h magazine. The strange details of the raid left me more
concerned than ever. Without its computers, the company had been
financially and operationally crippled. Half the SJG workforce, a
group of entirely innocent people, had been sorrowfully fired, deprived
of their livelihoods by the seizure. It began to dawn on me that
authors--American writers--might well have their computers seized,
under sealed warrants, without any criminal charge; and that, as Steve
Jackson had discovered, there was no immediate recourse for this. This
was no joke; this wasn't science fiction; this was real.

I determined to put science fiction aside until I had discovered what
had happened and where this trouble had come from. It was time to
enter the purportedly real world of electronic free expression and
computer crime. Hence, this book. Hence, the world of the telcos; and
the world of the digital underground; and next, the world of the police.

PART THREE: LAW AND ORDER

Of the various anti-hacker activities of 1990, "Operation Sundevil" had
by far the highest public profile. The sweeping, nationwide computer
seizures of May 8, 1990 were unprecedented in scope and highly, if
rather selectively, publicized.

Unlike the efforts of the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force,
"Operation Sundevil" was not intended to combat "hacking" in the sense
of computer intrusion or sophisticated raids on telco switching
stations. Nor did it have anything to do with hacker misdeeds with
AT&T's software, or with Southern Bell's proprietary documents.

Instead, "Operation Sundevil" was a crackdown on those traditional
scourges of the digital underground: credit-card theft and telephone
code abuse. The ambitious activities out of Chicago, and the somewhat
lesser-known but vigorous anti-hacker actions of the New York State
Police in 1990, were never a part of "Operation Sundevil" per se, which
was based in Arizona.

Nevertheless, after the spectacular May 8 raids, the public, misled by
police secrecy, hacker panic, and a puzzled national press-corps,
conflated all aspects of the nationwide crackdown in 1990 under the
blanket term "Operation Sundevil." "Sundevil" is still the best-known
synonym for the crackdown of 1990. But the Arizona organizers of
"Sundevil" did not really deserve this reputation--any more, for
instance, than all hackers deserve a reputation as "hackers."

There was some justice in this confused perception