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by "Unknown User," "VaxCat's" article on telco basics (slyly entitled
"Lifting Ma Bell's Veil of Secrecy,)" and the usual "Phrack World
News."
The News section, with painful irony, featured an extended account of
the sentencing of "Shadowhawk," an eighteen-year-old Chicago hacker
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who had just been put in federal prison by William J. Cook himself.
And then there were the two articles by "The Eavesdropper." The first
was the edited E911 Document, now titled "Control Office
Administration Of Enhanced 911 Services for Special Services and
Major Account Centers." Eavesdropper's second article was a glossary
of terms explaining the blizzard of telco acronyms and buzzwords in the
E911 Document.
The hapless document was now distributed, in the usual *Phrack* rou-
tine, to a good one hundred and fifty sites. Not a hundred and fifty *peo-
ple,* mind you a hundred and fifty *sites,* some of these sites linked
to UNIX nodes or bulletin board systems, which themselves had reader-
ships of tens, dozens, even hundreds of people.
This was February 1989. Nothing happened immediately. Summer
came, and the Atlanta crew were raided by the Secret Service. Fry Guy
was apprehended. Still nothing whatever happened to *Phrack.* Six
more issues of *Phrack* came out, 30 in all, more or less on a monthly
schedule. Knight Lightning and co-editor Taran King went untouched.
*Phrack* tended to duck and cover whenever the heat came down.
During the summer busts of 1987 (hacker busts tended to cluster in
summer, perhaps because hackers were easier to find at home than in
college) *Phrack* had ceased publication for several months, and laid
low. Several LoD hangers-on had been arrested, but nothing had hap-
pened to the *Phrack* crew, the premiere gossips of the underground.
In 1988, *Phrack* had been taken over by a new editor, "Crimson
Death," a raucous youngster with a taste for anarchy files.
1989, however, looked like a bounty year for the underground. Knight
Lightning and his co-editor Taran King took up the reins again, and
*Phrack* flourished throughout 1989. Atlanta LoD went down hard in
the summer of 1989, but *Phrack* rolled merrily on. Prophet's
E911 Document seemed unlikely to cause *Phrack* any trouble. By
January 1990, it had been available in *Phrack* for almost a year.
Kluepfel and Dalton, officers of Bellcore and AT&T security, had pos-
sessed the document for sixteen months in fact, they'd had it even
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before Knight Lightning himself, and had done nothing in particular to
stop its distribution. They hadn't even told Rich Andrews or Charles
Boykin to erase the copies from their UNIX nodes, Jolnet and Killer.
But then came the monster Martin Luther King Day Crash of January
15, 1990.
A flat three days later, on January 18, four agents showed up at Knight
Lightning's fraternity house. One was Timothy Foley, the second
Barbara Golden, both of them Secret Service agents from the Chicago
office. Also along was a University of Missouri security officer, and
Reed Newlin, a security man from Southwestern Bell, the RBOC having
jurisdiction over Missouri.
Foley accused Knight Lightning of causing the nationwide crash of the
phone system.
Knight Lightning was aghast at this allegation. On the face of it, the
suspicion was not entirely implausible though Knight Lightning knew
that he himself hadn't done it. Plenty of hot-dog hackers had bragged
that they could crash the phone system, however. "Shadowhawk," for
instance, the Chicago hacker whom William Cook had recently put in
jail, had several times boasted on boards that he could "shut down
AT&T's public switched network."
And now this event, or something that looked just like it, had actually
taken place. The Crash had lit a fire under the Chicago Task Force. And
the former fence- sitters at Bellcore and AT&T were now ready to roll.
The consensus among telco security already horrified by the skill of
the BellSouth intruders was that the digital underground was out of
hand. LoD and *Phrack* must go.
And in publishing Prophet's E911 Document, *Phrack* had provided
law enforcement with what appeared to be a powerful legal weapon.
Foley confronted Knight Lightning about the E911 Document.
Knight Lightning was cowed. He immediately began "cooperating fully"
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in the usual tradition of the digital underground.
He gave Foley a complete run of *Phrack,*printed out in a set of three-
ring binders. He handed over his electronic mailing list of *Phrack*
subscribers. Knight Lightning was grilled for four hours by Foley and
his cohorts. Knight Lightning admitted that Prophet had passed him the
E911 Document, and he admitted that he had known it was stolen booty
from a hacker raid on a telephone company. Knight Lightning signed a
statement to this effect, and agreed, in writing, to cooperate with inves-
tigators.
Next day January 19, 1990, a Friday the Secret Service returned
with a search warrant, and thoroughly searched Knight Lightning's
upstairs room in the fraternity house. They took all his floppy disks,
though, interestingly, they left Knight Lightning in possession of both
his computer and his modem. (The computer had no hard disk, and in
Foley's judgement was not a store of evidence.) But this was a very
minor bright spot among Knight Lightning's rapidly multiplying trou-
bles. By this time, Knight Lightning was in plenty of hot water, not only
with federal police, prosecutors, telco investigators, and university
security, but with the elders of his own campus fraternity, who were
outraged to think that they had been unwittingly harboring a federal
computer-criminal.
On Monday, Knight Lightning was summoned to Chicago, where he was
further grilled by Foley and USSS veteran agent Barbara Golden, this
time with an attorney present. And on Tuesday, he was formally indicted
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