Blankenship was less wary. He had shut down "Phoenix" as rumorsreached him of a crackdown coming. Still, a dawn raid roustedhim and his wife from bed in their underwear, and six SecretService agents, accompanied by a bemused Austin cop and acorporate security agent from Bellcore, made a rich haul. Offwent the works, into the agents' white Chevrolet minivan: anIBM PC-AT clone with 4 meg of RAM and a 120-meg hard disk; aHewlett-Packard LaserJet II printer; a completely legitimate andhighly expensive SCO-Xenix 286 operating system; Pagemaker disksand documentation; the Microsoft Word word-processing program;Mrs. Blankenship's incomplete academic thesis stored on disk;and the couple's telephone. All this property remains in policecustody today.

The agents then bundled Blankenship into a car and it was offthe Steve Jackson Games in the bleak light of dawn. The factthat this was a business headquarters, and not a privateresidence, did not deter the agents. It was still early; no onewas at work yet. The agents prepared to break down the door,until Blankenship offered his key.

The exact details of the next events are unclear. The agentswould not let anyone else into the building. Their searchwarrant, when produced, was unsigned. Apparently theybreakfasted from the local "Whataburger," as the litter fromhamburgers was later found inside. They also extensivelysampled a bag of jellybeans kept by an SJG employee. Someonetore a "Dukakis for President" sticker from the wall.

SJG employees, diligently showing up for the day's work, weremet at the door. They watched in astonishment as agentswielding crowbars and screwdrivers emerged with captivemachines. The agents wore blue nylon windbreakers with "SECRETSERVICE" stencilled across the back, with running-shoes andjeans. Confiscating computers can be heavy physical work.

No one at Steve Jackson Games was arrested. No one was accusedof any crime. There were no charges filed. Everythingappropriated was officially kept as "evidence" of crimes neverspecified. Steve Jackson will not face a conspiracy trial overthe contents of his science-fiction gaming book. On thecontrary, the raid's organizers have been accused of gravemisdeeds in a civil suit filed by EFF, and if there is any trialover GURPS Cyberpunk it seems likely to be theirs.

The day after the raid, Steve Jackson visited the local SecretService headquarters with a lawyer in tow. There was troubleover GURPS Cyberpunk, which had been discovered on thehard-disk of a seized machine. GURPS Cyberpunk, alleged aSecret Service agent to astonished businessman Steve Jackson,was "a manual for computer crime."

"It's science fiction," Jackson said.

"No, this is real." This statement was repeated several times,by several agents. This is not a fantasy, no, this is real.Jackson's ominously accurate game had passed from pure, obscure,small-scale fantasy into the impure, highly publicized,large-scale fantasy of the hacker crackdown. No mention wasmade of the real reason for the search, the E911 document.Indeed, this fact was not discovered until the Jacksonsearch-warrant was unsealed by his EFF lawyers, months later.Jackson was left to believe that his board had been seizedbecause he intended to publish a science fiction book that lawenforcement considered too dangerous to see print. Thismisconception was repeated again and again, for months, to anever-widening audience. The effect of this statement on thescience fiction community was, to say the least, striking.

GURPS Cyberpunk, now published and available from Steve JacksonGames (Box 18957, Austin, Texas 78760), does discuss some of thecommonplaces of computer-hacking, such as searching throughtrash for useful clues, or snitching passwords by boldly lyingto gullible users. Reading it won't make you a hacker, anymore than reading Spycatcher will make you an agent of MI5.Still, this bold insistence by the Secret Service on itsauthenticity has made GURPS Cyberpunk the Satanic Verses ofsimulation gaming, and has made Steve Jackson the firstmartyr-to-the-cause for the computer world's civil libertarians.

From the beginning, Steve Jackson declared that he had committedno crime, and had nothing to hide. Few believed him, for itseemed incredible that such a tremendous effort by thegovernment would be spent on someone entirely innocent.

Surely there were a few stolen long-distance codes in"Illuminati," a swiped credit-card number or two -- something.Those who rallied to the defense of Jackson were publicly warnedthat they would be caught with egg on their face when the realtruth came out, "later." But "later" came and went. The factis that Jackson was innocent of any crime. There was no caseagainst him; his activities were entirely legal. He had simplybeen consorting with the wrong sort of people.

In fact he was the wrong sort of people. His attitude stank.He showed no contrition; he scoffed at authority; he gave aidand comfort to the enemy; he was trouble. Steve Jackson comesfrom subcultures -- gaming, science fiction -- that have alwayssmelled to high heaven of troubling weirdness and deep-dyedunorthodoxy. He was important enough to attract repression,but not important enough, apparently, to deserve a straightanswer from those who had raided his property and destroyed hislivelihood.

The American law-enforcement community lacks the manpower andresources to prosecute hackers successfully, one by one, on themerits of the cases against them. The cyber-police to datehave settled instead for a cheap "hack" of the legal system: aquasi-legal tactic of seizure and "deterrence." Humiliate andharass a few ringleaders, the philosophy goes, and the rest willfall into line. After all, most hackers are just kids. The fewgrown-ups among them are sociopathic geeks, not real players inthe political and legal game. And in the final analysis, asmall company like Jackson's lacks the resources to make anyreal trouble for the Secret Service.

But Jackson, with his conspiracy-soaked bulletin board and hisseedy SF-fan computer-freak employees, is not "just a kid." Heis a publisher, and he was battered by the police in the fulllight of national publicity, under the shocked gaze ofjournalists, gaming fans, libertarian activists and millionairecomputer entrepreneurs, many of whom were not "deterred," butgenuinely aghast.

"What," reasons the author, "is to prevent the Secret Servicefrom carting off my word-processor as 'evidence' of somenon-existent crime?"

"What would I do," thinks the small-press owner, "if someonetook my laser-printer?"

Even the computer magnate in his private jet remembers hisheroic days in Silicon Valley when he was soldering semi-legalcircuit boards in a small garage.

Hence the establishment of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.The sherriff had shown up in Tombstone to clean up that outlawtown, but the response of the citizens was swift andwell-financed.

Steve Jackson was provided with a high-powered lawyerspecializing in Constitutional freedom-of-the-press issues.Faced with this, a markedly un-contrite Secret Service returnedJackson's machinery, after months of delay -- some of it broken,with valuable data lost. Jackson sustained many thousands ofdollars in business losses, from failure to meet deadlines andloss of computer-assisted production.

Half the employees of Steve Jackson Games were sorrowfullylaid-off. Some had been with the company for years -- notstatistics, these people, not "hackers" of any stripe, butbystanders, citizens, deprived of their livelihoods by thezealousness of the March 1 seizure. Some have since beenre-hired -- perhaps all will be, if Jackson can pull his companyout of its persistent financial hole. Devastated by the raid,the company would surely have collapsed in short order -- butSJG's distributors, touched by the company's plight and feelingsome natural subcultural solidarity, advanced him money toscrape along.