The Herculean Task of Making a Documentary on the History of Computer Hacking: Part 1

by Michael Lee Nirenberg  (restraining.order.ltd@gmail.com)

When my last film, Back Issues: The Hustler Magazine Story, was in its final stages, I was itching to make another documentary.  My friend and executive producer of Back Issues, Nick McKinney, proposed making a film on the history of computer hacking.  I thought it had been done already.  How could one not exist?

There have been plenty of films about contemporary hacking (We Are Legion, Downloaded, etc.), but the history of it has remained relatively unknown to the public.  Hacking is present in everything we do in this society.  It's no secret to the readers of 2600 that hackers have made contributions to tech that are now omnipresent in every aspect of American life.

Later, I learned several "made for TV movies" had been produced, but no serious cinematic documentary had been made on the people and events that have brought us here, particularly over the second half of the last century.  Is it possible that every major technological advancement can be traced back to a hacker like Nikola Tesla who had a better idea of how their corner of the world should work?

I'm not a hacker, at least not a hacker in the sense portrayed by the media.  I'm not interested in cracking cybersecurity, coding, programming, or repurposing hardware myself.  Although that stuff greatly interests me, I suppose I'm a hacker in its original 1960s vernacular.  The pioneer hacker Richard Stallman, who has been called "the last of the original hackers," defines a hacker as "someone who enjoys playful cleverness."

Nick McKinney had suggested a book he read called Masters of Deception.  It is a book about the hacker "gangs" of the 1980s.  It introduced a whole cast of colorful characters with names like Phiber Optik, Corrupt, Scorpion, and Acid Phreak.  The book's drama unfolds between our hacker protagonists and a befuddled National Security Agency (NSA), the forward thinking formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the unjust prison sentences for these hacker teenagers.

Nick was right.  It's a damned good story; however, after further research, we learn that these hackers were not "gangs."  The word "gangs" makes better ad copy than "groups."  They were more like rock bands.  Each hacker had his own system he liked to explore.  It turns out there was better info out there - the hackers themselves.  One thing I noticed by researching and observing hacker groups is that they always seem to develop a strong sense of ethics.  That's something interesting that may not necessarily be native to hackers, but I would like to explore that aspect as in my film.

In the 1980s, these hackers were just teenagers being teenagers, poking around the vast expanses of the networks of that time.  One of the tenets of Masters of Deception was "leave everything the way you found it."  At the time, hackers thought that this tenet was a preventative measure that would keep the hackers from being considered destructive by the courts, which ultimately helped them stay out of worse trouble in some cases.  Of course, we now know boys will be boys (and it almost always was boys until recently) and that not all teenagers demonstrate self-control.  This was the beginning of black hat (destructive) and white hat (harmless fun) hacking, but these terms were yet to develop.

Over the next few months, my colleagues and I were finalizing mastering for the release of Back Issues, and I was absorbing as many books on the topic of hacking as I could.  I realized Masters of Deception was only the tip of the iceberg.  The next book that was a great influence on me was Steven Levy'sHackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution from 1984.  At that time, Hackers was the canonical book on a subculture of programmers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries.  I believe it was the first of its kind.  Hackers covers the early days of the PC revolution, "phone phreaks," the early AI experiments at MIT, as well as the first video game systems.  I began to draw a generational connection between hackers.

There were waves of hacker groups throughout history, but their timeline was non-linear and, like most of history, messy.  After the computer left the corporate clutches of IBM, it was further developed by the math geniuses of more radical 1960s and 1970s subcultures.  I'm interested in the computer as a development for mind expansion.  Hacker culture sometimes has a mainstream presence when a negative occurrence happens, but it's mostly the subculture that first attracted me as a filmmaker.  It has its own hierarchies and fiefdoms despite its lofty goals for equality through information.  I suppose that's human nature.

The history of hacking gets really interesting to me in the 1960s.  That's when hippies and students became drawn to phone phreaking.  Phone phreaking was the name given to obsessive telecommunication enthusiasts.  Many early phone hackers involved were probably into only making free phone calls but, as we know now, a great many were simply drawn to understanding telecommunications in a larger sense.  In that period, we meet some of the pioneers of the modem and our contemporary communications systems.

Back then, you could listen to the clicks on a telephone and begin to untangle the routes in which a phone call would travel.  Before the Internet, this was the vanguard of telecommunications.  This story is forever tied to John "Cap'n Crunch" Draper and his fellow explorers, many of whom were blind.  The blind men had a real knack for listening closely to the clicks and telephone switch lines.  Draper later went to Apple and developed the Apple-CAT, which was their modem and one of the earliest from what I understand.  He is still around.  I interviewed him on Skype recently.

This act of phreaking was radicalized by the Yippie movement's TAP newsletter, a tongue in cheek acronym for Technological American Party and later changed to Technological Assistance Program.  (The word "party" could only be registered for political affiliation.)  Back then, the telephone system was a monopoly and AT&T was the only game in town.  Al Bell (a pseudonymous play on "Ma Bell" - the public's name for the telephone company) was the longtime editor of TAP until it was taken over by legendary hacker and all around interesting guy, Cheshire Catalyst.  Cheshire turned out to be, in his own words, "not a very good businessman" and TAP folded shortly after he took it over.  The hole for a hacker/phone phreaking magazine was shortly filled by Emmanuel Goldstein's 2600.

Phone phreaking peaked in the 1980s when the Internet was just around the corner.  Groups of talented hackers would meet on unsanctioned conference calls and computer bulletin boards in order to share their common interests.  Being teenagers, they formed cliques and groups based on who could get into what systems.  Knowledge is power when you are only 16.

Being a New Yorker made it much easier to start this film for me.

It just so happens many of the notable names throughout the story either live here or pass through frequently.  New York also happens to be the home of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly.  Every culture needs its publication to coalesce around.  2600 has been around since 1984 and has been steadily publishing for 31 years.

When one starts a documentary, one has to reach out to people to get started.  I reached out to about a dozen or so people to conduct interviews.  The first one to get back to me was cyberspace pioneer (and famed Grateful Dead lyricist) John Perry Barlow.  John was in town for meetings concerning one of the several projects he could be working on.  At the time, all I knew was I wanted to start gathering interview footage for a film on the history of computer hacking, so I had lots of questions.  He was a great first interview for several reasons, despite knowing nothing about my previous work.

Along with Mitch Kapor (founder of Lotus 1-2-3), John Perry Barlow had founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Mr. Kapor and Mr. Barlow met on The WELL, which was the online community started by Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand.  The WELL was an acronym that stood for "Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link," with the intention of starting an online community that would usher in the age of electronic enlightenment - a meeting of minds.

Barlow and Kapor both received unsolicited visits from the FBI and both men discussed it on The WELL.  After meeting, they decided something had to be done about government harassment in the electronic age.  Ostensibly, the FBI was looking for hackers.

While both Barlow and Kapor were innocent of any wrongdoing, they became aware that many kids who were poking around the early Internet were becoming the victims of a government hacker witch-hunt, which would ultimately hurt a burgeoning Internet.  They formed the EFF to create a bill of rights for the Information Age.  We owe them lots.  As it turned out, among the many kids who were poking around the Internet and having fun getting into systems were several "elite" groups of teenagers who were the best and brightest of their generation.  I've tracked down and spoken to them on camera.

I've had the pleasure of interviewing legends of the early Internet over the course of 2014-2015, some of whom have become friends of mine through the process.

Around the time I was heavily researching the hackers of the 1980s and 1990s, I was drawn towards cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000.  It was the tastemaker of hip cyberpunk.  Not only did they have contributions from Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, they also had Timothy Leary and countless other counterculture icons contributing to a magazine that defined the times.

Mondo 2000 was published by a lady named Queen Mu (Alison Bailey Kennedy), who inherited the startup capital for the enterprise, as I understand.  The magazine's creative force was Ken Goffman, known to the world as R.U. Sirius.  Unfortunately, Mondo 2000 was crushed by corporate startup Wired, which is another story for another time, but Mondo 2000 was the real thing.  I believe every issue is available on Internet Archive, where our friend Jason Scott is holding down the entire history of the Internet.

Not being a linear story, the challenge of the documentary director is to make sense of a sprawling history and to make it presentable.  Hell, we haven't even mentioned the tale of Kevin Mitnick or Kevin Poulsen yet.  As it stands, I don't even know where we will stop.  Just recently, the Ashley Madison hack was in the news and tomorrow is uncertain.  The landscape changes beneath us every day.

We even started an experiment in covering modern hacking a bit.  I was particularly excited to spend some time with Ellen Jorgensen in the homemade biohacking lab she and her colleagues set up in Brooklyn.  The frontier will always interest me, as will history.  I struggle with the solution.  In addition to the 22 hacker/experts I've interviewed, I've had a few icy interactions with some people who would be great here.  Sometimes they warm up, sometimes they don't.

Filming could take another year or so.

There is a lot of information to process into a cohesive whole.  Many of you will be mad at me.  I'm going to have to leave out some of your favorite hackers, hacks, and stories.  I apologize in advance.

The movie business isn't ready for a ten hour documentary.  These are the compromises one has to make to get millions to view it.  In my last film, I had to edit out all the vaginas from a documentary on Hustler Magazine.  Why did I agree with the studio in the end?

I wanted a wide audience and that's what I got.  Am I a sellout?  Yeah, I probably am.  Preaching to the converted doesn't interest me.  It doesn't educate and widen our culture.  I welcome your disagreements, but ultimately don't care.  That's the Faustian bargain the documentary director has to make with himself and the audience.

It's cool.  History will still be told regardless.

Feel free to contact me to discuss further.  My team will pass along all of the positive and constructive ideas as well as block/delete any trollish negativity.