The company valued this stolen file at $79,449 - an amount that was determined by adding together the wages of everyone who was involved in writing, editing and storing it, as well as the value of the computer hardware it was on ($31,000 for the computer, $6,000 for a printer and $850 for a monitor) and the Interleaf software it was made with ($2,500). It was only a text file, but it described the enhanced 911 system Bell South used to prioritise and identify emergency calls. When a hacker calling himself Prophet broke into the mainframe of phone company Bell South in September 1988 and copied a file he found there, it was treated as serious business. Jackson was told his company was publishing "a handbook for computer crime". "It was dumb, not to put a fine point on it," Jackson says, "and it was driven by the media, with the help of law enforcement (who liked playing up threats) and the 'hackers' themselves (who liked bragging, and inventing brags for the credulous, as much as any other smart teenaged boys)."
The news breathlessly reported on computer crime and the movie WarGames had the public convinced kids were going to start a nuclear war. It seems ridiculous now, but in the late 1980s hacker-mania swept the United States. Although the warrant was sealed at the time, leaving everyone to assume that GURPS Cyberpunk was the object of the raid, the truth is even odder. The strangest thing about this story isn't that government employees couldn't tell the difference between a work of science fiction and reality, but that they'd only confiscated it opportunistically. When he protested that it was clearly made up, he was repeatedly informed: "This is real." In spite of the fact the rulebook contained rules for having your consciousness transferred to a gender-swapped clone, when he spoke to them the day after the raid he was told that his company was publishing "a handbook for computer crime". Jackson had a hard time communicating that to the Secret Service.
The core manual for GURPS Cyberpunk included rules for exploring cyberspace and hacking networks. I should emphasise that even 30 years later, this is still fiction." The most typical scenarios are espionage, high-tech heists, protecting from same, and combinations of the above with plenty of double-crossing. "Typical characters have 'cyborg' augmentations," he explains, "Though that’s not necessary. Jackson describes the book as being heavily inspired by the high-tech low-life fiction of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. The warrant granting permission for the raid was sealed - since GURPS Cyberpunk was taken, it was natural to assume that was the focus for some reason. But they definitely bent a letter opener and left big scratches around the lock of a file cabinet."Īt the time nobody knew why this was happening. I can’t confirm the jelly bean story - they weren’t mine. "They didn’t treat the office with respect," as Jackson puts it. They tore open boxes, damaged a letter opener trying to pick a locked filing cabinet and, according to some accounts, ate jelly beans off someone's desk. The Secret Service confiscated computers Steve Jackson Games used to run its BBS (which is what people used to have in the days before online forums and comment sections existed), as well as every computer with files relating to then-unpublished GURPS Cyberpunk. The Secret Service agents tore open boxes, damaged a letter opener trying to pick a locked filing cabinet and, according to some accounts, ate jelly beans off someone's desk. Our company president was there, called me to tell me it was happening, and said, 'Don’t come in - they are not letting anyone in the office.' So I did not meet the SS people on the day of the raid, though I got to spend more than enough time with them later." “I did not come to the office during the raid.
I emailed Steve Jackson to ask if he remembered the day his company was raided by agents whose normal job is to stand between the US president and bullets. The office was not yet open for the day and the Secret Service agents almost broke the door down before Blankenship, still only half-dressed, explained that he had keys. Then the Secret Service headed across Austin to the office of Steve Jackson Games, where Blankenship worked as a managing editor, to do the same. On the morning of March 1st 1990, GURPS Cyberpunk author Loyd Blankenship and his wife were woken up by six Secret Service agents who raided their home, confiscating a computer, a printer and even their telephone.
Only one roleplaying game has a note on the cover declaring it "The book that was seized by the US Secret Service!" That RPG is GURPS Cyberpunk, a 1990 supplement for the Generic Universal Roleplaying System published by Steve Jackson Games.