📸

BREAKING AND ENTERING

such as Captain Crunch and Joe Engressia two decades ago. In words that echo Joe Engressia, one American telco phreak wrote in 1988: ‘The phone system is the most interesting, fascinating thing I know of. There is so much to know … I myself would like to work for the telco, doing something interesting, like programming a switch. Something that isn’t slave labor bullshit. Something that you enjoy, but have to take risks in order to participate unless you are lucky enough to work for the telco. To have access to telco things, manuals, etc, would be great.’ The writer signed himself ‘DP’ and left the message on a pirate board.

If there is a credo that unites all members of the computer underground, it is probably that first expounded by Steven Levy in his 1984 book, Hackers: ‘Access to computers, and anything that might teach you something about the way the world works, should be unlimited and total.’ This belief implies a code of ethics which, put simply, boils down to ‘Look, but don’t touch.’ Hackers, according to this code, may break into computers or computer networks with impunity, but should not tamper with files or programs.

In the real world it rarely works like that. Though hackers see themselves as a useful part of the system, discovering design flaws and security deficiencies, the urge to demonstrate that a particular computer has been cracked tempts hackers to leave evidence, which involves tampering with the computer. The ethical code is easy to overlook, and tampering can become malicious and damaging.

Still, some hackers abide by the code. One of the favourite targets for hackers in the US is the TRW system, the nation-wide credit agency that holds financial information on some 80 million Americans, and in the mid-1980s hacking TRW was reputed to be so simple it was almost routine. A hacker named Michael Synergy (he has legally changed his surname to his handle) once broke into the agency to have a look at then-president Ronald Reagan’s files. He located the files easily, and discovered sixty-three other requests for the president’s credit records, all logged that day and all from unlikely sources. Synergy also found something even odder – a group of about 700 people who all appeared to hold one specific credit card. Their credit histories were bizarre, and to Synergy they all seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, as if ‘they had no previous experience’.

📸