Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling (i have read the book TXT) 📕

are legitimate. You can then coax, flatter, or frighten them into revealing almost anything you want to know. Deceiving people (especially over the phone) is easy and fun. Exploiting their gullibility is very gratifying; it makes you feel very superior to them.

If I’d been a malicious hacker on a trashing raid, I would now have Evelyn very much in my power. Given all this inside data, it wouldn’t take much effort at all to invent a convincing lie. If I were ruthless enough, and jaded enough, and clever enough, this momentary indiscretion of hers—maybe committed in tears, who knows—could cause her a whole world of confusion and grief.

I didn’t even have to have a MALICIOUS motive. Maybe I’d be “on her side,” and call up Bob instead, and anonymously threaten to break both his kneecaps if he didn’t take Evelyn out for a steak dinner pronto. It was still profoundly NONE OF MY BUSINESS. To have gotten this knowledge at all was a sordid act and to use it would be to inflict a sordid injury.

To do all these awful things would require exactly zero high-tech expertise. All it would take was the willingness to do it and a certain amount of bent imagination.

I went back downstairs. The hardworking FCIC, who had labored forty-five minutes over their schedule, were through for the day, and adjourned to the hotel bar. We all had a beer.

I had a chat with a guy about “Isis,” or rather IACIS, the International Association of Computer Investigation Specialists. They’re into “computer forensics,” the techniques of picking computer-systems apart without destroying vital evidence. IACIS, currently run out of Oregon, is comprised of investigators in the U.S., Canada, Taiwan and Ireland. “Taiwan and Ireland?” I said. Are TAIWAN and IRELAND really in the forefront of this stuff? Well not exactly, my informant admitted. They just happen to have been the first ones to have caught on by word of mouth. Still, the international angle counts, because this is obviously an international problem. Phonelines go everywhere.

There was a Mountie here from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He seemed to be having quite a good time. Nobody had flung this Canadian out because he might pose a foreign security risk. These are cyberspace cops. They still worry a lot about “jurisdictions,” but mere geography is the least of their troubles.

NASA had failed to show. NASA suffers a lot from computer intrusions, in particular from Australian raiders and a well-trumpeted Chaos Computer Club case, and in 1990 there was a brief press flurry when it was revealed that one of NASA’s Houston branch-exchanges had been systematically ripped off by a gang of phone-phreaks. But the NASA guys had had their funding cut. They were stripping everything.

Air Force OSI, its Office of Special Investigations, is the ONLY federal entity dedicated full-time to computer security. They’d been expected to show up in force, but some of them had cancelled—a Pentagon budget pinch.

As the empties piled up, the guys began joshing around and telling war-stories. “These are cops,” Thackeray said tolerantly. “If they’re not talking shop they talk about women and beer.”

I heard the story about the guy who, asked for “a copy” of a computer disk, PHOTOCOPIED THE LABEL ON IT. He put the floppy disk onto the glass plate of a photocopier. The blast of static when the copier worked completely erased all the real information on the disk.

Some other poor souls threw a whole bag of confiscated diskettes into the squad-car trunk next to the police radio. The powerful radio signal blasted them, too.

We heard a bit about Dave Geneson, the first computer prosecutor, a mainframe-runner in Dade County, turned lawyer. Dave Geneson was one guy who had hit the ground running, a signal virtue in making the transition to computer-crime. It was generally agreed that it was easier to learn the world of computers first, then police or prosecutorial work. You could take certain computer people and train ‘em to successful police work—but of course they had to have the COP MENTALITY. They had to have street smarts. Patience. Persistence. And discretion. You’ve got to make sure they’re not hot-shots, show-offs, “cowboys.”

Most of the folks in the bar had backgrounds in military intelligence, or drugs, or homicide. It was rudely opined that “military intelligence” was a contradiction in terms, while even the grisly world of homicide was considered cleaner than drug enforcement. One guy had been ‘way undercover doing dope-work in Europe for four years straight. “I’m almost recovered now,” he said deadpan, with the acid black humor that is pure cop. “Hey, now I can say FUCKER without putting MOTHER in front of it.”

“In the cop world,” another guy said earnestly, “everything is good and bad, black and white. In the computer world everything is gray.”

One guy—a founder of the FCIC, who’d been with the group since it was just the Colluquy—described his own introduction to the field. He’d been a Washington DC homicide guy called in on a “hacker” case. From the word “hacker,” he naturally assumed he was on the trail of a knife-wielding marauder, and went to the computer center expecting blood and a body. When he finally figured out what was happening there (after loudly demanding, in vain, that the programmers “speak English”), he called headquarters and told them he was clueless about computers. They told him nobody else knew diddly either, and to get the hell back to work.

So, he said, he had proceeded by comparisons. By analogy. By metaphor. “Somebody broke in to your computer, huh?” Breaking and entering; I can understand that. How’d he get in? “Over the phonelines.” Harassing phone-calls, I can understand that! What we need here is a tap and a trace!

It worked. It was better than nothing. And it worked a lot faster when he got hold of another cop who’d done something similar. And then the two of them got another, and another, and pretty soon the Colluquy was a happening thing. It helped a lot that everybody seemed to know Carlton Fitzpatrick, the data-processing trainer in Glynco.

The ice broke big-time in Memphis in ‘86. The Colluquy had attracted a bunch of new guys—Secret Service, FBI, military, other feds, heavy guys. Nobody wanted to tell anybody anything. They suspected that if word got back to the home office they’d all be fired. They passed an uncomfortably guarded afternoon.

The formalities got them nowhere. But after the formal session was over, the organizers brought in a case of beer. As soon as the participants knocked it off with the bureaucratic ranks and turf-fighting, everything changed. “I bared my soul,” one veteran reminisced proudly. By nightfall they were building pyramids of empty beer-cans and doing everything but composing a team fight song.

FCIC were not the only computer-crime people around. There was DATTA (District Attorneys’ Technology Theft Association), though they mostly specialized in chip theft, intellectual property, and black-market cases. There was HTCIA (High Tech Computer Investigators Association), also out in Silicon Valley, a year older than FCIC and featuring brilliant people like Donald Ingraham. There was LEETAC (Law Enforcement Electronic Technology Assistance Committee) in Florida, and computer-crime units in Illinois and Maryland and Texas and Ohio and Colorado and Pennsylvania. But these were local groups. FCIC were the first to really network nationally and on a federal level.

FCIC people live on the phone lines. Not on bulletin board systems—they know very well what boards are, and they know that boards aren’t secure. Everyone in the FCIC has a voice-phone bill like you wouldn’t believe. FCIC people have been tight with the telco people for a long time. Telephone cyberspace is their native habitat.

FCIC has three basic sub-tribes: the trainers, the security people, and the investigators. That’s why it’s called an “Investigations Committee” with no mention of the term “computer-crime”—the dreaded “C-word.” FCIC, officially, is “an association of agencies rather than individuals;” unofficially, this field is small enough that the influence of individuals and individual expertise is paramount. Attendance is by invitation only, and most everyone in FCIC considers himself a prophet without honor in his own house.

Again and again I heard this, with different terms but identical sentiments. “I’d been sitting in the wilderness talking to myself.” “I was totally isolated.” “I was desperate.” “FCIC is the best thing there is about computer crime in America.” “FCIC is what really works.” “This is where you hear real people telling you what’s really happening out there, not just lawyers picking nits.” “We taught each other everything we knew.”

The sincerity of these statements convinces me that this is true. FCIC is the real thing and it is invaluable. It’s also very sharply at odds with the rest of the traditions and power structure in American law enforcement. There probably hasn’t been anything around as loose and go-getting as the FCIC since the start of the U.S. Secret Service in the 1860s. FCIC people are living like twenty-first-century people in a twentieth-century environment, and while there’s a great deal to be said for that, there’s also a great deal to be said against it, and those against it happen to control the budgets.

I listened to two FCIC guys from Jersey compare life histories. One of them had been a biker in a fairly heavy-duty gang in the 1960s. “Oh, did you know so-and-so?” said the other guy from Jersey. “Big guy, heavyset?”

“Yeah, I knew him.”

“Yeah, he was one of ours. He was our plant in the gang.”

“Really? Wow! Yeah, I knew him. Helluva guy.”

Thackeray reminisced at length about being tear-gassed blind in the November 1969 antiwar protests in Washington Circle, covering them for her college paper. “Oh yeah, I was there,” said another cop. “Glad to hear that tear gas hit somethin’. Haw haw haw.” He’d been so blind himself, he confessed, that later that day he’d arrested a small tree.

FCIC are an odd group, sifted out by coincidence and necessity, and turned into a new kind of cop. There are a lot of specialized cops in the world—your bunco guys, your drug guys, your tax guys, but the only group that matches FCIC for sheer isolation are probably the child-pornography people. Because they both deal with conspirators who are desperate to exchange forbidden data and also desperate to hide; and because nobody else in law enforcement even wants to hear about it.

FCIC people tend to change jobs a lot. They tend not to get the equipment and training they want and need. And they tend to get sued quite often.

As the night wore on and a band set up in the bar, the talk grew darker. Nothing ever gets done in government, someone opined, until there’s a DISASTER. Computing disasters are awful, but there’s no denying that they greatly help the credibility of FCIC people. The Internet Worm, for instance. “For years we’d been warning about that—but it’s nothing compared to what’s coming.” They expect horrors, these people. They know that nothing will really get done until there is a horror.

 

Next day we heard an extensive briefing from a guy who’d been a computer cop, gotten into hot water with an Arizona city council, and now installed computer networks for a living (at a considerable rise in pay). He talked about pulling fiber-optic networks apart.

Even a single computer, with enough peripherals, is a literal “network”—a bunch of machines all cabled together, generally with a complexity that puts stereo units to shame. FCIC people invent and publicize methods of seizing computers and maintaining their evidence. Simple things, sometimes, but vital rules of thumb for street cops, who nowadays often stumble across a busy computer in the midst of a drug investigation or a white-collar bust. For instance: Photograph the system before you touch it. Label the ends of all the cables before you detach anything. “Park” the heads