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scholarship, and then teach it. Universities are meant to *pass the
torch of civilization,* not just download data into student skulls, and the
values of the academic community are strongly at odds with those of all
would-be information empires. Teachers at all levels, from kinder-
garten up, have proven to be shameless and persistent software and data
pirates. Universities do not merely "leak information" but vigorously
broadcast free thought.
This clash of values has been fraught with controversy. Many hackers
of the 1960s remember their professional apprenticeship as a long
guerilla war against the uptight mainframe-computer "information
priesthood." These computer-hungry youngsters had to struggle hard
for access to computing power, and many of them were not above cer-
tain, er, shortcuts. But, over the years, this practice freed computing
from the sterile reserve of lab-coated technocrats and was largely
responsible for the explosive growth of computing in general society
especially *personal* computing.
Access to technical power acted like catnip on certain of these young-
sters. Most of the basic techniques of computer intrusion: password
cracking, trapdoors, backdoors, trojan horses were invented in col-
lege environments in the 1960s, in the early days of network comput-
ing. Some off-the-cuff experience at computer intrusion was to be in
the informal resume of most "hackers" and many future industry giants.
Outside of the tiny cult of computer enthusiasts, few people thought
much about the implications of "breaking into" computers. This sort of
activity had not yet been publicized, much less criminalized.
In the 1960s, definitions of "property" and "privacy" had not yet been
extended to cyberspace. Computers were not yet indispensable to soci-
ety. There were no vast databanks of vulnerable, proprietary informa-
tion stored in computers, which might be accessed, copied without per-
mission, erased, altered, or sabotaged. The stakes were low in the early
days but they grew every year, exponentially, as computers them-
selves grew.
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By the 1990s, commercial and political pressures had become over-
whelming, and they broke the social boundaries of the hacking subcul-
ture. Hacking had become too important to be left to the hackers.
Society was now forced to tackle the intangible nature of cyberspace-
as-property, cyberspace as privately-owned unreal-estate. In the
new, severe, responsible, high- stakes context of the "Information
Society" of the 1990s, "hacking" was called into question.
What did it mean to break into a computer without permission and use
its computational power, or look around inside its files without hurting
anything? What were computer-intruding hackers, anyway how
should society, and the law, best define their actions? Were they just
*browsers,* harmless intellectual explorers? Were they *voyeurs,*
snoops, invaders of privacy? Should they be sternly treated as potential
*agents of espionage,* or perhaps as *industrial spies?* Or were they
best defined as *trespassers,* a very common teenage misdemeanor?
Was hacking *theft of service?* (After all, intruders were getting
someone else's computer to carry out their orders, without permission
and without paying). Was hacking *fraud?* Maybe it was best
described as *impersonation.* The commonest mode of computer intru-
sion was (and is) to swipe or snoop somebody else's password, and then
enter the computer in the guise of another person who is commonly
stuck with the blame and the bills.
Perhaps a medical metaphor was better hackers should be defined as
"sick," as *computer addicts* unable to control their irresponsible,
compulsive behavior.
But these weighty assessments meant little to the people who were actu-
ally being judged. From inside the underground world of hacking itself,
all these perceptions seem quaint, wrongheaded, stupid, or meaningless.
The most important self-perception of underground hackers from the
1960s, right through to the present day is that they are an *elite.*
The day-to-day struggle in the underground is not over sociological def-
initions who cares? but for power, knowledge, and status among
one's peers.
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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 elec-
tronic harassment are also freely employed in down- and-dirty intra-
hacker 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
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