Crime & Puzzlement [3/8]

From

Max Belankov (2:5054/2.31)

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Date

1996-08-29T23:11Z

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PERM.LANGUAGE

Hello All!


=== Cut ===
******


Sometime in December 1988, a 21 year-old Atlanta-area Legion of
Doomster named The Prophet cracked a Bell South computer and
downloaded a three-page text file which outlined, in bureaucrat-ese
of surpassing opacity, the administrative procedures and
responsibilities for marketing, servicing, upgrading, and billing for
Bell South's 911 system.

A dense thicket of acronyms, the document was filled with passages
like:

"In accordance with the basic SSC/MAC strategy for provisioning, the
SSC/MAC will be  Overall Control Office (OCO) for all Notes to PSAP circuits
(official services)  and any  other services for this customer.  Training must be
scheduled for all  SSC/MAC involved  personnel during the pre-service stage
of the project."

And other such.

At some risk, I too have a copy of this document.  To read the whole
thing straight through without entering coma requires either a
machine or a human who has too much practice thinking like one.
Anyone who can understand it fully and fluidly has altered his
consciousness beyond the ability to ever again read Blake, Whitman,
or Tolstoy.  It is, quite simply, the worst writing I have ever tried to
read.

Since the document contains little of interest to anyone who is not a
student of advanced organizational sclerosis...that is, no access codes,
trade secrets, or proprietary information...I assume The Prophet only
copied this file as a kind of hunting trophy.  He had been to the heart
of the forest and had returned with this coonskin to nail to the barn
door.

Furthermore, he was proud of his accomplishment, and since such
trophies are infinitely replicable, he wasn't content to nail it to his
door alone.  Among the places he copied it was a UNIX bulletin
board (rather like the WELL) in Lockport, Illinois called Jolnet.

It was downloaded from there by a 20 year-old hacker and pre-law
student (whom I had met in the Harper's Forum) who called himself
Knight Lightning.  Though not a member of the Legion of Doom,
Knight Lightning and a friend, Taran King, also published from St.
Louis and his fraternity house at the University of Missouri a
worldwide hacker's magazine called Phrack.  (From phone phreak and
hack.)

Phrack was an unusual publication in that it was entirely virtual.  The
only time its articles hit paper was when one of its subscribers
decided to print out a hard copy.  Otherwise, its editions existed in
Cyberspace and took no physical form.

When Knight Lightning got hold of the Bell South document, he
thought it would amuse his readers and reproduced it in the next
issue of Phrack.  He had little reason to think that he was doing
something illegal.  There is nothing in it to indicate that it contains
proprietary or even sensitive information.  Indeed, it closely
resembles telco reference documents which have long been publicly
available.

However, Rich Andrews, the systems operator who oversaw the
operation of Jolnet, thought there might be something funny about
the document when he first ran across it in his system.  To be on the
safe side, he forwarded a copy of it to AT&T officials.  He was
subsequently contacted by the authorities, and he cooperated with
them fully.  He would regret that later.

On the basis of the forgoing, a Grand Jury in Lockport was persuaded
by the Secret Service in early February to hand down a seven count
indictment against The Prophet and Knight Lightning, charging
them, among other things, with interstate transfer of stolen property
worth more than $5,000.  When The Prophet and two of his Georgia
colleagues were arrested on February 7, 1990, the Atlanta papers
reported they faced 40 years in prison and a $2 million fine.  Knight
Lightning was arrested on February 15.

The property in question was the affore-mentioned blot on the
history of prose whose full title was A Bell South Standard Practice
(BSP) 660-225-104SV-Control Office Administration of Enhanced 911
Services for Special Services and Major Account Centers, March, 1988.

And not only was this item worth more than $5,000.00, it was worth,
according to the indictment and Bell South, precisely $79,449.00.  And
not a penny less.  We will probably never know how this figure was
reached or by whom, though I like to imagine an appraisal team
consisting of Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller, and Thomas Pynchon...

In addition to charging Knight Lightning with crimes for which he
could go to jail 30 years and be fined $122,000.00, they seized his
publication, Phrack, along with all related equipment, software and
data, including his list of subscribers, many of whom would soon lose
their computers and data for the crime of appearing on it.

I talked to Emmanuel Goldstein, the editor of 2600, another hacker
publication which has been known to publish purloined documents.
If they could shut down Phrack, couldn't they as easily shut down
2600?

He said, "I've got one advantage.  I come out on paper and the
Constitution knows   how to deal with paper."

In fact, nearly all publications are now electronic at some point in
their creation.  In a modern newspaper, stories written at the scene
are typed to screens and then sent by modem to a central computer.
This computer composes the layout in electronic type and the entire
product transmitted electronically to the presses.  There, finally, the
bytes become ink.

Phrack merely omitted the last step in a long line of virtual events.
However, that omission, and its insignificant circulation, left it
vulnerable to seizure based on content.  If the 911 document had been
the Pentagon Papers (another proprietary document) and Phrack the
New York Times, a completion of the analogy would have seen the
government stopping publication of the Times and seizing its every
material possession, from notepads to presses.

Not that anyone in the newspaper business seemed particularly
worried about such implications.  They, and the rest of the media
who bothered to report Knight Lightning's arrest were too obsessed
by what they portrayed as actual disruptions of emergency service
and with marvelling at the sociopathy of it.  One report expressed
relief that no one appeared to have died as a result of the
"intrusions."

> [По некотоpым данным, жеpтвы все-таки были.
>  Не могу пока сказать подpобнее, бо пpовеpяю эти данные. - MB]

Meanwhile, in Baltimore, the 911 dragnet snared Leonard Rose, aka
Terminus.  A professional computer consultant who specialized in
UNIX, Rose got a visit from the government early in February.  The
G-men forcibly detained his wife and children for six hours while
they interrogated Rose about the 911 document and ransacked his
system.

Rose had no knowledge of the 911 matter.  Indeed, his only
connection had been occasional contact with Knight Lightning over
several years...and admitted membership in the Legion of Doom.
However, when searching his hard disk for 911 evidence, they found
something else.  Like many UNIX consultants, Rose did have some
UNIX source code in his possession.   Furthermore, there was
evidence that he had transmitted some of it to Jolnet and left it there
for another consultant.

UNIX is a ubiquitous operating system, and though its main virtue is
its openness to amendment at the source level, it is nevertheless the
property of AT&T.  What had been widely d  istributed within
businesses and universities for years was suddenly, in Rose's hands,
a felonious possession.

Finally, the Secret Service rewarded the good citizenship of Rich
Andrews by confiscating the computer where Jolnet had dwelt, along
with all the e-mail, read and un-read, which his subscribers had left
there.  Like the many others whose equipment and data were taken
by the Secret Service subsequently, he wasn't charged with anything.
Nor is he likely to be.  They have already inflicted on him the worst
punishment a nerd can suffer: data death.

Andrews was baffled.  "I'm the one that found it, I'm the one that
turned it in...And I'm the one that's suffering," he said.

One wonders what will happen when they find such documents on
the hard disks of CompuServe.  Maybe I'll just upload my copy of
Bell South Standard Practice (BSP) 660-225-104SV and see...

In any case, association with stolen data is all the guilt you need.  It's
quite as if the government could seize your house simply because a
guest left a stolen VCR in an upstairs bedroom closet.  Or confiscate
all the mail in a post office upon finding a stolen package there. The
first concept of modern jurisprudence to have arrived in Cyberspace
seems to have been Zero Tolerance.

=== Cut ===


                                 With best wishes,
           Max

Kime: Лесть - это агpессия на коленях.

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