Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [284]
By the end of the 198os the received meaning of the term hacker had therefore shifted. It now referred to what digerati distinguished as acracker or "black-hat" hacker- someone who stealthily intruded into online computer systems for mischievous ends. When hacking in this demimonde sense became a focus of serious police and public attention, it was by virtue of its identification with phreaking. In 1989 a probation office in Florida found its calls being rerouted to a phone-sex line in New York. The telephone company investigated, and found that hackers had been not just phreaking its lines, but, in doing so, reprogramming its digital systems. At much the same time, Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg told the story of a KGB-inspired phreaking/hacking espionage ring. And the first large-scale online virus (technically, a worm) affected some six thousand networked computers.As they proliferated across the media, such episodes galvanized fears about the vulnerability of online information generally. More specifically, they stoked concerns about the amoral character of technically expert groups able to manipulate such systems.33 Rumors began to fly that the Legion of Doom intended to crash the entire telephone system-that old threat hinted at by Draper long before. When the long-distance network did crash on the following Martin Luther King Day, a hacker attack was immediately suspected, although in fact it turned out to be a fault in the system. New laws and police actions multiplied against a projected threat by criminal or even seditious hackerdom.
FIGURE 16.3. Piracy,phreaking,and hacking.26004,no.6(June 1987), cover. Reprinted by permission of26oo.
This caused considerable soul searching among proponents of online sociability. In the late i98os and early 199os repeated debates took place about the implications for digital communities, and about the responsibilities that digital expertise carried with it. They focused on what became the vexed question of the day: whether there was a hacker "ethic." A direct adoption from Merton's portrait of science, the contention that there was such an ethic took its rise from Levy's Hackers, which was overtly premised on the idea. But the point of the exchanges that now ensued was to determine whether the norms of such an ethic - assuming it existedwere consequential. Scientists, on aMertonian account, were not particularly virtuous as individuals, but their work was shaped by moral norms that were upheld and enforced by the scientific community at large. Did something like this hold for hacking? If so, could it be exploited to sustain digital community?
The best-known exchange on these lines was a "conference" held in the WELL in 1989 under the aegis ofHarpercMagazine.34Its immediate trigger was the panic over the first widely distributed worm but the exchange had time to develop broader themes, with participants arguing, changing their minds, and at length diverging irreconcilably. They included a number ofveterans, Lee Felsenstein among them. Richard Stallman took part from MIT. Emmanuel Goldstein and two crackers going by the monikers Acid Phreak and Phiber Optik also contributed. The initial subject was the hacker ethic itself, which they variously construed, credited, and disdained. Most accepted that hacking was characterized by contempt for obstacles to technical progress. That was what lay behind its commitment to the free exchange of information, and hence its repudiation of intellectual property. Hackers appeared antiauthoritarian because they claimed the right and ability to "undam the pipes" and allow information to flow freely- a very Wienerian image. "Everything that was once said about `phone phreaks' can be said about them too," observed