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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

They were raided by the US Secret Service because the Secret Service is/was actually the Treasury Police (the Protective Service assignment to the Secret Service is an accident of fate).

In other words, it is/was weirder that the Secret Service protects the President than it was that they were involved in Sun Devil.

And, as someone who came up close enough to Sun Devil to know a couple things (I graduated high school in '94 and went almost directly to working in vulnerability research): many of the people who got caught up in Sun Devil were ultimately good people playing MIT-style pranks that just got out of hand... but don't valorize it. For a good long chunk of time, people were routinely hacking phone switches and rerouting calls. Almost the whole phone infrastructure --- and EVERY Internet-connected Unix system --- was owned up. It was NUTS.

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Yeah, I'm vaguely aware of that history. But naming a government agency "secret service" is just a mythology-building choice in any circumstances, regardless of having a good explanation. Though the later association with guys wearing earpieces and black sunglasses taking a bullet for the President didn't help, either.

I don't valorize the '80s BBS scene per se, I just think the response was a bit over the top. Instead of fixing their shit, they tried to paint a bunch of teenage pranksters as some kind of apocalypse, as if these were uniquely evil geniuses, and raiding some BBSs and board game companies to incapacitate them was the real fix to the problem. If you're so wide-open that critical infrastructure is being owned by teenage kids of the level of technical sophistication that you find in '80s Phrack issues, there might be a bigger problem. If anything, the companies were lucky it was teenage kids and not, at that time, anyone more nefarious.

As far as the "mythos" part, the writings are what's appealing to me, mainly; there's a certain breathless, naive technical wonder of discovery that runs throughout the '80s textfiles on the subject, which is somehow endearing.

Ok, you just heard me explaining why I think the situation was apocalyptic, right? You could not have had a successful commercial Internet built on infrastructure as thoroughly owned up as the early '90s telco networks were.

I am also not talking about "the BBS scene" (which I was very much a part of). The BBS scene didn't own up switches. The BBS scene didn't have lists of X.25 outdials. The BBS scene couldn't rig you up a conference bridge. Lots of people posted comments on BBSs. Very few of them would know what to do with a DMS-100.

I am not saying the people to whom I am alluding were evil. They were not. I'm saying they were much smarter than "the BBS scene" as a whole, and that the pranks they were playing got way out of hand.

Also: I don't know why you're talking down early Phrack issues. Say what you will about today's Phrack, but in the early '90s, those were teenagers talking about how to reconfigure telco switches. The telco switches they had broken into and owned up.

Also, "Secret Service" originally referred to "The Secret Service Division of the Treasury", which was the anticounterfeiting task force of the US Treasury. It is less ominous in context. I do agree, though, that the name is ominous when you strip away the context.

Well sure, but that's an argument for fixing the infrastructure!

I'm thinking mostly of '80s Phrack issues; I haven't read too much of the '90s stuff. The '80s issues don't read to me like particularly high-level technical genius. They feel more like kids just learning relatively basic things about how different machines and networks work, sharing newbie advice (some of it cargo-cult), and then, somehow, also getting accounts on big telco systems at the same time. It's mostly the proximity that's striking, that you have kids clearly not up to the level of a Bell Labs engineer or anything, still trying to learn stuff, who are simultaneously breaking into everything using even their quite-in-progress knowledge.

Well sure, but that's an argument for fixing the infrastructure!

I'm not so sure... Most things in the world don't require as much security as information infrastructure. For some reason there is a cultural understanding that attacking it is OK.

Thought you might be interested in this.

At that time, for most teenage hackers, unix accounts were hard to come by. To even the odds, a war dialing search began and by sheer later night persistence, they discovered vast networks and operating systems. They dumpster dived, social engineered and brute forced their way to knowledge. On rare occasions, they may have shot off a flare gun when guards attempted to crack their developing bodies, become a line man for leads, or run various password permutations by hand.

what the masses aren't aware of is some of those kids quietly inoculated a virus in Chase Manhattan systems, showed the ss how banks can be compromised via tymnet, trw, etc. Not a cent was taken from those institutions, if anything, maybe a sneaker.

In the end, the ss threw them in the fed pen with hardened criminals. What a waste. After couple of decades, couple are leading startups funded by sandhill vcs. The rest are in darkness.

Maybe one day, we will realize what teenage spirit smells like and how to wield it for the good of mankind. Then again, we might be on the cusp of it - hackernews.

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