Getting Caught: Hacker's View (October, 1984)
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Deep down, every hacker wants to get caught. Computer hacking isn't really the
same as killing or stealing, after all. You need at least a little brains to be
able to hop around on the corporations' DEC systems or to know the ARPANET
better than your own PC. So if and when you get caught, you wind up getting a
little bit of credit for having some brains. Most people exaggerate and call
you a genius! Who can resist this type of an ego boost?

So when the FBI came knocking at my door early this spring, it seemed like the
beginning of an adventure. It was me they were after! I had done something to
deserve national attention!!

At first I didn't know what it was they wanted. They came to my house before I
was awake and showed my mother the search warrant. I'll never forget the tone
in her voice when she called me that day. "You'd better come down here right
away," she said, sounding very worried and pissed off at the same time. I knew
something was up when I heard that.

So then I came downstairs and saw what was happening. I was very calm
throughout the whole thing - I even kept my sense of humor. After I figured out
which of my many "projects" they were interested in, I showed them where all
the good stuff was hidden. "Go tell the world," I said.

I had been hacking for about a year. I seemed to pick up things incredibly fast
and before I knew it, I was buried inside the weird world of phones and
computers. In this case, I had been running a huge corporation's mainframe for
them for a few months. This computer had so much data in it that I could find
out (and change) just about anything: paychecks, profit margins, telephone
numbers, you name it. I had lots of fun.

My friends used to come over late at night and watch me explore. Nobody they
knew had ever been able to do anything like that and it seemed pretty amazing.
Then War Games came out and I turned into a sort of cult figure in my
neighborhood. But it was OK - nobody knew exactly what I was doing.

Even my parents didn't seem to mind that much. They'd shake their heads and
wonder what kind of mischief I'd get into next. Most people (grown-ups, that
is) seemed to act exactly the same. And my friends were all into it as
something fun and rebellious.

So now that I was caught, I expected the fun to continue. My parents would be
outraged that a mischievous kid was being hounded by the feds while murderers
and presidents were roaming free. And of course, my friends would stick by me
more than ever. We were pretty tight.

For about a day, that's exactly what happened. My name got in all the papers, I
was on a few news shows, and nobody really understood anything. I suddenly
became popular at school. Everybody seemed to agree that it wasn't fair for
them to come to my house and take away my two computers just like that.

Then, after the initial shock, people's moods started to change. My parents
were the first. They suddenly got mad at me. "What a stupid thing to do!" I
remember those words. "If you don't care about yourself, at least think about
what you re doing to your family," and so on. They also said that I never
listened when they told me to knock it off, which was totally false, since they
never really seemed to care at all.

But all that didn't upset me. After all, parents are supposed to say those
kinds of things. I knew they really cared, so it didn't matter what they said.

It wasn't until a few more weeks that the really bad stuff started happening.
The feds began calling my friends and tried to scare them into saying
incriminating things about me. They told them they'd be in just as much trouble
if they didn't say anything. I could tell something was wrong when all of a
sudden no one was talking to me. People I used to hang out with suddenly seemed
uneasy when I was around.

Then the feds started calling me. And I could tell from the pointed questions
they were asking, that someone I trusted had told them a lot. Much more than
they had to. It wasn't like they had just cracked and said, yes, he did this
and that. They volunteered information!

I tried to figure out why someone would do this no one I knew had any grudges
against me. I didn't really have any enemies. They must have thought that
telling everything was for my own good. The feds had probably told them that I
was really sick and needed help and that only the truth would set me free.
Could that have been it?

It might have been. But there was definitely more than that. When the feds
started scaring my friends, that was my fault. At least it seemed that way to
my friends. A couple of them got so scared that their families hired these big,
expensive lawyers. And that was my fault, too, even though I knew they were
being ripped off.

So what did I get out of the whole thing? Well, nobody trusts me anymore people
are even afraid to let me use their phone. I've gotten a reputation as someone
who doesn't care at all about his friends, otherwise how could I have put them
in such a spot? Everyone in town knows that I did something bad to some
corporation somewhere, but nobody understands how much of a game the whole
thing seemed at the time. The newspapers were never really interested in my
side and nobody else seems to be either.

Maybe this is good in a way, because I found out that most people value
friendship less than their own safety. As soon as the pressure is applied, they
lose all feeling for you. Then they trick themselves into believing that you
were always a bad seed from the start. They do this so they won't feel guilty
about the way they shafted you. But there were a couple of others who didn't
desert me because they knew who I really was. If it wasn't for them, I might
have just jumped off a building one night. That's how bad it makes you feel
sometimes.

Yes, I'm through hacking. Let the professionals do it they can't get hurt like
I was. 

Name withheld by request.