For Joe Warez Addict at the end of the cracked
              software food chain, membership in a group like
              the Inner Circle is the ultimate collectible. A
              way to legitimize their addiction, work for the
              common good, and, of course, get a nice fresh
              supply of warez. The drug addict becomes dealer.
              A sizable chunk of Mad Hatter's daily mail is
              begging letters.
              "I hope that if I ask this question, you will not
              be offended in any way. But can I join the Inner
              Circle? I mean, I respect the Inner Circle ... but
              never got a chance to join it. I was just
              wondering, can I? Please mail me back ASAP."

              Needless to say, this lone obsessive didn't get
              his chance. Joining the Inner Circle is nigh on
              impossible. Reaching its members, though, is
              easy enough. They keep a high profile, both in
              posting files on Usenet and flaming lamers.
              When I first tried to contact them I thought that
              they weren't so good at answering email, but it
              turned out their provider had just been taken
              offline for illegal spamming. They relocated en
              masse, and my mail had been lost in transit. So I
              posted a message to one of their newsgroups,
              made sure it was correctly labeled, politely
              worded, and not crossposted (a cardinal sin
              anywhere on Usenet). A reply arrived within
              eight hours. Mad Hatter was more than happy to
              talk, but not on the phone, not in person, and not
              on conventional IRC. "It has a bit of a habit of
              advertising my IP address," he said. He and six
              other Inner Circle members set up their own IRC
              server, configured a secret channel, and
              arranged a mutually convenient time for a live
              interview. We met and talked for nine hours, in
              the bizarre overlapping conversational style of
              IRC. They were frank and open, friendly and
              articulate - and, like any new start-up,
              flattered by the attention.

              A 17-strong force, the Inner Circle has its own
              iconography and its own ideals. Its members are
              warez gods. They preach, police, advise, flame.
              Their commandments? Good manners, good use
              of bandwidth, and good warez. Give unto others
              as you would have them give unto you. When the
              Inner Circle is not sourcing warez from secret
              sites, its members are hunting and gathering
              from more conventional sources. Clickety
              borrows fresh stuff from his clients. A few have
              attended Microsoft Solution seminars. "Some of
              us are actual beta testers, too," says Mad Hatter.
              "That's got to be scary for the developers." One
              way or another, they help maintain the steady
              flow of warez onto Usenet. From there, various
              wannabes, lamers, and aspirants copy their work
              to countless BBSes, FTP sites, and Web pages.

              These are not pimply teenagers devoid of social
              life and graces, little ferrets who talk in bIFF
              text and make napalm out of soap and lightbulbs;
              they're not downloading porn or being careful not
              to wake their parents or spelling "cool" as
              "kewl." According to the interviews I conducted,
              not one member is younger than 20;
              Clickety-Clack is the youngest at 23. Most are
              30-plus. Champion uploader Digital has been
              happily married for 22 of his 46 years. Most are
              well-adjusted white males with day jobs and
              thoroughly nuclear families. Founding member
              Abraxas has three kids, one over 18. Mad Hatter
              runs a small business from home. Technical guru
              TAG is a computer animator. Irrelevant
              maintains commercial real estate. They're
              spread all over the United States. A few are
              concentrated around Orlando, Florida. Two or
              three others are California-based. For obvious
              reasons, that's as precise as they like to get.

              The Inner Circle was born of a sense of outrage
              that their beloved pirate-wares newsgroups
              were going to pot. Warez had been around for
              more than a decade, but the growth of the
              Internet was bringing clueless newbies onto the
              boards. Warez needed a code of ethics and a
              group of leaders to set some examples. The
              leaders would be the best crackers - some of
              whom became the Inner Circle.

              "We took over alt.binaries.pictures.leek in early
              '96," explains Abraxas, "and then leaked the first
              Nashville [Windows 97] beta. The groups were
              being overrun by clueless people. They needed
              help. They were wasting Internet resources.
              Perhaps if we could encourage responsible use
              of the available bandwidth, the whole Usenet
              warez 'scene' might last a while longer. Warez
              was around before we were, and will be after,
              but we wanted to help people and preserve
              resources using common sense."

              As enforcers of the warez code, the Inner Circle
              can be swift and sure. In April 1996, a pirate
              gang called Nomad, convinced that posts to
              warez groups were being suppressed, decided to
              get themselves some unsupervised elbow room.
              They selected an antiwork newsgroup -
              alt.binaries.slack, relatively empty and off the
              beaten track - where software could be slipped
              past news providers who had firewalled the
              usual warez forums. Within 24 hours, the forum
              was flooded with the latest releases. The
              slackers bestirred themselves from their apathy
              and fought back, posting files that told the
              pirates politely to push off. The warez kept
              coming. Then the Inner Circle waded in on the
              slackers' side and castigated the invaders for
              their poor manners. The pirates left meekly -
              though as a parting gift, one of them posted
              Microsoft NT, Beta 3, all 48 Mbytes of it, in
              5,734 parts. The slackers' newsfeed was clogged
              for days.

              A slightly disturbing revelation came out of the
              slacker invasion. "After the first attempted
              takeover, we discovered just how scary search
              engines like Deja News and AltaVista were,"
              explains TAG. "You could dig up real email
              addresses pretty easy on about 75 percent of
              people posting warez." A worried TAG hacked
              into the code of Forte Agent, an industry
              standard newsreader already cracked to bypass
              the shareware cripples, and stripped away the
              X-newsreader header, giving posters far greater
              anonymity. As a side effect, the patch also
              reduced email spams by two-thirds. "The hack
              went over so well with even nonwarez people
              that Forte eventually incorporated it into Agent
              as a feature," TAG says proudly, "although I don't
              think they'll be giving us credit."

              By mid-'96, Mad Hatter decided that police work
              was getting to be too much of a chore. The
              newsfeed was being clogged by lamers,
              requesters, and partials posters with
              "room-temperature IQs." Those genuinely into
              warez were seeing less and less complete
              software uploaded; in its place were hundreds of
              stray disks and clammy begging posts. In a rare
              fit of pique, Mad Hatter took his revenge.

              "If I continue to see the 'here's what I have'
              threads," he wrote, "I will stop uploading here. I
              will not help and will laugh my ass off that
              everyone is suffering. If for some reason you
              doubt that I make a difference, it's your loss, as
              I personally have uploaded 85 percent of all the
              shit that's getting posted now when it was zero
              day or still fresh. Keep fighting over stale shit -
              I like to watch; keep posting partials, and I'll
              stop upping my 100 to 300 Mbytes a week. In
              fact, I think I'll stop now."

              And stop the Inner Circle did. "We became burnt
              out on educating the masses," Mad Hatter says.
              Instead, a range of guaranteed lamer-free
              encrypted newsgroups was created for posting
              PGP-encoded warez, for Inner Circle-approved
              members only. Those on the select
              interested-parties list are given the codes to
              unlock the software, and anyone can apply to
              join. Requirement: a reasonable knowledge of
              PGP. "Hopefully this is a sign you won't be
              totally incompetent if you choose to post," says
              TAG. At the last count, the IPL had 500
              subscribers, happily trading warez under the
              protection of the latest in antilamer technology.