ranks, so they turn one another in with astonishing
frequency.
There is no tradition of silence or *omerta* in the
hacker underworld. Hackers can be shy, even reclusive,
but when they do talk, hackers tend to brag, boast and
strut. Almost everything hackers do is *invisible;* if
they
don't brag, boast, and strut about it, then *nobody will
ever
know.* If you don't have something to brag, boast, and
strut about, then nobody in the underground will
recognize you and favor you with vital cooperation and
respect.
The way to win a solid reputation in the underground
is by telling other hackers things that could only have
been learned by exceptional cunning and stealth.
Forbidden knowledge, therefore, is the basic currency of
the digital underground, like seashells among Trobriand
Islanders. Hackers hoard this knowledge, and dwell upon
it obsessively, and refine it, and bargain with it, and talk
and talk about it.
Many hackers even suffer from a strange obsession
to *teach* -- to spread the ethos and the knowledge of the
digital underground. They'll do this even when it gains
them no particular advantage and presents a grave
personal risk.
And when that risk catches up with them, they will go
right on teaching and preaching -- to a new audience this
time, their interrogators from law enforcement. Almost
every hacker arrested tells everything he knows -- all
about his friends, his mentors, his disciples -- legends,
threats, horror stories, dire rumors, gossip,
hallucinations.
This is, of course, convenient for law enforcement -- except
when law enforcement begins to believe hacker legendry.
Phone phreaks are unique among criminals in their
willingness to call up law enforcement officials -- in the
office, at their homes -- and give them an extended piece
of their mind. It is hard not to interpret this as *begging
for arrest,* and in fact it is an act of incredible
foolhardiness. Police are naturally nettled by these acts
of
chutzpah and will go well out of their way to bust these
flaunting idiots. But it can also be interpreted as a
product of a world-view so elitist, so closed and hermetic,
that electronic police are simply not perceived as
"police,"
but rather as *enemy phone phreaks* who should be
scolded into behaving "decently."
Hackers at their most grandiloquent perceive
themselves as the elite pioneers of a new electronic world.
Attempts to make them obey the democratically
established laws of contemporary American society are
seen as repression and persecution. After all, they argue,
if Alexander Graham Bell had gone along with the rules of
the Western Union telegraph company, there would have
been no telephones. If Jobs and Wozniak had believed
that IBM was the be-all and end-all, there would have
been no personal computers. If Benjamin Franklin and
Thomas Jefferson had tried to "work within the system"
there would have been no United States.
Not only do hackers privately believe this as an
article of faith, but they have been known to write ardent
manifestos about it. Here are some revealing excerpts
from an especially vivid hacker manifesto: "The Techno-
Revolution" by "Dr. Crash," which appeared in electronic
form in *Phrack* Volume 1, Issue 6, Phile 3.
"To fully explain the true motives behind hacking, we
must first take a quick look into the past. In the 1960s, a
group of MIT students built the first modern computer
system. This wild, rebellious group of young men were the
first to bear the name 'hackers.' The systems that they
developed were intended to be used to solve world
problems and to benefit all of mankind.
"As we can see, this has not been the case. The
computer system has been solely in the hands of big
businesses and the government. The wonderful device
meant to enrich life has become a weapon which
dehumanizes people. To the government and large
businesses, people are no more than disk space, and the
government doesn't use computers to arrange aid for the
poor, but to control nuclear death weapons. The average
American can only have access to a small microcomputer
which is worth only a fraction of what they pay for it. The
businesses keep the true state-of-the-art equipment away
from the people behind a steel wall of incredibly high
prices and bureaucracy. It is because of this state of
affairs that hacking was born.(...)
"Of course, the government doesn't want the
monopoly of technology broken, so they have outlawed
hacking and arrest anyone who is caught.(...) The phone
company is another example of technology abused and
kept from people with high prices.(...)
"Hackers often find that their existing equipment,
due to the monopoly tactics of computer companies, is
inefficient for their purposes. Due to the exorbitantly
high
prices, it is impossible to legally purchase the necessary
equipment. This need has given still another segment of
the fight: Credit Carding. Carding is a way of obtaining
the necessary goods without paying for them. It is again
due to the companies' stupidity that Carding is so easy,
and shows that the world's businesses are in the hands of
those with considerably less technical know-how than we,
the hackers. (...)
"Hacking must continue. We must train newcomers
to the art of hacking.(....) And whatever you do, continue
the fight. Whether you know it or not, if you are a hacker,
you are a revolutionary. Don't worry, you're on the right
side."
The defense of "carding" is rare. Most hackers
regard credit-card theft as "poison" to the underground, a
sleazy and immoral effort that, worse yet, is hard to get
away with. Nevertheless, manifestos advocating credit-
card theft, the deliberate crashing of computer systems,
and even acts of violent physical destruction such as
vandalism and arson do exist in the underground. These
boasts and threats are taken quite seriously by the police.
And not every hacker is an abstract, Platonic computer-
nerd. Some few are quite experienced at picking locks,
robbing phone-trucks, and breaking and entering
buildings.
Hackers vary in their degree of hatred for authority
and the violence of their rhetoric. But, at a bottom line,
they are scofflaws. They don't regard the current rules of
electronic behavior as respectable efforts to preserve law
and order and protect public safety. They regard these
laws as immoral efforts by soulless corporations to protect
their profit margins and to crush dissidents. "Stupid"
people, including police, businessmen, politicians, and
journalists, simply have no right to judge the actions of
those possessed of genius, techno-revolutionary
intentions, and technical expertise.
#
Hackers are generally teenagers and college kids not
engaged in earning a living. They often come from fairly
well-to-do middle-class backgrounds, and are markedly
anti-materialistic (except, that is, when it comes to
computer equipment). Anyone motivated by greed for
mere money (as opposed to the greed for power,
knowledge and status) is swiftly written-off as a narrow-
minded breadhead whose interests can only be corrupt
and contemptible. Having grown up in the 1970s and
1980s, the young Bohemians of the digital underground
regard straight society as awash in plutocratic corruption,
where everyone from the President down is for sale and
whoever has the gold makes the rules.
Interestingly, there's a funhouse-mirror image of this
attitude on the other side of the conflict. The police are
also one of the most markedly anti-materialistic groups in
American society, motivated not by mere money but by
ideals of service, justice, esprit-de-corps, and, of course,
their own brand of specialized knowledge and power.
Remarkably, the propaganda war between cops and
hackers has always involved angry allegations that the
other side is trying to make a sleazy buck. Hackers
consistently sneer that anti-phreak prosecutors are
angling for cushy jobs as telco lawyers and that computer-
crime police are aiming to cash in later as well-paid
computer-security consultants in the private sector.
For their part, police publicly conflate all hacking
crimes with robbing payphones with crowbars. Allegations
of "monetary losses" from computer intrusion are
notoriously inflated. The act of illicitly copying a
document from a computer is morally equated with
directly robbing a company of, say, half a million dollars.
The teenage computer intruder in possession of this
"proprietary" document has certainly not sold it for such a
sum, would likely have little idea how to sell it at all,
and
quite probably doesn't even understand what he has. He
has not made a cent in profit from his felony but is still
morally equated with a thief who has robbed the church
poorbox and lit out for Brazil.
Police want to believe that all hackers are thieves.
It
is a tortuous and almost unbearable act for the American
justice system to put people in jail because they want to
learn things which are forbidden for them to know. In an
American context, almost any pretext for punishment is
better than jailing people to protect certain restricted
kinds of information. Nevertheless, *policing
information* is part and parcel of the struggle against
hackers.
This dilemma is well exemplified by the remarkable
activities of "Emmanuel Goldstein," editor and publisher
of a print magazine known as *2600: The Hacker
Quarterly.* Goldstein was an English major at Long
Island's State University of New York in the '70s, when he
became involved with the local college radio station. His
growing interest in electronics caused him to drift into
Yippie *TAP* circles and thus into the digital
underground, where he became a self-described techno-
rat. His magazine publishes techniques of computer
intrusion and telephone "exploration" as well as gloating
exposes of telco misdeeds and governmental failings.
Goldstein lives quietly and very privately in a large,
crumbling Victorian mansion in Setauket, New York. The
seaside house is decorated with telco decals, chunks of
driftwood, and the basic bric-a-brac of a hippie crash-pad.
He is unmarried, mildly unkempt, and survives mostly on
TV dinners and turkey-stuffing eaten straight out of the
bag. Goldstein is a man of considerable charm and
fluency, with a brief, disarming smile and the kind of
pitiless, stubborn, thoroughly recidivist integrity that
America's electronic police find genuinely alarming.
Goldstein took his nom-de-plume, or "handle," from a
character in Orwell's *1984,* which may be taken,
correctly, as a symptom of the gravity of his sociopolitical
worldview. He is not himself a practicing computer
intruder, though he vigorously abets these actions,
especially when they are pursued against large
corporations or governmental agencies. Nor is he a thief,
for he loudly scorns mere theft of phone service, in favor
of
'exploring and manipulating the system.' He is probably
best described and understood as a *dissident.*
Weirdly, Goldstein is living in modern America
under conditions very similar to those of former East
European intellectual dissidents. In other words, he
flagrantly espouses a value-system that is deeply and
irrevocably opposed to the system of those in power and
the police. The values in *2600* are generally expressed in
terms that are ironic, sarcastic, paradoxical, or just
downright confused. But there's no mistaking their
radically anti-authoritarian tenor. *2600* holds that
technical power and specialized knowledge, of any kind
obtainable, belong by right in the hands of those
individuals brave and bold enough to discover them -- by
whatever means necessary. Devices, laws, or systems that
forbid access, and the free spread of knowledge, are
provocations that any free and self-respecting hacker
should relentlessly attack. The "privacy" of governments,
corporations and other soulless technocratic organizations
should never be protected at the expense of the liberty
and free initiative of the individual techno-rat.
However, in our contemporary workaday world, both
governments and corporations are very anxious indeed to
police information which is secret, proprietary, restricted,
confidential, copyrighted, patented, hazardous, illegal,
unethical, embarrassing, or otherwise sensitive. This
makes Goldstein persona non grata, and his philosophy a
threat.
Very little about the conditions of Goldstein's daily
life would astonish, say, Vaclav Havel. (We may note in
passing that President Havel once had his word-processor
confiscated by the Czechoslovak police.) Goldstein lives
by *samizdat,* acting semi-openly as a data-center for the
underground, while challenging the powers-that-be to
abide by their own stated rules: freedom of speech and
the First Amendment.
Goldstein thoroughly looks and acts the part of
techno-rat, with shoulder-length ringlets and a piratical
black fisherman's-cap set at a rakish angle. He often
shows up like Banquo's ghost at meetings of computer
professionals, where he listens quietly, half-smiling and
taking thorough notes.
Computer professionals generally meet publicly, and
find it very difficult to rid themselves of Goldstein and
his
ilk without extralegal and unconstitutional actions.
Sympathizers, many of them quite respectable people
with responsible jobs, admire Goldstein's attitude and
surreptitiously pass him information. An unknown but
presumably large proportion of Goldstein's 2,000-plus
readership are telco security personnel and police, who
are forced to subscribe to *2600* to stay abreast of new
developments in hacking. They thus find themselves
*paying this guy's rent* while grinding their teeth in
anguish, a situation that would have delighted Abbie
Hoffman (one of Goldstein's few idols).
Goldstein is probably the best-known public
representative of the hacker underground today, and
certainly the best-hated. Police regard him as a Fagin, a
corrupter of youth, and speak of him with untempered
loathing. He is quite an accomplished gadfly.
After the Martin Luther King Day Crash of 1990,
Goldstein, for instance, adeptly rubbed salt into the wound
in the pages of *2600.* "Yeah, it was fun for the phone
phreaks as we watched the network crumble," he admitted
cheerfully. "But it was also an ominous sign of what's to
come... Some AT&T people, aided by well-meaning but
ignorant media, were spreading the notion that many
companies had the same software and therefore could
face the same problem someday. Wrong. This was
entirely an AT&T software deficiency. Of course, other
companies could face entirely *different* software
problems. But then, so too could AT&T."
After a technical discussion of the system's failings,
the Long Island techno-rat went on to offer thoughtful
criticism to the gigantic multinational's hundreds of
professionally qualified engineers. "What we don't know
is how a major force in communications like AT&T could
be so sloppy. What happened to backups? Sure,
computer systems go down all the time, but people
making phone calls are not the same as people logging on
to computers. We must make that distinction. It's not
acceptable for the phone system or any other essential
service to 'go down.' If we continue to trust technology
without understanding it, we can look forward to many
variations on this theme.
"AT&T owes it to its customers to be prepared to
*instantly* switch to another network if something strange
and unpredictable starts occurring. The news here isn't so
much the failure of a computer program, but the failure of
AT&T's entire structure."
The very idea of this.... this *person*.... offering
"advice" about "AT&T's entire structure" is more than
some people can easily bear. How dare this near-criminal
dictate what is or isn't "acceptable" behavior from AT&T?
Especially when he's publishing, in the very same issue,
detailed schematic diagrams for creating various
switching-network signalling tones unavailable to the
public.
"See what happens when you drop a 'silver box' tone
or two down your local exchange or through different long
distance service carriers," advises *2600* contributor "Mr.
Upsetter" in "How To Build a Signal Box." "If you
experiment systematically and keep good records, you will
surely discover something interesting."
This is, of course, the scientific method, generally
regarded as a praiseworthy activity and one of the flowers
of modern civilization. One can indeed learn a great deal
with this sort of structured intellectual activity. Telco
employees regard this mode of "exploration" as akin to
flinging sticks of dynamite into their pond to see what
lives
on the bottom.
*2600* has been published consistently since 1984. It
has also run a bulletin board computer system, printed
*2600* T-shirts, taken fax calls... The Spring 1991 issue
has
an interesting announcement on page 45: "We just
discovered an extra set of wires attached to our fax line
and heading up the pole. (They've since been clipped.)
Your faxes to us and to anyone else could be monitored."
In the worldview of *2600,* the tiny band of techno-
rat brothers (rarely, sisters) are a beseiged vanguard of
the
truly free and honest. The rest of the world is a
maelstrom
of corporate crime and high-level governmental
corruption, occasionally tempered with well-meaning
ignorance. To read a few issues in a row is to enter a
nightmare akin to Solzhenitsyn's, somewhat tempered by
the fact that *2600* is often extremely funny.
Goldstein did not become a target of the Hacker
Crackdown, though he protested loudly, eloquently, and
publicly about it, and it added considerably to his fame.
It
was not that he is not regarded as dangerous, because he
is so regarded. Goldstein has had brushes with the law in
the past: in 1985, a *2600* bulletin board computer was
seized by the FBI, and some software on it was formally
declared "a burglary tool in the form of a computer
program." But Goldstein escaped direct repression in
1990, because his magazine is printed on paper, and
recognized as subject to Constitutional freedom of the
press protection. As was seen in the *Ramparts* case, this
is far from an absolute guarantee. Still, as a practical
matter, shutting down *2600* by court-order would create
so much legal hassle that it is simply unfeasible, at least
for the present. Throughout 1990, both Goldstein and his
magazine were peevishly thriving.
Instead, the Crackdown of 1990 would concern itself
with the computerized version of forbidden data. The
crackdown itself, first and foremost, was about *bulletin
board systems.* Bulletin Board Systems, most often
known by the ugly and un-pluralizable acronym "BBS," are
the life-blood of the digital underground. Boards were
also central to law enforcement's tactics and strategy in
the Hacker Crackdown.
A "bulletin board system" can be formally defined as
a computer which serves as an information and message-
passing center for users dialing-up over the phone-lines
through the use of modems. A "modem," or modulator-
demodulator, is a device which translates the digital
impulses of computers into audible analog telephone
signals, and vice versa. Modems connect computers to
phones and thus to each other.
Large-scale mainframe computers have been
connected since the 1960s, but *personal* computers, run
by individuals out of their homes, were first networked in
the late 1970s. The "board" created by Ward Christensen
and Randy Suess in February 1978, in Chicago, Illinois, is
generally regarded as the first personal-computer bulletin
board system worthy of the name.
Boards run on many different machines, employing
many different kinds of software. Early boards were crude
and buggy, and their managers, known as "system
operators" or "sysops," were hard-working technical
experts who wrote their own software. But like most
everything else in the world of electronics, boards became
faster, cheaper, better-designed, and generally far more
sophisticated throughout the 1980s. They also moved
swiftly out of the hands of pioneers and into those of the
general public. By 1985 there were something in the
neighborhood of 4,000 boards in America. By 1990 it was
calculated, vaguely, that there were about 30,000 boards in
the US, with uncounted thousands overseas.
Computer bulletin boards are unregulated
enterprises. Running a board is a rough-and-ready, catch-
as-catch-can proposition. Basically, anybody with a
computer, modem, software and a phone-line can start a
board. With second-hand equipment and public-domain
free software, the price of a board might be quite small --
less than it would take to publish a magazine or even a
decent pamphlet. Entrepreneurs eagerly sell bulletin-
board software, and will coach nontechnical amateur
sysops in its use.
Boards are not "presses." They are not magazines, or
libraries, or phones, or CB radios, or traditional cork
bulletin boards down at the local laundry, though they
have some passing resemblance to those earlier media.
Boards are a new medium -- they may even be a *large
number* of new media.
Consider these unique characteristics: boards are
cheap, yet they can have a national, even global reach.
Boards can be contacted from anywhere in the global
telephone network, at *no cost* to the person running the
board -- the caller pays the phone bill, and if the caller
is
local, the call is free. Boards do not involve an editorial
elite addressing a mass audience. The "sysop" of a board
is not an exclusive publisher or writer -- he is managing an
electronic salon, where individuals can address the
general public, play the part of the general public, and
also exchange private mail with other individuals. And
the "conversation" on boards, though fluid, rapid, and
highly interactive, is not spoken, but written. It is also
relatively anonymous, sometimes completely so.
And because boards are cheap and ubiquitous,
regulations and licensing requirements would likely be
practically unenforceable. It would almost be easier to
"regulate" "inspect" and "license" the content of private
mail -- probably more so, since the mail system is
operated by the federal government. Boards are run by
individuals, independently, entirely at their own whim.
For the sysop, the cost of operation is not the primary
limiting factor. Once the investment in a computer and
modem has been made, the only steady cost is the charge
for maintaining a phone line (or several phone lines). The
primary limits for sysops are time and energy. Boards
require upkeep. New users are generally "validated" --
they must be issued individual passwords, and called at
home by voice-phone, so that their identity can be
verified. Obnoxious users, who exist in plenty, must be
chided or purged. Proliferating messages must be deleted
when they grow old, so that the capacity of the system is
not overwhelmed. And software programs (if such things
are kept on the board) must be examined for possible
computer viruses. If there is a financial charge to use
the
board (increasingly common, especially in larger and
fancier systems) then accounts must be kept, and users
must be billed. And if the board crashes -- a very common
occurrence -- then repairs must be made.
Boards can be distinguished by the amount of effort
spent in regulating them. First, we have the completely
open board, whose sysop is off chugging brews and
watching re-runs while his users generally degenerate
over time into peevish anarchy and eventual silence.
Second comes the supervised board, where the sysop
breaks in every once in a while to tidy up, calm brawls,
issue announcements, and rid the community of dolts
and troublemakers. Third is the heavily supervised
board, which sternly urges adult and responsible behavior
and swiftly edits any message considered offensive,
impertinent, illegal or irrelevant. And last comes the
completely edited "electronic publication," which is
presented to a silent audience which is not allowed to
respond directly in any way.
Boards can also be grouped by their degree of
anonymity. There is the completely anonymous board,
where everyone uses pseudonyms -- "handles" -- and even
the sysop is unaware of the user's true identity. The sysop
himself is likely pseudonymous on a board of this type.
Second, and rather more common, is the board where the
sysop knows (or thinks he knows) the true names and
addresses of all users, but the users don't know one
another's names and may not know his. Third is the board
where everyone has to use real names, and roleplaying
and pseudonymous posturing are forbidden.
Boards can be grouped by their immediacy. "Chat-
lines" are boards linking several users together over
several different phone-lines simultaneously, so that
people exchange messages at the very moment that they
type. (Many large boards feature "chat" capabilities along
with other services.) Less immediate boards, perhaps
with a single phoneline, store messages serially, one at a
time. And some boards are only open for business in
daylight hours or on weekends, which greatly slows
response. A *network* of boards, such as "FidoNet," can
carry electronic mail from board to board, continent to
continent, across huge distances -- but at a relative
snail's
pace, so that a message can take several days to reach its
target audience and elicit a reply.
Boards can be grouped by their degree of
community. Some boards emphasize the exchange of
private, person-to-person electronic mail. Others
emphasize public postings and may even purge people
who "lurk," merely reading posts but refusing to openly
participate. Some boards are intimate and neighborly.
Others are frosty and highly technical. Some are little
more than storage dumps for software, where users
"download" and "upload" programs, but interact among
themselves little if at all.
Boards can be grouped by their ease of access. Some
boards are entirely public. Others are private and
restricted only to personal friends of the sysop. Some
boards divide users by status. On these boards, some
users, especially beginners, strangers or children, will be
restricted to general topics, and perhaps forbidden to post.
Favored users, though, are granted the ability to post as
they please, and to stay "on-line" as long as they like,
even
to the disadvantage of other people trying to call in. High-
status users can be given access to hidden areas in the
board, such as off-color topics, private discussions, and/or
valuable software. Favored users may even become
"remote sysops" with the power to take remote control of
the board through their own home computers. Quite
often "remote sysops" end up doing all the work and
taking formal control of the enterprise, despite the fact
that it's physically located in someone else's house.
Sometimes several "co-sysops" share power.
And boards can also be grouped by size. Massive,
nationwide commercial networks, such as CompuServe,
Delphi, GEnie and Prodigy, are run on mainframe
computers and are generally not considered "boards,"
though they share many of their characteristics, such as
electronic mail, discussion topics, libraries of software,
and
persistent and growing problems with civil-liberties issues.
Some private boards have as many as thirty phone-lines
and quite sophisticated hardware. And then there are
tiny boards.
Boards vary in popularity. Some boards are huge and
crowded, where users must claw their way in against a
constant busy-signal. Others are huge and empty -- there
are few things sadder than a formerly flourishing board
where no one posts any longer, and the dead
conversations of vanished users lie about gathering digital
dust. Some boards are tiny and intimate, their telephone
numbers intentionally kept confidential so that only a
small number can log on.
And some boards are *underground.*
Boards can be mysterious entities. The activities of
their users can be hard to differentiate from conspiracy.
Sometimes they *are* conspiracies. Boards have
harbored, or have been accused of harboring, all manner
of fringe groups, and have abetted, or been accused of
abetting, every manner of frowned-upon, sleazy, radical,
and criminal activity. There are Satanist boards. Nazi
boards. Pornographic boards. Pedophile boards. Drug-
dealing boards. Anarchist boards. Communist boards.
Gay and Lesbian boards (these exist in great profusion,
many of them quite lively with well-established histories).
Religious cult boards. Evangelical boards. Witchcraft
boards, hippie boards, punk boards, skateboarder boards.
Boards for UFO believers. There may well be boards for
serial killers, airline terrorists and professional
assassins.
There is simply no way to tell. Boards spring up,
flourish,
and disappear in large numbers, in most every corner of
the developed world. Even apparently innocuous public
boards can, and sometimes do, harbor secret areas known
only to a few. And even on the vast, public, commercial
services, private mail is very private -- and quite possibly
criminal.
Boards cover most every topic imaginable and some
that are hard to imagine. They cover a vast spectrum of
social activity. However, all board users do have
something in common: their possession of computers and
phones. Naturally, computers and phones are primary
topics of conversation on almost every board.
And hackers and phone phreaks, those utter
devotees of computers and phones, live by boards. They
swarm by boards. They are bred by boards. By the late
1980s, phone-phreak groups and hacker groups, united by
boards, had proliferated fantastically.
As evidence, here is a list of hacker groups compiled
by the editors of *Phrack* on August 8, 1988.
The Administration. Advanced Telecommunications,
Inc. ALIAS. American Tone Travelers. Anarchy Inc.
Apple Mafia. The Association. Atlantic Pirates Guild.
Bad Ass Mother Fuckers. Bellcore. Bell Shock Force.
Black Bag.
Camorra. C&M Productions. Catholics Anonymous.
Chaos Computer Club. Chief Executive Officers. Circle
Of Death. Circle Of Deneb. Club X. Coalition of Hi-Tech
Pirates. Coast-To-Coast. Corrupt Computing. Cult Of The
Dead Cow. Custom Retaliations.
Damage Inc. D&B Communications. The Dange
Gang. Dec Hunters. Digital Gang. DPAK.
Eastern Alliance. The Elite Hackers Guild. Elite
Phreakers and Hackers Club. The Elite Society Of
America. EPG. Executives Of Crime. Extasyy Elite.
Fargo 4A. Farmers Of Doom. The Federation. Feds
R Us. First Class. Five O. Five Star. Force Hackers.
The
414s.
Hack-A-Trip. Hackers Of America. High Mountain
Hackers. High Society. The Hitchhikers.
IBM Syndicate. The Ice Pirates. Imperial Warlords.
Inner Circle. Inner Circle II. Insanity Inc. International
Computer Underground Bandits.
Justice League of America.
Kaos Inc. Knights Of Shadow. Knights Of The
Round Table.
League Of Adepts. Legion Of Doom. Legion Of
Hackers. Lords Of Chaos. Lunatic Labs, Unlimited.
Master Hackers. MAD! The Marauders. MD/PhD.
Metal Communications, Inc. MetalliBashers, Inc. MBI.
Metro Communications. Midwest Pirates Guild.
NASA Elite. The NATO Association. Neon Knights.
Nihilist Order. Order Of The Rose. OSS.
Pacific Pirates Guild. Phantom Access Associates.
PHido PHreaks. The Phirm. Phlash. PhoneLine
Phantoms. Phone Phreakers Of America. Phortune 500.
Phreak Hack Delinquents. Phreak Hack Destroyers.
Phreakers, Hackers, And Laundromat Employees Gang
(PHALSE Gang). Phreaks Against Geeks. Phreaks
Against Phreaks Against Geeks. Phreaks and Hackers of
America. Phreaks Anonymous World Wide. Project
Genesis. The Punk Mafia.
The Racketeers. Red Dawn Text Files. Roscoe Gang.
SABRE. Secret Circle of Pirates. Secret Service. 707
Club. Shadow Brotherhood. Sharp Inc. 65C02 Elite.
Spectral Force. Star League. Stowaways. Strata-Crackers.
Team Hackers '86. Team Hackers '87.
TeleComputist Newsletter Staff. Tribunal Of Knowledge.
Triple Entente. Turn Over And Die Syndrome (TOADS).
300 Club. 1200 Club. 2300 Club. 2600 Club. 2601 Club.
2AF.
The United Soft WareZ Force. United Technical
Underground.
Ware Brigade. The Warelords. WASP.
Contemplating this list is an impressive, almost
humbling business. As a cultural artifact, the thing
approaches poetry.
Underground groups -- subcultures -- can be
distinguished from independent cultures by their habit of
referring constantly to the parent society. Undergrounds
by their nature constantly must maintain a membrane of
differentiation. Funny/distinctive clothes and hair,
specialized jargon, specialized ghettoized areas in cities,
different hours of rising, working, sleeping.... The
digital
underground, which specializes in information, relies very
heavily on language to distinguish itself. As can be seen
from this list, they make heavy use of parody and
mockery. It's revealing to see who they choose to mock.
First, large corporations. We have the Phortune 500,
The Chief Executive Officers, Bellcore, IBM Syndicate,
SABRE (a computerized reservation service maintained
by airlines). The common use of "Inc." is telling -- none
of
these groups are actual corporations, but take clear
delight in mimicking them.
Second, governments and police. NASA Elite, NATO
Association. "Feds R Us" and "Secret Service" are fine bits
of fleering boldness. OSS -- the Office of Strategic
Services
was the forerunner of the CIA.
Third, criminals. Using stigmatizing pejoratives as a
perverse badge of honor is a time-honored tactic for
subcultures: punks, gangs, delinquents, mafias, pirates,
bandits, racketeers.
Specialized orthography, especially the use of "ph"
for "f" and "z" for the plural "s," are instant recognition
symbols. So is the use of the numeral "0" for the letter
"O"
-- computer-software orthography generally features a
slash through the zero, making the distinction obvious.
Some terms are poetically descriptive of computer
intrusion: the Stowaways, the Hitchhikers, the PhoneLine
Phantoms, Coast-to-Coast. Others are simple bravado
and vainglorious puffery. (Note the insistent use of the
terms "elite" and "master.") Some terms are
blasphemous, some obscene, others merely cryptic --
anything to puzzle, offend, confuse, and keep the straights
at bay.
Many hacker groups further re-encrypt their names
by the use of acronyms: United Technical Underground
becomes UTU, Farmers of Doom become FoD, the
United SoftWareZ Force becomes, at its own insistence,
"TuSwF," and woe to the ignorant rodent who capitalizes
the wrong letters.
It should be further recognized that the members of
these groups are themselves pseudonymous. If you did, in
fact, run across the "PhoneLine Phantoms," you would find
them to consist of "Carrier Culprit," "The Executioner,"
"Black Majik," "Egyptian Lover," "Solid State," and "Mr
Icom." "Carrier Culprit" will likely be referred to by his
friends as "CC," as in, "I got these dialups from CC of
PLP."
It's quite possible that this entire list refers to as
few
as a thousand people. It is not a complete list of
underground groups -- there has never been such a list,
and there never will be. Groups rise, flourish, decline,
share membership, maintain a cloud of wannabes and
casual hangers-on. People pass in and out, are ostracized,
get bored, are busted by police, or are cornered by telco
security and presented with huge bills. Many
"underground groups" are software pirates, "warez d00dz,"
who might break copy protection and pirate programs, but
likely wouldn't dare to intrude on a computer-system.
It is hard to estimate the true population of the
digital
underground. There is constant turnover. Most hackers
start young, come and go, then drop out at age 22 -- the
age of college graduation. And a large majority of
"hackers" access pirate boards, adopt a handle, swipe
software and perhaps abuse a phone-code or two, while
never actually joining the elite.
Some professional informants, who make it their
business to retail knowledge of the underground to
paymasters in private corporate security, have estimated
the hacker population at as high as fifty thousand. This
is
likely highly inflated, unless one counts every single
teenage software pirate and petty phone-booth thief. My
best guess is about 5,000 people. Of these, I would guess
that as few as a hundred are truly "elite" -- active
computer intruders, skilled enough to penetrate
sophisticated systems and truly to worry corporate security
and law enforcement.
Another interesting speculation is whether this group
is growing or not. Young teenage hackers are often
convinced that hackers exist in vast swarms and will soon
dominate the cybernetic universe. Older and wiser
veterans, perhaps as wizened as 24 or 25 years old, are
convinced that the glory days are long gone, that the cops
have the underground's number now, and that kids these
days are dirt-stupid and just want to play Nintendo.
My own assessment is that computer intrusion, as a
non-profit act of intellectual exploration and mastery, is
in
slow decline, at least in the United States; but that
electronic fraud, especially telecommunication crime, is
growing by leaps and bounds.
One might find a useful parallel to the digital
underground in the drug underground. There was a
time, now much-obscured by historical revisionism, when
Bohemians freely shared joints at concerts, and hip, small-
scale marijuana dealers might turn people on just for the
sake of enjoying a long stoned conversation about the
Doors and Allen Ginsberg. Now drugs are increasingly
verboten, except in a high-stakes, highly-criminal world of
highly addictive drugs. Over years of disenchantment and
police harassment, a vaguely ideological, free-wheeling
drug underground has relinquished the business of drug-
dealing to a far more savage criminal hard-core. This is
not a pleasant prospect to contemplate, but the analogy is
fairly compelling.
What does an underground board look like? What
distinguishes it from a standard board? It isn't
necessarily
the conversation -- hackers often talk about common
board topics, such as hardware, software, sex, science
fiction, current events, politics, movies, personal gossip.
Underground boards can best be distinguished by their
files, or "philes," pre-composed texts which teach the
techniques and ethos of the underground. These are
prized reservoirs of forbidden knowledge. Some are
anonymous, but most proudly bear the handle of the
"hacker" who has created them, and his group affiliation, if
he has one.
Here is a partial table-of-contents of philes from an
underground board, somewhere in the heart of middle
America, circa 1991. The descriptions are mostly self-
explanatory.
BANKAMER.ZIP 5406 06-11-91 Hacking Bank America
CHHACK.ZIP 4481 06-11-91 Chilton Hacking
CITIBANK.ZIP 4118 06-11-91 Hacking Citibank
CREDIMTC.ZIP 3241 06-11-91 Hacking Mtc Credit
Company
DIGEST.ZIP 5159 06-11-91 Hackers Digest
HACK.ZIP 14031 06-11-91 How To Hack
HACKBAS.ZIP 5073 06-11-91 Basics Of Hacking
HACKDICT.ZIP 42774 06-11-91 Hackers Dictionary
HACKER.ZIP 57938 06-11-91 Hacker Info
HACKERME.ZIP 3148 06-11-91 Hackers Manual
HACKHAND.ZIP 4814 06-11-91 Hackers Handbook
HACKTHES.ZIP 48290 06-11-91 Hackers Thesis
HACKVMS.ZIP 4696 06-11-91 Hacking Vms Systems
MCDON.ZIP 3830 06-11-91 Hacking Macdonalds
(Home Of The Archs)
P500UNIX.ZIP 15525 06-11-91 Phortune 500 Guide To
Unix
RADHACK.ZIP 8411 06-11-91 Radio Hacking
TAOTRASH.DOC 4096 12-25-89 Suggestions For
Trashing
TECHHACK.ZIP 5063 06-11-91 Technical Hacking
The files above are do-it-yourself manuals about
computer intrusion. The above is only a small section of a
much larger library of hacking and phreaking techniques
and history. We now move into a different and perhaps
surprising area.
+------------+
|Anarchy|
+------------+
ANARC.ZIP 3641 06-11-91 Anarchy Files
ANARCHST.ZIP 63703 06-11-91 Anarchist Book
ANARCHY.ZIP 2076 06-11-91 Anarchy At Home
ANARCHY3.ZIP 6982 06-11-91 Anarchy No 3
ANARCTOY.ZIP 2361 06-11-91 Anarchy Toys
ANTIMODM.ZIP 2877 06-11-91 Anti-modem Weapons
ATOM.ZIP 4494 06-11-91 How To Make An Atom
Bomb
BARBITUA.ZIP 3982 06-11-91 Barbiturate Formula
BLCKPWDR.ZIP 2810 06-11-91 Black Powder Formulas
BOMB.ZIP 3765 06-11-91 How To Make Bombs
BOOM.ZIP 2036 06-11-91 Things That Go Boom
CHLORINE.ZIP 1926 06-11-91 Chlorine Bomb
COOKBOOK.ZIP 1500 06-11-91 Anarchy Cook Book
DESTROY.ZIP 3947 06-11-91 Destroy Stuff
DUSTBOMB.ZIP 2576 06-11-91 Dust Bomb
ELECTERR.ZIP 3230 06-11-91 Electronic Terror
EXPLOS1.ZIP 2598 06-11-91 Explosives 1
EXPLOSIV.ZIP 18051 06-11-91 More Explosives
EZSTEAL.ZIP 4521 06-11-91 Ez-stealing
FLAME.ZIP 2240 06-11-91 Flame Thrower
FLASHLT.ZIP 2533 06-11-91 Flashlight Bomb
FMBUG.ZIP 2906 06-11-91 How To Make An Fm Bug
OMEEXPL.ZIP 2139 06-11-91 Home Explosives
HOW2BRK.ZIP 3332 06-11-91 How To Break In
LETTER.ZIP 2990 06-11-91 Letter Bomb
LOCK.ZIP 2199 06-11-91 How To Pick Locks
MRSHIN.ZIP 3991 06-11-91 Briefcase Locks
NAPALM.ZIP 3563 06-11-91 Napalm At Home
NITRO.ZIP 3158 06-11-91 Fun With Nitro
PARAMIL.ZIP 2962 06-11-91 Paramilitary Info
PICKING.ZIP 3398 06-11-91 Picking Locks
PIPEBOMB.ZIP 2137 06-11-91 Pipe Bomb
POTASS.ZIP 3987 06-11-91 Formulas With Potassium
PRANK.TXT 11074 08-03-90 More Pranks To Pull On
Idiots!
REVENGE.ZIP 4447 06-11-91 Revenge Tactics
ROCKET.ZIP 2590 06-11-91 Rockets For Fun
SMUGGLE.ZIP 3385 06-11-91 How To Smuggle
*Holy Cow!* The damned thing is full of stuff about
bombs!
What are we to make of this?
First, it should be acknowledged that spreading
knowledge about demolitions to teenagers is a highly and
deliberately antisocial act. It is not, however, illegal.
Second, it should be recognized that most of these
philes were in fact *written* by teenagers. Most adult
American males who can remember their teenage years
will recognize that the notion of building a flamethrower in
your garage is an incredibly neat-o idea. *Actually*
building a flamethrower in your garage, however, is
fraught with discouraging difficulty. Stuffing gunpowder
into a booby-trapped flashlight, so as to blow the arm off
your high-school vice-principal, can be a thing of dark
beauty to contemplate. Actually committing assault by
explosives will earn you the sustained attention of the
federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Some people, however, will actually try these plans. A
determinedly murderous American teenager can
probably buy or steal a handgun far more easily than he
can brew fake "napalm" in the kitchen sink. Nevertheless,
if temptation is spread before people a certain number
will succumb, and a small minority will actually attempt
these stunts. A large minority of that small minority will
either fail or, quite likely, maim themselves, since these
"philes" have not been checked for accuracy, are not the
product of professional experience, and are often highly
fanciful. But the gloating menace of these philes is not to
be entirely dismissed.
Hackers may not be "serious" about bombing; if they
were, we would hear far more about exploding flashlights,
homemade bazookas, and gym teachers poisoned by
chlorine and potassium. However, hackers are *very*
serious about forbidden knowledge. They are possessed
not merely by curiosity, but by a positive *lust to know.*
The desire to know what others don't is scarcely new. But
the *intensity* of this desire, as manifested by these young
technophilic denizens of the Information Age, may in fact
*be* new, and may represent some basic shift in social
values -- a harbinger of what the world may come to, as
society lays more and more value on the possession,
assimilation and retailing of *information* as a basic
commodity of daily life.
There have always been young men with obsessive
interests in these topics. Never before, however, have they
been able to network so extensively and easily, and to
propagandize their interests with impunity to random
passers-by. High-school teachers will recognize that
there's always one in a crowd, but when the one in a crowd
escapes control by jumping into the phone-lines, and
becomes a hundred such kids all together on a board,
then trouble is brewing visibly. The urge of authority to
*do something,* even something drastic, is hard to resist.
And in 1990, authority did something. In fact authority did
a great deal.
#
The process by which boards create hackers goes
something like this. A youngster becomes interested in
computers -- usually, computer games. He hears from
friends that "bulletin boards" exist where games can be
obtained for free. (Many computer games are "freeware,"
not copyrighted -- invented simply for the love of it and
given away to the public; some of these games are quite
good.) He bugs his parents for a modem, or quite often,
uses his parents' modem.
The world of boards suddenly opens up. Computer
games can be quite expensive, real budget-breakers for a
kid, but pirated games, stripped of copy protection, are
frequency.
There is no tradition of silence or *omerta* in the
hacker underworld. Hackers can be shy, even reclusive,
but when they do talk, hackers tend to brag, boast and
strut. Almost everything hackers do is *invisible;* if
they
don't brag, boast, and strut about it, then *nobody will
ever
know.* If you don't have something to brag, boast, and
strut about, then nobody in the underground will
recognize you and favor you with vital cooperation and
respect.
The way to win a solid reputation in the underground
is by telling other hackers things that could only have
been learned by exceptional cunning and stealth.
Forbidden knowledge, therefore, is the basic currency of
the digital underground, like seashells among Trobriand
Islanders. Hackers hoard this knowledge, and dwell upon
it obsessively, and refine it, and bargain with it, and talk
and talk about it.
Many hackers even suffer from a strange obsession
to *teach* -- to spread the ethos and the knowledge of the
digital underground. They'll do this even when it gains
them no particular advantage and presents a grave
personal risk.
And when that risk catches up with them, they will go
right on teaching and preaching -- to a new audience this
time, their interrogators from law enforcement. Almost
every hacker arrested tells everything he knows -- all
about his friends, his mentors, his disciples -- legends,
threats, horror stories, dire rumors, gossip,
hallucinations.
This is, of course, convenient for law enforcement -- except
when law enforcement begins to believe hacker legendry.
Phone phreaks are unique among criminals in their
willingness to call up law enforcement officials -- in the
office, at their homes -- and give them an extended piece
of their mind. It is hard not to interpret this as *begging
for arrest,* and in fact it is an act of incredible
foolhardiness. Police are naturally nettled by these acts
of
chutzpah and will go well out of their way to bust these
flaunting idiots. But it can also be interpreted as a
product of a world-view so elitist, so closed and hermetic,
that electronic police are simply not perceived as
"police,"
but rather as *enemy phone phreaks* who should be
scolded into behaving "decently."
Hackers at their most grandiloquent perceive
themselves as the elite pioneers of a new electronic world.
Attempts to make them obey the democratically
established laws of contemporary American society are
seen as repression and persecution. After all, they argue,
if Alexander Graham Bell had gone along with the rules of
the Western Union telegraph company, there would have
been no telephones. If Jobs and Wozniak had believed
that IBM was the be-all and end-all, there would have
been no personal computers. If Benjamin Franklin and
Thomas Jefferson had tried to "work within the system"
there would have been no United States.
Not only do hackers privately believe this as an
article of faith, but they have been known to write ardent
manifestos about it. Here are some revealing excerpts
from an especially vivid hacker manifesto: "The Techno-
Revolution" by "Dr. Crash," which appeared in electronic
form in *Phrack* Volume 1, Issue 6, Phile 3.
"To fully explain the true motives behind hacking, we
must first take a quick look into the past. In the 1960s, a
group of MIT students built the first modern computer
system. This wild, rebellious group of young men were the
first to bear the name 'hackers.' The systems that they
developed were intended to be used to solve world
problems and to benefit all of mankind.
"As we can see, this has not been the case. The
computer system has been solely in the hands of big
businesses and the government. The wonderful device
meant to enrich life has become a weapon which
dehumanizes people. To the government and large
businesses, people are no more than disk space, and the
government doesn't use computers to arrange aid for the
poor, but to control nuclear death weapons. The average
American can only have access to a small microcomputer
which is worth only a fraction of what they pay for it. The
businesses keep the true state-of-the-art equipment away
from the people behind a steel wall of incredibly high
prices and bureaucracy. It is because of this state of
affairs that hacking was born.(...)
"Of course, the government doesn't want the
monopoly of technology broken, so they have outlawed
hacking and arrest anyone who is caught.(...) The phone
company is another example of technology abused and
kept from people with high prices.(...)
"Hackers often find that their existing equipment,
due to the monopoly tactics of computer companies, is
inefficient for their purposes. Due to the exorbitantly
high
prices, it is impossible to legally purchase the necessary
equipment. This need has given still another segment of
the fight: Credit Carding. Carding is a way of obtaining
the necessary goods without paying for them. It is again
due to the companies' stupidity that Carding is so easy,
and shows that the world's businesses are in the hands of
those with considerably less technical know-how than we,
the hackers. (...)
"Hacking must continue. We must train newcomers
to the art of hacking.(....) And whatever you do, continue
the fight. Whether you know it or not, if you are a hacker,
you are a revolutionary. Don't worry, you're on the right
side."
The defense of "carding" is rare. Most hackers
regard credit-card theft as "poison" to the underground, a
sleazy and immoral effort that, worse yet, is hard to get
away with. Nevertheless, manifestos advocating credit-
card theft, the deliberate crashing of computer systems,
and even acts of violent physical destruction such as
vandalism and arson do exist in the underground. These
boasts and threats are taken quite seriously by the police.
And not every hacker is an abstract, Platonic computer-
nerd. Some few are quite experienced at picking locks,
robbing phone-trucks, and breaking and entering
buildings.
Hackers vary in their degree of hatred for authority
and the violence of their rhetoric. But, at a bottom line,
they are scofflaws. They don't regard the current rules of
electronic behavior as respectable efforts to preserve law
and order and protect public safety. They regard these
laws as immoral efforts by soulless corporations to protect
their profit margins and to crush dissidents. "Stupid"
people, including police, businessmen, politicians, and
journalists, simply have no right to judge the actions of
those possessed of genius, techno-revolutionary
intentions, and technical expertise.
#
Hackers are generally teenagers and college kids not
engaged in earning a living. They often come from fairly
well-to-do middle-class backgrounds, and are markedly
anti-materialistic (except, that is, when it comes to
computer equipment). Anyone motivated by greed for
mere money (as opposed to the greed for power,
knowledge and status) is swiftly written-off as a narrow-
minded breadhead whose interests can only be corrupt
and contemptible. Having grown up in the 1970s and
1980s, the young Bohemians of the digital underground
regard straight society as awash in plutocratic corruption,
where everyone from the President down is for sale and
whoever has the gold makes the rules.
Interestingly, there's a funhouse-mirror image of this
attitude on the other side of the conflict. The police are
also one of the most markedly anti-materialistic groups in
American society, motivated not by mere money but by
ideals of service, justice, esprit-de-corps, and, of course,
their own brand of specialized knowledge and power.
Remarkably, the propaganda war between cops and
hackers has always involved angry allegations that the
other side is trying to make a sleazy buck. Hackers
consistently sneer that anti-phreak prosecutors are
angling for cushy jobs as telco lawyers and that computer-
crime police are aiming to cash in later as well-paid
computer-security consultants in the private sector.
For their part, police publicly conflate all hacking
crimes with robbing payphones with crowbars. Allegations
of "monetary losses" from computer intrusion are
notoriously inflated. The act of illicitly copying a
document from a computer is morally equated with
directly robbing a company of, say, half a million dollars.
The teenage computer intruder in possession of this
"proprietary" document has certainly not sold it for such a
sum, would likely have little idea how to sell it at all,
and
quite probably doesn't even understand what he has. He
has not made a cent in profit from his felony but is still
morally equated with a thief who has robbed the church
poorbox and lit out for Brazil.
Police want to believe that all hackers are thieves.
It
is a tortuous and almost unbearable act for the American
justice system to put people in jail because they want to
learn things which are forbidden for them to know. In an
American context, almost any pretext for punishment is
better than jailing people to protect certain restricted
kinds of information. Nevertheless, *policing
information* is part and parcel of the struggle against
hackers.
This dilemma is well exemplified by the remarkable
activities of "Emmanuel Goldstein," editor and publisher
of a print magazine known as *2600: The Hacker
Quarterly.* Goldstein was an English major at Long
Island's State University of New York in the '70s, when he
became involved with the local college radio station. His
growing interest in electronics caused him to drift into
Yippie *TAP* circles and thus into the digital
underground, where he became a self-described techno-
rat. His magazine publishes techniques of computer
intrusion and telephone "exploration" as well as gloating
exposes of telco misdeeds and governmental failings.
Goldstein lives quietly and very privately in a large,
crumbling Victorian mansion in Setauket, New York. The
seaside house is decorated with telco decals, chunks of
driftwood, and the basic bric-a-brac of a hippie crash-pad.
He is unmarried, mildly unkempt, and survives mostly on
TV dinners and turkey-stuffing eaten straight out of the
bag. Goldstein is a man of considerable charm and
fluency, with a brief, disarming smile and the kind of
pitiless, stubborn, thoroughly recidivist integrity that
America's electronic police find genuinely alarming.
Goldstein took his nom-de-plume, or "handle," from a
character in Orwell's *1984,* which may be taken,
correctly, as a symptom of the gravity of his sociopolitical
worldview. He is not himself a practicing computer
intruder, though he vigorously abets these actions,
especially when they are pursued against large
corporations or governmental agencies. Nor is he a thief,
for he loudly scorns mere theft of phone service, in favor
of
'exploring and manipulating the system.' He is probably
best described and understood as a *dissident.*
Weirdly, Goldstein is living in modern America
under conditions very similar to those of former East
European intellectual dissidents. In other words, he
flagrantly espouses a value-system that is deeply and
irrevocably opposed to the system of those in power and
the police. The values in *2600* are generally expressed in
terms that are ironic, sarcastic, paradoxical, or just
downright confused. But there's no mistaking their
radically anti-authoritarian tenor. *2600* holds that
technical power and specialized knowledge, of any kind
obtainable, belong by right in the hands of those
individuals brave and bold enough to discover them -- by
whatever means necessary. Devices, laws, or systems that
forbid access, and the free spread of knowledge, are
provocations that any free and self-respecting hacker
should relentlessly attack. The "privacy" of governments,
corporations and other soulless technocratic organizations
should never be protected at the expense of the liberty
and free initiative of the individual techno-rat.
However, in our contemporary workaday world, both
governments and corporations are very anxious indeed to
police information which is secret, proprietary, restricted,
confidential, copyrighted, patented, hazardous, illegal,
unethical, embarrassing, or otherwise sensitive. This
makes Goldstein persona non grata, and his philosophy a
threat.
Very little about the conditions of Goldstein's daily
life would astonish, say, Vaclav Havel. (We may note in
passing that President Havel once had his word-processor
confiscated by the Czechoslovak police.) Goldstein lives
by *samizdat,* acting semi-openly as a data-center for the
underground, while challenging the powers-that-be to
abide by their own stated rules: freedom of speech and
the First Amendment.
Goldstein thoroughly looks and acts the part of
techno-rat, with shoulder-length ringlets and a piratical
black fisherman's-cap set at a rakish angle. He often
shows up like Banquo's ghost at meetings of computer
professionals, where he listens quietly, half-smiling and
taking thorough notes.
Computer professionals generally meet publicly, and
find it very difficult to rid themselves of Goldstein and
his
ilk without extralegal and unconstitutional actions.
Sympathizers, many of them quite respectable people
with responsible jobs, admire Goldstein's attitude and
surreptitiously pass him information. An unknown but
presumably large proportion of Goldstein's 2,000-plus
readership are telco security personnel and police, who
are forced to subscribe to *2600* to stay abreast of new
developments in hacking. They thus find themselves
*paying this guy's rent* while grinding their teeth in
anguish, a situation that would have delighted Abbie
Hoffman (one of Goldstein's few idols).
Goldstein is probably the best-known public
representative of the hacker underground today, and
certainly the best-hated. Police regard him as a Fagin, a
corrupter of youth, and speak of him with untempered
loathing. He is quite an accomplished gadfly.
After the Martin Luther King Day Crash of 1990,
Goldstein, for instance, adeptly rubbed salt into the wound
in the pages of *2600.* "Yeah, it was fun for the phone
phreaks as we watched the network crumble," he admitted
cheerfully. "But it was also an ominous sign of what's to
come... Some AT&T people, aided by well-meaning but
ignorant media, were spreading the notion that many
companies had the same software and therefore could
face the same problem someday. Wrong. This was
entirely an AT&T software deficiency. Of course, other
companies could face entirely *different* software
problems. But then, so too could AT&T."
After a technical discussion of the system's failings,
the Long Island techno-rat went on to offer thoughtful
criticism to the gigantic multinational's hundreds of
professionally qualified engineers. "What we don't know
is how a major force in communications like AT&T could
be so sloppy. What happened to backups? Sure,
computer systems go down all the time, but people
making phone calls are not the same as people logging on
to computers. We must make that distinction. It's not
acceptable for the phone system or any other essential
service to 'go down.' If we continue to trust technology
without understanding it, we can look forward to many
variations on this theme.
"AT&T owes it to its customers to be prepared to
*instantly* switch to another network if something strange
and unpredictable starts occurring. The news here isn't so
much the failure of a computer program, but the failure of
AT&T's entire structure."
The very idea of this.... this *person*.... offering
"advice" about "AT&T's entire structure" is more than
some people can easily bear. How dare this near-criminal
dictate what is or isn't "acceptable" behavior from AT&T?
Especially when he's publishing, in the very same issue,
detailed schematic diagrams for creating various
switching-network signalling tones unavailable to the
public.
"See what happens when you drop a 'silver box' tone
or two down your local exchange or through different long
distance service carriers," advises *2600* contributor "Mr.
Upsetter" in "How To Build a Signal Box." "If you
experiment systematically and keep good records, you will
surely discover something interesting."
This is, of course, the scientific method, generally
regarded as a praiseworthy activity and one of the flowers
of modern civilization. One can indeed learn a great deal
with this sort of structured intellectual activity. Telco
employees regard this mode of "exploration" as akin to
flinging sticks of dynamite into their pond to see what
lives
on the bottom.
*2600* has been published consistently since 1984. It
has also run a bulletin board computer system, printed
*2600* T-shirts, taken fax calls... The Spring 1991 issue
has
an interesting announcement on page 45: "We just
discovered an extra set of wires attached to our fax line
and heading up the pole. (They've since been clipped.)
Your faxes to us and to anyone else could be monitored."
In the worldview of *2600,* the tiny band of techno-
rat brothers (rarely, sisters) are a beseiged vanguard of
the
truly free and honest. The rest of the world is a
maelstrom
of corporate crime and high-level governmental
corruption, occasionally tempered with well-meaning
ignorance. To read a few issues in a row is to enter a
nightmare akin to Solzhenitsyn's, somewhat tempered by
the fact that *2600* is often extremely funny.
Goldstein did not become a target of the Hacker
Crackdown, though he protested loudly, eloquently, and
publicly about it, and it added considerably to his fame.
It
was not that he is not regarded as dangerous, because he
is so regarded. Goldstein has had brushes with the law in
the past: in 1985, a *2600* bulletin board computer was
seized by the FBI, and some software on it was formally
declared "a burglary tool in the form of a computer
program." But Goldstein escaped direct repression in
1990, because his magazine is printed on paper, and
recognized as subject to Constitutional freedom of the
press protection. As was seen in the *Ramparts* case, this
is far from an absolute guarantee. Still, as a practical
matter, shutting down *2600* by court-order would create
so much legal hassle that it is simply unfeasible, at least
for the present. Throughout 1990, both Goldstein and his
magazine were peevishly thriving.
Instead, the Crackdown of 1990 would concern itself
with the computerized version of forbidden data. The
crackdown itself, first and foremost, was about *bulletin
board systems.* Bulletin Board Systems, most often
known by the ugly and un-pluralizable acronym "BBS," are
the life-blood of the digital underground. Boards were
also central to law enforcement's tactics and strategy in
the Hacker Crackdown.
A "bulletin board system" can be formally defined as
a computer which serves as an information and message-
passing center for users dialing-up over the phone-lines
through the use of modems. A "modem," or modulator-
demodulator, is a device which translates the digital
impulses of computers into audible analog telephone
signals, and vice versa. Modems connect computers to
phones and thus to each other.
Large-scale mainframe computers have been
connected since the 1960s, but *personal* computers, run
by individuals out of their homes, were first networked in
the late 1970s. The "board" created by Ward Christensen
and Randy Suess in February 1978, in Chicago, Illinois, is
generally regarded as the first personal-computer bulletin
board system worthy of the name.
Boards run on many different machines, employing
many different kinds of software. Early boards were crude
and buggy, and their managers, known as "system
operators" or "sysops," were hard-working technical
experts who wrote their own software. But like most
everything else in the world of electronics, boards became
faster, cheaper, better-designed, and generally far more
sophisticated throughout the 1980s. They also moved
swiftly out of the hands of pioneers and into those of the
general public. By 1985 there were something in the
neighborhood of 4,000 boards in America. By 1990 it was
calculated, vaguely, that there were about 30,000 boards in
the US, with uncounted thousands overseas.
Computer bulletin boards are unregulated
enterprises. Running a board is a rough-and-ready, catch-
as-catch-can proposition. Basically, anybody with a
computer, modem, software and a phone-line can start a
board. With second-hand equipment and public-domain
free software, the price of a board might be quite small --
less than it would take to publish a magazine or even a
decent pamphlet. Entrepreneurs eagerly sell bulletin-
board software, and will coach nontechnical amateur
sysops in its use.
Boards are not "presses." They are not magazines, or
libraries, or phones, or CB radios, or traditional cork
bulletin boards down at the local laundry, though they
have some passing resemblance to those earlier media.
Boards are a new medium -- they may even be a *large
number* of new media.
Consider these unique characteristics: boards are
cheap, yet they can have a national, even global reach.
Boards can be contacted from anywhere in the global
telephone network, at *no cost* to the person running the
board -- the caller pays the phone bill, and if the caller
is
local, the call is free. Boards do not involve an editorial
elite addressing a mass audience. The "sysop" of a board
is not an exclusive publisher or writer -- he is managing an
electronic salon, where individuals can address the
general public, play the part of the general public, and
also exchange private mail with other individuals. And
the "conversation" on boards, though fluid, rapid, and
highly interactive, is not spoken, but written. It is also
relatively anonymous, sometimes completely so.
And because boards are cheap and ubiquitous,
regulations and licensing requirements would likely be
practically unenforceable. It would almost be easier to
"regulate" "inspect" and "license" the content of private
mail -- probably more so, since the mail system is
operated by the federal government. Boards are run by
individuals, independently, entirely at their own whim.
For the sysop, the cost of operation is not the primary
limiting factor. Once the investment in a computer and
modem has been made, the only steady cost is the charge
for maintaining a phone line (or several phone lines). The
primary limits for sysops are time and energy. Boards
require upkeep. New users are generally "validated" --
they must be issued individual passwords, and called at
home by voice-phone, so that their identity can be
verified. Obnoxious users, who exist in plenty, must be
chided or purged. Proliferating messages must be deleted
when they grow old, so that the capacity of the system is
not overwhelmed. And software programs (if such things
are kept on the board) must be examined for possible
computer viruses. If there is a financial charge to use
the
board (increasingly common, especially in larger and
fancier systems) then accounts must be kept, and users
must be billed. And if the board crashes -- a very common
occurrence -- then repairs must be made.
Boards can be distinguished by the amount of effort
spent in regulating them. First, we have the completely
open board, whose sysop is off chugging brews and
watching re-runs while his users generally degenerate
over time into peevish anarchy and eventual silence.
Second comes the supervised board, where the sysop
breaks in every once in a while to tidy up, calm brawls,
issue announcements, and rid the community of dolts
and troublemakers. Third is the heavily supervised
board, which sternly urges adult and responsible behavior
and swiftly edits any message considered offensive,
impertinent, illegal or irrelevant. And last comes the
completely edited "electronic publication," which is
presented to a silent audience which is not allowed to
respond directly in any way.
Boards can also be grouped by their degree of
anonymity. There is the completely anonymous board,
where everyone uses pseudonyms -- "handles" -- and even
the sysop is unaware of the user's true identity. The sysop
himself is likely pseudonymous on a board of this type.
Second, and rather more common, is the board where the
sysop knows (or thinks he knows) the true names and
addresses of all users, but the users don't know one
another's names and may not know his. Third is the board
where everyone has to use real names, and roleplaying
and pseudonymous posturing are forbidden.
Boards can be grouped by their immediacy. "Chat-
lines" are boards linking several users together over
several different phone-lines simultaneously, so that
people exchange messages at the very moment that they
type. (Many large boards feature "chat" capabilities along
with other services.) Less immediate boards, perhaps
with a single phoneline, store messages serially, one at a
time. And some boards are only open for business in
daylight hours or on weekends, which greatly slows
response. A *network* of boards, such as "FidoNet," can
carry electronic mail from board to board, continent to
continent, across huge distances -- but at a relative
snail's
pace, so that a message can take several days to reach its
target audience and elicit a reply.
Boards can be grouped by their degree of
community. Some boards emphasize the exchange of
private, person-to-person electronic mail. Others
emphasize public postings and may even purge people
who "lurk," merely reading posts but refusing to openly
participate. Some boards are intimate and neighborly.
Others are frosty and highly technical. Some are little
more than storage dumps for software, where users
"download" and "upload" programs, but interact among
themselves little if at all.
Boards can be grouped by their ease of access. Some
boards are entirely public. Others are private and
restricted only to personal friends of the sysop. Some
boards divide users by status. On these boards, some
users, especially beginners, strangers or children, will be
restricted to general topics, and perhaps forbidden to post.
Favored users, though, are granted the ability to post as
they please, and to stay "on-line" as long as they like,
even
to the disadvantage of other people trying to call in. High-
status users can be given access to hidden areas in the
board, such as off-color topics, private discussions, and/or
valuable software. Favored users may even become
"remote sysops" with the power to take remote control of
the board through their own home computers. Quite
often "remote sysops" end up doing all the work and
taking formal control of the enterprise, despite the fact
that it's physically located in someone else's house.
Sometimes several "co-sysops" share power.
And boards can also be grouped by size. Massive,
nationwide commercial networks, such as CompuServe,
Delphi, GEnie and Prodigy, are run on mainframe
computers and are generally not considered "boards,"
though they share many of their characteristics, such as
electronic mail, discussion topics, libraries of software,
and
persistent and growing problems with civil-liberties issues.
Some private boards have as many as thirty phone-lines
and quite sophisticated hardware. And then there are
tiny boards.
Boards vary in popularity. Some boards are huge and
crowded, where users must claw their way in against a
constant busy-signal. Others are huge and empty -- there
are few things sadder than a formerly flourishing board
where no one posts any longer, and the dead
conversations of vanished users lie about gathering digital
dust. Some boards are tiny and intimate, their telephone
numbers intentionally kept confidential so that only a
small number can log on.
And some boards are *underground.*
Boards can be mysterious entities. The activities of
their users can be hard to differentiate from conspiracy.
Sometimes they *are* conspiracies. Boards have
harbored, or have been accused of harboring, all manner
of fringe groups, and have abetted, or been accused of
abetting, every manner of frowned-upon, sleazy, radical,
and criminal activity. There are Satanist boards. Nazi
boards. Pornographic boards. Pedophile boards. Drug-
dealing boards. Anarchist boards. Communist boards.
Gay and Lesbian boards (these exist in great profusion,
many of them quite lively with well-established histories).
Religious cult boards. Evangelical boards. Witchcraft
boards, hippie boards, punk boards, skateboarder boards.
Boards for UFO believers. There may well be boards for
serial killers, airline terrorists and professional
assassins.
There is simply no way to tell. Boards spring up,
flourish,
and disappear in large numbers, in most every corner of
the developed world. Even apparently innocuous public
boards can, and sometimes do, harbor secret areas known
only to a few. And even on the vast, public, commercial
services, private mail is very private -- and quite possibly
criminal.
Boards cover most every topic imaginable and some
that are hard to imagine. They cover a vast spectrum of
social activity. However, all board users do have
something in common: their possession of computers and
phones. Naturally, computers and phones are primary
topics of conversation on almost every board.
And hackers and phone phreaks, those utter
devotees of computers and phones, live by boards. They
swarm by boards. They are bred by boards. By the late
1980s, phone-phreak groups and hacker groups, united by
boards, had proliferated fantastically.
As evidence, here is a list of hacker groups compiled
by the editors of *Phrack* on August 8, 1988.
The Administration. Advanced Telecommunications,
Inc. ALIAS. American Tone Travelers. Anarchy Inc.
Apple Mafia. The Association. Atlantic Pirates Guild.
Bad Ass Mother Fuckers. Bellcore. Bell Shock Force.
Black Bag.
Camorra. C&M Productions. Catholics Anonymous.
Chaos Computer Club. Chief Executive Officers. Circle
Of Death. Circle Of Deneb. Club X. Coalition of Hi-Tech
Pirates. Coast-To-Coast. Corrupt Computing. Cult Of The
Dead Cow. Custom Retaliations.
Damage Inc. D&B Communications. The Dange
Gang. Dec Hunters. Digital Gang. DPAK.
Eastern Alliance. The Elite Hackers Guild. Elite
Phreakers and Hackers Club. The Elite Society Of
America. EPG. Executives Of Crime. Extasyy Elite.
Fargo 4A. Farmers Of Doom. The Federation. Feds
R Us. First Class. Five O. Five Star. Force Hackers.
The
414s.
Hack-A-Trip. Hackers Of America. High Mountain
Hackers. High Society. The Hitchhikers.
IBM Syndicate. The Ice Pirates. Imperial Warlords.
Inner Circle. Inner Circle II. Insanity Inc. International
Computer Underground Bandits.
Justice League of America.
Kaos Inc. Knights Of Shadow. Knights Of The
Round Table.
League Of Adepts. Legion Of Doom. Legion Of
Hackers. Lords Of Chaos. Lunatic Labs, Unlimited.
Master Hackers. MAD! The Marauders. MD/PhD.
Metal Communications, Inc. MetalliBashers, Inc. MBI.
Metro Communications. Midwest Pirates Guild.
NASA Elite. The NATO Association. Neon Knights.
Nihilist Order. Order Of The Rose. OSS.
Pacific Pirates Guild. Phantom Access Associates.
PHido PHreaks. The Phirm. Phlash. PhoneLine
Phantoms. Phone Phreakers Of America. Phortune 500.
Phreak Hack Delinquents. Phreak Hack Destroyers.
Phreakers, Hackers, And Laundromat Employees Gang
(PHALSE Gang). Phreaks Against Geeks. Phreaks
Against Phreaks Against Geeks. Phreaks and Hackers of
America. Phreaks Anonymous World Wide. Project
Genesis. The Punk Mafia.
The Racketeers. Red Dawn Text Files. Roscoe Gang.
SABRE. Secret Circle of Pirates. Secret Service. 707
Club. Shadow Brotherhood. Sharp Inc. 65C02 Elite.
Spectral Force. Star League. Stowaways. Strata-Crackers.
Team Hackers '86. Team Hackers '87.
TeleComputist Newsletter Staff. Tribunal Of Knowledge.
Triple Entente. Turn Over And Die Syndrome (TOADS).
300 Club. 1200 Club. 2300 Club. 2600 Club. 2601 Club.
2AF.
The United Soft WareZ Force. United Technical
Underground.
Ware Brigade. The Warelords. WASP.
Contemplating this list is an impressive, almost
humbling business. As a cultural artifact, the thing
approaches poetry.
Underground groups -- subcultures -- can be
distinguished from independent cultures by their habit of
referring constantly to the parent society. Undergrounds
by their nature constantly must maintain a membrane of
differentiation. Funny/distinctive clothes and hair,
specialized jargon, specialized ghettoized areas in cities,
different hours of rising, working, sleeping.... The
digital
underground, which specializes in information, relies very
heavily on language to distinguish itself. As can be seen
from this list, they make heavy use of parody and
mockery. It's revealing to see who they choose to mock.
First, large corporations. We have the Phortune 500,
The Chief Executive Officers, Bellcore, IBM Syndicate,
SABRE (a computerized reservation service maintained
by airlines). The common use of "Inc." is telling -- none
of
these groups are actual corporations, but take clear
delight in mimicking them.
Second, governments and police. NASA Elite, NATO
Association. "Feds R Us" and "Secret Service" are fine bits
of fleering boldness. OSS -- the Office of Strategic
Services
was the forerunner of the CIA.
Third, criminals. Using stigmatizing pejoratives as a
perverse badge of honor is a time-honored tactic for
subcultures: punks, gangs, delinquents, mafias, pirates,
bandits, racketeers.
Specialized orthography, especially the use of "ph"
for "f" and "z" for the plural "s," are instant recognition
symbols. So is the use of the numeral "0" for the letter
"O"
-- computer-software orthography generally features a
slash through the zero, making the distinction obvious.
Some terms are poetically descriptive of computer
intrusion: the Stowaways, the Hitchhikers, the PhoneLine
Phantoms, Coast-to-Coast. Others are simple bravado
and vainglorious puffery. (Note the insistent use of the
terms "elite" and "master.") Some terms are
blasphemous, some obscene, others merely cryptic --
anything to puzzle, offend, confuse, and keep the straights
at bay.
Many hacker groups further re-encrypt their names
by the use of acronyms: United Technical Underground
becomes UTU, Farmers of Doom become FoD, the
United SoftWareZ Force becomes, at its own insistence,
"TuSwF," and woe to the ignorant rodent who capitalizes
the wrong letters.
It should be further recognized that the members of
these groups are themselves pseudonymous. If you did, in
fact, run across the "PhoneLine Phantoms," you would find
them to consist of "Carrier Culprit," "The Executioner,"
"Black Majik," "Egyptian Lover," "Solid State," and "Mr
Icom." "Carrier Culprit" will likely be referred to by his
friends as "CC," as in, "I got these dialups from CC of
PLP."
It's quite possible that this entire list refers to as
few
as a thousand people. It is not a complete list of
underground groups -- there has never been such a list,
and there never will be. Groups rise, flourish, decline,
share membership, maintain a cloud of wannabes and
casual hangers-on. People pass in and out, are ostracized,
get bored, are busted by police, or are cornered by telco
security and presented with huge bills. Many
"underground groups" are software pirates, "warez d00dz,"
who might break copy protection and pirate programs, but
likely wouldn't dare to intrude on a computer-system.
It is hard to estimate the true population of the
digital
underground. There is constant turnover. Most hackers
start young, come and go, then drop out at age 22 -- the
age of college graduation. And a large majority of
"hackers" access pirate boards, adopt a handle, swipe
software and perhaps abuse a phone-code or two, while
never actually joining the elite.
Some professional informants, who make it their
business to retail knowledge of the underground to
paymasters in private corporate security, have estimated
the hacker population at as high as fifty thousand. This
is
likely highly inflated, unless one counts every single
teenage software pirate and petty phone-booth thief. My
best guess is about 5,000 people. Of these, I would guess
that as few as a hundred are truly "elite" -- active
computer intruders, skilled enough to penetrate
sophisticated systems and truly to worry corporate security
and law enforcement.
Another interesting speculation is whether this group
is growing or not. Young teenage hackers are often
convinced that hackers exist in vast swarms and will soon
dominate the cybernetic universe. Older and wiser
veterans, perhaps as wizened as 24 or 25 years old, are
convinced that the glory days are long gone, that the cops
have the underground's number now, and that kids these
days are dirt-stupid and just want to play Nintendo.
My own assessment is that computer intrusion, as a
non-profit act of intellectual exploration and mastery, is
in
slow decline, at least in the United States; but that
electronic fraud, especially telecommunication crime, is
growing by leaps and bounds.
One might find a useful parallel to the digital
underground in the drug underground. There was a
time, now much-obscured by historical revisionism, when
Bohemians freely shared joints at concerts, and hip, small-
scale marijuana dealers might turn people on just for the
sake of enjoying a long stoned conversation about the
Doors and Allen Ginsberg. Now drugs are increasingly
verboten, except in a high-stakes, highly-criminal world of
highly addictive drugs. Over years of disenchantment and
police harassment, a vaguely ideological, free-wheeling
drug underground has relinquished the business of drug-
dealing to a far more savage criminal hard-core. This is
not a pleasant prospect to contemplate, but the analogy is
fairly compelling.
What does an underground board look like? What
distinguishes it from a standard board? It isn't
necessarily
the conversation -- hackers often talk about common
board topics, such as hardware, software, sex, science
fiction, current events, politics, movies, personal gossip.
Underground boards can best be distinguished by their
files, or "philes," pre-composed texts which teach the
techniques and ethos of the underground. These are
prized reservoirs of forbidden knowledge. Some are
anonymous, but most proudly bear the handle of the
"hacker" who has created them, and his group affiliation, if
he has one.
Here is a partial table-of-contents of philes from an
underground board, somewhere in the heart of middle
America, circa 1991. The descriptions are mostly self-
explanatory.
BANKAMER.ZIP 5406 06-11-91 Hacking Bank America
CHHACK.ZIP 4481 06-11-91 Chilton Hacking
CITIBANK.ZIP 4118 06-11-91 Hacking Citibank
CREDIMTC.ZIP 3241 06-11-91 Hacking Mtc Credit
Company
DIGEST.ZIP 5159 06-11-91 Hackers Digest
HACK.ZIP 14031 06-11-91 How To Hack
HACKBAS.ZIP 5073 06-11-91 Basics Of Hacking
HACKDICT.ZIP 42774 06-11-91 Hackers Dictionary
HACKER.ZIP 57938 06-11-91 Hacker Info
HACKERME.ZIP 3148 06-11-91 Hackers Manual
HACKHAND.ZIP 4814 06-11-91 Hackers Handbook
HACKTHES.ZIP 48290 06-11-91 Hackers Thesis
HACKVMS.ZIP 4696 06-11-91 Hacking Vms Systems
MCDON.ZIP 3830 06-11-91 Hacking Macdonalds
(Home Of The Archs)
P500UNIX.ZIP 15525 06-11-91 Phortune 500 Guide To
Unix
RADHACK.ZIP 8411 06-11-91 Radio Hacking
TAOTRASH.DOC 4096 12-25-89 Suggestions For
Trashing
TECHHACK.ZIP 5063 06-11-91 Technical Hacking
The files above are do-it-yourself manuals about
computer intrusion. The above is only a small section of a
much larger library of hacking and phreaking techniques
and history. We now move into a different and perhaps
surprising area.
+------------+
|Anarchy|
+------------+
ANARC.ZIP 3641 06-11-91 Anarchy Files
ANARCHST.ZIP 63703 06-11-91 Anarchist Book
ANARCHY.ZIP 2076 06-11-91 Anarchy At Home
ANARCHY3.ZIP 6982 06-11-91 Anarchy No 3
ANARCTOY.ZIP 2361 06-11-91 Anarchy Toys
ANTIMODM.ZIP 2877 06-11-91 Anti-modem Weapons
ATOM.ZIP 4494 06-11-91 How To Make An Atom
Bomb
BARBITUA.ZIP 3982 06-11-91 Barbiturate Formula
BLCKPWDR.ZIP 2810 06-11-91 Black Powder Formulas
BOMB.ZIP 3765 06-11-91 How To Make Bombs
BOOM.ZIP 2036 06-11-91 Things That Go Boom
CHLORINE.ZIP 1926 06-11-91 Chlorine Bomb
COOKBOOK.ZIP 1500 06-11-91 Anarchy Cook Book
DESTROY.ZIP 3947 06-11-91 Destroy Stuff
DUSTBOMB.ZIP 2576 06-11-91 Dust Bomb
ELECTERR.ZIP 3230 06-11-91 Electronic Terror
EXPLOS1.ZIP 2598 06-11-91 Explosives 1
EXPLOSIV.ZIP 18051 06-11-91 More Explosives
EZSTEAL.ZIP 4521 06-11-91 Ez-stealing
FLAME.ZIP 2240 06-11-91 Flame Thrower
FLASHLT.ZIP 2533 06-11-91 Flashlight Bomb
FMBUG.ZIP 2906 06-11-91 How To Make An Fm Bug
OMEEXPL.ZIP 2139 06-11-91 Home Explosives
HOW2BRK.ZIP 3332 06-11-91 How To Break In
LETTER.ZIP 2990 06-11-91 Letter Bomb
LOCK.ZIP 2199 06-11-91 How To Pick Locks
MRSHIN.ZIP 3991 06-11-91 Briefcase Locks
NAPALM.ZIP 3563 06-11-91 Napalm At Home
NITRO.ZIP 3158 06-11-91 Fun With Nitro
PARAMIL.ZIP 2962 06-11-91 Paramilitary Info
PICKING.ZIP 3398 06-11-91 Picking Locks
PIPEBOMB.ZIP 2137 06-11-91 Pipe Bomb
POTASS.ZIP 3987 06-11-91 Formulas With Potassium
PRANK.TXT 11074 08-03-90 More Pranks To Pull On
Idiots!
REVENGE.ZIP 4447 06-11-91 Revenge Tactics
ROCKET.ZIP 2590 06-11-91 Rockets For Fun
SMUGGLE.ZIP 3385 06-11-91 How To Smuggle
*Holy Cow!* The damned thing is full of stuff about
bombs!
What are we to make of this?
First, it should be acknowledged that spreading
knowledge about demolitions to teenagers is a highly and
deliberately antisocial act. It is not, however, illegal.
Second, it should be recognized that most of these
philes were in fact *written* by teenagers. Most adult
American males who can remember their teenage years
will recognize that the notion of building a flamethrower in
your garage is an incredibly neat-o idea. *Actually*
building a flamethrower in your garage, however, is
fraught with discouraging difficulty. Stuffing gunpowder
into a booby-trapped flashlight, so as to blow the arm off
your high-school vice-principal, can be a thing of dark
beauty to contemplate. Actually committing assault by
explosives will earn you the sustained attention of the
federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Some people, however, will actually try these plans. A
determinedly murderous American teenager can
probably buy or steal a handgun far more easily than he
can brew fake "napalm" in the kitchen sink. Nevertheless,
if temptation is spread before people a certain number
will succumb, and a small minority will actually attempt
these stunts. A large minority of that small minority will
either fail or, quite likely, maim themselves, since these
"philes" have not been checked for accuracy, are not the
product of professional experience, and are often highly
fanciful. But the gloating menace of these philes is not to
be entirely dismissed.
Hackers may not be "serious" about bombing; if they
were, we would hear far more about exploding flashlights,
homemade bazookas, and gym teachers poisoned by
chlorine and potassium. However, hackers are *very*
serious about forbidden knowledge. They are possessed
not merely by curiosity, but by a positive *lust to know.*
The desire to know what others don't is scarcely new. But
the *intensity* of this desire, as manifested by these young
technophilic denizens of the Information Age, may in fact
*be* new, and may represent some basic shift in social
values -- a harbinger of what the world may come to, as
society lays more and more value on the possession,
assimilation and retailing of *information* as a basic
commodity of daily life.
There have always been young men with obsessive
interests in these topics. Never before, however, have they
been able to network so extensively and easily, and to
propagandize their interests with impunity to random
passers-by. High-school teachers will recognize that
there's always one in a crowd, but when the one in a crowd
escapes control by jumping into the phone-lines, and
becomes a hundred such kids all together on a board,
then trouble is brewing visibly. The urge of authority to
*do something,* even something drastic, is hard to resist.
And in 1990, authority did something. In fact authority did
a great deal.
#
The process by which boards create hackers goes
something like this. A youngster becomes interested in
computers -- usually, computer games. He hears from
friends that "bulletin boards" exist where games can be
obtained for free. (Many computer games are "freeware,"
not copyrighted -- invented simply for the love of it and
given away to the public; some of these games are quite
good.) He bugs his parents for a modem, or quite often,
uses his parents' modem.
The world of boards suddenly opens up. Computer
games can be quite expensive, real budget-breakers for a
kid, but pirated games, stripped of copy protection, are