Hacking the System

by Moebius Strip

Hacking is really a far, far broader discipline than the naysayers and ideology police would have you believe.

Hacking doesn't only apply to computer systems, but to systems in general.  Society itself is nothing more than a system, and opportunities to "hack" society and its institutions are yours for the taking.

For almost three decades I have been hacking the system for personal gain and advancement.  I do so shamelessly and without apology, because it is my belief that anyone who achieves even a modicum of success and comfort in American society can arguably only do so by hacking the system.

Wealthy business magnates with clever accountants and offshore tax shelters?  Hacking the system.  Law enforcement officials who accept gifts in exchange for getting (((politicians))) released instead of charged with DUI?  Hacking the system.  Surgeons who avoid responsibility for operative mistakes by confining their accountability for their actions, admitting to their errors and oversights only to their peers in Mortality and Morbidity meetings - meetings that are statutorily out of the reach of the tort system?  Hacking the system.  I could go on and on, but no point beating a dead horse.

I have been a malcontent and a nonconformist for as long as I can remember.

I grew up strictly working class - my mother was a waitress and her second husband a truck driver (her first husband, my father, was a musician and furniture maker - definitely one of those who danced to his own tune and who never paid a dime in child support - which further exacerbated our relative poverty).

It really galls me to hear people who go on and on about what a character-building experience it is to do without - saying things like "We may have been poor but we always had a roof over our heads and food in our bellies."  Well, yeah, but so does the guy who sleeps in the basement of my building, and he damn sure doesn't bust his hump for eight to ten hours a day for ate who don't give a damn if he lives or dies.

In many ways, my homeless neighbor has a level of personal freedom that you or I may never attain, for he is living life entirely on his own terms.  I submit that there are really only two classes of people who can live life on their own terms: those who are independently wealthy and those who are destitute.  Everyone in the middle is f*cked.

It is a fact that in American society, our opportunities and options are limited by our class and social standing, and the very institutions that we aspire to work very hard to limit our access to them.

It didn't take me very long to realize that access to the finer things in life would be quite a bit harder for me to attain than it would be for those born into wealth and privilege.  However, it also didn't take me long to realize that if I enjoyed being free from confinement, I'd have to find a better way to acquire those things than outright taking them.

Rather than planning a big grab in one fell swoop, I have instead decided to create the appearance of conformity in my life and to "supplement" my existence on a more-or-less continuous basis by acquiring possessions, advantages, and privileges that would otherwise be outside my grasp as I go along.

So, this article will be part confessional (although I seek no one's sanction - I find that living skewed is its own reward) and part manifesto.  I can't guarantee that the resources and practices I've adopted will be successful for anyone other than me, so in this as in all things, proceed at your own risk.

Surely by now there are some of you who are reading this and saying "Wow - this guy sounds like a real sociopath - no morals at all here!"  This is not the case.  As I am primarily concerned with hacking society as a system, I strive never to initiate any actions that would cause undue loss or hardship for an individual.

If I'm walking down the street and I see a guy drop his wallet, I am far more likely to run up and return it to him than I am to clean out the cash and return the wallet to the gutter.  If I'm walking down the street and I see a bag of cash that was dropped from an armored vehicle, there is no way in Hell I would even think twice before appropriating that loot for my own.

I've lost my wallet - I know what that's like.  The headaches involved with doing things like canceling credit cards, getting a new driver license, etc., almost make whatever money you lost in the wallet an afterthought.

Karmically speaking, putting someone through that particular kind of hell is unconscionable.  However, if a bank loses a sack of cash, odds are 1.) it's insured; and 2.) they have plenty of additional sacks of cash in their vault (many of which they filled by charging Average Joe Depositor usurious interest, $30 bounced-check fees, and the like).

I'm not shedding a tear for the First National Bank of Screwing the Little Guy - I just don't feel their pain.  So, for me at least, it's more about taking from the bigger players in the game of life - companies, government, etc., and not from individuals.

Clearly I can't make it through 30 odd years of hacking in one article, so I will logically start at the beginning.

The first system I ever hacked was in middle school, and it started in sixth grade. I was not athletically talented and, as anyone who was a geek in school can attest, physical education class is a nightmare for misfits.

Gym teachers favored athletes and often turned a blind eye to their sadism, abuse, and mistreatment of geeks, and I was subjected to a great deal of physical and mental cruelty by my fellow students while my gym teacher feigned ignorance and just "never noticed" anyone picking on me.  Quickly realizing that going up the chain of command to the authoritarians in the school office was a fruitless effort, I instead focused on the real source of my agony: someone (the gym teacher) who was facilitating my mistreatment.

I was fortunate - I was the youngest of three children and there was a nine year gap between my sister and me.  So by the time I reached middle school, I was the only child still at home, and with the groundwork lain by the two who went before me, I was on a pretty long leash - my time between the end of the school day and around 11:30 pm when my mother returned home from work was all my own.  So, when I decided to embark on a little bit of surveillance of my gym teacher, I had plenty of time in which to do it.

The first thing I did was determine his home address - which was easy to do once I got his license plate number after seeing which vehicle he drove out of the parking lot.  Two phone calls to DMV pretending to be his wife and I got a readback of the vehicle's registered address, home phone number, and the name and policy number of the owner's insurance company - a handful of useful information for very little effort on my part.  Operation underway, I decided to begin surveillance in earnest the next morning.

I was up and out the door by 5:30 am, bicycling over to the gym teacher's neighborhood and stashing my bike in the bushes.  As luck would have it, the left side of his property was bordered by woods and I was able to hide there with a clear view of his front door.

I didn't have to wait long for another very useful piece of information to turn up.  Shortly after 6 am, the front door opened and out stepped a familiar face - not the gym teacher, but the science teacher.  The married science teacher.  Now perhaps there is some reasonable explanation for a married woman leaving the home of a man not her husband at six in the morning, but I somehow didn't think there was anything reasonable about what I'd just seen.

Mrs. Science Teacher drove off in her little black coupe (license plate number noted for future use), and a short while later, Mr. Gym Teacher also left for work.  I returned to my bicycle and headed off to school as well.

Figuring people to be creatures of habit and realizing that a married teacher might not have all that many opportunities to spend a night with her lover, I decided to return later on that evening to see if she was overnighting again.

Sure enough, as I drove past at 10:30 pm, there was Mrs. Science Teacher's black car parked in front of Gym Teacher's house.  Excellent!  I headed home to sleep and returned to my perch in the woods the next morning, camera in hand, first photographing the black car in front of the gym teacher's house (and a lovely shot of the license plate too), and then catching Mrs. Science Teacher herself exiting via the front door.  I waited long enough to get a shot of Gym Teacher himself leaving the house before biking to school.

Later that afternoon, I dropped my film off at Fotomat and had to wait for two days to pick up my pictures (this was at a time before we had one hour photo service).  But when I did, I was ecstatic - the photos were perfect and clear.  And it was perfectly clear who the people involved were.

An added bit of good fortune was that my Mom's camera was fairly new and actually stamped the corner of each picture with the date and time, making it clear that it was a little too early in the morning for Mr. Gym Teacher and Mrs. Science Teacher to be discussing exercise physiology (in anything but the strictest Biblical sense).  I quickly ordered two duplicate sets of the photos and returned home to concertize the rest of my plan.

Another call to DMV (this time pretending to be Mrs. Science Teacher - God bless the marvel that is the voice of the twelve year old male) netted me Mrs. Science Teacher's home address and other personal data.  I telephoned Mrs. Science Teacher's home and when she answered the phone I pretended to be the newspaper delivery boy inquiring about a good day to come by and collect the subscription fees each week.

"I'm sorry," she said "You must have the wrong number.  We don't subscribe to the paper!"

"Hmm... it's a new subscription that starts this week.  Is it possible that your husband subscribed to the paper and forgot to tell you?" I countered.

"Absolutely!" she replied.  "He never tells me anything!  If you come by Saturday afternoon at around 3 pm you'll catch him." she replied.

"Thanks, ma'am, and have a great day!"  I finished and hung up the phone.

Now I had all the information I needed to use a little leverage on Gym Teacher to make my life quite a bit easier.  Friday night passed quickly and I had just one last thing to do to prepare my counterattack on Gym Teacher.

Saturday afternoon at 3 pm I telephoned Mrs. Science Teacher's home, and this time, Mr. Science Teacher answered the phone.

"Hi - this is Ernie from the Sentinel-Courier.  I called a couple of days ago and spoke with your wife about the paper?"

"Are we getting the paper now?" he asked.

"Well, the form I have here says that you called us last week on Tuesday to start delivery.  I called and asked your wife what day would be good for me to come and collect for the paper and she didn't know anything about it.  She said to talk to you." I replied.

"I didn't call you last week - I was away on business from Sunday night until Friday night.  You must have the wrong house." he answered.

I apologized, saying that it must be a mistake, thanked him for his time, and hung up the phone, elated.  He sounded like a nice guy and even more so for telling me what I needed to know - that he and the Mrs.  were still cohabiting - which meant that her little overnighters at Gym Teacher's house were in all likelihood expressly forbidden.

Monday after school, I picked up my duplicate pictures at Fotomat and quickly stashed my originals and my negatives in a hole in the ground behind my house that I had come to use as a safekeeping place for items of value (a habit I continue even to this day - it's always a good idea to have a few dollars, a prepaid cell phone, a change of clothes, and other items of importance secreted away where you can get to them in a hurry if you need to).

The following morning, armed with my pictures, I went to school.  My first stop was to see Mrs. Science Teacher.  I found her in her classroom, sitting behind the desk looking at some papers while the kids in her homeroom shuffled in and found their seats.

"I have something I think you'll find very interesting from a scientific perspective!" I said quietly.

"Really?  I'd love to see it!" she replied.

Wordlessly, I handed her an envelope containing the pictures.  It took a moment for what she was seeing to register and I enjoyed watching the color drain from her face when it did.

"Scientifically speaking, what is the chance that you and Gym Teacher would keep your jobs if I mailed copies of these pictures to everyone on the Board of Education?" I leaned in, quietly asking her.  "What do you think your husband would do if he knew where you spent your nights last week?"

"T... er... I can't... You... you... why..." she stammered, searching for words and flushing with embarrassment and fear.

"That's what I thought." I said.  "Be sure to tell Gym Teacher that I showed these to you and that if things don't go my way, you'll both be really, really sorry."

I left her room as she shook, on the verge of tears.  I could scarcely keep from grinning as I went to my homeroom.

Gym was 4^th period that day for me, right before lunch.  We were going outside for soccer and the gym teacher split the class up alphabetically and sent them running to the soccer field, asking me to stay behind.

"You little f*cker!" he hissed.  "What are you going to do with those pictures?"

"You mean these pictures?" I pulled an envelope out from under my gym shirt, handing it to him.

He tore it open, and he too flushed bright red when he saw the pictures, his anger plainly visible.

"Don't worry," I said "I have the originals and the negatives.  Those are your own copies."

"What do you want?" he snarled.

"I want to come to Phys Ed about as much as you want me here.  All you have to do is cooperate, and your little secret is safe with me.  But if you don't, it'll be your ass, and hers, and not in the way you're used to!" I laughed, aggravating him further.  "I am not coming to gym class ever again.  You are to mark me present and give me an A.  I'll spend my time in the library, nobody gets hurt.  I'll tell my friends I have a medical excuse.  Got it?"

"That's it?" he asked "When do I get the originals and the negatives?"

"When I graduate from 8^th grade and leave the school," I replied.

He nodded his wordless submission to my demands and I went back to the locker room to get out of my gym uniform.

As it turned out, my manipulation of circumstance kept me free from gym class only until the end of 7^th grade.  After that summer I returned to school to find that a new gym teacher had been hired and the old one had left the district.

This one, however, was female, and did a much better job of keeping the muscle-heads from making us geeks miserable.

I considered using a little leverage to lean on the science teacher, just for fun, but she was a decent lady (adultery notwithstanding) and I actually liked science class, so I decided to shelve that particular exploit, satisfied that I had ridden that train for almost two years.

A good hack, that was.