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

A block down the street I meet a vigorous workman who is wheeling along some kind of industrial trolley; it has what appears to be a tank of propane on it.

We make eye contact. We nod politely. I walk past him. “Hey! Excuse me sir!” he says.

“Yes?” I say, stopping and turning.

“Have you seen,” the guy says rapidly, “a black guy, about 6′7″, scars on both his cheeks like this—” he gestures— “wears a black baseball cap on backwards, wandering around here anyplace?”

“Sounds like I don’t much WANT to meet him,” I say.

“He took my wallet,” says my new acquaintance. “Took it this morning. Y’know, some people would be SCARED of a guy like that. But I’m not scared. I’m from Chicago. I’m gonna hunt him down. We do things like that in Chicago.”

“Yeah?”

“I went to the cops and now he’s got an APB out on his ass,” he says with satisfaction. “You run into him, you let me know.”

“Okay,” I say. “What is your name, sir?”

“Stanley….”

“And how can I reach you?”

“Oh,” Stanley says, in the same rapid voice, “you don’t have to reach, uh, me. You can just call the cops. Go straight to the cops.” He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a greasy piece of pasteboard. “See, here’s my report on him.”

I look. The “report,” the size of an index card, is labelled PRO-ACT: Phoenix Residents Opposing Active Crime Threat…. or is it Organized Against Crime Threat? In the darkening street it’s hard to read. Some kind of vigilante group? Neighborhood watch? I feel very puzzled.

“Are you a police officer, sir?”

He smiles, seems very pleased by the question.

“No,” he says.

“But you are a ‘Phoenix Resident?’”

“Would you believe a homeless person,” Stanley says.

“Really? But what’s with the…” For the first time I take a close look at Stanley’s trolley. It’s a rubber-wheeled thing of industrial metal, but the device I had mistaken for a tank of propane is in fact a water-cooler. Stanley also has an Army duffel-bag, stuffed tight as a sausage with clothing or perhaps a tent, and, at the base of his trolley, a cardboard box and a battered leather briefcase.

“I see,” I say, quite at a loss. For the first time I notice that Stanley has a wallet. He has not lost his wallet at all. It is in his back pocket and chained to his belt. It’s not a new wallet. It seems to have seen a lot of wear.

“Well, you know how it is, brother,” says Stanley. Now that I know that he is homeless—A POSSIBLE THREAT—my entire perception of him has changed in an instant. His speech, which once seemed just bright and enthusiastic, now seems to have a dangerous tang of mania. “I have to do this!” he assures me. “Track this guy down… It’s a thing I do… you know… to keep myself together!” He smiles, nods, lifts his trolley by its decaying rubber handgrips.

“Gotta work together, y’know,” Stanley booms, his face alight with cheerfulness, “the police can’t do everything!”

The gentlemen I met in my stroll in downtown Phoenix are the only computer illiterates in this book. To regard them as irrelevant, however, would be a grave mistake.

As computerization spreads across society, the populace at large is subjected to wave after wave of future shock. But, as a necessary converse, the “computer community” itself is subjected to wave after wave of incoming computer illiterates. How will those currently enjoying America’s digital bounty regard, and treat, all this teeming refuse yearning to breathe free? Will the electronic frontier be another Land of Opportunity—or an armed and monitored enclave, where the disenfranchised snuggle on their cardboard at the locked doors of our houses of justice?

Some people just don’t get along with computers. They can’t read. They can’t type. They just don’t have it in their heads to master arcane instructions in wirebound manuals. Somewhere, the process of computerization of the populace will reach a limit. Some people—quite decent people maybe, who might have thrived in any other situation—will be left irretrievably outside the bounds. What’s to be done with these people, in the bright new shiny electroworld? How will they be regarded, by the mouse-whizzing masters of cyberspace? With contempt? Indifference? Fear?

In retrospect, it astonishes me to realize how quickly poor Stanley became a perceived threat. Surprise and fear are closely allied feelings. And the world of computing is full of surprises.

I met one character in the streets of Phoenix whose role in those book is supremely and directly relevant. That personage was Stanley’s giant thieving scarred phantom. This phantasm is everywhere in this book. He is the specter haunting cyberspace.

Sometimes he’s a maniac vandal ready to smash the phone system for no sane reason at all. Sometimes he’s a fascist fed, coldly programming his mighty mainframes to destroy our Bill of Rights. Sometimes he’s a telco bureaucrat, covertly conspiring to register all modems in the service of an Orwellian surveillance regime. Mostly, though, this fearsome phantom is a “hacker.” He’s strange, he doesn’t belong, he’s not authorized, he doesn’t smell right, he’s not keeping his proper place, he’s not one of us. The focus of fear is the hacker, for much the same reasons that Stanley’s fancied assailant is black.

Stanley’s demon can’t go away, because he doesn’t exist. Despite singleminded and tremendous effort, he can’t be arrested, sued, jailed, or fired. The only constructive way to do ANYTHING about him is to learn more about Stanley himself. This learning process may be repellent, it may be ugly, it may involve grave elements of paranoiac confusion, but it’s necessary. Knowing Stanley requires something more than class-crossing condescension. It requires more than steely legal objectivity. It requires human compassion and sympathy.

To know Stanley is to know his demon. If you know the other guy’s demon, then maybe you’ll come to know some of your own. You’ll be able to separate reality from illusion. And then you won’t do your cause, and yourself, more harm than good. Like poor damned Stanley from Chicago did.

The Federal Computer Investigations Committee (FCIC) is the most important and influential organization in the realm of American computer-crime. Since the police of other countries have largely taken their computer-crime cues from American methods, the FCIC might well be called the most important computer crime group in the world.

It is also, by federal standards, an organization of great unorthodoxy. State and local investigators mix with federal agents. Lawyers, financial auditors and computer-security programmers trade notes with street cops. Industry vendors and telco security people show up to explain their gadgetry and plead for protection and justice. Private investigators, think-tank experts and industry pundits throw in their two cents’ worth. The FCIC is the antithesis of a formal bureaucracy.

Members of the FCIC are obscurely proud of this fact; they recognize their group as aberrant, but are entirely convinced that this, for them, outright WEIRD behavior is nevertheless ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY to get their jobs done.

FCIC regulars—from the Secret Service, the FBI, the IRS, the Department of Labor, the offices of federal attorneys, state police, the Air Force, from military intelligence—often attend meetings, held hither and thither across the country, at their own expense. The FCIC doesn’t get grants. It doesn’t charge membership fees. It doesn’t have a boss. It has no headquarters—just a mail drop in Washington DC, at the Fraud Division of the Secret Service. It doesn’t have a budget. It doesn’t have schedules. It meets three times a year—sort of. Sometimes it issues publications, but the FCIC has no regular publisher, no treasurer, not even a secretary. There are no minutes of FCIC meetings. Non-federal people are considered “non-voting members,” but there’s not much in the way of elections. There are no badges, lapel pins or certificates of membership. Everyone is on a first-name basis. There are about forty of them. Nobody knows how many, exactly. People come, people go—sometimes people “go” formally but still hang around anyway. Nobody has ever exactly figured out what “membership” of this “Committee” actually entails.

Strange as this may seem to some, to anyone familiar with the social world of computing, the “organization” of the FCIC is very recognizable.

For years now, economists and management theorists have speculated that the tidal wave of the information revolution would destroy rigid, pyramidal bureaucracies, where everything is top-down and centrally controlled. Highly trained “employees” would take on much greater autonomy, being self-starting, and self-motivating, moving from place to place, task to task, with great speed and fluidity. “Ad-hocracy” would rule, with groups of people spontaneously knitting together across organizational lines, tackling the problem at hand, applying intense computer-aided expertise to it, and then vanishing whence they came.

This is more or less what has actually happened in the world of federal computer investigation. With the conspicuous exception of the phone companies, which are after all over a hundred years old, practically EVERY organization that playthe basis of this fear is not irrational.

Fear of hackers goes well beyond the fear of merely criminal activity.

Subversion and manipulation of the phone system is an act with disturbing political overtones. In America, computers and telephones are potent symbols of organized authority and the technocratic business elite.

But there is an element in American culture that has always strongly rebelled against these symbols; rebelled against all large industrial computers and all phone companies. A certain anarchical tinge deep in the American soul delights in causing confusion and pain to all bureaucracies, including technological ones.

There is sometimes malice and vandalism in this attitude, but it is a deep and cherished part of the American national character. The outlaw, the rebel, the rugged individual, the pioneer, the sturdy Jeffersonian yeoman, the private citizen resisting interference in his pursuit of happiness—these are figures that all Americans recognize, and that many will strongly applaud and defend.

Many scrupulously law-abiding citizens today do cutting-edge work with electronics—work that has already had tremendous social influence and will have much more in years to come. In all truth, these talented, hardworking, law-abiding, mature, adult people are far more disturbing to the peace and order of the current status quo than any scofflaw group of romantic teenage punk kids. These law-abiding hackers have the power, ability, and willingness to influence other people’s lives quite unpredictably. They have means, motive, and opportunity to meddle drastically with the American social order. When corralled into governments, universities, or large multinational companies, and forced to follow rulebooks and wear suits and ties, they at least have some conventional halters on their freedom of action. But when loosed alone, or in small groups, and fired by imagination and the entrepreneurial spirit, they can move mountains—causing landslides that will likely crash directly is any important role in this book functions just like the FCIC. The Chicago Task Force, the Arizona Racketeering Unit, the Legion of Doom, the Phrack crowd, the Electronic Frontier Foundation—they ALL look and act like “tiger teams” or “user’s groups.” They are all electronic ad-hocracies leaping up spontaneously to attempt to meet a need.

Some are police. Some are, by strict definition, criminals. Some are political interest-groups. But every single group has that same quality of apparent spontaneity—“Hey, gang! My uncle’s got a barn—let’s put on a show!”

Every one of these groups is embarrassed by this “amateurism,” and, for the sake of their public image in a world of non-computer people, they all attempt to look as stern and formal and impressive as possible. These electronic frontier-dwellers resemble groups of nineteenth-century pioneers hankering after the respectability of statehood. There are however, two crucial differences in the historical experience of these “pioneers” of the nineteeth and twenty-first centuries.

First, powerful information technology DOES play into the hands of small, fluid, loosely organized groups. There have always been “pioneers,”