the baudy world of the byte bandit-a postmodernist interpreta.txt

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                         THE BAUDY WORLD OF THE BYTE BANDIT:
             A POSTMODERNIST INTERPRETATION OF THE COMPUTER UNDERGROUND
 
 
                               Gordon Meyer and Jim Thomas
                               Department of Sociology
                            Northern Illinois University
                                  DeKalb, IL 60115
                                   (10 June, 1990)
 
 
 
 
 
 
          Forthcoming in In F.  Schmalleger (ed.),  Computers in Criminal
          Justice, Bristol (Ind.):  Wyndham Hall.   An earlier version of
          this paper was presented at  the American Society of Criminology
          annual meetings, Reno (November 9, 1989).   Authors are listed in
          alphabetical order.  Address correspondence to Jim Thomas.
          We are indebted  to the numerous anonymous  computer underground
          participants who provided  information.  Special acknowledgement
          goes to Hatchet Molly, Jedi, The Mentor,  Knight Lightning,  and
          Taran King.
 
 
 
 
                         THE BAUDY WORLD OF THE BYTE BANDIT:
             A POSTMODERNIST INTERPRETATION OF THE COMPUTER UNDERGROUND
               Hackers are "nothing more  than high-tech street gangs"
               (Federal Prosecutor, Chicago).
 
               Transgression is not immoral. Quite to the contrary, it
               reconciles the law with what it forbids; it is the dia-
               lectical game of good and evil (Baudrillard, 1987: 81).
               There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue.  There's
               just stuff people do.   It's all part of the nice, but
               that's as far as any man got a right to say (Steinbeck,
               1939:31-32).
 
               The criminalization of "deviant acts" transforms and reduces
          broader social meanings to legal ones.  Once a category of behav-
          iors has become defined by statute as sanctionably deviant,  the
          behaviors so-defined assume  a new set of meanings  that may ob-
          scure ones  possessed by those  who engage in  such behaviors.
          "Computer deviants" provide one example.
               The proliferation of computer  technology has been accompa-
          nied by the growth of a computer underground (CU),  often mistak-
          enly labeled "hackers," that is  perceived as criminally deviant
          by the media, law enforcement officials, and researchers.   Draw-
          ing from ethnographic data,  we offer  a cultural rather than a
          criminological analysis of the underground by suggesting that the
          CU reflects an attempt to recast, re-appropriate, and reconstruct
          the power-knowledge relationship that  increasingly dominates the
 
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          ideology and actions of modern society.  Our data reveal the com-
          puter underground as  an invisible community with  a complex and
          interconnected cultural lifestyle, an inchoate anti-authoritarian
          political consciousness,  and dependent on norms of reciprocity,
          sophisticated socialization  rituals,  networks  of information
          sharing, and an explicit value system.   We interpret the CU cul-
          ture as a challenge to and parody of conventional culture,  as a
          playful attempt to reject the seriousness of technocracy,  and as
          an ironic substitution of rational  technological control of the
          present for an anarchic and playful future.
                        Stigmatizing the Computer Underground
               The computer underground refers to persons engaged in one or
          more of several activities, including pirating, anarchy, hacking,
          and phreaking[1].    Because computer  underground participants
          freely share information and often are involved collectively in a
          single incident,  media definitions invoke the generalized meta-
          phors of  "conspiracies" and "criminal rings,"  (e.g.,  Camper,
          1989;  Computer Hacker Ring, 1990;  Zablit, 1989), "modem macho"
          evil-doers (Bloombecker, 1988),  moral bankruptcy (E.  Schwartz,
          1988), "electronic trespassers" (Parker: 1983), "crazy kids dedi-
          cated to making mischief" (Sandza, 1984a:  17), "electronic van-
          dals" (Bequai:  1987), a new or global "threat" (Markoff, 1990a;
          Van,  1989),  saboteurs ("Computer Sabateur," 1988),  monsters
          (Stoll, 1989:  323), secret societies of criminals (WMAQ, 1990),
          "'malevolent, nasty, evil-doers' who 'fill the screens of amateur
          {computer} users with pornography'"  (Minister of Parliament Emma
 
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          Nicholson, cited in "Civil Liberties," 1990:  27), "varmints" and
          "bastards" (Stoll,  1989:  257),  and "high-tech street gangs"
          ("Hacker, 18," 1989).  Stoll (cited in J. Schwartz, 1990: 50) has
          even compared them to persons who  put razorblades in the sand at
          beaches, a bloody, but hardly accurate, analogy.   Most dramatic
          is Rosenblatt's (1990:  37) attempt to link hackers to pedophilia
          and "snuff films," a ploy clearly designed to inflame rather than
          educate.
               These images have prompted calls  for community and law en-
          forcement vigilance (Conly and McEwen, 1990:  2;  Conly,  1989;
          McEwen, 1989).   and for application of the Racketeer Influenced
          and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act to prosecute and control the
          "criminals" (Cooley, 1984),  which have created considerable con-
          cern for civil liberties (Markoff, 1990b;  J.  Schwartz, 1990).
          Such exaggerated discourse also fails  to distinguish between un-
          derground "hobbyists," who may infringe  on legal norms but have
          no intention of pillaging,  from  felonious predators,  who use
          technology to loot[2].   Such terminology creates a common stock
          of public knowledge that formats  interpretations of CU activity
          in ways pre-patterned as requiring  social control to protect the
          commonweal (e.g., Altheide, 1985).
               As Hollinger and Lanza-Kaduce (1988:  119), Kane (1989), and
          Pfuhl (1987) observed,  the stigmatization of hackers has emerged
          primarily through value-laden media depictions.   When in 1988 a
          Cornell University graduate student inadvertently infected an in-
          ternational computer network by  planting a self-reproducing "vi-
 
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          rus," or "rogue program," the news  media followed the story with
          considerable detail about  the dangers of computer  abuse (e.g.,
          Allman, 1990; Winter, 1988).  Five years earlier, in May of 1983,
          a group of hackers known as  "The 414's" received equal media at-
          tention when they  broke into the computer system  of the Sloan
          Kettering Cancer research center.   Between these dramatic and a-
          typical events, the media have dramatized the dangers of computer
          renegades,  and media anecdotes  presented during Congressional
          legislative debates  to curtail "computer abuse"  dramatized the
          "computer hacking problem" (Hollinger  and Lanza-Kaduce,  1988:
          107).   Although the accuracy and objectivity of the evidence has
          since been challenged (Hollinger and Lanza-Kaduce 1988: 105), the
          media continue to format CU activity  by suggesting that any com-
          puter-related felony can be attributed to hacking.  Additionally,
          media stories are taken from the accounts of police blotters, se-
          curity personnel, and apprehended hackers, each of whom have dif-
          ferent perspectives and definitions.   This creates a self-rein-
          forcing  imagery in  which  extreme  examples and  cursively
          circulated data are discretely adduced  to substantiate the claim
          of criminality by  those with a vested interest  in creating and
          maintaining such definitions.   For  example,  Conly and McEwen
          (1990)  list examples of law  enforcement jurisdictions in which
          special units to  fight "computer crime," very  broadly defined,
          have been created.  These broad  definitions serve to expand the
          scope of authority and resources of the units.   Nonetheless, de-
          spite criminalization,  there is little  evidence to support the
 
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          contention that computer hacking has been sufficiently abusive or
          pervasive to warrant zealous  prosecution (Michalowski and Pfuhl,
          forthcoming).
               As an antidote to the  conventional meanings of CU activity
          as simply one of deviance,  we shift the social meaning of CU be-
          havior from one of stigma to one of culture creation and meaning.
          Our work is tentative,  in part  because of the lack of previous
          substantive literature and in part  because of the complexity of
          the data, which indicate a multiplicity of subcultures within the
          CU.  This paper examines two distinct CU subcultures, phreaks and
          hackers,  and challenges the Manichean  view that hackers can be
          understood simply as profaners of a sacred moral and economic or-
          der.
                     The Computer Underground and Postmodernism
               The computer underground  is a culture of  persons who call
          computer bulletin board systems (BBSs,  or just "boards"),  and
          share the interests fostered by the BBS.   In conceptualizing the
          computer underground as a distinct culture, we draw from Geertz's
          (1973: 5) definition of culture as a system of meanings that give
          significance to shared  behaviors that must be  interpreted from
          the perspective of those engaged in them.  A culture provides not
          only the "systems of standards for perceiving, believing,  evalu-
          ating, and acting" (Goodenough,  1981:  110),  but includes the
          rules and symbols  of interpretation and discourse  for partici-
          pants:
               In crude relief,  culture can be understood as a set of
               solutions devised by a group of people to meet specific
               problems  posed by  situations  they  face in  com-
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               mon. . . This notion of culture as a living, historical
               product of group problem solving  allows an approach to
               cultural study that is applicable to any group, be it a
               society, a neighborhood, a family, a dance band,  or an
               organization and its segments  (Van Maanen and Barley,
               1985: 33).
               Creating and maintaining a culture requires continuous indi-
          vidual or group processes of  sustaining an identity through the
          coherence gained by a consistent aesthetic point of view, a moral
          conception of self,  and a lifestyle that expresses those concep-
          tions in one's immediate existence and tastes (Bell, 1976:  36).
          These behavioral expressions signify a variety of meanings,  and
          as signifiers they reflect a type of code that can be interpreted
          semiotically,  or as a sign system amenable to readings indepen-
          dent of either participants or of  those imposed by the super-or-
          dinate culture:
               All aspects of culture possess  a semiotic value,  and
               the most  taken-for-granted phenomena can  function as
               signs:   as elements in communication systems governed
               by semantic rules  and codes which are  not themselves
               directly apprehended in experience.   These signs are,
               then,  as opaque as the social relations which produce
               them and which they re-present (Hebdige, 1982: 13).
               It is this symbolic cultural ethos,   by which we mean the
          style, world view, and mood (Hebdige,  1979),  that reflects the
          postmodernist elements of the CU and separates it from modernism.
          Modernist culture  is characterized especially  by rationality,
          technological enhancement, deference to centralized control,  and
          mass communication.   The emergence  of computer technology has
          created dramatic changes in social communication, economic trans-
          actions, and information processing and sharing, while simultane-
          ously introducing new forms of surveillance, social control,  and
 
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