A Give Up Exclusive!
by Richard Peek

After beginning a study of computers and the people involved in the computer revolution, I was struck by a phrase that came to my attention: "hacker ethic." In Steven Levy's book Hackers, described by Jonathan Littman in The Watchman as a book that "reminds the world that without hackers there would be no Apple Computer, no IBM PC, no revolution in computing" (45), the phrase "hacker ethic" is used eighty three times.

Levy states, "Wouldn't we benefit if we learned from computers the means of creating a perfect system, and set about emulating that perfection in a human system?" (49). He states that the hacker ethic implies an approach to the world with inquisitive intensity, skepticism toward bureaucracy, openness to creativity, unselfishness in sharing accomplishments, and an urge to make improvements.

Having this view of the "hacker ethic" in mind, I was surprised by Jonathan Quittner's article in Time Magazine titled "The Hacker's Revenge" in which he detailed problems he and Jonathan Littman have had with hackers plaguing their phone and e-mail accounts. This brought up a question. What happened to the so called "hacker ethic?" After all, persecuting someone electronically is not mentioned as a desired result of the computer revolution. What went wrong?

On further study I've come with several factors that polluted the "hacker ethic." Money, power, disenfranchisement, the influence of psychological and sociological factors and individuality. The first of these, money makes itself apparent in Levy's book, beginning with Bill Gates.

Apparently before Gates came along programmers never thought of charging for their work. Gates wrote an interpreter for the computer language, BASIC in 1975 while still a college student and was incensed when other people copied it. Gates' idea was to sale the program for $150 a shot and he considered those who took his program thieves. He ran a angry letter to the effect that was printed in several computer publications. This started what came to be known as the "software flap" (230) and opened people's eyes to the fact that perhaps there might be some money to be made in programming. Before Gates, computer related experiences were considered a hobby.

When Steve Wozniak designed his version of the "friendly little computer" he never had a thought that it would amount to anything of value financially but Steve Jobs recognized the profit motive and started Apple. "There's no way I would associate Apple with doing good computer design in my head," Wozniak is quoted as saying in Levy's Hackers. "It wasn't the reason for starting Apple. The reason for starting Apple after the computer design is there's something else -- that's to make money"(258).

Money changed everything in the hacker world. "Money was the means by which computer power was beginning to spread, and the hackers who ignored that fact were destined to work in (perhaps blissful) solipsism, either in tight, ARPA-funded communities or in meager collectives where the term "hand-to-mouth" was a neat analogy for a "chip-to-machine" existence"(268).

Suddenly computers were big business. "Now, as major shareholders of companies supporting hundreds of employees, the hackers found things not so simple. All of a sudden, they had secrets to keep" (269).

Of course the "secrets to keep" reflect the opposite notion depicted in the "hacker ethic" of "openness to creativity" and "unselfishness in sharing accomplishments" (49). "The Third Generation lived with compromises in the Hacker Ethic that would have caused the likes of Greenblatt and Gosper to recoil in horror. It all stemmed from money" (372) Levy states in Hackers.

"I don't care if anybody gets rich," said computer game mogul, Ken Williams in Hackers, "as long as I get richer" (391). This seems to sum up what happened to the "hacker ethic" as far as sharing information goes. Money made sharing information foolish and money is power, which brings me to my next point. The corrupting influence of power also helped dissolve the "hacker ethic."

"What's the harm in a little demonstration of power of the individual, a few acts of divine hacker intervention?" (115) says Littman in The Watchman as he voices Poulsen pondering the morality of fixing radio station games to win prizes. In Quittner's Masters of Deception we are told of the power hackers felt when they discovered that through electronic access to the credit bureau, TRW they could manipulate a person's financial records. Littman describes how Eric Heinz used his hacker powers to spy on his girlfriend and sold that power to others so that they could too. But power in the computer world means more than listening to other people's conversations or manipulating their electronic histories.

According to "The Hacker Manifesto" posted online by "The Mentor" and quoted in The Watchman a computer: "does what I want it to." "...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 the day-to-day incompetencies is sought..."(194).

Of course that power can also be used in a much less surrealistic way, like the way Kevin Poulsen used it when the television program Unsolved Mysteries ran a segment on him while he was a fugitive and all the phone lines in their "secret" phone center went dead which is quite a coincidence since when he was captured the computer running his fingerprints also failed.

The use of this power was a way of compensating. It made up for other problems in hacker's lives.

"As a young boy, Justin had always loved controlling his environment, monkeying with the lights, alarms, and public address system at school. Trouble was never far away. At fourteen, Justin ripped off a bank's drive-up window and the feds gave him probation. A few months later he wasn't so lucky. Caught stealing phone gear from Ma Bell service vans, he was sentenced to eight months in juvenile detention. Justin dropped out of Southeast High in Lincoln Nebraska, in the fall of his senior year and moved with his twice-divorced mother to Washington, D.C. Without a high school diploma or formal training, he was relegated to the blue-collar drudge work of the high-tech revolution. He repaired micro disk drives, and power suppliers. He never lasted very long at a job. He knew he was smarter than his bosses (87 & 88)

Earlier in this document I mentioned a third generation of hackers who came on the scene after the first generation developed the computer and the second produced the P.C. The third generation were the programmers, and game makers that got rich playing with their new toys. Littman names a fourth generation, the disenfranchised:

Hackers were changing and so was the meaning of the word. Justin was a new generation of hacker, not the third generation inspired by innocent wonder that Levy eulogized in Hackers but a disenfranchised fourth generation driven by anger (88)

The psychological and sociological implications are obvious in Justin's life. A poor kid from a broken home, in trouble since he was a child, too intelligent to fit into the working world, Justin rebelled, moved to California, changed his name, his face. He recreated himself into something more than mediocre. He made himself, with the help of telephone hacking and computers, powerful, independent, handsome, and strong.

Poulsen also had his own unique psychological traits as seen when Littman compares Kevin to his favorite comic book characters.

Kevin shares Kovack's physical inferiority, his history of abandonment, and his search for power through an alternate identity. Osterman, on the other hand, represents the superpower Kevin becomes through hacking, and the danger he poses to those closest to him---and to the world. So it's not surprising that when Kevin has trouble paying his phone bill, he enlists the help of his super heroes. He starts phone service as the Watchmen vigilante Walter Kovacs, and when Kovacs is disconnected a few months later, John Osterman takes over. (82)

We can see how this works when Kevin begins to fear that Eric might use the powers he has given him in ways that he does not approve of. "Ultimately, Kevin sees it as a question of being faithful to his code. His hacker ethics require that he control whatever access Eric might have stumbled upon through their association" (151). Kevin also sees the F.B.I. investigation of him as a challenge, an opportunity to exercise his "powers." Kevin tricks investigators, follows them around, breaks into their offices, listens to their conversations, collects the names, addresses, phone numbers, license plate numbers, and other information of agents and their families. Kevin wants control.

When we look at Kevin Mitnick we see other factors. Mitnick also wants control and like Kevin cannot resist the challenge of plaguing agents but Mitnick brings an added level of participation to the use of computers. Mitnick is an addict.

Viktor Frankl believed that much of substance abuse was caused by a lack of meaning in people's lives. Looking at Mitnick's life we see an intelligent young man in an unattractive body. Overweight as a boy he suffered ulcers and bad vision. Arrogant to the point of running people away he had few friends. Mitnick did not fit into the world. But he found a world he could fit into, one that few others were unable to access. The world created inside the space where computer programs are.

I believe few understand this world the way Mitnick did. I sense that if he could have Mitnick would have unplugged himself from his physical body, drawn himself into the computer and lived there. I believe Mitnick found meaning in being online. It became his drug.

Programmers like Tsutomu Shimomura, the security man who eventually tracked Mitnick down when he was a fugitive could not understand that. They berate Mitnick, say he didn't actually write programs, only stole them. But I believe Mitnick has a view of computers unmatched by the Shimomura's of the world who look into computers as a place to store their programs. Mitnick looks out from inside the computer. He lives in the underbelly of cyberspace, and thrives there.

Of all the hackers discussed here Mitnick actually comes the closest to the hackers who coined the term "hacker ethic" in the first place. Mitnick and the near dysfunctional hackers who lived to explore phone and computer systems at MIT in the 1960's, have a great deal in common. The following description could be used for many of them: "his grammar is off, he confuses tenses, and he has the attention span of a kid" (95) but it is used, in fact, to describe Mitnick in Littman's The Fugitive Game. However, due to the change in times and the way computers and hackers are perceived, Mitnick is a criminal while those early hackers are heros.

So what happened to the "hacker ethic?" It was an ideal and few ideals hold up when put to the test in the real world. It was a utopian idea, yet if you ask ten people to describe utopia you'll get ten different versions of what it would be. The "hacker ethic" was torn apart and glued back together, used to mean whatever the particular twist of mind of each individual user wanted it to mean. Much like the word "love" it's hard to know just what "hacker ethic" stands for anymore.

peek@midcoast.com

References:

Hackers by Steven Levy
New York: Delta Books, 1994

The Watchman: The twisted life and crimes of serial hacker Kevin Poulsen
by Jonathan Littman
Little, Brown and Company, New York: 1997.

Time Magazine 12 May, 1997

The Fugitive Game, Online with Kevin Mitnick by Jonathan Littman
New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1996 - 1997.