nced that his clever scheme is
bulletproof, swiftly learns otherwise when, for the first time in his
life, an actual no-kidding policeman leans over, grabs the front of his
shirt, looks him right in the eye and says: "All right, ASSHOLE--you
and me are going downtown!" All the hardware in the world will not
insulate your nerves from these actual real-life sensations of terror
and guilt.

Cops know ways to get from point A to point Z without thumbing through
every letter in some smart-ass bad-guy's alphabet. Cops know how to
cut to the chase. Cops know a lot of things other people don't know.

Hackers know a lot of things other people don't know, too. Hackers
know, for instance, how to sneak into your computer through the
phone-lines. But cops can show up RIGHT ON YOUR DOORSTEP and carry off
YOU and your computer in separate steel boxes. A cop interested in
hackers can grab them and grill them. A hacker interested in cops has
to depend on hearsay, underground legends, and what cops are willing to
publicly reveal. And the Secret Service didn't get named "the SECRET
Service" because they blab a lot.

Some people, our lecturer informed us, were under the mistaken
impression that it was "impossible" to tap a fiber-optic line. Well,
he announced, he and his son had just whipped up a fiber-optic tap in
his workshop at home. He passed it around the audience, along with a
circuit-covered LAN plug-in card so we'd all recognize one if we saw it
on a case. We all had a look.

The tap was a classic "Goofy Prototype"--a thumb-length rounded metal
cylinder with a pair of plastic brackets on it. From one end dangled
three thin black cables, each of which ended in a tiny black plastic
cap. When you plucked the safety-cap off the end of a cable, you could
see the glass fiber--no thicker than a pinhole.

Our lecturer informed us that the metal cylinder was a "wavelength
division multiplexer." Apparently, what one did was to cut the
fiber-optic cable, insert two of the legs into the cut to complete the
network again, and then read any passing data on the line by hooking up
the third leg to some kind of monitor. Sounded simple enough. I
wondered why nobody had thought of it before. I also wondered whether
this guy's son back at the workshop had any teenage friends.

We had a break. The guy sitting next to me was wearing a giveaway
baseball cap advertising the Uzi submachine gun. We had a desultory
chat about the me