Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession from the Electronic Frontier (2 page)

1) Another agency had ‘‘borrowed’’ parts Par’s file 2) There were medical ‘‘issues’’ surrounding Par 3) SS documents covering the time of Black Mountain incident had been destroyed for various reasons that become clear the book.

4) The remaining SS documents had been moved into

‘‘deep-storage’’ and would take two weeks to retrieve.

With only one week before our publisher’s ‘‘use it or lose it’’

dead-line, the chances of obtaining secondary confirmation of the Black Mountain events did not look promising.

While we waited for leads on the long trail of ex, transfered and seconded SS agents who might have been involved in the Black Mountain raid, I turned to resolving the two inconsistencies in Par’s story; Hurricane Hugo and the strange invisibility of the Black Mountain Motel.

Hurricane Hugo had wreathed a path of destruction, but like most most hurricanes heading directly into a continental land-mass it had started out big and ended up small. News reports followed this pattern, with a large amount of material on its initial impact, but little or nothing about subsequent events. Finally I obtained detailed time by velocity weather maps from the National Reconnaissance Office, which showed the remaining Hugo epicentre ripping through Charlotte NC (pop. 400k) before spending itself on the Carolinas. Database searches turned up a report by Natalie, D. & Ball, W, EIS Coordinator, North Carolina Emergency Management, ‘How North Carolina Managed Hurricane Hugo’ --

which was used to flesh out the scenes in Chapter 4 describing Par’s escape to New York via the Charlotte Airport.

Old Fashioned gum-shoe leg-work, calling every motel in Black Mountain and the surrounding area, revealed that the Black Mountain Motel had changed name, ownership and.. all its staff. Par’s story was holding, but in some ways I wished it hadn’t. We were back to square one in terms of gaining independent secondary confirmation.

Who else could have been involved? There must have been a paper-trail outside of Washington. Perhaps the SS representation in Charlotte had something? No. Perhaps there were records of the warrants in the Charlotte courts? No. Perhaps NC state police attended the SS raid in support? Maybe, but finding warm bodies who had been directly involved proved proved futile. If it was a SS case, they had no indexable records that they were willing to provide. What about the local coppers? An SS raid on a fugitive computer hacker holed up at one of the local motels was not the sort of event that would be likely to have passed unnoticed at the Black Mountain county police office, indexable records or not.

Neither however, were international telephone calls from strangely accented foreign-nationals wanting to know about them. Perhaps the Reds were no-longer under the beds, but in Black Mountain, this could be explained away by the fact they were now hanging out in phone booths. I waited for a new shift at the Black Mountain county police office, hoping against hope, that the officer I had spoken to wouldn’t contaminate his replacement. Shamed, I resorted to using that most special of US militia infiltration devices. An American accent and a woman’s touch. Suelette weaved her magic. The Black Mountain raid had taken place. The county police had supported it. We had our confirmation.

While this anecdote is a strong account, it’s also representative one.

Every chapter in underground was formed from many stories like it. They’re unseen, because a book must not be true merely in details.

It must be true in feeling.

True to the visible and the invisible. A difficult combination.

Julian Assange

January 2001

[email protected]

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction xi

1 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 1

2 The Corner Pub 45

3 The American Connection 84

4 The Fugitive 120

5 The Holy Grail 159

6 Page One, the New York Times 212

7 Judgment Day 244

8 The International Subversives 285

9 Operation Weather 323

10 Anthrax--the Outsider 364

11 The Prisoner’s Dilemma 400

Afterword 427 Glossary and Abbreviations 455 Notes 460

Bibliography

[ Page numbers above correspond to the Random House printed edition ]

_________________________________________________________________

There are many people who were interviewed for this work, and many others who helped in providing documents so vital for fact checking. Often this help invovled spending a considerable amount of time explaining complex technical or legal matters. I want to express my gratitude to all these people, some of whom prefer to remain anonymous, for their willingness to dig through the files in search of yet one more report and their patience in answering yet one more question.

I want to thank the members of the computer underground, past and present, who were interviewed for this book. Most gave me extraordinary access to their lives, for which I am very grateful.

I also want to thank Julian Assange for his tireless research efforts.

His superb technical expertise and first-rate research is evidence by the immense number of details which are included in this book.

Three exceptional women -- Fiona Inglis, Deb Callaghan and Jennifer Byrne -- believed in my vision for this book and helped me to bring it to fruition. Carl Harrison-Ford’s excellent editing job streamlined a large and difficult manuscript despite the tight deadline. Thank you also to Judy Brookes.

I am also very grateful to the following people and organisations for their help (in no particular order): John McMahon, Ron Tencati, Kevin Oberman, Ray Kaplan, the New York Daily News library staff, the New York Post library staff, Bow Street Magistrates Court staff, Southwark Court staff, the US Secret Service, the Black Mountain Police, Michael Rosenberg, Michael Rosen, Melbourne Magistrates Court staff, D.L

Sellers & Co. staff, Victorian County Court staff, Paul Galbally, Mark Dorset, Suburbia.net, Freeside Communications, Greg Hooper, H&S

Support Services, Peter Andrews, Kevin Thompson, Andrew Weaver, Mukhtar Hussain, Midnight Oil, Helen Meredith, Ivan Himmelhoch, Michael Hall, Donn Ferris, Victorian State Library staff, News Limited library staff (Sydney), Allan Young, Ed DeHart, Annette Seeber, Arthur Arkin, Doug Barnes, Jeremy Porter, James McNabb, Carolyn Ford, ATA, Domini Banfield, Alistair Kelman, Ann-Maree Moodie, Jane Hutchinson, Catherine Murphy, Norma Hawkins, N. Llewelyn, Christine Assange, Russel Brand, Matthew Bishop, Matthew Cox, Michele Ziehlky, Andrew James, Brendan McGrath, Warner Chappell Music Australia, News Limited, Pearson Williams Solicitors, Tami Friedman, the Free Software Foundation (GNU Project), and the US Department of Energy Computer Incident Advisory Capability.

Finally, I would like to thank my family, whose unfailing support, advice and encouragement have made this book possible.

_________________________________________________________________

My great aunt used to paint underwater.

Piling on the weighty diving gear used in 1939 and looking like something out of 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, Lucie slowly sank below the surface, with palette, special paints and canvas in hand. She settled on the ocean floor, arranged her weighted painter’s easel and allowed herself to become completely enveloped by another world. Red and white striped fish darted around fields of blue-green coral and blue-lipped giant clams. Lionfish drifted by, gracefully waving their dangerous feathered spines. Striped green moray eels peered at her from their rock crevice homes.

Lucie dived and painted everywhere. The Sulu Archipelago. Mexico.

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Hawaii. Borneo. Sometimes she was the first white woman seen by the Pacific villagers she lived with for months on end.

As a child, I was entranced by her stories of the unknown world below the ocean’s surface, and the strange and wonderful cultures she met on her journeys. I grew up in awe of her chosen task: to capture on canvas the essence of a world utterly foreign to her own.

New technology--revolutionary for its time--had allowed her to do this. Using a compressor, or sometimes just a hand pump connected to air hoses running to the surface, human beings were suddenly able to submerge themselves for long periods in an otherwise inaccessible world. New technology allowed her to both venture into this unexplored realm, and to document it in canvas.

I came upon the brave new world of computer communications and its darker side, the underground, quite by accident. It struck me somewhere in the journey that followed that my trepidations and conflicting desires to explore this alien world were perhaps not unlike my aunt’s own desires some half a century before. Like her journey, my own travels have only been made possible by new technologies. And like her, I have tried to capture a small corner of this world.

This is a book about the computer underground. It is not a book about law enforcement agencies, and it is not written from the point of view of the police officer. From a literary perspective, I have told this story through the eyes of numerous computer hackers. In doing so, I hope to provide the reader with a window into a mysterious, shrouded and usually inaccessible realm.

Who are hackers? Why do they hack? There are no simple answers to these questions. Each hacker is different. To that end, I have attempted to present a collection of individual but interconnected stories, bound by their links to the international computer underground. These are true stories, tales of the world’s best and the brightest hackers and phreakers. There are some members of the underground whose stories I have not covered, a few of whom would also rank as world-class. In the end, I chose to paint detailed portraits of a few hackers rather than attempt to compile a comprehensive but shallow catalogue.

While each hacker has a distinct story, there are common themes which appear throughout many of the stories. Rebellion against all symbols of authority. Dysfunctional families. Bright children suffocated by ill-equipped teachers. Mental illness or instability. Obsession and addiction.

I have endeavoured to track what happened to each character in this work over time: the individual’s hacking adventures, the police raid and the ensuing court case. Some of those court cases have taken years to reach completion.

Hackers use ‘handles’--on-line nicknames--that serve two purposes.

They shield the hacker’s identity and, importantly, they often make a statement about how the hacker perceives himself in the underground.

Hawk, Crawler, Toucan Jones, Comhack, Dataking, Spy, Ripmax, Fractal Insanity, Blade. These are all real handles used in Australia.

In the computer underground, a hacker’s handle is his name. For this reason, and because most hackers in this work have now put together new lives for themselves, I have chosen to use only their handles.

Where a hacker has had more than one handle, I have used the one he prefers.

Each chapter in this book is headed with a quote from a Midnight Oil song which expresses an important aspect of the chapter. The Oilz are uniquely Australian. Their loud voice of protest against the establishment--particularly the military-industrial establishment--echoes a key theme in the underground, where music in general plays a vital role.

The idea for using these Oilz extracts came while researching Chapter 1, which reveals the tale of the WANK worm crisis in NASA. Next to the RTM worm, WANK is the most famous worm in the history of computer networks. And it is the first major worm bearing a political message.

With WANK, life imitated art, since the term computer ‘worm’ came from John Brunner’s sci-fi novel, The Shockwave Rider, about a politically motivated worm.

The WANK worm is also believed to be the first worm written by an Australian, or Australians.

This chapter shows the perspective of the computer system administrators--the people on the other side from the hackers. Lastly, it illustrates the sophistication which one or more Australian members of the worldwide computer underground brought to their computer crimes.

The following chapters set the scene for the dramas which unfold and show the transition of the underground from its early days, its loss of innocence, its closing ranks in ever smaller circles until it reached the inevitable outcome: the lone hacker. In the beginning, the computer underground was a place, like the corner pub, open and friendly. Now, it has become an ephemeral expanse, where hackers occasionally bump into one another but where the original sense of open community has been lost.

The computer underground has changed over time, largely in response to the introduction of new computer crime laws across the globe and to numerous police crackdowns. This work attempts to document not only an important piece of Australian history, but also to show fundamental shifts in the underground --to show, in essence, how the underground has moved further underground.

Suelette Dreyfus

March 1997

_________________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________

Somebody’s out there, somebody’s waiting

Somebody’s trying to tell me something

-- from ‘Somebody’s Trying to Tell Me Something’, on 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 by Midnight Oil

Monday, 16 October 1989

Kennedy Space Center, Florida

NASA buzzed with the excitement of a launch. Galileo was finally going to Jupiter.

Administrators and scientists in the world’s most prestigious space agency had spent years trying to get the unmanned probe into space.

Now, on Tuesday, 17 October, if all went well, the five astronauts in the Atlantis space shuttle would blast off from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, with Galileo in tow. On the team’s fifth orbit, as the shuttle floated 295 kilometres above the Gulf of Mexico, the crew would liberate the three-tonne space probe.