ice-mail security, and lock out legitimate users, or even
shut down the system entirely.

Cellular phone-calls, cordless phones, and ship-to-shore telephony can
all be monitored by various forms of radio; this kind of "passive
monitoring" is spreading explosively today. Technically eavesdropping
on other people's cordless and cellular phone-calls is the
fastest-growing area in phreaking today. This practice strongly
appeals to the lust for power and conveys gratifying sensations of
technical superiority over the eavesdropping victim. Monitoring is
rife with all manner of tempting evil mischief. Simple prurient
snooping is by far the most common activity. But credit-card numbers
unwarily spoken over the phone can be recorded, stolen and used. And
tapping people's phone-calls (whether through active telephone taps or
passive radio monitors) does lend itself conveniently to activities
like blackmail, industrial espionage, and political dirty tricks.

It should be repeated that telecommunications fraud, the theft of phone
service, causes vastly greater monetary losses than the practice of
entering into computers by stealth. Hackers are mostly young suburban
American white males, and exist in their hundreds--but "phreaks" come
from both sexes and from many nationalities, ages and ethnic
backgrounds, and are flourishing in the thousands.

#

The term "hacker" has had an unfortunate history. This book, The
Hacker Crackdown, has little to say about "hacking" in its finer,
original sense. The term can signify the free-wheeling intellectual
exploration of the highest and deepest potential of computer systems.
Hacking can describe the determination to make access to computers and
information as free and open as possible. Hacking can involve the
heartfelt conviction that beauty can be found in computers, that the
fine aesthetic in a perfect program can liberate the mind and spirit.
This is "hacking" as it was defined in Steven Levy's much-praised
history of the pioneer computer milieu, Hackers, published in 1984.

Hackers of all kinds are absolutely soaked through with heroic
anti-bureaucratic sentiment. Hackers long for recognition as a
praiseworthy cultural archetype, the postmodern electronic equivalent
of the cowboy and mountain man. Whether they deserve such a reputation
is something for history to decide. But many hackers--including those
outlaw hackers who are computer intruders, and whose activities are