314 DEAR HACKER

314 DEAR HACKER

hours and dollars to protect themselves against people like you, and you somehow invade their privacy anyway, costing them even more money as well as embarrassment. These things cause businesses to close, and the ones that don’t close their doors are almost shut down because they are irreversibly damaged due to customer loss because of your intentional actions against them.

So aren’t you basically doing the same thing to people who have done nothing to you as the federal government is doing to your friend? You say that they have “boxed him in” by not allowing him to be near computers and the poor fool “can’t even work at McDonald’s.” Aren’t you doing that very same thing to small companies that are having a hard enough time keeping their head above water as it is? Do we really need your kind in front of a computer? No, I think not.

If it were up to me, I wouldn’t have even wasted the tax dollars it took to provide room and board to the sorry son of a bitch. We should have just shot him to begin with. Of course, then we’d hear whining from you about how a person just isn’t “ free” anymore in this great land, “...cause we can’t hack other people and screw them up now either!”

Why don’t you people get a life, and quit bothering others? Did anyone ever ask you to “test their security systems?” Well, did they?

And you can’t really be speaking seriously when you say you want me to feel sorry for him and do something for him. He broke the law. Intentionally. He sat up late at night, and knowingly did wrong. And the things he did had repercussions, and anything short of a cruel, deadly, or near-death beating is unacceptable to me. So, instead of complaining about what the outcome was, you should be damn glad

I wasn’t the judge in the case, because there would have never been any deals. I would have let him rot there.

It’s because of people like you that I pay so much more than necessary for things I need to survive.

None of Your Damn Business Another shining example of how just letting people talk can save you a lot of time

trying to prove your point. When you calm down enough to read this, consider what kind of a world it would be if security issues didn’t even exist. You need to research the case and see what it was Mitnick was charged with and analyze the

OUR BIGGEST FANS

true nature of most hacking crimes. The people in charge of security who get so bent out of shape when security holes are discovered should maybe be doing something else.

Dear 2600: There’s nothing I hate more than hypocrisy. The contradiction I speak

of comes when 2600, a prominent voice of the hacker community (like it or not), cries out against destructive behavior—attacking websites (government or otherwise), destroying data, unleashing viruses upon the world—and then turns around and defends those people when “hackers” are verbally or legally attacked by the public at large. The distinction needs to be made between those of us who promote peace, good behavior, and intellectual curiosity and those who are simply try- ing to cause mischief or get themselves put into jail. Perhaps we need a new term—the original meaning of “hacker” has become so perverted by the media that it now bears no relevance whatsoever to the ideal it was created to embody. What we need is a new term—and a hacker manifesto. A document that says, in plain layman’s terms, what we as “good” hackers believe in, what we do, and why. A document meant for circulation to the general public—through other magazines or newspapers. A document that distinguishes us from the malicious mob of angst-ridden fools who call themselves hackers because they want to belong to a bigger movement.

Entropic Dallas, Texas

Well, that may be so but it’s doubtful all of us are going to rally behind any one ideal or document. There is always going to be some level of dissent in any group of individualistic people. As for our alleged hypocrisy, consider this. We encourage responsible behavior but acknowledge that people don’t always act in the most responsible manner. However, there is a level of degree and a minor offense is simply not the same as a major one. We defend people who create a little mischief with no ulterior motive or whose actions have hurt no one. We don’t defend crimi- nals as we define them—but that doesn’t mean that we want all criminals to rot in prison. Everything has an order of magnitude and the mere fact that we have to