The Annoyed Man wrote:In all probability - at least for now - no American intelligence agency is likely interested in me, so I'm probably not at risk of a hack from that vector.
Quite true, but never forget Steve Jackson Games of Austin, in the dark days before the feds had a clue.
Basically, 13 year olds with Commodore 64's breached NYNEX, the New York phone company, in 1989 or 1990, and played unlawful games with the phone company. The telco was embarrassed and urged the feds to get to the bottom of it.
The FBI discovered the kids in New York had some contact with a credit card thief in Atlanta, which got the Secret Service involved. The SS wanted to show the FBI who was boss and uncovered an email dialog on a BBS-like system in Illinois with a nefarious guy called Knight Lightning who they found worked for Steve Jackson Games in Austin.
The email chatter was about universal hacking tools that would melt through Unix, VAX, any supercomputer, it would hack your Frigidaire so the light stayed on when the door shut, it would do everything, everywhere, with never a compatibility problem on any computing environment ever envisioned.
Unfortunately, the feds (at that time) were too dumb to tell they had learned about a work of fiction being written at Steve Jackson Games to support a role playing game based on rolling dice. A novel, but they thought it was all real. In fact, Steve Jackson Games had never developed computer software of any kind. Nobody bothered to check.
The Secret Service executed a no-knock warrant on Steve Jackson Games in the wee hours of March 1, 1990. Sam Sparks, the no-nothing judge who signed the warrant, is still on the bench. He may be a nice guy, but he did a stupid, stupid thing in 1990.
When Steve Jackson's employees began drifting in for work, the door was off the hinges, the premises open and unguarded, and every bit of paperwork and all electronic devices were seized.
As they drove away, the Secret Service was still unaware they had confiscated a book. More importantly in court, they had confiscated the computer hosting a BBS.
Mitch Kapor, the creator of Lotus123, and John Perry Barlow, a Grateful Dead lyricist, teamed up to create the Electronic Frontier Foundation to fight on Steve Jackson's behalf.
They won what I understand is the first successful civil rights lawsuit against the Secret Service, awarding $1,000 per each of the 300 BBS users who lost their place to peacefully assemble under the First Amendment. They couldn't reconnect since they used, as is done here, handles instead of names.
Steve Jackson was on Good Morning America, years after his raid. He'd nearly been bankrupted, and when his computers were returned they were bludgeoned into uselessness. The evidence had been abused, dropped, and mistreated in an extreme way. Nothing in the tale is a federal success story.
I've spoken to FBI agents a few times since 1990. These days the agents tasked with cyber issues are like systems administrators. They know lex from yacc, and that's great. But it's disturbing that I never spoke to one who had ever heard of the Steve Jackson Games fiasco. Not one.
A federal agent involved with communication crimes and not knowing the history of Steve Jackson's raid is like living in Texas and not knowing about the Alamo.
For more information, about Steve Jackson Games, not historic Spanish missions, read The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier by Bruce Sterling - in the public domain to raise alarm at the author's insistence,
http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html