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almost prostrate by 1993. IBM's vision of the commercial computer-
network of the future, "Prodigy," had managed to spend $900 million
without a whole heck of a lot to show for it, while AT&T, by contrast,
was boldly speculating on the possibilities of personal communicators
and hedging its bets with investments in handwritten interfaces. In
1990 AT&T had looked bad; but in 1993 AT&T looked like the future.
At least, AT&T's *advertising* looked like the future. Similar public
attention was riveted on the massive $22 billion megamerger between
RBOC Bell Atlantic and cable-TV giant Tele-Communications Inc. Nynex
was buying into cable company Viacom International. BellSouth was
buying stock in Prime Management, Southwestern Bell acquiring a cable
company in Washington DC, and so forth. By stark contrast, the
Internet, a noncommercial entity which officially did not even exist, had
no advertising budget at all. And yet, almost below the level of govern-
mental and corporate awareness, the Internet was stealthily devouring
everything in its path, growing at a rate that defied comprehension.
Kids who might have been eager computer-intruders a mere five years
earlier were now surfing the Internet, where their natural urge to
explore led them into cyberspace landscapes of such mindboggling vast-
ness that the very idea of hacking passwords seemed rather a waste of
time.
By 1993, there had not been a solid, knock 'em down, panic-striking,
teenage-hacker computer-intrusion scandal in many long months.
There had, of course, been some striking and well-publicized acts of
illicit computer access, but they had been committed by adult white-
collar industry insiders in clear pursuit of personal or commercial
advantage. The kids, by contrast, all seemed to be on IRC, Internet Relay
Chat.
Or, perhaps, frolicking out in the endless glass-roots network of per-
sonal bulletin board systems. In 1993, there were an estimated
60,000 boards in America; the population of boards had fully doubled
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since Operation Sundevil in 1990. The hobby was transmuting fitfully
into a genuine industry. The board community were no longer obscure
hobbyists; many were still hobbyists and proud of it, but board sysops
and advanced board users had become a far more cohesive and politically
aware community, no longer allowing themselves to be obscure.
The specter of cyberspace in the late 1980s, of outwitted authorities
trembling in fear before teenage hacker whiz- kids, seemed downright
antiquated by 1993. Law enforcement emphasis had changed, and the
favorite electronic villain of 1993 was not the vandal child, but the
victimizer of children, the digital child pornographer. "Operation
Longarm," a child- pornography computer raid carried out by the pre-
viously little- known cyberspace rangers of the U.S. Customs Service,
was almost the size of Operation Sundevil, but received very little
notice by comparison.
The huge and well-organized "Operation Disconnect," an FBI strike
against telephone rip-off con-artists, was actually larger than
Sundevil. "Operation Disconnect" had its brief moment in the sun of
publicity, and then vanished utterly. It was unfortunate that a law-
enforcement affair as apparently well-conducted as Operation
Disconnect, which pursued telecom adult career criminals a hundred
times more morally repugnant than teenage hackers, should have
received so little attention and fanfare, especially compared to the
abortive Sundevil and the basically disastrous efforts of the Chicago
Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force. But the life of an electronic
policeman is seldom easy.
If any law enforcement event truly deserved full-scale press coverage
(while somehow managing to escape it), it was the amazing saga of New
York State Police Senior Investigator Don Delaney Versus the Orchard
Street Finger- Hackers. This story probably represents the real
future of professional telecommunications crime in America. The fin-
ger- hackers sold, and still sell, stolen long-distance phone service to a
captive clientele of illegal aliens in New York City. This clientele is des-
perate to call home, yet as a group, illegal aliens have few legal means of
obtaining standard phone service, since their very presence in the
United States is against the law. The finger-hackers of Orchard Street
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were very unusual "hackers," with an astonishing lack of any kind of
genuine technological knowledge. And yet these New York call-sell
thieves showed a street-level ingenuity appalling in its single- minded
sense of larceny.
There was no dissident-hacker rhetoric about freedom- of-information
among the finger-hackers. Most of them came out of the cocaine-dealing
fraternity, and they retailed stolen calls with the same street-crime
techniques of lookouts and bagholders that a crack gang would employ.
This was down- and-dirty, urban, ethnic, organized crime, carried out
by crime families every day, for cash on the barrelhead, in the harsh
world of the streets. The finger-hackers dominated certain payphones
in certain strikingly unsavory neighborhoods. They provided a service
no one else would give to a clientele with little to lose.
With such a vast supply of electronic crime at hand, Don Delaney rock-
eted from a background in homicide to teaching telecom crime at FLETC
in less than three years. Few can rival Delaney's hands-on, street-
level experience in phone fraud. Anyone in 1993 who still believes
telecommunications crime to be something rare and arcane should have a
few words with Mr Delaney. Don Delaney has also written two fine
essays, on telecom fraud and computer crime, in Joseph Grau's
*Criminal and Civil Investigations Handbook* (McGraw Hill 1993).
*Phrack* was still publishing in 1993, now under the able editorship
of Erik Bloodaxe. Bloodaxe made a determined attempt to get law
enforcement and corporate security to pay real money for their elec-
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