Membership in the computer underground simply means belonging to a self-selected group of high-tech junkies. Some individual hackers--generally members of a particular bulletin board--work as a group and acquire a gang handle. In 1982 the Inner Circle was the first group to claim credit for breaking into the U.S. military computer network. The 414 gang, named after its local Wisconsin area code, specialized in cracking telephonecompany systems.
The telephone company, or "telco," as it is called, is still a favorite target for many hackers. Those who specialize in exploring the telco system are sometimes called phreakers like their predecessors Captain Crunch and Joe Engressia. In words that echo Joe Engressia, one telco phreak wrote, "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. Exploring the system is something that you enjoy, but have to take risks in order to participate in, unless you are lucky enough to work for the telco. To have access to telco things, manuals, etc., would be great."
If there is a credo that unites all members of the computer underground, it is probably the one 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 that, 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 sometimes tampering can become malicious and damaging.
For the authorities, the whole thing is a giant can of worms. Patrolling the access points and communications webs that make up Worldnet is an impossible task; in the end, policing in the information age is necessarily reactive. Adding to the problems of the authorities is the increasing internationalization of the computer underground. Laws are formed to cover local conditions, in which the crime, the victim, and the perpetrator share a common territory. International crime, in which the victim is in America, say, and the perpetrator in Europe, while the scene of the crime--the computer that was violated--may be located in a third country, makes enforcement all the more difficult. Police agencies only rarely cooperate internationally, language differences create artificial barriers, and the laws and legal systems are never the same.
Still, the authorities are bound to try. The argument that began as the information age dawned, encapsulated in Stephen Levy's uncompromising view that access to data should be "unlimited and total," has never ended. The government, corporations, and state agencies will never aliow unlimited access for very obvious reasons: state security, the privacy of individuals, the intellectual property conventions . . . the list goes on and on. In all western countries, hacking is now illegal; the theft of information from computers, and in some cases even unauthorized access, is punishable by fines and jail sentences. The position is rigid and clear: the computer underground is a renegade movement, in conflict with the authority of the state.
But there are still good hackers and bad hackers. And it is even true that sometimes hackers can be helpful to the authorities--or at least, it's happened once. A hacker named Michael Synergy (he has legally changed his name to his handle) once broke into the computer system at a giant credit agency that holds financial information on 80 million Americans, 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 from enquirers with unlikely names. Synergy also found something even odder--a group of about seven hundred 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." It then occurred to him that he was almost certainly looking at the credit history--and names and ad- dresses--of people who were in the U.S. government's Witness Protection Program.
