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<html><head> <title>
PART ONE: Crashing the System
</HEAD> </title>
</head><body>
On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance
telephone switching system crashed.
<p> This was a strange, dire, huge event. Sixty thousand people lost
their telephone service completely. During the nine long hours of frantic
effort that it took to restore service, some seventy million telephone calls
went uncompleted.
</p><p> Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco trade, are a
known and accepted hazard of the telephone business. Hurricanes hit,
and phone cables get snapped by the thousands. Earthquakes wrench
through buried fiber-optic lines. Switching stations catch fire and burn to
the ground. These things do happen. There are contingency plans for
them, and decades of experience in dealing with them. But the Crash of
January 15 was unprecedented. It was unbelievably huge, and it occurred
for no apparent physical reason.
</p><p> The crash started on a Monday afternoon in a single switching-
station in Manhattan. But, unlike any merely physical damage, it spread
and spread. Station after station across America collapsed in a chain
reaction, until fully half of AT&T's network had gone haywire and the
remaining half was hard-put to handle the overflow.
</p><p> Within nine hours, AT&T software engineers more or less
understood what had caused the crash. Replicating the problem exactly,
poring over software line by line, took them a couple of weeks. But
because it was hard to understand technically, the full truth of the matter
and its implications were not widely and thoroughly aired and explained.
The root cause of the crash remained obscure, surrounded by rumor and
fear. The crash was a grave corporate embarrassment. The "culprit" was a
bug in AT&T's own software -- not the sort of admission the
telecommunications giant wanted to make, especially in the face of
increasing competition. Still, the truth <i>was</i> told, in the baffling
technical terms necessary to explain it.
</p><p> Somehow the explanation failed to persuade American law
enforcement officials and even telephone corporate security personnel.
These people were not technical experts or software wizards, and they had
their own suspicions about the cause of this disaster.
</p><p> The police and telco security had important sources of information
denied to mere software engineers. They had informants in the computer
underground and years of experience in dealing with high-tech rascality
that seemed to grow ever more sophisticated. For years they had been
expecting a direct and savage attack against the American national
telephone system. And with the Crash of January 15 -- the first month of
a new, high-tech decade -- their predictions, fears, and suspicions seemed
at last to have entered the real world. A world where the telephone
system had not merely crashed, but, quite likely, <i>been</i> crashed -- by
"hackers."
</p><p> The crash created a large dark cloud of suspicion that would color
certain people's assumptions and actions for months. The fact that it took
place in the realm of software was suspicious on its face. The fact that it
occurred on Martin Luther King Day, still the most politically touchy of
American holidays, made it more suspicious yet.
</p><p> The Crash of January 15 gave the Hacker Crackdown its sense of
edge and its sweaty urgency. It made people, powerful people in
positions of public authority, willing to believe the worst. And, most
fatally, it helped to give investigators a willingness to take extreme
measures and the determination to preserve almost total secrecy. An
obscure software fault in an aging switching system in New York was to
lead to a chain reaction of legal and constitutional trouble all across the
country.
</p><p> Like the crash in the telephone system, this chain reaction was
ready and waiting to happen. During the 1980s, the American legal
system was extensively patched to deal with the novel issues of computer
crime. There was, for instance, the Electronic Communications Privacy
Act of 1986 (eloquently described as "a stinking mess" by a prominent
law enforcement official). And there was the draconian Computer Fraud
and Abuse Act of 1986, passed unanimously by the United States Senate,
which later would reveal a large number of flaws. Extensive, wellmeant
efforts had been made to keep the legal system up to date. But in the day-
to-day grind of the real world, even the most elegant software tends to
crumble and suddenly reveal its hidden bugs.
</p><p> Like the advancing telephone system, the American legal system
was certainly not ruined by its temporary crash; but for those caught under
the weight of the collapsing system, life became a series of blackouts and
anomalies.
</p><p> In order to understand why these weird events occurred, both in
the world of technology and in the world of law, it's not enough to
understand the merely technical problems. We will get to those; but first
and foremost, we must try to understand the telephone, and the business of
telephones, and the community of human beings that telephones have
created.
</p><p> Technologies have life cycles, like cities do, like institutions do,
like laws and governments do.
</p><p> The first stage of any technology is the Question Mark, often
known as the "Golden Vaporware" stage. At this early point, the
technology is only a phantom, a mere gleam in the inventor's eye. One
such inventor was a speech teacher and electrical tinkerer named
Alexander Graham Bell.
</p><p> Bell's early inventions, while ingenious, failed to move the world.
In 1863, the teenage Bell and his brother Melville made an artificial
talking mechanism out of wood, rubber, gutta-percha, and tin. This weird
device had a rubber-covered "tongue" made of movable wooden segments,
with vibrating rubber "vocal cords," and rubber "lips" and "cheeks."
While Melville puffed a bellows into a tin tube, imitating the lungs, young
Alec Bell would manipulate the "lips," "teeth," and "tongue," causing the
thing to emit high-pitched falsetto gibberish.
</p><p> Another would-be technical breakthrough was the Bell
"phonautograph" of 1874, actually made out of a human cadaver's ear.
Clamped into place on a tripod, this grisly gadget drew sound-wave
images on smoked glass through a thin straw glued to its vibrating
earbones.
</p><p> By 1875, Bell had learned to produce audible sounds - ugly shrieks
and squawks -- by using magnets, diaphragms, and electrical current. Most
"Golden Vaporware" technologies go nowhere.
</p><p> But the second stage of technology is the Rising Star, or, the
"Goofy Prototype," stage. The telephone, Bell's most ambitious gadget
yet, reached this stage on March 10, 1876. On that great day, Alexander
Graham Bell became the first person to transmit intelligible human speech
electrically. As it happened, young Professor Bell, industriously tinkering
in his Boston lab, had spattered his trousers with acid. His assistant, Mr.
Watson, heard his cry for help -- over Bell's experimental audiotelegraph.
This was an event without precedent.
</p><p> Technologies in their "Goofy Prototype" stage rarely work very
well. They're experimental, and therefore halfbaked and rather frazzled.
The prototype may be attractive and novel, and it does look as if it ought
to be good for something-or-other. But nobody, including the inventor, is
quite sure what. Inventors, and speculators, and pundits may have very
firm ideas about its potential use, but those ideas are often very wrong.
</p><p> The natural habitat of the Goofy Prototype is in trade shows and in
the popular press. Infant technologies need publicity and investment
money like a tottering calf need milk. This was very true of Bell's
machine. To raise research and development money, Bell toured with his
device as a stage attraction.
</p><p> Contemporary press reports of the stage debut of the telephone
showed pleased astonishment mixed with considerable dread. Bell's stage
telephone was a large wooden box with a crude speaker-nozzle, the whole
contraption about the size and shape of an overgrown Brownie camera.
Its buzzing steel soundplate, pumped up by powerful electromagnets, was
loud enough to fill an auditorium. Bell's assistant Mr. Watson, who could
manage on the keyboards fairly well, kicked in by playing the organ from
distant rooms, and, later, distant cities. This feat was considered
marvellous, but very eerie indeed.
</p><p> Bell's original notion for the telephone, an idea promoted for a
couple of years, was that it would become a mass medium. We might
recognize Bell's idea today as something close to modern "cable radio."
Telephones at a central source would transmit music, Sunday sermons,
and important public speeches to a paying network of wired-up
subscribers.
</p><p> At the time, most people thought this notion made good sense. In
fact, Bell's idea was workable. In Hungary, this philosophy of the
telephone was successfully put into everyday practice. In Budapest, for
decades, from 1893 until after World War I, there was a government-run
information service called "Telefon Hirmondo½." Hirmondo½ was a
centralized source of news and entertainment and culture, including stock
reports, plays, concerts, and novels read aloud. At certain hours of the
day, the phone would ring, you would plug in a loudspeaker for the use of
the family, and Telefon Hirmondo½ would be on the air -- or rather, on the
phone.
</p><p> Hirmondo½ is dead tech today, but Hirmondo½ might be
considered a spiritual ancestor of the modern telephone-accessed computer
data services, such as CompuServe, GEnie or Prodigy. The principle
behind Hirmondo½ is also not too far from computer "bulletinboard
systems" or BBS's, which arrived in the late 1970s, spread rapidly across
America, and will figure largely in this book.
</p><p> We are used to using telephones for individual person-to-person
speech, because we are used to the Bell system. But this was just one
possibility among many. Communication networks are very flexible and
protean, especially when their hardware becomes sufficiently advanced.
They can be put to all kinds of uses. And they have been -- and they will
be.
</p><p> Bell's telephone was bound for glory, but this was a combination of
political decisions, canny infighting in court, inspired industrial leadership,
receptive local conditions and outright good luck. Much the same is true
of communications systems today.
</p><p> As Bell and his backers struggled to install their newfangled
system in the real world of nineteenth-century New England, they had to
fight against skepticism and industrial rivalry. There was already a strong
electrical communications network present in America: the telegraph. The
head of the Western Union telegraph system dismissed Bell's prototype as
"an electrical toy" and refused to buy the rights to Bell's patent. The
telephone, it seemed, might be all right as a parlor entertainment -- but not
for serious business.
</p><p> Telegrams, unlike mere telephones, left a permanent physical
record of their messages. Telegrams, unlike telephones, could be
answered whenever the recipient had time and convenience. And the
telegram had a much longer distance-range than Bell's early telephone.
These factors made telegraphy seem a much more sound and businesslike
technology -- at least to some.
</p><p> The telegraph system was huge, and well-entrenched. In 1876, the
United States had 214,000 miles of telegraph wire, and 8500 telegraph
offices. There were specialized telegraphs for businesses and stock
traders, government, police and fire departments. And Bell's "toy" was
best known as a stage-magic musical device.
</p><p> The third stage of technology is known as the "Cash Cow" stage.
In the "cash cow" stage, a technology finds its place in the world, and
matures, and becomes settled and productive. After a year or so,
Alexander Graham Bell and his capitalist backers concluded that eerie
music piped from nineteenth-century cyberspace was not the real selling-
point of his invention. Instead, the telephone was about speech --
individual, personal speech, the human voice, human conversation and
human interaction. The telephone was not to be managed from any
centralized broadcast center. It was to be a personal, intimate technology.
</p><p> When you picked up a telephone, you were not absorbing the cold
output of a machine -- you were speaking to another human being. Once
people realized this, their instinctive dread of the telephone as an eerie,
unnatural device, swiftly vanished. A "telephone call" was not a "call"
from a "telephone" itself, but a call from another human being, someone
you would generally know and recognize. The real point was not what
the machine could do for you (or to you), but what you yourself, a person
and citizen, could do <i>through</i> the machine. This decision on the part of
the young Bell Company was absolutely vital.
</p><p> The first telephone networks went up around Boston - mostly
among the technically curious and the well-to-do (much the same segment
of the American populace that, a hundred years later, would be buying
personal computers). Entrenched backers of the telegraph continued to
scoff.
</p><p> But in January 1878, a disaster made the telephone famous. A
train crashed in Tarriffville, Connecticut. Forward-looking doctors in the
nearby city of Hartford had had Bell's "speaking telephone" installed. An
alert local druggist was able to telephone an entire community of local
doctors, who rushed to the site to give aid. The disaster, as disasters do,
aroused intense press coverage. The phone had proven its usefulness in the
real world.
</p><p> After Tarriffville, the telephone network spread like crabgrass. By
1890 it was all over New England. By '93, out to Chicago. By '97, into
Minnesota, Nebraska and Texas. By 1904 it was all over the continent.
</p><p> The telephone had become a mature technology. Professor Bell
(now generally known as "Dr. Bell" despite his lack of a formal degree)
became quite wealthy. He lost interest in the tedious day-to-day business
muddle of the booming telephone network, and gratefully returned his
attention to creatively hacking-around in his various laboratories, which
were now much larger, betterventilated, and gratifyingly better-equipped.
Bell was never to have another great inventive success, though his
speculations and prototypes anticipated fiber-optic transmission, manned
flight, sonar, hydrofoil ships, tetrahedral construction, and Montessori
education. The "decibel," the standard scientific measure of sound
intensity, was named after Bell.
</p><p> Not all Bell's vaporware notions were inspired. He was fascinated
by human eugenics. He also spent many years developing a weird
personal system of astrophysics in which gravity did not exist.
</p><p> Bell was a definite eccentric. He was something of a
hypochondriac, and throughout his life he habitually stayed up until four
A.M., refusing to rise before noon. But Bell had accomplished a great feat;
he was an idol of millions and his influence, wealth, and great personal
charm, combined with his eccentricity, made him something of a loose
cannon on deck. Bell maintained a thriving scientific salon in his winter
mansion in Washington, D.C., which gave him considerable backstage
influence in governmental and scientific circles. He was a major financial
backer of the the magazines <i>Science</i> and <i>National Geographic,</i> both
still flourishing today as important organs of the American scientific
establishment. Bell's companion Thomas Watson, similarly wealthy and
similarly odd, became the ardent political disciple of a 19th-century
science-fiction writer and would-be social reformer, Edward Bellamy.
Watson also trod the boards briefly as a Shakespearian actor.
</p><p> There would never be another Alexander Graham Bell, but in years
to come there would be surprising numbers of people like him. Bell was a
prototype of the high-tech entrepreneur. High-tech entrepreneurs will
play a very prominent role in this book: not merely as technicians and
businessmen, but as pioneers of the technical frontier, who can carry the
power and prestige they derive from high-technology into the political and
social arena.
</p><p> Like later entrepreneurs, Bell was fierce in defense of his own
technological territory. As the telephone began to flourish, Bell was soon
involved in violent lawsuits in the defense of his patents. Bell's Boston
lawyers were excellent, however, and Bell himself, as an elecution teacher
and gifted public speaker, was a devastatingly effective legal witness. In
the eighteen years of Bell's patents, the Bell company was involved in six
hundred separate lawsuits. The legal records printed filled 149 volumes.
The Bell Company won every single suit.
</p><p> After Bell's exclusive patents expired, rival telephone companies
sprang up all over America. Bell's company, American Bell Telephone,
was soon in deep trouble. In 1907, American Bell Telephone fell into the
hands of the rather sinister J.P. Morgan financial cartel, robber-baron
speculators who dominated Wall Street.
</p><p> At this point, history might have taken a different turn. American
might well have been served forever by a patchwork of locally owned
telephone companies. Many state politicians and local businessmen
considered this an excellent solution.
</p><p> But the new Bell holding company, American Telephone and
Telegraph or AT&T, put in a new man at the helm, a visionary industrialist
named Theodore Vail. Vail, a former Post Office manager, understood
large organizations and had an innate feeling for the nature of large-scale
communications. Vail quickly saw to it that AT&T seized the
technological edge once again. The Pupin and Campbell "loading coil,"
and the deForest "audion," are both extinct technology today, but in 1913
they gave Vail's company the best <i>long-distance</i> lines ever built. By
controlling long-distance -- the links between, and over, and above the
smaller local phone companies -- AT&T swiftly gained the whip-hand
over them, and was soon devouring them right and left.
</p><p> Vail plowed the profits back into research and development,
starting the Bell tradition of huge-scale and brilliant industrial research.
</p><p> Technically and financially, AT&T gradually steamrollered the
opposition. Independent telephone companies never became entirely
extinct, and hundreds of them flourish today. But Vail's AT&T became
the supreme communications company. At one point, Vail's AT&T
bought Western Union itself, the very company that had derided Bell's
telephone as a "toy." Vail thoroughly reformed Western Union's
hidebound business along his modern principles; but when the federal
government grew anxious at this centralization of power, Vail politely
gave Western Union back.
</p><p> This centralizing process was not unique. Very similar events had
happened in American steel, oil, and railroads. But AT&T, unlike the
other companies, was to remain supreme. The monopoly robber-barons of
those other industries were humbled and shattered by government trust-
busting. Vail, the former Post Office official, was quite willing to
accommodate the US government; in fact he would forge an active
alliance with it. AT&T would become almost a wing of the American
government, almost another Post Office -- though not quite. AT&T
would willingly submit to federal regulation, but in return, it would use the
government's regulators as its own police, who would keep out
competitors and assure the Bell system's profits and preeminence.
</p><p> This was the second birth -- the political birth -- of the American
telephone system. Vail's arrangement was to persist, with vast success, for
many decades, until 1982. His system was an odd kind of American
industrial socialism. It was born at about the same time as Leninist
Communism, and it lasted almost as long -- and, it must be admitted, to
considerably better effect.
</p><p> Vail's system worked. Except perhaps for aerospace, there has
been no technology more thoroughly dominated by Americans than the
telephone. The telephone was seen from the beginning as a
quintessentially American technology. Bell's policy, and the policy of
Theodore Vail, was a profoundly democratic policy of <i>universal access.</i>
Vail's famous corporate slogan, "One Policy, One System, Universal
Service," was a political slogan, with a very American ring to it. The
American telephone was not to become the specialized tool of government
or business, but a general public utility. At first, it was true, only the
wealthy could afford private telephones, and Bell's company pursued the
business markets primarily. The American phone system was a capitalist
effort, meant to make money; it was not a charity. But from the first,
almost all communities with telephone service had public telephones. And
many stores -- especially drugstores -offered public use of their phones.
You might not own a telephone -- but you could always get into the
system, if you really needed to.
</p><p> There was nothing inevitable about this decision to make
telephones "public" and "universal." Vail's system involved a profound
act of trust in the public. This decision was a political one, informed by
the basic values of the American republic. The situation might have been
very different; and in other countries, under other systems, it certainly
was.
</p><p> Joseph Stalin, for instance, vetoed plans for a Soviet phone system
soon after the Bolshevik revolution. Stalin was certain that publicly
accessible telephones would become instruments of anti-Soviet
counterrevolution and conspiracy. (He was probably right.) When
telephones did arrive in the Soviet Union, they would be instruments of
Party authority, and always heavily tapped. (Alexander Solzhenitsyn's
prison-camp novel <i>The First Circle</i> describes efforts to develop a phone
system more suited to Stalinist purposes.)
</p><p> France, with its tradition of rational centralized government, had
fought bitterly even against the electric telegraph, which seemed to the
French entirely too anarchical and frivolous. For decades, nineteenth-
century France communicated via the "visual telegraph," a nation-
spanning, government-owned semaphore system of huge stone towers that
signalled from hilltops, across vast distances, with big windmill-like arms.
In 1846, one Dr. Barbay, a semaphore enthusiast, memorably uttered an
early version of what might be called "the security expert's argument"
against the open media.
</p><p> "No, the electric telegraph is not a sound invention. It will always
be at the mercy of the slightest disruption, wild youths, drunkards, bums,
etc.... The electric telegraph meets those destructive elements with only a
few meters of wire over which supervision is impossible. A single man
could, without being seen, cut the telegraph wires leading to Paris, and in
twenty-four hours cut in ten different places the wires of the same line,
without being arrested. The visual telegraph, on the contrary, has its
towers, its high walls, its gates well-guarded from inside by strong armed
men. Yes, I declare, substitution of the electric telegraph for the visual
one is a dreadful measure, a truly idiotic act."
</p><p> Dr. Barbay and his high-security stone machines were eventually
unsuccessful, but his argument -- that communication exists for the safety
and convenience of the state, and must be carefully protected from the
wild boys and the gutter rabble who might want to crash the system --
would be heard again and again.
</p><p> When the French telephone system finally did arrive, its snarled
inadequacy was to be notorious. Devotees of the American Bell System
often recommended a trip to France, for skeptics.
</p><p> In Edwardian Britain, issues of class and privacy were a ball-and-
chain for telephonic progress. It was considered outrageous that anyone --
any wild fool off the street -- could simply barge bellowing into one's
office or home, preceded only by the ringing of a telephone bell. In
Britain, phones were tolerated for the use of business, but private phones
tended be stuffed away into closets, smoking rooms, or servants' quarters.
Telephone operators were resented in Britain because they did not seem to
"know their place." And no one of breeding would print a telephone
number on a business card; this seemed a crass attempt to make the
acquaintance of strangers.
</p><p> But phone access in America was to become a popular right;
something like universal suffrage, only more so. American women could
not yet vote when the phone system came through; yet from the beginning
American women doted on the telephone. This "feminization" of the
American telephone was often commented on by foreigners. Phones in
America were not censored or stiff or formalized; they were social,
private, intimate, and domestic. In America, Mother's Day is by far the
busiest day of the year for the phone network.
</p><p> The early telephone companies, and especially AT&T, were among
the foremost employers of American women. They employed the
daughters of the American middle-class in great armies: in 1891, eight
thousand women; by 1946, almost a quarter of a million. Women
seemed to enjoy telephone work; it was respectable, it was steady, it paid
fairly well as women's work went, and -- not least -- it seemed a genuine
contribution to the social good of the community. Women found Vail's
ideal of public service attractive. This was especially true in rural areas,
where women operators, running extensive rural partylines, enjoyed
considerable social power. The operator knew everyone on the party-line,
and everyone knew her.
</p><p> Although Bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the telephone
company did not employ women for the sake of advancing female
liberation. AT&T did this for sound commercial reasons. The first
telephone operators of the Bell system were not women, but teenage
American boys. They were telegraphic messenger boys (a group about to
be rendered technically obsolescent), who swept up around the phone
office, dunned customers for bills, and made phone connections on the
switchboard, all on the cheap.
</p><p> Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell's company
learned a sharp lesson about combining teenage boys and telephone
switchboards. Putting teenage boys in charge of the phone system
brought swift and consistent disaster. Bell's chief engineer described them
as "Wild Indians." The boys were openly rude to customers. They talked
back to subscribers, saucing off, uttering facetious remarks, and generally
giving lip. The rascals took Saint Patrick's Day off without permission.
And worst of all they played clever tricks with the switchboard plugs:
disconnecting calls, crossing lines so that customers found themselves
talking to strangers, and so forth.
</p><p> This combination of power, technical mastery, and effective
anonymity seemed to act like catnip on teenage boys.
</p><p> This wild-kid-on-the-wires phenomenon was not confined to the
USA; from the beginning, the same was true of the British phone system.
An early British commentator kindly remarked: "No doubt boys in their
teens found the work not a little irksome, and it is also highly probable that
under the early conditions of employment the adventurous and inquisitive
spirits of which the average healthy boy of that age is possessed, were not
always conducive to the best attention being given to the wants of the
telephone subscribers."
</p><p> So the boys were flung off the system -- or at least, deprived of
control of the switchboard. But the "adventurous and inquisitive spirits"
of the teenage boys would be heard from in the world of telephony, again
and again.
</p><p> The fourth stage in the technological life-cycle is death: "the Dog,"
dead tech. The telephone has so far avoided this fate. On the contrary, it
is thriving, still spreading, still evolving, and at increasing speed.
</p><p> The telephone has achieved a rare and exalted state for a
technological artifact: it has become a <i>household object.</i> The
telephone, like the clock, like pen and paper, like kitchen utensils and
running water, has become a technology that is visible only by its absence.
The telephone is technologically transparent. The global telephone system
is the largest and most complex machine in the world, yet it is easy to use.
More remarkable yet, the telephone is almost entirely physically safe for
the user.
</p><p> For the average citizen in the 1870s, the telephone was weirder,
more shocking, more "high-tech" and harder to comprehend, than the most
outrageous stunts of advanced computing for us Americans in the 1990s.
In trying to understand what is happening to us today, with our bulletin-
board systems, direct overseas dialling, fiberoptic transmissions, computer
viruses, hacking stunts, and a vivid tangle of new laws and new crimes, it
is important to realize that our society has been through a similar challenge
before -- and that, all in all, we did rather well by it.
</p><p> Bell's stage telephone seemed bizarre at first. But the sensations of
weirdness vanished quickly, once people began to hear the familiar voices
of relatives and friends, in their own homes on their own telephones. The
telephone changed from a fearsome high-tech totem to an everyday pillar
of human community.
</p><p> This has also happened, and is still happening, to computer
networks. Computer networks such as NSFnet, BITnet, USENET,
JANET, are technically advanced, intimidating, and much harder to use
than telephones. Even the popular, commercial computer networks, such
as GEnie, Prodigy, and CompuServe, cause much head-scratching and
have been described as "user-hateful." Nevertheless they too are
changing from fancy high-tech items into everyday sources of human
community.
</p><p> The words "community" and "communication" have the same root.
Wherever you put a communications network, you put a community as
well. And whenever you <i>take away</i> that network -- confiscate it,
outlaw it, crash it, raise its price beyond affordability -- then you hurt that
community.
</p><p> Communities will fight to defend themselves. People will fight
harder and more bitterly to defend their communities, than they will fight
to defend their own individual selves. And this is very true of the
"electronic community" that arose around computer networks in the 1980s
-- or rather, the <i>various</i> electronic communities, in telephony, law
enforcement, computing, and the digital underground that, by the year
1990, were raiding, rallying, arresting, suing, jailing, fining and issuing
angry manifestos.
</p><p> None of the events of 1990 were entirely new. Nothing happened
in 1990 that did not have some kind of earlier and more understandable
precedent. What gave the Hacker Crackdown its new sense of gravity and
importance was the feeling -- the <i>community</i> feeling - that the political
stakes had been raised; that trouble in cyberspace was no longer mere
mischief or inconclusive skirmishing, but a genuine fight over genuine
issues, a fight for community survival and the shape of the future. These
electronic communities, having flourished throughout the 1980s, were
becoming aware of themselves, and increasingly, becoming aware of
other, rival communities. Worries were sprouting up right and left, with
complaints, rumors, uneasy speculations. But it would take a catalyst, a
shock, to make the new world evident. Like Bell's great publicity break,
the Tarriffville Rail Disaster of January 1878, it would take a cause
celebre.
</p><p> That cause was the AT&T Crash of January 15, 1990. After the
Crash, the wounded and anxious telephone community would come out
fighting hard.
</p><p> The community of telephone technicians, engineers, operators and
researchers is the oldest community in cyberspace. These are the
veterans, the most developed group, the richest, the most respectable, in
most ways the most powerful. Whole generations have come and gone
since Alexander Graham Bell's day, but the community he founded
survives; people work for the phone system today whose great-
grandparents worked for the phone system. Its specialty magazines, such
as <i>Telephony,</i> <i>AT&T Technical Journal,</i> <i>Telephone Engineer and
Management,</i> are decades old; they make computer publications like
<i>Macworld</i> and <i>PC Week</i> look like amateur johnny-come-latelies.
</p><p> And the phone companies take no back seat in hightechnology,
either. Other companies' industrial researchers may have won new
markets; but the researchers of Bell Labs have won <i>seven Nobel
Prizes.</i> One potent device that Bell Labs originated, the transistor, has
created entire <i>groups</i> of industries. Bell Labs are world-famous for
generating "a patent a day," and have even made vital discoveries in
astronomy, physics and cosmology.
</p><p> Throughout its seventy-year history, "Ma Bell" was not so much a
company as a way of life. Until the cataclysmic divestiture of the 1980s,
Ma Bell was perhaps the ultimate maternalist mega-employer. The
AT&T corporate image was the "gentle giant," "the voice with a smile," a
vaguely socialist-realist world of cleanshaven linemen in shiny helmets
and blandly pretty phone-girls in headsets and nylons. Bell System
employees were famous as rock-ribbed Kiwanis and Rotary members,
Little-League enthusiasts, school-board people.
</p><p> During the long heyday of Ma Bell, the Bell employee corps were
nurtured top-to-botton on a corporate ethos of public service. There was
good money in Bell, but Bell was not <i>about</i> money; Bell used public
relations, but never mere marketeering. People went into the Bell System
for a good life, and they had a good life. But it was not mere money that
led Bell people out in the midst of storms and earthquakes to fight with
toppled phone-poles, to wade in flooded manholes, to pull the redeyed
graveyard-shift over collapsing switching-systems. The Bell ethic was the
electrical equivalent of the postman's: neither rain, nor snow, nor gloom of
night would stop these couriers.
</p><p> It is easy to be cynical about this, as it is easy to be cynical about
any political or social system; but cynicism does not change the fact that
thousands of people took these ideals very seriously. And some still do.
</p><p> The Bell ethos was about public service; and that was gratifying;
but it was also about private <i>power,</i> and that was gratifying too. As a
corporation, Bell was very special. Bell was privileged. Bell had snuggled
up close to the state. In fact, Bell was as close to government as you could
get in America and still make a whole lot of legitimate money.
</p><p> But unlike other companies, Bell was above and beyond the vulgar
commercial fray. Through its regional operating companies, Bell was
omnipresent, local, and intimate, all over America; but the central ivory
towers at its corporate heart were the tallest and the ivoriest around.
</p><p> There were other phone companies in America, to be sure;
the so-called independents. Rural cooperatives, mostly; small fry,
mostly tolerated, sometimes warred upon.
</p><p> For many decades, "independent" American phone companies
lived in fear and loathing of the official Bell monopoly (or the "Bell
Octopus," as Ma Bell's nineteenthcentury enemies described her in many
angry newspaper manifestos). Some few of these independent
entrepreneurs, while legally in the wrong, fought so bitterly against the
Octopus that their illegal phone networks were cast into the street by Bell
agents and publicly burned.
</p><p> The pure technical sweetness of the Bell System gave its operators,
inventors and engineers a deeply satisfying sense of power and mastery.
They had devoted their lives to improving this vast nation-spanning
machine; over years, whole human lives, they had watched it improve and
grow. It was like a great technological temple. They were an elite, and
they knew it -- even if others did not; in fact, they felt even more powerful
<i>because</i> others did not understand. The deep attraction of this sensation
of elite technical power should never be underestimated. "Technical
power" is not for everybody; for many people it simply has no charm at all.
But for some people, it becomes the core of their lives. For a few, it is
overwhelming, obsessive; it becomes something close to an addiction.
People -- especially clever teenage boys whose lives are otherwise mostly
powerless and put-upon - love this sensation of secret power, and are
willing to do all sorts of amazing things to achieve it. The technical
<i>power</i> of electronics has motivated many strange acts detailed in this
book, which would otherwise be inexplicable.
</p><p> So Bell had power beyond mere capitalism. The Bell service
ethos worked, and was often propagandized, in a rather saccharine fashion.
Over the decades, people slowly grew tired of this. And then, openly
impatient with it. By the early 1980s, Ma Bell was to find herself with
scarcely a real friend in the world. Vail's industrial socialism had become
hopelessly out-of-fashion politically. Bell would be punished for that.
And that punishment would fall harshly upon the people of the telephone
community.
</p><p> In 1983, Ma Bell was dismantled by federal court action. The
pieces of Bell are now separate corporate entities. The core of the
company became AT&T Communications, and also AT&T Industries
(formerly Western Electric, Bell's manufacturing arm). AT&T Bell Labs
become Bell Communications Research, Bellcore. Then there are the
Regional Bell Operating Companies, or RBOCs, pronounced "arbocks."
</p><p> Bell was a titan and even these regional chunks are gigantic
enterprises: Fortune 50 companies with plenty of wealth and power
behind them. But the clean lines of "One Policy, One System, Universal
Service" have been shattered, apparently forever.
</p><p> The "One Policy" of the early Reagan Administration was to
shatter a system that smacked of noncompetitive socialism. Since that
time, there has been no real telephone "policy" on the federal level.
Despite the breakup, the remnants of Bell have never been set free to
compete in the open marketplace.
</p><p> The RBOCs are still very heavily regulated, but not from the top.
Instead, they struggle politically, economically and legally, in what seems
an endless turmoil, in a patchwork of overlapping federal and state
jurisdictions. Increasingly, like other major American corporations, the
RBOCs are becoming multinational, acquiring important commercial
interests in Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific Rim. But this, too,
adds to their legal and political predicament.
</p><p> The people of what used to be Ma Bell are not happy about their
fate. They feel ill-used. They might have been grudgingly willing to make
a full transition to the free market; to become just companies amid other
companies. But this never happened. Instead, AT&T and the RBOCS
("the Baby Bells") feel themselves wrenched from side to side by state
regulators, by Congress, by the FCC, and especially by the federal court of
Judge Harold Greene, the magistrate who ordered the Bell breakup and
who has been the de facto czar of American telecommunications ever
since 1983.
</p><p> Bell people feel that they exist in a kind of paralegal limbo today.
They don't understand what's demanded of them. If it's "service," why
aren't they treated like a public service? And if it's money, then why aren't
they free to compete for it? No one seems to know, really. Those who
claim to know keep changing their minds. Nobody in authority seems
willing to grasp the nettle for once and all.
</p><p> Telephone people from other countries are amazed by the
American telephone system today. Not that it works so well; for
nowadays even the French telephone system works, more or less. They are
amazed that the American telephone system <i>still</i> works <i>at all,</i> under
these strange conditions.
</p><p> Bell's "One System" of long-distance service is now only about
eighty percent of a system, with the remainder held by Sprint, MCI, and
the midget long-distance companies. Ugly wars over dubious corporate
practices such as "slamming" (an underhanded method of snitching clients
from rivals) break out with some regularity in the realm of long-distance
service. The battle to break Bell's long-distance monopoly was long and
ugly, and since the breakup the battlefield has not become much prettier.
AT&T's famous shame-and-blame advertisements, which emphasized the
shoddy work and purported ethical shadiness of their competitors, were
much remarked on for their studied psychological cruelty. There is much
bad blood in this industry, and much long-treasured resentment. AT&T's
post-breakup corporate logo, a striped sphere, is known in the industry as
the "Death Star" (a reference from the movie <i>Star Wars,</i> in which the
"Death Star" was the spherical hightech fortress of the harsh-breathing
imperial ultra-baddie, Darth Vader.) Even AT&T employees are less than
thrilled by the Death Star. A popular (though banned) Tshirt among
AT&T employees bears the old-fashioned Bell logo of the Bell System,
plus the newfangled striped sphere, with the before-and-after comments:
"This is your brain -- This is your brain on drugs!" AT&T made a very
well-financed and determined effort to break into the personal computer
market; it was disastrous, and telco computer experts are derisively
known by their competitors as "the pole-climbers." AT&T and the Baby
Bell arbocks still seem to have few friends. Under conditions of sharp
commercial competition, a crash like that of January 15, 1990 was a major
embarrassment to AT&T. It was a direct blow against their much-
treasured reputation for reliability. Within days of the crash AT&T's
Chief Executive Officer, Bob Allen, officially apologized, in terms of
deeply pained humility: "AT&T had a major service disruption last
Monday. We didn't live up to our own standards of quality, and we didn't
live up to yours. It's as simple as that. And that's not acceptable to us. Or
to you.... We understand how much people have come to depend upon
AT&T service, so our AT&T Bell Laboratories scientists and our network
engineers are doing everything possible to guard against a recurrence....
We know there's no way to make up for the inconvenience this problem
may have caused you."
</p><p> Mr Allen's "open letter to customers" was printed in lavish ads all
over the country: in the <i>Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New
York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia
Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle Examiner, Boston Globe,
Dallas Morning News, Detroit Free Press, Washington Post,
Houston Chronicle, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Atlanta Journal
Constitution, Minneapolis Star Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer Press
Dispatch, Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer, Tacoma News Tribune,
Miami Herald, Pittsburgh Press, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Denver
Post, Phoenix Republic Gazette</i> and <i>Tampa Tribune.</i>
</p><p> In another press release, AT&T went to some pains to suggest that
this "software glitch" <i>might</i> have happened just as easily to MCI,
although, in fact, it hadn't. (MCI's switching software was quite different
from AT&T's -though not necessarily any safer.) AT&T also announced
their plans to offer a rebate of service on Valentine's Day to make up for
the loss during the Crash.
</p><p> "Every technical resource available, including Bell Labs scientists
and engineers, has been devoted to assuring it will not occur again," the
public was told. They were further assured that "The chances of a
recurrence are small--a problem of this magnitude never occurred before."
</p><p> In the meantime, however, police and corporate security
maintained their own suspicions about "the chances of recurrence" and the
real reason why a "problem of this magnitude" had appeared, seemingly
out of nowhere. Police and security knew for a fact that hackers of
unprecedented sophistication were illegally entering, and reprogramming,
certain digital switching stations. Rumors of hidden "viruses" and secret
"logic bombs" in the switches ran rampant in the underground, with much
chortling over AT&T's predicament, and idle speculation over what
unsung hacker genius was responsible for it. Some hackers, including
police informants, were trying hard to finger one another as the true
culprits of the Crash.
</p><p> Telco people found little comfort in objectivity when they
contemplated these possibilities. It was just too close to the bone for
them; it was embarrassing; it hurt so much, it was hard even to talk about.
</p><p> There has always been thieving and misbehavior in the phone
system. There has always been trouble with the rival independents, and in
the local loops. But to have such trouble in the core of the system, the
long-distance switching stations, is a horrifying affair. To telco people,
this is all the difference between finding roaches in your kitchen and big
horrid sewer-rats in your bedroom.
</p><p> From the outside, to the average citizen, the telcos still seem
gigantic and impersonal. The American public seems to regard them as
something akin to Soviet apparats. Even when the telcos do their best
corporatecitizen routine, subsidizing magnet high-schools and sponsoring
news-shows on public television, they seem to win little except public
suspicion.
</p><p> But from the inside, all this looks very different. There's harsh
competition. A legal and political system that seems baffled and bored,
when not actively hostile to telco interests. There's a loss of morale, a
deep sensation of having somehow lost the upper hand. Technological
change has caused a loss of data and revenue to other, newer forms of
transmission. There's theft, and new forms of theft, of growing scale and
boldness and sophistication. With all these factors, it was no surprise to
see the telcos, large and small, break out in a litany of bitter complaint.
</p><p> In late '88 and throughout 1989, telco representatives grew shrill in
their complaints to those few American law enforcement officials who
make it their business to try to understand what telephone people are
talking about. Telco security officials had discovered the computerhacker
underground, infiltrated it thoroughly, and become deeply alarmed at its
growing expertise. Here they had found a target that was not only
loathsome on its face, but clearly ripe for counterattack.
</p><p> Those bitter rivals: AT&T, MCI and Sprint -- and a crowd of Baby
Bells: PacBell, Bell South, Southwestern Bell, NYNEX, USWest, as well
as the Bell research consortium Bellcore, and the independent long-
distance carrier Mid-American -- all were to have their role in the great
hacker dragnet of 1990. After years of being battered and pushed around,
the telcos had, at least in a small way, seized the initiative again. After
years of turmoil, telcos and government officials were once again to work
smoothly in concert in defense of the System. Optimism blossomed;
enthusiasm grew on all sides; the prospective taste of vengeance was
sweet.
</p><p> From the beginning -- even before the crackdown had a name --
secrecy was a big problem. There were many good reasons for secrecy in
the hacker crackdown. Hackers and code-thieves were wily prey, slinking
back to their bedrooms and basements and destroying vital incriminating
evidence at the first hint of trouble. Furthermore, the crimes themselves
were heavily technical and difficult to describe, even to police -- much
less to the general public.
</p><p> When such crimes <i>had</i> been described intelligibly to the public,
in the past, that very publicity had tended to <i>increase</i> the crimes
enormously. Telco officials, while painfully aware of the vulnerabilities
of their systems, were anxious not to publicize those weaknesses.
Experience showed them that those weaknesses, once discovered, would
be pitilessly exploited by tens of thousands of people -- not only by
professional grifters and by underground hackers and phone phreaks, but
by many otherwise more-or-less honest everyday folks, who regarded
stealing service from the faceless, soulless "Phone Company" as a kind of
harmless indoor sport. When it came to protecting their interests, telcos
had long since given up on general public sympathy for "the Voice with a
Smile." Nowadays the telco's "Voice" was very likely to be a computer's;
and the American public showed much less of the proper respect and
gratitude due the fine public service bequeathed them by Dr. Bell and Mr.
Vail. The more efficient, high-tech, computerized, and impersonal the
telcos became, it seemed, the more they were met by sullen public
resentment and amoral greed.
</p><p> Telco officials wanted to punish the phone-phreak underground, in
as public and exemplary a manner as possible. They wanted to make dire
examples of the worst offenders, to seize the ringleaders and intimidate the
small fry, to discourage and frighten the wacky hobbyists, and send the
professional grifters to jail. To do all this, publicity was vital.
</p><p> Yet operational secrecy was even more so. If word got out that a
nationwide crackdown was coming, the hackers might simply vanish;
destroy the evidence, hide their computers, go to earth, and wait for the
campaign to blow over. Even the young hackers were crafty and
suspicious, and as for the professional grifters, they tended to split for the
nearest state-line at the first sign of trouble. For the crackdown to work
well, they would all have to be caught red-handed, swept upon suddenly,
out of the blue, from every corner of the compass. And there was another
strong motive for secrecy. In the worst-case scenario, a blown campaign
might leave the telcos open to a devastating hacker counter-attack. If
there were indeed hackers loose in America who had caused the January
15 Crash -- if there were truly gifted hackers, loose in the nation's long-
distance switching systems, and enraged or frightened by the crackdown --
then they might react unpredictably to an attempt to collar them. Even if
caught, they might have talented and vengeful friends still running around
loose. Conceivably, it could turn ugly. Very ugly. In fact, it was hard to
imagine just how ugly things might turn, given that possibility. Counter-
attack from hackers was a genuine concern for the telcos. In point of fact,
they would never suffer any such counter-attack. But in months to come,
they would be at some pains to publicize this notion and to utter grim
warnings about it.
</p><p> Still, that risk seemed well worth running. Better to run the risk of
vengeful attacks, than to live at the mercy of potential crashers. Any cop
would tell you that a protection racket had no real future.
</p><p> And publicity was such a useful thing. Corporate security officers,
including telco security, generally work under conditions of great
discretion. And corporate security officials do not make money for their
companies. Their job is to <i>prevent the loss</i> of money, which is much
less glamorous than actually winning profits. If you are a corporate
security official, and you do your job brilliantly, then nothing bad happens
to your company at all. Because of this, you appear completely
superfluous. This is one of the many unattractive aspects of security
work. It's rare that these folks have the chance to draw some healthy
attention to their own efforts.
</p><p> Publicity also served the interest of their friends in law
enforcement. Public officials, including law enforcement officials, thrive
by attracting favorable public interest. A brilliant prosecution in a matter
of vital public interest can make the career of a prosecuting attorney. And
for a police officer, good publicity opens the purses of the legislature; it
may bring a citation, or a promotion, or at least a rise in status and the
respect of one's peers.
</p><p> But to have both publicity and secrecy is to have one's cake and eat
it too. In months to come, as we will show, this impossible act was to
cause great pain to the agents of the crackdown. But early on, it seemed
possible -- maybe even likely -- that the crackdown could successfully
combine the best of both worlds. The <i>arrest</i> of hackers would be
heavily publicized. The actual <i>deeds</i> of the hackers, which were
technically hard to explain and also a security risk, would be left decently
obscured. The <i>threat</i> hackers posed would be heavily trumpeted; the
likelihood of their actually committing such fearsome crimes would be left
to the public's imagination. The spread of the computer underground, and
its growing technical sophistication, would be heavily promoted; the
actual hackers themselves, mostly bespectacled middle-class white
suburban teenagers, would be denied any personal publicity.
</p><p> It does not seem to have occurred to any telco official that the
hackers accused would demand a day in court; that journalists would smile
upon the hackers as "good copy;" that wealthy high-tech entrepreneurs
would offer moral and financial support to crackdown victims; that
constitutional lawyers would show up with briefcases, frowning mightily.
This possibility does not seem to have ever entered the game-plan.
</p><p> And even if it had, it probably would not have slowed the ferocious
pursuit of a stolen phone-company document, mellifluously known as
"Control Office Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special
Services and Major Account Centers."
</p><p> In the chapters to follow, we will explore the worlds of police and
the computer underground, and the large shadowy area where they overlap.
But first, we must explore the battleground. Before we leave the world of
the telcos, we must understand what a switching system actually is and
how your telephone actually works.
</p><p> To the average citizen, the idea of the telephone is represented by,
well, a <i>telephone:</i> a device that you talk into.
</p><p>
</p><p> To a telco professional, however, the telephone itself is known, in
lordly fashion, as a "subset." The "subset" in your house is a mere
adjunct, a distant nerve ending, of the central switching stations, which are
ranked in levels of heirarchy, up to the long-distance electronic switching
stations, which are some of the largest computers on earth.
</p><p> Let us imagine that it is, say, 1925, before the introduction of
computers, when the phone system was simpler and somewhat easier to
grasp. Let's further imagine that you are Miss Leticia Luthor, a fictional
operator for Ma Bell in New York City of the 20s.
</p><p> Basically, you, Miss Luthor, <i>are</i> the "switching system." You
are sitting in front of a large vertical switchboard, known as a "cordboard,"
made of shiny wooden panels, with ten thousand metal-rimmed holes
punched in them, known as jacks. The engineers would have put more
holes into your switchboard, but ten thousand is as many as you can reach
without actually having to get up out of your chair.
</p><p> Each of these ten thousand holes has its own little electric
lightbulb, known as a "lamp," and its own neatly printed number code.
</p><p> With the ease of long habit, you are scanning your board for lit-up
bulbs. This is what you do most of the time, so you are used to it.
</p><p> A lamp lights up. This means that the phone at the end of that line
has been taken off the hook. Whenever a handset is taken off the hook,
that closes a circuit inside the phone which then signals the local office,
i.e. you, automatically. There might be somebody calling, or then again
the phone might be simply off the hook, but this does not matter to you
yet. The first thing you do, is record that number in your logbook, in your
fine American public-school handwriting. This comes first, naturally,
since it is done for billing purposes.
</p><p> You now take the plug of your answering cord, which goes directly
to your headset, and plug it into the lit-up hole. "Operator," you announce.
</p><p> In operator's classes, before taking this job, you have been issued a
large pamphlet full of canned operator's responses for all kinds of
contingencies, which you had to memorize. You have also been trained in
a proper nonregional, non-ethnic pronunciation and tone of voice. You
rarely have the occasion to make any spontaneous remark to a customer,
and in fact this is frowned upon (except out on the rural lines where people
have time on their hands and get up to all kinds of mischief).
</p><p> A tough-sounding user's voice at the end of the line gives you a
number. Immediately, you write that number down in your logbook, next
to the caller's number, which you just wrote earlier. You then look and see
if the number this guy wants is in fact on your switchboard, which it
generally is, since it's generally a local call. Long distance costs so much
that people use it sparingly.
</p><p> Only then do you pick up a calling-cord from a shelf at the base of
the switchboard. This is a long elastic cord mounted on a kind of reel so
that it will zip back in when you unplug it. There are a lot of cords down
there, and when a bunch of them are out at once they look like a nest of
snakes. Some of the girls think there are bugs living in those cable-holes.
They're called "cable mites" and are supposed to bite your hands and give
you rashes. You don't believe this, yourself.
</p><p> Gripping the head of your calling-cord, you slip the tip of it deftly
into the sleeve of the jack for the called person. Not all the way in,
though. You just touch it. If you hear a clicking sound, that means the
line is busy and you can't put the call through. If the line is busy, you have
to stick the calling-cord into a "busy-tone jack," which will give the guy a
busy-tone. This way you don't have to talk to him yourself and absorb his
natural human frustration.
</p><p> But the line isn't busy. So you pop the cord all the way in. Relay
circuits in your board make the distant phone ring, and if somebody picks
it up off the hook, then a phone conversation starts. You can hear this
conversation on your answering cord, until you unplug it. In fact you could
listen to the whole conversation if you wanted, but this is sternly frowned
upon by management, and frankly, when you've overheard one, you've
pretty much heard 'em all.
</p><p> You can tell how long the conversation lasts by the glow of the
calling-cord's lamp, down on the calling-cord's shelf. When it's over, you
unplug and the calling-cord zips back into place.
</p><p> Having done this stuff a few hundred thousand times, you become
quite good at it. In fact you're plugging, and connecting, and
disconnecting, ten, twenty, forty cords at a time. It's a manual handicraft,
really, quite satisfying in a way, rather like weaving on an upright loom.
</p><p> Should a long-distance call come up, it would be different, but not
all that different. Instead of connecting the call through your own local
switchboard, you have to go up the hierarchy, onto the long-distance lines,
known as "trunklines." Depending on how far the call goes, it may have to
work its way through a whole series of operators, which can take quite a
while. The caller doesn't wait on the line while this complex process is
negotiated across the country by the gaggle of operators. Instead, the
caller hangs up, and you call him back yourself when the call has finally
worked its way through.
</p><p> After four or five years of this work, you get married, and you have
to quit your job, this being the natural order of womanhood in the
American 1920s. The phone company has to train somebody else --
maybe two people, since the phone system has grown somewhat in the
meantime. And this costs money.
</p><p> In fact, to use any kind of human being as a switching system is a
very expensive proposition. Eight thousand Leticia Luthors would be bad
enough, but a quarter of a million of them is a military-scale proposition
and makes drastic measures in automation financially worthwhile.
</p><p> Although the phone system continues to grow today, the number of
human beings employed by telcos has been dropping steadily for years.
Phone "operators" now deal with nothing but unusual contingencies, all
routine operations having been shrugged off onto machines. Consequently,
telephone operators are considerably less machine-like nowadays, and
have been known to have accents and actual character in their voices.
When you reach a human operator today, the operators are rather more
"human" than they were in Leticia's day -- but on the other hand, human
beings in the phone system are much harder to reach in the first place.
</p><p> Over the first half of the twentieth century, "electromechanical"
switching systems of growing complexity were cautiously introduced into
the phone system. In certain backwaters, some of these hybrid systems
are still in use. But after 1965, the phone system began to go completely
electronic, and this is by far the dominant mode today. Electromechanical
systems have "crossbars," and "brushes," and other large moving
mechanical parts, which, while faster and cheaper than Leticia, are still
slow, and tend to wear out fairly quickly.
</p><p> But fully electronic systems are inscribed on silicon chips, and are
lightning-fast, very cheap, and quite durable. They are much cheaper to
maintain than even the best electromechanical systems, and they fit into
half the space. And with every year, the silicon chip grows smaller,
faster, and cheaper yet. Best of all, automated electronics work around
the clock and don't have salaries or health insurance.
</p><p> There are, however, quite serious drawbacks to the use of
computer-chips. When they do break down, it is a daunting challenge to
figure out what the heck has gone wrong with them. A broken cordboard
generally had a problem in it big enough to see. A broken chip has
invisible, microscopic faults. And the faults in bad software can be so
subtle as to be practically theological. If you want a mechanical system to
do something new, then you must travel to where it is, and pull pieces out
of it, and wire in new pieces. This costs money. However, if you want a
chip to do something new, all you have to do is change its software, which
is easy, fast and dirt-cheap. You don't even have to see the chip to change
its program. Even if you did see the chip, it wouldn't look like much. A
chip with program X doesn't look one whit different from a chip with
program Y. With the proper codes and sequences, and access to
specialized phone-lines, you can change electronic switching systems all
over America from anywhere you please.
</p><p> And so can other people. If they know how, and if they want to,
they can sneak into a microchip via the special phonelines and diddle with
it, leaving no physical trace at all. If they broke into the operator's station
and held Leticia at gunpoint, that would be very obvious. If they broke
into a telco building and went after an electromechanical switch with a
toolbelt, that would at least leave many traces. But people can do all
manner of amazing things to computer switches just by typing on a
keyboard, and keyboards are everywhere today. The extent of this
vulnerability is deep, dark, broad, almost mind-boggling, and yet this is a
basic, primal fact of life about any computer on a network.
</p><p> Security experts over the past twenty years have insisted, with
growing urgency, that this basic vulnerability of computers represents an
entirely new level of risk, of unknown but obviously dire potential to
society. And they are right.
</p><p> An electronic switching station does pretty much everything Letitia
did, except in nanoseconds and on a much larger scale. Compared to Miss
Luthor's ten thousand jacks, even a primitive 1ESS switching computer,
60s vintage, has a 128,000 lines. And the current AT&T system of
choice is the monstrous fifth-generation 5ESS.
</p><p> An Electronic Switching Station can scan every line on its "board"
in a tenth of a second, and it does this over and over, tirelessly, around the
clock. Instead of eyes, it uses "ferrod scanners" to check the condition of
local lines and trunks. Instead of hands, it has "signal distributors,"
"central pulse distributors," "magnetic latching relays," and "reed
switches," which complete and break the calls. Instead of a brain, it has a
"central processor." Instead of an instruction manual, it has a program.
Instead of a handwritten logbook for recording and billing calls, it has
magnetic tapes. And it never has to talk to anybody. Everything a customer
might say to it is done by punching the direct-dial tone buttons on your
subset.
</p><p> Although an Electronic Switching Station can't talk, it does need an
interface, some way to relate to its, er, employers. This interface is known
as the "master control center." (This interface might be better known
simply as "the interface," since it doesn't actually "control" phone calls
directly. However, a term like "Master Control Center" is just the kind of
rhetoric that telco maintenance engineers -- and hackers -- find
particularly satisfying.) Using the master control center, a phone engineer
can test local and trunk lines for malfunctions. He (rarely she) can check
various alarm displays, measure traffic on the lines, examine the records of
telephone usage and the charges for those calls, and change the
programming.
</p><p> And, of course, anybody else who gets into the master control
center by remote control can also do these things, if he (rarely she) has
managed to figure them out, or, more likely, has somehow swiped the
knowledge from people who already know.
</p><p> In 1989 and 1990, one particular RBOC, BellSouth, which felt
particularly troubled, spent a purported $1.2 million on computer security.
Some think it spent as much as two million, if you count all the associated
costs. Two million dollars is still very little compared to the great cost-
saving utility of telephonic computer systems.
</p><p> Unfortunately, computers are also stupid. Unlike human beings,
computers possess the truly profound stupidity of the inanimate.
</p><p> In the 1960s, in the first shocks of spreading computerization, there
was much easy talk about the stupidity of computers -- how they could
"only follow the program" and were rigidly required to do "only what they
were told." There has been rather less talk about the stupidity of
computers since they began to achieve grandmaster status in chess
tournaments, and to manifest many other impressive forms of apparent
cleverness.
</p><p> Nevertheless, computers <i>still</i> are profoundly brittle and stupid;
they are simply vastly more subtle in their stupidity and brittleness. The
computers of the 1990s are much more reliable in their components than
earlier computer systems, but they are also called upon to do far more
complex things, under far more challenging conditions.
</p><p> On a basic mathematical level, every single line of a software
program offers a chance for some possible screwup. Software does not sit
still when it works; it "runs," it interacts with itself and with its own inputs
and outputs. By analogy, it stretches like putty into millions of possible
shapes and conditions, so many shapes that they can never all be
successfully tested, not even in the lifespan of the universe. Sometimes
the putty snaps.
</p><p> The stuff we call "software" is not like anything that human society
is used to thinking about. Software is something like a machine, and
something like mathematics, and something like language, and something
like thought, and art, and information.... but software is not in fact any of
those other things. The protean quality of software is one of the great
sources of its fascination. It also makes software very powerful, very
subtle, very unpredictable, and very risky.
</p><p> Some software is bad and buggy. Some is "robust," even
"bulletproof." The best software is that which has been tested by
thousands of users under thousands of different conditions, over years. It
is then known as "stable." This does <i>not</i> mean that the software is now
flawless, free of bugs. It generally means that there are plenty of bugs in
it, but the bugs are well-identified and fairly well understood.
</p><p> There is simply no way to assure that software is free of flaws.
Though software is mathematical in nature, it cannot by "proven" like a
mathematical theorem; software is more like language, with inherent
ambiguities, with different definitions, different assumptions, different
levels of meaning that can conflict.
</p><p> Human beings can manage, more or less, with human language
because we can catch the gist of it.
</p><p> Computers, despite years of effort in "artificial intelligence," have
proven spectacularly bad in "catching the gist" of anything at all. The
tiniest bit of semantic grit may still bring the mightiest computer tumbling
down. One of the most hazardous things you can do to a computer
program is try to improve it -- to try to make it safer. Software "patches"
represent new, untried un"stable" software, which is by definition riskier.
</p><p> The modern telephone system has come to depend, utterly and
irretrievably, upon software. And the System Crash of January 15, 1990,
was caused by an <i>improvement</i> in software. Or rather, an <i>attempted</i>
improvement.
</p><p> As it happened, the problem itself -- the problem per se -- took
this form. A piece of telco software had been written in C language, a
standard language of the telco field. Within the C software was a long
"do... while" construct. The "do... while" construct contained a "switch"
statement. The "switch" statement contained an "if" clause. The "if"
clause contained a "break." The "break" was <i>supposed</i> to "break" the "if
clause." Instead, the "break" broke the "switch" statement.
</p><p> That was the problem, the actual reason why people picking up
phones on January 15, 1990, could not talk to one another.
</p><p> Or at least, that was the subtle, abstract, cyberspatial seed of the
problem. This is how the problem manifested itself from the realm of
programming into the realm of real life.
</p><p> The System 7 software for AT&T's 4ESS switching station, the
"Generic 44E14 Central Office Switch Software," had been extensively
tested, and was considered very stable. By the end of 1989, eighty of
AT&T's switching systems nationwide had been programmed with the
new software. Cautiously, thirty four stations were left to run the slower,
less-capable System 6, because AT&T suspected there might be
shakedown problems with the new and unprecedently sophisticated
System 7 network.
</p><p> The stations with System 7 were programmed to switch over to a
backup net in case of any problems. In mid-December 1989, however, a
new high-velocity, high security software patch was distributed to each of
the 4ESS switches that would enable them to switch over even more
quickly, making the System 7 network that much more secure.
</p><p> Unfortunately, every one of these 4ESS switches was now in
possession of a small but deadly flaw.
</p><p> In order to maintain the network, switches must monitor the
condition of other switches -- whether they are up and running, whether
they have temporarily shut down, whether they are overloaded and in need
of assistance, and so forth. The new software helped control this
bookkeeping function by monitoring the status calls from other switches.
</p><p> It only takes four to six seconds for a troubled 4ESS switch to rid
itself of all its calls, drop everything temporarily, and re-boot its software
from scratch. Starting over from scratch will generally rid the switch of
any software problems that may have developed in the course of running
the system. Bugs that arise will be simply wiped out by this process. It is
a clever idea. This process of automatically re-booting from scratch is
known as the "normal fault recovery routine." Since AT&T's software is
in fact exceptionally stable, systems rarely have to go into "fault recovery"
in the first place; but AT&T has always boasted of its "real world"
reliability, and this tactic is a belt-and-suspenders routine.
</p><p> The 4ESS switch used its new software to monitor its fellow
switches as they recovered from faults. As other switches came back on
line after recovery, they would send their "OK" signals to the switch. The
switch would make a little note to that effect in its "status map,"
recognizing that the fellow switch was back and ready to go, and should be
sent some calls and put back to regular work.
</p><p> Unfortunately, while it was busy bookkeeping with the status map,
the tiny flaw in the brand-new software came into play. The flaw caused
the 4ESS switch to interacted, subtly but drastically, with incoming
telephone calls from human users. If -- and only if -- two incoming phone-
calls happened to hit the switch within a hundredth of a second, then a
small patch of data would be garbled by the flaw.
</p><p> But the switch had been programmed to monitor itself constantly
for any possible damage to its data. When the switch perceived that its
data had been somehow garbled, then it too would go down, for swift
repairs to its software. It would signal its fellow switches not to send any
more work. It would go into the fault recovery mode for four to six
seconds. And then the switch would be fine again, and would send out its
"OK, ready for work" signal.
</p><p> However, the "OK, ready for work" signal was the <i>very thing that
had caused the switch to go down in the first place.</i> And <i>all</i> the
System 7 switches had the same flaw in their status-map software. As
soon as they stopped to make the bookkeeping note that their fellow
switch was "OK," then they too would become vulnerable to the slight
chance that two phone-calls would hit them within a hundredth of a
second.
</p><p> At approximately 2:25 p.m. EST on Monday, January 15, one of
AT&T's 4ESS toll switching systems in New York City had an actual,
legitimate, minor problem. It went into fault recovery routines, announced
"I'm going down," then announced, "I'm back, I'm OK." And this cheery
message then blasted throughout the network to many of its fellow 4ESS
switches. Many of the switches, at first, completely escaped trouble.
These lucky switches were not hit by the coincidence of two phone calls
within a hundredth of a second. Their software did not fail -- at first. But
three switches -- in Atlanta, St. Louis, and Detroit -- were unlucky, and
were caught with their hands full. And they went down. And they came
back up, almost immediately. And they too began to broadcast the lethal
message that they, too, were "OK" again, activating the lurking software
bug in yet other switches.
</p><p> As more and more switches did have that bit of bad luck and
collapsed, the call-traffic became more and more densely packed in the
remaining switches, which were groaning to keep up with the load. And
of course, as the calls became more densely packed, the switches were
<i>much more likely</i> to be hit twice within a hundredth of a second. It only
took four seconds for a switch to get well. There was no <i>physical</i>
damage of any kind to the switches, after all. Physically, they were
working perfectly. This situation was "only" a software problem. But the
4ESS switches were leaping up and down every four to six seconds, in a
virulent spreading wave all over America, in utter, manic, mechanical
stupidity. They kept <i>knocking</i> one another down with their contagious
"OK" messages. It took about ten minutes for the chain reaction to cripple
the network. Even then, switches would periodically luck-out and manage
to resume their normal work. Many calls -- millions of them -- were
managing to get through. But millions weren't.
</p><p> The switching stations that used System 6 were not directly
affected. Thanks to these old-fashioned switches, AT&T's national system
avoided complete collapse. This fact also made it clear to engineers that
System 7 was at fault.
</p><p> Bell Labs engineers, working feverishly in New Jersey, Illinois,
and Ohio, first tried their entire repertoire of standard network remedies on
the malfunctioning System 7. None of the remedies worked, of course,
because nothing like this had ever happened to any phone system before.
</p><p> By cutting out the backup safety network entirely, they were able to
reduce the frenzy of "OK" messages by about half. The system then began
to recover, as the chain reaction slowed. By 11:30 pm on Monday
January 15, sweating engineers on the midnight shift breathed a sigh of
relief as the last switch cleared-up.
</p><p> By Tuesday they were pulling all the brand-new 4ESS software
and replacing it with an earlier version of System 7. If these had been
human operators, rather than computers at work, someone would simply
have eventually stopped screaming. It would have been <i>obvious</i> that the
situation was not "OK," and common sense would have kicked in.
Humans possess common sense -- at least to some extent. Computers
simply don't. On the other hand, computers can handle hundreds of calls
per second. Humans simply can't. If every single human being in
America worked for the phone company, we couldn't match the
performance of digital switches: direct-dialling, three-way calling, speed-
calling, callwaiting, Caller ID, all the rest of the cornucopia of digital
bounty. Replacing computers with operators is simply not an option any
more.
</p><p> And yet we still, anachronistically, expect humans to be running
our phone system. It is hard for us to understand that we have sacrificed
huge amounts of initiative and control to senseless yet powerful machines.
When the phones fail, we want somebody to be responsible. We want
somebody to blame.
</p><p> When the Crash of January 15 happened, the American populace
was simply not prepared to understand that enormous landslides in
cyberspace, like the Crash itself, can happen, and can be nobody's fault in
particular. It was easier to believe, maybe even in some odd way more
reassuring to believe, that some evil person, or evil group, had done this
to us. "Hackers" had done it. With a virus. A trojan horse. A software
bomb. A dirty plot of some kind. People believed this, responsible
people. In 1990, they were looking hard for evidence to confirm their
heartfelt suspicions.
</p><p> And they would look in a lot of places. Come 1991, however, the
outlines of an apparent new reality would begin to emerge from the fog.
</p><p> On July 1 and 2, 1991, computer-software collapses in telephone
switching stations disrupted service in Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Los
Angeles and San Francisco. Once again, seemingly minor maintenance
problems had crippled the digital System 7. About twelve million people
were affected in the Crash of July 1, 1991.
</p><p> Said the New York Times Service: "Telephone company
executives and federal regulators said they were not ruling out the
possibility of sabotage by computer hackers, but most seemed to think the
problems stemmed from some unknown defect in the software running the
networks."
</p><p> And sure enough, within the week, a red-faced software company,
DSC Communications Corporation of Plano, Texas, owned up to
"glitches" in the "signal transfer point" software that DSC had designed for
Bell Atlantic and Pacific Bell. The immediate cause of the July 1 Crash
was a single mistyped character: one tiny typographical flaw in one single
line of the software. One mistyped letter, in one single line, had deprived
the nation's capital of phone service. It was not particularly surprising that
this tiny flaw had escaped attention: a typical System 7 station requires
<i>ten million</i> lines of code.
</p><p> On Tuesday, September 17, 1991, came the most spectacular
outage yet. This case had nothing to do with software failures -- at least,
not directly. Instead, a group of AT&T's switching stations in New York
City had simply run out of electrical power and shut down cold. Their
back-up batteries had failed. Automatic warning systems were supposed
to warn of the loss of battery power, but those automatic systems had
failed as well.
</p><p> This time, Kennedy, La Guardia, and Newark airports all had their
voice and data communications cut. This horrifying event was
particularly ironic, as attacks on airport computers by hackers had long
been a standard nightmare scenario, much trumpeted by computer-
security experts who feared the computer underground. There had even
been a Hollywood thriller about sinister hackers ruining airport computers
-- <i>Die Hard II.</i>
</p><p> Now AT&T itself had crippled airports with computer
malfunctions -- not just one airport, but three at once, some of the busiest
in the world.
</p><p> Air traffic came to a standstill throughout the Greater New York
area, causing more than 500 flights to be cancelled, in a spreading wave all
over America and even into Europe. Another 500 or so flights were
delayed, affecting, all in all, about 85,000 passengers. (One of these
passengers was the chairman of the Federal Communications
Commission.)
</p><p> Stranded passengers in New York and New Jersey were further
infuriated to discover that they could not even manage to make a long
distance phone call, to explain their delay to loved ones or business
associates. Thanks to the crash, about four and a half million domestic
calls, and half a million international calls, failed to get through. The
September 17 NYC Crash, unlike the previous ones, involved not a
whisper of "hacker" misdeeds. On the contrary, by 1991, AT&T itself
was suffering much of the vilification that had formerly been directed at
hackers. Congressmen were grumbling. So were state and federal
regulators. And so was the press.
</p><p> For their part, ancient rival MCI took out snide fullpage newspaper
ads in New York, offering their own longdistance services for the "next
time that AT&T goes down." "You wouldn't find a classy company like
AT&T using such advertising," protested AT&T Chairman Robert Allen,
unconvincingly. Once again, out came the full-page AT&T apologies in
newspapers, apologies for "an inexcusable culmination of both human and
mechanical failure." (This time, however, AT&T offered no discount on
later calls. Unkind critics suggested that AT&T were worried about
setting any precedent for refunding the financial losses caused by
telephone crashes.)
</p><p> Industry journals asked publicly if AT&T was "asleep at the
switch." The telephone network, America's purported marvel of high-tech
reliability, had gone down three times in 18 months. <i>Fortune</i> magazine
listed the Crash of September 17 among the "Biggest Business Goofs of
1991," cruelly parodying AT&T's ad campaign in an article entitled
"AT&T Wants You Back (Safely On the Ground, God Willing)."
</p><p> Why had those New York switching systems simply run out of
power? Because no human being had attended to the alarm system. Why
did the alarm systems blare automatically, without any human being
noticing? Because the three telco technicians who <i>should</i> have been
listening were absent from their stations in the power-room, on another
floor of the building -- attending a training class. A training class about
the alarm systems for the power room!
</p><p> "Crashing the System" was no longer "unprecedented" by late
1991. On the contrary, it no longer even seemed an oddity. By 1991, it
was clear that all the policemen in the world could no longer "protect" the
phone system from crashes. By far the worst crashes the system had ever
had, had been inflicted, by the system, upon <i>itself.</i> And this time
nobody was making cocksure statements that this was an anomaly,
something that would never happen again. By 1991 the System's
defenders had met their nebulous Enemy, and the Enemy was -- the
System.
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