posed to be so serious and real-life
and dangerous, then how come NINE-YEAR-OLD KIDS have computers and
modems? You wouldn't give a nine year old his own car, or his own
rifle, or his own chainsaw--those things are "real."

People underground are perfectly aware that the "game" is frowned upon
by the powers that be. Word gets around about busts in the
underground. Publicizing busts is one of the primary functions of
pirate boards, but they also promulgate an attitude about them, and
their own idiosyncratic ideas of justice. The users of underground
boards won't complain if some guy is busted for crashing systems,
spreading viruses, or stealing money by wire-fraud. They may shake
their heads with a sneaky grin, but they won't openly defend these
practices. But when a kid is charged with some theoretical amount of
theft: $233,846.14, for instance, because he sneaked into a computer
and copied something, and kept it in his house on a floppy disk--this
is regarded as a sign of near-insanity from prosecutors, a sign that
they've drastically mistaken the immaterial game of computing for their
real and boring everyday world of fatcat corporate money.

It's as if big companies and their suck-up lawyers think that computing
belongs to them, and they can retail it with price stickers, as if it
were boxes of laundry soap! But pricing "information" is like trying
to price air or price dreams. Well, anybody on a pirate board knows
that computing can be, and ought to be, FREE. Pirate boards are little
independent worlds in cyberspace, and they don't belong to anybody but
the underground. Underground boards aren't "brought to you by Procter
& Gamble."

To log on to an underground board can mean to experience liberation, to
enter a world where, for once, money isn't everything and adults don't
have all the answers.

Let's sample another vivid hacker manifesto. Here are some excerpts
from "The Conscience of a Hacker," by "The Mentor," from Phrack Volume
One, Issue 7, Phile 3.

"I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is
cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because
I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me. ( ... ) "And then it
happened ... a door opened to a world ... rushing through the phone
line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent
out, a refuge from day-to-day incompetencies is sought ... a board is
found. 'This is it ... t