"There are several examples of how bulletin boards have been used in support of criminal activities.... (B)ulletin boards were used to relay illegally obtained access codes into computer service companies. Pedophiles have been known to leave suggestive messages on bulletin boards, and other sexually oriented messages have been found on bulletin boards. Members of cults and sects have also communicated through bulletin boards. While the storing of information on bulletin boards may not be illegal, the use of bulletin boards has certainly advanced many illegal activities."
Here is a troubling concept indeed: invisible electronic pornography, to be printed out at home and read by sects and cults. It makes a mockery of the traditional law-enforcement techniques concerning the publication and prosecution of smut. In fact, the prospect of large numbers of antisocial conspirators, congregating in the limbo of cyberspace without official oversight of any kind, is enough to trouble the sleep of anyone charged with maintaining public order.
Even the sternest free-speech advocate will likely do some headscratching at the prospect of digitized "anarchy files" teaching lock-picking, pipe-bombing, martial arts techniques, and highly unorthodox uses for shotgun shells, especially when these neat-o temptations are distributed freely to any teen (or pre-teen) with a modem.
These may be largely conjectural problems at present, but the use of bulletin boards to foment hacker mischief is real. Worse yet, the bulletin boards themselves are linked, sharing their audience and spreading the wicked knowledge of security flaws in the phone network, and in a wide variety of academic, corporate and governmental computer systems.
This strength of the hackers is also a weakness, however. If the boards are monitored by alert informants and/or officers, the whole wicked tangle can be seized all along its extended electronic vine, rather like harvesting pumpkins.
The war against hackers, including the "Cyberpunk Bust," was primarily a war against hacker bulletin boards. It was, first and foremost, an attack against the enemy's means of information.
This basic strategic insight supplied the tactics for the crackdown of 1990. The variant groups in the national subculture of cyber-law would be kept apprised, persuaded to action, and diplomatically martialled into effective strike position. Then, in a burst of energy and a glorious blaze of publicity, the whole nest of scofflaws would be wrenched up root and branch. Hopefully, the damage would be permanent; if not, the swarming wretches would at least keep their heads down.
"Operation Sundevil," the Phoenix-inspired crackdown of May 8,1990, concentrated on telephone code-fraud and credit-card abuse, and followed this seizure plan with some success. Boards went down all over America, terrifying the underground and swiftly depriving them of at least some of their criminal instruments. It also saddled analysts with some 24,000 floppy disks, and confronted harried Justice Department prosecutors with the daunting challenge of a gigantic nationwide hacker show-trial involving highly technical issues in dozens of jurisdictions. As of July 1991, it must be questioned whether the climate is right for an action of this sort, especially since several of the most promising prosecutees have already been jailed on other charges.
"Sundevil" aroused many dicey legal and constitutional questions, but at least its organizers were spared the spectacle of seizure victims loudly proclaiming their innocence -- (if one excepts Bruce Esquibel, sysop of "Dr. Ripco," an anarchist board in Chicago).
The activities of March 1, 1990, however, including the Jackson case, were the inspiration of the Chicago-based Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force. At telco urging, the Chicago group were pursuing the purportedly vital "E911 document" with headlong energy. As legal evidence, this proprietary Bell South document was to prove a very weak reed in the Craig Neidorf trial, which ended in a humiliating dismissal and a triumph for Neidorf. As of March 1990, however, this purloined data-file seemed a red-hot chunk of contraband, and the decision was made to track it down wherever it might have gone, and to shut down any board that had touched it -- or even come close to it.
In the meantime, however -- early 1990 -- Mr. Loyd Blankenship, an employee of Steve Jackson Games, an accomplished hacker, and a sometime member and file-writer for the Legion of Doom, was contemplating a "cyberpunk" simulation-module for the flourishing GURPS gaming-system.
The time seemed ripe for such a product, which had already been proven in the marketplace. The first games-company out of the gate, with a product boldly called "Cyberpunk" in defiance of possible infringement-of-copyright suits, had been an upstart group called R. Talsorian. Talsorian's "Cyberpunk" was a fairly decent game, but the mechanics of the simulation system sucked, and the nerds who wrote the manual were the kimd of half-hip twits who wrote their own fake rock lyrics and, worse yet, published them. The game sold like crazy, though.
The next "cyberpunk" game had been the even more successful "Shadowrun" by FASA Corporation. The mechanics of this game were fine, but the scenario was rendered moronic by lame fantasy elements like orcs, dwarves, trolls, magicians, and dragons -- all highly ideologically-incorrect, according to the hard-edged, high-tech standards of cyberpunk science fiction. No true cyberpunk fan could play this game without vomiting, despite FASA's nifty T-shirts and street-samurai lead figurines.
Lured by the scent of money, other game companies were champing at the bit. Blankenship reasoned that the time had come for a real "Cyberpunk" gaming-book -- one that the princes of computer-mischief in the Legion of Doom could play without laughing themselves sick. This book, GURPS Cyberpunk, would reek of culturally on-line authenticity.
Hot discussion soon raged on the Steve Jackson Games electronic bulletin board, the "Illuminati BBS." This board was named after a bestselling SJG card-game, involving antisocial sects and cults who war covertly for the domination of the world. Gamers and hackers alike loved this board, with its meticulously detailed discussions of pastimes like SJG's "Car Wars," in which souped-up armored hot-rods with rocket-launchers and heavy machine-guns do battle on the American highways of the future.
While working, with considerable creative success, for SJG, Blankenship himself was running his own computer bulletin board, "The Phoenix Project," from his house. It had been ages -- months, anyway -- since Blankenship, an increasingly sedate husband and author, had last entered a public phone-booth without a supply of pocket-change. However, his intellectual interest in computer-security remained intense. He was pleased to notice the presence on "Phoenix" of Henry Kluepfel, a phone-company security professional for Bellcore. Such contacts were risky for telco employees; at least one such gentleman who reached out to the hacker underground had been accused of divided loyalties and summarily fired. Kluepfel, on the other hand, was bravely engaging in friendly banter with heavy-dude hackers and eager telephone-wannabes. Blankenship did nothing to spook him away, and Kluepfel, for his part, passed dark warnings about "Phoenix Project" to the Chicago group. "Phoenix Project" glowed with the radioactive presence of the E911 document, passed there in a copy of Craig Neidorf's electronic hacker fan-magazine, Phrack.