Bloodaxe sighed wistfully. "When I look back at my life... I can see I've essentially been in school for eleven years, teaching myself to be a computer security consultant."
After a bit more grilling, Bloodaxe finally got to the core of matters. Did anybody here hate them now? he asked, almost timidly. Did people think the Legion had sold out? Nobody offered this opinion. The hackers shook their heads, they looked down at their sneakers, they had another slug of Coke. They didn't seem to see how it would make much difference, really. Not at this point.
Over half the attendees of CyberView publicly claimed to be out of the hacking game now. At least one hacker present -- (who had shown up, for some reason known only to himself, wearing a blond wig and a dime-store tiara, and was now catching flung Cheetos in his styrofoam cup) -- already made his living "consulting" for private investigators.
Almost everybody at CyberView had been busted, had had their computers seized, or, had, at least, been interrogated -- and when federal police put the squeeze on a teenage hacker, he generally spills his guts.
By '87, a mere year or so after they plunged seriously into anti-hacker enforcement, the Secret Service had workable dossiers on everybody that really mattered. By '89, they had files on practically every last soul in the American digital underground. The problem for law enforcement has never been finding out who the hackers are. The problem has been figuring out what the hell they're really up to, and, harder yet, trying to convince the public that it's actually important and dangerous to public safety.
From the point of view of hackers, the cops have been acting wacky lately. The cops, and their patrons in the telephone companies, just don't understand the modern world of computers, and they're scared. "They think there are masterminds running spy-rings who employ us," a hacker told me. "They don't understand that we don't do this for money, we do it for power and knowledge." Telephone security people who reach out to the underground are accused of divided loyalties and fired by panicked employers. A young Missourian coolly psychoanalyzed the opposition. "They're overdependent on things they don't understand. They've surrendered their lives to computers."
"Power and knowledge" may seem odd motivations. "Money" is a lot easier to understand. There are growing armies of professional thieves who rip-off phone service for money. Hackers, though, are into, well, power and knowledge. This has made them easier to catch than the street-hustlers who steal access codes at airports. It also makes them a lot scarier.
Take the increasingly dicey problems posed by "Bulletin Board Systems." "Boards" are home computers tied to home telephone lines, that can store and transmit data over the phone -- written texts, software programs, computer games, electronic mail. Boards were invented in the late 70s, and, while the vast majority of boards are utterly harmless, some few piratical boards swiftly became the very backbone of the 80s digital underground. Over half the attendees of CyberView ran their own boards. "Knight Lightning" had run an electronic magazine, "Phrack," that appeared on many underground boards across America.
Boards are mysterious. Boards are conspiratorial. Boards have been accused of harboring: Satanists, anarchists, thieves, child pornographers, Aryan nazis, religious cultists, drug dealers -- and, of course, software pirates, phone phreaks, and hackers. Underground hacker boards were scarcely reassuring, since they often sported terrifying sci-fi heavy-metal names, like "Speed Demon Elite," "Demon Roach Underground," and "Black Ice." (Modern hacker boards tend to feature defiant titles like "Uncensored BBS," "Free Speech," and "Fifth Amendment.")
Underground boards carry stuff as vile and scary as, say, 60s-era underground newspapers -- from the time when Yippies hit Chicago and ROLLING STONE gave away free roach-clips to subscribers. "Anarchy files" are popular features on outlaw boards, detailing how to build pipe-bombs, how to make Molotovs, how to brew methedrine and LSD, how to break and enter buildings, how to blow up bridges, the easiest ways to kill someone with a single blow of a blunt object -- and these boards bug straight people a lot. Never mind that all this data is publicly available in public libraries where it is protected by the First Amendment. There is something about its being on a computer -- where any teenage geek with a modem and keyboard can read it, and print it out, and spread it around, free as air -- there is something about that, that is creepy.
"Brad" is a New Age pagan from Saint Louis who runs a service known as "WEIRDBASE," available on an international network of boards called "FidoNet." Brad was mired in an interminable scandal when his readers formed a spontaneous underground railroad to help a New Age warlock smuggle his teenage daughter out of Texas, away from his fundamentalist Christian in-laws, who were utterly convinced that he had murdered his wife and intended to sacrifice his daughter to -- *Satan*! The scandal made local TV in Saint Louis. Cops came around and grilled Brad. The patchouli stench of Aleister Crowley hung heavy in the air. There was just no end to the hassle.
If you're into something goofy and dubious and you have a board about it, it can mean real trouble. Science-fiction game publisher Steve Jackson had his board seized in 1990. Some cryogenics people in California, who froze a woman for post-mortem preservation before she was officially, er, "dead," had their computers seized. People who sell dope-growing equipment have had their computers seized. In 1990, boards all over America went down: Illuminati, CLLI Code, Phoenix Project, Dr. Ripco. Computers are seized as "evidence," but since they can be kept indefinitely for study by police, this veers close to confiscation and punishment without trial. One good reason why Mitchell Kapor showed up at CyberView.
Mitch Kapor was the co-inventor of the mega-selling business program LOTUS 1-2-3 and the founder of the software giant, Lotus Development Corporation. He is currently the president of a newly-formed electronic civil liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Kapor, now 40, customarily wears Hawaiian shirts and is your typical post-hippie cybernetic multimillionaire. He and EFF's chief legal counsel, "Johnny Mnemonic," had flown in for the gig in Kapor's private jet.
Kapor had been dragged willy-nilly into the toils of the digital underground when he received an unsolicited floppy-disk in the mail, from an outlaw group known as the "NuPrometheus League." These rascals (still not apprehended) had stolen confidential proprietary software from Apple Computer, Inc., and were distributing it far and wide in order to blow Apple's trade secrets and humiliate the company. Kapor assumed that the disk was a joke, or, more likely, a clever scheme to infect his machines with a computer virus.
But when the FBI showed up, at Apple's behest, Kapor was shocked at the extent of their naivete. Here were these well-dressed federal officials, politely "Mr. Kapor"- ing him right and left, ready to carry out a war to the knife against evil marauding "hackers." They didn't seem to grasp that "hackers" had built the entire personal computer industry. Jobs was a hacker, Wozniak too, even Bill Gates, the youngest billionaire in the history of America -- all "hackers." The new buttoned-down regime at Apple had blown its top, and as for the feds, they were willing, but clueless. Well, let's be charitable -- the feds were "cluefully challenged." "Clue-impaired." "Differently clued...."