The agents then bundled Blankenship into a car and it was off the Steve Jackson Games in the bleak light of dawn. The fact that this was a business headquarters, and not a private residence, did not deter the agents. It was still early; no one was at work yet. The agents prepared to break down the door, until Blankenship offered his key.
The exact details of the next events are unclear. The agents would not let anyone else into the building. Their search warrant, when produced, was unsigned. Apparently they breakfasted from the local "Whataburger," as the litter from hamburgers was later found inside. They also extensively sampled a bag of jellybeans kept by an SJG employee. Someone tore a "Dukakis for President" sticker from the wall.
SJG employees, diligently showing up for the day's work, were met at the door. They watched in astonishment as agents wielding crowbars and screwdrivers emerged with captive machines. The agents wore blue nylon windbreakers with "SECRET SERVICE" stencilled across the back, with running-shoes and jeans. Confiscating computers can be heavy physical work.
No one at Steve Jackson Games was arrested. No one was accused of any crime. There were no charges filed. Everything appropriated was officially kept as "evidence" of crimes never specified. Steve Jackson will not face a conspiracy trial over the contents of his science-fiction gaming book. On the contrary, the raid's organizers have been accused of grave misdeeds in a civil suit filed by EFF, and if there is any trial over GURPS Cyberpunk it seems likely to be theirs.
The day after the raid, Steve Jackson visited the local Secret Service headquarters with a lawyer in tow. There was trouble over GURPS Cyberpunk, which had been discovered on the hard-disk of a seized machine. GURPS Cyberpunk, alleged a Secret Service agent to astonished businessman Steve Jackson, was "a manual for computer crime."
"It's science fiction," Jackson said.
"No, this is real." This statement was repeated several times, by several agents. This is not a fantasy, no, this is real. Jackson's ominously accurate game had passed from pure, obscure, small-scale fantasy into the impure, highly publicized, large-scale fantasy of the hacker crackdown. No mention was made of the real reason for the search, the E911 document. Indeed, this fact was not discovered until the Jackson search-warrant was unsealed by his EFF lawyers, months later. Jackson was left to believe that his board had been seized because he intended to publish a science fiction book that law enforcement considered too dangerous to see print. This misconception was repeated again and again, for months, to an ever-widening audience. The effect of this statement on the science fiction community was, to say the least, striking.
GURPS Cyberpunk, now published and available from Steve Jackson Games (Box 18957, Austin, Texas 78760), does discuss some of the commonplaces of computer-hacking, such as searching through trash for useful clues, or snitching passwords by boldly lying to gullible users. Reading it won't make you a hacker, any more than reading Spycatcher will make you an agent of MI5. Still, this bold insistence by the Secret Service on its authenticity has made GURPS Cyberpunk the Satanic Verses of simulation gaming, and has made Steve Jackson the first martyr-to-the-cause for the computer world's civil libertarians.
From the beginning, Steve Jackson declared that he had committed no crime, and had nothing to hide. Few believed him, for it seemed incredible that such a tremendous effort by the government would be spent on someone entirely innocent.
Surely there were a few stolen long-distance codes in "Illuminati," a swiped credit-card number or two -- something. Those who rallied to the defense of Jackson were publicly warned that they would be caught with egg on their face when the real truth came out, "later." But "later" came and went. The fact is that Jackson was innocent of any crime. There was no case against him; his activities were entirely legal. He had simply been consorting with the wrong sort of people.
In fact he was the wrong sort of people. His attitude stank. He showed no contrition; he scoffed at authority; he gave aid and comfort to the enemy; he was trouble. Steve Jackson comes from subcultures -- gaming, science fiction -- that have always smelled to high heaven of troubling weirdness and deep-dyed unorthodoxy. He was important enough to attract repression, but not important enough, apparently, to deserve a straight answer from those who had raided his property and destroyed his livelihood.
The American law-enforcement community lacks the manpower and resources to prosecute hackers successfully, one by one, on the merits of the cases against them. The cyber-police to date have settled instead for a cheap "hack" of the legal system: a quasi-legal tactic of seizure and "deterrence." Humiliate and harass a few ringleaders, the philosophy goes, and the rest will fall into line. After all, most hackers are just kids. The few grown-ups among them are sociopathic geeks, not real players in the political and legal game. And in the final analysis, a small company like Jackson's lacks the resources to make any real trouble for the Secret Service.
But Jackson, with his conspiracy-soaked bulletin board and his seedy SF-fan computer-freak employees, is not "just a kid." He is a publisher, and he was battered by the police in the full light of national publicity, under the shocked gaze of journalists, gaming fans, libertarian activists and millionaire computer entrepreneurs, many of whom were not "deterred," but genuinely aghast.
"What," reasons the author, "is to prevent the Secret Service from carting off my word-processor as 'evidence' of some non-existent crime?"
"What would I do," thinks the small-press owner, "if someone took my laser-printer?"
Even the computer magnate in his private jet remembers his heroic days in Silicon Valley when he was soldering semi-legal circuit boards in a small garage.
Hence the establishment of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The sherriff had shown up in Tombstone to clean up that outlaw town, but the response of the citizens was swift and well-financed.
Steve Jackson was provided with a high-powered lawyer specializing in Constitutional freedom-of-the-press issues. Faced with this, a markedly un-contrite Secret Service returned Jackson's machinery, after months of delay -- some of it broken, with valuable data lost. Jackson sustained many thousands of dollars in business losses, from failure to meet deadlines and loss of computer-assisted production.
Half the employees of Steve Jackson Games were sorrowfully laid-off. Some had been with the company for years -- not statistics, these people, not "hackers" of any stripe, but bystanders, citizens, deprived of their livelihoods by the zealousness of the March 1 seizure. Some have since been re-hired -- perhaps all will be, if Jackson can pull his company out of its persistent financial hole. Devastated by the raid, the company would surely have collapsed in short order -- but SJG's distributors, touched by the company's plight and feeling some natural subcultural solidarity, advanced him money to scrape along.
In retrospect, it is hard to see much good for anyone at all in the activities of March 1. Perhaps the Jackson case has served as a warning light for trouble in our legal system; but that's not much recompense for Jackson himself. His own unsought fame may be helpful, but it doesn't do much for his unemployed co-workers. In the meantime, "hackers" have been vilified and demonized as a national threat. "Cyberpunk," a literary term, has become a synonym for computer criminal. The cyber-police have leapt where angels fear to tread. And the phone companies have badly overstated their case and deeply embarrassed their protectors.