The Raid on Steve Jackson Games

In 1990, as Austin-based Steve Jackson Games was about to publish "GURPS Cyberpunk", its latest tabletop role-playing game, the United States Secret Service was conducting a nationwide crackdown on "illegal computer hacking activities."

A contemporary of the successful role-playing game "Dungeons and Dragons", SJG's latest game was also influenced by William Gibson's novel "Neuromancer", one of the first of a trend in science fiction called "cyberpunk."

The Secret Service Raid

When the Secret Service raided the Austin offices of Steve Jackson Games, they were following up on a tip that a SJG employee was engaged in illegal computer activities. In the process of the raid, no one was arrested, but all computers and the unpublished manuscript for "GURPS Cyberpunk" were seized.

Upon examining the confiscated items, a Secret Service agent dubbed the "GURPS Cyberpunk" manuscript a "handbook for computer crime."

911

It was later discovered that the Secret Service raids on Steve Jackson Games and other individuals and companies around the country were because of the illegal distribution of a phone company document that described how the nationwide emergency 911 system worked. The SJG staff member under scrutiny was one of the recipients of this document.

After the raid, Steve Jackson Games had to lay off half of its staff, and the company was close to bankruptcy. To make matters worse, after the Secret Service decided not to press charges against them and returned all the company's computers, it was discovered that all of the electronic mail on SJG's BBS had been accessed and deleted.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation

Steve Jackson tried to find an attorney to help his company seek restitution, but was unsuccessful in his search because the legal area of computer crime was too new at the time.

Jackson's dilemma spread throughout the gamer and high-tech community, spurring intense discussion on the WELL, a popular electronic bulletin board started in the late seventies as an offshoot of "The Whole Earth Catalog." The Secret Service raid was of special interest to three WELL members in particular: Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus software; Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow; and John Gilmore of Sun Microsystems. The Steve Jackson Games case caused the threesome to form an "organization to work on civil liberties issues raised by new technologies."

And so the Electronic Freedom Foundation was born!

In 1993, EFF backed Jackson and they went to court. The results: for the first time, a court decided that electronic mail deserved as much protection as telephone calls.

The federal court also awarded Steve Jackson Games $250,000 in attorney fees and $50,000 in damages. They ruled that the raid had been illegal and carelessly executed.

SOURCES:

http://www.eff.org/about/history.php

http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/SJG/

http://www.sjgames.com/SS/

http://www.eff.org/effector/HTML/effect13.02.html#I

http://www.sjgames.com/SS/topten.html