unted legions of PC-owning
phreaks and hackers had used Terminus's scanner program to rip-off
telco codes. This feat had not escaped the attention of telco
security; it hardly could, since Terminus's earlier handle, "Terminal
Technician," was proudly written right on the program.

When he became a full-time computer professional (specializing in
telecommunications programming), he adopted the handle Terminus, meant
to indicate that he had "reached the final point of being a proficient
hacker." He'd moved up to the UNIX-based "Netsys" board on an AT&T
computer, with four phone lines and an impressive 240 megs of storage.
"Netsys" carried complete issues of Phrack, and Terminus was quite
friendly with its publishers, Taran King and Knight Lightning.

In the early 1980s, Terminus had been a regular on Plovernet,
Pirate-80, Sherwood Forest and Shadowland, all well-known pirate
boards, all heavily frequented by the Legion of Doom. As it happened,
Terminus was never officially "in LoD," because he'd never been given
the official LoD high-sign and back-slap by Legion maven Lex Luthor.
Terminus had never physically met anyone from LoD. But that scarcely
mattered much--the Atlanta Three themselves had never been officially
vetted by Lex, either.

As far as law enforcement was concerned, the issues were clear.
Terminus was a full-time, adult computer professional with particular
skills at AT&T software and hardware--but Terminus reeked of the
Legion of Doom and the underground.

On February 1, 1990--half a month after the Martin Luther King Day
Crash--USSS agents Tim Foley from Chicago, and Jack Lewis from the
Baltimore office, accompanied by AT&T security officer Jerry Dalton,
travelled to Middle Town, Maryland. There they grilled Terminus in his
home (to the stark terror of his wife and small children), and, in
their customary fashion, hauled his computers out the door.

The Netsys machine proved to contain a plethora of arcane UNIX
software--proprietary source code formally owned by AT&T. Software
such as: UNIX System Five Release 3.2; UNIX SV Release 3.1; UUCP
communications software; KORN SHELL; RFS; IWB; WWB; DWB; the C++
programming language; PMON; TOOL CHEST; QUEST; DACT, and S FIND.

In the long-established piratical tradition of the underground,
Terminus had been trading this illicitly-copied software with a small
circle of fellow UNIX programmers. Very unwisely, he had stored seven
years of his electronic