Contents
About this project
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
Page 6
Page 7
Page 8
Page 9
Page 10
Page 11
Postscript, March 1997
Postscript, January 2000

Related Links
How I Knew When I Was a Hacker

Hackers, by Steven Levy

Steven Levy's homepage

Conscience of a Hacker

Ultimate Guide to Hacking and Phreaking, By Revelation

www.kevinmitnick.com
Kevin Mitnick's Web site

The Takedown site contains info about Mitnick's pursuit and capture

An excerpt from "Takedown" printed in Wired
Wired 4.02, Feb. 1996

A humorous review of "Takedown" by Winn Schwartau

Another "Takedown" review by Charles Platt

The Phiber Optik Archive
Courtesy The Electronic Frontier Foundation

Abene figures prominently in the 1996 book "Masters Of Deception" by Joshua Quittner and Michele Slatalla

An excerpt from "Masters of Deception"
printed in Wired Magazine Wired 2.12, December 1994

Crossbar Security
A security company launched in 1998 by Mark Abene, aka Phiber Optik

—From "How I Knew When I Was a Hacker" by Revelation, founder of the Legion of the Apocalypse

Defining who "hackers" are and exactly what constitutes "hacking" can be tricky.

Computer science students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are generally credited with coining the two terms in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A "hack" as explained by Steven Levy in his 1984 book "Hackers" and later by Katie Hafner and John Markoff in their book "Cyberpunk" was a prank or clever project undertaken for no purpose other than to satisfy the person doing it, generally involving a technically challenging system, electronic or otherwise. To be labeled a "hacker" at MIT meant having created a unique program or solved a problem with a truly innovative solution. To be a hacker was to have earned a badge of honor requiring near-monastic dedication to refining a computer program to perfection over the course of several hours, if not days.

In the mid-1980s to be a hacker was to be something else entirely. The first wave of personal home computers — the Apple II and Apple Macintosh, the Commodore 64, the IBM Pesonal Computer — landed in the living rooms of many American families. Hackers were software pirates, deft at cracking the codes that protected games, word processing programs and other software from being copied and circulated illegally.

Then in the 1990s, the civilized world discovered the Internet. With the help of the news media hacking came to mean nearly any crime in which a computer was somehow involved, even though it required no real skill. Someone with an America Online account entices a woman he meets in a chat room to meet him somewhere then rapes her, and the newspapers call him a hacker. Someone uses a government computer to store a collection of pornographic pictures, and the police call him a hacker.

Kevin Mitnick

To some the word hacker is synonymous with criminal, thanks to many well publicized cases of computer users who used their skills for personal gain or were for one reason or another judged to have violated the law. The 1995 arrest of so-called superhacker Kevin Mitnick made headlines around the country and was the focus of no less than three bestselling books on his pursuit and capture. In 1992 five members of the New York-based hacker group MoD (depending on which period of time you're referring to MoD stands for Masters of Destruction or Deception) were indicted in federal court and charged with several computer-related crimes stemming from a conflict with a rival Texas group, the Legion of Doom. All five served time in prison, their sentences intended as an example to other would-be hackers. The MoD case became the subject of yet another book that contributed to the hacker tradition, and elevated Queens native Mark Abene, aka Phiber Optik, to the status of a hacking deity.

Mark Abene, aka Phiber Optik

But to the people attending the 2600 meeting, hacking is nothing more than the quest for knowledge; an unquenchable thirst to understand the way computer systems in all their various forms function and shape our society — from the desktop PC to the specialized switching systems of the telephone networks. In a society increasingly controlled by information stored in computers all over the world, they strive to understand how that information is gathered, stored and used. Their quest is to understand the machinery that makes our society work; often that understanding exceeds that of the people who build it and the companies who own it.

Demographically, hackers tend to be male, aged 12 to 20 years. They are intelligent but perform poorly in school. Some tend to be social misfits, sharing little in common with schoolmates. But there is one common denominator among them all: at some point they have discovered a skill for using the computer.

There are many documents circulating on the Internet that attempt to describe how hackers think and why. None of them is more popular than "Conscience of a Hacker" also known as "The Hacker's Manifesto," written in 1986 by The Mentor, a Texas hacker whose real name is Lloyd Blankenship. Other documents are sets of rules by which hackers are urged to abide, or primers for beginners. There are hundreds of these so-called "text philes" but none so articulate as Blankenship's "Manifesto":

"I am a hacker, enter my world... Mine is a world that begins with school... I'm smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me... Damn underachiever. They're all alike.... "And then it happened... a door opened to a world... rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is found. This is it... this is where I belong... I know everyone here... even if I've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I know you all... "Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They're all alike... "Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something you will never forgive me for."