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                           *  F  E  A  T  U  R  E  *

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                                 Cyberview '91

                                Bruce Sterling
                             bruces@well.sf.ca.us

    They called  it "CyberView '91."   Actually,  it was another "SummerCon" --
the traditional summer   gathering  of  the  American  hacker underground.  The
organizer,  21 year old  "Knight  Lightning,"  had  recently  beaten a Computer
Fraud and Abuse rap that  might  have  put  him  in  jail for thirty years.   A
little discretion seemed in order.
    The convention hotel,  a  seedy  but  accommodating  motor-inn  outside the
airport in St Louis, had hosted SummerCons  before.  Changing the name had been
a good idea.  If the staff were  alert, and actually recognized that these were
the same kids back again,  things might get hairy.
    The SummerCon '88  hotel  was  definitely  out  of  bounds.   The US Secret
Service had set up shop in an  informant's  room that year,  and videotaped the
drunken antics of the now globally notorious "Legion of Doom" through a one-way
mirror.   The running  of  SummerCon  '88  had  constituted  a  major  count of
criminal conspiracy against young  Knight  Lightning,  during  his 1990 federal
trial.
    That hotel inspired  sour  memories.   Besides,  people  already got plenty
nervous playing  "hunt  the  fed"  at  SummerCon  gigs.   SummerCons  generally
featured at least one  active  federal  informant.    Hackers and phone phreaks
like to talk a lot.   They talk  about  phones  and computers -- and about each
other.

    For insiders, the world of computer  hacking  is a lot like Mexico. There's
no middle class.  There's  a  million  little  kids  screwing around with their
modems, trying to snitch  long-distance  phone-codes,  trying  to swipe pirated
software -- the "kodez  kidz"  and  "warez  doodz."   They're peons, "rodents."
Then there's a few earnest wannabes, up-and-comers, pupils.  Not many.  Less of
'em every year, lately.
    And then there's the heavy dudes.    The  players.   The Legion of Doom are
definitely heavy.  Germany's Chaos Computer  Club  are very  heavy, and already
back out on parole after their  dire  flirtation  with  the KGB. The Masters of
Destruction in New  York  are  a  pain  in  the  ass  to  their  rivals  in the
underground, but ya gotta admit  they  are   heavy.    MoD's "Phiber Optik" has
almost completed his public-service sentence,  too...   "Phoenix" and his crowd
down in Australia used to be heavy,  but  nobody's  heard much out of "Nom" and
"Electron" since the Australian heat came down on them.
    The people in Holland are very active,  but somehow the Dutch hackers don't
quite qualify as  "heavy."   Probably  because  computer-hacking  is  legal  in
Holland, and therefore nobody ever  gets  busted  for  it.   The Dutch lack the
proper bad attitude, somehow.
    America's answer to the Dutch menace  began  arriving in a steady confusion
of airport shuttle buses and college-kid  decaying junkers.  A software pirate,
one of the more prosperous attendees,  flaunted a radar-detecting black muscle-
car.  In some dim era before the jet  age,  this section of St Louis had been a
mellow, fertile   Samuel  Clemens  landscape.  Waist-high  summer  weeds  still
flourished beside the four-lane highway and the airport feeder roads.
    The graceless  CyberView hotel had been slammed down onto this landscape as
if dropped from a B-52.    A small  office-tower loomed in one corner  beside a
large parking garage.  The rest was a  rambling mess of long, narrow, dimly lit
corridors, with a small swimming  pool,   a  glass-fronted  souvenir shop and a
cheerless dining room.   The hotel  was  clean  enough,  and the staff, despite
provocation, proved adept at minding their  own business.   For their part, the
hackers seemed quite fond of the place.

    The term "hacker" has had a  spotted history.   Real "hackers," traditional
"hackers," like  to  write  software  programs.   They  like  to  "grind code,"
plunging into its densest  abstractions  until  the  world outside the computer
terminal bleaches away.  Hackers tend  to  be  portly  white techies with thick
fuzzy beards who talk entirely in  jargon,  stare  into  space a lot, and laugh
briefly for   no  apparent  reason.   The  CyberView  crowd,  though  they call
themselves "hackers,"  are better identified  as computer intruders. They don't
look, talk or act like 60s M.I.T.-style hackers.

    Computer intruders of the 90s aren't stone pocket-protector techies.

    They're young white suburban males,  and  look harmless enough, but sneaky.
They're much the kind of kid you might find skinny-dipping at 2AM in a backyard
suburban swimming pool.  The kind of kid  who  would freeze in the glare of the
homeowner's flashlight, then  frantically  grab  his  pants  and  leap over the
fence, leaving behind a half-empty bottle of tequila, a Metallica T-shirt, and,
probably, his wallet.
    One might  wonder  why,  in  the  second  decade  of  the personal-computer
revolution, most computer intruders are still suburban teenage white whiz-kids.
Hacking-as-computer-intrusion has been  around  long  enough  to  have  bred an
entire generation of serious,  heavy-duty adult computer-criminals.  Basically,
this simply hasn't occurred.  Almost  all  computer intruders simply quit after
age 22.  They get bored with  it,  frankly.   Sneaking around in other people's
swimming pools simply loses its  appeal.   They  get  out  of school.  They get
married.  They buy their own swimming  pools.    They have to find some replica
of a real life.

    The Legion of Doom  -- or rather,  the  Texas  wing of LoD -- had hit Saint
Louis in high style, this weekend  of  June  22.   The  Legion of Doom has been
characterized as "a high-tech street gang"  by  the Secret Service, but this is
surely one of the leakiest,  goofiest and best-publicized criminal conspiracies
in American history.
    Not much has been heard from  Legion  founder "Lex Luthor" in recent years.
The Legion's Atlanta wing,  "Prophet,"  "Leftist,"  and  "Urvile," are just now
getting out of various prisons  and  into  Georgia halfway-houses. "Mentor" got
married and writes science fiction games for a living.
    But "Erik Bloodaxe,"  "Doc  Holiday,"   and  "Malefactor"  were  here -- in
person, and in the current issues  of  TIME  and NEWSWEEK.  CyberView offered a
swell opportunity for the Texan  Doomsters  to  announce the formation of their
latest high-tech, uhm, organization, "Comsec Data Security Corporation."

    Comsec boasts a corporate office in Houston, and a marketing analyst, and a
full-scale corporate  computer-auditing  program.    The  Legion  boys  are now
digital guns for hire.  If you're a  well-heeled  company, and you can cough up
per diem and air-fare, the most notorious computer-hackers in America will show
right up on your doorstep and put your digital house in order -- guaranteed.
    Bloodaxe, a limber, strikingly  handsome   young Texan with shoulder-length
blond hair, mirrored sunglasses, a tie, and  a  formidable gift of gab, did the
talking.   Before some  thirty  of  his  former  peers,  gathered upstairs over
styrofoam coffee and canned  Coke  in  the  hotel's  Mark Twain Suite, Bloodaxe
sternly announced some home truths of modern computer security.
    Most so-called "computer security  experts"  --  (Comsec's competitors)  --
are  overpriced con artists!   They   charge gullible corporations thousands of
dollars a day, just to advise that  management  lock its doors at night and use
paper shredders.    Comsec Corp, on the  other hand (with occasional consultant
work from Messrs.  "Pain  Hertz"  and  "Prime  Suspect")  boasts America's most
formidable pool of genuine expertise at actually breaking into computers.
    Comsec, Bloodaxe continued smoothly, was not  in the business of turning-in
any former hacking compatriots.   Just  in  case  anybody  here  was, you know,
worrying...  On the other hand,  any  fool  rash  enough to challenge a Comsec-
secured system had better be prepared for a serious hacker-to-hacker dust-up.
    "Why would any company trust *you*?"  someone asked languidly.
    Malefactor, a muscular young Texan with close-cropped hair and the build of
a linebacker, pointed out that, once hired, Comsec would be allowed inside  the
employer's computer system, and would  have  no  reason  at  all to "break in."
Besides, Comsec agents were to be licensed and bonded.
    Bloodaxe insisted passionately that LoD were through with hacking for good.
There was simply no future in it.  The  time  had  come for LoD to move on, and
corporate  consultation  was  their  new  frontier.   (The  career  options  of
committed computer intruders are, when  you  come  right down to it, remarkably
slim.)   "We don't want to be  flippin'  burgers or sellin' life insurance when
we're thirty," Bloodaxe drawled.  "And wonderin'  when  Tim Foley is gonna come
kickin' in the door!"  (Special Agent Timothy M. Foley of the US Secret Service
has fully  earned his  reputation  as  the  most  formidable anti-hacker cop in
America.)
    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.")  [Whereas  we  PROVE  it  by  calling  our  magazine  "Pure
Bollocks"! -EGBSS]
    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...."
    Back in the  70s  (as  Kapor  recited  to  the  hushed and respectful young
hackers)  he himself had practiced  "software  piracy"   -- as those activities
would be known today.  Of course, back  then, "computer software" hadn't been a
major industry -- but today, "hackers"  had  police after them for doing things
that the industry's own pioneers  had  pulled  routinely. Kapor was irate about
this.  His own personal history,  the  lifestyle  of  his pioneering youth, was
being smugly written out of the  historical  record by the latter-day corporate
androids.  Why, nowadays, people even blanched when Kapor forthrightly declared
that he'd done LSD in the Sixties.
    Quite a few of  the  younger  hackers  grew  alarmed  at  this admission of
Kapor's, and gazed at him in wonder, as if expecting him to explode.
    "The law only has sledgehammers, when what  we need are parking tickets and
speeding tickets," Kapor said.   Anti-hacker hysteria had gripped the nation in
1990.  Huge law enforcement efforts had  been mounted against illusory threats.
In Washington DC, on the very day when the formation of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation had been announced,   a  Congressional  committee  had been formally
presented with the plotline of  a  thriller  movie  --   DIE  HARD II, in which
hacker terrorists seize an airport  computer  --  as  if this Hollywood fantasy
posed a clear and present danger  to  the American republic.   A similar hacker
thriller, WAR GAMES, had been presented  to  Congress in the mid-80s.  Hysteria
served no one's purposes, and created  a  stampede of foolish and unenforceable
laws likely to do more harm than good.
    Kapor didn't want to "paper  over  the  differences" between his Foundation
and the underground community.   In  the  firm  opinion  of EFF, intruding into
computers by stealth  was  morally  wrong.   Like  stealing  phone  service, it
deserved punishment.  Not draconian ruthlessness, though.  Not the ruination of
a youngster's entire life.
    After a lively and quite serious  discussion of digital free-speech issues,
the entire crew went to  dinner  at  an  Italian  eatery  in the local mall, on
Kapor's capacious charge-tab.  Having said  his  piece  and listened with care,
Kapor began glancing at his watch.   Back  in  Boston, his six-year-old son was
waiting at home, with a new Macintosh computer-game to tackle.  A quick  phone-
call got the jet warmed up, and Kapor and his lawyer split town.

    With the forces of conventionality  --  such  as  they  were  -- out of the
picture, the Legion of  Doom  began  to  get  heavily  into  "Mexican Flags." A
Mexican Flag is  a  lethal,  multi-layer  concoction  of  red  grenadine, white
tequila and green creme-de-menthe.  It is topped with a thin layer of 150 proof
rum, set afire, and sucked up through straws.
    The formal fire-and-straw ritual soon went by  the board as things began to
disintegrate.  Wandering from room to  room,  the crowd became howlingly rowdy,
though without creating trouble, as the  CyberView  crowd had wisely taken over
an entire wing of the hotel.
    "Crimson Death,"  a  cheerful,  baby-faced  young  hardware  expert  with a
pierced nose and three earrings,  attempted  to  hack the hotel's private phone
system, but only succeeded in cutting off phone service to his own room.
    Somebody announced there was a  cop  guarding  the  next wing of the hotel.
Mild panic ensued.  Drunken hackers crowded to the window.
    A gentleman  slipped quietly through the  door  of  the next wing wearing a
short terrycloth bathrobe and spangled silk boxer shorts.
    Spouse-swappers had taken over the neighboring  wing of the hotel, and were
holding a private weekend orgy.   It was a St Louis swingers' group.  It turned
out that the cop guarding the entrance  way was an off-duty swinging cop.  He'd
angrily threatened to clobber Doc Holiday.  Another swinger almost  punched-out
"Bill from RNOC," whose prurient hacker curiosity, naturally, knew no bounds.
    It was not much of a contest.  As  the weekend wore on and the booze flowed
freely, the hackers slowly but thoroughly infiltrated the hapless swingers, who
proved surprisingly open and tolerant.  At one point, they even invited a group
of hackers to join in their revels, though "they had to bring their own women."
    Despite the pulverizing  effects  of  numerous  Mexican  Flags, Comsec Data
Security seemed to be having very little trouble on that score. They'd vanished
downtown brandishing their full-color photo in TIME magazine, and returned with
an impressive depth-core sample of St Louis  womanhood, one of whom, in an idle
moment, broke into Doc Holiday's room,  emptied  his wallet, and stole his Sony
tape recorder and all his shirts.

    [This following paragraph is really sad! <Genie!>]

    Events stopped dead for the season's  final  episode of STAR TREK: THE NEXT
GENERATION.   The show  passed  in  rapt  attention  --  then  it  was  back to
harassing the  swingers.   Bill  from  RNOC  cunningly  out-waited  the swinger
guards, infiltrated the building, and decorated all the closed doors with globs
of mustard from a pump-bottle. 

    In the hungover glare of Sunday morning, a hacker proudly showed me a large
handlettered  placard  reading PRIVATE --  STOP,  which  he had stolen from the
unlucky swingers on his way out  of  their  wing.    Somehow, he had managed to
work his way into the  building,  and  had  suavely  ingratiated himself into a
bedroom, where he had engaged  a  swinging  airline  ticket-agent in a long and
most informative conversation about the security of airport computer terminals.
The ticket agent's wife, at  the  time,  was  sprawled  on  the bed engaging in
desultory oral sex with a third gentleman.   It transpired that she herself did
a lot of work on LOTUS  1-2-3.   She  was  thrilled  to hear that the program's
inventor, Mitch Kapor, had been in that very hotel,  that very weekend.
    Mitch Kapor.  Right  over  there?   Here  in  St  Louis?   Wow.  Isn't life
strange.


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