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some poor soul calling in with a genuine emergency. Hackers in Amtrak
computers, or air- traffic control computers, will kill somebody some-
day. Maybe a lot of people. Gail Thackeray expects it.
And the viruses are getting nastier. The "Scud" virus is the latest one
out. It wipes hard-disks.
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According to Thackeray, the idea that phone- phreaks are Robin Hoods is
a fraud. They don't deserve this repute. Basically, they pick on the
weak. AT&T now protects itself with the fearsome ANI (Automatic
Number Identification) trace capability. When AT&T wised up and
tightened security generally, the phreaks drifted into the Baby Bells.
The Baby Bells lashed out in 1989 and 1990, so the phreaks switched to
smaller long-distance entrepreneurs. Today, they are moving into
locally owned PBXes and voice-mail systems, which are full of security
holes, dreadfully easy to hack. These victims aren't the moneybags
Sheriff of Nottingham or Bad King John, but small groups of innocent
people who find it hard to protect themselves, and who really suffer
from these depredations. Phone phreaks pick on the weak. They do it
for power. If it were legal, they wouldn't do it. They don't want service,
or knowledge, they want the thrill of power- tripping. There's plenty
of knowledge or service around, if you're willing to pay. Phone phreaks
don't pay, they steal. It's because it is illegal that it feels like power,
that it gratifies their vanity.
I leave Gail Thackeray with a handshake at the door of her office building
 a vast International- Style office building downtown. The Sheriff's
office is renting part of it. I get the vague impression that quite a lot of
the building is empty  real estate crash.
In a Phoenix sports apparel store, in a downtown mall, I meet the "Sun
Devil" himself. He is the cartoon mascot of Arizona State University,
whose football stadium, "Sundevil," is near the local Secret Service HQ
 hence the name Operation Sundevil. The Sun Devil himself is named
"Sparky." Sparky the Sun Devil is maroon and bright yellow, the school
colors. Sparky brandishes a three-tined yellow pitchfork. He has a
small mustache, pointed ears, a barbed tail, and is dashing forward jab-
bing the air with the pitchfork, with an expression of devilish glee.
Phoenix was the home of Operation Sundevil. The Legion of Doom ran a
hacker bulletin board called "The Phoenix Project." An Australian
hacker named "Phoenix" once burrowed through the Internet to attack
Cliff Stoll, then bragged and boasted about it to *The New York Times.*
This net of coincidence is both odd and meaningless.
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The headquarters of the Arizona Attorney General, Gail Thackeray's for-
mer workplace, is on 1275 Washington Avenue. Many of the downtown
streets in Phoenix are named after prominent American presidents:
Washington, Jefferson, Madison....
After dark, all the employees go home to their suburbs. Washington,
Jefferson and Madison  what would be the Phoenix inner city, if there
were an inner city in this sprawling automobile-bred town  become
the haunts of transients and derelicts. The homeless. The sidewalks along
Washington are lined with orange trees. Ripe fallen fruit lies scattered
like croquet balls on the sidewalks and gutters. No one seems to be eat-
ing them. I try a fresh one. It tastes unbearably bitter.
The Attorney General's office, built in 1981 during the Babbitt admin-
istration, is a long low two- story building of white cement and wall-
sized sheets of curtain-glass. Behind each glass wall is a lawyer's
office, quite open and visible to anyone strolling by. Across the street is
a dour government building labelled simply ECONOMIC SECURITY,
something that has not been in great supply in the American Southwest
lately.
The offices are about twelve feet square. They feature tall wooden cases
full of red-spined lawbooks; Wang computer monitors; telephones;
Post-it notes galore. Also framed law diplomas and a general excess of
bad Western landscape art. Ansel Adams photos are a big favorite, per-
haps to compensate for the dismal specter of the parking- lot, two acres
of striped black asphalt, which features gravel landscaping and some
sickly-looking barrel cacti.
It has grown dark. Gail Thackeray has told me that the people who work
late here, are afraid of muggings in the parking lot. It seems cruelly
ironic that a woman tracing electronic racketeers across the interstate
labyrinth of Cyberspace should fear an assault by a homeless derelict in
the parking lot of her own workplace.
Perhaps this is less than coincidence. Perhaps these two seemingly dis-
parate worlds are somehow generating one another. The poor and disen-
franchised take to the streets, while the rich and computer-equipped,
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safe in their bedrooms, chatter over their modems. Quite often the
derelicts kick the glass out and break in to the lawyers' offices, if they
see something they need or want badly enough.
I cross the parking lot to the street behind the Attorney General's office.
A pair of young tramps are bedding down on flattened sheets of card-
board, under an alcove stretching over the sidewalk. One tramp wears a
glitter-covered T-shirt reading "CALIFORNIA" in Coca-Cola cursive.
His nose and cheeks look chafed and swollen; they glisten with what
seems to be Vaseline. The other tramp has a ragged long-sleeved shirt
and lank brown hair parted in the middle. They both wear blue jeans
coated in grime. They are both drunk.
"You guys crash here a lot?" I ask them.
They look at me warily. I am wearing black jeans, a black pinstriped
suit jacket and a black silk tie. I have odd shoes and a funny haircut.
"It's our first time here," says the red-nosed tramp unconvincingly.
There is a lot of cardboard stacked here. More than any two people could
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