Date: Fri, 17 Apr 92 15:07:13 EDT
From: Jerry Leichter <
[email protected]>
Subject: File 1--The Good, the Bad, and Ugly Facts
CuD 4.11 contains a reprint of a DFP article by one
"max%
[email protected]". The article makes two broad sets of points:
1. There is no real difference between the "good" hackers of yore
and the "bad" hackers of today. His quotes from Levy's
"Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" demonstrate
that these heroes were involved in such things as password
cracking, phone phreaking, and so on.
2. "Information" and "computers" should be free, hackers are just
trying to learn, there is nothing wrong with learning.
Point 2 I don't want to get into; it's old, tired, and if you don't
recognize it for its moral bankruptcy by this time, nothing I can say
will change your mind.
Point 1 I agree with. I was there, and I saw it happen. In fact, I
was involved in it. I broke into my share of systems, used resources
without paying for them, caused accidental system crashes that
disrupted people's work, and so on. (I never did get involved with
phone phreaking. I was one of many who dug up the Bell System
Technical Journal article that gave you all the information you needed
to build a blue box, and I knew the technical details of several other
tricks - but I thought that phreaking was theft even in the early
'70's.)
Max ends by saying:
It is my contention that hackers did not change. Society
changed, and it changed for the worse. The environment the early
hackers were working in correctly viewed these activities as the
desire to utilize technology in a personal way....
In a way he is correct. (The rest of the paragraph continues with the
usual pseudo-socialist twaddle about the evils of the profit motive,
elitism, snobbery, and such, but we'll ignore that.)
Moral decisions are not made in a vacuum. Nor, in a decent society,
are laws chosen without a social and moral context.
When the first "airplane hackers" began working on their devices, they
were free to do essentially as they pleased. If they crashed and
killed themselves well, that was too bad for them. If their planes
worked - so much the better.
After it became possible to build working airplanes, there followed a
period in which anyone could build one and fly anywhere he liked. But
in the long run that became untenable. An increasing number of planes
became too much of a hazard, to each other and to uninvolved people on
the ground. Further, people came to rely on air transport;
interference with it came to be unacceptable. If you want to fly
today, you must get a license. You must work within a whole set of
regulations, regulations that may be inconvenient for *you*, but
that's really too bad: You don't live alone, you live in a society
that is entitled, in fact *required*, to protect its members.
The same goes for many other technologies, ranging from automobiles to
radio transmitters. Think about all the regulations governing your
use of an automobile - not just the requirement that you be licensed,
that you be insured (in most states), that you follow various rules of
the road, but even that you have pollution control equipment that, for
you personally, adds nothing but extra cost.
Max seems to have no understanding of history, of how things change
over time. He has no vision of the world that the early hackers were
operating in. The computers they were hacking at were not being used
for critical things. They were almost entirely at universities, being
used for research. It's hard to imagine, with the reliable machines
of today, but a system in those days that ran for 24 hours without a
crash was doing very well. Yes, crashes caused by hackers were an
inconvenience - but people expected crashes anyway, so they planned
for them.
Disks were small, expensive, and given to head crashes. Few people
stored permanent data on them. There was little of interest to be
found by browsing on most systems, and certainly nothing sensitive.
Systems were stand-alone islands. There was no Internet; there were
few dialins. Systems actually doing significant work, systems
containing sensitive data - business and government systems - were
locked in rooms with no external access. No one thought about hacking
these because no one could get to them.
Even in those times, what I and others did was at best ethically
questionable. None of the people I hacked with ever doubted that;
none of us doubted that if we got caught, we could get into trouble.
As it happened, I was never caught - but several of my friends were.
Their accounts were terminated, which could be a major inconvenience,
as they had actual work to do on those systems. And in those days,
running off to the local Sears and buying a PC was not an option.
Let's not put halos on hackers past. The times were different; the
systems were different. The social scale was different: The hackers
Levy celebrates were operating within communities of at most a few
tens of people, most of whom knew each other. Today's hacker works in
an Internet community numbering in the tens of thousands. It's much
easier to trust people you know or "might easily know". Besides,
within those communities, even the people were different: Systems were
not being used by non-technical people. Much of what we know now -
about how to build secure systems, about the existence of deliberately
destructive programmers - we didn't know then. The same actions we
might have applauded in "the golden age" would draw only opprobrium
today.
This is not just a matter of *technological* change, nor is it a matter
of society becoming less understanding: Even if the only thing that
had happened between 1970 and today were that *the same* computers had
been duplicated and had become widely used for important things, the
argument would have remained the same.
The following is broad generalization, but I don't think it's
completely out of line. Today's college kids are caught in a time of
diminished expectations. Whatever the actual *realities*, they must
certainly look back at the romanticized '60's and '70's they hear
about as a time of free sex without worry, wild parties with free
consumption of drugs or alcohol, revolution and hope and grass in the
air, and so on. They've been led to expect that they will start their
lives at an economic level comparable to what their parents have
today, but they also see that for many of them that will prove
impossible to accomplish. The dissonance is painful; the feeling that
somehow they've been cheated out of something they are due must be
profound.
Hacking, in the broad sense, has always provided an escape from the
harsh realities of the outside world, escape to a world that seems
manageable, a world in which the hacker could imagine himself superior
to the "establishment" which everywhere else imposes controls on him.
The '60's-style language, the pseudo-socialism, the utopian views of the
world as an information-based commune within which greed and hate and
the profit motive would all fade away, all this in the language of the
cracker apologists is a clear echo of the rhetoric of the '60's.
That's where those dreams spring from. America is no longer to be
"greened"; it's to be "fibered" and "digitized". Timothy Leary no
longer needs to preach dropping out through acid; he can now preach
dropping out to virtual reality. There really isn't all that much of
a difference.
I'm sorry Max and his friends missed out on those wild and wooly
times; they seem to come along every forty or fifty years or so, so
perhaps their (our) children will see them again. I'm sorry that
it must seem unfair and "elitist" to him that things we could get away
with in those days bring severe punishment today. But history marches
on; all of us, individually and collectively, must grow up.
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