2600 Magazine_ The Hacker Quarterly - Digital Edition - Summer 2011 - 2600 Magazine [53]
How can an unknown (in RL) hacker with a nick trust another one whom they only know online? How do they know this new hacker they have been chatting up on IRC for months is not a federal agent trying to get the hacker thrown in jail? These are important questions because many a hacker has been caught in just this way: online communication only.
Well, in the old days (I’m an old-ish person), hackers would get on a BBS and trade information with each other. If the teleconference number, credit card numbers, or whatever “private” information that was being traded was good, the hacker’s reliability rating went up, kinda like eBay ratings.
Because almost everything was private back in the day, hackers relied on war dialing, reading old manuals found in a CO (Central Office) dumpsters, social engineering telephone linemen and operators, and any other tactic a brilliant and motivated individual could come up with. But most important of all? Mutual collaboration. Without multiple people/groups working on similar puzzles independently and from different perspectives, then sharing the information found with each other through BBSes, text files, Phrack, 2600, other small groups working together, etc... well, we simply never would have had all the hacking successes that came throughout that time period. Why did total strangers who had often never met, talked on the phone, or knew anything about their partners in what would one day be deemed a “crime,” decide to work with each other? Why did they often trade information that could get them put in prison for theft, treason, industrial espionage, or worse, get them a job at the CIA?
Privacy and Curiosity
Without the unwritten promise that those early hackers were “safe,” that they were “private,” hiding behind their computer screens, sometimes thousands of miles away from the computer(s) they were accessing (the extra-competent even routing their activities through tens of computers and different networks to add security), that even if their accomplices were caught, those accomplices had nothing but a nick.
These were some of the elements that made old-school hacking so exciting and gave people the freedom to explore the digital world to their heart’s content. We “white hats” were freeing and sharing information, liberating it from those who wanted to control it and keep it from the public. Information was meant to be free and being a hacker meant that you were one of the freedom fighters in the battle.
Despite such democratic beginnings, the Secret Service’s Operation Sundevil soon came along and, by getting hackers who actually did know each other to turn on their friends and associates, the Secret Service began the ruination of “hacker groups” and mutual collaboration. So began the cyber-age of hacker lone-wolves, larger international criminal cyber-theft rings, and the obvious need for even more privacy than before.
It’s 2011 now and things have changed quite a bit. “Private Information,” once the main purview solely of governments, private detectives, journalists, spies, and hackers is now big business. Where LexisNexis was once “The Database” used by all these people to find out anything about anyone, now there are countless data brokers out there, each one with their own specialty areas, each one trying everything in their power to find out everything they can about everyone and cross reference it. This means you. One hundred years ago, if you wanted to disappear, you just moved