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***  CuD, Issue #1.17 / File 3 of 6 / Info World - LoD      ***
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Newsgroups: news.admin,alt.bbs
Subject: Re: Legion of Doom/Secret Service
Reply-To: mnemonic@vondrake.cc.utexas.edu.UUCP (Mike Godwin)
Organization: The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas
 
In article <564@techbook.com> jamesd@techbook.com (James Deibele) writes:
>Interesting paragraph in this week's InfoWorld.  In "Notes from the Field,"
>Robert X. Cringely's column, he writes:
>
>"Back in February, when AT&T long distance service went down for most of a day,
>the company blamed it on a software bug, but it was really a worm --- sabotage
>by hackers loosely associated as the Legion of Doom.  Members also lifted UNIX
>System V.3 source code from Bell Labs and 911 maintenance code from Bellsouth.
>But it was disruption of telephone service that got the Secret Service
>involved.  Many Unix nodes on the anarchic Usenet crabgrass network were seized
>by zealous agents tracking down mailing lists."
 
I doubt Cringely is correct about the connection between the AT&T crash and
the Legion of Doom prosecutions:
 
1) The indictments don't mention any connection or criminal liability
relating to the AT&T crash.
 
2) The indictments DO list only counts of wire fraud and interstate
transportation of stolen property. (The major "theft" was of an E911
"help" file; the major "fraud" seems to have been that the hackers
used pseudonyms--e.g., "Knight Lightning"--and that they concealed
the evidence of their logons on remote systems.)
 
3) None of the so-called "stolen property" (there are legal reasons to
question the feds' expansive definition of stolen property here) seems
to have been source code.
 
4) The Secret Service has been apparently been involved in the LoD
investigation since long before the AT&T crash.
 
Since the feds are constitutionally required to inform Neidorff and
Riggs (the LoD defendants) of the charges against them, the indictment
is pretty much of a map of the way the case is going to go--the
prosecutors can't surprise the defendants later by saying, "Oh, yes,
we're REALLY prosecuting you for the AT&T crash.) If they had any
reason to believe that the LoD was involved in such a highly publicized
failure of an LD system, it is practically a sure thing that it would
have been mentioned in the indictment. Not to mention the press
releases that accompanied the issuing of the indictments.
 
There do seem to be a few genuine facts in Cringely's paragraph; e.g.,
that Usenet is anarchic.
 
 
--Mike
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MODERATOR'S RESPONSE: We attempted to contact Mr. Cringely, a
pseudonym, at Infoworld (415-328-4602). Mr. Cringely was not in,
but he did return our call later (but we were not in). We will
try to contact him again and print his response. One source who
has contacted him indicated that Infoworld has received many calls
objecting to the article. Our own information is that Mr.
Cringely stands by his sources, but that Infoworld may do a
follow-up NEWS story. The unidentified person with whom we spoke
said that the purpose of the rumors column was to allow "insiders"
to speak without fear of reprisal. But, as Mike Godwin indicates
above, there are so many demonstrable factual errors in the
story that one wonders whether the editors condone what appears
to be fabrication, especially when cynical prosecutors seem willing
to grasp any innuendo in order to discredit the CU.
 
 
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