cide guy called in on a "hacker" case. From
the word "hacker," he naturally assumed he was on the trail of a
knife-wielding marauder, and went to the computer center expecting
blood and a body. When he finally figured out what was happening there
(after loudly demanding, in vain, that the programmers "speak
English"), he called headquarters and told them he was clueless about
computers. They told him nobody else knew diddly either, and to get
the hell back to work.

So, he said, he had proceeded by comparisons. By analogy. By
metaphor. "Somebody broke in to your computer, huh?" Breaking and
entering; I can understand that. How'd he get in? "Over the
phone-lines." Harassing phone-calls, I can understand that! What we
need here is a tap and a trace!

It worked. It was better than nothing. And it worked a lot faster
when he got hold of another cop who'd done something similar. And then
the two of them got another, and another, and pretty soon the Colluquy
was a happening thing. It helped a lot that everybody seemed to know
Carlton Fitzpatrick, the data-processing trainer in Glynco.

The ice broke big-time in Memphis in '86. The Colluquy had attracted a
bunch of new guys--Secret Service, FBI, military, other feds, heavy
guys. Nobody wanted to tell anybody anything. They suspected that if
word got back to the home office they'd all be fired. They passed an
uncomfortably guarded afternoon.

The formalities got them nowhere. But after the formal session was
over, the organizers brought in a case of beer. As soon as the
participants knocked it off with the bureaucratic ranks and
turf-fighting, everything changed. "I bared my soul," one veteran
reminisced proudly. By nightfall they were building pyramids of empty
beer-cans and doing everything but composing a team fight song.

FCIC were not the only computer-crime people around. There was DATTA
(District Attorneys' Technology Theft Association), though they mostly
specialized in chip theft, intellectual property, and black-market
cases. There was HTCIA (High Tech Computer Investigators
Association), also out in Silicon Valley, a year older than FCIC and
featuring brilliant people like Donald Ingraham. There was LEETAC (Law
Enforcement Electronic Technology Assistance Committee) in Florida, and
computer-crime units in Illinois and Maryland and Texas and Ohio and
Colorado and Pennsylvania. But these were local groups. FCIC were the
first to really