Lloyd Blankenship was a hacker’s hacker. Operating under the pseudonym “The Mentor,” he was part of the influential hacking collective Legion of Doom. Much like the current generation, Blankenship and the early hackers had disparate motives: some wanted profit, some were just out for fun. Blankenship and “LoD” broke into Bellsouth and stole a file on the operation of the E911 one system — one that Bellsouth was already selling to any interested party for $13 dollars. But Bellsouth did not claim piracy: they claimed the breach could cause enormous disruption of the E911 system by hackers using the stolen data. In response to BellSouth’s alarm, the federal government went on a hacker-arresting spree.

On this day, March 1, in 1990, federal agents raided the offices of Steve Jackson Games, creators of Blankenship-written role-playing game. They uncovered nothing of use – but they did earn a lawsuit.

Steve Jackson Games won two lawsuits and collected a total of $300,000 for the raid, and the trial judge noted the federal raids essentially trampled on many constitutional rights. The incidents influenced the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights nonprofit, in July of that same year.