E911 document podcast: Historic, incredibly dull technical document read aloud
For the past 24 weeks, I've been reading Bruce Sterling's classic 1992 nonfiction book The Hacker Crackdown aloud on my podcast. The Hacker Crackdown was the first free online book I ever heard of, and it tells the engrossing story of the 1990 "Operation Sundevil" Secret Service sweep of hackers, which led to the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.
When I told Bruce I wanted to read The Hacker Crackdown aloud, he said, "You're going to read the E911 document aloud?" The E911 document ("Control Office Administration Of Enhanced 911 Services For Special Services and Account Centers") is an impenetrable bureaucratic document that was pilfered from a Bell South compute by a young hacker, and which led to an incredible domino-chain of legal and political ramifications. Bell South claimed that the slim document cost more than $79,000 to produce (the calculus by which this number was arrived at is hilariously dumb), and that the document itself was so hot that it could not even be shown to a jury, lest it enter the court record and be used to crash the nation's emergency telecoms infrastructure. (It turns out that the document was not secret after all -- that another division of Bell was selling it for $10)
So this week on my podcast, I got to the E911 document. It took about 25 minutes to read it aloud. It is the most amazing jumble of acronyms, passive voice prose and gibberish that I've ever seen. It's a hoot -- and a guaranteed soporific. Go ahead and download the podcast and see if you can make any sense of it.
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After trying for the first 30 seconds to valiantly follow the E911 audio, I began to question my purpose in life. I quickly decided it would be more realistic to listen to the it as an ambient background to other work, like writing this comment.
As I write, the E911 easily slips into the background like a boring lecture. It occasionally slips back into my consciousness, like a sermon intruding on a day dream. But unlike even the most boring talk, it quickly slips back int the sub-conscious. As I reach the end of writing this comment, I realize that it is has a subtle malignancy, especially in it's deceptively coherent structures. And so, two thirds of the way through, I gave up entirely.
Thanks for your courageous reading, Cory.
...The fun thing to do would be to go through a "where are they now?" update on this event, such as how Mike Godwin got immortalized not by being involved with the EFF, but for "Godwin's Law", or how "Illuminatti Online" went from a BBS to CenTex's best ISP, to being bought out by PrismNet and turned into a total clusterfuck WRT reneging on agreements between IO and long-time customers.
I was around when all that went down. It still seems like yesterday when every BBS in CenTex was going through their text file collections to see whether they had the e911 document on their BBS or not....
Can anyone explain how the information in this document could help crash the 911 system? It just seems to be an explanation of the fault reporting process.
Wow! You can consider yourself lucky - I had to translate the damned thing in Bulgarian, back in 1993/4...
Back then, me and my wife were young and hungry MScs just out of Sofia University's Department of Mathematics and Computer Science as we got this offer to translate Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown". We did - in about 3 months' time, but it was hard! Neither of us had had any contact with American press-speak at the time, and I can assure you first-hand that the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary at the time didn't list many of Bruce's idioms and so was of no help at all... No Internet... Luckily, The Jargon File was available on the Bulgarian BBSs at the time... And I had to argue with the editor about the meaning of everything - "data banks" for example - she insisted that it must mean "data about banks"... Oh, the times!
The irony of all this is that we never saw the book published. The University Publishing House (which was organizing the whole thing) kept postponing the publication... 9 years later, I came across a listing in a Bulgarian Internet bookstore selling the book - but I don't know whether it was our translation, or a new one, and anyway I wasn't living in Bulgaria at the time and so couldn't order a copy, so I don't know to this day whether we could honestly claim to be translators :-) Not that it matters anymore.
And to think that I was counting on Bruce's autograph on my copy - the publishers said they'd planned to invite him at the time.
It's all water under the bridge now, but I still vividly remember the E911 Document - or "Документът Е911" in Bulgarian - how do you translate an acronym if you have no idea what it means? - and that baby had lots and lots of them.
Cory mentions the "hilariously dumb" calculus behind the $79,449 number. More details can be found in this old EFF newsletter.
There's a chunk listing the labor expenses (200 hours for a contract writer and another 200 hours for a "Paygrade 3 Project Mgr"), typing and editing time, "Order Labels (Cost) = $5.00", and so forth.
But here's the really fun part:
HARDWARE EXPENSES
VT220 $850
Vaxstation II $31,000
Printer $6,000
Maintenance 10% of costs
SOFTWARE EXPENSES
Interleaf Software $22,000
VMS Software $2,500
Software Maintenance 10% of costs
Yes, they included the entire cost of the hardware and software used to write the document (and the maintenance contracts). After all, don't we all throw away our computers after each word processing document we create?
Ah, those were the days.
I'm pretty sure I grabbed this doc off a BBS because it was some kind of deal, looked at it and promptly filed it away somewhere.
Epic heroism in the reading, Cory. By the end I wanted to scream and jump out the window.
Some of Emmanuel Goldstein's early WBAI radio shows involved the events in The Hacker Crackdown. The second show on this page has Steve Jackson and John Perry Barlow as guests.
http://www.2600.com/offthehook/1990/0590.html
And the second show on this page interviews Craig Neidorf.
http://www.2600.com/offthehook/1990/0990.html
Phiber Optik later becomes a co-host on the show. He even calls in from prison during the time he spent there.
#3: It just seems to be an explanation of the fault reporting process.
And you don't think injecting false faults into the process would be a problem? More generally, it's a listing of who's expecting a phone call from whom about what topic, which would be useful for social engineering.
If I remember the story correctly, the original had actual names and phone numbers, which the *hackers* considered too sensitive to publish - so they elided them, but Bell's $10 version didn't.
I totally got a Royal Present in Katamari Damacy while listening to this. Obviously it increases productivity. Productmaridamacytivity.
You could at least put a beat under it or something. It could be, um, a new sort of ambient music.
I was thinking recently about finding the most ridiculously boring thing possible, taking it to a poetry slam, and performing it for 3 minutes. This document might work.
I second the spoken word nod.
Add a pretentious beret-wearing bongo player, and you've got money in the bank.
hmmm...Geraldine and Ricky - Trees Talk Too!
...Of course, if you find Cory's reading monotonous, imagine if he'd managed to get The Shat to do the delivery!
#11:
It works. I put the Gui Boratto record Chromophobia on (tracks 3-5 work best) while listening to this. End result is trippy and disturbing (but it's not suicide-inducing, unlike the music-less original).
Geez, aren't there a lot of NEW books that need readers. Sheesh.
Whoops, wrong URL - this one's rather stupifying in a Shatner/Nimoy kind of way - -
Geraldine and Ricky - Trees Talk Too!
I would have dumped it into a text reader myself and let that take the strain. I have read the Hacker Crackdown a few times and really enjoy it, but I've never read the E911 document.
There was a project a couple of years ago where someone had put the Linux source code into a text reader and was broadcasting it over the net and on radio. Ah, here it is: http://radioqualia.va.com.au/freeradiolinux/. Now *that's* boring.
Moon, that's not the point.