Tag: Secret Service

Planting Shrubs in Kalamazoo

Later today the President is going to give a speech about 100 yards from my office here in Kalamazoo, the main effect of which is I won’t get to work out because they’ve decided to have him speak from the Recreation Center here.

The security here is amazing — they shut down most of the Recreation Center four days ago, and the Secret Service has been everywhere.

I wonder if Bush will give the same paramount consideration to safety of civilians the next time he decides to bomb Iraq?

Anyway, on a related topic, although I try not to be an elitist sometimes I have the feeling that I am the last conscious person left in Michigan. The hot topic with my liberal friends lately has been Bush’s gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed standards on arsenic.

For those not following that debate, an independent report a few years ago concluded that the current standard, 50 parts per billion, is probably too high, but they didn’t offer any guidance on what would be an acceptable standard because there isn’t a lot of conclusive research on such low levels, except in animal models.

So the EPA went ahead and put forth a 5 parts per billion standard which Bush killed. My liberal friends have been going on about how this is just for the evil corporations who want to dump arsenic in our water. Amazingly, not a single person who has brought this up to me as an example of a good regulation killed by corporate greed was aware that the major problem with the standard was that arsenic occurs naturally in large quantities in many Western states and the cost of complying with the new standard would have been extremely expensive — far in excess of even the most optimistic estimates of benefits.

If you look at a state like New Mexico, for example, it is not inconceivable that it could cost literally billions of dollars to bring their water treatment systems in compliance with a 5 parts per billion standard. Promulgating such expensive regulations without a clearer idea of the benefits is the worst sort of government intervention.

The Steve Jackson Games Raid 10 Years Later

The recent denial of service
attacks that temporarily shut down prominent web site such as Yahoo! have
unleashed the inevitable call for yet more government regulation of cyberspace
as well as a crackdown on cyber criminals. Prosecuting criminals, regardless
of whether they commit their crimes in cyber space or the real world,
is important, but before running off half-cocked, it might help to revisit
an incident where overzealous federal agents almost ruined a completely
innocent private business in their efforts to crack down on cyber crime.

Ten years ago today, Secret
Service agents raided Steve Jackson games, an Austin-based company. Steve
Jackson Games produces a variety of board and role-playing games, including
the Generic Universal Role Playing System, which has a modular approach
to role playing games. They produce a core system which can then be adapted
to just about any role-playing genre imaginable.

As part of developing additional
settings for the game, Steve Jackson Games contracted with writer Loyd
Blankenship to produce a supplement called GURPS Cyberpunk, which gave
rules for role playing games set in the sort of dystopian futurist worlds
created in novels by authors such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.

In the process of fact-checking
his book to make the scenarios, rules and background information as realistic
and up-to-date as possible, Blankenship talked to everybody from computer
security professionals to people online claiming to be hackers and crackers.
In addition, Blankenship ran a Bulletin Board System from his home that
discussed the issues surrounding the computer underground.

The Secret Service logic went
something like this: Blankenship is talking to hackers, and writing about
hackers, therefore he most likely is a hacker. Because Blankenship was
contracted to write a book by Steve Jackson Games and also used Steve
Jackson Games’ Bulletin Board System, Steve Jackson Games is probably
engaged in hacking as well.

When the Secret Service raided
both Blankenship’s home and Steve Jackson Games, they seized the working
copy of GURPS Cyberpunk and then claimed that was actually the target
of the raid all along. Unable to distinguish between genuine hacking material
and a role playing game supplement, the Secret Service apparently believed
GURPS Cyberpunk was a hacking manual of sorts. An attorney for Steve Jackson
games said that during the raid an agent told Jackson that the game supplement
was “a handbook for computer crime.”

The raid was entirely baseless,
but it almost ruined Steve Jackson Games. The raid occurred in March,
yet all of the material confiscated was not returned until June (and in
fact, some of the confiscated materials, such as printed copies of the
GURPS Cyberpunk book, were never returned) — a significant lapse of time
for a small business. The company in fact almost went under, and 8 employees
were laid off as the company tried to stay afloat.

A judge later awarded Steve
Jackson Games $53 thousand in damages — a piddling amount given the court’s
conclusion about the raid:

[P]rior to March 1, 1990, and at all other times, __there has
never been any basis for suspicion__ that [Steve Jackson Games, Steve
Jackson, or any of the other individuals who subsequently sued the Secret
Service as a result of the raid] have engaged in any criminal activity,
violated any law, or attempted to communicate, publish, or store any illegally
obtained information or otherwise provide access to any illegally obtained
information or to solicit any information which was to be used illegally.

As someone who operates a number
of web site, the people who bring down servers with denial of service
attacks worry me, but they don’t worry me a tenth as much as a government
willing to possess a man’s entire business simply because its agents can
tell a role playing game from a hacker manual.