Leonard Rose (hacker)
American hacker (born 1959)
- Life
- 1959 – present
- Born
- 1959
- Nationality
- United States
Leonard Rose, aka Terminus, is an American hacker who in 1991 accepted a plea bargain that convicted him of two counts of wire fraud stemming from publishing an article in Phrack magazine.
Early Life
Leonard Rose was born in 1959 in Elkton, Maryland. Little is documented about his early background beyond his later identification with the hacker community under the handle Terminus.
The Phrack Article and Federal Investigation
Rose authored an article for Phrack magazine explaining how trojan horses functioned. As part of that article, he excerpted 21 lines of AT&T's SVR3.2 login.c source code. The publication drew immediate attention from both AT&T and the United States Secret Service, who raided his home office in Middletown, Maryland. Agents seized a moving truck's worth of computers, books, electronics, and paperwork in the process.
Legal Proceedings
The original federal indictment against Rose included multiple counts. Two counts of wire fraud arose specifically from his having sent the Phrack article — containing the excerpted login.c code — via email to the magazine's publishers on two separate occasions. The duplication was necessitated by the fact that Craig Neidorf, known as Knight Lightning and then a co-publisher of Phrack, had accidentally deleted the original message.
Additional counts in the indictment stemmed from Rose's development of a brute-force password decryption program that employed a dictionary attack. Federal prosecutors characterized the program as "burglary tools," drawing an analogy to physical break-in implements carried during the commission of a crime.
In 1991, Rose accepted a plea bargain that resulted in convictions on the two wire fraud counts.
Legion of Doom Accusations
During the period surrounding his prosecution, Rose was publicly characterized in numerous newspaper articles as the "mastermind" of the Legion of Doom hacker group. According to available accounts, this characterization was inaccurate, and Rose had no actual involvement with the Legion of Doom.
Defense and Support
Rose's legal defense drew support from several prominent figures in the technology and civil liberties communities. John Gilmore, Mitch Kapor, and John Perry Barlow were among those who contributed to funding his defense. Attorney Mike Godwin played an instrumental role in coordinating defense efforts prior to Rose's decision to accept the plea bargain.
Legacy
Rose's case was one of several that directly informed the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. His prosecution, along with those of Craig Neidorf (Knight Lightning), Taran King, and Steve Jackson Games, formed part of the broader sweep of Operation Sundevil, a large-scale federal crackdown on hacker activity. Operation Sundevil and the cases it generated were chronicled in Bruce Sterling's non-fiction book The Hacker Crackdown, which brought wider public attention to the legal and civil liberties questions raised by the government's actions against the hacker community during that era.
