Masters of Deception
Slatalla, Michelle & Quittner, Joshua
Like Pike, the late Peckinpah shared Huck Finn's instinct to "light out for the territory ahead of the rest"; and even though the territory has long since been tamed, this craving for a primitive...
...A group of New York City kids barely out of high school, the Masters pled guilty in 1993 to the most daring and damaging raid of corporate computer systems in history: they cracked AT&T's security codes, rewired phone lines, broke into files, and stole confidential passwords and credit histories...
...Just a few years ago, cyberspace seemed to be one of the last frontiers of that freedom, a wide open place where computer hackers roamed at will, jumping security fences and rustling corporate secrets...
...At times, especially when the authors overindulge in annoying Teenspeak to invoke the gang's world, Masters of Deception reads like an apology for the supposed martyrs...
...Barlow is stunned that this New York City punk could access his most private financial matters...
...It was "the crime of the future," according to prosecutors in the U.S...
...After one forum participant—cyberhippie and former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow—cracks a joke about the precocious MOD gang's immaturity ("Trade their modems for skateboards and only a slight conceptual shift wouldoccur"), an enraged Phiber Optik responds by posting a copy of Barlow's credit report for everyone to see...
...The authors have a happy ending to tack onto this American saga, a rah-rah replacement for Acid Phreak's canceled commentary: Through a computer network (where else...
...This crackdown was sparked in part by the antics of some teenage pranksters calling themselves the Masters of Deception...
...Once Corrupt blows his cover, a full-scale racial and regional feud breaks out, as Bloodaxe mocks the "History," which he mistakenly believes to be authored by Corrupt, by distributing a "jived" version pocked with nasty racial slurs...
...Some of the gang members are by now working their own side deals—even selling computer secrets, an activity Phiber Optik would never condone...
...Another on-line insult fuels a gang war that ultimately spells the final doom for the gang...
...Moreover, he understands the implications of Phiber Optik's deed: Is any information truly safe from plunder in cyberspace...
...High on candy bars and sodas, they take their souped-up, cheapo computers on MASTERS OF DECEPTION: THE GANG THAT RULED CYBERSPACE Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner HarperCollins / 225 pages / $23 reviewed by EDDIE DEAN 68 The American Spectator May 1995 all-night joy rides without ever leaving their bedrooms: Just like any schoolyard pack of boys born in the shadow of "The Dirty Dozen," "Hogan's Heroes," and "Mission Impossible," [they] fancied themselves specialists in some dark art...
...There was nothing illegal about that...
...Meanwhile, the MOD boys become bona fide media stars after Phiber Optik and Acid Phreak crash an electronic forum hosted by Harper's: "Is Computer Hacking a Crime...
...Another might be an expert in prograrmning BASIC...
...Boasting a ravenous appetite for arcane knowledge, Phiber Optik is a connoisseur of ultra-sophisticated computer networks, especially phone systems...
...At first, the Masters perform harmless stunts--exploring and exploiting the local phone company computers, sabotaging rival gangs' bulletin boards, downloading credit histories of cheesy celebs such as Geraldo Rivera...
...Using hi-tech surveillance to record MOD's continued transThe American Spectator April 1995 69 gressions, the feds nab the boys on a laundry list of crimes, including unauthorized access to computers, illegal possession of telephone calling cards, interception of electronic communication, and wire fraud...
...In the real world, Corrupt is accustomed to racial slurs, but not here in cyberspace, where he could be anyone he wanted to...
...But then they get cocky...
...Littering systems with MOD-signed taunts, they finally become destructive, crashing a university computer system...
...Unknown to the general public and mostly ignored by authorities, cyberspace sounded as cryptic and futuristic as its name...
...Even the authors seem seduced by Phreak's self-serving swagger: "The MOD boys," they write, "were definitely riding the ragged regions of the electronic frontier, even as the whole territory was being carved up...
...and Corrupt, a black computer whiz from Brooklyn whose deft impersonations of white middle-aged telephone linemen enable him to snag security passwords at will...
...In front of an old TV hooked to his Radio Shack computer, he transforms himself from a shy, skinny nobody into Phiber Optik, one of the most revered hackers in cyberspace...
...Eddie Dean is an associate editor at Washington CityPaper...
...I've been in redneck bars wearing shoulder-length curls," Barlow wrote later, "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...
...He greets them good-naturedly in one of his many put-on voices, but one of the Texans responds, "Get that nigger off the line...
...Nowadays cyberspace is a prime chunk of virtual real estate, flooded with greedy prospectors and marketed by Al Gore & Co...
...M eanwhile, Acid Phreak begins the gang's ultimate exercise in hubris, a running on-line narrative of the gang's exploits, "The History of the MOD...
...And now the feds have begun to round up renegade hackers, citing crimes from industry sabotage and smut peddling to more nebulous offenses that have civil-liberties watchdogs howling about Big Brother...
...The hacker of old sought to find what the computer itself could do...
...The reader may be less sympathetic: These are not Peckinpah's grizzled anti-heroes willing to die for their outlaw ways, or even hoodlums with the guts to hold up a liquor store...
...Whatever happened to, "Big enough to do the crime, big enough to do the time...
...The same rules apply: nicknames and passwords, initiation rites, and, most of all, protection of their turf...
...jailbird Phiber Optik finds a girlfriend who patiently awaits his release...
...Meanwhile, millions are surfing the Internet and other systems that once were as empty and foreboding as a ghetto alley...
...The fact that it's simply a network of computers connected by phone lines does little to demystify its Darth Vader aura...
...One kid might know how to make a wicked blue box, a device cobbled together from top-secret Radio Shack parts that simulated 'the tones of coins dropping into a pay phone...
...They harass rivals with computer-generated crank calls...
...Acid Phreak, group historian and expert dumpster diver (mining for priceless discarded data...
...Hacking under an assumed name, Corrupt joins an open phone conversation with members of a rival gang based in suburban Texas...
...This wild goose chase makes for some hilarious Keystone Kops vignettes, as the gang outwits the posse of pre-Computer Age geezers at every turn...
...he embarks on a four-year hacker-hunt, ultimately enlisting state and federal authorities, includingthe FBI and the Secret Service...
...It's only natural that they form a gang, not much different from the ones roaming the mean streets outside their windows...
...Attorney's Office, but in this account of the kids' fascinating saga, reporters Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner argue that their real crime was youthful curiosity and naïvet...
...It was the Wild West, right...
...Plotting revenge he takes an assumed name and infiltrates the rival gang led by a hacker known, after a Viking warrior, as Erik Bloodaxe...
...They are merely clever boys dialing up chaos on the family phone line and raising hell from the safety of Daddy's house, and it's difficult to shed tears when they get caught...
...We're always one step ahead...
...But he doesn't tell them that the dangerous hackers are, in effect, just a bunch of teenage boys who got to be friends because they shared a hobby...
...it possessed a dark, forbidding quality, like some faraway galaxy where evil lurks and no one can hear you scream...
...It is not surprising that Bloody Sam turned to the underground world of computer crime and hi-tech espionage for the subject matter of his last films...
...and even though the territory has long since been tamed, this craving for a primitive freedom remains a supremely American trait...
...Besides spewing a load of puns and jabs at the straitlaced forum, the brash boys from New York had a few answers to the seminar's topic question: "There is no one hacker ethic," declared Acid Phreak in an off-the-cuff manifesto...
...He tells them the boys' intrusions have cost companies thousands of dollars in security personnel salaries and lost processing time...
...Describing the official announcement of the 11-count indictment, they wax sentimental: [The U. S. Attorney] tells the press corps all about the crimes...
...as "The Information Superhighway," that buzzard of a buzzword endlessly circling its own lack of meaning...
...The story rationalizes MOD's conversion into destructive vandals, wrapping their exploits in a haze of mythmaking...
...No longer idealistic pioneers, the Masters begin to resemble bullies looking for the next cyberspace rumble...
...N o stereotypical computer geeks, the Masters are working-class city kids—bored with school (though they earn good grades), isolated from their peers, and stranded without girlfriends...
...There's Scorpion, class valedictorian and resident logician, who got his start cracking kiddie computer games...
...Outlaw, a Bronx cohort who spends his hours on a hacker bulletin board called Phuc the Pheds...
...Ultimately the Texans help the feds trap MOD in their own web...
...The problem with this self-righteous declaration is that by now the gang is busy violating the so-called "hacker ethic," as well as the law...
...A security specialist for the New York Telephone Company spots their brazen intrusions...
...m asters of Deception closes as the gang members (who each pled guilty, their pony-tails drooping like whipped dogs' tails) languish in prison with sentences ranging from six months to a year...
...Today, hackers and phreaks are drawn to specific, often corporate systems...
...The authors mostly pooh-pooh the seriousness of the crimes...
...The leader of this wild cyberbunch is the whip-smart son of Italian immigrants who holes up in his tiny room in the family row house in Queens...
...It's no wonder everyone on the other side is getting mad...
...Sporting the baggy clothes and bragging slang of street culture, the kids get their kicks in cyberspace, where they reinvent themselves and taste a freedom denied them in their humdrum lives...
...they download sensitive financial files to use against their enemies...
...And, as the rappers from whom they take a degree of inspiration often boast, the former members of MOD know they have "skills": all of them have cushy computer jobs lined up for life after prison...
Vol. 28 • May 1995 • No. 5
