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.

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, BEEN
crashed--by "hackers."

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.

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.

#

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,
well-meant 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.

Like the advancing telephone system,