Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling (the reader ebook txt) 📖

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 phonelines 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 hardworking 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