trivial, changing it is not.  But at that time, my assessment of the crackers'  black skills was one of superstitious awe.  They were digital brujos  about to zombify my economic soul. To a middle-class American, one's credit rating has become nearly identical to his freedom.  It now appeared that I was dealing with someone who had both the means and desire to hoodoo mine, leaving me trapped in a life of wrinkled bills and money order queues.  Never again would I call the Sharper Image on a whim.I've been in redneck bars wearing shoulder-length curls, police custody while on acid, and Harlem after midnight, but no one has ever put the spook in me quite as Phiber Optik did at that moment.  I realized that we had problems which exceeded the human conductivity of the WELL's bandwidth.  If someone were about to paralyze me with a spell, I wanted a more visceral sense of him than could fit through a modem.I e-mailed him asking him to give me a phone call.  I told him I wouldn't insult his skills by giving him my phone number and, with the assurance conveyed by that challenge, I settled back and waited for the phone to ring.  Which, directly, it did.In this conversation and the others that followed I encountered an intelligent, civilized, and surprisingly principled kid of 18 who sounded, and continues to sound, as though there's little harm in him to man or data.  His cracking impulses seemed purely exploratory, and I've begun to wonder if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves.The terrifying poses which Optik and Acid had been striking on screen were a media-amplified example of a human adaptation I'd seen before: One becomes as he is beheld.  They were simply living up to what they thought we, and, more particularly, the editors of Harper's, expected of them.  Like the televised tears of disaster victims, their snarls adapted easily to mass distribution.  Months later, Harper's took Optik, Acid and me to dinner at a Manhattan restaurant which, though very fancy, was appropriately Chinese.  Acid and Optik, as material beings, were well-scrubbed and  fashionably-clad. They looked to be dangerous as ducks.  But, as Harper's and the rest of the media have discovered to their delight, the boys had developed distinctly showier personae for their rambles through the howling wilderness of Cyberspace.  Glittering with spikes of binary chrome, they strode past the kleig lights and into the digital distance.  There they would be outlaws.  It was only a matter of time before they started to believe themselves as bad as they sounded.  And no time at all before everyone else did. In this, they were like another kid named Billy, many of whose feral deeds in the pre-civilized West were encouraged by the same dime novelist who chronicled them.  And like Tom Horn, they seemed to have some doubt as to which side of the law they were on.  Acid even expressed an ambition to work for the government someday, nabbing "terrorists and code abusers."  There is also a frontier ambiguity to the "crimes" the crackers commit.  They are not exactly stealing VCR's.  Copying a text file from TRW doesn't deprive its owner of anything except informational exclusivity.  (Though it may said that information has monetary value only in proportion to its containment.)   There was no question that they were making unauthorized use of data channels.  The night I met them, they left our restaurant table and disappeared into the phone booth for a long time.  I didn't see them marshalling quarters before they went.  And, as I became less their adversary and more their scoutmaster, I began to get "conference calls" in which six or eight of them would crack pay phones all over New York and simultaneously land on my line in Wyoming.  These deft maneuvers made me think of sky-diving stunts where large groups convene geometrically in free fall.  In this case, the risk was largely legal.Their other favorite risky business is the time-honored adolescent sport of trespassing.  They insist on going where they don't belong.  But then teen-age boys have been proceeding uninvited since the dawn of human puberty.  It seems hard-wired.  The only innovation is in the new form of the forbidden zone the means of getting in it.  In fact, like Kevin Mitnik, I broke into NORAD when I was 17.  A friend and I left a nearby "woodsie" (as rustic adolescent drunks were called in Colorado) and tried to get inside the Cheyenne Mountain.  The chrome-helmeted Air Force MP's held us for about 2 hours before letting us go.  They weren't much older than us and knew exactly our level of national security threat.  Had we come cloaked in electronic mystery, their alert status certainly would have been higher.Whence rises much of the anxiety.  Everything is so ill-defined.  How can you guess what lies in their hearts when you can't see their eyes?  How can one be sure that, like Mitnik, they won't cross the line from trespassing into another adolescent pastime, vandalism?  And how can you be sure they pose no threat when you don't know what a threat might be?And for the crackers some thrill is derived from the metamorphic vagueness of the laws themselves.  On the Net, their effects are unpredictable. One never knows when they'll bite. This is because most of the statutes invoked against the crackers were designed in a very different world from the one they explore.  For example, can unauthorized electronic access can be regarded as the ethical equivalent of old-fashioned trespass?  Like open range, the property boundaries of Cyberspace are hard to stake and harder still to defend.  Is transmission through an otherwise unused data channel really theft?  Is the track-less passage of a mind through TRW's mainframe the same as the passage of a pickup through my Back 40?  What is a place if Cyberspace is everywhere?  What are data and what is free speech?  How does one treat property which has no physical form and can be infinitely reproduced?  Is a computer the same as a printing press?  Can the history of my business affairs properly belong to someone else?  Can anyone morally claim to own knowledge itself?If such questions were hard to answer precisely, there are those who are ready to try.  Based on their experience in the Virtual World, they were about as qualified to enforce its mores as I am to write the Law of the Sea.  But if they lacked technical sophistication, they brought to this task their usual conviction.  And, of course, badges and guns.******Operation Sun Devil"Recently, we have witnessed an alarming number of young people who, for  a variety of  sociological and psychological reasons, have become attached to their  computers and are  exploiting their potential in a criminal manner.  Often, a progression of  criminal activity  occurs which involves telecommunications fraud (free long distance phone  calls),  unauthorized access to other computers (whether for profit, fascination, ego,  or the  intellectual challenge), credit card fraud (cash advances and unauthorized  purchases of  goods), and then move on to other destructive activities like computer  viruses."  "Our experience shows that many computer hacker suspects are no longer  misguided  teenagers mischievously playing games with their computers in their  bedrooms.  Some are  now high tech computer operators using computers to engage in unlawful conduct." --	Excerpts from a statement by	Garry M. Jenkins	Asst. Director, U. S. Secret Service						"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and  effects, against  unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants  shall issue but  upon probable cause, support by oath or affirmation, and particularly  describing the place  to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." --	Amendment IV	United States Constitution	On January 24, 1990, a platoon of Secret Service agents entered the apartment which Acid Phreak shares with his mother and 12 year-old sister.  The latter was the only person home when they burst through the door with guns drawn.  They managed to hold her at bay for about half an hour until their quarry happened home.  By then, they were nearly done packing up Acid's worldly goods, including his computer, his notes (both paper and magnetic), books, and such dubiously dangerous tools as a telephone answering machine, a ghetto blaster and his complete collection of audio tapes.  One agent asked him to define the real purpose of the answering machine and was frankly skeptical when told that it answered the phone.  The audio tapes seemed to contain nothing but music, but who knew what dark data Acid might have encoded between the notes... When Acid's mother returned from work, she found her apartment a scene of apprehended criminality.  She asked what, exactly, her son had done to deserve all this attention and was told that, among other things, he had caused the AT&T system crash several days earlier.  (Previously AT&T had taken full responsibility.) Thus, the agent explained, her darling boy was thought to have caused over a billion dollars in damage to the economy of the United States.  This accusation was never turned into a formal charge.  Indeed, no charge of any sort of was filed against Mr. Phreak then and, although the Secret Service maintained resolute possession of his hardware, software, and data, no c harge had been charged 4 months later.Across town, similar scenes were being played out at the homes of Phiber Optik and another colleague code-named Scorpion.  Again, equipment, notes, disks both hard and soft, and personal effects were confiscated.  Again no charges were filed.Thus began the visible phase of Operation Sun Devil, a two-year Secret Service investigation which involved 150 federal agents, numerous local and state law enforcement agencies. and the combined security resources of PacBell, AT&T, Bellcore, Bell South MCI, U.S. Sprint, Mid-American, Southwestern Bell, NYNEX, U.S. West and American Express.The focus of this impressive institutional array was the Legion of Doom, a group which never had any formal membership list but was thought by the members with whom I spoke to number less than 20, nearly all of them in their teens or early twenties.I asked Acid why they'd chosen such a threatening name.  "You wouldn't want a fairy kind of thing like Legion of Flower Pickers or something.  But the media ate it up too.  Probing the Legion of Doom like it was a gang or something, when really it was just a bunch of geeks behind terminals."******Sometime in December 1988, a 21 year-old Atlanta-area Legion of Doomster named The Prophet cracked a Bell South computer and downloaded a three-page text file which outlined, in bureaucrat-ese of surpassing opacity, the administrative procedures and responsibilities for marketing, servicing, upgrading, and billing for Bell South's 911 system.  A dense thicket of acronyms, the document was filled with passages like:  "In accordance with the basic SSC/MAC strategy for provisioning, the  SSC/MAC will be  Overall Control Office (OCO) for all Notes to PSAP circuits (official services)  and any  other services for this customer.  Training must be scheduled for all  SSC/MAC involved  personnel during the pre-service stage of the project."   And other such.At some risk, I too have a copy of this document.  To read the whole thing straight through without entering coma requires either a machine or a human who has too much practice thinking like one.  Anyone who can understand it fully and fluidly has altered his consciousness beyond the ability to ever again read Blake, Whitman, or Tolstoy.  It is, quite simply, the worst writing I have ever tried to read.  Since the document contains little of interest to anyone who is not a student of advanced organizational sclerosis...that is, no access codes, trade secrets, or proprietary information...I assume The Prophet only copied this file as a kind of hunting trophy.  He had been to the heart of the forest and had returned with this coonskin to nail to the barn door.Furthermore, he was proud of his accomplishment, and since such trophies are infinitely replicable, he wasn't content to nail it to his door alone.  Among the places he copied it was a UNIX bulletin board (rather like the WELL) in Lockport, Illinois called Jolnet.  It was downloaded from there by a 20 year-old hacker and pre-law student (whom I had met in the Harper's Forum) who called himself Knight Lightning.  Though not a member of the Legion of Doom, Knight Lightning and a friend, Taran King, also published from St. Louis and his fraternity house at the University of Missouri a worldwide hacker's magazine called Phrack.  (From phone phreak and hack.)Phrack was an unusual publication in that it was entirely virtual.  The only time its articles hit paper was when one of its subscribers decided to print out a hard copy.  Otherwise, its editions existed in