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

boards -- but there is no question that some
underground boards carried "carding" traffic,
generally exchanged through private mail.

Underground boards also carried handy
programs for "scanning" telephone codes and
raiding credit card companies, as well as the usual
obnoxious galaxy of pirated software, cracked
passwords, blue-box schematics, intrusion manuals,
anarchy files, porn files, and so forth.

But besides their nuisance potential for the
spread of illicit knowledge, bulletin boards have
another vitally interesting aspect for the professional
investigator. Bulletin boards are cram-full of
*evidence.* All that busy trading of electronic mail,
all those hacker boasts, brags and struts, even the
stolen codes and cards, can be neat, electronic, real-
time recordings of criminal activity.

As an investigator, when you seize a pirate
board, you have scored a coup as effective as
tapping phones or intercepting mail. However, you
have not actually tapped a phone or intercepted a
letter. The rules of evidence regarding phone-taps
and mail interceptions are old, stern and well-
understood by police, prosecutors and defense
attorneys alike. The rules of evidence regarding
boards are new, waffling, and understood by nobody
at all.

Sundevil was the largest crackdown on boards in
world history. On May 7, 8, and 9, 1990, about forty-
two computer systems were seized. Of those forty-
two computers, about twenty-five actually were
running boards. (The vagueness of this estimate is
attributable to the vagueness of (a) what a
"computer system" is, and (b) what it actually means
to "run a board" with one -- or with two computers, or
with three.)

About twenty-five boards vanished into police
custody in May 1990. As we have seen, there are an
estimated 30,000 boards in America today. If we
assume that one board in a hundred is up to no good
with codes and cards (which rather flatters the
honesty of the board-using community), then that
would leave 2,975 outlaw boards untouched by
Sundevil. Sundevil seized about one tenth of one
percent of all computer bulletin boards in America.