Think about the enormous amount of power government possesses over us. Think of the billions of dollars it can spend to pry into our lives, to pho-tograph us, record our movements and our daily activities. Think of all the expertise available to such a powerful entity. Anything that government - or big business, or anyone in power for that matter -wants to know about, wants to happen, or wants to change, will become known to it, will happen, or will be changed.
When we start to think about all the covert ac-tions going on around us, and all the myriad ways in which we don't even know we are being ma-nipulated or spied upon, we begin to think of gov-ernment agencies as unbreakable, unstoppable... unhackable. And even if we think we have a chance at hacking it, we know we will end up in prison.
But all of that is simply untrue!
Government agencies are limited in what they can do and in what they know. You only have to look as far back as Operation Sun Devil a few years ago, when Steve Jackson got his games taken away because they were thought to be a menace to socl-ety. Sure, the Secret Service and the FBI may be powerful, but maybe they arefeeble-minded too.
We read about all these scary spy gadgets that have been developed that can read our lives like a README.DOC. We hear about the "impenetrable" government computer systems that have been set UP, and we are scared away because they sound so hermetically protected. For example, we know that any transmission of an interesting nature has a 100% chance of being intercepted. Therefore, all those spy guys in Washington have set up ul-tra-secure network links in an effort to protect their valuable secrets. Their most safeguarded lines are fiber-optic cables buried deep below the surface of the earth and sealed in gas-filled pipes. These are strictly isolated systems - no connections to outside phones or computers, so no hackers can gain access by dialing in. Even if a hacker were to dis-cover where the (unmarked) underground lines are, and even if that hacker were to manage to dig down undetected, and cut open the pipe to tap the cable, the drop in gas pressure instantly sounds an alarm.
This is heavy protection, and sounds like it would be impossible to hack, especially when you realize that even if there were some way to get at those lines, you still need various levels of permis-sions, passwords and access codes to reach the highest and most secret classifications of data.
But think again. Never forget that behind every complicated system, is nothing more than some human beings. And what are human beings if not fallible? In the case of this seemingly impenetrable system, we can imagine the humans who sit night after peaceful night, watching their TV monitors, waiting for the alarm to sound that signals a breach. They're probably asleep more often than awake, especially if the temperature and humidity is high in their work area. If ever the alarm did sound, they probably would ignore it, or wouldn't know what to do. Or they would take a quick look out the window and go back to sleep.
Even if the guards did go out and check the wires to make sure everything was okay, do you think they would continue checking them after five or six false alarms? "The boy who cried wolf' trick always works, especially on a dark and stormy night. No guard is going to go out sloshing through the mud and rain to investigate an intruder he knows won't be there. There is always a way. Don't be fooled by first appearances.
And here are some more ways you can beat the security:
