Bruce Sterling - The Hacker Crackdown

Dorothy Denning approaches Phiber suddenly. The two of them are about the same height and body-build. Denning's blue eyes flash behind the round window- frames of her glasses. "Why did you say I was 'quaint?'" she asks Phiber, quaintly.

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 Denning would look great inside a china cabinet... The Cryptographeress.... The Cryptographrix... whatever... Weirdly, Peter Denning looks just like his wife, you could pick this gentleman out of a thousand guys as the soulmate of Dorothy Denning. Wearing tailored slacks, a spotless fuzzy varsity sweater, and a neatly knotted academician's tie.... This fineboned, exquisitely polite, utterly civilized and hyperintelligent couple seem to have emerged from some cleaner and finer parallel universe, where humanity exists to do the Brain Teasers column in Scientific American. Why does this Nice Lady hang out with these unsavory characters?

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

Donn Parker is here, the Great Bald Eagle of Computer Crime.... With his bald dome, great height, and enormous Lincoln-like hands, the great visionary pioneer of the field plows through the lesser mortals like an icebreaker.... His eyes are fixed on the future with the rigidity of a bronze statue.... Eventually, he tells his audience, all business crime will be computer crime, because businesses will do everything through computers. "Computer crime" as a category will vanish.

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 beginning to squirm, and yet there is something about the elemental purity of this guy's philosophy that compels uneasy respect.... Parker sounds like the only sane guy left in the lifeboat, sometimes. The guy who can prove rigorously, from deep moral principles, that Harvey there, the one with the broken leg and the checkered past, is the one who has to be, err.... that is, Mr. Harvey is best placed to make the necessary sacrifice for the security and indeed the very survival of the rest of this lifeboat's crew.... Computer security, Parker informs us mournfully, is a nasty topic, and we wish we didn't have to have it... The security expert, armed with method and logic, must think -- imagine -- everything that the adversary might do before the adversary might actually do it. It is as if the criminal's dark brain were an extensive subprogram within the shining cranium of Donn Parker. He is a Holmes whose Moriarty does not quite yet exist and so must be perfectly simulated.

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 personnel are, if anything, only too aware of the nature and potential of electronic networks. It's now clear to all players concerned that the status quo is dead-and-gone in American media and telecommunications, and almost any territory on the electronic frontier is up for grabs. Interactive multimedia, cable-phone alliances, the Information Superhighway, fiber- to-the-curb, laptops and palmtops, the explosive growth of cellular and the Internet -- the earth trembles visibly.

The year 1990 was not a pleasant one for AT&T. By 1993, however, AT&T had successfully devoured the computer company NCR in an unfriendly takeover, finally giving the pole-climbers a major piece of the digital action. AT&T managed to rid itself of ownership of the troublesome UNIX operating system, selling it to Novell, a netware company, which was itself preparing for a savage market dust-up with operating-system titan Microsoft. Furthermore, AT&T acquired McCaw Cellular in a gigantic merger, giving AT&T a potential wireless whip-hand over its former progeny, the RBOCs. The RBOCs themselves were now AT&T's clearest potential rivals, as the Chinese firewalls between regulated monopoly and frenzied digital entrepreneurism began to melt and collapse headlong. AT&T, mocked by industry analysts in 1990, was reaping awestruck praise by commentators in 1993. AT&T had managed to avoid any more major software crashes in its switching stations. AT&T's newfound reputation as "the nimble giant" was all the sweeter, since AT&T's traditional rival giant in the world of multinational computing, IBM, was almost prostrate by 1993. IBM's vision of the commercial computer-network of the future, "Prodigy," had managed to spend $900 million without a whole heck of a lot to show for it, while AT&T, by contrast, was boldly speculating on the possibilities of personal communicators and hedging its bets with investments in handwritten interfaces. In 1990 AT&T had looked bad; but in 1993 AT&T looked like the future.

At least, AT&T's *advertising* looked like the future. Similar public attention was riveted on the massive $22 billion megamerger between RBOC Bell Atlantic and cable-TV giant Tele-Communications Inc. Nynex was buying into cable company Viacom International. BellSouth was buying stock in Prime Management, Southwestern Bell acquiring a cable company in Washington DC, and so forth. By stark contrast, the Internet, a noncommercial entity which officially did not even exist, had no advertising budget at all. And yet, almost below the level of governmental and corporate awareness, the Internet was stealthily devouring everything in its path, growing at a rate that defied comprehension. Kids who might have been eager computer-intruders a mere five years earlier were now surfing the Internet, where their natural urge to explore led them into cyberspace landscapes of such mindboggling vastness that the very idea of hacking passwords seemed rather a waste of time.