GOTO Jail: FBI Investigated Bizarre BASIC Program Sent To Johnny Cash (muckrock.com)

v3rgEz writes: Who has time to write out all the vaguely threatening conspiracies that need to be sent to celebrities these days? Turns out, that can be automated too: In 1979, the FBI investigated a bizarre, threatening Christmas message sent to Johnny Cash on the eve of his 62nd album's release. The threat included the source and output of a BASIC program, which the FBI dutifully dusted for clues. Newly released documents show what would become the FBI's CyberCrime division.

Comments

I remember 1979 well.

[hey!]

The thing that you have to know about 1979 is that the vast majority of people (including most law enforcement) back then had never seen a computer in person. If you asked most people to draw a computer, they'd produce a rough sketch of the iconic IBM 729 7 track tape drive.

Technology moved so fast after that the computers of 1979 would seem inconceivably archaic even to people who were born in that year. I was still learning to program back then, on machines that had banks of lights on the front panel to show you the contents of the CPU registers. The very first microcomputers an average person (well, and average person with rudimentary soldering skills and the equivalent of $3200 burning a hole in his pocket) could own had just recently become available, and they had the same feature.

The point of my old-fart ramblings is this: unless you are old enough to remember this time, you probably have no idea of how alien and spooky this computer stuff would have been back then. It's not just people are more used to computers now, we're more used to being confronted with unfamiliar new technology in general. You have to understand the biggest change in technology experience most people had had at that time was the switch from rotary dial to keypad on telephones and not everyone had that yet. There was still a display in the Boston Museum of Science explaining the benefits of Touch Tone dialing. TV remote controls were still in the future, you still had to get off the couch to change the channel or the volume. So this kind computer stuff was barely one step removed from sorcery as far as most people were concerned.

The Internet also has familiarized most people today with oddball geek behavior, and experience has taught us not to expect people doing bizarre things to make sense. So not only were computers weird and disturbing to most people, weird and disturbing behavior was more weird and disturbing to most people. People in general, and law enforcement specifically, had no experience whatsoever to draw upon to formulate a reasonable response to something like this. Later law enforcement doesn't have that excuse, but at the time this is really all you could expect from the FBI.