s invade their
sanctum. Statistically speaking, the most dangerous thing a policeman
can do is to enter someone's home. (The second most dangerous thing is
to stop a car in traffic.) People have guns in their homes. More cops
are hurt in homes than are ever hurt in biker bars or massage parlors.

But in any case, no one was hurt during Sundevil, or indeed during any
part of the Hacker Crackdown.

Nor were there any allegations of any physical mistreatment of a
suspect. Guns were pointed, interrogations were sharp and prolonged;
but no one in 1990 claimed any act of brutality by any crackdown raider.

In addition to the forty or so computers, Sundevil reaped floppy disks
in particularly great abundance--an estimated 23,000 of them, which
naturally included every manner of illegitimate data: pirated games,
stolen codes, hot credit card numbers, the complete text and software
of entire pirate bulletin-boards. These floppy disks, which remain in
police custody today, offer a gigantic, almost embarrassingly rich
source of possible criminal indictments. These 23,000 floppy disks
also include a thus-far unknown quantity of legitimate computer games,
legitimate software, purportedly "private" mail from boards, business
records, and personal correspondence of all kinds.

Standard computer-crime search warrants lay great emphasis on seizing
written documents as well as computers--specifically including
photocopies, computer printouts, telephone bills, address books, logs,
notes, memoranda and correspondence. In practice, this has meant that
diaries, gaming magazines, software documentation, nonfiction books on
hacking and computer security, sometimes even science fiction novels,
have all vanished out the door in police custody. A wide variety of
electronic items have been known to vanish as well, including
telephones, televisions, answering machines, Sony Walkmans, desktop
printers, compact disks, and audiotapes.

No fewer than 150 members of the Secret Service were sent into the
field during Sundevil. They were commonly accompanied by squads of
local and/or state police. Most of these officers--especially the
locals--had never been on an anti-hacker raid before. (This was one
good reason, in fact, why so many of them were invited along in the
first place.) Also, the presence of a uniformed police officer assures
the raidees that the people entering their homes are, in fact, police.
Secret Service agents wear pl