Breaking the Stereotype

Without a doubt hacking is one of the most misunderstood and maligned terms in the vocabulary of the Digital Revolution. The term itself comes from the 19th century English term "to hack" which means to play around in a clever way. It became associated with computers when science and engineering students at facilities like MIT applied it to programming large mainframe computers in quicker, smarter, more 'elegant' ways.  Hackers are not judged by age, sex, race, or educational qualifications - only by their ability to hack, demonstrate a superior knowledge of either hardware or software, and use that knowledge to create elegant, new ways of solving problems and getting around obstacles.

As with many activities of an elite minority, hacking has been subjected to a media stereotype that has little to do with reality. Typically the media version of hacking concentrates on its destructive rather than constructive capabilities, depicting hackers as buck-toothed dweebs or the lazy sons of the white middle class whose loathing of their parents is so intense that they wreak their Freudian revenge on the aptly named Ma Bell.

While the 'dark side' of hacking and its destructive power has been  well popularized in films like "Wargames", "The Net" and "Hackers", its important place in the creation of personal computing and digital culture as we know it today is rarely publicized.  Probably the first person to demonstrate the importance of hacking was Stephen Levy in his 1984 book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which chronicled the first four 'generations' of hackers since the creation of mainframe computers in the 1950s.  According to Levy the first generation of hackers which emerged from university computer science departments in the late 50's transformed giant mainframes like the PDP-1 into virtual personal computers using a technique called time-sharing. Working in arcane computer languages like BASIC and FORTRAN, this initial generation demonstrated that computers had uses other that simply as the machines of big business and the defense industry. Re-programming these "hulking giants", they played games like "Spacewar" and broke through the mystique which had, until that point, restricted the use of computers. What emerged from this often unauthorized use of computers by students and non-students was what Levy terms the 'hacker ethic', the main tenets of which are as follows:

Access to computers should be unlimited and total.
All information should be free.
Mistrust authority, promote decentralization.
You can create art and beauty on a computer.
Computers can change your life for the better. 

As the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab run by Marvin Minsky dissipated over time many of these young hackers relocated to the Berkeley and Stanford campuses. In the Californian setting hacking took on a new manifestation. Amidst the heady radicalism of Berkeley in the '60s and '70s, the second generation of computer hackers gave the tenets of the hacker ethic far wider application. Called 'hardware hackers' this generation saw the computer as a powerful tool of empowerment in the battle over access to knowledge. Anxious to get their hands on this "hallowed technology" and take it from the university to the people, computer clubs formed in areas like Palo Alto and Menlo Park. Two of the most famous were the People's Computer Company and the Homebrew Computer Club. 

Many of these non-academic hackers were hard-core counterculture types - like Steve Jobs, a Beatle haired hippie who has dropped out of Reed College, and Steve Wozniak, a Hewlett-Packard engineer. Participating in the Homebrew Club, in which members actively made their own computers out of whatever was available, the two "Steves" created the first Apple personal computer in a garage. Before their success with Apple, both had developed "Blue Boxes," outlaw devices for making free telephone calls. One of their contemporary and early collaborators was Lee Felsenstein, who designed the first portable computer, known as the Osborne 1, and  was a New Left Radical who wrote for the renowned underground paper, The Berkeley Barb. 

According to Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue and the WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) in this radical context the popular mantra "Do Your Own Thing" readily translated into "Start You Own Business". What this generation of hackers did was demonstrate to the radical community that computers could in fact become a tools in their struggles against what they saw as the dominating power of the government and big business. Up until that time computers had been regarded as a key part in the military-industrial complexes and the enemy of those in the anti-war movement. Taking the counterculture's disdain of big business these second generation hackers created their own small businesses predicated on the belief that personal computing would enhance the lives of people everywhere. 

The third generation of hackers, the software hackers of the early 1980's, created the applications, education and entertainment programs for the personal computers created by their predecessors. This was the age of the Commodore 64 and the Atari, where small factory-made computers were beginning to become affordable to the average household. Typical of this generation was Mitch Kapor, a former transcendental-meditation teacher, who created the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3, which ensured the success of IBM's Apple-imitating PC. More memorable perhaps is Kapor's Electronic Frontier Foundation, which he co-founded with a lyricist from the Grateful Dead, which not only lobbies in Washington for civil rights in Cyberspace but has also funded the defense of certain high profile 'Hacking' cases.

The fourth generation, who emerged after the publication of Levy's book, have been responsible for transforming the Defense Department-sponsored ARPA-net into the global digital epidemic known as the Internet. Still abiding by the Hacker Ethic, these tens of thousands of 'netheads' have created  myriad computer bulletin boards and the non-hierarchical linking system we know as Usenet. According to statistics compiled by Stewart Brand the average age of today's Internet users, who number in the tens of millions, is about 30 years. Just as personal computers transformed the '80s, this latest generation of hackers knows that the Net is going to transform and shape the '90s. With the same ethos that has guided previous generations, today's hackers are keeping access to knowledge open by making "freeware" or "shareware" tools available to anyone who wants them.

While this side of hacking is largely ignored by the press the destructive capabilities of hacking continues to dominate public debate. The 'dark side' of hacking first came to national attention with a 1971 article, "The Secrets of the Little Blue Box" in Esquire magazine. Journalist Ron Rosenbaum interviewed John Draper a.k.a. Captain Crunch, along with Joe Engressia and Mark Bernay about the little known culture of phone phreaking. What the article did was expose phone phreaking rather than hacking per se, but ever since Ma Bell had decided to go digital and replace its operators with computers in the mid-60s, the legion of adolescent phone phreakers had begun to go digital too. A generation of phone phreakers dedicated to understanding the system that was Ma Bell's telephone network moved into a more complex and exciting arena - computer networks. This was the era when the modern stereotype of 'hacking' was born.

Rosenbaum's article not only informed generations of kids about the potential of hacking, or 'cracking' as the unlawful entry into computer systems became known, it also triggered off the first round of arrests and prosecutions. Not only did Draper and Bernay wind up in jail as a result of Rosenbaum's article, five states set up grand juries to investigate phone phreaking. Of the article itself, Draper was recorded as saying, "I knew I was in trouble as soon as I read it." The problems really started when Draper went to jail where he was forced to share his knowledge with true criminals who have since used his techniques to elude phone and computer surveillance for drug trafficking.

This was the first stage in the classic witchhunt which culminated in the late '80s and early '90s with Operation Sun Devil. Coinciding with end of the Cold War hackers became the new Communists, the new menace, the new enemy within. In April 1990 a large scale crash of AT&T's long-distance phone system which affected over 70 million users was blamed, wrongly, on hackers. A couple of months later a ring of busts were made across America as the result of Secret Service investigations that has started with the infiltration of SummerCon '88. Operation Sun Devil, named after the Arizona State  University mascot, cast a wide net, snaring not only hackers but fanning out to nab even those suspected of associating with hackers. Craig Neidorf, publisher of the magazine Phrack, was indicted in February 1990 for printing a document that had been hacked out a BellSouth computer. The government based its case on the claim that the purloined text was worth $79,449. When a BellSouth employee reluctantly admitted on the witness stand that the document was available from a catalogue for $13 the case against Neidorf collapsed. Neidorf was left to figure out how to pay his $100,000 legal bill and his magazine is now defunct.

Many other hackers have not been as fortunate to evade jail sentences and within the hacker community itself Operation Sun Devil was seen as a force useful only in destroying the  Hacker Ethic and replacing it with greater secrecy between hackers. Various 'gangs' were the targets of Operation Sun Devil, the most well-known being the Legion of Doom. Despite its ominous name, the LoD was a benign group more concerned with demonstrating their hacking flair to other rival gangs than actually using any of the information they 'browsed' for criminal purposes. As the prosecutions from Sun Devil take up more of the State's money and reveal less and less actual criminal activity, the witch hunt of the early '90s has begun to be revealed for what it really was. 

While hacking remains a pastime of the younger members of the computer community, most of the high profile gangs are a thing of the past.  Beyond the Internet the only hacking that goes on involves the hacking of software out of the price range of most personal computer users. Again ,this fifth generation seems to be continuing the Hacker Ethic, albeit in an altered form, by ensuring the continued access to both computers and the knowledge they contain.