bell's Boston lawyers were 
excellent, however, and Bell himself, as an elecution 
teacher and gifted public speaker, was a devastatingly 
effective legal witness.  In the eighteen years of  Bell's 
patents, the Bell company was involved in six hundred 
separate lawsuits.  The legal records printed filled 149 
volumes.   The Bell Company won every single suit.

	After Bell's exclusive patents expired, rival telephone 
companies sprang up all over America.  Bell's company, 
American Bell Telephone, was soon in deep trouble.  In 
1907, American Bell Telephone fell into the hands of the 
rather sinister J.P. Morgan financial cartel, robber-baron 
speculators who dominated Wall Street.

	At this point, history might have taken a different 
turn.  American might well have been served forever by a 
patchwork of locally owned telephone companies.   Many 
state politicians and local businessmen considered this an 
excellent solution.

	But the new Bell holding company, American 
Telephone and Telegraph or AT&T, put in a new man at 
the helm, a visionary industrialist named Theodore Vail.   
Vail, a former Post Office manager, understood large 
organizations and had an innate feeling for the nature of 
large-scale communications.   Vail quickly saw to it that 
AT&T seized the technological edge once again.   The 
Pupin and Campbell "loading coil," and the deForest 
"audion," are both extinct technology today, but in 1913 
they gave Vail's company the best *long-distance*  lines 
ever built.  By controlling long-distance -- the links 
between, and over, and above the smaller local phone 
companies -- AT&T swiftly gained the whip-hand over 
them, and was soon devouring them right and left. 

	 Vail plowed the profits back into research and 
development, starting the Bell tradition of huge-scale and 
brilliant industrial research.

	Technically and financially, AT&T gradually 
steamrollered the opposition.  Independent telephone 
companies never became entirely extinct, and hundreds 
of them flourish today.  But Vail's  AT&T became the 
supreme communications company.   At one point, Vail's 
AT&T bought Western Union itself, the very company 
that had derided Bell's telephone as a "toy."   Vail 
thoroughly reformed Western Union's hidebound 
business along his modern principles;  but when the 
federal government grew anxious at this centralization of 
power, Vail politely  gave Western Union back.

	This centralizing process was not unique.  Very 
similar  events had happened in American steel, oil, and 
railroads.   But AT&T, unlike the other companies, was to 
remain supreme.  The monopoly robber-barons of those 
other industries were humbled and shattered by 
government trust-busting.
   
	Vail, the former Post Office official, was quite willing 
to accommodate the US government; in fact he would 
forge an active alliance with it.   AT&T would become 
almost a wing of the American government, almost 
another Post Office -- though not quite.   AT&T would 
willingly submit to federal regulation, but in return, it 
would use the government's regulators as its own police, 
who would keep out competitors and assure the Bell 
system's profits and preeminence.

	 This was the second birth -- the political birth -- of the 
American telephone system.  Vail's arrangement was to 
persist, with vast success, for many decades, until 1982.   
His system was an odd kind of American industrial 
socialism.  It was born at about the same time as Leninist 
Communism, and it lasted almost as long -- and, it must 
be admitted, to considerably better effect.

	Vail's system worked.  Except perhaps for aerospace, 
there has been no technology more thoroughly dominated 
by Americans than the telephone.   The telephone was 
seen from the beginning as a quintessentially American 
technology.   Bell's policy, and the policy of Theodore Vail, 
was a profoundly democratic policy of *universal access.*   
Vail's famous corporate slogan, "One Policy, One System, 
Universal Service," was a political slogan, with a very 
American ring to it.
   
	The American telephone was not to become the 
specialized tool of government or business, but a general 
public utility.  At first, it was true, only the wealthy  could 
afford private telephones, and Bell's company pursued 
the business markets primarily.   The American phone 
system was a capitalist effort, meant to make money; it 
was not a charity.  But from the first, almost all 
communities with telephone service had public 
telephones.  And many stores -- especially drugstores -- 
offered public use of their phones.  You might not own a 
telephone -- but you could always get into the system, if 
you really needed to.

	There was nothing inevitable about this decision to 
make telephones "public" and "universal."   Vail's system 
involved a profound act of trust in the public.  This 
decision was a political one, informed by the basic values 
of the American republic.  The situation might have been 
very different;  and in other countries, under other 
systems, it certainly was. 

	Joseph Stalin, for instance, vetoed plans for a Soviet 
phone system soon after the Bolshevik revolution.  Stalin 
was certain that publicly accessible telephones would 
become instruments of anti-Soviet counterrevolution and 
conspiracy.   (He was probably right.)  When telephones 
did arrive in the Soviet Union, they would be instruments 
of Party authority, and always heavily tapped.  (Alexander 
Solzhenitsyn's  prison-camp novel *The First Circle* 
describes efforts to develop a phone system more suited 
to Stalinist purposes.)

	France, with its tradition of rational centralized 
government, had fought bitterly even against the electric 
telegraph, which seemed to the French entirely too 
anarchical and frivolous.   For decades, nineteenth-
century France communicated via the "visual telegraph,"  
a nation-spanning, government-owned  semaphore 
system of huge stone towers that signalled from hilltops,  
across vast distances, with big windmill-like arms.  In 1846, 
one Dr. Barbay, a semaphore enthusiast, memorably 
uttered an early version of what might be called "the 
security expert's argument" against the open media.
 
	"No, the electric telegraph is not a sound invention.  
It will always be at the mercy of the slightest disruption, 
wild youths, drunkards, bums, etc....  The electric telegraph 
meets those destructive elements with only a few meters 
of wire over which supervision is impossible.  A single man 
could, without being seen, cut the telegraph wires leading 
to Paris, and in twenty-four hours cut in ten different 
places the wires of the same line, without being arrested.  
The visual telegraph, on the contrary, has its towers, its 
high walls, its gates well-guarded from inside by strong 
armed men.  Yes, I declare, substitution of the electric 
telegraph for the visual one is a dreadful measure, a truly 
idiotic act."

	Dr. Barbay and his high-security stone machines 
were eventually unsuccessful, but his argument -- that 
communication  exists for the safety and convenience of 
the state, and must be carefully protected from the wild 
boys and the gutter rabble  who might want to crash the 
system -- would be heard again and again. 

	When the French telephone system finally did arrive, 
its snarled inadequacy was to be notorious.  Devotees of 
the American Bell System often recommended a trip to 
France, for skeptics.  

	In Edwardian Britain, issues of class and privacy were 
a ball-and-chain for telephonic progress.   It was 
considered outrageous that anyone -- any wild fool off the 
street -- could simply barge bellowing into one's office or 
home, preceded only by the ringing of a telephone bell.    
In Britain, phones were tolerated for the use of business, 
but private phones tended be stuffed away into closets, 
smoking rooms, or servants' quarters.  Telephone 
operators were resented in Britain because they did not 
seem to "know their place."   And no one of breeding 
would print a telephone number on a business card; this 
seemed a crass attempt to make the acquaintance of 
strangers.

	But phone access in America was to become a 
popular right; something like universal suffrage, only 
more so.  American women could not yet vote when the 
phone system came through; yet from the beginning 
American women doted on the telephone.  This 
"feminization" of the American telephone was often 
commented on by foreigners.   Phones in America were 
not censored or stiff or  formalized; they were social, 
private, intimate, and domestic.   In America, Mother's 
Day is by far the busiest day of the year for the phone 
network.  

	The early telephone companies, and especially 
AT&T, were among the foremost employers of American 
women.  They employed the daughters of the American 
middle-class in great armies: in 1891, eight thousand 
women; by 1946, almost a quarter of a million.   Women 
seemed to enjoy telephone work; it was respectable, it was 
steady, it paid fairly well as women's work went, and -- not 
least -- it seemed a genuine contribution to the social good  
of the community.   Women found Vail's ideal of public 
service attractive.  This was especially true in rural areas, 
where women operators, running extensive rural party-
lines, enjoyed considerable social power.   The operator 
knew everyone on the party-line, and everyone knew her. 

	Although Bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the  
telephone company did not employ women for the sake of 
advancing female liberation.  AT&T  did this for sound 
commercial reasons.  The first telephone operators of the 
Bell system were not women, but teenage American boys.  
They were telegraphic  messenger boys (a group about to 
be rendered technically obsolescent), who swept up 
around the phone office, dunned customers for bills, and 
made phone connections on the switchboard, all on the 
cheap.

	Within the very first  year of operation, 1878, Bell's 
company learned a sharp lesson about combining 
teenage boys and telephone switchboards.   Putting 
teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift 
and consistent disaster.  Bell's chief engineer described 
them as "Wild Indians."  The boys were openly rude to 
customers.  They talked back to subscribers, saucing off, 
uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip.  The 
rascals took Saint Patrick's Day off without permission.  
And worst of all they played clever tricks with the 
switchboard plugs:  disconnecting calls, crossing lines so 
that customers found themselves talking to strangers, and 
so forth.

	This combination of power, technical mastery, and 
effective anonymity seemed to act like catnip on teenage 
boys.
  
	This wild-kid-on-the-wires phenomenon was not 
confined to the USA; from the beginning, the same was 
true of the British phone system.   An early British 
commentator kindly remarked:  "No doubt boys in their 
teens found the work not a little irksome, and it is also 
highly probable that under the early conditions of 
employment the adventurous and inquisitive spirits of 
which the average healthy boy of that age is possessed, 
were not always conducive to the best attention being 
given to the wants of the telephone subscribers."

	So the boys were flung off the system -- or at least, 
deprived of control of the switchboard.  But the 
"adventurous and inquisitive spirits" of the teenage boys 
would be heard from in the world of telephony, again and 
again.

	The fourth stage in the technological life-cycle is 
death:  "the Dog," dead tech.   The telephone has so far 
avoided this fate.  On the contrary, it is thriving, still 
spreading, still evolving, and at increasing speed.

	 The telephone has achieved a rare and exalted state 
for a technological artifact:  it has become a *household 
object.*    The telephone, like the clock, like pen and 
paper, like kitchen utensils and  running water, has 
become a technology that is visible only by its absence.   
The telephone is technologically transparent.  The global 
telephone system is the largest and most complex 
machine in the world, yet it is easy to use.  More 
remarkable yet,  the telephone is almost entirely 
physically safe for the user. 

	 For the average citizen in the 1870s, the telephone 
was weirder, more shocking, more "high-tech" and harder 
to comprehend, than the most outrageous stunts of 
advanced computing for us Americans in the 1990s.   In 
trying to understand what is happening to us today, with 
our bulletin-board systems, direct overseas dialling, fiber-
optic transmissions, computer viruses, hacking stunts, and 
a vivid tangle of new laws and new crimes, it is important 
to realize that our society has been through a similar 
challenge before -- and that, all in all, we did rather well by 
it. 
 
	Bell's stage telephone seemed bizarre at first.  But 
the sensations of weirdness vanished quickly, once people 
began to hear the familiar voices of relatives and friends, 
in their own homes on their own telephones.   The 
telephone changed from a fearsome high-tech totem to 
an everyday pillar of human community.

	This has also happened, and is still happening, to 
computer networks.   Computer networks  such as  
NSFnet, BITnet,  USENET, JANET,  are technically 
advanced, intimidating, and much harder to use than 
telephones.  Even the popular, commercial computer 
networks, such as GEnie, Prodigy, and CompuServe,  
cause much head-scratching and have been described as 
"user-hateful."   Nevertheless they too are changing from 
fancy high-tech items into everyday sources of human 
community.

	The words "community" and "communication" have 
the same root.   Wherever you put a communications 
network, you put a community as well.  And whenever you 
*take away*  that network -- confiscate it, outlaw it,  crash it, 
raise its price beyond affordability -- then you hurt that 
community.

	Communities  will fight to defend themselves.  People 
will fight harder and more bitterly to defend their 
communities,  than they will fight to defend their own 
individual selves.   And this is very true of the "electronic 
community" that arose around computer networks in the 
1980s  -- or rather, the *various* electronic communities, in 
telephony, law enforcement, computing, and the digital 
underground that, by  the year 1990, were raiding, rallying, 
arresting, suing, jailing, fining and issuing angry 
manifestos.

	None of the events of 1990 were entirely new.   
Nothing happened in 1990 that did not have some kind of 
earlier and more understandable precedent.   What gave 
the Hacker Crackdown its new sense of gravity and 
importance was the feeling -- the *community* feeling -- 
that the political stakes had been raised; that trouble in 
cyberspace was no longer mere mischief or inconclusive 
skirmishing, but a genuine fight over genuine issues, a 
fight for community survival and the shape of the future. 

	These electronic communities, having flourished 
throughout the 1980s, were becoming aware of 
themselves, and increasingly, becoming aware of other, 
rival communities.   Worries were sprouting up right and 
left, with complaints, rumors, uneasy speculations.   But it 
would take a catalyst, a shock, to make the new world 
evident.   Like Bell's great publicity break, the  Tarriffville 
Rail Disaster of January 1878, it would take a cause 
celebre.

	  That cause was the AT&T Crash of January 15, 1990.   
After the Crash, the wounded and anxious telephone 
community would come out fighting hard.

					#

	The community of telephone technicians, engineers, 
operators and researchers is the oldest community in 
cyberspace.   These are the veterans, the most developed 
group,  the richest, the most respectable, in most ways the 
most powerful.   Whole generations  have come and gone 
since Alexander Graham Bell's day, but the community he 
founded survives; people work for the phone system today 
whose great-grandparents worked for the phone system.  
Its specialty magazines, such as *Telephony,*  *AT&T 
Technical Journal,*   *Telephone Engineer and 
Management,*  are decades old; they make computer 
publications like *Macworld* and *PC Week*  look like 
amateur johnny-come-latelies. 
  
	And the phone companies take no back seat in high-
technology, either.  Other companies' industrial 
researchers may have won new markets;  but the 
researchers of Bell Labs have won *seven  Nobel Prizes.*  
One potent device that Bell Labs originated, the transistor, 
has created entire *groups* of industries.  Bell Labs are 
world-famous for generating "a patent a day," and have 
even made vital discoveries in astronomy, physics and 
cosmology.

	Throughout its seventy-year history, "Ma Bell" was 
not so much a company as a way of life.  Until the 
cataclysmic divestiture of the 1980s, Ma Bell was perhaps 
the ultimate maternalist mega-employer.   The AT&T 
corporate image was the "gentle giant,"  "the voice with a 
smile," a vaguely socialist-realist world of cleanshaven 
linemen in shiny helmets and blandly pretty phone-girls 
in headsets and nylons.   Bell System employees were 
famous as rock-ribbed Kiwanis and Rotary members, 
Little-League enthusiasts, school-board people.

	During the long heyday of Ma Bell, the Bell 
employee corps were nurtured top-to-botton on a 
corporate ethos of public service.   There was good money 
in Bell, but Bell was not *about* money; Bell used public 
relations, but never mere marketeering.   People went into 
the Bell System for a good life, and they had a good life.  
But it was not mere money that led Bell people out in the 
midst of storms and earthquakes to fight with toppled 
phone-poles, to wade in flooded manholes, to pull the red-
eyed graveyard-shift over collapsing switching-systems.   
The Bell ethic was the electrical equivalent of the 
postman's: neither rain, nor snow, nor gloom of night 
would stop these couriers.

	 It is easy to be cynical about this, as it is easy to be 
cynical about any political or social system;  but cynicism 
does not change the fact that thousands of people took 
these ideals very seriously.   And some still do.

	The Bell ethos was about public service; and that was 
gratifying; but it was also about private *power,* and that 
was gratifying too.   As a corporation, Bell was very special.  
Bell was privileged.  Bell had snuggled up close to the 
state.  In fact, Bell was as close to government as you could 
get in America and still make a whole lot of legitimate 
money.

	  But unlike other companies,  Bell was above and 
beyond the vulgar commercial fray.  Through its regional  
operating companies, Bell was omnipresent, local, and 
intimate, all over America;  but the central ivory towers at 
its corporate heart were the tallest and the ivoriest around.

	 There were other phone companies in America, to be 
sure;  the so-called independents.  Rural cooperatives, 
mostly; small fry, mostly tolerated, sometimes warred 
upon.  For many decades, "independent" American phone 
companies lived in fear and loathing of the official Bell 
monopoly  (or the "Bell Octopus," as Ma Bell's nineteenth-
century enemies described her in many angry newspaper 
manifestos).  Some few of these independent 
entrepreneurs,  while legally in the wrong,  fought so 
bitterly against the Octopus that their illegal phone 
networks were cast into the street by Bell agents and 
publicly burned.
  
	The pure technical sweetness of the Bell System gave 
its operators, inventors and engineers a deeply satisfying 
sense of power and mastery.  They had devoted their lives 
to improving this vast nation-spanning machine; over 
years, whole human lives, they had watched it improve 
and grow.   It was like a great technological  temple.  They 
were an elite, and they knew it -- even if others did not; in 
fact, they felt even more powerful *because* others did 
not understand.

	  The deep attraction of this sensation  of elite 
technical power should never be underestimated.   
"Technical power" is not for everybody; for many people it 
simply has no charm at all.  But for some people, it 
becomes the core of their lives.  For a few, it is 
overwhelming, obsessive;  it becomes something close to 
an addiction.   People -- especially clever teenage boys 
whose lives are otherwise mostly powerless and put-upon -
-  love this sensation of secret power, and are willing to do 
all sorts of amazing things to achieve it.  The technical 
*power* of electronics has motivated many  strange acts 
detailed in this book, which would otherwise be 
inexplicable.

	So Bell had power beyond mere capitalism.  The Bell 
service  ethos worked, and was often propagandized, in a 
rather saccharine fashion.  Over the decades,  people 
slowly grew tired of this.   And then, openly impatient with 
it.  By the early 1980s, Ma Bell was to find herself with 
scarcely a real friend in the world.   Vail's industrial 
socialism had become hopelessly out-of-fashion 
politically.  Bell would be punished for that.  And that 
punishment would fall harshly upon the people of the 
telephone community.

					#
	 
	In 1983, Ma Bell was dismantled by federal court 
action.  The pieces of Bell are now separate corporate 
entities.  The core of the company became AT&T 
Communications, and also AT&T  Industries (formerly 
Western Electric, Bell's manufacturing arm).  AT&T Bell 
Labs become Bell Communications Research, Bellcore.  
Then there are the Regional Bell Operating Companies, 
or  RBOCs, pronounced "arbocks."

	Bell was a titan and even these regional chunks are 
gigantic enterprises:  Fortune 50 companies with plenty of 
wealth and power behind them.     But the clean lines of 
"One Policy, One System, Universal Service" have been 
shattered, apparently forever.

	The "One Policy" of the early Reagan Administration 
was to shatter a system that smacked of noncompetitive 
socialism.  Since that time, there has been no real 
telephone "policy" on the federal level.  Despite the 
breakup, the remnants of Bell have never been set free to 
compete in the open marketplace.

	The RBOCs are still very heavily regulated, but not 
from the top.  Instead, they struggle politically, 
economically and legally, in what seems an endless 
turmoil, in a patchwork of overlapping federal and state 
jurisdictions.   Increasingly, like other major American 
corporations, the RBOCs  are becoming multinational, 
acquiring important commercial interests in Europe, Latin 
America, and the Pacific Rim.  But this, too, adds to their 
legal and political predicament. 
  
	The people of what used to be Ma Bell are not happy 
about their fate.  They feel ill-used.  They might have been 
grudgingly willing to make a full transition to the free 
market; to become just companies amid other companies.  
But this never happened.   Instead,  AT&T and the RBOCS 
("the Baby Bells")  feel themselves wrenched from side to 
side by state regulators, by Congress, by the FCC,  and 
especially by the federal court of Judge Harold Greene, 
the magistrate who ordered the Bell breakup and who has 
been the de facto czar of American telecommunications 
ever since 1983. 
  
	Bell people feel that they exist in a kind of paralegal 
limbo today.   They don't understand what's demanded of 
them.   If it's "service," why aren't they treated like a public 
service?  And if it's money, then why aren't they free to 
compete for it?  No one seems to know, really.   Those who 
claim to know  keep changing their minds.  Nobody in 
authority seems willing to grasp the nettle for once and all.

	Telephone people from other countries are amazed 
by the American telephone system today.  Not that it 
works so well; for nowadays even the French telephone 
system works, more or less.  They are amazed that the 
American telephone system *still*  works *at all,* under 
these strange conditions.

	Bell's  "One System" of long-distance service is now 
only about eighty percent of a system, with the remainder 
held by Sprint, MCI, and the midget long-distance 
companies.   Ugly wars over dubious corporate practices 
such as "slamming" (an underhanded method of snitching 
clients from rivals) break out with some regularity in the 
realm of long-distance service.  The battle to break Bell's 
long-distance monopoly was long and ugly, and since the 
breakup the battlefield has not become much prettier.  
AT&T's famous shame-and-blame advertisements, which 
emphasized the shoddy work and purported ethical 
shadiness of their competitors,  were much remarked on 
for their studied psychological cruelty.

	There is much bad blood in this industry, and much 
long-treasured resentment.  AT&T's post-breakup 
corporate logo, a striped sphere, is known in the industry 
as the "Death Star"  (a reference from the movie *Star 
Wars,* in which the "Death Star" was the spherical  high-
tech fortress of the harsh-breathing  imperial ultra-baddie, 
Darth Vader.)   Even AT&T employees are less than 
thrilled by the Death Star.   A popular (though banned) T-
shirt among AT&T employees bears the old-fashioned 
Bell logo of the Bell System, plus the newfangled striped 
sphere, with the before-and-after comments:  "This is your 
brain -- This is your brain on drugs!"   AT&T made a very 
well-financed and determined effort to break into the 
personal computer market;  it was disastrous, and telco 
computer experts are derisively known by their 
competitors as "the pole-climbers."  AT&T and the Baby 
Bell arbocks still seem to have few friends.

	Under conditions of sharp commercial competition, a 
crash like that of January 15, 1990 was a major 
embarrassment to AT&T.  It was a direct blow against their 
much-treasured reputation for reliability.   Within days of 
the crash AT&T's Chief Executive Officer, Bob Allen, 
officially apologized, in terms of deeply pained  humility:

	"AT&T had a major service disruption last Monday.  
We didn't live up to our own standards of quality, and we 
didn't live up to yours. It's as simple as that.  And that's not 
acceptable to us.  Or to you.... We understand how much 
people have come to depend upon AT&T service, so our 
AT&T Bell Laboratories scientists and our network 
engineers are doing everything possible to guard against a 
recurrence.... We know there's no way to make up for the 
inconvenience this problem may have caused you."

	Mr Allen's "open letter to customers" was printed in 
lavish ads all over the country:  in the *Wall Street 
Journal,*  *USA Today,*  *New York Times,*
*Los Angeles Times,*  *Chicago Tribune,* *Philadelphia 
Inquirer,*  *San Francisco Chronicle Examiner,* *Boston 
Globe,*  *Dallas Morning News,* *Detroit Free Press,* 
*Washington Post,* *Houston Chronicle,* *Cleveland
Plain Dealer,* *Atlanta Journal Constitution,* 
*Minneapolis Star Tribune,* *St. Paul Pioneer Press 
Dispatch,*  *Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer,*
*Tacoma News Tribune,* *Miami Herald,* *Pittsburgh 
Press,*  *St. Louis Post Dispatch,* *Denver Post,* *Phoenix 
Republic Gazette* and *Tampa Tribune.*

	In another press release, AT&T went to some pains to 
suggest that this "software glitch" *might* have happened 
just as easily to MCI, although, in fact, it hadn't.  (MCI's 
switching software was quite different from AT&T's -- 
though not necessarily any safer.)   AT&T also announced 
their plans to offer a rebate of service on Valentine's Day 
to make up for the loss during the Crash.
    
	"Every technical resource available, including Bell 
Labs scientists and engineers, has been devoted to 
assuring it will not occur again," the public was told.  They 
were further assured that "The chances of a recurrence 
are small--a problem of this magnitude never occurred 
before."
 
	In the meantime, however, police and corporate 
security maintained their own suspicions about "the 
chances of recurrence" and the real reason why a 
"problem of this magnitude" had appeared, seemingly out 
of nowhere.   Police and security knew for a fact that 
hackers of unprecedented sophistication were illegally 
entering, and reprogramming, certain digital switching 
stations.  Rumors of hidden "viruses" and secret "logic 
bombs" in the switches ran rampant in the underground, 
with much chortling over AT&T's predicament, and idle 
speculation over what unsung hacker genius was 
responsible for it.  Some hackers, including police 
informants, were trying hard to finger one another as the 
true culprits  of the Crash. 

	Telco people found little comfort in objectivity when 
they contemplated these possibilities.   It was just too close 
to the bone for them; it was embarrassing; it hurt so much, 
it was hard even to talk about. 

	There has always been thieving and misbehavior in 
the phone system.  There has always been trouble with the 
rival independents, and in the local loops.  But to have 
such trouble in the core of the system, the long-distance 
switching stations, is a horrifying affair.   To telco people, 
this is all the difference between finding roaches in your 
kitchen and big horrid sewer-rats in your bedroom.

	From the outside, to the average citizen, the telcos 
still seem gigantic and impersonal.  The American public 
seems to regard them as something akin to Soviet 
apparats.  Even when the telcos  do their best corporate-
citizen routine,  subsidizing magnet high-schools and 
sponsoring news-shows on public television, they seem to 
win little except public suspicion.

	But from the inside, all this looks very different.  
There's harsh competition.  A legal and political system 
that seems baffled  and bored, when not actively hostile to 
telco interests.  There's a loss of morale, a deep sensation 
of having somehow lost the upper hand.  Technological 
change has caused a loss of data and revenue to other, 
newer forms of transmission.   There's theft, and new 
forms of theft, of growing scale and boldness and 
sophistication.  With all these factors, it was no surprise to 
see the telcos, large and small, break out in a litany of 
bitter complaint.

	In late '88 and throughout 1989, telco representatives 
grew shrill in their complaints to those few American law 
enforcement officials who make it their business to try to 
understand what telephone people are talking about.   
Telco security officials had discovered the computer-
hacker underground, infiltrated it thoroughly, and 
become deeply alarmed at its growing expertise.  Here 
they had found a target that was not only loathsome on its 
face, but clearly ripe for counterattack. 

	 Those bitter rivals: AT&T, MCI and Sprint -- and a 
crowd of Baby Bells:  PacBell, Bell South, Southwestern 
Bell, NYNEX, USWest, as well as the Bell research 
consortium Bellcore, and the independent long-distance 
carrier  Mid-American  -- all were to have their role in the 
great hacker dragnet of 1990.   After years of being 
battered and pushed around, the telcos had, at least in a 
small way, seized the initiative again.  After years of 
turmoil, telcos and government officials were once again 
to work smoothly in concert in defense of the System.   
Optimism blossomed; enthusiasm grew on all sides; the 
prospective taste of vengeance was sweet.

					#

	From the beginning -- even before the crackdown 
had a name -- secrecy was a big problem.  There were 
many good reasons for secrecy in the hacker crackdown.   
Hackers and code-thieves were wily prey, slinking back to 
their bedrooms and basements and destroying vital 
incriminating evidence at the first hint of trouble.   
Furthermore, the crimes themselves were heavily 
technical and difficult to describe, even to police -- much 
less to the general public.
 
	 When such crimes *had* been described intelligibly 
to the public, in the past, that very publicity had tended to 
*increase* the crimes enormously.   Telco officials, while 
painfully aware of the vulnerabilities of their systems, were 
anxious not to publicize those weaknesses.   Experience 
showed them that those weaknesses, once discovered,  
would be pitilessly exploited by tens of thousands of 
people -- not only by professional grifters and by 
underground hackers and phone phreaks, but by many 
otherwise more-or-less honest everyday folks, who 
regarded stealing service from the faceless, soulless 
"Phone Company" as a kind of harmless indoor sport.   
When it came to protecting their interests, telcos had long 
since given up on general public sympathy for "the Voice 
with a Smile."  Nowadays the telco's "Voice" was very likely 
to be a computer's; and the American public showed 
much less of the proper respect and gratitude due the fine 
public service bequeathed them by Dr. Bell and Mr. Vail.   
The more efficient, high-tech, computerized, and 
impersonal the telcos became, it seemed, the more they 
were met by sullen public resentment and amoral greed.

	Telco officials wanted to punish the phone-phreak 
underground,  in as public and exemplary a manner as 
possible.  They wanted to make dire examples of the worst 
offenders, to seize the ringleaders and intimidate the 
small fry, to discourage and frighten the wacky hobbyists, 
and send the professional grifters to jail.  To do all this, 
publicity was vital.
 
	Yet operational secrecy was even more so.  If word got 
out that a nationwide crackdown was coming, the hackers 
might simply vanish; destroy the evidence, hide their 
computers, go to earth, and wait for the campaign to blow 
over.  Even the young  hackers were crafty and suspicious, 
and as for the professional grifters, they tended to split for 
the nearest state-line at the first sign of trouble.  For the 
crackdown to work well, they would all have to be caught 
red-handed, swept upon suddenly, out of the blue, from 
every corner of the compass.

	And there was another strong motive for secrecy.  In 
the worst-case scenario, a blown campaign might leave 
the telcos open to a devastating hacker counter-attack.   If 
there were indeed hackers loose in America  who had 
caused the January 15 Crash -- if there were truly gifted 
hackers, loose in the nation's long-distance switching 
systems, and enraged or frightened by the crackdown -- 
then they might react unpredictably to an attempt to 
collar them.   Even if caught, they might have talented and 
vengeful friends still running around loose.   Conceivably, 
it could turn ugly.  Very ugly.  In fact, it was hard to 
imagine just how ugly things might turn, given that 
possibility.

	Counter-attack from hackers was a genuine concern 
for the telcos.  In point of fact, they would never suffer any 
such counter-attack.  But in months to come, they would 
be at some pains to publicize this notion and to utter grim 
warnings about it.

	Still, that risk seemed well worth running.  Better to 
run the risk of vengeful attacks, than to live at the mercy of 
potential crashers.  Any cop would tell you that a 
protection racket had no real future. 

	 And publicity was such a useful thing.   Corporate 
security officers, including telco security,  generally work 
under conditions of great discretion.  And corporate 
security officials do not make money for their companies. 
Their job is to *prevent the loss* of money, which is much 
less glamorous than actually winning profits.
  
	If you are a corporate security official, and you do 
your job brilliantly, then nothing bad happens to your 
company at all.  Because of this, you appear completely 
superfluous.   This is one of the many unattractive aspects 
of security work.   It's rare that these folks have the chance 
to draw some healthy attention to their own efforts.

	Publicity also served the interest of their friends in 
law enforcement.  Public officials, including law 
enforcement officials,  thrive by attracting favorable 
public interest.  A brilliant prosecution in a matter of vital 
public interest  can make the career of a prosecuting 
attorney.  And for a police officer, good publicity opens the 
purses of the legislature; it may bring a citation, or a 
promotion, or at least a rise in status and the respect of 
one's peers.

	But to have both publicity and secrecy is to have 
one's cake and eat it too.  In months to come, as we will 
show, this impossible act was to cause great pain to the 
agents of the crackdown.  But early on, it seemed possible 
-- maybe even likely -- that the crackdown could 
successfully combine the best of both worlds.   The 
*arrest* of hackers would be heavily publicized.  The 
actual *deeds* of the hackers, which were technically hard 
to explain and also a security risk, would be left decently 
obscured.   The *threat* hackers posed would be heavily 
trumpeted; the likelihood of their actually committing 
such fearsome crimes would be left to the public's 
imagination.  The spread of the computer underground, 
and its growing technical sophistication, would be heavily 
promoted;  the actual hackers themselves, mostly 
bespectacled middle-class white suburban teenagers, 
would be denied any personal publicity.
  
	It does not seem to have occurred to any telco official 
that the hackers accused would demand a day in court;  
that journalists would smile upon the hackers as "good 
copy;"  that wealthy high-tech entrepreneurs would offer 
moral and financial support to crackdown victims; that 
constitutional lawyers would show up with briefcases, 
frowning mightily.   This possibility does not seem to have 
ever entered the game-plan.

	And even if it had, it probably would not have slowed 
the ferocious pursuit of a stolen phone-company 
document, mellifluously known as "Control Office 
Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special 
Services and Major Account Centers."

	In the chapters to follow, we will explore the worlds of 
police and the computer underground, and the large 
shadowy area where they overlap.   But first, we must 
explore the battleground.  Before we leave the world of the 
telcos, we must understand what a switching system 
actually is and how your telephone actually works.

					#

	To the average citizen, the idea of the telephone is 
represented by, well,  a *telephone:*  a device that you talk 
into.  To a telco professional, however, the telephone itself 
is known, in lordly fashion, as a "subset."   The "subset" in 
your house is a mere adjunct, a distant nerve ending, of 
the central switching stations, which are ranked in levels of 
heirarchy, up to the  long-distance electronic switching 
stations, which are some of the largest computers on 
earth.

	Let us imagine that it is, say, 1925,  before the 
introduction of computers, when the phone system was 
simpler and somewhat easier to grasp.   Let's further 
imagine that you are Miss Leticia Luthor, a fictional 
operator for Ma Bell in New York City of the 20s.
  
	Basically, you, Miss Luthor, *are* the "switching 
system."  You are sitting in front of a large vertical 
switchboard, known as a "cordboard," made of shiny 
wooden panels, with ten thousand metal-rimmed holes 
punched in them, known as jacks.  The engineers would 
have put more holes into your switchboard, but ten 
thousand is as many as you can reach without actually 
having to get up out of your chair.

	 Each of these ten thousand holes has its own little 
electric lightbulb, known as a "lamp," and its own neatly 
printed number code.

	 With the ease of long habit, you are scanning your 
board for lit-up bulbs.  This is what you do most of the 
time, so you are used to it.

	  A lamp lights up.  This means that the phone at the 
end of that line has been taken off the hook.   Whenever a 
handset is taken off the hook, that closes a circuit inside 
the phone which then signals the local office, i.e. you,  
automatically.  There might be somebody calling, or then 
again the phone might be simply off the hook, but this 
does not matter to you yet.  The first thing you do, is record 
that number in your logbook, in your fine American 
public-school handwriting.   This comes first, naturally, 
since it is done for billing purposes.

	You now take the plug of your answering cord, which 
goes directly to your headset, and plug it into the lit-up 
hole.  "Operator," you announce.

	In operator's classes, before taking this job, you have 
been issued a large pamphlet full of canned operator's 
responses for all kinds of contingencies, which you had to 
memorize.  You have also been trained in a proper non-
regional, non-ethnic pronunciation and tone of voice.  You 
rarely  have the occasion to make any spontaneous 
remark to a customer, and in fact this is frowned upon 
(except out on the rural lines where people  have time on 
their hands and get up to all kinds of mischief).
 
	A tough-sounding user's voice at the end of the line 
gives you a number.  Immediately, you write that number 
down in your logbook, next to the caller's number, which 
you just wrote earlier.  You then look and see if the 
number this guy wants is in fact on your switchboard, 
which it generally is, since it's generally a local call.  Long 
distance costs so much that people use it sparingly.

	Only then do you pick up a calling-cord from a shelf 
at the base of the switchboard.  This is a long elastic cord 
mounted on a kind of reel so that it will zip back in when 
you unplug it.  There are a lot of cords down there, and 
when a bunch of them are out at once they look like a nest 
of snakes.  Some of the girls think there are bugs living in 
those cable-holes.  They're called "cable mites" and are 
supposed to bite your hands and give you rashes.  You 
don't believe this, yourself.

	Gripping the head of your calling-cord, you slip the 
tip of it deftly into the sleeve of the jack for the called 
person.  Not all the way in, though.  You just touch it.  If 
you hear a clicking sound, that means the line is busy and 
you can't put the call through.  If the line is busy, you have 
to stick the calling-cord into a "busy-tone jack," which will 
give the guy a busy-tone.  This way you don't have to talk to 
him yourself and absorb his natural human frustration.

	But the line isn't busy.  So you pop the cord all the 
way in.   Relay circuits in your board make the distant 
phone ring, and if somebody picks it up off the hook, then 
a phone conversation starts.   You can hear this 
conversation on your answering cord, until you unplug it.   
In fact you could listen to the whole conversation if you 
wanted, but this is sternly frowned upon by management, 
and frankly, when you've overheard one, you've pretty 
much heard 'em all. 

	 You can tell how long the conversation lasts by the 
glow of the calling-cord's lamp, down on the calling-cord's 
shelf.   When it's over, you unplug and the calling-cord 
zips back into place.

	Having done this stuff a few hundred thousand times, 
you become quite good at it.  In fact you're plugging, and 
connecting, and disconnecting, ten, twenty, forty cords at a 
time.  It's a manual handicraft, really, quite satisfying in a 
way, rather like weaving on an upright loom.

	Should a long-distance call come up, it would be 
different, but not all that different.  Instead of connecting 
the call through your own local switchboard, you have to 
go up the hierarchy, onto the long-distance lines, known as 
"trunklines."  Depending on how far the call goes, it may 
have to work its way through a whole series of operators, 
which can take quite a while.   The caller doesn't wait on 
the line while this complex process is negotiated across 
the country by the gaggle of operators.   Instead, the caller 
hangs up, and you call him back yourself when the call has 
finally worked its way through.

	After four or five years of this work, you get married, 
and you have to quit your job, this being the natural order 
of womanhood in the American 1920s.  The phone 
company has to train somebody else -- maybe two people, 
since the phone system has grown somewhat in the 
meantime.  And this costs money.

	In fact, to use any kind of human being as a switching 
system is a very expensive proposition.   Eight thousand 
Leticia Luthors would be bad enough, but a quarter of a 
million of them is a military-scale proposition and makes 
drastic measures in automation financially worthwhile.

	Although the phone system continues to grow today, 
the number of human beings employed by telcos has 
been dropping steadily for years.  Phone "operators" now 
deal with nothing but unusual contingencies, all routine 
operations having been shrugged off onto machines.  
Consequently, telephone operators are considerably less 
machine-like nowadays,  and have been known to have 
accents and actual character in their voices.  When you 
reach a human operator today, the operators are rather 
more "human" than they were in Leticia's day -- but on the 
other hand, human beings in the phone system are much 
harder to reach in the first place.

	Over the first half of the twentieth century, 
"electromechanical" switching systems of growing 
complexity were cautiously introduced into the phone 
system.  In certain backwaters, some of these hybrid 
systems are still in use.  But after 1965, the phone system 
began to go completely electronic, and this is by far the 
dominant mode today.  Electromechanical systems have 
"crossbars," and "brushes," and other large moving 
mechanical parts, which, while faster and cheaper than 
Leticia, are still slow, and tend to wear out fairly quickly.

	But fully electronic systems are inscribed on silicon 
chips, and are lightning-fast, very cheap, and quite 
durable.   They are much cheaper to maintain than even 
the best electromechanical systems, and they fit into half 
the space.   And with every year, the silicon chip grows 
smaller, faster, and cheaper yet.  Best of all,  automated 
electronics work around the clock and don't have salaries 
or health insurance.

	There are, however, quite serious drawbacks to the 
use of computer-chips.   When they do break down, it is a 
daunting challenge to figure out what the heck has gone 
wrong with them.  A broken cordboard generally had a 
problem in it big enough to see.  A broken chip has 
invisible, microscopic faults.  And the faults in bad 
software can be so subtle as to be practically theological.

	If you want a mechanical system to do something 
new, then you must travel to where it is, and pull pieces out 
of it, and wire in new pieces.  This costs money.  However, 
if you want a chip to do something new, all you have to do 
is change its software, which is easy, fast and dirt-cheap.  
You don't even have to see the chip to change its program.  
Even if you did see the chip, it wouldn't look like much.  A 
chip with program X doesn't look one whit different from a 
chip with program Y. 

	With the proper codes and sequences, and access to 
specialized phone-lines, you can change electronic 
switching systems all over America from anywhere you 
please.

	And so can other people.  If they know how, and if 
they want to, they can sneak into a  microchip via the 
special phonelines and diddle with it, leaving no physical 
trace at all.  If they broke into the operator's station and 
held Leticia at gunpoint, that would be very obvious.  If 
they broke into a telco building and went after an 
electromechanical switch with a toolbelt, that would at 
least leave many traces.  But people can do all manner of 
amazing things to computer switches just by typing on a 
keyboard, and keyboards are everywhere today.  The 
extent of this vulnerability is deep, dark, broad, almost 
mind-boggling, and yet this is a basic, primal fact of life 
about any computer on a network. 
     
	Security experts over the past twenty years have 
insisted, with growing urgency, that this basic vulnerability 
of computers represents an entirely new level of risk, of 
unknown but obviously dire potential to society.   And they 
are right. 
  
	An electronic switching station does pretty much 
everything Letitia did, except in nanoseconds and on a 
much larger scale.  Compared to Miss Luthor's ten 
thousand jacks, even a primitive 1ESS switching computer, 
60s vintage,  has a 128,000 lines.   And the current AT&T 
system of choice is the monstrous fifth-generation 5ESS.

	 An Electronic Switching Station can scan every line 
on its "board" in a tenth of a second, and it does this over 
and over, tirelessly, around the clock.  Instead of eyes, it 
uses "ferrod scanners" to check the condition of local lines 
and trunks.  Instead of hands, it has "signal distributors," 
"central pulse distributors," "magnetic latching relays," 
and "reed switches," which complete and break the calls.  
Instead of a brain, it has a "central processor."   Instead of 
an instruction manual, it has a program.   Instead of a 
handwritten logbook for recording and billing calls, it has 
magnetic tapes. And it never has to talk to anybody.  
Everything a customer might say to it is done by punching 
the direct-dial tone buttons on your subset.

	Although an Electronic Switching Station can't talk, it 
does need an interface, some way to relate to its, er, 
employers.   This interface is known as the "master control 
center."  (This interface might be better known simply as 
"the interface," since it doesn't actually "control" phone 
calls directly.  However, a term like "Master Control 
Center" is just the kind of rhetoric that telco maintenance 
engineers  -- and hackers -- find particularly satisfying.)

	Using the master control center, a phone engineer 
can test local and trunk lines for malfunctions.  He (rarely 
she) can check various alarm displays, measure traffic on 
the lines, examine the records of telephone usage and the 
charges for those calls, and change the programming.

	And, of course, anybody else who gets into the master 
control center by remote control can also do these things, 
if he (rarely she) has managed to figure them out, or, more 
likely, has somehow swiped the knowledge from people 
who already know.

	In 1989 and 1990, one particular RBOC, BellSouth, 
which felt particularly troubled, spent a purported $1.2 
million on computer security.   Some think it spent as 
much as two million, if you count all the associated costs.  
Two million dollars is still very little compared to the great 
cost-saving utility of telephonic computer systems.
  
	Unfortunately, computers are also stupid.  Unlike 
human beings, computers  possess the truly profound 
stupidity of the inanimate.

	 In the 1960s, in the first shocks of spreading 
computerization, there was much easy talk about the 
stupidity of computers -- how they could "only follow the 
program" and were rigidly required to do "only what they 
were told."   There has been rather less talk about the 
stupidity of computers since they began to achieve 
grandmaster status in chess tournaments, and to manifest 
many other impressive forms of apparent cleverness.

	  Nevertheless, computers *still* are profoundly 
brittle and stupid; they are simply vastly more subtle in 
their stupidity and brittleness.   The computers of the 
1990s are much more reliable in their components than 
earlier computer systems, but they are also called upon to 
do far more complex things, under far more challenging 
conditions.

	On a basic mathematical level, every single line of a 
software program offers a chance for some possible 
screwup.   Software does not sit still when it works; it "runs," 
it interacts with itself and with its own inputs and outputs.  
By analogy, it stretches like putty into millions of possible 
shapes and conditions, so many shapes that they can 
never all be successfully tested, not even in the lifespan of 
the universe.  Sometimes the putty snaps.

	The stuff we call "software" is not like anything that 
human society is used to thinking about.  Software is 
something like a machine, and something like 
mathematics, and something like language, and 
something like thought, and art, and information....  but 
software is not in fact any of those other things.   The 
protean quality of software is one of the great sources of its 
fascination.  It also makes software very powerful, very 
subtle, very unpredictable, and very risky.

	Some software is bad and buggy.  Some is "robust," 
even "bulletproof."  The best software is that which has 
been tested by thousands of users under thousands of 
different conditions, over years.  It is then known as 
"stable."   This does *not* mean that the software is now 
flawless, free of bugs.  It generally means that there are 
plenty of bugs in it, but the bugs are well-identified and 
fairly well understood.

	 There is simply no way to assure that software is free 
of flaws.  Though software is mathematical in nature, it 
cannot by "proven" like a mathematical theorem; software 
is more like language, with inherent ambiguities, with 
different definitions, different assumptions, different 
levels of meaning that can conflict.

	 Human beings can manage, more or less, with 
human language because we can catch the gist of it.
   
	Computers, despite years of effort in "artificial 
intelligence," have proven spectacularly bad in "catching 
the gist" of anything at all.  The tiniest bit of semantic grit 
may still bring the mightiest computer tumbling down.  
One of the most hazardous things you can do to a 
computer program is try to improve it -- to try to make it 
safer.  Software "patches" represent new, untried un-
"stable" software, which is by definition riskier.

	The modern telephone system has come to depend, 
utterly and irretrievably, upon software.  And the System 
Crash of January 15, 1990, was caused by an 
*improvement* in software.  Or rather, an *attempted* 
improvement.
   
	As it happened, the problem itself -- the problem per 
se  --  took this form.  A piece of telco software had been 
written in C language, a standard language of the telco 
field.  Within the C software was a long "do... while" 
construct.  The "do... while" construct contained a "switch" 
statement.  The "switch" statement contained an "if" 
clause.  The "if" clause contained a "break."  The "break" 
was *supposed* to "break" the "if clause."  Instead, the 
"break" broke the "switch" statement.

	That was the problem, the actual reason why people 
picking up phones on January 15, 1990, could not talk to 
one another.

	Or at least, that was the subtle, abstract, cyberspatial 
seed of the problem.  This is how the problem manifested 
itself from the realm of programming into the realm of 
real life. 
   
	The System 7 software for AT&T's 4ESS switching 
station, the "Generic 44E14 Central Office Switch 
Software," had been extensively tested, and was 
considered very stable.   By the end of 1989, eighty of 
AT&T's switching systems nationwide had been 
programmed with the new software.  Cautiously, thirty-
four stations were left to run the slower, less-capable 
System 6, because AT&T suspected there might be 
shakedown problems with the new and unprecedently 
sophisticated System 7 network.

	The stations with System 7 were programmed to 
switch over to a backup net in case of any problems.  In 
mid-December 1989, however, a new high-velocity, high-
security software patch was distributed to each of the 4ESS 
switches that would enable them to switch over even more 
quickly, making the System 7 network that much more 
secure.
   	
	Unfortunately, every one of these 4ESS switches was 
now in possession of a small but deadly flaw.

	 In order to maintain the network, switches must 
monitor the condition of other switches -- whether they are 
up and running, whether they have temporarily shut down, 
whether they are overloaded and in need of assistance, 
and so forth.  The new software helped control this 
bookkeeping function by monitoring the status calls from 
other switches. 
 
	It only takes four to six seconds for a troubled 4ESS 
switch to rid itself of all its calls, drop everything 
temporarily, and re-boot its software from scratch.   
Starting over from scratch will generally rid the switch of 
any software problems that may have developed in the 
course of running the system.   Bugs that arise will be 
simply wiped out by this process.  It is a clever idea.   This 
process of automatically re-booting from scratch is known 
as the "normal fault recovery routine."   Since AT&T's 
software is in fact exceptionally stable, systems rarely have 
to go into "fault recovery" in the first place;  but AT&T has 
always boasted of its "real world" reliability, and this tactic 
is a belt-and-suspenders routine.

	The 4ESS switch used its new software to monitor its 
fellow switches as they recovered from faults.   As other 
switches came back on line after recovery, they would 
send their "OK" signals to the switch.   The switch would 
make a little note to that effect in its "status map," 
recognizing that the fellow switch was back and ready to 
go, and should be sent some calls and put back to regular 
work. 
  
	Unfortunately, while it was busy bookkeeping with 
the status map, the tiny flaw in the brand-new software 
came into play.  The flaw caused the 4ESS switch to 
interacted, subtly but drastically, with incoming telephone 
calls from human users.  If -- and only if -- two incoming 
phone-calls happened to hit the switch within a hundredth 
of a second,  then a small patch of data would be garbled 
by the flaw.
  
	But the switch had been programmed to monitor 
itself constantly for any possible damage to its data.  
When the switch perceived that its data had been 
somehow  garbled, then it too would go down, for swift 
repairs to its software.  It would signal its fellow switches 
not to send any more work.  It would go into the fault-
recovery mode for four to six seconds.  And then the switch 
would be fine again, and would send out its "OK, ready for 
work" signal.

	However, the "OK, ready for work" signal was the 
*very thing that had caused the   switch to go down in the 
first place.*  And *all* the System 7 switches had the same 
flaw in their status-map software.  As soon as they stopped 
to make  the bookkeeping note that their fellow switch was 
"OK," then they too would become vulnerable to the slight 
chance that two phone-calls would hit them within a 
hundredth of a second. 
     
	At approximately 2:25 p.m. EST on Monday, January 
15, one of AT&T's 4ESS toll switching systems in New York 
City had an actual, legitimate, minor problem.  It went into 
fault recovery routines, announced "I'm going down," then 
announced, "I'm back, I'm OK."   And this cheery message 
then blasted throughout the network to many of its fellow 
4ESS switches.

	Many of the switches, at first, completely escaped 
trouble.  These lucky switches were not hit by the 
coincidence of two phone calls within a hundredth of a 
second.   Their software did not fail -- at first.  But  three 
switches -- in Atlanta, St. Louis, and Detroit --  were 
unlucky, and were caught with their hands full.  And they 
went down.  And they came back up, almost immediately.  
And they too began to broadcast the lethal message that 
they, too, were "OK" again, activating the lurking software 
bug in yet other switches.
 
	As more and more switches did have that bit of bad 
luck and collapsed, the call-traffic became more and more 
densely packed in the remaining switches, which were 
groaning to keep up with the load.   And of course, as the 
calls became more densely packed, the switches were 
*much more likely* to be hit twice within a hundredth of a 
second.

	It only took four seconds for a switch to get well.  
There was no *physical* damage of any kind to the 
switches, after all.   Physically, they were working perfectly.  
This situation was "only" a software problem.
   
	But the 4ESS switches were leaping up and down 
every four to six seconds, in a virulent spreading wave all 
over America,  in utter, manic, mechanical stupidity.  They 
kept *knocking*  one another down with their contagious 
"OK" messages.
 
	It took about ten minutes for the chain reaction to 
cripple the network.  Even then, switches would 
periodically luck-out and manage to resume their normal 
work.  Many calls -- millions of them -- were managing to 
get through.  But millions weren't.
  
	The switching stations that used System 6 were not 
directly affected.  Thanks to these old-fashioned switches,  
AT&T's national system avoided complete collapse.  This 
fact also made it clear to engineers that System 7 was at 
fault.

	Bell Labs engineers, working feverishly in New 
Jersey, Illinois, and Ohio, first tried their entire repertoire 
of standard network remedies on the malfunctioning 
System 7.  None of the remedies worked, of course, 
because nothing like this had ever happened to any 
phone system before.

	By cutting out the backup safety network entirely, 
they were able to reduce the frenzy of "OK" messages by 
about half.  The system then began to recover, as the 
chain reaction slowed.   By 11:30 pm on Monday January 
15, sweating engineers on the midnight shift breathed a 
sigh of relief as the last switch cleared-up.

	By Tuesday they were pulling all the brand-new 4ESS 
software and replacing it with an earlier version of System 
7. 
   
	If these had been human operators, rather than 
computers at work, someone would simply have 
eventually stopped screaming.  It would have been 
*obvious* that the situation was not "OK," and common 
sense would have kicked in.   Humans possess common 
sense -- at least to some extent.   Computers simply don't.

 	On the other hand, computers can handle hundreds 
of calls per second.  Humans simply can't.   If every single 
human being in America worked for the phone company, 
we couldn't match the performance of digital switches:  
direct-dialling, three-way calling, speed-calling, call-
waiting, Caller ID, all the rest of the cornucopia of digital 
bounty.   Replacing computers with operators is simply not 
an option any more.

	And yet we still, anachronistically,  expect humans to 
be running our phone system.   It is hard for us to 
understand that we have sacrificed huge amounts of 
initiative and control to senseless yet powerful machines.   
When the phones fail, we want somebody to be 
responsible.  We want somebody to blame.
  
	When the Crash of January 15 happened, the 
American populace was simply not prepared to 
understand that enormous landslides in cyberspace, like 
the Crash itself, can happen, and can be nobody's fault in 
particular.   It was easier to believe, maybe even in some 
odd way more reassuring to believe, that some evil person, 
or evil group, had done this to us.  "Hackers" had done it.  
With a virus.   A trojan horse.  A software bomb.  A dirty 
plot of some kind.   People believed this, responsible 
people.  In 1990, they were looking hard for evidence to 
confirm their heartfelt suspicions.

	And they would look in a lot of places.

	Come 1991, however, the outlines of an apparent new 
reality would begin to emerge from the fog.
  
	On July 1 and 2, 1991, computer-software collapses in 
telephone switching stations disrupted service in 
Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and San 
Francisco.   Once again, seemingly minor maintenance 
problems had crippled the digital System 7.  About twelve 
million people were affected in the Crash of July 1, 1991. 
 
	Said the New York Times Service:  "Telephone 
company executives and federal regulators said they were 
not ruling out the possibility of sabotage by computer 
hackers, but most seemed to think the problems stemmed 
from some unknown defect in the software running the 
networks."

	And sure enough, within the week, a red-faced 
software company, DSC Communications Corporation of 
Plano, Texas, owned up to "glitches" in the "signal transfer 
point" software that DSC had designed for Bell Atlantic 
and Pacific Bell.  The immediate cause of the July 1 Crash 
was a single mistyped character:  one tiny typographical 
flaw in one single line of the software.  One mistyped 
letter, in one single line, had deprived the nation's capital 
of phone service.  It was not particularly surprising that 
this tiny flaw had escaped attention: a typical System 7 
station requires *ten million* lines of code.
  
	On Tuesday, September 17, 1991, came the most 
spectacular outage yet.   This case had nothing to do with 
software failures -- at least, not directly.  Instead, a group 
of AT&T's switching stations in New York City had simply 
run out of electrical power and shut down cold.  Their  
back-up batteries had failed.  Automatic warning systems 
were supposed to warn of the loss of battery power, but 
those automatic systems had failed as well.

	This time, Kennedy, La Guardia, and Newark airports 
all had their voice and data communications cut.   This 
horrifying event was particularly ironic, as attacks on 
airport computers by hackers had long been a standard 
nightmare scenario, much trumpeted by computer-
security experts who feared the computer underground.   
There had even been a Hollywood thriller about sinister 
hackers ruining airport computers -- *Die Hard II.* 
  
	Now AT&T itself had crippled airports with computer 
malfunctions  -- not just one airport, but three at once, 
some of the busiest in the world.
 
	Air traffic came to a standstill throughout the Greater 
New York area, causing more than 500 flights to be 
cancelled, in a spreading wave all over America and even 
into Europe.  Another 500 or so flights were delayed, 
affecting, all in all, about 85,000 passengers.  (One of these 
passengers was the chairman of the Federal 
Communications Commission.) 

	Stranded passengers in New York and New Jersey 
were further infuriated to discover that they could not 
even manage to make a long distance phone call, to 
explain their delay to loved ones or business associates.   
Thanks to the crash, about four and a half million 
domestic calls, and half a million international calls, failed 
to get through.

	The September 17 NYC Crash, unlike the previous 
ones, involved not a whisper of "hacker" misdeeds.  On the 
contrary,  by 1991, AT&T itself was suffering much of the 
vilification that had formerly been directed at hackers.   
Congressmen were grumbling.  So were state and federal 
regulators.  And so was the press.
  
	For their part, ancient rival MCI took out snide full-
page newspaper ads in New York, offering their own long-
distance services for the "next time that AT&T goes down."

	"You wouldn't find a classy company like AT&T using 
such advertising," protested AT&T Chairman Robert 
Allen, unconvincingly.  Once again, out came the full-page 
AT&T apologies in newspapers, apologies for "an 
inexcusable culmination of both human and mechanical 
failure."   (This time, however, AT&T offered no discount 
on later calls.  Unkind critics suggested that AT&T were 
worried about setting any precedent for refunding the 
financial losses caused by telephone crashes.) 

	Industry journals asked  publicly if AT&T was "asleep 
at the switch."   The telephone network, America's 
purported marvel of high-tech reliability,  had gone down 
three times in 18 months.  *Fortune* magazine listed the 
Crash of September 17 among the "Biggest Business 
Goofs of 1991,"  cruelly parodying AT&T's ad campaign in 
an article entitled "AT&T Wants You Back (Safely On the 
Ground, God Willing)." 

	Why had those New York switching systems simply 
run out of power?  Because no human being had attended 
to the alarm system.  Why did the alarm systems blare 
automatically, without any human being noticing?  
Because the three telco technicians who *should* have 
been listening were absent from their stations in the 
power-room, on another floor of the building -- attending a 
training class.  A training class about the alarm systems for 
the power room!

	"Crashing the System" was no longer 
"unprecedented" by late 1991.   On the contrary, it no 
longer even seemed an oddity.   By 1991, it was clear that 
all the policemen in the world could no longer "protect" 
the phone system from crashes.   By far the worst crashes 
the system had ever had, had been inflicted, by the 
system, upon *itself.*  And this time nobody was making 
cocksure statements that this was an anomaly, something 
that would never happen again.   By 1991 the System's 
defenders had met their nebulous Enemy, and the Enemy 
was -- the System.
 
