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people, and their favorite pastimes tend to be somewhat out of the ordi-
nary. The best-known American simulation game is probably
"Dungeons & Dragons," a multi-player parlor entertainment played
with paper, maps, pencils, statistical tables and a variety of oddly-
shaped dice. Players pretend to be heroic characters exploring a whol-
ly-invented fantasy world. The fantasy worlds of simulation gaming are
commonly pseudo-medieval, involving swords and sorcery spell-
casting wizards, knights in armor, unicorns and dragons, demons and
goblins.
Urvile and his fellow gamers preferred their fantasies highly techno-
logical. They made use of a game known as "G.U.R.P.S.," the "Generic
Universal Role Playing System," published by a company called Steve
Jackson Games (SJG).
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"G.U.R.P.S." served as a framework for creating a wide variety of arti-
ficial fantasy worlds. Steve Jackson Games published a smorgasboard of
books, full of detailed information and gaming hints, which were used to
flesh-out many different fantastic backgrounds for the basic GURPS
framework. Urvile made extensive use of two SJG books called *GURPS
High-Tech* and *GURPS Special Ops.*
In the artificial fantasy-world of *GURPS Special Ops,* players
entered a modern fantasy of intrigue and international espionage. On
beginning the game, players started small and powerless, perhaps as
minor-league CIA agents or penny-ante arms dealers. But as players
persisted through a series of game sessions (game sessions generally
lasted for hours, over long, elaborate campaigns that might be pursued
for months on end) then they would achieve new skills, new knowledge,
new power. They would acquire and hone new abilities, such as marks-
manship, karate, wiretapping, or Watergate burglary. They could also
win various kinds of imaginary booty, like Berettas, or martini shak-
ers, or fast cars with ejection seats and machine-guns under the head-
lights.
As might be imagined from the complexity of these games, Urvile's gam-
ing notes were very detailed and extensive. Urvile was a "dungeon-
master," inventing scenarios for his fellow gamers, giant simulated
adventure-puzzles for his friends to unravel. Urvile's game notes cov-
ered dozens of pages with all sorts of exotic lunacy, all about ninja raids
on Libya and break-ins on encrypted Red Chinese supercomputers. His
notes were written on scrap-paper and kept in loose-leaf binders.
The handiest scrap paper around Urvile's college digs were the many
pounds of BellSouth printouts and documents that he had snitched out of
telco dumpsters. His notes were written on the back of misappropriated
telco property. Worse yet, the gaming notes were chaotically inter-
spersed with Urvile's hand-scrawled records involving *actual com-
puter intrusions* that he had committed.
Not only was it next to impossible to tell Urvile's fantasy game-notes
from cyberspace "reality," but Urvile himself barely made this dis-
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tinction. It's no exaggeration to say that to Urvile it was *all* a game.
Urvile was very bright, highly imaginative, and quite careless of other
people's notions of propriety. His connection to "reality" was not some-
thing to which he paid a great deal of attention.
Hacking was a game for Urvile. It was an amusement he was carrying
out, it was something he was doing for fun. And Urvile was an obsessive
young man. He could no more stop hacking than he could stop in the
middle of a jigsaw puzzle, or stop in the middle of reading a Stephen
Donaldson fantasy trilogy. (The name "Urvile" came from a best-sell-
ing Donaldson novel.)
Urvile's airy, bulletproof attitude seriously annoyed his interrogators.
First of all, he didn't consider that he'd done anything wrong. There was
scarcely a shred of honest remorse in him. On the contrary, he seemed
privately convinced that his police interrogators were operating in a
demented fantasy-world all their own. Urvile was too polite and well-
behaved to say this straight- out, but his reactions were askew and dis-
quieting.
For instance, there was the business about LoD's ability to monitor
phone-calls to the police and Secret Service. Urvile agreed that this
was quite possible, and posed no big problem for LoD. In fact, he and his
friends had kicked the idea around on the "Black Ice" board, much as
they had discussed many other nifty notions, such as building personal
flame-throwers and jury-rigging fistfulls of blasting-caps. They had
hundreds of dial-up numbers for government agencies that they'd gotten
through scanning Atlanta phones, or had pulled from raided VAX/VMS
mainframe computers.
Basically, they'd never gotten around to listening in on the cops because
the idea wasn't interesting enough to bother with. Besides, if they'd
been monitoring Secret Service phone calls, obviously they'd never have
been caught in the first place. Right?
The Secret Service was less than satisfied with this rapier-like hacker
logic.
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Then there was the issue of crashing the phone system. No problem,
Urvile admitted sunnily. Atlanta LoD could have shut down phone ser-
vice all over Atlanta any time they liked. *Even the 911 service?*
Nothing special about that, Urvile explained patiently. Bring the
switch to its knees, with say the UNIX "makedir" bug, and 911 goes
down too as a matter of course. The 911 system wasn't very interest-
ing, frankly. It might be tremendously interesting to cops (for odd
reasons of their own), but as technical challenges went, the 911 service
was yawnsville.
So of course the Atlanta Three could crash service. They probably could
have crashed service all over BellSouth territory, if they'd worked at it
for a while. But Atlanta LoD weren't crashers. Only losers and rodents
were crashers. LoD were *elite.*
Urvile was privately convinced that sheer technical expertise could win
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