cal police, possibly BellSouth telco security; it was hard to tell in
the crush. Leftist's dad, at work in his basement office, first
noticed a muscular stranger in plain clothes crashing through the back
yard with a drawn pistol. As more strangers poured into the house,
Leftist's dad naturally assumed there was an armed robbery in progress.

Like most hacker parents, Leftist's mom and dad had only the vaguest
notions of what their son had been up to all this time. Leftist had a
day-job repairing computer hardware. His obsession with computers
seemed a bit odd, but harmless enough, and likely to produce a
well-paying career. The sudden, overwhelming raid left Leftist's
parents traumatized.

The Leftist himself had been out after work with his co-workers,
surrounding a couple of pitchers of margaritas. As he came trucking on
tequila-numbed feet up the pavement, toting a bag full of floppy-disks,
he noticed a large number of unmarked cars parked in his driveway. All
the cars sported tiny microwave antennas.

The Secret Service had knocked the front door off its hinges, almost
flattening his mom.

Inside, Leftist was greeted by Special Agent James Cool of the US
Secret Service, Atlanta office. Leftist was flabbergasted. He'd never
met a Secret Service agent before. He could not imagine that he'd ever
done anything worthy of federal attention. He'd always figured that if
his activities became intolerable, one of his contacts in telco
security would give him a private phone-call and tell him to knock it
off.

But now Leftist was pat-searched for weapons by grim professionals, and
his bag of floppies was quickly seized. He and his parents were all
shepherded into separate rooms and grilled at length as a score of
officers scoured their home for anything electronic.

Leftist was horrified as his treasured IBM AT personal computer with
its forty-meg hard disk, and his recently purchased 80386 IBM-clone
with a whopping hundred-meg hard disk, both went swiftly out the door
in Secret Service custody. They also seized all his disks, all his
notebooks, and a tremendous booty in dogeared telco documents that
Leftist had snitched out of trash dumpsters.

Leftist figured the whole thing for a big misunderstanding. He'd never
been into MILITARY computers. He wasn't a SPY or a COMMUNIST. He was
just a good ol' Georgia hacker, and now he just wanted all these people
out of the house. But it seemed they wouldn't g