Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Michigan, Missouri,
Texas, and Virginia: boards such as "Crime Bytes," "Crimestoppers,"
"All Points" and "Bullet-N-Board." Police officers, as private
computer enthusiasts, ran their own boards in Arizona, California,
Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Missouri, Maryland, New Mexico, North
Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas. Police boards have often proved
helpful in community relations. Sometimes crimes are reported on
police boards.

Sometimes crimes are COMMITTED on police boards. This has sometimes
happened by accident, as naive hackers blunder onto police boards and
blithely begin offering telephone codes. Far more often, however, it
occurs through the now almost-traditional use of "sting boards." The
first police sting-boards were established in 1985: "Underground
Tunnel" in Austin, Texas, whose sysop Sgt. Robert Ansley called himself
"Pluto"--"The Phone Company" in Phoenix, Arizona, run by Ken MacLeod of
the Maricopa County Sheriff's office--and Sgt. Dan Pasquale's board in
Fremont, California. Sysops posed as hackers, and swiftly garnered
coteries of ardent users, who posted codes and loaded pirate software
with abandon, and came to a sticky end.

Sting boards, like other boards, are cheap to operate, very cheap by
the standards of undercover police operations. Once accepted by the
local underground, sysops will likely be invited into other pirate
boards, where they can compile more dossiers. And when the sting is
announced and the worst offenders arrested, the publicity is generally
gratifying. The resultant paranoia in the underground--perhaps more
justly described as a "deterrence effect"--tends to quell local
lawbreaking for quite a while.

Obviously police do not have to beat the underbrush for hackers. On
the contrary, they can go trolling for them. Those caught can be
grilled. Some become useful informants. They can lead the way to
pirate boards all across the country.

And boards all across the country showed the sticky fingerprints of
Phrack, and of that loudest and most flagrant of all underground
groups, the "Legion of Doom."

The term "Legion of Doom" came from comic books. The Legion of Doom, a
conspiracy of costumed super-villains headed by the chrome-domed
criminal ultra-mastermind Lex Luthor, gave Superman a lot of four-color
graphic trouble for a number of decades. Of course, Superman, that
exemplar of Truth, Justice, and the American Way,