Hacker Perspective: Barrett D. Brown

I am a hacker.

I am not famous, infamous, or even well known.  But I have always been a hacker.  For over a decade, I've vainly sought attention and recognition from the supposed "elite" hackers, trying to get them to admit me to some secret club I imagined they had.  I tried chatting on IRC, going to 2600 meetings, trading "secrets," hanging out with already famous hackers, and many various other exploits and pranks done with the intent to impress - trying to become a "hacker."  None of that made me a hacker, though I wouldn't realize that until the end. Let me start at the beginning...

I was in third grade when I first came across the book Cyberpunk by Katie Hafner and John Markoff in a used bookstore.  It was there that I learned about Kevin Mitnick and that member of the Chaos Computer Club who was working for the KGB.  I got my first vague impression about what it meant to be a "hacker."

From that moment on, I was obsessed and wanted more than anything to be one.  I was already into computers, having grown up with a succession of Apples.  First the Apple IIe, then the Apple IIGS, then the first Macintosh, etc.  I was lucky to be in an upper-middle class family that could afford to keep replacing computers every year or two, when the newest one came out.  But Cyberpunk made me realize that computers could connect and, when they did, very amazing things could happen.  It was all up to the user.  This revelation led me to The Anarchist Cookbook and many other individualists' classics.

My mother got me a 300 baud modem and I connected to the Internet by finding "Netcom," one of the very few ISPs that existed in the Yellow Pages.  The Internet was command line only, with Gopher, Archie, and the amazingly powerful Finger.  But perhaps most importantly it gave me access to BBSes and finding the right ones could lead to all sorts of information from credit card numbers to pirated games to lists of war-dialed numbers.  The list of things one could access was virtually infinite.  It was all up to the user.  It was all up to me.

Eventually, the World Wide Web came along and with it my parents subscribed to a brand new service called "America Online," which had chat rooms where you could talk to all types of people.  I quickly learned that there was a "User Profile" where you could enter information about yourself that others could see, rather like the finger command.  I made an account where I was a 30-year-old lawyer and part-time television actor.

At 12 years old, I would sometimes stay up all night chatting on AOL with adult women who thought I was a 30-year-old actor!  I would find teachers online and get them to write my school papers for me (cut-and-paste!) just by asking them questions.  Oh, the fun that could be had on AOL, if only one knew how to find the loopholes, how to explore.

I soon found any free game I wanted to download and lists with phone numbers for "pirate" and "hacker" BBSes.  Most of them would be busy when I tried or wouldn't give me an account.  My budding as a hacker did not go easily.  I just didn't seem to fit in.

Let me say here that computer, phone, and program hacking did not and still does not come naturally to me.  I have met computer whizzes to whom binary was like a natural second language, but I was not a fast learner, could not learn programming, and was usually too scared to try anything patently illegal.  Nevertheless, I wanted to be a hacker so badly that I made a motto for myself: "Whatever I lack in skill, I will make up for with persistence."

This motto has served me well.  I would bang my head against something over and over and over until I got it.  Eventually, I always got it, even if it took years.

Outside of the computer and phone world, I was known as an incredibly precocious teenager whom the majority of teachers could not stand.  I could cheat my way through most classes and figure out how to pass tests through process of elimination and how the test was framed, I could social engineer my way into getting friends out of assignments and class with forged notes and phone calls from their "parents," and on and on.

In high school, I was elected freshman class president, even though I was virtually unknown, by putting up posters that said "Vote For Me and I'll Give You a Piece of Cheese."  When it came time to speak to the school, my opponents talked about changing policy and blah, blah, blah.  I had a stack of Kraft singles which I handed out.

I won by a landslide to the principal's dismay and learned a lot about politics that day.  I found high school classes were so boring and basic to me that I would often skip class to sit in on lectures at the University of California at Berkeley; the lecture halls at that prestigious University were so packed nobody ever noticed me sitting in on advanced lectures about neurology, chemistry, and Egyptology.

Meanwhile, my parents were getting understandably distressed.  Not only were they getting a divorce, but they did not understand me at all.  All they knew was that I was skipping class and staying out all night going to nightclubs with 20- and 30-somethings.  (As a side note, I've hung out with older people for most of my life.  As a teenager, I looked and acted older than my age and older people always seemed to understand me better.  Not only that, but they were more experienced in life and didn't make all the mistakes other people my age did, so I learned a lot from just being around them.)

How did I get into 18+ nightclubs at 14 years of age?  I made fake IDs, of course, but also social engineering.  I remember being in line for a club in San Francisco called "Winters Gone By" and the guy three people ahead of me in line was chatting with the bouncer.  He said "Hey Jackal, great set the other night at Phantom," and Jackal let him right in.

When my time came, I said the same thing and voilà, no ID check.  Anyway, I wasn't a bad kid, but my parents didn't understand me, so they sent me away to a disciplinary boarding school on the other side of the country.  I was only there a month, but I do remember one of the older students was a "real" computer hacker (after several years you were allowed access to computers, but not until they had "reprogrammed" you).  He told me to just go with the program and keep my real life secret, but I couldn't stand it, so I ran away from the school to live on the streets.

I was 15-years-old and my parents wanted me back, so they could send me away again.  I was doing pretty well on the streets; I went to the local high school and hung out in the senior's lounge, meeting other kids who I could stay with.  Without a GED, I would have to go back to high school and I didn't want to do that, so I went to Berkshire Community College.  They said I could get in without a high school diploma, but I had to take some tests.  No problem.  A few tests later, I was in college and my parents were amazed.  Throughout this time, I continued to study computers, telephones, hacking, hackers, and intelligence agencies, also learning how to use the new Microsoft Windows and DOS operating systems.

After a year of community college and homelessness, I was getting a bit bored again and missed the excitement of the lectures at U.C. Berkeley.  I told my father I wanted to go there and he just laughed saying, "If you can get into U.C. Berkeley, then I'll pay for it."  I was 16-years-old without a diploma; he thought I didn't have a chance.  So, after hitchhiking across the U.S. to get back to California, I began to study the U.C. Berkeley admissions system, allegedly one of the hardest colleges to get into.

What I found were two things.  First, there was a particular path of admissions properly called "Special Admissions," for students who do not meet the regular qualifications for admission, but had some other skill (like football star or a physics genius).  That was one way to go, but the second was called "Concurrent Enrollment," and all that took was some paperwork signed by the teacher of the class (and money of course).

So, after a couple of piles of paperwork and the social engineering of a few teachers, I was taking classes at U.C. Berkeley at 16, with no high school diploma, and only a year of mediocre grades from a small community college.  One of the classes was a graduate level course on the works of John Milton with only five other students.  Not bad for a homeless dropout delinquent.  My father was shocked, but he kept up his end of the bargain and paid.

Finding a small room near campus, I began my two year stint at U.C. Berkeley.  It was around this time that I discovered Phrack, 2600, and LSD.  All three changed me, but LSD possibly changed me the most.

After taking my first dose, I was so amazed that my mind's perception could be changed so radically that I dedicated myself to experimenting with chemicals.  I even took Neuroscience 101, so I could learn about neurons, synapses, and the various neurotransmitters that were being affected by the chemicals I was taking.  Figuring out that drinking nettle tea while LSD was wearing off increased the amount of serotonin, making the comedown easier.

I didn't realize it at the time, but what I was doing was hacking my own mind.  Since "All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be." (Pink Floyd), I wanted to make sure I experienced every state of mind possible before I died, adding meditation and Yogic pranayama (breath control) to the list of personal curriculum.

I couldn't believe that so many people on the Earth lived and died without ever experiencing these altered states of consciousness.  Of course, at the time I didn't realize that even things like "love" and "depression" are altered states, but I digress.

A few things that I didn't study were addiction, tolerance, and withdrawal.  I still can't place exactly when it happened, but somewhere along the line my "experimentation" with chemicals and perspective stopped and some "addictions" began.

I used less LSD, mushrooms, meditation, DMT, 2C-B, ketamine, and other mind altering substances and more methamphetamine (speed), diacetylmorphine (heroin), alcohol, and cannabis (pot), which to me were total body altering substances.  Naturally, my grades at U.C. Berkeley began to fall and by the time I turned 18, I was cut off from my family and living on a friend's couch.

I realized some of my chemical problems and cut out the worst of them to the best of my ability and set about getting a job for myself.  My love of hacking and knowledge of computers still intact, I set out to find a job working for a phone company.

I dumpster-dived at a few central offices to get the names of some telephony programs, tools, and other jargon I could use to social engineer my way into a job.  I went through all the wanted ads and tailored my resume for each position, then went directly to the telephony building without an appointment and introduced myself.  If the job was working on a 5ESS switch, I went on the net, to the library, the bookstore, and anywhere else to study up on it.  Then I lied to the hiring manager, using whatever keywords I'd memorized to pretend I was perfect for the job.

One particular long distance carrier needed a telephone switch engineer who also was a Windows NT admin who could run an SQL server.  I had no idea about SQL anything, but an hour before the interview, I was in Borders bookstore boning up on it, preparing to lie my butt off.  Sure enough, it worked, but the company wanted me in Los Angeles.  I had nothing to lose and was so excited to be working for a real telco at an actual switch that I accepted gladly and moved right down to southern California.

Looking back, that was one of the best jobs I ever had, but I didn't know it at the time because it was my first real job.  Ironically, I found out that the company lied in the interview just as much as I had.  (Later, I would learn that this was just par for the course in the corporate world!)  They didn't need SQL anything, or even a Windows NT admin.  Everything they needed me to do, I learned right there working on an Alcatel 600E switch, routers, and T1 lines.

I thought my hacking dream had finally come true!  I could write an article for 2600 on this stuff, call Pac Bell as a legitimate associate, have dial-up access to CO switches all around the country, etc.  The problem was that I was so busy working and learning that I never had time to do anything illicit.  Listening in on customer phone calls was part of the job (to test for line quality), so I never needed to do it illegally, though I did learn a lot about human nature after listening to hours and hours of phone calls.  I also learned how many switches the average long distance phone call goes through, this also being the time that many telcos were trying to change to a packet switching model, - la Internet.

So I worked 60 hours a week, became more proficient at phone networks, SS7, routers, and UNIX.  I read Phrack and 2600 in my off hours and I had more money than I knew what to do with.  I bought a lifetime subscription to 2600, something I've never regretted.

In the rare hours I had when I wasn't working, I was so tired of working on computers and the phone network that I didn't really want to touch them.  I played games, I drank a lot, wrote letters to Congress about Kevin Mitnick, and did what I could to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

Despite all of this, I still did not feel like a hacker.  I tried going to the Computer Learning Center for night school to study "client-server networking," which turned out to be a joke.  CLC was a vocational trap school to fool ignorant people into thinking they could be mighty system admins after taking their classes, whereas in reality, they taught nothing useful (Hey, I learned some mean COBOL programming!), while tricking their students into taking out huge loans because "One day they would be highly paid system administrators."  I dropped out after not too long.  Later, CLC was sued for fraud and lost.

After my first year in corporate land, I had a solid resume and was deeply depressed.  I did not want to be in telco for the rest of my life and that seemed to be how it was going.  So I took some time off, traveled around the country trying various things like train-hopping, squatting, and shoplifting.

I'm an average looking White guy and my first shoplifting exploit was pretty simple and not yet illegal.  The idea just came to me one day when someone mentioned that a well known pharmacy gave cash back for returned items.  I happened to have a receipt for a package of condoms in my wallet, $10.99, which was almost exactly how much I was short for a Greyhound bus ticket.  I walked into the pharmacy, took a package of condoms off the shelf that matched the receipt, and brought it to the counter to be returned.

They called for the manager and I gave her an Academy Award winning act where I said, looking down at my feet very nervously, "Um, I bought these condoms, um and I am really small down there, oh, um, I mean they are too big, uh, can I just return them?"  She was so embarrassed that she gave me a small form to fill out and asked for my ID.  I pulled out my ID and laid it down on the glass counter, but I wrote something totally different on the form.  She didn't even notice.  She just put the form away and gave me the money.  I ended up doing this many times and never once did a manager check the info I wrote against the ID.

I'm not proud of this and I could try to justify it by saying that they were insured and didn't really lose any money, or that I shopped there a lot and a little bit of the money I paid them every time I went in there went to theft insurance so I was just taking what was mine anyway, but none of that changes the fact that it was wrong and now illegal.

I tried this trick a few more times when I was desperate, and it almost always worked.  When it didn't work, the managers usually just took the product and the receipt and told me to leave the store; since I hadn't taken the product out of the store, it wasn't technically theft.  They didn't even have a name for it yet.

I thought I was pretty bright and the first person to ever think of this and started going through the trash outside the pharmacies for expensive receipts, because I noticed that very often a customer threw away their receipts there as soon as they left the store, and I'd come out with a large handful.  There were so many pharmacies in metropolitan areas and each pharmacy had a certain number of managers: a day manager, a night manager, a weekend manager, a substitute manager, and, of course, newly hired managers.  By keeping track and rotating stores, I could make a good living doing just this.  Before too long though, I had to start wearing costumes as the managers all knew me, and finally a law was passed against it - something like identity fraud - and I was sent to jail.

In jail, I found out that I was not the first person to discover this trick at all.  It was very well known, and I was really just a common petty thief.  The only thing special about my trick was the manager rotation and using receipts that make people naturally uncomfortable (like condoms).  The reason I'm writing it here for all you hackers is because it's long over.

Now it's just an example of an old loophole that has been fixed.  In my first long jail stint, I learned about other small time society tricks to get fast money, or "licks," as they are called by many petty criminals.  I met a few big-time identity thieves who also read 2600 and we had a lot of great conversations, but I never wanted to take my computer use that far to the dark side.

When I got out of jail, I became a small time con man and shoplifter.

The method of shoplifting that put me a head above the rest was this: I'd dress up nice in a suit with glasses, an average rich-looking White guy with short hair.  Then, I'd send my grungy looking Black associate into the store ahead of me to pretend that he was shoplifting.  Without fail, the store security would tail and focus on the Black, even when the guards were Black themselves, while I proceeded to clean the store out of small valuable items which I usually took out in the McDonald's bag I brought in with me.

This is just one example of how society's norms and mores can be used to its own disadvantage.  I've never hacked into a highly secure computer that was not a friend's, so I can't be sure, but I'm willing to bet that the adrenaline rush is the same that I got from shoplifting and con jobs.  Making a thousand dollars in five minutes gave me an incredible adrenaline high that I got very addicted to.  Naturally, too much success leads to sloppiness and criminal associations always seem to end badly and I ended up in jail too many times, so I had to stop doing that before I ended up going to prison...

That all ended about five years ago.

Since then, I went back to college (as my love of academics has never changed), stopped my criminal life, and found a niche in society that I could fit into.  I found working at the library and teaching people how to read infinitely more satisfying than working in the corporate world.  It gave me back my free time to enjoy technology again.

I found living humbly, serenely, and serving my fellow human beings to be of more value than a life of solitude, excitement, wealth, and danger.  I've continued to receive my lifetime subscription to 2600 and even had a few articles accepted and published by them.  There really is nothing quite like the knowledge that your words are being read by thousands of intelligent people.  I've kept up my study of hackers and watched in horror as the world of nicks and small time groups like LOD, and "Hacking for Girliez" has disappeared, to be replaced by a generation scooped up by the NSA and other causes faster than you can say "l33t-0," and botnets controlled by the (((Russian mafia))), political leaders, and phishers from Nigeria.

What I've found that surprises me the most is that I am a hacker - that I have been one all along and never knew it.

My entire life has been spent looking for loopholes, looking for a different way to do things, learning boundaries in order to break them experimentally, pushing the limits of my and others' reality, taking the paths least taken.

Yes, I did some criminal things and I also paid for them.  But the world also did some criminal things to me, and this is what I want to impart to the generations that come after me.  There are data brokers, marketers, governments, secret agencies, politicians, and all sorts of other groups that are trying to change and control others.

While I am still examining society, society is examining me.  While I am trying to hack computer systems, some of them are trying to hack me back (quite literally these days).  Corporate managers order their underpaid tech support people to do things the managers don't understand themselves.

The CIA and the NSA farm out intelligence work to Blackwater and other private companies.  The world is a very strange place and is becoming more so every day.  Slowly but surely, the world is turning into "hack or be hacked."

There are people who know, there are people who don't know, there are people who have power who are known, there are people who have power who are unknown, and there are all levels in between.  Who you are is up to you.

Which will it be?

Barrett D. Brown (Barrett.Brown@gmail.com) is a freelance writer, non-profit public intelligence officer, and a lifelong student of many diverse subjects.  He has attended academic institutions ranging from The University of California at Santa Cruz, The University of California at Berkeley, Sacramento City College, Berkshire Community College, and various other trade schools not even worth naming.  To this day, he holds the lowest opinion of the most "prestigious" academic institutions and encourages anyone interested in serious study to stick to community colleges, the local library, collaboration with like-minded others, investigating sources, and taking everything one hears, sees, or reads with a large grain of salt.  His web page can be found at barrett.chaosnet.org.