TIME Domestic

   January 23, 1995 Volume 145, No. 4
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  TECHNOLOGY

HACKER HOMECOMING

  Having paid the price for his computer trespasses, a digital Robin Hood
  called Phiber Optik is out of jail and back online

   BY JOSHUA QUITTNER

   The  nightclub  in  downtown  Manhattan  is  swarming  with reporters,
   cameramen,  Internet  bohemians  and  online  celebrities, people with
   handles  like  "Mnemonic," "Razor" and "Garbled Uplink." The center of
   attention  -  a  fashionably  wan,  cigarette-smoking  ex-con known as
   Phiber  Optik - shows up an hour late, even though the party is in his
   honor.  Phiberphest  '95, they're calling it. Onstage is a band called
   Foamola,  consisting  of  a bald male organist, a homeless man playing
   what  appear  to  be  a pair of rocks and a female vocalist who yowls,
   "When  I  read  a  book,  I always read Balzac!/ When I take a drug, I
   always  take  Prozac!"  Mercifully,  an  emcee  named Jane Doe finally
   seizes  the  mike  and asks, to the delight of the assembled digerati,
   "Just who the hell is Phiber Optik? A soft drink? A sex aid?"

   Phiber  Optik,  23, is decidedly not a soft drink - and probably not a
   sex  aid.  According  to  his  supporters,  who  gathered last week to
   celebrate  his release from prison, he's the first underground hero of
   the  Information Age, the Robin Hood of cyberspace. Arrested two years
   ago  in  a  federal crackdown on computer break-ins, he became a cause
   celebre  among the Net intelligentsia: a master hacker jailed not only
   for what he did but also for what he knew how to do.

   Like many bright kids with a talent for things digital, Mark Abene (as
   he's  known to his parents) decided early on that computers were going
   to be his ticket to stardom. Raised in a working-class neighborhood in
   Queens,  New  York, he used his $300 Radio Shack computer like a magic
   carpet to cyberspace, staying up all night to explore the mysteries of
   the  worldwide  telephone  grid.  Phiber had a gift: computers yielded
   their  secrets  to  his  prying  fingers like jewels to a safecracker.
   Eventually,  he  dropped  out of school to pursue his education in the
   online world - the poor man's university.

   There  he  met  other  students,  among them a gang of mischief-making
   teenagers  from  Brooklyn  and  the  Bronx  who  called themselves the
   Masters of Destruction. Although Phiber claims he never joined MOD, he
   was  happy  to share his knowledge with them. Under his tutelage, they
   learned how to seize control of a telephone account and alter services
   at will. One trick: turning a rival's home telephone into a pay phone,
   so  that whenever his parents tried to dial a number an operator would
   interrupt to say, "Please deposit 25 cents."

   By  1992  every  U.S.  telephone  network of any consequence was MOD's
   playground.  At  first they used their powers for harmless high jinks:
   looking  up the unlisted numbers of celebrities, pestering people they
   disliked  (such  as  white supremacist Tom Metzgar and former Klansman
   David  Duke)  and  calling  the  homes of people they admired (Richard
   Gere,  Julia  Roberts).  But gradually, they began to trespass on more
   than   just   the  telephone  lines.  With  Phiber's  help,  the  crew
   infiltrated the computer networks of TRW, Martin Marietta, the Bank of
   America,  the  National  Security  Agency  and Chiquita Banana. At one
   point,  two  MOD  members  can  be  heard  in a Secret Service wiretap
   hatching a scheme to create their own bogus credit bureau that would -
   for the right price - alter people's credit histories. "We can destroy
   people's lives," they boasted. "Or make them look like saints."

   Phiber  says  he had no interest in anything so venal. He adheres to a
   self-styled  "hacker ethic," which justifies any computer intrusion as
   long  as  the  motive  is pure. In his mind, he was studying the phone
   system  as  an  architecture  student  would  the  floor  plan  for  a
   cathedral:  as  a  thing  of beauty. Still, when Secret Service agents
   began  investigating  telephone-company  complaints,  they  found  his
   digital  footprints everywhere. During one six-month period, according
   to  Secret  Service  logs, he broke into AT&T computers in Chicago and
   Portland, Maine, 69 times.

   In  the  summer  of 1992 Phiber and four MOD members were indicted for
   their  computer  trespasses.  Phiber  was  the  last  to plead guilty,
   insisting  to  the  end that he had done nothing wrong. The judge gave
   Phiber  the longest sentence of the bunch - a year in federal prison -
   to send a message to other hackers that computer crime doesn't pay.

   Or  does  it? Phiber is now a bigger star than ever. Most of the major
   TV  networks  and  national  press  turned up last week to witness his
   triumphant  return. After 10 months in a minimum-security prison - and
   away  from  his  computers  - he looks relatively healthy and relaxed.
   He's  now  employed as a computer technician at ECHO, a New York-based
   online salon. It hardly ever crashes.

   Copyright 1995 Time Inc. All rights reserved.