The TAPpers’ side was this: they illegally logged on to networks like Telenet and the feds’ because they couldn’t stand seeing expensive computer time go unused. “Nobody wants to pool it as a computer utility and make it available to everyone because it would probably not make a profit,” groused “A. Ben Dump” in the newsletter. Cheshire portrayed TAP to High Technology as basically just pranksters, at least in his case. “Good grief!” Cheshire once ghost-wired to a Telex machine; “I seem to have reached Adelaide, Australia. This is just a computer hacker in the United States out for a good time.” The TAPpers said they were against the Bell bureaucracy, not America at large, and, in fact, censored an article submitted to their newsletter telling how to build an H-bomb. “Among other things,” Cheshire worried, “anyone using that technology is going to take out the phone network.” I still wondered. Would TAP have printed the article if a way existed to H-bomb the countryside without toppling any microwave towers?
■ ■ ■
Hacking: An Addiction to Be “Squelched”?
With WarGames-style break-ins in mind, someone once called hacking an addiction to be squelched.
That’s wrong. Hacking is more an addiction to be tamed.
The term “hacking,” perhaps born at M.I.T., just means someone who hacks away at computer problems until he solves them. Many hackers for some reason or another love Chinese food. Sooner or later a computer-crime expert will link computer addiction to ODing on monosodium glutamate.
Cheshire Catalyst is a prototypical hacker in many ways. He’s a thin, bearded man in his twenties, extrapolite, who, when I saw him, was in Washington for an aeronautics and space gathering and wore a Space Shuttle tie and an Apple pin. His nickname indeed came from the grinning, vanishing cat in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Proudly he told me how his clock ran counterclockwise. Cheshire said he hoped someday to meet another backward-clock buff, Grace Hopper, a distinguished military officer who helped give the world the COBOL computer language.
Cheshire might find even more of a soulmate in Steve Wozniak, the Apple cofounder[cofounder], who is perhaps one of the world’s leading hackers—in addition to having been a phone phreak in his time. “Woz” and a friend snooped on computers across America. The friend was John Drapper, a bearded, somewhat maniacal-looking man who earned the nickname Cap’n Crunch because he used prize whistles from cereal boxes to steal free long-distance calls by way of a tone at exactly the right frequency. Later, Crunch wrote the EasyWriter word-processing program used on the Apple and later the IBM PC.
On balance Cheshire thinks that hackers do more good than harm. “Let’s say you have money in a bank,” he says. “Wouldn’t you rather that a hacker get into its computer than a criminal did? He could warn the bank. If I had money at a bank, I’d feel safer with hackers checking out security.”
Well, it depends. Some hackers are nothing more than electronic vandals. Some are a privacy threat; they’re doing the equivalent of spying on mail and tapping phones.