d Control-C. The
Georgia boys knew all about phone switching-stations. Though relative
johnny-come-latelies in the Legion of Doom, they were considered some
of LoD's heaviest guys, into the hairiest systems around. They had the
good fortune to live in or near Atlanta, home of the sleepy and
apparently tolerant BellSouth RBOC.

As RBOC security went, BellSouth were "cake." US West (of Arizona, the
Rockies and the Pacific Northwest) were tough and aggressive, probably
the heaviest RBOC around. Pacific Bell, California's PacBell, were
sleek, high-tech, and longtime veterans of the LA phone-phreak wars.
NYNEX had the misfortune to run the New York City area, and were warily
prepared for most anything. Even Michigan Bell, a division of the
Ameritech RBOC, at least had the elementary sense to hire their own
hacker as a useful scarecrow. But BellSouth, even though their
corporate P.R. proclaimed them to have "Everything You Expect From a
Leader," were pathetic.

When rumor about LoD's mastery of Georgia's switching network got
around to BellSouth through Bellcore and telco security scuttlebutt,
they at first refused to believe it. If you paid serious attention to
every rumor out and about these hacker kids, you would hear all kinds
of wacko saucer-nut nonsense: that the National Security Agency
monitored all American phone calls, that the CIA and DEA tracked
traffic on bulletin-boards with word-analysis programs, that the Condor
could start World War III from a payphone.

If there were hackers into BellSouth switching-stations, then how come
nothing had happened? Nothing had been hurt. BellSouth's machines
weren't crashing. BellSouth wasn't suffering especially badly from
fraud. BellSouth's customers weren't complaining. BellSouth was
headquartered in Atlanta, ambitious metropolis of the new high-tech
Sunbelt; and BellSouth was upgrading its network by leaps and bounds,
digitizing the works left right and center. They could hardly be
considered sluggish or naive. BellSouth's technical expertise was
second to none, thank you kindly. But then came the Florida business.

On June 13, 1989, callers to the Palm Beach County Probation
Department, in Delray Beach, Florida, found themselves involved in a
remarkable discussion with a phone-sex worker named "Tina" in New York
State. Somehow, ANY call to this probation office near Miami was
instantly and magically transported across state lines, at no extra
charge