uts to the Secret Service, or by Secret Service agents
themselves, who not only come equipped with modems but know how to use
them.

There were a number of motives for Sundevil. First, it offered a
chance to get ahead of the curve on wire-fraud crimes. Tracking back
credit-card ripoffs to their perpetrators can be appallingly difficult.
If these miscreants have any kind of electronic sophistication, they
can snarl their tracks through the phone network into a mind-boggling,
untraceable mess, while still managing to "reach out and rob someone."
Boards, however, full of brags and boasts, codes and cards, offer
evidence in the handy congealed form.

Seizures themselves--the mere physical removal of machines--tends to
take the pressure off. During Sundevil, a large number of code kids,
warez d00dz, and credit card thieves would be deprived of those
boards--their means of community and conspiracy--in one swift blow.
As for the sysops themselves (commonly among the boldest offenders)
they would be directly stripped of their computer equipment, and
rendered digitally mute and blind.

And this aspect of Sundevil was carried out with great success.
Sundevil seems to have been a complete tactical surprise--unlike the
fragmentary and continuing seizures of the war on the Legion of Doom,
Sundevil was precisely timed and utterly overwhelming. At least forty
"computers" were seized during May 7, 8 and 9, 1990, in Cincinnati,
Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Phoenix, Tucson, Richmond, San
Diego, San Jose, Pittsburgh and San Francisco. Some cities saw
multiple raids, such as the five separate raids in the New York City
environs. Plano, Texas (essentially a suburb of the Dallas/Fort Worth
metroplex, and a hub of the telecommunications industry) saw four
computer seizures. Chicago, ever in the forefront, saw its own local
Sundevil raid, briskly carried out by Secret Service agents Timothy
Foley and Barbara Golden.

Many of these raids occurred, not in the cities proper, but in
associated white-middle class suburbs--places like Mount Lebanon,
Pennsylvania and Clark Lake, Michigan. There were a few raids on
offices; most took place in people's homes, the classic hacker
basements and bedrooms.

The Sundevil raids were searches and seizures, not a group of mass
arrests. There were only four arrests during Sundevil. "Tony the
Trashman," a longtime teenage bete noire of the Arizona Racketeering
unit, was arrested in Tucso