Steve Jackson himself arrived at the office just as the Secret Service agents were attempting to kick down the door. The agents were offered a key instead. They spared the door but did prefer to force open a locker and to cut the locks off of the outside storage sheds, despite being offered the appropriate keys.
The agents seized all the computer equipment they could find. They also tore open cartons in the warehouse, looking for a handbook on computer crime that was in preparation: they intended to seize all copies before it could be distributed.
The "handbook on computer crime" later turned out to be an innocent game about computers called GURPS Cyberpunk, published by Steve Jackson Games.s The mere fact that Loyd had chosen the name Cyberpunk had led the authorities to conclude that the program was part of a conspiracy to spread hacking techniques nationwide. The Secret Service seized all copies of the game at the company's premises and made doubly certain that they collected the data for Loyd's manual as well.
Two months later Operation Sundevil struck again. On May 8th coordinated raids on hackers in fourteen cities were carried out. Over 150 Secret Service agents were deployed, teamed with numerous local and state law enforcement agencies. The agents served twenty-seven search warrants in Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, New York, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Plano (Texas), Richmond, San Diego, San Jose, and Tucson. Forty computers and 23,000 diskettes were seized.
The official reason for the busts was telecommunications fraud. The raids were synchronized in order to completely surprise the hacker community and prevent important evidence from being destroyed.
But that nearly happened anyway. As reports of the Atlanta and New York raids circulated, a number of hacker boards carried warnings that another "major bust" was imminent. (Captain Zap, the Philadelphia hacker arrested years before for theft, takes credit for the messages.) One of those who took the warnings seriously was Erik Bloodaxe, the LoD member who was so keen on selling U.S. military secrets to the Soviets. All his equipment, as well as any documents that could incriminate him, was hidden away before the raids. When the Secret Service and local cops burst in on him, he was the picture of innocence. With little to choose from, the agents considered taking away his PacMan game--then decided to take his phone instead. It was the only piece of hacker equipment they could find.
Others were less lucky. As the Secret Service raided homes of known hackers, carrying away boxes of diskettes and computer equipment, they were invariably asked, "When do I get my system back?" The authorities were well aware that confiscating equipment for use as evidence later--should there ever be a case-- was punishment in itself.
During the raids half the members of the Legion of Doom were busted. MoD and DPAC were less affected than the Legion by the busts, but the aftershock would cause DPAC to split up, and MoD would come to grief the next year.
The spluttering, intermittent hacker wars had ended in default. The Secret Service had broken the hacker gangs and brought law and order to Cyberspace. Or so it seemed.
But support for hackers was building--unwittingly aided by the FBI, the Secret Service's rival in the bureaucratic battle for responsibility for computer crime. On May 1, 1990, an FBI agent named Richard Baxter, Jr., drove to Pinedale, Wyoming, for a meeting with John Perry Barlow. The two men came from different worlds. Barlow was a bundle of idiosyncrasies and contradictions, the sort of man who seems to survive only in the American West: aged forty-two, a former rancher, the Lyricist for the Grate- ful Dead, and also the local Republican party county chairman he believed in the frontier, both the real one around Pinedale and the electronic one accessible through his computer. Barlow wasn't a hacker, but he was part of something called WELL--the Whole Earth Electronic Link, the embodiment of the sixties counterculture surviving in the 1990s on an electronic bulletin board based in Sausalito, California. His philosophy was a mix of sixties liberalism leavened by a rancher's rugged individualism; he was a Republican hippie with a computer.
Agent Baxter was a country boy who "didn't know a ROM chip from a vise grip," according to Barlow. He wanted to talk to Barlow about high-tech crime, although hackers were not his usual beat.
