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
