Hello, My Name Isn't ... - Industry Trend or Event -------------------------------------------------- By Ethan Smith Phreaks and geeks keep it anonymous at a Manhattan hacker convention. "I DON'T WANT TO BE RECOGNIZED," says the guy in the yellow poncho and Groucho Marx glasses. "People at my office knew I wanted to come here, so I have to be careful." "Here" is H2K, a three-day convention sponsored by hacker bible 2600. Despite a freewheeling, antiauthoritarian atmosphere at the Hotel Pennsylvania, the paranoia at the event is palpable -- perhaps not without reason. The gathering is taking place just days before opening arguments in the high-stakes copyright-infringement case the Motion Picture Association of America has filed against 2600. "Groucho" is in the back of a conference room, taking a break between panels. Appearing to be in his early 20s, he sports wire-framed glasses behind the novelty specs, and refuses to divulge even his nom de Net, or handle. Despite the elaborate disguise, Groucho produces an employee ID card from a major Internet hosting firm -- careful to keep an index finger over his name on the card. "I'm on probation for downloading warez [pirated software] on their bandwidth," he says. "So being here is the worst thing I could do." Groucho's supervisors, though, shouldn't be overly concerned about what their errant techie finds at H2K. The first talk of the conference, "Selling Out: The Pros and Cons of Working for The Man," sounds like a 1960s counterculture revival meeting, but it soon becomes clear that the speaker, a network-security consultant named Scott Blake, is really here to pitch the largely teenage audience on, well, selling out. "Business, government, even academia -- basically, collecting a regular paycheck means working for The Man," says Blake, 28. Among the enticements he cites are benefits ("as some of you grow up -- God forbid -- get married and have kids, health insurance will become really, really important; trust me"), business cards ("some of you laugh, but they're important") and "perquisites" ("at some places you get, like, servants"). His final selling point: colleagues. Regular contact with other people, Blake informs the audience, can be a good thing. Next door in the Network Room, Rob, who owns and operates 30 pay telephones on Long Island, sits at a display table behind a pair of half-dismantled pay phones. Thanks to their flimsy security, customer-owned coin-operated telephones are a favorite target of hackers and phreakers, the phone-system equivalent of hackers. "I brought these in to let people see the inner workings," says Rob. "Other people here might own pay phones, too. But they probably didn't get them legally, like I did, so they're not in a position to share them." As a local TV-news camera crew approaches, Rob discreetly tucks a pair of cable descrambler boxes out of sight. In the center of the room, on a long banquet table, 15-year-old "Mr. Ohm" assembles nostalgia-evoking Amigas, TRS-80s and Commodore 64s for the conference's "retro computing network." The fact that most of the machines are older than he is, Ohm says, is part of their appeal. "I missed out on a lot of these technologies," he adds. "It's important to know your history." As more of the 2,300 conference attendees arrive, they plug sticker-adorned laptops (Fuck the MPAA; Knowledge is Power; Linux) into the blue Ethernet cables that snake across every available surface. Surveying the scene, John Kurzman, a 42-year-old computer security consultant, explains why he's shown up. "I'm here to look at what's going on and make sure I can respond to it," he says, insisting he's not on a recruiting mission. "But there isn't a lot of new news." A blond teenager rushes up to Kurzman, breathless with excitement. "If you're smart, don't send any text over the network," the teenager blurts out. "It took us 15 minutes to get root password and we're reading everybody's e-mail!" "I'm staying at another hotel," Kurzman confesses. "Sometimes at these things they'll disable all the hotel's door cards or whatever. It can be kind of a pain." "Script kiddies!" spits John Draper, 57. "Think they're hot shit." The grizzled veteran got his handle, Captain Crunch, in the early 1970s when he discovered that a plastic whistle from a Captain Crunch cereal box emitted a tone crucial to phreaking. In 1978, Draper spent four months in jail for his illicit proclivities, and these days tries to stay legit. "You should try one of my body tune-ups," says Draper. "It's a great energy boost." Indeed, he spends a good deal of time at the conference enticing young attendees back to his hotel room, where he offers full-contact "stretching" sessions. The Captain also seems to have absorbed the lessons of the selling-out talk all too well. "Did you get my URL?" he asks. "ShopIP.com -- it's e-commerce for the rest of us." On the second night the hackers stage a mock trial of the impending MPAA vs. 2600. Bernie S., who once served two years in a federal penitentiary for telecommunications fraud, plays plaintiff Jack Valenti -- eliciting the biggest laugh of the night when he quotes verbatim from the MPAA president's actual deposition. (Attorney: "Do you know the name of the defendant in this case?" Valenti: "I'm not sure.") Playing the role of Judge Lewis Kaplan is "Sunspot," a New York-area assistant district attorney -- and longtime member of the Cult of the Dead Cow hacker outfit -- who for obvious reasons keeps his real identity secret. Eric Corley, 2600's editor and the defendant in the lawsuit, is wheeled onto the stage on a hand truck, handcuffed and gagged a la Hannibal Lecter. Corley is, of course, cleared by the jury of his hacker peers. As the conference winds down, the terminals in the Network Room are being sold off at $25 a pop, and the script kiddies are packing up their laptops and heading home. A forlorn-looking hacker from Seattle sits at a table piled with T-shirts that read, "i did it at the h2k orgy." The twenty-something hacker -- like Groucho, he won't give his handle -- spent over $3,000 on a loft in Chelsea, insurance and other expenses, with plans to stage a $25-a-head orgy. Instead, he says, "the FBI investigated us; we were going to let some 17-year-olds come, so we were crossing a state line with the intent of having sex with a minor." Only two people showed up, and now the would-be Dionysus is trying to recoup some of his costs by selling the shirts for $15. In retrospect, the hacker realizes the orgy was probably a bad idea. "The idea came out of a conversation on IRC [Internet relay chat]," he admits. "We were bitching about how hackers never get laid." Even at an orgy. COPYRIGHT 2000 Standard Media International COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group