Computers: The Great Satellite Caper

It started innocuously enough: a credit card customer in Connecticut opened his monthly statement and noticed a charge for a piece of electronic equipment that he had never purchased. By last week that apparent billing error had blossomed into a full-fledged hacker scandal and led to the arrest of seven New Jersey teenagers who were charged with conspiracy and using their home computers and telephone hookups to commit computer theft.

According to police, who confiscated $30,000 worth of computer equipment and hundreds of floppy disks, the youths had exchanged stolen credit card numbers, bypassed long-distance telephone fees, traded supposedly secret phone numbers (including those of top Pentagon officials) and published instructions on how to construct a letter bomb. But most remarkable of all, the first reports said, the youngsters had even managed to shift the orbit of one or more communications satellites. That feat, the New York Post decided, was worth a front-page headline: WHIZ KIDS ZAP U.S. SATELLITES.

It was the latest real-life version of the hit movie WarGames, in which an ingenious teenager penetrates a sensitive military computer system and nearly sets off World War III. Two years ago, for instance, the story was re-enacted by the so-called 414 Gang, a group of Milwaukee-area youths who used their machines to break into dozens of computers across the U.S.

The New Jersey episode assumed heroic proportions when Middlesex County Prosecutor Alan Rockoff reported that the youths, in addition to carrying on other mischief, had been "changing the positions of satellites up in the blue heavens." That achievement, if true, could have disrupted telephone and telex communications on two continents. Officials from AT&T and Comsat hastily denied that anything of the sort had taken place. In fact, the computers that control the movement of their satellites cannot be reached by public phone lines. By week's end the prosecutor's office was quietly backing away from its most startling assertion, but to most Americans, the satellite caper remained real, a dramatic reminder that for a bright youngster steeped in the secret arts of the computer age, anything is possible. Says Steven Levy, author of Hackers: "It's an immensely seductive myth, that a kid with a little computer can bring a powerful institution to its knees."

Last spring postal authorities traced the Connecticut credit card purchase and a string of other fraudulent transactions to a post-office box in South Plainfield, N. J. Someone was using the box to take delivery of stereo and radar-detection equipment ordered through a computerized mail-order catalog. The trail led to a young New Jersey enthusiast who used the alias "New Jersey Hack Sack" and communicated regularly with other computer owners over a loosely organized network of electronic bulletin boards. A computer search of the contents of those boards by Detective George Green and Patrolman Michael Grennier, who is something of a hacker himself, yielded a flood of gossip, advice, tall tales and hard information, including excerpts from an AT&T satellite manual, dozens of secret telephone numbers and lists of stolen credit card numbers.