street-crime techniques of lookouts and
bagholders that a crack gang would employ.  This was down-
and-dirty, urban, ethnic, organized crime, carried out by
crime
families every day, for cash on the barrelhead, in the harsh
world of the streets.  The finger-hackers dominated certain
payphones in certain strikingly unsavory neighborhoods.
They
provided a service no one else would give to a clientele
with
little to lose.

     With such a vast supply of electronic crime  at hand,
Don
Delaney rocketed from a background in homicide to teaching
telecom crime at FLETC in less than three years.  Few can
rival
Delaney's hands-on, street-level experience in phone fraud.
Anyone in 1993 who still believes telecommunications crime
to
be something rare and arcane should have a few words with
Mr Delaney.  Don Delaney has also written two fine essays,
on
telecom fraud and computer crime, in Joseph Grau's *Criminal
and Civil Investigations Handbook* (McGraw Hill 1993).

     *Phrack* was still publishing in 1993, now under the
able
editorship of Erik Bloodaxe.  Bloodaxe made a determined
attempt to get law enforcement and corporate security to pay
real money for their electronic copies of *Phrack,* but, as
usual, these stalwart defenders of intellectual property
preferred to pirate the magazine.  Bloodaxe has still not
gotten
back any of his property from the seizure raids of March 1,
1990.  Neither has the Mentor, who is still the managing
editor
of Steve Jackson Games.

     Nor has ъobert Izenberg, who has suspended his court
struggle to get his machinery back.  Mr Izenberg has
calculated
that his $20,000 of equipment seized in 1990 is, in 1993,
worth
$4,000 at most.  The missing software, also gone out his
door,
was long ago replaced.   He might, he says, sue for the sake
of
principle, but he feels that the people who seized his
machinery
have already been discredited, and won't be doing any more
seizures.  And even if his machinery were returned -- and in
good repair, which is doubtful -- it will  be essentially
worthless
by 1995.  ъobert Izenberg no longer works for IBM, but has a
job programming for a major telecommunications company in
Austin.

     Steve Jackson won his case against the Secret Service
on
March 12, 1993, just over three years after the federal raid
on
his enterprise.   Thanks to the delaying tactics available
through the legal doctrine of "qualified immunity," Jackson
was
tactically forced to drop his suit against the individuals
William
Cook, Tim Foley, Barbara Golden and Henry Kluepfel.   (Cook,
Foley, Golden and Kluepfel did, however, testify during the
trial.)

     The Secret Service fought vigorously in the case,
battling
Jackson's lawyers right down the line, on the (mostly
previously untried) legal turf of the Electronic
Communications
Privacy Act and the Privacy Protection Act of 1980.  The
Secret
Service denied they were legally or morally responsible for
seizing the work of a publisher.   They claimed that (1)
Jackson's gaming "books" weren't real books anyhow, and (2)
the Secret Service didn't realize SJG Inc was a "publisher"
when they raided his offices, and (3) the books only
vanished by
accident because they merely happened to be inside the
computers the agents were appropriating.

     The Secret Service also denied any wrongdoing in
reading and erasing all the supposedly "private" e-mail
inside
Jackson's seized board, Illuminati.  The USSS attorneys
claimed the seizure did not violate the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act, because they weren't actually
"intercepting" electronic mail that was moving on a wire,
but
only electronic mail that was quietly sitting on a disk
inside
Jackson's computer.  They also claimed that USSS agents
hadn't read any of the private mail on Illuminati; and
anyway,
even supposing that they had, they were allowed to do that
by
the subpoena.

     The Jackson case became even more peculiar when the
Secret Service attorneys went so far as to allege that the
federal raid against the gaming company had actually
*improved Jackson's business*  thanks to the ensuing
nationwide publicity.

     It was a long and rather involved trial.  The judge
seemed most perturbed, not by the arcane matters of
electronic
law, but by the fact that the Secret Service could have
avoided
almost all the consequent trouble simply by giving Jackson
his
computers back in short order.   The Secret Service easily
could
have looked at everything in Jackson's computers, recorded
everything, and given the machinery back, and there would
have been no major scandal or federal court suit.  On the
contrary, everybody simply would have had a good laugh.
Unfortunately, it appeared that this idea had never entered
the
heads of the Chicago-based investigators.  They seemed to
have concluded unilaterally, and without due course of law,
that the world would be better off if Steve Jackson didn't
have
computers.  Golden and Foley claimed that they had both
never
even heard of the Privacy Protection Act.  Cook had heard of
the Act, but he'd decided on his own that the Privacy
Protection
Act had nothing to do with Steve Jackson.

     The Jackson case was also a very politicized trial,
both
sides deliberately angling for a long-term legal precedent
that
would stake-out big claims for their interests in
cyberspace.
Jackson and his EFF advisors tried hard to establish that
the
least e-mail remark of the lonely electronic pamphleteer
deserves the same somber civil-rights protection as that
afforded *The New York Times.*  By stark contrast, the
Secret
Service's attorneys argued boldly that the contents of an
electronic bulletin board have no more expectation of
privacy
than a heap of postcards.  In the final analysis, very
little was
firmly nailed down.  Formally, the legal rulings in the
Jackson
case apply only in the federal Western District of Texas.
It
was, however, established that these were real civil-
liberties
issues that powerful people were prepared to go to the
courthouse over; the seizure of bulletin board systems,
though
it still goes on, can be a perilous act for the seizer.
The Secret
Service owes Steve Jackson $50,000 in damages, and a
thousand dollars each to three of Jackson's angry and
offended
board users.  And Steve Jackson, rather than owning the
single-line bulletin board system "Illuminati" seized in
1990,
now rejoices in possession of a huge privately-owned
Internet
node, "io.com," with dozens of phone-lines on its  own T-1
trunk.

     Jackson has made the entire blow-by-blow narrative of
his case available electronically, for interested parties.
And yet, the
Jackson case may still not be over; a Secret Service appeal
seems
likely and the EFF is also gravely dissatisfied with the
ruling on
electronic interception.

     The WELL, home of the American electronic civil
libertarian movement, added two thousand more users and
dropped its aging Sequent computer in favor of a snappy new
Sun Sparcstation.  Search-and-seizure discussions on the
WELL
are now taking a decided back-seat to the current hot topic
in
digital civil liberties, unbreakable public-key encryption
for
private citizens.

     The Electronic Frontier Foundation left its modest home
in Boston to move inside the Washington Beltway of the
Clinton Administration.  Its new executive director, ECPA
pioneer and longtime ACLU activist Jerry Berman, gained a
reputation of a man adept as dining with tigers, as the EFF
devoted its attention to networking at the highest levels of
the
computer and telecommunications industry.  EFF's pro-
encryption lobby and anti-wiretapping initiative were
especially impressive, successfully assembling a herd of
highly
variegated industry camels under the same EFF tent, in open
and powerful opposition to the electronic ambitions of the
FBI
and the NSA.

     EFF had transmuted at light-speed from an insurrection
to an institution.  EFF Co-Founder Mitch Kapor once again
sidestepped the bureaucratic consequences of his own
success,
by remaining in Boston and adapting the role of EFF guru and
gray eminence.   John Perry Barlow, for his part, left
Wyoming,
quit the ъepublican Party, and moved to New York City,
accompanied by his swarm of cellular phones.   Mike Godwin
left Boston for Washington as EFF's official legal adviser
to the
electronically afflicted.

     After the Neidorf trial, Dorothy Denning further proved
her firm scholastic independence-of-mind by speaking up
boldly on the usefulness and social value of federal
wiretapping.  Many civil libertarians, who regarded the
practice of wiretapping with deep occult horror,  were
crestfallen to the point of comedy when nationally known
"hacker sympathizer" Dorothy Denning sternly defended
police and public interests in official eavesdropping.
However,
no amount of public uproar seemed to swerve the "quaint" Dr.
Denning in the slightest.  She not only made up her own
mind,
she made it up in public and then stuck to her guns.

     In 1993, the stalwarts of the Masters of Deception,
Phiber
Optik, Acid Phreak and Scorpion, finally fell afoul of the
machineries of legal prosecution.  Acid Phreak and Scorpion
were sent to prison for six months, six months of home
detention, 750 hours of community service, and, oddly, a $50
fine for conspiracy to commit computer crime.  Phiber Optik,
the computer intruder with perhaps the highest public
profile in
the entire world, took the longest to plead guilty, but,
facing
the possibility of ten years in jail, he finally did so.  He
was
sentenced to a year and a day in prison.

     As for the Atlanta wing of the Legion of Doom, Prophet,
Leftist and Urvile...   Urvile now works for a software
company in Atlanta.  He is still on probation and still
repaying
his enormous fine.  In fifteen months, he will once again be
allowed to own a personal computer.  He is still a convicted
federal felon, but has not had any legal difficulties since
leaving
prison.  He has lost contact with Prophet and Leftist.
Unfortunately, so have I, though not through lack of honest
effort.

     Knight Lightning, now 24,  is a technical writer for
the federal government in Washington DC.  He has still not
been accepted into law school, but having spent more than
his
share of time in the company of attorneys, he's come to
think
that maybe an MBA would be more to the point.   He still
owes
his attorneys $30,000, but the sum is dwindling steadily
since he
is manfully working two jobs.  Knight Lightning customarily
wears a suit and tie and carries a valise.  He has a federal
security clearance.

     Unindicted *Phrack* co-editor Taran King is also a
technical writer in Washington DC,  and recently got
married.

     Terminus did his time, got out of prison, and currently
lives in Silicon Valley where he is running a full-scale
Internet
node, "netsys.com."   He programs professionally for a
company specializing in satellite links for the Internet.

     Carlton Fitzpatrick still teaches at the Federal Law
Enforcement Training Center, but FLETC found that the issues
involved in sponsoring and running a bulletin board system
are
rather more complex than they at first appear to be.

     Gail Thackeray  briefly considered going into private
security, but then changed tack, and joined the Maricopa
County District Attorney's Office (with a salary).  She is
still
vigorously prosecuting electronic racketeering in Phoenix,
Arizona.

     The fourth consecutive Computers, Freedom and Privacy
Conference will take place in March 1994 in Chicago.

     As for Bruce Sterling... well *8-).  I thankfully
abandoned
my brief career as  a true-crime journalist and wrote a new
science fiction novel, *Heavy Weather,* and assembled a new
collection of short stories, *Globalhead.*  I also write
nonfiction regularly,  for the popular-science column in
*The
Magazine of  Fantasy and Science Fiction.*

     I like life better on the far side of the boundary
between
fantasy and reality;  but I've come to recognize that
reality has
an unfortunate  way of annexing fantasy for its own
purposes.
That's why I'm on the Police Liaison Committee for  EFF-
Austin, a local electronic civil liberties group (eff-
austin@tic.com).  I don't think I will ever get over my
experience of the Hacker Crackdown, and I expect to be
involved in electronic civil liberties activism for the rest
of my
life.

     It wouldn't be hard to find material for another book
on
computer crime and civil liberties issues.   I truly believe
that I
could write another book much like this one, every year.
Cyberspace is very big.  There's a lot going on out there,
far
more than can be adequately covered by the tiny, though
growing, cadre of network-literate reporters.  I do wish I
could
do more work on this topic, because the various people of
cyberspace are an element of our society that definitely
requires
sustained study and attention.

     But there's only one of me, and I have a lot on my
mind,
and, like most science fiction writers, I have a lot more
imagination than discipline.  Having done my stint as an
electronic-frontier reporter, my hat is off to those
stalwart few
who do it every day.  I may return to this topic some day,
but I
have no real plans to do so.  However, I didn't have any
real
plans to write "Hacker Crackdown," either.  Things happen,
nowadays.  There are landslides in cyberspace.  I'll just
have to
try and stay alert and on my feet.

     The electronic landscape changes with astounding speed.
We are living through the fastest technological
transformation
in human history.  I was glad to have a chance to document
cyberspace during one moment in its long mutation; a kind of
strobe-flash of the maelstrom.  This book is already out-of-
date, though, and it will be quite obsolete in another five
years.
It seems a pity.

     However, in about fifty years, I think this book might
seem quite interesting.  And in a hundred years, this book
should seem mind-bogglingly archaic and bizarre, and will
probably seem far weirder to an audience in 2092 than it
ever
seemed to the contemporary readership.

     Keeping up in cyberspace requires a great deal of
sustained attention.   Personally, I keep tabs with the
milieu by
reading the invaluable electronic magazine  Computer
underground Digest  (tk0jut2@mvs.cso.niu.edu with the
subject
header: SUB CuD and a message that says:  SUB CuD your
name     your.full.internet@address).  I also read Jack
ъickard's
bracingly iconoclastic *Boardwatch  Magazine* for print news
of the BBS and online community.  And, needless to say, I
read
*Wired,* the first magazine of the 1990s that actually looks
and
acts like it really belongs in this decade.  There are other
ways
to learn, of course, but these three outlets will guide your
efforts very well.

     When I myself want to publish something electronically,
which I'm doing with increasing frequency, I generally put
it on
the gopher at Texas Internet Consulting, who are my, well,
Texan Internet consultants  (tic.com).  This book can be
found
there.  I think it is a worthwhile act to let this work go
free.

     From thence, one's bread floats out onto the dark
waters
of cyberspace, only to return someday, tenfold.  And of
course,
thoroughly soggy, and riddled with an entire amazing
ecosystem of bizarre and gnawingly hungry cybermarine life-
forms.  For this author at least, that's all that really
counts.

     Thanks for your attention  *8-)

     Bruce Sterling  bruces@well.sf.ca.us  -- New Years' Day
1994, Austin Texas