However smart, and despite his background as a computer science professor-consultant, he was hardly a genius. “Master criminal?” asked H. Michael Snell, a publisher who’d dealt with him.[[53]] “I could sooner imagine a smoking gun in the hands of Winnie the Pooh. In fact, Stan resembled Pooh Bear: short, stocky, paunchy from too much good food and wine, a deeply receding hairline above an intelligent, sloping forehead. Quiet, unassuming, not the kind of guy who’d stand out at a cocktail party.” Rifkin was good at puzzles, at problem solving, but as Snell and others agree, that’s true of all talented programmers. You could say the same, too, of first-rate accountants and engineers. Rifkin’s case made me think of Hannah Arendt’s phrase about Adolph Eichmann, applied not to the Nazis but to garden-variety crooks within the computer field: “the banality of evil.”
Rifkin’s take happened to be larger than most. But his mind-set was the same.
Snell said, “He shared the dreams of many academics who feel blocked from great success and wealth, and he loved ‘get-rich-quick’ stories, such as a friend who struck gold in California real estate or the Silicon Valley’s overnight millionaires.”
Greed, however, isn’t the only motive. “People who like computers are games people,” John Lewis, the FBI agent, told me, “and they like challenges. It’s ‘me against the machine.’ You give them a computer and say you can do anything but that, and that’s the first thing they’re going to do. You go back to the Book of Genesis in the Bible where God said, ‘You can do anything in the Garden of Eden but eat from that tree,’ and what’s the first thing people did?” We were in a windowless, fluorescent-lit room at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, where Lewis lectured on computer crime. He looked at a fellow instructor, a tall, alert man who started out in the bureau not as an agent but as a programmer. “I’ve seen Ken get ahold of material. Like this one program that said it couldn’t be copied. Now he didn’t care what the program did. The first thing he did was copy it. Because they said he couldn’t do it. And he did it.”
I thought of John and Ken three weeks later when I picked up a copy of Technology Illustrated magazine.
A stranger in Quantico, Virginia, it seemed, was dialing up the electronic bulletin boards on which computer pranksters sometimes left messages. The bulletin boards were a form of electronic mail. Callers could write out their thoughts for friends or anyone checking up on the highest-numbered entries. The mysterious computer dialer from Quantico, however, would just read, never send. Aware of the FBI Academy’s location, one of the pranksters posted a friendly suggestion on a board.
He invited the Quantico caller to subscribe to the TAP newsletter—said to be “to phone phreaks what the Wall Street Journal is to stockbrokers.”
TAP stands for a group named the Technology Assistance Program, a successor to Youth International Party Line (YIPL), whose own radical pedigree goes back to Abbie Hoffman’s Yippies. “Al Bell” and Hoffman started YIPL. It was a high-tech display of Hoffman’s Steal This Book philosophy, there being, however, a serious problem, one shared by society at large. The technocrats usurped the politicians.
They were, reportedly, “more interested in blue boxing Ma Bell than in pushing politics.” Cheshire Catalyst, who was editing the TAP newsletter when I talked to him, said, “You don’t have to be a phone phreak to read us—but it helps.”[helps.”]
Lindsay L. Baird, Jr., a tough, no-nonsense consultant with famous corporate clients, told me TAP was a serious threat. “They’re now using micro systems to test the 800 numbers methodically to see which ones have computers on them,” he said of some TAP people. The corporate computers whine their strange mating call no matter who dials up, saying electronically, “I am here, I am a computer, I am ready.” You might say they’re like an unlocked, unattended BMW left with the motor running in New York City. And Baird claimed, rightly or not, that TAP has some political zealots mixed in with the technocrats and that they could indulge in large-scale computer zapping over the next few years.