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

Mr. Neidorf. He’s not interested in computer science. Why should he be? He’s not interested in writing C code the rest of his life, and besides, he’s seen where the chips fall. To the world of computer science he and PHRACK were just a curiosity. But to the world of law…. The kid has learned where the bodies are buried. He carries his notebook of press clippings wherever he goes.

Phiber Optik makes fun of Neidorf for a Midwestern geek, for believing that “Acid Phreak” does acid and listens to acid rock. Hell no. Acid’s never done ACID! Acid’s into ACID HOUSE MUSIC. Jesus. The very idea of doing LSD. Our PARENTS did LSD, ya clown.

Thackeray suddenly turns upon Craig Neidorf the full lighthouse glare of her attention and begins a determined half-hour attempt to WIN THE BOY OVER. The Joan of Arc of Computer Crime is GIVING CAREER ADVICE TO KNIGHT LIGHTNING! “Your experience would be very valuable—a real asset,” she tells him with unmistakeable sixty-thousand-watt sincerity. Neidorf is fascinated. He listens with unfeigned attention. He’s nodding and saying yes ma’am. Yes, Craig, you too can forget all about money and enter the glamorous and horribly underpaid world of PROSECUTING COMPUTER CRIME! You can put your former friends in prison—ooops….

You cannot go on dueling at modem’s length indefinitely. You cannot beat one another senseless with rolled-up press-clippings. Sooner or later you have to come directly to grips. And yet the very act of assembling here has changed the entire situation drastically. John Quarterman, author of THE MATRIX, explains the Internet at his symposium. It is the largest news network in the world, it is growing by leaps and bounds, and yet you cannot measure Internet because you cannot stop it in place. It cannot stop, because there is no one anywhere in the world with the authority to stop Internet. It changes, yes, it grows, it embeds itself across the post-industrial, postmodern world and it generates community wherever it touches, and it is doing this all by itself.

Phiber is different. A very fin de siecle kid, Phiber Optik. Barlow says he looks like an Edwardian dandy. He does rather. Shaven neck, the sides of his skull cropped hip-hop close, unruly tangle of black hair on top that looks pomaded, he stays up till four a.m. and misses all the sessions, then hangs out in payphone booths with his acoustic coupler gutsily CRACKING SYSTEMS RIGHT IN THE MIDST OF THE HEAVIEST LAW ENFORCEMENT DUDES IN THE U.S., or at least PRETENDING to…. Unlike “Frank Drake.” Drake, who wrote Dorothy Denning out of nowhere, and asked for an interview for his cheapo cyberpunk fanzine, and then started grilling her on her ethics. She was squirmin’, too…. Drake, scarecrow-tall with his floppy blond mohawk, rotting tennis shoes and black leather jacket lettered ILLUMINATI in red, gives off an unmistakeable air of the bohemian literatus. Drake is the kind of guy who reads British industrial design magazines and appreciates William Gibson because the quality of the prose is so tasty. Drake could never touch a phone or a keyboard again, and he’d still have the nose-ring and the blurry photocopied fanzines and the sampled industrial music. He’s a radical punk with a desktop-publishing rig and an Internet address. Standing next to Drake, the diminutive Phiber looks like he’s been physically coagulated out of phonelines. Born to phreak.

Dorothy Denning approaches Phiber suddenly. The two of them are about the same height and body-build. Denning’s blue eyes flash behind the round window-frames of her glasses. “Why did you say I was ‘quaint?’” she asks Phiber, quaintly.

It’s a perfect description but Phiber is nonplussed… “Well, I uh, you know….”

“I also think you’re quaint, Dorothy,” I say, novelist to the rescue, the journo gift of gab… She is neat and dapper and yet there’s an arcane quality to her, something like a Pilgrim Maiden behind leaded glass; if she were six inches high Dorothy Denning would look great inside a china cabinet… The Cryptographeress…. The Cryptographrix… whatever… Weirdly, Peter Denning looks just like his wife, you could pick this gentleman out of a thousand guys as the soulmate of Dorothy Denning. Wearing tailored slacks, a spotless fuzzy varsity sweater, and a neatly knotted academician’s tie…. This fineboned, exquisitely polite, utterly civilized and hyperintelligent couple seem to have emerged from some cleaner and finer parallel universe, where humanity exists to do the Brain Teasers column in Scientific American. Why does this Nice Lady hang out with these unsavory characters?

Because the time has come for it, that’s why. Because she’s the best there is at what she does.

Donn Parker is here, the Great Bald Eagle of Computer Crime…. With his bald dome, great height, and enormous Lincoln-like hands, the great visionary pioneer of the field plows through the lesser mortals like an icebreaker…. His eyes are fixed on the future with the rigidity of a bronze statue…. Eventually, he tells his audience, all business crime will be computer crime, because businesses will do everything through computers. “Computer crime” as a category will vanish.

In the meantime, passing fads will flourish and fail and evaporate…. Parker’s commanding, resonant voice is sphinxlike, everything is viewed from some eldritch valley of deep historical abstraction… Yes, they’ve come and they’ve gone, these passing flaps in the world of digital computation…. The radio-frequency emanation scandal… KGB and MI5 and CIA do it every day, it’s easy, but nobody else ever has…. The salami-slice fraud, mostly mythical… “Crimoids,” he calls them…. Computer viruses are the current crimoid champ, a lot less dangerous than most people let on, but the novelty is fading and there’s a crimoid vacuum at the moment, the press is visibly hungering for something more outrageous…. The Great Man shares with us a few speculations on the coming crimoids…. Desktop Forgery! Wow…. Computers stolen just for the sake of the information within them—data-napping! Happened in Britain a while ago, could be the coming thing…. Phantom nodes in the Internet!

Parker handles his overhead projector sheets with an ecclesiastical air… He wears a grey double-breasted suit, a light blue shirt, and a very quiet tie of understated maroon and blue paisley… Aphorisms emerge from him with slow, leaden emphasis… There is no such thing as an adequately secure computer when one faces a sufficiently powerful adversary…. Deterrence is the most socially useful aspect of security… People are the primary weakness in all information systems… The entire baseline of computer security must be shifted upward…. Don’t ever violate your security by publicly describing your security measures…

People in the audience are beginning to squirm, and yet there is something about the elemental purity of this guy’s philosophy that compels uneasy respect…. Parker sounds like the only sane guy left in the lifeboat, sometimes. The guy who can prove rigorously, from deep moral principles, that Harvey there, the one with the broken leg and the checkered past, is the one who has to be, err…. that is, Mr. Harvey is best placed to make the necessary sacrifice for the security and indeed the very survival of the rest of this lifeboat’s crew…. Computer security, Parker informs us mournfully, is a nasty topic, and we wish we didn’t have to have it… The security expert, armed with method and logic, must think—imagine—everything that the adversary might do before the adversary might actually do it. It is as if the criminal’s dark brain were an extensive subprogram within the shining cranium of Donn Parker. He is a Holmes whose Moriarty does not quite yet exist and so must be perfectly simulated.

CFP is a stellar gathering, with the giddiness of a wedding. It is a happy time, a happy ending, they know their world is changing forever tonight, and they’re proud to have been there to see it happen, to talk, to think, to help.

And yet as night falls, a certain elegiac quality manifests itself, as the crowd gathers beneath the chandeliers with their wineglasses and dessert plates. Something is ending here, gone forever, and it takes a while to pinpoint it.

It is the End of the Amateurs.

 

Afterword: The Hacker Crackdown Three Years Later

Three years in cyberspace is like thirty years anyplace real. It feels as if a generation has passed since I wrote this book. In terms of the generations of computing machinery involved, that’s pretty much the case.

The basic shape of cyberspace has changed drastically since 1990. A new U.S. Administration is in power whose personnel are, if anything, only too aware of the nature and potential of electronic networks. It’s now clear to all players concerned that the status quo is dead-and-gone in American media and telecommunications, and almost any territory on the electronic frontier is up for grabs. Interactive multimedia, cable-phone alliances, the Information Superhighway, fiber-to- the-curb, laptops and palmtops, the explosive growth of cellular and the Internet—the earth trembles visibly.

The year 1990 was not a pleasant one for AT&T. By 1993, however, AT&T had successfully devoured the computer company NCR in an unfriendly takeover, finally giving the pole-climbers a major piece of the digital action. AT&T managed to rid itself of ownership of the troublesome UNIX operating system, selling it to Novell, a netware company, which was itself preparing for a savage market dust-up with operating-system titan Microsoft. Furthermore, AT&T acquired McCaw Cellular in a gigantic merger, giving AT&T a potential wireless whip-hand over its former progeny, the RBOCs. The RBOCs themselves were now AT&T’s clearest potential rivals, as the Chinese firewalls between regulated monopoly and frenzied digital entrepreneurism began to melt and collapse headlong.

AT&T, mocked by industry analysts in 1990, was reaping awestruck praise by commentators in 1993. AT&T had managed to avoid any more major software crashes in its switching stations. AT&T’s newfound reputation as “the nimble giant” was all the sweeter, since AT&T’s traditional rival giant in the world of multinational computing, IBM, was almost prostrate by 1993. IBM’s vision of the commercial computer-network of the future, “Prodigy,” had managed to spend $900 million without a whole heck of a lot to show for it, while AT&T, by contrast, was boldly speculating on the possibilities of personal communicators and hedging its bets with investments in handwritten interfaces. In 1990 AT&T had looked bad; but in 1993 AT&T looked like the future.

At least, AT&T’s ADVERTISING looked like the future. Similar public attention was riveted on the massive $22 billion megamerger between RBOC Bell Atlantic and cable-TV giant TeleCommunications Inc. Nynex was buying into cable company Viacom International. BellSouth was buying stock in Prime Management, Southwestern Bell acquiring a cable company in Washington DC, and so forth. By stark contrast, the Internet, a noncommercial entity which officially did not even exist, had no advertising budget at all. And yet, almost below the level of governmental and corporate awareness, the Internet was stealthily devouring everything in its path, growing at a rate that defied comprehension. Kids who might have been eager computer-intruders a mere five years earlier were now surfing the Internet, where their natural urge to explore led them into cyberspace landscapes of such mindboggling vastness that the very idea of hacking passwords seemed rather a waste of time.

By 1993, there had not been a solid, knock ‘em down, panic-striking, teenage-hacker computer-intrusion scandal in many long months. There had, of course, been some striking and well-publicized acts of illicit computer access, but they had been committed by adult white-collar industry insiders in clear pursuit of personal or commercial advantage. The kids, by contrast, all seemed to be on IRC, Internet Relay Chat.

Or, perhaps, frolicking out in the endless glass-roots network of personal bulletin board systems. In 1993, there were an estimated 60,000 boards in America; the population of boards had fully doubled since Operation Sundevil in 1990. The hobby was transmuting fitfully into a genuine industry. The board community were no longer obscure hobbyists; many were still hobbyists and proud of it,