Chapter 1

THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

by Bruce Sterling

CONTENTS

Preface to the Electronic Release of The Hacker Crackdown

Chronology of the Hacker Crackdown

Introduction

Part 1: CRASHING THE SYSTEM
A Brief History of Telephony
Bell's Golden Vaporware
Universal Service
Wild Boys and Wire Women
The Electronic Communities
The Ungentle Giant
The Breakup
In Defense of the System
The Crash Post-Mortem
Landslides in Cyberspace

Part 2: THE DIGITAL UNDERGROUND
Steal This Phone
Phreaking and Hacking
The View From Under the Floorboards
Boards: Core of the Underground
Phile Phun
The Rake's Progress
Strongholds of the Elite
Sting Boards
Hot Potatoes
War on the Legion
Terminus
Phile 9-1-1
War Games
Real Cyberpunk

Part 3: LAW AND ORDER
Crooked Boards
The World's Biggest Hacker Bust
Teach Them a Lesson
The U.S. Secret Service
The Secret Service Battles the Boodlers
A Walk Downtown
FCIC: The Cutting-Edge Mess
Cyberspace Rangers
FLETC: Training the Hacker-Trackers

Part 4: THE CIVIL LIBERTARIANS
NuPrometheus + FBI = Grateful Dead
Whole Earth + Computer Revolution = WELL
Phiber Runs Underground and Acid Spikes the Well
The Trial of Knight Lightning
Shadowhawk Plummets to Earth
Kyrie in the Confessional
$79,499
A Scholar Investigates
Computers, Freedom, and Privacy

Electronic Afterword to The Hacker Crackdown, Halloween 1993

THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

by Bruce Sterling

Preface to the Electronic Release of The Hacker Crackdown

January 1, 1994--Austin, Texas

Hi, I'm Bruce Sterling, the author of this electronic book.

Out in the traditional world of print, The Hacker Crackdown
is ISBN 0-553-08058-X, and is formally catalogued by
the Library of Congress as "1. Computer crimes--United States.
2. Telephone--United States--Corrupt practices.
3. Programming (Electronic computers)--United States--Corrupt practices."

`Corrupt practices,' I always get a kick out of that description.
Librarians are very ingenious people.

The critics were very kind to The Hacker Crackdown,
and commercially the book has done well. On the other hand,
I didn't write this book in order to squeeze every last nickel
and dime out of the mitts of impoverished sixteen-year-old
cyberpunk high-school-students. Teenagers don't have any money--
(no, not even enough for the six-dollar Hacker Crackdown paperback,
with its attractive bright-red cover and useful index).
That's a major reason why teenagers sometimes succumb to the temptation
to do things they shouldn't, such as swiping my books out of libraries.
Kids: this one is all yours, all right? Go give the print version back.
*8-)

Well-meaning, public-spirited civil libertarians don't have much money,
either. And it seems almost criminal to snatch cash out of the hands of
America's direly underpaid electronic law enforcement community.

If you're a computer cop, a hacker, or an electronic civil
liberties activist, you are the target audience for this book.
I wrote this book because I wanted to help you, and help other people
understand you and your unique, uhm, problems. I wrote this book
to aid your activities, and to contribute to the public discussion
of important political issues. In giving the text away in this
fashion, I am directly contributing to the book's ultimate aim:
to help civilize cyberspace.

Information WANTS to be free. And the information inside
this book longs for freedom with a peculiar intensity.
I genuinely believe that the natural habitat of this book
is inside an electronic network. That may not be the easiest
direct method to generate revenue for the book's author,
but that doesn't matter; this is where this book belongs
by its nature. I've written other books--plenty of other books--
and I'll write more and I am writing more, but this one is special.
I am making The Hacker Crackdown available electronically
as widely as I can conveniently manage, and if you like the book,
and think it is useful, then I urge you to do the same with it.

You can copy this electronic book. Copy the heck out of it,
be my guest, and give those copies to anybody who wants them.
The nascent world of cyberspace is full of sysadmins, teachers,
trainers, cybrarians, netgurus, and various species of cybernetic activist.
If you're one of those people, I know about you, and I know the hassle
you go through to try to help people learn about the electronic frontier.
I hope that possessing this book in electronic form will lessen your troubles.
Granted, this treatment of our electronic social spectrum is not the ultimate
in academic rigor. And politically, it has something to offend
and trouble almost everyone. But hey, I'm told it's readable,
and at least the price is right.

You can upload the book onto bulletin board systems, or Internet nodes,
or electronic discussion groups. Go right ahead and do that, I am giving
you express permission right now. Enjoy yourself.

You can put the book on disks and give the disks away,
as long as you don't take any money for it.

But this book is not public domain. You can't copyright it in
your own name. I own the copyright. Attempts to pirate this book
and make money from selling it may involve you in a serious litigative snarl.
Believe me, for the pittance you might wring out of such an action,
it's really not worth it. This book don't "belong" to you.
In an odd but very genuine way, I feel it doesn't "belong" to me, either.
It's a book about the people of cyberspace, and distributing it in this way
is the best way I know to actually make this information available,
freely and easily, to all the people of cyberspace--including people
far outside the borders of the United States, who otherwise may never
have a chance to see any edition of the book, and who may perhaps learn
something useful from this strange story of distant, obscure, but portentous
events in so-called "American cyberspace."

This electronic book is now literary freeware. It now belongs to the
emergent realm of alternative information economics. You have no right
to make this electronic book part of the conventional flow of commerce.
Let it be part of the flow of knowledge: there's a difference.
I've divided the book into four sections, so that it is less ungainly
for upload and download; if there's a section of particular relevance
to you and your colleagues, feel free to reproduce that one and skip the rest.

Just make more when you need them, and give them to whoever might want them.

Now have fun.

Bruce Sterling--bruces@well.sf.ca.us

THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

by Bruce Sterling

CHRONOLOGY OF THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

1865 U.S. Secret Service (USSS) founded.

1876 Alexander Graham Bell invents telephone.

1878 First teenage males flung off phone system by enraged authorities.

1939 "Futurian" science-fiction group raided by Secret Service.

1971 Yippie phone phreaks start YIPL/TAP magazine.

1972 RAMPARTS magazine seized in blue-box rip-off scandal.

1978 Ward Christenson and Randy Suess create first personal
computer bulletin board system.

1982 William Gibson coins term "cyberspace."

1982 "414 Gang" raided.

1983-1983 AT&T dismantled in divestiture.

1984 Congress passes Comprehensive Crime Control Act giving USSS
jurisdiction over credit card fraud and computer fraud.

1984 "Legion of Doom" formed.

1984. 2600: THE HACKER QUARTERLY founded.

1984. WHOLE EARTH SOFTWARE CATALOG published.

1985. First police "sting" bulletin board systems established.

1985. Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link computer conference (WELL) goes on-line.

1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act passed.

1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act passed.

1987 Chicago prosecutors form Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force.

1988

July. Secret Service covertly videotapes "SummerCon" hacker convention.

September. "Prophet" cracks BellSouth AIMSX computer network
and downloads E911 Document to his own computer and to Jolnet.

September. AT&T Corporate Information Security informed of Prophet's action.

October. Bellcore Security informed of Prophet's action.

1989

January. Prophet uploads E911 Document to Knight Lightning.

February 25. Knight Lightning publishes E911 Document in PHRACK
electronic newsletter.

May. Chicago Task Force raids and arrests "Kyrie."

June. "NuPrometheus League" distributes Apple Computer proprietary software.

June 13. Florida probation office crossed with phone-sex line
in switching-station stunt.

July. "Fry Guy" raided by USSS and Chicago Computer Fraud
and Abuse Task Force.

July. Secret Service raids "Prophet," "Leftist," and "Urvile" in Georgia.

1990

January 15. Martin Luther King Day Crash strikes AT&T long-distance
network nationwide.

January 18-19. Chicago Task Force raids Knight Lightning in St. Louis.

January 24. USSS and New York State Police raid "Phiber Optik,"
"Acid Phreak," and "Scorpion" in New York City.

February 1. USSS raids "Terminus" in Maryland.

February 3. Chicago Task Force raids Richard Andrews' home.

February 6. Chicago Task Force raids Richard Andrews' business.

February 6. USSS arrests Terminus, Prophet, Leftist, and Urvile.

February 9. Chicago Task Force arrests Knight Lightning.

February 20. AT&T Security shuts down public-access
"attctc" computer in Dallas.

February 21. Chicago Task Force raids Robert Izenberg in Austin.

March 1. Chicago Task Force raids Steve Jackson Games, Inc.,
"Mentor," and "Erik Bloodaxe" in Austin.

May 7,8,9.

USSS and Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau conduct
"Operation Sundevil" raids in Cincinnatti, Detroit, Los Angeles,
Miami, Newark, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Tucson, San Diego,
San Jose, and San Francisco.

May. FBI interviews John Perry Barlow re NuPrometheus case.

June. Mitch Kapor and Barlow found Electronic Frontier Foundation;
Barlow publishes CRIME AND PUZZLEMENT manifesto.

July 24-27. Trial of Knight Lightning.

1991

February. CPSR Roundtable in Washington, D.C.

March 25-28. Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in San Francisco.

May 1. Electronic Frontier Foundation, Steve Jackson,
and others file suit against members of Chicago Task Force.

July 1-2. Switching station phone software crash affects
Washington, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, San Francisco.

September 17. AT&T phone crash affects New York City and three airports.

Introduction

This is a book about cops, and wild teenage whiz-kids, and lawyers,
and hairy-eyed anarchists, and industrial technicians, and hippies,
and high-tech millionaires, and game hobbyists, and computer security
experts, and Secret Service agents, and grifters, and thieves.

This book is about the electronic frontier of the 1990s.
It concerns activities that take place inside computers
and over telephone lines.

A science fiction writer coined the useful term "cyberspace" in 1982,
but the territory in question, the electronic frontier, is about
a hundred and thirty years old. Cyberspace is the "place" where
a telephone conversation appears to occur. Not inside your actual phone,
the plastic device on your desk. Not inside the other person's phone,
in some other city. THE PLACE BETWEEN the phones. The indefinite
place OUT THERE, where the two of you, two human beings,
actually meet and communicate.

Although it is not exactly "real," "cyberspace" is a genuine place.
Things happen there that have very genuine consequences. This "place"
is not "real," but it is serious, it is earnest. Tens of thousands
of people have dedicated their lives to it, to the public service
of public communication by wire and electronics.

People have worked on this "frontier" for generations now.
Some people became rich and famous from their efforts there.
Some just played in it, as hobbyists. Others soberly pondered it,
and wrote about it, and regulated it, and negotiated over it in
international forums, and sued one another about it, in gigantic,
epic court battles that lasted for years. And almost since
the beginning, some people have committed crimes in this place.

But in the past twenty years, this electrical "space,"
which was once thin and dark and one-dimensional--little more
than a narrow speaking-tube, stretching from phone to phone--
has flung itself open like a gigantic jack-in-the-box.
Light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of the glowing computer screen.
This dark electric netherworld has become a vast flowering electronic landscape.
Since the 1960s, the world of the telephone has cross-bred itself
with computers and television, and though there is still no substance
to cyberspace, nothing you can handle, it has a strange kind
of physicality now. It makes good sense today to talk of cyberspace
as a place all its own.

Because people live in it now. Not just a few people,
not just a few technicians and eccentrics, but thousands
of people, quite normal people. And not just for a little while,
either, but for hours straight, over weeks, and months,
and years. Cyberspace today is a "Net," a "Matrix,"
international in scope and growing swiftly and steadily.
It's growing in size, and wealth, and political importance.

People are making entire careers in modern cyberspace.
Scientists and technicians, of course; they've been there
for twenty years now. But increasingly, cyberspace
is filling with journalists and doctors and lawyers
and artists and clerks. Civil servants make their
careers there now, "on-line" in vast government data-banks;
and so do spies, industrial, political, and just plain snoops;
and so do police, at least a few of them. And there are children
living there now.

People have met there and been married there.
There are entire living communities in cyberspace today;
chattering, gossiping, planning, conferring and scheming,
leaving one another voice-mail and electronic mail,
giving one another big weightless chunks of valuable data,
both legitimate and illegitimate. They busily pass one another
computer software and the occasional festering computer virus.

We do not really understand how to live in cyberspace yet.
We are feeling our way into it, blundering about.
That is not surprising. Our lives in the physical world,
the "real" world, are also far from perfect, despite a lot more practice.
Human lives, real lives, are imperfect by their nature, and there are
human beings in cyberspace. The way we live in cyberspace is
a funhouse mirror of the way we live in the real world.
We take both our advantages and our troubles with us.

This book is about trouble in cyberspace.
Specifically, this book is about certain strange events in
the year 1990, an unprecedented and startling year for the
the growing world of computerized communications.

In 1990 there came a nationwide crackdown on illicit
computer hackers, with arrests, criminal charges,
one dramatic show-trial, several guilty pleas, and
huge confiscations of data and equipment all over the USA.

The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was larger, better organized,
more deliberate, and more resolute than any previous effort
in the brave new world of computer crime. The U.S. Secret Service,
private telephone security, and state and local law enforcement groups
across the country all joined forces in a determined attempt to break
the back of America's electronic underground. It was a fascinating
effort, with very mixed results.

The Hacker Crackdown had another unprecedented effect;
it spurred the creation, within "the computer community,"
of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a new and very odd
interest group, fiercely dedicated to the establishment
and preservation of electronic civil liberties. The crackdown,
remarkable in itself, has created a melee of debate over electronic crime,
punishment, freedom of the press, and issues of search and seizure.
Politics has entered cyberspace. Where people go, politics follow.

This is the story of the people of cyberspace.

PART ONE: Crashing the System

On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance telephone switching system crashed.

This was a strange, dire, huge event. Sixty thousand people lost
their telephone service completely. During the nine long hours
of frantic effort that it took to restore service, some seventy million
telephone calls went uncompleted.

Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco trade,
are a known and accepted hazard of the telephone business.
Hurricanes hit, and phone cables get snapped by the thousands.
Earthquakes wrench through buried fiber-optic lines.
Switching stations catch fire and burn to the ground.
These things do happen. There are contingency plans for them,
and decades of experience in dealing with them.
But the Crash of January 15 was unprecedented.
It was unbelievably huge, and it occurred for
no apparent physical reason.

The crash started on a Monday afternoon in a single
switching-station in Manhattan. But, unlike any merely
physical damage, it spread and spread. Station after
station across America collapsed in a chain reaction,
until fully half of AT&T's network had gone haywire
and the remaining half was hard-put to handle the overflow.

Within nine hours, AT&T software engineers more or less
understood what had caused the crash. Replicating the
problem exactly, poring over software line by line,
took them a couple of weeks. But because it was hard
to understand technically, the full truth of the matter
and its implications were not widely and thoroughly aired
and explained. The root cause of the crash remained obscure,
surrounded by rumor and fear.

The crash was a grave corporate embarrassment.
The "culprit" was a bug in AT&T's own software--not the
sort of admission the telecommunications giant wanted
to make, especially in the face of increasing competition.
Still, the truth WAS told, in the baffling technical terms
necessary to explain it.

Somehow the explanation failed to persuade
American law enforcement officials and even telephone
corporate security personnel. These people were not
technical experts or software wizards, and they had their
own suspicions about the cause of this disaster.

The police and telco security had important sources
of information denied to mere software engineers.
They had informants in the computer underground and
years of experience in dealing with high-tech rascality
that seemed to grow ever more sophisticated.
For years they had been expecting a direct and
savage attack against the American national telephone system.
And with the Crash of January 15--the first month of a
new, high-tech decade--their predictions, fears,
and suspicions seemed at last to have entered the real world.
A world where the telephone system had not merely crashed,
but, quite likely, BEEN crashed--by "hackers."

The crash created a large dark cloud of suspicion
that would color certain people's assumptions and actions
for months. The fact that it took place in the realm of
software was suspicious on its face. The fact that it
occurred on Martin Luther King Day, still the most
politically touchy of American holidays, made it more
suspicious yet.

The Crash of January 15 gave the Hacker Crackdown
its sense of edge and its sweaty urgency. It made people,
powerful people in positions of public authority,
willing to believe the worst. And, most fatally,
it helped to give investigators a willingness
to take extreme measures and the determination
to preserve almost total secrecy.

An obscure software fault in an aging switching system
in New York was to lead to a chain reaction of legal
and constitutional trouble all across the country.

#

Like the crash in the telephone system, this chain reaction
was ready and waiting to happen. During the 1980s,
the American legal system was extensively patched
to deal with the novel issues of computer crime.
There was, for instance, the Electronic Communications
Privacy Act of 1986 (eloquently described as "a stinking mess"
by a prominent law enforcement official). And there was the
draconian Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, passed unanimously
by the United States Senate, which later would reveal
a large number of flaws. Extensive, well-meant efforts
had been made to keep the legal system up to date.
But in the day-to-day grind of the real world,
even the most elegant software tends to crumble
and suddenly reveal its hidden bugs.

Like the advancing telephone system, the American legal system
was certainly not ruined by its temporary crash; but for those
caught under the weight of the collapsing system, life became
a series of blackouts and anomalies.

In order to understand why these weird events occurred,
both in the world of technology and in the world of law,
it's not enough to understand the merely technical problems.
We will get to those; but first and foremost, we must try
to understand the telephone, and the business of telephones,
and the community of human beings that telephones have created.

#

Technologies have life cycles, like cities do,
like institutions do, like laws and governments do.

The first stage of any technology is the Question
Mark, often known as the "Golden Vaporware" stage.
At this early point, the technology is only a phantom,
a mere gleam in the inventor's eye. One such inventor
was a speech teacher and electrical tinkerer named
Alexander Graham Bell.

Bell's early inventions, while ingenious, failed to move the world.
In 1863, the teenage Bell and his brother Melville made an artificial
talking mechanism out of wood, rubber, gutta-percha, and tin.
This weird device had a rubber-covered "tongue" made of movable
wooden segments, with vibrating rubber "vocal cords," and
rubber "lips" and "cheeks." While Melville puffed a bellows
into a tin tube, imitating the lungs, young Alec Bell would
manipulate the "lips," "teeth," and "tongue," causing the thing
to emit high-pitched falsetto gibberish.

Another would-be technical breakthrough was the Bell "phonautograph"
of 1874, actually made out of a human cadaver's ear. Clamped into place
on a tripod, this grisly gadget drew sound-wave images on smoked glass
through a thin straw glued to its vibrating earbones.

By 1875, Bell had learned to produce audible sounds--ugly shrieks
and squawks--by using magnets, diaphragms, and electrical current.

Most "Golden Vaporware" technologies go nowhere.

But the second stage of technology is the Rising Star,
or, the "Goofy Prototype," stage. The telephone, Bell's
most ambitious gadget yet, reached this stage on March
10, 1876. On that great day, Alexander Graham Bell
became the first person to transmit intelligible human
speech electrically. As it happened, young Professor Bell,
industriously tinkering in his Boston lab, had spattered
his trousers with acid. His assistant, Mr. Watson,
heard his cry for help--over Bell's experimental
audio-telegraph. This was an event without precedent.

Technologies in their "Goofy Prototype" stage rarely
work very well. They're experimental, and therefore
half- baked and rather frazzled. The prototype may
be attractive and novel, and it does look as if it ought
to be good for something-or-other. But nobody, including
the inventor, is quite sure what. Inventors, and speculators,
and pundits may have very firm ideas about its potential
use, but those ideas are often very wrong.

The natural habitat of the Goofy Prototype is in trade shows
and in the popular press. Infant technologies need publicity
and investment money like a tottering calf need milk.
This was very true of Bell's machine. To raise research and
development money, Bell toured with his device as a stage attraction.

Contemporary press reports of the stage debut of the telephone
showed pleased astonishment mixed with considerable dread.
Bell's stage telephone was a large wooden box with a crude
speaker-nozzle, the whole contraption about the size and shape
of an overgrown Brownie camera. Its buzzing steel soundplate,
pumped up by powerful electromagnets, was loud enough to fill
an auditorium. Bell's assistant Mr. Watson, who could manage
on the keyboards fairly well, kicked in by playing the organ
from distant rooms, and, later, distant cities. This feat was
considered marvellous, but very eerie indeed.

Bell's original notion for the telephone, an idea promoted
for a couple of years, was that it would become a mass medium.
We might recognize Bell's idea today as something close to modern
"cable radio." Telephones at a central source would transmit music,
Sunday sermons, and important public speeches to a paying network
of wired-up subscribers.

At the time, most people thought this notion made good sense.
In fact, Bell's idea was workable. In Hungary, this philosophy
of the telephone was successfully put into everyday practice.
In Budapest, for decades, from 1893 until after World War I,
there was a government-run information service called
"Telefon Hirmondo-." Hirmondo- was a centralized source
of news and entertainment and culture, including stock reports,
plays, concerts, and novels read aloud. At certain hours
of the day, the phone would ring, you would plug in
a loudspeaker for the use of the family, and Telefon
Hirmondo- would be on the air--or rather, on the phone.

Hirmondo- is dead tech today, but Hirmondo- might be considered
a spiritual ancestor of the modern telephone-accessed computer
data services, such as CompuServe, GEnie or Prodigy.
The principle behind Hirmondo- is also not too far from computer
"bulletin- board systems" or BBS's, which arrived in the late 1970s,
spread rapidly across America, and will figure largely in this book.

We are used to using telephones for individual person-to-person speech,
because we are used to the Bell system. But this was just one possibility
among many. Communication networks are very flexible and protean,
especially when their hardware becomes sufficiently advanced.
They can be put to all kinds of uses. And they have been--
and they will be.

Bell's telephone was bound for glory, but this was a combination
of political decisions, canny infighting in court, inspired industrial
leadership, receptive local conditions and outright good luck.
Much the same is true of communications systems today.

As Bell and his backers struggled to install their newfangled system
in the real world of nineteenth-century New England, they had to fight
against skepticism and industrial rivalry. There was already a strong
electrical communications network present in America: the telegraph.
The head of the Western Union telegraph system dismissed Bell's prototype
as "an electrical toy" and refused to buy the rights to Bell's patent.
The telephone, it seemed, might be all right as a parlor entertainment--
but not for serious business.

Telegrams, unlike mere telephones, left a permanent physical record
of their messages. Telegrams, unlike telephones, could be answered
whenever the recipient had time and convenience. And the telegram
had a much longer distance-range than Bell's early telephone.
These factors made telegraphy seem a much more sound and businesslike
technology--at least to some.

The telegraph system was huge, and well-entrenched.
In 1876, the United States had 214,000 miles of telegraph wire,
and 8500 telegraph offices. There were specialized telegraphs
for businesses and stock traders, government, police and fire departments.
And Bell's "toy" was best known as a stage-magic musical device.

The third stage of technology is known as the "Cash Cow" stage.
In the "cash cow" stage, a technology finds its place in the world,
and matures, and becomes settled and productive. After a year or so,
Alexander Graham Bell and his capitalist backers concluded that
eerie music piped from nineteenth-century cyberspace was not the real
selling-point of his invention. Instead, the telephone was about speech--
individual, personal speech, the human voice, human conversation and
human interaction. The telephone was not to be managed from any centralized
broadcast center. It was to be a personal, intimate technology.

When you picked up a telephone, you were not absorbing
the cold output of a machine--you were speaking to another human being.
Once people realized this, their instinctive dread of the telephone
as an eerie, unnatural device, swiftly vanished. A "telephone call"
was not a "call" from a "telephone" itself, but a call from another
human being, someone you would generally know and recognize.
The real point was not what the machine could do for you (or to you),
but what you yourself, a person and citizen, could do THROUGH the machine.
This decision on the part of the young Bell Company was absolutely vital.

The first telephone networks went up around Boston--mostly among
the technically curious and the well-to-do (much the same segment
of the American populace that, a hundred years later, would be
buying personal computers). Entrenched backers of the telegraph
continued to scoff.

But in January 1878, a disaster made the telephone famous.
A train crashed in Tarriffville, Connecticut. Forward-looking
doctors in the nearby city of Hartford had had Bell's
"speaking telephone" installed. An alert local druggist
was able to telephone an entire community of local doctors,
who rushed to the site to give aid. The disaster, as disasters do,
aroused intense press coverage. The phone had proven its usefulness
in the real world.

After Tarriffville, the telephone network spread like crabgrass.
By 1890 it was all over New England. By '93, out to Chicago.
By '97, into Minnesota, Nebraska and Texas. By 1904 it was
all over the continent.

The telephone had become a mature technology. Professor Bell
(now generally known as "Dr. Bell" despite his lack of a formal degree)
became quite wealthy. He lost interest in the tedious day-to-day business
muddle of the booming telephone network, and gratefully returned
his attention to creatively hacking-around in his various laboratories,
which were now much larger, better-ventilated, and gratifyingly
better-equipped. Bell was never to have another great inventive success,
though his speculations and prototypes anticipated fiber-optic transmission,
manned flight, sonar, hydrofoil ships, tetrahedral construction, and
Montessori education. The "decibel," the standard scientific measure
of sound intensity, was named after Bell.

Not all Bell's vaporware notions were inspired. He was fascinated
by human eugenics. He also spent many years developing a weird personal
system of astrophysics in which gravity did not exist.

Bell was a definite eccentric. He was something of a hypochondriac,
and throughout his life he habitually stayed up until four A.M.,
refusing to rise before noon. But Bell had accomplished a great feat;
he was an idol of millions and his influence, wealth, and great
personal charm, combined with his eccentricity, made him something
of a loose cannon on deck. Bell maintained a thriving scientific
salon in his winter mansion in Washington, D.C., which gave him
considerable backstage influence in governmental and scientific circles.
He was a major financial backer of the the magazines Science and
National Geographic, both still flourishing today as important organs
of the American scientific establishment.

Bell's companion Thomas Watson, similarly wealthy and similarly odd,
became the ardent political disciple of a 19th-century science-fiction writer
and would-be social reformer, Edward Bellamy. Watson also trod the boards
briefly as a Shakespearian actor.

There would never be another Alexander Graham Bell,
but in years to come there would be surprising numbers
of people like him. Bell was a prototype of the
high-tech entrepreneur. High-tech entrepreneurs will
play a very prominent role in this book: not merely as
technicians and businessmen, but as pioneers of the
technical frontier, who can carry the power and prestige
they derive from high-technology into the political and
social arena.

Like later entrepreneurs, Bell was fierce in defense of
his own technological territory. As the telephone began to
flourish, Bell was soon involved in violent lawsuits in the
defense of his patents. Bell's Boston lawyers were
excellent, however, and Bell himself, as an elocution
teacher and gifted public speaker, was a devastatingly
effective legal witness. In the eighteen years of Bell's patents,
the Bell company was involved in six hundred separate lawsuits.
The legal records printed filled 149 volumes. The Bell Company
won every single suit.

After Bell's exclusive patents expired, rival telephone
companies sprang up all over America.