Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling (the reader ebook txt) 📖

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The reader is forgiven if he or she was entirely unable to read this document. John Perry Barlow had a great deal of fun at its expense, in “Crime and Puzzlement:” “Bureaucratese of surpassing opacity…. To read the whole thing straight through without entering coma requires either a machine or a human who has too much practice thinking like one. Anyone who can understand it fully and fluidly had altered his consciousness beyond the ability to ever again read Blake, Whitman, or Tolstoy…. the document contains little of interest to anyone who is not a student of advanced organizational sclerosis.”

With the Document itself to hand, however, exactly as it was published (in its six-page edited form) in PHRACK, the reader may be able to verify a few statements of fact about its nature. First, there is no software, no computer code, in the Document. It is not computer-programming language like FORTRAN or C++, it is English; all the sentences have nouns and verbs and punctuation. It does not explain how to break into the E911 system. It does not suggest ways to destroy or damage the E911 system.

There are no access codes in the Document. There are no computer passwords. It does not explain how to steal long distance service. It does not explain how to break in to telco switching stations. There is nothing in it about using a personal computer or a modem for any purpose at all, good or bad.

Close study will reveal that this document is not about machinery. The E911 Document is about ADMINISTRATION. It describes how one creates and administers certain units of telco bureaucracy: Special Service Centers and Major Account Centers (SSC/MAC). It describes how these centers should distribute responsibility for the E911 service, to other units of telco bureaucracy, in a chain of command, a formal hierarchy. It describes who answers customer complaints, who screens calls, who reports equipment failures, who answers those reports, who handles maintenance, who chairs subcommittees, who gives orders, who follows orders, WHO tells WHOM what to do. The Document is not a “roadmap” to computers. The Document is a roadmap to PEOPLE.

As an aid to breaking into computer systems, the Document is USELESS. As an aid to harassing and deceiving telco people, however, the Document might prove handy (especially with its Glossary, which I have not included). An intense and protracted study of this Document and its Glossary, combined with many other such documents, might teach one to speak like a telco employee. And telco people live by SPEECH—they live by phone communication. If you can mimic their language over the phone, you can “social-engineer” them. If you can con telco people, you can wreak havoc among them. You can force them to no longer trust one another; you can break the telephonic ties that bind their community; you can make them paranoid. And people will fight harder to defend their community than they will fight to defend their individual selves.

This was the genuine, gut-level threat posed by PHRACK magazine. The real struggle was over the control of telco language, the control of telco knowledge. It was a struggle to defend the social “membrane of differentiation” that forms the walls of the telco community’s ivory tower—the special jargon that allows telco professionals to recognize one another, and to exclude charlatans, thieves, and upstarts. And the prosecution brought out this fact. They repeatedly made reference to the threat posed to telco professionals by hackers using “social engineering.”

However, Craig Neidorf was not on trial for learning to speak like a professional telecommunications expert. Craig Neidorf was on trial for access device fraud and transportation of stolen property. He was on trial for stealing a document that was purportedly highly sensitive and purportedly worth tens of thousands of dollars.

John Nagle read the E911 Document. He drew his own conclusions. And he presented Zenner and his defense team with an overflowing box of similar material, drawn mostly from Stanford University’s engineering libraries. During the trial, the defense team—Zenner, half-a-dozen other attorneys, Nagle, Neidorf, and computer-security expert Dorothy Denning, all pored over the E911 Document line-by-line.

On the afternoon of July 25, 1990, Zenner began to cross-examine a woman named Billie Williams, a service manager for Southern Bell in Atlanta. Ms. Williams had been responsible for the E911 Document. (She was not its author—its original “author” was a Southern Bell staff manager named Richard Helms. However, Mr. Helms should not bear the entire blame; many telco staff people and maintenance personnel had amended the Document. It had not been so much “written” by a single author, as built by committee out of concrete-blocks of jargon.)

Ms. Williams had been called as a witness for the prosecution, and had gamely tried to explain the basic technical structure of the E911 system, aided by charts.

Now it was Zenner’s turn. He first established that the “proprietary stamp” that BellSouth had used on the E911 Document was stamped on EVERY SINGLE DOCUMENT that BellSouth wrote— THOUSANDS of documents. “We do not publish anything other than for our own company,” Ms. Williams explained. “Any company document of this nature is considered proprietary.” Nobody was in charge of singling out special high-security publications for special high-security protection. They were ALL special, no matter how trivial, no matter what their subject matter—the stamp was put on as soon as any document was written, and the stamp was never removed.

Zenner now asked whether the charts she had been using to explain the mechanics of E911 system were “proprietary,” too. Were they PUBLIC INFORMATION, these charts, all about PSAPs, ALIs, nodes, local end switches? Could he take the charts out in the street and show them to anybody, “without violating some proprietary notion that BellSouth has?”

Ms. Williams showed some confusion, but finally agreed that the charts were, in fact, public.

“But isn’t this what you said was basically what appeared in PHRACK?”

Ms. Williams denied this.

Zenner now pointed out that the E911 Document as published in Phrack was only half the size of the original E911 Document (as Prophet had purloined it). Half of it had been deleted—edited by Neidorf.

Ms. Williams countered that “Most of the information that is in the text file is redundant.”

Zenner continued to probe. Exactly what bits of knowledge in the Document were, in fact, unknown to the public? Locations of E911 computers? Phone numbers for telco personnel? Ongoing maintenance subcommittees? Hadn’t Neidorf removed much of this?

Then he pounced. “Are you familiar with Bellcore Technical Reference Document TR-TSY-000350?” It was, Zenner explained, officially titled “E911 Public Safety Answering Point Interface Between 1-1AESS Switch and Customer Premises Equipment.” It contained highly detailed and specific technical information about the E911 System. It was published by Bellcore and publicly available for about $20.

He showed the witness a Bellcore catalog which listed thousands of documents from Bellcore and from all the Baby Bells, BellSouth included. The catalog, Zenner pointed out, was free. Anyone with a credit card could call the Bellcore toll-free 800 number and simply order any of these documents, which would be shipped to any customer without question. Including, for instance, “BellSouth E911 Service Interfaces to Customer Premises Equipment at a Public Safety Answering Point.”

Zenner gave the witness a copy of “BellSouth E911 Service Interfaces,” which cost, as he pointed out, $13, straight from the catalog. “Look at it carefully,” he urged Ms. Williams, “and tell me if it doesn’t contain about twice as much detailed information about the E911 system of BellSouth than appeared anywhere in PHRACK.”

“You want me to….” Ms. Williams trailed off. “I don’t understand.”

“Take a careful look,” Zenner persisted. “Take a look at that document, and tell me when you’re done looking at it if, indeed, it doesn’t contain much more detailed information about the E911 system than appeared in PHRACK.”

“PHRACK wasn’t taken from this,” Ms. Williams said.

“Excuse me?” said Zenner.

“PHRACK wasn’t taken from this.”

“I can’t hear you,” Zenner said.

“PHRACK was not taken from this document. I don’t understand your question to me.”

“I guess you don’t,” Zenner said.

At this point, the prosecution’s case had been gutshot. Ms. Williams was distressed. Her confusion was quite genuine. PHRACK had not been taken from any publicly available Bellcore document. PHRACK E911 Document had been stolen from her own company’s computers, from her own company’s text files, that her own colleagues had written, and revised, with much labor.

But the “value” of the Document had been blown to smithereens. It wasn’t worth eighty grand. According to Bellcore it was worth thirteen bucks. And the looming menace that it supposedly posed had been reduced in instants to a scarecrow. Bellcore itself was selling material far more detailed and “dangerous,” to anybody with a credit card and a phone.

Actually, Bellcore was not giving this information to just anybody. They gave it to ANYBODY WHO ASKED, but not many did ask. Not many people knew that Bellcore had a free catalog and an 800 number. John Nagle knew, but certainly the average teenage phreak didn’t know. “Tuc,” a friend of Neidorf’s and sometime PHRACK contributor, knew, and Tuc had been very helpful to the defense, behind the scenes. But the Legion of Doom didn’t know—otherwise, they would never have wasted so much time raiding dumpsters. Cook didn’t know. Foley didn’t know. Kluepfel didn’t know. The right hand of Bellcore knew not what the left hand was doing. The right hand was battering hackers without mercy, while the left hand was distributing Bellcore’s intellectual property to anybody who was interested in telephone technical trivia—apparently, a pathetic few.

The digital underground was so amateurish and poorly organized that they had never discovered this heap of unguarded riches. The ivory tower of the telcos was so wrapped-up in the fog of its own technical obscurity that it had left all the windows open and flung open the doors. No one had even noticed.

Zenner sank another nail in the coffin. He produced a printed issue of TELEPHONE ENGINEER & MANAGEMENT, a prominent industry journal that comes out twice a month and costs $27 a year. This particular issue of TE&M, called “Update on 911,” featured a galaxy of technical details on 911 service and a glossary far more extensive than PHRACK’S.

The trial rumbled on, somehow, through its own momentum. Tim Foley testified about his interrogations of Neidorf. Neidorf’s written admission that he had known the E911 Document was pilfered was officially read into the court record.

An interesting side issue came up: “Terminus” had once passed Neidorf a piece of UNIX AT&T software, a log-in sequence, that had been cunningly altered so that it could trap passwords. The UNIX software itself was illegally copied AT&T property, and the alterations “Terminus” had made to it, had transformed it into a device for facilitating computer breakins. Terminus himself would eventually plead guilty to theft of this piece of software, and the Chicago group would send Terminus to prison for it. But it was of dubious relevance in the Neidorf case. Neidorf hadn’t written the program. He wasn’t accused of ever having used it. And Neidorf wasn’t being charged with software theft or owning a password trapper.

On the next day, Zenner took the offensive. The civil libertarians now had their own arcane, untried legal weaponry to launch into action—the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, 18 US Code, Section 2701 et seq. Section 2701 makes it a crime to intentionally access without authorization a facility in which an electronic communication service is provided—it is, at heart, an anti-bugging and anti-tapping law, intended to carry the traditional protections of telephones into other electronic channels of communication. While providing penalties for amateur snoops, however, Section 2703 of the ECPA also lays some formal difficulties on the bugging and tapping activities of police.

The Secret Service, in the person of Tim Foley, had served Richard