Action
Along with the Chicago Task Force and the Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau, the operation involved raids in Austin, Plano, Cincinnati, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Newark, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Richmond, Tucson, San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco. The raids were centered in Arizona, where the press conference occurred.
Raids generally took place in middle-class suburbs and targeted credit card thieves and telephone abusers. They were carried out by local police, with the aid of over 150 Secret Service agents. Twenty-seven search warrants, resulting in three arrests, were issued and executed on May 7 and 8, 1990. Police also took around 42 computers and approximately 25 BBSes, making it the largest crackdown on electronic bulletin boards in world history. Finally, about 23,000 floppy disks were also seized. These held a variety of data, including software and other pirated material. The three people arrested were "Tony the Trashman," "Dr. Ripco," and "Electra."
Other parts of the operation targeted the underground ezine Phrack, which had published the contents of a proprietary text file copied from Bell South computers and containing information about the E911 emergency response system, although this was later made null in a court case in which it was proven that the same information about the E911 system was also provided to the public through a mail-order catalog.
Read more about this topic: Operation Sundevil
Famous quotes containing the word action:
“Acts themselves alone are history.... Tell me the acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish! All that is not action is not worth reading.”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“In the life of the human spirit, words are action, much more so than many of us may realize who live in countries where freedom of expression is taken for granted. The leaders of totalitarian nations understand this very well. The proof is that words are precisely the action for which dissidents in those countries are being persecuted.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)