GURPS LABOR LOST: The Cyberpunk Bust

by Bruce Sterling
Copyright (c) by Bruce Sterling, 1991.
Reprinted by permission of the author.


Some months ago, I wrote an article about the raid on Steve Jackson 
Games, which appeared in my "Comment" column in the British science 
fiction monthly, Interzone(#44, February 1991).  This updated version, 
specially re-written for  dissemination by EFF, reflects the somewhat 
greater knowledge I've gained to date, in the course of research on an 
upcoming nonfiction book, The Hacker Crackdown: The True Story of the 
Digital Dragnet of 1990 and the Start of the Electronic Frontier 
Foundation.   

The bizarre events suffered by Mr. Jackson and his co-workers, in my 
own home town of Austin, Texas, were directly responsible for my 
decision to put science fiction aside and to tackle the purportedly 
real world of computer crime and electronic free-expression.

The national crackdown on computer hackers in 1990 was the largest and 
best-coordinated attack on computer mischief in American history.   
There was  Arizona's "Operation Sundevil,"  the sweeping May 8 
nationwide raid against outlaw bulletin boards.   The BellSouth E911 
case (of which the Jackson raid was a small and particularly egregious 
part) was coordinated out of Chicago.  The New York State Police were 
also very active in 1990.   

All this vigorous law enforcement activity meant very little to the 
narrow and intensely clannish world of  science fiction.   All we knew 
- and this perception persisted, uncorrected, for months - was that 
Mr. Jackson had been raided because of his intention to  publish a 
gaming book about "cyberpunk" science fiction.   The Jackson raid 
received extensive coverage in science fiction news magazines (yes, we 
have these) and became notorious in the world of SF as "the Cyberpunk 
Bust."   My INTERZONE article attempted to make the Jackson case 
intelligible to the  British SF audience.

What possible reason could lead an American federal law enforcement 
agency to raid the headquarters of a science-fiction gaming company?  
Why did armed teams of city police, corporate security men, and 
federal agents roust two Texan computer hackers from their beds at 
dawn, and then confiscate thousands of dollars' worth of computer 
equipment, including the hackers' common household telephones?  Why 
was an unpublished book called GURPS Cyberpunk seized by the US Secret 
Service and declared "a manual for computer crime?"  These weird 
events were not parodies or fantasies; no, this was real.

The first order of business in untangling this bizarre drama is to 
know the players - who come in entire teams.

PLAYER ONE:  The Law Enforcement Agencies.

America's defense against the threat of computer crime is a confusing 
hodgepodge of state, municipal, and federal agencies.  Ranked first, 
by size and power, are the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the 
National Security Agency (NSA), and the Federal Bureau of 
Investigation (FBI), large, potent and secretive organizations who, 
luckily, play almost no role in the Jackson story.

The second rank of such agencies include the Internal Revenue Service 
(IRS),  the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the 
Justice Department, the Department of Labor, and various branches of 
the defense establishment, especially the Air Force Office of Special 
Investigations (AFOSI).   Premier among these groups, however, is the 
highly-motivated US Secret Service (USSS),the suited, mirrorshades-
toting, heavily-armed bodyguards of the President of the United 
States.

Guarding high-ranking federal officials and foreign dignitaries is a 
hazardous, challenging and eminently necessary task, which has won 
USSS a high public profile.  But Abraham Lincoln created this oldest 
of federal law enforcement agencies in order to foil counterfeiting.   
Due to the historical tribulations of the Treasury Department (of 
which USSS is a part), the Secret Service also guards historical 
documents, analyzes forgeries, combats wire fraud, and battles 
"computer fraud and abuse."   These may seem unrelated assignments, 
but the Secret Service is fiercely aware of its duties.  It is also 
jealous of its bureaucratic turf, especially in computer-crime, where 
it formally shares jurisdiction with its traditional rival, the 
Johnny-come-lately FBI.

As the use of plastic money has spread, and their long-established 
role as protectors of the currency has faded in importance, the Secret 
Service has moved aggressively into the realm of electronic crime.  
Unlike the lordly NSA, CIA, and FBI, which generally can't be bothered 
with domestic computer mischief, the Secret Service is noted for its 
street-level enthusiasm.





The third-rank of law enforcement are the local "dedicated computer 
crime units."  There are few such groups, pitifully under staffed.  
They struggle hard for funding and the vital light of publicity.  It's 
difficult to make white-collar computer crimes seem pressing, to an 
American public that lives in terror of armed and violent street-
crime.

These local groups are small - often, one or two officers, computer 
hobbyists, who have drifted into electronic crimebusting because they 
alone are game to devote time and effort to bringing law to the 
electronic frontier.  California's Silicon Valley has three computer-
crime units.   There are others in Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Maryland, 
Texas, Colorado, and a formerly very active one in Arizona - all told, 
though, perhaps only fifty people nationwide.

The locals do have one great advantage, though.  They all know one 
another.  Though scattered across the country, they are linked by both 
public-sector and private-sector professional societies, and have a 
commendable subcultural esprit-de-corps.  And in the well-manned 
Secret Service, they have willing national-level assistance.

PLAYER TWO:  The Telephone Companies.

In the early 80s, after years of bitter federal court battle, 
America's telephone monopoly was pulverized.  "Ma Bell," the national 
phone company, became AT&T, AT&T Industries, and the regional "Baby 
Bells," all purportedly independent companies, who compete with new 
communications companies and other long-distance providers.  As a 
class, however, they are all sorely harassed by fraudsters, phone 
phreaks, and computer hackers, and they all maintain computer-security 
experts.  In a lot of cases these "corporate security divisions" 
consist of just one or two guys, who drifted into the work from 
backgrounds in traditional security or law enforcement.  But, linked 
by specialized security trade journals and private sector trade 
groups, they all know one another.

PLAYER THREE:  The Computer Hackers.

The American "hacker" elite consists of about a hundred people, who 
all know one another.  These are the people who know enough about 
computer intrusion to baffle corporate security and alarm police (and 
who, furthermore, are willing to put their intrusion skills into 
actual practice).   The somewhat older subculture of "phone-
phreaking," once native only to the phone system, has blended into 
hackerdom as phones have become digital and computers have been 
netted-together by telephones.   "Phone phreaks," always tarred with 
the stigma of rip-off artists, are nowadays increasingly hacking PBX 
systems and cellular phones.  These practices, unlike computer-
intrusion, offer easy profit to fraudsters. 

There are legions of minor "hackers," such as the "kodez kidz," who 
purloin telephone access codes to make free (i.e., stolen) phone 
calls.   Code theft can be done with home computers, and almost looks 
like real "hacking," though "kodez kidz" are regarded with lordly 
contempt by the elite. "Warez d00dz," who copy and pirate computer 
games and software, are a thriving subspecies of "hacker," but they 
played no real role in the crackdown of 1990 or the Jackson case.  As 
for the dire minority who create computer viruses, the less said the 
better.

The princes of hackerdom skate the phone-lines, and computer networks, 
as a lifestyle.  They hang out in loose, modem-connected gangs like 
the "Legion of Doom" and the "Masters of Destruction."  The craft of 
hacking is taught through "bulletin board systems," personal computers 
that carry electronic mail and can be accessed by phone.  Hacker 
bulletin boards generally sport grim, scary, sci-fi heavy metal names 
like BLACK ICE - PRIVATE or SPEED DEMON ELITE.   Hackers themselves 
often adopt romantic and highly suspicious tough-guy monickers like 
"Necron 99," "Prime Suspect," "Erik Bloodaxe," "Malefactor" and "Phase 
Jitter."   This can be seen as a kind of cyberpunk folk-poetry - after 
all, baseball players also have colorful nicknames.  But so do the 
Mafia and the Medellin Cartel.

  PLAYER FOUR:  The Simulation Gamers.

Wargames and role-playing adventures are an old and honored pastime, 
much favored by professional military strategists and H.G. Wells, and 
now played by hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts throughout North 
America, Europe and Japan.  In today's market, many simulation games 
are computerized, making simulation gaming a favorite pastime of 
hackers, who dote on arcane intellectual challenges and the thrill of 
doing simulated mischief.

Modern simulation games frequently have a heavily science-fictional 
cast.  Over the past decade or so, fueled by very respectable 
royalties, the world of simulation gaming has increasingly permeated 
the world of science-fiction publishing.  TSR, Inc., proprietors of 
the best-known role-playing game, "Dungeons and Dragons," own the 
venerable science-fiction magazine "Amazing."  Gaming-books, once 
restricted to hobby outlets, now commonly appear in chain-stores like 
B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks, and sell vigorously.

Steve Jackson Games, Inc., of Austin, Texas, is a games company of the 
middle rank.  In early 1990, it employed fifteen people.  In 1989, SJG 
grossed about half a million dollars.  SJG's Austin headquarters is a 
modest two-story brick office-suite, cluttered with phones, 
photocopiers, fax machines and computers.  A publisher's digs, it 
bustles with semi-organized activity and is littered with glossy 
promotional brochures and dog-eared SF novels.  Attached to the 
offices is a large tin-roofed warehouse piled twenty feet high with 
cardboard boxes of games and books.  This building was the site of the 
"Cyberpunk Bust."

A look at the company's wares, neatly stacked on endless rows of cheap 
shelving, quickly shows SJG's long involvement with the Science 
Fiction community.  SJG's main product, the Generic Universal Role-
Playing System or GURPS, features licensed and adapted works from many 
genre writers.  There is GURPS Witch World, GURPS Conan, GURPS 
Riverworld, GURPS Horseclans,  many names eminently familiar to SF 
fans.  (GURPS Difference Engine  is currently in the works.)  GURPS 
Cyberpunk,  however, was to be another story entirely.

PLAYER FIVE:  The Science Fiction Writers.

The "cyberpunk" SF writers are a small group of mostly college-
educated white litterateurs, without conspicuous criminal records, 
scattered throughout the US and Canada.  Only one, Rudy Rucker, a 
professor of computer science in Silicon Valley, would rank with even 
the humblest computer hacker.  However, these writers all own 
computers and take an intense, public, and somewhat morbid interest in 
the social ramifications of the information industry.   Despite their 
small numbers, the "cyberpunk" writers all know one another, and are 
linked by antique print-medium publications with unlikely names like 
Science Fiction Eye, Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Omni and 
Interzone.

 PLAYER SIX:  The Civil Libertarians.

This small but rapidly growing group consists of heavily politicized 
computer enthusiasts and heavily cyberneticized political activists: a 
mix of wealthy high-tech entrepreneurs, veteran West Coast 
troublemaking hippies, touchy journalists, and toney East Coast civil 
rights lawyers.  They are all getting to know one another.

We now return to our story.   By 1988, law enforcement officials, led 
by contrite teenage informants, had thoroughly permeated the world of 
underground bulletin boards, and were alertly prowling the nets 
compiling dossiers on wrongdoers.  While most bulletin board systems 
are utterly harmless, some few had matured into alarming reservoirs of 
forbidden knowledge.  One such was BLACK ICE - PRIVATE, located 
"somewhere in the 607 area code,"  frequented by members of the 
"Legion of Doom" and notorious even among hackers for the violence of 
its rhetoric, which discussed sabotage of phone-lines, drug-
manufacturing techniques, and the assembly of home-made bombs, as well 
as a plethora of rules-of-thumb for penetrating computer security.

Of course, the mere discussion of these notions is not illegal - many 
cyberpunk SF stories positively dote on such ideas, as do hundreds of 
spy epics, techno-thrillers and adventure novels.  It was no 
coincidence that "ICE," or "Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics," 
was a term invented by cyberpunk writer Tom Maddox, and "BLACK ICE," 
or a computer-defense that fries the brain of the unwary trespasser, 
was a coinage of William Gibson.

A reference manual from the US National Institute of Justice, 
Dedicated Computer Crime Units by J. Thomas McEwen, suggests that 
federal attitudes toward bulletin-board systems are ambivalent at 
best:

"There are several examples of how bulletin boards have been used in 
support of criminal activities.... (B)ulletin boards were used to 
relay illegally obtained access codes into computer service companies.  
Pedophiles have been known to leave suggestive messages on bulletin 
boards, and other sexually oriented messages have been found on 
bulletin boards.  Members of cults and sects have also communicated 
through bulletin boards.  While the storing of information on bulletin 
boards may not be illegal, the use of bulletin boards has certainly 
advanced many illegal activities."

Here is a troubling concept indeed:  invisible electronic pornography, 
to be printed out at home and read by sects and cults.  It makes a 
mockery of the traditional law-enforcement techniques concerning the 
publication and prosecution of smut.  In fact, the prospect of large 
numbers of antisocial conspirators, congregating in cyberspace without 
official oversight of any kind, is enough to trouble the sleep of 
anyone charged with maintaining public order.

Even the sternest free-speech advocate will likely do some 
headscratching at the prospect of digitized "anarchy files" teaching 
lock-picking, pipe-bombing, martial arts techniques, and highly 
unorthodox uses for shotgun shells, especially when these neat-o 
temptations are distributed freely to any teen (or pre-teen) with a 
modem. 

These may be largely conjectural problems at present, but the use of 
bulletin boards to foment hacker mischief is real.  Worse yet, the 
bulletin boards themselves are linked, sharing their audience and 
spreading the wicked knowledge of security flaws in the phone network, 
and in a wide variety of academic, corporate and governmental computer 
systems.  

This strength of the hackers is also a weakness, however.  If the 
boards are monitored by alert informants and/or officers, the whole 
wicked tangle can be seized all along its extended electronic vine, 
rather like harvesting pumpkins.

The war against hackers, including the "Cyberpunk Bust," was primarily 
a war against hacker bulletin boards.  It was, first and foremost, an 
attack against the enemy's means of information.

This  basic strategic insight supplied the tactics for the crackdown 
of 1990.  The variant groups in the national subculture of cyber-law  
would be kept apprised, persuaded to action, and diplomatically 
martialled into effective strike position.  Then, in a burst of energy 
and a glorious blaze of publicity, the whole nest of scofflaws would 
be wrenched up root and branch.  Hopefully, the damage would be 
permanent; if not, the swarming wretches would at least keep their 
heads down.

"Operation Sundevil," the Phoenix-inspired crackdown of May 8,1990, 
concentrated on telephone code-fraud and credit-card abuse, and 
followed this seizure plan with some success.  Boards went down all 
over America, terrifying the underground and swiftly depriving them of 
at least some of their criminal instruments.  It also saddled analysts 
with some 24,000 floppy disks, and confronted harried Justice 
Department prosecutors with the daunting challenge of a gigantic 
nationwide hacker show-trial involving highly technical issues in 
dozens of jurisdictions.   As of July 1991, it must be questioned 
whether the climate is right for an action of this sort, especially 
since several of the most promising prosecutees have already been 
jailed on other charges.

"Sundevil" aroused many dicey legal and constitutional questions, but 
at least its organizers were spared the spectacle of seizure victims 
loudly proclaiming their innocence - (if one excepts Bruce Esquibel, 
sysop of "Dr. Ripco," an anarchist board in Chicago).    

The activities of March 1, 1990, including the Jackson case, were the 
inspiration of the Chicago-based Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force.   
At telco urging, the Chicago group were pursuing the purportedly vital 
"E911 document" with headlong energy.   As legal evidence, this Bell 
South document was to prove a very weak reed in the Craig Neidorf 
trial, which ended in a humiliating dismissal and a triumph for 
Neidorf.   As of March 1990, however, this purloined data-file seemed 
a red-hot chunk of contraband, and the decision was made to track it 
down wherever it might have gone, and to shut down any board that had 
touched it - or even come close to it.

In the meantime, however - early 1990 - Mr. Loyd Blankenship, an 
employee of Steve Jackson Games, an accomplished hacker, and a 
sometime member and file-writer for the Legion of Doom, was 
contemplating a "cyberpunk" simulation-module for the flourishing 
GURPS gaming-system.

The time seemed ripe for such a product, which had already been proven 
in the marketplace.  The first games-company out of the gate, with a 
product boldly called "Cyberpunk" in defiance of possible 
infringement-of-copyright suits, had been an upstart group called R. 
Talsorian.  Talsorian's "Cyberpunk" was a fairly decent game, but the 
mechanics of the simulation system sucked. But the game sold like 
crazy. 

The next "cyberpunk" game had been the even more successful 
"Shadowrun" by FASA Corporation.  The mechanics of this game were 
fine, but the scenario was rendered moronic by  lame fantasy elements 
like orcs, dwarves, trolls, magicians, and  dragons - all highly 
ideologically incorrect, according to the hard-edged, high-tech 
standards of cyberpunk science fiction.   No true cyberpunk fan could 
play this game without vomiting, despite FASA's nifty T-shirts and 
street-samurai lead figurines. 

Lured by the scent of money, other game companies were champing at the 
bit.  Blankenship reasoned that the time had come for a real  
"Cyberpunk" gaming-book - one that the princes of computer-mischief in 
the Legion of Doom could play without laughing themselves sick.  This 
book, GURPS Cyberpunk,  would reek of on-line authenticity.

Hot discussion soon raged on the Steve Jackson Games electronic 
bulletin board, the "Illuminati BBS."  This board was named after a 
bestselling SJG card-game, involving antisocial sects and cults who 
war covertly for the domination of the world.  Gamers and hackers 
alike loved this board, with its meticulously detailed discussions of 
pastimes like SJG's "Car Wars," in which souped-up armored hot-rods 
with rocket-launchers and heavy machine-guns do battle on the American 
highways of the future.

While working, with considerable creative success, for SJG, 
Blankenship himself was running his own computer bulletin board, "The 
Phoenix Project," from his house.  It had been ages - months, anyway - 
since Blankenship, an increasingly sedate husband and author, had last 
entered a public phone-booth without a supply of pocket-change.  
However, his intellectual interest in computer-security remained 
intense.  He was pleased to notice the presence on "Phoenix" of Henry 
Kluepfel, a phone-company security professional for Bellcore.   Such 
contacts were risky for telco employees; at least one such gentleman 
who reached out to the hacker underground has been accused of divided 
loyalties and summarily fired.  Kluepfel, on the other hand, was 
bravely engaging in friendly banter with heavy-dude hackers and eager 
telephone-wannabes.   Blankenship did nothing to spook him away, and 
Kluepfel, for his part,  passed dark warnings about "Phoenix Project" 
to the Chicago group.   "Phoenix Project" glowed with the radioactive 
presence of the E911 document, passed there in a copy of Craig 
Neidorf's electronic hacker fan-magazine, Phrack.

"Illuminati" was prominently mentioned on the Phoenix Project.  
Phoenix users were urged to visit Illuminati, to discuss the upcoming 
"cyberpunk" game and possibly lend their expertise.   It was also 
frankly hoped that they would spend some money on SJG games.

Illuminati and Phoenix had become two ripe pumpkins on the criminal 
vine.

Hacker busts were nothing new.  They had always been  problematic for 
the authorities.  The offenders were generally high-IQ white juveniles 
with no criminal record.  Public sympathy for the phone companies was 
limited at best.  Trials often ended in puzzled  dismissals or a slap 
on the wrist. 

Through long experience, law enforcement had come up with an 
unorthodox but workable tactic.  This was to avoid any trial at all, 
or even an arrest.  Instead, somber teams of grim police would swoop 
upon the teenage suspect's home and box up his computer as "evidence."  
If he was a good boy, and promised contritely to stay out of trouble 
forthwith, the highly expensive equipment might be returned to him in 
short order.  If he was a hard-case, though, his toys could stay 
boxed-up and locked away for a couple of years.

The busts in Austin were an intensification of this tried-and-true 
technique.  There were adults involved in this case, though,  reeking 
of a hardened bad attitude.  The supposed threat to the 911 system, 
apparently posed by the E911 document, had nerved law enforcement to 
extraordinary effort.   The 911 system is the emergency system used by 
the police themselves.  Any threat to it was a direct, insolent hacker 
menace to the electronic home turf of American law enforcement.

Had Steve Jackson been arrested and directly accused of a plot to 
destroy the 911 system, the resultant embarrassment would likely have 
been sharp, but brief.  The Chicago group, instead, chose total 
operational security.  They may have suspected that their search for 
E911, once publicized, would cause that "dangerous" document to spread 
like wildfire throughout the underground.  Instead, they allowed the 
impression to spread that they had raided Steve Jackson to stop the 
publication of a book:  GURPS Cyberpunk.   This was a grave public-
relations blunder which caused the darkest fears and suspicions to 
spread  - not in the hacker underground, but among the general public.

On March 1, 1990, 21-year-old hacker Chris Goggans (aka "Erik 
Bloodaxe") was wakened by a police revolver levelled at his head.  He 
watched, jittery, as Secret Service agents appropriated his 300 baud 
terminal and, rifling his files, discovered his treasured source-code 
for the notorious Internet Worm.  Goggans, a co-sysop of "Phoenix 
Project" and a wily operator, had suspected that something of the like 
might be coming.  All his best equipment had been hidden away 
elsewhere.  They took his phone, though, and considered hauling away 
his hefty arcade-style Pac-Man game, before deciding that it was 
simply too heavy.  Goggans was not arrested.  To date, he has never 
been charged with a crime.  The police still have what they took, 
though.

Blankenship was less wary.  He had shut down "Phoenix" as rumors 
reached him of a crackdown coming.  Still, a dawn raid rousted him and 
his wife from bed in their underwear, and six Secret Service agents, 
accompanied by a bemused Austin cop and a corporate security agent 
from Bellcore, made a rich haul.  Off went the works, into the agents' 
white Chevrolet minivan:  an IBM PC-AT clone with  and a 120-meg hard 
disk; a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet II printer; a completely legitimate 
and highly expensive SCO-Xenix 286 operating system; Pagemaker disks 
and documentation; the Microsoft Word word-processing program; Mrs. 
Blankenship's incomplete academic thesis stored on disk; and the 
couple's telephone.  All this property remains in police custody 
today.

The agents then bundled Blankenship into a car and it was off the 
Steve Jackson Games in the bleak light of dawn.  The fact that this 
was a business headquarters, and not a private residence, did not 
deter the agents.  It was still early; no one was at work yet.  The 
agents prepared to break down the door, until Blankenship offered his 
key.

The exact details of the next events are unclear.  The agents would 
not let anyone else into the building.  Their search warrant, when 
produced, was unsigned.  Apparently they breakfasted from  
"Whataburger," as the litter from hamburgers was later found inside.  
They also extensively sampled a bag of jellybeans kept by an SJG 
employee.  Someone tore a "Dukakis for President" sticker from the 
wall.

SJG employees, diligently showing up for the day's work, were met at 
the door.  They watched in astonishment as agents wielding crowbars 
and screwdrivers emerged with captive machines.  The agents wore blue 
nylon windbreakers with "SECRET SERVICE" stencilled across the back, 
with running-shoes and jeans.  Confiscating computers can be heavy 
physical work.

No one at Steve Jackson Games was arrested.  No one was accused of any 
crime.   There were no charges filed.  Everything appropriated was 
officially kept as "evidence" of crimes never specified.  Steve 
Jackson will not face a conspiracy trial over the contents of his 
science-fiction gaming book.  On the contrary, the raid's organizers 
have been accused of grave misdeeds in a civil suit filed by EFF, and 
if there is any trial over GURPS Cyberpunk  it seems likely to be 
theirs.

The day after the raid, Steve Jackson visited the local Secret Service 
headquarters with a lawyer in tow.  There was trouble over GURPS 
Cyberpunk,  which had been discovered on the hard-disk of a seized 
machine.  GURPS Cyberpunk,  alleged a Secret Service agent to 
astonished businessman Steve Jackson, was "a manual for computer 
crime."

"It's science fiction," Jackson said.

"No, this is real."  This statement was repeated several times, by 
several agents.  This is not a fantasy, no, this is real.  Jackson's 
ominously "accurate" game had passed from pure, obscure, small-scale 
fantasy into the impure, highly publicized, large-scale fantasy of the 
hacker crackdown.   No mention was made of the real reason for the 
search, the E911 document.  Indeed, this fact was not discovered until 
the Jackson search-warrant was unsealed months later.   Jackson was 
left to believe that his board had been seized because he intended to 
publish a science fiction book that law enforcement considered too 
dangerous to see print.  This misconception was repeated again and 
again, for months, to an ever-widening audience.  The effect of this 
statement on the science fiction community was, to say the least, 
striking.

GURPS Cyberpunk,  now published and available from Steve Jackson Games 
(Box 18957, Austin, Texas 78760), does discuss some of the 
commonplaces of computer-hacking, such as searching through trash for 
useful clues, or snitching passwords by boldly lying to gullible 
users.   Reading it won't make you a hacker, any more than reading 
Spycatcher  will make you an agent of MI5.  Still, this bold 
insistence by the Secret Service on its authenticity has made GURPS 
Cyberpunk  the Satanic Verses  of simulation gaming, and has made 
Steve Jackson the first martyr-to-the-cause for the computer world's 
civil libertarians.  

From the beginning, Steve Jackson declared that he had committed no 
crime, and had nothing to hide.  Few believed him, for it seemed 
incredible that such a tremendous effort by the government would be 
spent on someone entirely innocent.

Surely there were a few stolen long-distance codes in "Illuminati," a 
swiped credit-card number or two - something.  Those who rallied to 
the defense of Jackson were publicly warned that they would be caught 
with egg on their face when the real truth came out, "later."  But 
"later" came and went.  The fact is that Jackson was innocent of any 
crime.  There was no case against him; his activities were entirely 
legal.  He had simply been consorting with the wrong sort of people.

In fact he was the wrong sort of people.  His attitude stank.  He 
showed no contrition; he scoffed at authority; he gave aid and comfort 
to the enemy; he was trouble.   Steve Jackson comes from subcultures - 
gaming, science fiction - that have always smelled to high heaven of 
troubling weirdness and deep-dyed unorthodoxy.   He was important 
enough to attract repression, but not important enough, apparently, to 
deserve a straight answer from those who had raided his property and 
destroyed his livelihood.

The American law-enforcement community lacks the manpower and 
resources to prosecute hackers successfully on the merits of the cases 
against them.   The cyber-police to date have settled instead for a 
cheap "hack" of the legal system: a quasi-legal tactic of seizure and 
"deterrence."  Humiliate and harass a few ringleaders, the philosophy 
goes, and the rest will fall into line.  After all, most hackers are 
just kids.  The few grown-ups among them are sociopathic geeks, not 
real players in the political and legal game.  In the final analysis, 
a small company like Jackson's lacks the resources to make any real 
trouble for the Secret Service. 

But Jackson, with his conspiracy-obsessed bulletin board and his seedy 
SF-fan computer-freak employees, is not "just a kid."  He is a 
publisher, and he was battered by the police in the full light of 
national publicity, under the shocked gaze of journalists, gaming 
fans, libertarian activists and millionaire computer entrepreneurs, 
many of whom were not "deterred," but genuinely aghast.

"What," reasons the author, "is to prevent the Secret Service from 
carting off my word-processor as 'evidence' of some non-existent 
crime?"

"What would I do," thinks the small-press owner, "if someone took my 
laser-printer?"

Hence the establishment of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  

Steve Jackson was provided with a high-powered lawyer specializing in 
Constitutional freedom-of-the-press issues.  Faced with this, a 
markedly un-contrite Secret Service returned Jackson's machinery, 
after months of delay - some of it broken, with valuable data lost.  
Jackson sustained many thousands of dollars in business losses, from 
failure to meet deadlines and loss of computer-assisted production.

Half the employees of Steve Jackson Games were sorrowfully laid-off.   
Some had been with the company for years -  not statistics, these 
people, not "hackers" of any stripe, but bystanders, citizens, 
deprived of their livelihoods by the zealousness of the March 1 
seizure.  Some have since been re-hired - perhaps all will be, if 
Jackson can pull his company out of its now persistent financial hole.  
Devastated by the raid, the company would surely have collapsed  in 
short order - but SJG's distributors, touched by the company's plight 
and feeling some natural subcultural solidarity, advanced him money to 
scrape along.

In retrospect, it is hard to see much good for anyone at all in the 
activities of March 1.  Perhaps the Jackson case has served as a 
warning light for trouble in our legal system; but that's not much 
recompense for Jackson himself.   His own unsought fame may be 
helpful, but it doesn't do much for his unemployed co-workers.   In 
the meantime, "hackers" have been  demonized as a national threat.  
"Cyberpunk," a literary term, has become a synonym for computer 
criminal.  The cyber-police have leapt where angels fear to tread.  
And the phone companies have badly overstated their case and deeply 
embarrassed their protectors.  

Sixteen months later, Steve Jackson suspects he may yet pull through.  
Illuminati is still on-line.  GURPS Cyberpunk,  while it failed to 
match Satanic Verses,  sold fairly briskly.   And Steve Jackson Games 
headquarters, the site of the raid, was the site of  a Cyberspace 
Weenie Roast to launch an Austin Chapter of The Electronic Frontier 
Foundation.. -

  


