With its top sliced off at a 45-degree angle it looks like a bookend without its twin wedged into place among other flat-roofed office buildings and needle-topped towers for which New York's skyline are known. The angular roof was once intended to accommodate solar panels, which at the time of its completion in 1978 were thought to be the solution of the energy crisis that dogged the nation.

But on the first Friday of each month, this post-modern building in a not-quite post modern city bears another unique distinction. Since the mid-1980s, the building has been the monthly meeting place of New York's computer hackers and telephone phreakers — the 2600 meeting.

Sanctioned by the editors of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, a magazine considered to be the Bible of hacking and phreaking, 55 similar meetings take place on the same Friday in 25 states and nine countries. The name of the magazine is taken from a now obsolete tone — 2600 hertz (Real | WAV) — that until the early 1980s was the key to controlling access to long distance phone lines.

Dozens of teenagers and young adults, very few of them older than 20, most of them male, stand in unorganized groups, some of them passing around copies of the magazine, asking questions of each other and listening intently to those members of the group with more advanced skills than the novices and beginners. Citicorp security guards watch warily from a distance, interrupting only when the conglomeration blocks other foot traffic through the building's public mall area. Each meeting takes place in a centrally located public building; a mall, convention center or a student union building, usually near a bank of pay telephones. There is no call

Cover of the Winter 1996/97 issue of 2600

to order, no agenda, no chairman, no treasury, no procedure, no podium. But for the new generation of young hackers, there is plenty of business to conduct and information to exchange, information which wants to be free.

Over the course of four months, I attended the New York 2600 meetings and met dozens of hackers with varying levels of skill, a handful of whom I interviewed extensively. Though I was never allowed to witness any actual acts of hacking, the people I interviewed described in exacting detail incidents involving the intrusion of several computer systems on the Internet through the use of well-documented security flaws.

I met a boy not yet old enough to shave who is able to gather personal information on people, including social security numbers, criminal background information on their relatives and bank account numbers using a personal computer and a modem. I met a man who at one time could access the credit history of nearly anyone and alter it, before the credit bureaus finally tightened their security. The same man can today still access phone and bank account records, and has masqueraded as an employee of at least one Fortune 500 financial company to steal trade secrets for a competitor.

All this from a handful of inquisitive, technically adept young men driven by compulsion to understand the very machines that keep our society running.

Most people have a vague idea of what a hacker is — mostly from stories on the arrest of so-called "superhackers." There is no doubt that hackers have been villified in the press. Some people would have the public believe that hackers are a threat to the country's electronic infrastructure.

Others say that adolescent hackers should be considered an early-warning system. If a group of unorganized teenagers playing around on home computer can infiltrate the computers of a major corporation or government agency, the theory goes, what could a politically motivated, well-financed group of hackers using more powerful computers and employed by a foreign government accomplish? Hackers could be considered a national resource. The truth must lie somewhere in between.