1. A postmodernist interpretation of the computer underground

Gordon Meyer and Jim Thomas Department of Sociology Northern Illinois University DeKalb, IL 60115 (10 June, 1990)

Forthcoming in In F. Schmalleger (ed.), Computers in Criminal Justice, Bristol (Ind.): Wyndham Hall. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the American Society of Criminology annual meetings, Reno (November 9, 1989). Authors are listed in alphabetical order. Address correspondence to Jim Thomas. We are indebted to the numerous anonymous computer underground participants who provided information. Special acknowledgement goes to Hatchet Molly, Jedi, The Mentor, Knight Lightning, and Taran King.

Transgression is not immoral. Quite to the contrary, it reconciles the law with what it forbids; it is the dia- lectical game of good and evil (Baudrillard, 1987: 81). There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the nice, but that's as far as any man got a right to say (Steinbeck, 1939:31-32).

The criminalization of "deviant acts" transforms and reduces broader social meanings to legal ones. Once a category of behav- iors has become defined by statute as sanctionably deviant, the behaviors so-defined assume a new set of meanings that may ob- scure ones possessed by those who engage in such behaviors. "Computer deviants" provide one example.

The proliferation of computer technology has been accompa- nied by the growth of a computer underground (CU), often mistak- enly labeled "hackers," that is perceived as criminally deviant by the media, law enforcement officials, and researchers. Draw- ing from ethnographic data, we offer a cultural rather than a criminological analysis of the underground by suggesting that the CU reflects an attempt to recast, re-appropriate, and reconstruct the power-knowledge relationship that increasingly dominates the ideology and actions of modern society. Our data reveal the com- puter underground as an invisible community with a complex and interconnected cultural lifestyle, an inchoate anti-authoritarian political consciousness, and dependent on norms of reciprocity, sophisticated socialization rituals, networks of information sharing, and an explicit value system. We interpret the CU cul- ture as a challenge to and parody of conventional culture, as a playful attempt to reject the seriousness of technocracy, and as an ironic substitution of rational technological control of the present for an anarchic and playful future.

Stigmatizing the Computer Underground

The computer underground refers to persons engaged in one or more of several activities, including pirating, anarchy, hacking, and phreaking[1]. Because computer underground participants freely share information and often are involved collectively in a single incident, media definitions invoke the generalized meta- phors of "conspiracies" and "criminal rings," (e.g., Camper, 1989; Computer Hacker Ring, 1990; Zablit, 1989), "modem macho" evil-doers (Bloombecker, 1988), moral bankruptcy (E. Schwartz, 1988), "electronic trespassers" (Parker: 1983), "crazy kids dedi- cated to making mischief" (Sandza, 1984a: 17), "electronic van- dals" (Bequai: 1987), a new or global "threat" (Markoff, 1990a; Van, 1989), saboteurs ("Computer Sabateur," 1988), monsters (Stoll, 1989: 323), secret societies of criminals (WMAQ, 1990), "'malevolent, nasty, evil-doers' who 'fill the screens of amateur {computer} users with pornography'" (Minister of Parliament Emma Nicholson, cited in "Civil Liberties," 1990: 27), "varmints" and "bastards" (Stoll, 1989: 257), and "high-tech street gangs" ("Hacker, 18," 1989). Stoll (cited in J. Schwartz, 1990: 50) has even compared them to persons who put razorblades in the sand at beaches, a bloody, but hardly accurate, analogy. Most dramatic is Rosenblatt's (1990: 37) attempt to link hackers to pedophilia and "snuff films," a ploy clearly designed to inflame rather than educate.

These images have prompted calls for community and law en- forcement vigilance (Conly and McEwen, 1990: 2; Conly, 1989; McEwen, 1989). and for application of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act to prosecute and control the "criminals" (Cooley, 1984), which have created considerable con- cern for civil liberties (Markoff, 1990b; J. Schwartz, 1990). Such exaggerated discourse also fails to distinguish between un- derground "hobbyists," who may infringe on legal norms but have no intention of pillaging, from felonious predators, who use technology to loot[2]. Such terminology creates a common stock of public knowledge that formats interpretations of CU activity in ways pre-patterned as requiring social control to protect the commonweal (e.g., Altheide, 1985).

As Hollinger and Lanza-Kaduce (1988: 119), Kane (1989), and Pfuhl (1987) observed, the stigmatization of hackers has emerged primarily through value-laden media depictions. When in 1988 a Cornell University graduate student inadvertently infected an in- ternational computer network by planting a self-reproducing "vi- rus," or "rogue program," the news media followed the story with considerable detail about the dangers of computer abuse (e.g., Allman, 1990; Winter, 1988). Five years earlier, in May of 1983, a group of hackers known as "The 414's" received equal media at- tention when they broke into the computer system of the Sloan Kettering Cancer research center. Between these dramatic and a- typical events, the media have dramatized the dangers of computer renegades, and media anecdotes presented during Congressional legislative debates to curtail "computer abuse" dramatized the "computer hacking problem" (Hollinger and Lanza-Kaduce, 1988: 107). Although the accuracy and objectivity of the evidence has since been challenged (Hollinger and Lanza-Kaduce 1988: 105), the media continue to format CU activity by suggesting that any com- puter-related felony can be attributed to hacking. Additionally, media stories are taken from the accounts of police blotters, se- curity personnel, and apprehended hackers, each of whom have dif- ferent perspectives and definitions. This creates a self-rein- forcing imagery in which extreme examples and cursively circulated data are discretely adduced to substantiate the claim of criminality by those with a vested interest in creating and maintaining such definitions. For example, Conly and McEwen (1990) list examples of law enforcement jurisdictions in which special units to fight "computer crime," very broadly defined, have been created. These broad definitions serve to expand the scope of authority and resources of the units. Nonetheless, de- spite criminalization, there is little evidence to support the contention that computer hacking has been sufficiently abusive or pervasive to warrant zealous prosecution (Michalowski and Pfuhl, forthcoming).

As an antidote to the conventional meanings of CU activity as simply one of deviance, we shift the social meaning of CU be- havior from one of stigma to one of culture creation and meaning. Our work is tentative, in part because of the lack of previous substantive literature and in part because of the complexity of the data, which indicate a multiplicity of subcultures within the CU. This paper examines two distinct CU subcultures, phreaks and hackers, and challenges the Manichean view that hackers can be understood simply as profaners of a sacred moral and economic or- der.

The Computer Underground and Postmodernism

The computer underground is a culture of persons who call computer bulletin board systems (BBSs, or just "boards"), and share the interests fostered by the BBS. In conceptualizing the computer underground as a distinct culture, we draw from Geertz's (1973: 5) definition of culture as a system of meanings that give significance to shared behaviors that must be interpreted from the perspective of those engaged in them. A culture provides not only the "systems of standards for perceiving, believing, evalu- ating, and acting" (Goodenough, 1981: 110), but includes the rules and symbols of interpretation and discourse for partici- pants:

In crude relief, culture can be understood as a set of solutions devised by a group of people to meet specific problems posed by situations they face in com- - 5 - mon. . . This notion of culture as a living, historical product of group problem solving allows an approach to cultural study that is applicable to any group, be it a society, a neighborhood, a family, a dance band, or an organization and its segments (Van Maanen and Barley, 1985: 33).

Creating and maintaining a culture requires continuous indi- vidual or group processes of sustaining an identity through the coherence gained by a consistent aesthetic point of view, a moral conception of self, and a lifestyle that expresses those concep- tions in one's immediate existence and tastes (Bell, 1976: 36). These behavioral expressions signify a variety of meanings, and as signifiers they reflect a type of code that can be interpreted semiotically, or as a sign system amenable to readings indepen- dent of either participants or of those imposed by the super-or- dinate culture:

All aspects of culture possess a semiotic value, and the most taken-for-granted phenomena can function as signs: as elements in communication systems governed by semantic rules and codes which are not themselves directly apprehended in experience. These signs are, then, as opaque as the social relations which produce them and which they re-present (Hebdige, 1982: 13).

It is this symbolic cultural ethos, by which we mean the style, world view, and mood (Hebdige, 1979), that reflects the postmodernist elements of the CU and separates it from modernism. Modernist culture is characterized especially by rationality, technological enhancement, deference to centralized control, and mass communication. The emergence of computer technology has created dramatic changes in social communication, economic trans- actions, and information processing and sharing, while simultane- ously introducing new forms of surveillance, social control, and intrusions on privacy (Marx, 1988a: 208-211; Marx and Reichman, 1985). This has contributed to a:

. . . richly confused and hugely verbal age, energized by a multitude of competing discourses, the very pro- liferation and plasticity of which increasingly deter- mine what we defensively refer to as our reality (New- man, 1985: 15)

. By Postmodernism we mean a reaction against "cultural moder- nity" and a destruction of the constraints of the present "maxi- mum security society" (Marx, 1988b) that reflect an attempt to gain control of an alternative future. In the CU world, this con- stitutes a conscious resistance to the domination of but not the fact of technological encroachment into all realms of our social existence. The CU represents a reaction against modernism by of- fering an ironic response to the primacy of a master technocratic language, the incursion of computers into realms once considered private, the politics of techno-society, and the sanctity of es- tablished civil and state authority. Postmodernism is character- ized not so much by a single definition as by a number of inter- related characteristics, including, but not limited to:

1. Dissent for dissent's sake (Lyotard, 1988).
2. The collapse of the hierarchical distinction between mass and popular culture (Featherstone, 1988: 203).
3. A stylistic promiscuity favoring eclecticism and the mixing of codes (Featherstone, 1988: 203).
4. Parody, pastiche, irony, playfulness and the celebration of the surface "depthlessness" of culture (Featherstone, 1988: 203).
5. The decline of the originality/genius of the artistic producer and the assumption that art can only be repetitious (Featherstone 1988: 203).
6. The stripping away of social and perceptual coordinates that let one "know where one is" (Latimer, 1984: 121).
7. A search for new ways to make the unpresentable presentable, and break down the barriers that keep the profane out of everyday life (Denzin, 1988: 471).
8. The introduction of new moves into old games or inventing new games that are evaluated pragmatically rather than from some uniform stand point of "truth" or philosophical discourse (Callinicos, 1985: 86).
9. Emphasis on the visual over the literary (Lash, 1988: 314).
10. Devaluation of formalism and juxtaposition of signifiers taken from the banalities of everyday life (Lash, 1988: 314).
11. Contesting of rationalist and/or didactive views of culture (Lash, 1988: 314).
12. Asking not what a cultural text means, but what it does (Lash, 1988: 314).
13. Operation through the spectator's immersion, the relatively unmediated investment of his/her desire in the cultural object (Lash, 1988: 314).
14. Acknowledgement of the decenteredness of modern life and "plays with the apparent emptiness of modern life as well as the lack of coherence in modern symbol systems" (Manning, 1989: 8).

"Post-Modernism" in its positive form constitutes an intel- lectual attack upon the atomized, passive and indifferent mass culture which, through the saturation of electronic technology, has reached its zenith in Post-War American (Newman, 1985: 5). It is this style of playful rebellion, irreverent subversion, and juxtaposition of fantasy with high-tech reality that impels us to interpret the computer underground as a postmodernist culture.

Data and Method

Obtaining data from any underground culture requires tact. BBS operators protect the privacy of users and access to elite boards, or at least to their relevant security levels, virtually always requires completion of a preliminary questionnaire, a screening process, and occasional voice verification. Research- ers generally do not themselves violate laws or dominant norms, so they depend on their informants for potentially "dirty infor- mation" (Thomas and Marquart, 1988). Our own data are no excep- tion and derive from several sources.

First, the bulk of our data come from computer bulletin board systems. BBSs are personal computers (PCs) that have been equipped with a telephone modem and special software that con- nects users to other PCs by telephone. After "logging in" by supplying a valid user name and password, the user can receive and leave messages to other users of the system. These messages are rarely private and anyone calling the BBS can freely read and respond to them. There is usually the capacity to receive (down- load) or send (upload) text files ("G-philes") or software pro- grams between the caller and host system.

We logged the message section of CU BBSs to compile documen- tary evidence of the issues deemed important for discussion by participants. Logs are "captured" (recorded using the computer buffer) messages left on the board by users. Calculating the quantity of logged data is difficult because of formatting vari- ance, but we estimate that our logs exceed 10,000 printed pages. The logs cited here are verbatim with the exception of minor editing changes in format and extreme typographical errors.

Identifying underground BBSs can be difficult, and to the uninitiated they may appear to be licit chat or shareware boards. For callers with sufficient access, however, there exist back- stage realms in which "cracking" information is exchanged and private text or software files made available. With current technology, establishing a BBS requires little initial skill. Most boards are short-lived and serve only local or regional callers. Because of the generally poor quality and amateur na- ture of these systems, we focused on national elite boards. We considered a board "elite" if it met all of the following charac- teristics: At least one quarter of the users were registered out- side the state of the board called; the phone line were exclu- sively for BBS use and available 24 hours a day; and the information and files/warez were current "state of the field." Elite CU members argue that there are less than ten "truly elite" p/hacker boards nationally.

We obtained the names and numbers of BBSs from the first boards we called, and used a snowball technique to supplement the list. We obtained additional numbers from CU periodicals, and, as we became more familiar with the culture, users also added to the list. Our aggregate data include no less than 300 Bulletin board systems, of which at least 50 attract phreaks and hackers, and voice or on-line interviews with no less than 45 sysops (op- erators of BBS systems) and other active CU participants.

A second data source included open-ended voice and on-line interviews with hackers, phreaks and pirates. The data include no less than 25 face-to-face, 25 telephone, and 60 on-line inter- views obtained as we became familiar with our informants. Third, data acquisition included as much participation as legally possible in CU activities[3]. This served to justify our presence in the culture and provided information about the mun- dane activity of the CU.

Finally, we obtained back and current issues of the primary underground computerized magazines, which are distributed on na- tional BBSs as text files. These contain information relevant to the particular subculture, and included PHRACK, Activist Times Incorporated (ATI), P/Hun, 2600 Magazine, PIRATE, TAP, and Legion of Doom (LoD/H). We also draw data from national and interna- tional electronic mail (e-mail) systems on which an active infor- mation-sharing CU network has developed and spread.

Assessing the validity and reliability of data obtained in this manner creates special problems. One is that of sampling. The number of boards, their often ephemeral existence, and the problem of obtaining access all make conventional sampling impos- sible. We focused on national boards and engaged in theoretical sampling (Glaser and Strauss, 1967: 45-77). We consider our sam- ple representative, and accept Bordieu's observation that:

If, following the canon dictated by orthodox methodolo- gy, you take a random sample, you mutilate the very ob- ject you have set out to construct. If, in a study of the field of lawyers, for instance, you do not draw the President of the Supreme Court, or if, in an inquiry into the French intellectual field of the 1950s, you leave out Jean-Paul Sartre, or Princeton University in a study of American academics, your field is destroyed, insofar as these personas or institutions alone mark a crucial position--there are positions in a field which command the whole structure (Bordieu, interviewed in Wacquant, 1989: 38).

We judge our sample of participants adequate for several reasons. First, we presume that the members with whom we have had contact comprise the elite members of the culture, as deter- mined by the nature of the boards they were on, references to them on national boards, the level of expertise displayed in their messages, and their appearance in the "user lists" of elite boards. We consider the BBSs to be "typical exemplars" because of their status in the culture, because of the level of sophisti- cation both of users and of message content, and because of ref- erences to these boards as "elite" in CU periodicals.

The Computer Underground

The computer underground is both a life style and a social network. As a lifestyle, it provides identity and roles, an op- erational ideology, and guides daily routine. As a social net- work, it functions as a communications channel between persons engaged in one of three basic activities: Hacking, phreaking, and pirating[4]. Each subgroup possesses an explicit style that includes an ethic and "code of honor," cohesive norms, career paths, and other characteristics that typify a culture (Meyer, 1989a, 1989b; Meyer and Thomas, 1989).

Hebdige (1982: 113-117) used the concept of homology to de- scribe the structural unity that binds participants and provides the "symbolic fit between the values and life-styles of a group" and how it expresses or reinforces its focal concerns. Homology refers to the affinity and similarities members of a group share that give it the particular cultural identity. These shared al- ternative values and actions connect CU members to each other and their culture, and create a celebration of "otherness" from the broader culture.

Hackers (Tune: "Put Another Nickel in") Put another password in, Bomb it out, and try again, Try to get past logging in, Were hacking, hacking, hacking. Try his first wife's maiden name, This is more than just a game, It's real fun, but just the same It's hacking, hacking, hacking. Sys-call, let's try sys-call. Remember, that great bug from Version 3, Of R S X, It's here! Whoopee! Put another sys-call in, Run those passwords out and then, Dial back up, we're logging on, We're hacking, hacking, hacking. (The Hacker Anthem, by Chesire Catalyst) Hacking broadly refers to attempts to gain access to comput- ers to which one does not possess authorization. The term "hack- ers" first came into use in the early 1960's when it was applied to a group of pioneering computer aficionados at MIT (Levy, 1984). Through the 1970s, a hacker was viewed as someone obs- essed with understanding and mastering computer systems (Levy 1984). But, in the early 1980's, stimulated by the release of the movie "War Games" and the much publicized arrest of a "hacker gang" known as "The 414s", hackers were seen as young whiz-kids capable of breaking into corporate and government computer sys- tems (Landreth 1985:34). The imprecise media definition and the lack of any clear understanding of what it means to be a hacker results in the mis-application of the label to all forms of com- puter malfeasance.

Despite the inter-relationship between phreaks and hackers, the label of "hacker" is generally reserved for those engaged in computer system trespassing. For CU participants, hacking can mean either attempting to gain access to a computer system, or the more refined goals of exploring in, experimenting with, or testing a computer system. In the first connotation, hacking re- quires skills to obtain valid user accounts on computer systems that would otherwise be unavailable, and the term connotes the repetitive nature of break-in attempts. Once successful entry is made, the illicit accounts are often shared among associates and described as being "freshly (or newly) hacked."

The second connotation refers to someone possessing the knowledge, ability, and desire to fully explore a computer sys- tem. For elite hackers, the mere act of gaining entry is not enough to warrant the "hacker" label; there must be a desire to master and skill to use the system after access has been achieved:

It's Sunday night, and I'm in my room, deep into a hack. My eyes are on the monitor, and my hands are on the keyboard, but my mind is really on the operating system of a super-minicomputer a thousand miles away - a super-mini with an operating systems that does a good job of tracking users, and that will show my activities in its user logs, unless I can outwit it in the few hours before the Monday morning staff arrives for work.....Eighteen hours ago, I managed to hack a pass- word for the PDP 11/44. Now, I have only an hour or so left to alter the user logs. If I don't the logs will lead the system operators to my secret account, and the hours of work it took me to get this account will be wasted (Landreth, 1985: 57-58).

An elite hacker must experiment with command structures and explore the many files available in order to understand and ef- fectively use the system. This is sometimes called "hacking around" or simply "hacking a system". This distinction is neces- sary because not all trespassers are necessarily skilled at hack- ing out passwords, and not all hackers retain interest in a sys- tem once the challenge of gaining entry has been surmounted. Further, passwords and accounts are often traded, allowing even an unskilled intruder to erroneously claim the title of "hacker."

Our data indicate that, contrary to their media image, hack- ers avoid deliberately destroying data or otherwise damaging the system. Doing so would conflict with their instrumental goal of blending in with the average user to conceal their presence and prevent the deletion of the account. After spending what may be a substantial amount of time obtaining a high access account, the hacker places a high priority on not being discovered using it, and hackers share considerable contempt for media stories that portray them as "criminals." The leading CU periodicals (e.g., PHRACK, PIRATE) and several CU "home boards" reprint and disseminate media stories, adding ironic commentary. The percep- tion of media distortion also provides grist for message sec- tions:

A1: I myself hate newspaper reporters who do stories on hackers, piraters, phreaks, etc...because they always make us sound like these incred. {sic} smart people (which isn't too bad) who are the biggest threat to to- days community. Shit...the BEST hackers/phreaks/etc will tell you that they only do it to gain information on those systems, etc...(Freedom - That's what they call it...right?) (grin) A2: Good point...never met a "real p/h type yet who was into ripping off. To rip of a line from the Steve Good- man song (loosely), the game's the thing. Even those who allegedly fly the jolly rodger {pirates}, the true ones, don't do it for the rip-off, but, like monopoly, to see if they can get Boardwalk and Park Place without losing any railroads. Fun of the latter is to start on a board with a single good game or util {software util- ity} and see what it can be turned into, so I'm told. Fuck the press (DS message log, 1989).

One elite hacker, a member of a loose-knit organization re- cently in the national news when some participants were indicted for hacking, responded to media distortions of the group by is- sueing an underground press release:

My name is {deleted}, but to the computer world, I am {deleted}. I have been a member of the group known as Legion of Doom since its creation, and admittedly I have not been the most legitimate computer user around, but when people start hinting at my supposed Communist- backed actions, and say that I am involved in a world- wide conspiracy to destroy the nation's computer and/or 911 network, I have to speak up and hope that people will take what I have to say seriously. . . . People just can't seem to grasp the fact that a group of 20 year old kids just might know a little more than they do, and rather than make good use of us, they would rather just lock us away and keep on letting things pass by them. I've said this before, you can't stop burglars from robbing you when you leave the doors unlocked and merely bash them in the head with baseball bats when they walk in. You need to lock the door. But when you leave the doors open, but lock up the peo- ple who can close them for you another burglar will just walk right in ("EB," 1990).

Although skirting the law, hackers possess an explicit ethic and their primary goal is knowledge acquisition. Levy (1984: 26-36) identifies six "planks" of the original hacker ethic, and these continue to guide modern hackers:

1. First, access to computers should be unlimited and total: "Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative!"
2. Second, all information should be free.
3. Third, mistrust authority and promote decentralization.
4. Fourth, hackers should be judged by their prowess as hackers rather than by formal organizational or other irrelevant criteria.
5. Fifth, one can create art and beauty on a computer.
6. Finally, computers can change lives for the better.

PHRACK, recognized as the "official" p/hacker newsletter, expanded on this creed with a rationale that can be summarized in three principles ("Doctor Crash," 1986). First, hackers reject the notion that "businesses" are the only groups entitled to ac- cess and use of modern technology. Second, hacking is a major weapon in the fight against encroaching computer technology. Fi- nally, the high cost of equipment is beyond the means of most hackers, which results in the perception that hacking and phreak- ing are the only recourse to spreading computer literacy to the masses:

Hacking. It is a full time hobby, taking countless hours per week to learn, experiment, and execute the art of penetrating multi-user computers: Why do hack- ers spend a good portion of their time hacking? Some might say it is scientific curiosity, others that it is for mental stimulation. But the true roots of hacker motives run much deeper than that. In this file I will describe the underlying motives of the aware hackers, make known the connections between Hacking, Phreaking, Carding, and Anarchy, and make known the "techno-revo- lution" which is laying seeds in the mind of every hacker. . . .If you need a tutorial on how to perform any of the above stated methods {of hacking}, please read a {PHRACK} file on it. And whatever you do, con- tinue 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 ("Doctor Crash," 1986).

Computer software, such as auto-dialers popularized in the film War Games, provides a means for inexperienced hackers to search out other computers. Auto-dialers randomly dial numbers and save the "hits" for manual testing later. Some users self-i- dentify has hackers simply on the basis of successfully collect- ing computer numbers or passwords, but these users are considered "lamerz," because they do not possess sufficient knowledge to ob- tain access or move about in the system once access is obtained. Lamerz are readily identified by their message content:

Sub ->numbers From -> (#538) To ->all Date ->02/21/xx 06:10:00 PM Does anyone know any numbers for hotels, schools, busi- nesses, etc..and passwords if you do please leave a bulletin with the number and the password and/or logon id. Sub ->phun From -> (#138) To ->all Date ->02/22/xx 12:21:00 AM Anyone out there got some good 800 dial up that are fairly safe to hack? If so could ya leave me em in e- mail or post em with the formats.....any help would{be appreciated...... thanx Sub ->NUMBERS From -> (#538) To ->ALL Date ->02/24/xx 03:12:00 PM Does anyone have any 1-800 numbers with id, logon and passwords? Sub ->Credit Card's for Codez From -> (#134) To ->All Date ->01/26/xx 07:43:00 AM Tell ya what. I will exchange any amount of credit cards for a code or two. You name the credit limit you want on the credit card and I will get it for you. I do this cause I to janitorial work at night INSIDE the bank when no one is there..... heheheheheh Sub ->Codes.. From -> (#660) To ->All Date ->01/31/xx 01:29:00 AM Well, instead of leaving codes, could you leave us "uninformed" people with a few 800 dialups and formats? I don't need codes, I just want dialups! Is that so much to ask? I would be willing to trade CC's {credit cards} for dialups. Lemme know.. Sub ->0266 Codez From -> (#134) To ->All Date ->01/31/xx 06:56:00 AM Anyone, What is the full dial up for 0266 codez?

Such requests are considered amateurish, rarely generate the requested information, and elicit predictable "flamez" (severe criticism) or even potentially dangerous pseudo-assistance:

Sub ->Reply to: 0266 Codez From -> (#124) To ->C-Poo Date ->01/31/xx 09:02:00 AM Okay, here's the full info, Chris: Dial 1-900-(pause)-{xxx}-REAL. When it answers, hit #*9876321233456534323545766764 Got it? Okay, here's a 800 number to try: 1-800-426-{xxxx}. Give the opera- tor your zip,and fake it from there! Enjoy, you hack- meister, you! Sub ->Reply to: 0266 Codez From -> (#448) To -> #38 Date ->01/31/xx 03:43:00 PM What the fuck kind of question is that? Are you that stupid? what is the full dial up for an 0266? Give me a break! Call back when you learn not when you want to leech! Sub ->CC-ING From -> (#393) To -> #38 Date ->02/05/xx 01:41:00 AM WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU? PROBABLY A NARC, AREN'T YA! NO ONE IN HIS RIGHT MIND ASKS FOR CARDS. (AND NARCS AREN'T IN THEIR RIGHT MINDS) AND GIVE OUT CARDS, WHAT DO YOU THINK WE ARE, SHLONGS?! PERSONALLY I GET MY OWN ON THE JOB, PUMPING GAS PAYS A LOT MORE THAN YOU THINK, THEREFORE I DON'T NEED ANY. THINK ABOUT IT, IF YOU ARE A GOOD HACKER, WHICH I CAN SEE YOU'RE NOT, THEN YOU CAN HACK OUT YOUR OWN CODEZ. PEOPLE WHO NEED CCS CAN CALL CC-VMBS. I HAVE ONE, BUT DON'T ASK FOR IT. IF YOU DON'T KNOW MY CC-VMB LINE THEN YOU'RE NOT TO WELL KNOWN. A LOT OF KNOWN HACKERS KNOW MY CC-VMB LINE. WELL, IF YOU'RE A NARC, YOU'VE JUST BEEN FOUND OUT, IF NOT YOU MIGHT WANT TO GET A JOB AS ONE CUZ YOU ACT JUST LIKE ONE {In BBS protocol, upper case letters indicate emphasis, anger, or shouting}.

Although hackers freely acknowledge that their activities may be occasionally illegal, considerable emphasis is placed on limiting violations only to those required to obtain access and learn a system, and they display hostility toward those who transgress beyond beyond these limits. Most experienced CU mem- bers are suspicious of young novices who are often entranced with what they perceive to be the "romance" of hacking. Elite hackers complain continuously that novices are at an increased risk of apprehension and also can "trash" accounts on which experienced hackers have gained and hidden their access. Nonetheless, ex- perienced hackers take pride in their ethic of mentoring promis- ing newcomers, both through their BBSs and newsletters:

As {my} reputation grew, answering such requests [from novice hackers wanting help] became a matter of pride. No matter how difficult the question happened to be, I would sit at the terminal for five, ten, twenty hours at a time, until I had the answer (Landreth, 1985: 16).

The nation's top elite p/hacker board was particularly nur- turing of promising novices before it voluntarily closed in early 1990, and its sysop's handle means "teacher." PHRACK, begun in 1985, normally contained 10-12 educational articles (or "phi- les"), most of which provided explicit sophisticated technical information about computer networks and telecommunications sys- tems[5]. Boundary socialization occurs in message bases and newsletters that either discourage such activity or provide guidelines for concealing access once obtained:

Welcome to the world of hacking! We, the people who live outside of the normal rules, and have been scorned and even arrested by those from the 'civilized world', are becoming scarcer every day. This is due to the greater fear of what a good hacker (skill wise, no mor- al judgements here) can do nowadays, thus causing anti- hacker sentiment in the masses. Also, few hackers seem to actually know about the computer systems they hack, or what equipment they will run into on the front end, or what they could do wrong on a system to alert the 'higher' authorities who monitor the system. This arti- cle is intended to tell you about some things not to do, even before you get on the system. We will tell you about the new wave of front end security devices that are beginning to be used on computers. We will attempt to instill in you a second identity, to be brought up at time of great need, to pull you out of trouble. (p/hacker newsletter, 1987).

Elite hacking requires highly sophisticated technical skills to enter the maze of protective barriers, recognize the computer type, and move about at the highest system levels. As a conse- quence, information sharing becomes the sine qua non of the hack- er culture. "Main message" sections are generally open to all users, but only general information, gossip, and casual commen- tary is posted. Elite users, those with higher security privileg- es and access to the "backstage" regions, share technical infor- mation and problems, of which the following is typical:

89Mar11 From ***** ** * ***> Help! Anyone familiar with a system that responds: A2: SELECT : DISPLAY: 1=TRUNK,2=SXS;INPUT:3=TRUNK,4=SXS,5=DELETE;7=MSG and then it gives you a prompt If you chose 1... ENTER OLD#,(R=RETURN) At this point I know you can enter 7 digits, the 8th will give you an INVALID ENTRY type message. Some num- bers don't work however. (1,2,7,8 I know will) Anybody? 89Mar10 From *********> I was hacking around on telenet (415 area code) and got a few things that I am stuck-o on if ya can help, I'd be greatly happy. First of all, I got one that is called RCC PALO ALTO and I can't figure it out. Second (and this looks pretty fun) is the ESPRIT COMMAIL and I know that a user name is SYSTEM because it asked for a password on ONLY that account (pretty obvious eh?) a few primnet and geonet nodes and a bunch of TELENET ASYYNC to 3270 SERVICE. It asks for TERMINAL TYPE, my LU NUMBER and on numbers higher than 0 and lower that 22 it asks for a password. Is it an outdial? What are some common passwords? then I got a sushi-primnet sys- tem. And a dELUT system. And at 206174 there is JUST a : prompt. help! (P/h message log, 1988).

Rebelliousness also permeates the hacker culture and is re- flected in actions, messages, and symbolic identities. Like oth- er CU participants, hackers employ handles (aliases) intended to display an aspect of one's personality and interests, and a han- dle can often reveal whether its owner is a "lamer" (an incompe- tent) or sophisticated. Hackers take pride in their assumed names, and one of the greatest taboos is to use the handle of an- other or to use multiple handles. Handles are borrowed liberally from the anti-heros of science fiction, adventure fantasy, and heavy metal rock lyrics, particularly among younger users, and from word plays on technology, nihilism, and violence. The CU handle reflects a stylistic identity heavily influenced by meta- phors reflecting color (especially red and black), supernatural power (e.g., "Ultimate Warrior, "Dragon Lord"), and chaos ("Death Stalker," "Black Avenger"), or ironic twists on technology, fan- tasy, or symbols of mass culture (e.g., Epeios, Phelix the Hack, Ellis Dea, Rambo Pacifist, Hitch Hacker).

This anti-establishment ethos also provides an ideological unity for collective action. Hackers have been known to use their collective skills in retaliation for acts against the cul- ture that the perceive as unfair by, for example, changing credit data or "revoking" driver's licenses (Sandza, 1984b; "Yes, you Sound very Sexy," 1989). Following a bust of a national hacker group, the message section of the "home board" contained a lively debate on the desireability of a retaliatory response, and the moderates prevailed. Influenced especially by such science fan- tasy as William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider (1975), and cyber-punk, which is a fusion of ele- ments of electronic communication technology and the "punk" sub- culture, the hacker ethic promotes resistance to the very forms that create it. Suggestive of Frazer's (1922) The Golden Bough, power is challenged and supplanted by rituals combining both de- struction and rejuvenation. From this emerges a shared ethos of opposition against perceived Orwellian domination by an informa- tion-controlling elite:

(Hackers will) always be necessary, especially in the technological oppression of the future. Just imagine an information system that systematically filters out certain obscene words. Then it will move on to phras- es, and then entire ideas will be replaced by comput- ers! Anyway, there will always be people tripping out on paper and trying to keep it to themselves, and it's up to us to at least loosen their grasp (P.A. Message Log 1988).

Another hacker summarized the near-anarchist ethic characterized the CU style:

Lookit, we're here as criminal hobbyists, peeping toms, and looters. I am in it for the fun. Not providing the public what it has a right to know, or keeping big brother in check. I couldn't care less. I am sick of the old journalistic hackers nonsense about or (oops! OUR) computerized ego...I make no attempt to justify what I am doing. Because it doesn't matter. As long as we live in this goddamn welfare state I might as well have some fun taking what isn't mine, and I am better off than those welfare-assholes who justify their stealing. At least I am smart enough to know that the free lunch can't go on forever (U.U. message log 1988).

In sum, the hacker style reflects well-defined goals, commu- nication networks, values, and an ethos of resistance to authori- ty. Because hacking requires a broader range of knowledge than does phreaking, and because such knowledge can be acquired only through experience, hackers tend to be both older and more knowl- edgeable than phreaks. In addition, despite some overlap, the goals of the two are somewhat dissimilar. As a consequence, each group constitutes a separate analytic category.

Phreaks

Running numbers is not only fun; it's a moral impera- tive! (Phreak credo).

Phreaking broadly refers to the practice of using either technology or telephone credit card numbers (called "codez") to avoid long distance charges. Phreaking attained public visibili- ty with the revelation of the exploits of John "Cap'n Crunch" Draper, the "father of phreaking" (Rosenbaum, 1971). Although phreaking and hacking each require different skills, phreaks and hackers tend to associate on same boards. Unlike hackers, who attempt to master a computer system and its command and security structure, phreaks struggle to master telecom (tele-communica- tions) technology:

The phone system is the most interesting, fascinating thing that I know of. There is so much to know. Even phreaks have their own areas of knowledge. There is so much to know that one phreak could know something fair- ly important and the next phreak not. The next phreak might know 10 things that the first phreak doesn't though. It all depends upon where and how they get their info. I myself would like to work for the telco, doing something interesting, like programming a switch. Something that isn't slave labor bullshit. Something that you enjoy, but have to take risks in order to par- ticipate unless you are lucky enough to work for Bell/ AT&T/any telco. To have legal access to telco things, manuals, etc. would be great (message log, 1988).

Early phreaking methods involved electro-mechanical devices that generated key tones or altered phone line voltages to trick the mechanical switches of the phone company into connecting calls without charging, but the advent of computerized telephone- switching systems largely made these devices obsolete. In order to continue their practice, phreaks have had to learn hacking skills in order to obtain access to telephone company computers and software.

Access to telecom information takes several forms, and the possesion of numbers for "loops" and "bridges," while lying in a grey area of law, further enhances the reputation and status of a phreak. P/hackers can utilize "loop lines" to limit the number of eavesdroppers on their conversations. Unlike bridges, which connect an unlimited number of callers simultaneously, loops are limited to just two people at a time[6]. A "bridge" is a techni- cal name for what is commonly known as a "chat line" or "confer- ence system." Bridges are familiar to the public as the pay-per- minute group conversation systems advertised on late night television. Many bridge systems are owned by large corporations that maintain them for business use during the day. While the numbers to these systems are not public knowledge, many of them have been discovered by phreaks who then utilize the systems at night. Phreaks are skilled at arranging for a temporary, pri- vate bridge to be created via ATT's conference calling facili- ties. This provides a helpful information sharing technique among a self-selected group of phreak/hackers:

Bridges can be extremely useful means of distributing information as long as the {phone} number is not known, and you don't have a bunch of children online testing out their DTMF. The last great discussion I partici- pated with over a bridge occurred about 2 months ago on an AT&T Quorum where all we did was engineer 3/way {calls} and restrict ourselves to purely technical in- formation. We could have convinced the Quorum operators that we were AT&T technicians had the need occurred. Don't let the kids ruin all the fun and convenience of bridges. Lameness is one thing, practicality is an- other (DC, message log, 1988).

Phreaks recognize their precarious legal position, but see no other way to "play the game:"

Phreaking involves having the dedication to commit yourself to learning as much about the phone system/ network as possible. Since most of this information is not made public, phreaks have to resort to legally questionable means to obtain the knowledge they want (TP2, message log, 1988).

Little sympathy exists among experienced phreaks for "teleco ripoff." "Carding," or the use of fraudulent credit cards, is anathema to phreaks, and not only violates the phreaking ethic, but is simply not the goal of phreaking:

Credit card fraud truly gives hacking a bad name. Snooping around a VAX is just electronic voyeu- rism. . .carding a new modem is just flat out blue-col- lar crime. It's just as bad as breaking into a house or kicking a puppy! {This phreak} does everything he can (even up to turning off a number) to get credit in- formation taken off a BBS. {This phreak} also tries to remove codes from BBSes. He doesn't see code abuse in the same light as credit card fraud, (although the law does), but posted codes are the quickest way to get your board busted, and your computer confiscated. Peo- ple should just find a local outdial to wherever they want to call and use that. If you only make local calls from an outdial, it will never die, you will keep out of trouble, and everyone will be happy (PHRACK, 3(28): Phile 2).

Experienced phreaks become easily angered at novices and "lamerz" who engage in fraud or are interested only in "leeching" (obtaining something for nothing):

Sub ->Carding From ->JB (#208) To ->ALL Date ->02/10/xx 02:22:00 PM What do you people think about using a parents card number for carding? For instance, if I had a friend order and receive via next day air on my parents card, and receive it at my parents house while we were on va- cation. Do you think that would work? Cuz then, all that we have to do is to leave the note, and have the bud pick up the packages, and when the bill came for over $1500, then we just say... 'Fuck you! We were on vacation! Look at our airline tickets!' I hope it does... Its such a great plan! Sub ->Reply to: Carding From -> (xxx) To -> X Date ->02/11xx 03: 16:00 AM NO IT'S NOT A GREAT IDEA! WHERE'S YOUR SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY TO YOUR FAMILY? ARE THEY ALL IN AGREEMENT WITH YOU? WOULD YOU WANT ANYONE TO USE YOUR PRIVATE STUFF IN ILLEGAL (AND IMMORAL) ACTIVITIES WITHOUT YOUR KNOWLEDGE? DIDJA EVER HEAR ABOUT TRUST BETWEEN FAMILY MEMBERS? IF YOU'RE GOING TO BE A THIEF (AND THAT'S NOT NEAT LIKE JAMES BOND IN THE MOVIES), TAKE THE RISKS ONLY UPON YOURSELF! Sub ->Carding From -> (#208) To -> (#47) Date ->02/12/xx 11: 18:00 AM Why not? We have a law that says that we have the right to refuse payment to credit cards if there are fraudulent charges. All we do and it is settled.... what is so bad about it? I'm going for it! Sub ->Reply to: Carding From -> (xxx) To ->J.B. Date ->02/13/xx 02:08:00 AM APPARENTLY YOU MISSED THE MAIN POINTS I TRIED TO MAKE TO YOU . . . YOU'RE A THIEF AND A LIAR, AND ARE BETRAYING THE TRUST OF YOUR FAMILY AS WELL AS INVOLVING THEM IN YOUR RISK WITHOUT THEIR KNOWLEDGE. THAT MEANS YOU ARE A FAIRLY SCUMMY INDIVIDUAL IF YOU GO THROUGH WITH IT! NOW AS TO YOUR "DEFENCE" ABOUT $50 MAXIMUMS AND ERRONEOUS BILLINGS.. LAW MAKES A CLEAR DISTINCTION ABOUT THEFT BY FRAUD (OF WHICH YOU WOULD BE GUILTY). AND IN A LARGER SENSE, YOUR THEFT JUST MAKES IT MORE COSTLY FOR YOU YOU AND EVERYBODY ELSE TO GET CREDIT, AND DO BUSINESS WITH CREDIT CARDS. YOU'RE GOING TO DO WHATEVER YOU DO ANYWAY.....DON'T LOOK FOR ANY APPROVAL IN THIS DIRECTION.

Ironically, experienced phreaks are not only offended by such disregard of law, but also feel that "rip-off artists" have no information to share and only increase the risk for the "tech- no-junkies." Message boards reflect hostility toward apprehended "lamerz" with such comments as "I hope they burn him," or "the lamer probably narked {turned informant} to the pheds {law en- forcement agents}." Experienced phreaks also post continual re- minders that some actions, because of their illegality, are sim- ply unacceptable:

It should be pointed out however, that should any of you crack any WATS EXTENDER access codes and attempt to use them, you are guilty of Theft of communications services from the company who owns it, and Bell is very willing and able to help nail you! WATS EXTENDERS can get you in every bit as much trouble as a Blue Box should you be caught.

Ex-phreaks, especially those who are no longer defined by law as juveniles, often attempt to caution younger phreaks from pursuing phreaking:

ZA1: One thing to consider, also, is that the phone co. knows where the junction box is for all of the lines that you are messing with and if they get enough com- plaints about the bills, they may start to check things out (I hope your work is neat). I would guess that the odds are probably against this from happening though, because when each of the people call to complain, they'll probably get a different person from the oth- ers. This means that someone at Ma Bell has to notice that all of the complaints are coming from the same area...I don't think anybody there really cares that much about their job to really start noticing things like that...anyway, enjoy!!! My guess is that you're under-age. Anyway, so if they catch you, they won't do anything to you anyway. ZB1: Yeah I am a minor (17 years old) I just hope that they don't cause I would like to not have a criminal or juvenile record when I apply to college. Also if they do come as I said in the other message if there are no wires they can't prove shit. Also as I said I only hook up after 6 p.m. The phone company doesn't service peo- ple after 6 p.m. Just recently (today) I hooked up to an empty line. No wires were leading from the two plugs to somebody house but I got a dial tone. How great. Don't have to worry about billing somebody else. But I still have to disconnect cause the phone bills should be coming to the other people pretty soon. HEHEHEHE ZX1: Be cool on that, especially if you're calling oth- er boards. Easiest way for telecom security to catch you is match the number called to the time called, call the board, look at users log or messages for hints of identity, then work from there. If you do it too much to a pirate board, they can (and have successfully) pressured the sysop to reveal the identity under threat of prosecution. They may or may not be able to always trace it back, but remember: Yesterday's phreaks are today's telecom security folk. AND: IT'S NOT COOL TO PHREAK TO A PIRATE BOARD...draws attention to that board and screws it up for everybody. So, be cool phreaking....there's safer ways. ZC2: Be cool, Wormburger. They can use all sorts of stuff for evidence. Here's what they'd do in Ill. If they suspected you, they'd flag the phone lines, send somebody out during the time you're on (or they suspect you're on) and nail you. Don't want to squelch a bud- ding phreak, but you're really taking an unnecessary chance. Most of us have been doing stuff for some time, and just don't want to see you get nailed for something. There's some good boards with tips on how to phreak, and if you want the numbers, let me know. We've survived to warn you because we know the dangers. If you don't know what ESS is, best do some quick research (P/h message log, 1988).

In sum, the attraction of phreaking and its attendant life- style appear to center on three fundamental characteristics: The quest for knowledge, the belief in a higher ideological purpose of opposition to potentially dangerous technological control, and the enjoyment of risk-taking. In a sense, CU participants con- sciously create dissonance as a means of creating social meaning in what is perceived as an increasingly meaningless world (Milo- vanovic and Thomas, 1989). Together, phreaks and hackers have created an overlapping culture that, whatever the legality, is seen by participants as a legitimate enterprise in the new "tech- no-society."

Conclusion

The transition to an information-oriented society dependent on computer technology brings with it new symbolic metaphors and behaviors. Baudrillard (1987: 15) observed that our private sphere now ceases to be the stage where the drama of subjects at odds with their objects and with their image is played out, and we no longer exist as playwrites or actors, but as terminals of multiple networks. The public space of the social arena is re- duced to the private space of the computer desk, which in turn creates a new semi-public, but restricted, public realm to which dissonance seekers retreat. To participate in the computer un- derground is to engage in what Baudrillard (1987: 15) describes as private telematics, in which individuals, to extend Baudril- lard's fantasy metaphor, are transported from their mundane com- puter system to the controls of a hypothetical machine, isolated in a position of perfect sovereignty, at an infinite distance from the original universe. There, identity is created through symbolic strategies and collective beliefs (Bordieu, cited in Wacquant, 1989: 35).

We have argued that the symbolic identity of the computer underground creates a rich and diverse culture comprised of jus- tifications, highly specialized skills, information-sharing net- works, norms, status hierarchies, language, and unifying symbolic meanings. The stylistic elements of CU identity and activity serve what Denzin (1988: 471) sees as the primary characteristic of postmodern behavior, which is to make fun of the past while keeping it alive and the search for new ways to present the un- presentable in order to break down the barriers that keep the profane out of the everyday.

The risks entailed by acting on the fringes of legality and substituting definitions of acceptable behavior with their own, the playful parodying of mass culture, and the challenge to au- thority constitute an exploration of the limits of techno-culture while resisting the legal meanings that would control such ac- tions. The celebration of anti-heros, re-enacted through forays into the world of computer programs and software, reflects the stylistic promiscuity, eclecticism and code-mixing that typifies the postmodern experience (Featherstone, 1988: 202). Rather than attempt to fit within modern culture and adapt to values and def- initions imposed on them, CU participants mediate it by mixing art, science, and resistance to create a culture with an alterna- tive meaning both to the dominant one and to those that observers would impose on them and on their enterprise.

Pfuhl (1987) cogently argued that criminalization of comput- er abuse tends to polarize definitions of behavior. As a conse- quence, To view the CU as simply another form of deviance, or as little more than "high-tech street gangs" obscures the ironic, mythic, and subversive element, the Nieztschean "will to power," reflected in the attempt to master technology while challenging those forces that control it. The "new society" spawned by com- puter technology is in its infancy, and, as Sennet (1970: xvii) observed, the passage of societies through adolescence to maturi- ty requires acceptance of disorder and painful dislocation.

Instead of embracing the dominant culture, the CU has creat- ed an irreducible cultural alternative, one that cannot be under- stood without locating its place within the dialectic of social change. Especially in counter-cultures, as Hebdige (1983: 3) ob- serves, "objects are made to mean and mean again," often ending:

...

.in the construction of a style, in a gesture of defiance or contempt, in a smile or a sneer. It sig- nals a Refusal. I would like to think that this Reusal is worth making, that these gestures have a meaning, that the smiles and the sneers have some subversive value. . . (Hebdige, 1982: 3)

. ..

Footnotes

1. Participants in the computer underground engage in considera- ble word play that includes juxtaposition of letters. For ex- ample, commonly used words beginning with "f" are customarily spelled with a "ph." The CU spelling conventions are re- tained throughout this paper.
2. Conly and McEwen (1990: 3) classify "software piracy" in the same category as theft of computers and trade secrets, and grossly confuse both the concept and definition of computer crime by conflating any illicit activity involving computers under a definition so broad that embezzlement and bulletin boards all fall within it. However, the label of "computer criminal" should be reserved for those who manipulate comput- erized records in order to defraud or damage, a point implied by Bequai (1978: 4) and Parker (1983: 106).
3. One author has been active in the computer underground since 1984 and participated in Summercon-88 in St. Louis, a nation- al conference of elite hackers. The other began researching p/hackers and pirates in 1988. Both authors have had sysop experience with national CU boards. As do virtually all CU participants, we used pseudonyms but, as we became more fully immersed in the culture, our true identities were sometimes revealed.
4. Although we consider software pirates an integral part of the computer underground, we have excluded them from this analy- sis both for parsimony and because their actions are suffi- ciently different to warrant separate analysis (Thomas and Meyer, 1990). We also have excluded anarchist boards, which tend to be utilized by teenagers who use BBSs to exchange in- formation relating to social disruption, such as making home- made explosives, sabotaging equipment, and other less dramat- ic pranks. These boards are largely symbolic, and despite the name, are devoid of political intent. However, our data sug- gest that many hackers began their careers because of the an- archist influence.
5. In January, 1990, the co-editor of the magazine was indicted for allegedly "transporting" stolen property across state lines. According to the Secret Service agent in charge of the case in Atlanta (personal communication), the offender was apprehended for receiving copies of E911 ("enhanced" 911 emergency system) documents by electronic mail, but added that there was no evidence that those involved were motivated by, or received, material gain.
6. "Loop lines" are telephone company test lines installed for two separate telephone numbers that connect only to each oth- er. Each end has a separate phone number, and when each per- son calls one end, they are connected to each other automati- cally. A loop consists of "Dual Tone Multi-Frequency," which is the touch tone sounds used to dial phone numbers. These test lines are discovered by phreaks and hackers by program- ming their home computer to dial numbers at random and "lis- ten" for the distinctive tone that an answering loop makes, by asking sympathetic telephone company employees, or through information contained on internal company computers

2. The electronic discourse of the computer underground

A Note in Methodology: Doing Ethnographies in Cyberspace

The basis for this paper lies in a series of discussions observed in various electronic conferencing systems. Some of these discussions were initiated by me. But in most cases, I was a "lurker" - a passive observer of the discussions of two or more hackers. In order to explain this project, and the basis of my choices, I need to discuss some of the principal difficulties in working with my research subject. But first, I should give a few words to the vagaries of doing ethnography in cyberspace. Doubtless, other panelists will emphasize these points, but I feel the need to make them as well. There are many people who suggest cyber-ethnography is NOT anthropology.

I define cyberspace rather broadly, as a "non-space" consisting of the interactions of persons through electronically mediated communication. People talking on a bulletin board system (BBS), using the Internet Relay Chat (IRC), or visiting the fora on America Online (AOL), are all "in" cyberspace. But, so are people making a teleconference call, chatting on a CB radio, using a videophone, or exchanging Morse code. They've not "left" their "real" body or "real" lives, which are still quite there; the point is that the focus of their attention and communication has moved from "real" space to "cyber" space, and as good ethnographers we should go with them.

For one thing, they say, cyberspace is not the real space in which people live their lives; their actions in cyberspace are not real actions, formed by expectations of real consequences; and there are NO SUCH THINGS as virtual communities, despite what amateur sociologists such as Howard Rheingold might think, since people interacting in cyberspace do not have the webs of real dependencies and interchanges that those in "true" communities have. Thus, observing the discourse and 'behavior' of people in cyberspace tells us nothing about their 'real' lives, and thus this should be only a minor component of ethnography, not the basis for it.

Studying electronic discourse, these critics would suggest, is a sham because it's not a real "ethnography of speaking." Since most people have various forms of on-line editing and off-line mail-reading, their participation in electronic conferencing is too deliberated and artificial to be considered true "discourse" in the standard sense of the term. Further, electronic communication eliminates all the contextual cues (gesture, expression, kinesics, voice quality, and all the other components of "speech acts") normally thought to constitute discourse. It is true that electronic communication falls in a curious wedge between speaking (parole) (day-to-day speech improvised informally) and writing (langue) (formally composed text which more closely follows official lexical rules) - but we should recognize that space and deal with it. It may not be speaking, but it is discourse.

Indeed, as a form of discourse, it makes various moves to create modes of context in a medium (ASCII) which seems to work against context. Doubtless, everyone by now has heard of "Smilies," (emoticons) since just about every major media outlet has discussed them. Basically, most electronic conferencing is more back-and-forth dialogue, kind of like leaving notes for your roommate and then her leaving notes for you. But some forms of electronic conferencing are "realtime," and thus very akin to many of the everyday speech situations in which we find ourselves. Cyberspace allows people to conceal many of their "real life" contexts - e.g. gender, race, culture, ethnicity, and all of anthropology's other BIG variables - but as others will undoubtedly note, it does not eliminate them, and often creates norms and values of its own in their place - "netiquette."

From an emic perspective, many of our subjects do not distinguish between "real" life and "virtual" life. As good ethnographers and participant observers, we should not make such seemingly "etic" distinctions, in the face of our informants. If they spend more of their waking time in cyberspace than in "real life," who is doing the more honest ethnography? The cyber-ethnographer, or the person who ignores that part of their life to which they devote the most time? Many of them claim to be creating wholly new social institutions that exist solely in "cyberspace" - e.g. the various virtual "universities" and "town halls" and so on. As good cyber-ethnographers, we should be just as willing to examine the sociocultural relations in "cyber" society as we do "real" society. A "virtual" insult can sting as much as a "real" slap; people invest great deals of importance in "virtual" marriages, births, and deaths. Where people invest meaning, the anthropological interpreter should go; and people do invest great meaning into cyberspace.

One of the big criticisms of much of cyber-ethnography is that the Internet and other systems allow a person to participate without making their presence known. This is known as "lurking." You can read a bulletin board, or sit passively in a chat room, without making your presence known, all the while capturing what people "say" or "do" to your own computer. To some people this is espionage, not anthropology. Maybe; but what we are after is discourse. When researchers do a content analysis of Dan Rather's words on the TV news, he is not aware at that moment that he is being studied; he may find out after the fact. The group I was studying was extremely suspicious of outsiders, whom they generally take to be "narcs."

I suspect that this is the case with any marginalized and criminalized subculture. Considering that the group I was studying is probably in violation of numerous sections of the Computer Crimes Acts of the 1980s, I can understand their reluctance to talk openly to outsiders. In cyberspace, I have no way of verifying their identities or truthfulness; and likewise, they have no way of verifying mine. While the technologies of "digital signatures" and encryption may help to get around this problem, they were not mature enough at the point where I began my project to be of much use. Almost every hacker I talked to made some attempt to verify my identity, either by checking my credit rating or "fingering" me; and based on the "sting" operations they've faced, like Operation SunDevil, I don't find this surprising.

So; while the problem of studying the computer underground is no more difficult basically than dealing with other "underground" groups (political terrorists, drug users, the Mafia, etc.) - which mind you, is extremely difficult in itself - it in a way DOES becomes even more difficult in that knowledgeable users of the electronic medium are able to "lock" out and shun outsiders. I had no success, for example, in getting on any of the "elite" boards in my area - where software pirates openly exchange commerical software and other hacks - because many used a system of caller ID verification. Anthropologists, who are often accused of being CIA agents in the Third World, may find the common accusation of being Secret Service in cyberspace. So, I was dealing with a population of people not likely to exchange discourse with someone they were not sure was a member of their subculture (and there are all sorts of tests for that, as I will discuss later.)

Thus, I chose to transcribe the conversations of hackers on basically public fora, such as the Usenet groups alt.2600, alt.hackers, and alt.cyberpunk; the Internet lists Future Culture, Fringeware, and Cypherpunks; the local Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) known as Ground Zero, OnlineNOW!, Digital Underground, Digi-Net, First Church of Cyberspace, and StellarNet, among others; national hacker BBSes such as Temple of the Screaming Electron, Demon Roach Underground, and Hacker's Haven; the Internet Relay Chat channels #2600, #leri, #hackers, #crackers, and others; and the hacker conferences on the Whole Earth Electronic Link (WELL), MindVox, and The Internet Wiretap (Spies in the Wire.) Also critical to my research were several on-line electronic hacker publications, including but not limited to Phrack, TAP, the Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC), Computer Underground Digest (CuD), Line Noize, Activist Times Incorporated (ATI), and 40HEX, among others.

In many cases, I did not "speak up" (on the chat channels, for example) to tell people their conversations were being observed by an online anthropologist. To some in this room, that's unethical, dishonest, criminal, maybe (horrors!) even colonialist. I don't feel it was particularly villainous, and it was also pretty effective, because everytime one of those chat channels noted an outside observer claim he was transcribing everything that was going on, everybody on disappeared. Other times, I acted like a hacker-wannabe, hoping the experienced ones would "mentor" me. This elicited very interesting conversational data. Some people may call this dishonest. But in cyberspace, which often involves games revolving around sudden shifts of identity, I call it participant observation.

The technologies of electronic discourse allow for "lurking." At a party, we can sit and listen to participants without people noticing we are listening intently, a skill that Erving Goffman was apparently very good at. In cyberspace, it becomes even easier to do. The Hacker Ethic is that "information wants to be free." I consider online conversations on public electronic media to be similarly so (free for usage by researchers), just as I've often seen my own words reposted to Internet lists without my permission. The rules and norms for electronic discourse are being shaped right here and now, as we all know; but the computer underground in particular likes to play fast and slippery with those rules. Whether through cellphone hacking or some other technique, they've found ways to listen in on other people, whether they knew it or not.

Was what I was doing true participant observation? I did not accompany my subjects on hacking forays, since I was not interested in the Secret Service knocking on my door, and I did not think I could master the technique sufficiently to avoid that outcome. But I did play all the hacker tricks - posing as somebody else to elicit information from a person (social engineering) - for example. I manipulated the electronic medium to get out of it what I was after - what hackers call "beating the system." Thus, it was participant observation, though perhaps not in the sense that most of us are used to thinking about it. What I was after was hackers' electronic discourse, and I got it. I see no reason why it had to be me to be the one who initiated it, anymore than the person who analyzes Dan Rather's six thirty news broadcast feels he should also have created the news.

What is the Computer Underground?

Gordon Meyer, a sociologist who has since left academia but continues to be involved in the computer industry (and to publish the Computer Underground Digest), wrote in his seminal paper The Social Organization of the Computer Underground that the "computer underground consists of actors in three roles - computer hackers, phone phreaks, and software pirates." I think that this definition is not only inadequate, but probably ignores a lot of discursive difficulties. Firstly, it ignores the recent debates about who owns the term "hacker" - battles that have been no less pitched than any over who owns the name "America." Author Steven Levy recently attempted to settle the matter with his recent work Hackers: the Heroes of the Computer Revolution. From Levy's point of view, there were three essential generations of hackers - the Homebrew Hackers that populated the Artificial Intelligence labs of Stanford and MIT in the early 60s; the Hardware Hackers of the People's Computer Company (PCC) who promulgated computer communitarianism in the early 70s; and the Game Hackers of Silicon Valley in the early 1980s.

Of course, Levy stops his hacker geneaology in the early 1980s, as if to suggest that the species has disappeared, although he does in an addendum discuss the efforts of Richard Stallman and his GNU (Gnu's not Unix) Free Software Foundation throughout the 80s. Levy suggests that there are few hackers anymore, largely due to the corporate, technocratic mentality that has settled into the computer industry. But, the media in the 80s started to use the term "hacker" for a different type of computer user - usually described as a "nerdy, sociopathic, hyperintelligent, hygiene-deprived computer intruder" - thus causing the semantic shift that causes many people to associate hacking with "computer crime." According to Levy, calling the "computer miscreants" of the mid-80s and on "hackers" debases an august honorific, since he considers such individuals to be motivated by far less honorable intentions than the Hacker Ethic he describes in his book.

In the old Hackerspeak of 60s MIT, a "hack" was a clever programming trick that exploited hardware features of a computer for purposes other than what they were originally intended. People good at such tricks were, then, "hackers," and there was a competitive vying for the mantle of hackerdom. But, starting in the 80s, some computer users started to call the relentless attacks on password-protection systems often used by computer 'intruders' "hacking" - signifying a sort of brute-force assault on security systems. Thus did computer intruders come to be known as "hackers" also. But Levy and others know that computer intrusion and semi-criminal activity is not a new phenomenon. The hackers of MIT wanted access to the mainframe computers of the time to to be total, and they were famous for picking locks, using underground access tunnels, prying open floorboards, and playing pranks on technicians in order to secure this access. The only difference between now and then is that computer intrusion often involved getting physical access to a time-shared mainframe, rather than breaking the security systems of a networked system.

The only difference between the computer-obsessed mangy kids of Minsky's lab at MIT and the computer-obsessed "miscreants" trying to work their way onto General Motors' corporate database is the decade and the institutions they have access to. It's important to remember that. Levy credits the first generation of hackers with being the "heroes" of the "computer revolution" - namely, the one that put a personal computer on everybody's desk, rather than forcing them to work with the cumbersome Hulking Giants and technician-priests of IBM. Yet, he and ex-1st generation hackers such as Clifford Stoll see this current generation of hackers as a threat to personal computing and networking, because of the ways in which he feels they threaten the "trust and openness" required for people to share their data freely. This is interesting, for "old hackers" like Stallman have often questioned the current emphasis on security, suggesting it does more to heighten anxiety and distrust than the "miscreants" the "computer security industry" is supposedly responding to. But the fact is that they are correct in that some of the new hackers are indeed a peril to the old Hacker Ethic, because they do not share its essentially intellectual motivations.

Among new hackers, a slightly different version of Levy's Ethic has crystallized. It's OK to copy commercial software - if you distribute it freely to people. Reselling it is wrong. It's OK to hack your way onto systems containing public information (and from the hacker's point of view, such things as "corporate secrets" are public, not private, property) but wrong to read people's private mail. It's OK to read data that one is not "authorized" to - but wrong to alter or destroy that data. It's OK to propagate nondestructive viruses as a prank, but wrong to unleash destructive ones. It's OK to "rip off" corporate voice mail systems and other services, but wrong to steal the credit card numbers and telephone codes of hapless individuals. Hackers that engage in such "dark side" activities are generally identified as "Dark side hackers," and they are often shunned by the rest of the community for giving them a bad name. Unfortunately, it is these "dark side" activities that often result in the passage of computer crime statutes, and thus the persecution of the good with the bad.

Many hackers still maintain that they engage in their activities not for malicious or mischievous purposes, but for intellectual ones. They hack because they want to find out all they can about a system - beating it, if necessary, by becoming the "sysman" - regardless of the security systems and other limitations people have put in their way. Some claim political motivations - that they are resisting a corporate-software complex which rips people off, or fighting off the corporate hoarding of information about peoples' lives and activities. And, there is the common need found in many American subcultures to engage in deviancy for its own sake: as a marker of identity and difference. Criminological analyses of "computer crime" often overlook these factors, as if so-called "computer criminals" were engaging in willful behavior that they agreed was criminal. Many hackers maintain the common libertarian argument that their so-called crimes are victimless and do not damage property, since information cannot be property. If a person breaks into your home and reads every book in your house, but then leaves without taking a thing and politely locks the door on the way out, has a crime been committed? The definition of theft is preventing the use of someone else's private property by taking it away from them. The question is not facile - but current computer law still maintains the law is broken at the point of entry, not what you do once you are on the system.

I would say that the "computer underground" can be said to be made up of individuals engaged in a number of illegal and quasi-illegal activities, namely, as Meyer suggests, hackers, phone phreaks (people adept at manipulating the telephone system), and software pirates. But it also consists of cypherpunks (people who work at cracking and creating codes), media pirates (sattelite TV piracy becoming one of the fastest growing areas), virus/Trojan horse/worm writers (people who create self-propagating autonomous programs), and many true-life "1st generation type" hackers who are alive today, do not engage in any illegal activities, but work to combat "the system" by doing such things as distributing software for free, creating Freenets that don't require expensive user accounts, and creating encryption systems for people that the National Security Agency (NSA) does not have the "keys" to crack. As some writers have noted, there are other factors that link the computer underground, one being a common interest in the science-fiction genre "cyberpunk," popularized by such writers as William F. Gibson and Bruce Sterling.

Many in the computer underground believe that the fictional future depicted by Gibson - where corporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems replace governments and engage in corporate warfare over access to each others' databases - is rapidly coming true. I could speak at length about other things which could be concerned as "marker traits" for the computer underground subculture (which in this sense reduplicates other youth cultures such as punk or mod) - their preference for musical styles involving digital sampling and lyrical appropriation, e.g. rave, industrial, house, techno, hiphop, dub, trance, ambient, and acid jazz (often collectively called simply "techno"); dress and body adornment (especially the use of circuitry as earrings and jewelry or the fetishizing of adopting prosthetics, piercing, and other artificial technologies/invasions into the body - in essence, "modern primitive" chic); or "virtual" social organization (the use of BBSes, conference calling, voicemail systems, the Internet, etc. for communicating and coordinating activities). But I am here today to talk about discourse - and I do believe the discourse of the computer underground is another feature that marks it as a distinctive subculture.

The Hacker's Jargon

Many people are aware of the so-called "Hacker Jargon file." This contains a lexicon of most of the interesting words and phrases from 1960s MIT Hackerspeak. Recently, authors Eric Raymond and Guy Steele have tried to bring it to print in their newly released Hacker's Dictionary. I would argue that, as with any other linguistic jargon, hacker jargon has evolved a great deal beyond this original formation. Mostly, due to the evolution of the computer underground subculture, it has incorporated a large number of terms from a) science fiction b) the cant of various criminal and deviant subcultures c) the changing nature of computer technology and electronic discourse in the 80s and 90s and d) television, esp. spoof shows such as Monty Python and so on. But it's worthwhile understanding some of the conventions of MIT Hackerspeak, for it's at the root of a great deal of modern hacker talk, and often appears in various forms on the Internet among people otherwise marginal to the "computer underground."

The Hackerspeak of the early 60s was electronic discourse not so much because it was electronically mediated - email, chat systems, and BBSes came much later - but because it was formed in an environment of constant interaction with computers and electronic technology. Most of the features of Hackerspeak came from the MIT hackers' way of emulating the way they "spoke" to their computers through programming languages such as Lisp in the ways that they communicated with each other; and attempting to come up with novel ways to characterize each others' habits and style of interacting with programming code and technology. It is not surprising, for example, that Hackerspeak is principally parsimonious, trying to summarize complex results in one acronym or concatenation ("GIGO," etc.) or simple phrase, for the Hackers were also taught that parsimony in computer language was essential, and that the goal of their endeavors was the produce the most elegant result with the simplest possible code, if only because access time to the mainframe was so precious.

People who work for extensive periods of time with computers are noted for their ability to interrupt a sentence when speaking to someone, then come back hours later and resume with the completion of that sentence. And why not? This is what they often did when programming. Hackers are noted for describing their human-human interactions in human-computer terms, and thus they often express surprise over criticisms of the way they "interface" with people, since they look at communication as primarily being data exchange. As Sherry Turkle notes in The Second Self, hackers often described computer behavior in anthropomorphic terms; but they also modelled their selves on the computer as well, and utilized metaphors from computer performance to describe human behavior. We can understand a lot of Hackerspeak from this viewpoint. We know that language is determined by environment (and thus the worn-out dictum that some Esqimuax have over 30 words for "snow") and people obsessed with their interactions with computers are likely to transfer their ways of describing those interactions into their human relations as well.

So what was/is the Hacker's Jargon? A good deal of Hacker Jargon revolved around such grammatical features as verb doubling as a point of emphasis and the generation of unusual nouns from the addition of suffixes such as "age," "tude," "ness," or "ity." (Such nouns include "lossage," "losertude," "hackification," and "porosity") Another common feature was soundalike slang, such as converting "historical reasons" to "hysterical raisins." Some of the other conventions of Hackerspeak including appending the suffix -p to sentences (a feature derived from Lisp programming), and employing reversed consonant order (for example, converting "creeping featurism" to "feeping creaturism.") Also, the use of inarticulations and programmer talk, such as using the words "BEGIN" and "END" to actually encapsulate paragraphs of conversation. In the Hacker lexicon, there were novel uses of old words ("boot"), unusual attempts at combining unlikely words into phrases (i.e. "core dump,") and the coining of many new words to encapsulate computer situations that seemed beyond the pale of ordinary life - "crufty" being a notable example. It's hard to separate original hacker jargon from the jargon crystallizing around the computer industry as a whole ("user-friendly," etc.) but hacker jargon stands out mostly due to its highly eccentric and erratic conventions.

Much of hacker jargon reflected the topsy-turvy insular universe of the MIT AI lab. "Users" were "losers" - people who only saw computers as things to get a task done. But real hackers were "winners" - "winning" being defined as mastering the machine and understanding all the undocumented features that enable it to do things it may not have been originally designed to do. Here are some of the other famous early hacker neologisms: (those of you who've ever played Adventure or Zork or hung around an old-time computer lab have run across some of them.)

• BAGBITER 1. n. Equipment or program that fails, usually intermittently. 2. BAGBITING: adj. Failing hardware or software. "This bagbiting system won't let me get out of spacewar." Usage: verges on obscenity. Grammatically separable; one may speak of "biting the bag". Synonyms: LOSER, LOSING, CRETINOUS, BLETCHEROUS, BARFUCIOUS, CHOMPER, CHOMPING.
• CRUFTY [from "cruddy"] adj. 1. Poorly built, possibly overly complex. "This is standard old crufty DEC software". Hence CRUFT, n. shoddy construction. Also CRUFT, v. [from hand cruft, pun on hand craft] to write assembler code for something normally (and better) done by a compiler. 2. Unpleasant, especially to the touch, often with encrusted junk. Like spilled coffee smeared with peanut butter and catsup. Hence CRUFT, n. disgusting mess. 3. Generally unpleasant.
• FEEP 1. n. The soft bell of a display terminal (except for a VT-52!); a beep. 2. v. To cause the display to make a feep sound. TTY's do not have feeps. Alternate forms: BEEP, BLEEP, or just about anything suitably onomatopoeic. The term BREEDLE is sometimes heard at SAIL, where the terminal bleepers are not particularly "soft" (they sound more like the musical equivalent of sticking out one's tongue). The "feeper" on a VT-52 has been compared to the sound of a '52 Chevy stripping its gears.
• FROBNICATE v. To manipulate or adjust, to tweak. Derived from FROBNITZ (q.v.). Usually abbreviated to FROB. Thus one has the saying "to frob a frob". See TWEAK and TWIDDLE. Usage: FROB, TWIDDLE, and TWEAK sometimes connote points along a continuum. FROB connotes aimless manipulation; TWIDDLE connotes gross manipulation, often a coarse search for a proper setting; TWEAK connotes fine-tuning. If someone is turning a knob on an oscilloscope, then if he's carefully adjusting it he is probably tweaking it; if he is just turning it but looking at the screen he is probably twiddling it; but if he's just doing it because turning a knob is fun, he's frobbing it.
• GLORK 1. interj. Term of mild surprise, usually tinged with outrage, as when one attempts to save the results of two hours of editing and finds that the system has just crashed. 2. Used as a name for just about anything. See FOO. 3. v. Similar to GLITCH (q.v.), but usually used reflexively. "My program just glorked itself."
• KLUGE (kloodj) alt. KLUDGE [from the German "kluge", clever] n. 1. A Rube Goldberg device in hardware or software. 2. A clever programming trick intended to solve a particular nasty case in an efficient, if not clear, manner. Often used to repair bugs. Often verges on being a crock. 3. Something that works for the wrong reason. 4. v. To insert a kluge into a program. "I've kluged this routine to get around that weird bug, but there's probably a better way." Also KLUGE UP. 5. KLUGE AROUND: To avoid by inserting a kluge. 6. (WPI) A feature which is implemented in a RUDE manner.
• MUNG (variant: MUNGE) [recursive acronym for Mung Until No Good] v. 1. To make changes to a file, often large-scale, usually irrevocable. Occasionally accidental. See BLT. 2. To destroy, usually accidentally, occasionally maliciously. The system only mungs things maliciously.
• SMOP [Simple (or Small) Matter of Programming] n. A piece of code, not yet written, whose anticipated length is significantly greater than its complexity. Usage: used to refer to a program that could obviously be written, but is not worth the trouble.

These are just a few of the examples from Guy L. Steele's Hacker's Dictionary. Many of the things that are notable about early hacker talk is that it uses a great deal of acronyms. This is probably simply "spreadage" of the acronymization that was occurring in many technical fields of the 50s and 60s. Some hacker acronyms, such as FOOBAR, (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition) may have been borrowed from other engineering fields. Certainly, many hacker terms have already made it into mass culture, "spazz" and "glitch" being notable ones. But what early hacker talk shows is a certain sense of playfulness with language - reflecting the hacker attitude that working with computers was play rather than work. Viewing language as an instruction set for exchanging commands between people, hackers felt it was necessary to "tweak" it, just as they might "twiddle" computer code until their beloved PDP-10s could understand them. Not surprisingly, hacker jargon is full of derogative terms, reflecting the competitiveness between the MIT hackers to see who could come up with the best hacks.

I provide this introduction to 60s Hacker Jargon for two reasons - one, that namely it is still with us in many areas of computing, and can be found all over the net in places where nobody even knows what an old (or new) hacker is; and two, it is the template on which 90s Hacker jargon is built. By and large, today's Hacker's jargon begins with the MIT/SAIL Hacker talk of yore, and appends a whole bunch of syntactic, grammatical, and lexical innovations, based on the differing experiences and motivations and self-identifications of the new hackers. Just as the Hacker jargon of that time was based on their technological environment - unwieldy time-sharing systems - the hacker jargon of today is based on a different technological environment: a massive internetworking of computer systems all over the globe into a seamless web. It's also based on a different social environment - namely the anathematization and criminalization of their activities. The 90s hackers see themselves as the heirs of the 60s hackers, but by and large, their 'parents' have denied them, largely due to the actions of 'dark side' hackers who they feel have put a stain on the hacker name.

Our Phathers, the Phreaks and Pirates and the Cypherpunks

The discourse of the computer underground is truly electronic, because by and large it involves the exchange of communication through electronic media, the most popular of which being hacker bulletin board systems (BBSes.) Even moreso than early hacker talk, the discourse of the computer underground is shaped by the constraints and features of the electronic (ASCII) medium. The MIT hackers mostly communicated through verbal interchange; after all, all they had to do was walk next door and complain about something to one of their peers. But today's hackers are geographically distant, and by necessity must use electronic technologies to conquer that distance. The cost of information exchange - specifically the impossibly high costs of AT & T long distance rates in the old days - was/is a source of constant complaint, and a provocation for many to turn to phreaking. It's impossible to understand the nature of today's computer underground or its discourse without understanding the history and discourse of phreaking.

I won't go into the whole history of "blue boxing," Cap'n Crunch (John Draper), and TAP and its Youth International Party Line (YIPL.) By and large, the beginnings of phreaking lie in the discovery that the generation of a specific tone - at the 2600 Hz frequency - one could control the electromechanical switching system of the telephone system. Magazines like Esquire focused on how this could enable people to make phone calls for free; but diehard phreaks were interested in using this trick to explore the phone system, and all its mysterious trunks, branches, loop lines, switches, and nodes. Just like MIT hackers who wanted to explore all the hidden byways of the circuitry of the PDP-10, or the tunnel system under their campus, the phreaks wanted to know the ins and outs of Ma Bell. But some had a specific political edge to their efforts: they thought "The Company" or "The Death Star" (their name for the AT & T logo) were depriving people of their right to communicate cheaply and easily.

When AT & T discovered to their horror that outside people could control the phone system to this degree, they began replacing electromechanical switches with the computer-controlled digital switches that they use today. This had two notable effects - it made "crashes" of the system more likely (and thus more likely to be blamed on phreaks, just as the Bell crash of 1990 which led to Operation Sundevil was) as any effort at computerization inevitably does; and also brought about a convergence of hacking and phreaking in the early 1980s. After all, if computers were now controlling the phone system, then a phreak would need the skills of a hacker in order to ply his trade. Most hackers began phreaking in order to avoid the massive long-distance charges for calling their favorite hacker boards, and phreakers began hacking to come up with new ways to manipulate the phone system. Kevin Mitnick, for example, replaced many of the automated operator messages on NYNEX's system with his own voice, and rerouted calls in one case from a government agency to a bordello.

Phreaker discourse is of course heavily laden with technical jargon borrowed from Bell Labs' own technical manuals. Phreaks are expected as a matter of course to know the ins and outs of telecommunications lingo, and they know a fellow phreak by their use of these specialized acronyms. Thus, a good phreak knows that what most people call a "pay phone" is really a COCOT (Customer-Owned Coin-Operated Telephone.) Some of the more intimidating acronyms that are found sprinkled throughout phreaker talk include:

• ADCCP Advanced Data Communications Control Procedure
• AUTOSEVCOM AUTOmatic SEcure Voice COMmunications
• BORSCHT Battery, Overvoltage, Ringing, Supervision, Coding, Hybrid Testing
• BRAT Business Residence Account Tracking system
• CATLAS Centralized Automatic Trouble Locating and Analysis System
• CLASS Centralized Local Area Selective Signaling
• COSMOS COmputerized System for Mainframe OperationS
• DSBAM Double-SideBand Amplitude Module
• LATIS Loop Activity Tracking Information System
• MATFAP Metropolitan Area Transmission Facility Analysys Program

You get the idea. Phreakers rely on these dense technical acronyms for different reasons than the phone company. (Well, actually, it's the same reason - to prevent knowledge from falling into the wrong hands.) Mostly, they use them to recognize a fellow phreak from a "narc" or other individual in law enforcement, who is assumed to be ignorant of the intricacies of the phone system. Anybody who calls a COCOT a "pay phone," for example, is suspect. Phreaks also began the widespread convention of inverting the "f" and "ph" characters - a practice that now can be found in a lot of mass culture, such as the name of the band "Phish." It's not uncommon to see phreaks describe something as "phunky phat phresh." This inversion is a sign of coolness to phellow phreaks. This convention led to a series of other common inversions - including switching the "s" at the end of a word to a "z" and a beginning "c" to a "k" and converting the alphabetic character o to the numeric 0 . The soundz of the words remain the same - but they look k00ler.

Another important source of geneaology for hacker jargon was the discourse of the first pirates. Before BBSes ever really began to focus on phreaking and hacking, they were hotbeds for software piracy. Some of the first bulletin boards were pirate boards, where the copy protection on commercial software was "cracked" (hence, the origins of the term "cracker" to refer to some "dark side" hackers) and then made available to be downloaded - as long as people offered money, or more commonly, other pirated programs, in return. Pirate boards were often known as "elite" if they had a large number of expensive commercial software programs available for downloading. These boards often distinguished themselves from other boards by using a combination of lowercase and uppercase alphanumeric characters, and a lack of spaces in their name. (The numeric characters often replaced letters or sounds.) The origins of this practice probably lie in the case-insensitivity of most early text parsers, which treated a small "t" and a capital "T" as basically the same, and the fact that many systems required logins that contained one or more numeric or non-alphabetic characters, as well as the refusal of some computer languages to permit spaces in their variables.

Common names for these early pirate boards were often things like HoUSe4SofTWaRez or PLacE2SwAp... this is a practice that continues today, especially with the names of hacker boards and hacker handles. They also started referring to programs as "warez." Thus, in my own area code, we have eLiTE boards such as InSaNE DoMAin, and hacker handles like BorN2HaCk... today, many hackers look down on people who are "merely" pirates, because they are more interested in getting free programs than in exploring networked systems or hacking, and such people are called "warez d00dz." If they are merely after codes for the phone system, without offering anything in return (reciprocity is important in the hacker subculture), then they are demeaned as "kodez kidz." Many purely pirate boards continue to operate today, with small sections on phreaking and hacking. But a large source for their interest - tools and schemes for cracking copy protection - has faded since many software producers no longer utilize copy protection.

Another area of professional technical discourse that has come to dominate the computer underground has been cryptography. Largely controlled by mathematicians and the National Security Agency (NSA) for many years, applied cryptography has become a matter of concern for hackers interested in foiling government surveillance and maintaing their electronic privacy. These hackers, often known today as "cypherpunks," specialize in developing techniques for foiling cryptography as a method of securing data while simultaneously coming up with strategies (such as the Public-Key cryptosystem Pretty Good Privacy, PGP, or the newer method of hiding messages in graphic images, Cypherella) for protecting their messages from NSA snooping. Since cryptographic techniques have been seized upon by many companies for securing communication (esp. wireless, such as cellular phones) or encoding passwords and other data, hackers have been forced to ply the cryptography trade, much as phreaks have been forced to turn to hacking. Cypherpunks understand that crypto is the key to the information economy, as it's the only way in which the legitimacy of electronic funds transfer and "digital signatures" (the authenticity of messages) can be maintained.

Cypherpunks are some of the most politically motivated of hackers, and they particularly oppose government-controlled and designed cryptosystems like the Clipper Chip which have "holes" specifically built in for when the FBI, etc., feels it necessary to initiate surveillance. They often tout the advantages of "totally secure cryptography," which often arouses the horror of law enforcement officials, who foresee the largest users of uncrackable ciphers to be pedophiles, terrorists, drug dealers, and, of course, hackers. Largely because of cypherpunk activity, words from cryptography have crept into computer underground discourse, even among people who don't really know much about it, or even use computer crypto programs.

Some of the crypto terms that often turn up in C.U. discourse:

• blob -- the crypto equivalent of a locked box. A cryptographic primitive for bit commitment, with the properties that a blobs can represent a 0 or a 1, that others cannot tell be looking whether itUs a 0 or a 1, that the creator of the blob can "open" the blob to reveal the contents, and that no blob can be both a 1 and a 0. An example of this is a flipped coin covered by a hand.
• collusion -- wherein several participants cooperate to deduce the identity of a sender or receiver, or to break a cipher. Most cryptosystems are sensitive to some forms of collusion. Much of the work on implementing DC Nets, for example, involves ensuring that colluders cannot isolate message senders and thereby trace origins and destinations of mail.
• digital pseudonym -- basically, a "crypto identity." A way for individuals to set up accounts with various organizations without revealing more information than they wish. Users may have several digital pseudonyms, some used only once, some used over the course of many years. Ideally, the pseudonyms can be linked only at the will of the holder. In the simplest form, a public key can serve as a digital pseudonym and need not be linked to a physical identity.
• mixes -- David Chaum's term for a box which performs the function of mixing, or decorrelating, incoming and outgoing electronic mail messages. The box also strips off the outer envelope (i.e., decrypts with its private key) and remails the message to the address on the inner envelope. Tamper-resistant modules may be used to prevent cheating and forced disclosure of the mapping between incoming and outgoing mail. A sequence of many remailings effectively makes tracing sending and receiving impossible. Contrast this with the software version, the DC protocol.
• padding -- sending extra messages to confuse eavesdroppers and to defeat traffic analysis. Also adding random bits to a message to be enciphered.
• spoofing, or masquerading -- posing as another user. Used for stealing passwords, modifying files, and stealing cash. Digital signatures and other authentication methods are useful to prevent this. Public keys must be validated and protected to ensure that others don't substitute their own public keys which users may then unwittingly use.
• trap-door -- In cryptography, a piece of secret information that allows the holder of a private key to invert a normally hard to invert function.

The Coming of Cyberpunk: Science Fiction and Role-Playing

The roots of the word "cyberpunk" are fairly simple. Cyber- is a prefix derived from the term cybernetics , itself derived from the Greek word for helmsman or navigator, kubernetes. Norbert Weiner used ('coined'?) the term in the late 1940s to refer to autodirective systems that are capable of 'steering' or responding to feedback, much in the same way that a helmsman of a ship makes subtle changes in the course of a ship based in changes in the behavior of the sea. Though originally meant as a means of modelling electromechanical systems (thermostats, vacuum pumps, etc.), cybernetic models quickly spread into other disciplines, and were used to describe things as disparate as digital-electronic communication, the weather, and, by anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson, human cultures. Cybernetics, systems theory, game theory, and other allied mathematical-logical techniques were quickly seized upon by the social sciences, especially economics. Prominent in most of these models were that cybernetic systems were homeostatic , and constantly using negative/positive feedback, self-mapping, autocorrection, and structural modification to maintain some sort of critical balance required for their continued existence.

"Punk," of course, comes from a prominent subculture of Britain in the 1970s. Though it followed in a long line of youth subcultures with peculiar musical tastes in the British Isles - the teds, the mods, the skins, the hippies; and since, the ravers and zippies - punk was perhaps moreso than all the others, a youth movement of negation and refusal. More lower-class and lumpenproletarianized, more defiant, more violent, more angry, more politically disaffected, and more odd-looking than all their predecessors, the punks quickly attracted the attention of English and other social scientists. Their musical idols like the Sex Pistols openly sang of a nihlistic world view where kids had "no future"; mocked all possible institutions, no matter how sacred (esp. the Queen); and performed an anti-Muzak where volume, energy, and wildness came to replace the cult of virtuosity, talent, and pretty-boy image which had come to surround rock n' roll. Punks openly proclaimed their allegiance to Anarchy and declared war on the manners, morals, and stiff upper lips of the British class structure.

So, while 'cyber' has basically become a catch-all prefix for 'cool' in our digitally saturated age ("Wow! That MTV program was really cyber !"), the term "cyberpunk" came to refer to a rather specific subgenre of science fiction in the mid-1980s. Within the universe of science fiction, writers like Gibson, Sterling, and Stephenson tried to carve out a specific niche which was notable for its fast-moving, high-tech, aggressive, grittily realistic plots. Cyberpunk offered readers a very near and possible future, rather than the vast sprawling cosmic visions of Asimov or Heinlein. While it might seem hard to unite the nerdy engineers of MIT with the street kids of Manchester, "cyberpunk" sci fi writer William Gibson was able to do it with his novel Neuromancer. In Gibson's dystopian future, the central plot device is the Matrix, which is basically the interconnected web of digital representations of all the data in computers in the world. Gibson's "console cowboys" were able to "jack" into "cyberspace" - the term he coined for the "consensual hallucination" one perceived when they "uploaded" their consciousness into this digital virtual-reality realm.

Gibson portrays a world in which national governments have dissolved and vast hyperurban zones are controlled by multinational corporations ruled by Artificial Intelligences (AIs) and dynasties kept immortal through cloning and cryogenics, whose rule is predicated on the fact that they control all the data on citizens and other economic and social transactions. (Sound familiar? That world is already partially here. Big Brother is here; but I assure you Pepsico knows more about your market preferences and consumer choices than the government. Whether you like it or not, media conglomerates and advertising firms have assigned you all into pools of people organized around identifying through product choice and responding to specific signifiers.) Gibson's antiheroes are the 'console cowboys,' data thieves who are used by the different corporations to swipe away the precious information-commodities of their opponents. The stakes for the cowboys are high, because "black ice" and other Matrix defense systems can "flatline" (terminate) them for good, and they are likely to meet hostile AIs or counteragents while in cyberspace.

Gibson's protagonists often start out as small-time operators who discover that there are big-time forces swirling around them. They often discover that shadowy ancient political forces (like the Japanese Yakuza or the Voudoun priests and their AI-loa deities) are calling the shots in the high-tech future. They move from being parasites and pawns of the system to trying to bring it down, much like the character in The Shockwave Rider, who writes a "worm" to crash the global computer network. (Life imitated art, as it often does, when hacker Robert Tappan Morris came close to this feat in 1988.) The new hackers of the 80s devoured Gibson's fiction like candy. They identified with his characters and fantasized that, like them, they were playing for real stakes, with a real sense of political purpose and mission, and were struggling against computerized domination and Machievellian corporate intrigue. Some of the 80s computer underground, like Michael Synergy, began calling themselves "cyberpunks," and started identifying themselves as part of a "cyberpunk movement," issuing manifestoes, programmes, and threats.

But, much like the earlier punks, much of their resistance was much more on symbolic terrain than on actual. Very little "computer terrorism" was ever actually carried out. No systems were targeted with "logic bombs," most computer viruses plagued hobbyist bulletin-board systems rather than big-time Pentagon defense systems, AT & T's telephone network fell from its own misprogramming and not from outside "attack," and most datatheft raids produced boring corporate memos and private love letters rather than ultra-secret government projects or shocking patent data. Raising the level of symbolic threat to the crescendo that they did, though, was enough for the government to take action, and the Secret Service carried out its infamous Operation Sundevil raids of 1990, putting many cyberpunks out of business, and causing enough of a furor about the rights of cybercitizens for Mitch Kapor and Perry Barlow to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose very first acts were to mount a legal defense for some of the busted hackers.

The main point of all this was that terms from cyberpunk science fiction became part of everyday computer underground discourse. Gibson, as technologically illiterate as they come (who wrote his novel on an old manual typewriter and was disappointed when he saw his first real disk drive), was lionized by a group of "nerds" whose alienation from school usually came from the fact that they were too smart (rather than too rebellious); but who were able to transform themselves into "cyber-punks" by adopting the tough, street-talking manner of Gibson's characters in his fictional world, where participation in the information economy is not voluntary, and is literally a matter of life and death. Not surprisingly, one of the things that became part and parcel of computer underground discourse was imitation of the argot of criminal gangs and syndicates. Castigated as "computer criminals" and "sociopathic deviants" by the law for their often innocent exploration of the back doors of cyberspace, the computer underground started talking like criminals, acting out the secret fantasy and adoration for the "Bonnie and Clyde" lifestyle that many "straights" often have.

Many of the early hackers were frequent players of role-playing games, especially early dice, model, and paper games like Dungeons and Dragons. Not surprisingly, the influence of Tolkien and D & D on the 70s hacker culture was quite great, and spawned a lot of the early text-adventure games like Colossal Cave and Wumpus. Role-playing games undoubtely influenced the first generation of hackers, and this is part of the reason why MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) were some of the first Internet recreations to really take off (as well as the chess servers.) It also explains the ongoing predilection for handles among both old and new hackers. In cyberspace, where nobody can really tell what other people really look like, role-playing is often encouraged (pretending to be a different gender, for example)- much to the detriment of people who are not prepared for all the cat-and-mouse games it leads to. Role-playing is an old hat in computer science, who has been obsessed from the beginning of whether an Artificial Intelligence (AI) could role-play a human being convincingly (the much ballyhooed Turing Test.)

Much of hacker discourse (and discursive behavior, e.g. flaming) needs to be understood as role-playing. Few people realize this. (The "VAXINator" may bellow about how he's preparing to crash every mainframe on campus. But, IRL [in real life], 14 year-old Tommy Jones not only probably wouldn't do that, but also probably doesn't know how to either. Of course, people get lost in the roles they are playing; and so the VAXinator might be forced to do something drastic anyway to uphold his 'virtual' reputation among his peers.) Shortly after cyberpunk sci-fi became hot, a whole rash of cyberpunk role-playing games became released, such as Shadowrun, which combined cyberpunk elements with the trolls and demons of Dungeons & Dragons. One of the big creators of such RPG games was Steve Jackson Games, who had the misfortune to be raided by the Secret Service when it was thought that an employee's BBS, Phoenix Project, contained a "sensitive" document from the Bell Company's 911 System. The Secret Service also seized prepress digital copies of their role-playing game, GURPS Cyberpunk , calling it for no apparent reason "a manual for computer crime!" One of mankind's oldest roles, cops n' robbers, was being acted out.

Hackers often kept accounts on Phoenix Project, mainly because Loyd Blankenship, one of Jackson's employees, liked talking to them to get ideas for his games, and because they liked many of the RPG modules that Jackson made. Unknown to Blankenship, some of them were also using the system to exchange basically 'illegal' information, such as long-distance phone codes. There were many levels of irony involved in the Secret Service bust. The name of Jackson's own BBS, Illuminati BBS, came from a game based on sci-fi writer Robert Anton Wilson's book Illuminatus, where he brings right-wing paranoia to life by suggesting that the so-called Bavarian Illuminati are real and are the secret conspiracy behind the world's misfortunes. Wilson's wicked Illuminati are resisted only by the Discordians, a pseudoreligion which worships Eris (Our Lady of Discord) and promotes an anarcho-libertarian philosophy, and whose invention has provided the basis for a number of subsequent "real life" pseudoreligions, including the Church of the SubGenius, whose deity is a piece of clip art (the Head of Bob) that is probably in more hacker signature files than any other icon. When German hacker Markus Hess was found after his suicide, he had a copy of Illuminatus on him, and friends said that he often claimed that the fictional story was true.

Cyberpunk role-playing games, and especially Steve Jackson's Cyberpunk and Hacker games, have also influenced the discourse of the computer underground a great deal. Role-playing is the stock and trade of a hacker's existence. Much of a hacker's technique involves Social Engineering (SE) and Reverse Social Engineering (RSE), where the hacker role-plays over the phone either a knowledgable authority (such as a line technician or system operator) or a clueless person (such as an academic at a university who's forgotten their password) in order to get people to divulge information. But, like so many of us in our postmodern world, they've lost track of where the role stops and the actor steps back into real life. Many mostly abandon their real lives of school, friends, and family for the role-world of hackerdom, with its moves and countermoves. Why sit as Tommy Jones in History and be criticized for penmanship, when on Demon Roach Underground he can be Digital Destroyer and bask in people praising him for that "ferocious hack" into Lotus' Corps. pension file? Computer underground discourse is more than influenced by role-playing; it is role-playing.

Living in an ASCII Wonderland

To understand the discourse of the computer underground, which as I've stressed earlier is doubly an electronic discourse (because it's about electronic subjects and is electronically mediated), it's important to understand the constraints of using E-mail systems and electronic conferencing. These constraints have led to a number of features about electronic discourse in general, which hackers have either modified, overexaggerated, or imitated. Although electronic discourse may change over the next few years, as systems like HTML and SGML allow people to modify fonts and include images to better express themselves, up until recently, electronic conferencing was limited to the impoverished ASCII environment, the least common denominator that enabled all computer systems, whether UNIX, DOS, VMS, or JCL, to "talk" to each other. Basically, ASCII assigns all the upper and lower case letters, numbers, basic punctuation and emphatic marks, and some specialized control characters (like linefeeds) to one of 256 possible values (i.e. one byte of 8 binary bits - 2 to the 8th power.)

Most electronic conferencing takes place on computer systems where users maintain an account and must login to use it. People often choose some combination of their first and last names for their login, since this is often the only way they can be identified on the system by other users. But even the first wave of hackers and computer users felt it was unnecessary to use one's own given name, and probably more fun to use a "handle," much like CB users often use to identify themselves. Most systems were case-insensitive, allowed only short one-word logins (with no spaces), and often insisted (for security purposes) that one or more characters be numeric or diacritical marks. Thus, many chose handles like "Seeker1." Most users choose handles that identify favorite fictional characters, or personal qualities, or pet nicknames. Early hackers often used names from fantasy or science fiction; today's hackers often borrow names from famous real-life or fictional outlaws or villains. One hacker in Gainesville went by the handle "(Erich) Hoenecker," the deposed East German dictator. Another nationally known hacker goes by "Immanuel (Goldstein)," the propaganda-generated, villified "enemy of the people" of Orwell's 1984.

Since most electronic conferencing systems use only one standard font, and ASCII contains no code for character modification (i.e. underlining, bold, italicizing, etc.), expressing emotion through email, etc. was an early problem. This was often solved through the use of CAPITAL LETTERS for emphasis, or putting words in asterisks or underlining them with carat marks, although the emotion behind the emphasis was hard to grasp for the person on the other end. A better impromptu solution was devised - the use of "smilies," or emoticons, consisting of combinations of ASCII characters which look like sideways facial expressions. For example, the colon, dash, and right parenthesis :-) look like a smiley face on its side. Putting this next to something that might be mistaken for hostile can enable people to detect sarcasm, for example. Like many other things, creating new smilies became somewhat of an intricate art, and as usual, hackers took it to an extreme.

Nonetheless, even smilies cannot prevent people from misreading the emotional intent behind electronic communication, and when you combine this with the fact that people often simply feel less communicative restraint in cyberspace (mainly because the guy on the other end may not know who you are, and even if he did, he couldn't do anything to you), this often leads to what is known as "flaming" or "flame wars." "Flaming" probably comes from the gay community, where it referred primarily to the habit of drag queens overdoing their personal decor. In cyberspace, it refers to the extremely overdone art of verbal abuse that people often heap on each other through email. Since quoting others is often done by adding marks to the beginning of a sentence, such as a right angular bracket >, long flame "threads" often result in "cascading," or an energetic piling of comment on top of comment on top of comment. The practice of "spamming," a term that probably comes from Monty Python and refers to the act of people posting messages indiscriminately and too frequently (thus clogging peoples' mailboxes with junk e-mail), is one sure way to start a flame war.

Many email systems often have sharp length restrictions on messages. Ones that are too long or too complicated may clog the mail buffer or use up too much disk space. Thus, this forces all users to employ a good deal of parsimony in communication. They usually do this in one of several ways. A common way is the use of simpler acronyms for frequently used expressions - IMHO for "in my humble opinion," IRL for "in real life," FAQ for "frequently asked questions" or BBIOM for "be back in one minute," for example. Another device is the use of concatenations or abbreviations - "sysop" for system operator or "listserv" for mailing list server. Yet another way is to use numerics in place of vowel sounds, such as "2 Tired" or "4 You." Handles are commonly shortened this way. Elements like these, which were originally devised for systems with sharp content restrictions, still predominate in conferencing environments where these restrictions no longer exist.

Lastly, most mail systems allow a person to include a signature, which may contain information not in their "headers." The information in this file, the .sig file, is normally used to identify a person's real name and institution. Many people, esp. hackers, are extremely clever with their .sigs, and usually use it to include their favorite quotes or carefully drawn illustrations done completely in ASCII characters. Another file, the .plan file, which contains information for when the person is "fingered" by another user, can also be similarly manipulated. .Sig files have become an important part of the verbal artistry of communicating in an ASCII environment, and hackers use them to show off their cleverness or occasionally enclose important information (such as their public key.) Hackers are not unique in flaming, acronymization, sigging, using handles, etc., but the creative ways in which they utilize these constraints of the medium to their advantage do mark their electronic discourse as distinct from other people in cyberspace.

The New Hacker's Jargon: Form and Function

Some of the features of hacker jargon of the 90s are, as suggested earlier, intensifications of 60s hacker talk. Hacker jargon today primarily functions in one similar respect - it's a tool for brokering reputations. Many of the terms used in the discourse of the computer underground essentially are devices for either derogation or braggadoccio - tearing down the reputation of another hacker or elevating one's own reputation. Hackers who break the hacker ethic are no-good "crackers"; those who don't know what they're doing but keep asking people for free tips are low-life "warez doodz" and "codez kidz"; people who don't know the power of hacking are "lusers"; people who are not as good as they brag they are are "posers" or "wannabes"; and the genuinely hated ones are simply "bagbiters." Spoof terms abound for systems or computer companies that are despised, like "WinDoze" or "Micro$hit." Praise terms in new hackerspeak, like "winner," are reserved for people who show both technical mastery and the boldness to "go root," or shoot for controlling the root node of an entire system.

However, new hacker jargon also differs from the old hackerspeak because it serves one new and different function - secrecy. The old hackers used their jargon to convey complex relationships with computers that couldn't be "put into plain English"; but they didn't employ it to conceal information from people or disguise their activities. Because new hackers are so afraid of being 'narced' or busted by law enforcement, the jargon of the hacker functions like a Masonic grip - people know who another hacker is in cyberspace by the use of their jargon, and thus avoid accidentally 'blabbing' to the feds. Thus, new hacker jargon functions to exclude , to conceal information from people who are unable to display the "linguistic competence" that shows them to truly be a fellow hacker. Hacker jargon, like any criminal argot, functions to conceal illegal activities behind euphemisms and code words, as well as to hopefully scare off Secret Service types with a dense fog of technobabble.

And it also serves to identify the new hacker as a unique subculture on the continually growing arena of cyberspace. They use their jargon both to mark themselves off as "cooler" than other computer users, and to symbolically link themselves to the 1st generation of hackers, the people who were around and knew the back roads of the Internet before all these ignorant "newbies" came along - people who "don't know what a command line prompt is." Hacker style is flamboyant - their way of showing off that they are just basically more "with it" than other computer people. They try and intimidate other users with threats, warning them that they can shut down their account, ruin their credit rating, intercept their Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT), etc. Hacker talk is used to impress and gain awe from other users, who are assumed to lack the technical know-how and the screw-the-authorities spirit that hackers have.

 

3. Is there a Hacker Ethic for 90s Hackers?

Introduction

The goal of this text analysis project was to take the texts of the computer underground and to analyze them for the presence of a) knowledge about the Hacker Ethic and b) evolution of that Ethic. Many writers, such as Steven Levy, bemoan the fact that modern-day hackers (the computer underground) are not worthy of the name because they do not live up to the principles of the original Hacker Ethic, and as unethical individuals, should simply be called "computer terrorists" or "juvenile delinquents." I sought to examine whether 90s new hackers knew of the old Hacker Ethic, if they had added anything to it, and the reasons why they felt they acted differently from their predecessors. I broadened my text analysis to look at what they saw as ethical violations, and reasons why some might repudiate the Hacker Ethic or the idea of having an ethic.

As my text project evolved, I found that after discovering the existence of a new hacker ethic for new hackers, I was wondering if people expressing the principles of the new ethic also expressed the old. I expected that the adoption of a new set of ethics would not necessarily mean the complete abandonment of the old. This would establish some continuity between both groups of hackers, and some familiarity by new hackers with the old ideals. If the hypothesis of continuity turns out to be true, then new hackers are not as different from old hackers as authors like Levy (or certain computer security professionals) might claim. They would then not only have their own ethics, but also utilize some ethical principles of their predecessors.

I coded 29 documents from the computer underground online using the NUD*IST text analysis system. I allowed new codes to emerge from other codes, based on the sort of interactive text-searching and investigation process that NUDIST makes possible. I decided to code a few factors that were not directly relevant to my tests, but could provide avenues for future investigation. Finally, after coding, I came up with two tests to look at evidence for continuity between the old and new hacker ethics.

Who is the Computer Underground?

I define the computer underground as members of the following six groups. Sometimes I refer to the CU as "90s hackers" or "new hackers," as opposed to old hackers, who are hackers (old sense of the term) from the 60s who subscribed to the original Hacker Ethic. See below.

1. Hackers (Crackers, system intruders) - These are people who attempt to penetrate security systems on remote computers. This is the new sense of the term, whereas the old sense of the term simply referred to a person who was capable of creating hacks, or elegant, unusual, and unexpected uses of technology. Typical magazines (both print and online) read by hackers include 2600 and Iron Feather Journal.
2. Phreaks (Phone Phreakers, Blue Boxers) - These are people who attempt to use technology to explore and/or control the telephone system. Originally, this involved the use of "blue boxes" or tone generators, but as the phone company began using digital instead of electro-mechanical switches, the phreaks became more like hackers. Typical magazines read by Phreaks include Phrack, Line Noize, and New Fone Express.
3. Virus writers (also, creators of Trojans, worms, logic bombs) - These are people who write code which attempts to a) reproduce itself on other systems without authorization and b) often has a side effect, whether that be to display a message, play a prank, or trash a hard drive. Agents and spiders are essentially 'benevolent' virii, raising the question of how underground this activity really is. Typical magazines read by Virus writers include 40HEX.
4. Pirates - Piracy is sort of a non-technical matter. Originally, it involved breaking copy protection on software, and this activity was called "cracking." Nowadays, few software vendors use copy protection, but there are still various minor measures used to prevent the unauthorized duplication of software. Pirates devote themselves to thwarting these things and sharing commercial software freely with their friends. They usually read Pirate Newsletter and Pirate magazine.
5. Cypherpunks (cryptoanarchists) - Cypherpunks freely distribute the tools and methods for making use of strong encryption, which is basically unbreakable except by massive supercomputers. Because the NSA and FBI cannot break strong encryption (which is the basis of the PGP or Pretty Good Privacy), programs that employ it are classified as munitions, and distribution of algorithms that make use of it is a felony. Some cryptoanarchists advocate strong encryption as a tool to completely evade the State, by preventing any access whatsoever to financial or personal information. They typically read the Cypherpunks mailing list.
6. Anarchists - are committed to distributing illegal (or at least morally suspect) information, including but not limited to data on bombmaking, lockpicking, pornography, drug manufacturing, pirate radio, and cable and satellite TV piracy. In this parlance of the computer underground, anarchists are less likely to advocate the overthrow of government than the simple refusal to obey restrictions on distributing information. They tend to read Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC) and Activist Times Incorporated (ATI).
7. Cyberpunk - usually some combination of the above, plus interest in technological self-modification, science fiction of the Neuromancer genre, and interest in hardware hacking and "street tech." A youth subculture in its own right, with some overlaps with the "modern primitive" and "raver" subcultures.

The Documents

These 29 text files come from the following sources: the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) BBS, the MindVox BBS archives, various other hacker boards, the Usenet newsgroup alt.2600, World Wide Web HTML documents, the gopher.eff.org hacking 'zine archive, the cypherpunks.org ftp site, and a netwide search on documents containing the search term "hacker ethic." Documents were selected for this study for relevance, and thus do not constitute a fully randomized sample of electronic text.

1. Discussion begins
2. An unwritten manifesto?
3. Government ethic
4. Hacker theory to practice
5. The Manifesto
6. The MetaForum

In 1990, the online bulletin board system (BBS) known as the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) co-hosted a conference with Harper's magazine to discuss the future of hacking. Old and new hackers were invited to participate. These are transcripts of the various postings to the topic headings in the conference.

Cracker subculture

Hackers wanted

These are transcripts of postings to two other topic headings in the WELL Hacker Conference forum.

Assert your rights

Defense of Piracy

Revolt

These are three "propaganda" text files by hacker Subvert, where he attempts to make the moral case for hacking.

From Crossbows to Cryptography: Thwarting the State via Technology

The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto

These two documents from the cypherpunks ftp archive attempt to make the case for strong encryption and cryptoanarchy.

Pirate

Pirate Newsletter

These are two e-zines for pirates.

Ethics of Hacking by "dissident"

Hack Ethics -- A definition of the hacker ethic from the MIT "Fishwrap Gallery"

Jargon File hacker ethic -- Definition of "hacker ethic" from the Hacker's Jargon File (online companion to Hacker's Dictionary) 3.0

The Hacker's Code of Ethics by "Darkman"

These are four texts which deal directly with ethical issues pertaining to hacking. Two are simply definition files.

CDC -- Cult of the Dead Cow description file

Digital Free Press -- a hacker e-zine

Emmanuel Goldstein testimony-- Testimony of the 2600 leader before a Congressional hearing on hacking

Hacker Manifesto -- "The Conscience of a Hacker" by Mentor

Hacker vs Cracker -- " The Difference between Hackers and Crackers" by CandyMan

Novice's guide to hacking -- A guide by Mentor and the Legion of Doom (LOD), circa 1989

Phrack- Declaration of Grievances of the Electronic Community -- An imitation of the grievances clauses from the Declaration of Independence, updated for the cyberspace era, containing complaints about current technology policy.

Rebels with a Cause -- A 1994 honors essay by Anthropology student Tanja Rosteck, containing some transcripts of hacker interviews and statements.

What is hacking? -- Definition file from Hacker's Haven Website

The Anarchist's Guide to the BBS -- a description of using BBSes for CU purposes.

Other miscellaneous files.

The Original Hacker Ethic

Every profession or trade tends to have an ethical code which suggests that it is capable of self-regulation of its members. The code demonstrates the shared core values necessary for people to practice within the professional community. And it enables the public and the government to have some degree of trust for the profession. Some of these codes may be very ancient and formalized, such as the Hippocratic Oath sworn by physicians. Others may be very modern and legalistic, like the code of ethics for applied or academic anthropologists. Some ethical systems may be "underground," (such as the Pirates' Code of 18th century buccaneers or Mafia oaths of loyalty) enabling members of subcultures or groups to survive, cooperate, and escape outsiders. Yet others like the original Hacker Ethic are very informal and simple - rules of thumb to live by.

Groups employ different means of enforcing their ethical systems. Some provisions are often recognized as simply being archaic and are ignored. This is why most doctors do not heed the prohibitions in the Hippocratic Oath against abortion or euthanasia, yet most (but not all!) believe in the ethical principle of not refusing critical treatment to a patient who is unable to pay. Other groups (such as anthropologists) often devise ethical codes simply because they are forced to by the bad behavior of some of their members in the past, and their provisions are specifically tailored to probems that have arisen. Violating some ethical codes can get you banned from the profession or worse, when professional associations exist to enforce the regulations; with hackers, breaking the Hacker Ethic seems to result mostly in anathema or social ostracization, a time-honored method of social control.

The original Hacker Ethic was sort of an impromptu, informal ethical code developed by the original hackers of MIT and Stanford (SAIL) in the 50s and 60s. These "hackers" were the first generation of programmers, employing time-sharing terminal access to 'dumb' mainframes, and they often confronted various sorts of bureaucratic interference that prevented them from exploring fully how technological systems (computers, but also model trains, university steam tunnels, university phone systems, etc.) worked. The ethic reflects their resistance to these obstacles, and their ideology of the liberatory power of technology. The six principles of the Hacker Ethic are listed below, with some text samples showing where it appears within these documents.

A concise summation of it can be found in Steven Levy's 1984 book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Levy suggested that because of their Ethic and their unconventional style, hackers like Jobs and Wozniak were able to launch the "computer revolution," resulting in the first personal computer (the Apple) which was easy to use and which put programming power in the individual's hands. Here I cite documents from my sample which reiterate some of its principles.

1. Hands On Imperative: Access to computers and hardware should be complete and total. It is asserted to be a categorical imperative to remove any barriers between people and the use and understanding of any technology, no matter how large, complex, dangerous, labyrinthine, proprietary, or powerful.

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. ("Doctor Crash", 1986)

"Information Wants to Be Free" "Information wants to be free" can be interpreted in three ways. Free might mean without restrictions (freedom of movement = no censorship), without control (freedom of change/evolution = no ownership or authorship, no intellectual property), or without monetary value (no cost.) Some hackers even take this to mean information is alive, free to act on its own agency, as viruses, genetic algorithms, 'bots and other software programs do. Most hackers seem to advocate this principle in different senses of the word "free" at different times. In any case, when asked about the content of the Hacker Ethic, most people assert this as the key principle.

There is much knowledge that is disallowed, hidden. Government activities, corporate crime, and "illegitimate" information needs to be disseminated. People without access to technology need it - they can contribute to the world. Distributing this information is illegal, potentially dangerous. This, in my humble opinion, is the best use of hacked accounts. Obtaining information, disseminating information needs anonymity. This protects your hide. This is important. Whistle blowers are only silenced when their identity is known...

---

Access to information

Yes, access is a right you have. You need to know when the government is killing people, radiating them, listening to them, lying to them, lying to you. You have a right to gain access to information about OUR government. This government is supposedly of the people, by the people, power granted by a social contract.

Mistrust Authority. Promote decentralization. This element of the ethic shows its strong anarchistic, individualistic, and libertarian nature. Hackers have always shown distrust toward large institutions, including but not limited to the State, corporations, and computer administrative bureaucracies (the IBM 'priesthood'). Tools like the PC are said to move power away from large organizations (who use mainframes) and put them in the hands of the 'little guy' user. Nowhere is this ethos stronger than among the anti-statist cypherpunks and extropians.

In fact, technology represents one of the most promising avenues available for re-capturing our freedoms from those who have stolen them. By its very nature, it favors the bright (who can put it to use) over the dull (who cannot). It favors the adaptable (who are quick to see the merit of the new (over the sluggish, who cling to time-tested ways). And what two better words are there to describe government bureaucracy than "dull" and "sluggish"?

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The State will of course try to slow or halt the spread of this technology, citing national security concerns, use of the technology by drug dealers and tax evaders, and fears of societal disintegration. Many of these concerns will be valid; crypto anarchy will allow national secrets to be traded freely and will allow illicit and stolen materials to be traded. An anonymous computerized market will even make possible abhorrent markets for assassinations and extortion. Various criminal and foreign elements will be active users of CryptoNet. But this will not halt the spread of cryptoanarchy.

No Bogus Criteria: Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not by "bogus criteria" such as race, age, sex, or position. Nowhere is this ethos more apparent than in the strong embrace by most hackers of the levelling power of the Internet, where anonymity makes it possible for all such 'variables' about a person to remain unknown, and where their ideas must be judged on their merits alone since such contextual factors are not available.

The Internet is one of the best hacks the world has to offer. It has continually shattered deeply ingrained social prejudices concerning characteristics such as age, race, wealth, and sex. In fact, it is common to find 14 year olds arguing philosophy with 41 year olds on America's computer networks!

"You can create truth and beauty on a computer." Hacking is equated with artistry and creativity. Furthermore, this element of the ethos raises it to the level of philosophy (as opposed to simple pragmatism), which (at least in some quarters) is about humanity's search for the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Without question, good/great programming (hacking) is art and as with art each person has their own signature and style (which changes over time). Quite a few years ago I was reviewing some derivative works of one hacker, and found the lack of signature and style of the original.

"Computers can change your life for the better." In some ways, this last statement really is simply a corollary of the previous one. Since most of humanity desires things that are good, true, and/or beautiful, the fact that a computer can create such things would seem to mean that axiomatically it can change peoples' lives for the better. However, this is merely a declarative statement, which like the previous one reflects a deep-felt love of technology. It does not state explicitly that computers should always change peoples' lives for the better, or the principle that would follow from that, which is that it is unethical to use them to make peoples' lives worse. .. Many hackers see the Internet as an immense positive force, and this reiterated again by hacker Emmanuel Goldstein --

The future holds such enormous potential. It is vital that we not succumb to our fears and allow our democratic ideals and privacy values to be shattered. In many ways, the world of cyberspace is more real than the real world itself. I say this because it is only within the virtual world that people are really free to be themselves - to speak without fear of reprisal, to be anonymous if they so choose, to participate in a dialogue where one is judged by the merits of their words, not the color of their skin or the timbre of their voice. Contrast this to our existing "real" world where we often have people sized up before they even utter a word. The Internet has evolved, on its own volition, to become a true bastion of worldwide democracy. It is the obligation of this committee, and of governments throughout the world, not to stand in its way.

Thus, the ethical principles of the Hacker Ethic suggest it is the ethical duty of the hacker to remove barriers, liberate information, decentralize power, honor people based on their ability, and create things that are good and life-enhancing through computers. It remains an open question (of interpretation) as to whether it advocates the free distribution of software (the GNU/Richard Stallman position), the injunction against using computers for malicious purposes (the Clifford Stoll position), or the need for secure networks based on trust (the Steven Levy position.) Each of these document samples show that new hackers are aware of, and advocate (whether intentionally or accidentally) elements of the original Hacker Ethic.

New Hacker Ethic

From my documents, I found that there is a new hacker ethic which 90s hackers live by. There are fragments of continuity from the old hacker ethic, as one can see. The new ethic appears to have developed like the old one, informally and by processes of mutual reinforcement. The new ethic seems to contain some ambiguities (like the old one) and a few contradictions. This may be due to the fact that its practicioners are more numerous and more dispersed than the original 60s hackers.

1. "Above all else, do no harm" Do not damage computers or data if at all possible. Much like the key element of the Hippocratic Oath.

According to the "hacker ethic," a hack must: * be safe
* not damage anything
* not damage anyone, either physically, mentally or emotionally
* be funny, at least to most of the people who experience it

It is against hacker ethics to alter any data aside from the logs that are needed to clean their tracks. They have no need or desire to destroy data as the malicious crackers. They are there to explore the system and learn more. The hacker has a constant yearning and thirst for knowledge that increases in intensity as their journey progresses.

2. The belief that system-cracking for fun and exploration is ethically OK as long as the cracker commits no theft, vandalism, or breach of confidentiality.

Of course, the key problem with this ethical position is its stance on intent. One should not damage data deliberately. But what if, as often happens in hacking attempts, one accidentally erases or alters data while trying to alter system log files or user records? Is that an ethical violation? Also, the question of what constitutes "harm" is left open. Most hackers seem to see pranks and practical jokes as harmless, regardless of their psychological impact. Yet their victims may not feel these are so 'harmless,' especially if this causes them to lose valuable time or effort.

Protect Privacy People have a right to privacy, which means control over their own personal (or even familial) information. Privacy rights are notably missing from the U.S. Constitution, but they have been brought to the forefront of modern legal argument due to the growing surveillance power of technology. There still is no codified right to privacy for U.S. citizens, although the Supreme Court has ruled that it is contained implicitly in its judgements legalizing the distribution of birth control and the right to first-trimester abortion.

How far do privacy rights go, however? Do people also have an intrinsic right to online anonymity? Do I have the right to conceal my health status, criminal record, or sexuality from my employer? Are some people (politicians, celebrities, etc.) entitled to less privacy than others? Does my social security number, credit history, or telephone number belong only to me? Further, the strange thing about hackers asserting a right to privacy is that it declares a certain kind of information to not be free. Thus, in some ways this is a contradiction to the original hacker ethic.

Your right to Privacy

Privacy is a right we beleive we have. Unfortunately privacy is not explicitately protected in the constitution. Our consitution is dated in that respect, there weren't the threats to privacy then as there are now. Technology is truly a double-edged sword. The abscense of privacy provisions in the constitution does not make it any less important. Indeed, the lack of constitutional protections have allowed our privacy to be gravely threatened.

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The concept of privacy is something that is very important to a hacker. This is so because hackers know how fragile privacy is in today's world. Wherever possible we encourage people to protect their directories, encrypt their electronic mail, not use cellular phones, and whatever else it takes to keep their lives to themselves. In 1984 hackers were instrumental in showing the world how TRW kept credit files on millions of Americans. Most people had never even heard of a credit file until this happened. Passwords were very poorly guarded - in fact, credit reports had the password printed on the credit report itself.

The second argument is an interesting one. The problem most hackers had with TRW is not they kept files on most peoples' credit histories without their knowledge (thus they couldn't see if they contained any errors), and it was on that (unknown) basis that they were denied loans, credit cards, mortgages, etc. It was that those files were insecure.

"Waste not, want not." Computer resources should not lie idle and wasted. It's ethically wrong to keep people out of systems when they could be using them during idle time. This is what some people call the "joy riders' ethic." If you borrow someone's car, and return it with no damage, a full tank of gas, and perhaps even some suggestions for improved performance, have you not done them a favor? Especially if they never know you borrowed it in the first place for a few road trips? Isn't it wasting that precious engine power to leave the car in a parking spot while somebody else could be using it for a grocery trip? (Is it an ethical violation to borrow the car and make a set of keys for yourself so you can borrow it whenever you feel like? This is, after all, what most hackers do when they give themselves sysadmin privileges.) Yet most are possessive over the use of their own personal computer.

The hacker ethics involves several things. One of these is avoiding waste. Over the internet, we have about a quarter million computers each of which is virtually unused for 10 hours a day. A true hacker seeing something useful that he could do with terraflops of computing power that would otherwise be wasted might would request permission to use these machines and would probably go ahead and use them even if permission was denied. In doing so, he would take the greatest possible precautions to not damage the system.

Exceed Limitations Hacking is about the continual transcendence of problem limitations. Some old hackers assert this principle, as an informal seventh addition to the original Ethic. Telling a hacker something can't be done, is a moral imperative for him to try. "Extropians" believe there is a universal force of expansion and growth, inverse to entropy, which they call "extropy." Hacking is seen as extropian because it always seeks to surpass current limits. Technology is seen as a necessarily exponential force of growth. Limitations must be overcome. For some hackers, these limitations might be unjust laws or outdated moral codes.

To become free it may be necessary to break free from medieval morality, break unjust laws, and be a disloyal employee. Some may call you an disloyal, sinful criminal. To be free in a room of slaves is demoralizing. Free your fellow man, give him the tools, the knowledge to fight oppression. Do not infringe on others' rights.

The Communicational Imperative People have the right to communicate and associate with their peers freely. The United Nations International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has stated in many conferences that this should be a fundamental human right, with which no nation should ever interfere. The sweeping freedoms given to amateur radio hobbyists internationally reflect this belief. Globally, it remains a significant moral problem, in that most developing nations lack the infrastructure to grant this right. Various UN reports have shown that despite the rhetoric, many Third World nations do not have access to the "global" information superhighway because they lack "onramps." Their telecommunications infrastructure is lacking.

Most hackers strongly support the 1st amendments' rights to communication and assembly, since these are necessary for the free flow of information. Phreakers take this a step beyond, however, in asserting that people should have the right to communicate with each other cheaply (thus poor people have as much right to talk on the phone long distance as the rest of us) and easily . When telecommunications companies are an obstacle to this right to communicate, phreaking (blue boxing the phone system, making unauthorized 'bridge' conference calls, using empty voicemail boxes, etc.) is said to be the answer.

The Right to communicate

Communicate!
This is our strongest right, and our most crucial. There mere fact that this page is allowed to exist is proof that our 1st amendment has not crumbled completely. Despite the governmental protection, there are threats to our freedom to communicate.

Leave No Traces Don't leave a trail or trace of your presence; don't call attention to yourself or your exploits. Keep quiet, so everyone can enjoy what you have. This is an ethical principle, in that the hacker follows it not only for his own self-interest, but also to protect other hackers from being caught or losing access. Such a principle can be found among various criminal or underground organizations. Of course, there is a contradiction between asserting a need for secrecy (as well as privacy), and the need for unrestricted information.

The rules a Hacker lives by:
1. Keep a low profile.
2. If suspected, keep a lower profile.
3. If accused, deny it.
4. If caught, plea the 5th.

Share! Information increases in value by sharing it with the maximum number of people; don't hoard, don't hide. Just because it wants to be free, does not mean necessarily you must give it to as many people as possible. This principle can be seen as an elaboration on an original ethical principle. The Pirates' ethic is that piracy increases interest in software, by giving people a chance to try it out and experiment with it before paying for it. So sharing software with your friends is a good thing.

Pirates SHARE warez to learn, trade information, and have fun! But, being a pirate is more than swapping warez. It's a life style and a passion. The office worker or class mate who brings in a disk with a few files is not necessarily a pirate any more than a friend laying a copy of the lastest Depeche Mode album on you is a pirate. The *TRUE* pirate is plugged into a larger group of people who share similar interests in warez. This is usually done through Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs), and the rule of thumb is "you gotta give a little to get a little...ya gets back what ya gives." Pirates are NOT freeloaders, and only lamerz think they get something for nothing.

Self Defense against a Cyberpunk Future Hacking and viruses are necessary to protect people from a possible 1984/cyberpunk dystopian future, or even in the present from the growing power of government and corporations. It's a moral imperative to use hacking as the equivalent of 'jujitsu,' allowing the individual to overcome larger, more impersonal, more powerful forces that can control their lives. If governments and corporations know they can be hacked, then they will not overstep their power to afflict the citizenry.

I believe, before it's all over, that the War between those who love liberty and the control freaks who have been waiting for to rid America of all that constitutional mollycoddling called the Bill of Rights, will escalate.

Should that come to pass, I will want to use every available method to vex and confuse the eyes and ears of surveillance. Viruses could become the necessary defense against a government that fears your computer.

What's interesting is that this principle recognizes and asserts that it's not only possible but also likely for computers to have a dark side and to be used for purposes other than truth and beauty, and that we need to be wary of technology, or at least technology in the wrong hands.

Hacking Helps Security This could be called the "Tiger team ethic": it is useful and courteous to find security holes, and then tell people how to fix them. Hacking is a positive force, because it shows people how to mend weak security, or in some cases to recognize and accept that total security is unattainable, without drastic sacrifice.

Sense 2 is more controversial: some people consider the act of cracking itself to be unethical, like breaking and entering. But the belief that `ethical' cracking excludes destruction at least moderates the behavior of people who see themselves as `benign' crackers (see also samurai). Based on this view, it may be one of the highest forms of hackerly courtesy to (a) break into a system, and then (b) explain to the sysop, preferably by email from a superuser account, exactly how it was done and how the hole can be plugged --- acting as an unpaid (and unsolicited) tiger team.

Many software companies today, including Lotus, regularly use tiger teams to test their security systems. So, this ethical principle seems to be agreed upon by some members of the industry -- to a certain extent. Even Lotus does not want its systems being tested by hackers who are not under its employ or control.

Trust, but Test! You must constantly test the integrity of systems and find ways to improve them. Do not leave their maintenance and schematics to others; understand fully the systems you use or which affect you. If you can exploit certain systems (such as the telephone network) in ways that their creators never intended or anticipated, that's all to the better. This could help them create better systems. One of those systems that may require constant revision, testing, and adjustment, apparently, is constitutional democracy.

Democracy is always being tested -- it's an inherent part of what it stands for. whether it's flag burners, gay activists, klansmen, or computer hackers, we're always testing the system to see if it holds up to pressure. i stress that this is NOT an end iwe do because it interests us, but in the bigger picture we're actually testing the sincerity of the democratic system, whether we're aware of it or not.

One of the most important manuals for British hackers was called "beating the system." The essential argument is that as systems (like the phone network) become more and more complex, they become impossible to manage from a centralized office. Hacking at the edges of the system not only becomes possible, in some cases it becomes necessary. It becomes an ethical imperative to test the system, lest it fail when it is most needed (like the AT & T phone switches did in 1990.)

So, in short, the new hacker ethic suggests that it is the ethical duty of new hackers (or the CU), to : 1) protect data and hardware 2) respect and protect privacy 3) utilize what is being wasted by others 4) exceed unnecessary restrictions 5) promote peoples' right to communicate 6) leave no traces 7) share data and software 8) be vigilant against cyber-tyranny and 9) test security and system integrity of computer systems.

Violations/Transgressions

These could be considered the "thou shalt nots" of the new hacker ethic, as opposed to its affirmative "you shoulds." Some of these transgressions of the hacker ethic are already implied by some of its basic affirmative principles. We can get an idea of what hackers believe they should do, based on what they reject as unsuitable activities of their peers.

1. Bootlegging Commercialism; selling pirated software; hacking for profit; selling out. Bootlegging violates the new ethic of sharing and the original hacker ethic which eschewed profit (and embraced personal satisfaction) as a reason for creating software (hence the existence of Richard Stallman's GNU Free Software Foundation.)

On occasion the possibility of making a profit from these advances tempts hackers into commercialism. On other occasions, they see commercialism as the only way to get their work into the hands of the masses. When they succeed they become rich, and usually get moved further and further from hacker life and more and more into paperwork and then don't live happily ever after.

Bootleggers are to pirates as a chop-shop is to a home auto mechanic. Bootleggers are people who DEAL stolen merchandise for personal gain. Bootleggers are crooks. They sell stolen goods. Pirates are not crooks, and most pirates consider bootleggers to be lower life forms than child molesters.

Bootlegging seems to contradict new hacker ethic 7, share!

Freeloading Always taking and never contributing. Profitting from other peoples' efforts without adding to them. "Warez d00dz" and "Codez d00dz" who are hunting for free software or phone codes without offering anything in return (a hack, a number, whatever) are looked down upon. Hoarding and refusing to tell others about your hacks are seen as wrong. This also violates the new ethic of sharing.

In fact, pirates may be one of the best forms of advertising for quality products, because sharing allows a shop-around method for buying warez. Most of us buy a program for the documents and the support, but why invest in four or five similar programs if we aren't sure which best suits our needs? Nah, pirates aren't freeloaders. We are against freeloading.

Trashing Crashing systems; destroying hardware; hurting other users; malicious vandalism; irreversible damaging or destroying of data; unleashing destructive viruses, Trojans, logic bombs. Prankful (non-harmless) games with users and sysops and systems is acceptable... This is seen as the obvious corollary of the new ethic to "do no harm."

I. Do not intentionally damage *any* system. Trashing BBSes is wrong, plain and simple.
II. Do not alter any system files other than ones needed to ensure your escape from detection and your future access (Trojan Horses, Altering Logs, and the like are all necessary to your survival for as long as possible.)

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The one thing I hate, is the way some self-appointed hackers find there way into a system, and ruin the name of the rest of us by destroying everything they can find. Now that is pathetic. First of all, as I said, it ruins the name of the rest of us. Thus, once again, the "Destructive Computer User" Stereotype... A board crasher is no more a "hacker" than my grandmother is.

Excessive Selfishness Self interest overrules any concern for other hackers whatsoever. This violation implies others... once again, we run into the strange divide at the heart of the Hacker Ethic, which is deeply individualistic, yet also fiercely communal. Individuals are expected to be highly self-motivated, but not selfish.

I think you'd be less agitated if you define your categories as hackers and criminals. The former are in it to explore and the latter are in it for themselves and nothing else. Of course, some hackers do break laws on occasion but I don't think that necessarily turns them into criminals, at least not in the moral sense.

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Also, some hackers have this massive ego problem... I must name one here, for that problem, and he is Corporal Punishment... I have had numerous run-ins with this guy. He seems to think he is a God, constantly running everyone into the ground. He even went as far as saying "PHRACK sucks!" But he isn't the only one with that problem... Some feel that if they put others down, they will elevate to a higher level. Sorry to burst you bubble guys, but your only viewed as massive ego-maniacs that deserve nothing less than being run down yourselves...

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Let us not forget that hackers, crackers, chippers, crunchers, and whatnot all have ego, and one thing that bothers me about using the Hacker Ethic to describe people is that ego and self-interest are not accounted for. How else can you explain crackers selling pirated software, otherwise intelligent people distributing viruses to the general public in hope of causing maximum damage to other users, or hackers breaking into some system and erasing files for laughs? People break into computers because it's fun and it makes one feel powerful, not because there is untapped power waiting to be used if only the right programming "wizard" comes along.

The (Selective) Anti-Stealing Ethic Information, services, and software are not property; hardware, physical property, money, and monetary services (credit cards, digital cash, phone card numbers) are. Theft of these is still wrong. Also, the target makes a difference. Stealing phone service (say, voicemail boxes) from a large institution like a corporation or the government is OK. Stealing it from an individual or a small nonprofit is not.

Thus the new hacker ethic, according to its propagandists, does not embrace theft; instead it simply defines certain things (like information) as not being personal property, or certain actions (using phone service) as "borrowing" rather than theft.

So where is the boundary between the hacker world and the criminal world? To me, it has always been in the same place. We know that it's wrong to steal tangible objects. We know that it's wrong to vandalize. We know that it's wrong to invade somebody's privacy. Not one of these elements is part of the hacker world.

Bragging Calling too much attention to oneself. It is acceptable ('elite') to brag in private hacker circles, unacceptable to brag or make taunts and dares to sysops, law enforcement, or authorities, or in any public forum where they tend to listen. Some hackers even consider the first unacceptable, since hacker boards are monitored by the Secret Service as well. Bragging and boasting to the media or other non-hackers violates the ethic of 'leave no trace' and keeping a low profile.

Bragging after a neat hack may seem like the natural thing to do. But just remember that it can only call attention to yourself, and not everyone who pays attention to hackers are admirers. You may jeopardize your friends and anyone else who ever accesses the same system as you.

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True hackers are quiet. I don't mean they talk at about .5 dB, I mean they keep their mouths shut and don't brag. The number one killer of those the media would have us call hackers is bragging. You tell a friend, or you run your mouth on a board, and sooner or later people in power will find out what you did, who you are, and you're gone...

Spying Snooping, monitoring of people, and invading their privacy is wrong... so therefore is reading private e-mail, etc. This follows from the new hacker ethic which sees privacy as a fundamental right. However, part of the hacker praxis is about finding out passwords and security holes from users, whether through "social engineering" or simple snooping and "sniffing." This is the contradiction, once again, of embracing privacy but also insisting on unrestricted information.

Some crackers are using computers in the exact *opposite* way that the first hackers intended them: first, by restricting the unimpeded and unmonitored flow of information through the computer networks and phone lines; and second, by using computers to monitor people, by intrusive methods of information-gathering.

Narcing It is wrong to turn other hackers in. This part of their ethical code is not different from many other criminal organizations or subcultures, such as prison inmates, drug addicts, prostitutes, etc., or even 'above-ground' subcultures such as police departments. ("code of silence.") However, this code has special meaning for hackers, since many ex-hackers often decide to become computer security personnel later in life. Many of their peers consider this 'selling out.'

There's no lower form of life than the narc. Hackers who go and rat on other hackers are scum. They get lots of promises of immunity and stuff if they turn in all their friends. Some hackers get back at other people by turning them into the feds. This is wrong, and it only damages the hacker community. We need to stick together, because nobody else is really on our side.

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The last thing I will mention, will be hackers turning in other hackers to federal crime agencies, or to the PhoneCorp security offices, or any other type of company that deals with computer related phraud. This activity, refered to as Narcing, is getting to be too popular for a hackers good... You may be saying, " Come on, no hacker in they're right mind would turn another on in ". And your right... It's once again those self proclaimed hackers, or the ones who think they are who will do this to get "Even"...

We can then see that new hackers do believe certain things are wrong - and people who commit these actions are frowned upon and often prevented from being recognized by the hacker community. Many of the things new hackers reject, would also be rejected by the community of old hackers.

Reasons for Change

I coded various "emic" explanations in these texts for why some people felt the Hacker Ethic had changed. These could potentially provide the basis for looking for some interesting etic, measurable variables.

1. "More Stuff" Computers are more numerous, more powerful, more networked, more distributed, more important, more widespread. More power over society = more corruption, more incentive.

So the process of society adopting a new technology BY DEFINITION must include the removal of all idealistic motivations originally present in the promoters of the technology. Computers are power, and direct contact with power can bring out the best or the worst in a person. The Hacker Ethic is simply the ideal case: it's tempting to think that everyone exposed to the technology will be so grandly inspired, but alas, it just ain't so.

The "hacker ethic" was unnoticed before because fiddling with large complex systems was so difficult until recently. There have always been basement tinkers and young pranksters but their explorations were very local. Once we are all connected, the work of these investigators ripple through the world we have constructed and affect us.

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We live in the age of computers. Everything is controlled by massive mainframes; Our water distribution system, rail-road control, airline control, electricity control, telephone companies, etc, etc, etc... Imagine the fun someone can have in one of those systems!!! Just the fact of getting in them can sometimes be a major accomplishment. But my point is, what people do once they are in...

Society Society has changed for the worse. Either the old hackers lived in a more sheltered, supportive, rewarding environment (the MIT lab where they had access to everything they could ever want, plus recognition from their mentors and peers), or they simply lived in a larger society (the U.S. of the 50s) which was more based on trust, honesty, etc., and that is why their behavior was different. This might be the sort of sociological explanation found in a sociology textbook.

PANTY RAIDS: When panty raids meet biotech it may be time to adapt new rituals; or the cracker phenomena is more complex then that and has at least something to do with increased levels of social alienation and how the street finds its own use for things.

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It is my contention that hackers did not change. Society changed, and it changed for the worse. The environment the early hackers were working in rewarded them for their mischief and their desire to experiment and try new things.

The Computer Industry has Sold Out

The computer industry sold out; no commercial software developers today believe in the Hacker Ethic either. They patent software, copy-protect programs, lock up data and algorithms. New hackers are merely responding to the times. They wouldn't have to do what they have to do if the computer industry believed in open standards and systems and free source code.

And yet, in practice, I can't help but conclude that the computer revolution is over, and that the people lost. The computer community is driven now not by a lust for knowledge but by a lust for money. What were fledgling companies of wild-eyed programmers sharing knowledge and feeding on each other's ideas have become corporate behemoths, run by suits and ties, and copyright lawyers, and the bottom line.

Generational Change Hackers, like other youth of their generation ("generation X"), are more alienated, more pessimistic, more self-centered, more thoughtless, more careless, more pragmatic, etc. It's not that society, technology, or computing practices changed; it's just that new hackers come from a generation which was raised differently from its predecessors and was exposed to different influences.

It's like you sometimes see in the media - 'GenX' is more in it for themselves, more likely to try and get ahead through using information from any which way, and more often see themselves as getting screwed over by their elders ... so it's not surprising that they don't have the same attitudes as Baby Boomer hackers.

A future research project might be to try and turn these into etic variables. If one could operationalize and measure "level of alienation" for the authors of these texts, it might turn out to be a causal factor for "level of adherence to the Hacker Ethic," which would be the degree to which the person espouses the old or new Hacker ethics. Or one could try and correlate changes in the Hacker Ethic with changes in computing practices or level of intensification of computer use.

Repudiations

It's interesting to examine the ways in which 90s hackers often repudiate the original Hacker Ethic, or the possibility of embracing any Ethic at all. These are based on some items I coded in the texts, and other mentions found on the Net.

1. Fraud "The hacker ethic is a fraud" perpetrated by the original hackers. It's too idealistic to possibly work in the real world.

But the Hacker Ethic is also a fraud. It is a fraud because there is nothing magical about computers that causes one of its users or owners to undergo religious conversions and devote themselves to use of the computer for the betterment of the public good. Early automobile enthusiasts were tinkerers, inventors, people with a dream building motorized transportation. Then the new invention became popular and the elite used it to drive around in luxury. Then the new invention became accessible, and for many, necessary for survival. Now we have traffic jams, drunk drivers, air pollution, and suburban sprawl. Whatever magic still present in the use of the automobile occasionally surfaces, but we possess no delusions that it automatically invades the consciousness of everyone who sits behind the wheel.

Individualism Individualistic loners don't tend to subcribe to communal ethics. Many hackers argue that hacking is by nature oriented toward individualism rather than "groupthink," and thus the community of hackers is one of mutually reinforcing self-interest rather than any true form of fellowship or common ideology.

Many, not one There is no one single hacker ethic; in the extreme position, every hacker has their own ethic.

I think the problem we're all having is the fact that everyone is deluding themselves thinking there is only ONE 'hacker ethic'. The truth of the matter is, everyone has their *OWN* hacker 'ethic'. To say that we all think the same way is foolish.

Anti-professionalism Ethics are usually professional standards; by their very nature hackers are anti-professional and tend to make up the rules as they go along. Creating a professional, formalized code for hackers would mean the end of hacking.

Natural Evolution The hacker ethic, like any belief system, must evolve over time; it's foolish to assume anyone could maintain the same ethics when everything else (especially technology) changes so rapidly.

In exploring some of the factors that lead to rejection of the original Hacker Ethic, we might be able to understand better why certain hackers do embrace either the old or new one or a combination of both.

Investigations of Patterns

I did two index tree searches of the NUDIST tree-index to examine my hypothesis of continuity between the 60s and 90s hackers.

Report 1

This was simply an index search where I told NUDIST to identify the number of documents which contained codes from both the old and new hacker ethics' subcodes. Any document which contained one or more codes from both sets of ethical codes was considered a 'hit,' indicating knowledge of (if not practice) of both systems. The results were: retrievals in 15 out of 29 documents or 52 percent. This seems to be statistically significant, and it is unlikely that hackers would express elements of both ethical systems purely by chance unless they were aware of both.

Report 2

I generated a matrix of overlapping documents for the Hacker Ethics (old and new). This identifies where codes co-occur within the same text units (as opposed to elsewhere in the same text) and in which documents.

	1 1	1 2	1 3	1 4	1 5	1 6
2 1	24	24, 18
2 2
2 3
2 4
2 5
2 6
2 7
2 8	27					27
2 9
2 10

In document 24, "hacker vs. cracker," we see the co-occurence of the old hacker ethic of "total access" and the new hacker ethic of "do no harm," as well as the co-occurence of "information wants to be free" with "do no harm." In document 18, "Hacker ethic jargon file," we see the co-occurence of these same sentiments. And in document 27, "Rebels with a cause," we see the co-occurence of "self defense" with "information wants to be free" and "computers can change your life for the better."

Apparently, while hackers may express principles of both hacker ethics, they are unlikely to do so at the same time or within the same thought. Co-occurence within the same text unit did not occur very often - only 3 out of 29 documents.

Conclusions - areas for future research

I feel it safe to say that I can conclude a few basic facts from this early effort at text analysis. Mostly, I have a basis for a good deal of future research. I might be able to state more, if I had access to more documents or more information about their authors beyond their "handles."

   --  New 90s hackers are not unethical. They are not unaware of the original Hacker Ethic. They have their own ethical system which combines elements of the old 60s Hacker Ethic with some new innovations (the new hacker ethic.) The fact that ethics are important to these hackers is suggested by the fact that they anethematize "crackers" and "dark side" hackers for transgressions which violate the spirit of their ethics.

    --  There are four interesting areas of investigation for looking into the changes between the old and new Hacker Ethic. Measurement of changes in computer technology, social indicators, computer industry practices, and generational demographics might provide variables which covary with, and possibly even explain, the changes in this ideological system.

    --  Some new hackers do repudiate the original Hacker Ethic or the possibility of having an ethic at all. It would be interesting to find out what aspects of their profiles (age, background, experience, gender, social class, etc.) correlate with whether or not they repudiate it and why. There should be some way to predict whether or not a hacker is likely to embrace the ethic, and how much they fidelity to it they will demonstrate.

    --  The (old and new) Hacker Ethic is not totally idiosyncratic. Elements of it are similar to principles advocated by American culture and its "democratic" constitutional and informal ideals; the ethical codes of professional organizations such as academics, doctors, and lawyers; the ethical systems of "underground" and marginalized groups such as addicts, prostitutes, homeless people, etc.; and traditional ethical precepts of philosophy (such as the Golden Rule or Kantian categorical imperative.) Hackers are not alone in wanting privacy, knowledge, or community.

    --  The similarity between the old and new hacker ethics suggest that the new hackers did not emerge out of a distinct "tradition" from the old hackers. Ethical continuity suggests some demographic continuity. The 60s and 90s hackers may not be all that different, despite the fact that the 60s hackers consider the 90s hackers to be less deserving of the mantle of the term "hacker."

But what about the 'new' hackers? Many of the 'old' hackers think they don't deserve the name, preferring to call them 'computer criminals,' 'vandals,' 'crackers,' 'miscreants,' or in a purely generational swipe, 'juvenile delinquents.' The media uses the word 'hacker' to refer to young, clever computer users who use their modems to break into systems without authorization, much as depicted in the movie War Games. And the old school hackers resent this. Many of the new hackers aren't good programmers; they are just people without ethics who have no reservations about swiping passwords, codes, software, and other information and trading them with their friends. They may be good at exploiting security holes in systems, but all they succeed in doing (say people like Stoll) is destroying the trust on which open networks are built.

I am interested, needless to say, in the generational aspect to this battle over the name 'hacker'. Most of the old hackers of the 60s are of course now living in the 90s - Baby Boomers who, like their ex-hippie friends, went from 'freak' to 'straight,' finding jobs in computer security firms and corporate software conglomerates. And like other counterculturalists from the 60s, they just can't seem to figure out this Generation X forming the counterculture of the 90s... where's the openness? The idealism? These "juvenile delinquents" just don't live up to the high moral standards of the 60s nostalgiacs like Levy and Stoll. But then, Levy rants about those great hackers who founded Apple Computer and launched the PC revolution - those same ex-phreaks, Jobs and Wozniak, who actually allowed their company to patent their system hardware and software!

The "cyberpunks" of the 90s, it seems, just don't live up to what people like Stoll and Levy expect of them. And all the old 'hackers' go to great pains to define themselves apart from the new breed of 'hackers,' always groaning in angst when the label continues to be applied to them. I would argue that the hackers of the 90s are not so different from the hackers of the 60s, that indeed, the same exploratory, antiauthoritarian, liberatory impulses are at work; it is simply that the hackers of the 60s do not understand the situation in which we live, and this is probably because they read 60s hippie lit rather than 90s cyberpunk SF... the 'old hackers' are simply too comfortable to be afflicted... they don't understand why the new 'hacker' does what he does.

According to Levy, the differences between the old and new hackers are stark and clear. The first group strove to create, the second strives to destroy and tamper, he says. The first group loved control over their computers, but the second group loves the power computers gives them over people. The first group was always seeking to improve and simplify; the second group only exploits and manipulates. The first group did what they did because of a feeling of truth and beauty in their activities; the second group hacks for profit and status. The first group was communal and closely knit, always sharing openly their new hacks and discoveries; the second, he says, is paranoid, isolated, and secretive. For Levy, the old hackers were computer wizards, but the new hackers are computer terrorists, always searching for new forms of electronic vandalism or maliciousness without thought of the consequences.

But where Levy sees differences, I see some curious similarities. Old-style MIT 'hackers' were rather well-known for getting around locks of both the physical and electronic variety. Is there such a difference between the righteous anger of the MIT hacker toward the IBM 'priesthood' who kept him away from the massive mainframe, and the 90s hacker who feels righteous anger over being prevented access from huge commercial databases without an expensive account? The old MIT hackers were also known for their exploration of the phone system, and exploring 'hacks' to make calls to unsuspecting places for free. Indeed, many of the early hackers were phone phreaks, plain and simple, ripping off service from the phone company (THE company, AT & T, alias Ma Bell, back then), which they resented for its refusal to share the technical information about telephony.

The 60s hackers were known for their desire for liberating information. They openly shared source code; members of the Homebrew Computer Club also openly shared with each other the flaws of various machines, and 'hacks' to get around their lack of performance. Since Levy seems to think that software piracy should not be a crime (since he thinks source code should not be copyrighted), his problem with the 'new hackers' does not appear to be piracy. Neither does it appear to be the open sharing of some admittedly dangerous 'real-world' information taken straight from books like the Anarchist Cookbook on how to make bombs and drugs. Rather, it seems to focus around the malicious misdeeds of a small minority, dedicated to spreading Trojan horses, logic bombs, viruses, worms, and other destructive programs...

In actuality, the majority of viruses (such as the Christmas virus) are harmless. They eat up small fractions of CPU space and are designed, rather than to wipe clean someone's hard drive, to just display a message at a given time. They are, in short, pranks - something that Levy also points out the old MIT hackers were overfond of. They were known for playing complex tricks on people, and were masters of "social engineering" - the art of manipulating technocrats by being a good bullshit artist - just as the 90s hackers are... their elaborate games and pranks often being ways to demonstrate their superiority to the faculty, administrators, or other "know-it-alls" who they felt got in their way of their access to computers...

In "invading" corporate voicemail systems, the modern 90s hackers are no different than the 60s MIT hackers mapping out the labyrinths of the MIT underground tunnel system. They do it for the same reasons: because they are told not to, because the conduits often lead to surprising places, because the activity is basically harmless even though it is declared unauthorized or even illegal, and because it gives them a feeling of mastery and control over a complex problem. The simple fact is, most of the 90s hackers are not wantonly malicious or destructive. Indeed, many subscribe to an updated 90s Hacker Ethic, declaring that they will not "hack" personal privacy or the personal computer user, instead declaring that their "targets" will be large, unresponsive corporations or bureaucratic government organizations...

But the main reason for the difference between the 60s and 90s hackers is that the GenXers are a "post-punk" generation, hence the term, "cyberpunk." Their music has a little more edge and anger and a little less idealism. They've seen the death of rock n'roll, and watched Michael Bolton and Whitney Houston try and revive its corpse. Their world is a little more multicultural and complicated, and less black-and-white. And it is one in which, while computers can be used to create beauty, they are also being used to destroy freedom and autonomy... hence control over computers is an act of self-defense, not just power-hunger. Hacking, for some of the new 'hackers,' is more than just a game, or a means to get goodies without paying for them. As with the older generation, it has become a way of life, a means of defining themselves as a subculture...

Many of them are quite deliberately 'nonviolent' in their ambitions. They will not lock others out from their accounts, damage or change data without permission, or do anything to jeopardize system viability. Instead, they enter computer systems to 1) look around and see what's there (if someone breaks into your house, looks at the posters on your wall, then locks the door on the way out, have they committed a crime?) 2) see where else they can go from where they are (what connections can be pursued?) and 3) take advantage of any unique abilities of the machine that they've accessed. MIT's hackers did all of these things and more with the various mainframes they were 'forbidden' to access and explore... they questioned the right of technocrats to limit access, and openly transgressed their arbitrary limitations based on invoked mantras of the preciousness of computer time.

Indeed, the 90s hackers pay a lot of homage to the first generation. They have borrowed much of their jargon and certainly many of their ideas. Their modus operandi , the PC, would not be available to them were it not for the way the 60s hackers challenged the IBM/corporate computer model and made personal computing a reality... their style, their use of handles, their love for late-night junk food, are all testaments to the durability and transmission of 60s Hacker culture. So why are the biographers of the 60s hackers so antagonistic and hostile to the new 90s hackers? Do they sense some sort of betrayal of the original Hacker Ethic and its imperatives? Is it just the classic refusal to pass a torch onto a new generation?

Breaking into the root node of a UNIX network or the system manager account of a VAX network takes nimble thinking and clever programming. It often takes a knowledge of various loopholes in the system, and clever tricks that can be done with its coding. It often requires unorthodox uses of standard applications. In short, it requires hacking in the oldest and best senses of the term. In doing it, many 90s hackers seek to expand their knowledge of the system and its capabilities, not to sabotage the efforts of others or wreck the system. Phreaks, in 'hacking' the phone system, are simply acting in the centuries-old tradition of American radicals who have always challenged the ways in which corporate and governmental structures prevent people from free association with their peers... challenging the notion that "to reach out and touch someone" should be a costly privilege rather than a right.