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APPROACHING ZERO

called the Dark Side. The local police referred his case to the District Attorney for prosecution, who in turn notified the Secret Service.

No one was quite sure what to do with The Dictator – but then someone had the bright idea of running his board as a sting. The Dictator agreed to co-operate. In return for immunity from prosecution, he continued to operate the Dark Side as a Secret Service tool for collecting hacker lore and gossip, and for monitoring the progress of the Phoenix Project. That the scheme to investigate the Phoenix Project was based in the city of Phoenix was entirely coincidental: it was established there solely because the local office of the Secret Service was willing to run an undercover operation.

Dubbed Operation Sundevil, after the Arizona State University mascot, it was officially described as ‘a Secret Service investigation into financial crimes (fraud, credit-card fraud, communications service losses, etc.) led by the Phoenix Secret Service with task force participation by the Arizona US Attorney’s office and the Arizona Attorney General’s office’. The Arizona assistant attorney general assigned to the case was Gail Thackeray, an energetic and combative attorney who would become the focal point for press coverage of the operation.

But the impetus for Operation Sundevil, the Dark Side sting, only provided the authorities with a limited insight into the computer underworld. Reams of gossip and electronic messages were collected, but investigators were still no nearer to getting a fix on the extent of hacking or the identities of the key players. They decided on another trick: they enlisted The Dictator’s help in penetrating the forthcoming hacker convention, SummerCon ’88, the event that would launch the Phoenix Project.

Less a conference and more a hacker party, SummerCon ’88 was held in a dingy motel just off the flight path to the nearby airport. Delegates, usually adolescent hackers, popped in and out of one another’s rooms to gossip and play with computers.

The Dictator stayed in a special room, courtesy of the Secret Service. Agents next door filmed the proceedings in the room through a two-way mirror, recording over 150 hours of video-tape. Just what was captured in this film has never been revealed (the Secret Service has declined all requests to view the tapes), but cynics have suggested

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