a victim's shoulder as he punches-in his own code-number
on a public payphone. This technique is known as "shoulder-surfing,"
and is especially common in airports, bus terminals, and train stations.
The code is then sold by the thief for a few dollars. The buyer abusing
the code has no computer expertise, but calls his Mom in New York,
Kingston or Caracas and runs up a huge bill with impunity. The losses
from this primitive phreaking activity are far, far greater than the
monetary losses caused by computer-intruding hackers.
In the mid-to-late 1980s, until the introduction of sterner telco
security measures, COMPUTERIZED code theft worked like a charm,
and was virtually omnipresent throughout the digital underground,
among phreaks and hackers alike. This was accomplished through
programming one's computer to try random code numbers over the telephone
until one of them worked. Simple programs to do this were widely available
in the underground; a computer running all night was likely to come up with
a dozen or so useful hits. This could be repeated week after week until
one had a large library of stolen codes.
Nowadays, the computerized dialling of hundreds of numbers
can be detected within hours and swiftly traced.
If a stolen code is repeatedly abused, this too can
be detected within a few hours. But for years in the 1980s,
the publication of stolen codes was a kind of elementary etiquette
for fledgling hackers. The simplest way to establish your bona-fides
as a raider was to steal a code through repeated random dialling
and offer it to the "community" for use. Codes could be both stolen,
and used, simply and easily from the safety of one's own bedroom,
with very little fear of detection or punishment.
Before computers and their phone-line modems entered American homes
in gigantic numbers, phone phreaks had their own special telecommunications
hardware gadget, the famous "blue box." This fraud device (now rendered
increasingly useless by the digital evolution of the phone system) could
trick switching systems into granting free access to long-distance lines.
It did this by mimicking the system's own signal, a tone of 2600 hertz.
Steven Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple Computer, Inc.,
once dabbled in selling blue-boxes in college dorms in California.
For many, in the early days of phreaking, blue-boxing was scarcely
perceived as "theft," but rather as a fun (if sneaky) way to use
excess phone capacity harmlessly. After all, the long-distance
lines were JUST SITTING THERE. . . . Whom did it hurt, really?
If you're not DAMAGING the system, and you're not USING UP ANY
TANGIBLE RESOURCE, and if nobody FINDS OUT what you did,
then what real harm have you done? What exactly HAVE you "stolen,"
anyway? If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it,
how much is the noise worth? Even now this remains a rather
dicey question.
Blue-boxing was no joke to the phone companies, however.
Indeed, when Ramparts magazine, a radical publication in California,
printed the wiring schematics necessary to create a mute box in June 1972,
the magazine was seized by police and Pacific Bell phone-company officials.
The mute box, a blue-box variant, allowed its user to receive long-distance
calls free of charge to the caller. This device was closely described in a
Ramparts article wryly titled "Regulating the Phone Company In Your Home."
Publication of this article was held to be in violation of Californian
State Penal Code section 502.7, which outlaws ownership of wire-fraud
devices and the selling of "plans or instructions for any instrument,
apparatus, or device intended to avoid telephone toll charges."
Issues of Ramparts were recalled or seized on the newsstands,
and the resultant loss of income helped put the magazine out of business.
This was an ominous precedent for free-expression issues, but the telco's
crushing of a radical-fringe magazine passed without serious challenge
at the time. Even in the freewheeling California 1970s, it was widely felt
that there was something sacrosanct about what the phone company knew;
that the telco had a legal and moral right to protect itself by shutting
off the flow of such illicit information. Most telco information was so
"specialized" that it would scarcely be understood by any honest member
of the public. If not published, it would not be missed. To print such
material did not seem part of the legitimate role of a free press.
In 1990 there would be a similar telco-inspired attack
on the electronic phreak/hacking "magazine" Phrack.
The Phrack legal case became a central issue in the
Hacker Crackdown, and gave rise to great controversy.
Phrack would also be shut down, for a time, at least,
but this time both the telcos and their law-enforcement
allies would pay a much larger price for their actions.
The Phrack case will be examined in detail, later.
Phone-phreaking as a social practice is still very
much alive at this moment. Today, phone-phreaking
is thriving much more vigorously than the better-known
and worse-feared practice of "computer hacking."
New forms of phreaking are spreading rapidly, following
new vulnerabilities in sophisticated phone services.
Cellular phones are especially vulnerable; their chips
can be re-programmed to present a false caller ID
and avoid billing. Doing so also avoids police tapping,
making cellular-phone abuse a favorite among drug-dealers.
"Call-sell operations" using pirate cellular phones can,
and have, been run right out of the backs of cars, which move
from "cell" to "cell" in the local phone system, retailing
stolen long-distance service, like some kind of demented
electronic version of the neighborhood ice-cream truck.
Private branch-exchange phone systems in large corporations
can be penetrated; phreaks dial-up a local company, enter its
internal phone-system, hack it, then use the company's own
PBX system to dial back out over the public network,
causing the company to be stuck with the resulting
long-distance bill. This technique is known as "diverting."
"Diverting" can be very costly, especially because phreaks
tend to travel in packs and never stop talking.
Perhaps the worst by-product of this "PBX fraud"
is that victim companies and telcos have sued one another
over the financial responsibility for the stolen calls,
thus enriching not only shabby phreaks but well-paid lawyers.
"Voice-mail systems" can also be abused; phreaks
can seize their own sections of these sophisticated
electronic answering machines, and use them for trading
codes or knowledge of illegal techniques. Voice-mail
abuse does not hurt the company directly, but finding
supposedly empty slots in your company's answering
machine all crammed with phreaks eagerly chattering
and hey-duding one another in impenetrable jargon can
cause sensations of almost mystical repulsion and dread.
Worse yet, phreaks have sometimes been known to react
truculently to attempts to "clean up" the voice-mail system.
Rather than humbly acquiescing to being thrown out of their playground,
they may very well call up the company officials at work (or at home)
and loudly demand free voice-mail addresses of their very own.
Such bullying is taken very seriously by spooked victims.
Acts of phreak revenge against straight people are rare,
but voice-mail systems are especially tempting and vulnerable,
and an infestation of angry phreaks in one's voice-mail system is no joke.
They can erase legitimate messages; or spy on private messages;
or harass users with recorded taunts and obscenities.
They've even been known to seize control of voice-mail security,
and lock out legitimate users, or even shut down the system entirely.
Cellular phone-calls, cordless phones, and ship-to-shore
telephony can all be monitored by various forms of radio;
this kind of "passive monitoring" is spreading explosively today.
Technically eavesdropping on other people's cordless and cellular
phone-calls is the fastest-growing area in phreaking today.
This practice strongly appeals to the lust for power and conveys
gratifying sensations of technical superiority over the eavesdropping
victim. Monitoring is rife with all manner of tempting evil mischief.
Simple prurient snooping is by far the most common activity.
But credit-card numbers unwarily spoken over the phone can be recorded,
stolen and used. And tapping people's phone-calls (whether through
active telephone taps or passive radio monitors) does lend itself
conveniently to activities like blackmail, industrial espionage,
and political dirty tricks.
It should be repeated that telecommunications fraud,
the theft of phone service, causes vastly greater monetary
losses than the practice of entering into computers by stealth.
Hackers are mostly young suburban American white males,
and exist in their hundreds--but "phreaks" come from both sexes
and from many nationalities, ages and ethnic backgrounds,
and are flourishing in the thousands.
#
The term "hacker" has had an unfortunate history.
This book, The Hacker Crackdown, has little to say about
"hacking" in its finer, original sense. The term can signify
the free-wheeling intellectual exploration of the highest
and deepest potential of computer systems. Hacking can
describe the determination to make access to computers
and information as free and open as possible. Hacking
can involve the heartfelt conviction that beauty can
be found in computers, that the fine aesthetic in a perfect
program can liberate the mind and spirit. This is "hacking"
as it was defined in Steven Levy's much-praised history
of the pioneer computer milieu, Hackers, published in 1984.
Hackers of all kinds are absolutely soaked through with heroic
anti-bureaucratic sentiment. Hackers long for recognition
as a praiseworthy cultural archetype, the postmodern electronic
equivalent of the cowboy and mountain man. Whether they deserve
such a reputation is something for history to decide. But many hackers--
including those outlaw hackers who are computer intruders, and whose
activities are defined as criminal--actually attempt to LIVE UP TO
this techno-cowboy reputation. And given that electronics and
telecommunications are still largely unexplored territories,
there is simply NO TELLING what hackers might uncover.
For some people, this freedom is the very breath of oxygen,
the inventive spontaneity that makes life worth living
and that flings open doors to marvellous possibility and
individual empowerment. But for many people
--and increasingly so--the hacker is an ominous figure,
a smart-aleck sociopath ready to burst out of his basement
wilderness and savage other people's lives for his own
anarchical convenience.
Any form of power without responsibility, without direct
and formal checks and balances, is frightening to people--
and reasonably so. It should be frankly admitted that
hackers ARE frightening, and that the 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 into your
office and living room.
These people, as a class, instinctively recognize that a public,
politicized attack on hackers will eventually spread to them--
that the term "hacker," once demonized, might be used to knock
their hands off the levers of power and choke them out of existence.
There are hackers today who fiercely and publicly resist any besmirching
of the noble title of hacker. Naturally and understandably, they deeply
resent the attack on their values implicit in using the word "hacker"
as a synonym for computer-criminal.
This book, sadly but in my opinion unavoidably, rather adds
to the degradation of the term. It concerns itself mostly with "hacking"
in its commonest latter-day definition, i.e., intruding into computer
systems by stealth and without permission. The term "hacking" is used
routinely today by almost all law enforcement officials with any
professional interest in computer fraud and abuse. American police
describe almost any crime committed with, by, through, or against
a computer as hacking.
Most importantly, "hacker" is what computer-intruders
choose to call THEMSELVES. Nobody who "hacks" into systems
willingly describes himself (rarely, herself) as a "computer intruder,"
"computer trespasser," "cracker," "wormer," "darkside hacker"
or "high tech street gangster." Several other demeaning terms
have been invented in the hope that the press and public
will leave the original sense of the word alone. But few people
actually use these terms. (I exempt the term "cyberpunk,"
which a few hackers and law enforcement people actually do use.
The term "cyberpunk" is drawn from literary criticism and has
some odd and unlikely resonances, but, like hacker,
cyberpunk too has become a criminal pejorative today.)
In any case, breaking into computer systems was hardly alien
to the original hacker tradition. The first tottering systems
of the 1960s required fairly extensive internal surgery merely
to function day-by-day. Their users "invaded" the deepest,
most arcane recesses of their operating software almost
as a matter of routine. "Computer security" in these early,
primitive systems was at best an afterthought. What security
there was, was entirely physical, for it was assumed that
anyone allowed near this expensive, arcane hardware would be
a fully qualified professional expert.
In a campus environment, though, this meant that grad students,
teaching assistants, undergraduates, and eventually,
all manner of dropouts and hangers-on ended up accessing
and often running the works.
Universities, even modern universities, are not in
the business of maintaining security over information.
On the contrary, universities, as institutions, pre-date
the "information economy" by many centuries and are not-
for-profit cultural entities, whose reason for existence
(purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through
techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. Universities
are meant to PASS THE TORCH OF CIVILIZATION, not just
download data into student skulls, and the values of the
academic community are strongly at odds with those of all
would-be information empires. Teachers at all levels, from
kindergarten up, have proven to be shameless and persistent
software and data pirates. Universities do not merely
"leak information" but vigorously broadcast free thought.
This clash of values has been fraught with controversy.
Many hackers of the 1960s remember their professional
apprenticeship as a long guerilla war against the uptight
mainframe-computer "information priesthood." These computer-hungry
youngsters had to struggle hard for access to computing power,
and many of them were not above certain, er, shortcuts.
But, over the years, this practice freed computing
from the sterile reserve of lab-coated technocrats and
was largely responsible for the explosive growth of computing
in general society--especially PERSONAL computing.
Access to technical power acted like catnip on certain
of these youngsters. Most of the basic techniques of
computer intrusion: password cracking, trapdoors, backdoors,
trojan horses--were invented in college environments in the 1960s,
in the early days of network computing. Some off-the-cuff
experience at computer intrusion was to be in the informal
resume of most "hackers" and many future industry giants.
Outside of the tiny cult of computer enthusiasts, few people
thought much about the implications of "breaking into"
computers. This sort of activity had not yet been publicized,
much less criminalized.
In the 1960s, definitions of "property" and "privacy"
had not yet been extended to cyberspace. Computers
were not yet indispensable to society. There were no vast
databanks of vulnerable, proprietary information stored
in computers, which might be accessed, copied without
permission, erased, altered, or sabotaged. The stakes
were low in the early days--but they grew every year,
exponentially, as computers themselves grew.
By the 1990s, commercial and political pressures
had become overwhelming, and they broke the social
boundaries of the hacking subculture. Hacking
had become too important to be left to the hackers.
Society was now forced to tackle the intangible nature
of cyberspace-as-property, cyberspace as privately-owned
unreal-estate. In the new, severe, responsible, high-stakes
context of the "Information Society" of the 1990s,
"hacking" was called into question.
What did it mean to break into a computer without
permission and use its computational power, or look
around inside its files without hurting anything?
What were computer-intruding hackers, anyway--how should
society, and the law, best define their actions?
Were they just BROWSERS, harmless intellectual explorers?
Were they VOYEURS, snoops, invaders of privacy? Should
they be sternly treated as potential AGENTS OF ESPIONAGE,
or perhaps as INDUSTRIAL SPIES? Or were they best
defined as TRESPASSERS, a very common teenage
misdemeanor? Was hacking THEFT OF SERVICE?
(After all, intruders were getting someone else's
computer to carry out their orders, without permission
and without paying). Was hacking FRAUD? Maybe it was
best described as IMPERSONATION. The commonest mode
of computer intrusion was (and is) to swipe or snoop
somebody else's password, and then enter the computer
in the guise of another person--who is commonly stuck
with the blame and the bills.
Perhaps a medical metaphor was better--hackers should
be defined as "sick," as COMPUTER ADDICTS unable
to control their irresponsible, compulsive behavior.
But these weighty assessments meant little to the
people who were actually being judged. From inside
the underground world of hacking itself, all these
perceptions seem quaint, wrongheaded, stupid, or meaningless.
The most important self-perception of underground hackers--
from the 1960s, right through to the present day--is that
they are an ELITE. The day-to-day struggle in the underground
is not over sociological definitions--who cares?--but for power,
knowledge, and status among one's peers.
When you are a hacker, it is your own inner conviction
of your elite status that enables you to break, or let
us say "transcend," the rules. It is not that ALL rules
go by the board. The rules habitually broken by hackers
are UNIMPORTANT rules--the rules of dopey greedhead telco
bureaucrats and pig-ignorant government pests.
Hackers have their OWN rules, which separate behavior
which is cool and elite, from behavior which is rodentlike,
stupid and losing. These "rules," however, are mostly unwritten
and enforced by peer pressure and tribal feeling. Like all rules
that depend on the unspoken conviction that everybody else
is a good old boy, these rules are ripe for abuse. The mechanisms
of hacker peer- pressure, "teletrials" and ostracism, are rarely used
and rarely work. Back-stabbing slander, threats, and electronic
harassment are also freely employed in down-and-dirty intrahacker feuds,
but this rarely forces a rival out of the scene entirely. The only real
solution for the problem of an utterly losing, treacherous and rodentlike
hacker is to TURN HIM IN TO THE POLICE. Unlike the Mafia or Medellin Cartel,
the hacker elite cannot simply execute the bigmouths, creeps and troublemakers
among their 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 Danger 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 cheap or free.
They are also illegal, but it is very rare, almost unheard of,
for a small-scale software pirate to be prosecuted.
Once "cracked" of its copy protection, the program,
being digital data, becomes infinitely reproducible.
Even the instructions to the game, any manuals that accompany it,
can be reproduced as text files, or photocopied from legitimate sets.
Other users on boards can give many useful hints in game-playing tactics.
And a youngster with an infinite supply of free computer games can
certainly cut quite a swath among his modem-less friends.
And boards are pseudonymous. No one need know that you're
fourteen years old--with a little practice at subterfuge,
you can talk to adults about adult things, and be accepted
and taken seriously! You can even pretend to be a girl,
or an old man, or anybody you can imagine. If you find this
kind of deception gratifying, there is ample opportunity
to hone your ability on boards.
But local boards can grow stale. And almost every board maintains
a list of phone-numbers to other boards, some in distant, tempting,
exotic locales. Who knows what they're up to, in Oregon or Alaska
or Florida or California? It's very easy to find out--just order
the modem to call through its software--nothing to this, just typing
on a keyboard, the same thing you would do for most any computer game.
The machine reacts swiftly and in a few seconds you are talking to
a bunch of interesting people on another seaboard.
And yet the BILLS for this trivial action can be staggering!
Just 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 WORK! 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 elite.)
Most any underground board not hopelessly lame and out-of-it
would feature a complete run of Phrack--and, possibly,
the lesser-known standards of the underground:
the Legion of Doom Technical Journal, the obscene
and raucous Cult of the Dead Cow files, P/HUN magazine,
Pirate, the Syndicate Reports, and perhaps the highly
anarcho-political Activist Times Incorporated.
Possession of Phrack on one's board was prima facie
evidence of a bad attitude. Phrack was seemingly everywhere,
aiding, abetting, and spreading the underground ethos.
And this did not escape the attention of corporate security
or the police.
We now come to the touchy subject of police and boards.
Police, do, in fact, own boards. In 1989, there were
police-sponsored boards in California, Colorado, Florida,
Georgia, Idaho, Michigan, Missouri, Texas, and Virginia:
boards such as "Crime Bytes," "Crimestoppers," "All Points"
and "Bullet-N-Board." Police officers, as private computer
enthusiasts, ran their own boards in Arizona, California,
Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Missouri, Maryland,
New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas.
Police boards have often proved helpful in community relations.
Sometimes crimes are reported on police boards.
Sometimes crimes are COMMITTED on police boards.
This has sometimes happened by accident, as naive hackers
blunder onto police boards and blithely begin offering telephone codes.
Far more often, however, it occurs through the now almost-traditional
use of "sting boards." The first police sting-boards were established
in 1985: "Underground Tunnel" in Austin, Texas, whose sysop
Sgt. Robert Ansley called himself "Pluto"--"The Phone Company"
in Phoenix, Arizona, run by Ken MacLeod of the Maricopa County
Sheriff's office--and Sgt. Dan Pasquale's board in Fremont, California.
Sysops posed as hackers, and swiftly garnered coteries of ardent users,
who posted codes and loaded pirate software with abandon,
and came to a sticky end.
Sting boards, like other boards, are cheap to operate,
very cheap by the standards of undercover police operations.
Once accepted by the local underground, sysops will likely be
invited into other pirate boards, where they can compile more dossiers.
And when the sting is announced and the worst offenders arrested,
the publicity is generally gratifying. The resultant paranoia
in the underground--perhaps more justly described as a "deterrence effect"--
tends to quell local lawbreaking for quite a while.
Obviously police do not have to beat the underbrush for hackers.
On the contrary, they can go trolling for them. Those caught
can be grilled. Some become useful informants. They can lead
the way to pirate boards all across the country.
And boards all across the country showed the sticky
fingerprints of Phrack, and of that loudest and most
flagrant of all underground groups, the "Legion of Doom."
The term "Legion of Doom" came from comic books. The Legion of Doom,
a conspiracy of costumed super- villains headed by the chrome-domed
criminal ultra- mastermind Lex Luthor, gave Superman a lot of four-color
graphic trouble for a number of decades. Of course, Superman,
that exemplar of Truth, Justice, and the American Way,
always won in the long run. This didn't matter to the hacker Doomsters--
"Legion of Doom" was not some thunderous and evil Satanic reference,
it was not meant to be taken seriously. "Legion of Doom" came
from funny-books and was supposed to be funny.
"Legion of Doom" did have a good mouthfilling ring to it, though.
It sounded really cool. Other groups, such as the "Farmers of Doom,"
closely allied to LoD, recognized this grandiloquent quality,
and made fun of it. There was even a hacker group called
"Justice League of America," named after Superman's club
of true-blue crimefighting superheros.
But they didn't last; the Legion did.
The original Legion of Doom, hanging out on Quasi Moto's Plovernet board,
were phone phreaks. They weren't much into computers. "Lex Luthor" himself
(who was under eighteen when he formed the Legion) was a COSMOS expert,
COSMOS being the "Central System for Mainframe Operations,"
a telco internal computer network. Lex would eventually become
quite a dab hand at breaking into IBM mainframes, but although
everyone liked Lex and admired his attitude, he was not considered
a truly accomplished computer intruder. Nor was he the "mastermind"
of the Legion of Doom--LoD were never big on formal leadership.
As a regular on Plovernet and sysop of his "Legion of Doom BBS,"
Lex was the Legion's cheerleader and recruiting officer.
Legion of Doom began on the ruins of an earlier phreak group,
The Knights of Shadow. Later, LoD was to subsume the personnel
of the hacker group "Tribunal of Knowledge." People came and went
constantly in LoD; groups split up or formed offshoots.
Early on, the LoD phreaks befriended a few computer-intrusion
enthusiasts, who became the associated "Legion of Hackers."
Then the two groups conflated into the "Legion of Doom/Hackers,"
or LoD/H. When the original "hacker" wing, Messrs. "Compu-Phreak"
and "Phucked Agent 04," found other matters to occupy their time,
the extra "/H" slowly atrophied out of the name; but by this time
the phreak wing, Messrs. Lex Luthor, "Blue Archer," "Gary Seven,"
"Kerrang Khan," "Master of Impact," "Silver Spy," "The Marauder,"
and "The Videosmith," had picked up a plethora of intrusion
expertise and had become a force to be reckoned with.
LoD members seemed to have an instinctive understanding
that the way to real power in the underground lay through
covert publicity. LoD were flagrant. Not only was it one
of the earliest groups, but the members took pains to widely
distribute their illicit knowledge. Some LoD members,
like "The Mentor," were close to evangelical about it.
Legion of Doom Technical Journal began to show up on boards
throughout the underground.
LoD Technical Journal was named in cruel parody
of the ancient and honored AT&T Technical Journal.
The material in these two publications was quite similar--
much of it, adopted from public journals and discussions
in the telco community. And yet, the predatory attitude
of LoD made even its most innocuous data seem deeply sinister;
an outrage; a clear and present danger.
To see why this should be, let's consider the following
(invented) paragraphs, as a kind of thought experiment.
(A) "W. Fred Brown, AT&T Vice President for
Advanced Technical Development, testified May 8
at a Washington hearing of the National Telecommunications
and Information Administration (NTIA), regarding
Bellcore's GARDEN project. GARDEN (Generalized
Automatic Remote Distributed Electronic Network) is a
telephone-switch programming tool that makes it possible
to develop new telecom services, including hold-on-hold
and customized message transfers, from any keypad terminal,
within seconds. The GARDEN prototype combines centrex
lines with a minicomputer using UNIX operating system software."
(B) "Crimson Flash 512 of the Centrex Mobsters reports:
D00dz, you wouldn't believe this GARDEN bullshit Bellcore's
just come up with! Now you don't even need a lousy Commodore
to reprogram a switch--just log on to GARDEN as a technician,
and you can reprogram switches right off the keypad in any
public phone booth! You can give yourself hold-on-hold
and customized message transfers, and best of all,
the thing is run off (notoriously insecure) centrex lines
using--get this--standard UNIX software! Ha ha ha ha!"
Message (A), couched in typical techno-bureaucratese,
appears tedious and almost unreadable. (A) scarcely seems
threatening or menacing. Message (B), on the other hand,
is a dreadful thing, prima facie evidence of a dire conspiracy,
definitely not the kind of thing you want your teenager reading.
The INFORMATION, however, is identical. It is PUBLIC
information, presented before the federal government in
an open hearing. It is not "secret." It is not "proprietary."
It is not even "confidential." On the contrary, the
development of advanced software systems is a matter
of great public pride to Bellcore.
However, when Bellcore publicly announces a project of this kind,
it expects a certain attitude from the public--something along
the lines of GOSH WOW, YOU GUYS ARE GREAT, KEEP THAT UP, WHATEVER IT IS--
certainly not cruel mimickry, one-upmanship and outrageous speculations
about possible security holes.
Now put yourself in the place of a policeman confronted by
an outraged parent, or telco official, with a copy of Version (B).
This well-meaning citizen, to his horror, has discovered
a local bulletin-board carrying outrageous stuff like (B),
which his son is examining with a deep and unhealthy interest.
If (B) were printed in a book or magazine, you, as an American
law enforcement officer, would know that it would take
a hell of a lot of trouble to do anything about it;
but it doesn't take technical genius to recognize that
if there's a computer in your area harboring stuff like (B),
there's going to be trouble.
In fact, if you ask around, any computer-literate cop
will tell you straight out that boards with stuff like (B)
are the SOURCE of trouble. And the WORST source of trouble
on boards are the ringleaders inventing and spreading stuff like (B).
If it weren't for these jokers, there wouldn't BE any trouble.
And Legion of Doom were on boards like nobody else.
Plovernet. The Legion of Doom Board. The Farmers of Doom Board.
Metal Shop. OSUNY. Blottoland. Private Sector. Atlantis.
Digital Logic. Hell Phrozen Over.
LoD members also ran their own boards. "Silver Spy" started
his own board, "Catch-22," considered one of the heaviest around.
So did "Mentor," with his "Phoenix Project." When they didn't run boards
themselves, they showed up on other people's boards, to brag, boast,
and strut. And where they themselves didn't go, their philes went,
carrying evil knowledge and an even more evil attitude.
As early as 1986, the police were under the vague impression
that EVERYONE in the underground was Legion of Doom.
LoD was never that large--considerably smaller than either
"Metal Communications" or "The Administration," for instance--
but LoD got tremendous press. Especially in Phrack,
which at times read like an LoD fan magazine; and Phrack
was everywhere, especially in the offices of telco security.
You couldn't GET busted as a phone phreak, a hacker,
or even a lousy codes kid or warez dood, without the cops
asking if you were LoD.
This was a difficult charge to deny, as LoD never
distributed membership badges or laminated ID cards.
If they had, they would likely have died out quickly,
for turnover in their membership was considerable.
LoD was less a high-tech street-gang than an ongoing
state-of-mind. LoD was the Gang That Refused to Die.
By 1990, LoD had RULED for ten years, and it seemed WEIRD
to police that they were continually busting people who were
only sixteen years old. All these teenage small-timers
were pleading the tiresome hacker litany of "just curious,
no criminal intent." Somewhere at the center of this
conspiracy there had to be some serious adult masterminds,
not this seemingly endless supply of myopic suburban
white kids with high SATs and funny haircuts.
There was no question that most any American hacker
arrested would "know" LoD. They knew the handles
of contributors to LoD Tech Journal, and were likely
to have learned their craft through LoD boards and LoD activism.
But they'd never met anyone from LoD. Even some of the
rotating cadre who were actually and formally "in LoD"
knew one another only by board-mail and pseudonyms.
This was a highly unconventional profile for a criminal conspiracy.
Computer networking, and the rapid evolution of the digital underground,
made the situation very diffuse and confusing.
Furthermore, a big reputation in the digital underground
did not coincide with one's willingness to commit "crimes."
Instead, reputation was based on cleverness and technical mastery.
As a result, it often seemed that the HEAVIER the hackers were,
the LESS likely they were to have committed any kind of common,
easily prosecutable crime. There were some hackers who could really steal.
And there were hackers who could really hack. But the two groups didn't seem
to overlap much, if at all. For instance, most people in the underground
looked up to "Emmanuel Goldstein" of 2600 as a hacker demigod.
But Goldstein's publishing activities were entirely legal--
Goldstein just printed dodgy stuff and talked about politics,
he didn't even hack. When you came right down to it,
Goldstein spent half his time complaining that computer security
WASN'T STRONG ENOUGH and ought to be drastically improved
across the board!
Truly heavy-duty hackers, those with serious technical skills
who had earned the respect of the underground, never stole money
or abused credit cards. Sometimes they might abuse phone-codes--
but often, they seemed to get all the free phone-time they wanted
without leaving a trace of any kind.
The best hackers, the most powerful and technically accomplished,
were not professional fraudsters. They raided computers habitually,
but wouldn't alter anything, or damage anything. They didn't even steal
computer equipment--most had day-jobs messing with hardware,
and could get all the cheap secondhand equipment they wanted.
The hottest hackers, unlike the teenage wannabes, weren't snobs
about fancy or expensive hardware. Their machines tended to be
raw second-hand digital hot-rods full of custom add-ons that
they'd cobbled together out of chickenwire, memory chips and spit.
Some were adults, computer software writers and consultants by trade,
and making quite good livings at it. Some of them ACTUALLY WORKED
FOR THE PHONE COMPANY--and for those, the "hackers" actually found
under the skirts of Ma Bell, there would be little mercy in 1990.
It has long been an article of faith in the
underground that the "best" hackers never get caught.
They're far too smart, supposedly. They never get caught
because they never boast, brag, or strut. These demigods
may read underground boards (with a condescending smile),
but they never say anything there. The "best" hackers,
according to legend, are adult computer professionals,
such as mainframe system administrators, who already know
the ins and outs of their particular brand of security.
Even the "best" hacker can't break in to just any computer at random:
the knowledge of security holes is too specialized, varying widely
with different software and hardware. But if people are employed to run,
say, a UNIX mainframe or a VAX/VMS machine, then they tend to learn
security from the inside out. Armed with this knowledge,
they can look into most anybody else's UNIX or VMS
without much trouble or risk, if they want to.
And, according to hacker legend, of course they want to,
so of course they do. They just don't make a big deal
of what they've done. So nobody ever finds out.
It is also an article of faith in the underground that
professional telco people "phreak" like crazed weasels.
OF COURSE they spy on Madonna's phone calls--I mean,
WOULDN'T YOU? Of course they give themselves free long-
distance--why the hell should THEY pay, they're running
the whole shebang!
It has, as a third matter, long been an article of faith
that any hacker caught can escape serious punishment if
he confesses HOW HE DID IT. Hackers seem to believe
that governmental agencies and large corporations are
blundering about in cyberspace like eyeless jellyfish
or cave salamanders. They feel that these large
but pathetically stupid organizations will proffer up
genuine gratitude, and perhaps even a security post
and a big salary, to the hot-shot intruder who will deign
to reveal to them the supreme genius of his modus operandi.
In the case of longtime LoD member "Control-C,"
this actually happened, more or less. Control-C had led
Michigan Bell a merry chase, and when captured in 1987,
he turned out to be a bright and apparently physically
harmless young fanatic, fascinated by phones. There was
no chance in hell that Control-C would actually repay the
enormous and largely theoretical sums in long-distance
service that he had accumulated from Michigan Bell.
He could always be indicted for fraud or computer-intrusion,
but there seemed little real point in this--he hadn't
physically damaged any computer. He'd just plead guilty,
and he'd likely get the usual slap-on-the-wrist,
and in the meantime it would be a big hassle for Michigan Bell
just to bring up the case. But if kept on the payroll,
he might at least keep his fellow hackers at bay.
There were uses for him. For instance, a contrite
Control-C was featured on Michigan Bell internal posters,
sternly warning employees to shred their trash.
He'd always gotten most of his best inside info from
"trashing"--raiding telco dumpsters, for useful data
indiscreetly thrown away. He signed these posters, too.
Control-C had become something like a Michigan Bell mascot.
And in fact, Control-C DID keep other hackers at bay.
Little hackers were quite scared of Control-C and his
heavy-duty Legion of Doom friends. And big hackers WERE
his friends and didn't want to screw up his cushy situation.
No matter what one might say of LoD, they did stick together.
When "Wasp," an apparently genuinely malicious New York hacker,
began crashing Bellcore machines, Control-C received swift volunteer
help from "the Mentor" and the Georgia LoD wing made up of
"The Prophet," "Urvile," and "Leftist." Using Mentor's Phoenix
Project board to coordinate, the Doomsters helped telco security
to trap Wasp, by luring him into a machine with a tap
and line-trace installed. Wasp lost. LoD won! And my, did they brag.
Urvile, Prophet and Leftist were well-qualified for this activity,
probably more so even than the quite accomplished Control-C.
The Georgia boys knew all about phone switching-stations.
Though relative johnny-come-latelies in the Legion of Doom,
they were considered some of LoD's heaviest guys,
into the hairiest systems around. They had the good fortune
to live in or near Atlanta, home of the sleepy and apparently
tolerant BellSouth RBOC.
As RBOC security went, BellSouth were "cake." US West (of Arizona,
the Rockies and the Pacific Northwest) were tough and aggressive,
probably the heaviest RBOC around. Pacific Bell, California's PacBell,
were sleek, high-tech, and longtime veterans of the LA phone-phreak wars.
NYNEX had the misfortune to run the New York City area, and were warily
prepared for most anything. Even Michigan Bell, a division of the
Ameritech RBOC, at least had the elementary sense to hire their own hacker
as a useful scarecrow. But BellSouth, even though their corporate P.R.
proclaimed them to have "Everything You Expect From a Leader," were pathetic.
When rumor about LoD's mastery of Georgia's switching network got around
to BellSouth through Bellcore and telco security scuttlebutt,
they at first refused to believe it. If you paid serious attention
to every rumor out and about these hacker kids, you would hear all kinds
of wacko saucer-nut nonsense: that the National Security Agency
monitored all American phone calls, that the CIA and DEA tracked
traffic on bulletin-boards with word-analysis programs,
that the Condor could start World War III from a payphone.
If there were hackers into BellSouth switching-stations, then how come
nothing had happened? Nothing had been hurt. BellSouth's machines
weren't crashing. BellSouth wasn't suffering especially badly from fraud.
BellSouth's customers weren't complaining. BellSouth was headquartered
in Atlanta, ambitious metropolis of the new high-tech Sunbelt;
and BellSouth was upgrading its network by leaps and bounds,
digitizing the works left right and center. They could hardly be
considered sluggish or naive. BellSouth's technical expertise
was second to none, thank you kindly. But then came the Florida business.
On June 13, 1989, callers to the Palm Beach County Probation Department,
in Delray Beach, Florida, found themselves involved in a remarkable
discussion with a phone-sex worker named "Tina" in New York State.
Somehow, ANY call to this probation office near Miami was instantly
and magically transported across state lines, at no extra charge to the user,
to a pornographic phone-sex hotline hundreds of miles away!
This practical joke may seem utterly hilarious at first hearing,
and indeed there was a good deal of chuckling about it in
phone phreak circles, including the Autumn 1989 issue of 2600.
But for Southern Bell (the division of the BellSouth RBOC
supplying local service for Florida, Georgia, North Carolina
and South Carolina), this was a smoking gun. For the first time ever,
a computer intruder had broken into a BellSouth central office
switching station and re-programmed it!
Or so BellSouth thought in June 1989. Actually, LoD members had been
frolicking harmlessly in BellSouth switches since September 1987.
The stunt of June 13--call-forwarding a number through manipulation
of a switching station--was child's play for hackers as accomplished
as the Georgia wing of LoD. Switching calls interstate sounded like
a big deal, but it took only four lines of code to accomplish this.
An easy, yet more discreet, stunt, would be to call-forward another
number to your own house. If you were careful and considerate,
and changed the software back later, then not a soul would know.
Except you. And whoever you had bragged to about it.
As for BellSouth, what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them.
Except now somebody had blown the whole thing wide open, and BellSouth knew.
A now alerted and considerably paranoid BellSouth began searching switches
right and left for signs of impropriety, in that hot summer of 1989.
No fewer than forty-two BellSouth employees were put on 12-hour shifts,
twenty-four hours a day, for two solid months, poring over records
and monitoring computers for any sign of phony access. These forty-two
overworked experts were known as BellSouth's "Intrusion Task Force."
What the investigators found astounded them. Proprietary telco databases
had been manipulated: phone numbers had been created out of thin air,
with no users' names and no addresses. And perhaps worst of all,
no charges and no records of use. The new digital ReMOB (Remote Observation)
diagnostic feature had been extensively tampered with--hackers had learned to
reprogram ReMOB software, so that they could listen in on any switch-routed
call at their leisure! They were using telco property to SPY!
The electrifying news went out throughout law enforcement in 1989.
It had never really occurred to anyone at BellSouth that their prized
and brand-new digital switching-stations could be RE-PROGRAMMED.
People seemed utterly amazed that anyone could have the nerve.
Of course these switching stations were "computers," and everybody
knew hackers liked to "break into computers:" but telephone people's
computers were DIFFERENT from normal people's computers.
The exact reason WHY these computers were "different" was
rather ill-defined. It certainly wasn't the extent of their security.
The security on these BellSouth computers was lousy; the AIMSX computers,
for instance, didn't even have passwords. But there was no question that
BellSouth strongly FELT that their computers were very different indeed.
And if there were some criminals out there who had not gotten that message,
BellSouth was determined to see that message taught.
After all, a 5ESS switching station was no mere bookkeeping system for
some local chain of florists. Public service depended on these stations.
Public SAFETY depended on these stations.
And hackers, lurking in there call-forwarding or ReMobbing, could spy
on anybody in the local area! They could spy on telco officials!
They could spy on police stations! They could spy on local offices
of the Secret Service. . . .
In 1989, electronic cops and hacker-trackers began using scrambler-phones
and secured lines. It only made sense. There was no telling who was into
those systems. Whoever they were, they sounded scary. This was some
new level of antisocial daring. Could be West German hackers, in the pay
of the KGB. That too had seemed a weird and farfetched notion,
until Clifford Stoll had poked and prodded a sluggish Washington
law-enforcement bureaucracy into investigating a computer intrusion
that turned out to be exactly that--HACKERS, IN THE PAY OF THE KGB!
Stoll, the systems manager for an Internet lab in Berkeley California,
had ended up on the front page of the New Nork Times, proclaimed a national
hero in the first true story of international computer espionage.
Stoll's counterspy efforts, which he related in a bestselling book,
The Cuckoo's Egg, in 1989, had established the credibility of `hacking'
as a possible threat to national security. The United States Secret Service
doesn't mess around when it suspects a possible action by a foreign
intelligence apparat.
The Secret Service scrambler-phones and secured lines put
a tremendous kink in law enforcement's ability to operate freely;
to get the word out, cooperate, prevent misunderstandings.
Nevertheless, 1989 scarcely seemed the time for half-measures.
If the police and Secret Service themselves were not operationally secure,
then how could they reasonably demand measures of security from
private enterprise? At least, the inconvenience made people aware
of the seriousness of the threat.
If there was a final spur needed to get the police off the dime,
it came in the realization that the emergency 911 system was vulnerable.
The 911 system has its own specialized software, but it is run on the same
digital switching systems as the rest of the telephone network.
911 is not physically different from normal telephony. But it is
certainly culturally different, because this is the area of
telephonic cyberspace reserved for the police and emergency services.
Your average policeman may not know much about hackers or phone-phreaks.
Computer people are weird; even computer COPS are rather weird;
the stuff they do is hard to figure out. But a threat to the 911 system
is anything but an abstract threat. If the 911 system goes, people can die.
Imagine being in a car-wreck, staggering to a phone-booth,
punching 911 and hearing "Tina" pick up the phone-sex line
somewhere in New York! The situation's no longer comical, somehow.
And was it possible? No question. Hackers had attacked 911
systems before. Phreaks can max-out 911 systems just by siccing
a bunch of computer-modems on them in tandem, dialling them over
and over until they clog. That's very crude and low-tech,
but it's still a serious business.
The time had come for action. It was time to take stern measures
with the underground. It was time to start picking up the dropped threads,
the loose edges, the bits of braggadocio here and there; it was time to get
on the stick and start putting serious casework together. Hackers weren't
"invisible." They THOUGHT they were invisible; but the truth was,
they had just been tolerated too long.
Under sustained police attention in the summer of '89, the digital
underground began to unravel as never before.
The first big break in the case came very early on: July 1989,
the following month. The perpetrator of the "Tina" switch was caught,
and confessed. His name was "Fry Guy," a 16-year-old in Indiana.
Fry Guy had been a very wicked young man.
Fry Guy had earned his handle from a stunt involving French fries.
Fry Guy had filched the log-in of a local MacDonald's manager
and had logged-on to the MacDonald's mainframe on the Sprint
Telenet system. Posing as the manager, Fry Guy had altered
MacDonald's records, and given some teenage hamburger-flipping
friends of his, generous raises. He had not been caught.
Emboldened by success, Fry Guy moved on to credit-card abuse.
Fry Guy was quite an accomplished talker; with a gift for
"social engineering." If you can do "social engineering"
--fast-talk, fake-outs, impersonation, conning, scamming--
then card abuse comes easy. (Getting away with it in
the long run is another question).
Fry Guy had run across "Urvile" of the Legion of Doom
on the ALTOS Chat board in Bonn, Germany. ALTOS Chat
was a sophisticated board, accessible through globe-spanning
computer networks like BITnet, Tymnet, and Telenet.
ALTOS was much frequented by members of Germany's
Chaos Computer Club. Two Chaos hackers who hung out on ALTOS,
"Jaeger" and "Pengo," had been the central villains of
Clifford Stoll's Cuckoo's Egg case: consorting in East Berlin
with a spymaster from the KGB, and breaking into American
computers for hire, through the Internet.
When LoD members learned the story of Jaeger's depredations
from Stoll's book, they were rather less than impressed,
technically speaking. On LoD's own favorite board of the moment,
"Black Ice," LoD members bragged that they themselves could have done
all the Chaos break-ins in a week flat! Nevertheless, LoD were grudgingly
impressed by the Chaos rep, the sheer hairy-eyed daring of hash-smoking
anarchist hackers who had rubbed shoulders with the fearsome big-boys
of international Communist espionage. LoD members sometimes traded
bits of knowledge with friendly German hackers on ALTOS--phone numbers
for vulnerable VAX/VMS computers in Georgia, for instance.
Dutch and British phone phreaks, and the Australian clique of
"Phoenix," "Nom," and "Electron," were ALTOS regulars, too.
In underground circles, to hang out on ALTOS was considered
the sign of an elite dude, a sophisticated hacker of the
international digital jet-set.
Fry Guy quickly learned how to raid information from credit-card
consumer-reporting agencies. He had over a hundred stolen credit-card
numbers in his notebooks, and upwards of a thousand swiped long-distance
access codes. He knew how to get onto Altos, and how to talk the talk of
the underground convincingly. He now wheedled knowledge of switching-station
tricks from Urvile on the ALTOS system.
Combining these two forms of knowledge enabled Fry Guy to bootstrap
his way up to a new form of wire-fraud. First, he'd snitched credit card
numbers from credit-company computers. The data he copied included names,
addresses and phone numbers of the random card-holders.
Then Fry Guy, impersonating a card-holder, called up Western Union
and asked for a cash advance on "his" credit card. Western Union,
as a security guarantee, would call the customer back, at home,
to verify the transaction.
But, just as he had switched the Florida probation office to "Tina"
in New York, Fry Guy switched the card-holder's number to a local pay-phone.
There he would lurk in wait, muddying his trail by routing and re-routing
the call, through switches as far away as Canada. When the call came through,
he would boldly "social-engineer," or con, the Western Union people, pretending
to be the legitimate card-holder. Since he'd answered the proper phone number,
the deception was not very hard. Western Union's money was then shipped to
a confederate of Fry Guy's in his home town in Indiana.
Fry Guy and his cohort, using LoD techniques, stole six thousand dollars
from Western Union between December 1988 and July 1989. They also dabbled
in ordering delivery of stolen goods through card-fraud. Fry Guy
was intoxicated with success. The sixteen-year-old fantasized wildly
to hacker rivals, boasting that he'd used rip-off money to hire himself
a big limousine, and had driven out-of-state with a groupie from
his favorite heavy-metal band, Motley Crue.
Armed with knowledge, power, and a gratifying stream of free money,
Fry Guy now took it upon himself to call local representatives
of Indiana Bell security, to brag, boast, strut, and utter
tormenting warnings that his powerful friends in the notorious
Legion of Doom could crash the national telephone network.
Fry Guy even named a date for the scheme: the Fourth of July,
a national holiday.
This egregious example of the begging-for-arrest syndrome was shortly
followed by Fry Guy's arrest. After the Indiana telephone company figured
out who he was, the Secret Service had DNRs--Dialed Number Recorders--
installed on his home phone lines. These devices are not taps, and can't
record the substance of phone calls, but they do record the phone numbers
of all calls going in and out. Tracing these numbers showed Fry Guy's
long-distance code fraud, his extensive ties to pirate bulletin boards,
and numerous personal calls to his LoD friends in Atlanta. By July 11,
1989, Prophet, Urvile and Leftist also had Secret Service DNR
"pen registers" installed on their own lines.
The Secret Service showed up in force at Fry Guy's house on July 22, 1989,
to the horror of his unsuspecting parents. The raiders were led by
a special agent from the Secret Service's Indianapolis office.
However, the raiders were accompanied and advised by Timothy M. Foley
of the Secret Service's Chicago office (a gentleman about whom
we will soon be hearing a great deal).
Following federal computer-crime techniques that had been standard
since the early 1980s, the Secret Service searched the house thoroughly,
and seized all of Fry Guy's electronic equipment and notebooks.
All Fry Guy's equipment went out the door in the custody of the
Secret Service, which put a swift end to his depredations.
The USSS interrogated Fry Guy at length. His case was put in the charge
of Deborah Daniels, the federal US Attorney for the Southern District
of Indiana. Fry Guy was charged with eleven counts of computer fraud,
unauthorized computer access, and wire fraud. The evidence was thorough
and irrefutable. For his part, Fry Guy blamed his corruption on the
Legion of Doom and offered to testify against them.
Fry Guy insisted that the Legion intended to crash the phone system
on a national holiday. And when AT&T crashed on Martin Luther King Day,
1990, this lent a credence to his claim that genuinely alarmed telco
security and the Secret Service.
Fry Guy eventually pled guilty on May 31, 1990. On September 14,
he was sentenced to forty-four months' probation and four hundred hours'
community service. He could have had it much worse; but it made sense
to prosecutors to take it easy on this teenage minor, while zeroing
in on the notorious kingpins of the Legion of Doom.