This first article is an interesting story that I heard from an old school hacker in doing work on www.thebighack.org. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but I did meet him personally and many of the details check out. Either way it is quite intriguing and makes great lore. Anyone heard this story before?
-lowtec

For those who don’t know, before the well publicized hacker crackdowns of operation Sun Devil et. al. in 1990, there was a smaller crackdown near the end of 1985. Those of us in Texas referred to it as “the incident”. During this time the Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies went into people’s houses and seized their computers and other equipment. Much of the equipment was never returned. Most were never formally charged with crimes. Some were, but the charges came months later.

“The Mentor,” (Lloyd Blankenship) attended Southwest Texas State, (now called Texas State) in San Marcos, TX. I went to school there at the same time. I used to lurk on the LoD and other BBSes, but at the time I was in the larval stage. Most of the true technology of the day was new to me.

Well, after the Feds came to town for “the incident” and took all of Lloyd’s hardware away, it started a bit of a buzz through the scene. Most of the peeps were nervous about hitting any of the traditional BBSes for communication. There was a general paranoia in the air. As it turns out, the Secret Service got what they came for and left, but that didn’t stop the general paranoia.

One of the SMPD officers that helped the Feds when they came around saw this hacking thing as a potential stepping stone for him into the service. He had spoken up in the local press and said some nasty things about the mentor. He was generally viewing every geek with suspicion. Since San Marcos is such a small town, geeks were getting hassled by him when they where just hanging out, drinking, or conversing in groups.

He decided to start hanging around the school lab undercover and looking for more suspicious activity. He wanted to make a big contact and slide himself directly upstairs. However, no one was in the mood for his nonsense.

About the same time as the incident, SWT had replaced its old DEC 10 computer with a shiny new two VAX cluster called Nyssa and Tegan. Along with this they had also attached SWT to both the BIT (Because Its Time) net and to SPAN (Space, Physics, Astronomy, Network). Of course this was before the TCP/IP protocol was ubiquitous. At that time people were pushing a 7 layer OSI model, a 5 layer TCP/IP model, and using other protocols to do actual work. Networking was a mess, but it was actually starting to work.

Along with the shiny new VAX came a program called “talk”; it was the instant messenger of the time. You typed in the bottom half of the screen and someone somewhere else typed in the top half of the screen. It was very cool at the time. There were even a class of girls we called talk junkies. Because they never left the lab and never did anything interesting. Nice to have girls to look at though.

Well under the nose of the nice officer who was often sitting a couple of terms down, everyone did start to “talk” again. The guy was so interested in the spook stuff, the secrecy, wire taps on private bbs and such that he missed the “talk” right under his nose.

A plan was born.

Occasionally, back in the lab, someone would mention a special phone number in passing. Rumors of the gang getting back together drifted around. Our own personal officer would go scurrying off to make a call. Other times, we would drop a hint about meeting up and all rendezvous at a bar near campus.

Showdown was a typical country/biker/student bar and a good place to play spot the Fed if you know what I mean. They also had unlimited 10 cent beers from 3 to 3:15. There were some quiet tables off in the back but also some big windows in front so you could see who was walking up during the day. If you sat at the bar and dropped a dollar in the tip jar, the bartender would ring the “tip” bell. It wasn’t exactly a full fledged storefront, but it was very Neuman/Redford. Right next to Showdown but facing LBJ street was a video arcade, after the 10 cent beer ran out we would go over there and drop the rest of our change.

At first we would just have someone in the lab drop a “hint” about a meet, usually around 3:05 and he would rush out to get to the bar just after cheap beer ran out. A guy at the bar would drop a tip, ring the bell and all of us in the back would loudly “finish” our secret conversations and then file out past him to go play video games. He would skunk about for a while being very frustrated. We got such a bang out of this.

Originally we were just going to leave it at this. One evening though after a long afternoon of game playing, he decided to hassle us. He would take one of us and lock him in the back seat of his car and grill us about our activities. Then he would to the same with another one of us. All in all what he did was seriously piss us off. Once the word spread through “talk” many others got pissed as well.

We created our own temporary secret hacker society. It was called Lord Akalabeth’s Warriors. The name originally came from one of the guys over SPAN. (We were busy passing messages all over the country. It was so cool.) Originally we just liked the acronym it made, but we also got to make lots of clever jokes about Richard being the “origin” of all evil and so forth. Great fun, so the name stuck.

While in the squad car, one of the guys noticed some Radio Shack crap. It seemed this guy was pretending he was James Bond. Ideas started flying. Just for fun we all started “quasi-covertly” carrying rat shack walkie talkies. Occasionally we would pretend to send secret messages to other LAW members. Not long afterward, the nice officer showed up at the rat shack for his own pair. This was big mistake number one. He took the bait. Big mistake number two was that he left his receipt on the counter.

Every spy drama needs both a hero and a patsy. We found ours in a local who started playing games at the arcade during all of this. He was still a Senior in High School but he was pretty tall and looked older. He had one interesting quirk to hang a story on. He was terribly shy, he would almost never say a word. When he did he would whisper it (horrible stutter). Often times he would just write things down and pass us a note. We all thought this was too cool. Without his knowledge he became Lord Akalabeth himself.

We all took to carrying a pad and chewing gum. We would slip him notes in the arcade and when he returned the note, we would take it, wrap our gum in it, and throw it away in plain site of the officer. In our chatter we started mentioning that this guy was so paranoid that he never spoke in public. He only talked over his computer. Predictably our nice officer started staking out his house. We took advantage of this to drive by his house, pause briefly, take out our walkie talkie, and pass a message. Then we would speed off without a reply.

Using traditional means the nice officer had noticed that the kid did seem to be on the phone an awful lot. He had even asked the operator to make an emergency interruption, where he got to hear the phone line making lots of funny noises. Turns out the kid did have penchant for hardware.

Well one day after we had been building to some major action, the nice officer had Lord Akalabeth’s house staked out, when a phone call went into the Chief of Police himself.

In a panic, someone had called to say that there was this big guy who seemed to be stalking one of the local kids. He was just skunking around the back of the garage and now he was just sitting out front waiting. Obviously something horrible was going to happen. Hurry!!

The Chief himself came, knocked on the door, met the nice kid. They went around by the garage and sure enough there was a shoe box there. Inside was a new lineman’s phone handset. There was also a soldering iron, a receipt, and strangely a twisted pair wire running through the bushes. They followed it, and sure enough, someone had tapped the phone line.

The chief asked to see the boys bedroom. The boy had no problem at all giving him a tour. While they looked around, the Chief noticed a walkie talkie stuck under the bed. It had the transmit key taped down and had been modified and plugged into the wall with a transformer brick so the battery would not run down. The only other thing of interest was a primitive TDD machine attached to the phone. It seemed this particular boy was deaf.

In all the hullabaloo with the Chief arriving, the nice officer had come in to assist. He explained that he had been watching this particular “hacker” on his off time. Big mistake number three. This, along with the receipt, seemed to catch the chief’s attention. Turns out this officer’s name was on the receipt for a pair of walkie talkies just like the modified one found in the boy’s bedroom. They looked in his car and sure enough there was a matching one.

It seems even the police have some rules about invasion of privacy, without special legal protocols. A few days later, a credit card statement arrived in the mail with a charge for a brand new lineman’s handset.

All of this caused quite a big stink and embarrassment for the SMPD. The boy and his family got a formal apology. We never saw the nice officer again after that.

I never bothered to find out who made the phone call or exactly how the box got by the garage. How the walkie talkie got under the bed was a puzzle to me as well. But in the end, some things are better left unknown.