Gary Gygax on Something Positive

[Vargo]

<mode=pedantic>Bah, it's CRACKER, not HACKER. </mode>

Crackers built the trojan horse.

Hackers sent Apollo 11 to the moon, and got Apollo 13 back with everybody alive.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

However, that book goes into detail about the operation Sundevil of 1990 by the SS (Secret Services). Long story short, they were trying to get some guys of LOD (Legion of Doom, a hacker gang) and mistakenly busted GURPS Cyberpunk. SJG was the one entity the most thoroughly attacked by Sundevil, with little damage to real hackers. From then on, the SS got a reputation of being morons that don't know how to deal with the hacker problem properly.

I have yet to learn that they improved in that field...

Somewhere out there is a clip from the news in Austin Texas with the agent in charge holding up GURPS Cyberpunk (upside down. ) and stating that 'This is a handbook for computer crime!' If anybody can find it it is pretty darned funny... except that it very nearly put SJG out of business. Fortunately their creditors thought that having your inventory confiscated by the SS was a reasonable reason for falling behind...

The Auld Grump

 

[wocky]

According to this article by Bruce Sterling himself, the truth about the SJG affair is not as simple as "Silly CIA takes game for hacking manual". That's just the usual misconception.

 

[Trainz]

Here's a chat paste from this site.

Steve Jackson's top 10 on the event:

• 10. We're a computer game company. No we're not. None of our games are computer games. We use computers to write the games, like every other publisher in the '90s. We run an Internet access service. And the game that was seized, GURPS Cyberpunk, was about computers. But we're not a computer game company.
  
  9. GURPS Cyberpunk is a computer game. No it's not. Aieeeeee! Not at all! It's a role-playing game. It is not played on a computer. It's played on a table, with dice.
  
  8. We're out of business. No we're not. It's been reported that we are bankrupt, or filing for bankruptcy. The raid cost us a lot of money, and almost closed us - we did have to lay off half our staff shortly after the raid ... but we survived.
  
  7. We were raided by the FBI. No we weren't. We were raided by the US Secret Service. The FBI had nothing to do with it. (In fact, when Bill Cook, the assistant US attorney named in our suit, was doing his "research," he talked to the FBI. They told him he didn't have a case. We have this from FBI sources!)
  
  6. Some of our staff members were arrested by the Secret Service and charged with hacking. No, they weren't. No member of our staff was arrested, indicted, or charged. Nobody was even questioned after the day of the raid. We were not the defendants in the suit. We were the plaintiffs! (So there, scamp!!)
  
  5. This was part of Operation Sun Devil. No it wasn't. Sun Devil was a totally separate project, aimed at credit card fraud. Because it had a neat name, it got a lot of headlines. Since computers were involved, some reporters got the two confused. The Secret Service helped the confusion along by refusing to comment on what was or wasn't part of Sun Devil. Sun Devil was not a "hacker" investigation. So says Gail Thackeray, who was its spearhead.
  
  4. The raid was after GURPS Cyberpunk. We all thought so in the beginning, but no. The Secret Service suspected the book's author of hacking, using his computer at home. They had nothing connecting his alleged misdeeds with his book or our office, but they raided us anyway and took a lot of things. One of the things they took was the GURPS Cyberpunk manuscript. Their agents were very critical of it, and on March 2 in their office, one of them called it a "handbook for computer crime". Since their warrant was sealed, and they wouldn't comment, our best guess was that they were trying to suppress the book. They did suppress it, but apparently it was through bureaucratic inertia and stonewalling rather than because it was a target of the raid. Unfortunately, they let us believe for 7 months (until their warrant affidavit was unsealed) that they had been after the books.
  
  3. There was a hacker threat to sabotage the 911 system. No there wasn't. This story has been cynically spread by phone company employees (who know better) and by Secret Service spokesmen (who probably believe it, because they still don't understand any of this). They tried to use this story to panic the media, to try to justify the illegal things they've done and the huge amount of money they've spent. There was no way this file could be used to hurt the 911 system, even if anybody had wanted to. To say otherwise shows an incredible ignorance of the facts. It's as though a banker claimed "This criminal made an illegal copy of the list of our Board of Directors. He can use that to break into our vault." (How detailed was the book? Quite detailed, about imaginary technology. It was a science fiction game! The "real" hacking information was less detailed than you might find in a Time story ....) What happened was this: A student got access to a phone company computer and copied a text file - not a program. This file was nothing but administrative information, and it was publicly available elsewhere. Bell South tried to value it at US$79,000, but in court they admitted that they sold copies for under US$20.
  
  2. We have an employee named Lloyd Blankenship. We had an employee named Lloyd Blankenship. (And he's now gone back to school.)
  
  1. And the Number One "false fact" ever reported about this story ... That we're the second biggest game company. Don't we wish!

Apparently I was wrong saying SJG's SS bust was part of Sundevil. Sundevil and SJG's bust both happened on the same year though, from the same entity (SS), so I'm convinced it is somewhat connected. When he says "The Secret Service helped the confusion along by refusing to comment on what was or wasn't part of Sun Devil. Sun Devil was not a "hacker" investigation. So says Gail Thackeray, who was its spearhead.", that makes me think it's related.

In any case, the SS were very confused in those years about their computer crimes investigations, so who knows...

 

[Trainz]

According to this article by Bruce Sterling himself, the truth about the SJG affair is not as simple as "Silly CIA takes game for hacking manual". That's just the usual misconception.

From that article: "in the course of research on an upcoming nonfiction book,
THE HACKER CRACKDOWN"

He wrote that before the Hacker Crackdown, which I provided the link to in a poste above, so it's safe to assume that the info in the book itself is more "recent" and thus possibly more "accurate"...

 

[BSF]

I was working at Wargames West here in Albuquerque when the Steve Jackson thing went down. It was a strain on Steve Jackson Games. From the scattered details I remember, the Secret Service decided to execute the search warrant to SJ Games even though the warrant was for a different address.

The Secret Service seized property, including the BBS, with intent to search each emailbox. At the time, it was arguable that they would need a search warrant for each user of the system to do so. (I am not up on current laws.)

In the end, the Secret Service tried to argue that it was a simple mistake. The judge disagreed. He seemed to expect a higher standard from the Secret Service. There is plenty of material to read on the Net about the case, but I recall my frustration at the time. The Secret Service almost put a book/game publisher out of business. They should have done a better job of getting the facts first.

 

[Trainz]

Fascinating testimony BSF. Thanks.

It does reek of "witch-hunt", doesn't it ?