rd for the "property" of these 1,500
people. Whatever "property" the users had been storing on AT&T's
computer simply vanished completely.

Boykin, who had himself reported the E911 problem, now found himself
under a cloud of suspicion. In a weird private-security replay of the
Secret Service seizures, Boykin's own home was visited by AT&T Security
and his own machines were carried out the door.

However, there were marked special features in the Boykin case.
Boykin's disks and his personal computers were swiftly examined by his
corporate employers and returned politely in just two days--(unlike
Secret Service seizures, which commonly take months or years). Boykin
was not charged with any crime or wrongdoing, and he kept his job with
AT&T (though he did retire from AT&T in September 1991, at the age of
52).

It's interesting to note that the US Secret Service somehow failed to
seize Boykin's "Killer" node and carry AT&T's own computer out the
door. Nor did they raid Boykin's home. They seemed perfectly willing
to take the word of AT&T Security that AT&T's employee, and AT&T's
"Killer" node, were free of hacker contraband and on the up-and-up.

It's digital water-under-the-bridge at this point, as Killer's 3,200
megabytes of Texan electronic community were erased in 1990, and
"Killer" itself was shipped out of the state.

But the experiences of Andrews and Boykin, and the users of their
systems, remained side issues. They did not begin to assume the
social, political, and legal importance that gathered, slowly but
inexorably, around the issue of the raid on Steve Jackson Games.

#

We must now turn our attention to Steve Jackson Games itself, and
explain what SJG was, what it really did, and how it had managed to
attract this particularly odd and virulent kind of trouble. The reader
may recall that this is not the first but the second time that the
company has appeared in this narrative; a Steve Jackson game called
GURPS was a favorite pastime of Atlanta hacker Urvile, and Urvile's
science-fictional gaming notes had been mixed up promiscuously with
notes about his actual computer intrusions.

First, Steve Jackson Games, Inc., was NOT a publisher of "computer
games." SJG published "simulation games," parlor games that were played
on paper, with pencils, and dice, and printed guidebooks full of rules
and statistics tables. There were no computers involved in the games
themselves. When you bought a Steve