Chapter 2

Bell's company,
American Bell Telephone, was soon in deep trouble.
In 1907, American Bell Telephone fell into the hands of the
rather sinister J.P. Morgan financial cartel, robber-baron
speculators who dominated Wall Street.

At this point, history might have taken a different turn.
American might well have been served forever by a patchwork
of locally owned telephone companies. Many state politicians
and local businessmen considered this an excellent solution.

But the new Bell holding company, American Telephone and Telegraph
or AT&T, put in a new man at the helm, a visionary industrialist
named Theodore Vail. Vail, a former Post Office manager,
understood large organizations and had an innate feeling
for the nature of large-scale communications. Vail quickly
saw to it that AT&T seized the technological edge once again.
The Pupin and Campbell "loading coil," and the deForest
"audion," are both extinct technology today, but in 1913
they gave Vail's company the best LONG-DISTANCE lines
ever built. By controlling long-distance--the links
between, and over, and above the smaller local phone
companies--AT&T swiftly gained the whip-hand over them,
and was soon devouring them right and left.

Vail plowed the profits back into research and development,
starting the Bell tradition of huge-scale and brilliant
industrial research.

Technically and financially, AT&T gradually steamrollered
the opposition. Independent telephone companies never
became entirely extinct, and hundreds of them flourish today.
But Vail's AT&T became the supreme communications company.
At one point, Vail's AT&T bought Western Union itself,
the very company that had derided Bell's telephone as a "toy."
Vail thoroughly reformed Western Union's hidebound business
along his modern principles; but when the federal government
grew anxious at this centralization of power, Vail politely
gave Western Union back.

This centralizing process was not unique. Very similar
events had happened in American steel, oil, and railroads.
But AT&T, unlike the other companies, was to remain supreme.
The monopoly robber-barons of those other industries
were humbled and shattered by government trust-busting.

Vail, the former Post Office official, was quite willing
to accommodate the US government; in fact he would
forge an active alliance with it. AT&T would become
almost a wing of the American government, almost
another Post Office--though not quite. AT&T would
willingly submit to federal regulation, but in return,
it would use the government's regulators as its own police,
who would keep out competitors and assure the Bell
system's profits and preeminence.

This was the second birth--the political birth--of the
American telephone system. Vail's arrangement was to
persist, with vast success, for many decades, until 1982.
His system was an odd kind of American industrial socialism.
It was born at about the same time as Leninist Communism,
and it lasted almost as long--and, it must be admitted,
to considerably better effect.

Vail's system worked. Except perhaps for aerospace,
there has been no technology more thoroughly dominated
by Americans than the telephone. The telephone was
seen from the beginning as a quintessentially American
technology. Bell's policy, and the policy of Theodore Vail,
was a profoundly democratic policy of UNIVERSAL ACCESS.
Vail's famous corporate slogan, "One Policy, One System,
Universal Service," was a political slogan, with a very
American ring to it.

The American telephone was not to become the specialized tool
of government or business, but a general public utility.
At first, it was true, only the wealthy could afford
private telephones, and Bell's company pursued the
business markets primarily. The American phone system
was a capitalist effort, meant to make money; it was not a charity.
But from the first, almost all communities with telephone service
had public telephones. And many stores--especially drugstores--
offered public use of their phones. You might not own a telephone--
but you could always get into the system, if you really needed to.

There was nothing inevitable about this decision to make telephones
"public" and "universal." Vail's system involved a profound act
of trust in the public. This decision was a political one,
informed by the basic values of the American republic.
The situation might have been very different;
and in other countries, under other systems,
it certainly was.

Joseph Stalin, for instance, vetoed plans for a Soviet
phone system soon after the Bolshevik revolution.
Stalin was certain that publicly accessible telephones
would become instruments of anti-Soviet counterrevolution
and conspiracy. (He was probably right.) When telephones
did arrive in the Soviet Union, they would be instruments
of Party authority, and always heavily tapped. (Alexander
Solzhenitsyn's prison-camp novel The First Circle
describes efforts to develop a phone system more suited
to Stalinist purposes.)

France, with its tradition of rational centralized government,
had fought bitterly even against the electric telegraph,
which seemed to the French entirely too anarchical and frivolous.
For decades, nineteenth-century France communicated via the
"visual telegraph," a nation-spanning, government-owned semaphore
system of huge stone towers that signalled from hilltops,
across vast distances, with big windmill-like arms.
In 1846, one Dr. Barbay, a semaphore enthusiast,
memorably uttered an early version of what might be called
"the security expert's argument" against the open media.

"No, the electric telegraph is not a sound invention.
It will always be at the mercy of the slightest disruption,
wild youths, drunkards, bums, etc. . . . The electric telegraph
meets those destructive elements with only a few meters of wire
over which supervision is impossible. A single man could,
without being seen, cut the telegraph wires leading to Paris,
and in twenty-four hours cut in ten different places the wires
of the same line, without being arrested. The visual telegraph,
on the contrary, has its towers, its high walls, its gates
well-guarded from inside by strong armed men. Yes, I declare,
substitution of the electric telegraph for the visual one
is a dreadful measure, a truly idiotic act."

Dr. Barbay and his high-security stone machines
were eventually unsuccessful, but his argument--
that communication exists for the safety and convenience
of the state, and must be carefully protected from the wild
boys and the gutter rabble who might want to crash the
system--would be heard again and again.

When the French telephone system finally did arrive,
its snarled inadequacy was to be notorious. Devotees
of the American Bell System often recommended a trip
to France, for skeptics.

In Edwardian Britain, issues of class and privacy
were a ball-and-chain for telephonic progress. It was
considered outrageous that anyone--any wild fool off
the street--could simply barge bellowing into one's office
or home, preceded only by the ringing of a telephone bell.
In Britain, phones were tolerated for the use of business,
but private phones tended be stuffed away into closets,
smoking rooms, or servants' quarters. Telephone operators
were resented in Britain because they did not seem to
"know their place." And no one of breeding would print
a telephone number on a business card; this seemed a crass
attempt to make the acquaintance of strangers.

But phone access in America was to become a popular right;
something like universal suffrage, only more so.
American women could not yet vote when the phone system
came through; yet from the beginning American women
doted on the telephone. This "feminization" of the
American telephone was often commented on by foreigners.
Phones in America were not censored or stiff or formalized;
they were social, private, intimate, and domestic.
In America, Mother's Day is by far the busiest day
of the year for the phone network.

The early telephone companies, and especially AT&T,
were among the foremost employers of American women.
They employed the daughters of the American middle-class
in great armies: in 1891, eight thousand women; by 1946,
almost a quarter of a million. Women seemed to enjoy
telephone work; it was respectable, it was steady,
it paid fairly well as women's work went, and--not least--
it seemed a genuine contribution to the social good
of the community. Women found Vail's ideal of public
service attractive. This was especially true in rural areas,
where women operators, running extensive rural party-lines,
enjoyed considerable social power. The operator knew everyone
on the party-line, and everyone knew her.

Although Bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the
telephone company did not employ women for the sake of
advancing female liberation. AT&T did this for sound
commercial reasons. The first telephone operators of
the Bell system were not women, but teenage American boys.
They were telegraphic messenger boys (a group about to
be rendered technically obsolescent), who swept up
around the phone office, dunned customers for bills,
and made phone connections on the switchboard,
all on the cheap.

Within the very first year of operation, 1878,
Bell's company learned a sharp lesson about combining
teenage boys and telephone switchboards. Putting
teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift
and consistent disaster. Bell's chief engineer described them
as "Wild Indians." The boys were openly rude to customers.
They talked back to subscribers, saucing off,
uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip.
The rascals took Saint Patrick's Day off without permission.
And worst of all they played clever tricks with
the switchboard plugs: disconnecting calls, crossing lines
so that customers found themselves talking to strangers,
and so forth.

This combination of power, technical mastery, and effective
anonymity seemed to act like catnip on teenage boys.

This wild-kid-on-the-wires phenomenon was not confined to
the USA; from the beginning, the same was true of the British
phone system. An early British commentator kindly remarked:
"No doubt boys in their teens found the work not a little irksome,
and it is also highly probable that under the early conditions
of employment the adventurous and inquisitive spirits of which
the average healthy boy of that age is possessed, were not always
conducive to the best attention being given to the wants
of the telephone subscribers."

So the boys were flung off the system--or at least,
deprived of control of the switchboard. But the
"adventurous and inquisitive spirits" of the teenage boys
would be heard from in the world of telephony, again and again.

The fourth stage in the technological life-cycle is death:
"the Dog," dead tech. The telephone has so far avoided this fate.
On the contrary, it is thriving, still spreading, still evolving,
and at increasing speed.

The telephone has achieved a rare and exalted state for a
technological artifact: it has become a HOUSEHOLD OBJECT.
The telephone, like the clock, like pen and paper,
like kitchen utensils and running water, has become
a technology that is visible only by its absence.
The telephone is technologically transparent.
The global telephone system is the largest and most
complex machine in the world, yet it is easy to use.
More remarkable yet, the telephone is almost entirely
physically safe for the user.

For the average citizen in the 1870s, the telephone
was weirder, more shocking, more "high-tech" and
harder to comprehend, than the most outrageous stunts
of advanced computing for us Americans in the 1990s.
In trying to understand what is happening to us today,
with our bulletin-board systems, direct overseas dialling,
fiber-optic transmissions, computer viruses, hacking stunts,
and a vivid tangle of new laws and new crimes, it is important
to realize that our society has been through a similar challenge before--
and that, all in all, we did rather well by it.

Bell's stage telephone seemed bizarre at first. But the
sensations of weirdness vanished quickly, once people began
to hear the familiar voices of relatives and friends,
in their own homes on their own telephones. The telephone
changed from a fearsome high-tech totem to an everyday pillar
of human community.

This has also happened, and is still happening,
to computer networks. Computer networks such as
NSFnet, BITnet, USENET, JANET, are technically
advanced, intimidating, and much harder to use than
telephones. Even the popular, commercial computer
networks, such as GEnie, Prodigy, and CompuServe,
cause much head-scratching and have been described
as "user-hateful." Nevertheless they too are changing
from fancy high-tech items into everyday sources
of human community.

The words "community" and "communication" have
the same root. Wherever you put a communications
network, you put a community as well. And whenever
you TAKE AWAY that network--confiscate it, outlaw it,
crash it, raise its price beyond affordability--
then you hurt that community.

Communities will fight to defend themselves. People will fight harder
and more bitterly to defend their communities, than they will fight
to defend their own individual selves. And this is very true
of the "electronic community" that arose around computer networks
in the 1980s--or rather, the VARIOUS electronic communities,
in telephony, law enforcement, computing, and the digital
underground that, by the year 1990, were raiding, rallying,
arresting, suing, jailing, fining and issuing angry manifestos.

None of the events of 1990 were entirely new.
Nothing happened in 1990 that did not have some kind
of earlier and more understandable precedent. What gave
the Hacker Crackdown its new sense of gravity and
importance was the feeling--the COMMUNITY feeling--
that the political stakes had been raised; that trouble
in cyberspace was no longer mere mischief or inconclusive
skirmishing, but a genuine fight over genuine issues,
a fight for community survival and the shape of the future.

These electronic communities, having flourished throughout
the 1980s, were becoming aware of themselves, and increasingly,
becoming aware of other, rival communities. Worries were
sprouting up right and left, with complaints, rumors,
uneasy speculations. But it would take a catalyst, a shock,
to make the new world evident. Like Bell's great publicity break,
the Tarriffville Rail Disaster of January 1878,
it would take a cause celebre.

That cause was the AT&T Crash of January 15, 1990.
After the Crash, the wounded and anxious telephone
community would come out fighting hard.

#

The community of telephone technicians, engineers, operators
and researchers is the oldest community in cyberspace.
These are the veterans, the most developed group,
the richest, the most respectable, in most ways the most powerful.
Whole generations have come and gone since Alexander Graham Bell's day,
but the community he founded survives; people work for the phone system
today whose great-grandparents worked for the phone system.
Its specialty magazines, such as Telephony, AT&T Technical Journal,
Telephone Engineer and Management, are decades old;
they make computer publications like Macworld and PC Week
look like amateur johnny-come-latelies.

And the phone companies take no back seat in high-technology, either.
Other companies' industrial researchers may have won new markets;
but the researchers of Bell Labs have won SEVEN NOBEL PRIZES.
One potent device that Bell Labs originated, the transistor,
has created entire GROUPS of industries. Bell Labs are
world-famous for generating "a patent a day," and have even
made vital discoveries in astronomy, physics and cosmology.

Throughout its seventy-year history, "Ma Bell" was not so much
a company as a way of life. Until the cataclysmic divestiture
of the 1980s, Ma Bell was perhaps the ultimate maternalist mega-employer.
The AT&T corporate image was the "gentle giant," "the voice with a smile,"
a vaguely socialist-realist world of cleanshaven linemen in shiny helmets
and blandly pretty phone-girls in headsets and nylons. Bell System
employees were famous as rock-ribbed Kiwanis and Rotary members,
Little-League enthusiasts, school-board people.

During the long heyday of Ma Bell, the Bell employee corps
were nurtured top-to-bottom on a corporate ethos of public service.
There was good money in Bell, but Bell was not ABOUT money;
Bell used public relations, but never mere marketeering.
People went into the Bell System for a good life,
and they had a good life. But it was not mere money
that led Bell people out in the midst of storms and earthquakes
to fight with toppled phone-poles, to wade in flooded manholes,
to pull the red-eyed graveyard-shift over collapsing switching-systems.
The Bell ethic was the electrical equivalent of the postman's:
neither rain, nor snow, nor gloom of night would stop these couriers.

It is easy to be cynical about this, as it is easy to be
cynical about any political or social system; but cynicism
does not change the fact that thousands of people took
these ideals very seriously. And some still do.

The Bell ethos was about public service; and that was
gratifying; but it was also about private POWER, and that
was gratifying too. As a corporation, Bell was very special.
Bell was privileged. Bell had snuggled up close to the state.
In fact, Bell was as close to government as you could get in
America and still make a whole lot of legitimate money.

But unlike other companies, Bell was above and beyond
the vulgar commercial fray. Through its regional operating companies,
Bell was omnipresent, local, and intimate, all over America;
but the central ivory towers at its corporate heart were the
tallest and the ivoriest around.

There were other phone companies in America, to be sure;
the so-called independents. Rural cooperatives, mostly;
small fry, mostly tolerated, sometimes warred upon.
For many decades, "independent" American phone companies
lived in fear and loathing of the official Bell monopoly
(or the "Bell Octopus," as Ma Bell's nineteenth-century
enemies described her in many angry newspaper manifestos).
Some few of these independent entrepreneurs, while legally
in the wrong, fought so bitterly against the Octopus
that their illegal phone networks were cast into the street
by Bell agents and publicly burned.

The pure technical sweetness of the Bell System gave its operators,
inventors and engineers a deeply satisfying sense of power and mastery.
They had devoted their lives to improving this vast nation-spanning machine;
over years, whole human lives, they had watched it improve and grow.
It was like a great technological temple. They were an elite,
and they knew it--even if others did not; in fact, they felt
even more powerful BECAUSE others did not understand.

The deep attraction of this sensation of elite technical power
should never be underestimated. "Technical power" is not for everybody;
for many people it simply has no charm at all. But for some people,
it becomes the core of their lives. For a few, it is overwhelming,
obsessive; it becomes something close to an addiction. People--especially
clever teenage boys whose lives are otherwise mostly powerless and put-upon
--love this sensation of secret power, and are willing to do all sorts
of amazing things to achieve it. The technical POWER of electronics
has motivated many strange acts detailed in this book, which would
otherwise be inexplicable.

So Bell had power beyond mere capitalism. The Bell service ethos worked,
and was often propagandized, in a rather saccharine fashion. Over the decades,
people slowly grew tired of this. And then, openly impatient with it.
By the early 1980s, Ma Bell was to find herself with scarcely a real friend
in the world. Vail's industrial socialism had become hopelessly
out-of-fashion politically. Bell would be punished for that.
And that punishment would fall harshly upon the people of the
telephone community.

#

In 1983, Ma Bell was dismantled by federal court action.
The pieces of Bell are now separate corporate entities.
The core of the company became AT&T Communications,
and also AT&T Industries (formerly Western Electric,
Bell's manufacturing arm). AT&T Bell Labs became Bell
Communications Research, Bellcore. Then there are the
Regional Bell Operating Companies, or RBOCs, pronounced "arbocks."

Bell was a titan and even these regional chunks are gigantic enterprises:
Fortune 50 companies with plenty of wealth and power behind them.
But the clean lines of "One Policy, One System, Universal Service"
have been shattered, apparently forever.

The "One Policy" of the early Reagan Administration was to
shatter a system that smacked of noncompetitive socialism.
Since that time, there has been no real telephone "policy"
on the federal level. Despite the breakup, the remnants
of Bell have never been set free to compete in the open marketplace.

The RBOCs are still very heavily regulated, but not from the top.
Instead, they struggle politically, economically and legally,
in what seems an endless turmoil, in a patchwork of overlapping federal
and state jurisdictions. Increasingly, like other major American corporations,
the RBOCs are becoming multinational, acquiring important commercial interests
in Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific Rim. But this, too, adds to their
legal and political predicament.

The people of what used to be Ma Bell are not happy about their fate.
They feel ill-used. They might have been grudgingly willing to make
a full transition to the free market; to become just companies amid
other companies. But this never happened. Instead, AT&T and the RBOCS
("the Baby Bells") feel themselves wrenched from side to side by state
regulators, by Congress, by the FCC, and especially by the federal court
of Judge Harold Greene, the magistrate who ordered the Bell breakup
and who has been the de facto czar of American telecommunications
ever since 1983.

Bell people feel that they exist in a kind of paralegal limbo today.
They don't understand what's demanded of them. If it's "service,"
why aren't they treated like a public service? And if it's money,
then why aren't they free to compete for it? No one seems to know,
really. Those who claim to know keep changing their minds.
Nobody in authority seems willing to grasp the nettle for once and all.

Telephone people from other countries are amazed by the
American telephone system today. Not that it works so well;
for nowadays even the French telephone system works, more or less.
They are amazed that the American telephone system STILL works
AT ALL, under these strange conditions.

Bell's "One System" of long-distance service is now only about
eighty percent of a system, with the remainder held by Sprint, MCI,
and the midget long-distance companies. Ugly wars over dubious
corporate practices such as "slamming" (an underhanded method
of snitching clients from rivals) break out with some regularity
in the realm of long-distance service. The battle to break Bell's
long-distance monopoly was long and ugly, and since the breakup
the battlefield has not become much prettier. AT&T's famous
shame-and-blame advertisements, which emphasized the shoddy work
and purported ethical shadiness of their competitors, were much
remarked on for their studied psychological cruelty.

There is much bad blood in this industry, and much
long-treasured resentment. AT&T's post-breakup
corporate logo, a striped sphere, is known in the
industry as the "Death Star" (a reference from the movie
Star Wars, in which the "Death Star" was the spherical
high- tech fortress of the harsh-breathing imperial ultra-baddie,
Darth Vader.) Even AT&T employees are less than thrilled
by the Death Star. A popular (though banned) T-shirt among
AT&T employees bears the old-fashioned Bell logo of the Bell System,
plus the newfangled striped sphere, with the before-and-after comments:
"This is your brain--This is your brain on drugs!" AT&T made a very
well-financed and determined effort to break into the personal
computer market; it was disastrous, and telco computer experts
are derisively known by their competitors as "the pole-climbers."
AT&T and the Baby Bell arbocks still seem to have few friends.

Under conditions of sharp commercial competition, a crash like
that of January 15, 1990 was a major embarrassment to AT&T.
It was a direct blow against their much-treasured reputation
for reliability. Within days of the crash AT&T's
Chief Executive Officer, Bob Allen, officially apologized,
in terms of deeply pained humility:

"AT&T had a major service disruption last Monday.
We didn't live up to our own standards of quality,
and we didn't live up to yours. It's as simple as that.
And that's not acceptable to us. Or to you. . . .
We understand how much people have come to depend
upon AT&T service, so our AT&T Bell Laboratories scientists
and our network engineers are doing everything possible
to guard against a recurrence. . . . We know there's no way
to make up for the inconvenience this problem may have caused you."

Mr Allen's "open letter to customers" was printed in lavish ads
all over the country: in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today,
New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune,
Philadelphia Inquirer, San Francisco Chronicle Examiner,
Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Detroit Free Press,
Washington Post, Houston Chronicle, Cleveland Plain Dealer,
Atlanta Journal Constitution, Minneapolis Star Tribune,
St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch, Seattle Times/Post Intelligencer,
Tacoma News Tribune, Miami Herald, Pittsburgh Press,
St. Louis Post Dispatch, Denver Post, Phoenix Republic Gazette
and Tampa Tribune.

In another press release, AT&T went to some pains to suggest
that this "software glitch" might have happened just as easily to MCI,
although, in fact, it hadn't. (MCI's switching software was quite different
from AT&T's--though not necessarily any safer.) AT&T also announced
their plans to offer a rebate of service on Valentine's Day to make up
for the loss during the Crash.

"Every technical resource available, including Bell Labs
scientists and engineers, has been devoted to assuring
it will not occur again," the public was told. They were
further assured that "The chances of a recurrence are small--
a problem of this magnitude never occurred before."

In the meantime, however, police and corporate
security maintained their own suspicions about
"the chances of recurrence" and the real reason why
a "problem of this magnitude" had appeared, seemingly
out of nowhere. Police and security knew for a fact
that hackers of unprecedented sophistication were illegally
entering, and reprogramming, certain digital switching stations.
Rumors of hidden "viruses" and secret "logic bombs"
in the switches ran rampant in the underground,
with much chortling over AT&T's predicament,
and idle speculation over what unsung hacker genius
was responsible for it. Some hackers, including police
informants, were trying hard to finger one another
as the true culprits of the Crash.

Telco people found little comfort in objectivity when
they contemplated these possibilities. It was just too close
to the bone for them; it was embarrassing; it hurt so much,
it was hard even to talk about.

There has always been thieving and misbehavior in the phone system.
There has always been trouble with the rival independents,
and in the local loops. But to have such trouble in the core
of the system, the long-distance switching stations,
is a horrifying affair. To telco people, this is
all the difference between finding roaches in your kitchen
and big horrid sewer-rats in your bedroom.

From the outside, to the average citizen, the telcos
still seem gigantic and impersonal. The American public
seems to regard them as something akin to Soviet apparats.
Even when the telcos do their best corporate-citizen routine,
subsidizing magnet high-schools and sponsoring news-shows
on public television, they seem to win little except public suspicion.

But from the inside, all this looks very different.
There's harsh competition. A legal and political system
that seems baffled and bored, when not actively hostile
to telco interests. There's a loss of morale, a deep sensation
of having somehow lost the upper hand. Technological change
has caused a loss of data and revenue to other, newer forms
of transmission. There's theft, and new forms of theft,
of growing scale and boldness and sophistication.
With all these factors, it was no surprise to see the telcos,
large and small, break out in a litany of bitter complaint.

In late '88 and throughout 1989, telco representatives
grew shrill in their complaints to those few American law
enforcement officials who make it their business to try to
understand what telephone people are talking about.
Telco security officials had discovered the computer-
hacker underground, infiltrated it thoroughly,
and become deeply alarmed at its growing expertise.
Here they had found a target that was not only loathsome
on its face, but clearly ripe for counterattack.

Those bitter rivals: AT&T, MCI and Sprint--and a crowd
of Baby Bells: PacBell, Bell South, Southwestern Bell,
NYNEX, USWest, as well as the Bell research consortium Bellcore,
and the independent long-distance carrier Mid-American--
all were to have their role in the great hacker dragnet of 1990.
After years of being battered and pushed around, the telcos had,
at least in a small way, seized the initiative again.
After years of turmoil, telcos and government officials were
once again to work smoothly in concert in defense of the System.
Optimism blossomed; enthusiasm grew on all sides;
the prospective taste of vengeance was sweet.

#

From the beginning--even before the crackdown had a name--
secrecy was a big problem. There were many good reasons
for secrecy in the hacker crackdown. Hackers and code-thieves
were wily prey, slinking back to their bedrooms and basements
and destroying vital incriminating evidence at the first hint of trouble.
Furthermore, the crimes themselves were heavily technical and difficult
to describe, even to police--much less to the general public.

When such crimes HAD been described intelligibly to the public,
in the past, that very publicity had tended to INCREASE the crimes
enormously. Telco officials, while painfully aware of the vulnerabilities
of their systems, were anxious not to publicize those weaknesses.
Experience showed them that those weaknesses, once discovered,
would be pitilessly exploited by tens of thousands of people--not only
by professional grifters and by underground hackers and phone phreaks,
but by many otherwise more-or-less honest everyday folks, who regarded
stealing service from the faceless, soulless "Phone Company" as a kind of
harmless indoor sport. When it came to protecting their interests,
telcos had long since given up on general public sympathy for
"the Voice with a Smile." Nowadays the telco's "Voice" was
very likely to be a computer's; and the American public
showed much less of the proper respect and gratitude due
the fine public service bequeathed them by Dr. Bell and Mr. Vail.
The more efficient, high-tech, computerized, and impersonal
the telcos became, it seemed, the more they were met by
sullen public resentment and amoral greed.

Telco officials wanted to punish the phone-phreak underground, in as
public and exemplary a manner as possible. They wanted to make dire
examples of the worst offenders, to seize the ringleaders and intimidate
the small fry, to discourage and frighten the wacky hobbyists, and send
the professional grifters to jail. To do all this, publicity was vital.

Yet operational secrecy was even more so. If word got out that
a nationwide crackdown was coming, the hackers might simply vanish;
destroy the evidence, hide their computers, go to earth,
and wait for the campaign to blow over.