Cybercrime and the Law: Challenges, Issues, and Outcomes

1. Hacking

>chapter:1 hacking The term “hacker” and much of what would become hacker culture emerged at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the late 1950s.1 At the time, the only computersweremainframes —behemothsoneinteractedwithviaacumbersome process involving punch cards. This created a problem for a group of MIT students who were interested in computers and programming: only faculty and other “important” users were authorized to use MIT mainframes . A sympathetic computer technician eventually let the students use a special mainframe on loan to MIT, one they could directly interact with instead of having to use the punch card process. By working with thiscomputer,thestudentslearnedprogramming—learnedhowtomake a computer “do” things (such as converting Arabic numbers to Roman numerals). More precisely, they learned to “hack,” but hacking did not have the negative connotation it has today. At MIT, a hacker was “someone who does . . . interesting and creative work at a high intensity level.”2 An MIT hack was originally a clever practical joke, like elevator hacking: the buttons on an elevator were rewired so that, say, pushing the button for the second floor sent the person to the twentieth floor.3 Hacking | 17 Fromthisbeginning,acultureofcomputerhackinggrewupat MITand spread to academic computing centers across the country. It was based on an informal ethos. According to one source, the hacker code of ethics was based on these principles: ▶ Access to computers . . . should be unlimited and total. . . . ▶ All information should be free. ▶ Mistrust Authority—Promote Decentralization. ▶ Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position. ▶ You can create art and beauty on a computer. ▶ Computers can change your life for the better.4 As the principles indicate, the early hacker culture was based on intellectual inquiry: hackersexploredcomputer systemsandsharedwhat they learned. When a hacker created a program, he (they were usually “he” in thisera)woulddistributeittoothers,tobeusedandimproved.Thisethos of exploring and sharing evolved at a time when computers were closed systems, that is, were not accessible by outsiders, and software had not become a commercial product. Since computers were only available to a very few, hacking was still a niche activity. That began to change in 1969 when the ARPANET went online.5 The ARPANET linked mainframes in hundreds of universities, research laboratories , and defense contracting companies. It also linked hackers all over the United States: “Instead of remaining in isolated small groups each developing their own ephemeral local cultures, they discovered . . . themselves as a networked tribe.”6 That led to the standardization of the hacker ethos; the first version of the Hacker’s Dictionary, which helped standardizehackerjargon,appearedintheearly1970s.7 Asanearlyversion of the Dictionary noted, the “special vocabulary of hackers” bound them together by expressing “shared values and experiences.”8 This secondstage hacker culture evolved over the next decade; since the ARPANET could link a maximum of 256 computers,9 the culture was still limited to a relatively small group until the 1980s, when the networked personal computer brought it to a much wider audience and eventually led to the corruption of what had been a pristine hacker ethos. The popularization of hacking was the result of two innovations: One 18 | cybercrime and the law was the Internet, a new network that could support an unlimited number of computers and was available to anyone who could log on. The first versions of the Internet went online in the early 1980s and quickly replaced the ARPANET, which was shut down in 1990. The other innovation was the personal computer: though the term first appeared in print in 1962, personal computers did not become a reality until the end of the 1970s.10 Three personal computers—the Apple II, the PET 2001, and the TRS-80—hit the market in 1979; “over half a million . . . were sold,” and computingceasedtobeanicheactivity.11 TheeraoftheWarGameshacker had begun.12 In 1983, the New York Times noted that the number of “young people roaming without authorization through” the country’s computer systems was in the thousands and was growing “hand-in-hand with the boom in personal computers.”13 The Times article also explained that these “electronic explorations” were being carried out by teenagers who used personal computers “in their bedrooms and basements” and the electronic bulletin boards that were a precursor of the true Internet.14 The Times article was one of many stories about hackers that appeared in1983,mostpromptedbythe FBI’sarrestingthemembersofaMilwaukee hacker group known as the 414s (after the local area...