o pay. Phone phreaks
don't pay, they steal. It's because it is illegal that it feels like
power, that it gratifies their vanity.

I leave Gail Thackeray with a handshake at the door of her office
building--a vast International-Style office building downtown. The
Sheriff's office is renting part of it. I get the vague impression
that quite a lot of the building is empty--real estate crash.

In a Phoenix sports apparel store, in a downtown mall, I meet the "Sun
Devil" himself. He is the cartoon mascot of Arizona State University,
whose football stadium, "Sundevil," is near the local Secret Service
HQ--hence the name Operation Sundevil. The Sun Devil himself is named
"Sparky." Sparky the Sun Devil is maroon and bright yellow, the school
colors. Sparky brandishes a three-tined yellow pitchfork. He has a
small mustache, pointed ears, a barbed tail, and is dashing forward
jabbing the air with the pitchfork, with an expression of devilish glee.

Phoenix was the home of Operation Sundevil. The Legion of Doom ran a
hacker bulletin board called "The Phoenix Project." An Australian
hacker named "Phoenix" once burrowed through the Internet to attack
Cliff Stoll, then bragged and boasted about it to The New York Times.
This net of coincidence is both odd and meaningless.

The headquarters of the Arizona Attorney General, Gail Thackeray's
former workplace, is on 1275 Washington Avenue. Many of the downtown
streets in Phoenix are named after prominent American presidents:
Washington, Jefferson, Madison....

After dark, all the employees go home to their suburbs. Washington,
Jefferson and Madison--what would be the Phoenix inner city, if there
were an inner city in this sprawling automobile-bred town--become the
haunts of transients and derelicts. The homeless. The sidewalks along
Washington are lined with orange trees. Ripe fallen fruit lies
scattered like croquet balls on the sidewalks and gutters. No one
seems to be eating them. I try a fresh one. It tastes unbearably
bitter.

The Attorney General's office, built in 1981 during the Babbitt
administration, is a long low two-story building of white cement and
wall-sized sheets of curtain-glass. Behind each glass wall is a
lawyer's office, quite open and visible to anyone strolling by. Across
the street is a dour government building labelled simply ECONOMIC
SECURITY, something that has not been in great supply in the American
Southwest lately.

The offices