When I was
a budding revolutionary in the 70s, with my Abbie Hoffman and Jimi Hendrix
posters and
my cache of middle class weapons (.22 caliber rifles, .12 gauge shotgun,
hunting bows), 1, like McGoohan, was gearing up for the Big Confrontation. With a few friends (who seemed more
interested in firearms than revolutionary rhetoric), I used to do maneuvers in
the woods near my house. We would
fantasize how it was all gonna come down and what role we (the "Radicals
for Social Improvement") would play in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't take a military genius to see the
futility of armed force against the U.S. military on its own turf. The idea that bands of weekend rebels,
however well trained and coordinated, could bring down "The Man" was
pure romance. Part of me knew this the
same part of me that was more interested in posture than real revolution and in
getting laid more than in fucking up the State.
My friends and I were content to play act, to dream the impossible dream
of overthrow.
One of the
first "aha's" I had about computer terrorism in the late '80s was
that the possibilities for insurrection and for a parity of power not based on
brute force had changed radically with the advent of computer networks and our
society's almost complete reliance on them.
There was now at least the possibility that groups or individual hackers
could seriously compromise the U.S. military and/or civilian electronic
infrastructure. The reality of this hit
home on November 2, 1988, when Robert Morris, Jr., the son of a well known
computer security researcher, brought down over 10% of the Internet with his worm
(a program
that self propagates over a network, reproducing as it goes). This event led to a media feeding frenzy
which brought the heretofore computer underground into the harsh lights of
television cameras and sound bite journalism.
"Hacker terrorists," "viruses," "worms,"
"computer espionage"...all of a sudden, everyone was looking over
their shoulders for lurking cyberspooks and sniffing their computer disks and
downloads to see if they had con-tracted nasty viruses. A new computer security industry popped up
overnight, offering counseling, virus protection software (sometimes with
antidotes to viruses that didn't even exist!), and work shops, seminars and
books on computer crime.
Hysteria
over hacker terrorism reached another plateau in 1990 with the execution of
Operation Sundevil, a wide net Secret Service operation in tended to cripple
the now notorious hacker underground.
Like a cat chasing its own tail, the busts and media coverage and
additional busts, followed by more sensational reportage, created a runaway
loop of accelerating hysteria and misinformation. One radio report on the "stealing"
(copying, actually) of a piece of information "critical to the operations
of the Emergency 911 system" for Bell South opined: "It's a miracle
that no one was seriously hurt." Of course, the truth turned out to be far
less dramatic. The copied booty was a
very boring text document on some management aspects of the Bell South
system. For a thorough and lively account
of this and many of the other arrests made during Operation Sundevil, check out
Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown (Bantam, 1992).
Whatever
the truth of these particular incidents, computer crime is here big time and
the boasts of even the most suspect hacker/cracker are usually at least
theoretically possible. Computer terrorism
has yet to rear its head in any significant fashion, but the potential is
definitely there. This is very
unsettling when you think how many people can gain access to critical systems
and how many loony tunes there are out there armed with computers, modems, and
less than honorable intentions.
Wireheads of every gauge would do well to study volumes like Secrets of
a Super Hacker to stay abreast of the game and to cover their backsides should
the proverbial shit hit the fan.
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