Operation Sundevil and the Birth of the EFF - Part Two

So here is part two. I hope you guys enjoy, and I'm probably gonna start like mid sentence because we had to interrupt the last one right in the middle of somewhere. So let's go now. On Martin Luther King Junior Day in nine So, several months after this raid

had happened, a T and T E crashed. There was a nationwide crash of a T and T S phone service, which since Fry Guy had mentioned the possibility of a phone service crashing nationwide on fourth of July and Martin Luther King Jr. Days another holiday, made the Secret Service totally flip out and suspect that the Legion of Doom was responsible, and so they stepped up surveillance of the

group in general beyond the Atlanta three. Remember those are just three people who are in this larger hacker group. That's that's roster changed regularly. It's not like people would become a member of this hacker group for life. That list of members changed pretty frequently, uh, And there was a lot of turnover. People would go off and form splinter groups, or they would just drop out entirely. But the Legion of Doom had no responsibility for that phone crash. However,

things were already getting out of control. There was this growing sense of unease and law enforcement. Hackers were getting access to critical infrastructure. Now, a lot of that fell onto the entities responsible for creating the infrastructure in the

first place. So, for example, Bell South, which was really flipping out when discovered that hackers were reprogramming its digital switching systems, had pretty lousy security on some of their systems, particularly the Bell South that was focusing in the Atlanta and Georgia area. Georgia and Florida area, I should say they their security at the time was pretty terrible. They had entire phone the computer systems that were not even protected by passwords. So once you knew that the system

existed and you found an entry way into it. It was pretty much free gain. And people argued, well, yeah, hackers are getting access to this infrastructure, but a large part of that is because there's no security on the infrastructure infrastructure side, So whose fault is that? Really there

should be much better security. If you have a a bank and there's no back wall to the vault, then it's kind of hard to say that, Uh, you know, you should expect that money to be there the next the next day, and people just walk in through the back and take it. So there was definitely a shared responsibility here, although ultimately you could argue people who choose

to infiltrate a system are ultimately responsible. But still there was it was complicated, and some folks said that it just felt like there was There was the thought of someone breaking into a system like that was just outside the realm of possibility, not because it was too difficult, but just because the system was considered to be so important. Who would have the temerity to go in and break

into such a system. Once bell Seuth became aware that this was happening and that it had been going on for a while, it's just that again, most hackers were smart enough to cover their tracks. Fry Guy was just not one of them. The company agan to dedicate time and resources hiring on people and having them tracked down

other instances of abuse. Now across the nation, law enforcement officials were closing in on various hackers, many of them teenagers, and the Secret Service really were focusing on Erville, Leftist and Profit. The Atlanta Three, those members of the Legion of Doom. They all three were infamous for exploring systems that they had no business being in. But unlike Fry Guy, they weren't interested in causing really mischief for stealing money. They just wanted to poke around to see what was

going on. But one of them did do something supremely dumb that would cause huge issues for numerous other people. And the one who did something supremely dumb was Profit. So Erville was kind of a problem because he wasn't really considering anything that he had done to have been wrong in the first place, which was antagonizing his interrogators.

But Profit had taken a trophy while exploring what was supposed to be a very private computer system, and that trophy is what would ultimately lead to a massive sting operation that would go far beyond the reach of the Secret Service. Now, this actually happened a little bit earlier.

We had been talking about eighty nine and nine. But back in Profit had broken into a Bell South automation system called AMSX, which stood for Advanced Information Management System, and it was an internal business network at Bell South, not terribly interesting. It had a lot of files that

people within Bell South might need access to. Think of like a company intranet has a lot of just you know, working documents that you would need access to for whatever reason, but nothing that's of particular interest to anyone on the outside necessarily. But getting into the system was tricky, not due to security because again and this was one of those systems that didn't even have password protection, but because it was largely invisible. There were no forward facing or

public facing portals into the system. You had to get into a Bell South system and then from their log into this other computer system. Uh, it wasn't much of a problem for Profit. He was able to compromise a valid user I D and then he was able to access the am SX system that way, and he did so almost a dozen times, and as a trophy, he made a copy of a document that he came across. He wasn't looking for it, He just saw it and thought, I'll make a copy of this to prove that I

was here. So I when I tell my hacker friends, hey, I broke into that system. This is the proof I will have. The document he copied was titled Bell South Standard Practice six six zero DASH two to five DASH one oh four s V Control Office, Administration of Enhance nine eleven Services for Special Services and Major Account Centers, and it was dated March. This is the e N

one document, the Enhanced nine one services document. Then he made a copy of this document and he stored it on an account he had made on a Unix bulletin board system called Joel Net j O L n Et, and Joel Nett belonged to a guy named Richard Andrews, who would end up suffering a huge amount of grief for this. And you then have two unauthorized copies of this out in the wild, beyond the ones that actual

BellSouth employees might have had access to. So real BELLSOFF employees may have had copies of this on their machines, which isn't terribly safe either, but profits certainly wasn't supposed to have it, and not only did he have a copy on his computer, yet now one on someone else's computer. That would be Richard Drew's computer, the one that was

running this bulletin board system. Well, then Richard Andrews notices that there's this new account on joel Net that he doesn't recognize, and he gets a little suspicious about it. You know, he's the administrator of this bulletin board system, so he sees when stuff is going up or down on it, and he investigated and saw the copy of

the document and figured something hinky was going on. So then he makes a copy of this file and he sends it to a friend of his who worked at A T and T. This would be a guy named Charles Boykin. Now Boykin was not in voice communication, that wasn't the department he worked in, but he immediately knew that the document was serious business. Boy can get a little upset because he's like, why are people messing with this?

This is critical stuff? And he decided to consult with an A T and T corporate information security officer named Jerome Dalton. That meant that Boykin had to make another copy of the E nine one document. So you're seeing how this is starting to escalate. Dalton would in turn send a copy of the file to a telecommunications fraud expert named Henry Klipfel. But Clipfel was a happy cat.

He figured this document was a hacker trophy. It wasn't meant to be a guide for some sort of nationwide catastrophe. He figured someone broke into the system. This was their proof that they did it. So he just kind of put it on the shelf and didn't really think about it again and wasn't too worried about it until later. Um, he just figured it was what it actually was. He would sell this for a while, although he would eventually become heavily involved in a response team a little bit

later on. Now we've got a lot more to talk about for this whole series of events that would end up perpetuating a seriously a series of bad decisions that led to the formation of the FF which, by the way, it was not a bad decision. It's just that a bunch of bad decisions happened and the e f F had to come into creation because of it. But before I get into that part of the story, let's take another quick break and thank our sponsor. All right, let's

get back to profit profit. What had decided that he was going to really revel in his victorious infiltration of the Bell South system. He was not aware of this leap frogging of the document that was going down the line being sent from one person to another, and an effort to figure out what exactly is going on here? He thought, I wanna, I want to really brag about this. This was a big achievement. How can I how can I let the community know that I have this this

amazing document. Well, there was a journalist who was working on a publication, a digital publication called Frack. Fracks spelled with a pH, so it was a portmanteau of the words freak and hack and uh. The journalist used the handle night lightning and a night, as in like a man dressed up in big old armored underpants, that kind of night, which, by the way, you do not want to be a night when there's lightning around. That's a

bad combination. Anyway, night Lightning was writing this publication called Frack, which was very popular. It was distributed to multiple bolletin board systems across the entire world, primarily the United States, but also beyond that, and night Lightning had been bothering the Atlanta Three for years about giving the giving the publication more information so they could publish stories about them. And typically the Atlanta Freight three weren't interested in doing that.

They just didn't really play ball very much. But Profits saw this as being a great opportunity, and so a Profit sent a copy of the nine one file tonight Lightning. Night Lightning was going to the University of Missouri, and so this copy of E nine one one then goes

on to a computer at the University of Missouri campus. Uh. Profit figured that he was pretty safe because no one had said anything to him and he wasn't aware of this other activity that was going on with the file at the time, and then he and night Lightning together started to edit down the document. They wanted to publish it. Well, night Lightning really wanted to publish it, but Profit was scared that one the information inside it could be put

to malicious use and it could cause a catastrophe. I mean, it did involve the emergency phone system in the United States.

That's a big deal. And two he didn't want anything that could ultimately be traced back to him so together they edited out all the sensitive information while keeping the rest of it as much as they could so that they could prove that, yes, this document did come from Bell South, but they leave out all the things like all the phone numbers for the various officers at Bell South,

which were part of this document. They didn't want that to be revealed to the general public because then a bunch of hackers would end up just using those phone numbers for various malicious purposes. So they're trying to limit the amount of damage that could be done with this document, and Frank would end up publishing this edited document on February twenty nine. I remember July of that year would be when the raid would happen, so this is still before the raid that hit fry Guy profit or Vile

and the Leftist. The Digital dogument was then published to one fifty different hacker sites or hacker bolton board systems would be more appropriate to say, so it got very wide distribution, even though this was an edited down version of that document, and at this point law enforcement and Bell South had totally gone eight. They flipped their collective lids. This is what helped fuel the move to the Legion of Doom and Fry Guy sweep At later on that year,

on July two. It's what really motivated the Secret Service to make that make that sting operation. The intrusion was a huge problem, but the apparent distribution of what was considered a critical document was really the catastrophe in question. It It terrified people because here was a sensitive document about a critical service and who knows what could happen.

As far as the Secret Service could tell, there was some sort of conspiracy going on among the hacker subculture to take down the phone system or the emergency phone system specifically, and it was a coordinated attack that was going across the nation. It was being spread around, and so the Secret Service was highly motivated to pursue this. The problem was that they weren't necessarily doing it in a way that was technically what you would call legal. As it turns out, So you have a a an

arguably understandable motivation for the Secret Service. They really have to buckle down and make sure that the nation is safe. Uh You. There, you then have the more mischievous community of the hackers who are just kind of reveling in this thought that here's this private computer system that's supposed to be off limits, and yet a hacker strolled right in and took one of these files. Um and both groups had totally not really considered the other the motivations

of the other one. So the hackers were mostly ignorant of what was going on with the Secret Service at this time, and the Secret Service was just imagining a worst case scenario in the case of the hackers, and it would lead to enormous problems further down the road. And we also know that if you take down a digital file once it's been put up online, that's it. It's out there. The genie is out of the bottle,

the cat is out of the bag. You're not getting it back because someone's gonna make a copy of it and post it somewhere else. We've seen it with videos. We've seen it with tweets, We've seen it with social media posts, We've seen it with files. It's just once it goes up, all it takes is one other person to download it and then host it somewhere else and it's game over. Then the phone system would crash on January.

This is after those rates with Fry Guy in the atlant A three, and it seemed to prove what Fry Guy had been saying. Fry Guy had said that the group of hackers, the Legion of Dooms, specifically, we're going to end up crashing the phone system. Now, he had said it was going to be on the fourth of July nine, and instead it happens on Martin Luther King Junior Day in nineteen and that's when the poo hit

the oscillating cooling device, as they say. Three days later, January four, people would show up to night Lightning's frat house at the University of Missouri. Two of those people were Secret Service agents, one was an agent for Southwestern Bell and one was a University of Missouri security officer, and they accused night Lightning of causing this phone system crash,

or at least coordinating it. Now, night Lightning had nothing to do with the phone system coming down, but, like lots of other hackers before, decided to cooperate fully within terry Gators, sharing an entire of the subscribers to the Fracking Newsletter, or the Frack Newsletter, i should say, and that gave law enforcement a ton of other leads to follow. Around that same time, agents were starting to do stuff that was really causing a lot of concern, not just

in the hacking community, but in the broader computer industry community. So, for example, one target of this investigation was a guy named Robert Eisenberg who ran a node. A node is part of an interconnected system of message boards, so it's like a bolton Board system, but amped up because it could actually connect directly to other nodes. Bolton Board systems were kind of like an island, right. There was no connection directly to other bolton Board systems for the most part.

There were some exceptions, but generally speaking, it was like an individual computer system that you would log into and that's all you saw. Nodes were more like web pages on the Internet, though not quite as sophisticated as that, so sort of somewhere in between a bolton Board system and a web page, but they could interconnect with each other and allow for direct communication and file transfers between them. So Eisenberg was running a node that was a a

Unix node. It was called Elephant. Eisenberg was targeted because a task force out of Chicago, a very active task force that was largely responsible for leading some of these investigations into hackers, had identified elephant uh the node that he was running after performing a raid on a different Unix expert called Terminus, or his handle was Terminus. Eisenberg was a Unix consultant, and they thought because Terminus was connected to this world, that Eisenberg too must be connected

to it. Eisenberg, though, was a total stand up dude, a straight shooter. He was not someone who acted outside of the law. He did do some contract work with a phone company, and while technically his contract was up, he could log into the phone company systems and occasionally he would do so. But he wasn't stealing files, he wasn't distributing files, he wasn't causing any sort of sabotage.

So you could argue that he was still being a little questionable because he was poking his nose someplace where technically he was no longer working. But beyond that, he wasn't really doing anything. He wasn't publishing any of that on his Bolton board system or his node. Rather, and the investigators were asking them all about the legion of Doom,

and he says, what are you talking about? And they started asking about Terminus, and then he said, I don't I don't know who you're I don't know these people. Then they gave him the actual name for the guy who was using the handle, Terminus, and Eisenberg says, oh, yeah, that guy. Know that guy because he is an expert on this one particular very powerful computer system, and we've talked about that, but we've talked as you know, human beings,

not to hacker handles and otherwise. He really had no connection to Terminus or hackers like the Legion of Doom. But that didn't stop the government from seizing Eisenberg's equipment and the node itself. Eisenberg wasn't arrested, he was not charged with any crimes, but the government would end up holding onto his equipment for a couple of years, so he had no access to things that he he outright owned.

The government did say that the modem he was using was likely hot as in it was stolen property, but Eisenberg didn't purchase it as stolen. He wasn't like going to some sort of person who's like, hey, this modem fell off the back of a truck. He bought it second hand. But that's what a lot of hackers were doing. They were buying equipment she that was usually equipment that say, a university was getting rid of because they were upgrading to the next level of equipment, so then they offload

the stuff that they already had. According to the government, the modem that Eisenberg had was likely stolen property, but he didn't know that, so he was like, well, I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to buy stolen property. I just needed

a modem. Uh. This whole move of the government taking Eisenberg's equipment without charging him of any sort of crime, as you might imagine, is problematic because if you assume we're in adjust society, which is obviously being very lenient, you don't have governments sweep in to take possession of someone else's property with no legal justification. But that's totally what happened to Eisenberg as well as to other people.

Eisenberg was not an isolated case. There were other people who also had their their various computer systems taken from them without any actual evidence that they themselves had done any sort of crime. Now, this was largely because there was still so much uncertainty about what was actually going on. The Secret Service was still trying to figure out is there some sort of nationwide conspiracy that's gonna try and do the equivalent of a cyber attack on the United States. Uh,

But they weren't really sure. They didn't have any evidence of it apart from the fact that this one emergency document had made its way through all these different hacker sites. There were also fears that perhaps foreign agents were involved, including possibly the involvement of the KGB out of Germany, which, by the way, at that time there were two Germany's. There was a West Germany in the East Germany. Now the days that's not the case, but some of us

remember when the map was very different in Europe. So the fear of what could possibly be was fueling a lot of very questionable decisions over at the Secret Service. Back to the Legion of Doom, one of the other members, not the Atlanta three, but another member who had not been picked up in this initial sweep, was known as the Mentor. Mentor happened to work at a little company called Steve Jackson Games. I mentioned them earlier in this episode.

Steve Jackson Games had its own little bolton board system called Illuminati, which if you know what the Illuminati are supposed to be, it's this hidden government organization that supposedly was controlling the world. It obviously brings up other questions of oh, maybe there is a hacker conspiracy here, but no, that was because Steve Jackson Games had a game called Illuminati and they named their bolton Board system after it. It had nothing to do with any sort of hacker conspiracy.

Steve Jackson Games just makes games, and that game again, Illuminati, the game of conspiracy was what they called their bolton

Board system. So the Secret Service was getting confused between the actual games that Steve Jackson was making and reality, kind of similar to what Erville had experienced with those notes he had made for his Steve Jackson Girp's game that he was game mastering, the fact that it was all about espionage and had all these different spy terminology, the elements in it that really made the Secret Service suspicious.

And now you had this whole bolton Board system filled with that kind of information that also made them suspicious. They were sure that there was some connection between this bolletin board system and this document that was making the rounds. So on March, one group of agents rated the Mentors home where he lived with his wife and children, and they took away his computer, his phone, his printer, and

all this other equipment. He was not arrested, he was not charged with any crime, but his property was not returned to him on any sort of decent time scale either. I think they kept it for a couple of years. Then the same team decided to move on and raid Steve Jackson Games itself. The office for Steve Jackson Games.

The mentor had overheard some of the agents talking on their radios about busting the door down and doing this raid, and the mentor, absolutely aghast at the idea, knowing that there was nothing at Steve Jackson Games that was remotely connected to this world, said hey, let me just give you my key so you can go in. Because you're gonna go in anyway, you might as well not break

the door down, And so he did. He surrendered his key voluntarily, and they went in and they started seizing all these computers and other various pieces of equipment, and they denied entry to all of the Steve Jackson employees who were showing up, including Steve Jackson himself, and they said, we're conducting an investigation and this is off limits. They took three computers, a handful of hard disk drives, tons of floppy disks, and lots of other pieces of equipment.

And it wasn't just the equipment, it was the stuff that was stored on the equipment. On those hard drives included financial information about the company, you know, customer contacts, uh, personnel files, stuff that was sensitive. And of course the bulletin board system itself existed on one of those computers, and that also contained electronic communication between various employees. It was sort of like their internal email server in a way.

And all of this equipment was seized by the Secret Service. But what about arrests Zero No one was arrested or charged with any crime. There was no crime to charge them with. There was just the seizure of property on the suspicion that this document, the document might be on one of those machines, So that was the actual reason for the raid. But they couldn't find it anywhere on

any of the machines. There was no sign of it on the bulletin board system, there was no sign of it on any of the hard drives or on any of the floppy disks. It was completely absent from the property of Steve Jackson Games. Now, the fallout from that raid was terrible for the company. Even though they were completely innocent, they couldn't have access to their equipment. The Secret Service did not return it to them very quickly at all, and so as a result, their financials had

taken a huge hit. Steve Jackson had no choice but to lay off nearly half of his employees. He just couldn't afford to pay them and stay in business because of this huge setback. So there was demonstrable harm from

this raid, which ultimately was an unjustified raid. Uh. Meanwhile, you have the Secret Service convinced that because of the subject matter of some of the games that Steve Jackson made, that they were onto something and the whole thing would be comical if it didn't actually mean that there was a negative impact on decent people who were just doing their job. Eventually, the Secret Service did return all the equipment to the company, but the damage had already been done.

And worse than that, they had discovered that the electronic mail that it existed on this bulletin board system was missing information like there were entire communications that were gone had been deleted. They had been accessed individually and deleted from the bulletin board system. Which infuriated Steve Jackson. This is what would end up becoming the starting point for

the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Steve Jackson was certain that his First Amendment rights and the First Amendment rights of his employees had been violated because the government had come in seized a list of community cations and deleted some of them. This would be like if the government raided a library, grabbed a whole bunch of books from it, and then just burnt them. It's not it's not within the realm of government in a just and free society to do that.

That's an authoritarian move, not a democratic move. So Steve Jackson started looking for civil liberties organizations to help him pursue a claim against the U. S. Government to say our free free speech was violated and we need to have this resolved. But he was having a lot of trouble finding anyone to help him because these problems were

really new. I mean, these were electronic communications, not hard copies, and there are a lot of civil liberties groups that just didn't know how to handle that because there really there was no like precedent set. No one was really sure how to argue it. So he was kind of stuck. But three people felt that they understood these issues and they were very much on the side of Steve Jackson

and his company. And those three people belonged to an online community that was called the Whole Earth Electronic Link or well w e l L. Those three people were Mitch Kapoor, who was the former president of the Lotus Development Corporation, John Perry Barlow, who was a cattle rancher and who wrote lyrics for the band The Grateful Dead,

and John Gilmore, who worked for Sun Microsystems. These three decided to form the nonprofit organization that would be dedicated to defending civil liberties in the technology space, and they called it the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Their first act as an organization was to hire a legal team to represent Steve Jackson Games in a lawsuit filed against the Secret Service. So they brought on a law firm called George Donaldson and Ford. The lead counsel was a fellow named Pete Kennedy.

They brought three charges against the Secret Service and Sam Sparks, the court judge who heard the case, would uphold two of those charges. The one that he would ultimately strike down was an argument that the Secret Service had quote intercepted end quote electronic messages illegally, and the way they intercepted these messages was by taking the actual physical computer equipment that the messages were stored on. So Steve Jackson Games would appeal this decision saying no, no, no, we

need to have this resolved. The Fifth Circuit Court would end up ruling against that appeal, so denying the appeal, and that essentially set a precedent saying that physical possession of computer equipment does not constitute interception of electronic communication just because the communication happens to be on that equipment. The judge gave a lengthy reprimand to the Secret Service, and it's a pretty long summary, but let me give you the rundown because I think it's very interesting. These

are the words of Sam Sparks. This is a complex case. It is still not clear how sensitive and or proprietary the one document was, or how genuinely harmful the potential decryption scheme may have been, or if either were discovered by the Secret Service and the information seized on March first nine. The fact that no criminal charges have ever been filed and the investigation remains ongoing is of course

not conclusive. The complexity of this case results from the Secret services insufficient investigation and its lack of knowledge of the specific laws that could apply to their conduct. On February nine and thereafter, it appears obvious neither the government employees nor the plaintiffs or their lawyers contemplated the statute upon which this case is brought back in February, March, April, May or June of n but this does not provide

assistance to the defense of the case. The Secret Service and its personnel are the entities that citizens, like each of the plaintiffs, rely upon and look to protect their rights and properties. The Secret Service conduct resulted in the seizure of property, products, business records, business documents, and electronic communications of a corporate and for individual citizens that the

statutes were intended to protect. It may well be, as the government defendants contend, these statutes relied upon by the plaintiffs should not apply to the facts of this case, as these holdings may result in the government having great difficulties in obtaining information or computer documents representing illegal activities. But this court cannot amend or rewrite the statutes involved. The Secret Service must go to the Congress for relief

until that time. This Court recommends better education, investigation, and strict compliance with the statutes as written. And that's how the e f F was born out of the overreaching response by the Secret Service to a perceived threat of an imagined conspiracy of hackers determined to take down the

N one emergency services system. That is a heck of a story, And as I said at the beginning, while I was researching this topic, I realized that that origin story was so fascinating that it involved a deeper look than just Oh, the e f F started because the Secret Service rated the offices of Steve Jackson Games. You've

got to know more than that. And since then, the e f F has done a lot of different work defending the various liberties of people in the Internet space, and will definitely cover more of that in a future episode.

In the meantime, if you guys have suggestions for future topics to cover on this show, being tech stuff, send a message the email addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you know, drop me a line on the social media like Facebook and Twitter the handle of both of those tech stuff hs W. You're gonna see a lot more activity from those in the days moving forward. Remember you can watch me stream live over at twitch dot tv slash tech stuff. I record on

Wednesdays and Fridays, so pop over to that link. You'll see the schedule there, and you can participate in the chat room, and I might even be able to read it and chat with you. I try to multiple times throw an episode, and uh, I guess I'll talk to you guys again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it has stuff works dot com