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David Golombek, daveg@mit.edu\\
6.805 Paper \#2: Steve Jackson Games\\\\

I started playing GURPS about the same time all my friends started
playing Dungeons and Dragons.  It was simply another of the role
playing games that allowed the players to control their characters in
a virtual world designed by a ``Dungeon Master'', an exploration in
fantasy and imagination.  What I particularly enjoyed about GURPS was
the way it allowed easy expansion into a wide variety of genres,
rather than simply swords and sorcery, as Dungeons and Dragons is want
to do.  Thus, when I first saw the new GURPS Cyberpunk book available
at my favorite bookstore, I eagerly picked up a copy, interested in
seeing how they had adopted the flexible rules of GURPS to handle this
new genre, and read the traditionally excellent background material on
the style provided in each genre guide.  What immediately grabbed my
eye was not the excellent cover art however; it was the plain white
triangle in the bottom right corner bearing the label ``The book that
was seized by the U.S. Secret Service! (See p. 5)''.  

Page 5 contained a full, although slightly biased, description of the
events leading to the delay in publishing of GURPS Cyberpunk.  The
primary author of the piece, Loyd Blankenship, was suspected of being
an important hacker in the underground community (using the handle
The Mentor 1), and had forwarded a copy of a Phrack zine (electronic
magazine) containing a description of the Bell South Enhanced 911
service (the infamous E911 document).  The Secret Service obtained a
Search Warrant to sieze both Loyd's computers and those of his
employer, Steve Jackson Games, despite the lack of any evidence
suggesting he had stored illegal information there.  The Search
Warrant itself is a marvel of overzealousness on the part of the
Secret Service, expanding one line statements of Loyd's regarding the
kermit communication protocol into implications in large decryption
schemes, and posting the Phrack zine into a deep involvement in the
hacker community.

It is likely the Steve Jackson Games computers were siezed because
they involved the text of GURPS cyberpunk, which the Secret Service
would later claim was a ``guide to hackers'', despite the science
fictional nature of the book (and completely regardless of its first
ammendment protections).  Steve Jackson Games never received a full
explanation of the siezure, but in their subsequent court case against
the Secret Service, were deemed to have been harmed financially, and
thus reimbursed almost \$300,000, but electronic mail that was on the
computer when it was siezed was never returned.  It turns out the
exclamation on the front of GURPS Cyberpunk is something of a lie ---
the original copy of the book was largely deleted by the Secret
Service during the sieze.  The orignal copy of the book and all the
play testing notes for it were stored on a Steve Jackson Games, Inc.,
computer, which also hosted the Illuminati BBS, a chat forum for
games, science fiction, and comics.

I was 14 when I read this all for the first time on page 5 of GURPS
Cyberpunk, and it scared me.  It scared me that the Secret Service
would act in such bad faith, not fully investigating the nature of the
Loyd's ``crimes'', or his involvement at Steve Jackson Games.  It
scared me that Steve Jackson games was almost put out of business, and
if not for the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation to lead
their court case, probably would have gone bankrupt.  And even today,
I'm still scared that the FBI, who would instead be handling the case,
may still have not gotten a real feel for the nature of computer
crime.  The FBI, like the Secret Service, is still out to show their
power, to try and scare off hackers, and convict everyone they go
after.  

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