charges filed; this is the first known case of a government trying to stop the spread of encryption technology. 1994 An international group, dubbed the "Phonemasters" by the FBI, hacked into the networks of a number of companies including MCI WorldCom, Sprint, AT&T, and Equifax credit reporters. The gang accounted for approximately $1.85 million in business losses. In late 1995, Vladimir Levin persuaded Citibank's computers to transfer $10 million from its customers' accounts to his. Interpol arrested him at Heathrow Airport and Citibank got most of the money back. He pleaded guilty in 1995, but the method he used wasn't uncovered for another ten years and at that time was one of the largest computer crimes by dollar value. Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel post the first large commercial newsgroup spam, setting off an arms race between spammers and network operators. 1995 Scientology and the Internet: After documents copyrighted by the Church of Scientology are posted to Usenet group alt.religion.scientology, church lawyers send threats of legal action to several users and attempt to shut down the group. Lawsuits are brought against users Dennis Erlich, Grady Ward, Arnaldo Lerma and Karin Spaink, but these fail to stem distribution of the documents. 1996 Tim Lloyd plants a software time bomb at Omega Engineering, a company in New Jersey. The results of the attack are devastating: losses of US$12 million and more than 80 employees lose their jobs. Lloyd is sentenced to 41 months in jail. US President Bill Clinton signs the Communications Decency Act into US federal law as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Web site operators turn their pages black in protest. The decency provisions are overturned the following year in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union. 1998 The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) becomes law in the United States. The CIH computer virus is released, written by Chen Ing Hau of Taiwan. It is considered to be one of the most harmful widely circulated viruses, overwriting critical information on infected system drives, and more importantly, in some cases corrupting the system BIOS, rendering computer systems unbootable. It was found in the wild in September. Two Chinese hackers, Hao Jinglong and Hao Jingwen (twin brothers), are sentenced to death by a court in China for breaking into a bank's computer network and stealing 720,000 yuan ($87,000). The US government allows the export of 56-bit encryption software, and stronger encryption