ograms for "scanning" telephone
codes and raiding credit card companies, as well as the usual obnoxious
galaxy of pirated software, cracked passwords, blue-box schematics,
intrusion manuals, anarchy files, porn files, and so forth.

But besides their nuisance potential for the spread of illicit
knowledge, bulletin boards have another vitally interesting aspect for
the professional investigator. Bulletin boards are cram-full of
EVIDENCE. All that busy trading of electronic mail, all those hacker
boasts, brags and struts, even the stolen codes and cards, can be neat,
electronic, real-time recordings of criminal activity. As an
investigator, when you seize a pirate board, you have scored a coup as
effective as tapping phones or intercepting mail. However, you have
not actually tapped a phone or intercepted a letter. The rules of
evidence regarding phone-taps and mail interceptions are old, stern and
well-understood by police, prosecutors and defense attorneys alike.
The rules of evidence regarding boards are new, waffling, and
understood by nobody at all.

Sundevil was the largest crackdown on boards in world history. On May
7, 8, and 9, 1990, about forty-two computer systems were seized. Of
those forty-two computers, about twenty-five actually were running
boards. (The vagueness of this estimate is attributable to the
vagueness of (a) what a "computer system" is, and (b) what it actually
means to "run a board" with one--or with two computers, or with three.)

About twenty-five boards vanished into police custody in May 1990. As
we have seen, there are an estimated 30,000 boards in America today.
If we assume that one board in a hundred is up to no good with codes
and cards (which rather flatters the honesty of the board-using
community), then that would leave 2,975 outlaw boards untouched by
Sundevil. Sundevil seized about one tenth of one percent of all
computer bulletin boards in America. Seen objectively, this is
something less than a comprehensive assault. In 1990, Sundevil's
organizers--the team at the Phoenix Secret Service office, and the
Arizona Attorney General's office--had a list of at least THREE HUNDRED
boards that they considered fully deserving of search and seizure
warrants. The twenty-five boards actually seized were merely among the
most obvious and egregious of this much larger list of candidates. All
these boards had been examined beforehand--either by informants, who
had passed printo