Approaching Zero, Paul Mungo [good summer reads TXT] 📗

father was at the door bewilderedly reading a warrant

presented to him by the policemen. Nick sat down on his bed. He thought that

perhaps they were after a spy or a murderer. They couldn’t be after him: he was

nineteen years old and liked to play games with computers, that was all.

 

The police moved upstairs to arrest Nick. By this time, there were twelve

members of the team in the tiny house, communicating by portable phone to their

colleagues outside. John Austen from the CCU told Nick he was being arrested

for “criminal damage.” Nick looked at him incredulously, then burst out

laughing. He thought it must be a mistake.

 

Though hacking wasn’t illegal at that time, the case against Whiteley had been

put together around the concept of criminal damage, which boiled down to loss

of data and denial of computer service as a result of his hacks. QMC alone had

valued the downtime to fix its computers at $48,000.

 

Police photographers moved in to record the computer screen, keyboard, and

modem. Every inch of the room was photographed: Nick’s files, the books on his

bookshelf, the posters on the wall. The police stayed until midnight: they

confiscated Nick’s Commodore and all the other equipment, loading the evidence

into bags; they removed from Nick’s room books, blank paper, empty folders,

even the posters; and they interviewed Nick’s older brother, Christopher.

Nick’s mother, who was out when the raid began, came home to find the team

searching Nick’s car.

 

Nick was still stunned: he was convinced it was all a mistake and that soon the

police would apologize and go away. He presumed that he had never been locked

out of the QMC mainframe because the systems manager wanted him to test the

security, that , he was playing the game too. Nick was the stereotypical

hacker: a kid who wanted to play a big-time computer game to demonstrate how

clever he was. He didn’t want to damage anything, although he did enjoy playing

a few malicious pranks from time to time. When he was busted, Nick had only

been hacking for six months.

 

Two days after the raid, he was taken to Bow Street magistrate’s court and

charged with having caused a total of $115,000 damage to computer hardware and

disks. But what concerned the authorities the most were the suggestions that

Nick had been hacking into MoD and MI5; in his room they found a little red

notebook with dial-ups for ICLs operated by government agencies. They also

wanted to know about the messages that had been left by Nick on the QMC

computer alleging that he had knowledge of “surveillance” of the Labor party,

CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) and the Cabinet.

 

Nick told the police, and later two agents he presumed to be from the MoD and

MI5, that he had never used the numbers in his book; they were for future

reference. As for the messages about surveillance, they were fantasy, part of

the games he was playing with the sysman at QMC.

 

The police were unimpressed. Nick was released on bail, but only after

promising not to continue hacking. In May 1990, almost two years after the

incidents took place, he was tried for criminal damage at London’s Southwark

crown court. The defense accepted the prosecution’s charges, but argued that

there had been no real criminal damage. Nick’s lawyers were confident of

getting him off, but it’s said that he made a bad impression as a witness in

his own defense: he was too sure of himself, too clever. Bob Jones later

described him as “flippant and sneering.” Nick himself thinks he was destined

for a harsh sentence from the start.

 

“They wanted to make an example of me,” he said. “They’d have sent me to jail

for a parking ticket.”

 

In the end, amid a flurry of national publicity, he was cleared of causing

criminal damage to computer hardware, but convicted on four counts of damaging

disks. After the verdict, defense counsel asked for but were refused bail.

Whiteley was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, but eight months were

suspended, and with good behavior in jail, he was paroled after serving only

two months. He was released in March 1991.

 

Nick was the first person in Britain to be convicted of offenses relating to

hacking. The overtones in his case—and the allegations of MI5 snooping and

breakins at the MoD—were enough to bring pressure on Parliament to propose a

new computer crime law. The Computer Misuse Act came into effect in 1990: it

made any attempt, successful or otherwise, to alter computer data with criminal

intent an offense punishable by up to five years in jail. It could be called

Nick Whiteley’s legacy.

 

The contrast between Nick—generally polite, easygoing, and articulate—and his

alter ego, the Mad Hacker, impressed everyone who met him. Nick Whiteley would

never leave messages redolent with sexual aggression for Marlyn: that was the

Mad Hacker, or Alan Dolby. Nick Whiteley wouldn’t cause damage to an ICL:

again, that was the Mad Hacker. Like so many hackers, Nick played out his

fantasies on the computer keyboard. He was no longer Nick Whiteley from Enfield

when he was hacking, he was the Mad Hacker, the Mr. Hyde of QMC, Hull, Glasgow,

and JANET. With a computer he could become anyone he wanted to be; without it

he was just Nick Whiteley.

 

Even when the computer underground was in its infancy, in the United States

back in the early sixties, the use of aliases was symbolic of the growing

subculture. Early phreakers had names such as Cheshire Catalyst, Dr. No,

Midnight Skulker, and of course Captain Crunch. Hackers continued to use

aliases to hide their identities—and more often than not to disguise their

real selves behind a fearsome mask. Later, aliases became known as handles,

after CB slang.

 

A handle with high-tech allusions (Fiber Cables, Apple Maniac, Byte Ripper) or

suggesting personal instability (Perfect Asshole, the Prisoner, Right Wing

Fool) is considered perfectly acceptable. Some hackers opt for fiercer handles

(Knight Stalker, Scorpion) or just co-opt the names of celebrities (there are

hackers called Pink Floyd and Robin Williams). Behind these sometimes demonic

handles often lurks a fourteen-or fifteen-year-old boy who is hooked on

technology and spends hours alone in his bedroom, hacking into remote

computers. Armchair psychology suggests that the fiercer the handle, the meeker

the kid behind it. There is a huge element of role-playing in hacking, a need

to be accepted among the community, not as the person one really is

but as the person suggested by the handle. Hacking brings out the Mr. Hyde in

all the little technological Dr. Jekylls.

 

Adopting a handle is essential for a novice to be accepted on pirate hacker

boards, where he can access information about his hobby and pass on messages to

other hackers. The computer underground is amorphous; any structure it does

have is provided through communication within the community via the boards and

a variety of other technical modes electronic and voice mailboxes, conference

bridges, and even loop-around-pairs, the old phreaker technology. A handle is a

hacker’s badge of belonging, his calling card; the pirate boards serve as

electronic meeting places, the high-tech equivalent of hanging out at the mall.

 

Boards are simply computers loaded with some specialist software and linked to

a modem. They are generally owned and operated by a single person, who becomes

the system operator and controls access. There may be hundreds in existence—

the majority are in North America—and they come and go, as does their status

within the hacker community. At any given time there may be only two or three

“hot boards” that attract the top hackers. Getting access to one of these

boards is a sign of having arrived in the computer underground, a mark of

respect. Belonging to a particular board means belonging to the group that uses

the board: it means becoming part of what one U.S. attorney called a high-tech

street gang.

 

Hacker boards are never publicized. Obtaining the dial-up number is itself a

sign that a potential member has some credibility within the community, but

that alone is not enough; no selfrespecting pirate systems operator wants his

board cluttered up with “lamers,” kids who pretend to be hackers but don’t

really have what it takes.

 

The registration procedure on pirate boards is a careful process. First-time

callers are met with a request for their user-name and their phone number.

Lamers who enter their real name and real phone number have already blown it.

The correct procedure is to enter a handle and a fake phone number—a healthy

dose of paranoia is a good sign that a caller is a real hacker. The next step

is to provide personal references, which will determine the level of access to

the pirate board. Hacker boards often have several grades of users, and only

the most trusted callers are able to access the “good stuff.” The reference

query is designed to elicit the names of other pirate boards the caller has

access to, his level of access on those boards, and the handles of any other

trusted hackers he may know. If the references prove satisfactory, the caller

will be granted leave to use the board.

 

Some boards go a step farther: they ask the caller to write a short statement

explaining his reasons for wanting access, or to complete a questionnaire, to

test his technical expertise. Some operators, particularly on “cracker” boards

(those used by software pirates to swap “cracked”—illegally copied—programs)

demand that a caller prove himself by supplying what is called warez—for

wares, or pirated software.

 

Complementing the boards is a sporadically functioning electronic underground

press—newsletters, most distributed electronically, that contain articles

about busts, tips on hacking and phreaking, and technical descriptions of

computer operating systems. The oldest is PHRACK Inc. (the name is an

amalgamation of phreak and hack), which was available off and on from 1985

until 1990. Others that have appeared from time to time include the Legion of

Doom: Hackers Technical Journal, Phreakers/ Hackers Underground Network, and

the Activist Times. A traditional, printed, publication, 2600 The Hacker

Quarterly, has been published since 1987, and is available on some news stands.

 

The 2600 in its title is a bow to the infamous frequency tone used by phreakers

to make toll-free long-distance calls.

 

Membership in the computer underground simply means belonging to a

self-selected group of high-tech junkies. Some individual hackers—generally

members of a particular bulletin board—work as a group and acquire a gang

handle. In 1982 the Inner Circle was the first group to claim credit for

breaking into the U.S. military computer network. The 414 gang, named after

its local Wisconsin area code, specialized in cracking telephonecompany

systems.

 

The telephone company, or “telco,” as it is called, is still a favorite target

for many hackers. Those who specialize in exploring the telco system are

sometimes called phreakers like their predecessors Captain Crunch and Joe

Engressia. In words that echo Joe Engressia, one telco phreak wrote, “The phone

system is the most interesting, fascinating thing I know of. There is so much

to know. I myself would like to work for the telco, doing something

interesting, like programming a switch—something that isn’t slave labor

bullshit. Exploring the system is something that you enjoy, but have to take

risks in order to participate in, unless you are lucky enough to work for the

telco. To have access to telco things, manuals, etc., would be great.”

 

If there is a credo that unites all members of the computer underground, it is

probably the one first expounded by Steven Levy in his 1984 book, Hackers:

“Access to computers, and anything that might teach you something about the way

the world works, should be unlimited and total.” This belief implies a code of

ethics