Another Stinger is Stung

Late last month, hackers uncovered another "sting" bulletin board system.

In the past, such boards have been put up by the Secret Service and the FBI in an effort to catch people passing stolen credit card numbers and talking about "illegal" things.

This time, though, it was different.  This "sting" BBS was run by a TV station.  Mike Wendland of WDIV-TV in Detroit thought the board would be a good way to get background fora story on hackers.  So, for six weeks he operated a BBS on John Maxfield's HP 2000 minicomputer.  Maxfield has been after hackers for years - both as an FBI informant (see page 1-6) and a private consultant.

The board had virtually unlimited disk storage and a variety of phone lines.  But it all began to crumble as an anonymous hacker figured out what the true purpose of the board was and who the operators were.

Word spread quickly and the operators decided to "come clean" (see below).  Despite the threatening tone of WDIV's message below, Wendland says he will not turn any names in to the authorities, but he will do a story about the information that was posted.  This will include credit card numbers, codes, passwords. etc.  The purpose, he claims, is to "show that it [this kind of info] is still out there."

Wendland will do three stories, airing in mid-October.  He will use handles in his report, not real names.  He plans to talk about "how people profit at the expense of hackers...  Hackers are not bad guys, by and large." he says.

That's true: they're not.  And, as far as we can tell, no actual crime was committed by any of the users.  Yet their mailboxes were opened and the contents seized.  But because it was all electronic, somehow it didn't constitute a violation of their privacy.

In these days of curtailed freedoms, where magazines are pulled off shelves in 7-Eleven's for everyone's good, where drug and lie detector tests are as "necessary" as spelling quizzes, where our numbers have become our names, it's more than a trifle unsettling that there is another moralistic set of eyes watching all of us, judging our words, misreading the facts.

You come to expect this sort of thing from the government, but when a TV reporter begins to play cop, judge, and jury, it's time to say enough already.