tatus among
one's peers.

     When you are a hacker, it is your own inner
conviction of your elite status that enables you to break,
or
let us say "transcend," the rules.   It is not that *all*
rules go
by the board.   The rules habitually broken  by hackers are
*unimportant* rules -- the rules of dopey greedhead telco
bureaucrats and pig-ignorant government pests.

     Hackers have their *own* rules,  which separate
behavior which is cool and elite, from behavior which is
rodentlike, stupid and losing.   These "rules," however, are
mostly unwritten and  enforced by peer pressure and
tribal feeling.   Like all rules that depend on the unspoken
conviction that everybody else is a good old boy, these
rules are ripe for abuse.  The mechanisms of hacker peer-
pressure, "teletrials" and ostracism, are rarely used and
rarely work.  Back-stabbing slander, threats, and
electronic harassment are also freely employed in down-
and-dirty intrahacker feuds, but this rarely forces a rival
out of the scene entirely.  The only real solution for the
problem of an utterly losing, treacherous and rodentlike
hacker is to *turn him in to the police.*   Unlike the Mafia
or Medellin Cartel, the hacker elite cannot simply execute
the bigmouths, creeps and troublemakers among their
ranks, so they turn one another in with astonishing
frequency.

     There is no tradition of silence or *omerta* in the
hacker underworld.     Hackers can be shy, even reclusive,
but when they do talk, hackers tend to brag, boast and
strut.   Almost everything hackers do is *invisible;* if
they
don't brag, boast, and strut about it, then *nobody will
ever
know.*  If you don't have something to brag, boast, and
strut about, then nobody in the underground will
recognize you and favor you with vital cooperation and
respect.

     The way to win a solid reputation in the underground
is by telling other hackers things that could only have
been learned by exceptional cunning and stealth.
Forbidden knowledge, therefore, is the basic currency of
the digital underground, like seashells among Trobriand
Islanders.   Hackers hoard this knowledge, and dwell upon
it obsessively, and refine it, and bargain with it, and talk
and talk about it.

     Many hackers even suffer from a strange obsession
to *teach* -- to spread the ethos and the knowledge of the
digital underground.  They'll do this even when it gains
them no particular advantage and presents a grave
personal risk.

      And when that risk catches up with them, they will go
right on teaching and preaching -- to a new audience this
time, their interrogators from law enforcement.   Almost
every hacker arrested tells everything he knows --  all
about his friends, his mentors, his disciples -- legends,
threats, horror stories, dire rumors, gossip,
hallucinations.
This is, of course, convenient for law enforcement -- except
when law enforcement begins to believe hacker legendry.

     Phone phreaks are unique among criminals in their
willingness to call up law enforcement officials -- in the
office, at their homes -- and give them an extended piece
of their mind.  It is hard not to interpret this as *begging
for arrest,* and in fact it is an act of incredible
foolhardiness.  Police are naturally nettled by these acts
of
chutzpah and will go well out of their way to bust these
flaunting idiots.   But it can also be interpreted as a
product of a world-view so elitist, so closed and hermetic,
that electronic police are simply  not perceived as
"police,"
but rather as *enemy phone phreaks* who should be
scolded into behaving "decently."

     Hackers at their most grandiloquent perceive
themselves as the elite pioneers of a new electronic world.
Attempts to make them obey the democratically
established laws of contemporary American society are
seen as repression and persecution.   After all, they argue,
if Alexander Graham Bell had gone along with the rules of
the Western Union telegraph company, there would have
been no telephones.  If Jobs and Wozniak had believed
that IBM was the be-all and end-all, there would have
been no personal computers.  If Benjamin Franklin and
Thomas Jefferson had tried to "work within the system"
there would have been no United States.

     Not only do hackers privately believe this as an
article of faith, but they have been known to write ardent
manifestos about it.  Here are some revealing excerpts
from an especially vivid hacker manifesto:  "The Techno-
ъevolution" by  "Dr. Crash,"  which appeared in electronic
form in *Phrack* Volume 1, Issue 6, Phile 3.


     "To fully explain the true motives behind hacking, we
must first take a quick look into the past.  In the 1960s, a
group of MIT students built the first modern computer
system.  This wild, rebellious group of young men were the
first to bear the name 'hackers.'  The systems that they
developed were intended to be used to solve world
problems and to benefit all of mankind.
     "As we can see, this has not been the case.  The
computer system has been solely in the hands of big
businesses and the government.  The wonderful device
meant to enrich life has become a weapon which
dehumanizes people.  To the government and large
businesses, people are no more than disk space, and the
government doesn't use computers to arrange aid for the
poor, but to control nuclear death weapons.  The average
American can only have access to a small microcomputer
which is worth only a fraction of what they pay for it.  The
businesses keep the true state-of-the-art equipment away
from the people behind a steel wall of incredibly high
prices and bureaucracy.  It is because of this state of
affairs that hacking was born.(...)
     "Of course, the government doesn't want the
monopoly of technology broken, so they have outlawed
hacking and arrest anyone who is caught.(...) The phone
company is another example of technology abused and
kept from people with high prices.(...)
     "Hackers often find that their existing equipment,
due to the monopoly tactics of computer companies, is
inefficient for their purposes.  Due to the exorbitantly
high
prices, it is impossible to legally purchase the necessary
equipment.  This need has given still another segment of
the fight:  Credit Carding.  Carding is a way of obtaining
the necessary goods without paying for them.  It is again
due to the companies' stupidity that Carding is so easy,
and shows that the world's businesses are in the hands of
those with considerably less technical know-how than we,
the hackers. (...)
     "Hacking must continue.  We must train newcomers
to the art of hacking.(....)  And whatever you do, continue
the fight.  Whether you know it or not, if you are a hacker,
you are a revolutionary.  Don't worry, you're on the right
side."

     The  defense of "carding" is rare.  Most hackers
regard credit-card theft as "poison" to the underground, a
sleazy and immoral effort that, worse yet, is hard to get
away with.   Nevertheless, manifestos advocating credit-
card theft, the deliberate crashing of computer systems,
and even acts of violent physical destruction such as
vandalism and arson do exist in the underground.  These
boasts and threats are taken quite seriously by the police.
And not every hacker is an abstract, Platonic computer-
nerd.  Some few are quite experienced at picking locks,
robbing phone-trucks, and breaking and entering
buildings.

     Hackers  vary in their degree of hatred for authority
and the violence of their rhetoric.  But, at a bottom line,
they are scofflaws.  They don't regard the current rules of
electronic behavior as respectable efforts to preserve law
and order and protect public safety.  They regard these
laws as immoral efforts by soulless corporations to protect
their profit margins and to crush dissidents.   "Stupid"
people, including police, businessmen, politicians, and
journalists, simply have no right to judge the actions of
those possessed of genius, techno-revolutionary
intentions, and technical expertise.

                    #

     Hackers are generally teenagers and college kids not
engaged in earning a living.   They often come from fairly
well-to-do middle-class backgrounds, and are markedly
anti-materialistic (except, that is, when it comes to
computer equipment).   Anyone motivated by greed for
mere money (as opposed to the greed for power,
knowledge and status)  is swiftly written-off as a narrow-
minded breadhead whose interests can only be corrupt
and contemptible.   Having grown up in the 1970s and
1980s, the young Bohemians of the digital underground
regard straight society as awash in plutocratic corruption,
where everyone from the President down is for sale and
whoever has the gold makes the rules.

     Interestingly, there's a funhouse-mirror image of this
attitude on the other side of the conflict.  The police are
also one of the most markedly anti-materialistic groups in
American society, motivated not by mere money but by
ideals of service, justice, esprit-de-corps, and, of course,
their own brand of specialized knowledge and power.
ъemarkably, the propaganda war between cops and
hackers has always involved angry allegations that the
other side is trying to make a sleazy buck.  Hackers
consistently sneer that anti-phreak prosecutors are
angling for cushy jobs as telco lawyers and that computer-
crime police are aiming to cash in later as well-paid
computer-security consultants in the private sector.

     For their part, police publicly conflate all hacking
crimes with robbing payphones with crowbars.  Allegations
of "monetary losses" from computer intrusion are
notoriously inflated.  The act of illicitly copying a
document from a computer is morally equated with
directly robbing a company of, say, half a million dollars.
The teenage computer intruder in possession of this
"proprietary"  document has certainly not sold it for such a
sum, would likely have little idea how to sell it at all,
and
quite probably doesn't even understand what he has.  He
has not made a cent in profit from his felony but is still
morally equated with a thief who has robbed the church
poorbox and lit out for Brazil.

     Police want to believe that all hackers are thieves.
It
is a tortuous and almost unbearable act for the American
justice system to put people in jail because they want to
learn things which are forbidden for them to know.   In an
American context, almost any pretext for punishment is
better than jailing people to protect certain restricted
kinds of information.  Nevertheless, *policing
information* is part and parcel of the struggle against
hackers.

     This dilemma is well exemplified by the remarkable
activities of "Emmanuel Goldstein," editor and publisher
of a print magazine known as *2600: The Hacker
Quarterly.*  Goldstein was an English major at Long
Island's State University of New York in the '70s, when he
became involved with the local college radio station.  His
growing interest in electronics caused him to drift into
Yippie *TAP* circles and thus into the digital
underground, where he became a self-described techno-
rat.  His magazine publishes techniques of computer
intrusion and telephone "exploration" as well as gloating
exposes of telco misdeeds and governmental failings.

     Goldstein lives quietly and very privately in a large,
crumbling Victorian mansion in Setauket, New York.   The
seaside house is decorated with telco decals, chunks of
driftwood, and the basic bric-a-brac of a hippie crash-pad.
He is unmarried, mildly unkempt, and survives mostly on
TV dinners and turkey-stuffing eaten straight out of the
bag.   Goldstein is a man of considerable charm and
fluency, with a brief, disarming smile and the kind of
pitiless, stubborn, thoroughly recidivist integrity that
America's electronic police find genuinely alarming.

     Goldstein took his nom-de-plume, or "handle," from a
character in Orwell's *1984,*  which may be taken,
correctly, as a symptom of the gravity of his sociopolitical
worldview.   He is not himself a practicing computer
intruder, though he vigorously abets these actions,
especially when they are pursued against large
corporations or governmental agencies.   Nor is he a thief,
for he loudly scorns mere theft of phone service, in favor
of
'exploring and manipulating the system.'  He is probably
best described and understood as a *dissident.*

      Weirdly, Goldstein is living in modern America
under conditions very similar to those of former East
European intellectual dissidents.  In other words, he
flagrantly espouses a value-system that is deeply and
irrevocably opposed to the system of those in power and
the police.  The values in *2600* are generally expressed in
terms that are ironic, sarcastic, paradoxical, or just
downright confused.  But there's no mistaking their
radically anti-authoritarian tenor.  *2600* holds that
technical power and specialized knowledge, of any kind
obtainable, belong by right in the hands of those
individuals brave and bold enough to discover them -- by
whatever means necessary.  Devices, laws, or systems that
forbid access, and the free spread of knowledge, are
provocations that any free and self-respecting hacker
should relentlessly attack.  The "privacy" of governments,
corporations and other soulless technocratic organizations
should never be protected at the expense of the liberty
and free initiative of the individual techno-rat.

     However, in our contemporary workaday world,  both
governments and corporations are very anxious indeed to
police information which is secret, proprietary, restricted,
confidential, copyrighted, patented, hazardous, illegal,
unethical, embarrassing, or otherwise sensitive.   This
makes Goldstein persona non grata, and his philosophy a
threat.

     Very little about the conditions of Goldstein's daily
life would astonish, say, Vaclav Havel.  (We may note in
passing that President Havel once had his word-processor
confiscated by the Czechoslovak police.)   Goldstein lives
by *samizdat,* acting semi-openly as a data-center for the
underground, while challenging the powers-that-be to
abide by their own stated rules:  freedom of speech and
the First Amendment.

     Goldstein thoroughly looks and acts the part of
techno-rat, with shoulder-length ringlets and a piratical
black fisherman's-cap set at a rakish angle.  He often
shows up like Banquo's ghost at meetings of computer
professionals, where he listens quietly, half-smiling and
taking thorough notes.

     Computer professionals generally meet publicly,  and
find it very difficult to rid themselves of Goldstein and
his
ilk  without extralegal and unconstitutional actions.
Sympathizers, many of them quite respectable people
with responsible jobs, admire Goldstein's attitude and
surreptitiously pass him information.  An unknown but
presumably large proportion of Goldstein's  2,000-plus
readership are telco security personnel and police, who
are forced to subscribe to *2600*  to stay abreast of new
developments in hacking.  They thus find themselves
*paying this guy's rent* while grinding their teeth in
anguish, a situation that would have delighted Abbie
Hoffman (one of Goldstein's few idols).

     Goldstein is probably the best-known public
representative of the hacker underground today, and
certainly the best-hated.  Police regard him as a Fagin, a
corrupter of youth, and speak of him with untempered
loathing.  He is quite an accomplished gadfly.

     After the  Martin Luther King Day Crash of 1990,
Goldstein, for instance, adeptly rubbed salt into the wound
in the pages of *2600.*   "Yeah, it was fun for the phone
phreaks as we watched the network crumble," he admitted
cheerfully.   "But it was also an ominous sign of what's to
come...  Some AT&T people, aided by well-meaning but
ignorant media, were spreading the notion that many
companies had the same software and therefore could
face the same problem someday.  Wrong.  This was
entirely an AT&T software deficiency.  Of course, other
companies could face entirely *different* software
problems.  But then, so too could AT&T."

     After a technical discussion of the system's failings,
the Long Island techno-rat went on to offer thoughtful
criticism to the gigantic multinational's hundreds of
professionally qualified engineers.  "What we don't know
is how a major force in communications like AT&T could
be so sloppy.  What happened to backups?  Sure,
computer systems go down all the time, but people
making phone calls are not the same as people logging on
to computers.  We must make that distinction.  It's not
acceptable for the phone system or any other essential
service to 'go down.'  If we continue to trust technology
without understanding it, we can look forward to many
variations on this theme.
     "AT&T owes it to its customers to be prepared to
*instantly* switch to another network if something strange
and unpredictable starts occurring.  The news here isn't so
much the failure of a computer program, but the failure of
AT&T's entire structure."

     The very idea of this.... this *person*....  offering
"advice" about "AT&T's entire structure" is more than
some people can easily bear.   How dare this near-criminal
dictate what is or isn't "acceptable" behavior from AT&T?
Especially when he's publishing, in the very same issue,
detailed schematic diagrams for creating various
switching-network signalling tones unavailable to the
public.

      "See what happens when you drop a 'silver box' tone
or two down your local exchange or through different long
distance service carriers," advises *2600* contributor "Mr.
Upsetter" in "How To Build a Signal Box."  "If you
experiment systematically and keep good records, you will
surely discover something interesting."

     This is, of course, the scientific method, generally
regarded as a praiseworthy activity and one of the flowers
of modern civilization.   One can indeed learn a great deal
with this sort of structured intellectual activity.   Telco
employees regard this mode of "exploration" as akin to
flinging sticks of dynamite into their pond to see what
lives
on the bottom.

     *2600* has been published consistently since 1984.  It
has also run a bulletin board computer system, printed
*2600* T-shirts, taken fax calls...  The Spring 1991 issue
has
an interesting announcement on page 45:  "We just
discovered an extra set of wires attached to our fax line
and heading up the pole.  (They've since been clipped.)
Your faxes to us and to anyone else could be monitored."

      In the worldview of *2600,* the tiny band of techno-
rat brothers (rarely, sisters) are a beseiged vanguard of
the
truly free and honest.   The rest of the world is a
maelstrom
of corporate crime and high-level governmental
corruption, occasionally tempered with well-meaning
ignorance.   To read a few issues in a row is to enter a
nightmare akin to Solzhenitsyn's, somewhat tempered by
the fact that *2600* is often extremely funny.

     Goldstein did not become a target of the Hacker
Crackdown, though he protested loudly, eloquently, and
publicly about it, and it added considerably to his fame.
It
was not that he is not regarded as dangerous, because he
is so regarded.  Goldstein has had brushes with the law in
the past:  in 1985, a *2600* bulletin board computer was
seized by the FBI, and some software on it was formally
declared "a burglary tool in the form of a computer
program."  But Goldstein escaped direct repression in
1990, because his magazine is printed on paper, and
recognized as subject to