Date   : Sun, 03 Jun 1984203:25:00-MDT
From   : jpm@BNL.ARPA
Subject: The latest info on the BBS confiscation case

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.