t-out, but
his reactions were askew and disquieting.

For instance, there was the business about LoD's ability to monitor
phone-calls to the police and Secret Service. Urvile agreed that this
was quite possible, and posed no big problem for LoD. In fact, he and
his friends had kicked the idea around on the "Black Ice" board, much
as they had discussed many other nifty notions, such as building
personal flame-throwers and jury-rigging fistfulls of blasting-caps.
They had hundreds of dial-up numbers for government agencies that
they'd gotten through scanning Atlanta phones, or had pulled from
raided VAX/VMS mainframe computers.

Basically, they'd never gotten around to listening in on the cops
because the idea wasn't interesting enough to bother with. Besides, if
they'd been monitoring Secret Service phone calls, obviously they'd
never have been caught in the first place. Right?

The Secret Service was less than satisfied with this rapier-like hacker
logic.

Then there was the issue of crashing the phone system. No problem,
Urvile admitted sunnily. Atlanta LoD could have shut down phone
service all over Atlanta any time they liked. EVEN THE 911 SERVICE?
Nothing special about that, Urvile explained patiently. Bring the
switch to its knees, with say the UNIX "makedir" bug, and 911 goes down
too as a matter of course. The 911 system wasn't very interesting,
frankly. It might be tremendously interesting to cops (for odd reasons
of their own), but as technical challenges went, the 911 service was
yawnsville.

So of course the Atlanta Three could crash service. They probably
could have crashed service all over BellSouth territory, if they'd
worked at it for a while. But Atlanta LoD weren't crashers. Only
losers and rodents were crashers. LoD were ELITE.

Urvile was privately convinced that sheer technical expertise could win
him free of any kind of problem. As far as he was concerned, elite
status in the digital underground had placed him permanently beyond the
intellectual grasp of cops and straights. Urvile had a lot to learn.

Of the three LoD stalwarts, Prophet was in the most direct trouble.
Prophet was a UNIX programming expert who burrowed in and out of the
Internet as a matter of course. He'd started his hacking career at
around age 14, meddling with a UNIX mainframe system at the University
of North Carolina.

Prophet himself had written the handy Legion of Doom file "UNIX Use and
Security F