rom the Ground Up." UNIX (pronounced "you-nicks") is a
powerful, flexible computer operating-system, for multi-user,
multi-tasking computers. In 1969, when UNIX was created in Bell Labs,
such computers were exclusive to large corporations and universities,
but today UNIX is run on thousands of powerful home machines. UNIX was
particularly well-suited to telecommunications programming, and had
become a standard in the field. Naturally, UNIX also became a standard
for the elite hacker and phone phreak. Lately, Prophet had not been so
active as Leftist and Urvile, but Prophet was a recidivist. In 1986,
when he was eighteen, Prophet had been convicted of "unauthorized
access to a computer network" in North Carolina. He'd been discovered
breaking into the Southern Bell Data Network, a UNIX-based internal
telco network supposedly closed to the public. He'd gotten a typical
hacker sentence: six months suspended, 120 hours community service,
and three years' probation.

After that humiliating bust, Prophet had gotten rid of most of his
tonnage of illicit phreak and hacker data, and had tried to go
straight. He was, after all, still on probation. But by the autumn
of 1988, the temptations of cyberspace had proved too much for young
Prophet, and he was shoulder-to-shoulder with Urvile and Leftist into
some of the hairiest systems around.

In early September 1988, he'd broken into BellSouth's centralized
automation system, AIMSX or "Advanced Information Management System."
AIMSX was an internal business network for BellSouth, where telco
employees stored electronic mail, databases, memos, and calendars, and
did text processing. Since AIMSX did not have public dial-ups, it was
considered utterly invisible to the public, and was not well-secured--it
didn't even require passwords. Prophet abused an account known as
"waa1," the personal account of an unsuspecting telco employee.
Disguised as the owner of waa1, Prophet made about ten visits to AIMSX.

Prophet did not damage or delete anything in the system. His presence
in AIMSX was harmless and almost invisible. But he could not rest
content with that.

One particular piece of processed text on AIMSX was a telco document
known as "Bell South Standard Practice 660-225-104SV Control Office
Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special Services and Major
Account Centers dated March 1988."

Prophet had not been looking for this document. It was merely one
among