Hacker Crackdown - Bruce Sterling (books for 9th graders .TXT) š
- Author: Bruce Sterling
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First Iād ātrashedāāand now, mere hours later, Iād bragged to someone else. Having entered the lifestyle of hackerdom, I was now, unsurprisingly, following its logic. Having discovered something remarkable through a surreptitious action, I of course HAD to ābrag,ā and to drag the passing Draper into my iniquities. I felt I needed a witness. Otherwise nobody would have believed what Iād discoveredā¦.
Back at the meeting, Thackeray cordially, if rather tentatively, introduced Kapor and Godwin to her colleagues. Papers were distributed. Kapor took center stage. The brilliant Bostonian high-tech entrepreneur, normally the hawk in his own administration and quite an effective public speaker, seemed visibly nervous, and frankly admitted as much. He began by saying he consided computer-intrusion to be morally wrong, and that the EFF was not a āhacker defense fund,ā despite what had appeared in print. Kapor chatted a bit about the basic motivations of his group, emphasizing their good faith and willingness to listen and seek common ground with law enforcementāwhen, er, possible.
Then, at Godwinās urging, Kapor suddenly remarked that EFFās own Internet machine had been āhackedā recently, and that EFF did not consider this incident amusing.
After this surprising confession, things began to loosen up quite rapidly. Soon Kapor was fielding questions, parrying objections, challenging definitions, and juggling paradigms with something akin to his usual gusto.
Kapor seemed to score quite an effect with his shrewd and skeptical analysis of the merits of telco āCaller-IDā services. (On this topic, FCIC and EFF have never been at loggerheads, and have no particular established earthworks to defend.) Caller-ID has generally been promoted as a privacy service for consumers, a presentation Kapor described as a āsmokescreen,ā the real point of Caller-ID being to ALLOW CORPORATE CUSTOMERS TO BUILD EXTENSIVE COMMERCIAL DATABASES ON EVERYBODY WHO PHONES OR FAXES THEM. Clearly, few people in the room had considered this possibility, except perhaps for two late-arrivals from US WEST RBOC security, who chuckled nervously.
Mike Godwin then made an extensive presentation on āCivil Liberties Implications of Computer Searches and Seizures.ā Now, at last, we were getting to the real nitty-gritty here, real political horse-trading. The audience listened with close attention, angry mutters rising occasionally: āHeās trying to teach us our jobs!ā āWeāve been thinking about this for years! We think about these issues every day!ā āIf I didnāt seize the works, Iād be sued by the guyās victims!ā āIām violating the law if I leave ten thousand disks full of illegal PIRATED SOFTWARE and STOLEN CODES!ā āItās our job to make sure people donāt trash the Constitutionāweāre the DEFENDERS of the Constitution!ā āWe seize stuff when we know it will be forfeited anyway as restitution for the victim!ā
āIf itās forfeitable, then donāt get a search warrant, get a forfeiture warrant,ā Godwin suggested coolly. He further remarked that most suspects in computer crime donāt WANT to see their computers vanish out the door, headed God knew where, for who knows how long. They might not mind a search, even an extensive search, but they want their machines searched on-site.
āAre they gonna feed us?ā somebody asked sourly.
āHow about if you take copies of the data?ā Godwin parried.
āThatāll never stand up in court.ā
āOkay, you make copies, give THEM the copies, and take the originals.ā
Hmmm.
Godwin championed bulletin-board systems as repositories of First Amendment protected free speech. He complained that federal computer-crime training manuals gave boards a bad press, suggesting that they are hotbeds of crime haunted by pedophiles and crooks, whereas the vast majority of the nationās thousands of boards are completely innocuous, and nowhere near so romantically suspicious.
People who run boards violently resent it when their systems are seized, and their dozens (or hundreds) of users look on in abject horror. Their rights of free expression are cut short. Their right to associate with other people is infringed. And their privacy is violated as their private electronic mail becomes police property.
Not a soul spoke up to defend the practice of seizing boards. The issue passed in chastened silence. Legal principles asideā(and those principles cannot be settled without laws passed or court precedents)āseizing bulletin boards has become public-relations poison for American computer police.
And anyway, itās not entirely necessary. If youāre a cop, you can get āmost everything you need from a pirate board, just by using an inside informant. Plenty of vigilantesāwell, CONCERNED CITIZENSāwill inform police the moment they see a pirate board hit their area (and will tell the police all about it, in such technical detail, actually, that you kinda wish theyād shut up). They will happily supply police with extensive downloads or printouts. Itās IMPOSSIBLE to keep this fluid electronic information out of the hands of police.
Some people in the electronic community become enraged at the prospect of cops āmonitoringā bulletin boards. This does have touchy aspects, as Secret Service people in particular examine bulletin boards with some regularity. But to expect electronic police to be deaf dumb and blind in regard to this particular medium rather flies in the face of common sense. Police watch television, listen to radio, read newspapers and magazines; why should the new medium of boards be different? Cops can exercise the same access to electronic information as everybody else. As we have seen, quite a few computer police maintain THEIR OWN bulletin boards, including anti-hacker āstingā boards, which have generally proven quite effective.
As a final clincher, their Mountie friends in Canada (and colleagues in Ireland and Taiwan) donāt have First Amendment or American constitutional restrictions, but they do have phone lines, and can call any bulletin board in America whenever they please. The same technological determinants that play into the hands of hackers, phone phreaks and software pirates can play into the hands of police. āTechnological determinantsā donāt have ANY human allegiances. Theyāre not black or white, or Establishment or Underground, or pro-or-anti anything.
Godwin complained at length about what he called āthe Clever Hobbyist hypothesisāāthe assumption that the āhackerā youāre busting is clearly a technical genius, and must therefore by searched with extreme thoroughness. So: from the lawās point of view, why risk missing anything? Take the works. Take the guyās computer. Take his books. Take his notebooks. Take the electronic drafts of his love letters. Take his Walkman. Take his wifeās computer. Take his dadās computer. Take his kid sisterās computer. Take his employerās computer. Take his compact disksāthey MIGHT be CD-ROM disks, cunningly disguised as pop music. Take his laser printerāhe might have hidden something vital in the printerās 5 meg of memory. Take his software manuals and hardware documentation. Take his science-fiction novels and his simulation-gaming books. Take his Nintendo Game-Boy and his Pac-Man arcade game. Take his answering machine, take his telephone out of the wall. Take anything remotely suspicious.
Godwin pointed out that most āhackersā are not, in fact, clever genius hobbyists. Quite a few are crooks and grifters who donāt have much in the way of technical sophistication; just some rule-of-thumb rip-off techniques. The same goes for most fifteen-year-olds whoāve downloaded a code-scanning program from a pirate board. Thereās no real need to seize everything in sight. It doesnāt require an entire computer system and ten thousand disks to prove a case in court.
What if the computer is the instrumentality of a crime? someone demanded.
Godwin admitted quietly that the doctrine of seizing the instrumentality of a crime was pretty well established in the American legal system.
The meeting broke up. Godwin and Kapor had to leave. Kapor was testifying next morning before the Massachusetts Department Of Public Utility, about ISDN narrowband wide-area networking.
As soon as they were gone, Thackeray seemed elated. She had taken a great risk with this. Her colleagues had not, in fact, torn Kapor and Godwinās heads off. She was very proud of them, and told them so.
āDid you hear what Godwin said about INSTRUMENTALITY OF A CRIME?ā she exulted, to nobody in particular. āWow, that means MITCH ISNāT GOING TO SUE ME.ā
Americaās computer police are an interesting group. As a social phenomenon they are far more interesting, and far more important, than teenage phone phreaks and computer hackers. First, theyāre older and wiser; not dizzy hobbyists with leaky morals, but seasoned adult professionals with all the responsibilities of public service. And, unlike hackers, they possess not merely TECHNICAL power alone, but heavy-duty legal and social authority.
And, very interestingly, they are just as much at sea in cyberspace as everyone else. They are not happy about this. Police are authoritarian by nature, and prefer to obey rules and precedents. (Even those police who secretly enjoy a fast ride in rough territory will soberly disclaim any ācowboyā attitude.) But in cyberspace there ARE no rules and precedents. They are groundbreaking pioneers, Cyberspace Rangers, whether they like it or not.
In my opinion, any teenager enthralled by computers, fascinated by the ins and outs of computer security, and attracted by the lure of specialized forms of knowledge and power, would do well to forget all about āhackingā and set his (or her) sights on becoming a fed. Feds can trump hackers at almost every single thing hackers do, including gathering intelligence, undercover disguise, trashing, phone-tapping, building dossiers, networking, and infiltrating computer systems- -CRIMINAL computer systems. Secret Service agents know more about phreaking, coding and carding than most phreaks can find out in years, and when it comes to viruses, breakins, software bombs and trojan horses, Feds have direct access to red-hot confidential information that is only vague rumor in the underground.
And if itās an impressive public rep youāre after, there are few people in the world who can be so chillingly impressive as a well-trained, well-armed United States Secret Service agent.
Of course, a few personal sacrifices are necessary in order to obtain that power and knowledge. First, youāll have the galling discipline of belonging to a large organization; but the world of computer crime is still so small, and so amazingly fast-moving, that it will remain spectacularly fluid for years to come. The second sacrifice is that youāll have to give up ripping people off. This is not a great loss. Abstaining from the use of illegal drugs, also necessary, will be a boon to your health.
A career in computer security is not a bad choice for a young man or woman today. The field will almost certainly expand drastically in years to come. If you are a teenager today, by the time you become a professional, the pioneers you have read about in this book will be the grand old men and women of the field, swamped by their many disciples and successors. Of course, some of them, like William P. Wood of the 1865 Secret Service, may well be mangled in the whirring machinery of legal controversy; but by the time you enter the computer-crime field, it may have stabilized somewhat, while remaining entertainingly challenging.
But you canāt just have a badge. You have to win it. First, thereās the federal law enforcement training. And itās hardāitās a challenge. A real challengeānot for wimps and rodents.
Every Secret Service agent must complete gruelling courses at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. (In fact, Secret Service agents are periodically re-trained during their entire careers.)
In order to get a glimpse of what this might be like, I myself travelled to FLETC.
The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center is a 1500-acre facility on Georgiaās Atlantic coast. Itās a milieu of marshgrass, seabirds, damp, clinging sea-breezes, palmettos, mosquitos, and bats. Until 1974, it was a Navy Air Base, and still features a working runway, and some WWII vintage blockhouses and officersā quarters. The Center has since benefitted by a forty-million-dollar retrofit, but thereās still enough forest and swamp on the facility for the Border Patrol to put in tracking practice.
As a town, āGlyncoā scarcely exists. The nearest real town is Brunswick, a few miles down Highway
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