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in the Pacific Northwest and was working as a computer programmer in a company with access to a large time-share mainframe - a central computer accessed by telephone that was shared among hundreds of smaller companies. Following normal practice, each user had his own log-in - identification code or ID - and password, which he would need to type in before being allowed access to the mainframe. Once on the mainframe, to avoid companies seeing each other's data, users were confined to their own sectors of the computer.

Bernay quickly tired of this arrangement. He wrote a program that allowed him to read everyone else's ID and password and used them to enter other sectors. He began leaving messages for users in their files, signing them 'The Midnight Skulker'. He didn't want to get caught, but he did want to impress the others with what he could do. He wanted some reaction. The computer operators changed the passwords, but Bernay found another way to access them. He left clues about his identity in files. He even wrote a program that, if activated, would destroy his own password-catching program. He wanted to play, to have his original program destroyed so he could write another one to undo what he had, in effect, done to himself, and then reappear. But the management refused to play. He left more clues, all signed by 'The Midnight Skulker'.

Eventually, the management tired of the whole thing. They interrogated everyone who had access to the mainframe and, inevitably, one of Bernay's colleagues fingered him. Bernay was fired.³

When Rosenbaum wrote his article in 1971 the practice of breaking into computers was so new and so bizarre it didn't even have a name. Rosenbaum called it computer freaking - the 'f' used to distinguish it from ordinary phone phreaking. What was being described was the birth of hacking.

It was Draper, alias Captain Crunch, who spread the techniques of phreaking and hacking to the underworld - the real underworld of criminals and drug dealers. This wasn't intentional. He was in jail at the time.

Part of the reason Draper went to jail, he now says, was because of the Esquire article: 'I knew I was in trouble as soon as I read it.' As a direct result of the article five states set up grand juries to

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