Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/phiber_goes2.jail

Text File | 1994-06-26 | 10KB | 190 lines

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Julian Dibbell                                       [e-mail]
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(c)1993 by Julian Dibbell.  Electronic-redistribution only, limited to
the net and not-for-profit BBSs. Plus, it would be nice to be advised of
any reposts: [e-mail].

(This article originally appeared in The Village Voice, January 11, 1994)



The Prisoner: Phiber Optik Goes Directly to Jail

By Julian Dibbell

____________________________________________________________________

Phiber Optik is going to prison this week and if you ask me and
a whole lot of other people, that's just a goddamn shame.

    To some folks, of course, it's just deserts. Talk to
phone-company executives, most computer-security experts, any
number of U.S. attorneys and law-enforcement agents, or Justice
Louis Stanton of the Southern District of New York (who handed
Phiber his year-and-a-day in the federal joint at Minorsville,
Pennsylvania), and they'll tell you the sentence is nothing more
than what the young hacker had coming to him. They'll tell you
Phiber Optik is a remorseless, malicious invader of other
people's computers, a drain on the economic lifeblood of our
national telecommunications infrastructure, and/or a dangerous
role model for the technoliterate youth of today.

    The rest of us will tell you he's some kind of hero. Just ask.
Ask the journalists like me who have come to know this
21-year-old high-school dropout from Queens over the course of
his legal travails. We'll describe a principled and gruffly
plain-talking spokesdude whose bravado, street-smart style, and
remarkably unmanipulative accessibility have made him the object
of more media attention than any hacker since Robert Morris
nearly brought down the Internet. Or ask the on-line civil
libertarians who felt that Phiber's commitment to nondestructive
hacking and to dialogue with the straight world made him an
ideal poster boy for their campaign against the repressive
excesses of the government's war on hackers. You might even ask
the small subset of government warriors who have arrived at a
grudging respect for Phiber's expertise and the purity of his
obsession with the workings of the modern computerized phone
system (a respect that has at times bordered on parental concern
as it grew clear that a 1991 conviction on state charges of
computer trespass had failed to curb Phiber's reckless
explorations of the system).

    But for a truly convincing glimpse of the high regard in which
Phiber Optik is held in some quarters, you'd have to pay an
on-line visit to ECHO, the liberal-minded but hardly cyberpunk
New York bulletin-board system where Phiber has worked as
resident technical maven since last spring. Forsaking the
glories of phonephreaking for the workaday pleasures of hooking
the system up to the Internet and helping users navigate its
intricacies, he moved swiftly into the heart of ECHO's virtual
community (which took to referring to him by the name his mother
gave him -- Mark -- as often as by his nom de hack). So that when he
was indicted again, this time on federal charges of unauthorized
access to phone-company computers and conspiracy to commit
further computer crimes, ECHO too was drawn into the
nerve-racking drama of his case.

    As the ``coconspirators'' named in the indictment (a group of
Phiber's friends and government-friendly ex-friends) pleaded
guilty one by one, there remained brave smiles and high hopes
for Phiber's jury trial in July. By the time the trial date
arrived, however, Phiber had made an agonizing calculus of risks
and decided to plead guilty to one count each of computer
intrusion and conspiracy. ECHO was left on tenterhooks waiting
for the day of the sentencing. Given Mark's newfound enthusiasm
for more legitimate means of working with computers and his
undisputed insistence at the time of his plea that he had never
damaged or intended to damage any of the systems he broke into,
it seemed reasonable to wish for something lenient. A long
probation, maybe, or at worst a couple months' jail time. After
all, the infamous Morris had done considerably greater harm, and
he got off with no jail time at all.

When the news arrived, therefore, of Phiber's 12-month prison
sentence (plus three years' probation and 600 hours of service),
it hit like a slap in the face, and ECHO responded with a
massive outburst of dismay and sympathy. ECHO's director, Stacy
Horn, posted the information at 3 p.m. on November 3 in the
system's main conference area, and within 24 hours the place was
flooded with over 100 messages offering condolences, advice on
penitentiary life, and curses on Judge Stanton. Not all the
messages were what you'd want to call articulate (``shit,'' read
the first one in its entirety; quoth another: ``fuckfuckfuck-
fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck''),
nor was all the advice exactly comforting (``Try not to get
killed,'' a sincere and apparently quite prison-savvy Echoid
suggested; ``Skip the country,'' proposed one user who connects
from abroad, inviting Phiber to join him in sunny South Africa).
But the sentiment throughout was unmistakably heartfelt, and
when Phiber Optik finally checked in, his brief response was
even more so:

    ``I just finished reading all this and...I'm speechless. I
couldn't say enough to thank all of you.''

    He didn't have to thank anybody, of course. Motivated by genuine
fellow feeling as this electronic lovefest was, it was also the
last step in the long-running canonization of Phiber Optik as
the digital age's first full-fledged outlaw hero, and making
somebody else a hero is not necessarily the most generous of
acts. For one thing, we tend to get more from our heroes than
they get from us, and for another, we tend to be heedless of
(when not morbidly fascinated by) the very high psychic overhead
often involved in becoming a hero -- especially the outlaw kind. To
their credit, though, the Echoids proved themselves sensitive to
the weight of the burden Phiber had been asked to take on. As
one of them put it: ``Sorry Mark. You've obviously been made a
martyr for our generation.''

    There was some melodrama in that statement, to be sure, but not
too much exaggeration. For ironically enough, Judge Stanton
himself seemed to have endorsed its basic premise in his remarks
upon passing sentence. Not unmoved by the stacks of letters sent
him in support of Phiber Optik's character and motivations, the
judge allowed as how a less celebrated Phiber Optik convicted of
the same crimes might not deserve the severity of the discipline
he was about to prescribe (and in Phiber's case it could be
argued that 12 months locked up without a computer is severe
enough to rate as cruel and unusual). But since Phiber had made
of himself a very public advertisement for the ethic of the
digital underground, the judge insisted he would have to make of
the sentence an equally public countermessage. ``The
defendant...stands as a symbol here today,'' said Stanton,
making it clear that the defendant would therefore be punished
as one too.

    The judge did not make it clear when exactly it was that the
judicial system had abandoned the principle that the punishment
fits the crime and not the status of the criminal, though I
suppose that happened too long ago to be of much interest. More
frustratingly, he also didn't go into much detail as to what it
was that Phiber Optik was to stand as a symbol _of_. In at least
one of his remarks, however, he did provide an ample enough
clue:

    ``Hacking crimes,'' said Judge Stanton, ``constitute a real
threat to the expanding information highway.''

    That ``real threat'' bit was a nice dramatic touch, but anyone
well-versed in the issues of the case could see that at this point the
judge was speaking symbolically. For one thing, even as practiced by the
least scrupulous joyriders among Phiber Optik's subcultural peers, hacking
represents about as much of a threat to the newly rampant
telecommunications juggernaut as shoplifting does to the future of world
capitalism. But more to the point, everybody recognizes by now that all
references to information highways, super or otherwise, are increasingly
just code for the corporate wet dream of a pay-as-you-go telecom turnpike,
owned by the same megabusinesses that own our phone and cable systems
today and off-limits to anyone with a slender wallet or a bad credit
rating. And _that_, symbolically speaking, is what Phiber Optik's
transgressions threaten.

    For what did his crimes consist of after all? He picked the
locks on computers owned by large corporations, and he shared
the knowledge of how to do it with his friends (they had given
themselves the meaningless name MOD, more for the thrill of
sounding like a conspiracy than for the purpose of actually
acting like one). In themselves the offenses are trivial, but
raised to the level of a social principle, they do spell doom
for the locks some people want to put on our cyberspatial
future. And I'm tempted, therefore, to close with a rousing
celebration of Phiber Optik as the symbol of a spirit of
anarchic resistance to the corporate Haussmannization of our
increasingly information-based lives, and to cheer Phiber's hero
status in places like ECHO as a sign that that spirit is
thriving.

    But I think I'll pass for now. Phiber Optik has suffered enough
for having become a symbol, and in any case his symbolic power
will always be available to us, no matter where he is. Right
now, though, the man himself is going away for far too long, and
like I said, that's nothing but a goddamn shame.