Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [283]
In that looming struggle another enemy also threatened. If the WELL was one adaptation of the convivial ideals of the seventies, a hacker underground represented another, less respectable adaptation. Its roots lay more with the radical phreaks of Hoffman's ilk-as Bruce Sterling put it, Steal This Book had become the "spiritual ancestor of a computer virus."30 Although much hyped by the press, the black hat hacker crowd was real and numerous. A BBS to champion it was launched as early as i98o; it went by the name 8BBS and was dedicated at first to phone phreaking. By the mid-i98os, such boards had proliferated, often taking on explicit piratical identities: Pirate-8o, Pirate's Harbor, and Pirates of Puget Sound were three among dozens, perhaps hundreds, of BBSs devoted to this scene. They issued pirated code and tips about phone phreaking cheek by jowl. The curious could trawl through these sites for phreak codes, which then became tokens of exchange warranting entry into various groups, much as arcane alchemical recipes had acted as passports to philosophical clubs in the mid-seventeenth century Contacts could be made through these actual pirate and phreak groups via the BBSs. Some of the sites even acquired public notoriety-none more so than the Legion of Doom, which was named after the old gang led by Superman's foe, Lex Luthor. Originally a gathering of phone phreaks, like many of the online cracker groups, the Legion of Doom moved from phreaking into hacking. Like most of them, it affected the techno-elitist libertarianism and the language of exploration that had been such a feature of phreaking. It even affected the same lexical tics, inparticular the ubiquitousph. Above all, Legion ofDoom hackers and like-minded digerati appropriated wholesale the phreaks' presumptuous claim-itself descended from interwar radio culture - that as practitioners of the scientific method they should be supported, not restrained. A much-reissued posting of 1986 variously titled "Conscience of a Hacker" or "The Hacker's Manifesto" declared all this explicitly. It was the work of a Legion of Doom hacker named The Mentor. Hackers were firstly explorers of a telephone system, it claimed-a system that ought to be cheap for all, but had been hijacked by "profiteering gluttons." Hence hackers were resistance fighters. But at the same time they were scientists. The Mentor laid claim to the persona of the lone researcher persecuted by an uncomprehending and conformist society. "We explore," he insisted: "We seek after knowledge ... and you callus criminals."31And he had a point. When the police moved against the Legion, they found that its members had generally not stolen anything. Even the more serious pirates to whom the Legion did lead them turned out to have circulated copies of commercial software for free.
As more and more phreaks found each other online, so a digital counterpublic came to constitute itself. Hackers developed a number of flamboyantly libertarian periodicals aimed at the knowing. The best known were Phrack (a conjunction of phreak and hack, launched in 1985) and 2600 (named for the fundamental phreaking tone, and proud to claim a pirate identity as shown in fig. 16.3). The latter was edited by a then-mysterious individual calling himself Emmanuel Goldstein, after the Trotsky figure invoked in the hate rallies of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. His real name was Eric Corley, and he had long been involved in amateur radio. There was even a Legion of Doom Technical Journal, parodying the old Bell System Technical Journal that had opened the door to the whole phreaking phenomenon.