"Hacker Crackdown.Part 3 LAW AND ORDER" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

investigators to the publicly known cases of Knight
Lightning and the Atlanta Three. And "Sundevil"
was certainly the largest aspect of the Crackdown,
the most deliberate and the best-organized. As a
crackdown on electronic fraud, "Sundevil" lacked
the frantic pace of the war on the Legion of Doom;
on the contrary, Sundevil's targets were picked out
with cool deliberation over an elaborate
investigation lasting two full years.

And once again the targets were bulletin board
systems.

Boards can be powerful aids to organized fraud.
Underground boards carry lively, extensive,
detailed, and often quite flagrant "discussions" of
lawbreaking techniques and lawbreaking activities.
"Discussing" crime in the abstract, or "discussing"
the particulars of criminal cases, is not illegal -- but
there are stern state and federal laws against
coldbloodedly conspiring in groups in order to
commit crimes.

In the eyes of police, people who actively
conspire to break the law are not regarded as
"clubs," "debating salons," "users' groups," or "free
speech advocates." Rather, such people tend to
find themselves formally indicted by prosecutors as
"gangs," "racketeers," "corrupt organizations" and
"organized crime figures."

What's more, the illicit data contained on
outlaw boards goes well beyond mere acts of speech
and/or possible criminal conspiracy. As we have
seen, it was common practice in the digital
underground to post purloined telephone codes on
boards, for any phreak or hacker who cared to abuse
them. Is posting digital booty of this sort supposed
to be protected by the First Amendment? Hardly --
though the issue, like most issues in cyberspace, is
not entirely resolved. Some theorists argue that to
merely *recite* a number publicly is not illegal --
only its *use* is illegal. But anti-hacker police point
out that magazines and newspapers (more
traditional forms of free expression) never publish
stolen telephone codes (even though this might well
raise their circulation).

Stolen credit card numbers, being riskier and
more valuable, were less often publicly posted on