Still, talented hackers may become real assets to corporations. They’ll care infinitely more about your computer system—and all its quirks—than will programmers working nine to five for the money alone. Just a little oversimplistically it’s been said that you can befriend a hacker merely by supplying a computer with enough RAM, encouragement, a long leash, and lots of chow mein.

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The TAPpers, depending on your viewpoint, came across in Technology as reassuringly or distressingly middle class. Cheshire at the time of the article was teaching computer skills at a large corporation. “VAX-man”[[54]] worked as a computer programmer, “The Librarian” as a systems analyst, and another was, of all things, a middle manager for a defense contractor; indeed, every member reportedly boasted a technical background. Most, I suspect, perhaps nearly all, didn’t see themselves as criminals.

“We’re just an information service for the people,” said one.

Well, okay. Maybe it’s good that if G-men want to bone up on the latest electronic tricks, they need only log on to hackers’ bulletin boards and read the TAP newsletter. Still, how many crooks have the same idea?

TAP’s another indication that for the criminally greedy the “data cookie jar,” as it’s been called, is out there.

Lindsay Baird scoffs at computer trade associations’ efforts to play down the problem. And he fires back with statistics of his own. “I’ve worked on thirty-five or forty cases,” he says, “and only one was reported to authorities.” The loot ranged from $40,000 to $29 million. And Baird, dismayed that some computer criminals’ sentences are more shoplifterlike than adequate, jokes, “My wife tells me I ought to commit a crime.”

“The security problems with computing systems in the 1960s was like a balloon deflated,” he says, “and you could hold it in your hand. But now it’s like a huge balloon inflated. Or a big bowl of Jell-O.

“You just can’t handle it now, and the manufacturers have got to be concerned.”

Of course you should remember that most corporate data are far from sensitive, that only the most self-important executive would view everything as a national-security secret. Also, Baird is hardly hurting his bank account in sounding the computer-crime alarm. Still, he’s basically right in saying that computer buyers with sexy data of interest to thieves now may have three choices: