back to the early 80s, use a sweeping language that targets
computers, most anything attached to a computer, most anything used to
operate a computer--most anything that remotely resembles a
computer--plus most any and all written documents surrounding it.
Computer-crime investigators have strongly urged agents to seize the
works.

In this sense, Operation Sundevil appears to have been a complete
success. Boards went down all over America, and were shipped en masse
to the computer investigation lab of the Secret Service, in Washington
DC, along with the 23,000 floppy disks and unknown quantities of
printed material.

But the seizure of twenty-five boards, and the multi-megabyte mountains
of possibly useful evidence contained in these boards (and in their
owners' other computers, also out the door), were far from the only
motives for Operation Sundevil. An unprecedented action of great
ambition and size, Sundevil's motives can only be described as
political. It was a public-relations effort, meant to pass certain
messages, meant to make certain situations clear: both in the mind of
the general public, and in the minds of various constituencies of the
electronic community.

First--and this motivation was vital--a "message" would be sent from
law enforcement to the digital underground. This very message was
recited in so many words by Garry M. Jenkins, the Assistant Director of
the US Secret Service, at the Sundevil press conference in Phoenix on
May 9, 1990, immediately after the raids. In brief, hackers were
mistaken in their foolish belief that they could hide behind the
"relative anonymity of their computer terminals." On the contrary,
they should fully understand that state and federal cops were actively
patrolling the beat in cyberspace--that they were on the watch
everywhere, even in those sleazy and secretive dens of cybernetic vice,
the underground boards.

This is not an unusual message for police to publicly convey to crooks.
The message is a standard message; only the context is new.

In this respect, the Sundevil raids were the digital equivalent of the
standard vice-squad crackdown on massage parlors, porno bookstores,
head-shops, or floating crap-games. There may be few or no arrests in
a raid of this sort; no convictions, no trials, no interrogations. In
cases of this sort, police may well walk out the door with many pounds
of sleazy magazines, X-rated videotapes, sex toys, gambling equipmen