What happened with the Secret Service?
The short version of a very long story: On March 1, 1990, the Secret Service raided our offices, looking for evidence of a non-existent conspiracy in which they thought one of our employees had been involved from his home. They had a broadly-drafted and unsigned search warrant. They took a lot of material, including all current drafts of GURPS Cyberpunk and the computer which was running the Illuminati BBS. And they were not cooperative, or even truthful, about giving it back. With the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, SJ Games eventually took the Secret Service to Federal court, and won. The judge simply did not believe important parts of the Secret Service’s testimony, and gave the agent in charge of the raid a public tongue-lashing. SJ Games was awarded more than $50,000, and finally got paid early in 1994, more than a year after the judgment. It did not nearly make up for the true damage to the company, but it was better than nothing . . . and just winning the case was th
