Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier - 1

** This is a COPYRIGHTED Project Gutenberg eBook, Details Below **

** Please follow the copyright guidelines in this file. **

I have donated my book `Underground' to Project Gutenberg's collection in memory of my great aunt, Lucie Palmer. Lucie was an explorer, a naturalist, a keen undersea diver and above all a gifted painter. In the last years of her life, she lost her vision due to macular degeneration. She could no longer do her beloved undersea paintings. But, while she could not travel in person, she continued to travel in her mind through books for the vision impaired. I hope you enjoy your journey to another world as much as she did. — From Suelette Dreyfus, Author, Underground

Underground —
Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier.

By Suelette Dreyfus with Research by Julian Assange.

`Gripping, eminently readable.. Dreyfus has uncovered one of this country's best kept secrets and in doing so has created a highly intense and enjoyable read' — Rolling Stone

www.underground-book.net

This edition has been specifically adapted for speech synthesis. We recommend using a different distribution with intact type-setting for visual use.

First Published 1997 by Mandarin; a part of Reed Books Australia; 35
Cotham Road, Kew 3101.

a subsidiary of Random House books Australia.

a division of Random House International Pty Limited.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher.

Typeset in New Baskerville by J&M Typesetting.

Printed and bound in Australia by Australian Print Group.

National Library of Australia.

cataloguing-in-publication data:

Dreyfus, Suelette.

Underground: tales of hacking, madness & obsession on the electronic frontier.

Bibliography:

ISBN number 1 86330 595 5

1. Computer hackers—Australia—Biography. 2. Computer crimes—Australia. 3. Computer security—Australia. I. Assange, Julian. II. Title.

364.1680922

Send all comments to "feedback@underground-book.net".

Preface to the electronic edition.

Why would an author give away an unlimited number of copies of her book for free? That's a good question. When `Underground''s researcher, Julian Assange, first suggested releasing an electronic version of the book on the Net for free, I had to stop and think about just that question.

I'd spent nearly three years researching, writing and editing the nearly 500 pages of `Underground'. Julian had worked thousands of hours doing painstaking research; discovering and cultivating sources, digging with great resourcefulness into obscure databases and legal papers, not to mention providing valuable editorial advice.

So why would I give away this carefully ripened fruit for free?

Because part of the joy of creating a piece of art is in knowing that many people can - and are - enjoying it. Particularly people who can't otherwise afford to pay $11 USD for a book. People such as cash strapped hackers. This book is about them, their lives and obsessions. It rubs clear a small circle in the frosted glass so the reader can peer into that hazy world. `Underground' belongs on the Net, in their ephemeral landscape.

The critics have been good to `Underground', for which I am very grateful. But the best praise came from two of the hackers detailed in the book. Surprising praise, because while the text is free of the narrative moralising that plague other works, the selection of material is often very personal and evokes mixed sympathies. One of the hackers, Anthrax dropped by my office to say `Hi'. Out of the blue, he said with a note of amazement, `When I read those chapters, it was so real, as if you had been right there inside my head'. Not long after Par, half a world away, and with a real tone of bewildered incredulity in his voice made exactly the same observation. For a writer, it just doesn't get any better than that.

By releasing this book for free on the Net, I'm hoping more people will not only enjoy the story of how the international computer underground rose to power, but also make the journey into the minds of hackers involved. When I first began sketching out the book's structure, I decided to go with depth. I wanted the reader to think, 'NOW I understand, because I too was there.' I hope those words will enter your thoughts as you read this electronic book.

Michael Hall, a supersmart lawyer on the book's legal team, told me in July last year he saw a young man in Sydney reading a copy of `Underground' beside him on the #380 bus to North Bondi. Michael said he wanted to lean over and proclaim proudly, `I legalled that book!'. Instead, he chose to watch the young man's reactions.

The young man was completely absorbed, reading hungrily through his well-worn copy, which he had completely personalised. The pages were covered in highlighter, scrawled margin writing and post-it notes. He had underlined sections and dog-eared pages. If the bus had detoured to Brisbane, he probably wouldn't have noticed.

I like that. Call me subversive, but I'm chuffed `Underground' is engaging enough to make people miss bus stops. It makes me happy, and happy people usually want to share.

There are other reasons for releasing `Underground' in this format. The electronic version is being donated to the visionary Project Gutenburg, a collection of free electronic books run with missionary zeal by Michael Hart.

Project Gutenburg promises to keep old out-of-print books in free ``electronic'' print forever, to bring literature to those who can't afford books, and to brighten the world of the visually impaired. `Underground' isn't out of print — and long may it remain that way — but those are laudable goals. I wrote in the `Introduction' to the printed edition about my great aunt, a diver and artist who pioneered underwater painting in the 1940s. She provided me with a kind of inspiration for this book. What I didn't mention is that as a result of macular degeneration in both eyes, she is now blind. She can no longer paint or dive. But she does read - avidly - through `talking books'. She is another reason I decided to release `Underground' in this format.

So, now you can download and read the electronic version of `Underground' for free. You can also send the work to your friends for free. Or your enemies. At over a megabyte of plain text each, a few dozen copies of underground make an extremely effective mail bomb.

That's a joke, folks, not a suggestion. ;-)

Like many of the people in this book, I'm not big on rules. Fortunately, there aren't many that come with this electronic version. Don't print the work on paper, CD or any other format, except for your own personal reading pleasure. This includes using the work as teaching material in institutions. You must not alter or truncate the work in any way. You must not redistribute the work for any sort of payment, including selling it on its own or as part of a package. Random House is a friendly place, but as one of the world's largest publishers it has a collection of equally large lawyers. Messing with them will leave you with scars in places that could be hard to explain to any future partner.

If you want to do any of these things, please contact me or my literary agents Curtis Brown & Co first. I retain the copyright on the work. Julian Assange designed the elegant layout of this electronic edition, and he retains ownership of this design and layout.

If you like the electronic version of the book, do buy the paper version. Why? For starters, it's not only much easier to read on the bus, its much easier to read full stop. It's also easier to thumb through, highlight, scribble on, dribble on, and show off. It never needs batteries. It can run on solar power and candles. It looks sexy on your bookshelf, by your bed and in your bed. If you are a male geek, the book comes with a girl-magnet guarantee. The paper version is much easier to lend to a prospective girlfriend. When she's finished reading the book, ask her which hacker thrilled her to pieces. Then nod knowingly, and say coyly `Well, I've never admitted this to anyone except the author and the Feds, but ..'

And the most important reason to purchase a paper copy? Because buying the printed edition of the book lets the author continue to write more fine books like this one.

Enjoy!

Suelette Dreyfus

January 2001

suelette@iq.org
Researcher's introduction.

"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth" — Oscar Wilde

"What is essential is invisible to the eye" — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

"But, how do you *know* it happened like that?" — Reader

Due of the seamless nature of `Underground' this is a reasonable question to ask, although hints can be found at the back of the book in the Bibliography and Endnotes. The simple answer to this question is that we conducted over a hundred interviews and collected around 40,000 pages of primary documentation; telephone intercepts, data intercepts, log-files, witness statements, confessions, judgements. Telephone dialog and on-line discussions are drawn directly from the latter. Every significant hacking incident mentioned in this book has reams of primary documentation behind it. System X included.

The non-simple answer goes more like this:

In chapter 4, Par, one of the principle subjects of this book, is being watched by the Secret Service. He's on the run. He's a wanted fugitive. He's hiding out with another hacker, Nibbler in a motel chalet, Black Mountain, North Carolina. The Secret Service move in. The incident is vital in explaining Par's life on the run and the nature of his interaction with the Secret Service. Yet, just before the final edits of this book were to go the publisher, all the pages relating to the Block Mountain incident were about to be pulled. Why?

Suelette had flown to Tuscon Az where she spent three days interviewing Par. I had spent dozens of hours interviewing Par on the phone and on-line. Par gave both of us extraordinary access to his life. While Par displayed a high degree of paranoia about why events had unfolded in the manner they had, he was consistent, detailed and believable as to the events themselves. He showed very little blurring of these two realities, but we needed to show none at all.

During Par's time on the run, the international computer underground was a small and strongly connected place. We had already co-incidentally interviewed half a dozen hackers he had communicated with at various times during his zig-zag flight across America. Suelette also spoke at length to his lead lawyer Richard Rosen, who, after getting the all-clear from Par, was kind enough to send us a copy of the legal brief. We had logs of messages Par had written on underground BBS's. We had data intercepts of other hackers in conversation with Par. We had obtained various Secret Service documents and propriety security reports relating to Par's activities. I had extensively interviewed his Swiss girlfriend Theorem (who had also been involved with Electron and Pengo), and yes, she did have a melting French accent.

Altogether we had an enormous amount of material on Par's activities, all of which was consistent with what Par had said during his interviews, but none of it, including Rosen's file, contained any reference to Black Mountain, NC. Rosen, Theorem and others had heard about a SS raid on the run, yet when the story was traced back, it always led to one source. To Par.

Was Par having us on? Par had said that he had made a telephone call to Theorem in Switzerland from a phone booth outside the motel a day or two before the Secret Service raid. During a storm. Not just any storm. Hurricane Hugo. But archival news reports on Hugo discussed it hitting South Carolina, not North Carolina. And not Black Mountain. Theorem remembered Par calling once during a storm. But not Hugo. And she didn't remember it in relation to the Black Mountain raid.

Par had destroyed most of his legal documents, in circumstances that become clear in the book, but of the hundreds of pages of documentary material we had obtained from other sources there was wasn't a single mention of Black Mountain. The Black Mountain Motel didn't seem to exist. Par said Nibbler had moved and couldn't be located. Dozens of calls by Suelette to the Secret Service told us what we didn't want to hear. The agents we thought most likely to have been involved in the the hypothetical Black Mountain incident had either left the Secret Service or were otherwise unreachable. The Secret Service had no idea who would have been involved, because while Par was still listed in the Secret Service central database, his profile, contained three significant annotations:

1. Another agency had ``borrowed'' parts Par's file. 2. There were medical ``issues'' surrounding Par. 3. SS documents covering the time of Black Mountain incident had been destroyed for various reasons that become clear the book. 4. The remaining SS documents had been moved into ``deep-storage'' and would take two weeks to retrieve.

With only one week before our publisher's ``use it or lose it'' dead-line, the chances of obtaining secondary confirmation of the Black Mountain events did not look promising.

While we waited for leads on the long trail of ex, transfered and seconded SS agents who might have been involved in the Black Mountain raid, I turned to resolving the two inconsistencies in Par's story; Hurricane Hugo and the strange invisibility of the Black Mountain Motel.

Hurricane Hugo had wreathed a path of destruction, but like most most hurricanes heading directly into a continental land-mass it had started out big and ended up small. News reports followed this pattern, with a large amount of material on its initial impact, but little or nothing about subsequent events. Finally I obtained detailed time by velocity weather maps from the National Reconnaissance Office, which showed the remaining Hugo epicentre ripping through Charlotte NC (pop. 400k) before spending itself on the Carolinas. Database searches turned up a report by Natalie, D. & Ball, W, EIS Coordinator, North Carolina Emergency Management, `How North Carolina Managed Hurricane Hugo' — which was used to flesh out the scenes in Chapter 4 describing Par's escape to New York via the Charlotte Airport.

Old Fashioned gum-shoe leg-work, calling every motel in Black Mountain and the surrounding area, revealed that the Black Mountain Motel had changed name, ownership and.. all its staff. Par's story was holding, but in someways I wished it hadn't. We were back to square one in terms of gaining independent secondary confirmation.

Who else could have been involved? There must have been a paper-trail outside of Washington. Perhaps the SS representation in Charlotte had something? No. Perhaps there were records of the warrants in the Charlotte courts? No. Perhaps NC state police attended the SS raid in support? Maybe, but finding walm bodies who had been directly involved proved proved futile. If it was a SS case, they had no indexable records that they were willing to provide. What about the local coppers? An SS raid on a fugitive computer hacker holed up at one of the local motels was not the sort of event that would be likely to have passed unnoticed at the Black Mountain county police office, indexable records or not.

Neither however, were international telephone calls from strangely accented foreign-nationals wanting to know about them. Perhaps the Reds were no-longer under the beds, but in Black Mountain, this could be explained away by the fact they were now hanging out in phone booths. I waited for a new shift at the Black Mountain county police office, hoping against hope, that the officer I had spoken to wouldn't contaminate his replacement. Shamed, I resorted to using that most special of US militia infiltration devices. An American accent and a woman's touch. Suelette weaved her magic. The Black Mountain raid had taken place. The county police had supported it. We had our confirmation.

While this anecdote is a strong account, it's also representative one. Every chapter in underground has many tales just like it. They're unseen, because a book must not just be true in details, but true in feeling.

True to the visible and the invisible. A difficult combination.

Julian Assange

January 2001

proff@iq.org Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use.

This HTML and text electronic version was arranged by Julian Assange <proff@iq.org> and is based on the printed paper edition.

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this publication provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies and distribution is without fee.

Contents.

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction xi

1 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 1

2 The Corner Pub 45

3 The American Connection 84

4 The Fugitive 120

5 The Holy Grail 159

6 Page One, the New York Times 212

7 Judgment Day 244

8 The International Subversives 285

9 Operation Weather 323

10 Anthrax—the Outsider 364

11 The Prisoner's Dilemma 400

Afterword 427 Glossary and Abbreviations 455 Notes 460

Bibliography

[ Page numbers above correspond to the Random House printed edition ]
Acknowledgements.

There are many people who were interviewed for this work, and many others who helped in providing documents so vital for fact checking. Often this help invovled spending a considerable amount of time explaining complex technical or legal matters. I want to express my gratitude to all these people, some of whom prefer to remain anonymous, for their willingness to dig through the files in search of yet one more report and their patience in answering yet one more question.

I want to thank the members of the computer underground, past and present, who were interviewed for this book. Most gave me extraordinary access to their lives, for which I am very grateful.

I also want to thank Julian Assange for his tireless research efforts. His superb technical expertise and first-rate research is evidence by the immense number of details which are included in this book.

Three exceptional women — Fiona Inglis, Deb Callaghan and Jennifer Byrne — believed in my vision for this book and helped me to bring it to fruition. Carl Harrison-Ford's excellent editing job streamlined a large and difficult manuscript despite the tight deadline. Thank you also to Judy Brookes.

I am also very grateful to the following people and organisations for
their help (in no particular order): John McMahon, Ron Tencati, Kevin
Oberman, Ray Kaplan, the New York Daily News library staff, the New
York Post library staff, Bow Street Magistrates Court staff, Southwark
Court staff, the US Secret Service, the Black Mountain Police, Michael
Rosenberg, Michael Rosen, Melbourne Magistrates Court staff, D.L
Sellers & Co. staff, Victorian County Court staff, Paul Galbally, Mark
Dorset, Suburbia.net, Freeside Communications, Greg Hooper, H&S
Support Services, Peter Andrews, Kevin Thompson, Andrew Weaver,
Mukhtar Hussain, Midnight Oil, Helen Meredith, Ivan Himmelhoch,
Michael Hall, Donn Ferris, Victorian State Library staff, News Limited
library staff (Sydney), Allan Young, Ed DeHart, Annette Seeber, Arthur
Arkin, Doug Barnes, Jeremy Porter, James McNabb, Carolyn Ford, ATA,
Domini Banfield, Alistair Kelman, Ann-Maree Moodie, Jane Hutchinson,
Catherine Murphy, Norma Hawkins, N. Llewelyn, Christine Assange,
Russel Brand, Matthew Bishop, Matthew Cox, Michele Ziehlky, Andrew
James, Brendan McGrath, Warner Chappell Music Australia, News Limited,
Pearson Williams Solicitors, Tami Friedman, the Free Software
Foundation (GNU Project), and the US Department of Energy Computer
Incident Advisory Capability.

Finally, I would like to thank my family, whose unfailing support, advice and encouragement have made this book possible.

Introduction.

My great aunt used to paint underwater.

Piling on the weighty diving gear used in 1939 and looking like something out of 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, Lucie slowly sank below the surface, with palette, special paints and canvas in hand. She settled on the ocean floor, arranged her weighted painter's easel and allowed herself to become completely enveloped by another world. Red and white striped fish darted around fields of blue-green coral and blue-lipped giant clams. Lionfish drifted by, gracefully waving their dangerous feathered spines. Striped green moray eels peered at her from their rock crevice homes.

Lucie dived and painted everywhere. The Sulu Archipelago. Mexico. Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Hawaii. Borneo. Sometimes she was the first white woman seen by the Pacific villagers she lived with for months on end.

As a child, I was entranced by her stories of the unknown world below the ocean's surface, and the strange and wonderful cultures she met on her journeys. I grew up in awe of her chosen task: to capture on canvas the essence of a world utterly foreign to her own.

New technology—revolutionary for its time—had allowed her to do this. Using a compressor, or sometimes just a hand pump connected to air hoses running to the surface, human beings were suddenly able to submerge themselves for long periods in an otherwise inaccessible world. New technology allowed her to both venture into this unexplored realm, and to document it in canvas.

I came upon the brave new world of computer communications and its darker side, the underground, quite by accident. It struck me somewhere in the journey that followed that my trepidations and conflicting desires to explore this alien world were perhaps not unlike my aunt's own desires some half a century before. Like her journey, my own travels have only been made possible by new technologies. And like her, I have tried to capture a small corner of this world.

This is a book about the computer underground. It is not a book about law enforcement agencies, and it is not written from the point of view of the police officer. From a literary perspective, I have told this story through the eyes of numerous computer hackers. In doing so, I hope to provide the reader with a window into a mysterious, shrouded and usually inaccessible realm.

Who are hackers? Why do they hack? There are no simple answers to these questions. Each hacker is different. To that end, I have attempted to present a collection of individual but interconnected stories, bound by their links to the international computer underground. These are true stories, tales of the world's best and the brightest hackers and phreakers. There are some members of the underground whose stories I have not covered, a few of whom would also rank as world-class. In the end, I chose to paint detailed portraits of a few hackers rather than attempt to compile a comprehensive but shallow catalogue.

While each hacker has a distinct story, there are common themes which appear throughout many of the stories. Rebellion against all symbols of authority. Dysfunctional families. Bright children suffocated by ill-equipped teachers. Mental illness or instability. Obsession and addiction.

I have endeavoured to track what happened to each character in this work over time: the individual's hacking adventures, the police raid and the ensuing court case. Some of those court cases have taken years to reach completion.

Hackers use `handles'—on-line nicknames—that serve two purposes.
They shield the hacker's identity and, importantly, they often make a
statement about how the hacker perceives himself in the underground.
Hawk, Crawler, Toucan Jones, Comhack, Dataking, Spy, Ripmax, Fractal
Insanity, Blade. These are all real handles used in Australia.

In the computer underground, a hacker's handle is his name. For this reason, and because most hackers in this work have now put together new lives for themselves, I have chosen to use only their handles. Where a hacker has had more than one handle, I have used the one he prefers.

Each chapter in this book is headed with a quote from a Midnight Oil song which expresses an important aspect of the chapter. The Oilz are uniquely Australian. Their loud voice of protest against the establishment—particularly the military-industrial establishment—echoes a key theme in the underground, where music in general plays a vital role.

The idea for using these Oilz extracts came while researching Chapter 1, which reveals the tale of the WANK worm crisis in NASA. Next to the RTM worm, WANK is the most famous worm in the history of computer networks. And it is the first major worm bearing a political message. With WANK, life imitated art, since the term computer `worm' came from John Brunner's sci-fi novel, The Shockwave Rider, about a politically motivated worm.

The WANK worm is also believed to be the first worm written by an
Australian, or Australians.

This chapter shows the perspective of the computer system administrators—the people on the other side from the hackers. Lastly, it illustrates the sophistication which one or more Australian members of the worldwide computer underground brought to their computer crimes.

The following chapters set the scene for the dramas which unfold and show the transition of the underground from its early days, its loss of innocence, its closing ranks in ever smaller circles until it reached the inevitable outcome: the lone hacker. In the beginning, the computer underground was a place, like the corner pub, open and friendly. Now, it has become an ephemeral expanse, where hackers occasionally bump into one another but where the original sense of open community has been lost.

The computer underground has changed over time, largely in response to the introduction of new computer crime laws across the globe and to numerous police crackdowns. This work attempts to document not only an important piece of Australian history, but also to show fundamental shifts in the underground —to show, in essence, how the underground has moved further underground.

Suelette Dreyfus

March 1997