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e. The fact that it occurred on Martin Luther King Day, still the most politically touchy of American holidays, made it more suspicious yet.
The Crash of January 15 gave the Hacker Crackdown its sense of edge and its sweaty urgency. It made people, powerful people in positions of public authority, willing to believe the worst. And, most fatally, it helped to give investigators a willingness to take extreme measures and the determination to preserve almost total secrecy.
An obscure software fault in an aging switching system in New York was to lead to a chain reaction of legal and constitutional trouble all across the country.
Like the crash in the telephone system, this chain reaction was ready and waiting to happen. During the 1980s, the American legal system was extensively patched to deal with the novel issues of computer crime. There was, for instance, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 (eloquently described as "a stinking mess" by a prominent law enforcement official). And there was the draconian Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, passed unanimously by the United States Senate, which later would reveal a large number of flaws. Extensive, well-meant efforts had been made to keep the legal system up to date. But in the day-to-day grind of the real world, even the most elegant software tends to crumble and suddenly reveal its hidden bugs.
Like the advancing telephone system, the American legal system was certainly not ruined by its temporary crash; but for those caught under the weight of the collapsing system, life became a series of blackouts and anomalies.
In order to understand why these weird events occurred, both in the world of technology and in the world of law, it's not enough to understand the merely technical problems. We will get to those; but first and foremost, we must try to understand the telephone, and the business of telephones, and the community of human beings that telephones have created.
Technologies have life cycles, like cities
Hacker Crackdown, page 17
by Bruce Sterling
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