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and AT&T’s final, official explanation remains that the shutdown was caused by an errant piece of software.

The system collapse did not affect the emergency 911 numbers, which are handled by local carriers. Nor, even if it was a bomb, was it likely to have been linked to the previous incident. But it had taken place on a national holiday, Martin Luther King Day, and the coincidence bothered the authorities.

On 18 January 1990, three days after the AT&T system collapsed, the Secret Service began a nation-wide sweep, targeting hacker gangs – in particular the Legion of Doom – and anyone who appeared to be a threat to the phone system.

Their first call was on Knight Lightning, one of the co-editors of the underground newsletter PHRACK. The handle belonged to Craig Neidorf, a twenty-year-old pre-law student at the University of Missouri in Columbia. He was found in his room on the third floor of the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity house.

Special Agent Tim Foley, who had been investigating the attacks on the telephone computer switches for seven months, and Reed Nolan, a security representative from Southwestern Bell Telephone, interviewed Neidorf about an article in PHRACK on the electronic switching systems (ESS). Foley and Nolan also brought up the E911 document. They knew that Neidorf had received a copy of the file from The Prophet and had published it in PHRACK in February 1989. According to Foley, Neidorf admitted knowing that the E911 tutorial had been stolen from BellSouth.

The next day Foley returned with a search warrant and the local police. The ESS article had been forgotten; Neidorf was instead charged with ten felony counts centring on the publication of the E911 file in PHRACK. If found guilty, he faced a sentence of up to sixty-five years in prison.

On 24 January 1990 the Secret Service operation moved to the Queens district of New York, to the homes of several known hackers. The first target was a twenty-year-old known on the underground as Acid Phreak. To his mother and twelve-year-old sister he was simply Joey. He was out when the Secret Service agents called and his kid sister entertained them. When Acid Phreak arrived home, he was told directly that he was suspected of responsibility for the AT&T

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