Lincoln agreed that this
seemed a good idea, and, with a terrible irony, Abraham Lincoln was
shot that very night by John Wilkes Booth.

The Secret Service originally had nothing to do with protecting
Presidents. They didn't take this on as a regular assignment until
after the Garfield assassination in 1881. And they didn't get any
Congressional money for it until President McKinley was shot in 1901.
The Service was originally designed for one purpose: destroying
counterfeiters.

#

There are interesting parallels between the Service's
nineteenth-century entry into counterfeiting, and America's
twentieth-century entry into computer-crime.

In 1865, America's paper currency was a terrible muddle. Security was
drastically bad. Currency was printed on the spot by local banks in
literally hundreds of different designs. No one really knew what the
heck a dollar bill was supposed to look like. Bogus bills passed
easily. If some joker told you that a one-dollar bill from the
Railroad Bank of Lowell, Massachusetts had a woman leaning on a shield,
with a locomotive, a cornucopia, a compass, various agricultural
implements, a railroad bridge, and some factories, then you pretty much
had to take his word for it. (And in fact he was telling the truth!)

SIXTEEN HUNDRED local American banks designed and printed their own
paper currency, and there were no general standards for security. Like
a badly guarded node in a computer network, badly designed bills were
easy to fake, and posed a security hazard for the entire monetary
system.

No one knew the exact extent of the threat to the currency. There were
panicked estimates that as much as a third of the entire national
currency was faked. Counterfeiters--known as "boodlers" in the
underground slang of the time--were mostly technically skilled
printers who had gone to the bad. Many had once worked printing
legitimate currency. Boodlers operated in rings and gangs. Technical
experts engraved the bogus plates--commonly in basements in New York
City. Smooth confidence men passed large wads of high-quality,
high-denomination fakes, including the really sophisticated
stuff--government bonds, stock certificates, and railway shares.
Cheaper, botched fakes were sold or sharewared to low-level gangs of
boodler wannabes. (The really cheesy lowlife boodlers merely upgraded
real bills by altering face values, changing ones to fives, tens to
hundreds, and so on.)

The te