SJ Games vs. the Secret Service (1990)(sjgames.com) |
SJ Games vs. the Secret Service (1990)(sjgames.com) |
In late 1990, I was working in the basement of the Pentagon, supporting the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the J4 Logistics Readiness Center, inside the National Military Command Center. I was a gamer, but I also had a TS/SCI security clearance. I had heard about the SS raid on SJG, and I was pissed off. So, I decided to spend a lot of money and go out and buy one copy of every GURPS book that I could find at my friendly local gaming store (FLGS).
I had a copy of GURPS CyberPunk, and didn’t think very much of it. I was already in a CyberPunk game, and the GURPS version was a pale imitation. But there was another book that drew my attention. It was oriented towards espionage, and among other things it gave a very accurate description of how satellite surveillance worked. It also happened to use an actual classified military code word in the context of explaining what a classified military code word was and how they were used.
The latter was a clear violation of the law, and as soon as I saw it, I reported it to my security officer. He confirmed that this was a legitimate leak of a classified military code word, and he said he would report it further up the chain of command.
I never heard anything more about it from inside the government, but I have to believe that the SS and the FBI would use a coverup like pointing at a different book, if this was the actual reason that they were doing a raid on SJG.
So, there you go — almost 30 years later, yet another clue as to what might have been the real reason for the raid.
NB: When a classified military code word is leaked, they have to go through a huge process to reclassify all the documents that were covered under the old code word. This is a massive undertaking, and would cost millions or possibly even billions of dollars. And then there is the cost of the damage to National Security by all the documents which might already be in enemy hands but where they didn’t know what the code word covered or what compartment those documents were in. So, a leak of this type would be ... a really big deal.
The actual chronology is closer to something like this: feds target a bunch of hackers, one such hacker is also working on a game for SJG, during raid on his house feds notice all of the galley drafts and docs for GURPS Cyberpunk (some of which may have been internal phone company docs and manuals that would look very suspicious to a non-technical agent who signed up to look cool standing next to the president and has no idea about most of this stuff) and so they ask him about it, he happens to mention all of the other docs are just down the road at the SJG office, some fed gets a bright idea and a bunch of them head over to SJG to make a very big mistake...
Source: Straight from the mouths of Steve and Loyd. I was hired by Steve to start Austin's first real ISP with the money he won in this case and my future brother-in-law worked for SJG at the time of the raid.
But your story could be the reason behind the raid.
I don’t have first hand knowledge of any such cases, but I can certainly conceive of them.
Second, I believe it's a matter of record that SJG got caught in "operation sundevil" - a massive crackdown driven by a couple of high profile hacks, mixed in with paranoia driven by such authorative sources as the fictional move "war games"...
[ed: whops, no - that's one of the top ten false facts; apparently sundevil was limited to credit card fraud]
See also: Bruce Sterling, hacker crackdown.
Was the true meaning of the code word described, or might it just have been a coincidence? Like, if I used the words "CASE NIGHTMARE PINK" as an example of a military code word, and it just so happened to be a real military code word? Because stuff like that is probably bound to happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Day_Daily_Telegraph_crosswor...
Also, making names secret under threat of criminal punishment sounds quite problematic. A name itself after all doesn't convey information, and you have to be able to name something to, for example, contest its secret status through legal channels available to a citizen.
like, see the list of WWII operations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_World_War_II_military_...
Operation Menace - Corkscrew - Dracula - it's extremely likely to have a name collision if anyone where to come up with secret operation names.
Sadly, no one got the joke when I asked if anyone had warned the Steve Jackson Games crew.
It's not like he funneled his Lotus gains into the EFF. A foundation is also a money raising endeavor and there were likely many people who contributed a great deal in their early years (and now).
Your statement could just as easily be applied to Wozniak, as in "the money made from Apple (a game changing computer company) eventually went on the found the EFF". It's a fun fact, but not all that accurate.
You know, this really sounds like a "win" only in the sense it's the "win" we're "allowed" to have.
Everyone's lives were ruined for years. They almost lost their business. They lost a product they had poured countless hours into. They had to pay up front for attorney's fees (even though they were completely in the right), and spent years in court.
And all the Secret Service lost was some "sharply worded comments" and a tear-drop amount of taxpayer money that wouldn't even register on their budget and had zero affect on their future budgets.
The only brightsides were indirect ones. The EFF was founded, and their case law would likely be used for future cases and possibly future government actions (before they act) since they know they wouldn't be able to get away with it.
I could understand parents being somewhat disconcerted with finding their teenage daughters surrounded by a bunch of adult men. Especially if they didn't know that another convention was going on (at first). Imagine you take a large group of young teenage girls somewhere and find that there are a couple thousand adult men seemingly at the same event. At first it'd seem very odd.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/civilizing-cyb...
Let's say that someone in the military decides to use the word PANDA as a classified military code word to cover a certain type of activity -- for example, all signals intelligence (see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signals_intelligence>). We will abbreviate PANDA as "PX", and if you have a TS (Top Secret, see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_secret>) SCI (Sensitive Compartemented Information, see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_Compartmented_Inform...) clearance and you have been read onto this compartment, then you can be said to have a "TS/SCI/PX" clearance.
Now, PANDA (or PX) covers all signals intelligence. All satellite surveillance of any type. All "bugging" technologies. All interception of digital communications, human or otherwise. Basically, pretty much everything that the NSA does. And a good part of what the CIA does. A TS/SCI/PX clearance is the minimum necessary to work at the NSA, CIA, White House Communications Agency, or pretty much any of the other dozens and dozens of intelligence agencies in the country.
Any compromise of PANDA would mean that hundreds or thousands of classified military projects would be impacted, some of which might be so sensitive that they have to be shut down entirely rather than be associated with a now-compromised keyword. Each of these projects might have to spend thousands or millions of dollars to reclassify their work, and to do what they can to mitigate the damage done. Each project might have hundreds or thousands of personnel who might no longer have jobs, either for the short term or the long term, because of the compromise.
Now, let's assume that some silly person decides to write an article about PANDA, using it as an example of how an SCI code word is used and what it covers, and publishes that in Wikipedia (or Hacker News). And maybe that also gets published on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
Any time you get a single intelligence agency to run around like a chicken with their head cut off because of some minor compromise, that event probably costs hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. Now imagine what it would cost if the code word for the largest SCI compartment was exposed, and all of the intelligence agencies in the country were running around like chickens with their heads cut off. And all of DoD, for that matter.
Do the math.
Frankly, I think just "billions of dollars" might actually be low-balling the numbers somewhat with regards to the upper boundary, but then I'm just guessing -- I have no first hand knowledge of that kind of activity or cost.
But I do know which compartment was affected by the book I saw.
For all I know, SJG picked a cool sounding word a 16 year old would like, e.g. SHARK, and it just happened to be an actual code word.
Maybe this is why the F35 is so far behind and expensive.
Famously the Times crossword on the day prior to D-day included several of the codewords, but this appears to have been a total coincidence.
That someone who is known to have a TS/SCI/PX clearance is a signal intelligence expert? Where is the threat, compared to other easy ways to figure out someone is a NSA employee?
What a budget item is about? Somewhat interesting, but hardly compromising security (assuming the budget wasn't obfuscated, e.g. by splitting entries and adding fake ones, to begin with).
That PANDA is probably small enough to have no subcompartments? A lot of data would be required to confirm such an hint, and clearly not a running around like a chicken with their head cut off matter.
What if they had to cancel or mothball multiple programs of that size?
What would it have cost if they had to cancel or mothball all stealth programs?
I’m not saying that is what actually happened, but that would give us a reasonable top end for the potential costs involved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...