alk about breaking into systems, including some bold and
reckless stuff about a supposed "decryption service" that Mentor and
friends were planning to run, to help crack encrypted passwords off of
hacked systems.

Mentor was an adult. There was a bulletin board at his place of work,
as well. Kleupfel logged onto this board, too, and discovered it to be
called "Illuminati." It was run by some company called Steve Jackson
Games.

On March 1, 1990, the Austin crackdown went into high gear.

On the morning of March 1--a Thursday--21-year-old University of Texas
student "Erik Bloodaxe," co-sysop of Phoenix Project and an avowed
member of the Legion of Doom, was wakened by a police revolver levelled
at his head.

Bloodaxe watched, jittery, as Secret Service agents appropriated his
300 baud terminal and, rifling his files, discovered his treasured
source-code for Robert Morris's notorious Internet Worm. But Bloodaxe,
a wily operator, had suspected that something of the like might be
coming. All his best equipment had been hidden away elsewhere. The
raiders took everything electronic, however, including his telephone.
They were stymied by his hefty arcade-style Pac-Man game, and left it
in place, as it was simply too heavy to move.

Bloodaxe was not arrested. He was not charged with any crime. A good
two years later, the police still had what they had taken from him,
however.

The Mentor was less wary. The dawn raid rousted him and his wife from
bed in their underwear, and six Secret Service agents, accompanied by
an Austin policeman and Henry Kluepfel himself, made a rich haul. Off
went the works, into the agents' white Chevrolet minivan: an IBM PC-AT
clone with 4 meg of RAM and a 120-meg hard disk; a Hewlett-Packard
LaserJet II printer; a completely legitimate and highly expensive
SCO-Xenix 286 operating system; Pagemaker disks and documentation; and
the Microsoft Word word-processing program. Mentor's wife had her
incomplete academic thesis stored on the hard-disk; that went, too, and
so did the couple's telephone. As of two years later, all this
property remained in police custody.

Mentor remained under guard in his apartment as agents prepared to raid
Steve Jackson Games. The fact that this was a business headquarters
and not a private residence did not deter the agents. It was still
very early; no one was at work yet. The agents prepared to break down
the door, but Mentor, eavesdropping on the