Hacker Chronicles 1/HACKER1.ISO/phrk3/phrack33.10c

Text File | 1992-09-26 | 24KB | 413 lines

                              ==Phrack Classic==

                     Volume Three, Issue 33, File #10 of 10


                        KL ^*^ KL ^*^ KL ^*^ KL ^*^ KL

                              K N I G H T L I N E

                              Issue 002 / Part 2

                           First of September, 1991

                              Written, compiled,

                          and edited by Crimson Death

                        KL ^*^ KL ^*^ KL ^*^ KL ^*^ KL

                                      ---


   The following is a article written by Bruce Sterling about his journey
into the underground at CyberView '91 in St. Louis.  This Article can also
been seen in Details men's magazine.


Bruce Sterling
[e-mail]

     They called  it "CyberView '91."   Actually, it was another
"SummerCon" -- the traditional summer  gathering of the American
hacker underground.  The organizer,  21 year old "Knight
Lightning," had recently beaten a Computer Fraud and Abuse rap that
might have put him in jail for thirty years.   A little discretion
seemed in order.
     The convention hotel, a seedy but accommodating motor-inn
outside the airport in St Louis, had hosted SummerCons  before.
Changing the name had been a good idea.  If the staff were alert,
and actually recognized that these were the same kids back again,
things might get hairy.
     The SummerCon '88 hotel was definitely out of bounds.  The US
Secret Service had set up shop in an informant's room that year,
and videotaped the drunken antics of the now globally notorious
"Legion of Doom" through a one-way mirror.   The running of
SummerCon '88 had constituted a major count of criminal conspiracy
against young Knight Lightning, during his 1990 federal trial.
     That hotel inspired sour memories.  Besides, people already
got plenty nervous playing "hunt the fed" at SummerCon gigs.
SummerCons generally featured at least one active federal
informant.   Hackers and phone phreaks like to talk a lot.   They
talk about phones and computers -- and about each other.
     For insiders, the world of computer hacking is a lot like
Mexico.  There's no middle class.  There's a million little kids
screwing around with their modems, trying to snitch long-distance
phone-codes, trying to swipe pirated software -- the "kodez kidz"
and "warez doodz."  They're peons, "rodents."  Then there's a few
earnest wannabes, up-and-comers, pupils.  Not many.  Less of 'em
every year, lately.
     And then there's the heavy dudes.   The players.   The Legion
of Doom are definitely heavy.  Germany's Chaos Computer Club are
very  heavy, and already back out on parole after their dire
flirtation with the KGB.   The Masters of Destruction in New York
are a pain in the ass to their rivals in the underground, but ya
gotta admit they are  heavy.   MoD's "Phiber Optik" has almost
completed his public-service sentence, too...  "Phoenix" and his
crowd down in Australia used to be heavy, but nobody's heard much
out of "Nom" and "Electron" since the Australian heat came down on
them.
      The people in Holland are very active, but somehow the Dutch
hackers don't quite qualify as "heavy."  Probably because
computer-hacking is legal  in Holland, and therefore nobody ever
gets busted for it.  The Dutch lack the proper bad attitude,
somehow.
     America's answer to the Dutch menace began arriving in a
steady confusion of airport shuttle buses and college-kid  decaying
junkers.  A software pirate, one of the more prosperous attendees,
flaunted a radar-detecting black muscle-car.  In some dim era
before the jet age, this section of St Louis had been a mellow,
fertile  Samuel Clemens landscape.  Waist-high summer weeds still
flourished beside the four-lane highway and the airport feeder
roads.
       The graceless  CyberView hotel had been slammed down onto
this landscape as if dropped from a B-52.    A small office-tower
loomed in one corner  beside a large parking garage.  The rest was
a rambling mess of long, narrow, dimly lit corridors, with a small
swimming pool,  a  glass-fronted souvenir shop and a cheerless
dining room.   The hotel was clean enough, and the staff, despite
provocation, proved adept at minding their own business.   For
their part, the hackers seemed quite fond of the place.
     The term "hacker" has had a spotted history.   Real "hackers,"
traditional "hackers," like to write software programs.  They like
to "grind code," plunging into its densest abstractions until the
world outside the computer terminal bleaches away.  Hackers tend to
be portly white techies with thick fuzzy beards who talk entirely
in jargon, stare into space a lot, and laugh briefly for  no
apparent reason.  The CyberView crowd, though they call themselves
"hackers,"  are better identified as computer intruders.   They
don't look, talk or act like 60s M.I.T.-style hackers.
     Computer intruders of the 90s aren't stone pocket-protector
techies.  They're young white suburban males, and look harmless
enough, but sneaky.   They're much the kind of kid you might find
skinny-dipping at 2AM in a backyard suburban swimming pool.  The
kind of kid who would freeze in the glare of the homeowner's
flashlight, then frantically grab his pants and leap over the
fence, leaving behind a half-empty bottle of tequila, a Metallica
T-shirt, and, probably, his wallet.
     One might wonder why, in the second decade of the
personal-computer revolution, most computer intruders are still
suburban teenage white whiz-kids.   Hacking-as-computer-intrusion
has been around long enough to have bred an entire generation of
serious, heavy-duty adult computer-criminals.  Basically, this
simply hasn't occurred.  Almost all computer intruders simply quit
after age 22.  They get bored with it, frankly.  Sneaking around in
other people's swimming pools simply loses its appeal.  They get
out of school.  They get married.  They buy their own swimming
pools.   They have to find some replica of a real life.
     The Legion of Doom  -- or rather, the Texas wing of LoD -- had
hit Saint Louis in high style, this weekend of June 22.  The Legion
of Doom has been characterized as "a high-tech street gang" by the
Secret Service, but this is surely one of the leakiest, goofiest
and best-publicized criminal conspiracies in American history.
      Not much has been heard from Legion founder "Lex Luthor" in
recent years.  The Legion's Atlanta wing,  "Prophet," "Leftist,"
and "Urvile," are just now getting out of various prisons and into
Georgia halfway-houses.  "Mentor" got married and writes science
fiction games for a living.
     But "Erik Bloodaxe," "Doc Holiday,"  and "Malefactor" were
here -- in person, and in the current issues of TIME and NEWSWEEK.
CyberView offered a swell opportunity for the Texan Doomsters to
announce the formation of their latest high-tech, uhm,
organization, "Comsec Data Security Corporation."
        Comsec boasts a corporate office in Houston, and a
marketing analyst, and a full-scale corporate computer-auditing
program.   The Legion boys are now digital guns for hire.  If
you're a well-heeled company, and you can cough up per diem and
air-fare, the most notorious computer-hackers in America will show
right up on your doorstep and put your digital house in order --
guaranteed.
     Bloodaxe, a limber, strikingly handsome  young Texan with
shoulder-length blond hair, mirrored sunglasses, a tie, and a
formidable gift of gab, did the talking.   Before some thirty of
his former peers, gathered upstairs over styrofoam coffee and
canned Coke in the hotel's Mark Twain Suite, Bloodaxe sternly
announced some home truths of modern computer security.
       Most so-called "computer security experts" -- (Comsec's
competitors)  -- are  overpriced con artists!   They  charge
gullible corporations thousands of dollars a day, just to advise
that management lock its doors at night and use paper shredders.
 Comsec Corp, on the other hand (with occasional consultant work
from Messrs.  "Pain Hertz" and "Prime Suspect") boasts America's
most formidable pool of genuine expertise at actually breaking into
computers.
     Comsec, Bloodaxe continued smoothly, was not in the business
of turning-in any former hacking compatriots.  Just in case anybody
here was, you know, worrying...  On the other hand, any fool rash
enough to challenge a Comsec-secured system had better be prepared
for a serious hacker-to-hacker dust-up.
     "Why would any company trust you?"  someone asked languidly.
     Malefactor, a muscular young Texan with close-cropped hair and
the build of a linebacker, pointed out that, once hired, Comsec
would be allowed inside  the employer's computer system, and would
have no reason at all to "break in."   Besides, Comsec agents were
to be licensed and bonded.
     Bloodaxe insisted passionately that LoD were through with
hacking for good.  There was simply no future in it.  The time had
come for LoD to move on, and corporate consultation was their new
frontier.  (The career options of committed computer intruders are,
when you come right down to it, remarkably slim.)   "We don't want
to be flippin' burgers or sellin' life insurance when we're
thirty," Bloodaxe drawled.  "And wonderin' when Tim Foley is gonna
come  kickin' in the door!"  (Special Agent Timothy M. Foley of the
US Secret Service  has fully  earned his reputation as the most
formidable anti-hacker cop in America.)
       Bloodaxe  sighed wistfully.  "When I look back at my life...
I can see I've essentially been in school for eleven years,
teaching myself to be a computer security consultant."
     After a bit more grilling, Bloodaxe finally got to the core of
matters.  Did anybody here hate them  now?  he asked, almost
timidly.  Did people think the Legion had sold out?   Nobody
offered this opinion.  The hackers shook their heads, they looked
down at their sneakers, they had another slug of Coke. They didn't
seem to see how it would make much difference, really.  Not at this
point.
     Over half the attendees of CyberView publicly claimed to be
out of the hacking game now.   At least one hacker present -- (who
had shown up, for some reason known only to himself, wearing a
blond wig and a dime-store tiara, and was now catching flung
Cheetos in his  styrofoam cup) --  already made  his living
"consulting" for private investigators.
     Almost everybody at CyberView had been busted, had their
computers seized, or, had, at least, been interrogated -- and when
federal police put the squeeze on a teenage hacker, he  generally
spills his guts.
     By '87, a mere year or so after they plunged seriously into
anti-hacker enforcement, the Secret Service had workable dossiers
on everybody that really  mattered.  By '89, they had files on
practically every last soul in the American digital underground.
The problem for law enforcement has never been finding out who  the
hackers are.  The problem has been figuring out what the hell
they're really up to,  and, harder yet, trying to convince the
public that it's actually important and dangerous to public safety.
     From the point of view of hackers, the cops have been acting
wacky lately.  The cops, and their patrons in the telephone
companies, just don't understand the modern world of computers, and
they're scared.  "They think there are masterminds running
spy-rings who employ us," a hacker told me.   "They don't
understand that we don't do this for money, we do it for power and
knowledge."  Telephone security people who reach out to the
underground are accused of divided loyalties and fired by panicked
employers.  A young Missourian coolly psychoanalyzed the
opposition.  "They're overdependent on things they don't
understand.  They've surrendered their lives to computers."
      "Power and knowledge" may seem odd motivations.  "Money" is
a lot easier to understand.   There are growing armies of
professional thieves who rip-off phone service for money.  Hackers,
though, are into, well, power  and knowledge.  This has made them
easier to catch than the street-hustlers who steal access codes at
airports.  It also makes them a lot scarier.
      Take the increasingly dicey problems posed by "Bulletin Board
Systems."  "Boards" are  home computers tied to home telephone
lines, that can store and transmit  data over  the phone  --
written texts, software programs, computer games, electronic mail.
Boards were invented in the late 70s, and, while the vast majority
of boards are utterly harmless, some few piratical boards swiftly
became the very backbone of the 80s digital underground.  Over half
the attendees of CyberView ran their own boards.  "Knight
Lightning" had run an electronic magazine, "Phrack," that appeared
on many underground boards across America.
     Boards are mysterious.  Boards are conspiratorial.  Boards
have been accused of harboring: Satanists, anarchists, thieves,
child pornographers,
Aryan nazis, religious cultists, drug dealers --  and, of course,
software pirates, phone phreaks, and hackers.  Underground hacker
boards were scarcely reassuring, since they often sported
terrifying sci-fi heavy-metal names, like "Speed Demon Elite,"
"Demon Roach Underground," and "Black Ice."    (Modern hacker
boards tend to feature defiant titles like "Uncensored BBS," "Free
Speech," and "Fifth Amendment.")
     Underground boards carry stuff as vile and scary as, say,
60s-era underground newspapers -- from the time when Yippies hit
Chicago and ROLLING STONE gave away free roach-clips to
subscribers.  "Anarchy files" are popular features on outlaw
boards, detailing how to build pipe-bombs, how to make Molotovs,
how to brew methedrine and LSD, how to break and enter buildings,
how to blow up bridges, the easiest ways to kill someone with a
single blow of a blunt object -- and these boards bug straight
people a lot.  Never mind that all this data is publicly available
in public libraries where it is protected by the First Amendment.
There is something about its being on a computer  -- where any
teenage geek with a modem and keyboard can read it, and print it
out, and spread it around, free as air -- there is something about
that, that is creepy.
     "Brad" is a New Age pagan from Saint Louis who runs a service
known as "WEIRDBASE," available on an international network of
boards called "FidoNet."  Brad was mired in an interminable scandal
when his readers formed a spontaneous underground railroad to help
a New Age warlock smuggle his teenage daughter out of Texas, away
from his fundamentalist Christian in-laws, who were utterly
convinced that he had murdered his wife and intended to sacrifice
his daughter to -- Satan!   The scandal made local TV in Saint
Louis.  Cops came around and grilled Brad.  The patchouli stench of
Aleister Crowley hung heavy in the air.  There was just no end to
the hassle.
     If you're into something goofy and dubious and you have a
board about it, it can mean real trouble.  Science-fiction game
publisher Steve Jackson had his board seized in 1990.  Some
cryogenics people in California, who froze a woman for post-mortem
preservation before she was officially, er, "dead," had their
computers seized.  People who sell dope-growing equipment have had
their computers seized.  In 1990, boards all over America went
down:  Illuminati, CLLI Code, Phoenix Project, Dr. Ripco.
Computers are seized as "evidence," but since they can be kept
indefinitely for study by police, this veers close to confiscation
and punishment without trial.  One good reason why Mitchell Kapor
showed up at CyberView.
     Mitch Kapor was the co-inventor of the mega-selling business
program LOTUS 1-2-3 and the founder of the software giant, Lotus
Development Corporation.  He is currently the president of a
newly-formed electronic civil liberties group, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation.   Kapor, now 40, customarily wears Hawaiian
shirts and is your typical post-hippie cybernetic multimillionaire.
 He and EFF's chief legal counsel, "Johnny Mnemonic," had flown in
for the gig in Kapor's private jet.
     Kapor had been dragged willy-nilly into the toils of the
digital underground when he received an unsolicited floppy-disk in
the mail, from an outlaw group known as  the "NuPrometheus League."
These rascals (still not apprehended)  had stolen confidential
proprietary software from Apple Computer, Inc., and were
distributing it far and wide in order to blow Apple's trade secrets
and humiliate the company.   Kapor assumed that the disk was a
joke, or, more likely, a clever scheme to infect his machines with
a computer virus.
     But when the FBI showed up, at Apple's behest, Kapor was
shocked at the extent of their naivete.  Here were these
well-dressed federal officials, politely "Mr. Kapor"- ing him right
and left, ready to carry out a war to the knife against evil
marauding "hackers."  They didn't seem to grasp that "hackers" had
built the entire personal computer industry.  Jobs was a hacker,
Wozniak too, even Bill Gates, the youngest billionaire in the
history of America -- all "hackers."   The new buttoned-down regime
at Apple had blown its top, and as for the feds, they were willing,
but clueless.  Well, let's be charitable -- the feds were
"cluefully challenged."  "Clue-impaired."  "Differently  clued...."

     Back in the  70s  (as Kapor recited to the hushed and
respectful young hackers)  he himself had practiced "software
piracy"  -- as those activities would be known today.  Of course,
back then, "computer software" hadn't been a major industry -- but
today, "hackers" had police after them for doing things that the
industry's own pioneers had pulled routinely.  Kapor was irate
about this.  His own personal history, the lifestyle of his
pioneering youth, was being smugly written out of the historical
record by the latter-day corporate androids.  Why, nowadays, people
even blanched when Kapor forthrightly declared that he'd done LSD
in the Sixties.
     Quite a few of the younger hackers grew alarmed at this
admission of Kapor's, and gazed at him in wonder, as if expecting
him to explode.
     "The law only has sledgehammers, when what we need are parking
tickets and speeding tickets," Kapor said.   Anti-hacker hysteria
had gripped the nation in 1990.  Huge law enforcement efforts had
been mounted against illusory threats.  In Washington DC, on the
very day when the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation
had been announced,  a Congressional committee had been formally
presented with the plotline of a thriller movie --  DIE HARD II, in
which hacker terrorists seize an airport computer -- as if this
Hollywood fantasy posed a clear and present danger to the American
republic.   A similar hacker thriller, WAR GAMES, had been
presented to Congress in the mid-80s.  Hysteria served no one's
purposes, and created a stampede of foolish and unenforceable laws
likely to do more harm than good.
     Kapor didn't want to "paper over the differences" between his
Foundation and the underground community.  In the firm opinion of
EFF, intruding into computers by stealth was morally wrong.  Like
stealing phone service, it deserved punishment.  Not draconian
ruthlessness, though.  Not the ruination of a youngster's entire
life.
     After a lively and quite serious  discussion of digital
free-speech issues,  the entire crew went to dinner at an Italian
eatery in the local mall, on Kapor's capacious charge-tab.  Having
said his piece and listened with care, Kapor began glancing at his
watch.  Back in Boston, his six-year-old son was waiting at home,
with a new Macintosh computer-game to tackle.  A quick  phone-call
got the jet warmed up, and Kapor and his lawyer split town.
     With the forces of conventionality -- such as they were -- out
of the picture, the Legion of Doom began to get heavily into
"Mexican Flags."  A Mexican Flag is a lethal, multi-layer
concoction of red grenadine, white tequila and green
creme-de-menthe.  It is topped with a thin layer of 150 proof rum,
set afire, and sucked up through straws.
     The formal fire-and-straw ritual soon went by the board as
things began to  disintegrate.  Wandering from room to room, the
crowd became howlingly rowdy, though without creating trouble, as
the CyberView crowd had wisely taken over an entire wing of the
hotel.
     "Crimson Death," a cheerful, baby-faced young hardware expert
with a pierced nose and three earrings, attempted to hack the
hotel's private phone system, but only succeeded in cutting off
phone service to his own room.
     Somebody announced there was a cop guarding the next wing of
the hotel.  Mild panic ensued.  Drunken hackers crowded to the
window.
     A gentleman  slipped quietly through the door of the next wing
wearing a short terrycloth bathrobe and spangled silk boxer shorts.
     Spouse-swappers had taken over the neighboring wing of the
hotel, and were holding a private weekend orgy.   It was a St Louis
swingers' group.  It turned out that the cop guarding the entrance
way was an off-duty swinging cop.  He'd angrily threatened to
clobber Doc Holiday.  Another swinger almost  punched-out "Bill
from RNOC," whose prurient hacker curiosity, naturally, knew no
bounds.
     It was not much of a contest.  As the weekend wore on and the
booze flowed freely, the hackers slowly but thoroughly infiltrated
the hapless swingers, who proved surprisingly open and tolerant.
At one point, they even invited a group of hackers to join in their
revels, though "they had to bring their own women."
     Despite the pulverizing effects of numerous Mexican Flags,
Comsec Data Security seemed to be having very little trouble on
that score.   They'd vanished downtown brandishing their full-color
photo in TIME magazine, and returned with an impressive depth-core
sample of St Louis womanhood, one of whom, in an idle moment, broke
into Doc Holiday's room, emptied his wallet, and stole his Sony
tape recorder and all his shirts.
     Events stopped dead for the season's final episode of STAR
TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION.   The show passed in rapt attention --
then it was back to harassing the swingers.  Bill from RNOC
cunningly out-waited the swinger guards, infiltrated the building,
and decorated all the closed doors with globs of mustard from a
pump-bottle.
     In the hungover glare of Sunday morning, a hacker proudly
showed me a large handlettered  placard  reading PRIVATE -- STOP,
which he had stolen from the unlucky swingers on his way out of
their wing.   Somehow, he had managed to work his way into the
building, and had suavely ingratiated himself into a bedroom, where
he had engaged a swinging airline ticket-agent in a long and most
informative conversation about the security of airport computer
terminals.  The ticket agent's wife, at the time, was sprawled on
the bed engaging in desultory oral sex with a third gentleman.  It
transpired that she herself did a lot of work on LOTUS 1-2-3.  She
was thrilled to hear that the program's inventor, Mitch Kapor, had
been in that very hotel,  that very weekend.
     Mitch Kapor.  Right over there?  Here in St Louis?  Wow.
Isn't life strange.
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End of Phrack Classic Issue 33.


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