g, but the DANGER,
the potential hazard, the sheer TECHNICAL POWER LoD had accumulated,
that had made the situation untenable. Fry Guy was not LoD. He'd
never laid eyes on anyone in LoD; his only contacts with them had been
electronic. Core members of the Legion of Doom tended to meet
physically for conventions every year or so, to get drunk, give each
other the hacker high-sign, send out for pizza and ravage hotel suites.
Fry Guy had never done any of this. Deborah Daniels assessed Fry Guy
accurately as "an LoD wannabe."

Nevertheless Fry Guy's crimes would be directly attributed to LoD in
much future police propaganda. LoD would be described as "a closely
knit group" involved in "numerous illegal activities" including
"stealing and modifying individual credit histories," and "fraudulently
obtaining money and property." Fry Guy did this, but the Atlanta Three
didn't; they simply weren't into theft, but rather intrusion. This
caused a strange kink in the prosecution's strategy. LoD were accused
of "disseminating information about attacking computers to other
computer hackers in an effort to shift the focus of law enforcement to
those other hackers and away from the Legion of Doom."

This last accusation (taken directly from a press release by the
Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force) sounds particularly
far-fetched. One might conclude at this point that investigators would
have been well-advised to go ahead and "shift their focus" from the
"Legion of Doom." Maybe they SHOULD concentrate on "those other
hackers"--the ones who were actually stealing money and physical
objects.

But the Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was not a simple policing action. It
wasn't meant just to walk the beat in cyberspace--it was a CRACKDOWN, a
deliberate attempt to nail the core of the operation, to send a dire
and potent message that would settle the hash of the digital
underground for good.

By this reasoning, Fry Guy wasn't much more than the electronic
equivalent of a cheap streetcorner dope dealer. As long as the
masterminds of LoD were still flagrantly operating, pushing their
mountains of illicit knowledge right and left, and whipping up
enthusiasm for blatant lawbreaking, then there would be an INFINITE
SUPPLY of Fry Guys.

Because LoD were flagrant, they had left trails everywhere, to be
picked up by law enforcement in New York, Indiana, Florida, Texas,
Arizona, Missouri, even Australia. But 1990's war on the Legi