📸

demonstrating the newly established Sov-Am Teleport Union, a telephone link that connected San Francisco to Moscow via satellite. Using a phone on the stage the Captain dialled first to San Francisco, where he linked to the Teleport and jumped via satellite to Moscow. Unusually for the Captain, he had a purpose to his call. He dialled a number in Moscow where a group of ten Soviet hackers were waiting to address the conference about the underground in the USSR.

The line, inevitably, was not very good.

The Russians joined a multilingual babble of hackers on the line from a number of other countries, including Germany, France, Kenya, New Zealand and the US. The Captain, revelling in his role as prophet for the whole movement, fielded calls about technology and the ethics of hacking - one caller wanted to know if it would be right to hack into South African computers at the behest of the ANC - and related his own phreaking experiences.

The Captain was in Amsterdam representing what has been called the second generation of hackers. His audience, the visitors to the Galactic Hacker Party, were dubbed the fourth generation. They had been separated by more than a decade in time and by thousands of miles in geography; the Hacker Party was their meeting place.

The concept of hacker generations was first suggested by Steven Levy, the man who also outlined the philosophy of ‘hacker ethics’. In his 1984 book Hackers, Levy argued that the first generation of hackers was the group of students at MIT: they had access to big, expensive mainframes; they worked together to produce useful, new software; and, in doing so, they bent the rules of the university. More than anything, they believed in freedom of information and unfettered access to technology. They abhorred security to the extent that they made sure they could pick every lock in the building they worked in.

The second generation of hackers, according to Levy, were people like Captain Crunch and Steve Wozniak, as well as the other members of the Bay Area's Personal Computer Company and its successor, the Homebrew Computer Club. These were the guys who intuitively believed that the way to drive technology forward was through making the specifications for their machines freely available, a con-

📸