Session 6 - Feb 23/25
The Myth of the Hacker

In this lecture we will examine the myth of the hacker as a symbol
of our modern technological world. We will explore how the image of
a 'hacker' has been constructed by various key texts and how it has
changed over time. We will examine the following texts: 

The Hacker's Dictionary by Eric Raymond and Guy Steele, 1991/1996
Neuromancer by William Gibson, 1984
The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll, 1990
"Crime and Puzzlement" by John Perry Barlow, 1990
"The Prisoner: Phiber Optik Goes Directly to Jail" by Julian
Dibbell, 1996

In addition, there are many excellent related readings recommended
on the syllabus. Before we begin, you should jot down your ideas
and fantasies of what a hacker is.

In thinking about where the idea of the hacker originated, I begin
with The Hacker's Dictionary, which is a print version of "The
Jargon File" at http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon.html. The
Hacker's Dictionary defines a hacker in the following way:

     hacker [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe]
     n. 1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of
     programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as
     opposed to most users, who perfer to learn only the minimum
     necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even
     obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just
     theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of
     appreciating hack value. 4. A person who is good at
     programming quickly. 5. An expert at a particular program, or
     one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in 'a UNIX
     hacker'. (Definitions 1 through5 are correlated, and people
     who fit them congregate.) 6. An expert or enthusiast of any
     kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example. 7. One
     who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming
     or circumventing limitations. 8. [deprecated] A malicious
     meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poling
     around. Hence password hacker, network hacker. See cracker.

     It is better to be described as a hacker by others than to
     describe oneself that way. Hackers consider themselves
     something of an elite (A meritocracy based on ability), though
     one to which new members are gladly welcome. There is thus a
     certain ego satisfaction to be had in identifying yourself as
     a hacker (but if you claim to be one and are not, you'll
     quickly be labeled bogus). (p.191-2)

The Hacker's Dictionary has two introductions written by
individuals who describe themselves as "hackers." The first
introduction is by Guy Steele, called "Confessioms of a Happy
Hacker"; the second is by Eric Raymond, called "Hacker in a Strange
Land."  Let's examine these two introductions briefly for ideas
about what a hacker is. How do these men describe themselves and
their experience?

Guy Steele grew up as part of the mainframe computer culture of AI
programmers at MIT in the 1970s. This was a university based
subculture of young programmers that hung out in the labs where the
big machines were located, networked to other labs by ARPANET.
Steele notes that in the 1960s and 1970s "hackers congregated
around any computer center that made computer time available for
play...hacking is done mostly for fun, for its own sake, for the
pure joy of it" (p.xiii). They developed a sense of community and
culture, with its own jargon that Steele began to record and store
online in the 1970s. This is the "Jargon File" that continues
today. It was first published as the The Hacker's Dictionary in
1983. 

Eric Raymond is of the generation that followed Steele. He sees his
history and skills as a "bridge between the 'old' LISP/PDP-
10/ARPANET culture and the huge newer community of C and UNIX
hackers," USENET enthusiasts, and personal computer hobbyists that
arose in the 1980s. Raymond himself introduced jargon that
originated with unix programming and that is how he became involved
in the hacker's dictionary. In 1991, Steele and Raymond came out
with the first revised issue this year in 1996 they came out with
another issue. 

Despite the jump in generations, these two men have much in common
in the way they describe their experience. Their first memories of
the computer are of playing games. Steele remembers a PDP-6
bursting into a Bach Brandenburg concerto, a program called MacHack
that played chess against human players in tournaments, and having
his spaceship shot down during a game of Space War. Similarly,
Raymond was fascinated by a game that dropped bombs on a freighter.
Raymond remembers "hacking at the program, trying to see what I
could make it do" (xvii). Both men learned programming as hobbies
while in their teens and they both have a strong sense of being
"hackers." Steele describes his fascination with an IBM that he
discovered as a teenager in highschool:

     no doubt about it, I was born to be a hacker. Fortunately I
     did not let my studies suffer, as many young hackers do, but
     every spare moment I thought about the computer. It was spell
     binding, I wanted to know all about it, what it could do,
     couldn't do, how its programm worked, what its circuits looked
     like. During study hall, lunch, and after school, I could be
     found in the computer room punching programs onto cards and
     running them through the computer. (p.x)

Here, the hacker is portrayed as somebody who is fascinated by the
machine and what it can do. Somebody who actually likes reading
manuals and loves playing with the machine. Sherry Turkle also has
an excellent discussion of the hacker as someone who loves the
machine, in her book The Second Self: Computers and the Human
Spirit, 1984.  

In addition to being fascinated by computers, both Steele and
Raymond discovered new forms of communication -- email and talk
programs -- that allowed them to socialize in new ways. Raymond
refers to the "odd and wonderful world of online communication."
With the formation of APRPANET in 1969, and USENET in the 1980s,
hackers formed an international, computer-mediated, networked
community. Steele notes: "I was never a lone hacker, but one of
many. Despite stories you may have read about anti-social nerds
glued permanently to display screens, totally addicted to the
computers, hackers have (human) friends too" (xi). The hacker is
portrayed as a social being, although social skills are not of high
priority compared to programming skills.

Social networking over computer networks, Steele observes, is
different from face-to-face communication in two important ways: 1)
users acquire an electronic identity by virtue of logging in to the
computer with a login name; 2) not seeing people does not mean you
cannot get to know them although it may lead to surprises.

The portrait that Steele paints is that of a hacker as somebody
whose work and social life revolves around the computer. The
computer becomes a world. And these are the issues that people are
researching today -- identity and community, communication and
culture -- since computer-mediated communication has grown way
beyond the province of computer professionals.

The values that Raymond attaches to the "hacker" are those of
dedication, irreverance, competence, and playfullness. The question
is how does this image move from the "happy hacker" to what we
encounter so often today in the press as a kind of criminal,
vandal. juvenile delinquent, outlaw. We will examine these images.

An important influence in building a negative image of the hacker is
William Gibson's award-winning novel Neuromancer (1984). Gibson is a
science fiction writer. He is not a programmer or computer
professional. At the time that he wrote this book he was not online,
and did not use computer networks in any form. There are numerous
web sites about him and his work.  His book is a work of
fantasy, collective myths and metaphors. His work was adopted by
computer enthusiasts in the 1980s and much of his language is in use
today. He coined the word "cyberspace." He refers to the computer
networks as a "matrix." He refers to the "console man," or "cyberspace
cowboys." There are other expressions of his that have not caught on to
the same degree -- night city, chiba, the sprawl, the chat -- although
there are web spaces named "chibamoo" and the "sprawl" after Gibson's
book, but they do not quite capture the spirit of the spaces he
envisioned. 

Although Gibson does not really use the word "hacker" his main
character, Case, is described as "the best interface cowboy who
ever ran the earth's computer matrix." Like the hackers we examined
above, he is somebody whose world is the computer yet the image he
portrays is very different from the self portraits we just
explored. The novel opens with an image of a sky "the color of
television, tuned to a dead channel." Case enters a bar for
professional expatriates in Japan, call the Chat. The bartender
fills glasses with a prosthetic arm cased in "grubby pink plastic."
He is surrounded by giggling, hissing whores, Africans with tribal
scars on their cheeks, drunken jokes, and drugs. Case takes a lot
of drugs. He used to be a "cowboy, a rustler, one of the best in
the Sprawl": 

     He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a
     byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom
     cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness
     into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix. 

He was a "thief" who stole software to penetrate corporate systems: 
Then he stole from his employers and they punished him by damaging his
nervous system with a "wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in
a Memphis hotel..." 

     The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies
     of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn't
     repair the damage he's suffered in that Memphis hotel.

     A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading
     nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and
     the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the
     matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across
     that colorless void....The Sprawl was a long way home over the
     Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy.
     Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the
     dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and
     he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark,
     curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed
     into the bedslab, temperfoam, bunched between his fingers,
     trying to reach the console that wasn't there (p.5).

This is a radically different world from that of the "happy hacker"
described in the "Hacker's Dictionary." It is portrays a confusion of
life and death, hostility and alienation, drawing on a host of American
symbols: the cowboy, Memphis (the home of cowboy country music), a
hotel, artifical limbs, whores, ugliness, surgery and speed. In a
jarring reversal of what is felt to be "natural," technology is used to
describe nature where the sky is the color of "a tv tuned to a dead
channel." The writing is rich with images of addiction, seediness,
death and longing. Where do these images come from? The community
depicted is hardly warm or friendly. Cyberspace is something like a
drug. Do these images express the collective fantasies of American
culture, or the collective experience of North American culture?
	

The 1980s, when Gibson wrote Neuromancer, was the period of Reagan
economics with the rise of corporate interests and investment, the
dismanteling of the Great Society that Johnson had created in the
1960s. In addition to the rise of the "yuppie," the 1980s also gave
birth to the "unix wizard" and USENET News. Raymond notes that UNIX (an
operating system) and C (a programming language) spread from a few
niches in academia into an "unstoppable tide that completely
transformed the computing landscape" (p. xix). UUCP, in contrast to
ARPANET, used the existing network of ordinary phone lines to transmit
files, news and email. This gave rise to a popular, grassroots
fascination with computer communications. Perhaps the emergence of
computer networks laid the groundwork for a fascination with the
telecommunications infrastructure in general.  There emerged a
subculture of phone phreaking, network cracking, and TV descrambling
whose challenge was to penetrate the corporate infrastructure. This
mostly teenage subculture of phreakers and crackers were the underbelly
of the yuppie culture. They emerged as the techno-rebels of their time. 
They had not a little in common with their peers on the ground,
graffitti artists who explored the physical grid of underground subway
systems, riding the trains and sneaking into forbidden train yards.
Both groups have been depicted as gangs of punks or juvenile
delinquents who trespass and are punished when caught. Both groups
represented juvenile forms of play based on rebellion. 

Clifford Stoll's classic, The Cuckoo's Egg (1989) describes his
experience of tracking down an intruder on his computer network. He
tells the wonderful story about how he discovered and trapped a unix
"hacker" logging in from Germany, using his computer to jump onto
military networks and sniff out secrets for the KGB. Stoll's story
presents the meeting of the two worlds of old and new hackers. Even his
office is situated between a VAX mainframe programmer (symbol of the
old) and a unix programmer (symbol of the new) who conduct an ongoing
debate between them. As they argue, he is assigned to track an
accounting glitch in the system and that puts him on the trail of an
intruder into their computer system. His story describes the awakening
of the ARPANET community to the possiblity of malicious intent. It had
apparently not occured to many people that somebody could/would use
their network of computers for espionage or other illegal activity. The
'old' hackers were smart, capable programmers, creating a network,
maintaining, sharing information with others. Suddenly they encounter
what Stoll calls "punks" who come in and invade their system and
"tarnish" the word hacker (p.6). And they resent having to secure their
systems.

This image of the hacker as a "punk" coming on the scene, is further
elaborated by John Perry Barlow in "Crime and Puzzlement."  Barlow,
songwriter for the rock and roll band, the Grateful Dead
(http://www.eff.org/barlow), describes how he became involved with the
plight of a group of kids who called themselves the "Legion of Doom,"
They faced criminal charges for downloading and circulating a text file
from Bell South. As a result, he helped form the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, which is today a lobbying organization in Washington DC for
rights in cyberspace. Its homepage is located at http://www.eff.org

The article begins with Barlow hanging out on the WELL, a well-
known network based in San Fransisco. It is 1989 and computers and
security have become important enough an issue for Harper's
Magazine to sponsor an electronic conference on the WELL. Two new
users show up by the name of Phiber Optik and Acid Phreak. Barlow
notes the arrival of the "outlaws" which conjures up a whole series
of imagery that is rooted in American mythology about the
'frontier' the 'wild west' and the ambivalent place of the 'outlaw'
as both folkhero and criminal. 

Barlow describes the WELL as a "frontier village." He himself lives
on a ranch in Wyoming so physically he lives in cowboy country. He
writes:

     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...hard to get around in, and
     up for graps. 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 outlawas and new
     ideas about liberty" (p.2). 

So we have a very ambivalent place here. It can be dangerous and
liberating, independent or sociopathic. In contrast to the portrait
painted by Steele and Raymond who described sociability and
community as an integral part of their experience of being hackers,
Barlow suggests that the "natives" of cyberspace are solitary, even
sociopathic. This disregards that fact that the kids he gets to
know arrive as a team and work as part of a group, but it fits the
image of the "lone cowboy" that Gibson painted.

As the conference on computers and security proceeds, Barlow
describes these two kids, Phiber Optik and Acid Phreak, as
"fractious, immature, immoral, insulting, and too damn good at what
they do." He calls them "cyberpunks" and starts having fantasies
that they are part of the mob, will steal credit cards, and recalls
the case of Kevin Mitnick who is serving a jail sentence for allegedly
breaking into the North American Command Computers and destroyed
and altered data. 

Barlow came to the conference with the idea that a hacker is a
dangerous punk, a threat to his personal survival. The ensuing
interactions with these two kids shows how Barlow's image of the hacker
changed from one of being a criminal to that of being an explorer.  

The issue being discussed on the WELL conference is a moral debate that
centers around whether and how to secure a computer network.  Related
to that question is the question of who owns information online. Barlow
notes: "they had me questioning a basic tenet [of mine], namely that
the greatest security lies in vulnerability. I decided it was time to
put that principal to the test..." Barlow gave out his address. 
Acid Phreak replied: 

     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.

Then he downloaded Barlow's credit history from TRW, a credit
reporting agency. Barlow writes:

     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....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 adid at moment. I realized that we had
     problems that exceeded the human conductivity of the WELL's
     bandwidth...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.

What followed, was a profound change in attitude for Barlow. In person,
he encountered an "intelligent, civilized, and surprisingly principled
kid of 18." Barlow suggests that the "terrifying poses" which Optik and
Acid had been striking on screen were simply the construction online
personae for the media and public consumption, a commodity:  "They were
simply living up to what they thought we, and more particularly, the
editors of Harper's, expected of them." Still evoking the image of the
American "frontier," Barlow views these two kids as versions of Billy
the Kid, rambling through the "howling wilderness of Cyberspace."

Barlow continues to tell the story of what happened to Phiber Optik and
Acid Phreak. They were arrested in 1988 by the FBI for Interstate
transmission of stolen property. In the process of their investigation,
law officers came to consult with Barlow and he began to understand
their perspective and fears as well.  As a result of his friendship
with these kids and his fight for their civil rights, Barlow helped
found the Electronic Frontier Foundation together with Mitch Kapor,
founder of Lotus.  EFF's mandate is to educate, lobby, and litigate in
areas related to free speech and extension of the constitution into
cyberspace. They work in cooperation with Computer Professionals for
Social Responsibility (CPSR). 

One of the questions that Barlow explores is why there is such great
anxiety and fear of hackers, when the reality does not match the myth? 
He concludes that people are afraid of cyberspace because it is a
vague, undefined, unknown place and "Cyberpunks"  are the "perfect
boogeyman" for modern times. He paints this portrait of the hacker: 

     He is so smart he makes you feel even more stupid than you
     usually do. He knows this complex country in which you're
     perpetually lost. He understands the value of things you can't
     conceptualize long enough to cash in on. In a world where you
     and your wealth consist of nothing but beeps and boops of
     micro-voltage, he can steal all your assets in nanoseconds and
     then make you disappear....perhaps the most frightening thing
     about the Cyberpunk is the danger he presents to The
     Institution, whether corporate or governmental.

Here, Barlow's portrait of the hacker becomes a symbol for the dangers
of our changing, modern world. 

Following up on many of the issues first sketched out by Barlow, is the
book "High Noon on the Electronic Frontier" (1996) that includes a
wonderful collection of essays on hacking, cracking, and phreaking, as
well other essays on identity and community. In it a small essay by
Julian Dibbell called "The Prisoner: Phiber Optik goes diretly to jail" 
examines what happened to Phiber Optik who was sentenced to 12 months
in jail for his participation in the Legion Of Doom.

At the time of his sentence, Optik was 21, a highschool dropout from
Queens, working as resident techie at ECHO, and East Coast version of
the WELL. He had been embraced by the community of users on ECHO who
referred to him by his real name "Mark" and who responded with dismay
and anger when they heard the sentence he received. They felt that
Phiber Optik had been made a "martyr for our generation." And indeed
the judge who sentenced him notes that "the defendent stands as a
symbol..." adding that "hacking crimes constitute a real threat to the
expanding information highway." 

Dibbel suggests that the "information highway" is a symbol for
corporate greed, the fantasy of a "pay-as-you-go telecom turnpike" 
owned by phone and cable systems. Gibson has pointed out that what the
corporations actually want is a "mall" not an "information highway." 
And that is what Phiber Optik's transgressions threatened. He writes: 

     For what did his crimes consist of after all? He picked the
     locks on computers owned by large corporations, and he shared
     the knowledge of how to do it with his friends... In
     themselves the offenses are trivial, but raised to the level
     of a social principle, they do spell doom for the locks some
     people want to put on our cyberspatial future.

And he concludes:

     And I'm tempted, therefore, to close with a rousing
     celebration of Phiber Optik as the symbol of a spirit of
     anarchic resistance to the corporate [control] of our
     increasingly information-based lives... (p.136)

I suggest that in fact, it is not the hacker who threatens corporate
control or current structures. It is the Internet itself that has
introduced profound changes in the way we network and interact,
including the way corporations function. This is the real challenge. 

The struggle grassroots movements against corporate control, as well as
the practice of government lobbying by special interest groups is
peculiar to the American political and economic system. In other
cultures, the hacker will symbolize other problems. For example, at the
end of "High Noon" is a description of the suppression of computer
networks in Italy, linked to issues of political freedom and fears of
resurgent fascism. Another example is Ben Gurion University in Israel,
where the computer systems failed on the weekends for a period of time.
The "myth" around this annoying occurance was that a "religious hacker"
brought down the system on purpose in order to impose the sabbath. 
People entertained this possibilty because it expressed the local
Israeli fears and concerns over a polarization of the community into
religious and non-religious factions.  

The "hacker" will have different symbolic meanings in different
cultures. As the internet provides a global network for communication
and trade, most likely the image of the hacker will continue to evolve
as a symbol of achievement and change.