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

by going tippety-tap with your fingers, you may have saddled your parents with four hundred bucks in long-distance charges, and gotten chewed out but good. That hardly seems fair.

How horrifying to have made friends in another state and to be deprived of their company—and their software—just because telephone companies demand absurd amounts of money! How painful, to be restricted to boards in one’s own AREA CODE—what the heck is an “area code” anyway, and what makes it so special? A few grumbles, complaints, and innocent questions of this sort will often elicit a sympathetic reply from another board user—someone with some stolen codes to hand. You dither a while, knowing this isn’t quite right, then you make up your mind to try them anyhow—AND THEY WORD! Suddenly you’re doing something even your parents can’t do. Six months ago you were just some kid—now, you’re the Crimson Flash of Area Code 512! You’re bad—you’re nationwide!

Maybe you’ll stop at a few abused codes. Maybe you’ll decide that boards aren’t all that interesting after all, that it’s wrong, not worth the risk—but maybe you won’t. The next step is to pick up your own repeat-dialling program—to learn to generate your own stolen codes. (This was dead easy five years ago, much harder to get away with nowadays, but not yet impossible.) And these dialling programs are not complex or intimidating—some are as small as twenty lines of software.

Now, you too can share codes. You can trade codes to learn other techniques. If you’re smart enough to catch on, and obsessive enough to want to bother, and ruthless enough to start seriously bending rules, then you’ll get better, fast. You start to develop a rep. You move up to a heavier class of board—a board with a bad attitude, the kind of board that naive dopes like your classmates and your former self have never even heard of! You pick up the jargon of phreaking and hacking from the board. You read a few of those anarchy philes—and man, you never realized you could be a real OUTLAW without ever leaving your bedroom.

You still play other computer games, but now you have a new and bigger game. This one will bring you a different kind of status than destroying even eight zillion lousy space invaders.

Hacking is perceived by hackers as a “game.” This is not an entirely unreasonable or sociopathic perception. You can win or lose at hacking, succeed or fail, but it never feels “real.” It’s not simply that imaginative youngsters sometimes have a hard time telling “make-believe” from “real life.” Cyberspace is NOT REAL! “Real” things are physical objects like trees and shoes and cars. Hacking takes place on a screen. Words aren’t physical, numbers (even telephone numbers and credit card numbers) aren’t physical. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but data will never hurt me. Computers SIMULATE reality, like computer games that simulate tank battles or dogfights or spaceships. Simulations are just make-believe, and the stuff in computers is NOT REAL.

Consider this: if “hacking” is supposed to be so serious and real-life and dangerous, then how come NINE-YEAR-OLD KIDS have computers and modems? You wouldn’t give a nine year old his own car, or his own rifle, or his own chainsaw—those things are “real.”

People underground are perfectly aware that the “game” is frowned upon by the powers that be. Word gets around about busts in the underground. Publicizing busts is one of the primary functions of pirate boards, but they also promulgate an attitude about them, and their own idiosyncratic ideas of justice. The users of underground boards won’t complain if some guy is busted for crashing systems, spreading viruses, or stealing money by wire-fraud. They may shake their heads with a sneaky grin, but they won’t openly defend these practices. But when a kid is charged with some theoretical amount of theft: $233,846.14, for instance, because he sneaked into a computer and copied something, and kept it in his house on a floppy disk—this is regarded as a sign of near-insanity from prosecutors, a sign that they’ve drastically mistaken the immaterial game of computing for their real and boring everyday world of fatcat corporate money.

It’s as if big companies and their suck-up lawyers think that computing belongs to them, and they can retail it with price stickers, as if it were boxes of laundry soap! But pricing “information” is like trying to price air or price dreams. Well, anybody on a pirate board knows that computing can be, and ought to be, FREE. Pirate boards are little independent worlds in cyberspace, and they don’t belong to anybody but the underground. Underground boards aren’t “brought to you by Procter & Gamble.”

To log on to an underground board can mean to experience liberation, to enter a world where, for once, money isn’t everything and adults don’t have all the answers.

Let’s sample another vivid hacker manifesto. Here are some excerpts from “The Conscience of a Hacker,” by “The Mentor,” from PHRACK Volume One, Issue 7, Phile 3.

 

“I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it’s because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn’t like me.(…)

“And then it happened… a door opened to a world… rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from day-to-day incompetencies is sought… a board is found. ‘This is it… this is where I belong…’

“I know everyone here… even if I’ve never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again… I know you all…(…)

“This is our world now…. the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat and lie to us and try to make us believe that it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

“Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.”

 

There have been underground boards almost as long as there have been boards. One of the first was 8BBS, which became a stronghold of the West Coast phone-phreak elite. After going on-line in March 1980, 8BBS sponsored “Susan Thunder,” and “Tuc,” and, most notoriously, “the Condor.” “The Condor” bore the singular distinction of becoming the most vilified American phreak and hacker ever. Angry underground associates, fed up with Condor’s peevish behavior, turned him in to police, along with a heaping double-helping of outrageous hacker legendry. As a result, Condor was kept in solitary confinement for seven months, for fear that he might start World War Three by triggering missile silos from the prison payphone. (Having served his time, Condor is now walking around loose; WWIII has thus far conspicuously failed to occur.)

The sysop of 8BBS was an ardent free-speech enthusiast who simply felt that ANY attempt to restrict the expression of his users was unconstitutional and immoral. Swarms of the technically curious entered 8BBS and emerged as phreaks and hackers, until, in 1982, a friendly 8BBS alumnus passed the sysop a new modem which had been purchased by credit-card fraud. Police took this opportunity to seize the entire board and remove what they considered an attractive nuisance.

Plovernet was a powerful East Coast pirate board that operated in both New York and Florida. Owned and operated by teenage hacker “Quasi Moto,” Plovernet attracted five hundred eager users in 1983. “Emmanuel Goldstein” was one-time co-sysop of Plovernet, along with “Lex Luthor,” founder of the “Legion of Doom” group. Plovernet bore the signal honor of being the original home of the “Legion of Doom,” about which the reader will be hearing a great deal, soon.

“Pirate-80,” or “P-80,” run by a sysop known as “Scan-Man,” got into the game very early in Charleston, and continued steadily for years. P-80 flourished so flagrantly that even its most hardened users became nervous, and some slanderously speculated that “Scan Man” must have ties to corporate security, a charge he vigorously denied.

“414 Private” was the home board for the first GROUP to attract conspicuous trouble, the teenage “414 Gang,” whose intrusions into Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Los Alamos military computers were to be a nine-days-wonder in 1982.

At about this time, the first software piracy boards began to open up, trading cracked games for the Atari 800 and the Commodore C64. Naturally these boards were heavily frequented by teenagers. And with the 1983 release of the hacker-thriller movie WAR GAMES, the scene exploded. It seemed that every kid in America had demanded and gotten a modem for Christmas. Most of these dabbler wannabes put their modems in the attic after a few weeks, and most of the remainder minded their P’s and Q’s and stayed well out of hot water. But some stubborn and talented diehards had this hacker kid in WAR GAMES figured for a happening dude. They simply could not rest until they had contacted the underground—or, failing that, created their own.

In the mid-80s, underground boards sprang up like digital fungi. ShadowSpawn Elite. Sherwood Forest I, II, and III. Digital Logic Data Service in Florida, sysoped by no less a man than “Digital Logic” himself; Lex Luthor of the Legion of Doom was prominent on this board, since it was in his area code. Lex’s own board, “Legion of Doom,” started in 1984. The Neon Knights ran a network of Apple-hacker boards: Neon Knights North, South, East and West. Free World II was run by “Major Havoc.” Lunatic Labs is still in operation as of this writing. Dr. Ripco in Chicago, an anything-goes anarchist board with an extensive and raucous history, was seized by Secret Service agents in 1990 on Sundevil day, but up again almost immediately, with new machines and scarcely diminished vigor.

The St. Louis scene was not to rank with major centers of American hacking such as New York and L.A. But St. Louis did rejoice in possession of “Knight Lightning” and “Taran King,” two of the foremost JOURNALISTS native to the underground. Missouri boards like Metal Shop, Metal Shop Private, Metal Shop Brewery, may not have been the heaviest boards around in terms of illicit expertise. But they became boards where hackers could exchange social gossip and try to figure out what the heck was going on nationally—and internationally. Gossip from Metal Shop was put into the form of news files, then assembled into a general electronic publication, PHRACK, a portmanteau title coined from “phreak” and “hack.” The PHRACK editors were as obsessively curious about other hackers as hackers were about machines.

PHRACK, being free of charge and lively reading, began to circulate throughout the underground. As Taran King and Knight Lightning left high school for college, PHRACK began to appear on mainframe machines linked to BITNET, and, through BITNET to the “Internet,” that loose but extremely potent not-for-profit network where academic, governmental and corporate machines trade data through the UNIX TCP/IP protocol. (The “Internet Worm” of November 2-3,1988, created by Cornell grad student Robert Morris, was to be the largest and best-publicized computer-intrusion scandal to date. Morris claimed that his ingenious “worm” program was meant to harmlessly explore the Internet, but due to bad programming, the Worm replicated out of control and crashed some six thousand Internet computers. Smaller-scale and less ambitious Internet hacking was a standard for the underground