nty of hot water, not only with
federal police, prosecutors, telco investigators, and university
security, but with the elders of his own campus fraternity, who were
outraged to think that they had been unwittingly harboring a federal
computer-criminal.

On Monday, Knight Lightning was summoned to Chicago, where he was
further grilled by Foley and USSS veteran agent Barbara Golden, this
time with an attorney present. And on Tuesday, he was formally
indicted by a federal grand jury.

The trial of Knight Lightning, which occurred on July 24-27, 1990, was
the crucial show-trial of the Hacker Crackdown. We will examine the
trial at some length in Part Four of this book.

In the meantime, we must continue our dogged pursuit of the E911
Document.

It must have been clear by January 1990 that the E911 Document, in the
form Phrack had published it back in February 1989, had gone off at the
speed of light in at least a hundred and fifty different directions.
To attempt to put this electronic genie back in the bottle was flatly
impossible.

And yet, the E911 Document was STILL stolen property, formally and
legally speaking. Any electronic transference of this document, by
anyone unauthorized to have it, could be interpreted as an act of wire
fraud. Interstate transfer of stolen property, including electronic
property, was a federal crime.

The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force had been assured that
the E911 Document was worth a hefty sum of money. In fact, they had a
precise estimate of its worth from BellSouth security personnel:
$79,449. A sum of this scale seemed to warrant vigorous prosecution.
Even if the damage could not be undone, at least this large sum offered
a good legal pretext for stern punishment of the thieves. It seemed
likely to impress judges and juries. And it could be used in court to
mop up the Legion of Doom.

The Atlanta crowd was already in the bag, by the time the Chicago Task
Force had gotten around to Phrack. But the Legion was a hydra-headed
thing. In late 89, a brand-new Legion of Doom board, "Phoenix
Project," had gone up in Austin, Texas. Phoenix Project was sysoped by
no less a man than the Mentor himself, ably assisted by University of
Texas student and hardened Doomster "Erik Bloodaxe."

As we have seen from his Phrack manifesto, the Mentor was a hacker
zealot who regarded computer intrusion as something close to a moral
duty. Phoenix Project was an ambitious effor