When I was a budding revolutionary in the 70s, with my Abbie Hoffman and Jimi Hendrix
posters and my cache of middle class weapons (.22 caliber rifles, .12 gauge shotgun, hunting bows), 1, like McGoohan, was gearing up for the Big Confrontation. With a few friends (who seemed more interested in firearms than revolutionary rhetoric), I used to do maneuvers in the woods near my house. We would fantasize how it was all gonna come down and what role we (the "Radicals for Social Improvement") would play in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't take a military genius to see the futility of armed force against the U.S. military on its own turf. The idea that bands of weekend rebels, however well trained and coordinated,
could bring down "The Man" was pure romance.
Part of me knew this the same part of me that was more interested in posture than real revolution and in getting laid more than in fucking up the State. My friends and I were content to play act, to dream the impossible dream of overthrow. One of the first "aha's" I had about computer terrorism in the late '80s was that the possibilities for insurrection and for a parity of power not based on brute force had changed radically with the advent of computer networks and our society's almost complete reliance on them. There was now at least the possibility that groups or individual hackers could seriously compromise the U.S. military and/or civilian electronic infrastructure. The reality of this hit home on November 2, 1988, when Robert Morris, Jr., the son of a well known computer security researcher, brought down over 10% of the Internet with his worm (a program that self propagates over a network, reproducing as it goes). This event led to a media feeding frenzy which brought the heretofore computer underground into the harsh lights of television cameras and sound bite journalism. "Hacker terrorists," "viruses," "worms," "computer espionage"...all of a sudden, everyone was looking over their shoulders for lurking cyberspooks and sniffing their computer disks and downloads to see if they had con-tracted nasty viruses. A new computer security industry popped up overnight, offering counseling, virus protection software (sometimes with antidotes to viruses that didn't even exist!), and work shops, seminars and books on computer crime.
Hysteria over hacker terrorism reached another plateau in 1990 with the execution of Operation Sundevil, a wide net Secret Service operation in tended to cripple the now notorious hacker underground. Like a cat chasing its own tail, the busts and media coverage and additional busts, followed by more sensational reportage, created a runaway loop of accelerating hysteria and misinformation. One radio report on the "stealing" (copying, actually) of a piece of information "critical to the operations of the Emergency 911 system" for Bell South opined: "It's a miracle that no one was seriously hurt." Of course, the truth turned out to be far less dramatic.
The copied booty was a very boring text document on some management aspects of the Bell South system. For a thorough and lively account of this and many of the other arrests made during Operation Sundevil, check out Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown (Bantam, 1992).
Whatever the truth of these particular incidents, computer crime is here big time and the boasts of even the most suspect hacker/cracker are usually at least theoretically possible. Computer terrorism has yet to rear its head in any significant fashion, but the potential is definitely there. This is very unsettling when you think how many people can gain access to critical systems and how many loony tunes there are out there armed with computers, modems, and less than honorable intentions. Wireheads of every gauge would do well to study volumes like Secrets of a Super Hacker to stay abreast of the game and to cover their backsides should the proverbial shit hit the fan.
