scene was not to rank with major centers of American
hacking such as New York and L.A. But St. Louis did rejoice in
possession of "Knight Lightning" and "Taran King," two of the foremost
JOURNALISTS native to the underground. Missouri boards like Metal
Shop, Metal Shop Private, Metal Shop Brewery, may not have been the
heaviest boards around in terms of illicit expertise. But they became
boards where hackers could exchange social gossip and try to figure out
what the heck was going on nationally--and internationally. Gossip
from Metal Shop was put into the form of news files, then assembled
into a general electronic publication, Phrack, a portmanteau title
coined from "phreak" and "hack." The Phrack editors were as obsessively
curious about other hackers as hackers were about machines.

Phrack, being free of charge and lively reading, began to circulate
throughout the underground. As Taran King and Knight Lightning left
high school for college, Phrack began to appear on mainframe machines
linked to BITNET, and, through BITNET to the "Internet," that loose but
extremely potent not-for-profit network where academic, governmental
and corporate machines trade data through the UNIX TCP/IP protocol.
(The "Internet Worm" of November 2-3,1988, created by Cornell grad
student Robert Morris, was to be the largest and best-publicized
computer-intrusion scandal to date. Morris claimed that his ingenious
"worm" program was meant to harmlessly explore the Internet, but due to
bad programming, the Worm replicated out of control and crashed some
six thousand Internet computers. Smaller-scale and less ambitious
Internet hacking was a standard for the underground elite.)

Most any underground board not hopelessly lame and out-of-it would
feature a complete run of Phrack--and, possibly, the lesser-known
standards of the underground: the Legion of Doom Technical Journal, the
obscene and raucous Cult of the Dead Cow files, P/HUN magazine,
Pirate, the Syndicate Reports, and perhaps the highly anarcho-political
Activist Times Incorporated.

Possession of Phrack on one's board was prima facie evidence of a bad
attitude. Phrack was seemingly everywhere, aiding, abetting, and
spreading the underground ethos. And this did not escape the attention
of corporate security or the police.

We now come to the touchy subject of police and boards. Police, do, in
fact, own boards. In 1989, there were police-sponsored boards in
California,