aking, coding and carding than most phreaks can find out in
years, and when it comes to viruses, break-ins, software bombs and
trojan horses, Feds have direct access to red-hot confidential
information that is only vague rumor in the underground.

And if it's an impressive public rep you're after, there are few people
in the world who can be so chillingly impressive as a well-trained,
well-armed United States Secret Service agent.

Of course, a few personal sacrifices are necessary in order to obtain
that power and knowledge. First, you'll have the galling discipline of
belonging to a large organization; but the world of computer crime is
still so small, and so amazingly fast-moving, that it will remain
spectacularly fluid for years to come. The second sacrifice is that
you'll have to give up ripping people off. This is not a great loss.
Abstaining from the use of illegal drugs, also necessary, will be a
boon to your health.

A career in computer security is not a bad choice for a young man or
woman today. The field will almost certainly expand drastically in
years to come. If you are a teenager today, by the time you become a
professional, the pioneers you have read about in this book will be the
grand old men and women of the field, swamped by their many disciples
and successors. Of course, some of them, like William P. Wood of the
1865 Secret Service, may well be mangled in the whirring machinery of
legal controversy; but by the time you enter the computer-crime field,
it may have stabilized somewhat, while remaining entertainingly
challenging.

But you can't just have a badge. You have to win it. First, there's
the federal law enforcement training. And it's hard--it's a challenge.
A real challenge--not for wimps and rodents.

Every Secret Service agent must complete gruelling courses at the
Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. (In fact, Secret Service
agents are periodically re-trained during their entire careers.)

In order to get a glimpse of what this might be like, I myself
travelled to FLETC.

#

The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center is a 1500-acre facility on
Georgia's Atlantic coast. It's a milieu of marshgrass, seabirds, damp,
clinging sea-breezes, palmettos, mosquitos, and bats. Until 1974, it
was a Navy Air Base, and still features a working runway, and some WWII
vintage blockhouses and officers' quarters. The Center has since
benefitted by a forty-million-dollar retrofit,