, though. For one
thing, the confusion was abetted by the Washington office of the Secret
Service, who responded to Freedom of Information Act requests on
"Operation Sundevil" by referring investigators to the publicly known
cases of Knight Lightning and the Atlanta Three. And "Sundevil" was
certainly the largest aspect of the Crackdown, the most deliberate and
the best-organized. As a crackdown on electronic fraud, "Sundevil"
lacked the frantic pace of the war on the Legion of Doom; on the
contrary, Sundevil's targets were picked out with cool deliberation
over an elaborate investigation lasting two full years.

And once again the targets were bulletin board systems.

Boards can be powerful aids to organized fraud. Underground boards
carry lively, extensive, detailed, and often quite flagrant
"discussions" of lawbreaking techniques and lawbreaking activities.
"Discussing" crime in the abstract, or "discussing" the particulars of
criminal cases, is not illegal--but there are stern state and federal
laws against coldbloodedly conspiring in groups in order to commit
crimes.

In the eyes of police, people who actively conspire to break the law
are not regarded as "clubs," "debating salons," "users' groups," or
"free speech advocates." Rather, such people tend to find themselves
formally indicted by prosecutors as "gangs," "racketeers," "corrupt
organizations" and "organized crime figures."

What's more, the illicit data contained on outlaw boards goes well
beyond mere acts of speech and/or possible criminal conspiracy. As we
have seen, it was common practice in the digital underground to post
purloined telephone codes on boards, for any phreak or hacker who cared
to abuse them. Is posting digital booty of this sort supposed to be
protected by the First Amendment? Hardly--though the issue, like most
issues in cyberspace, is not entirely resolved. Some theorists argue
that to merely RECITE a number publicly is not illegal--only its USE is
illegal. But anti-hacker police point out that magazines and
newspapers (more traditional forms of free expression) never publish
stolen telephone codes (even though this might well raise their
circulation).

Stolen credit card numbers, being riskier and more valuable, were less
often publicly posted on boards--but there is no question that some
underground boards carried "carding" traffic, generally exchanged
through private mail.

Underground boards also carried handy pr