Yet on March 16, 1988, the Menlo Park police handed some of the tapes over to von Brauch! A private citizen, (theoretically). Tyson argued that the tapes were his company's property: why shouldn't he get them? The information on the tapes, of course, was subsequently used by federal investigators. A suppression of evidence hearing based on the no-warrant argument has been held, and all sides are awaiting the Judge Ronald Whyte's decision. "Which is good, because if this evidence is suppressed, which is should be, the espionage charge is all but gone," Meltzer said.

****Elizabeth, the suppression of evidence hearing will likely be decided before we go to press. I've told Meltzer to call my machine if anything happens while I'm gone, and I'll be sure to let you know. It should be easy to alter either way. Maybe we could stick an explanation here or during the sum up of the legal situation at the end. ***********

I openly laughed, startling the court clerks in San Jose, when I read the official Air Force reports from officers who seem confused about whether the Caber Dragon Air Tasking Orders that are the source of the espionage charge were, or are, classified or not. One Officer Jaramillo, of the Office of Special Investigators (OSI), seems to indicate in an April 13, 1988 memo that one of the ATO's has been declassified. Then, in the fall of 1988, both documents seem to have achieved declassification status, while in August of 1989, the Air Force appears to have gotten its act together when a Major Lecklider declared the info on both orders "were and still remain classified." Are we sure now, guys?

It is interesting to note that historians often have trouble getting military authorities to declassify World War II data. It should be also be mentioned, however, that U.S. Attorney Crowe insists that one of the ATO's contained sensitive military information that could reveal U.S. flight patterns during battle.

von Brauch wouldn't tell me if he was one of the security people who were allegedly wire tapped by Poulsen (the indictment counter-indicated this) but there's no question his testimony is a cornerstone of the case. The FBI didn't even want to be involved in this headache of a case, and the prosecution was being prepared on the state level initially, according to that 1991 San Jose Mercury News report on Poulsen.

Unless one reminds one's cynical self that one should know better, the Poulsen extravaganza appears to show evidence of being a personal vendetta, either personal or corporate. It was Pac Bell agent Terry Atchley who was staking out Hugh's, and he had to yank the FBI out of bed to come pick up the Suspect. The Mercury News story even has Atchley handcuffing Poulsen. Is that what you call a citizen's arrest?

Phone guy stakeouts. What's next? McDonalds ketchup patrol?

Former Poulsen co-defendant Mark Lottor agreed with the hypothesis that the Feds had to be dragged into this case by Pac Bell. So why was the FBI able to be convinced? Maybe I should let the Assistant Director of the Technical Services Division of the FBI, William Bayse, whose press secretary startled me with a call at 6 a.m. one morning, respond to that. (Not a good way to wake up: "Mr. Fine, this is the FBI. Stop dreaming about those Amazon Women."): "We run about 1000 wiretaps a year, mainly to stop child molesters, embezzlers and terrorists," Bayse said. "Now this is an infinitesimally small number of monitored calls compared to the number of calls each year, but we do cooperate with various phone companies around the country."

Meltzer said he'd also suspected this you-scratch-our-backs-with-wire-taps-when-needed, we'll-investigate-your-hacker-problems arrangement had reared its head in the Poulsen case.

Evidence of the special treatment accorded by the FBI to a company which routinely allows it to "cut in" to conversations can be discerned in the rather less civil attitude afforded even other businesses that have allegedly been visited by Dark Dante. For example, the radio stations bilked of prizes according to the L.A. charges had no idea what was going on until they saw the indictment and the press releases from the U.S. Attorney's Office. "We never even knew that we had been victimized," asserted Karen Tobin, VP for Marketing at KIIS FM, a Top 40 station that allegedly handed Poulsen two Porches. "The FBI came in and didn't tell us anything. They just said, 'we're the FBI, and we're pulling some files'."

From its tentative initial entanglement, the federal involvement in the case has snowballed to the extent that 10 FBI agents attended a recent pre-trial hearing in San Jose, according to Meltzer, and two U.S. Attorney's in two separate offices are working on the case, almost full-time. "It's overkill," Meltzer said. "and at ridiculous public expense. If they devoted this much time and effort to the National Debt, there wouldn't be one, and if the case received the attention it deserved, Kevin Poulsen would no longer be in jail."

In the end, this long-delayed trial will likely net nothing except maybe an unwanted husband for Kevin Poulsen (he's unlikely to get those Boesky-esque federal country clubs since he's considered, remember, an "extreme escape risk"). As for increased security, Judy Petersen, a Pac Bell spokesperson, said that the Poulsen breach is of "serious" concern and that the company devotes "a lot of time energy and money to preventing fraud." But she then admitted that there isn't much the phone company can do about a hacker of Kevin Poulsen's sophistication. "I suppose it could happen again, if you look at what he did with the break-ins and all," she said, "and stick some 'allegeds' in there for me, will ya?"

Both von Brauch and an adamant David Schindler disputed the assertion that security hasn't improved as a result of the Poulsen indictment, but neither would give me details.

The Unsolved Mysteries coverage is, as expected and like many aspects of this case, very humorous to watch. The first episode, which aired in 1990 while Kevin was a fugitive, featured actor Robert Stack standing in what appears to be a rain coat in the middle of a Pac Bell warehouse, warning middle America what could happen to the Pat Buchanan Vision of life if a "computer genius run amuck" is permitted to, you know, tap into all those fancy machines that we should just ignore since the government runs them. The show's narrator tries hard to paint Kevin as part of a Communist Conspiracy by virtue of his having sequestered, as a prank, the Soviet Embassy's unlisted number (probably to order a Large Dominos Pie to the front door). This line of thinking seems to have disappeared from prosecution rhetoric once the country in question ceased to exist.

Despite evidence of its reluctance to jump on the Fry Poulsen bandwagon, once it got with the ideological program, the federal boys, like Patty Hearst, were in for the duration. One of the defendants told me about "aerial surveillance," and Bayse described computer crimes generally as among the Agency's top priorities, especially in order to stop "terrorists and narcotics operations."

Interestingly, various governmental high-ups, among them Bayse and Congressman Don Edwards (D-CA), told me they are increasingly worried about violations of the public trust from insider positions, people who have "legitimate" access to a system's codes, and who violate that trust, rather than private hackers. An example of a public violation of trust is the recent Government Accounting Office's revelation of widespread IRS agent abuse in the processing of tax returns.

Private hackers, evidently, make better headlines for prosecutors, however.

The whole issue of on-line security is reaching the highest levels of Government: The Commerce Department's "Clipper Chip" is a proposal inherited by the Clinton Administration to mandate an encryption device in every consumer telecommunications product sold in the United States. This is to ensure absolute privacy and freedom from surveillance for every American. Oh, one little catch. Law Enforcement can access the key to anyone's conversations with a court order. Industrial espionage at hi-tech firms is also an explicit major concern of the security establishment. Wouldn't want those Japs copying our Macintoshes, or whatever. With all the attention afforded hi-tech security these days by players, inside and outside of government who have billions of dollars to throw around like monopoly money, it's quite possible Kevin Poulsen finds himself a major scapegoat caught at a bad time. Prosecutor Crowe, who came across to me as a forthright, dedicated guy, somewhat nebulously characterized the extent of high-level Justice Department interest in the outcome of this case as something less than the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (Iraqgate) case, saying he hadn't consulted superiors except to approve the espionage charge. But even FBI honcho Bayse, 3000 miles and three years away from Hugh's supermarket in an office in Washington, knew Poulsen's name instantly when I brought it up.

In addition to the hearings that are starting to be held on hacking and on-line privacy in congressional subcommittees dealing with technology and communications, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was asked during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings whether she believed the Constitution needed to be amended in order to accommodate "new technologies." (She waffled).

Ethical issues abound in the Poulsen case. There is considerable difference of opinion, with the two sides usually delineated by whether or not one is an employee of the U.S. Justice Department, Pacific Bell, or three certain radio stations in Southern California, over whether Kevin Poulsen really did anything seriously wrong, either morally or criminally. Or at least wrong enough to be facing much of the 21st century with Jake, the Cannibal from Concord.

One ex-Poulsen crony called Kevin "one of the most morally principled people I know. Maybe most people don't enter military computers, but he thinks about the impact of what he's done. Most people in our society don't."

Civil Libertarian Godwin explained that there are definite ethics in the universe of the cyberpunk. "For example," he said, "One has to understand that picking locks is considered very neat in hacker culture, while destroying systems needlessly is looked down upon." Mark Rotenberg of the group Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR), a hero who spends his time running around Capitol Hill defending our privacy on issues we don't even know exist yet, made some interesting observations about the moral culpability of hackers. "I see it as a delineation between trespass, burglary and arson," he said. "To treat all of those as the same under the computer crimes statues strikes me as wrong." In other words, exploring a system, which is mostly what Poulsn is accused of, is not the same as crashing AT&T;'s long-distance service for Labor Day Weekend. Rotenberg, one of the more ethical people I've ever met, also had a view that probably reverberates strongly with the moral relativity of many hackers, although he isn't one: "I find it very hard to feel sympathy for a company like TRW when it gets raided by hackers and begins to whine," he said. "I mean, these guys are selling thousands of private credit histories every day, probably in violation of the Fair Credit Act, and making millions of dollars." Poulsen, unless one adds up cash accrued by selling the Porches he allegedly won, wasn't making big money from his activities. That is simply not how the hacker mind works.

Godwin and Rotenberg agree that compiling transcripts of other people's phone calls is a crime deserving punishment, but just how much is open to question. No one wants his or her phone convo's eavesdropped upon, but Pac- and all the other Bells can do it any time, and with the rubber stamp of a wire tap approval, so can any number of security establishment agencies (funded by that multi-billion part of the federal budget we aren't allowed to see).

Another Congressional aide, who (wisely) spoke on the condition that he not be named, went on a tirade about what he perceives to be the amorality of computer hackers. "These kids are growing up with technology that their parents didn't even dream of. There's no one to teach them on-line right or wrong. Imagine the potential for abuse in an on-line National Health Care system!" Now, listening to a patent leather flunky on Capital Hill lecture me about ethics made me want to e-mail a piece of Meatloaf's jock strap to every legislator in DC on general principles, but the guy actually did have a point on his moral vacuum argument.

Poulsen, people who knew him early on have said, really had no family at all. Actually, it is quite a tragic story. The mother of a good friend of Kevin's from their days growing up in North Hollywood named Annette Randol told me that Kevin's adoptive mother sent Kevin and his sister out to the store for a few minutes one day when he was eight or nine years old, and when they came back, he discovered the body: she had killed herself. From there, Randol said, Kevin was basically "on his own."

I asked Kevin if he associated that experience with some kind of withdrawal from the "real" world into cyberspace. "I never thought about it before," he said, "but then again, I'm not a Freudian idiot."

He described his family life as "typically middle-class. Not ideal, but I certainly didn't lack parental supervision. We were happy."

Moral or criminal departures from the Leave It To Beaver paradigm aside, Kevin Poulsen got heavily into computers because that's what incredibly intelligent, skinny teen-agers did in the early 1980s. Randol, who claimed she's known Kevin since he was a little kid, laughed heartily when asked if she thought Kevin was a spy. "What he needs is a girlfriend!" she said.

Mrs. Randol also claimed she should know, since some of the tapes found by authorities allegedly contain phone conversations of her daughter, Sean's, with whom Kevin supposedly had a long friendship and, later, on whom he had a crush. "I was mad at him for taping us, but the tapes were in storage," Randol said. "It wasn't like he was listening to them by his bedside. He just didn't believe Sean when she said she wasn't interested in him romantically, so he wanted to hear if she had another romantic friend."

Mrs. Randol's comments should be taken with a shaker of salt, by the way. She asked me to assure Kevin that she would never rat on him to the Feds, but when I told him this, he said that in discovery he found numerous statements by Randol to the FBI. She is invariably the "close family source" identified in most of the newspaper accounts of the case, and Sean's comments figure prominently in the Unsolved Mysteries version of the Poulsen saga.

Kevin's father, a retired police mechanic, told me he'd just like to leave this case behind him. "Read what I've said earlier," he sad sadly, which I did, and it's mainly along the lines of, "I'd like to leave this case behind me." One time he is wuoted as saying Kevin, as a teen-ager was "very proud" of his computer skills and the opportunities they provided him..

It is often pointed out in mainstream media accounts of this case that Kevin Lee Poulsen received his first computer as a gift at age 16 in 1982, and his first visit from the FBI a year later. (Kevin was implicated, but because of his age not charged, in a spectacular electronic break-in to a linked University of California and Pentagon computer system called Arpanet.) What these articles invariably fail to mention is that a year following that episode, SRI, a huge firm from Menlo Park with so many government contracts you'd think somebody owed 'em something, heard about the young whiz kid from North Hollywood and hired the 18-year-old high school drop-out as a programmer, a job which came complete with security clearance. Is one to assume that the federal people responsible for granting such clearance ignored the very reason he was hired: he not only knew how to, but had a history of "examining" systems which the subject wished not to be examined? Kevin insisted to me that although they might have first heard about him from the publicity surrounding the California break-in, this is not why SRI hired him.