cular advantage and presents a
grave personal risk.

And when that risk catches up with them, they will go right on teaching
and preaching--to a new audience this time, their interrogators from
law enforcement. Almost every hacker arrested tells everything he
knows--all about his friends, his mentors, his disciples--legends,
threats, horror stories, dire rumors, gossip, hallucinations. This is,
of course, convenient for law enforcement--except when law enforcement
begins to believe hacker legendry.

Phone phreaks are unique among criminals in their willingness to call
up law enforcement officials--in the office, at their homes--and give
them an extended piece of their mind. It is hard not to interpret this
as BEGGING FOR ARREST, and in fact it is an act of incredible
foolhardiness. Police are naturally nettled by these acts of chutzpah
and will go well out of their way to bust these flaunting idiots. But
it can also be interpreted as a product of a world-view so elitist, so
closed and hermetic, that electronic police are simply not perceived as
"police," but rather as ENEMY PHONE PHREAKS who should be scolded into
behaving "decently."

Hackers at their most grandiloquent perceive themselves as the elite
pioneers of a new electronic world. Attempts to make them obey the
democratically established laws of contemporary American society are
seen as repression and persecution. After all, they argue, if
Alexander Graham Bell had gone along with the rules of the Western
Union telegraph company, there would have been no telephones. If Jobs
and Wozniak had believed that IBM was the be-all and end-all, there
would have been no personal computers. If Benjamin Franklin and Thomas
Jefferson had tried to "work within the system" there would have been
no United States.

Not only do hackers privately believe this as an article of faith, but
they have been known to write ardent manifestos about it. Here are
some revealing excerpts from an especially vivid hacker manifesto: "The
Techno-Revolution" by "Dr. Crash," which appeared in electronic form
in Phrack Volume 1, Issue 6, Phile 3.

"To fully explain the true motives behind hacking, we must first take a
quick look into the past. In the 1960s, a group of MIT students built
the first modern computer system. This wild, rebellious group of young
men were the first to bear the name 'hackers.' The systems that they
developed were intended to be used to solve world probl