ose study will reveal that this document is not about machinery. The
E911 Document is about ADMINISTRATION. It describes how one creates and
administers certain units of telco bureaucracy: Special Service Centers
and Major Account Centers (SSC/MAC). It describes how these centers
should distribute responsibility for the E911 service, to other units
of telco bureaucracy, in a chain of command, a formal hierarchy. It
describes who answers customer complaints, who screens calls, who
reports equipment failures, who answers those reports, who handles
maintenance, who chairs subcommittees, who gives orders, who follows
orders, WHO tells WHOM what to do. The Document is not a "roadmap" to
computers. The Document is a roadmap to PEOPLE.

As an aid to breaking into computer systems, the Document is USELESS.
As an aid to harassing and deceiving telco people, however, the
Document might prove handy (especially with its Glossary, which I have
not included). An intense and protracted study of this Document and
its Glossary, combined with many other such documents, might teach one
to speak like a telco employee. And telco people live by SPEECH--they
live by phone communication. If you can mimic their language over the
phone, you can "social-engineer" them. If you can con telco people,
you can wreak havoc among them. You can force them to no longer trust
one another; you can break the telephonic ties that bind their
community; you can make them paranoid. And people will fight harder to
defend their community than they will fight to defend their individual
selves.

This was the genuine, gut-level threat posed by Phrack magazine. The
real struggle was over the control of telco language, the control of
telco knowledge. It was a struggle to defend the social "membrane of
differentiation" that forms the walls of the telco community's ivory
tower --the special jargon that allows telco professionals to recognize
one another, and to exclude charlatans, thieves, and upstarts. And the
prosecution brought out this fact. They repeatedly made reference to
the threat posed to telco professionals by hackers using "social
engineering."

However, Craig Neidorf was not on trial for learning to speak like a
professional telecommunications expert. Craig Neidorf was on trial for
access device fraud and transportation of stolen property. He was on
trial for stealing a document that was purportedly highly sensitive and
purportedly worth