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- Here is an article on one of P-80's members who managed to dig up a little
- publicity. Silver Spy. From the U.S. News and World Report (June 3 85)
-
- World of Silver Spy, 17 Yr Old Tinkerer
-
- Silver Spy has everything going for him - comfortable surroundings, a father
- who is an engineer. He ranks in the top 3 percent of his high-school class.
- His SAT scores for college admission totaled 1,400 of a possible 1,600. He
- wants to attend Stanford or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But in
- the eyes of the phone companies he is a thief, and in the eyes of the law he's
- a criminal. Such is the portrait of this 17-year-old computer "hacker" and
- "phone phreaker" who lives about 20 miles outside Boston. He spoke with
- U.S. News & World report on the condition that neither his real name nor
- home town be revealed.
-
- Catch 22. Silver spy runs one of the most exclusive bullentin boards in the
- nation. Called Catch 22, it will have no more than 20 users, whose credentials
- will be carefully checked. Silver spy, who owns two personal computers, wants
- to keep the user list small so that his board is not infiltrated by
- authorities. He terminated spy master, an earlier system, because of messages
- he received that threatened him with arrest. He believes they came from FBI
- agents. The youth says he has hacked, or tinkered, in a number of university
- and commercial computers, including some belonging to banks. But he maintains
- that he has never damaged a computer or compromised private information. "I'm
- out to learn as much as i can about a system and not do any damage," he says.
- "I know people who delete [destroy] files when they get into a commercial
- computer. There are little 12-year-olds who are so ecstatic about getting into
- a computer that they fill all its memory with the words, "Hacker was here."
- Phone phreaking-making toll calls that are billed to other users-is another
- story: "since most of the people and boards I talk to are out ot state, I
- generally don't pay for the phone calls. Some people could say it's immoral.
- I know it's illegal." Then how does he justify calls for which others are asked
- to pay? "I don't," replies Silver Spy.
-
- Downloaded from p-80 systems....
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