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

Seen objectively, this is something less than a
comprehensive assault. In 1990, Sundevil's
organizers -- the team at the Phoenix Secret Service
office, and the Arizona Attorney General's office --
had a list of at least *three hundred* boards that
they considered fully deserving of search and
seizure warrants. The twenty-five boards actually
seized were merely among the most obvious and
egregious of this much larger list of candidates. All
these boards had been examined beforehand --
either by informants, who had passed printouts to
the Secret Service, or by Secret Service agents
themselves, who not only come equipped with
modems but know how to use them.

There were a number of motives for Sundevil.
First, it offered a chance to get ahead of the curve on
wire-fraud crimes. Tracking back credit-card ripoffs
to their perpetrators can be appallingly difficult. If
these miscreants have any kind of electronic
sophistication, they can snarl their tracks through
the phone network into a mind-boggling,
untraceable mess, while still managing to "reach out
and rob someone." Boards, however, full of brags
and boasts, codes and cards, offer evidence in the
handy congealed form.

Seizures themselves -- the mere physical
removal of machines -- tends to take the pressure
off. During Sundevil, a large number of code kids,
warez d00dz, and credit card thieves would be
deprived of those boards -- their means of
community and conspiracy -- in one swift blow. As
for the sysops themselves (commonly among the
boldest offenders) they would be directly stripped of
their computer equipment, and rendered digitally
mute and blind.

And this aspect of Sundevil was carried out with
great success. Sundevil seems to have been a
complete tactical surprise -- unlike the fragmentary
and continuing seizures of the war on the Legion of
Doom, Sundevil was precisely timed and utterly
overwhelming. At least forty "computers" were
seized during May 7, 8 and 9, 1990, in Cincinnati,
Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Phoenix,
Tucson, Richmond, San Diego, San Jose, Pittsburgh
and San Francisco. Some cities saw multiple raids,
such as the five separate raids in the New York City
environs. Plano, Texas (essentially a suburb of the