ne) is easy and fun.
Exploiting their gullibility is very gratifying; it makes you feel very
superior to them.

If I'd been a malicious hacker on a trashing raid, I would now have
Evelyn very much in my power. Given all this inside data, it wouldn't
take much effort at all to invent a convincing lie. If I were ruthless
enough, and jaded enough, and clever enough, this momentary
indiscretion of hers--maybe committed in tears, who knows--could cause
her a whole world of confusion and grief.

I didn't even have to have a MALICIOUS motive. Maybe I'd be "on her
side," and call up Bob instead, and anonymously threaten to break both
his kneecaps if he didn't take Evelyn out for a steak dinner pronto.
It was still profoundly NONE OF MY BUSINESS. To have gotten this
knowledge at all was a sordid act and to use it would be to inflict a
sordid injury.

To do all these awful things would require exactly zero high-tech
expertise. All it would take was the willingness to do it and a
certain amount of bent imagination.

I went back downstairs. The hard-working FCIC, who had labored
forty-five minutes over their schedule, were through for the day, and
adjourned to the hotel bar. We all had a beer.

I had a chat with a guy about "Isis," or rather IACIS, the
International Association of Computer Investigation Specialists.
They're into "computer forensics," the techniques of picking
computer-systems apart without destroying vital evidence. IACIS,
currently run out of Oregon, is comprised of investigators in the U.S.,
Canada, Taiwan and Ireland. "Taiwan and Ireland?" I said. Are TAIWAN
and IRELAND really in the forefront of this stuff? Well not exactly,
my informant admitted. They just happen to have been the first ones to
have caught on by word of mouth. Still, the international angle
counts, because this is obviously an international problem.
Phone-lines go everywhere.

There was a Mountie here from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He
seemed to be having quite a good time. Nobody had flung this Canadian
out because he might pose a foreign security risk. These are
cyberspace cops. They still worry a lot about "jurisdictions," but
mere geography is the least of their troubles.

NASA had failed to show. NASA suffers a lot from computer intrusions,
in particular from Australian raiders and a well-trumpeted Chaos
Computer Club case, and in 1990 there was a brief press flurry when it
was revealed that one of NASA