derstandings. Nevertheless, 1989 scarcely
seemed the time for half-measures. If the police and Secret Service
themselves were not operationally secure, then how could they
reasonably demand measures of security from private enterprise? At
least, the inconvenience made people aware of the seriousness of the
threat.

If there was a final spur needed to get the police off the dime, it
came in the realization that the emergency 911 system was vulnerable.
The 911 system has its own specialized software, but it is run on the
same digital switching systems as the rest of the telephone network.
911 is not physically different from normal telephony. But it is
certainly culturally different, because this is the area of telephonic
cyberspace reserved for the police and emergency services.

Your average policeman may not know much about hackers or
phone-phreaks. Computer people are weird; even computer COPS are
rather weird; the stuff they do is hard to figure out. But a threat to
the 911 system is anything but an abstract threat. If the 911 system
goes, people can die.

Imagine being in a car-wreck, staggering to a phone-booth, punching 911
and hearing "Tina" pick up the phone-sex line somewhere in New York!
The situation's no longer comical, somehow.

And was it possible? No question. Hackers had attacked 911 systems
before. Phreaks can max-out 911 systems just by siccing a bunch of
computer-modems on them in tandem, dialling them over and over until
they clog. That's very crude and low-tech, but it's still a serious
business.

The time had come for action. It was time to take stern measures with
the underground. It was time to start picking up the dropped threads,
the loose edges, the bits of braggadocio here and there; it was time to
get on the stick and start putting serious casework together. Hackers
weren't "invisible." They THOUGHT they were invisible; but the truth
was, they had just been tolerated too long.

Under sustained police attention in the summer of '89, the digital
underground began to unravel as never before.

The first big break in the case came very early on: July 1989, the
following month. The perpetrator of the "Tina" switch was caught, and
confessed. His name was "Fry Guy," a 16-year-old in Indiana. Fry Guy
had been a very wicked young man.

Fry Guy had earned his handle from a stunt involving French fries. Fry
Guy had filched the log-in of a local MacDonald's manager and ha