Operation Sundevil and the Birth of the EFF - Part One

guys a little peek behind the curtain. Typically, when I decide upon a topic, let's say it's one that I've just decided I want to cover that wasn't necessarily a request from a listener, sometimes I find out through my research that I've made an error in judgment. Right. I might discover that perhaps the topic I wanted to cover isn't as interesting as I thought, or that there is some aspect of it that is more interesting than what I thought the story was going to be about. So

that's the case with today's episode. I was originally going to do an episode just about how the Electronic Frontier Foundation works, the e f F, and I probably still will do that, in fact, it might be the episode that follows this one. But as I was researching this, and I was researching the whole founding of the e f F, it made me dive into a deeper and deeper investigation into the events that led up to the necessity for the Electronic Frontier Foundation to become a thing.

And that story is so fascinating, and I was actually surprised that I didn't know it. I don't have any memory of hearing about this story, and it's possible that I've just forgotten. But it's a story that I should know for multiple reasons. One, it involves some people here in Atlanta, where I am based. It too. It involves uh, a big staying operation that the Secret Service did in nine three. It involves a game company that I'm a fan of and that had a tenuous, if best, connection

to all of the shenanigans that went on. So there's all these different elements at play where I should have known this story already, especially considering that I've done research on hacking, and and yet I didn't really remember it. And I thought, I want to tell this story, and it's been told by other people, and it's been told well by other people, but this is my stab at it.

So we're gonna talk about a big sting operation called Operations Sun Devil, and we're gonna talk about how that led to the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation or the e f F. So let's talk a little bit about the e f F in general, in case you're not familiar with this organization. It's the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world, and it's based in San Francisco, California. It's dedicated to promoting Internet civil liberty.

So it's a lot like the American Civil Liberties Union or a c l U, except its specifically dedicated to championing civil liberties in the realm of the Internet. So online civil liberties for the most part is what it

focuses on. UH and the e f has a website. Obviously, they have a very strong web presence, as you would imagine considering their focus, and they have this specific statement about their organization says, blending the expertise of lawyers, policy analysts, activists, and technologists, e f F achieves significant victories on behalf

of consumers and the general public. E f fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing and defending lawsuits, even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations. By mobilizing more than one d forty thousand concerned citizens through our action center, e f F beats back back legislation. In addition to advising policymakers, e f educates the press and public. E f F is a donor funded nonprofit and depends on your support to continue successfully defending your

digital rights. Litigation is particularly expensive because two thirds of our budget comes from individual donors. Every contribution is critical to helping e f fight and win more cases, so it is a nonprofit. They do use that money to help fund legal cases, either defending people from what they see as an overreach on the part of various entities, or to help people lay a claim against those entities in the case where their their civil liberties were perhaps violated.

And as I as I said, as I was looking into this organization, which I had heard a lot about obviously, and I followed e f f H news stories for years, and how they've supported concepts like net neutrality and online privacy and other protections that they feel everyone should enjoy as citizens of the internet. Uh, I had never really

looked into the backstory behind it. They do use their funds to help provide for legal defense in cases in which the organization determines the accused may have their civil liberties infringed upon, and it was founded back in nine in response to a threat to free speech. So here's a quick overview and then we're gonna dive deep into

this story. The United States Secret Service was on a mission back in the late eighties and early nineties which was to track down the distribution of a document that was copied off of a Bell South computer system. That document described how enhanced emergency nine one one systems worked, and it was called the Shorthand version was called the E nine eleven document, and as opposed on Boing Boing once said, it's an historic, incredibly dull technical document, which

is true. You would actually read it. You probably read yourself to sleep pretty quickly. But it was also a very important document detailing a very sensitive part of the phone system infrastructure in regards to emergency systems, and it ended up playing a big part in a huge nationwide sweep of hackers that would later be known as Operation Sun Devil. The United States Attorney's Office in Phoenix, Arizona,

would announce that operation on May nine, nine nine. The day before May, law enforcement officials carried out twenty seven search warrants. They made three actual arrests and carried out operations and at least a dozen cities. Now, official accounts from different agencies and different areas have a different number of how many cities were involved, but it's usually at the very least twelve and sometimes upwards of fourteen or fifteen.

The entities that were responsed bull or at least given credit for operations on Devil would include the Assistant Attorney General of Arizona, who is Gail Thackeray at the time, the Assistant U S Attorney Tim Holtzon, and the U S Secret Service. The Assistant Director of the Secret Service, Gary M. Jenkins, gave a statement at the press event that summarized the government's perspective. Uh here's a selection of

what Mr Jenkins said today. The Secret Service is sending a clear message to those computer hackers who have decided to violate the laws of this nation in the mistaken belief that they can successfully avoid detection by hiding behind the relative anonymity of their computer terminals. Underground groups have been formed for the purpose of exchanging information relevant to their criminal activities. These groups often communicate with each other

through message systems between computers called bulletin boards. Our experience shows that many computer hackers suspects are no longer misguided teenagers mischievously playing games with their computers in their bedrooms. Some are now high tech computer operators using computers to engage in unlawful conduct. This was a complicated statement to make back in because technology was outpacing the legal system.

So while you could argue that some of the things that were happening were against the law, it was a lot more challenging to find which law it was against. In some cases, it really didn't make sense to charge the person with anything because there just weren't any laws that were relevant in that case, which became extremely problematic.

Now the story dates way back further than if we want to understand the series of events that led up to Operations Sun Devil and then ultimately to the foundation of the e f F. So this is gonna be kind of a gather around the campfire and listen to Grandpa tell you as a tail, that's what's happening right now. So get some high coco, get some marshmallows for roasting. We're gonna have ourselves story time right now. And I

think it's a pretty fascinating story. Now to understand this, uh, you know, I keep peeling back layers whenever I go into history, and it always seems like I go further back than I need to. But that's really so that we can kind of see where things were headed when the events were interested in really took off. So to understand the hacker motivation, you have to look at previous movements, things that kind of had that same sort of philosophy

that fed into the formation of hacker culture. And I would argue that a lot of that grew primarily out of an older movement called freaking. Freaking had to do with phones, phone systems, not not computer systems. So you think of hacker is to computer as freaker is to phone systems. But we'll talk more about freaking in a second. But freaking, in turn, was fueled in part by a powerful anti authoritarian sentiment that was running in the United

States in the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies. This was the time of political turmoil in the United States. The Vietnam War had created an enormous cultural divide in the country, with a growing population of people, mostly young people, feeling underrepresented and exploited. Because it was the young people who were being sent overseas in their mind just to die in jungles, and a lot of people felt that no one was listening to their voices, and this gave rise

to a movement, several movements. In fact, you had a lot of different movements in the sixties and seventies, but one in particular was called the Youth International Party, and the members of this group called themselves Yippies. He had hippies and yippies. Yippies were largely anarchists. They had a deep distrust of authority and government. They also celebrated in lots of acts that were hedonistic, perhaps, including things like drug abuse and uh and sexual exploration. Stuff that's kind

of put towards the hippies as well. In this era of the late sixties and early seventies, it was largely the era of free love. So a lot of this stuff is all kind of feeding in on itself. And they rejected the trappings of government. They felt that the system had previously rejected them, so they're now rejecting it back.

And many of their activities, like I said, fell on this kind of questionable criminal side in some cases, and they kind of celebrated in that as well, and increasingly popular activity for yippies was coming up with different ways to rip off the system. So this is kind of where that can of the man comes into play, where you've got the man that's the authority figure, and how can you stick it to the man. What can you do that will be at least a tiny irritation to them?

And one of the things that yippies like to do was find ways to game a system to get stuff for free. Not just to get free stuff, although more and more people did start doing it just for that, but because their money would not go to large corporations and tax money would not go to the government to fund what they saw as an unjust and perhaps even illegal war in their eyes. So they thought, well, you know, if you're gonna take these actions, I'm not gonna enable you.

I'm not gonna pay money to you. I'll find ways to get the stuff I want for free. And so it's kind of like almost like a robin Hood mentality, although around in a roundabout way, and obviously some people were less concerned with that aspect of the philosophy and they just want their hands on the free stuff. So there are a lot of folks who were enjoying the thrill of stealing essentially, and they didn't really care if

there was any political statement associated with that. They were mostly concerned with getting the stuff for free and perhaps causing a little trouble in the process. Now this leads up to the nineteen seventies when phone freaking really became

a big activity. And I've done a full episode on freaking in the past, so if you want to check that out, it's freaking a spelled with a pH, because of course it's all about the phone systems, but essentially it's all about manipulating those phone systems in different ways, typically to navigate through the various subsystems that phone companies have, sometimes to make long distance phone calls for free, or to do other mischievous things like reroute calls so that

they don't go to where they're supposed to go. That's all part of phone freaking. And there were some pretty famous people who were into that that scene, like Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. They were really into the phone freaking stuff in the seventies. Really, Steve Wozniak was more of the one who would design the the technology that would take advantage of phone systems, and Steve Jobs just thought it was kind of funny and also was trying to find ways to sell it. Curious folks also were

just wanting to know how the phone systems were. Some people weren't into phone freaking to cause mischief. They just wanted to know how does this work, like what what makes it tick? And they would sort of reverse engineer the phone system from the outside. Just pretty ingenious and

there's some great stories from the phone freaking days. And uh, they weren't necessarily trying to exploit the system, but rather just understand it, and so would engage in exploiting that knowledge later on, sometimes just to test it, sometimes just to have fun. Um. Some ended up doing it as a way to show off their skill and understanding. So they might pull a big prank, but it's so that they can impress their friends in the freaking community. And

some did it because hey, man, free long distance. Once upon a time, long distance was not free. You paid for that. Every minute you were on the phone on a long distance call, you were racking up charges. That doesn't tend to be the case today. Long distance today is largely meaningless. But for a long time, that was a big deal, and if you happen to have friends and distant places, then you know you might bristle at the thought of having to pay extra just to talk

to them. A lot of freakers felt that it was not really justified, and they also didn't really see the use of their knowledge of the system being used to make free long distance calls. They didn't see that as theft of service because nothing's really being lost, although there were lots of different methods that would end up costing other people. Typically, freakers would reroute information so that they can make long distance calls and someone else gets footed

for the bill. Many freakers would target companies or notable personalities as the recipient of that phone bill because they thought was funny or they just felt again like they were sticking it to the man. Other people just didn't care who the bill went to as long as it

wasn't them. So V two You Get a magazine called Ramparts, and Ramparts published an article that detailed how to make a device called a blue box that would allow users to receive long distance calls in such a way that the person on the other end of the call would not get billed for it, they'd be able to make it for free. So if you had one of these blue boxes attached to your phone and someone from another state called you, it would act as if it was a local call, or that there was no call at all,

and you could have that call for free. You couldn't make outgoing calls for free, but you could accept incoming calls and the other person would never get charged for it. The box would do this by mimicking the phone system's signal tone to UH to fool the system into allowing this to happen. Now, police acting on behalf of Pacific Bell raided Ramparts magazine and required the company to recall issues.

They also seized issues on newsstands, which ended up driving Ramparts out of business, and this brought up some questions about free speech, like could a an instrument of the free press publish something and have the government come in and effectively shut down the the the journal. But even though these questions came up, no one really pursued them

with any tenacity. So a lot of people seemed to feel like Ramparts had overstepped its bounce, like it had published something that was meant to be kept away from the public, and that that was not the realm of free press that you know, you can't just because you have free press, you can't do something that might be illegal.

And it was technically against the law according to California State Penal Code Section five oh two point seven, which says it is illegal to sell plans for any instrument, apparatus, or device intended to avoid telephone toll charges. So you could argue, while, it's against the law because you're selling the magazine, and the magazine has an article in it that tells you how to get around toll charges, so

therefore it breaks this law. However, you could then argue, well, that law is unconstitutional because of free speech, but Ramparts didn't have the luxury of arguing that, and so the company went under. Now, the yippie movement began to transform

as the Vietnam War was ending. A lot of political motivation transitioned into anti corporate philosophy and the Youth International Party Line, which was a newsletter that had been in publication for a few years and would document different activities and ways to stick it to the man, changed gradually into a new format called the Technical Assistance Program or TAP, and TAP was largely a parody of the technical documents you could find at places like Bell Systems. Only here's

the thing. The documents that TAP would publish were supposed to again be internal corporate documents. They weren't supposed to be exposed to to the public. Uh. And it again was raising some questions is it ethical to publish something that is an internal document of another company? And raised questions about intellectual property and again freedom of speech. Uh. TAP itself fizzled out in the late nineteen seventies, but this wasn't due to any pressure from the government. Uh.

This was also a time of transformation. Phone systems were becoming digitized and that would lead to a new era. People, mostly young men, became interested in a new emerging technology, computers. So from the sixties through the seventies, computers were largely

the domain of colleges. So you did have some hackers in those early days who were working on different computer systems and creating interesting programs and making computers do stuff that their creators didn't necessarily intend for them to do, but didn't really take off until the late seventies, and by night the nineties, freaking would largely give way to computer hacking, in which curious people began to prod at various systems, whether they were individual computers or networked machines,

in order to see how those systems worked, and some people would take advantage of that knowledge and end up getting a bit mischievous. So this is when we can once again touch on the differences in the concepts of

hacker versus cracker for lack of a better term. So if you go by the strictly traditional, original definition of hacker, that would be someone who wants to learn how something works, typically by taking it apart and examining all the parts and putting it back together, maybe putting it back together in a different way, so that the thing that they were using is now behaving in a different way, it can do different stuff. Those are all hacks. Whether it's

physical or with software, it's a hack. It's not necessarily elegant, but ideally it just works. So you might create a computer program and call it a hack because you were just trying to get to a specific goal, and it didn't really matter how you got there or how much code it took or how pretty it was, as long as it would give you the output. You wanted. Hackers worked with in code and in actual physical circuits. They might take machines apart literally and put them back together.

And they might infiltrate a computer system just to kind of snoop around and see what makes it tick, like just again to get that knowledge of what's going on and how it all works together. But strictly speaking, hackers are not inherently malicious. They might be a bit mischievous, but they're not necessarily out to cause problems. Crackers, on the other hand, would use their knowledge and experience to exploit systems in some way, and that could include anything

from theft to sabotage. And these are the types of people who work for profit. They're using their knowledge to leverage a system in some way in order to profit from it, either financially or otherwise. And that's regardless of ethics. It doesn't really matter who the target is, uh, They're just using their their expertise and their abilities and knowledge to you make money off of this in some way

or to otherwise benefit from it in some way. Now, over time, those two definitions have kind of merged and all become part of just the word hacker. So if you use the word hacker. A lot of people immediately think of someone who is specifically intent on infiltrating a computer system for some reason, whether it's to poke around or to spy, or to cause the system to collapse in some way, it all tends to get lumped under

the term hacker. So I'll be talking about the word hacker in the very general sense from this point forward, because that's how most of us think of it at this point anyway. And and to be fair, there are lots and lots of examples of hackers causing this shift or giving into the urge to steal, and I think that kind of justifies this point of view about hackers being a broader term. So in the hacking community, one of the most important elements is respect among your peers.

There are hackers out there who just want to use their their talents or often just the tools at their disposal in order to make a profit. But quote unquote, real hackers tend to look down on those people because they like to get into systems for other reasons, reasons they consider to be above material gain. However, the esteem of their fellow hackers is something that they crave, so it's kind of a digital currency, respect among your peers.

It's an important system. So if you are a hacker and you gain access to a system that is known to be particularly robust with very good security, then that's a badge of honor. But it's only a badge of honor if people know about it. Now, this is a double edged sword because as a hacker, if you're really good, you're covering your tracks so that the people who are in control of whatever system you're checking out don't notice

that you are there. You don't want to leave any evidence behind that you were there because you don't want to get caught. But the on the flip side, you do want your fellow hackers to know about your exploits because then you can brag about it and you can get some cashet that way. So it's a delicate balance. Uh So, a hacker might test him or herself in an interesting way and then try and take some sort of proof of whatever their exploits were so that they

could brag about it to their peers. And it's because again they thrive on that respect and validation that their peers could give them. And this could lead also to some hackers sidestepping or breaking rules and laws when applicable. But again the issue here is that at the time there were are not that many laws that specifically dealt

with the digital side of the world. So there were a lot of times where you could argue, yeah, what they did was wrong, but there weren't any laws in place, so it wasn't illegal for the simple reason that there was no law to break. Uh, though later there would be laws that would certainly cover that. It's just that, again,

technology had outpaced the legal system. It was on an effort to maintain or gain status, and that was a very powerful motivator, powerful enough again to push some hackers to doing activities that perhaps they should not have because it would have surprised or amazed or delighted their fellow hackers.

And in order to show that they were truly responsible for the acts they got up to, hackers would often use information that they could only have through a successful hack, and that became sort of their way of saying, look,

I know what I'm talking about. Here's the proof. So you might do this either by giving information about the system to other hackers so that they could access that same system and thus they would know that you were telling the truth, or you might, you know, copy some files to prove that you were there and that you actually have some evidence of what you did that will

come back into play later in this episode. So you just wanted to prove to people you actually possessed the skills and the moxie, not just the skill to get into a system, but that you have it, have what it takes to actually take those steps, and you're brave enough to do it and you're not afraid of getting caught. Most hacker groups would actually have their own guidelines and rules,

largely unspoken but generally agreed upon. So hackers might say like, yeah, we like to goof around and we like to mess with systems and play around and learn how they work and sometimes manipulate them a little bit, but we don't want to take a system down on purpose, or steal money or otherwise do anything for specific financial gain. A lot of hacker groups had that kind of unspoken group of rules that guided their own ethical decisions were what

they saw as ethical decisions. Breaking the rules if you were part of this hacker group, but typically get you ostracized from that group, and if you broke the rules badly enough, or if you were a repeat offender. A hacker might even report you to the authorities. Hackers frequently would do this in order to get rid of problematic individuals.

They might say, like, this person is just stirring up trouble, and even if that trouble never comes back to us, I still find it distasteful, and so therefore I'm going to give up their identity to someone authority because they have broken these rules. So there was some honor among hackers, even those who didn't view theft as being all that bad of a concept, or they just didn't recognize digital

copying as any kind of similarity to theft. Many hackers who were apprehended by law enforcement would end up spilling all the beans. There would be no beans left unspilled. Most of them were extremely cooperative with law enforcement once they got snatched, and they would talk all about the bulletin board systems they would use, the other hackers that they would roll with where they learned skills. If they were using tools that someone else made, they might talk

about that. There are a lot of hackers who weren't really hackers. They were what some folks derisively called script kiddies. These would be people who would use code that was designed by other people, and it would be code that would do something typically uh, something that could be malicious, and then they would execute that code themselves, and that would give these people power over others. But it's not like they made the tools they were using. They were

just relying upon them. They were willing to use those tools,

and those would be the script kiddies. Often if they got picked up, they would just spill the beans about all the people who worked on those tools in the first place, even if the people who made the tools never had any intention of using them in a malicious way, and that would lead to some difficult, difficult situations because law enforcement doesn't necessarily make that designation between someone who has created a tool that could be good or bad

and someone who has created a bad tool on purpose in order to be bad all the time. There's a level of subtlety there that frequently law enforcement would just overlook because us it gets pretty complicated when you start trying to look at it as a spectrum. Now. Hacker culture at the time was largely the realm of bulletin board systems, and those were message boards and file storage

systems that lived on someone's computer somewhere. You had thousands of these in the United States, and the way you would access it is you would use a dial up modem. You would dial into the bulletin board system's phone number and you would connect to the remote computer system, and there you could access things like files that were on the system, you could leave messages for other people. It

really was a bulletin board system. It was like a giant electronic bulletin board, but bulletin board where you could also do stuff like play games and um download files.

So this was kind of a precursor to the Internet, although there the Internet at this time did exist, but it was something that very few people had access to in the late eighties, so bolton boards were really really popular, and hackers would go there to discuss their exploits, to share information so that other people could get access to the same sort of systems that they were in, uh and you know, just kind of shoot the breeze with

fellow hackers. Not all bolton board systems were a den of scum and villany or a hive of scum and villainy, if I want to be appropriate with that that quote, But there were a lot that were catered specifically to hackers. So there were underground bolletin board systems as well as ones that were more public. They might have some hacker activity on them, but that wasn't the primary focus of them.

But again, law enforcement often will paint everyone with the same brush, particularly for things that are rapidly advancing and not fully understood, and so bolletin board systems in general were viewed with a lot of suspicion. Computer hacking itself was relatively new stuff, and for a while hackers were mostly ignored as a nuisance, as was evident in that quote I gave earlier from the Secret Service talking about

mischievous people living in their parents homes teenagers. Mostly that was the common view of hackers, and in fact it really wasn't that inaccurate or a lot of hackers out there. A lot of the hackers that caused a lot of issues were teenagers who were living at home where they were in their early twenties at their oldest, and they were in college. There are only a few people in their mid twenties or older who were in that hacker culture. There were some notable people that were in that age

group and also were known as hackers. But a lot of them were very young, and most of them were guys. Cyberspace had tangible values. At this point, information was starting to be viewed as property. It wasn't just data data, uh. And also it became a weird kind of switcherou because universities their whole purpose is to impart information, to to give information to people, and now they had computer systems where folks were thinking about information is something you were

to restrict from other people. And it was a weird dichotomy that was going on at the time, and in what had mostly been viewed as the harmless activity of a few hundred or maybe a few thousand computer nerds began to take on a new connotation as potentially criminal behavior because there were a couple of different incidents that were at least criminal adjacent, if not outright criminal activity itself.

And that ended up becoming a big influence on the way we view hacking in general, because went beyond just oh, this person is being kind of a a pain in my side, to this is someone who could potentially cause great harm to me in one way or another. And some of those criminal behaviors went beyond being potential. Some of them were clearly criminal acts. So here's an example.

There was a sixteen year old hacker out of Indiana who used the handle Fry Guy, and he had been committing credit card and wire fraud using hacking techniques that he had learned from a group of hackers called the Legion of Doom. Hackers love giving them their groups these these different connotations, and a lot of them are very playful.

Legion of Doom while it, you know, sounds kind of wicked, you said there and thing like yeah, but that's a cartoon group of villains, like that's the bad guys that would face off against the Justice League. And in fact that was purposefully chosen. The hackers were choosing these names partly kind of tongue in cheek, and there were even offshoots of this, like the Farmers of Doom uh f O D and Legion of Doom was called l O d well. Fry Guy had learned some interesting hacking skills

from folks at the Legion of Doom. And by the way, the Legion of Doom folks, they mostly were just interested in learning how these computer systems worked. They were they were the sort of hackers who were they looked down on the concept of stealing. Fry Guy, however, not so concerned about this, and Fry Guy liked the association of knowing people in the Legion of Doom, but Fry Guy

was not part of that group. People would refer to him as a legion of Doom wanna be, and he had ended up stealing more than six thousand dollars from

Western Union over over time with credit card and wire fraud. Uh. Fry Guy also had previously pulled what he thought was a hilarious prank by using the knowledge he gained from a few members from the Legion of Doom to redirect the digital switching system in Bell South and send phone calls that were intended for the Palm Beach County Probation Department in Florida to a phone sex operator going by

the name of Tina Up in New York State. But Fry Guy also didn't bother to cover his tracks very well, which meant that Bell South eventually found out about this, and company executives were clearly horrified and also terrified that someone had been able to infiltrate their systems and do this because if they could redirect calls meant for one entity and send it to another they might be able to do something way worse, like manipulate the nine one

one service, which could result in someone's death if if emergency responders cannot get to a situation in time. So there was a clear level of concern as this was

going on. Fry Guy's activities caught the attention of the Secret Service, largely because Fry Guy, perhaps drunk on his own limited power, had been taunting the phone company and claiming that his hacker group was going to cause a massive disruption in the phone system on a nationwide level on July so frieda Guy thought he was being pretty clever and hiding his tracks, but he was located by Western Union. Western Union passed this information onto the Secret Service,

which put pen registers on Fry Guy's phones. Now, pen registers will detect when calls are going out from a phone line. They cannot listen in on the content of that conversation. There's no spying on the actual conversations, but they can detect where those calls are going, including calls being made from a dial up modem. So that's what

the Secret Service was interested in. They wanted to see all the numbers that Fry Guy was calling on a regular basis, and they were able to trace those numbers to a lot of different entities, including lots of hacker and pirate based bulletin board systems and members of the Legion of Doom. UH. Those members of Legion of Doom, three of them were hackers who lived in Atlanta, Georgia. Fry Guy had been using his knowledge of systems to

steal money. These members of Legion of Doom viewed that behavior as being against their own code, so they wouldn't do that sort of thing. But because Fry Guy had learned the skills from them, and because he was still in contact with them, their identities and their their existence was a thing of interest to the Secret Service. So on July twenty nine, remember Fry Guy had said that on the fourth of July there was going to be

this massive nationwide disruption of the phone service. That didn't happen, but on July the Secret Service performed a coordinated sweep a Fry Guy and the Atlanta Three as they were known. UH. Those three would include hackers with the handles, the leftist, her vile and profit as in like a person who can give you a prophecy, not someone who profits off of others. Erville was an avid gamer as well as a hacker, and he particularly liked a game called a

Generic Universal role Playing System or GIRPS. Girp's was published by a company called Steve Jackson Games. That that game company will actually come back into this conversation later, and it's not a direct link to this particular fact. I just thought it was interesting that there was more than one connection to Steve Jackson Games in this Storyville particularly like playing a spy themed game using this universal system, and relied heavily on two source books called GIRPS High

Tech and Groups Special Ops. So the Genetic Universal role Playing System. You may be familiar with role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, the Generic Universal role Playing System. The intent of that was to create a basic set of rules that you could then adapt to any setting. It could be fantasy like Dungeons and Dragons. It could be a Western, it could be science fiction. It could be as in the case of Ervill's favorite version, espionage

and spy work kind of James bond Ish. Now Erville himself was the game master of the game he was running, and he had tons of notes relating to various game related missions in his possession, and because the game was about international espionage and would play out like a James Bond film, those notes, if viewed by someone looking for evidence of criminal behavior, could set off some major alarm bells, like reading about various kinds of international espionage and plans

of assassination and this sort of thing. It doesn't look good if the Secret Service comes into your home and starts looking at things you've written down on pieces of paper, and that includes ways that you can spy on other governments, or you might be a you know, a double agent or something that tends to make people feel a little antsy. It didn't help that Erville was not too picky about differentiating fantasy from reality. It uh meant that that whole

interrogation went a little rocky. And Erville also would put these notes on any kind of scrap paper he happen to have at his disposal. Unfortunately for Erville, a lot of those scraps of paper were on various Bell South print outs and documents that he was totally not supposed to have. So there are all these documents that were meant to be internal Bell South documents that Erville had

possession of. He had written all these notes about international espionage on them, and he was already linked to Fry Guy, who had been caught for you know, fraud and uh and Fry Guy had even said that the Legion of Doom was gonna cause this huge phone outage. So all of those cards were stacked against him, and it definitely

didn't look great. So the Secret Service interrogator Ville and asked him about the possibility of his group doing stuff like spying on phone conversations or disrupting the system, and ours like, uh, yeah, it's totally possible. We could totally do that if we wanted to. We could spy on you. We could bring down the phone system. It wouldn't even be that difficult. It's actually pretty easy. There's just some simple code we could run and the whole system would crash.

And the Secret Service said, what, yeah, I mean, we wouldn't because I mean, that's not interesting. He didn't say we wouldn't because it's wrong. He says, we wouldn't because there's no challenge in it. There's nothing special about it. It would just be boring. So that didn't make the Secret Service feel much better about what was going on at that point. Irville may not have done himself very

many favors during that interrogation. All right, guys, I'm interrupting myself right now and the sas and I'm doing it is because you know how I talk a lot. I did it a lot today, like more than we had anticipated on this topic. And so rather than continue this and make it an epic, super duper long episode of tech stuff that I'm sure you guys would love, We're gonna split up into two super duper long episodes of tech stuff, which I'm sure my boss will love for reasons.

So if you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech stuff, you should write me the email addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com or draw me a line on Facebook or Twitter to handle at both of those is tech stuff hs W. Remember I stream live over at twitch dot tv slash tech stuff on Wednesdays and Friday, So go over there and you can check out the schedule and join in on the conversation and you might even see me do super duper long episodes that later on I have to divide into a

couple of different ones. In our next episode, we will continue this amazing story and see how it concludes, and how it leads to the formation of the Electronic Frontier or Foundation. It's a story in tech that I don't think gets circulated enough and it's really fascinating to me. And I'll see you guys again soon for more on this and thousands of other topics because at how Stuff Works dot com