142 DEAR HACKER

142 DEAR HACKER

Dear 2600: Something very scary happened at my place of business today. I work at

a small computer store in Tampa. Nothing big, just a small mom and pop place that fixes Macs and PCs. Someone came in and introduced himself as a senior computer analyst who works for the Department of Homeland Security. He said that our company was in a unique position to see “sensitive “ data on people’s computers and wanted to know if we had seen anything unusual lately. When we tried to probe the matter further as to what would be “anything unusual” he avoided the question totally—but it was pretty obvious as to what

he meant or at least what I thought he meant: anything written in Arabic or something to do with bombs or terrorism. The scary thing is the agent said if we ever came across something that we thought they should have a better look at, they could have someone over to our store within 20 minutes to clone the drive and bring it back to their labs for further investigation with no warrants! It seemed like I was the only one this scared the hell out of. We have government agents wanting to look at people’s hard drives and when I told others about this, they just brushed it off and said that this is the world we are living in today and called me crazy for thinking twice about it. I do not care what I find on someone’s computer when I am trying to fix it—it is none of my business and it should be none of the government’s business either. Sad that this is the beginning of the end of privacy.

We’re well beyond the beginning. If we’re ever to start moving in the other direc- tion, we’ll need lots more people like you watching out for and reporting any abuses like this. Be sure to get as much information from these people as you possibly can before making it clear that you have no intention of cooperating with them. And then be sure and report this “suspicious activity” to anyone who will listen.

THE CHALLENGES OF LIFE AS A HACKER

Dear 2600: Been a reader of the magazine for some time. Just had to write to tell

you that I got pulled over tonight. My license is suspended and I just got off of house arrest and am now on probation. I happened to have

a copy of 21:3 in the glove compartment when the cop searched the car. As I stood in front of those wonderful blue flashing lights, he came back to me with the 2600 in his hand. I was thinking that I was about to get a hard time because I had a magazine that said “hacker” in the car along with three old computers in the trunk awaiting my repairs. As he stood in front of me flipping through the pages with this “I know what this is all about” look on his face I explained to him that I’m a network security/administration major. He then revealed that he used to be a network engineer but had to take up being a cop because of the pay (or lack thereof) in the state I’m in. Driving on suspension, on probation, and driving home at 1 a.m. after picking up some software from a friend, the cop let me go. Kind of nice knowing that that type of authority respects what we’re all about. Just thought I’d share that. Keep up the great work.

MLG We understand the relief you must have felt. But it sounds as if there was abso-