t,
baggies of marijuana....

Of course, if something truly horrendous is discovered by the raiders,
there will be arrests and prosecutions. Far more likely, however,
there will simply be a brief but sharp disruption of the closed and
secretive world of the nogoodniks. There will be "street hassle."
"Heat." "Deterrence." And, of course, the immediate loss of the
seized goods. It is very unlikely that any of this seized material
will ever be returned. Whether charged or not, whether convicted or
not, the perpetrators will almost surely lack the nerve ever to ask for
this stuff to be given back.

Arrests and trials--putting people in jail--may involve all kinds of
formal legalities; but dealing with the justice system is far from the
only task of police. Police do not simply arrest people. They don't
simply put people in jail. That is not how the police perceive their
jobs. Police "protect and serve." Police "keep the peace," they "keep
public order." Like other forms of public relations, keeping public
order is not an exact science. Keeping public order is something of an
art-form.

If a group of tough-looking teenage hoodlums was loitering on a
street-corner, no one would be surprised to see a street-cop arrive and
sternly order them to "break it up." On the contrary, the surprise
would come if one of these ne'er-do-wells stepped briskly into a
phone-booth, called a civil rights lawyer, and instituted a civil suit
in defense of his Constitutional rights of free speech and free
assembly. But something much along this line was one of the many
anomolous outcomes of the Hacker Crackdown.

Sundevil also carried useful "messages" for other constituents of the
electronic community. These messages may not have been read aloud from
the Phoenix podium in front of the press corps, but there was little
mistaking their meaning. There was a message of reassurance for the
primary victims of coding and carding: the telcos, and the credit
companies. Sundevil was greeted with joy by the security officers of
the electronic business community. After years of high-tech harassment
and spiralling revenue losses, their complaints of rampant outlawry
were being taken seriously by law enforcement. No more head-scratching
or dismissive shrugs; no more feeble excuses about "lack of
computer-trained officers" or the low priority of "victimless"
white-collar telecommunication crimes.

Computer-crime experts have long believed