agined in private
hands. How do you keep people disposable, yet assure their awestruck
respect for your property? It was a dilemma.

Much UNIX code was public-domain, available for free. Much
"proprietary" UNIX code had been extensively re-written, perhaps
altered so much that it became an entirely new product--or perhaps not.
Intellectual property rights for software developers were, and are,
extraordinarily complex and confused. And software "piracy," like the
private copying of videos, is one of the most widely practiced "crimes"
in the world today.

The USSS were not experts in UNIX or familiar with the customs of its
use. The United States Secret Service, considered as a body, did not
have one single person in it who could program in a UNIX
environment--no, not even one. The Secret Service WERE making
extensive use of expert help, but the "experts" they had chosen were
AT&T and Bellcore security officials, the very victims of the purported
crimes under investigation, the very people whose interest in AT&T's
"proprietary" software was most pronounced.

On February 6, 1990, Terminus was arrested by Agent Lewis. Eventually,
Terminus would be sent to prison for his illicit use of a piece of AT&T
software.

The issue of pirated AT&T software would bubble along in the background
during the war on the Legion of Doom. Some half-dozen of Terminus's
on-line acquaintances, including people in Illinois, Texas and
California, were grilled by the Secret Service in connection with the
illicit copying of software. Except for Terminus, however, none were
charged with a crime. None of them shared his peculiar prominence in
the hacker underground.

But that did not mean that these people would, or could, stay out of
trouble. The transferral of illicit data in cyberspace is hazy and
ill-defined business, with paradoxical dangers for everyone concerned:
hackers, signal carriers, board owners, cops, prosecutors, even random
passers-by. Sometimes, well-meant attempts to avert trouble or punish
wrongdoing bring more trouble than would simple ignorance, indifference
or impropriety.

Terminus's "Netsys" board was not a common-or-garden bulletin board
system, though it had most of the usual functions of a board. Netsys
was not a stand-alone machine, but part of the globe-spanning "UUCP"
cooperative network. The UUCP network uses a set of Unix software
programs called "Unix-to-Unix Copy," which allows Unix systems to thr