RPGs & The Feds: That Time The Secret Service Raided Steve Jackson Games – PRIME
Have you ever written a game so good that the Secret Service raids your offices, seizes your computers… even your printers? Steve Jackson Games has.
One quiet spring morning in Austin, TX, armed Secret Service Agents, accompanied by a “civilian expert” from Bell South, descended upon what they believed to be a hotbed of hackers and computer piracy. A place where digital secrets were being traded on the open market.
What they would find was a computer full of references to a secret organization known only as the Illuminati, and a recipe for computer crimes and credit fraud using advanced technology the Secret Service had never heard of it. So dangerous did this threat seem that the agents raiding the hacker hideout seized:
- Four computers
- An assortment of loose hard disks
- Various electronic hardware
- And of course, two laser printers
Because you know, laser printers are dangerous machines. Even to this day, some of them are known to have security vulnerabilities that allow a careful programmer to get them to run programs they were never designed to run.
Of course, there was just one small problem with the fruits of the raid. The computers in question belonged not to hackers, but to game developers. The book they were working on detailed methods of computer hacking that relied on technology that a) didn’t exist yet, and b) was entirely fictional.
The product in question was GURPS Cyberpunk, which to this date is the only RPG book to have ever been seized by the Secret Service.
The place? Steve Jackson Games. But SJG wasn’t the only place raided by agents who are expected to protect the president of the United States at all costs, as well as track down counterfeit bills wherever they rear their heads. Secret Service agents also descended on the house of Loyd Blankenship, managing editor of Steve Jackson Games as well, taking a computer, phone, and yet another printer.
Which to be fair, for an organization that investigates counterfeiting as much as they do, grabbing printers just feels like standard operating procedures. That explains the printers, but why did they target Steve Jackson Games? The answer lies in Steve Jackson Games’ commitment to thoroughly researching their sourcebooks. SJG calls their process “reality-checking.”
And while reality-checking the book, Loyd Blankenship, the managing editor whose house was raided, communicated with a range of people from computer security experts to “computer crackers” and, aside from that, Blankenship ran a BBS dedicated to discussing the ‘computer underground.’
All of it perfectly legal, but according to SJG’s review of the Secret Services’ warrant affidavit, it was guilt by association:
From his home, he ran a legal BBS which discussed the “computer underground,” and he knew many of its members. That was enough to put him on a federal List of Dangerous Hoodlums! The affidavit on which SJ Games were raided was unbelievably flimsy . . . Loyd Blankenship was suspect because he ran a technologically literate and politically irreverent BBS, because he wrote about hacking, and because he received and re-posted a copy of the /Phrack newsletter. The company was raided simply because Loyd worked there and used its (entirely different) BBS!
It gets even better when Steve Jackson visits the FBI offices to try and retrieve, or at least make copies of the company’s files. Secret Service agents had promised Jackson that he could make copies of the files stored on the computers they seized from the offices. But as the story goes, he was only allowed to copy a few files, and only from one system.
Jackson was unable to obtain the current text files and hard copy for GURPS Cyberpunk, nor was he able to get the playtest files from the Illuminati BBS. As Jackon himself puts it:
“It became clear that the investigating agents considered GURPS Cyberpunk to be ‘a handbook for computer crime.’ They seemed to make no distinction between a discussion of futuristic credit fraud, using equipment that doesn’t exist, and modern real-life credit card abuse. A repeated comment by the agents was ‘This is real.’“
If this all sounds absurd, you’d be right. But this was so absurd that it led to the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation–the nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the Constitutional rights of computer users. The EFF gave SJG the financial backing it needed to sue the Secret Service, and after a lengthy legal battle, won their case. The judge presiding over the case ruled for the gaming company on two out of three different counts. The repercussions of this trial and ruling are still felt to this day.
