tierney@fortune.UUCP (06/05/84)
#N:fortune:29600008:000:4155 fortune!tierney Jun 4 14:05:00 1984 ***** fortune:net.legal / tierney / 2:03 pm Jun 4, 1984 ***** fortune:net.micro / sri-arpa!ARPA / 10:25 pm Jun 3, 1984 On Saturday, June 2, there was a meeting of Los Angeles area sysops to find out the truth behind the confiscation of the Mog-Ur BBS. The Sysop of the Mog-Ur BBS was there along with his lawyer. Here is a report on what I learned at the meeting: The messages (there were two of them) containing the AT&T calling card numbers were left on his board using an option to leave an anonymous message. The Sysop can tell who leaves such messages, but the general public can't. Another feature of his BBS software is that you can specify the length of time (in days) that a message should stay up. The messages in question were left with a very small number of days and Tom (the sysop) never got to see them before the system automagically killed them. During the time the messages were on, a Pacific Bell agent called in and saw them. PacBell asked the police to get a search warrent for Tom's computer. This is standard procedure when PacTel finds a BBS handing out phone phreak information. No effort was made to ask Tom to delete the messages or find out who left them. Either somehow Tom found out that PacBell was going to show up or they allowed him to do the work while they were there, but Tom searched his disk to find the information on the offending messages (now killed) and got the name of the person who left the messages. He provided this information to the police. The police confiscated Tom's computer, not to find out who left the messages, but to give Tom a hard time. It is a standard PacBell procedure to have computers confiscated when they are used to run whacker BBS's. The idea is to use terror to keep sysops in line. It didn't matter that Tom had provided them with the name of the person who left it, they were going to take his computer (which with many hardware goodies, including a hard disk, is worth over $10k). The police have charged Tom with conspiracy (which they change you with when they can't find anything else that will stick), and under a law that makes it illegal to provide credit card numbers with the intent to defraud. Tom has retained a lawyer who thinks the whole thing will be thrown out and is going to try to make PacBell look bad. If it ever goes to court he says all he has to do is get a jury of normal people (i.e. no PacBell employees) and present it as a case of John Doe vs. the phone company. Nobody likes the phone company. The lawyer has documented cases where this kind of information was left for weeks on UCLA computers and on CompuServe (I assume in BULLET), and the police did nothing (its easy to pick on a small computer sysop, but trying to confiscate UCLA or CompuSevre is harder). InfoWorld reporter Peggy Watt was on the scene and a story will run on the front page of the next issue about it. If there is any difference between my story and the one in InfoWorld, believe InfoWorld. I have tried to get this correct, but Peggy talked with Tom and his lawyer a lot longer than I did, and she took written notes (this is from memory). PacBell has refused to talk to Peggy, and the LAPD person who conducted the raid is on vacation. When the superior of the detective was asked about it, the reply was like "You mean we confiscated $10,000 worth of computers? I didn't know that!". It was reported earlier that Tom had a section on his BBS called "Underground" where these kinds of messages were posted before. I have found out it was his policy to delete any such messages when he saw them. The idea behind the section was not to rip off the phone company, but to discuss "things you wouldn't want just anybody to read" (Tom's system didn't require validation to use, except for the underground section which you had to ask for access to). Another idea was to provide a place to leave unpopular opinions since it had the ability to leave anonymous messages. I hope this clears up what this section was meant for. Thats all for now. The lawyer is pressing for something to be decided during the next week. I will keep the net posted. ---------- ----------