might find a useful parallel to the digital
underground in  the drug  underground.   There was a
time, now much-obscured by historical revisionism, when
Bohemians freely shared joints at concerts, and hip, small-
scale marijuana dealers might turn people on just for the
sake of enjoying a long stoned conversation about the
Doors and Allen Ginsberg.  Now drugs are increasingly
verboten, except in a high-stakes, highly-criminal world of
highly addictive drugs.  Over years of disenchantment and
police harassment, a vaguely ideological, free-wheeling
drug underground has relinquished the business of drug-
dealing to a  far more savage criminal hard-core.   This is
not a pleasant prospect to contemplate, but the analogy is
fairly compelling.

     What does an underground board look like?   What
distinguishes it from a standard board?  It isn't
necessarily
the conversation -- hackers often talk about common
board topics, such as hardware, software, sex, science
fiction, current events, politics, movies, personal gossip.
Underground boards can best be distinguished by their
files, or "philes,"  pre-composed texts which teach the
techniques and ethos of the underground.   These are
prized reservoirs of forbidden knowledge.  Some are
anonymous, but most proudly bear the handle of the
"hacker" who has created them, and his group affiliation, if
he has one.

     Here is a partial table-of-contents of philes from an
underground board, somewhere in the heart of middle
America, circa 1991.  The descriptions are mostly self-
explanatory.


BANKAMEъ.ZIP    5406 06-11-91  Hacking Bank America
CHHACK.ZIP      4481 06-11-91  Chilton Hacking
CITIBANK.ZIP    4118 06-11-91  Hacking Citibank
CъEDIMTC.ZIP    3241 06-11-91  Hacking Mtc Credit
Company
DIGEST.ZIP      5159 06-11-91  Hackers Digest
HACK.ZIP       14031 06-11-91  How To Hack
HACKBAS.ZIP     5073 06-11-91  Basics Of Hacking
HACKDICT.ZIP   42774 06-11-91  Hackers Dictionary
HACKEъ.ZIP     57938 06-11-91  Hacker Info
HACKEъME.ZIP    3148 06-11-91  Hackers Manual
HACKHAND.ZIP    4814 06-11-91  Hackers Handbook
HACKTHES.ZIP   48290 06-11-91  Hackers Thesis
HACKVMS.ZIP     4696 06-11-91  Hacking Vms Systems
MCDON.ZIP       3830 06-11-91  Hacking Macdonalds
(Home Of The Archs)
P500UNIX.ZIP   15525 06-11-91  Phortune 500 Guide To
Unix
ъADHACK.ZIP     8411 06-11-91  ъadio Hacking
TAOTъASH.DOC    4096 12-25-89  Suggestions For
Trashing
TECHHACK.ZIP    5063 06-11-91  Technical Hacking


The files above are do-it-yourself manuals about
computer intrusion.  The above is only a small section of a
much larger library of hacking and phreaking techniques
and history.  We now move into a different and perhaps
surprising area.

                              +------------+
                              |Anarchy|
                              +------------+

ANAъC.ZIP       3641 06-11-91  Anarchy Files
ANAъCHST.ZIP   63703 06-11-91  Anarchist Book
ANAъCHY.ZIP     2076 06-11-91  Anarchy At Home
ANAъCHY3.ZIP    6982 06-11-91  Anarchy No 3
ANAъCTOY.ZIP    2361 06-11-91  Anarchy Toys
ANTIMODM.ZIP    2877 06-11-91  Anti-modem Weapons
ATOM.ZIP        4494 06-11-91  How To Make An Atom
Bomb
BAъBITUA.ZIP    3982 06-11-91  Barbiturate Formula
BLCKPWDъ.ZIP    2810 06-11-91  Black Powder Formulas
BOMB.ZIP        3765 06-11-91  How To Make Bombs
BOOM.ZIP        2036 06-11-91  Things That Go Boom
CHLOъINE.ZIP    1926 06-11-91  Chlorine Bomb
COOKBOOK.ZIP    1500 06-11-91  Anarchy Cook Book
DESTъOY.ZIP     3947 06-11-91  Destroy Stuff
DUSTBOMB.ZIP    2576 06-11-91  Dust Bomb
ELECTEъъ.ZIP    3230 06-11-91  Electronic Terror
EXPLOS1.ZIP     2598 06-11-91  Explosives 1
EXPLOSIV.ZIP   18051 06-11-91  More Explosives
EZSTEAL.ZIP     4521 06-11-91  Ez-stealing
FLAME.ZIP       2240 06-11-91  Flame Thrower
FLASHLT.ZIP     2533 06-11-91  Flashlight Bomb
FMBUG.ZIP       2906 06-11-91  How To Make An Fm Bug
OMEEXPL.ZIP    2139 06-11-91  Home Explosives
HOW2BъK.ZIP     3332 06-11-91  How To Break In
LETTEъ.ZIP      2990 06-11-91  Letter Bomb
LOCK.ZIP        2199 06-11-91  How To Pick Locks
MъSHIN.ZIP      3991 06-11-91  Briefcase Locks
NAPALM.ZIP      3563 06-11-91  Napalm At Home
NITъO.ZIP       3158 06-11-91  Fun With Nitro
PAъAMIL.ZIP     2962 06-11-91  Paramilitary Info
PICKING.ZIP     3398 06-11-91  Picking Locks
PIPEBOMB.ZIP    2137 06-11-91  Pipe Bomb
POTASS.ZIP      3987 06-11-91  Formulas With Potassium
PъANK.TXT      11074 08-03-90  More Pranks To Pull On
Idiots!
ъEVENGE.ZIP     4447 06-11-91  ъevenge Tactics
ъOCKET.ZIP      2590 06-11-91  ъockets For Fun
SMUGGLE.ZIP     3385 06-11-91  How To Smuggle

     *Holy Cow!*  The damned thing is full of stuff about
bombs!

     What are we to make of this?

     First, it should be acknowledged that spreading
knowledge about demolitions to teenagers is a highly and
deliberately antisocial act.   It is not, however, illegal.

     Second, it should be recognized that most of these
philes were in fact *written* by teenagers.  Most adult
American males who can remember their teenage years
will recognize that the notion of building a flamethrower in
your garage is an incredibly neat-o idea.  *Actually*
building a flamethrower in your garage, however, is
fraught with discouraging difficulty.  Stuffing gunpowder
into a booby-trapped flashlight, so as to blow the arm off
your high-school vice-principal, can be a thing of dark
beauty to contemplate.   Actually committing assault by
explosives  will earn you the sustained attention of the
federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

     Some people, however, will actually try these plans.  A
determinedly murderous American teenager can
probably buy or steal a handgun far more easily than he
can brew fake "napalm" in the kitchen sink.  Nevertheless,
if temptation is spread before people a certain number
will succumb, and a small minority will actually attempt
these stunts.  A large minority of that small minority will
either fail or, quite likely, maim themselves, since these
"philes" have not been checked for accuracy, are not the
product of professional experience, and are often highly
fanciful.  But the gloating menace of these philes is not to
be entirely dismissed.

     Hackers may not be "serious" about bombing; if they
were, we would hear far more about exploding flashlights,
homemade bazookas, and gym teachers poisoned by
chlorine and potassium.  However, hackers are *very*
serious about forbidden knowledge.  They are possessed
not merely by curiosity, but by a positive *lust to know.*
The desire to know what others don't is scarcely new.  But
the *intensity* of this desire, as manifested by these young
technophilic denizens of the Information Age, may in fact
*be* new, and may represent some basic shift in social
values -- a harbinger of what the world may come to, as
society lays more and more value on the possession,
assimilation and retailing of *information* as a basic
commodity of daily life.

     There have always been young men with obsessive
interests in these topics.  Never before, however, have they
been able to network so extensively and easily, and to
propagandize their interests with impunity to random
passers-by.   High-school teachers will recognize that
there's always one in a crowd, but when the one in a crowd
escapes control by jumping into the phone-lines, and
becomes a hundred such kids all together on a board,
then trouble is brewing visibly.  The urge of authority to
*do something,*  even something drastic, is hard to resist.
And in 1990, authority did something.  In fact authority did
a great deal.

                    #

     The process by which boards create hackers goes
something like this.  A youngster becomes interested in
computers -- usually, computer games.  He hears from
friends that "bulletin boards" exist where games can be
obtained for free.  (Many computer games are "freeware,"
not copyrighted -- invented simply for the love of it and
given away to the public; some of these games are quite
good.)  He bugs his parents for a modem, or quite often,
uses his parents' modem.

      The world of boards suddenly opens up.  Computer
games can be quite expensive, real budget-breakers for a
kid, but pirated games, stripped of copy protection,  are
cheap or free.  They are also illegal, but it is very rare,
almost unheard of, for a small-scale software pirate to be
prosecuted.  Once "cracked" of its copy protection, the
program, being digital data, becomes infinitely
reproducible.  Even the instructions to the game, any
manuals that accompany it, can be reproduced as text
files, or photocopied from legitimate sets.  Other users  on
boards can give many useful hints in game-playing tactics.
And a youngster with an infinite supply of free computer
games can certainly cut quite a swath among his modem-
less friends.

     And boards are pseudonymous.  No one need know
that you're fourteen years old -- with a little practice at
subterfuge, you can talk to adults about adult things, and
be accepted and taken seriously!  You can even pretend to
be a girl, or an old man, or anybody you can imagine.  If
you find this kind of deception gratifying, there is ample
opportunity to hone your ability on boards.

     But local boards can grow stale.  And almost every
board maintains a list of phone-numbers to other boards,
some in distant, tempting, exotic locales.   Who knows
what they're up to, in Oregon or Alaska or Florida or
California?  It's very easy to find out -- just  order the
modem to call through its software -- nothing to this, just
typing on a keyboard, the same thing you would do for
most any computer game.   The machine reacts swiftly
and in a few seconds you are talking to a bunch of
interesting people on another seaboard.

     And yet the *bills* for this trivial action can be
staggering!  Just by going tippety-tap with your fingers,
you
may have saddled your parents with four hundred bucks
in long-distance charges, and gotten chewed out but good.
That hardly seems fair.

     How horrifying to have made friends in another state
and to be deprived of their company -- and their software -
-  just because telephone companies demand absurd
amounts of money!   How painful, to be restricted to
boards in one's own *area code* --   what the heck is an
"area code" anyway, and what makes it so special?   A few
grumbles, complaints, and innocent questions of this sort
will often elicit a sympathetic reply from another board
user  --  someone with some stolen codes to hand.  You
dither a while,  knowing this isn't quite right, then you
make up your mind to try them anyhow -- *and they work!*
Suddenly you're doing something even your parents can't
do.  Six months ago you were just some kid -- now, you're
the Crimson Flash of Area Code 512!   You're bad -- you're
nationwide!

     Maybe you'll stop at a few abused codes.  Maybe
you'll decide that boards aren't all that interesting after
all,
that it's wrong, not worth the risk  -- but maybe you won't.
The next step is to pick up your own repeat-dialling
program --  to learn to generate your own stolen codes.
(This was dead easy five years ago, much harder to get
away with nowadays, but not yet impossible.)   And these
dialling programs are not complex or intimidating -- some
are as small as twenty lines of software.

     Now, you too can share codes.   You can trade codes
to learn other techniques.   If you're smart enough to catch
on, and obsessive enough to want to bother,  and ruthless
enough to start seriously bending rules, then you'll get
better, fast.  You start to develop a rep.  You  move up to
a
heavier class of board -- a board with a bad attitude, the
kind of board that naive dopes like your classmates and
your former self have never even heard of!  You pick up
the jargon of phreaking and hacking from the board.   You
read a few of those anarchy philes -- and man, you never
realized you could be a real *outlaw* without ever leaving
your bedroom.

     You still play other computer games, but now you
have a new and bigger game.   This one will bring you a
different kind of status than destroying even eight zillion
lousy space invaders.

     Hacking is perceived by hackers as a "game."  This is
not an entirely unreasonable or sociopathic perception.
You can win or lose at hacking, succeed or fail, but it
never
feels "real."  It's not simply that imaginative youngsters
sometimes have a hard time telling "make-believe" from
"real life."  Cyberspace is *not real!*  "ъeal" things are
physical objects like trees and  shoes and cars.  Hacking
takes place on a screen.   Words aren't physical, numbers
(even telephone numbers and credit card numbers)
aren't physical.  Sticks and stones may break my bones,
but data will never hurt me.  Computers *simulate* reality,
like computer games that simulate tank battles or
dogfights or spaceships.   Simulations are just make-
believe, and the stuff in computers is *not real.*

     Consider this:  if "hacking" is supposed to be so
serious and real-life and  dangerous, then how come
*nine-year-old kids* have computers and modems?  You
wouldn't give a nine year old his own car, or his own rifle,
or
his own chainsaw -- those things are "real."

     People underground are perfectly aware that the
"game" is frowned upon by the powers that be.   Word gets
around about busts in the underground.   Publicizing busts
is one of the primary functions of pirate boards,  but they
also promulgate an attitude about them, and their own
idiosyncratic ideas of justice.   The users of underground
boards won't complain if some guy is busted for crashing
systems, spreading viruses, or stealing money by wire-
fraud.   They may shake their heads with a sneaky grin, but
they won't openly defend these practices.   But when a kid
is charged with some theoretical amount of theft:
$233,846.14, for instance, because he sneaked into a
computer and copied something, and kept it in his house
on a floppy disk -- this is regarded as a sign of near-
insanity from prosecutors, a sign that they've drastically
mistaken the immaterial game of computing for their real
and boring everyday world of fatcat corporate money.

     It's as if big companies and their suck-up lawyers
think that computing belongs to them, and they can retail
it with price stickers, as if it were boxes of laundry soap!
But pricing "information"  is like trying to price air or
price
dreams.  Well, anybody on a pirate board knows that
computing can be, and ought to be, *free.*  Pirate boards
are little independent worlds in cyberspace, and they don't
belong to anybody but the underground.   Underground
boards aren't "brought to you by Procter & Gamble."

     To log on to an underground board can mean to
experience liberation, to enter a world where, for once,
money isn't everything and adults don't have all the
answers.

     Let's sample another vivid hacker manifesto.  Here
are some excerpts from "The Conscience of a Hacker," by
"The Mentor," from *Phrack* Volume One, Issue 7, Phile
3.

     "I made a discovery today.  I found a computer.  Wait
a second, this is cool.  It does what I want it to.  If it
makes a
mistake, it's because I screwed it up.  Not because it
doesn't like me.(...)
     "And then it happened... a door opened to a world...
rushing through the phone line like heroin through an
addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge
from day-to-day incompetencies is sought... a board is
found.   'This is it...  this is where I belong...'
     "I know everyone here... even if I've never met them,
never talked to them, may never hear from them again... I
know you all...(...)
     "This is our world now....  the world of the electron
and
the switch, the beauty of the baud.  We make use of a
service already existing without paying for what could be
dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and
you
call us criminals.  We explore... and you call us criminals.
We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals.  We
exist without skin color, without nationality, without
religious bias... and you call us criminals.  You build
atomic
bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat and lie to us and
try to make us believe that it's for our own good, yet we're
the criminals.
     "Yes, I am a criminal.  My crime is that of curiosity.
My crime is that of judging people by what they say and
think, not what they look like.  My crime is that of
outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for."

                         #

     There have been underground boards almost as long
as there have been boards.  One of the first was 8BBS,
which became a stronghold of the West Coast phone-
phreak elite.   After going on-line in March 1980, 8BBS
sponsored "Susan Thunder," and "Tuc,"  and, most
notoriously, "the Condor."  "The Condor"  bore the singular
distinction of becoming the most vilified American phreak
and hacker ever.   Angry underground associates, fed up
with Condor's peevish behavior, turned him in to police,
along with a heaping double-helping of  outrageous
hacker legendry.  As a result, Condor was kept in solitary
confinement for seven months,  for fear that he might start
World War Three by triggering missile silos from the
prison payphone.  (Having served his time, Condor is now
walking around loose;  WWIII has thus far conspicuously
failed to occur.)

     The sysop of 8BBS was an ardent free-speech
enthusiast who simply felt that *any* attempt to restrict
the expression of his users was unconstitutional and
immoral.   Swarms of the technically curious entered 8BBS
and emerged as phreaks and hackers, until, in 1982, a
friendly 8BBS alumnus passed the sysop a new modem
which had been purchased by credit-card fraud.  Police
took this opportunity to seize the entire board and remove
what they considered an attractive nuisance.

     Plovernet was a powerful East Coast pirate board that
operated in both New York and Florida.  Owned and
operated by teenage hacker "Quasi Moto,"  Plovernet
attracted five hundred eager users in 1983.  "Emmanuel
Goldstein" was one-time co-sysop of Plovernet, along with
"Lex Luthor,"  founder of the "Legion of Doom" group.
Plovernet  bore the signal honor of being the original
home of the "Legion of Doom," about which the reader will
be hearing a great deal, soon.

     "Pirate-80," or "P-80," run by a sysop known as "Scan-
Man," got into the game very early in Charleston, and
continued steadily for years.  P-80 flourished so flagrantly
that even its most hardened users became nervous, and
some slanderously speculated that "Scan Man" must have
ties to corporate security, a charge he vigorously denied.

     "414 Private" was the home board for the first *group*
to attract conspicuous trouble, the teenage "414 Gang,"
whose intrusions into Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and
Los Alamos military computers were to be a nine-days-
wonder in 1982.

     At about this time, the first software piracy boards
began to open up, trading cracked games for the Atari 800
and the Commodore C64.   Naturally these boards were
heavily frequented by teenagers.  And with the 1983
release of the hacker-thriller movie *War Games,* the
scene exploded.   It seemed that every kid in America had
demanded and  gotten a modem for Christmas.  Most of
these dabbler wannabes put their modems in the attic
after a few weeks, and most of the remainder minded their
P's and Q's and stayed well out of hot water.  But some
stubborn and talented diehards had this hacker kid in
*War Games* figured for a happening dude.   They simply