"Illuminati" was prominently mentioned on the Phoenix Project. Phoenix users were urged to visit Illuminati, to discuss the upcoming "cyberpunk" game and possibly lend their expertise. It was also frankly hoped that they would spend some money on SJG games.
Illuminati and Phoenix had become two ripe pumpkins on the criminal vine.
Hacker busts were nothing new. They had always been somewhat problematic for the authorities. The offenders were generally high-IQ white juveniles with no criminal record. Public sympathy for the phone companies was limited at best. Trials often ended in puzzled dismissals or a slap on the wrist. But the harassment suffered by "the business community" -- always the best friend of law enforcement -- was real, and highly annoying both financially and in its sheer irritation to the target corporation.
Through long experience, law enforcement had come up with an unorthodox but workable tactic. This was to avoid any trial at all, or even an arrest. Instead, somber teams of grim police would swoop upon the teenage suspect's home and box up his computer as "evidence." If he was a good boy, and promised contritely to stay out of trouble forthwith, the highly expensive equipment might be returned to him in short order. If he was a hard-case, though, too bad. His toys could stay boxed-up and locked away for a couple of years.
The busts in Austin were an intensification of this tried-and-true technique. There were adults involved in this case, though, reeking of a hardened bad-attitude. The supposed threat to the 911 system, apparently posed by the E911 document, had nerved law enforcement to extraordinary effort. The 911 system is, of course, the emergency dialling system used by the police themselves. Any threat to it was a direct and insolent hacker menace to the electronic home-turf of American law enforcement.
Had Steve Jackson been arrested and directly accused of a plot to destroy the 911 system, the resultant embarrassment would likely have been sharp, but brief. The Chicago group, instead, chose total operational security. They may have suspected that their search for E911, once publicized, would cause that "dangerous" document to spread like wildfire throughout the underground. Instead, they allowed the misapprehension to spread that they had raided Steve Jackson to stop the publication of a book: GURPS Cyberpunk. This was a grave public-relations blunder which caused the darkest fears and suspicions to spread -- not in the hacker underground, but among the general public.
On March 1, 1990, 21-year-old hacker Chris Goggans (aka "Erik Bloodaxe") was wakened by a police revolver levelled at his head. He watched, jittery, as Secret Service agents appropriated his 300 baud terminal and, rifling his files, discovered his treasured source-code for the notorious Internet Worm. Goggans, a co-sysop of "Phoenix Project" and a wily operator, had suspected that something of the like might be coming. All his best equipment had been hidden away elsewhere. They took his phone, though, and considered hauling away his hefty arcade-style Pac-Man game, before deciding that it was simply too heavy. Goggans was not arrested. To date, he has never been charged with a crime. The police still have what they took, though.
Blankenship was less wary. He had shut down "Phoenix" as rumors reached him of a crackdown coming. Still, a dawn raid rousted him and his wife from bed in their underwear, and six Secret Service agents, accompanied by a bemused Austin cop and a corporate security agent from Bellcore, made a rich haul. Off went the works, into the agents' white Chevrolet minivan: an IBM PC-AT clone with 4 meg of RAM and a 120-meg hard disk; a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet II printer; a completely legitimate and highly expensive SCO-Xenix 286 operating system; Pagemaker disks and documentation; the Microsoft Word word-processing program; Mrs. Blankenship's incomplete academic thesis stored on disk; and the couple's telephone. All this property remains in police custody today.
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."