cop car, and what the cops were really like. Another time, I found out that the local video rental store had policies that could be exploited, such as the one where if they didn’t have a title in, you’d get it free next time. There I was, an eleven-year-old kid, hated by all of the clerks, because I was making a game out of 29
it—trying to figure out when the most in-demand titles would be unavailable, which was the opposite of what everyone else was doing.
It was all kid’s stuff. But looking back, it seems to me that these trivial misdemeanors were a foundation for a more important life—a life that I didn’t yet know about but felt was waiting for me. My mother’s attempts to involve me emotionally in her struggle for existence were obliterated by my constant struggle to find an outlet for my energies, by learning more and more about the world around me.
So when one day a classmate asked me to join a conference call that he was arranging over the public phone system, I took him up on the offer immediately. He assured me that the phone call would be free, since he had found a way to cheat the phone company out of paying for calls. I agreed, and that night I was introduced to the pastime of phone hacking, known as “phreaking.”
Here was a new world—a network of phones and exchanges, of blue boxes and black boxes, of phreaks (as my new friends called themselves) and hackers, and it was massively more complex than the other trivial systems I had been toying with.
It was an endless connection of phone systems and subsystems. It went all around the world. It stretched from the White House to the Kremlin. Immediately, I wanted to know everything possible about it.
Some nights I went dumpster diving for trash at the local phone company offices, looking for documents that I thought might hold valuable information. Some nights I phoned faraway telephone exchanges, and pretended to be a phone company employee, extracting clues about the phone system.
Soon, I was making free phone calls to Iceland, Holland, and Australia.
“What’s the weather like there?” I would ask a puzzled Icelander, who asked in broken English who I was, and why exactly I was calling him.
Then one night, about three months after I had started phreaking, I had a close call when a tough-looking phone company engineer, complete with utility belt, knocked on the door of the apartment, and started asking awkward questions.
But it didn't matter. By that time, my new friends had already introduced me to the world of computer hacking.
I met up with Knight and his crew of hackers at a computer convention. They were high school kids, but they seemed to know everything about computers. I didn’t really know or care what their real names were. They all went by fake names, known as “handles,” which they had given themselves: Knight, Blizzard, Darkness, and several others. They thought that they were agents working against an unfair system.
But I didn’t mind that, because they showed me Unix and C. These were the tools that engineers used to create software systems. These operating systems, languages, and programs seemed utterly inaccessible at first. But what looked like rawness, I soon realized meant flexibility. It was like having a pick-up truck instead of a Mercedes.
Once I had learned how to hack systems, I learned how to hack into them—
war dialing, pretexting, brute forcing. I spent days, weeks, and months learning how to use hacker tools to gain access to, and complete control of, remote computer systems. School didn’t matter anymore. The whole of the year was taken up in hacking and cracking.
There was an unspoken competition to find out who among us could do the best hack. But after just a year, I saw no serious competition, except maybe Knight. I knew then that I was going to be the fastest draw in the new frontier.
Soon, I had outgrown my classmates. My hacking ‘kung-fu’ went beyond anything they possessed. I
it—trying to figure out when the most in-demand titles would be unavailable, which was the opposite of what everyone else was doing.
It was all kid’s stuff. But looking back, it seems to me that these trivial misdemeanors were a foundation for a more important life—a life that I didn’t yet know about but felt was waiting for me. My mother’s attempts to involve me emotionally in her struggle for existence were obliterated by my constant struggle to find an outlet for my energies, by learning more and more about the world around me.
So when one day a classmate asked me to join a conference call that he was arranging over the public phone system, I took him up on the offer immediately. He assured me that the phone call would be free, since he had found a way to cheat the phone company out of paying for calls. I agreed, and that night I was introduced to the pastime of phone hacking, known as “phreaking.”
Here was a new world—a network of phones and exchanges, of blue boxes and black boxes, of phreaks (as my new friends called themselves) and hackers, and it was massively more complex than the other trivial systems I had been toying with.
It was an endless connection of phone systems and subsystems. It went all around the world. It stretched from the White House to the Kremlin. Immediately, I wanted to know everything possible about it.
Some nights I went dumpster diving for trash at the local phone company offices, looking for documents that I thought might hold valuable information. Some nights I phoned faraway telephone exchanges, and pretended to be a phone company employee, extracting clues about the phone system.
Soon, I was making free phone calls to Iceland, Holland, and Australia.
“What’s the weather like there?” I would ask a puzzled Icelander, who asked in broken English who I was, and why exactly I was calling him.
Then one night, about three months after I had started phreaking, I had a close call when a tough-looking phone company engineer, complete with utility belt, knocked on the door of the apartment, and started asking awkward questions.
But it didn't matter. By that time, my new friends had already introduced me to the world of computer hacking.
I met up with Knight and his crew of hackers at a computer convention. They were high school kids, but they seemed to know everything about computers. I didn’t really know or care what their real names were. They all went by fake names, known as “handles,” which they had given themselves: Knight, Blizzard, Darkness, and several others. They thought that they were agents working against an unfair system.
But I didn’t mind that, because they showed me Unix and C. These were the tools that engineers used to create software systems. These operating systems, languages, and programs seemed utterly inaccessible at first. But what looked like rawness, I soon realized meant flexibility. It was like having a pick-up truck instead of a Mercedes.
Once I had learned how to hack systems, I learned how to hack into them—
war dialing, pretexting, brute forcing. I spent days, weeks, and months learning how to use hacker tools to gain access to, and complete control of, remote computer systems. School didn’t matter anymore. The whole of the year was taken up in hacking and cracking.
There was an unspoken competition to find out who among us could do the best hack. But after just a year, I saw no serious competition, except maybe Knight. I knew then that I was going to be the fastest draw in the new frontier.
Soon, I had outgrown my classmates. My hacking ‘kung-fu’ went beyond anything they possessed. I
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