On 29 June 1989, a security manager for the US telephone company Indiana Bell received an anonymous telephone call. In a menacing tone a young man's voice informed him that he had planted bombs in several switching systems known as 5ESSs. 'They're set to blow on a national holiday. They could be anywhere in the country - it's a sort of competition, a security test.' On 15 January 1990 - Martin Luther King Day - AT-T's long-distance telephone switching system went out of action for nine hours. About seventy million calls went uncompleted.

LRB 4 November 1993 | PDF Download