oard on the Data General when he's
finished beta-testing the software for it, which he wrote himself.
It'll have E-mail features, massive files on all manner of
computer-crime and investigation procedures, and will follow the
computer-security specifics of the Department of Defense "Orange Book."
He thinks it will be the biggest BBS in the federal government.

Will it have Phrack on it? I ask wryly.

Sure, he tells me. Phrack, TAP, Computer Underground Digest, all that
stuff. With proper disclaimers, of course.

I ask him if he plans to be the sysop. Running a system that size is
very time-consuming, and Fitzpatrick teaches two three-hour courses
every day.

No, he says seriously, FLETC has to get its money worth out of the
instructors. He thinks he can get a local volunteer to do it, a
high-school student.

He says a bit more, something I think about an Eagle Scout
law-enforcement liaison program, but my mind has rocketed off in
disbelief.

"You're going to put a TEENAGER in charge of a federal security BBS?"
I'm speechless. It hasn't escaped my notice that the FLETC Financial
Fraud Institute is the ULTIMATE hacker-trashing target; there is stuff
in here, stuff of such utter and consummate cool by every standard of
the digital underground....

I imagine the hackers of my acquaintance, fainting dead-away from
forbidden-knowledge greed-fits, at the mere prospect of cracking the
superultra top-secret computers used to train the Secret Service in
computer-crime....

"Uhm, Carlton," I babble, "I'm sure he's a really nice kid and all, but
that's a terrible temptation to set in front of somebody who's, you
know, into computers and just starting out...."

"Yeah," he says, "that did occur to me." For the first time I begin to
suspect that he's pulling my leg.

He seems proudest when he shows me an ongoing project called JICC,
Joint Intelligence Control Council. It's based on the services
provided by EPIC, the El Paso Intelligence Center, which supplies data
and intelligence to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Customs
Service, the Coast Guard, and the state police of the four southern
border states. Certain EPIC files can now be accessed by
drug-enforcement police of Central America, South America and the
Caribbean, who can also trade information among themselves. Using a
telecom program called "White Hat," written by two brothers named Lopez
from the Dominican Republic, police can now network inte