Crime Waves (Spring, 1994) -------------------------- A decade is a long time to be doing anything. When we first started this project back in the summer of 1983, nobody could have predicted our growth, or even our existence in 1994. It's pretty strange to look back at the early days when we literally snuck around in offices and alleyways to get our first issues printed. And today you can find us in chain stores. Reality has always been weird to us. Of course, if we had just been doing the same thing for ten years, we would all be abject failures. Fortunately, the hacker world is such that you can spend a long time within it and never feel the kind of boredom that has become such an important part of the average American's life. There is always something happening in this world, always something new to explore and discover, more knowledge to share, more friends to meet for the first time. The last ten years have been tinged with hilarity and fun, but also sadness, fear, anger, and determination. One thing these years have not been is a waste of time. We know that with every page we turn, there is a risk. The most obvious of these include pissing off the powerful corporations and their law enforcement drones. Each and every time we share knowledge, we engage in a conspiracy of some sort. We risk having our lives disrupted by our accusers, our very means of learning taken from us by large armed men. We risk being chastised by our friends and family for being different and ostracized in school for not asking the proper questions or memorizing the standard answers. These are the obvious risks of who we are and what we do. Most of us have come to recognize them. But there is a far greater risk facing us and it s one that many of us could fall victim to with little or no warning. Over the years, we ve tried to dispel the myth that hackers are criminals. This has been most difficult. As the tabloid press loves to scream, hackers can get into your credit file. But so can anybody else. Hackers can make thousands of dollars of long distance calls. Anyone is capable of this unimpressive feat. Hackers can break into thousands of sensitive computer systems around the world. And the holes will still be there if we never try. What the press fails to see is the distinction between hacking for the sake of adventure and using hacker knowledge for personal profit. To them it s all the same. Somebody who sells phone codes is the same person as somebody who manipulates the telephone network in wild and imaginative ways. By defining the two as one and the same, we could actually find ourselves being nudged into criminal behavior because it's what's expected of us. With this in mind, the massive growth of the hacker community is cause for concern. Many people are being drawn into our fold through these very same media perceptions. People have shown up at our meetings assuming that we're there to sell or buy codes. A disturbing number of people who engage in credit card fraud, that is, the stealing of actual physical, tangible merchandise, are trying to ingratiate themselves into the hacker community. It's not surprising. And they might actually be able to prey on our temptations and suck some hackers into their midst, thereby learning a few new tricks. And by calling themselves hackers, they manage to justify what it is they do. Ironically, their technical prowess oftentimes doesn't extend beyond knowing how to operate a red box or punch in a code. This kind of thing was inevitable, given the growing awareness that the mainstream world, and hence the mainstream criminal world, has developed for hackers. Carrots are being dangled in front of our faces. Our brains are suddenly in demand. You might say that society has finally found a use for us. Knowing this, the most important thing as individuals is to realize why we do what we do. Is it that we want to find out things and spread knowledge around? Or do we want to get what we feel the world owes us? Are we trying to survive and get access to a locked world? Or are we intent on selling our knowledge to the highest bidder? Truthful answers to these questions are more valuable than anything else. Once we understand our motivation, we can at least be honest with ourselves. Those who use their hacker knowledge to embark upon a life of crime can at least admit to themselves that they are now criminals, thereby salvaging some self respect. The rest of us will have some sense of where we draw our lines. But how do we know what constitutes criminal behavior and what does not? Regrettably, the law no longer seems an accurate definer. With many of us, we just know when something doesn't feel right. And in such a case, trusting your instincts is always a good idea. To be a hacker, your primary goal must be to learn for the sake of learning just to find out what happens if you do a certain thing at a particular time under a specific condition. A good way to know if you're a genuine hacker is to look at the reaction of the non-hackers around you. If most of them think you re wasting your time doing something incomprehensible that only you can appreciate, welcome to the world of hacking. If, however, you find yourself being trailed and hounded by a bunch of drooling wannabes with a list of plots and schemes to make your knowledge "pay off" in a big way, you're probably on the verge of becoming a criminal and leaving the rest of us back in the age of innocence. Obviously, embarking on such a journey en masse would mean the end of the hacker world. We would play right into the hands of our enemies and criminalize hacking by definition, rather than by legislation. Nothing would be better for the anti-hacker lobbyists. As a curious side note, in more than one instance, people who were found to have been helping the government prosecute hackers have been caught actively encouraging criminal behavior among hackers. We have to wonder. We hack because we're curious. We spread what we find because segregated knowledge is our common enemy. This means that some opportunists will get a free ride and run the risk of giving the rest of us a bad name. The only surefire way to keep this from happening is for us to behave like the phone companies and restrict knowledge. Not likely. It's not our job to catch criminals. But it is our moral obligation to keep our noble, if somewhat naive, aspirations from becoming subverted by those who truly don't understand.