witching-stations could be RE-PROGRAMMED. People
seemed utterly amazed that anyone could have the nerve. Of course
these switching stations were "computers," and everybody knew hackers
liked to "break into computers:" but telephone people's computers were
DIFFERENT from normal people's computers.

The exact reason WHY these computers were "different" was rather
ill-defined. It certainly wasn't the extent of their security. The
security on these BellSouth computers was lousy; the AIMSX computers,
for instance, didn't even have passwords. But there was no question
that BellSouth strongly FELT that their computers were very different
indeed. And if there were some criminals out there who had not gotten
that message, BellSouth was determined to see that message taught.

After all, a 5ESS switching station was no mere bookkeeping system for
some local chain of florists. Public service depended on these
stations. Public SAFETY depended on these stations.

And hackers, lurking in there call-forwarding or ReMobbing, could spy
on anybody in the local area! They could spy on telco officials! They
could spy on police stations! They could spy on local offices of the
Secret Service....

In 1989, electronic cops and hacker-trackers began using
scrambler-phones and secured lines. It only made sense. There was no
telling who was into those systems. Whoever they were, they sounded
scary. This was some new level of antisocial daring. Could be West
German hackers, in the pay of the KGB. That too had seemed a weird and
farfetched notion, until Clifford Stoll had poked and prodded a
sluggish Washington law-enforcement bureaucracy into investigating a
computer intrusion that turned out to be exactly that--HACKERS, IN THE
PAY OF THE KGB! Stoll, the systems manager for an Internet lab in
Berkeley California, had ended up on the front page of the New Nork
Times, proclaimed a national hero in the first true story of
international computer espionage. Stoll's counterspy efforts, which he
related in a bestselling book, The Cuckoo's Egg, in 1989, had
established the credibility of 'hacking' as a possible threat to
national security. The United States Secret Service doesn't mess
around when it suspects a possible action by a foreign intelligence
apparat.

The Secret Service scrambler-phones and secured lines put a tremendous
kink in law enforcement's ability to operate freely; to get the word
out, cooperate, prevent misun