Behind the Scenes 
Law
Drag.net
Combining old-fashioned detective work with newfangled computer savvy, Austin’s high-tech police unit is cracking down on hackers, chip thieves, and other futuristic felons.
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Indeed, previous forays by the APD into electronic crime had been less than sparkling successes. Five years ago, for instance, Austin police officers went along on a federally directed anti-hacker raid that was a fiasco and, later, the subject of a book, The Hacker Crackdown, by cyberpunk writer Bruce Sterling. As part of a national effort to combat hacking, FBI and Secret Service agents raided the Austin headquarters of Steve Jackson Games, mistaking it for a hotbed of computer crime. Steve Jackson, aided by the newly formed Electronic Frontier Foundation, sued the feds and was awarded more than $300,000. “There’s no question that that case was a deterrent for a lot of officers,” Bradley says.
But even without that discouraging precedent, the new unit had a lot to prove—not just to the high-tech firms that were sponsoring it but to the public as well. And within days of the meeting of Watson and his fellow security officers in 1994, a case began shaping up that would test the new high-tech unit’s capabilities. It involved not only daring physical thefts but hacking that went far beyond the usual bounds of electronic intrusion.
During the first week of February that year, the systems operator for the main computer at Texas Racing Commission headquarters noticed some suspicious intrusions into its system. After the APD was notified, the complaint was forwarded to Bradley and Brick, who traced the phone line used for the break-in to an apartment rented to 21-year-old Chris Lamprecht, a.k.a. Minor Threat, a member of the computer underground who was working as a programmer at a small high-tech company. Lamprecht had been in trouble with the law before: In 1991 he and two friends had been caught breaking into a building on the edge of town. Lamprecht’s attorney, Jim Sawyer, says that he got his client off by adopting the strategy of most lawyers who represent hacker types. He went in front of a judge, pointed to his nerdy client, and said, “It was Pee-wee’s big night out.”
But just a year later, on July 9, 1992, Lamprecht was arrested again, this time for trying to sell stolen memory chips. His accomplice, who gave his name as “Scott Berry,” turned out to be a fugitive named Jason Copson, the leader of a Virginia gang of hackers called Dark Side Research (DSR) that messed with PBX boards, the telephone exchange switching devices that route calls from station to station. Three months before, Copson had hidden out in Lamprecht’s apartment in North Austin, and the two began to hatch plans for an even more devious Texas wing of DSR—one that would target the larger switching boards used by Southwestern Bell. Until their arrest, Copson and Lamprecht had been hacking into Bell’s main computer and hitting the switching boards of nearly every one of its central offices.
When the police uncovered Copson’s true identity through his fingerprints, he was charged for his offenses in Texas; first, however, he was extradited back to Virginia to serve time for crimes committed there. Lamprecht also pleaded guilty, was sentenced to a year, and wound up serving five months in the Del Valle Correctional Institute. After getting out of jail, Lamprecht seemed to turn his life around. He was doing so well at his new job that he was allowed to install equipment at banks.
Then came the hacking incident at the Racing Commission. When officers arrived at Lamprecht’s apartment to search for evidence, they discovered that all the computer equipment had been removed. Days before, as Bradley learned later, Lamprecht and his roommate, a hacker named David Querin, a.k.a. Mental Conflict, had managed to download the log of ongoing investigations from the Racing Commission files, which included their own case and mentioned the planned raid on their apartment. Still, while the search was going on, Querin pulled up in his jeep, which was loaded with computer equipment. Although he fled the premises on foot—and remains on the lam—the officers got a warrant to search the vehicle and later removed three computers and some stolen telephone equipment.
Initially stymied by the password on Querin’s computer, Bradley asked for help from the manufacturer, and after logging on he was able to use his basic technical training to copy the necessary files and gather evidence of hacking. But hacking was small potatoes compared with what else he found in the apartment: recent bank receipts from an account under the name of Scott Berry and a handwritten note that suggested a teenage fantasy as much as a master plan for a crime. It concluded: “After 30 days (when all money is transferred), Fly to distant person, party, get cash, party, come home. Buy safe. Shop for & buy 300 ZX.”
At first, Bradley and Brick were puzzled. The receipts were recent—yet Scott Berry was the alias used by Jason Copson, who had been behind bars since July 1992. They learned, however, that Copson was something of a sleight-of-hand artist in prison. To prevent his phone calls from being monitored, he had stolen a phone from a chaplain’s office and had broken it down into basic components that could be carried in his pocket. And in addition to his secret calls, Copson continued to make calls over the regular prison telephone, talking to Lamprecht in code.
Bradley and Brick subpoenaed the prison’s tapes of those calls and decoded them. Then they contacted veteran Internal Revenue Service investigator George Madding, who traced the bank activities of Lamprecht and his associates and uncovered suspicious deposits to various accounts linked to Lamprecht. Between information gleaned from the phone calls and Madding’s detective work, Bradley and Brick figured out that Lamprecht—with Copson’s advice—had been selling stolen circuit boards and covering his tracks by using multiple bank accounts. They eventually determined that Lamprecht had stolen nearly $1 million worth of phone equipment.
In November 1994 Lamprecht was charged with money laundering. Lamprecht’s attorney, Jim Sawyer, recommended a plea-bargain to his client with the understanding that he would cooperate in the case against Copson, and in January Lamprecht turned himself in and agreed to debrief Bradley and Brick about his activities. Yet perhaps because of the hacker code of silence, he never actually told them anything useful, and his plea-bargain was revoked. Four months later Lamprecht was sentenced to seventy months in federal prison. As part of his parole, the judge ruled that he could not own a computer with a modem or work in a job that involved installing or troubleshooting computer systems.
Following the sentencing, officers in the new high-tech crime unit joined the prosecuting attorney and IRS agents at a press conference. A table was piled high with ten-inch- by fourteen-inch circuit boards, a portion of the booty seized from Lamprecht and his cohorts. One of the boards, as Bradley pointed out, had been stolen by Lamprecht twice. He had stolen it once with Copson, and then, after the board had been returned to Southwestern Bell, he had stolen it again.
For Bradley and Brick, as well as for high-tech security agents around the country, those circuit boards represent a new kind of contraband. The officers have their work cut out for them, and as the Surface Mount case demonstrates, it’s going to take more than luck, persistence, and old-fashioned police work. “It’s still a new area for us,” says Bradley, “and the criminals have a long head start.” Or as lawyer Sawyer puts it, “Pee-wee’s big night out has gotten ominous.”
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