Speaker 1: Again text with technology with tech Stuff from stuff works
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I
Speaker 1: am your host, Jonathan Strickland, executive producer at how Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: And in our last episode we started the story of
Speaker 1: Operation Sun Devil and how that leads into the formation
Speaker 1: of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. As it turned out, it's
Speaker 1: a much bigger story than I had originally anticipated, and
Speaker 1: thus necessitated two episodes to talk about this amazing story.
Speaker 1: So here is part two. I hope you guys enjoy,
Speaker 1: and I'm probably gonna start like mid sentence because we
Speaker 1: had to interrupt the last one right in the middle
Speaker 1: of somewhere. So let's go now. On Martin Luther King
Speaker 1: Junior Day in nine So, several months after this raid
Speaker 1: had happened, a T and T E crashed. There was
Speaker 1: a nationwide crash of a T and T S phone service,
Speaker 1: which since Fry Guy had mentioned the possibility of a
Speaker 1: phone service crashing nationwide on fourth of July and Martin
Speaker 1: Luther King Jr. Days another holiday, made the Secret Service
Speaker 1: totally flip out and suspect that the Legion of Doom
Speaker 1: was responsible, and so they stepped up surveillance of the
Speaker 1: group in general beyond the Atlanta three. Remember those are
Speaker 1: just three people who are in this larger hacker group.
Speaker 1: That's that's roster changed regularly. It's not like people would
Speaker 1: become a member of this hacker group for life. That
Speaker 1: list of members changed pretty frequently, uh, And there was
Speaker 1: a lot of turnover. People would go off and form
Speaker 1: splinter groups, or they would just drop out entirely. But
Speaker 1: the Legion of Doom had no responsibility for that phone crash. However,
Speaker 1: things were already getting out of control. There was this
Speaker 1: growing sense of unease and law enforcement. Hackers were getting
Speaker 1: access to critical infrastructure. Now, a lot of that fell
Speaker 1: onto the entities responsible for creating the infrastructure in the
Speaker 1: first place. So, for example, Bell South, which was really
Speaker 1: flipping out when discovered that hackers were reprogramming its digital
Speaker 1: switching systems, had pretty lousy security on some of their systems,
Speaker 1: particularly the Bell South that was focusing in the Atlanta
Speaker 1: and Georgia area. Georgia and Florida area, I should say
Speaker 1: they their security at the time was pretty terrible. They
Speaker 1: had entire phone the computer systems that were not even
Speaker 1: protected by passwords. So once you knew that the system
Speaker 1: existed and you found an entry way into it. It
Speaker 1: was pretty much free gain. And people argued, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: hackers are getting access to this infrastructure, but a large
Speaker 1: part of that is because there's no security on the
Speaker 1: infrastructure infrastructure side, So whose fault is that? Really there
Speaker 1: should be much better security. If you have a a
Speaker 1: bank and there's no back wall to the vault, then
Speaker 1: it's kind of hard to say that, Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: you should expect that money to be there the next
Speaker 1: the next day, and people just walk in through the
Speaker 1: back and take it. So there was definitely a shared
Speaker 1: responsibility here, although ultimately you could argue people who choose
Speaker 1: to infiltrate a system are ultimately responsible. But still there
Speaker 1: was it was complicated, and some folks said that it
Speaker 1: just felt like there was There was the thought of
Speaker 1: someone breaking into a system like that was just outside
Speaker 1: the realm of possibility, not because it was too difficult,
Speaker 1: but just because the system was considered to be so important.
Speaker 1: Who would have the temerity to go in and break
Speaker 1: into such a system. Once bell Seuth became aware that
Speaker 1: this was happening and that it had been going on
Speaker 1: for a while, it's just that again, most hackers were
Speaker 1: smart enough to cover their tracks. Fry Guy was just
Speaker 1: not one of them. The company agan to dedicate time
Speaker 1: and resources hiring on people and having them tracked down
Speaker 1: other instances of abuse. Now across the nation, law enforcement
Speaker 1: officials were closing in on various hackers, many of them teenagers,
Speaker 1: and the Secret Service really were focusing on Erville, Leftist
Speaker 1: and Profit. The Atlanta Three, those members of the Legion
Speaker 1: of Doom. They all three were infamous for exploring systems
Speaker 1: that they had no business being in. But unlike Fry Guy,
Speaker 1: they weren't interested in causing really mischief for stealing money.
Speaker 1: They just wanted to poke around to see what was
Speaker 1: going on. But one of them did do something supremely
Speaker 1: dumb that would cause huge issues for numerous other people.
Speaker 1: And the one who did something supremely dumb was Profit.
Speaker 1: So Erville was kind of a problem because he wasn't
Speaker 1: really considering anything that he had done to have been
Speaker 1: wrong in the first place, which was antagonizing his interrogators.
Speaker 1: But Profit had taken a trophy while exploring what was
Speaker 1: supposed to be a very private computer system, and that
Speaker 1: trophy is what would ultimately lead to a massive sting
Speaker 1: operation that would go far beyond the reach of the
Speaker 1: Secret Service. Now, this actually happened a little bit earlier.
Speaker 1: We had been talking about eighty nine and nine. But
Speaker 1: back in Profit had broken into a Bell South automation
Speaker 1: system called AMSX, which stood for Advanced Information Management System,
Speaker 1: and it was an internal business network at Bell South,
Speaker 1: not terribly interesting. It had a lot of files that
Speaker 1: people within Bell South might need access to. Think of
Speaker 1: like a company intranet has a lot of just you know,
Speaker 1: working documents that you would need access to for whatever reason,
Speaker 1: but nothing that's of particular interest to anyone on the
Speaker 1: outside necessarily. But getting into the system was tricky, not
Speaker 1: due to security because again and this was one of
Speaker 1: those systems that didn't even have password protection, but because
Speaker 1: it was largely invisible. There were no forward facing or
Speaker 1: public facing portals into the system. You had to get
Speaker 1: into a Bell South system and then from their log
Speaker 1: into this other computer system. Uh, it wasn't much of
Speaker 1: a problem for Profit. He was able to compromise a
Speaker 1: valid user I D and then he was able to
Speaker 1: access the am SX system that way, and he did
Speaker 1: so almost a dozen times, and as a trophy, he
Speaker 1: made a copy of a document that he came across.
Speaker 1: He wasn't looking for it, He just saw it and thought,
Speaker 1: I'll make a copy of this to prove that I
Speaker 1: was here. So I when I tell my hacker friends, hey,
Speaker 1: I broke into that system. This is the proof I
Speaker 1: will have. The document he copied was titled Bell South
Speaker 1: Standard Practice six six zero DASH two to five DASH
Speaker 1: one oh four s V Control Office, Administration of Enhance
Speaker 1: nine eleven Services for Special Services and Major Account Centers,
Speaker 1: and it was dated March. This is the e N
Speaker 1: one document, the Enhanced nine one services document. Then he
Speaker 1: made a copy of this document and he stored it
Speaker 1: on an account he had made on a Unix bulletin
Speaker 1: board system called Joel Net j O L n Et,
Speaker 1: and Joel Nett belonged to a guy named Richard Andrews,
Speaker 1: who would end up suffering a huge amount of grief
Speaker 1: for this. And you then have two unauthorized copies of
Speaker 1: this out in the wild, beyond the ones that actual
Speaker 1: BellSouth employees might have had access to. So real BELLSOFF
Speaker 1: employees may have had copies of this on their machines,
Speaker 1: which isn't terribly safe either, but profits certainly wasn't supposed
Speaker 1: to have it, and not only did he have a
Speaker 1: copy on his computer, yet now one on someone else's computer.
Speaker 1: That would be Richard Drew's computer, the one that was
Speaker 1: running this bulletin board system. Well, then Richard Andrews notices
Speaker 1: that there's this new account on joel Net that he
Speaker 1: doesn't recognize, and he gets a little suspicious about it.
Speaker 1: You know, he's the administrator of this bulletin board system,
Speaker 1: so he sees when stuff is going up or down
Speaker 1: on it, and he investigated and saw the copy of
Speaker 1: the document and figured something hinky was going on. So
Speaker 1: then he makes a copy of this file and he
Speaker 1: sends it to a friend of his who worked at
Speaker 1: A T and T. This would be a guy named
Speaker 1: Charles Boykin. Now Boykin was not in voice communication, that
Speaker 1: wasn't the department he worked in, but he immediately knew
Speaker 1: that the document was serious business. Boy can get a
Speaker 1: little upset because he's like, why are people messing with this?
Speaker 1: This is critical stuff? And he decided to consult with
Speaker 1: an A T and T corporate information security officer named
Speaker 1: Jerome Dalton. That meant that Boykin had to make another
Speaker 1: copy of the E nine one document. So you're seeing
Speaker 1: how this is starting to escalate. Dalton would in turn
Speaker 1: send a copy of the file to a telecommunications fraud
Speaker 1: expert named Henry Klipfel. But Clipfel was a happy cat.
Speaker 1: He figured this document was a hacker trophy. It wasn't
Speaker 1: meant to be a guide for some sort of nationwide catastrophe.
Speaker 1: He figured someone broke into the system. This was their
Speaker 1: proof that they did it. So he just kind of
Speaker 1: put it on the shelf and didn't really think about
Speaker 1: it again and wasn't too worried about it until later. Um,
Speaker 1: he just figured it was what it actually was. He
Speaker 1: would sell this for a while, although he would eventually
Speaker 1: become heavily involved in a response team a little bit
Speaker 1: later on. Now we've got a lot more to talk
Speaker 1: about for this whole series of events that would end
Speaker 1: up perpetuating a seriously a series of bad decisions that
Speaker 1: led to the formation of the FF which, by the way,
Speaker 1: it was not a bad decision. It's just that a
Speaker 1: bunch of bad decisions happened and the e f F
Speaker 1: had to come into creation because of it. But before
Speaker 1: I get into that part of the story, let's take
Speaker 1: another quick break and thank our sponsor. All right, let's
Speaker 1: get back to profit profit. What had decided that he
Speaker 1: was going to really revel in his victorious infiltration of
Speaker 1: the Bell South system. He was not aware of this
Speaker 1: leap frogging of the document that was going down the
Speaker 1: line being sent from one person to another, and an
Speaker 1: effort to figure out what exactly is going on here?
Speaker 1: He thought, I wanna, I want to really brag about this.
Speaker 1: This was a big achievement. How can I how can
Speaker 1: I let the community know that I have this this
Speaker 1: amazing document. Well, there was a journalist who was working
Speaker 1: on a publication, a digital publication called Frack. Fracks spelled
Speaker 1: with a pH, so it was a portmanteau of the
Speaker 1: words freak and hack and uh. The journalist used the
Speaker 1: handle night lightning and a night, as in like a
Speaker 1: man dressed up in big old armored underpants, that kind
Speaker 1: of night, which, by the way, you do not want
Speaker 1: to be a night when there's lightning around. That's a
Speaker 1: bad combination. Anyway, night Lightning was writing this publication called Frack,
Speaker 1: which was very popular. It was distributed to multiple bolletin
Speaker 1: board systems across the entire world, primarily the United States,
Speaker 1: but also beyond that, and night Lightning had been bothering
Speaker 1: the Atlanta Three for years about giving the giving the
Speaker 1: publication more information so they could publish stories about them.
Speaker 1: And typically the Atlanta Freight three weren't interested in doing that.
Speaker 1: They just didn't really play ball very much. But Profits
Speaker 1: saw this as being a great opportunity, and so a
Speaker 1: Profit sent a copy of the nine one file tonight Lightning.
Speaker 1: Night Lightning was going to the University of Missouri, and
Speaker 1: so this copy of E nine one one then goes
Speaker 1: on to a computer at the University of Missouri campus. Uh.
Speaker 1: Profit figured that he was pretty safe because no one
Speaker 1: had said anything to him and he wasn't aware of
Speaker 1: this other activity that was going on with the file
Speaker 1: at the time, and then he and night Lightning together
Speaker 1: started to edit down the document. They wanted to publish it. Well,
Speaker 1: night Lightning really wanted to publish it, but Profit was
Speaker 1: scared that one the information inside it could be put
Speaker 1: to malicious use and it could cause a catastrophe. I mean,
Speaker 1: it did involve the emergency phone system in the United States.
Speaker 1: That's a big deal. And two he didn't want anything
Speaker 1: that could ultimately be traced back to him so together
Speaker 1: they edited out all the sensitive information while keeping the
Speaker 1: rest of it as much as they could so that
Speaker 1: they could prove that, yes, this document did come from
Speaker 1: Bell South, but they leave out all the things like
Speaker 1: all the phone numbers for the various officers at Bell South,
Speaker 1: which were part of this document. They didn't want that
Speaker 1: to be revealed to the general public because then a
Speaker 1: bunch of hackers would end up just using those phone
Speaker 1: numbers for various malicious purposes. So they're trying to limit
Speaker 1: the amount of damage that could be done with this document,
Speaker 1: and Frank would end up publishing this edited document on
Speaker 1: February twenty nine. I remember July of that year would
Speaker 1: be when the raid would happen, so this is still
Speaker 1: before the raid that hit fry Guy profit or Vile
Speaker 1: and the Leftist. The Digital dogument was then published to
Speaker 1: one fifty different hacker sites or hacker bolton board systems
Speaker 1: would be more appropriate to say, so it got very
Speaker 1: wide distribution, even though this was an edited down version
Speaker 1: of that document, and at this point law enforcement and
Speaker 1: Bell South had totally gone eight. They flipped their collective lids.
Speaker 1: This is what helped fuel the move to the Legion
Speaker 1: of Doom and Fry Guy sweep At later on that year,
Speaker 1: on July two. It's what really motivated the Secret Service
Speaker 1: to make that make that sting operation. The intrusion was
Speaker 1: a huge problem, but the apparent distribution of what was
Speaker 1: considered a critical document was really the catastrophe in question.
Speaker 1: It It terrified people because here was a sensitive document
Speaker 1: about a critical service and who knows what could happen.
Speaker 1: As far as the Secret Service could tell, there was
Speaker 1: some sort of conspiracy going on among the hacker subculture
Speaker 1: to take down the phone system or the emergency phone
Speaker 1: system specifically, and it was a coordinated attack that was
Speaker 1: going across the nation. It was being spread around, and
Speaker 1: so the Secret Service was highly motivated to pursue this.
Speaker 1: The problem was that they weren't necessarily doing it in
Speaker 1: a way that was technically what you would call legal.
Speaker 1: As it turns out, So you have a a an
Speaker 1: arguably understandable motivation for the Secret Service. They really have
Speaker 1: to buckle down and make sure that the nation is safe.
Speaker 1: Uh You. There, you then have the more mischievous community
Speaker 1: of the hackers who are just kind of reveling in
Speaker 1: this thought that here's this private computer system that's supposed
Speaker 1: to be off limits, and yet a hacker strolled right
Speaker 1: in and took one of these files. Um and both
Speaker 1: groups had totally not really considered the other the motivations
Speaker 1: of the other one. So the hackers were mostly ignorant
Speaker 1: of what was going on with the Secret Service at
Speaker 1: this time, and the Secret Service was just imagining a
Speaker 1: worst case scenario in the case of the hackers, and
Speaker 1: it would lead to enormous problems further down the road.
Speaker 1: And we also know that if you take down a
Speaker 1: digital file once it's been put up online, that's it.
Speaker 1: It's out there. The genie is out of the bottle,
Speaker 1: the cat is out of the bag. You're not getting
Speaker 1: it back because someone's gonna make a copy of it
Speaker 1: and post it somewhere else. We've seen it with videos.
Speaker 1: We've seen it with tweets, We've seen it with social
Speaker 1: media posts, We've seen it with files. It's just once
Speaker 1: it goes up, all it takes is one other person
Speaker 1: to download it and then host it somewhere else and
Speaker 1: it's game over. Then the phone system would crash on January.
Speaker 1: This is after those rates with Fry Guy in the
Speaker 1: atlant A three, and it seemed to prove what Fry
Speaker 1: Guy had been saying. Fry Guy had said that the
Speaker 1: group of hackers, the Legion of Dooms, specifically, we're going
Speaker 1: to end up crashing the phone system. Now, he had
Speaker 1: said it was going to be on the fourth of
Speaker 1: July nine, and instead it happens on Martin Luther King
Speaker 1: Junior Day in nineteen and that's when the poo hit
Speaker 1: the oscillating cooling device, as they say. Three days later,
Speaker 1: January four, people would show up to night Lightning's frat
Speaker 1: house at the University of Missouri. Two of those people
Speaker 1: were Secret Service agents, one was an agent for Southwestern
Speaker 1: Bell and one was a University of Missouri security officer,
Speaker 1: and they accused night Lightning of causing this phone system crash,
Speaker 1: or at least coordinating it. Now, night Lightning had nothing
Speaker 1: to do with the phone system coming down, but, like
Speaker 1: lots of other hackers before, decided to cooperate fully within
Speaker 1: terry Gators, sharing an entire of the subscribers to the
Speaker 1: Fracking Newsletter, or the Frack Newsletter, i should say, and
Speaker 1: that gave law enforcement a ton of other leads to follow.
Speaker 1: Around that same time, agents were starting to do stuff
Speaker 1: that was really causing a lot of concern, not just
Speaker 1: in the hacking community, but in the broader computer industry community. So,
Speaker 1: for example, one target of this investigation was a guy
Speaker 1: named Robert Eisenberg who ran a node. A node is
Speaker 1: part of an interconnected system of message boards, so it's
Speaker 1: like a bolton Board system, but amped up because it
Speaker 1: could actually connect directly to other nodes. Bolton Board systems
Speaker 1: were kind of like an island, right. There was no
Speaker 1: connection directly to other bolton Board systems for the most part.
Speaker 1: There were some exceptions, but generally speaking, it was like
Speaker 1: an individual computer system that you would log into and
Speaker 1: that's all you saw. Nodes were more like web pages
Speaker 1: on the Internet, though not quite as sophisticated as that,
Speaker 1: so sort of somewhere in between a bolton Board system
Speaker 1: and a web page, but they could interconnect with each
Speaker 1: other and allow for direct communication and file transfers between them.
Speaker 1: So Eisenberg was running a node that was a a
Speaker 1: Unix node. It was called Elephant. Eisenberg was targeted because
Speaker 1: a task force out of Chicago, a very active task
Speaker 1: force that was largely responsible for leading some of these
Speaker 1: investigations into hackers, had identified elephant uh the node that
Speaker 1: he was running after performing a raid on a different
Speaker 1: Unix expert called Terminus, or his handle was Terminus. Eisenberg
Speaker 1: was a Unix consultant, and they thought because Terminus was
Speaker 1: connected to this world, that Eisenberg too must be connected
Speaker 1: to it. Eisenberg, though, was a total stand up dude,
Speaker 1: a straight shooter. He was not someone who acted outside
Speaker 1: of the law. He did do some contract work with
Speaker 1: a phone company, and while technically his contract was up,
Speaker 1: he could log into the phone company systems and occasionally
Speaker 1: he would do so. But he wasn't stealing files, he
Speaker 1: wasn't distributing files, he wasn't causing any sort of sabotage.
Speaker 1: So you could argue that he was still being a
Speaker 1: little questionable because he was poking his nose someplace where
Speaker 1: technically he was no longer working. But beyond that, he
Speaker 1: wasn't really doing anything. He wasn't publishing any of that
Speaker 1: on his Bolton board system or his node. Rather, and
Speaker 1: the investigators were asking them all about the legion of Doom,
Speaker 1: and he says, what are you talking about? And they
Speaker 1: started asking about Terminus, and then he said, I don't
Speaker 1: I don't know who you're I don't know these people.
Speaker 1: Then they gave him the actual name for the guy
Speaker 1: who was using the handle, Terminus, and Eisenberg says, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: that guy. Know that guy because he is an expert
Speaker 1: on this one particular very powerful computer system, and we've
Speaker 1: talked about that, but we've talked as you know, human beings,
Speaker 1: not to hacker handles and otherwise. He really had no
Speaker 1: connection to Terminus or hackers like the Legion of Doom.
Speaker 1: But that didn't stop the government from seizing Eisenberg's equipment
Speaker 1: and the node itself. Eisenberg wasn't arrested, he was not
Speaker 1: charged with any crimes, but the government would end up
Speaker 1: holding onto his equipment for a couple of years, so
Speaker 1: he had no access to things that he he outright owned.
Speaker 1: The government did say that the modem he was using
Speaker 1: was likely hot as in it was stolen property, but
Speaker 1: Eisenberg didn't purchase it as stolen. He wasn't like going
Speaker 1: to some sort of person who's like, hey, this modem
Speaker 1: fell off the back of a truck. He bought it
Speaker 1: second hand. But that's what a lot of hackers were doing.
Speaker 1: They were buying equipment she that was usually equipment that say,
Speaker 1: a university was getting rid of because they were upgrading
Speaker 1: to the next level of equipment, so then they offload
Speaker 1: the stuff that they already had. According to the government,
Speaker 1: the modem that Eisenberg had was likely stolen property, but
Speaker 1: he didn't know that, so he was like, well, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: I wasn't trying to buy stolen property. I just needed
Speaker 1: a modem. Uh. This whole move of the government taking
Speaker 1: Eisenberg's equipment without charging him of any sort of crime,
Speaker 1: as you might imagine, is problematic because if you assume
Speaker 1: we're in adjust society, which is obviously being very lenient,
Speaker 1: you don't have governments sweep in to take possession of
Speaker 1: someone else's property with no legal justification. But that's totally
Speaker 1: what happened to Eisenberg as well as to other people.
Speaker 1: Eisenberg was not an isolated case. There were other people
Speaker 1: who also had their their various computer systems taken from
Speaker 1: them without any actual evidence that they themselves had done
Speaker 1: any sort of crime. Now, this was largely because there
Speaker 1: was still so much uncertainty about what was actually going on.
Speaker 1: The Secret Service was still trying to figure out is
Speaker 1: there some sort of nationwide conspiracy that's gonna try and
Speaker 1: do the equivalent of a cyber attack on the United States. Uh,
Speaker 1: But they weren't really sure. They didn't have any evidence
Speaker 1: of it apart from the fact that this one emergency
Speaker 1: document had made its way through all these different hacker sites.
Speaker 1: There were also fears that perhaps foreign agents were involved,
Speaker 1: including possibly the involvement of the KGB out of Germany, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, at that time there were two Germany's.
Speaker 1: There was a West Germany in the East Germany. Now
Speaker 1: the days that's not the case, but some of us
Speaker 1: remember when the map was very different in Europe. So
Speaker 1: the fear of what could possibly be was fueling a
Speaker 1: lot of very questionable decisions over at the Secret Service.
Speaker 1: Back to the Legion of Doom, one of the other members,
Speaker 1: not the Atlanta three, but another member who had not
Speaker 1: been picked up in this initial sweep, was known as
Speaker 1: the Mentor. Mentor happened to work at a little company
Speaker 1: called Steve Jackson Games. I mentioned them earlier in this episode.
Speaker 1: Steve Jackson Games had its own little bolton board system
Speaker 1: called Illuminati, which if you know what the Illuminati are
Speaker 1: supposed to be, it's this hidden government organization that supposedly
Speaker 1: was controlling the world. It obviously brings up other questions
Speaker 1: of oh, maybe there is a hacker conspiracy here, but no,
Speaker 1: that was because Steve Jackson Games had a game called
Speaker 1: Illuminati and they named their bolton Board system after it.
Speaker 1: It had nothing to do with any sort of hacker conspiracy.
Speaker 1: Steve Jackson Games just makes games, and that game again, Illuminati,
Speaker 1: the game of conspiracy was what they called their bolton
Speaker 1: Board system. So the Secret Service was getting confused between
Speaker 1: the actual games that Steve Jackson was making and reality,
Speaker 1: kind of similar to what Erville had experienced with those
Speaker 1: notes he had made for his Steve Jackson Girp's game
Speaker 1: that he was game mastering, the fact that it was
Speaker 1: all about espionage and had all these different spy terminology,
Speaker 1: the elements in it that really made the Secret Service suspicious.
Speaker 1: And now you had this whole bolton Board system filled
Speaker 1: with that kind of information that also made them suspicious.
Speaker 1: They were sure that there was some connection between this
Speaker 1: bolletin board system and this document that was making the rounds.
Speaker 1: So on March, one group of agents rated the Mentors
Speaker 1: home where he lived with his wife and children, and
Speaker 1: they took away his computer, his phone, his printer, and
Speaker 1: all this other equipment. He was not arrested, he was
Speaker 1: not charged with any crime, but his property was not
Speaker 1: returned to him on any sort of decent time scale either.
Speaker 1: I think they kept it for a couple of years.
Speaker 1: Then the same team decided to move on and raid
Speaker 1: Steve Jackson Games itself. The office for Steve Jackson Games.
Speaker 1: The mentor had overheard some of the agents talking on
Speaker 1: their radios about busting the door down and doing this raid,
Speaker 1: and the mentor, absolutely aghast at the idea, knowing that
Speaker 1: there was nothing at Steve Jackson Games that was remotely
Speaker 1: connected to this world, said hey, let me just give
Speaker 1: you my key so you can go in. Because you're
Speaker 1: gonna go in anyway, you might as well not break
Speaker 1: the door down, And so he did. He surrendered his
Speaker 1: key voluntarily, and they went in and they started seizing
Speaker 1: all these computers and other various pieces of equipment, and
Speaker 1: they denied entry to all of the Steve Jackson employees
Speaker 1: who were showing up, including Steve Jackson himself, and they said,
Speaker 1: we're conducting an investigation and this is off limits. They
Speaker 1: took three computers, a handful of hard disk drives, tons
Speaker 1: of floppy disks, and lots of other pieces of equipment.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't just the equipment, it was the stuff
Speaker 1: that was stored on the equipment. On those hard drives
Speaker 1: included financial information about the company, you know, customer contacts, uh,
Speaker 1: personnel files, stuff that was sensitive. And of course the
Speaker 1: bulletin board system itself existed on one of those computers,
Speaker 1: and that also contained electronic communication between various employees. It
Speaker 1: was sort of like their internal email server in a way.
Speaker 1: And all of this equipment was seized by the Secret Service.
Speaker 1: But what about arrests Zero No one was arrested or
Speaker 1: charged with any crime. There was no crime to charge
Speaker 1: them with. There was just the seizure of property on
Speaker 1: the suspicion that this document, the document might be on
Speaker 1: one of those machines, So that was the actual reason
Speaker 1: for the raid. But they couldn't find it anywhere on
Speaker 1: any of the machines. There was no sign of it
Speaker 1: on the bulletin board system, there was no sign of
Speaker 1: it on any of the hard drives or on any
Speaker 1: of the floppy disks. It was completely absent from the
Speaker 1: property of Steve Jackson Games. Now, the fallout from that
Speaker 1: raid was terrible for the company. Even though they were
Speaker 1: completely innocent, they couldn't have access to their equipment. The
Speaker 1: Secret Service did not return it to them very quickly
Speaker 1: at all, and so as a result, their financials had
Speaker 1: taken a huge hit. Steve Jackson had no choice but
Speaker 1: to lay off nearly half of his employees. He just
Speaker 1: couldn't afford to pay them and stay in business because
Speaker 1: of this huge setback. So there was demonstrable harm from
Speaker 1: this raid, which ultimately was an unjustified raid. Uh. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: you have the Secret Service convinced that because of the
Speaker 1: subject matter of some of the games that Steve Jackson made,
Speaker 1: that they were onto something and the whole thing would
Speaker 1: be comical if it didn't actually mean that there was
Speaker 1: a negative impact on decent people who were just doing
Speaker 1: their job. Eventually, the Secret Service did return all the
Speaker 1: equipment to the company, but the damage had already been done.
Speaker 1: And worse than that, they had discovered that the electronic
Speaker 1: mail that it existed on this bulletin board system was
Speaker 1: missing information like there were entire communications that were gone
Speaker 1: had been deleted. They had been accessed individually and deleted
Speaker 1: from the bulletin board system. Which infuriated Steve Jackson. This
Speaker 1: is what would end up becoming the starting point for
Speaker 1: the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Steve Jackson was certain that his
Speaker 1: First Amendment rights and the First Amendment rights of his
Speaker 1: employees had been violated because the government had come in
Speaker 1: seized a list of community cations and deleted some of them.
Speaker 1: This would be like if the government raided a library,
Speaker 1: grabbed a whole bunch of books from it, and then
Speaker 1: just burnt them. It's not it's not within the realm
Speaker 1: of government in a just and free society to do that.
Speaker 1: That's an authoritarian move, not a democratic move. So Steve
Speaker 1: Jackson started looking for civil liberties organizations to help him
Speaker 1: pursue a claim against the U. S. Government to say
Speaker 1: our free free speech was violated and we need to
Speaker 1: have this resolved. But he was having a lot of
Speaker 1: trouble finding anyone to help him because these problems were
Speaker 1: really new. I mean, these were electronic communications, not hard copies,
Speaker 1: and there are a lot of civil liberties groups that
Speaker 1: just didn't know how to handle that because there really
Speaker 1: there was no like precedent set. No one was really
Speaker 1: sure how to argue it. So he was kind of stuck.
Speaker 1: But three people felt that they understood these issues and
Speaker 1: they were very much on the side of Steve Jackson
Speaker 1: and his company. And those three people belonged to an
Speaker 1: online community that was called the Whole Earth Electronic Link
Speaker 1: or well w e l L. Those three people were
Speaker 1: Mitch Kapoor, who was the former president of the Lotus
Speaker 1: Development Corporation, John Perry Barlow, who was a cattle rancher
Speaker 1: and who wrote lyrics for the band The Grateful Dead,
Speaker 1: and John Gilmore, who worked for Sun Microsystems. These three
Speaker 1: decided to form the nonprofit organization that would be dedicated
Speaker 1: to defending civil liberties in the technology space, and they
Speaker 1: called it the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Their first act as
Speaker 1: an organization was to hire a legal team to represent
Speaker 1: Steve Jackson Games in a lawsuit filed against the Secret Service.
Speaker 1: So they brought on a law firm called George Donaldson
Speaker 1: and Ford. The lead counsel was a fellow named Pete Kennedy.
Speaker 1: They brought three charges against the Secret Service and Sam Sparks,
Speaker 1: the court judge who heard the case, would uphold two
Speaker 1: of those charges. The one that he would ultimately strike
Speaker 1: down was an argument that the Secret Service had quote
Speaker 1: intercepted end quote electronic messages illegally, and the way they
Speaker 1: intercepted these messages was by taking the actual physical computer
Speaker 1: equipment that the messages were stored on. So Steve Jackson
Speaker 1: Games would appeal this decision saying no, no, no, we
Speaker 1: need to have this resolved. The Fifth Circuit Court would
Speaker 1: end up ruling against that appeal, so denying the appeal,
Speaker 1: and that essentially set a precedent saying that physical possession
Speaker 1: of computer equipment does not constitute interception of electronic communication
Speaker 1: just because the communication happens to be on that equipment.
Speaker 1: The judge gave a lengthy reprimand to the Secret Service,
Speaker 1: and it's a pretty long summary, but let me give
Speaker 1: you the rundown because I think it's very interesting. These
Speaker 1: are the words of Sam Sparks. This is a complex case.
Speaker 1: It is still not clear how sensitive and or proprietary
Speaker 1: the one document was, or how genuinely harmful the potential
Speaker 1: decryption scheme may have been, or if either were discovered
Speaker 1: by the Secret Service and the information seized on March
Speaker 1: first nine. The fact that no criminal charges have ever
Speaker 1: been filed and the investigation remains ongoing is of course
Speaker 1: not conclusive. The complexity of this case results from the
Speaker 1: Secret services insufficient investigation and its lack of knowledge of
Speaker 1: the specific laws that could apply to their conduct. On
Speaker 1: February nine and thereafter, it appears obvious neither the government
Speaker 1: employees nor the plaintiffs or their lawyers contemplated the statute
Speaker 1: upon which this case is brought back in February, March, April,
Speaker 1: May or June of n but this does not provide
Speaker 1: assistance to the defense of the case. The Secret Service
Speaker 1: and its personnel are the entities that citizens, like each
Speaker 1: of the plaintiffs, rely upon and look to protect their
Speaker 1: rights and properties. The Secret Service conduct resulted in the
Speaker 1: seizure of property, products, business records, business documents, and electronic
Speaker 1: communications of a corporate and for individual citizens that the
Speaker 1: statutes were intended to protect. It may well be, as
Speaker 1: the government defendants contend, these statutes relied upon by the
Speaker 1: plaintiffs should not apply to the facts of this case,
Speaker 1: as these holdings may result in the government having great
Speaker 1: difficulties in obtaining information or computer documents representing illegal activities.
Speaker 1: But this court cannot amend or rewrite the statutes involved.
Speaker 1: The Secret Service must go to the Congress for relief
Speaker 1: until that time. This Court recommends better education, investigation, and
Speaker 1: strict compliance with the statutes as written. And that's how
Speaker 1: the e f F was born out of the overreaching
Speaker 1: response by the Secret Service to a perceived threat of
Speaker 1: an imagined conspiracy of hackers determined to take down the
Speaker 1: N one emergency services system. That is a heck of
Speaker 1: a story, And as I said at the beginning, while
Speaker 1: I was researching this topic, I realized that that origin
Speaker 1: story was so fascinating that it involved a deeper look
Speaker 1: than just Oh, the e f F started because the
Speaker 1: Secret Service rated the offices of Steve Jackson Games. You've
Speaker 1: got to know more than that. And since then, the
Speaker 1: e f F has done a lot of different work
Speaker 1: defending the various liberties of people in the Internet space,
Speaker 1: and will definitely cover more of that in a future episode.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, if you guys have suggestions for future
Speaker 1: topics to cover on this show, being tech stuff, send
Speaker 1: a message the email addresses tech stuff at how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com, or you know, drop me a line
Speaker 1: on the social media like Facebook and Twitter the handle
Speaker 1: of both of those tech stuff hs W. You're gonna
Speaker 1: see a lot more activity from those in the days
Speaker 1: moving forward. Remember you can watch me stream live over
Speaker 1: at twitch dot tv slash tech stuff. I record on
Speaker 1: Wednesdays and Fridays, so pop over to that link. You'll
Speaker 1: see the schedule there, and you can participate in the
Speaker 1: chat room, and I might even be able to read
Speaker 1: it and chat with you. I try to multiple times
Speaker 1: throw an episode, and uh, I guess I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you guys again really soon for more on this and
Speaker 1: thousands of other topics. Because it has stuff works dot
Speaker 1: com