302 DEAR HACKER

302 DEAR HACKER

Dear 2600: In the letters to the editor section of the Summer 1997 issue, readers

called into question your judgment on a couple of things that make me believe 2600 does not hold itself to a standard as high as I thought.

First, your response to a reader questioning your printing of “Credit Card Numbers via Calculators” as a show of support for credit card fraud. Your defense that it is only an exercise in algorithms and calcu- lator programming is bull. This sounds like something a lawyer would say. I suppose you believe head shops sell pipes that are not intended to be used in any illegal activities. Printing information for knowledge is quite different that printing information that could be used in the commission of a crime against innocent people. I sense you are losing the ability to tell the difference.

Second, the Mitnick thing. What is wrong with you people? You act like Mitnick is some kind of God and that he is being persecuted by the powers that be. The truth is Mitnick is a punk. If he shouldn’t be in jail because “there are a great number of holes in the accusations hurled at Kevin,” then he should be in jail because he is stupid. Anyone who continues to do what he did after being in trouble for the same thing needs to be punished. What does it take to get through Mitnick’s head to stop hacking? If he is such a genius, why doesn’t he realize this? He’s lucky he never broke into anything of mine. I wouldn’t have been as merciful as Shimomura. Instead of spending the last two and a half years in jail, the SOB would have spent the last two and a half years recovering at a local hospital.

Technically, Mitnick is not great at all. After all, he did get caught. And most of the techniques he used were obtained from more clever and skillful hackers. Anybody can use the social engineering techniques used by Mitnick. You just have to be willing to lie like a dog (which I’m sure is OK by 2600 standards). His greatest social engineering feat has been convincing 2600 that he is a victim.

Has Mitnick ever contributed anything to society? Isn’t it about time for him to grow up and get a job and go on with life contributing something of value to society?

Orion

OUR BIGGEST FANS

You obviously can think of only one use for studying credit card algorithms, which makes you just as pathetic as the idiots who commit credit card fraud. That’s your problem.

But your views on Mitnick are truly disturbing. In the interests of space, we’ll skip over the childish posturing and focus on your apparent belief that his imprisonment is justified. How can you honestly say that so many years in prison (his trial at press time is being scheduled for April 1998, more than three years after his imprison- ment) is a suitable punishment for someone who has never committed a violent crime or profited in any way from his actions? Just how much vengeance do you want and exactly what is it that you think you’re avenging? Your loss of privacy and security? You lost that a long time ago. And the people who’ve locked Mitnick away have no interest in giving it back to you. Mitnick didn’t expose your life for all to see. It’s the fact that he could have or really that anybody could have that has you so bent out of shape.

Who is the real victim here? You? Us? Corporate America? Not at all. The real suf- fering has been going on behind bars the whole time. And the real problem is sim- plistic idiots who go around thinking that violence and imprisonment are the only ways of dealing with things. This method of thinking has transformed our society into the shortsighted reactionary wasteland of paranoia that plagues us daily. And that will make victims of every last one of us. We’ll see you there.

Dear 2600:

I am very disappointed. The hacking/phreaking community promised to be the most intense and influential counterculture faction since the punk rockers of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Alas, you have sold out, and I blame 2600—the largest and perhaps most respected icon in the whole hacker world—for much of it.

In numerous editorials you have cited this fact: Hackers aren’t crimi- nals. I disagree. Discarding all “wordy” definitions of just what a hack- er is and all romanticisms, we find what hacker really means, from the real hackers. Your magazine, hundreds of web pages, programs