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and every program, looking for a few lines of code that could portend disruption.

The threat to the phone system was duly notified to the United States Secret Service. The agency, part of the Treasury Department, had been assigned national responsibility for computer crime in 1984, after a long bureaucratic battle with the FBI. The limits of its responsibilities and those of the FBI had never been strictly defined; there were always areas where the two national police forces overlapped.

The Secret Service was already in the midst of an in-depth investigation of the computer underworld. In 1988 the agency had become aware of a new proposal, one that appeared to signal an escalation in hacker activity. Called the Phoenix Project, it was heralded in the hacker bulletin PHRACK as ‘a new beginning to the phreak/hack community where knowledge is the key to the future and is FREE. The telecommunications and security industries can no longer withhold the right to learn, the right to explore, or the right to have knowledge’. The Phoenix Project, it was announced, would be launched at SummerCon '88 – the annual hacker conference, to be held in a hotel near the airport in St Louis.

The Phoenix was the legendary bird which rose from its own ashes after a fiery death. To the hackers it was just another project for their 1988 convention. But to the telephone companies and the Secret Service, the Phoenix Project portended greater disruption – as well as the theft of industrial or defence secrets. To the authorities, the implications of ‘the right to learn, the right to explore . . . the right to have knowledge’ appeared more sinister than liberating. The article was published just as the Secret Service was becoming aware of an upsurge in hacker activity, principally telecommunications fraud – in other words, the use of voice or data communications without charge. The increase appeared linked to the hacker wars, then spluttering inconclusively along.

Coincidentally, in May 1988, police in the city of Phoenix, Arizona, raided the home of a suspected local hacker known as The Dictator. The young man was the system operator of a small-time pirate board

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