Synergy, a good citizen, notified the FBI about the potential breach of the Witness Program's security. That was hacker ethics. But not every hacker is as good a citizen.
DATA CRIME
Pat Riddle has never claimed to be a good citizen. He is proud of being the first hacker in America to be prosecuted. Even now, as a thirty-four-year-old computer security consultant, he is fond of describing cases he has worked on in which the law, if not actually broken, is overlooked. "I've never been entirely straight," he says.
As a child growing up in a suburb of Philadelphia, he, like most hackers, was fascinated by technology. He built model rockets, played with electronics, and he liked to watch space launches. When he became a little older, his interests turned to telecommunications and computers.
Pat and his friends used to rummage through the garbage left outside the back doors of phone company offices for discarded manuals or internal memos that would tell them more about the telephone system--a practice known as dumpster diving. He learned how to make a "butt set," a portable phone carried by phone repairmen to check the lines, and first started "line tapping"--literally, listening in on telephone calls--in the early 1970s, when he was fourteen or fifteen.
The butt set he had built was a simple hand-held instrument with a dial on the back and two alligator clips dangling from one end. All the materials he used were purchased from hardware and electronics stores. To line-tap, he would search out a neighbor- hood telephone box where the lines for all the local phones come together. Every three-block area, roughly, has one, either attached to a telephone pole or freestanding. Opening the box with a special wrench--also available from most good hardware stores--he would attach the clips to two terminals and listen in on conversations.
Sometimes, if the telephone box was in a public area, he would run two long wires from the clips so that he could sit behind the bushes and listen in on conversations without getting caught. To find out whose phone he was listening to, he would simply use his butt set to call the operator and pretend to be a lineman. He would give the correct code, which he had learned from his hours of dumpster diving, and then ask, "What's this number?" Despite being fourteen, he was never refused. "So long as you know the lingo, you can get people to do anything," Pat says.
The area where he grew up was a dull place, however, and he never heard anything more interesting than a girl talking to her date. "It was basically boring and mundane," he says, "but at that age any tittle-tattle seemed exciting."
Pat learned about hacking from a guy he met while shoplifting electronic parts at Radio Shack. Doctor Diode, as his new friend was called, didn't really know much more about hacking than Pat, but the two of them discovered the procedures together. They began playing with the school's computer, and then found that with a modem they could actually call into a maintenance port--a dial-up--at the phone company's switching office. The phone company was the preferred target for phreakers-turned-hackers: it was huge, it was secretive, and it was a lot of fun to play on.
Breaking into a switch through a maintenance port shouldn't have been easy, but in those days security was light. "For years and years the phone company never had any problems because they were so secret," Pat says. "They never expected anyone to try to break into their systems." The switch used an operating system called UNIX, designed by the phone company, that was relatively simple to use. "It had lots of menus," recalls Pat with satisfaction. Menus are the lists of functions and services available to the computer user, or in this case, the computer hacker. Used skillfully, menus are like a map of the computer.
