Crime & Puzzlement [1/8]

From

Max Belankov (2:5054/2.31)

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Date

1996-08-29T23:10Z

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PERM.LANGUAGE

Hello All!


=== Cut ===

CRIME AND PUZZLEMENT
by

John Perry Barlow
barlow@well.sf.ca.us

Desperados of the DataSphere

So me and my sidekick Howard,  we was sitting out in front of the 40 Rod
Saloon one evening  when he all of a sudden says, "Lookee  here.  What do
you reckon?"  I look up and there's these two strangers riding into town.
They're young and got kind of a restless, bored way about 'em.  A person
don't  need both eyes to see they mean trouble...

Well, that wasn't quite how it went.  Actually, Howard and I were
floating blind as cave fish in the electronic barrens of the WELL, so
the whole incident passed as words on a display screen:

Howard: Interesting couple of newusers just signed on.  One calls himself
 acid and the other's optik.

Barlow: Hmmm.  What are their real names?

Howard: Check their finger files.

And so I typed !finger acid.  Several seconds later the WELL's
Sequent computer sent the following message to my Macintosh in
Wyoming:

 Login name: acid   In real life: Acid Phreak

By this, I knew that the WELL had a new resident and that his
corporeal analog was supposedly called Acid Phreak.  Typing !finger
optik yielded results of similar insufficiency, including the claim that
someone, somewhere in the real world, was walking around calling
himself Phiber Optik.  I doubted it.

However, associating these sparse data with the knowledge that the
WELL was about to host a conference on computers and security
rendered the conclusion that I had made my first sighting of genuine
computer crackers.  As the arrival of an outlaw was a major event to
the settlements of the Old West, so was the appearance of crackers
cause for stir on the WELL.

The WELL (or Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) is an example of the
latest thing in frontier villages, the computer bulletin board.  In this
kind of small town, Main Street is a central minicomputer to which
(in the case of the WELL) as many as 64 microcomputers may be
connected at one time by phone lines and little blinking boxes called
modems.

In this silent world, all conversation is typed.  To enter it, one
forsakes both body and place and becomes a thing of words alone.
You can see what your neighbors are saying (or recently said), but
not what either they or their physical surroundings look like.  Town
meetings are continuous and discussions rage on everything from
sexual kinks to depreciation schedules.

There are thousands of these nodes in the United States, ranging from
PC clone hamlets of a few users to mainframe metros like
CompuServe, with its 550,000 subscribers.  They are used by
corporations to transmit memoranda and spreadsheets, universities
to disseminate research, and a multitude of factions, from apiarists to
Zoroastrians, for purposes unique to each.

Whether by one telephonic tendril or millions, they are all connected
to one another.  Collectively, they form what their inhabitants call the
Net.  It extends across that immense region of electron states,
microwaves, magnetic fields, light pulses and thought which sci-fi
writer William Gibson named Cyberspace.

Cyberspace, in its present condition, has a lot in common with the
19th Century West.  It is vast, unmapped, culturally and legally
ambiguous, verbally terse (unless you happen to be a court
stenographer), hard to get around in, and up for grabs.  Large
institutions already claim to own the place, but most of the actual
natives are solitary and independent, sometimes to the point of
sociopathy.  It is, of course, a perfect breeding ground for both
outlaws and new ideas about liberty.

Recognizing this, Harper's Magazine decided in December, 1989 to
hold one of its periodic Forums on the complex of issues surrounding
computers, information, privacy, and electronic intrusion or
"cracking."  Appropriately, they convened their conference in
Cyberspace, using the WELL as the "site."

Harper's invited an odd lot of about 40 participants.  These included:
Clifford Stoll, whose book The Cuckoo's Egg details his cunning efforts
to nab a German cracker.  John Draper or "Cap'n Crunch," the grand-
daddy of crackers whose blue boxes got Wozniak and Jobs into
consumer electronics.  Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly of Whole Earth
fame.  Steven Levy, who wrote the seminal Hackers.  A retired Army
colonel named Dave Hughes.  Lee Felsenstein, who designed the
Osborne computer and was once called the "Robespierre of
computing."  A UNIX wizard and former hacker named Jeff
Poskanzer.  There was also a score of aging techno-hippies, the
crackers, and me.

What I was doing there was not precisely clear since I've spent most
of my working years either pushing cows or song-mongering, but I at
least brought to the situation a vivid knowledge of actual cow-towns,
having lived in or around one most of my life.

That and a kind of innocence about both the technology and morality
of Cyberspace which was soon to pass into the confusion of
knowledge.

At first, I was inclined toward sympathy with Acid 'n' Optik as well
as their colleagues, Adelaide, Knight Lightning, Taran King, and
Emmanuel.  I've always been more comfortable with outlaws than
Republicans, despite having more certain credentials in the latter
camp.

But as the Harper's Forum mushroomed into a boom-town of ASCII
text (the participants typing 110,000 words in 10 days), I began to
wonder.  These kids were fractious, vulgar, immature, amoral,
insulting, and too damned good at their work.

Worse, they inducted a number of former kids like myself into
Middle Age.  The long feared day had finally come when some
gunsel would yank my beard and call me, too accurately, an old fart.

Under ideal circumstances, the blind gropings of bulletin board
discourse force a kind of Noh drama stylization on human commerce.
Intemperate responses, or "flames" as they are called, are common
even among conference participants who understand one another,
which, it became immediately clear, the cyberpunks and techno-
hippies did not.

My own initial enthusiasm for the crackers wilted under a steady
barrage of typed testosterone.  I quickly remembered I didn't know
much about who they were, what they did, or how they did it.  I also
remembered stories about crackers working in league with the Mob,
ripping off credit card numbers and getting paid for them in (stolen)
computer equipment.

And I remembered Kevin Mitnik.  Mitnik, now 25, recently served
federal time for a variety of computer and telephone related crimes.
Prior to incarceration, Mitnik was, by all accounts, a dangerous guy
with a computer.  He disrupted phone company operations and
arbitrarily disconnected the phones of celebrities.  Like the kid in
Wargames, he broke into the North American Defense Command
computer in Colorado Springs.

Unlike the kid in Wargames, he is reputed to have made a practice of
destroying and altering data. There is even the (perhaps apocryphal)
story that he altered the credit information of his probation officer
and other enemies.  Digital Equipment claimed that his depredations
cost them more than $4 million in computer downtime and file
rebuilding.  Eventually, he was turned in by a friend who, after
careful observation, had decided he was "a menace to society."

His spectre began to hang over the conference.  After several days of
strained diplomacy, the discussion settled into a moral debate on the
ethics of security and went critical.

The techno-hippies were of the unanimous opinion that, in Dylan's
words, one "must be honest to live outside the law."   But these
young strangers apparently lived by no code save those with which
they unlocked forbidden regions of the Net.

They appeared to think that improperly secured systems deserved to
be violated and, by extension, that unlocked houses ought to be
robbed.  This latter built particular heat in me since I refuse, on
philosophical grounds, to lock my house.

Civility broke down.  We began to see exchanges like:

Dave Hughes: Clifford Stoll said a wise thing that no one has
  commented on. That networks are
  built on trust. If they aren't, they should be.


Acid Phreak: Yeah. Sure.  And we should use the 'honor system' as a
  first line of security against hack attempts.


Jef Poskanzer: This guy down the street from me sometimes leaves his
  back door unlocked. I told him about it once, but he still
  does it.  If I had the chance to do it over, I would go in the
  back door, shoot him, and take all his money and
  consumer electronics.  It's the only way to get through to
  him.

Acid Phreak: Jef Poskanker (Puss?  Canker?  yechh)  Anyway, now
  when did you first start having these delusions where
  computer hacking was even *remotely* similar to
  murder?

Presented with such a terrifying amalgam of raw youth and apparent
power, we fluttered like a flock of indignant Babbitts around the
Status Quo, defending it heartily.  One former hacker howled to the
Harper's editor in charge of the forum, "Do you or do you not have
names and addresses for these criminals?"  Though they had
committed no obvious crimes, he was ready to call the police.

They finally got to me with:

Acid:   Whoever said they'd leave the door open to their house...
  where do you live?  (the address)  Leave it to me in mail if you
  like.

I had never encountered anyone so apparently unworthy of my trust
as these little nihilists.  They had me questioning a basic tenet,
namely that the greatest security lies in vulnerability.  I decided it
was time to put that principal to the test...

Barlow:  Acid. My house is at 372 North Franklin Street in
  Pinedale, Wyoming. If you're heading north on Franklin,
  you go about two blocks off the main drag before you run
  into hay meadow on the left. I've got the last house before
  the field. The computer is always on...

  And is that really what you mean? Are you merely just
  the kind of little sneak that goes around looking for easy
  places to violate? You disappoint me, pal. For all your
  James Dean-On-Silicon rhetoric, you're not a cyberpunk.
  You're just a punk.

Acid Phreak: Mr. Barlow:  Thank you for posting all I need to get your
  credit information and a whole lot more!  Now, who is to
  blame?  ME for getting it or YOU for being such an idiot?!
  I think this should just about sum things up.


Barlow:  Acid, if you've got a lesson to teach me, I hope it's not that
  it's idiotic to trust one's fellow man. Life on those terms
  would be endless and brutal. I'd try to tell you something
  about conscience, but I'd sound like Father O'Flannigan
  trying to reform the punk that's about to gutshoot him.
  For no more reason that to watch him die.

  But actually, if you take it upon yourself to destroy my
  credit, you might do me a favor. I've been looking for
  something to put the brakes on my burgeoning
  materialism.

I spent a day wondering whether I was dealing with another Kevin
Mitnik before the other shoe dropped:

Barlow:  ... With crackers like acid and optik, the issue is less
  intelligence than alienation.  Trade their modems for
  skateboards and only a slight conceptual shift would
  occur.

Optik:   You have some pair of balls comparing my talent with
  that of a skateboarder.  Hmmm...  This was indeed boring,
  but nonetheless:

At which point he downloaded my credit history.

Optik had hacked the core of TRW, an institution which has made
my business (and yours) their business, extracting from it an
abbreviated ( and incorrect) version of my personal financial life.
With this came the implication that he and Acid could and would
revise it to my disadvantage if I didn't back off.

I have since learned that while getting someone's TRW file is fairly
trivial, changing it is not.  But at that time, my assessment of the
crackers'  black skills was one of superstitious awe.  They were digital
brujos  about to zombify my economic soul.

To a middle-class American, one's credit rating has become nearly
identical to his freedom.  It now appeared that I was dealing with
someone who had both the means and desire to hoodoo mine,
leaving me trapped in a life of wrinkled bills and money order
queues.  Never again would I call the Sharper Image on a whim.

I've been in redneck bars wearing shoulder-length curls, police
custody while on acid, and Harlem after midnight, but no one has
ever put the spook in me quite as Phiber Optik did at that moment.  I
realized that we had problems which exceeded the human
conductivity of the WELL's bandwidth.  If someone were about to
paralyze me with a spell, I wanted a more visceral sense of him than
could fit through a modem.

I e-mailed him asking him to give me a phone call.  I told him I
wouldn't insult his skills by giving him my phone number and, with
the assurance conveyed by that challenge, I settled back and waited
for the phone to ring.  Which, directly, it did.

In this conversation and the others that followed I encountered an
intelligent, civilized, and surprisingly principled kid of 18 who
sounded, and continues to sound, as though there's little harm in him
to man or data.  His cracking impulses seemed purely exploratory,
and I've begun to wonder if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as
desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves.

The terrifying poses which Optik and Acid had been striking on
screen were a media-amplified example of a human adaptation I'd
seen before: One becomes as he is beheld.  They were simply living up to
what they thought we, and, more particularly, the editors of
Harper's, expected of them.  Like the televised tears of disaster
victims, their snarls adapted easily to mass distribution.

Months later, Harper's took Optik, Acid and me to dinner at a
Manhattan restaurant which, though very fancy, was appropriately
Chinese.  Acid and Optik, as material beings, were well-scrubbed and
fashionably-clad. They looked to be dangerous as ducks.  But, as
Harper's and the rest of the media have discovered to their delight,
the boys had developed distinctly showier personae for their rambles
through the howling wilderness of Cyberspace.

Glittering with spikes of binary chrome, they strode past the kleig
lights and into the digital distance.  There they would be outlaws.  It
was only a matter of time before they started to believe themselves as
bad as they sounded.  And no time at all before everyone else did.

In this, they were like another kid named Billy, many of whose feral
deeds in the pre-civilized West were encouraged by the same dime
novelist who chronicled them.  And like Tom Horn, they seemed to
have some doubt as to which side of the law they were on.  Acid even
expressed an ambition to work for the government someday, nabbing
"terrorists and code abusers."

There is also a frontier ambiguity to the "crimes" the crackers
commit.  They are not exactly stealing VCR's.  Copying a text file
from TRW doesn't deprive its owner of anything except
informational exclusivity.  (Though it may said that information has
monetary value only in proportion to its containment.)

There was no question that they were making unauthorized use of
data channels.  The night I met them, they left our restaurant table
and disappeared into the phone booth for a long time.  I didn't see
them marshalling quarters before they went.

And, as I became less their adversary and more their scoutmaster, I
began to get "conference calls" in which six or eight of them would
crack pay phones all over New York and simultaneously land on my
line in Wyoming.  These deft maneuvers made me think of sky-
diving stunts where large groups convene geometrically in free fall.
In this case, the risk was largely legal.

Their other favorite risky business is the time-honored adolescent
sport of trespassing.  They insist on going where they don't belong.
But then teen-age boys have been proceeding uninvited since the
dawn of human puberty.  It seems hard-wired.  The only innovation
is in the new form of the forbidden zone the means of getting in it.

In fact, like Kevin Mitnik, I broke into NORAD when I was 17.  A
friend and I left a nearby "woodsie" (as rustic adolescent drunks
were called in Colorado) and tried to get inside the Cheyenne
Mountain.  The chrome-helmeted Air Force MP's held us for about 2
hours before letting us go.  They weren't much older than us and
knew exactly our level of national security threat.  Had we come
cloaked in electronic mystery, their alert status certainly would have
been higher.

Whence rises much of the anxiety.  Everything is so ill-defined.  How
can you guess what lies in their hearts when you can't see their eyes?
How can one be sure that, like Mitnik, they won't cross the line from
trespassing into another adolescent pastime, vandalism?  And how
can you be sure they pose no threat when you don't know what a
threat might be?

And for the crackers some thrill is derived from the metamorphic
vagueness of the laws themselves.  On the Net, their effects are
unpredictable. One never knows when they'll bite.

This is because most of the statutes invoked against the crackers were
designed in a very different world from the one they explore.  For
example, can unauthorized electronic access can be regarded as the
ethical equivalent of old-fashioned trespass?  Like open range, the
property boundaries of Cyberspace are hard to stake and harder still
to defend.

Is transmission through an otherwise unused data channel really
theft?  Is the track-less passage of a mind through TRW's mainframe
the same as the passage of a pickup through my Back 40?  What is a
place if Cyberspace is everywhere?  What are data and what is free
speech?  How does one treat property which has no physical form
and can be infinitely reproduced?  Is a computer the same as a
printing press?  Can the history of my business affairs properly
belong to someone else?  Can anyone morally claim to own
knowledge itself?

If such questions were hard to answer precisely, there are those who
are ready to try.  Based on their experience in the Virtual World, they
were about as qualified to enforce its mores as I am to write the Law
of the Sea.  But if they lacked technical sophistication, they brought to
this task their usual conviction.  And, of course, badges and guns.

=== Cut ===


                                 With best wishes,
           Max

Kime: Если пpоpочество не сбылось, его следует считать пpогнозом.

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