Hacker Perspective: Patrick Beam

I feel a little pretentious writing this.  I've thought about sending a column into 2600 for a long time and until now had never worked up enough courage to do so.  It always seemed to me that my experience wasn't quite something (cool?) enough to offer a take on the hacker's perspective in such a legendary publication.  It finally dawned on me tonight that that was exactly why I had to do it.  I don't have any clever research projects or vulnerabilities to share with you.  If my words can't be instructive, I hope they're at least interesting.

Earlier today I was having dinner with my family and my oldest son asked me why the little book open on our coffee cart had this strange title, 2600.  I was so happy that he asked!  It was a joy to tell him the story of John Draper and the Cap'n Crunch whistle, about how curious people were able to penetrate the formidable systems of Ma Bell, to introduce the idea of phreaking to the next generation.  Although I'm too young to have had those experiences with the phone system personally, talking about these things with my son reminded me of my own journey as a hacker (this article is, I think, the first time I've claimed that title for myself).

I was very fortunate growing up in that my dad was a programmer by trade and an early believer in the Internet and what it would mean for us collectively.  Because of his interests, I suspect that I'm one of the oldest people who can't remember not having the Internet, at least in some rudimentary form.  I wanted to know right away how the computer knew to do the things that it did.  I could tell at a young age that it was very different from the TV, but didn't quite know how to explain why.

I got a little bit older and read the Tolkien books.  I was excited to talk about them with someone, anyone, but no one my age around me had any idea what they were or why I cared about them.  The other kids were more interested in sports, which I never had any real attraction to.  Not long after, I was poking around on the net, probably using Lycos or Dogpile (Remember those?  I just checked and was surprised to see that both are currently active), and stumbled across a game called Angband.

For those who don't know, Angband is a Rogue-like dungeon crawling adventure game based on the works of Tolkien.  I was immediately enchanted - there were other people who liked the things that I did!  I spent a lot of time playing Angband, and quickly learned that this is a very, very difficult game.  Try as I might, I could not even make respectable progress, let alone run a winning adventure.  Though I liked the subject matter, my frustrations mounted.  In what turned out to be a fortuitous decision, I started spending my time in the game's files instead of learning the game's mechanics.

In those files I discovered something incredible - although the contents were strangely formatted, I could make out enough to realize that the contents corresponded to aspects of the game's rules.  Numbers matched up between what I found in them and, say, the starting strength of one's character.  I changed the number and fired up the game.  Much to my delight, my new character had a great deal more strength than usual - exactly what I had changed it to.  I closed the game and changed the number to something ridiculous, only to find that the game would crash on the character creation screen.  This was interesting; some numbers were okay, others weren't.

Over time, I became quite adept at modifying Angband to do all sorts of things that the game's developers didn't intend.  Although I never did become an honorable Angband player, I did learn that the way things are presented to us, whether it be a game, the rules of an institution like school or work, or the function of our society often don't reflect the reality of the thing.  The rules may seem all-encompassing or inevitable, but so very often with just a little examination one finds that they have serious flaws.

At this point in the story, I wish I had an entertaining anecdote about how I used my budding computer skills to circumvent some indignity imposed upon me by the administration of my high school.  I don't.  My parents got divorced and I spent a long time lost in anger over that.  For whatever reason, I pulled back from the things that interested me, thinking that by doing so I was punishing the world.  It turns out the world was fine and I was not.  In any event, our story picks up quite a while later after I finished high school and joined the U.S. Army.

I was not exactly what you might imagine a gung-ho young military man to be.  I joined the service for two reasons: first to piss off my mother, and second because I wanted to be like Ernest Hemingway.  It turns out that I'm not a great fit for the military (surprise!).  In any event, I found myself deployed to Afghanistan and not in a very good mood.  I was stuck in transit at a not-so-nice place called Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan.  While there, I discovered that I had to pay far too much for really shitty Wi-Fi to some contracting company that was happy to rip off soldiers.  This injustice was too much for me to bear, and a part of me woke up that had been mostly dormant since my parents were together.

I was not going to pay for garbage network access and I was not going to stay disconnected when 7,000 miles away from my home.  Thus, I set about learning how this evil Wi-Fi system worked and discovered something called a MAC address.  It turns out this Wi-Fi system wasn't implemented very well, and it kept a list of MACs that were authorized to use the Wi-Fi and didn't notice if two devices supplied the same MAC.  It was the kind of thing that granted access if your MAC checked out and dropped you into a captive payment portal if it didn't.  I asked around and found another soldier who had paid for three whole days of Wi-Fi and, after some discussion, learned what his MAC address was.  After a bit more messing around, I managed to spoof my laptop's MAC to be the same as his and I was on the network.  Justice!

Happily, this trick worked for the Wi-Fi on the bases in Afghanistan too.  By the time someone figured out that they had a problem, I didn't have much of my tour left.  Although prosecuting the war took up a lot of my time, it turns out that a significant portion of time spent in a war zone is just waiting around for something to happen.  I took to investing that time in picking up where I left off as a kid, teaching myself how networks worked and to code.  This helped me cope somewhat with the grim reality I was so deeply embedded in.

I was set back a handful of years after the war by insomnia and other mental health issues, but I kept my momentum and started a career as a software engineer.  These days I work at a big tech company, which is great for taking care of my family, but definitely leaves me feeling more like the villain in a William Gibson novel than a hacker.  I sometimes feel as though I missed out on being a "real" hacker because of the winding journey I took to technology and how quickly I ended up working at a mega-corporation.  I suspect some of you too may look around and have the sense that the magic is lost, that the promise of technology idealized in things like John Perry Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace (a naive but inspiring piece) is so far divorced from our present reality that you missed your moment.  Or if you're in a position similar to mine, it can feel like you sold out, chose money over principles.

To some degree, I think those feelings are fair, however I want to close this column with an alternative view.  Imagine for a moment being around when the first telephones were created.  How magical must that have been for the people of the time!  To hear another person's voice through these mysterious wires over great distances would have been mind blowing to people in the 1870s.  The future was now!  Then, of course, the telephone companies formed, and eventually Ma Bell won the game.  Telephones probably didn't feel so magical anymore.  Then the phreaks brought the magic back, inspiring on several levels the current generations of curious technologists.

In the same way, we've reached the point where powerful corporate and government interests dominate the technologies that inspired many of us when we were young.  Some of these groups are doing pretty dark things with the very systems we build and explore and exploit.  Yes, the landscape is more complicated now, the stakes are higher, and there are far more and serious obstacles to playing with systems than there were 50 years ago.  Despite this, I'm holding onto hope that the Internet Age's phreaker moment hasn't happened yet, that despite the walled gardens, state overreach, destabilization of democracies, and the looming Balkanization of the Internet, we aren't approaching limits on what a motivated hacker can do to change the world.  Rather, we're settling into the next phase of fertile ground for the curious and the determined to find those beautiful cracks in the systems that now so completely underpin our lives.

Hope is all well and good, but waiting around for someone else to take action is not a great way to live.  As such, one thing that I aim to get out of writing this article is renewed motivation to keep exploring and breaking things.  Sharing that joy with others.  The importance of not drowning in the banality of my corporate responsibilities, or losing sight of the fact that these systems I'm paid to build are morally complicated, as well as the need for people who understand the systems to stand up for those who don't are all greater than ever.  Much more important than that, however, is the possibility that even one person who reads this finds a bit of inspiration or comfort from these words.

I'm writing directly to the hackers whose day jobs and responsibilities leave them exhausted mentally and emotionally.  It's very hard to keep your curiosity hungry when you're raising kids or working 60 hours a week, or just in general during a global pandemic.  Nothing I can say will make any of these situations easier.  Know, however, that you're not alone and that your moment hasn't passed.  Even if you have no bandwidth for side projects or intensive learning, I bet there are quite hackable aspects of your daily routine.  I find that even little exploits of boring things in daily life can do wonders for my sanity (repairing my kids' toys and adding function or keeping them alive past their prime is a frequent enjoyment for me these days - did I need to solder the $10 train night light's charging port after it broke?  Yes, yes I did.).

An aspect of this I've done very poorly with in recent years is staying part of a hacker community.  I still haven't completely solved this problem for myself despite the wide array of easy means we have now to keep in touch.  Having people to talk to who share your curiosity and need to question everything, even occasionally, can be a great boost to your well being.  Whatever that looks like for you, I encourage you to make the effort, no matter how stretched thin you are.  The magic is only lost if we let it be.

Keep fighting the good fight; I'll see you out there.

Patrick made it through the worst of the pandemic and still works at a big technology company.  He enjoys observing the rich signals traffic zooming by his house in Northern Virginia, less so the frequent helicopters flying overhead.