The birth of the Electronic Frontier Foundation was announced July 10, 1990. EFF is a group dedi-cated to protecting our constitutional rights; it was created as a response to a series of rude and unin-formed blunderings by the Secret Service in the witch hunt known as Operation Sundevil. By May, 1989, this "hacker hunt" had led 150 Secret Service agents to serve 28 search warrants in 14 cities. They seized 23,000 disks and 42 computers, often for in-appropriate reasons. E-mail was left undelivered. Public postings never made it to the screens of the computer community. Many innocent bystanders (as well as criminals) were arrested.
John Perry Barlow (author, retired cattle rancher, and a lyricist for the Grateful Dead), and computer guru Mitch Kapor, best known for writ-ing Lotus 1-2-3, were outraged by these events (and by their own run-ins with the FBI over stolen source code that was being distributed by the NuPrometheus League). They teamed up with attorney Harvey Silverglate who was known for taking on offbeat causes. Some yellow journalism by the Washington Post provided the publicity needed to attract Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple) and John Gilmore (of Sun Microsystems) who offered monetary support for the enterprise. It was at this point that the Steve Jackson inci-dent made the headlines. An Austin, Texas, pub-lisher of role-playing games, Jackson's business was raided by the Secret Service because one of his games, called GURPS Cyberpunk, had to do
with a kind of futuristic computer hacking. The Secret Service called Jackson's game "a handbook for computer crime." This was ludicrous, akin to arrest-ing Milton Bradley because they sell Chess, which teaches kids how to wage war.
Jackson's office equipment was confiscated, he was forced to lay off half his staff, and he very nearly went into bankruptcy. "Eventually," Jackson later wrote, "we got most of our property back (though some of it was damaged or destroyed). The Secret Service admitted that we'd never been a tar-get of their investigation."
Jackson sued the U.S. government (the Secret Service, two of its agents, and a Bellcore official were named in the suit) on charges that the Secret Service had violated his right to free speech during the office raid. Justice prevailed and the SS was held guilty. Jackson has, since made a role-playing game about the incident.
The summer of 1990 was filled with all sorts of similar surprises. There are the famous stories, the infamous ones, and the ones that barely made the back page. In the middle of August, thirteen New York young adults and minors were charged with felonies involving computer tampering, computer trespassing, and theft of
services. They had broken into the Pentagon's computers, among others, and got a whole load of law enforcers on their tail. $50,000 worth of computing equipment was seized, said to have been used by the hackers to do the break-ins. Dozens of stories like this were reported then quickly faded. Other tales and other hackers held more interest, like Acid Phreak and Phiber Optik, who became "celebrity hackers," speaking on behalf of the hacker community for various media. Phiber Optik was eventually arrested and sentenced to thirty-five hours of community service in'February, 1991. And the Craig M. Neidorf story made head-lines. We have already mentioned Neidorf (Knight Lightning) as one of the co-founders of Phrack. Nei-dorf published an (edited) internal BellSouth paper in Phrack and was quickly charged with interstate transport of stolen property, with a possible sen-tence of 60 years in jail and $122,000 in fines. What was particularly absurd was that the document was easily and legally available (though BellSouth declared it to be full of company secrets), and it talked about the BellSouth bureaucracy as it per-tained to 911 lines. Sixty years in jail for copyright infringement?
The EFF helped Neidorf through these troubled times (as they'd helped Steve Jackson, and would come to aid many hackers and crackers who'd been treated unfairly or with ignorance by the law). The U.S. dropped its case against Neidorf at the end of July, 1990.
There are dozens or hundreds of stories about hackers every year, and there have been for quite some time. Some are quickly forgotten; others pro-voke controversy. Such was the case on November 6,1992, when a group of hackers, peacefully con-vening in the food court of the Pentagon City Mall outside Washington, D.C., were bullied and man-handled by mall security personnel, Secret Service and FBI agents.
Hacking has had a long past and will continue to enjoy a prosperous and successful future because of people like us who enjoy seeing what secrets are out in the world, waiting to be unearthed.
