The Hacker Crackdown

You ca

Phiber is different. A very fin de siecle kid, Phiber Optik. Barlow says he looks like an Edwardian dandy. He does rather. Shaven neck, the sides of his skull cropped hip-hop close, unruly tangle of black hair on top that looks pomaded, he stays up till four a.m. and misses all the sessions, then hangs out in payphone booths with his acoustic coupler gutsily CRACKING SYSTEMS RIGHT IN THE MIDST OF THE HEAVIEST LAW ENFORCEMENT DUDES IN THE U.S., or at least *pretending* to.... Unlike "Frank Drake." Drake, who wrote Dorothy De

Dorothy De

It's a perfect description but Phiber is nonplussed... "Well, I uh, you know...."

"I also think you're quaint, Dorothy," I say, novelist to the rescue, the journo gift of gab... She is neat and dapper and yet there's an arcane quality to her, something like a Pilgrim Maiden behind leaded glass; if she were six inches high Dorothy De

Because the time has come for it, that's why. Because she's the best there is at what she does.

Do

In the meantime, passing fads will flourish and fail and evaporate.... Parker's commanding, resonant voice is sphinxlike, everything is viewed from some eldritch valley of deep historical abstraction... Yes, they've come and they've gone, these passing flaps in the world of digital computation.... The radio-frequency emanation scandal... KGB and MI5 and CIA do it every day, it's easy, but nobody else ever has.... The salami-slice fraud, mostly mythical... "Crimoids," he calls them.... Computer viruses are the current crimoid champ, a lot less dangerous than most people let on, but the novelty is fading and there's a crimoid vacuum at the moment, the press is visibly hungering for something more outrageous.... The Great Man shares with us a few speculations on the coming crimoids.... Desktop Forgery! Wow.... Computers stolen just for the sake of the information within them -- data- napping! Happened in Britain a while ago, could be the coming thing.... Phantom nodes in the Internet!

Parker handles his overhead projector sheets with an ecclesiastical air... He wears a grey double-breasted suit, a light blue shirt, and a very quiet tie of understated maroon and blue paisley... Aphorisms emerge from him with slow, leaden emphasis... There is no such thing as an adequately secure computer when one faces a sufficiently powerful adversary.... Deterrence is the most socially useful aspect of security... People are the primary weakness in all information systems... The entire baseline of computer security must be shifted upward.... Don't ever violate your security by publicly describing your security measures...

People in the audience are begi

CFP is a stellar gathering, with the giddiness of a wedding. It is a happy time, a happy ending, they know their world is changing forever tonight, and they're proud to have been there to see it happen, to talk, to think, to help.

And yet as night falls, a certain elegiac quality manifests itself, as the crowd gathers beneath the chandeliers with their wineglasses and dessert plates. Something is ending here, gone forever, and it takes a while to pinpoint it.

It is the End of the Amateurs.

***********

Afterword: The Hacker Crackdown Three Years Later

Three years in cyberspace is like thirty years anyplace real. It feels as if a generation has passed since I wrote this book. In terms of the generations of computing machinery involved, that's pretty much the case.

The basic shape of cyberspace has changed drastically since 1990. A new U.S. Administration is in power whose perso