In mid-July the Secret Service recorded Fry Guy charging $500 to a stolen credit card number. With that piece of evidence (previous telco monitors had not been court-approved and therefore could not be used as evidence), the Secret Service was also able to include Fry Guy in the Atlanta Three search warrant.
The house in Elmwood, Indiana, was raided the same day the three addresses in Atlanta were busted. Fry Guy awoke from his summer-long haze to find that he was suspected of the two Florida incidents, the anonymous telephone call to Indiana Bell's security manager, planting the computer bombs, and credit card fraud.
Hackers are often victims of their own hype. The LoD was the principal target of the crackdown because it promoted itself as the biggest and meanest gang in Cyberspace--and because the authorities believed them.
The computer underworld is a hall of mirrors. Reality becomes bent, the truth shrunken. The authorities who organized Operation Sundevil and its related investigations believed they were dealing with a nationwide conspiracy involving $50 million in telecommunications fraud alone. And that, they said, was only the tip of the iceberg.
What they got in the end, notwithstanding the Atlanta Three's guilty pleas, were some relatively minor convictions. After the barrage of criticism from John Perry Barlow's Electronic Frontier Foundation, the investigators began to pull back. The Phoenix officials, such as Gail Thackeray, are now keen to distance both themselves and Operation Sundevil from the other antihacker actions that year. The wilder suggestions--that the AT&T incident had been caused by Acid Phreak; that hackers were looting banks; that hospital records were being altered, and patients put at risk--have been dropped. The word conspiracy is used less and less, and the computer bombs, the specific catalyst for the whole crackdown, have been quietly forgotten. No one has been officially charged with planting the bombs, and it is unlikely that anyone ever will be. Everyone in the underworld's hall of mirrors claims to know who did it, but they all finger different people.
As for Fry Guy, he denies any responsibility for the bombs: "They're just pointless destruction. I can't understand why anyone would do it. I'm not malicious or destructive: I only do things for gain."
That was Fry Guy's downfall: he operated for gain. When he was raided, the Secret Service found more than a hundred "access devices" in his possession-- credit card numbers and telephone calling cards. He could never be charged with planting the bombs, and no one was able to pin the Florida incidents on him, but he was caught red-handed on the credit card fraud. Following his arrest, it was estimated that his little scam had netted him $6,000 that year. He is now on probation, his equipment confiscated, but if you ask him why he hacked, he still sighs: "It's the greatest thing in the world."
New technology requires new approaches. The reactions of the authorities to the computer underworld show a dependence on old ideas. Hacking becomes "breaking and entering"; role-playing games become "conspiracies"; exploration becomes "espionage." The dated terms obliterate the difference between the "bad" hackers and the "good" hackers.
And there is a difference. Society might tolerate some activities of the computer underground. Hackers are mostly explorers exercising intellectual curiosity. Undoubtedly, they will break into computers, sometimes causing ancillary damage or taking up system time, and they probably will exploit the telecom systems to do so. But their intent, for the most part, is not malicious.
On the other hand, the black arts of virus writing or hacking to steal money are unjustifiable. Virus writers are electronic vandals; hackers who rob are high-tech thieves.
The difference between the good and the bad is often blurred. The distinction is one of motive: the malicious and the criminal should be viewed differently from the merely clever or curious.
