The decision to deny Mitnick access to a phone was greeted with alarm by an increasingly nervous hacker community. "We must rise to defend those endangered by the hacker witch-hunts," wrote an unnamed contributor to 2600, the hacker journal. The U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago, then in the midst of its own hacker case, responded by saying it intended to prosecute "aggressively."
The Chicago case, though less publicized than the Mitnick affair, was the first test of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. In 1987 local law enforcement agencies began watching a sixteen-year-old hacker and high school dropout named Herbert Zinn, Jr., who used the handle Shadow Hawk. The law enforcement officials spent two months investigating Zinn, auditing his calls and monitoring his activities on computers.
He was subsequently accused of using a PC to hack into a Bell Laboratories computer in New York, an AT&T computer in North Carolina, another AT&T computer at Robbins Air Force Base in Georgia, an IBM facility in New York, and other computers belonging to the Illinois Bell Telephone Company. He was also accused of copying various documents, including what were called highly sensitive programs relating to the U.S. Missile Command.
Shadow Hawk was arrested in a raid involving the FBI, AT&T security representatives, and the Chicago police. He was eventually sentenced to nine months in prison and fined $10,000.
The Mitnick and Shadow Hawk cases fueled the growing concern among U.S. Iaw enforcement agencies about hacking. By the end of the decade, the Secret Service--which is now charged with investigating computer crime, a responsibility partly, and not entirely amicably, shared with the FBI--was said to have established a unit for monitoring pirate bulletin boards. A number of state and local police forces had organized their own computer crime sections, while separate investigations of the underground were mounted by U.S. Attorneys' offices and local prosecutors. By the beginning of the 1990s, American law enforcement agencies had begun paying extraordinary attention to computer crime.
Across the Atlantic, away from the prying eyes of the American authorities, the biggest international gathering of hackers ever organized took place in Amsterdam in early August 1989.
The assembly was held in the seedy confines of the Paradiso, a former church that had been turned into a one-thousand-seat theater. The Paradiso was the home of Amsterdam's alternative culture; it specialized in musical events, underground exhibits, and drug parties. The Galactic Hacker Party--or, more grandly, the International Conference on the Alternative Use of Technol- gy brought together some 400 to 450 hackers, hangers-on, journalists, and, inevitably, undercover cops, to swap stories, refine techniques, gather information, or simply enjoy themselves.
The conference took place on all three floors of the Paradiso. On the top floor, above what had been the nave of the church, participants were provided with computers to play with. (Their popularity decreased after one wag programmed them to flash,
THIS MACHINE IS BEING MONITORED BY THE DUTCH POLICE, when they were turned on.) The ground floor, the theater itself, was reserved for speakers and demonstrations; across the back of the stage drooped a white banner emblazoned with the words GALACTIC HACKER PARTY. The crypts in the basement of the Paradiso were reserved for partying.
At ten A.M. on Tuesday, August 2nd, the opening day, a large monitor displayed a computer-generated image of a head of a hacker. "Keep on hacking," urged the head in an American accent, as the multinational gathering milled about in the disorganized way of a crowd that clearly lacked a common language. Then, a bearded, bespectacled, balding figure shuffled unheralded onto the stage. He was the keynote speaker, the man who, more than anyone, had given rise to the whole hacking phenomenon.
At forty-six, Captain Crunch looked strangely out of place among the younger hackers. It had been eighteen years since he had first come to symbolize the new technological underground, ten years since he had last been jailed for a second time for phone phreaking. And here he was in Amsterdam, on a month's vacation in Europe, still spreading the word.
