History and Public Image of Hacking

Before the Internet (c. 1993) Hacking was a different affair

The History of Hacking

First Came Hardware Where does one begin a history of hacking?

The computer came first, but the ethic of hacking grew out of Telephone Phreaking – hacking long-distance telephone service to make free calls.

The first recorded computer abuse, according to Donn B. Parker, a frequent writer on computer crime, occurred in 1958. The first federally prose cuted crime identified specifically as

a computer crime involved an alteration of bank records by computer in Minneapolis in 1966.

Computers were not so widespread then as they are nowand the stakes weren't quite so high In 1970, many criminology researchers were stating

that the problem of computer crime was merely a result of a new technology and not a topic worth a great deal of thought.

Even in the mid-1970s, as crimes by computer were becoming more frequent and more costly, the feeling was that the machines themselves were just a part of the environment, and so they naturally would become a component of crime in some instances.

The US Government Recognizes Hacking In 1976 two important developments occurred. The FBI established a 4-week training course for its agents in the

investigation of computer crime (and followed it up with a second course for other agencies in 1978).

Also in 1976, Senator Abraham Ribicoff and his U.S. Senate Government Affairs Committee realized that something big was going on, and it was important for the gov ernment to get in on it. The committee produced two research reports and Ribicoff introduced the

first Federal Systems Protection Act Bill in June, 1977. These reports eventually became the Com puter Fraud and Abuse Act of

1986. Florida, Michigan, Colorado, Rhode Island, and Arizona were some of the first states to have computer crime leg islation, based on the Ribicoff bills that had devel oped into the 1986 Act.

A year before, a major breakthrough was announced at the Securicom Conference in Cannes by a group of Swedish scientists who had invented a method of silently eavesdropping on a computer screen from a far-off distance.

2600

in 1984, hacker Eric Corley (aka Emmanuel Goldstein) filled the void with a new publication: 2600 Magazine. Goldstein is more a rhetorician than a hacker, and the magazine

is less technical and more political Networks were being formed all over, enabling hackers to not

only hack more sites but to exchange information among themselves quicker and more easily.

Who needs published magazines? The City University of New York and Yale University joined

together as the first BITNET (Because It's Time NETwork) link in May 1981.

Now there are networks of networks (such as Internet) connecting the globe, putting all hackers and common folk in di-red communication with one another.

Phrack

Phrack: a magazine that deals with PHReaking and hACKing A hacker named Bill Landreth was indicted for computer fraud in 1983, and

convicted in 1984 of entering such computer systems as GTE Tele-mail's electronic mail network, and reading the NASA and Department of Defense correspondence within.

The online publication Phrack was founded on ber 17, 1985, on the Metal Shop Private BBS Louis, Missouri

The term "online" referred to the that this magazine was distributed, not at newsstands and through the mails, but on the "news racks" of electronic bulletin board systems, where collections of files are available for the tak ing.

Later, when the journal's founders went off to college and received Internet access, the publication was distributed through list servers which can automatically e-mail hundreds of copies of the pub lication throughout the world.

Annual conventions, hosted by Phrack, called SummerCons, are now held in St. Louis.

Out of the Inner Circle

Bill Landreth, who had been arrested in 1983, published his guide to computer security called Out of the Inner Circle. He left a note stating that he would commit suicide

"sometime around my 22nd birthday..." There was much discussion about all this.

Was it a publicity stunt, or for real? Eventually Landreth reappeared in Seattle,

Washington, in July, 1987, and he was hastily carted back to jail for breaking probation.

Shadow Hawk

In 1987 a cracker named Shadow Hawk (also identified by some press reports as Shadow Hawk 1) had been discovered by an AT&T security agent to be bragging on a Texas BBS called Phreak Class-2600 about how he had hacked AT&T's com puter system. Shadow Hawk (really Herbert Zinn of Chicago) was an 18-year-

old high school drop-out when he was arrested. He'd managed to get the FBI, the Secret Service, the Defense

Criminal Inves tigative Service and the Chicago U.S. attorney on his tail for not only the above mentioned hack, but also for invading computers belonging to NATO and the US Air Force, and stealing a bit over $1 million worth of software.

Shadow Hawk's case is important because in 1989 he became the first person to be prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.

Cliff Stoll

In August, 1986, Cliff Stoll first set out to find out why there was a 75 cent imbalance in the computer accounts at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California.

Stoll's efforts led to the discovery of a group of German hackers who had broken into the computer system.

In October, 1989, a book about Stoll's exploits called The Cuckoo's Egg was pub lished and became an instant best seller.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation The birth of the Electronic Frontier Foundation was announced

July 10, 1990. EFF is a group dedicated to protecting our constitutional rights;

It was created as a response to a series of rude and uninformed blunderings by the Secret Service in Operation Sundevil.

By May, 1989, this "hacker hunt" had led 150 Secret Service agents to serve 28 search warrants in 14 cities.

They seized 23,000 disks and 42 computers, often for in-appropriate reasons.

Many innocent bystanders (as well as criminals) were arrested.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation John Perry Barlow (author, retired cattle rancher, and a lyricist

for the Grateful Dead), and computer guru Mitch Kapor, best known for writ ing Lotus 1-

2-3, were outraged by these events

and by their own run-ins with the FBI over stolen source code that was being distributed by the NuPrometheus League.

They teamed up with attorney Harvey Silverglate who was known for taking on offbeat causes.

Some yellow journalism by the Washington Post provided the publicity needed to attract

Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple) and John Gilmore (of Sun Microsystems) who offered monetary support for the enterprise.

EFF’s first publicity

It was at this point that the Steve Jackson (a publisher of role-playing games) incident made the headlines.

Jackson's business was raided by the Secret Service because one of his games, called GLIRPS Cyberpunk, had to do with a kind of

futuristic computer hacking. The Secret Service called Jackson's game "a handbook for computer crime."

Jackson's office equipment was confiscated, he was forced to lay off half his staff, and he very nearly went into bankruptcy.

"Eventually," Jackson later wrote, "we got most of our property back (though some of it was damaged or destroyed).

The Secret Service admitted that Jackson had never been a target of their investigation.

Jackson sued the U.S. government (the Secret Service, two of its agents, and a Bellcore official were named in the suit) on charges that the Secret Service had violated his right to free speech during the

office raid. The SS was held guilty.

Jackson has since made a role-playing game about the incident.

More Break-ins for EFF

In the middle of August 1990, thirteen New York young adults and minors were charged with felonies involving computer tampering, computer trespassing, and theft of services.

They had broken into the Pentagon's computers, among others, and

got a whole load of law enforcers on their tail. $50,000 worth of computing equipment was seized, said to have been used by the hackers to do the break-ins.

Dozens of stories like this were reported then quickly faded. Other tales and other hackers held more interest, like Acid

Phreak and Phiber Optik, who became "celebrity hackers," speaking on behalf of the hacker community for various media. Phiber Optik was eventually arrested and sentenced to thirty-five hours of community service in February, 1991.

Images of Hackers in News and Fiction

What motivates people to become hackers

The Hacker as Independent Scientist

The first image of hackerdom to emerge in the '60s and '70s was of the benevolent computer science student pushing the limits of computer technology and his/her own intellect. Hacking was the smart alteration of code

Computer labs at MIT, Berkeley, Stanford and many other schools had students that were mesmerized by the promise of life on the other side of a glowing computer screen.

These early hackers quickly developed a set of ethics that centered around the pursuit of pure knowledge and the idea that hackers should share all of their in-formation and brilliant hacks with each other.

Steven Levy’s 1984 book Hackers: "To a hacker a closed door is an insult, and a locked

door is an outrage. Just as information should be clearly and elegantly transported within the computer, and just as software should be freely disseminated, hackers believed people should be allowed access to files or tools which might pro-mote the hacker quest to find out and improve the way the world works. When a hacker needed some-thing to help him create, explore, or fix, he did not bother with such ridiculous concepts as property rights."

The Hacker as Cowboy

William Gibson chose cowboy metaphors for his groundbreaking cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984).

Case and the other "console cowboys" in the novel ride a cybernetic range as data rustlers for hire, ultimately sad and alone in their harsh nomadic world.

Not surprisingly, Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow (a Wyoming cattle rancher himself) chose frontier metaphors

He wrote his landmark essay "Crime and Puzzlement" (Whole Earth Review, Fall 1990).

The first section of this lengthy essay that lead to the birth of the EFF was entitled, "Desperadoes of the DataSphere."

The Hacker as Techno-TerroristGrew out of quasi-revolutionary sentiments in the counterculture in

the '70s There was now at least the possibility that groups or individual

hackers could seriously compromise the U.S. military and/or civilian electronic infrastructure. The reality of this hit home on November 2, 1988, when Robert

Morris, Jr., the son of a well-known computer security researcher, brought down over 10% of the In ternet with his worm This event led to a media feeding frenzy which brought the heretofore

computer under-ground into the harsh lights of television cameras and sound-bite journalism. "Hacker terrorists," "viruses," "worms," "computer espionage"

For a thorough and lively account of this and many of the other arrests made during Operation Sundevil, check out Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown (Bantam, 1992).

The Hacker as Pirate

Piracy metaphors are as common in cyberculture as ones about lawless frontiers. People talk of "surfing the edge," and the "vast

oceans of the Internet." Bruce Sterling's near-future novel about data

piracy was named Islands in the Net. In it, third world countries and anarchist

enclaves operate data havens, buying and selling global infor mation through the world's wide-bandwidth com puter networks.

Hakim Bey’s anarchic pirate societies Using all the resources of the global nets, individual cybernauts can

come together to form temporary and virtual enclaves. These bands can wreak havoc, throw a party, exchange intelligence, or

whatever else they want. Once the deed is done, the party over, the nomadic bands simply disappear

back into the dense fabric of cyberspace.

Of course, pirates were mainly concerned with stealing things. In cyberspace, piracy becomes a more ambiguous and contested can of

worms. Are you really taking something if you're simply looking at it or making a copy

of it? If you copy copyrighted material — let's say an image — and then alter it

significantly, to the point that it is almost unrecognizable, have you violated the copyright?

What if you're using it as raw materials in a piece of art, like collage? What does stealing mean when what is stolen is nothing more than a

particular assemblage of electrical im pulses?

The Hacker as Security Informant Hacker as an either self-appointed or hired security

checker. Many hackers, true to their ethos of simply wanting

to push the limits of their ability and not to cause harm, will report holes in security after they've breached them.

To the hacker who is inter ested in the gamesmanship and challenge of pene trating a system, tipping off the system's adminis trators means a new level of challenge should they ever return.

The Hacker as Security Informant Hackers who are hired for purposes of testing

system security, called "tiger teams," also work to compromise the security of a system to find weaknesses.

Often times, these hired guns are convicted computer criminals who "go straight."

Several members of the legendary Legion of Doom, caught in the Operation Sundevil busts, formed COMSEC, a computer security team for hire.

The Hacker as U.S. Cavalry

Movies such as WarGames, Sneakers, Jurassic Park, and TV shows such as Max Headroom glamorize hackers, often portraying them as misguided geniuses who finally see the light and prevent calamities they're often responsible for initiating. At the same time that the mainstream media has demonized hackers, Hollywood has romanticized them.

John Badham's 1983 film WarGames probably did more to stimulate interest in hacking and phone phreaking among young people than anything before or since.

The Hacker as Cyborg

By some opinion’s hackers represent the scouts to a new territory that is just now beginning to be mapped

out by others. Hackers were the first cybernauts, the first group of people to understand that we as a

species are about to disappear into a cyberspace at least similar in function to that posited by William Gibson in his 80's fiction.

As Manuel De Landa explains in his book War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (MIT, 1991), we are forging a new symbiotic relationship with machines via computers.

"...[S]ome elements of the hacker ethic which were once indispensable means to channel their energies into the quest for interactivity (system-crashing, physical and logical lock-busting) have changed character as the once innocent world of hackerism has become the mul timillion-dollar business of computer crime. What used to be a healthy expression of the hacker maxim that information should flow freely is now organized crime which could create a new era of unprecedented repression."