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Date: Tue, 09 Jul 91 21:28:26 CDT
From: "Craig Neidorf" < C483307@UMCVMB.BITNET>
Subject: File 3-- The TERMINUS of Len Rose
The TERMINUS of LEN ROSE
by Craig Neidorf
(kl@stormking.com)
(Adapted from 2600 Magazine, Spring 1990)
As most readers of 2600 Magazine and Computer Underground Digest
should know, I am Knight Lightning, and I used to be the editor and
publisher of Phrack, a magazine similar to 2600, but not available in
a hardcopy format. In my capacity as editor and publisher I often
received text files and other articles submitted for publication.
Actually, this is how the majority of the material found in Phrack was
acquired. Outside of articles written by Taran King or myself, there
was no staff, merely a loose, unorganized group of free-lancers who
sent us material from time-to-time.
One such free-lance writer was Len Rose, known to some as
Terminus. To the best of my knowledge at the time, Len was a Unix
consultant who ran his own system on UUCP called Netsys. Netsys was a
major electronic mail station for messages passing through UUCP.
Terminus was no stranger to Phrack. Taran King had interviewed him
for Phrack Pro-Phile 10, found in Phrack's fourteenth issue.
Prior to the end of 1988, I had very little contact with Terminus
and we were reintroduced when he contacted me through the Internet.
He was very excited that Phrack still existed over the course of the
years and he wanted to send us an article. However, Len was a
professional Unix consultant, holding contracts with major
corporations and organizations across the country and quite reasonably
(given the corporate mentality) he assumed that these companies would
not understand his involvement with Phrack. Nevertheless, he did send
Phrack an article back in 1988. It was a computer program actually
that was called "Yet Another File on Hacking Unix" and the name on the
file was >Unknown User<, adopted from the anonymous posting feature of
the once famous Metal Shop Private bulletin board.
The file itself was a password cracking program. Such programs
were then and are still today publicly available intentionally so that
system managers can run them against their own password files in order
"An example is the password cracker in COPS, a package
that checks a Unix system for different types of
vulnerabilities. The complete package can be obtained
by anonymous FTP from ftp.uu.net. Like the password
cracker published in Phrack, the COPS cracker checks
whether any of the words in an on-line dictionary
correspond to a password in the password file."
(Dorothy Denning, Communications of the ACM,
March 1991, p. 28)
Perhaps if more people used them, we would not have incidents
like the Robert Morris Worm, Cliff Stoll's KGB agents, or the
recent crisis involving system intruders from the Netherlands.
Time passed and eventually we come to January 1990. At some
point during the first week or two of the new year, I briefly logged
on to my account on the VM mainframe on the University of
Missouri-Columbia and saw that I had received electronic mail from Len
Rose. There was a brief letter followed by some sort of program.
From the text I saw that the program was Unix-based, an operating
system I was virtually unfamiliar with at the time. I did not
understand the significance of the file or why Len had sent it to me,
however, since I was logged in remotely from St. Louis, I decided to
let it sit until I arrived back at school a few days later. In the
meantime I had noticed some copyright markings on the file and sent a
letter to a friend at Bellcore Security asking about the legalities in
having or publishing such material. As it turns out this file was
never published in Phrack.
Although Taran King and I had already decided not to publish this
file, other events made sure that our decision was mandatory. Upon
returning to University of Missouri-Columbia (for the new semester) on
January 12, 1990, we discovered that all access to our accounts on the
mainframe of the University of Missouri had been revoked without
explanation. On January 18, 1990 I was visited by the U.S. Secret
Service for reasons unrelated to the Unix program Len Rose had sent.
That same day under obligation from a subpoena issued by a Federal
District Court judge, the University turned over all files from my
mainframe account to the U.S. Secret Service including the Unix file.
Included below is the text portion of that file:
"Here is a specialized login for System V 3.2 sites.
I presume that any competent person can get it working
on other levels of System V. It took me about 10
minutes to make the changes and longer to write the
README file and this bit of mail."
"It comes from original AT&T SVR3.2 sources, so it's
definitely now something you wish to get caught with.
As people will probably tell you, it was originally
part of the port to an AT&T 3B2 system. Just so that
I can head off any complaints, tell them I also
compiled it with a minimal change on a 386 running AT&T
Unix System V 3.2 (they'll have to fiddle with some
defines, quite simple to do). Any changes I made are
bracketed with comments, so if they run into something
terrible tell them to blame AT&T and not me."
"I will get my hands on some Berkeley 4.3 code and do
the same thing if you like (it's easy of course)."
In the text of the program it also reads:
"WARNING: This is AT&T proprietary source code. Do
NOT get caught with it."
and;
" Copyright (c) 1984 AT&T
All Rights Reserved
* THIS IS UNPUBLISHED PROPRIETARY SOURCE CODE OF AT&T *
* The copyright notice above does not evidence any *
* actual or intended publication of such source code. *"
As it turned out the program that Len Rose had sent was
modified to be a Trojan horse program that could capture accounts
and passwords, saving them into a file that could later be
retrieved. However, knowing how to write a Trojan horse login
program is no secret. For example;
"such programs have been published in The Cuckoo's Egg
by Clifford Stoll and an article by Grampp and Morris.
Also in his ACM turing lecture, Ken Thompson, one of
the Bell Labs coauthors of Unix, explained how to
create a powerful Trojan horse that would allow its
author to log onto any account with either the password
assigned to the account or a password chosen by the
author."(Dorothy Denning, Communications of the ACM,
March 1991, p. 29-30)
Between the Unix 3.2 source code, the Unix password cracking
file, and the added fact that Terminus was a subscriber to
Phrack, Len Rose was raided by the United States Secret Service
(including SSA Tim Foley who was the case agent in U.S. v.
Neidorf) at his Middletown, Maryland home on February 1, 1990.
The actual search on his home was another atrocity in and of
itself.
"For five hours, the agents -- along with two Bellcore
employees -- confined Rose to his bedroom for
questioning and the computer consultant's wide, Sun,
in another room while they searched the house.
The agents seized enough computers, documents, and
personal effects -- including Army medals, Sun Rose's
personal phone book, and sets of keys to their house
-- to fill a 14-page list in a pending court case."
(No Kid Gloves For The Accused, Unix Today!,
June 11, 1990, page 1)
It was also reported that the agents did serious damage to
the physical house itself. Len was left without the computers
that belonged to him and that he desperately needed to support
himself and his family financially. Essentially Len went into
bankruptcy and furthermore now he was blacklisted by AT&T.
This culminated in a May 15, 1990 indictment of Len Rose at
age 31. There were five counts charging Len with violations of
the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and Wire Fraud. The total
maximum penalty he faced was 32 years in prison and fines of
$950,000. Furthermore, the U.S. Attorney's office in Baltimore
insisted that Len was a member of the Legion of Doom, a claim
that Len and known LOD members have consistently denied. It did
finally become clear that Terminus was not a member.
This was just the beginning of another long saga of bad luck
for Len Rose. He had no real lawyer, he had no money, and he had
no job. Furthermore, Len suffered a broken leg after rescuing
his son during a camping trip.
Eventually Len found work with a company in Naperville,
Illinois (DuPage County ) with a Unix consulting
firm called InterActive and he had a new lawyer named Jane Macht.
The future began to look a little brighter temporarily. The
problem was that within a week InterActive was making claims that Len
had copied Unix source code from them. Illinois State Police and SSA
Tim Foley (what is HE doing here!?) came to Len's new home and took
him away. In addition to the five count indictment in Baltimore, now
Len was facing criminal charges from the State of Illinois. It was at
this point, attorney Sheldon T. Zenner, who had successfully defended
me took on the responsibility of defending Len against the state
charges.
Len's spin of bad luck was not over yet. Assistant U.S. Attorney
William Cook in Chicago wanted a piece of the action, in part perhaps
to redeem himself from his highly publicized defeat in U.S. v.
Neidorf. A third possible indictment for Len seemed inevitable. In
fact, there were statements made that I personally was to have been
subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury about Len, but this never
took place.
As time passed and court dates kept being delayed, Len was barely
surviving; running out of money and options. His wife wanted to leave
him and take away his children, he could not find work, he was looking
at two serious indictments for sure, and a possible third, and he just
could not take it any longer.
Len's legal arguments were strong in many respects and it is
widely believed that if he had fought the charges that he may very
well have been able to prove his innocence. Unfortunately, the pile
up of multiple indictments, in a legal system that defines justice in
terms of how much money you can afford to spend defending yourself,
took its toll. The U.S. Attorney in Baltimore did not want to try the
case and they offered Len a deal, part of which was that Assistant
U.S. Attorney Cook got something as well. Len would agree to plead
guilty to two wire fraud charges, one in Baltimore, one in Chicago.
The U.S. Attorney's office would offer a recommendation of a prison
sentence of 10 months, the State of Illinois would drop it's charges,
and Len would eventually get his computer equipment back.
In the weeks prior to accepting this decision I often spoke with
Len, pleading with him to fight based on the principles and importance
of the issues, no matter what the costs. However, I was blinded by
idealism while Len still had to face the reality.
Len Rose was sentenced in June and began serving his time on July
10, 1990. He got his computer equipment back, but only under the
agreement that he sell all of it.
United States v. Rose was not a case about illegal intrusion into
other people's computers. Despite this the Secret Service and AT&T
called his case a prime example of a hacker conspiracy. In reality it
was only an example of blind justice and corporate power. Like many
criminal cases of this type, it is all a question of how much justice
can a defendant afford -- How much of this type of *injustice* can the
American public afford?
-- -- -- -- --
A Few Words About Law Enforcement and the Len Rose case...
As a person who has been involved with the legal process
repeatedly over the last couple of years I have learned and
discovered some of the realities behind the rumors and the myths.
In the Spring 1991 issue 2600, I authored an article titled "The
Terminus of Len Rose" and unfortunately the meaning behind the
article was lost on some of the readers whom I admire greatly.
Through my unique experiences at meetings like the 13th
Annual National Computer Security Conference in Washington D.C. and
the first conference on Computers, Freedom, & Privacy in San
Francisco, I have come into contact and had discussions with both the
people who help create the laws as well as those who actively enforce
them. I have learned a lot about what actually takes place behind the
scenes and why. More than anything else, I discovered that my views
on several issues were not so very far from theirs and they taught me
why certain realities were so. What they said made sense and I
realized that I was indeed wrong about some issues and situations. I
was even more wrong in my expectations of the individuals themselves.
These people are decent folks just like you and me. Despite the
highly publicized incidents of the past couple of years, the vast
majority of these people are not out there trying to destroy someone's
life just to make a name for themselves or to put a notch on their
desk. They believe in their work like a sacred religious mission. At
the same time they have families, hobbies, like to go to the movies,
play video games, take vacations during the holidays, and everything
else.
In the article about Len Rose, I did not intend to imply that the
prosecution or the prosecutors were malicious (although the frantic
raid on Len's house may have been a bit out of order), but rather that
the legal process itself can be a difficult road for a non-wealthy
defendant to travel, especially when faced with many indictments at
once. Len Rose was never charged with actually breaking into a
computer, but he was called a hacker (under the negative definition)
just the same. That is not fair. I believe that the prosecutors
acted in the way they thought best and were not out to deny Rose of
his constitutional rights, but the issues of law and computers that
clashed here make things confusing for everyone including myself.
The fact of the matter is that the system does have flaws in it
which arise and are corrected over time. These flaws arose in my own
case and cost me dearly until the system caught its flaw and corrected
itself. I am not here to tell you that Len Rose was a saint or that
he did not do anything wrong. Indeed in the past month I have heard
complaints from several people about bad business deals with Len and
mishaps concerning stolen computer equipment. I don't know all of the
details behind those allegations and considering where Len is today,
those questions are moot. I must admit that Len's transportation of
Unix source code strikes me as a form of copyright infringement or
perhaps software piracy, but Rose did not even make an attempt to
profit financially from this venture. The value of what he actually
transported and his guilt or innocence of these statutes was never put
to the test because the prosecution did not seek to use these more
appropriate statutes concerning piracy or copyright infringement. I
still wonder why.
While I believe that the prosecutors involved with his case are
honest, hardworking, and highly motivated people, it strikes me as
being overly harsh to see a very bright, non-violent offender who did
not even commit a crime for money go to prison when his formidable
talents could have been put to good use elsewhere.
In conclusion I think there may be a rare bad apple mucking up
the legal process from time to time, but it is my firm belief that the
prosecutors and law enforcement officials in our system overall are
dedicated to doing the right thing and going after offenders that they
truly believe to be committing real crimes. Up to this point I've
only been able to watch and learn about their work from an outsider's
viewpoint, but one day I may be interested in participating from their
perspective. As a group in general, the law enforcement community has
earned my respect and appreciation.