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
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
