illiant prosecution in a
matter of vital public interest can make the career of a prosecuting
attorney. And for a police officer, good publicity opens the purses of
the legislature; it may bring a citation, or a promotion, or at least a
rise in status and the respect of one's peers.

But to have both publicity and secrecy is to have one's cake and eat it
too. In months to come, as we will show, this impossible act was to
cause great pain to the agents of the crackdown. But early on, it
seemed possible--maybe even likely--that the crackdown could
successfully combine the best of both worlds. The ARREST of hackers
would be heavily publicized. The actual DEEDS of the hackers, which
were technically hard to explain and also a security risk, would be
left decently obscured. The THREAT hackers posed would be heavily
trumpeted; the likelihood of their actually committing such fearsome
crimes would be left to the public's imagination. The spread of the
computer underground, and its growing technical sophistication, would
be heavily promoted; the actual hackers themselves, mostly
bespectacled middle-class white suburban teenagers, would be denied any
personal publicity.

It does not seem to have occurred to any telco official that the
hackers accused would demand a day in court; that journalists would
smile upon the hackers as "good copy;" that wealthy high-tech
entrepreneurs would offer moral and financial support to crackdown
victims; that constitutional lawyers would show up with briefcases,
frowning mightily. This possibility does not seem to have ever entered
the game-plan.

And even if it had, it probably would not have slowed the ferocious
pursuit of a stolen phone-company document, mellifluously known as
"Control Office Administration of Enhanced 911 Services for Special
Services and Major Account Centers."

In the chapters to follow, we will explore the worlds of police and the
computer underground, and the large shadowy area where they overlap.
But first, we must explore the battleground. Before we leave the world
of the telcos, we must understand what a switching system actually is
and how your telephone actually works.

#

To the average citizen, the idea of the telephone is represented by,
well, a TELEPHONE: a device that you talk into. To a telco
professional, however, the telephone itself is known, in lordly
fashion, as a "subset." The "subset" in your house is a mere adjunct,
a distant nerv