them in jail.

And although the Atlanta Three--Prophet, Leftist, and especially
Urvile--had taught Fry Guy plenty, they were not themselves credit-card
fraudsters. The only thing they'd "stolen" was long-distance
service--and since they'd done much of that through phone-switch
manipulation, there was no easy way to judge how much they'd "stolen,"
or whether this practice was even "theft" of any easily recognizable
kind.

Fry Guy's theft of long-distance codes had cost the phone companies
plenty. The theft of long-distance service may be a fairly theoretical
"loss," but it costs genuine money and genuine time to delete all those
stolen codes, and to re-issue new codes to the innocent owners of those
corrupted codes. The owners of the codes themselves are victimized,
and lose time and money and peace of mind in the hassle. And then
there were the credit-card victims to deal with, too, and Western
Union. When it came to rip-off, Fry Guy was far more of a thief than
LoD. It was only when it came to actual computer expertise that Fry
Guy was small potatoes.

The Atlanta Legion thought most "rules" of cyberspace were for rodents
and losers, but they DID have rules. THEY NEVER CRASHED ANYTHING, AND
THEY NEVER TOOK MONEY. These were rough rules-of-thumb, and rather
dubious principles when it comes to the ethical subtleties of
cyberspace, but they enabled the Atlanta Three to operate with a
relatively clear conscience (though never with peace of mind).

If you didn't hack for money, if you weren't robbing people of actual
funds--money in the bank, that is--then nobody REALLY got hurt, in
LoD's opinion. "Theft of service" was a bogus issue, and "intellectual
property" was a bad joke. But LoD had only elitist contempt for
rip-off artists, "leechers," thieves. They considered themselves
clean. In their opinion, if you didn't smash-up or crash any systems
--(well, not on purpose, anyhow--accidents can happen, just ask Robert
Morris) then it was very unfair to call you a "vandal" or a "cracker."
When you were hanging out on-line with your "pals" in telco security,
you could face them down from the higher plane of hacker morality. And
you could mock the police from the supercilious heights of your
hacker's quest for pure knowledge.

But from the point of view of law enforcement and telco security,
however, Fry Guy was not really dangerous. The Atlanta Three WERE
dangerous. It wasn't the crimes they were committin