Hacking Away, Long Before There Were Hackers

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Hacking Away, Long Before There Were Hackers

January 5, 2003
By JOHN SCHWARTZ 

THE curious thing about the new film "Catch Me if You Can"
is how contemporary it seems. Curious because this tale of
Frank W. Abagnale Jr. - in real life a teenage con artist
who cashed millions in fake checks while impersonating an
airline pilot, a doctor and a prosecutor - is set in the
swinging 60's. 

In those days few mortals had used a computer, and Internet
wasn't even a word. But the young Frank Abagnale seems an
eery prefiguration of a very modern character: the hacker.

Like them, he discovered a vast and arcane system held
together with technology - in his case, the nation's
network of banks. He worked tirelessly to understand its
every facet, from the codes used by the Federal Reserve
system, to the special paper and ink and machines used to
make checks. And he exploited the system with a teenager's
limitless energy - and limited morality.

Like many of today's hackers, Mr. Abagnale - who is
currently unavailable for interviews, said a spokesman,
having just completed a publicity tour for the film -
finally went legit. He crossed over from committing crimes
to solving them - first for the F.B.I., and these days as a
consultant to the industry he once defrauded. In this, too,
he was ahead of his time. In January 2000, the computer
security firm known as @stake hired the seven members of
L0pht Heavy Industries, a hacking collective in Boston. Two
years before, a member of L0pht (pronounced loft) had
bragged about the group's skills to a Senate committee,
saying that any member could take down the Internet within
30 minutes. 

Chris Wysopal, who attended that hearing as a L0pht member
and is now the director of research and development for
@stake, says that while his firm doesn't go out of its way
to hire hackers, it values "learning how the systems work
through exploration."

Kevin D. Mitnick, perhaps the nation's best-known hacker,
served five years in prison on charges of computer and wire
fraud and is currently trying to reinvent himself as a
business consultant. He has started a company, Defensive
Thinking Inc., and has written a book on computer security,
"The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of
Security," with William L. Simon.

Hackers have always been with us, said David J. Farber, who
helped to develop electronic telephone switching when he
worked at Bell Laboratories in the 1950's and 60's, and
went on to pioneer many of the technologies underlying
today's networked computers.

"There's been a big history of - let's call it hacking,"
said Mr. Farber, citing tricks like using magnets to guide
slugs through Coke machines, and getting free phone calls
by turning the telephone company's own technologies against
it. "I don't remember doing anything particularly onerous,"
he said, and joked that his memory might be clouded by the
fact that "I don't know what the statute of limitations
is." 

Broadly defined, he said, it is a fundamental urge to game
the system. "If you could find the records and dug back far
enough, it was probably going on in ancient Rome," he said.


In that sense, the hacker really is a species of trickster.
And as the "cyberpunk" novelist Neal Stephenson wrote in
"The Diamond Age," the trickster is universal, but varies
in guise from culture to culture.

"The Indians of the American Southwest called him Coyote,
those of the Pacific Coast called him Raven," Mr.
Stephenson writes. "Europeans called him Reynard the Fox.
African-Americans called him Br'er Rabbit. In 20-century
literature he appears first as Bugs Bunny and then as the
Hacker." 

OF course, hackers may have another, less mythological
reason for embracing Mr. Abagnale as one of their own. In
the movie, at least, he is an infallibly successful seducer
of women - a particular sort of con at which the
stereotypically male hacker is proverbially inept.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/05/weekinreview/05SCHW.html?ex=1042790284&ei=
1&en=56ce12b5b3288ec9



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