146 DEAR HACKER

146 DEAR HACKER

So on the one hand you’re upset that someone has decided to control your access based on who and where you are while on the other hand you’re inter- ested in learning how to disrupt the activities of others on the net based on who you believe they are? How do you propose concluding whether or not someone deserves to be taken off the net or otherwise attacked? Your opinion? Someone else’s? What your government tells you? This is not what hacking is about. What you’re interested in is doing the bidding of one group of people in order to defeat another. This is what the military does. And every time something contentious happens in the world, members of our military try to get hackers involved in the fight for their version of justice. By even considering such requests as legitimate, we tarnish what hackers have always stood for which is free and open access to thoughts, ideas, and technology. People are free to do what they want on their own or as part of some other organization but please don’t assume hackers are about to become another branch of anyone’s military.

Dear 2600: After receiving the newest issue of 2600 I started going through my

stacks of back issues. This wasn’t what I was looking for but I came across an all time great article in 20:3 entitled “Infidelity in the Information Age.” Normally I’d just skim this article and move on but last May my wife broke the heartbreaking news to me. I’ll leave out the juicy details but she told me she broke off the affair and wanted to fix our marriage. Having your spouse tell you this is the worst kind of agony. I can say there is nothing more painful or life changing that I’ve ever experienced. Within the next few weeks I changed from being an all-trusting husband who never questioned his wife’s faithfulness to an obsessive, overly jealous man who had to know where she was and what she was doing at all times. Atoma’s article was about the information he was able to pull up off his girlfriend’s computer from deleted and hidden files. He was not only able to find this information but he was able to put everything together and create a very detailed timeline of everything she did including phone calls, bank withdrawals, and addresses she went to.

THE CHALLENGES OF LIFE AS A HACKER

I am not so lucky. My wife is aware of my computer skills and if she wants to do something on the Internet that she doesn’t want me to know about, she’ll use one of the Internet accessible computers at her college. When I wasn’t pacing or going nuts in some way, I was on the web trying to find out everything I could: Where was she now? What was she doing? How long had she been there? What was this guy’s name? Where did he live? Where did he work? What was his email address and phone number? Did he have a criminal record? Was he a sex offender? Was there a warrant for his arrest, hopefully?

www.blackbookonline.info has links to several sites looking up crimi- nal or government records. With this site and others I was able to answer all these questions. Atoma said he was shocked that he was able to get all the information that he did. I can easily say the same thing about what I found off the Internet: my wife’s college-issued student identification cards that worked similar to credit cards. You deposit money and that amount is credited onto the card. This allows you to use these cards to pay for anything while on campus. This informa- tion is then put on the college’s website so the students can view their account balance and history. Through this website I was able to see when she arrived by the coffee she purchased before her first class and when she left by paying the parking fee for the parking garage. The college email account allows you to forward all incoming and outgo- ing emails to another account so you can view them in your preferred email provider. I had no trouble setting this so I could monitor her online communication. I had access to her class schedule, room num- bers, times, teachers and their email addresses as well.

Our home phone and cell phone providers are also available on the Internet. I cannot only make monthly payments online but I can view the call history going back several months. I was able to see every- one my wife talked to on our home phone and her cell phone. If she deleted something from the history on either phone, it would not be removed from the online records. Using Firefox, I found an extension that helped me find street addresses. All I had to get was a name and city. www.skipease.com gave me access to the extension “People Search and Public Record Toolbar.” This gave me several links to websites including www.zabasearch.com to do my searches and made it very