book back. But there
was trouble. GURPS Cyberpunk, alleged a Secret Service agent to
astonished businessman Steve Jackson, was "a manual for computer crime."

"It's science fiction," Jackson said.

"No, this is real."

This statement was repeated several times, by several agents.
Jackson's ominously accurate game had passed from pure, obscure,
small-scale fantasy into the impure, highly publicized, large-scale
fantasy of the Hacker Crackdown.

No mention was made of the real reason for the search. According to
their search warrant, the raiders had expected to find the E911
Document stored on Jackson's bulletin board system. But that warrant
was sealed; a procedure that most law enforcement agencies will use
only when lives are demonstrably in danger. The raiders' true motives
were not discovered until the Jackson search-warrant was unsealed by
his lawyers, many months later. The Secret Service, and the Chicago
Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force, said absolutely nothing to Steve
Jackson about any threat to the police 911 System. They said nothing
about the Atlanta Three, nothing about Phrack or Knight Lightning,
nothing about Terminus.

Jackson was left to believe that his computers had been seized because
he intended to publish a science fiction book that law enforcement
considered too dangerous to see print.

This misconception was repeated again and again, for months, to an
ever-widening public audience. It was not the truth of the case; but
as months passed, and this misconception was publicly printed again and
again, it became one of the few publicly known "facts" about the
mysterious Hacker Crackdown. The Secret Service had seized a computer
to stop the publication of a cyberpunk science fiction book.

The second section of this book, "The Digital Underground," is almost
finished now. We have become acquainted with all the major figures of
this case who actually belong to the underground milieu of computer
intrusion. We have some idea of their history, their motives, their
general modus operandi. We now know, I hope, who they are, where they
came from, and more or less what they want. In the next section of
this book, "Law and Order," we will leave this milieu and directly
enter the world of America's computer-crime police.

At this point, however, I have another figure to introduce: myself.

My name is Bruce Sterling. I live in Austin, Texas, where I am a
science fiction writer by trade: