Now our lecturer distributed copied diagrams of a typical LAN or "Local Area Network", which happened to be out of Connecticut. ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY-NINE desktop computers, each with its own peripherals. Three "file servers." Five "star couplers" each with thirty-two ports. One sixteen-port coupler off in the corner office. All these machines talking to each other, distributing electronic mail, distributing software, distributing, quite possibly, criminal evidence. All linked by high-capacity fiber-optic cable. A bad guy—cops talk a about "bad guys" —might be lurking on PC #47 lot or #123 and distributing his ill doings onto some dupe's "personal" machine in another office—or another floor—or, quite possibly, two or three miles away! Or, conceivably, the evidence might be "data-striped"—split up into meaningless slivers stored, one by one, on a whole crowd of different disk drives.
The lecturer challenged us for solutions. I for one was utterly clueless. As far as I could figure, the Cossacks were at the gate; there were probably more disks in this single building than were seized during the entirety of Operation Sundevil.
"Inside informant," somebody said. Right. There's always the human angle, something easy to forget when contemplating the arcane recesses of high technology. Cops are skilled at getting people to talk, and computer people, given a chair and some sustained attention, will talk about their computers till their throats go raw. There's a case on record of a single question—"How'd you do it?"—eliciting a forty-five-minute videotaped confession from a computer criminal who not only completely incriminated himself but drew helpful diagrams.
Computer people talk. Hackers BRAG. Phone-phreaks talk PATHOLOGICALLY—why else are they stealing phone-codes, if not to natter for ten hours straight to their friends on an opposite seaboard? Computer-literate people do in fact possess an arsenal of nifty gadgets and techniques that would allow them to conceal all kinds of exotic skullduggery, and if they could only SHUT UP about it, they could probably get away with all manner of amazing information-crimes. But that's just not how it works—or at least, that's not how it's worked SO FAR.
Most every phone-phreak ever busted has swiftly implicated his mentors, his disciples, and his friends. Most every white-collar computer-criminal, smugly convinced that his clever scheme is bulletproof, swiftly learns otherwise when, for the first time in his life, an actual no-kidding policeman leans over, grabs the front of his shirt, looks him right in the eye and says: "All right, ASSHOLE—you and me are going downtown!" All the hardware in the world will not insulate your nerves from these actual real-life sensations of terror and guilt.
Cops know ways to get from point A to point Z without thumbing through every letter in some smart-ass bad-guy's alphabet. Cops know how to cut to the chase. Cops know a lot of things other people don't know.
Hackers know a lot of things other people don't know, too. Hackers know, for instance, how to sneak into your computer through the phone-lines. But cops can show up RIGHT ON YOUR DOORSTEP and carry off YOU and your computer in separate steel boxes. A cop interested in hackers can grab them and grill them. A hacker interested in cops has to depend on hearsay, underground legends, and what cops are willing to publicly reveal. And the Secret Service didn't get named "the SECRET Service" because they blab a lot.
Some people, our lecturer informed us, were under the mistaken impression that it was "impossible" to tap a fiber-optic line. Well, he announced, he and his son had just whipped up a fiber-optic tap in his workshop at home. He passed it around the audience, along with a circuit-covered LAN plug-in card so we'd all recognize one if we saw it on a case. We all had a look.
The tap was a classic "Goofy Prototype"—a thumb-length rounded metal cylinder with a pair of plastic brackets on it. From one end dangled three thin black cables, each of which ended in a tiny black plastic cap. When you plucked the safety-cap off the end of a cable, you could see the glass fiber—no thicker than a pinhole.
Our lecturer informed us that the metal cylinder was a "wavelength division multiplexer." Apparently, what one did was to cut the fiber-optic cable, insert two of the legs into the cut to complete the network again, and then read any passing data on the line by hooking up the third leg to some kind of monitor. Sounded simple enough. I wondered why nobody had thought of it before. I also wondered whether this guy's son back at the workshop had any teenage friends.