t, intended to revive the
digital underground to what Mentor considered the full flower of the
early 80s. The Phoenix board would also boldly bring elite hackers
face-to-face with the telco "opposition." On "Phoenix," America's
cleverest hackers would supposedly shame the telco squareheads out of
their stick-in-the-mud attitudes, and perhaps convince them that the
Legion of Doom elite were really an all-right crew. The premiere of
"Phoenix Project" was heavily trumpeted by Phrack,and "Phoenix Project"
carried a complete run of Phrack issues, including the E911 Document as
Phrack had published it.

Phoenix Project was only one of many--possibly hundreds--of nodes and
boards all over America that were in guilty possession of the E911
Document. But Phoenix was an outright, unashamed Legion of Doom board.
Under Mentor's guidance, it was flaunting itself in the face of telco
security personnel. Worse yet, it was actively trying to WIN THEM OVER
as sympathizers for the digital underground elite. "Phoenix" had no
cards or codes on it. Its hacker elite considered Phoenix at least
technically legal. But Phoenix was a corrupting influence, where
hacker anarchy was eating away like digital acid at the underbelly of
corporate propriety.

The Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force now prepared to descend
upon Austin, Texas.

Oddly, not one but TWO trails of the Task Force's investigation led
toward Austin. The city of Austin, like Atlanta, had made itself a
bulwark of the Sunbelt's Information Age, with a strong university
research presence, and a number of cutting-edge electronics companies,
including Motorola, Dell, CompuAdd, IBM, Sematech and MCC.

Where computing machinery went, hackers generally followed. Austin
boasted not only "Phoenix Project," currently LoD's most flagrant
underground board, but a number of UNIX nodes.

One of these nodes was "Elephant," run by a UNIX consultant named
Robert Izenberg. Izenberg, in search of a relaxed Southern lifestyle
and a lowered cost-of-living, had recently migrated to Austin from New
Jersey. In New Jersey, Izenberg had worked for an independent
contracting company, programming UNIX code for AT&T itself. "Terminus"
had been a frequent user on Izenberg's privately owned Elephant node.

Having interviewed Terminus and examined the records on Netsys, the
Chicago Task Force were now convinced that they had discovered an
underground gang of UNIX software pirates, w