s from the Chicago
office. Also along was a University of Missouri security officer, and
Reed Newlin, a security man from Southwestern Bell, the RBOC having
jurisdiction over Missouri.

Foley accused Knight Lightning of causing the nationwide crash of the
phone system.

Knight Lightning was aghast at this allegation. On the face of it, the
suspicion was not entirely implausible--though Knight Lightning knew
that he himself hadn't done it. Plenty of hot-dog hackers had bragged
that they could crash the phone system, however. "Shadowhawk," for
instance, the Chicago hacker whom William Cook had recently put in
jail, had several times boasted on boards that he could "shut down
AT&T's public switched network."

And now this event, or something that looked just like it, had actually
taken place. The Crash had lit a fire under the Chicago Task Force.
And the former fence-sitters at Bellcore and AT&T were now ready to
roll. The consensus among telco security--already horrified by the
skill of the BellSouth intruders --was that the digital underground was
out of hand. LoD and Phrack must go. And in publishing Prophet's E911
Document, Phrack had provided law enforcement with what appeared to be
a powerful legal weapon.

Foley confronted Knight Lightning about the E911 Document.

Knight Lightning was cowed. He immediately began "cooperating fully"
in the usual tradition of the digital underground.

He gave Foley a complete run of Phrack, printed out in a set of
three-ring binders. He handed over his electronic mailing list of
Phrack subscribers. Knight Lightning was grilled for four hours by
Foley and his cohorts. Knight Lightning admitted that Prophet had
passed him the E911 Document, and he admitted that he had known it was
stolen booty from a hacker raid on a telephone company. Knight
Lightning signed a statement to this effect, and agreed, in writing, to
cooperate with investigators.

Next day--January 19, 1990, a Friday --the Secret Service returned with
a search warrant, and thoroughly searched Knight Lightning's upstairs
room in the fraternity house. They took all his floppy disks, though,
interestingly, they left Knight Lightning in possession of both his
computer and his modem. (The computer had no hard disk, and in Foley's
judgement was not a store of evidence.) But this was a very minor
bright spot among Knight Lightning's rapidly multiplying troubles. By
this time, Knight Lightning was in ple