Over the past 20 years
a new breed of people has been evolving.
They have their own culture,
their own technology and their own languages.
Among them are pirates and thieves, celebrities and philosophers,
lawbreakers and police,
heroes and villains.
They operate all over the world but their real home is cyberspace.
And now there's a conflict in cyberspace
between its outlaws and its angels.
This is the inside story of the very different missions
which now drive the diverse breed of people
known to the world as hackers.
24 hours a day, seven days a week,
a war is being fought on the web.
Dennis Treece leads one of the teams
of front line defenders positioned around the globe,
ready to spot and neutralize the latest attack.
This is the Global Threat Operations Center.
This is where we monitor the hacker threat
24 hours a day on four continents.
It's like the bridge of the star ship Enterprise.
Minute by minute,
hour by hour every attack is analyzed.
Any one of them could be the precursor
to a bigger onslaught fired
by a hacker anywhere in the world.
We had just about 400 pre-attack probes in that hour.
1,500 denial of service attacks in that hour.
In the last year the team have intercepted 83 million hacker attacks
aimed at the corporate networks they protect all over the world.
The key is flying through an asteroid belt all the time.
It's constantly being inundated with you know decisions
to go around these things up, over etcetera
What is it? Is it gonna hit the ship
and if it does is it big enough
to do us any damage?
It's a computerized game.
The bad guys against the good guys, if you will.
The emergence of internet good guys like Dennis
is the result of a series of attacks by the bad guys,
often inflicted against high profile targets
over the past 20 years.
One of the first was launched by the legendary Captain Zap.
The man behind the comic book image was barely out of his teens
when he put himself into the hacker hall of fame.
You just mention Captain Zap and they go,
"Old history. Oh, my God! Bow."
The target of Captain Zap's hacking
was the computerized charging system at AT&T.
The telephone rates are too high, just in general,
so why not reduce the rates for some people or all people?
To gather intelligence for his mission
Captain Zap went looking for a way into the phone system.
We would go dumpster diving
at the phone company offiices late at night
because they don't throw out food, they don't throw out garbage
they throw out manuals.
A huge box of weather protected data
that I can come after and get from you
It kind of gives you a good snapshot
view of their daily existence,
morning, noon and night.
Armed with a hacker's ammunition, Captain Zap got to work.
Sit down in front of the terminal, turn it on and start hacking,
and spend hours and hours trying to get in,
and then once you got in you were,
you know, do you want to play a game?
Well you would dial into their maintenance ports,
and because there was no protection back
then the maintenance ports would automatically answer.
The system would come up and identify itself as,
"Hi, this is the Ardmoor switch, number five, E-S-S.
Log on, password, guest, guest." You're in.
Captain Zap fashioned himself as a modern day Robin Hood,
an electronic outlaw.
We decided that we were going to
change the clocks and the switches around the country
so that everybody got free long distance
or discounted long distance.
Captain Zap succeeded in changing the clocks
in the national telephone charging system,
giving everyone discounted calls in peak time.
In hacker terminology, he owned it.
I knew more about the phone company's switches than they did.
In Captain Zap's hands, inside AT&T's computers
day became night,
and night became day
We changed their clocks so that it was an exact, 12 hour difference.
Millions of Americans started saving money, but none of them knew it
neither did the phone company.
Lan was one of the pioneers.
Lan was one of the first people to recognize the bad things
that you could do with computers.
He didn't have a lot of people going before him
that he had to emulate
and he's sort of an original.
And he's one of the first generation of hackers,
the people that figured out
how to do it when figuring out how to do
it was really diffiicult.
Captain Zap had discovered
he could hack almost anything from almost anywhere.
A career of mischief making had begun
According to Wired magazine the top hack ever done
by any hacker was the AT&T time clock hacking.
They consider that the finest hack ever.
What Captain Zap had done was only discovered
when the next set of phone bills started going out.
But by then he'd disappeared back into cyberspace.
He wasn't caught for 18 months.
I was naturally traced.
I could have sold drugs
or I could have stolen cars or been a rock musician,
but no I decided to become a techno freak,
and it was a whole lot easier and there were no laws against it.
20 years later there are laws against it.
NYPD Computer Crime Squad is a growing team of detectives,
expanding to deal with the weight of the work they face.
A computer forensics lab backs them up
Sergeant Jimmy Doyle runs the squad
and he sees most hackers as people
who use new tools to commit old crimes
Basically what you have is an individual
that may do web defacements
break into that web site, change the page a little bit,
that would be the equivalent of graffiiti artists.
Then you'll have somebody
that would break in to steal something, a burglar.
Go up a little bit more, someone who wants to commit crime
he's gonna use his skills to steal money.
And as you see you're going up and up
And then I guess at the top of the pile
would be the cyber,
someone who wants to create a great amount of fear
through their skill
by taking down power grids or attacking financial institutions,
they would be at the top of the pile.
In the old days, criminal outlaws hid behind masks,
these days they hide behind computers.
For probably as way back as when you'd have your, your Western
your Western robberies and someone would run in
they would try to stay anonymous.
They would put masks on because they it'd be hard to identify themselves.
Now if you take that and just fast forward it
to the year 2002, it's the same basic principle.
I mean, you know,
you don't have a person putting on a mask.
They're sitting behind a computer.
At least one hacker does hide behind a mask as well as a computer
KP fears British police want to speak to him
about an electronic break-in at a cell phone company.
He went one step further than Captain Zap
and increased the bills of people he didn't like.
I did look up several people
that I was having a disagreement with at the time,
trying to get in the detabase.
Made several slight changes to the billing records
but nothing so conspicuous as to be noticed.
Turning their service off. Having them blacklisted.
It's great. I was up until four or five in the morning
just knowing that I was the one person
who was doing what I was doing
and nobody could even come close and touch me.
In the battle to track down the hackers
the forensics team at NYPD
use the electronic equivalent of fingerprinting.
In the 21st Century,
the scene of a crime is often the hard disk of a computer.
Suspects' hard drives are routinely seized or cloned.
What we do on occasion is either go in and use these devices
to make an exact copy of the suspect's hard drive,
and then bring it back here for analysis.
They think they're protected by the screen,
but it's pretty much, you know, it's like chasing the invisible man.
Even the invisible man leaves a footstep or two,
footprint or two, and you follow along
The explosion of online outlaws has prompted the NYPD
to beef up its computer crime squad.
It's now the force's fastest growing team.
Now let's go get bad guys.
After you.
But as fast as the digital detectives deploy their hardware,
the black hat hackers have developed software
which helps them scan for security holes
and vulnerable systems day and night.
I scan the records 24 hours a day.
I have a computer sitting in the flat on a co-op basis,
that they'll up using four different phone lines,
and look for codes for me
and I come back, get in, see what they found.
And you're gonna find that secret hole that nobody else will find,
and you will get in and you will exploit that.
And they will never catch you.
To keep up with the black hats,
every morning the white hats
at the Internet Security Services Global Threat team
hook up for a live briefing.
They share intelligence on hacker activity worldwide,
with colleagues across the globe and at the FBI.
Attack would prevent legitimate traffiic firmly executed
on the server by means of the FTP.
They need to stay in constant contact
as new vulnerabilities appear
which they know hackers will find and exploit
Anything more than like two megabytes and it's gonna crash on the spot.
Once briefed, they agree on the level of threat the internet
and its users face from hackers in the next 24 hours.
Okay. Great.
So we'll notify everybody that we'll stay at 1-1.
Are we at 1-1? We're at 1-1.
This morning they've set the alert con level at a routine level one.
But even at this level they calculate that
any new computer that is not defended
when it goes on line will be attacked in less than a day.
At alert Con One, an unprotected computer
will be compromised within 24 hours of connecting it to the internet.
20 years after Captain Zap changed the clocks at AT&T,
Dennis' team is fighting off hacker attacks
at the rate of two a second.
At the heart of corporate America,
fear of hacker attacks has given birth to a new profession.
Brian Holyfield is a 26-year old
with a different kind of Wall Street career
He's an ethical hacker.
He and his team spend their days being paid to
try to break into the computers
run by some of the biggest names in the Fortune 500
They're called the Tiger Team.
A tiger team is a group of, of computer security professionals
that a company hires to try and break into their networks from the internet
And the reason they do this is that they want to make sure that
they can identify all the potential security issues,
that way they can minimize the risk of someone
that's an enemy of the company, for example, doing the same thing.
They call themselves ethical hackers.
The most angelic of the angels,
but on a daily basis Brian is paid to lie and cheat his way
into whatever information he can find.
Today, with the blessing of his client's boardroom,
Brian gets ready to become Will the Hacker.
Hi Jim, this is Will Rogers over in I.T. How are you?
Doing good. Doing good.
You got a couple minutes, or did I interrupt?
Is this a bad time?
Okay. Great. Okay.
Brian's mission is to get unsuspecting employees
to reveal their passwords.
He tells them he's from their own I.T. Department.
He's pretending he's checking that their passwords
are suitable for changes planned for their network.
None of it's true.
It's really designed to make your life a little bit easier.
So, what I want to do...
Surprisingly, the technique frequently bears fruit
The way we're gonna implement this system
it might restrict the type of characters
and whether it's letters or numbers you can use.
So, so for example, what you know,
what exactly is the password that you're using
and I'll see if it will actually work with the system
we're gonna implement?
Okay.
Brian has successfully convinced numerous employees
to hand over their passwords.
All right. Bye-bye.
He can now use them to unlock the company's secrets.
You can do a lot of damage
with the information that we see, and,
and there's a lot of privileged information
that we see on a day-to-day basis.
So, you've really got to have a strong sense of ethics.
We could obtain, let's say, access to a
a company's credit card database.
Well, you know, your typical hacker out there
who's gonna take the credit cards and try and sell them somewhere
and make a profit off of it.
We're not, we're not, we're, we're just gonna you know,
document how we were able to obtain access to that information.
We're gonna recommend to our clients how to fix it.
The emergence of ethical hacking
as a morally upright way to earn a living,
amuses Captain Zap.
But it's a job he'd happily do for nothing.
The money is kind ofjust the icing on the cake to all of it.
The money pays for the toys that you get to buy.
Hacking is actually the best reward.
But being paid to be allowed to commit crime
is absolutely genius and American.
It's a lot tougher than one would think.
I mean you know, trying to keep a straight face and trying to lie is,
is not that easy for someone who's, who's pretty honest.
Ethical hackers don't have the mindset
They are above board, nice people.
You hire an evil, rotten, son of a bitch if you want a job done.
It comes down to this, dirty deeds done really expensive.
And that's the way it should be, you know.
Learn to hire the thief to tell you how to steal something.
Don't hire a cop.
But 70 percent of hacker attacks are never reported to the police.
Instead, many of the biggest businesses
turn to Allan Brill.
He's a former intelligence offiicer who runs the Hi-Tech crime team
at the world's largest private detective agency, Kroll.
I'm on the way. I'll be there as soon as I can.
Day and night, Allan's team is poised with mobile hacker detection kits,
helping corporations stop the hackers and keep the break-ins quiet.
We work for the corporation.
We can help them to understand without having to go to government.
Once you go to government they really control the case.
Will they take the case? Who's gonna prosecute?
What publicity will there be about it?
In this day and age of volatility in the markets,
that's not always something you want to take a chance with.
But you can't afford not to know what happened.
Theirjob is to out hack the hackers.
Breaking passwords,
cloning hard drives, seizing suspect drives.
Allan's computer forensics team
is made up of people who could easily have turned
their own talents to hacking.
There is a difference.
The difference is this.
I think the typical computer forensics specialist is somebody
that has that skill set but whose moral compass has rusted on good.
They may be on the side of the angels,
but keeping quiet about hacker attacks suits some other white hats too.
The system administrators who guard most computer networks
often choose to keep their own bosses in the dark
when they discover the black hats have scored a hit.
Absolutely. There's a lot more that goes on.
A lot of people you know, job security
or a fear that you know if the boss found out that they left
a vulnerability open in the system,
upper management might not understand.
Anxiety among computer security professionals is now so great
that every year hundreds of them sign up for special classes.
It's where the white hats come to learn how to outsmart the black hats.
The students come from all over America.
They have to be closely vetted, because this is hacking school.
If you can't think like the hackers then you can't figure out what it is
they're trying to do.
Probably my biggest nightmare would be that hackers breaking into my network
and publishing financial information or something about my company.
What would happen to me?
Would get yelled at a lot, probably get fired.
Seriously.
While James worries about keeping his job,
Pete White, his fellow student in the X treme Hacking class,
is anxious about his workplace too.
Around the clock
Pete's responsible for keeping hackers
from getting at the confidential patient data in a hospital
in downtown Houston.
It's my job. We're responsible for making sure that,
being in a hospital environment, that patient data doesn't get out
to the general public.
Your reputation is based upon your ability to
keep patient data confidential,
and if we violate that then we're not in business for very much longer.
It'll make for a very bad day.
In the X treme Hacking class, Brian Holyfield, the ethical hacker,
is one of the teachers.
Within a couple of hours he and his team have got
the students hacking.
They are hacking and they are also learning
how to protect against each hack that they carry out.
They are real world examples
and they are always, we're always updating the material
so that it accurately covers what's happening out in the wild.
The bad guys have to find one way in, the good guys have to find
all the ways in.
Thanks to Brian and his colleagues,
after four days a new team of angels is ready to face up to the outlaws.
The teachers have to hope none of their graduates will swap sides.
Using it for bad, I don't do that. I mean I don't understand
why you would, you know.
What's the, the thrill of going and breaking into someone's systems,
you know?
Unfortunately for the hacker schools passing out parade
a new generation of black hats across the world understands
the thrill only too well.
The white hats have to be ready for an attack from anywhere.
At the Global Threat Center, all attention is suddenly drawn
to internet intelligence expert Carter Schoenberg.
He's spotted something strange.
A major electronic pipeline carrying the internet's traffiic
is being slowed down by a suspected hacker attack.
It looks like it's following the time zones across the Pacific
and heading for America.
Indonesia is pretty much getting slammed.
It appears to be starting in the Pacific Rim and making its way
towards North America.
South America still seems to be okay, but it seems like it's making
its way towards North America.
It's a possible attack on the infrastructure of
the internet itself.
It appears that for whatever the reason, whatever this cause is
it's moving with the sun,
starting with the Pacific Rim making its way towards the U.S.
You're witnessing trench warfare on the internet.
If the attack hits America as the working day gets underway
it could affect millions of people.
If it hits the North American continent
like it's been hitting everybody else
and then anybody that has their, an attachment to the pipeline,
any pipeline would probably see some significant degradation.
All traffiic relying on the suspect internet pipeline could fail.
Carter makes an urgent check call to
their sister station in Southeast Asia.
As he does,
both stations simultaneously see the pipeline recover
and the incident is over as quickly as it appeared.
It was just one of these anomalies,
but it's an anomaly that when it happens, we were on top of it
right when it occurred,
and we were able to bring it to everybody's attention
It's unclear what role, if any may have been played by hackers.
But for several minutes it looked like exactly the kind of attack
that the white hats fear most,
an electronic Pearl Harbor,
the real threat of a deliberately launched info war.
An info war is very real,
and the possibility of info war being used in coordination
with an attack,
an electronic Pearl Harbor is absolutely a possibility
and is an event that we effectively think we're waiting to happen.
For much of the 1990s,
the computers of the United States military were defended
against such an attack by a team led by Bob Ayers.
I was director of the U.S. DOD
Defensive Information Warfare Program.
So if you think of the security program that's keeping individuals out
think of the Defensive Information Warfare Program
as designed to keep nation states out of DOD systems.
Hackers are already working for over 100 foreign governments.
127 nation states have an active offensive information
warfare program underway
In the mid 1990s,
one of the United States' most secret military projects,
the Stealth Bomber, became the target of hackers.
Leaks of its specifications were highly sensitive.
Extremely sensitive. It's sensitive to this very day.
At the time the, the existence of the aircraft was, was known,
however any of the characteristics or indeed even the, the image
of the aircraft itself was not known,
so it was an item of high curiosity.
The secrets of the Stealth technology were held on computers
at the Rivers Air Force Base in Rome, New York,
home to the Air Force Research and Development Laboratories.
A system administrator at Rivers Air Force Base in New York
noticed the attacks taking place.
He noticed it three days after they began.
And as soon as he noticed it he reported it to,
to my organization,
and the, the reaction process then began.
They knew the secrets of the Stealth project
were being hacked into
but they didn't know who was doing it.
There was a great deal of concern, evidenced by these attacks
because the U.S. Didn't know where they were coming from.
It's a classic diffiiculty for the white hats.
Hackers make perfect spies because they can hide
in the shadows of cyberspace.
The problem is hackers typically come through multiple launch points.
And so they, they kind of play hopscotch on the internet.
You see typically the last IP address that they came from
into your network,
and that'll resolve back to some computer that they have hacked
into and taken over
for the purposes of masking who they really are.
It's very diffiicult to go back through the chain of hops to find
the actual source.
So the technical attempts to, in the terms of the day,
to hack back to find the source failed
Who could have wanted such information
The immediate suspects were hostile foreign powers.
But in fact,
the hackers who got under the radar of the most sophisticated
spying technology ever built
were teenagers, sitting at home in London, England.
The young men that were launching these attacks,
they didn't go from London, which was the environment they were in,
directly to New York.
They'd go from London through South Africa through Mexico
and then to the United States.
Technology in the global hacker community has expanded rapidly
in the years since the Stealth Bomber attacks.
At that time the Department of Defense calculated the total number
of intrusions into its systems.
The figure was extraordinary.
Over a quarter of a million times in 1995
someone other than a DOD employee was in charge of a DOD system.
Now if that isn't the foundation for an electronic Pearl Harbor,
I don't know what is.
Seven years later, new technology brings a constant set
of new vulnerabilities.
Chris O'Ferrell is a white hat who protects
the U.S. Government systems
and sees himself as a foot soldier in a never-ending daily battle.
Definitely there's a battle between the black hats and the white hats.
It's an, it's an ever-ongoing battle.
It's like digging a hole in the sand.
The more and more you work, the more and more it fills up.
Vulnerabilities are found everyday.
Chris is on the side of the angels,
but today he's setting off on what hackers call, a war drive.
He's heading for the heart of the federal government to expose
a new way in for hackers,
created by the growing use of wireless networks.
We use the same techniques,
methodologies and all that hackers use
in order to basically secure networks for the U.S. Government,
financial institutions and other types of agencies.
As well as countless corporations, a host of government departments
use wireless networks,
vulnerable to hackers on the outside equipped with a simple rig.
All that you need to put together a war-driving rig is
what they call it.
I have a GPS receiver.
I have my antenna and my wireless card,
which I've pieced together here.
You can tell it's been used quite a bit.
What Chris calls a war drive is an electronic fishing expedition
looking for vulnerable wireless networks.
Every time you hear a beep on the computer you know
it's another wireless network.
There you go.
They just found a couple. Up on Capitol Hill
you'll just start going crazy.
It'll sound like a pinball machine here.
There's one.
Got another one.
Every building around here is a federal building.
All right, right in front of the federal building
we just got another network.
By glancing at the screen,
Chris can instantly assess
how long it would take him to hack into any of the wireless networks
broadcasting their presence onto the streets of the Capitol.
Most of them are not even encrypted to protect them.
Right now I have 20 networks on my computer.
Out of the 20 only six of them have encryption.
It would take me probably about 20 seconds out of 14
of the 20 networks for me to reconfigure my wireless card
and enter these networks.
They can spend millions of dollars on security,
have firewalls and have all kinds of internal policies,
it only takes one person with one wireless access point to plug in
and anybody sitting where I am in my car right now
can break into a government network in about 20 seconds.
Well what I've seen today it really disturbs me.
I don't understand why there is wireless access points
beaconing out these signals out onto the roads,
out into the parking lots of these government buildings
in Washington D.C.
But hackers don't have to be
on the doorstep to engage in info war.
The Chinese president Jiang Zemin has urged the United States
to stop all spy flights near China
for the sake of healthy development
of China and U.S. Relations.
Following the collision of
a Chinese fighter with a U.S. Spy plane
angry hackers from China launched a hacker war against the U.S.
Chinese hackers banded together.
And, and for a period of a week they showed solidarity and compromised
over 10,000 U.S. Systems in a period of a week.
So we saw that basically a loose group of, of hackers
with one common political motivation
can cause significant damage.
The first wave of attacks was followed
by the release of a new type
of virus, an attack worm.
Apparently launched from China against systems set to American English.
It became known as Code Red.
Viruses spread among computer systems just the way colds spread among,
you know grade school classrooms.
Code Red imitated the actions of a hacker
and used compromised systems to break into other systems.
Significant portions of the internet were either disabled or infected
as a byproduct of the rapid propagation of the Code Red worm.
This propagation was so dramatic and so fast,
and the cascading effect of hundreds of attacks coming from
each infected computer
simply overwhelmed the, the internet.
Code Red was set to stop and start
when the internal computer clocks hit certain dates and times.
We noticed that, okay, it stops propagating
when the system clock in the computer turns to the 20th of the month.
It begins a new phase of activity,
and that phase of activity as we discovered
was to launch a distributed denial of service attack against
the White House website.
The attack was tracked back to a Chinese university.
In the last line of, of the software code it says,
"hacked by Chinese."
The White House simply changed the numbers in their web address,
but Code Red had a lasting impact.
Code Red was potentially a test to see
if automated info war would work.
If other key components of the internet infrastructure
had been targeted by Code Red instead ofjust a web server,
we could have seen massive amount of damage.
It was the most serious episode in the health of the internet
in the history of the internet.
While cyber terrorism is regarded as an inevitable threat for the future,
the reality today is that the bulk of hackers who break into
high profile sites
have a less alarming motivation.
The Department of Defense in the United States of course is,
is like the, the Mount Everest of, of you know,
the targets that you can go after.
I planted my flag in a Pentagon computer system.
You know that's a wonderful thing.
They really didn't want to hurt the Pentagon computer system.
They didn't want to look at any information.
They just wanted to get it in there and get it planted,
and then brag about it amongst their peers.
Such recognition seems to have driven the teenager
who was branded one of the world's most notorious hackers.
Online, he's known as Cold Fire.
He keeps his real name secret.
His face is not yet famous
but his hacker exploits have made him a cyberspace celebrity.
Britain's most notorious hacker.
And most people who were involved in the, in the hacking community,
and a lot of the people that were involved in the security industry
would know my name straightaway.
I'd say I'm still famous in that group of people.
Yeah, it feels great.
Ask a film star how they feel about being famous.
Cold Fire was branded Britain's most notorious hacker
after he electronically broke into the computers at
a major cell phone company.
He then re-routed calls from his phone so that they were billed
to other people.
Obviously hacking is a criminal offense,
and the people that are doing it need to remain anonymous.
But not only that you get a lot of
the a lot of jealousy from the, the kiddies
trying to get up to your level
and they'd like want to find out who you are, get more details on you,
that sort of thing.
So that's why most of us at the top would prefer to remain anonymous.
Analyzing the behavior of hackers like Cold Fire is a full-time job
for Eric Raymond.
He calls himself a hacker anthropologist.
His work reveals a side of their culture and philosophy
that's part of a bigger battle for cyber rights,
and how hackers are understood by the wider world.
I describe myself as a wandering anthropologist and
troublemaking philosopher.
And for more than 20 years
I've been part of a culture of internet hackers,
and I've both functioned within that culture and tried to
describe it to other people.
Let's see the guest, we've got the guest machine over here.
Eric is part of the core hacker tradition.
We have a foldout bed down here where hackers sometimes stay
when they come to visit,
and we provide them with all the courtesies.
They're driven by a clear set of hacker ethics.
They share their programs and resist domination by big,
commercial software companies.
World domination central.
Hackers like Eric rarely stray into systems where they're not invited.
I haven't done any like that since 1977.
There have been once, once or twice since then that I have broken into
systems just to verify that a vulnerability was there,
but proper hacker courtesy is to immediately notify the system
administrators that the hole is present and how to plug it.
Those two are from Korea.
He studies his subjects like they are part of a remote and colorful tribe.
And those two are from Indonesia.
But he doesn't like what all of them do.
In fact, he tries to disown those like Cold Fire and Captain Zap,
who give hackers a bad name.
What's more, he wants them renamed, not hackers, but crackers.
Crackers are people who break into computer systems and commit vandalism
and computer crime.
They're generally neither very bright nor very skilled.
You can distinguish them from hackers by the fact
that they typically use pseudonyms
or handles to describe their identities.
Hackers don't do this.
But the real difference is more fundamental.
Hackers make things;
crackers only know how to break them.
The hacker's bible, written by Eric, is The New Hacker's Dictionary.
It sums up the hacker ethic he wants the world to understand.
But Eric's battle to give the outlaws a new name
has launched him into a war of words with another dictionary.
In Oxford, England, the use of the word hacker is being reassessed
for the next edition of the oldest and biggest dictionary
in the English language,
the Oxford English Dictionary.
As part of the research Nick Shearing has Eric's dictionary on his desk,
but he's decided to disagree with Eric about what a hacker is.
I think most people who use English throughout the world
would understand a hacker to be someone who breaks into
a computer system.
But this is a misuse of the word according to Eric,
and he's determined to fight for his definition.
Hackers build software.
They maintain the internet.
Hackers are the culture
that invented the worldwide web, as we know it today.
We make stuff and we improve the world.
It's very hard to make people chose a certain word to describe
a phenomenon when there is already a word existing,
which unfortunately for the people who object to hacker being used,
is hacker.
The culture of internet hackers owns the word hacker and,
and a lot of this language associated with it.
The fact that people outside that culture use it incorrectly
is not a warrant to change its meaning.
But despites Eric's mission,
the exploits of the black hats seem to have demonized all hackers.
A hacker is somebody who enters the system without authorization.
Hackers today are electronic juvenile delinquents.
I don't like being confused
with a group of people who by and large
I think are incompetent and unimaginative.
Behind his war of words is a hacker battle that's serious.
Eric fears for the future of cyber rights
if the public fails to learn the difference between
hackers and the computer criminals he calls crackers.
I think it's important for people to understand that the computer,
the culture of computer hackers is a benign one.
Otherwise, to the extent that we're confused with criminal crackers
we become a justification for bad laws and for censorship and repression.
Fear that interfering lawmakers want to take over cyberspace
has driven John Perry Barlow's life as a hacker with a difference.
He's the former songwriter for The Grateful Dead,
and the joint founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation,
which lobbies for cyber rights.
What we're dealing with is the battle between the future and the past,
between the powers that were and the powers that have yet to be.
He believes the internet represents a change in history
as great as the Industrial Revolution, which brought us structures
like the Brooklyn Bridge.
He sums up this new world with his own declaration of independence
for cyber space.
Governments of the industrial world,
I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind.
On behalf of the future I ask you of the past to leave us alone.
You are not welcome here.
You have no sovereignty where we gather.
You do not know us, nor do you know our world.
Cyberspace does not lie within your borders.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement
and context do not apply to us.
They are all based on matter,
and there is no matter here.
This philosophy has led John into a new hacker battle.
John and the electronic frontier foundation are supporting one
of the most widespread and controversial forms of hacking.
The hot commodity is stolen movies.
The target is Hollywood.
We want cyberspace to be as open to
communications of all sorts as possible
The most eagerly awaited movie of 2002 was Star Wars, Episode II.
As the clocks passed midnight into May 16th,
it opened to moviegoers who had camped out for two nights
to get a ticket.
27 hours.
18 hours. Yeah.
But rewind by over a week and hackers had already seen it
and were already trading it on the internet.
A week before the world premiere,
this is the chat room where hackers are trading Star Wars.
Once the pirates have stolen the movie,
the hackers distribute it by breaking into the pipelines,
which power the internet.
This is not just piracy, this depends on hacking
because the commodity is the bandwidth.
Pirates have to use what we refer to as the big pipes, the multi-gigabit,
internet backbone connections to transfer data.
I've heard one major internet ISP referred to as the Blockbuster Video
of the internet
because their computers are so fast, so easy to hack,
it's the best place to get movies.
To help them fight back,
Hollywood has cast a former FBI agent as their good guy.
Ken Jacobsen has a tough role.
Almost every movie released by the big seven studios is made available
on the web by hackers.
It's incredibly common.
We have discovered that almost all of our movies, whether they are
blockbusters orjust regular movies,
are up on the internet within 24 to 48 hours
after the movie opens in the theaters in the United States.
As the heroes of the movie battle it out on the big screen,
the outlaws of cyberspace are fighting a battle of their own.
And it's certainly a hacker's battle.
The hackers are the closest thing we have to troops
outside of the lawyers
that EFF employs to take the motion picture industry
and the record industry to court.
The hackers are the people who are literally going out there and,
and breaking the encryption codes and,
and un-bottling the stuff that, that needs to be accessible to,
to everybody.
It amazes me
because these are people who would never, never ever consider
walking into a Tower Record store or some other record store
or a video store
and walking out with a stolen CD
or a stolen D VD or a stolen video cassette,
but actually will go up on the internet and will take
exactly the same product
and will decide that it should be free and that it's not a theft
that's occurred.
The battles continue between the Electronic Frontier Foundation
and the studios.
But in the town that gave America so many of its heroic villains,
the modern band of mischief-making outlaws seems to be having
the last laugh.
As the first generation of teenage hackers reach their 40s,
the battle between the angels and the outlaws has enabled
many of them to start making a living from their skills.
Captain Zap has decided to cash in by switching sides.
The hacker formally known as Captain Zap has reinvented himself
as lan Murphy, Chief Executive Offiicer
The embodiment of Captain Zap with a business viewpoint.
I'm a hacker. You might as well hack life to its fullest.
We'll create a civilization of the mind in cyberspace.
May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments
have built before.
Hey, hacking boy.
I'm not saying that I've ever hacked
but I can understand the thrill firsthand.
If you take a, a good, close look at your average security person,
he's a former black hat,
I mean in almost every case, you know, who still actually understands
the thrill of it.
Some people like to bungee jump.
Some of them like to parachute.
Some of them like to,
you know, do all kinds of strange things,
but hackers it's, it's, it's a rush.
I'm sure they do it for the rush effect.
Do I think it is a good thing to do? No.
Do I want my kids doing it? No.
But can I sort of understand it? Yeah, I think I can.
Your mind's going 100 miles per hour
and behind the scenes you're thinking,
"I could be doing this. I could be doing that.
I could exploit that. I could do this. I could do that."
And you can't sit still and not think about that.
It's, it's always there in the back of your mind.
You just need to do it.
The battle between the angels and the outlaws seems set to continue.
But hackers on both sides know that like many conflicts,
it's between people that speak the same language,
use the same tools and play the same games.
It's great. It's a, it's a wonderful thing to do,
and it's like permanent employment as well.
We will spread ourselves across the planet,
so that no one may arrest our thoughts.
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