How the US Secret Service confused cyberpunk RPG with a textbook for hackers

Only one book with the rules of the role-playing game has on its cover the message "Book Confiscated by the US Secret Service!" This RPG is the GURPS Cyberpunk, a 1990 addition to the Generic Universal Roleplaying System, published by Steve Jackson Games.

On the morning of March 1, 1990, GURPS Cyberpunk author Lloyd Blankenship and his wife were woken up by six Secret Service agents who invaded their home and confiscated a laptop, printer, and even telephone. Then the Secret Service went to the office of Steve Jackson Games, where Blankenship worked as a senior editor, and did the same. The office was still closed, and Secret Service agents nearly knocked out the door before the still half-dressed Blankenship did not explain to them that he had keys.

I asked Steve Jackson in a letter if he remembers the day when his company was stormed by agents whose primary job is to protect the president from bullets.

“Vaguely enough,” he replied. “When they invaded the office, I haven't come yet. The company president was there, he called me, told me what was happening and advised me not to come, because no one was allowed into the office. Therefore, that day I did not come across the guys from the Secret Service, but later we talked for quite some time. ”

The Secret Service confiscated the computers on which the Steve Jackson Games BBS was running (people used this technology when there were no online forums and comment sections yet), as well as all computers that had files related to the then unpublished GURPS Cyberpunk. They opened the boxes, damaged the knife for opening letters, trying to break open a closed clerical cabinet and, according to rumors, ate candy-dragees from someone's table.

According to Jackson, “they behaved unceremoniously in the office. Created real chaos. Not like vandals, but the mess turned out pretty good. I can not say anything about the story with sweets - they were not mine. But they certainly bent the letter opener and left strong scratches around the cabinet lock. ”

Then no one understood what was happening. The search warrant was sealed, but since GURPS Cyberpunk was taken, it was logical to assume that for some reason it was in it. Jackson says the author of the rule book was inspired by works of art in the high-tech low-life genre of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.

“The characters usually had devices that turned them into cyborgs,” he says. "But it was not always so. The most popular game scenarios were espionage, high-tech attacks, protection against such attacks and their various combinations with many betrayals and intrigues. It’s worth noting that even after 30 years, it still remains science fiction. ”

The Cyberpunk GURPS Basic Guide contains rules for exploring cyberspace and hacking networks.

It was hard for Jackson to explain all this to the Secret Service. Despite the fact that the book contained rules for transferring the player’s consciousness to a clone of a different gender, the next day after the search he was informed that the company was publishing a “computer crime textbook”. When he protested and said that all this was fiction, the answer was one: "All this is real."

The strangest thing in this story is not that government officials were unable to distinguish a science fiction book from reality, but that the confiscation was carried out for their own reasons. Although the warrant was sealed at that time, everyone assumed that the reason for the search was GURPS Cyberpunk; but the truth was even stranger.

Today it may seem ridiculous, but in the late 80s, the US was swept by hackermania. The news constantly talked about computer crimes, and the film "War Games" convinced society that children could start a nuclear war.

“It was stupid, to say the least,” Jackson says. “All the hype was fanned by the media, which was helped by law enforcement officers (they liked using horror stories) and the“ hackers “themselves (they, like any smart teenagers, loved to brag and come up with reasons for boasting, which the trusting public took seriously)."

When a hacker who called himself a Prophet hacked into the mainframe of the telephone company Bell South in September 1988 and copied the file from there, it was perceived as a serious threat. It was just a text file, but it described an advanced 911 system that Bell South used to prioritize and recognize emergency calls. The company rated this stolen file at $ 79,449 - this amount was obtained by summing the salaries of all employees involved in writing, editing and storing the file, as well as the cost of the computer equipment on which the file was stored ($ 31,000 for a computer, $ 6,000 for a printer and $ 850 per monitor) and the Interleaf software that created the file ($ 2,500).

The information contained in the document was not top-secret. Basically, it was administrative, and all the information from it could be found in a document that Bellcore
(the company owner of Bell South) sold to anyone for $ 13. Strongly overestimating this file, and therefore exaggerating the significance of the crime, Bell South attracted the attention of the Secret Service to it to scare teenagers who might want to crack the company’s security system again.

In his youth, Blankenship was a member of the hacker group Legion of Doom (the same one where the Prophet was) under the pseudonym Mentor. In 1986, after he was arrested for a computer crime, he wrote an essay The Conscience of the Hacker(“Hacker Conscience”), which, after being published in the Samizdat magazine Phrack, became known as the Hacker Manifesto (Hacker Manifesto). Later, fragments from a document stolen from Bell South were published in the same magazine.

Four years after his arrest, Blankenship had already left a criminal path. He was no longer a young computer criminal; he got a real job. However, he still managed BBS from home and worked for a company that had its own BBS. This BBS in the Steve Jackson Games was jokingly called the Illuminati.

GURPS Cyberpunk actively borrowed surroundings from science fiction books of the 80s, for example, from Neuromancer. To the extent that the concepts from William Gibson's fundamental novel are highlighted in the glossary of the desktop RPG with asterisks.

The idea that the forum owned by the RPG publishing company should be closed to the Secret Service, because there you can publish a stolen text file with publicly available information, is obviously ridiculous. However, this is exactly what happened. When the agents did not find this file in the equipment of Steve Jackson Games, they took away instead a computer book with the name Blankenship on the cover.

It took Jackson and his lawyer a few days to find out all this, and a few more months to get their equipment back. When it was finally surrendered, most of it was inoperative.

“The equipment was sent to the lawyer’s office in one large box without packaging material,” Jackson says. “For example, the hard drive was simply put inside the PC case, where it hung freely and fought on the motherboard during transportation. It is difficult to attribute it to ignorance; someone did it on purpose. ”

The release of GURPS Cyberpunk was postponed, and the rules had to be almost completely rewritten from scratch based on notes on playtesting and memories. The loss of BBS, a way of direct communication with fans, was also a big blow. “I guess it seems funny from the outside,” Jackson says. “But the damage to the business made me fire half of the employees, and that’s not funny at all.”

Jackson filed a civil lawsuit against the Secret Service, and, in particular, against the Chicago Department of Computer Fraud and Search Abuses. Thanks to the help of technically competent legal advisers who became interested in the recent increase in the number of computer crime cases (another 15 searches were conducted throughout the country as part of the Sundevil operation), Jackson and three of his employees received 300,000 in damages and attorney fees.

Later, these legal advisers organized the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group dedicated to protecting civil rights online. This search also inspired Bruce Sterling, the author of science fiction books, who wrote such fundamental cyberpunk novels as The Schematrix and Islands on the Net, to turn to the documentary genre and write The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier .

Steve Jackson Games has survived and is still publishing games, including Munchkin, Toon and Discworld Roleplaying Game. Remembering the search, Jackson says that he almost buried his company, "but managed to survive it."

“According to my most optimistic estimates, it cost us five years of development,” says Steve.

Lloyd Blankenship no longer works in the field of RPG. Today, he is on the other side of cybersecurity - working as a UX designer for McAfee antivirus software developer.

GURPS Cyberpunk is still for sale. The book thanks the US Secret Service for “unsolicited comments.”