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included him on the Atlanta Three's DNR request. The inclusion was mostly a matter of convenience, but the agents had noted a geographic coincidence that intrigued them: Fry Guy lived in Indiana, as did the recipient of the anonymous telephone call warning of the computer bombs in the switches; Fry Guy also knew his way around BellSouth, where one of the bombs had been planted - indeed, other hackers regarded it as his 'sphere of influence'.

In mid-July the Secret Service recorded Fry Guy charging $500 to a stolen credit card number. With that piece of evidence (previous telco monitors were not court-approved and therefore could not be used as evidence), the Secret Service was also able to include Fry Guy in the Atlanta Three search warrant.

The house in Elwood, Indiana, was raided the same day the three addresses in Atlanta were busted. Fry Guy awoke from his summer-long haze to find he was suspected of the two Florida incidents, the anonymous telephone call to Indiana Bell's security manager, planting the computer bombs and credit card fraud.

Hackers are often victims of their own hype. The LoD was the principal target of the crackdown because it promoted itself as the biggest and meanest gang in Cyberspace - and because the authorities believed the legends.

The computer underworld is a hall of mirrors. Reality becomes bent, the truth shrunken. Perceptions of the underworld are equally misshapen. The authorities who organized Operation Sundevil and its related investigations believed they were dealing with a nation-wide conspiracy involving some $50 million in telecommunications fraud alone. And that, they said, 'was only the tip of the iceberg'.

What they got in the end, notwithstanding the Atlanta Three's guilty pleas, were some relatively minor convictions. After the barrage of criticism from John Perry Barlow's Electronic Frontier Foundation, the investigators began to pull back. The Phoenix officials, like Gail Thackeray, are now keen to distance both themselves and Operation Sundevil from the other anti-hacker actions that year. The wilder suggestions - that the AT&T incident had been caused by Acid Phreak, or anyone else; that hackers were looting banks; that hospital records were being altered, and patients put at risk - have

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