There are legions of minor "hackers," such as the "kodez kidz," who purloin telephone access codes to make free (i.e., stolen) phone calls. Code theft can be done with home computers, and almost looks like real "hacking," though "kodez kidz" are regarded with lordly contempt by the elite. "Warez d00dz," who copy and pirate computer games and software, are a thriving subspecies of "hacker," but they played no real role in the crackdown of 1990 or the Jackson case. As for the dire minority who create computer viruses, the less said the better.
The princes of hackerdom skate the phone-lines, and computer networks, as a lifestyle. They hang out in loose, modem-connected gangs like the "Legion of Doom" and the "Masters of Destruction." The craft of hacking is taught through "bulletin board systems," personal computers that carry electronic mail and can be accessed by phone. Hacker bulletin boards generally sport grim, scary, sci-fi heavy metal names like BLACK ICE -- PRIVATE or SPEED DEMON ELITE. Hackers themselves often adopt romantic and highly suspicious tough-guy monickers like "Necron 99," "Prime Suspect," "Erik Bloodaxe," "Malefactor" and "Phase Jitter." This can be seen as a kind of cyberpunk folk-poetry -- after all, baseball players also have colorful nicknames. But so do the Mafia and the Medellin Cartel.
PLAYER FOUR: The Simulation Gamers.
Wargames and role-playing adventures are an old and honored pastime, much favored by professional military strategists and H.G. Wells, and now played by hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts throughout North America, Europe and Japan. In today's market, many simulation games are computerized, making simulation gaming a favorite pastime of hackers, who dote on arcane intellectual challenges and the thrill of doing simulated mischief.
Modern simulation games frequently have a heavily science-fictional cast. Over the past decade or so, fueled by very respectable royalties, the world of simulation gaming has increasingly permeated the world of science-fiction publishing. TSR, Inc., proprietors of the best-known role-playing game, "Dungeons and Dragons," own the venerable science-fiction magazine "Amazing." Gaming-books, once restricted to hobby outlets, now commonly appear in chain-stores like B. Dalton's and Waldenbooks, and sell vigorously.
Steve Jackson Games, Inc., of Austin, Texas, is a games company of the middle rank. In early 1990, it employed fifteen people. In 1989, SJG grossed about half a million dollars. SJG's Austin headquarters is a modest two-story brick office-suite, cluttered with phones, photocopiers, fax machines and computers. A publisher's digs, it bustles with semi-organized activity and is littered with glossy promotional brochures and dog-eared SF novels. Attached to the offices is a large tin-roofed warehouse piled twenty feet high with cardboard boxes of games and books. This building was the site of the "Cyberpunk Bust."
A look at the company's wares, neatly stacked on endless rows of cheap shelving, quickly shows SJG's long involvement with the Science Fiction community. SJG's main product, the Generic Universal Role-Playing System or G.U.R.P.S., features licensed and adapted works from many genre writers. There is GURPS Witch World, GURPS Conan, GURPS Riverworld, GURPS Horseclans, many names eminently familiar to SF fans. (GURPS Difference Engine is currently in the works.) GURPS Cyberpunk, however, was to be another story entirely.
PLAYER FIVE: The Science Fiction Writers.
The "cyberpunk" SF writers are a small group of mostly college-educated white litterateurs, without conspicuous criminal records, scattered through the US and Canada. Only one, Rudy Rucker, a professor of computer science in Silicon Valley, would rank with even the humblest computer hacker. However, these writers all own computers and take an intense, public, and somewhat morbid interest in the social ramifications of the information industry. Despite their small numbers, they all know one another, and are linked by antique print-medium publications with unlikely names like SCIENCE FICTION EYE, ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, OMNI and INTERZONE.
PLAYER SIX: The Civil Libertarians.
This small but rapidly growing group consists of heavily politicized computer enthusiasts and heavily cyberneticized political activists: a mix of wealthy high-tech entrepreneurs, veteran West Coast troublemaking hippies, touchy journalists, and toney East Coast civil rights lawyers. They are all getting to know one another.
We now return to our story. By 1988, law enforcement officials, led by contrite teenage informants, had thoroughly permeated the world of underground bulletin boards, and were alertly prowling the nets compiling dossiers on wrongdoers. While most bulletin board systems are utterly harmless, some few had matured into alarming reservoirs of forbidden knowledge. One such was BLACK ICE -- PRIVATE, located "somewhere in the 607 area code," frequented by members of the "Legion of Doom" and notorious even among hackers for the violence of its rhetoric, which discussed sabotage of phone-lines, drug-manufacturing techniques, and the assembly of home-made bombs, as well as a plethora of rules-of-thumb for penetrating computer security.
Of course, the mere discussion of these notions is not illegal -- many cyberpunk SF stories positively dote on such ideas, as do hundreds of spy epics, techno-thrillers and adventure novels. It was no coincidence that "ICE," or "Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics," was a term invented by cyberpunk writer Tom Maddox, and "BLACK ICE," or a computer-defense that fries the brain of the unwary trespasser, was a coinage of William Gibson.
A reference manual from the US National Institute of Justice, "Dedicated Computer Crime Units" by J. Thomas McEwen, suggests that federal attitudes toward bulletin-board systems are ambivalent at best: