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CRACKDOWN

that it may be quite the most boring movie ever made – a six-day epic featuring kids drinking Coke, eating pizzas and gossiping.

None the less, the intelligence gathered at SummerCon and through Dark Side convinced the Feds they were dealing with a national conspiracy, a fraud that was costing the country upwards of $50 million in telecom costs alone. And that, said Gail Thackeray, was ‘just the tip of the iceberg’.

Then the Phoenix Secret Service had a lucky break.

In May 1989, just a year after busting The Dictator, police investigating the abuse of a Phoenix hotel’s private telephone exchange stumbled across another hacker. He was no small-time operator. Questioned by the Secret Service, he admitted he had access to Black ICE. He wasn’t an LoD member, he added; he was just one of the few non-Legionnaires privileged to use the gang’s favoured board. Under pressure from the Secret Service, who reminded him of the penalties for hacking into a private telephone exchange and stealing services, he too agreed to become an informant. He would be referred to only as Hacker #1.

A month later the Secret Service learned about the anonymous call to the Indiana Bell security manager, and the threat to the telephone switches. At this stage there was as yet no evidence of an attack. Similar hoax calls are received every day by the phone companies. But then, on 3 July, four days after the anonymous call, the Bellcore task force discovered this wasn’t just an idle threat. Three computer bombs were found, just hours before the Fourth of July public holiday. The bombs, as the caller had warned, were spread across the country: one was discovered in a switch in BellSouth in Atlanta, Georgia; another in Mountain Bell in Denver, Colorado; and the third in Newark, New Jersey. The devices were described by the Secret Service as ‘time bomb[s] . . . which if left undetected, would have compromised these computers (for an unknown period) and effectively shut down the compromised computer telephone systems in Denver, Atlanta and New Jersey’. In plainer language, had the bombs not been discovered and defused, they could have created local disasters. If not quite the nation-wide nightmare scenario, it was too close for the authorities.

In the Secret Service offices in Phoenix, the interrogation of Hacker

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