I remember hearing about Sundevil II, but I have no idea what became of it - by the time Sundevil I went down, my friends and I had long ago migrated to more sophisticated methods of calling - and when we wanted to do those "unusual" things (experimenting with a particular kind of system that could get bad attention regardless of diverting, for example) we would rent a hotel room for the night. It is amazingly easy to be the poor confused guy on your Oki 900 cellphone (which almost nobody had at the time, so you look all the more important) explaining to what sounds like a business partner how you "lost the papers in your luggage" then with an exhasperated look, beg the person behind the counter to give you a room with just your (totally fake) student ID or whatever - now you have free local (global) calling and a private room to do what you want from, and your only worry is any physical description the clerk might be able to give of you. Pay in cash, because "your wallet was in your luggage - thank god you stuffed some money in your pocket" You have made sure to let your friends in later, and not drive your car past a window they can see.

I remember when a few unnamed people in a popular group in NYC got nailed, and they said something to the police to the effect of "We did it because we enjoy having power over your lives" - WOW I never felt such a total wave of honesty in my life. Here all these darned little 2600 kiddies are running around yammering about how "information wants to be free" with their need to rationalize, and this unnamed group has the sheer courage to tell it like it is/was. Face it, most people didn't do what they did out of sheer love for computers OR out of curiousity or to `learn how things work' or to `test' - they (we) did it because it feels good to know things most people don't, and it feels even better to be able to flex that into a sense of personal power. When the k0dez-kidz started with the rationale is when I got off the bus - I did what *I* did because I am (was) smart enough to get away with having more power than anyone else I knew, excluding possibly some other hackers. To heck with "exploring" or "learning" - this was a *I am better and smarter and stronger than you, and I can control you like a puppet* thing. But I digress...

It does scare me a bit, - having fallen almost entirely out of that scene myself, I have to wonder if there aren't groups of older teenagers who don't have control of the vast majority of ESS5s and DMS100s and more in the USA. Ordinarily I would be amused at the thought, but with what is happening in the world today, not only would those kids be facing potential life sentences, but their knowledge could be used by the kind of cowardly S.O.B.s who murder innocent people on tape, or who fly planes into buildings.

It scares the tar out of me that if WE were able to do it - well, lets all just pray that telcos are a lot smarter now. And afterwards, let's all pray that same thing again, this time with all of our heart. I just think back at what we could have done had we been both organized and out to cause harm, instead of just fun. I honestly never sat and thought "gee what kind of DAMAGE could we do?" but in retrospect thinking about it nowdays, it could have at least caused many deaths, like by routing a certain percentage of 911 calls from elderly neighborhoods to a always-busy test number or something - if it was carefully done, the death and crime rates in certain specific areas could be manipulated. Or how about simply listening to certain lawyers or stockbrokers, or watching Information America passwords scroll by...

Yeah that prayer is for real and it is called for. I hope they not only padlock trash bins, but that they guard them with multiple heavily-armed guards.